Opera Nights and Nightmares 9788370992026, 8370992021

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Opera Nights and

Nightmares

LbL i't

Robert Anderson

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Opera Nights and

Nightmares by

Robert Anderson

Musica lagellonica Krakow 2015

Biblioteka Glówna Akademii Muzycznej w Bydgoszczy

K 14 797 Published by Musica lagellonica Sp. z o.o.

© Robert Anderson 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including the Internet, without the prior permission in writing of Musica lagellonica Sp z o.o..

ISBN 978-83-7099-202-6

Printed and bound in Poland

Musica lagellonica Sp. z o.o. ul. Westerplatte 10 31-033 Krakow, Poland

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I Contents Foreword Reviews

Thomas Arne Ludwig van Beethoven Ján Levoslav Bella Vincenzo Bellini Alban Berg Hector Berlioz Georges Bizet Alexander Borodin Rutland Boughton Benjamin Britten Geoffrey Bush Francesco Cavalli Antonio Cesti Francesco Cilea Claude Debussy Frederick Delius Gaetano Donizetti Edward Elgar Gabriel Fauré John Gay George Gershwin Umberto Giordano Philip Glass Mikhail Glinka Christoph Willibald Gluck Charles Gounod Carl Heinrich Graun George Frideric Handel Franz Joseph Haydn Gustav Holst Leos Janáéek

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1-379 1

3 8 9 13 14 17 19 22 24 25 27 29 30 32 34 39 45 47 48 49 50 52 54 55 59 63 64 74 76 76

Opera Nights and Nightmares

IV

Ruud Langgaard Ruggiero Leoncavallo Pietro Mascagni Jules Massenet Simon Mayr Saverio Mercadante Claudio Monteverdi Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Modeste Musorgsky Carl Otto Nicolai Jacques Offenbach Giovanni Battista Pergolesi Hans Erich Pfitzner Francis Poulenc Sergei Prokofiev Giacomo Puccini Henry Purcell Jean Philippe Rameau Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov Gioacchino Rossini Oliver Rudland Alessandro Scarlatti Franz Schubert Dmitri Shostakovich Bedrich Smetana Ethel Sm3dh Gasparo Spontini Richard Strauss Igor Stravinsky Arthur Sullivan Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky Ambroise Thomas Ralph Vaughan Williams Giuseppe Verdi Leonardo Vinci Richard Wagner William Walton Carl Maria von Weber Scott Wheeler Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari Bernd Alois Zimmermann

77 79 80 81 84 84 86 91 122 126 127 131 134 136 139 145 156 159 164 166 183 186 187 190 192 193 194 196 224 227 229 235 236 237 277 278 371 371 375 376 378

Contents

Chronology of Operas Chronology of Reviews Index of Singers Index of Orchestras Index of Conductors Index of Stage Personnel General Index

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381 386 394 407 410 413 416

List of Illustrations

(Between pages 212 & 213) George Frideric Handel by Hudson Bust of Gluck by Houdon Print of Mozart by E. Thelott lamino, the Three Ladies, and Papageno in Act 1 of The Magic Flute Beethoven in 1819 by Josef Stieler Fidelio Act 1 at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London, in 1851 Oil painting of Weber by Ferdinand Schimon Photograph of Berlioz Photographs of Wagner in 1852 The Bayreuth Festspielhaus about 1910 Photograph of Verdi with his signature Design for the start oí FalstaffAct 3

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For Zygmunt M. Szweykowski

Foreword My enchantment with opera began, I think, in a shoe-box. Perhaps I was seven or eight at the time. I had been given, probably by an uncle who had sung many Gilbert & Sullivan roles, cut-outs of characters from The Mikado. They were exotic enough to please me, and it was suggested I should make a peep-show for their display. A shoe-box was commandeered and the characters were given places inside. I had no idea of the story, so my show was more like an unorganised final curtain. A hole was made in the front of the box through which admiring spectators might peep; and in the top of the box a torch was fixed to light my arrangement. Grown ups expressed inevitable astonishment and delight. 1 purred, and put my foot on the first rung of an artistic ladder. As a teenager during the Second World War, I saw only one opera. The Marriage of Figaro. It made little impression, seeming frivolous to one taken up with Bach, Beethoven and Brahms at the time. The black out was somehow not conducive to opera, and my musical instruction was distinctly Toveyesque, so that I was enthralled by the mysteries of sonata form rather than the significance of a cabaletta or the coloratura that might embellish it. Indeed wartime austerity could only keep me from an artistic experience my mentors may have considered dubious if not risky. So the nearest I got to both Aida and La bohème were the capacious 78 rpm record albums that once held them both but were then home to sterner stuff. By now I was cellist enough for weekly quartets and a modest place in symphonic works. Opera, however, came into my life from a quarter shrouded in mystery. The wartime activities at Bletchley Park are now public knowledge. Then they were not, but it became obvious the staff contained a number of very gifted musicians. Notable among their achievements was the formation of a viable opera group that would perform in concert at certain selected locations under the baton of the linguist, Ludovick Stewart. Mozart was the staple fare, and that was certainly how I first heard Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute. I preferred the former, approving in the latter only the fugai overture and duet of The Men in Armour. With increasing cellistic skill, I was allowed to participate in the Bletchley concerts so that I got Inside knowledge of the works.

Foreword

IX

During my schooldays I started writing reviews of musical events for the weekly magazine; towards the end I heard Peter Grimes at Sadler’s Wells and The Rape ofLucretia at Glyndebourne, which makes me regret the more that I have had the chance to write about only one Britten opera since. Equally crucial was my National Service in Egypt, not so much for the lingering presence of a German prisoner-of-\yar orchestra in the Canal Zone, though it did extend my symphonic repertoire to include Bruckner, but for the revelation of Wagner. I remember no Wagner during my school years, unless it was the Lohengrin wedding music in church, which was obviously so much less exciting than the Mendelssohn march. But now 1 rehearsed ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ as courtesy cellist in the band of the North Staffordshire Regiment; could hear at the local Education Centre run by John Warrack the preludes to Tristan and Meistersinger Act 3 in close succession, not sure when one ended or the other began; and above all I could borrow for my own delectation and instruction records of the 1928 Bayreuth Tristan conducted by Elmendorff, with Larsén-Todsen as Isolde and Gunnar Graarud’s Tristan. Returned to England and at Cambridge in nick of time to begin the 1948 academic year, I continued to cherish Wagner so that, though reading Classics and Egyptology, I earned marks from Paddy Hadley as professor of music by identifying the Tristan chords he played to a group of us as from Meistersinger Act 3. When in emotional turmoil, it was Meistersinger I would always pound on the piano. My operatic activities extended backwards towards the beginning when Jill Vlasto enlisted me as cellist for her productions at Girton of Cavalieri’s Rappresentazione di Anima e Corpo and the Orfeo of Monteverdi. Standard fare was provided by visits of the Chelsea Opera Group, which I later joined as ‘the discretest cellist west of Notting Hill Gate’, according to Colin Davis. These were also the years when operatic tradition seemed worthily maintained in England by both Vaughan Williams in The Pilgrim’s Progress and Walton’s Troilus and Cressida apart from Britten. A couple of early reviews (1956-57) were the result of friendship with David Cairns. I had launched him as a record reviewer; he was in a position to let me write for The Times Educational Supplement. The only time I have tried my hand as a very faltering producer was for Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at Gordonstoun School, when I was also conducting. The chorus of not very expert boys in what was, I suppose, Carthaginian white, had to be kept in formation as close as a boxful of sweets irrevocably stuck together, except when they danced. The dense black clouds of malice created by the witches and the chemistry department were driven by a light wind on to the orchestra so that music disappeared from sight and throats were incapacitated by smoke. The situation was saved by the unbelievable beauty of the setting, within the large round steading that is the architectural glory of the school.

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Opera Nights and Nightmares

by summer nights when the limpid Scottish sky smiled throughout, and by a local Dido and Belinda as enchanting musically as they were captivating in interplay and movement. My first visit to Bayreuth (1957) took place in one of the Gordonstoun years. This was by courtesy of Sir Robert Mayer, for whose children’s concerts I had written some programme notes, and with the sympathetic connivance of the headmaster. It was dormitory accommodation, but Wieland Wagner was in control at the Festspielhaus, with controversial productions that yet earned admiration for their elemental simplicity, removal of traditional clutter, subtle use of lighting, and shrewd exploitation of postwar austerity as a necessary virtue. I saw Parsifal twice. The Ring, Tristan and Meistersinger. Wahnfried was still ruinous, but Wilhelmine’s (sister of Frederick the Great) 18th-century Bayreuth was there as counterpoise to the gripping dramas summoning us Act by Act through enticing hints on balcony brass of the portentous music to come. Woodland walks were the means for needed interval recovery, as I have found ever since. A web of Warburg intrigue somehow whisked me from Gordonstoun to Menotti’s Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto in 1962, where I was assistant conductor for two gruelling months. The three operas were Le Comte Ory, Carmen and The Love for Three Oranges, firm favourites ever since. The first two were conducted by Thomas Schippers, the last by Julius Rudel. As rehearsal pianist I had to coach and cajole, drilling Franco Bonisolli as the Prince in Prokofiev, and playing ultimately for the final pre-orchestral stage rehearsal. Apart from working with Shirley Verrett, chaperoned by strictly religious parents, and George Shirley in their roles, my most fascinating Carmen task was to play over and over again while Antonio Gades worked out his sequence of passionate dance steps with a ferocious concentration. In Comte Ory I reverted to a backstage peep-hole through which I relayed Schippers’s beat to a chorus off. Back in England, I wondered about Sadler’s Wells. For audition I played much of A Village Romeo and Juliet, was tested on some Magic Flute, and quizzed on Wagner. I played with feeling but no success. Gordonstoun then provided an introduction to Elsa Mayer-Lismann, who needed a pianistconductor for her opera workshop. It was a joy to work with Kathryn Pring as Aida and the Amneris of Anne Evans before both decided they were singing the wrong role. A long-range result was that Anne Evans twice sang soprano solo for me in the Verdi Requiem, at Southwark Cathedral and in the Albert Hall. Mayer-Lismann was a source of constant fascination to me, for an idiosyncratic English that would urge a budding Strauss Elektra to storm the stage with hair yet more ‘dishevelled’, or an acting brdvura that conjured the Magic Flute serpent by wriggling her considerable bulk with convulsive movements across the floor.

Foreword

XI

Twenty-five years as conductor of the Bart’s Choral Society, which grew from some 30 shy nurses and medical students in 1965 to a final Verdi Requiem in 1987 with choir of 600, allowed not only such titanic works as A Mass of Life by Delius and Mahler 8, but also operas in concert that included Gluck’s Orfeo at Guildhall, Fidelia at the Central Hall, and a Magic Flute at the Albert Hall. In 1967 I was recruited by Stanley Sadie as an associate editor of The Musical Times, and a year later began the long series of reviews that form the bulk of this volume, arranged alphabetically. If recordings and opera tickets came my way by discretion of the editor, I can claim to have heard nothing I did not wish to hear but to have missed much I now ruefully regret. Wagner forms the bulk of the reviews, as he should. If some of my writing seems cavalier, it is no more so than some productions I witnessed. Over the years my canon of excellence has been established, and I doubt if my favourite quartet of The Magic Flute, Fidelio, Meistersinger and Falstaff will ever be dislodged. All four feature largely in the ensuing pages, and I can express only gratitude to the press officers of Covent Garden, the Coliseum and Glyndebourne who have allowed so many evenings of pleasure, both memorable and maddening. Record companies have filled my shelves with LPs, CDs and now the delight of DVDs that mean I need hardly stir abroad again. Stanley Sadie launched me on this wondrous course; Basil Ramsey and Keith Bramich of Music & Viâion are those who now sustain me. The dedication of the book recalls a warm friendship with Professor Szweykowski and his wife. He welcomed me to his Department of the History and Theory of Music at the Jagiellonian University of Cracow. I had much pleasant talk with his students, whom I also addressed more formally. A number of them came later to London under the auspices of my Research Trust; it was also a major pleasure to welcome Zygmunt and Anna to my London home when they too needed a convenient base for their own research. I know for certain the earlier Italian operas I have touched on were familiar to them both; how much further their syiöpathies would have stretched in the book’s lengthy chronological list, others can probably judge more accurately than I. It remains for me to acknowledge yet again the unstinting help provided by John Norris towards the final form of the book. It is he who set the reviews in order, provided the two chronologies at the end of the book, and organised the index. I have almost lost count of the number of my books he has guided towards publication. He is the most generous of colleagues, and somehow manages to accommodate all my whims in the midst of a very heavy schedule. My gratitude is unbounded. Robert Anderson July 2013

Th o m a s Ar n e (1710-78)

Artaxerxes (1762) his recording was originally made in 1995: it deserves to survive at least as long as the forty-one years Artaxerxes himself managed on the throne. Of course the main credit is Arne’s. Remembered mainly as the composer of ‘Rule. Britannia’ at a time when Britons were indeed less slavish than now, Arne should have continued with this work of 1762 a noble school of opera in English as begun by Purcell’s Dido and Aeheas long before. It was not to be, for English snobbery preferred the mostly incomprehensible operatic Italian as easier to gossip through. Artaxerxes remains, therefore, a largely isolated masterpiece. The original libretto was by Metastasio, Englished anonymously. Xerxes, Great King of Persia, was indeed murdered in 465 BC by Artabanes, the operatic scamp who happened also to be his uncle (Ian Partridge). Thus far history. Perhaps Xerxes as Ahasuerus had previously taken the Jewish Esther to wife. Thus far the Bible. About the succeeding antics of the court we know little. Maybe Artabanes handed over his bloodied and incriminating sword to Patricia Spence as his son Arbaces, loyal companion to the Artaxerxes of Christopher Robson, now seated on a somewhat rocky throne. The immediate entourage of the new king is represented by two sisters. Mandane his own, and Semira that of -Arbaces, with Richard Edgar-Wilson as a Rimenes and supplementary evil conscience for .Artabanes. There is of course much love in the air, and it is initial misunderstandings that make the palace action go round. But towards the end of Act 2 the composer, who had hitherto lavished infinite care on a succession of ravishing arias, shows himself also a superb dramatist. The Mandane of Catherine Bott. almost anticipating Mozart’s Queen of Night, manages towering wrath against Artabanes as a villain apparently willing to destroy his son. But Artabanes, plotting yet more diabolically, wants to commit a further regicide, this time on Artaxerxes, free his son, and install .Arbaces on the throne of Persia.

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Opera Nights and Nightmares

Naturally the incarcerated Arbaces is anxious only for death: nor will he accept help proffered by Artaxerxes in the form of escape by means of a secret passage till bidden by his sovereign to make off. Left to himself, Artaxerxes is convinced of his friend’s innocence, seeing in his present suffering merely the likeness of a cloud obscuring momentarily the rays of the sun. The mystery, though, is further compounded when Artabanes fails to find Arbaces in the prison where he last consigned him. Rimenes. with poisoned cup prepared, is bent only on the murder of Artaxerxes, and urges Artabanes to screw his courage to the stickingpoint, even if Arbaces as future king seems momentarily to have disappeared and may be in danger. Of the whole cast Mandane is now the most afflicted, having lost ‘Father, Brother, Lover, Friend’ - in other words Xerxes, Artaxerxes as having seemingly condemned to death her former lover Arbaces, and now his sister Semira, who imagines Mandane wanted vengeance for her father at the cost of Arbaces’ life. Clouds do indeed lighten briefly when Arbaces, on his way to eternal exile, meets Mandane, and they admit their love. At the coronation festivities Artaxerxes all but drains the lethal draught when rebels led by Rimenes burst into the palace. Arbaces repels them, and is then urged to drink the poison, thus proving he never murdered Xerxes. That is too much even for Artabanes. who confesses all and is condemned to death. The pleading of Arbaces has the sentence commuted, and it remains for the chorus to praise as ‘Augustus’ both Artaxerxes I and the more local King Farmer George III. Roy Goodman and his team give their all to a superb work that remained in the operatic repertoire for more than half a century and has every claim to resume an honoured place again at Covent Garden. M&V, December 2009

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Beethoven

Lu d w i g v a n Be e t h o v e n (1770-1827)

Fidelio (1804-14) tanford said of Beethoven’s Fidelio, ‘A crust of bread has become in his hands the means of stirring the world’s emotions for a century.’ Furtwängler’s performance on this HMV recording, now reissued in the Everyman Opera series at a very attractive price, dates from the time (1953) when opera houses throughout Europe were still reopening to the soimds of ‘the noblest, most ideal, most human, and most touching opera in existence’ (Stanford again). Qualms about Furtwängler in Beethoven can be readily dismissed. There are here the expressive changes of tempo that often damaged the flow of symphonic argument in the concert room; but there is justification for all of them, either in the libretto or in the facts known about the conception of the work. It is a magnificent and deeply moving performance, with a heroic Leonora in Martha Modi and a fine-voiced if slightly unrhythmical Florestan in Wolfgang Windgassen. The recording wears its years well.

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MT, April 1968

n the immediate post-war years it was Furtwängler’s performance of Fidelio that seemed most fully to embody the noble message of the op'era. And Karajan has clearly studied to advantage his predecessor’s methods with the work, just as some members of the Berlin Philharmonic may well remember them. The two trios, for instance, have a similar breadth and concentration, and Leonora offers her slice of bread with as significant an emphasis as in the earlier HMV recording. The Karajan glow seems more fully inside the music than usual; and there are more imperfections of ensemble, notably in the prisoners’ chorus and the introduction to Act 2, than this conductor would normally allow. If the opening duet lacks warmth and lightness, it seems in retrospect as if this is only because Karajan is impatient for the real drama of the work. Of the spoken dialogue we have a representative selection, of outside effects, such as knocking at the postern or the rattling of chains, nothing at all.

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Opera Nights and Nightmares

The Leonora of Helga Dernesch grows majestically throughout the performance. She has taken her natural place in the canon quartet, caught up with the others in an apparently trivial situation, yet selflessly dedicated to her dangerous mission; but from the moment the proudly champing cellos and basses launch her on ‘Abscheulicher!’, she dominates the music with a glorious flow of sound that flnely expresses all Beethoven’s sympathy for her predicament. Jon Vickers as Florestan is vocally in full command, and gives a thoughtful, serious reading of the part. Here nobility is all, whether in the initial despair of the dungeon scene or in the incredulous exultation of the duet with Leonora. The bickering youngsters are in the safe hands of Helen Donath and Horst Liebenthal; Karl Ridderbusch as Rocco encompasses both the easy sentiments of his ‘Gold’ aria and the moment of glory when he can at last denounce Pizarro, while the dark menace of Zoltán Kelemen as the prison governor makes fine sense of a role that Beethoven in his loathing came perilously near to making a caricature. The playing of the orchestra and the exemplary quality of the recording add to the fine pleasures of the set. MT, August 1971

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lyndebourne 1981 has been a vintage year indoors; whether the interval cows have also looked sleeker and the horses frisked faster beneath the changeful Sussex skies I cannot be sure. Within the theatre an omnipresent sparrow did splendid symbolic duty as 19th-century freedom in Fidelio (31 July), while the prison courtyard of Act 1, where the Marceline of Elizabeth Gale is busy ironing and a well-trained hen pecks around to keep Patrick Powers’s Jaquino at bay, has for background John Bury’s gatehouse, first seen two years ago, and the sombre portals of the gaol. Outside are disconsolate relatives and friends; inside a kindly Rocco, finely sung by Curt Appelgren, bespectacled and a bit bumbling in official uniform, manages the complex marital problems of his daughter, the fiendish demands of Pizarro, and a vague humanity towards the prisoners with such aplomb that the part had unusual stature. Malcolm Donnelly’s Pizarro was got up like his contemporary Napoleon, and his murderous monomania chillingly put across. Most glorious of all was the Leonora of Josephine Barstow, in style and stature a personable young man, vocally a woman of such character as fully to deserve every heartfelt note of Beethoven’s final paean. It was of course Beethoven’s fault that tears trickled faster with every number. But he was aided and abetted by Peter Hall’s production, as simple, right and serious as the music, ably revived under Guus

Beethoven

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Mostart; by Anton de Ridder’s affecting Florestan, physically shattered, taut yet not self-piteous in voice; by the shambling prisoners coalescing into a plea for freedom mighty enough to disturb the equanimity of any would-be tyrant within ear-shot or beyond; by the oboe that etches the strange lines of Florestan’s ecstatic vision and with unearthly tenderness loosens his fetters; by the overall sensitivity of the London Philharmonic and the conducting of Bernard Haitink, who now approaches Furtwängler in the nobility of his conception, lapsing into banality only in the Act 1 March and start of the Act 2 finale, where poise and rhythm gave place to scrambled impetuosity. Beethoven’s message came urgently across; no more is needed. MT, September 1981

t is almost a decade since I first wept through Peter Hall’s Glyndebourne Fidelio; and now the Touring Company has done it to me again (10 October). The director, Stephen Lawless, remains almost as faithful to the original staging as Leonora to her Florestan. Still the anxious watchers are gathered outside John Bury’s massive fortress gâtés, responsive to events within; still the bewildered prisoners huddle close in their misery when reminded of their constant surveillance; still the loosing of Florestan’s fetters is a moment of supreme private drama on a stage now brilliant and crowded. The period costumes work well; my only regrets were that I had to stare so long at the costumes of my neighbours between leaving the subterranean vault of Act 2 and emerging to the Spanish sunshine of Don Fernando’s arrival; and that Beethoven’s formal, almost hieratic finale should generate such a passion of flag-waving. The Glyndebourne acoustic made the start of the overture stark and uncompromising. But Graeme Jenkins and the Glyndebourne Touring orchestra had much warmth and lyricism at command. They produced the tenderest haze of sound for the Act 1 canon and as the prisoners shuffled on; there were also whipcrack accents for Pizarro’s demonic obsession, and well-groomed rhythms throughout the marches. The cast was evenly matched. Cheryl Baker as the deluded Marceline ironed persistently at the outset, and her firm voice duly kept Christopher Ventris’s personable and musical Jacquino at arm’s length. The kindly and generous-sounding Rocco of John Hall was paternal and protective towards Carol Yahr’s boyish Leonora, an interpretation that grew grandly as the evening progressed. Nicholas Folwell’s dark-grained Bizarro was menacing without any trace of caricature, but Stephen

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Opera Nights and Nightmares

Richardson as Don Fernando gave him his deserts by commanding presence and vocal authority. If Mark Baker, the Florestan, seemed in almost too good shape after so long in the dank depths, there was no doubting his conviction and power. The choral captives had mighty reserves in them too, and the final hymn to freedom with a singularly successful marriage had a joyous strength. This Fidelio would make a clarion call in any land; it goes next to liberate the Scots. MT, January 1991

orty years on, and my tears still flow throughout Fidelio. I had a cold while watching this DVD, so I could snuffle into a handkerchief lest my companion imagined all my critical faculties had been wiped away with the tears. The first question to ask of any operatic DVD is when the performance took place. The more recent, the more nonsensical will be the production. So it is cause for relief and gratitude that this Hamburg Fidelio is all but forty years on. The sound is mono, the colour wavers occasionally, and the magnificent cast of singers mimes to the pre-recorded performance. We are deprived of Rocco’s ‘Gold’ aria and the dialogue is sensibly cut; otherwise Beethoven is free to tell an unvarnished tale that moved him to the depths. The trinity of librettists was sufficiently harried by the exacting composer to produce eventually a drama of taut concentration and searing power; Rolf Liebermann as artistic director has seen to it that the three Hamburg sets are convincingly real yet undistracting. Lucia Popp’s delightful Marceline is busy sewing in the prison courtyard while trying to keep the Jacquino of Erwin Wohlfahrt at bay. At the start of the astonishing canon quartet the camera concentrates hard on Anja Silja as Leonora; so Marceline has every chance to realise that in the end Jacquino might make a more satisfactory husband. But for now she remains an admirable Fidelio. Beethoven could not know how many Don Pizarros would plague the world since the dismal days of the French Revolution. Democracies throw them up as plentifully as the most bloodthirsty tyranny, vengeful petty bureaucrats with sufficient power to turn their heads. The twentieth century spawned them almost to outnumber the grains of sand on the seashore, and its successor promises to do better still. Beethoven leaves us in no doubt how he loathes such specimens of inhumanity, and Theo Adam manages to curdle our blood with the ferocious passion of his nionomania. His final exit, though, is typically hangdog but unrepentant. For the moment he has no intention of resigning.

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Beethoven

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The dazed shuffling of the prisoners is movingly done. To them freedom is so precious an ideal there can be not one of them proposing an interview with the newspapers or a posthumous television appearance. They huddle together as if blinded by the sunlight, and their spokesmen speak up for them from the midst, hardly individualised. They know their every move and word is carefully marked by the soldiers pacing their beat on the walkway above. Fidelio moves among them searching for the husband she suspects is incarcerated somewhere in the prison. But Florestan, in an imwholesome vault far below, is not yet to see the light of day. Fidelio has been taken on as Rocco’s assistant to help dig the grave for Pizarro’s bitterest enemy. The double bassoon eerily reinforces the pickaxe’s gruesome work as Fidelio seeks to discover whether it is indeed Florestan whom Pizarro intends to murder. Horrorstruck that it is he, she gives him what has become the most famous operatic morsel of food to eat and sip to drink. Both are rescued by Leonora’s production of a revolver against Pizarro and the distant trumpet on the ramparts announcing the minister’s arrival. Pizarro can only flee to certain exposure and disgrace. As Don Fernando, Hans Sotin has all the authority to unmask Pizarro and organise the unshackling of his friend Florestan. The citizenry has crowded into the handsome castle courtyard, with the liberated prisoners among them. News of Leonora’s unfailing courage inspires them to a hymn of praise to womanhood and freedom. The Hamburg chorus has superb attack and diction. But it is of course Leonora herself who must divest Florestan of his chains. If it was Furtwängler who seemed to have almost a postwar monopoly of Fidelio, Leopold Ludwig proves himself here an altogether worthy runner-up. M&V, May 2007 idelio was one of the three Beethoven works I was determined to conduct, the others being the Missa solemnis and Symphony no. 9. They had long been an awesome presence in the family music room, part of the old Breitkopf & Härtel complete edition generously purchased by my father from the widow of Alan Gray at Cambridge, when he realised his sons were unswerving in their devotion to music. My chance came in June 1972 through the good offices of Geoffrey Chard, who suggested that the Australian Music Association would support my choral society in a concert performance of the opera with a cast of Australian singers. So it was that on the platform of the Central Hall, Westminster, the Florestan was Gregory Dempsey, with Judith Turner as Leonora, Noel Noble’s Rocco, and the Pizarro of John Shaw. Conducting, as I always did, from memory, I made a momentary slip in ‘Abscheulicher’. Perhaps only Judith Turner and I knew; yet it remains in my mind an unforgivable blot on a joyous occasion.

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Opera Nights and Nightmares

Já n Le v o s l a v Be l l a (1843-1936)

Wieland der Schmied (1880-90)

o hear a Wagner libretto in another composer’s setting is a rare experience indeed. Bella’s Wieland der Schmied is much more than a curiosity, as a recent concert performance in the Bratislava Retoutensaal amply showed. Wagner began his Wieland sketch near the beginning of his Swiss exile in December 1849. He wondered whether it might be worked towards an operatic success in Paris; but by the following October the scheme was abandoned, and the ‘dramatic sketch’ was offered to Liszt. It was later suggested to Rockel, Weissheimer, and even Berlioz. The musician who eventually took it up was the Slovakian Ján Bella. Wagner’s sketch was partially dramatised and, as he told Princess Wittgenstein, he had even written some of the verses. It was turned into a workable libretto by Oskar Schlemm, who enthusiastically espoused Wagnerian alliteration so as to produce as climactic line, ‘Wahnfrei gewannst du das wonnigste Weib’. References to Wotan, Valkyries and Valhalla are incorporated, while ‘Hollaho’ is a characteristic greeting, and work at the forge elicits ‘Hojahoho’. The ingredients could not be more Wagnerian. A wounded swanwoman arrives at the Nordic home of Wieland, the master smith. She has with her a ring that will ensure the undying love of any man and, if worn by a man, secure victory for him in every contest. Marriage instantly ensues. The hostile Bathilde, daughter of King Neiding, filches the ring and engineers the capture of Wieland by her henchman Gram, who fires Wieland’s home and apparently incinerates the swanwoman. Wieland bestrides a log and is sea-borne to vengeance at the court of Neiding. But Bathilde has the ring, by which she causes Wieland to forget the swan-wife and become her thrall. To gain her he will now make weapons for her father. Bathilde, however, desires Gram, and tells Neiding about the ring to gain his consent. Neiding, though, dislikes the match, and engineers that Wieland should slay Gram; to secure Wieland’s continued service he has him lamed. The ring was damaged in the murderous fight, and Bathilde needs Wieland to repair it. When she removes the ring from her finger, her power over Wieland is broken. She has ^o confess that his swan-wife still lives. Wieland’s masterstroke as craftsman is now to forge for himself glittering swan wings, by means

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Bella

of which he can fly to join his wife, ensuring at the same time the death of Neiding and his entourage in the flames of the forge. If Wagner envisaged the spirit of Germany rising above the ashes of the old régime, the authorities of Bratislava needed to look no further than the recent independence of Slovakia as excuse for three concert performances. The Wagnerian mantle fits Bella splendidly. His motifs may not grip so tellingly, nor does he know how to ease tension; but the excitement is authentic enough. With the Slovak Philharmonic in virtuoso form on stage rather than in the pit, the richness of Bella’s scoring seemed as remarkable as the singers’ struggle to withstand it. Ondrej Lenard at the helm might have attempted a more merciful balance, but the male singers, and notably Richard Haan as Wieland and the Neiding of Dalibor Jenis, made a considerable impression. Jana Valaskova’s swan-wife was more convincing than the muchvibratoed malice of Magdalena Blahusiakova as Bathilde; but it was the vibrant splendour of the chorus that stole the vocal honours with singing of exemplary fervour and power. Their final celebration of the two airborne swan creatures was moving and exhilarating. MT, December 1993

Vi n c e n z o Be l l i n i (1801-35)

IIpirata (1827) hen Bellini’s Pirata was first done in London, on 17 April 1830, The Harmonicon considered it had been produced ‘in so inefficient a manner, that it was utterly impossible to form any conclusive impression of its merits’. This was far from the case with the London Opera Society’s performance under Carlo Felice Cillario at Drury Lane on 22 April, though there were some hints that both chorus (Ambrosian Opera) and orchestra (Royal Opera House) could have benefited from greater knowledge of their parts. The pirates, the naval warfare, and the Sicilian political background of the story make little musical impact; all is concentrated in the plight of the heroine, who loses husband (slain), lover (condemned to death), and consequently her reason. Montserrat Caballé as Imogene had

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moments of unreliable intonation, but for the most part gave unalloyed pleasure with an effortless succession of beautiful sounds, and revealed in the finale an unsuspected dramatic intensity that gave a touch of genuine terror to the mad scene. MT, August 1969

n 1891 Shaw was predicting a bright future for ‘the enchanting old tunes and the inspiriting old rum-turn’ of yesteryear’s Italian opera. He pointed out that where harmonies were so meagre and orchestration so elementary, it must he irresistible tune or nothing. But now that we can hear on HMV discs Bellini’s third opera, written the year Beethoven died and in the composer’s mid-20s, the wonder is that the orchestration is so subtle and the harmonies so rich. There are those moments when the polonaise rh5dhms and buoyant Rossini crescendos entirely belie the mournful sentiments being poured out on stage; and the murderous trio in which the main characters are involved in a life-death struggle would probably strike any visitor from east of Suez as frolicsome in the extreme. But time and again the young Bellini startles us with a stroke of chilling musical drama, and in the final mad scene for Imogen there is mood-painting of astonishing power from the cor anglais, before the more conventionally lunatic flute takes over. The scene is set in 13th-century Sicily, and the action depends on the indubitable fact that, as an early commentator indicated, Sicilians do not regard injuries ‘with the exemplary nonchalance that philosophers do in colder climates’. The story originates in a play by an Irish divine, and is as devoted to the bloodbath as the history of Irish religion would lead us to expect. Coleridge thought the tale execrable, but Scott liked it. Romani, the librettist, and Bellini did their best to civilize it. The resulting scheme gave Bellini all he needed for a great popular success: an opening storm with ruined sea-shore monastery and buffeted boat as background; choruses of prayer, drink, and pity; a heroine ready to be mentally unhinged almost before the curtain goes up, a ducal husband of possessive jealousy, and a former lover turned pirate for want of more orthodox success. Montserrat Caballé ensures a warm welcome for this first recording of II pirata. Those effortless sounds, concentrated sometimes into an utterance of thrilling tension, sometimes into a line of unearthly beauty, capable always of fining to an exquisite pianissimo, makes magical listening. Her lover Gualtiero (one hastens to add that Bernabé Marti is her wedded husband outside the theatre) is impulsive, undaunted by

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top D’s, but so unrelievedly strenuous as to risk monotony. Piracy may not offer the best training either for manners or vocal technique; but a little more variety in approach would have been welcome. By contrast the supposedly unsympathetic Duke is made richly appealing in his political triumph and emotional despair, and Piero Cappuccini gives a full and rounded performance. Gavazzeni is a devoted Bellinian, and the delicacy of the orchestral playing pleads eloquently for a score that has been too long neglected. MT, February 1972

I Capuleti ed i Montecchi (1830) erlioz heard Bellini’s Romeo and Juliet opera in Florence, about a year after its first performance, and loathed it. There was no Shakespeare, nothing; and why make Romeo a woman, in the name of all that was musical ? The Juliet was tall and substantial, the Romeo short and thin; the rest of the cast was out of tune. The Prom performance (Albert Hall, 21 August) couldn’t bring back Shakespeare, resex Romeo or give us a Veronese balcony; but it did nearly everything else. We of the audience applauded roundly throughout the evening; and the orchestra did likewise. They were not primarily congratulating themselves, though they could well have done so. Bellini’s ravishing solos for clarinet, horn and cello were done with a passion and tenderness that bespoke a lively commitment to the music; and indeed the BBC Symphony Orchestra showed by its alert rhythms and delicacy of phrasing that there was more to Bellini than Berlioz ever imagined. And what a chap he is. Even Wagner (in a rare moment of dispassionate enlightenment) regarded him as the perfect antidote to German stodginess. When he is not lifting the spirit with dashing marches or melting cavatinas, weaving vocal ensembles of ever more cunning sonority, causing us smiles with the infectious gaiety of his musifc-making, suddenly he decides to be tragic and kill off his lovers, leaving not a dry eye in the house. I imagine Sir John Pritchard enjoyed himself as much as the orchestra and I did. The opera was beautifully paced and finely controlled apparently without effort. But it was the Romeo and Juliet who most earned our gratitude. I was too intrigued by their musicianship to bother about their relative heights or whether blue was essentially Capuletish or flashing silver Montaguesque. The Giulietta of Leila Cuberli and Marline Dupuy’s Romeo were superbly realized. The radiant voices, flexible of tone and packed with

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emotion, easily filled the vast hall; they could hush, too, to an awesome pianissimo that was just as telling. With such duettiste, Romeo had to he a woman. MT, October 1988

/puritani (1835) t is all but 12 years since Miss Sutherland was last a recorded Roundhead, wandering in and out of madness with beguiling ease, the more genuinely touching the more unhinged by unfounded jealousy of Queen Henrietta Maria. For Bellini in 1835 Cromvello was eternally glorious, the Stuardi good riddance in defeat. The scene of the opera is Plymouth, Charles’s head is already off, Henrietta’s likely to follow suit till disguised by Elvira’s veil, and the heroine ready to dance for her postponed wedding day whenever the situation becomes too poignant for any normal reaction. Bellini handles the war background and politics with dramatic instinct and strength, giving the chorus of ladies and gentlemen a role well beyond commentary; but it is on the maddened maiden he lavishes his ultimate skill and shows times without number that impossible situations can be improbably moving. Joan Sutherland may not have quite the stratospheric ease of former days on this Becca recording; but there are still very few who could negotiate a mad scene better. Elvira in distress is tenderly imagined and most beautifully sung. Initially I felt both the Sir Richard of Piero Cappuccini and Nicolai Ghiaurov’s Sir George Walton were too dark and melancholy for their parts; but as the work developed and Bellini warmed to the task, they seemed increasingly appropriate. As Lord Arthur Talbot, Luciano Pavarotti is more conventionally cast, the robust, emotional Italian tenor, ready for a made-to-measure tear; yet he too gets caught up in the real drama of side 6 and becomes credibly human. As Bellini’s last opera, I puritani suggests the young composer might well have led Verdi a merry dance in latter years; it is an impressive piece, in which Richard Bon3mge has elicited a fine performance from soloists, the Covent Garden Opera Chorus and London Symphony Orchestra alike.

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MT, February 1976

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Al b a n Be r g (1885-1935)

Wozzeck (1914-25) he great joy of this opera, when the treatment meted out to most of its characters becomes unendurable, is to take refuge in the simple attractions of its musical structures. Act 1 offers a Suite, Military March and Passacaglia. In Act 2 there is the comfort of a Fantasia and Fugue plus Scherzo with two trios. The final act is a series of Inventions: during that on one note Marie is murdered by Wozzeck; in the course of Berg’s meditations on a six-note chord Wozzeck wades further and further into a pool to cleanse himself of Marie’s blood (shades of dear Lady Macbeth) until at last he drowns. Thus in his cunning Berg anchors his music to time-honoured devices well proved in every composer’s workshop. Composition of the work was protracted. Büchner’s play had a first Viennese performance in 1914, when Berg decided to set it. Then came the war, Berg’s conscription to the War Ministry, appalling asthma attacks, and at last some sick leave in August 1917. It was then Berg wrote to his erstwhile teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, that he had resumed composition of Wozzeck. But it was with a heavy heart, as he explained in his letter of 13 August. Four of his students had suffered notably: one was already a year in Russian captivity; two had been killed that year; and a fourth had leg wounds and frostbite that could incapacitate him for life. Büchner’s post-1830 revolutionary sympathy for the underdog was now combined with the agony of Berg’s wartime experience to produce a searing drama perfectly matched in music both manically chromatic and of pathological precision. Peter Mussbach, who designed the sets for this Arthaus Musik DVD and directed on stage, combines also the disciplines of psychiatry, neurology and sociology. Wozzeck and Marie as victims could not be in safer hands. There is no attempt at realism. Wozzeck’s home first appears as a toy red house, a prophetic skull surveys the work’s rare attempts at jollification, and all the children, including Marie’s little lad, wear masks of non-identity. Wozzeck’s (the American Dale Duesing) first tormenter is the pot bellied captain of Dieter Bundschuh, whom he must shave every day. With his moral sense kindling towards a sort of gavotte, the captain upbraids his barber with having produced a child without blessing from

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the church. As Marie, emotionally susceptible and unstable, Kristine Ciesinski tries her ineffective best to calm Wozzeck out of irrational fears and strange visions that torment him. Their little boy is in attendance, understanding nothing and expressionless. Coming from a medical family and indeed a doctor himself, Georg Büchner is merciless to his stage quack. In this production. Frode Olsen’s doctor cavorts round his consulting room like a demented magician, while the increasingly distressed Wozzeck shins up a psychological cone that dominates the surgery to find ever-diminishing comfort as he approaches the top. Marie’s undoing will be Ronald Hamilton’s drummajor, a burly figure who at once excites her and in no time has his arms about her. Her fate is sealed when Wozzeck sees them executing a seedy little waltz in a tavern garden. A blood-red moon rises as Wozzeck and Marie walk together. Driven to a desperation of jealousy, Wozzeck has with him the knife with which he slits Marie’s throat. In a futile attempt to dispose of the knife, Wozzeck himself perishes. The captain and doctor have heard his agonised cries but hurry on. It remains only for the local urchins to try and convince the little boy his mother is dead while he plays on his hobby-horse. This Frankfurt performance under the painstaking Sylvain Cambreling is quite convincing enough to convince me another decade can happily pass before I need see the opera again. M&V, July 2006

He c t o r Be r l i o z (1803-69)

The Trojans (1856-58)

vast deal of British piety has gone into the resurrection of The Trojans, enough almost to have floated Aeneas across the Atlantic to a still further shore of the west. While we hardly knew the piece, i was thrilling to clutch it to our national bosom as a monument to the classical education in which we had all been brought up, as a civilized rejoinder to the barbarities and exaggerations of Wagner, as the pearl of Gallic opera that the French themselves had unaccountably neglected. The ‘Royal Hunt and Storm’, touted around by Beecham with ever

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greater panache, promised magnificent things; an impoverished pre war production in Glasgow hinted at the vast hoard of musical wonders to be unearthed in the score. But now that we have been the first to produce the work complete in its original language, to get the full score properly into print, and admirably to record it, should we not start to tot up the number of stools among which Berlioz so disappointingly tumbled in this his most ambitious project ? Many a schoolboy has wished to rush out of a Virgil lesson; only Berlioz, we are led to believe, did so for the right reasons: he was too moved by the death of Dido to hang on any longer. A good start. Berlioz, though late in time, might have produced a 19th-century successor to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, the title of which so effortlessly reveals the composer’s aims, the music of which so completely fulfils them. But Berlioz knew his Virgil through and through. The imperial theme that made the poet seek to justify the ways of Augustus to men took hold of the composer (at one time he contemplated a reference to French successes in North Africa), and he came to insult the purity of his boyhood vision with Dido’s ruinous death-cry to Hannibal (of course the hint is in Virgil), and the sad vulgarity of the Trojan march at the final curtain. This confusion of aim runs through the piece. Poor Aeneas gets a hopeless launching by having to narrate the death of Laocoon and personally explain that everything is ready for the dragging in of the wooden horse. Augustus would have disowned such an ancestral ninny and Virgil bewailed the psychological blunder that made of his hero a political nonentity from the outset. On the musical side there was Berlioz’s youthful fascination with Gluck, an influence responsible for much that is finest in The Trojans. But while leaning heavily on Gluck’s dramatic method, he forgot his masterful concision, the heart-rending concentration that can still make Orfeo a moving experience in the theatre, despite the funked ending and the remoteness of the myth. By the mid-19th century, though, Parisian operatic traditions had hardened to the point of sclerosis, and in The Trojans Berlioz showed to what extent the old revolutionary fires in him had burned away and how far he was prepared to compromise with local demands for pageantry and spectacle. But perhaps it is needless to examine dramatic pretensions to which Berlioz’s music makes little claim. The fact that his name doesn’t appear in the index of Kerman’s Music as Drama doesn’t matter a pin compared with the magical beauty of so much in Act 4, the solemn anguish of Andromache’s entry, the weird intensity of Dido’s last moments. Wherever Berlioz was caught by the human situation, he responded magnificently and with success; imperial Rome he should have left to the incomparable Virgil and the curious attention of Edward Gibbon.

eriment. Instead the Prologue was dominated by a gauze imprinted

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in the manner of Veronica’s veil with a wide-eyed Christ face; and the great bells of Poutivl were ready in the background to declare warfare against the Tartars as Igor ignored the warning eclipse. There was also enough comic invention to justify the constant popping-up of Skula and Yeroshka and the drunken see-saw of their politics. Under the direction of V.Zeva, the orchestra gave proper expression to the fathomless gloom of the Russian soul and made up with fire and energy what it may have lacked in finesse. The reediness of the choral women was backed by full-throated men to make an impressive contribution from the crowd. There seems an infinite supply of Russians with the right physique and voice for Khan Konchak, and F.Kuznetsov did his genial best to make the passionate Igor of N.Koplov settle down. But thoughts of Yaroslavna, eloquently sung by F.Lukutova, persisted. In the absence of Act 3, it was quite unclear how Igor managed his escape to Poutivl; this made all the more occasion for the two tipsy gudok players to demonstrate their resource. L.Gladkov and V.Shevelev were a plausible pair of scoundrels, vocally incisive but without coarseness. All in all it was the integrity of the production that prevailed and the sureness of the stage ensemble rather than the virtuosity of individual singers. MT, September 1991

t Petersburg is a little south of the Shetland island where I used annually to spend the shortest night in June; nonetheless, Peter the Great’s glorious city rightly celebrates its ‘White Nights’, an the operatic highlight of this year’s festival was thought to be the first Russian production since 1929 of Strauss’s Salome. Despite the appearance in the St Petersburg Press of a snake-locked, half-page Salome as imagined by Aubrey Beardsley, I felt I had seen enough of the Baptist’s head for 1995. Salome had made love to it at Covent Garden (p.l99); I had mourned over its reputed resting-place in Damascus; and countless Russian icons had shown its owner gazing at it through the eyes of a new head. So I deserted Herod Agrippa’s daughter-in-law for Borodin’s Prince Igor and the tale of his rash campaign against the Polovtsians undertaken in 1185. Russian history-opera is irresistible. It hardly matters whether the tragic hero is Igor, Ivan or Boris; indeed there is excellent material in the more recent Vladimir, Joseph, or even another Boris. Stasov’s scenario, on which Borodin based his magnificent operatic torso, used The Lay of the Host of Igor, a 12th-century epic probably written soon after the ill-fated campaign. It was not printed

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lint,il 1800, and the original MS was destroyed in the 1812 fire of Moscow during Napoleon’s yet more ill-fated campaign. The sometime Maly theatre is now named after Musorgsky, no bad omen for a staging of Igor. Just as Borodin’s music is equally at home in the chronicles of ancient Russia or when surveying the unfathomable depths of the Russian soul, so a vast brooding Christ image dominated the Prologue and gave baleful significance to the eclipse of the sun that should have warned Igor off the battlefield. The producer, S.L.Graudasinsky, marshalled his princes, boyars, elders and warriors with’ consummate skill, and the dark-hued richness of the mediaeval costumes made a splendid show against the stark simplicity of the set. The city of Poutivl was no more than its gateway and obligatory belfry. The Polovtsian camp on a gentle hill slope was equally symbolic, so as to accommodate easily the staggering vitality of the hectic dances, in which the pagan cohorts went through every contortion known to primitive or modern man. Musically the dances were whipped to a frenzy of excitement by the conductor, A. Anikhanov. Somehow the orchestra and full-voiced chorus kept up, and so did the whirling warriors. Outstanding among the singers were the Igor of I. Logvinov, noble in bearing and finely resonant in his prison-camp aria, and the genial F. Kuznetsov as Khan Konchak, commanding in presence and vocally assured to the lowest depths. The young lovers, Vladimir and Konchakovna, were taken by the pleasing tenor of I. Ostrovsky and Y. Gertseva’s rich contralto. If V. Yuvzenko as Yaroslavna behaved and acted like a true princess (she might with advantage give a few lessons in Britain), grieving for her absent husband without a trace of self-pity, her voice did not quite match the intensity of her characterisation. The scoundrels Skula and Yeroshka, as interpreted by S.Saphenin and V.Lukyanov, managed tkeir bibulous romps in excellent voice and with sufficient variety to avoid becoming tiresome. The fact that Borodin, despite a creative effort spanning 18 years, never finished Prince Igor means that theatres select from it what they will. If Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov, in their righteous zeal to make viable an obviously outstanding work, lopped all but 2000 bars from Borodin’s MS material, one can hardly cavil at the Musorgsky team for truncating the overture and omitting Act 3. But there exists a published version first heard 20 years ago in Vilnius that gives a revealing idea of what we usually miss. St Petersburg first heard the opera in November 1890, and Borodin is buried in the grounds of its Alexander Nevsky monastery; no city has a stronger duty to mount an ur-Igor for the repertoire. MT, September 1995

'M.f: At the outset the Princess Fedora of Mirella Freni, perhaps more # fresh in voice than appearance (she has many a misery ahead of her) % |b awaiting her fiancé. Captain of the Imperial Guard. His arrival on a 1tretcher all but dead is not what she bargained for. The palace is in an uproar, and from the welter of witnesses the police elicit the persistent % name, of Count Loris Ipanov. He is surely the culprit, and the Princess W is resolved on vengeance. As a good Orthodox Christian subject to no industrial tribunal, she wears a notably visible cross. Within it, though, Í is a phial of deadly poison that might be put to some characteristic Russian purpose. t;. Giordano has already shown himself capable of grand Italianate ' melodic lines. Translated to Paris, the initial social scene is conducted against the background of a piano recital by Boleslao Lazinski (Arnold Bosnian), who claimed to be a nephew of Chopin on the reasonable ground that the composer had two married sisters. Placido Domingo as Count Loris is vocally magnificent, admits he murdered Vladimir, and is therefore about to be killed by assassins planted in the garden by the Pripcess. He then produces a letter incriminating Vladimir as the lover of Loris’s wife. Assassination inevitably gives place to love between Count and Princess, so that she forbids him the garden and urges him to remain for the night. Fedora and Loris have adopted what they assume is a safe retreat in the mountains, where they can luxuriate in their passion and the splendid scenery provided by La Scala. Countess Olga, proprietress of the Polish pianist, has taken up cycling in what must be arduous terrain and appears equipped for a ride on her machine. The lakeside idyll is rudely shattered by the arrival of a diplomat well known to the lovers. The letter Fedora had penned to eliminate Loris in Paris had also reached Vladimir’s father. The double result was the death by drowning of Loris’s brother and the fatal grief of his mother.

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Fedora is beside herself and can finally concentrate only on her crucifix. She wonders if she might keep the appalling tidings from Loris, but he gets a letter from St. Petersburg revealing the full scale of the disaster. She has to admit her responsibility, and Loris’s initial reaction is to curse her roundly. The poison is suspended round her neck, concealed within that symbol of intolerable suffering. This was not how Fedora anticipated its use, but in her abject wretchedness she sees no escape. The deadly fluid destroys her at its own operatic tempo, by which time Loris is both full of understanding and forgiveness. This 1993 performance is admirably conducted by the veteran Gianandrea Gavazzeni, who has since joined the immortals in a loftier sphere. But it is a refreshment to watch and hear how idiomatically he directs a score that should be far more familiar here. Giordano obviously liked political turmoil. The Andrea Chénier of two years previously is embroiled in the midst of the French Revolution, and now we have a moment in Russian history when, to quote Madame de Staël, ‘despotism was mitigated by strangulation’ (more strictly a couple of bombs). At the Scala in 1993 there was no need to implicate the director in the bloodbath. Giordano’s wishes were admirably followed, and TDK can congratulate itself on a memorable experience. M&V, December 2006

Ph i l

ip

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(b.l937)

Akhnaten (1984)

here they are, the gods of ancient Egypt, scattered over the stage of Philip Glass’s A/e/maien (Coliseum, 17 June) even before curtainup. I picked out Thoth, Sekhmet, Horus, Anubis and many others. T heretic king (c. 1352-36 BC) and his dotty family force them to be piled up, higgledy-piggledy for most of the evening, but they’re back at the end, majestic, jolly and harmless symbols of Egypt’s eternity. David Freeman, the producer, keeps Egypt also on the go with a perpetual winnower to the right, throwing corn into the air throughout the reign, and an everlasting brickmaker to the left. Whether Philip Glass’s music server the same end I rather doubt.

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Glass Much is made in the programme writings of the monotony of such Egyptian texts as the Book of the Dead. Maybe one can wander through Egyptian temples built by New Kingdomers or Romans and fail, to detect any difference. Doubtless one may wilt if presented with a millionth mummified ibis. Possibly one of the most striking traits of ancient Egyptian music (about which we know next to nothing) was an addiction to one tonality. Yet Mr Glass risks all by spending his allotted span on an arpeggio of A minor, except when it turns for some hundreds of bars into an arpeggio of E minor. There was great applause at the end, in which I failed to join, having fallen fast asleep. I have long classed Akhnaten (to stick to Glass’s spelling) with Edward Lear’s Co-operative Cauliflower, regarding him with mingled affection and disgust. His statues in the Cairo Museum, aggressively hermaphrodite, are not much fun. His hymn to the Aten, which obviously gave ideas to the psalmist of no. 104, is beautiful and touching. He is reckoned with his sun-god to have done much for the foundation of monotheism, a very questionable endeavour in view of its later history. So he’s controversial enough, and Mr Glass has an enigmatic hero about whom distressingly little is known. Take the family tree. There is the mother, Tye; the wife of surpassing loveliness, Nefertiti; six daughters; two successors, the second being Tutankhamun. But who fathered or mothered whom is beyond anyone’s wit to sort out. Mr Glass suggests the worst, by making everyone as incestuous as possible. Queen Tye becomes the protagonist and a seeming all-mother. She and Nefertiti whirl like dervishes (they’re probably meant to be kites - that is, birds) round the bier of the dead father, Amenhotep III. She has Akhnaten and Nefertiti hopping round the temple of Amun and among the statues of the gods in a froglike ritual that threatens to become another symbol of Egypt’s eternity (whether in A or E minor I forget). Christopher Robson was got up as Akhnaten with uncanny cleverness. When stripped for purification, he obviously had one organ the Akhnaten statues omit; otherwise he could have been a spitting image, and his clear, cold countertenor was both appropriate and controlled with nice calculation. The Tye of Marie Angel was commanding and sinist.er, more full of desire than dismay at what was happening. Sally Burgess’s Nefertiti may not quite have rivalled the Berlin bust, but she sang with the ‘sweet voice’ attributed to the queen in the inscriptions. Graeme Matheson-Bruce as the High Priest of Amon towered above the action and patted Egypt back to polytheism with a loving hand. The Cook’s tourists (I use the name generically) who trampled over the ruins of Akhnaten’s capital under the guidance of Lord Harewood were good entertainment; but it was in the ghostly epilogue, with the royal

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trio scrabbling over the plain, that I fell into an A minor doze. I suspect Paul Daniel conducted well throughout, and I know from personal converse that a trombonist enjoyed himself. I did not. MT, August 1985 ihnaten and his capital have always involved the visitor in a certain mount of suffering. The vast area, surrounded by a semicircle of desert hills, had transport of greater originality than comfort towards the rock-cut tombs of courtiers who supported the eccentric pharaoh in his religious experiment. There was a dust-cart dragged by a tractor through clouds of sand so dense that passengers were thoroughly addled and hardly recognisable at the end of the journey; the cart was later replaced by an ex-NAAFI vehicle high enough to escape some of the sand; but the only practical solution was to ride on the tractor itself, a privilege granted only to the most agile or the visitor with the most readily accessible tip. I have a suspicion Mr Glass may have travelled on the dust-cart.

Mi k h a i l Gl

in k a

(1804-57)

Excerpts from A Life for the Tsar (1836) A Life for the Tsar is concerned with the Russian ‘Time of Troubles’, that thirty-year period from the death of Ivan the Terrible to the election of the first Romanov in 1613. The villains of the piece are the Poles, who had supported the claims of Ivan’s young son Dmitri (he died mysteriously in Boris Godunov"s reign) in the persons of two false Dmitris aspiring to the Russian throne. Though the first false Dmitri was shot from a cannon, and the second was summarily bumped off, the Poles remained a major menace, with their king Sigismund master of Smolensk and ready to pounce. A Polish attempt to waylay Michael Romanov in the neighbourhood of Kostroma was thwarted by the ingenuity and loyalty of Ivan Susanin, ready to die rather than let the young Tsar be captured. The subject was the more relevant after Napoleon’s onslaught, and it was Tsar Nicholas himself who produced the accepted title of the opera rather than the originai ‘Ivan Susanin’, revived in 1939 by the Soviets. The story has such deep roots in Russia that a friend of mine with no sense of direction and capable of leading anyone anywhere is nicknamed Susanin.

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The rest of the music on the disc stems from the period after the comparative failure of Ruslan and Lyudmila. Glinka continues in the Russian vein for his arrangement of a Valse-Fantaisie piano piece. It starts melancholic and in typical Russian dumps. Kamarinskaya dovetails and plays resourceful variations on a couple of folk tunes that were to become ubiquitous in Russian music.‘Tchaikovsky considered the "piece the essential acorn to the wide-branching oak of Russian musical achievement. Glinka’s stay in Spain produced two overtures, the first exploiting in fascinating sonorities the jota aragonesa. The second was originally called ‘Reminiscenses of Castille’, but was then localised to ‘Memory of a summer night in Madrid’. It is rather more sectional than the first, and less successful despite its zest. The Armenian orchestra under Tjeknavorian gives a competent performance throughout but lacks the sheer dash and verve to bring the inúsic fully to life. As an introduction to some of Glinka’s best pieces, some unfamiliar, the disc does well; but somewhere round the corner should be a performance that for brilliance and bravura would sweep us off our feet. Glinka deserves it. ,

M&V, 17 February 2001

Ch r i s t o ph Wi l

l i ba l d

(1714-87)

Gl

uc k

Orfeo ed Euridice (1762, 1774) nthisDecca recorded version ofthe Covent Garden Orfeo, Solti manages all the bustling music to capital effect. With splendid cooperation from the orchestra, the festive overture, Orpheus’s Parisian exit aria and the triumphant finale have admirable energy and drive; and the Furies cavort around to their Don Juan ballet music with terrifying zest. But sometimes Solti seems uneasy when compelled to don the tragic mask and buskins. The first Ballo is a little cumbersome, Amor’s wings seem clipped in the central part of his opening aria, and occasionally the pace of the recitative is more portentous than expressive. Among the soloists Marilyn Horne’s Orpheus is somewhat muted: this is appropriate enough at the outset of Act 1, but less so when Orpheus summons the utmost of his art to quell the Furies and secure

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entrance to the underworld. The bickerings with Eurydice at the start of Act 3 are finely done, but here Pilar Lorengar’s more dramatic approach contributes its effect and consolidates the impression made by her subtly phrased ‘E quest’ asilo’. The Amor of Helen Donath is lively and manages to put across the essential capriciousness of this intolerable little god. Nevertheless, the vocal honours are really carried off by the Royal Opera Chorus, whether circling the tomb of Eurydice with dignified funereal pomp, turbulently fending off the intruder to Hades in Act 2 (their ultimate collapse is one of the loveliest things in the recording), or steering the opera to its jubilant conclusion. Words have exemplary clarity, and their performance has a dramatic range seldom touched elsewhere. In the accompanying booklet Arthur Hutchings introduces the work with many fine sentiments, and pays dignified tribute to the stature of one of the few operas that can really be taken seriously. He may be right in suggesting that ‘purists who say: “Stick to the original Vienna version and the Italian words” are now rarely heard’; but as a staunch believer in the respective virtues of both the Viennese original (1762) and its Parisian reworking (1774), I should have appreciated some indication of which European capital the recorded music was to visit next. As it is, we hop without warning (and sometimes in mid recitative) from Vienna to Paris and back, while the only textual note in the libretto might suggest to the unwary that the Act 1 exit aria was written by Bertoni rather than Gluck. In the event Solti is surprisingly Viennese, and increasingly so as the opera proceeds. The emergence from Hades, for instance, remains Viennese right through the lengthy recitative and duet (though there Solti interpolates the slowings-down Gluck thought up for Paris). For those operatic tourists who may prefer to know where they are, the quick answer is Vienna, except for the usual excursions to Parisian highspots; but a detailed plotting of the itinerary would require the Bärenreiter scores of the two versions and recourse to Patricia Howard’s MT article of October 1967, ‘Orfeo and Orphée’. MT, September 1970

luck was pleased that his librettist had gone in for ‘heartfelt language, strong passions, interesting situations and an endlessly varied spectacle’. The Komische Oper of Berlin recently launched Covent Garden its interpretation of what Gluck meant (6 August). There were some flat reminders of heartfelt words in the surtitles. Jochen

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Kowalski, a male-alto Orpheus of remarkable vocal range, gesticulated a large number of passions to near tatters. It was interesting enough to set most of the opera at New Street station, Birmingham and amid 1960s high-rises. Variety rather ran out, though sometimes the opera house itself was mirrored from the stage and I kept an eager watch to see whether I too might shoot by. \' The producer Harry Kupfer made of Orpheus a guitar-playing busker, to whom one paid unusual attention because he happened to know some nÿ of the loveliest tunes in the world. His wife Eiurydice had been killed in a ömash, and Orpheus spent the rest of the evening bemoaning his loss, retiring to a Birmingham hospital for Act 2, hallucinating, and not watching Eurydice on his portable television set for most of Act 3. The ingredients of the story were roughly News of the World. Talk of gods and furies seemed oddly out of place, and indeed it was unclear what psychological release Orpheus had achieved by perhaps taming these particular neuroses. Amor was represented as a cupid, a dear little boy who played ball with Orpheus at the station, while being effectively sung in evening dress by Christiane Oertel. The Eurydice of the evening was the rightly bewildered but gamely musical Alexandra Coku. There were some harsh voices among the chorus, maybe too much influenced by the flashed-up pop singers at the back of the stage. The chorus sat at right angles to the orchestral pit, whence emanated lovely sounds (much melancholy tromboning) under Hartmut Haenchen. The 1762 version of the opera, used for this bizarre Midlands drama, has the supreme virtues of swift action and brevity. When played without interval, the work would be irresistible under almost any circumstances. That it caught constantly at the throat even as filtered V through the glum perversity of the DDR spoke volumes for Gluck, whose ■'ll recourse to the ancient world has a relevance way beyond a derailment at New Street, or indeed the upsets of 20th-century Berlin. V..

MT, October 1989 rfeo ed Euridice in the Vienna version of 1762, dramatically concentrated and disappointing only in its beginning and end, when a cheerful overture and festive conclusion belie the tense impact of the myth, was a revelation for me to conduct in 1969. 1 had been brqught up on a mishmash of Vienna and Paris (it was not easy to resist somb of the later additions); but to present for the approval of Gog and Magog, the gigantic guardians of Guildhall in the City of London, a Work as cogent as Gluck’s and Calzabigi’s original design was privilege indeed. Oriel Sutherland as Orpheus and Jill Gomez as Eurydice could not have been more sensitive in this concert performance.

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Iphigeneia atAulis (1774) and Iphigeneia in Tauris (1779)

main problem with performing these two works in tandem is what to do with the heroine at the end of the first opera. In the Greek original of Euripides a stag is sacrificed instead of her, and she is whisked of the goddess Artemis to be her priestess. Gluck, by not planning a sequel for five more years, could afford, with divine permission, to end happily and marry her off to Achilles. Wagner, from respect for Euripides, disliked Gluck’s ending, abolished the wedding, and allowed Artemis to explain future plans in person. The present Netherlands Opera director, Pierre Audi, has Iphigeneia discreetly detach herself from the wedding and wait absentmindedly for transport to the Crimea. It makes Dutch economic sense that the buildings in both locations consist only of metal scaffolding. Perhaps this does well enough for the Greek camp at Aulis, but one might have hoped that the goddess, who under her Roman name of Diana (Salome Haller) surveys most of the performance from aloft, could have managed something better at Tauris. I am no expert in heavenly dress fashion, but she has borrowed a very pleasant contemporary outfit, as in rather more disarray has the rest of the'cast. The orchestra plays behind the stage, and the conductor’s gestures sometimes seem an almost integral part of the action. Between the two operas most of the human characters have been either murdered or killed, and only one member of the human cast, the Areas of Laurent Alvaro, survives to become the barbarian chieftain Thoas atTauris. Nicolas Teste as Agamemnon is eventually slaughtered in the bath by his wife, Anne Sofie von Otter’s Clytemnestra; meanwhile he can complain about Diana’s refusal to give a fair wind to Troy without the sacrifice of his daughter. For the moment Clytemnestra is ignorant of why she is at Aulis and can bask in the acclamations of the Greek host. This is of course French opera, so there is much ballet music before the Iphigeneia of Veronique Gens can also acknowledge the unwitting greetings of the army. The text of the opera is based at some distance on Racine, but in any case Paris would always demand that the course of true love should not be smooth. So it is that on no evidence whatever Agamemnon sets about persuading his wife and daughter that Achilles as future husband has been faithless to Iphigeneia. Naturally Frederic Antoun as the hero is more than able to defend himself in presence of his bride. It is of course he and the troops he commands who burst in to prevent the appalling sacrifice, which is in fact unnecessary because Diana has conveniently changed her mind.

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It is likewise difficult to feel much sympathy for divine arrangements at Tauris, as the local chief Thoas, got up in much the same military garb as Agamemnon in the previous work, is under instruction from Diana to ensure that all those washed up on his coast will be duly sacrificed. It is alas Iphigeneia, now fifteen years older and surrounded by a group of equally sorrowful female waifs from Greece, who is responsible for this miserable duty. Naturally Mireille Delunsch resents her fate. Thoas comes far too close for comfort as he in his turn is overwhelmed by the enormity of his crimes. On this unusually inhospitable shore are eventually deposited Orestes and his friend Pylades. The former has duly murdered his mother Clytemnestra in revenge for the loss of his father, but is pursued even here by a hideous band of Furies. Only Euripides among ancient Greek dramatists allowed Pylades to speak, so there is every reason why Gluck should let Yann Beuron sing his warm friendship for Orestes. When condemned to death, they both vie to release the other. As Orestes, Jean-Frangois Lapointe is gradually revealed as Iphigeneia’s long-lost brother, and Diana is sufficiently touched to abrogate for the moment her local law and allow the Greeks to return home amid general rejoicing. The musical performance under Marc Minkowski is more convincing than the staging, but that is the way of the contemporary world. M&V, March 2013

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Faust excerpts (1859) n January 1930 Sir Thomas Beecham was too busy to put the final touches to his ‘complete’ Faust recording, and on four of the original 32 sides Clarence Raybould did it instead. From the evidence of this HMV reissue, the results wer-e good enough to deserve special mention. Beecham at 50 obviously had all the qualities we remember from his last years, the most exhilarating moments being the Waltz Scene and opening to the Prison Scene. Heddle Nash is easily the best of the singers, and it is frankly his disc.

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It is a joy to be reminded of this fine Italianate voice, plangent without a trace of self-pity, perennially youthful and easy yet admirably suggesting here the basic nobility of Faust’s search for satisfaction. Miriam Licette has charm and skill but hardly the imagination to light up a straightforward and honest performance. Her King of Thule ballad and Jewel Song are nice enough, but we have heard better since. Charley’s English translation is a period piece, as is the singing of Robert Easton as Mephistopheles, and the whole disc a collector’s item valuable for the samples of Nash on top form and the pre-echoes of what Beecham was to do for the gramophone when recording techniques could catch up with his particular brand of magic. MT, October 1974

Romeo et Juliette (1867)

o doubt Napoleon III considered himself a cut above Elizabeth I and would have welcomed an operatic Romeo and Juliet that gave the Capulets a splendid ball, Juliet two marriage services (even if passes out long before any wedding march that might have graced the second), and opportunity for much valedictory duetting between the lovers in the tomb. Elizabeth might have regretted the total loss of Montague and his wife, the new-found respectability of the Nurse, and the absence of Juliet’s forward contrariness when father Capulet forces Paris on her. Bernard Shaw considered Gounod a Fra Angelico of music, certainly no Shakespeare, and claimed in 1891 that he ‘would not go out of London to hear the finest performance of Romeo et Juliette that Eirrope can produce’, whereas Wagner with ‘stupendously unattractive singers’ would drag him willingly out of England. But Shaw could afford to be snooty, for Gounod’s opera was still a repertory piece. Now the situation is very different: the last revival at Covent Garden was on 26 June 1930. when Ezio Pinza sang Friar Laurence and Barbirolli conducted. So there was every reason for anticipation at the Royal Opera. Gounod starts in grand style, with an orchestra in high turbulence and ready for a plunge into temporary fugue; moreover, he can summon drama enough from time to time to keep the Montagues and Capulets convincingly at each other’s throats. But his heart is in the sequence of lovers’ duets, and Covent Garden had found a youthful pair, comely in appearance and movement, that could do their music full justice.

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The Romeo of Roberto Alagna had the ardour and ringing authority seldom heard in the tenors of today, and could effortlessly float a lovely legato line to melt not only Juliet’s heart. He was impetuous enough to throw off Rosaline for Juliette at a glance, could fight well and dared all for his new love. Leontina Vaduva as Juliette was petite and passionate, self-willed and vocally in full command. Both had taken part in the Toulouse and Paris performances of this production and acted with complete assurance. With Friar Laurence. Gounod is on home territory, never happier than when turning out dog-collared music by the yard. And in Robert Lloyd he had a masterful priest, whose risky schemes came shipwreck only on the rocks of an unnationalised postal system. Verona as designed by Carlo Tommasi had easy and effective transformations from views of the Capulet palazzo inside and out lo the quiet intimacy of Juliet’s bedroom, from the splendour of the church service celebrating her nuptials with Paris to the cavernous vaults of the final tomb. If there was a pleasant Moorish look to the ancient town, history could happily take the adjustment. Nicolas Joel devised a stylised and almost balletic interpretation of the ‘two houses at variance’, with actors choreographed into hostility at once ordered and earnest. There are deaths enough to tax any producer’s ingenuity, some fast, some slow, but all were sufficiently piteous to move even in this murderous age. With much strongly sung and strongly acted on stage, it remained for Charles Mackerras and the Royal Opera House Orchestra below to make a telling unity of the work. If they could not altogether disguise a feeling of monotony as Gounod sweetly luxuriates in his lovers’ plight, they characterised for all they were worth and maintained a taut hold on the drama. The Capulets’ waltz at the ball took us idiomatically to Vienna and back, while many of the accompaniments managed to be tender but unmawkish. The surtitles above were studiedly unShakespearian, a cold dose of prose to steady the nerves. MT, January 1995

hakespeare never visited Verona, though he made it the home town of Romeo and Juliet. He designed his play for the small dimension of the “Wooden O’ in London. Even Gounod had to be content with the Parisian Theatre Lyrique when his opera on the subject was first performed in 1867. Neither could have conceived a setting for the story as gigantic as the Roman Amphitheatre at Verona, constructed after the manner of the Colosseum on an Olympic scale, nor much later. On one

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occasion I had to sympathise in the audience with a v^ry remote Mimi in La Boheme, whose tiny hand was probably more frozen than usual. With Capulets inscribed in large letters stage left, and Montagus emblazoned on the opposite side, the chorus describes the deadly feud that has racked the city for so many years. It soon becomes clear that the set designer, Edoardo Sanchi, was going to work throughout mainly with the aid of metal. Like me, he may have played as a boy with meccano. Heavily disguised, the Romeo of Stefano Secco and Artur Rucinski as Mercutio join the festivities. Whether Juliet was wise to choose the former rather than the latter must be a matter of taste. Romeo is all too aware of the danger they are in, whereas Mercutio is ready to hold forth on the subject of the delusions inspired by Mab, the fairy queen. The time-chariot in which she travels turns out to be a vintage car with diaphanous wings. For the balcony scene, Nino Machaidze as Juliet peers out of a porthole from her metallic bedroom to welcome the waiting Romeo, who has found a convenient ladder nearby. There is no need for me to describe the architecture of Friar Laurence’s church. Giorgio Giuseppino makes an impressive figure within it and appears to have a workable solution to the problems of the young lovers, imagining that their marriage may go some way towards reconciling the warring families. Friar Laurence could not be more mistaken. It is no time before gangs from both sides assemble in bellicose mood, ready to draw their weapons and shed blood if need be. The battle groups assemble separately, but such is the hatred between the two clans that the ensuing fight inevitably claims a victim. The dead man is Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin. This means exile for Romeo, and marriage for Juliet with Paris. Again Friar Laurence thinks he has a remedy. Juliet will take a sleeping-draft and be buried as if dead. Romeo returns and enters the tomb, imagining she has finally left him. His inevitable suicide is cue for a last love-duet as Juliet awakes. If the ancient Romans had been sufficiently musical, they would undoubtedly have chosen Aida as the most suitable work for the Verona amphitheatre. In the case of this DVD, television is both help and hindrance. It can give an awesome impression of the gigantic space this building encloses and make remote midgets into recognisable human beings. But scenic effects designed to be seen far off appear more clumsy close to. Musically the performance deserves all the applause it gets. M&V, August 2012

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Ga e l He i n r i c h Gr a u n (1703/4-69)

Cleopatra e Cesare (1742) hatever Frederick the Great’s tyrannical father forbade, his French governess and tutor encouraged. Supposed to disdain operas' and plays like a good Prussian, he played the flute, studied figured bass, preferred French to German and refused to ride or hunt. At 16 he was bowled over by the Dresden opera, and when he came to the throne 12 years later, one of his first acts was to commission the huilcfing of what is now the Staatsoper on Unter den Linden. A noble temple to the arts, it has been much smashed and restored through the ages, but the pediment still bears its original dedication, ‘Fridericus Rex Apollini et Musis’. In 1735 Carl Heinrich Graun became general court musician to Frederick at a handsome salary. He remained in the king’s employment till his death and produced 26 operas for Berlin. One of the most, significant was Cleopatra e Cesare to a libretto by Giovanni Bottarelli after Corneille’s La mart de Pompee, the opera specially composed for the opening of the new theatre on 7 December 1742. It was revived as an anniversary production 150 years on. Musically much was a delight. The Concerto Koln under Rene Jacobs was brisk, crisp and idiomatic on period instruments in the pit. Da capo arias were happily and unfussily embellished. The RIAS Chamber Choir performed its modest role with spirit and good diction. Graun is never less than competent, and manages brave noises for moments of ceremonial pomp. The love between the soprano Caesar of Iris Vermillion and Jane Williams as Cleopatra, both admirably sung, seems to have interested him less than Lynne Dawson’s mourning Cornelia, widow of the slaughtered Pompey, whose part is instinct with real emotion. History permitted her no residence in Egypt, but her presence there with two children added greatly to the opera’s effect. The story is essentially that of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, as foretold in a prologue by the god Ra, ‘How Caesar, seeking Pompey in Egypt, found Cleopatra; and how he received that present of a pickled cabbage that was once the head of Pompey; and what things happened between the old Caesar and the child queen.’

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Recent experience has shown that opera seria can indeed be treated seriously. This was not the way of the Staatsoper producer Walter Rosier and the designer Fred Berndt. From a delightful drop-curtain

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depicting Frederick the Great amid his courtiers emerged a balletic Frederick during the overture, who devised elegant pantomime with Julius Caesar, involving much interchange of a crown and laurel wreath. A seated statue of the king was unveiled in front of a box to approve or disapprove his alter ego. Cleopatra took a leaf out of Shaw’s book and made a first appearance as a human parcel. Her home for much of the action was a pyramid with obelisk as front door; outside it her seductiveness outdid that of any among her film sisters and would speedily have undone the toughest world-bestrider. Cornelia showed equal single-mindedness in her devotion to the ‘pickled cabbage’, which she carried with her throughout the evening. If my heart sank during the opening pas de deux between the king and dictator, it rose considerably in time to the toy-soldier marches of Romans and Egyptians, and resigned itself cheerfully to the pervasive spirit of resourceful burlesque. MT, July 1995

Ge o r g e Fr i d e r i c Ha n d e l (1685-1759)

Germanico (1706)

f Germanico is indeed a long-lost Handel opera, it brings the total of such works nearer still to a half-century. But there is no action in these forty-five numbers, and it may be safer to follow the title-page o the CD booklet and think of it as a ‘Serenata’. An early Nero by Handel, written for Hamburg in 1705 and dealing with the son of Germanicus, did once exist, and it would have been natural enough for Handel to turn the following year towards a more salubrious subject. This may be Handel’s first piece written for Italy, at the bidding of a Florentine Medici. The Prelude begins a trifle seriously but then bounds cheerfully away. Germanicus is triumphant after successful warfare against tribal groups settled on the Rhine. His task had been to obliterate all memory of the disaster in AD 9, when three legions under the command of Quintilius Varus had been lured by the German Arminius into the Teutoburg forest and annihilated. It was a defeat from which the emperor Augustus never recovered. Tribunes of the plebs and indeed the Roman mob are in festive mood as they welcome back the conquering

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hero. The alto Sara Mingardo does effective duty for Germanicus, who -claims to have been acting only for the glory of the empire. For the moment the Tiberius of Sergio Foresti exudes nothing but imperial goodwill towards his military commander, desiring that all should partake in the spoils of his victory. It is no concern of Handel that Germanicus was soon to be put in charge of Rome’s eastern provinces, jvas to make an unauthorised visit to Egypt (Augustus had forbidden that turbulent country to all senators), and was so to exacerbate Tiberius that the emperor may well have been responsible for the early death of a man whom Tacitus considered the equal of if not superior to Alexander the Great. ; It seems odd that Germanicus has not attracted the notice of other bperatic composers. His own life was eventful enough, and he had the doubtful distinction of being father and grandfather to two of the most notorious Roman emperors, Caligula and Nero. Metastasio, who cannibalised innumerable events in ancient history, never wrote a Germanico text. As the hero’s wife Agrippina, Maria Grazia Schiavo rightly declares that she is no coward even though she may have been afraid for her husband. Indeed she was with him when he died in Syria, and later starved herself to death when 'Tiberius took against her. The fact that Tiberius is waiting to receive Germanicus in his palace is signal for an enchanting trio shared by Germanicus, Agrippina and Laura Cherici as his mother Antonia. The knowledge that Antonia was daughter to Mark Antony in the intervals of his affair with Cleopatra adds considerable spice to the cast. For the moment all is sweetness and light that can only be relished by the two tribunes. It seems that Germanicus prefers for the moment sleep to an imperial reception. During his slumber, he dreams of a future golden age for the state, though certainly having nothing to do with his immediate descendants. The chorus naturally embraces the idea of a glorious future, though Roman history being what it was, even the youngest singer would probably have been too old to glimpse it. I have no idea at what speed Roman mu^ic used to go. Ottaviano Tenerani knows perfectly well that his team can face at any tempo such difficulties as may be presented by the composer, so Handel is made to proceed for the most part at a tremendous lick. The result from the soloists, chorus and orchestra is always exhilarating though less often idiomatic. Nevertheless, I anxiously await another such Handel opera. M&V, March 2012

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Agrippina (1709)

film by Nayo Titzin about this production at the Berlin State Opera called ‘Facing Agrippina’ is included with the set. Frankly I would run a mile rather than ‘face’ this particular woman, w was dangerous heyond most and a thoroughly bad lot. The film also serves another admirable purpose, effectively persuading me that I need not regret having missed performances of the work in this version. The Emperor Claudius, for instance, is got up most to resemble a pumpkin, with a diminutive cross surmounting a mitre, presumably in mockery of the contemporary Pope Clement XI, who became hopelessly embroiled in the War of the Spanish Succession. Other characters spend an inordinate amount of time lying flat on the ground. But Handel’s music survives gloriously,*with singers and orchestra at top voltage. The libretto may be by Cardinal Grimani or not. Either way, mincemeat has been made of history. Tacitus is a laconic and often sardonic commentator on this particular period. Claudius, though weak at the knees, was not quite the uxorious gull represented here; nor did he have any amorous designs on Poppaea, who shared herself mainly between Otho and the ever-more pathological Nero. Agrippina is prepared to stick at nothing so long as Nero gets the throne. The opera ends in a chorus of general rejoicing, the more hollow when we remember that Claudius was soon to perish from a dish of poisoned mushrooms (Agrippina’s ploy), and that Agrippina herself was sent to sea by Nero in a collapsible boat, from which she somehow managed to swim ashore, only to be bludgeoned to death by Nero’s agents. Writing for Venice in 1709, Handel lavished much care on the recitatives hut was content to adapt more than forty of the set pieces from earlier music of his own, as also from works by Keiser and Mattheson. Known for some reason as ‘parodies’ by musical scholars, adaptation seems a more sensible word for such procedure. The opening Sinfonia sets the scene in almost baleful mood. Agrippina, having urged her son Nero to aim for the throne, broadcast that Claudius has perished during his return from Britain, and set about planning three murders, is formidable indeed towards the end of Act 2. The young Handel, still making his reputation as a composer, was ready to accommodate the whims of singers in a manner he would not countenance later. So, Scene 18 of Act 2 began originally with an enchanting little cavatina for Claudius, apparently expressing an undying love for Agrippina, whereas his eye has been roving far and wide. This was abandoned in Venice for a more extended aria, but

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Handel’s first conception is here restored. Agrippina responds with fears for Claudius’s safety and a demand that Otho should be at once eliminated in favour of Nero. Act 3 begins with the sort of scene Mozart (or rather Da Ponte) would have introduced with the warning words ‘Vien gente’. Poppaea tells Otho he must conceal himself behind one of the doors and keep silent whatever he hears. She then hides the amorous Nero behind another on the ground that Agrippina is not far off. The latest arrival, Claudius, is then informed it is not Otho who is chasing her, but Nero, who should receive a thwacking rather than the throne. Nero is produced for punishment, and is chaSed off. Claudius disappears the moment he hears Agrippina may he on the warpath. Otho and Poppaea can then indulge in the opera’s wily duet, again later changed to two separate arias. ' When Agrippina does indeed arrive, she demands that Nero shall ^ve up Poppaea and settle finally for throne and empire. Nero can only meekly (or, as Handel would have it, tempestuously) comply. The joy of this set is the sheer conviction and energy imparted to the performance by cast and orchestra under the direction of Rene Jacobs. The passion and heat generated along the way is sufficient to have dried up a good proportion of Venice’s canals. Face this Agrippina if you dare. M&V, December 2011

Rinaldo (1711) hen Handel came north from Italy in early 1710, it was via Innsbruck. It would be pleasant to think he entered the Hofkirche and saw the magnificent array of statues surrounding the mausoleum of Maximilian I, among which was Godfrey of Bouillon, crowned with thorns as liberator from Islam of the Holy Sepulchre. Gibbon offers little congratulation: A bloody sacrifice was offered by his mistaken votaries to the God of the Christians: resistance might provoke, but neither age nor sex could mollify, their implacable rage: they indulged themselves three days in a promiscuous massacre.’ Tasso in Gerusalemme liberata softened the crusaders with love interests and produced Armida with her enchanted garden to beguile Rinaldo and eventually marry him once she converted to Christianity. Handel had very sensibly been hired as Kappelmeister in Hanover by the future George I and was now in London determined on operatic success..

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Rinaldo was advertised for 24 February 1711 at the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket. Report was that Handel had composed the opera in a fortnight. This may be so, since Handel, bent on a triumph, lifted much from his own previous winners in Italy, as also from the music of his Hamburg rival Reinhold Reiser, so that of all but 40 numbers, only some dozen were original. The present Harmonia Mundi recording, a more than commendable offering, with varied repeats and infectious vitality, follows Handel’s cast specification, except that Goffredo (Godfrey of Bouillon) and his brother Rinaldo have swapped sexes, with the Christian general now a male alto. Of the seven main characters in 1711, all but one was either female or a castrato. This may well have enchanted the contemporary audience, but the risk is monotony. It is with a sense of relief that one hears the pagan bass of James Rutherford as Argante king of Jerusalem at last bestride the stage. Indeed it must be confessed that those seeking to undermine the crusaders have quite the most exciting music. Armida, as sorceress and Queen of Damascus, is mistress of all the noisiest and most terrifying elements. She enters in an aerial car drawn by two dragons belching flame and smoke, and Inga Kilna makes the most of her malevolent appearance in a formidable spitfire aria. Very different is the background to the second aria of Miah Persson as Almirena, who wUl, in defiance of Tasso, eventually marry Rinaldo. Here all is atwitter with prominent flageolet and flutes. The original production reinforced Handel’s evocation of bird life with live examples, a novelty suitably mocked by Richard Steele: ‘The Sparrows and Chaffinches at the Hay-Market fly as yet very irregularly over the Stage; and instead of perching on the Trees and performing their Parts, these young Actors either get into the Galleries or put out the Candles.’ As well as displaying his finest musical wares in Rinaldo, Handel was determined to present himself as an outstanding keyboard virtuoso. There is a dazzling such display to introduce Armida’s aria at the end of Act 2. It is difficult to imagine that Handel would have played any faster than Nicolau de Figueiredo. For those enamoured of such things, there is veritable harpsichord warfare between Figueiredo and Piers Maxim to bring down the curtain (music by Babell rather than Handel). Act 3 offers a last fling for the wicked ones in a superb duet ‘A1 trionfo del nostro furore’. Bluster as they will, there is no chance that their cause can prevail, and the opera ends with the happiest of choral reconciliations between Christians and pagans. There is little point in pretending that Rinaldo makes much dramatic sense or is any sort of commentary on the First Crusade, and it is frustrating that some of the more sensational effects occur in secco recitative. But as an anthology of what Handel could offer to the connoisseurs of London the

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(lay after his 26th birthday, it is brimful of musical delights. Singers and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra give a performance of vitality and appropriate style under the watchful direction of Rene Jacobs. M&V, June 2003

Giulio Cesare (1724) aym as librettist and Handel as composer connived at adjusting the ages of Caesar and Cleopatra so as to deprive the one of his baldness and to grant the other so experienced a coquetry that, in this Australian Opera production, she is prepared to seduce while semisubmerged in a bathtub. It matters not a jot that the mournful Cornelia as Pompey’s widow never set foot in Egypt, nor that Sesto was stepson to her and not son. Bernard Shaw’s Ptolemy XIII is vastly preferable to Haym’s, a petulant boy rather than lascivious and sadistic tyrant. So much for history, which has hardly bothered with opera. The castrate Senesino was Handel’s Caesar. At one performance ‘A Piece of the Machinery tumbled down from the Roof of the Theatre upon the Stage’ just as Senesino had denied in Act 2 any knowledge of fear. The hero is then said to have trembled, lost his voice, and wept. It would take at least the whole roof to silence this Caesar. Graham Pushee sings with utmost bravura, fire and clarity at Handel’s alto pitch, somehow managing to seem a Roman conqueror in the midst of the composer’s most testing divisions. It is a dazzling tour de force and deserves every decibel of applause the Sydney audience gives him, as when he reacts at the gift of Pompey’s severed head. Cornelia has a wretched time. Having lost her husband, she is so pursued by suitors whether castrated or not that suicide repeatedly seems her only resource. It is a wonder indeed that she survives till curtain-down. At the end of Act 1, she and Sesto (Rosemary Gunn and Elizabeth Campbell) are united in the dumps, the one as heavy in voice as mood, the other giving no sign that, despite a certain reluctance to negotiate Richard Hickox’s brisk speeds in coloratura, eventually he will do the odious Ptolemy in. Cornelia in captivity has yet to do a stint as Ptolemy’s gardener. Determined to catch Caesar, the Cleopatra of Yvonne Kenny, vocally and personally well up to the job, pretends to be her handmaid Lidia. Next she is in a pseudo-Parnassus, seated on a throne as ‘Virtue’, with Muses around her, a private orchestra on stage, and busy with her

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best-known aria. Parnassus disappears, and Caesar muses playfully in duet with a solo violin on the increased charms of a presence he no longer enjoys. Throughout the opera it is’ worth keeping watch on Caesar’s eyebrows: they tell much. Equally fascinating are the varied repeats that make a da capo not only welcome but constantly intriguing if occasionally outrageous enough to cause mirth in the auditorium. Andrew Dalton as Ptolemy is presented as unpleasantly as possible, caught at one moment using a serving man as a chair. The walls of the Alexandria seraglio apparently carry a large portrait of himself up to the total of his ladies. They might well wish a portion of the ceiling to descend on him, leaving the rest to annihilate the tiresome Nireno, officially Cleopatra’s eunuch, but ubiquitous in this production. Like most of the characters, Ptolemy can fly into a decorative rage the moment he is crossed, as by Cornelia’s scorn. Ptolemy’s palace hieroglyphs are chaotic and never deviate into sense. But why should they ? In Handel’s day nobody understood them. At the start of Act 3, Stephen Bennett as Ptolemy’s general Achilla has decided in disgust to join Cleopatra. Though he is slain for his pains, it is good to hear a bass voice at last. It might seem that the odds are now stacked too heavily against Caesar and Cleopatra. He has had to swim the Mediterranean from a balcony and is presumed drowned. She has been captured by her loathsome brother and would appear finally to have lost Egypt and the crown. But the fates scheme tirelessly, and ultimately they are united in a duet as euphonious as it is carefree. Caesarion, one must assume, is hardly nine months away. M&V, April 2005

Tamerlano (1724)

orld-conquerors are an unmitigated nuisance, whether they be Tamburlaine, Napoleon or Hitler. Even if it seems a bit unfair, in the inevitable absence of a castrato, to cast the marauding Mo as a woman (here Monica Bacelli), I am all for making him a figure of fun, adorning him in voluminous rohes of white, green, mauve, and black with towering white wig, planting what I assume is his enlarged foot atop a gigantic globe, and giving him a first entrance enlivened by extravagant dance steps. Little elephants parade occasionally above the back wall, and a huge one carries the much wronged form of Jennifer Holloway as his wife, newly arrived from India.

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Handel celebrates the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his death with a DVD containing music of tragic power. It is a dark-hued score, even if many of the ingredients concern love misunderstood or spurned. I^e moving suicide hy a fatal poisoned cup of Placido Domingo’s Bajazet gives proper emphasis to Tamburlaine’s ruthless and disastrous policies. From the moment he creeps out from under the all-dominating globe till he fades into the obscurity of Erebus, to utter endless curses against the monster, the Turkish Bajazet shows only nohility of character. Even at the start of the opera the conquered Bajazet is ready for a premature suicide after conversation with the Greek prince Andronicus (Sara Mingardo), who is apparently in league with Tamhurlaine at ftie same time as being in love with Ingela Bohlin as Sultan Bajazet’s laughter Asteria. Tamburlaine’s entrance is frankly grotesque, entirely Suited to his historical worth maybe, but less than worthy of opera seria Conventions, or the splendour of Handel’s music. To spite his absent wife, Tamburlaine is after Asteria and determined tb get her. This puts enormous strain on Andronicus, who has to conceal his own feelings in front of the triumphant conqueror. It puts even greater strain on Asteria, who now imagines Andronicus has deserted her and abandoned her to the bed of her father’s tormentor. Her emotional confusion will lead eventually to the work’s catastrophe. Irepe aloft on her slowly-plodding elephant is another greatly y^ronged woman. She is naturally much upset that Tamburlaine is bent on deceiving her. But she was unaware of Asteria’s character. The, Turkish princess scorns the Mongol throne, is promptly reduced to the position of a slave, is about to administer a poisoned draught to her loathed suitor, when the wily Tamburlaine suggests another tries it first. Bajazet volunteers at once, and his life is thereby gradually extinguished. The simplicity of the production is welcome, but there remains a lurking suspicion that Graham Vick as director is not prepared to take the work quite seriously. The cast and players of the Madrid Teatro Real have to do so, whether tested by Handel’s superb cantilena or responding with bustling strings or whiffling recorders to his manifold orchestral demands. Paul McCreesh controls the varied music of Handel’s grand design with extravagant gestures but benign good sense. The orchestra responds splendidly. M&V, June 2009

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Atalanta (1736)

his pastoral opera was written in 1736 to celebrate the marriage of Frederick Prince of Wales to Augusta of Saxe-Coburg. The royal family considered him a ‘nauseous beast’, and maybe it was as wel died before his father, George II. The scenery was suitably festive: an avenue led ‘to the Temple of Hymen, adorn’d with Figures of several Heathen Deities. Next was a Triumphal Arch on the top of which were the Arms of their Royal Highnesses.’ The evening ended with a display of stage fireworks. In the opera most of the characters pretend to be someone else and in love with the wrong person. The overture bowls along in high spirits, as interpreted by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra of San Francisco under Nicholas McGegan. The Irene of Cecile van de Sant is being thoroughly elusive towards Michael Slattery’s Am5Uitas, while at the same time pretending to favour Meleager, who is wandering through the woodlands as the shepherd Thyrsis. At the first performance Meleager was taken by a teenage castrato from Italy. Now he is Susanne Ryden, and just wants to be left alone. Irene shows no sign of mercy towards Amyntas. The main problem seems to be that, though her father Nicander was in full agreement, he desired not only the girl, but extensive lands and livestock too. Irene lambasts him in merciless recitative, so that he launches on a desperate aria of suicide and eternal fidelity beyond the grave. Irene knows she is going too far, and she rightly gets some paternal advice not to be so cruel to a man of such devotion. It seems Irene has 5delded somewhat to her father’s counsel, now urging Amyntas not to lose hope. At last Dominique Labelle’s Atalanta, masquerading as Amaryllis the shepherdess yet keen only for the hunt, sniffs the near presence of mighty game. It is indeed the Calydonian boar (the family might have considered Frederick a Caledonian boor or bore). Thyrsis-Meleager is at her side but totally fails to spear the beast. Helpless with love for her, he will learn soon enough that his passion is returned. Meanwhile Atalanta downs the brute and sings her song of triumph. Towards the end of Act 3 all four lovers have ironed out their petty differences. The junior partners do so in recitative, but Atalanta and Meleager are accorded the rare privilege of a Handelian duet (indeed their second in this opera) to express an overwhelming pleasure and happiness. Handel certainly did his best to propel the royal couple towards a blissful married life, and maybe Frederick (a cellist) was musician enough to respond with gratitude.

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. If remained only for the gods to approve (no problem with such expert gingers). For some reason they have decided to become Latin in what has been hitherto a Greek context, so that it is Jove who dispatches Mercury in answer to the prayers of the British people to bless the iredded pair, grant them prosperity and happy issue in days to come, ffhere is acclamation from the jubilant Philharmonia Chorale to crown the evening, and here the splendour of authentic trumpeting allows gven the ancient messenger god to go up with a merry noise. M&V, May 2012

Deidamia (1741)

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erformed at the beginning of 1741, this was Handel’s last opera. He might not have bothered to write it at all if he had foreseen this Dutch production, which abounds in folly and seldom deviates into fense. The story concerns the upbringing of Achilles, whose mother had been informed he would die young in warfare. To forestall such a fate, she had him confined to the delightful Aegean island of Scyros, dressed as a girl among local princesses. But the Greeks had been told they could defeat Troy only with the assistance of this same potential warrior. Hence drama and this opera. I am no expert in the architecture of Sc3o:os, and it may be there is a gigantic Ionic column located in the waters just off the coast, convenient perch, it would seem, for the local ruler Lycomedes. His meditations are interrupted by the arrival of a submarine full of Greek fighters with Ulysses in command. That wily man from Ithaca, originally a Handelian castrato but here impersonated by Sylvia Tro Santafe, knows perfectly well that Achilles is concealed somewhere on the island and demands his release for the glory of his native land. Umberto Chiummo as Lycomedes, now as always a bass, is content that the Greek party should search the island for the young man they are after, hoping that the disguise will be effective enough to put them off? At the same time he is well aware in the maturity of his wisdom that mortals can never penetrate the mists surrounding the decrees of fate. Now elderly but not to be trifled with, he had once pushed Theseus as refugee from the summit of a local crag, so myth assiures us, to a Watery death in the sea below. In 1741 the part of Achilles was taken by Miss Edwards, who went on to sing T know that my Redeemer liveth’ in Messiah. Whether Olga

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Pasichnyk will do likewise I simply do not know. Meanwhile she is emphatic in praise of the chase, managing to look, despite her skirts, as pugilistic as Mohamed Ali. All this is against the background of a lofty diving board, from which presumably ‘his’ female companions can launch themselves with less risk than in the the notorious case of Theseus. Deidamia has been informed about the arrival of the Greeks, but is lulled by her growing affection for Achilles. Nevertheless she warns the young man that displays of courage might be extremely dangerous, and reminds him of their mutual love and good faith. Sally Matthews is a delight to watch at all times, but particularly when she decides to prepare for a bathe by largely undressing herself. There is of course immediately a small crowd of enchanted Greeks spying on her with any available optical device. And she has a special treat in store: the amorous Ulysses opens a bottle of champagne in her honour on a delectable little atoll nearby. All precautions, however, are in vain. The Greeks, always suspect when bringing gifts, decide on offering presents to the nobility of Scjoros, concealing among them the sort of weaponry that would certainly attract Achilles. He is given first choice, and of course he falls into the trap, a willing victim ready to sail at once and battle beneath the walls of Troy. It is a relief to know that the despondent Deidamia did ultimately bear a son called Pyrrhus to her departing transvestite hero. Musically the opera bowls along with both speed and distinction; visually it is vaudeville. M&V, December 2012

Fr a n z Jo s e ph Ha y d n (1732-1809)

Uincontro improvviso (1775)

t is no good pretending Haydn was a great opera composer; and to his eternal credit he quickly acknowledged his eclipse by Mozart in this field. L’incontro is a Turkish abduction opera, with all the righ percussion, a Prince Ali as hero who before the start of the work has been pushed out of Belsora by a wicked brother, fled to Persia, eloped with the king’s daughter Rezia, been separated from her by pirates for two years, and ended up in Cairo, that most accommodating of capitals.

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By curtain-up Rezia is there too, in the harem of a sultan who is yet «respectful of her virtue. Ali’s servant Osmin is a cheerful fellow who likes a drink, swears by Diana, and becomes buddies with a begging dervish, a scalliwag who can’t understand the prophet Mohamed’s distaste for wine and begs his way through the dusty Cairene streets with a gibberish all his own. It is this dervish’s greed for money that almost foils Rezia’s escape and the happy ending. But the sultan is as magnanimous as all his operatic kind. Haydn wrote the piece in 1775 (Gluck had previously set the story) for a visit by the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria to the Esterhazy palace. Much of the ensemble music is first-rate: the trio in Act 1, for instance, where Rezia shares her recognition of Ali with two confidantes, which is gentle, delicious, and effective; the ravishing Act 2 love-duet between Eeziaiand Ali; and the three finales, music of spirit, poise and dignity. And what of the arias ? Delectable, most of them, but too many and too long. In this Philips set, Dorati has unaccountably made Osmin a baritone rather than tenor, which involves some rewriting and loss of vocal excitement. Indeed many of the characters ‘improve’ on Haydn, adding top notes, funking low ones, having different ideas from the composer how the mostly brief cadenzas should end. And it would be good to know who set the pair of Act 2 recitatives for which no Haydn music exists. There is fine, strong singing. The Rezia of Linda Zoghby starts flatfish and dispirited but improves greatly for her splendid Act 2 aria ‘Or vicina a te’ and her overlong Act 3 piece in the cellars. Claes Ahnsjo’s Ali is firm and mellifluous, suitably martial when singing about warriors girt with arms. As Osmin, Domenico Trimarchi can hardly recover from being in the wrong clef throughout, though he has vocal point and a bice sense of comedy; while the dervish of Benjamin Luxon manages, by sheer strength of character, to elicit a laugh or two from music that is Hot fundamentally comic. Dorati at the harpsichord paces the recitatives moderato, and in much of the work he misses the elegance and sparkle that could give it dramatic verve. The Lausanne Chamber Orchestra plays sensuously and with good feeling for the style. MT, March 1981

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Gu s t a v Ho l

st

(1874-1934)

The Wandering Scholar (1929-30)

olst’s last opera was published only in 1968, and rare performances have concealed the merits of a viable one-act work that pits husband, priest and scholar against the easy virtue of Alison in the springtim a 13th-century French farmhouse. The story is trite enough, with the scholar detecting the priest beneath a bale of straw and the husband chasing Alison up the ladder to bed or a beating; but Holst is in fine epigrammatic vein and packs much effective music into his fast-moving score. The cast in this HMV recording sings with exemplary clarity and Steuart Bedford directs the English Chamber Orchestra in a spirited performance.

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MT, December 1975

Le g s Ja n a c e k (1854-1928)

Kdfa Kabanova (1920-21) T^dt’a Kabanova at the Proms (24 August) brought the admirable XVGlyndebourne cast to a raked yellow stage at the back of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. JanaCek and the conductor Andrew Davis ensured that we could not hear all that was sung, and the original Czech ensured that most of us could not understand it; yet the emotional impact of the opera was considerable. Semi-staging meant that all the characters were visible all the time. Felicity Palmer’s harridan of a Kabanicha, ruthless in her crushing of Kat’a, totally dominated the singing and action. She remained a baleful presence even when sitting quietly beneath the organ, and my instinct was to boo her every entry as that of a pantomime villainess. It was no wonder that Nancy Gustafson as Kat’a, twisting and turning in her agony but singing radiantly too, included the bust of Sir Henry Wood in many of her appeals against fate. Her two tenor men, the

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bewildered Tichon of Ryland Davies and eloquent Kim Begley as Boris, had suitcases and trunks to get them out of the action for a bit. Poor Kat’a has only a dried-up Albert Hall river as ultimate escape from that appalling mother-in-law. MT, November 1990

Ru u d La n g g a a r d (1893-1952)

Antikrist (1921-23, rev. 1926-29) he Antichrist idea has a long and distinguished history. Conceived as a figure to gather up the powers of evil in a final onslaught on God, he has a significant Jewish background. The slippery Antiochus tv of Syria and even decapitated Pompey provided a pattern in their 4esecration of the Temple. He gets scant mention in Christian scripture, but his sinister presence looms, notably in Revelation. Nero’s ferocious persecutions qualified him for the post until it became manifest that the Second Coming and end of the world, despite sin and seismic disturbance, was not yet. In the Middle Ages an unusually disreputable pope or emperor might seem to fit the bill, but for Protestants it was quite simply the papacy. Ruud Langgaard is hardly a name to conjure with here. Germany took some notice of him both pre-and post-World War I, Denmark very, little; and the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen obstinately and repeatedly turned down Antikrist. The libretto, perhaps stranger than the Apocalypse, was the stumbling block. The work was written near the start of the 1920s and revised towards their end. It almost outWagners Wagner in its self-denying rejection of vocal ensemble for the dost part and chorus. The wayward characters deliver their message in stark isolation.

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The impression of the work, though, is far from stark. The orchestral sounds, interpreted with total commitment on this Dacapo DVD by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Dausgaard, are as opulent as an5hhing Strauss thought up for the court of Herod the tetrarch or for the doomed Agamemnon in murderous Mycenae. The 1920s were inhospitable to such music, but if anyone deserved it after 1914-18, it was surely Antichrist. He seems now permanently to stalk

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the world in ever-threatening ways the least satisfactory pope couh never have conceived. Antikrist is a powerful work, gripping equally t( hear and watch.

Antikrist was first staged in Innsbruck six years ago. The Danes made amends with this performance 50 years after Langgaard’s death The Royal Danish Theatre is at last involved, but the setting is the vasi space of a Riding School, with the orchestra prudently surrounded bj battlements against the developments on stage. Staffan Holm as stage director has made of his cast a black-clad sect, led by an Ibsenesque Lucifer in the person of Sten Byriel. His first task, impressively done, IS to summon Antichrist. Physically he does not appear, but in a blaze of sound Moren Suurballe as the spoken Voice of God permits him to range the world and relish its decadence. Such characters as the Spirit of Mystery and Vainglory are temporarily assumed by the otherwise sober members of the sect (Poul Elming almost disappears from time to time beneath the weight of Langgaard’s orchestration). I have two favourites, though. The first is Despair, whose comfortable if anxious appearance suggests an overdose of housework rather than more cosmic concerns. But Susanne Resmark puts across her doom-laden thoughts with fine conviction. But it is of course the Great Whore of Camilla Nylaund who most readily gains my affection. I could wish she was as many -breasted as the unforgettable Diana of the Ephesians, but there she is, gaudy and glorious, Babylon of old, immortal Rome or maybe modern Baghdad, morally dissolute as Langgaard thought us. Scene 5, in which Hatred tries to mediate between the Great Whore and the Lie, is the most dramatic, and can do sinister duty for capitalism on the rampage. The Lie is powerfully delivered in febrile dialogue by Johnny van Hal. The choral finale, now that God has terminated the reign of Antichrist, can be modal and soberly contrapuntal. It is dubbed the ‘Ephphatha Chorus’. I take the strange word to be Aramaic. It is spoken by Christ as he heals a deaf man in Mark vii 34, and immediately translated by the New Testament into Greek. Everyman must stumble his own way towards God. M&V, August 2005

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Leoncavallo

Ru g g i e r o Le o n c a v a l l

o

(1857-1919)

Ipagliacci (1892)

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t is a huge relief to discover that Giancarlo del Monaco and his set designer for the Teatro Real, Madrid, are not always marooned in ifeozen wastes (see over). The fact is that this work, with its split action Ifetween village green and improvised commedia del’ arte theatre, Vinigtit as well take place in an approximation to its original setting. It is ■ifceunningly crafted piece, and Leoncavallo has the range to encompass Jttie real passions of the actors and Silvio the villager, plus the artificial ■ ffestures on stage once the curtain for the play within a play is drawn. ; fhdeed his Harlequin and Columbine have an illusory lightness in their music that hints towards the late Verdi of Falstaff. The crowd shows its delight at the outset that the players are again in their village and will soon be performing. They are a motley lot, filoth-capped, well-bodiced, as such a gathering should be. I usually fiislike intervals; on this occasion the break after Cavalleria rusticana has proved nothing but gain. The chorus has shed its funereal black and arrayed itself in an assortment of styles and colours that puts it on top vocal form. It is some time before we need realise there is manic j'ealousy, tragedy and murder in the air. But the Canio of Vladimir Galouzine is alerted soon enough that his wife plans an elopement with Silvio. Maria Bayo’s Nedda, fine actress and musical to her fingertips, hesitates before Silvio’s insistence, but they both know the die is cast. The show delights the crowd increasingly as the real-life drama is played out before them and Columbine becomes the more dismissive as her Harlequin husband seeks to discover the name of her lover. Emotions boil over, and Canio is now so exasperated he stabs his wife, an action that reveals Silvio to him, as he hastens to help the dying Nedda and is in turn slaughtered by Canio. It is a powerful piece, and here powerfully performed by a cast and orchestra kept constantly on their toes by the vigilant conductor. M&V, December 2007

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Pi e t r o Ma s c a g n i (1863-1945)

Cavalleria rusticana (1890) irector and designer for this Madrid production have the oddest ideas about Easter in Sicily. The landscape is antarctic, with blocks of snow or dismembered iceberg the most obvious features. That villagers are all in black can only mean they are ready for the funeral that will inevitably follow the end of the opera. They are also in Good Friday mood, as they drag themselves haltingly to church, and even the image of Christ, still attached to the cross, has forgotten to rise on the third day. Mascagni’s singing birds and village square jollity do not get a look in, so that tragedy looms over the work from first note to last, and disputing women cowering in odd corners only increase the prevailing gloom. Luckily soloists, orchestra and conductor are aware they are involved in what has usually been considered a ‘verismo’ opera, attempting a realistic penny-dreadful with proper conviction and passion. The geriatric procession up the snow-bound ramp gives an adequate impression of the work’s staging. The average age of the villagers is anybody’s guess, but the number of decrepit pensioners is an awful warning for the future of the developed world. Mercifully, despite all appearances, the Madrid chorus can sing as robustly as Mascagni deserves and relishes the magnificent tunes that swept Europe almost as soon as written. Whatever the social customs of Antarctica, those of Sicily are known to be raw and violent. So the Turiddu of Viacenzo La Scola has no chance of survival when carrying on with two women, one already married. His touching love for his mother also rings true, as does an inevitable recourse to the bottle. While the chorus looks on with studied indifference (what is another murder at such extreme latitudes ?), Turiddu has to fight to the death, and inevitably loses. A supplementary disc allows Giancarlo del Monaco as stage director a chance to explain his thinking behind this icy version of Mascagni’s warm-blooded score.

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M&V, December 2007

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Massenet

Ju l

es

Ma s s e n e t

(1842-1912)

Werther (1892) hat with the children carolling, the old men tippling, and Sophie darting in and out to bewitch anyone around, Massenet hardly gives his Werther time to develop. But the genre scenes are so cunningly donemne can’t complain; and the John Copley production, revived at "Covent Garden (14 October), subtly redresses the balance. It and the Aazaridis sets, with gentle rustic scene, misty gauzes and sympathetic teteriors, have worn well. On stage ever5d;hing was beautifully paced; but it was not quite so happy in the pit, where Jacques Delacote was lacking in rhythmic point "and indulged in over-enthusiastic climaxes with the orchestra. But the Excitement of Act 3 was well sustained all round, except by the Charlotte of Yvonne Minton whose intonation indicated an uncharacteristic night i>ff. As Werther, Giacomo Aragal was more successful in ardour than in the immaturity and uncertainties of the part; it was a robust and powerful performance. Jonathan Summers continues ably as a long standing Albert whose pistols have now caused quite a catalogue of suicides; Yvonne Kenny made a delightful Sophie (why didn’t Werther marry her ?); and Stafford Dean’s Le Bailli controlled his children and Gronies with easy authority and vocal panache. MT, December 1983

hristmas always drives me to despair though not yet to suicide, mainly because of the cards I never send but feel I should answer. In this Vienna Staatsoper production on TDK, the Bailiffs six younger children seem to have been infinitely multiplied so that their rehearsal and performance of a relentless ‘Noel, Noel’ gives Werther an additional reason to do himself in. Andrei Serban as producer has transferred Goethe’s tale of the 1770s to the 1950s, preserving for the woebegone hero a blue jacket of traditional ‘Wertherism’, but rejecting the yellow trousers. He and the designer Peter Pabst have plumped for a uniset staging of the opera. An omnipresent widespread tree becomes a main character. One senses immediately it is too large to be uprooted, so that Massenet’s

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garden, town square of Wetzlar, drawing-room in Charlotte’s house, and Werther’s study remain resolutely sylvan. At one moment Charlotte is on a garden swing-sofa, then apparently sleeping outdoors in weather that will be the death of her (her accompanying Bosendorfer grand piano is already much the worse for wear), and poor Werther must expire on a bed of Christmas snow. It must be said that much is ravishingly beautiful, nor has opera ever troubled not to be absiird. It is clear that the Werther of Marcelo Alvarez has a discriminating eye for nature, and Massenet introduces him with an enchantment of rural noises. Despite the children’s anticipation of Christmas as early as July, there is as yet no hint of self-pity as Werther joins Charlotte and her father in their encouragement. The Charlotte of Elina Garanca is certainly worth falling for, vocally and in appearance, while Alfred Sramek’s Bailiff keeps a surprising semblance of good humour in the midst of his outsize family. We are left in no doubt that Christmas is coming. Charlotte, I fear, shows herself an inveterate ditherer. She foolishly promised her dying mother she would marry Adrian Erod as Albert, and now she is swept almost off her feet by the urgency of Werther’s pleading. Albert’s six-month absence has been too long for her to resist Werther emotionally, even if in this production he seems the less eligible of the two. There is nothing in this Werther of Goethe’s urbane melancholy, a man in princely favour and destined for diplomatic success. But there is no doubt he can protest his love with sufficient ardour to fire Charlotte for a passionate duet. At the beginning of Act 2, Albert and Charlotte have been married three months. It is hardly a success, and Albert is well aware of Charlotte’s divided loyalties. She does her best to rally round and play the contented wife. Perhaps Massenet is at his happiest when portra5dng Charlotte’s relationship with her younger sister, Ileana Tonca’s impulsive Sophie. Both have been smitten by Werther, who realises he is already doomed, even though Charlotte has suggested he might return at Christmas, presumably for an unhappy family reunion. Werther has requested one of Albert’s pistols, and the gathering’s Christmas present will be his suicide. This nihilistic conclusion to Goethe’s novel caused much contemporary scandal. Whether Werther need have been so concerned in the 1950s about the possibility of burial in unconsecrated ground is a matter for social history. At last Charlotte realises her tragic error of judgment, as she comforts the dying Werther. English Thackeray gave an irreverent twist to a story that was beginning to embarrass even Goethe:

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Massenet So he sigh’d and pined and ogled, And his passion boil’d and bubbled, Till he blew his silly brains out. And was no more by it troubled.

M&V, February 2006

Therese (1907) Mrnhis brief glimpse into the French Revolution makes a useful •S’i compendium of Massenet’s art. Therese is married to the Girondist M^dre but in love with his boyhood companion the marquis Armand; ^ihus Massenet can tear his heroine apart in the sort of passionate inusic, at once tender and turbulent, that he understood so well. And |,1h the background is the menace of soldiers, the murmur of the mob, hnd the certainty that at least one of the triangle is for the tumbrils. When this turns out to be Andre, Therese resolves her doubts and, with MM cry of ‘God save the King!’, is packed off to the guillotine as well, i '^ Massenet’s librettist gave him the sort of verismo package that only .‘¥-it*uccini could have made more effective. But musically Massenet is ways more distinguished than the Italian, and here, with a lifetime’s cperience behind him (the opera was completed in 1906), he worked ith a mastery and economy that shows him on top form. If Massenet iems now fitfully to be reviving, this concise and moving piece should ^5>e a useful shot in the arm. Hughette Tourangeau, full-voiced, a little cavernous, but wonderfully i command of the role, makes of Therese a rounded character whose offerings epitomize one of the more excessive episodes in human istory. Her admirable men are Louis Quilico as husband and Ryland -avies as lover, both dashing in and out of politics to stoke up the heroine’s troubles. The Linden Singers are fine in tone and diction, and I the New Philharmonia under Richard Bonynge is at once lyrical and f:', incisive in its plea for one of Massenet’s most telling scores. MT, December 1983

Opera Nights and Nightmares

Si m o n Ma y r (1763-1845)

Excerpts

y definition Opera Kara functions in byways. Its second box in ‘A Hundred Years of Italian Opera’ is an LP disc and bookle|; devoted to Simon Mayr. He was born in south Germany, got fame in north Ita is remembered for teaching Donizetti, and is forgotten as a ‘diminished Mozart’ swept away hy the tidal wave of Rossini. The eight excerpts here range from Ginevra di Scozia of 1801 (Handel’s Ariodante story) to Fedra of 1820. We start with the excitement of the ‘royal hunt and storm’ in Adelasia ed Aleramo, a spirited episode of Piedmontese history that includes a mother-daughter recognition scene of Gluckian nobility. Mayr knew his German instrumental skills, as demonstrated in a romanza from Alfredo il grande. His comic gifts (enchanting enough) are shown in Le finte rivali; and the excerpt from Cora makes one greedy for the opera’s initial eclipse of the sun and later erupting volcano. Mayr liked to develop his scenes over an extensive canvas; an anthology such as this inevitably cuts him short, nowhere more sadly than in the finale to Fedra, where the poisoned heroine has only a fine Andantino from the profusion of her last lamentations. At La Scala and in Venice and Naples, Ma5a- could command the best voices of his day. His music needs them. Eiddwen Harrhy, Delia Jones, Penelope Walker, to name only three, contribute admirably; but under David Parry the Philharmonia Orchestra sounds ill at ease, while lapses of ensemble suggest they never came to terms.

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MT, July 1985

Sa v e r i o Me r c a d a n t e (1795-1870)

Orazi e Curiazi (1846) he libretto for this opera comes directly from Livy Book 1. The three contending brothers on each side represent Rome and Alba Longa.

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'Livy makes both sets triplets but is uncertain whether it is the Horatii (Orazi) or Curiatii who belong to Rome. Ultimately he chooses the Horatii, and there was no operatic reason to reverse his decision. With characteristic Latin brevity, Livy sets in c.640 BC a swift and sorry tale. A three-act opera demands far more detail. Salvadore Cammarano, who wrote notably for Donizetti {Lucia and much besides) and Verdi {Luisa Miller and E trovatore), produced for Mercadante a fast-moving gtory, with only Orazio and Curiazio as singing combatants. As in Livy, Orazio has a sister, there Horatia, here Camilla betrothed to Curiazio; Cammarano gives Curiazio one too, Sybilla by name and, to promote further symmetry, marries her to Orazio. With the father of the Horatii to uphold all traditional Roman virtues, and a Pontifex Maximus to Wge on the worst of the horrors, the cast is virtually complete. The announcement that the warfare between the two cities will i^ally be decided by three champions from each side is made some Way into the opera. A truce between the rest of the two armies means Curiazio can come from Alba to Rome and marry Camilla. As yet it is unknown who will be the six combatants. Senators tell Orazio that he and his two brothers have been chosen to uphold the claims of Rome; with the marriage already in progress, Orazio rushes in to proclaim that Curiazio and his brothers have been nominated by Alba. The position of Camilla is now impossible: she will lose either brother or lover. Act 2 concerns the dilemma of the men. There has been strong affection between Orazio and Curiazio. This, says Orazio the stern young Roman, is at an end; Curiazio finds it less easy to agree. The High Priest declares the omens unpropitious for the fight, and bids the company follow him to the dread cavern in the Aventine Hill, where the oracle of Apollo will pronounce. Camilla has insinuated herself into the cavern and is dumbfounded when the oracle bids the combat take place. In best classical manner, and with operatic good sense, Cammarano denies us the actual battle. Imagine ‘the three tenors’ engaged against a similarly shaped trio of baritones. Camilla makes a last plea in Act 3 to Curiazio: either flee with her or slay her. He can do neither. Among the Romans only Orazio’s father has not climbed the walls to observe the fight. Relatives inform him that Rome has lost, since two of the Orazii are slain, and Orazio himself has fled. Livy has it that after the death of his brothers, Horatius faced three wounded Curiatii. His device was to feign flight so that the enemy would pursue at different speeds; thus he picked them off severally and secured victory for Rome. Camilla is distraught at the death of Curiazio and so angers her brother in his triumph that he thrusts his sword through her too.

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Mercadante provides music mostly worthy of so taut and tragic a plot. Now and again he wavers stylistically and produces sounds more suggestive of New Year in Vienna, a city he knew well. But the opera remains a notable achievement. Mercadante may have become unfriendly towards Verdi, and was certainly surpassed by him; but for many years, with his secure base in Naples, he was well ahead. Opera Rara has already indebted us with little-known Donizetti, Mayr and Meyerbeer. This Mercadante recording is a similar triumph, with a strong cast responding to his impassioned demands. Nelly Miricioiu as CamUla (it is a mercy none of the men is called ‘Carlo’ or aspired to be king) compasses the supremely affecting role with touching mastery; she made me weep more than once. The Orazii, father and son, are Alastair Miles and Anthony Michaels-Moore; both are exciting and committed. Curiazio, doomed to die but not to sing no more, has vocal authority and a fine sense of drama. Mercadante elicits from the Geoffrey Mitchell Choir and admirable Philharmonia Orchestra under David Parry much verve and passion. MT, February 1996

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(1567-1643)

Orfeo (1607)

usic herself (or himself in this production by Pierre Audi) launches Monteverdi’s Orfeo, throwing down the gauntlet to the protagonist by telling the audience how splendid, a singer he is, ab to tame the wildest beast and enchant both heaven and hell. As if to emphasise his supremacy. Music, possessed of her own ‘lute’, smashes it in a fit of pique at the end of her exordium. This is bravely symbolic, but leaves us no wiser about Orpheus as lutenist, since he does not strike a single note henceforth. The Thracian stream that Monteverdi envisaged for the Mantuan premiere has been transformed by the set designer Michael Simon into a miniature version of the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. The Round Pond is indeed the main feature of the staging, which is otherwise bare but for rocks that come and go. Its function in Act 1 is beyond me. The chorus and most of the cast wade into it on various occasions. Maybe they are thus purified for the imminent wedding of

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4* Orpheus and Eurydice, about which they sing with joyous expectation. % Instrumentally there is a lovely range of effects throughout the work, ¥ and the nuptial couple (John Mark Ainsley and Juanita Lascarro), are 4 sped radiantly towards what should be a cheerful future. But fate wills otherwise. Orpheus has hardly finished explaining ‘ ■ how trying life was before Eurydice agreed to marriage when a .'i doomladen messenger arrives, too stricken to make immediately clear 4 what has happened to Eurydice. Monteverdi and his librettist are here at their subtlest. Doubts are allowed gradually to mount, until finally it is revealed that Eurydice is dead of a snake bite. While the chorus ; bewails the appalling turn of events, Orpheus laments briefly, but then shows his mettle by making for the underworld. Now indeed the Round Pond becomes the inky waters of Styx, with *■; Charon (Mario Luperi), alert and menacing on the banks. Equipped ; with a long pole for ferrying the dead, he has no serviceable sort of boat to perform the task. Naturally he is enraged that Orpheus is apparently alive. Orpheus sings his utmost, and in the Monteverdi original Charon could not be less impressed. It is only when Orpheus strums the lute that Charon’s enchantment leads to sleep. Having forgotten his lute, Orpheus must now sing effectively enough or soporifically enough to neutralise Charon. With open access to the underworld, Orpheus begs Eurydice from Pluto its king. He finds a strong ally in Proserpina, queen of the dead, if only because she is but semi-resident in Hades, and more than understands why Orpheus is grief-stricken that Eurydice should be permanently confined to the shades. She gets her way with Pluto. The conditions of Eurydice’s release need no restatement. It is perhaps unfortunate that in this production the potentially happy couple gets apparently no further than the shore of Styx before Orpheus’s will falters and he fatally turns his head. The ending of the opera has always been a matter of debate. The original libretto of 1607 has Orpheus prudently on the run from a rout of Bacchantes bent on his destruction, as specified in Classical sources. Two years later Monteverdi provided a manifestation of Apollo to comfort Orpheus with transfer to heaven and an eternity of gazing at the remote twinkling of Eurydice as a distant star. Monteverdi’s music is convincing enough, and the chorus accepts the solution as eminently satisfactory. As so often, in this performance sound prevails over action, and Stephen Stubbs is to be congratulated on an imaginative realisation of Monteverdi’s often cryptic instructions. M&V, January 2006

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II ritorno d'JJlisse in patria (1641) lyr uchhasbeen dispensed withinthisversionofUlysses’shomecoming. iVXInevitably we must do without tbe Nereids, Sirens and Moors of tbe libretto, since no music exists for them. More regrettable is tbe depopulation of Olympus, with Jupiter, Juno and Neptune banished and the absence of a chorus so that we can only imagine the Phaeacians shantying on board ship and an ensemble of assorted maritime and heavenly denizens approving peace among the gods.. If I personally missed most the tailwag of Ulysses’s aged dog Argos (Homer loved him but Monteverdi ignored him), if was a moment to savour when Jupiter’s eagle alighted in Amsterdam to disconcert Penelope’s suitors. For the rest it must be said that the Dutch producers have preferred for the most part a rock and a hard place to the sumptuous scenic devices of 17th-century Venice. A main problem of the opera is the differences between the score (kept m Vienna) and surviving librettos. The music as we have it specifies m the prologue Time, Fortune and Cupid as manipulators of Human hFailty. The texts prefer the more relevant Fate, Prudence and Fortitude characters Ulysses would readily recognise at the end of his ten years’ wandering Here Frailty is first at the mercy of Time. The musical du-ector, Glen Wilson, explains in his notes to the DVD that he has cut and rearranged much. But the psychological subtlety at the core of the libretto remains, and with it Monteverdi’s wonderfully varied response. The Penelope of Graciella Araya has no tapestry to weave by day and nightly undo; indeed her monumental steadfastness needs no props and IS proof against flirtatious suggestions from her entourage and mcreasing pressure from the suitors. At the outset she gives moving expression to her desolation. Ulysses appears to have been abandoned by the Phaeacians on yet another unknown shore, a frustration sensitively portrayed by Anthony Rolfe Johnson. It is eventually Minerva sole sui^vor among the deities, who breaks to him the news he is alreadv on his native Ithaca. The Minerva of Diana Montague could not be more helpful. Long ago she had instructed Ulysses’s son Telemachus what he should say when tongue-tied before eminent Greeks in search of his father. Now she will speed to Sparta and fetch him back to be reunited with Ulysses. Toby Spences Telemachus thoroughly appreciates her assistance in what has been a surprisingly easy passage home, and they can cheerfully duet their mutual pleasure. Opera is always straining our credulity and now father and son are in each other’s presence a long time before any sign of recognition.

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f' v; The suitors, hearing rumours in Act 2 that not only Telemachus was in Ithaca again but maybe Ulysses too, realise how urgently they must ‘I how press Penelope. A trio of them, Jaco Huijpen (previously Time), ; Christopher Gillett and Brian Asawa (no longer Human Frailty), confer on the turn of events and debate policy. Under duress, Penelope proposes a trial of strength involving Ulysses’s bow, knowing full well only her husband could ever bend it. The producer makes the task seem ^ very odd one, but Ulysses, arriving on Minerva’s advice in guise of a beggar, indeed works the bow to the total destruction of the suitors. ^ With the elimination of those who went a-wooing, only the shapeless 1 lump of a parasite, Alexander Oliver as Irus, is dismally stricken. He cannot imagine how in future he will be wined or dined at all. The more he contemplates his wretched plight, the more he realises suicide is the only solution. If Irus has provided some moments of black comedy, it is now for Penelope to grasp at last that, after ten years at Troy and a ' further ten as Fate’s helpless plajdhing, her husband is home. Can this stalwart beggar be he ? Librettist and composer pay proper tribute to Penelope’s doubts and hesitations, but the opera can finally end in a tender duet between the sorely afflicted pair. Glen Wilson’s musical resources are modest but apposite and he presides over a performance of moving drama and notable accomplishment. M&V, October 2005

Uincoronazione di Poppaea (1643) > we continue our dismal progress into the 21st century, I wonder dly what might be the equivalent period in imperial Roman history we have so far reached. Undoubtedly we have passed Caligula; I think we have progressed beyond Nero; but I am not convinced we have yet reached Elagabalus. At least I have not heard so far that the Conservatives have employed his particular criterion (1 leave that to your further research, dear reader) in their choice of a new leader. I am less well-informed about 17th-century Venice and the steady decline that transformed the republic from a trading city to one of glorious art. Resident in Venice from 1613, Monteverdi had his last surviving opera, Poppaea, performed there thirty years later. Its success suggests it conformed to the spirit of the times, as it fundamentally does to ours. The prologue stages a losing battle between Fortune, Virtue, and the

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exultant Cupid. In some later librettos a chorus of Virtues is featured. Monteverdi never set them, and this is our sole chance to hear what might have been, if imperial Rome had not been rampantly decadent. Wilke te Brummelstrote makes a powerful plea for rectitude, but she sings in vain. Cupid, sitting atop a world globe, and his assistant vocalist, win the day. Few of the characters in this Dutch performance belong to the sex one might expect. Cupid, Nero, and the page are women; the two nurses are men. Brigitte Baileys as Nero is white, Cynthia Haymon’s Poppaea is black, which cheerfully makes up for any vocal confusion. They first emerge after a night of delicious dalliance to interminable regrets that they must now part. There is already sufficient human wreckage as a result of their love to threaten future carnage. Otho, friend of Nero and married to Poppaea, need hardly be surprised that Nero has taken advantage of his absence to occupy his bed. More justifiably outraged is the empress Octavia (Ning Liang), now scorned by the ambitious upstart. The only decent character in the opera is the moralist and playwright Seneca, strongly sung by Harry van der Kamp. His sentiments were perhaps better than his plays, and it is with real regret we learn from the goddess Pallas Athene that he will eventually have to commit suicide in the bath (mercifully off). Here, before a stormy encounter with Nero, he propounds the perils of the imperial purple. Monteverdi enjoys also the inanities of Venetian gossip among the lesser characters, setting the black page of Claron McFadden against a companionable lady-inwaiting. By Act 2 Octavia has become a raging fury and in colloquy with a reluctant Otho (the countertenor Michael Chance) nerves him gradually to attempt the murder of Poppaea while asleep in her garden. He is to creep up on Poppaea disguised as far as possible in the outer raiment of Drusilla, a court lady in love with him. Otho assumes the part of murderer with dithering incompetence, and the plot is foiled in a coup de theatre by the timely appearance of a Cupid armed with divine authority and no morals. With a clemency known only to opera, Nero merely banishes Octavia and Drusilla, while allowing Otho to survive and become one of the four emperors in AD 69. The nicest touch in this Amsterdam production by Pierre Audi is the flight of steps that leads diagonally from the stage into the orchestral pit. Characters come and go, therefore, among the players, and it adds to the unity of the musical conception that occasionally the neck of a lute will protrude into the bottom of the stage picture. Christophe Rousset conducts Les Talents Lyriques and his highly gifted soloists in an idiomatic performance that both delights and horrifies in its flagrant

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^glorification of vice, crime and terrorism. It is almost a relief that the Wondrous duetting to a ground by Nero and Poppaea at the end may in fact not be by Monteverdi. M&V, November 2005

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Am a d e u s Mo z a r t (1756-91)

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Mitridate, Re di Ponto (1770) ■Oor twenty-five years Mithridates VI of Pontus led Rome the merriest of dances in one of those classic East-West confrontations that continue to plague the world. Based in Turkey and the Crimea he threatened to make the Black Sea a Mare Ponticum, and it took all the skill of Roman generals such as Sulla, Lucullus, and Pompey eventually to put him down. His body was so inured to the poisons with which he attempted to commit suicide that he had to be finished off by another’s hand. And here he is, by courtesy of Racine and Cigna-Santi, magnanimous to all and sundry in the best tradition of opera seria with his dying breath. The French Revolution was a distant cloud twenty years off when Mozart at fomteen wrote this opera for Milan. Court circles could still tie themselves in as many amorous knots as they pleased to while away a pleasant evening in whatever historical setting they chose. So Mithridates is less concerned with Rome (it has to despatch him when all are reconciled) than with the fortunes in love of himself and his two sons. It is misunderstanding that keeps the work afloat and gives the teenage Mozart every opportunity to agonise with his characters; and already his wind instruments have the secret of worming into any heart. At the start Mithridates (Bruce Ford) has circulated the report that he is dead. So the work opens against the background of an obelisk dutifully erected in his memory. The Aspasia of Luba Orgonasova had been his betrothed, but now she is apparently the plaything of his two sons. As Sifare, Ann Murray supports the Greeks of good old times against ruthless Rome, and now betrays his feelings for the deserted Aspasia. Whether the costumes of Paul Brown are typical of a Pontic court is quite beyond me. The spread-arm gestures, though, are all that opera seria is likely to get.

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Jochen Kowalski’s alto Farnace is the elder son, historically slaughtered by his father, but operatically forgiven for a flirtation with Rome and unduly forceful attempt to make Aspasia his own. At the outset he is all villain. Indeed his eyebrows are initially as unstable as his character is menacing. But everyone is brought up short by the arrival of Bruce Ford as Mithridates himself, accompanied by an outlandish cohort of warrior supporters with prominent red tongues who can only be Hyperboreans, about whom the ancient world knew nothing. The most level-headed character in the opera is the Ismene of T.niian Watson, got up to resemble how a peahen should look if God had not run out of ideas after inventing the peacock. Her unrequited love for Farnace persists until it gets its ultunate reward. And it is she who prevents Mithridates from doing away with both his sons. For the moment, though, he is appropriately moved at being back in the Crimea, and is about to kiss, in the manner of John Paul II, a mound of sand above the prompter’s box. It is now revealed that the Hyperboreans have infinitely expandable tongues, like those Christmas toys one used to blow into as a child. Act 2 displays the young Mozart at his most intense, with wondrous horn obbligato and oboes only reluctantly resolving their dissonances. And the characters are at such sixes and sevens that Aspasia and Sifare, cornered by Mithridates, consider death the only release from their woes! It is then the turn of Farnace to face the ultimate penalty. A Roman tribune is shown bestriding a vast world globe, but Farnace decides to fire the Roman ships and return to the love of Ismene. Thus the dying Mithridates can bless his sons and their brides, while they can descant cheerily on the disadvantages of empire. There has been marvellous singing throughout this 1993 performance, and Paul Daniel’s taut direction demonstrates conclusively that Mozart is a genius at any age. M&V, July 2008

Ascanio in Alba (1771)

scanius is that tiresome son of Aeneas and Creusa who plagues so many pages of Virgil’s Aeneid: and Alba Longa is a notorious town of oiir early Latin days. Mozart’s librettist Giuseppe Parini does awa with orthodox mythology by sacking Creusa, making Venus the wife not mother of Aeneas, and thus Ascanius’s mother not granny. And why not ? There is scant action in these wooded glades of Latium, and there is room enough for an appearance or two by the goddess of love.

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Mozart at 15 was commissioned to write this festa teatrale for the p' irourt wedding in Milan of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and Maria Beatrice of Este. He seems to have enjoyed the plethora of pastoral f' choruses (the sixfold repetition of the shepherds’ effort is more a surfeit of lampreys than lamb), the expressive accompanied recitatives and the succession of sturdy arias, many in the energetic manner of the V Salzburg symphonies soon to follow. He may have enjoyed the secco ?' recitatives too; but they’re a special taste. * The trio of sopranos is under Venus herself, taken on this Deutsche Grammophon recording with authority and much beauty of tone by Lilian J] Sukis. Edith Mathis, warm, expressive and clear, is on splendid form as . the nymph Sylvia descended from Hercules. The shepherd Faunus has fc: ho cogent dramatic reason to exist but justifies himself in the brilliant « coloratura of Arleen Auger. This high standard is maintained by Agnes Baltsa, whose rich contralto makes Ascanius sympathetic enough to give us pleasure when in the end he reveals himself and claims the swooning Sylvia. Peter Schreier is likewise admirable as the athletic priest Acestes. The Salzburg Mozarteum orchestra plays neatly and .sensitively for Leopold Hager, who makes a very unfestive harpsichord I; continuo. The Archduke and his bride may have been surprised by this strange allegory of their courtship; one hopes they were equally ’ surprised by the quality of Mozart’s music. ■W‘

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II sogno di Scipione (1772) odern historians don’t give the younger Scipio Africanus quite such a good press as did Cicero in his Republic or Metastasio in this poem. Not that in 1771-72 the omnivorous Mozart would have minded either way. Metastasio’s ‘dream’, with its setting in the sleeping quarters of Masinissa’s North African palace, is based only vaguely on Cicero. Metastasio prefers a formal contest, between Fortune and Constancy, over Scipio’s allegiance to Cicero’s sober statement of the heavy tasks imposed by patriotic duty. Both authors whirl Scipio to the heavens for colloquy with distinguished ancestors and some elementary discussion of the solar system; Metastasio is ready to expand by comparing one thing with another and ends with a festive cantata which, in the event of performance, would have hymned the virtues of Archbishop Colloredo (the Mozartian hete noire) on the occasion of his coronation in March 1772. In fact only the last three numbers (with a new version of the aria no. 11) may have been done in Colloredo’s honour.

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For this strange ‘dream' the teenage Mozart managed a splendid quantity of relaxed, heartfelt music, with some pages undoubtedly more bland than significant. Yet all the main characters. Scipio himself, Fortune and Constancy, have pieces where passion hursts the mellifluous phrase, nowhere more impressively than in the accompanied recitative when the spurned Fortune threatens her worst. It is quite something to have found for this Deutsche Grammophon recording three" tenors as accomplished as Peter Schreier (the sleepingjieip), Thomas Moser (father Aemilius) and Claes Ahnsjo (grandfather Publius), who thrive on everything except Mozart’s coloratura, which harshens under stress. The Fortune of Edita Gruberova is effectively dramatic if sometimes strained on top, Lucia Popp’s Constancy very much at ease, and Edith Mathis bright and warm-toned in the finale. Hager’s direction of the admirable Salzburg Chamber Choir and Mozarteum Orchestra is occasionally laboured but mostly well judged. MT, December 1980

La finta giardiniera (1775)

ove is as good a reason as any for taking up gardening, and Mozart’s Countess Violante has landed up in the flower beds not only because she has been deserted by her lover, whose family tr goes back to Marcus Aurelius and Alexander the Great, but was almost run through by him. The complications of the plot, however, need hardly detain us; my sympathies at the end are entirely with the old Mayor and his view that all the characters may marry whom they please so long as they leave him in peace. And indeed, though we are assured that hero and heroine have both gone mad before the Act 2 curtain, their derangement is confined to a commendable interest in ancient mythology and a useful spell as shepherd and shepherdess. There is a deal of nonsense here, but the 18-year old Mozart sets it with a conviction that pulls constantly at the heartstrings. He hurls himself into C minor and G minor, his keys of highest tragedy, works miracles with the finales of Acts 1 and 2, and somehow manages to make even the trite moralising of old operatic tradition seem touching and appropriate. The lad’s achievement is wondrous: he has given us too many arias, maybe, and too lengthy; but their aptness and beauty is a delight; and he investigates the byways of human character with a subtlety the more moving for his obvious inexperience.

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- And Philips has found in Schmidt-Isserstedt just the man for the work.'It is a pleasure to hear such civilized music-making, such limpid textures and purity of style. He points without exaggeration the many touches of humour, and notes each fleeting cloud as it crosses the score. The performance is leisurely, relaxed and unfailingly musical, ihe opera is here in German, because this is the version that has piost completely survived; thus Singspiel dialogue (mercifully short)