Music Richard Osborne

ROMÉO ET JULIETTE GOUNOD AT 200

When the great Polish-born tenor Jean de Reszke and the 28-year-old Australian singing sensation Nellie Melba sang the title roles in Charles Gounod’s Roméo et

Juliette at Covent Garden in the summer of 1889, the world went giddy on its axis. Even George Bernard Shaw felt obliged to crook his knee after an event he later placed ‘in the foremost ranks of my operatic recollections’.

June saw the bicentenary of Gounod’s birth, an event that might have passed largely unnoticed had it not been for a staging of Roméo et Juliette by Grange Park Opera in its newly built opera house at West Horsley Place, in Surrey.

If the staging itself was questionable, there could be few doubts about the musicianship and allure of the Juliette, Olena Tokar, or the vocal credentials of David Junghoon Kim’s Roméo. Kim can barely act; but, then, neither could Jussi Bjoerling, the most famous Roméo of his day. What Kim has is an exceptional instrument deployed in a way that suggests that he knows what a classic vocal style actually is.

Director Patrick Mason’s decision to move the action from 15th-century Verona to Fascist Italy robbed the opera of beauty and colour, which may explain why I spent most of the evening with my eyes closed. No bad thing, you might think, if you share the view that Gounod’s opera is little more than a ‘love duet with interruptions’ – a somewhat curmudgeonly view, given the care with which the work hugs the coastline of Shakespeare’s drama.

Yes, this is French grand opéra; and, yes, Juliet wakes in the tomb to enjoy a viscerally charged final duet with Romeo. But whose play is it anyway, this startlingly beautiful verse drama which has been played in so many ways down the years?

The idea of a ‘last encounter’ between the lovers, which persists to this day in film and musical adaptations, was first made famous by David Garrick in his 1748 Drury Lane production, a staging whose influence held sway well into Gounod’s lifetime. In the theatre, it took productions by John Gielgud in the 1930s, and Peter Brook and Franco Zeffirelli after that, to render Shakespeare’s original text sovereign.

Gounod’s own private twist comes in the terrific final scene. Here God enters the fray in what, as Romeo and Juliet bid their fond farewells, is now a drama of Catholic expiation. All his adult life, Gounod veered between the sacristy and the stage; embraced purity but loved revel; relished the gutter yet remained beholden to the heavens and the beneficent deity above. It’s why his greatest opera, Faust, is such knockout.

A bicentenary gem from abroad that offers rare insights into Gounod in his formative years is volume six of Palazzetto Bru Zane’s Collection Prix de Rome, one of those beautifully produced 150-page hardback books with CDS slipped in at either end that is increasingly favoured by continental publishers.

Gounod was 19 when he made the first of three permitted attempts to win the Prix de Rome, the prestigious scholarship, originally set up for French artists and sculptors by Louis XIV, which Napoleon revived in 1803, adding music and prescribing a three-year residency in Rome’s newly acquired Villa Medici.

Shortlisted finalists were required to