Music Richard Osborne
OPERA: PASSION, POWER AND POLITICS AT THE V&A
BBC programmers are addicted to ‘seasons’, those ‘across-all-platforms’ experiences that propose enlightenment and deliver overload.
Last autumn, Russian music flowed through Radio 3 in torrents as part of the BBC’S ‘Breaking Free’ season marking the centenary of the October Revolution. (‘Out of the Frying-pan’ might have been a better title.) Another season was devoted to the ‘demystifying’ of opera; not a concept the man at the back of the Verona Arena with the Juventus T-shirt and six-pack of Nastro Azzurro would readily understand.
The season was a joint collaboration with the Royal Opera House and the V&A, whose small but perfectly formed exhibition Opera: Passion, Power and Politics (until 25th February) is an evident highlight. Sited in the museum’s new, high-tech, below-stairs exhibition space, it traces the history of opera through seven ages and seven cities, from Monteverdi’s Venice to Shostakovich’s Leningrad.
Two things stay in the mind. One is the large-scale working model of a stage set for Handel’s first London opera,
Rinaldo; the other is the snazzy, handsfree GPS tracker device with headphones which plays the right music wherever you are standing.
This was mesmerising in itself. I shall not readily forget moving from Vienna (Mozart’s Figaro) to Milan (Verdi’s
Nabucco) and being stopped in my tracks by a voice that appeared to come from heaven. It was Maria Callas singing (I guess) Abigail’s aria from Act 2 of
Nabucco. Not that I knew it at the time. Opera messes with the mind, subverting thought with music’s intravenous feed.
That very point was made a good deal during five autobiographical talks about opera in Radio 3’s rarely less than superb late-night series The Essay (weeknights 10.45pm). ‘Bad theatre set to good music’ had been novelist Julian Barnes’s view of opera until, at the age of 62, grief invaded his life and opera began speaking to him in new and all-involving ways.
Patricia Duncker, author of that super-sophisticated modern thriller The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge, came to opera earlier, in her mid-twenties, enthralled by Britten’s recently written Death in Venice. Hers was a talk that re-engaged Peter Conrad’s groundbreaking contention that opera is closer to the novel, with the spaces it opens out for reflection and thought, than it is to a conventional stage play. It is, as Duncker put it in a freewheeling translation of one of her favourite German words, ‘a monstrous immensity filled with promise’.
Applying that same phrase to the great Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti, whose memory Decca is honouring with the release of an advantageously priced 101-CD box of his complete opera recordings, would be a less than gentlemanly act.
In the first place, Pavarotti was quite slim when he made his stage debut as Rodolfo in La bohème in 1961. A recording of that performance survives and is included in the new set. After ‘Che gelida manina’ the audience goes wild, instantly sensing, as some of our grander critics failed to do at the time, that here was a voice – and an artist – of rare pedigree and promise. Turn after that to the complete recording of La bohème Pavarotti made under Karajan’s direction
in Berlin in 1972 and you’ll hear the aria unfurled with a beauty unmatched in the history of the gramophone.
The Mimì on that recording is the great Italian soprano Mirella Freni who was, quite literally, a lifetime friend. Pavarotti’s mother and hers worked in the same cigarette factory and the children shared the same wet-nurse. Thus the set celebrates Freni’s art, much as it does that of another of Pavarotti’s long-term collaborators, Joan Sutherland. Among the 34 operas and 42 complete recordings assembled here, few are more memorable than the nine operas by Donizetti and Bellini – gems of the bel canto repertory – that Pavarotti recorded with Sutherland.
The set has its oddities. The role of the Singer in Solti’s 1968 recording of Der Rosenkavalier lasts all of three minutes. (‘My favourite part,’ quipped Pavarotti.) And what are we to make of the inclusion of five sacred works when the addition of just one DVD – the Jean-pierre Ponnelle film of Rigoletto perhaps – would have allowed us to witness the humour, charm and impetuosity Pavarotti brought to the best of his stage performances?
Still, the character is generally there in the voice, as we can hear in longcherished recordings of two of his favourite Donizetti operas, L’elisir d’amore and La fille du régiment. And there are other instances of Pavarotti’s theatrical skills, not least an intellectually astute portrayal of Faust, the troubled philosopher, in Boito’s too little-known opera Mefistofele.