Tilting at metronomes: Massenet’s Don Quichotte opens at Grange Park Opera

To suggest that the ageing Jules Massenet identified himself with the title character of his Don Quichotte is nothing new — and late works such as this by definition encourage biographical interpretations. One of the main liberties of the opera, premièred in 1910 and very loosely based (via a contemporary verse play) on Cervantes, was to bring the character of Dulcinea (here ‘La Belle Dulcinée’) out of the realm of the imagination and to embody her as a distinctly flesh-and-blood mezzo-soprano. That the first singer to perform Dulcinée, Lucy Arbell, was the object of Massenet’s infatuation only emphasises the biographical parallels, all of which give extra layers to a gently wise and touchingly melancholy work.

What might have been better left hinted at, however, Charles Edwards’s new production at Grange Park Opera heavy-handedly emphasises, as a sentence preceding the otherwise unaltered programme synopsis seems to warn. ‘An elderly composer prepares to present a public showing of his latest opera to his friends in his salon…’ it reads ominously.

The set (also by Edwards) consists of a stage within the stage; a piano sits in front of it, at which our ‘composer’ slumps even before the opera starts. Half of the action takes place on the second stage, half of it off, with Clive Bayley switching between guises as composer and, donning a copper helmet and grasping his lance, knight-errant — or is it the composer ‘acting’ the knight? His adversaries become representatives of the musical avant-garde, their improbable uniform white tie and tails; the famous windmill becomes a metronome in front of which, at one point, a grotesque Stravinsky lookalike stands brandishing a score of The Rite of Spring.

The line between La belle Dulcinée (Sara Fulgoni) and la belle Lucy Arbell is similarly blurred, with Fulgoni clambering on to the piano in her big scene to be surrounded by adoring fans, then signing shellac discs for them.