Statue-esque

Why set a supremely great play to music? The Winter’s Tale, the play of Shakespeare’s that I love most, has much of his most beautiful and intelligent poetry, as well as some of his most condensed and puzzling lines. Ryan Wigglesworth, in several of the innumerable interviews about his new opera, says he has been obsessed by the play for decades. So have I, but if I were a composer I think that would be a reason for leaving well alone. Wigglesworth has made his own libretto by using snippets of Shakespeare, enough to remind one of the original, but frustrating, most of the time, in producing a strip-cartoon version of the text. The idea, presumably, is to amplify this telegrammatic digest with the music. But, though I found the textures of the orchestra continuously interesting, much of the time, especially in Act I (which covers Shakespeare’s first three acts), I wasn’t able to see in what relationship they stood to the words and the action.

I shall certainly go to another performance of the piece, mainly in the hope of changing my mind. First time round I was unable to feel anything with or about any of the characters, apart from odd moments. When the unjustly accused Hermione, gloriously sung and acted by Sophie Bevan, uttered one of Shakespeare’s most desolate lines, ‘The flatness of my misery’, I knew what I was missing most of the time: the line is set to a low monotone, almost spoken, and left as Shakespeare wrote it — unlike, for instance, Florizel’s sublime speech to Perdita, of which we get fragments. I could have forgotten my reservations about the earlier parts if the final scene, with Paulina unveiling the ‘statue’ of Hermione and bringing her back to life, had been moving.