Music Richard Osborne
MONTEVERDI AT 450
danger somehow mean much in ‘our unstable contemporary world’. One way or another, Auden gave ominous voice to the Aids crisis, 9/11 and Muslim refugee issues. We were reminded that Faber sold 350,000 copies of the booklet containing ‘Funeral Blues’, in the wake of the Four Weddings film. I disagreed with the entire programme. To say that Auden is ‘more resonant and relevant in difficult times’ belittles him, as if his poetry simply illustrated newspaper stories, describing the blasts of the outer world. Where, to me, the pressure of meaning behind his work – those factories, burning furnaces, lead mines, obsolete machinery – is magical, disquietingly so, like shapes in twisted trees, not journalistic.
It is also a false and sentimental reading of Auden to say he was a sort of progressive liberal. In the Thirties, his complex sexuality rather fancied and respected the romantic idea of the ‘Leader’, the ‘truly strong man’.
So, even had he not died in Vienna in 1973, it is unlikely Auden would be voting for Jeremy Corbyn. There were a number of retrospective glances in this year’s 70th anniversary Edinburgh Festival, not least the staging by Turin’s Teatro Regio of Verdi’s Macbeth, the same opera that the Glyndebourne company brought to the inaugural festival in 1947.
I doubt whether that 1947 production (by Carl Ebert) had a ballet of hospital beds competing for the audience’s attention in Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene. On the other hand, Turin did manage to field its advertised conductor, which is more than Glyndebourne did in 1947 after George Szell walked out and his replacement, Tullio Serafin, refused to leave Italy after getting wind of socialist Britain’s punitive currency regulations.
‘Monteverdi 450’, John Eliot Gardiner’s presentation of Monteverdi’s three surviving operas, was a more serendipitous link to Edinburgh’s past, as anyone will know who saw the operas played in the King’s Theatre in 1978 in Jean-pierre Ponnelle’s High Baroque stagings – ‘Monteverdi’s Flying Circus’, as one wag dubbed the productions – with Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting.
As it happens, 1978 was a watershed year for the festival. With the nation in financial disarray and Peter Diamand coming to the end of his thirteen-year imperium, the city fathers were emboldened to decree that the days of ‘continental’ levels of investment in staged opera were over.
It is a decision that has haunted the festival ever since, which is why it was cheering to see Edinburgh back among the big boys – Venice, Salzburg, Lucerne, Berlin, Paris, Chicago, New York – as one of Monteverdi 450’s chosen venues. Mind you, it remains astonishingly good value. A seat for Orfeo in Salzburg’s Felsenreitschule would have cost you eight times as much as one in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall.
This was a more nourishing cycle musically and dramatically than its 1978 predecessor. Seek out the DVDS of those Ponnelle productions and you will find they have not worn well in comparison to, say, Peter Hall’s timelessly affecting 1972 Glyndebourne production of Il ritorno d’ulisse (also on DVD) with Benjamin Luxon in the title role and Janet Baker matchless as Penelope, opera’s first great heroine.
I also recall an unforgettable Orfeo, conducted by Roger Norrington and directed by Jonathan Miller, which Kent Opera staged in 1976. That, too, was filmed for television but, unlike Glyndebourne’s Il ritorno d’ulisse, which was made by Southern Television, the BBC2 film of Orfeo has disappeared.
It’s just possible that I saw the Kent Opera Orfeo through rose-coloured spectacles. There’s nothing like experiencing a Monteverdi opera cheek by jowl with one of the ancient Greek dramas which inspired it; and I had arrived in Bath’s Theatre Royal that fine June evening hot-foot from a matinée of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, played in the original Greek in Bradfield College’s Greek Theatre. But the spectacles weren’t rose-coloured. Everything about the Kent production – the Poussin-inspired stage designs, the choreography, the staging, the dispensation of the musical forces – was perfectly attuned to the work’s special mix of high drama and austere tranquillity.
Written for the Mantuan court in 1607, Orfeo is more a courtly charade, a pastoral play with dance and sung
speech, than either of its Venetian successors. Which may explain why it was partly hamstrung by Monteverdi 450’s semi-staging, or ‘spatial staging’, as Gardiner prefers to call it. The scenes in Hades worked best: premonitions of things to come in the stupendous performance of L’incoronazione di
Poppea. Powerful, long-drawn and absorbing from first note to last, this was as fine an account of this deep, dark, occasionally raunchy and frankly amoral dramma musicale as anyone could hope to experience.
The singing ranged from the good to the sensational. The Seneca, the bass Gianluca Buratto, had already astonished us with his Charon, Pluto and Neptune. But none of the earlier appearances of Korean-born ‘sopranist’ Kangmin Justin Kim had quite prepared us for the crazed supremacist that was his Nero. We used to think that this kind of figure was a thing of the past. No more, of course.
Since Poppea doesn’t require ‘scenery’– merely costumes, props, lights and a range of levels to denote the earth below and the heavens above – the opera looked well in the Usher Hall, where the action flowed freely round the seated figure of the 74-year-old Gardiner and his 24 on-stage instrumentalists.
Gardiner’s direction was as awesome as it was physically understated. I remember the 82-year-old Otto Klemperer directing a similarly deep, dark and occasionally hair-raising Mahler Ninth in that same hall in 1967.
Age brings wisdom. And, happily, conducting remains one of the few professions where the law is powerless to decree retirement.