Welcome to the sillier side of opera
Pelléas et Mélisande Glyndebourne ★★★☆☆
‘Too clever by half ” would be my exasperated verdict on Stefan Herheim’s overloaded and befuddling new production of Debussy’s masterpiece. Herheim is obviously very gifted, and his staging has undeniably been immaculately rehearsed and executed.
But he regrettably appears to be in thrall to that baneful phenomenon of Middle European culture, the Dramaturge – an academic adviser (in this case, one Professor Alexander Meier-dörzenbach), whose task is to feed a director ideas, concepts and critiques from an ivory tower. If Herheim could only trust what emerges from the score and text in the rehearsal room, his audiences would all be left much happier.
This interpretation of Pelléas is framed by a meticulous reproduction of Glyndebourne’s great hall, known as the Organ Room. Costuming suggests the period of the opera’s composition in the 1890s – aside from the nymph Mélisande, who wanders around in a white slip looking like a refugee from Isadora Duncan’s troupe.
Although no palpable connection is made with the Organ Room’s actual history, this is a promising starting point: we could plausibly be in the world of Henry James, focused on an acutely observed love triangle between two half-brothers and a fey, secretive girl of passive-aggressive personality.
But the specific and realistic nature of the setting soon proves a liability and a drag: it cannot accommodate the fluid topography of a story that moves from gloomy forest to cavernous seashore, from damp dark vaults to the tower from which Mélisande like Rapunzel lets down her hair. Instead everything remains stolidly within the Organ Room and its panoply of pipes and ancestral portraits, though outbursts of wishy-washy video may imply an element of hallucination or dream in what unfolds.
Things certainly get progressively sillier and sillier, as Golaud (in Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers) appears to sodomise his son Yniold, Pelléas is presented as a painter (except that there are no canvases on his easels), Jesus Christ appears on high with a sheep draped over his shoulders, and the climactic love duet is enacted not in whispered intimacy but in front of a crowd of gawping retainers.
Things reach a peak of perversity in the final scene when the ghost of the murdered Pelléas and the dying Mélisande vanish into the inglenook – by which time one concludes that Herren Herheim and Meierdörzenbach are either locked in a folie à deux or simply having us on.
In the American baritone John Chest and Austrian soprano Christina Gansch, the title roles have been rightly cast with two fresh and ingenuous singers: although they are hampered by Herheim’s eccentricities, they would both be enchanting in a less batty context. Christopher Purves is the strongest of operatic actors, but I found him a degree too lightweight vocally for Golaud.
Others were compromised. Suffering from a bad throat, Brindley Sherratt manfully mimed the patriarch Arkel while Richard Wiegold sang from the side of the auditorium; Karen Cargill’s gorgeous mezzo-soprano timbre is perhaps too sumptuous an instrument for the austere declamation of Geneviève’s letter; and Chloé Briot had to cope with several indignities heaped on little Yniold.
At least the spirit of Debussy’s score and Maeterlinck’s symbolist text were seriously honoured in Robin Ticciati’s conducting of the London Philharmonic: in the pit, the mystery and eroticism of the drama resonated, almost defiant of the muddle on stage, in a reading of vibrant colours and palpitating emotion.
Until August 9. Tickets: 01273 815000; www.glyndebourne.com