An opera that’s all power, but no punch
ONCE upon a time, the Wexford Festival Opera guaranteed variety by ensuring that one of its three offerings was a drama, one a romance, and the third a comedy.
Now, as has happened once again, all three can be from the same category. This year all are dramatic, inevitably leading to comparisons between the three of them, which is not necessarily to the festival’s advantage.
I recently got to see what is generally regarded as the best of them, Marco Tutino’s two-act La Ciociara (Two Women), a 2015 offering composed for San Francisco. Vittorio de Sica turned the story into a film that, decades before, won the young Sophia Loren a best actress Oscar.
Camille Erlanger’s L’Aube Rouge (The Red Dawn) concerns the activities of a group of nihilists, and was premiered in Rouen in 1911, towards the end of Erlanger’s career.
This verismo offering has power but, at the end, doesn’t really pack any punch. Erlanger wrote more than a dozen operas in the course of his career, but few have ever amounted to much, and there is no evidence that this one, well presented by director Ella Marchment, and ably conducted by Guillaume Tourniaire, will amount to very much either despite creditable performances of Andreea Soare as Olga and Andrew Morstein as Serge.
Erlanger died in 1919, but his posthumous reputation has not flourished, and, indeed, he is deemed not to merit an entry in Grove’s Dictionary. Sadly, there is no reason to think that this show will do much to alter that assessment. The problem is that once it ends, few memories are left of exceptional drama, or great music. There isn’t much in the way of a tune, though at almost the same time, Puccini was producing some of his finest melodies, attached to the kind of drama that Erlanger was keen to set. This is a composer whose reach seems to have far exceeded his grasp.
Comparisons are odious but have to be made. I can’t see this worthwhile production doing anything much for Erlanger’s posthumous reputation, which is likely to remain at the outermost fringes of the repertory.