The revival of Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Minotaur is the most significant artistic event at the Royal Opera since its première, almost five years ago. Unlike Thomas Adès’s more immediately accessible The Tempest, The Minotaur has not gone on to have an international career, though it unquestionably deserves one. With its ideal cast and direction, this production should tour the world’s major opera houses, demonstrating that at irregular but not too large intervals a new masterwork can still be forthcoming in this form, whose decline and decease has often been announced. Birtwistle’s work has something in common with Michael Tippett’s, in that both are attracted or addicted to myth, and therefore unafraid of creating works of immense pretensions, which sometimes come off and sometimes don’t. Tippett was his own librettist, a largely bad idea since there was no check on his intellectual ambitions, while Birtwistle has various librettists, whose work can lead to indigestible concoctions, as The Mask of Orpheus showed, or to great works of the order of Gawain and now this. He and David Harsent worked, naturally, very closely on this text, as they did on Gawain, and the result is mainly a success. The opera is fairly tightly constructed, the action is clear and the words as audible as one could hope with a vast, volcanic orchestra erupting unnervingly and quite often. The whole effect is volcanic, with long periods of sinister quiescence giving way to huge ejaculations and streams of musico-dramatic lava.
At the same time, this is self-conscious mythology. The main characters are meditative and interested in their place in a fore-ordained saga. They aren’t sure of their pedigree, but they are sure that who their parents were has a lot to do with what happens to them. I’m never very happy with Destiny: if something is your destiny, then just go ahead with whatever you want to do and you will clearly fulfil it. Ariadne and Theseus wonder about theirs, but really the only thing that counts is that Theseus enters the maze and finds the Minotaur and kills him.
Harsent’s text occasionally becomes self-conscious and platitudinous; as when the chorus sing ‘There comes a day in each man’s life, That is the day of his death’, which is no better because it is, so to speak, translated from the Greek. The dying monologue of the Minotaur, too, movingly acted and sung by John Tomlinson, doesn’t avoid a slightly contrived pathos, with its series of antitheses, as if as soon as, while dying, he becomes wholly human, his fate is then to brood to no purpose on the relationship between Beast and Man.
But these things, while they become trying, especially on repeated viewings and hearings (there is an Opus Arte DVD made during the first run), are of little account compared with the grandeur of the main movement of the work, from its magnificent opening. We see the ocean, endlessly the same and never the same, if I may allow myself a brief lapse, and then Ariadne sitting beside it, with a bull’s skull next to her. Christine Rice surely deserves recognition as one of the great operatic artists of our time. Even when she has to sing loudly her tone loses none of its lustre, and as always she acts with sovereign economy and point: one hangs just as keenly on her gestures as on her voice.
Ariadne, in this version, is not a straightforward character, and Rice has to convey the element of scheming and even deceit in her make-up, at the same time as she is the focus of our concern for much of the opera. That makes her sudden disappearance from the scene, before Theseus enters the Maze, all the more disconcerting. Theseus is not lacking in complexity either, and I’d be very interested to know what happens to both of them after the curtain descends. Johan Reuter seems to me more into the role now than he was in 2008, though he was already impressive.
Between them he and Rice evoke so uncertain a response to the mythological characters that to encounter the Minotaur in all his tormented longing and anger is a relief. It’s hard to imagine anyone but Tomlinson playing the part. His singing voice, now rough and sometimes grating, but also capable of soft semi-moaning, seems here to have met its final destination, if not its Destiny. And the brilliant make-up, his human head sometimes discernible through the terrifying but pleading bull’s eyes, makes one feel that Alison Chitty, the set and costume designer, deserves all her awards.
Antonio Pappano, understandably, has been suffering from tendonitis after four Ring cycles in a month, and Ryan Wigglesworth took over the conducting — no easy task, I imagine. The results are even finer than the first run of performances, with relaxation in the singing and some wonderfully expressive playing, melodic wisps floating up from the orchestra from time to time, and with a strong direction throughout.
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