Music Richard Osborne

AMADEUS PIRATES OF PENZANCE

During its time on the South Bank, the National Theatre has had a sequence of musically literate artistic directors: Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn, Nicholas Hytner. Opera and operetta being beyond the National’s remit, this has been most apparent in outstanding productions of American musicals.

Yet there have been other things too, notably one of Peter Hall’s earliest commissions, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. Hall himself directed the original 1979 production, with Simon Callow as Mozart and Paul Schofield as court Kapellmeister Antonio Salieri, the man the world believed had poisoned his upstart rival. They had fake news even then.

Rossini, who used to dine with Salieri and thought him ‘a fine old fellow’, asked him outright, ‘Did you really poison Mozart?’ ‘Look me in the face,’ Salieri replied. ‘Do I look like a murderer?’ Salieri was certainly a deeply jealous type but, as Rossini remarked to his friend Ferdinand Hiller, ‘Going from jealousy to preparing poisons is highly unlikely.’ ‘Thank God,’ sighed Hiller, ‘otherwise, we’d all be dying like flies!’

But where stands the National Theatre now? It has a new director, Rufus Norris, and a new production of Amadeus which,

after glowing reviews and a sell-out season, is due to return next year. All I can say is caveat emptor. As turkeys go, this is a big one.

The principal problem is director Michael Longhurst’s decision to have Shaffer’s strategically placed Mozart quotations realised live on stage by a twenty-piece chamber orchestra. Playing the music from recordings may seem old hat, but Shaffer knew what he was doing when he wove Mozart’s music in and around the elderly Salieri’s haunted memories. Played from recordings – each recording hand-picked by Shaffer himself – these mesmerising sounds had the effect of coming from another world.

Balancing such meditations with the bangings and scrapings of onstage musicians is well-nigh impossible. Worse, a good deal of new music has been commissioned, third-rate rackety stuff which has no place in a play that casts its spell partly because the only music we hear – a few bars of Salieri notwithstanding – is Mozart’s own.

Adam Gillen’s Mozart was a tour de force but Lucian Msamati was a brutish bull of a Salieri, quite at odds with Shaffer’s politically subtle, hypersensitive shell of a man. Salieri’s search for the eternal through music is mired in a perverted desire to use music as a vehicle for his own immortality.

Another show which will be much revived, but with better reason, is English National Opera’s blissfully enjoyable The Pirates of Penzance. It is directed by Mike Leigh, whose 1999 film, TopsyTurvy, about the making of The Mikado, ranks with Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love and Amadeus itself as one of the great behind-the-scenes theatre entertainments.

We know Gilbert, a gifted stage director, played the G&S operas straight, with no tomfoolery or extraneous business. Mike Leigh does likewise, to stunning effect. And the singing in this first revival was superb: not least for its crystalline diction.

What with Pirates, and a fizzing new production of Patience currently travelling the land with English Touring Opera, there’s the feeling that G&S is up and running again. This is much as Nicholas Hytner predicted in the rollicking and richly informative documentary series Gilbert & Sullivan: A Motley Pair, which singer Simon Butteriss and director Tony Britten made for Sky Arts in 2010 (now a Capriol Films DVD). Hytner’s point was that it’s no longer necessary to apologise for these superbly crafted operettas by updating them or playing them in quotation marks. Leigh’s Pirates bears that out.

Not having heard Pirates for a while, I found myself in a state of semi-delirium as one fabulous melody followed another – the stirring ‘With cat-like tread’ shifting via one of Gilbert’s more surreal links to the Major-general’s ‘Sighing Softly to the River’, a barcarolle for baritone and chorus (beautifully sung by Andrew Shore) which Schubert himself would have struggled to match.

What an enigma Sullivan was. I’ve recently been listening to a handsomely produced two-cd Chandos set of his songs. It’s an absorbing affair; yet there’s barely a tune in sight. Was it the lure of Gilbert’s flesh-and-blood situations that spurred Sullivan into song or the aphrodisiac effect of having a full orchestral palette at his disposal (he was a consummate orchestrator)?

And what of Sullivan’s all-too-early death? Women, drugs and failing kidneys are the usual suspects. My guess is that he was poisoned: probably by Charles Villiers Stanford, the Salieri of his day.