Efforts rewarded

La fedeltà premiata
Royal Academy of Music

Jenùfa
English National Opera

Everyone agrees that Haydn’s operas are a disappointment, given what is now widely regarded as his supreme musical stature, but it’s hard to say just why. In the case of La fedeltà premiata (Fidelity rewarded), which the Royal Academy of Music staged brilliantly — my efforts to persuade soi-disant opera lovers to go to these productions of the music schools are, it seems, a total failure — one reason could be the insanely complicated plot, which I abandoned any attempt to follow. Richard Wigmore, in his Faber Guide to Haydn, quite rightly points out that the finale to Act I is as extended as any Mozart finale, and gathers an impressive momentum. The big difference is that we don’t give a damn about Haydn’s characters, especially not when they are parts of a send-up of the pastoral mode. The director Alessandro Talevi rather let that go by updating the action to now, with most of the characters tourist nerds, apparently competing in some inane TV contest, which would obviously be lost on me. That meant that it became a satire on modern life rather than on an artistic convention, a crucial alteration.

It was all slickly carried through, and the sets were exceptionally attractive, but what did it all mean? The music varies between placid or stormy arias and some genuinely, if abstractly, tense ensembles. What mattered was that the standard of singing was impressively high, with the Chinese mezzo Fu Qian outstanding, and surely destined for a major career. Acting was of a decent quality, too, and if only Haydn had been more involved in the enterprise and I had had a less vague idea of what was going on it could have been a yet more enjoyable evening.