The stable of operatic warhorses keeping the genre alive
As Richard Eyre’s ‘La traviata’ returns, Flora Willson looks at the ‘warhorses’ whose popularity makes the entire art form possible
If you’ve been to the opera in London in the past couple of decades, there’s a good chance you’ll have seen Verdi’s La
traviata at the Royal Opera House. Some 166 years after its premiere, La traviata is the most frequently performed opera in the world. And Covent Garden’s venerable production, created by director Richard Eyre in 1994 with designs by Bob Crowley, is about to open its 23rd revival. The production takes us to the later 19th century, where the women might have stepped out of Winterhalter portraits, the sets are recognisable spaces (ballroom, country getaway, casino, bedroom) and the chorus raise their glasses precisely as specified in the opera’s 1853 text. Even if you’ve not seen the production live, you might have seen one of the three differently cast DVD recordings, or attended an outdoor “big screen” performance, or watched a live cinema relay. In short, Eyre’s
Traviata is as close to a blockbuster as opera gets today. The question is why it has remained so popular for a quarter of a century.
It was Eyre’s production that launched a young Romanian called Angela Gheorghiu into the operatic stratosphere – and in the 25 years since, it’s been a consistent starmagnet. Anna Netrebko, Renée Fleming, Ermonela Jaho and Diana Damrau are just a few of the sopranos. The roster of tenors, from Roberto Alagna to Marcelo Álvarez, Joseph Calleja to Jonas Kaufmann, has been just as impressive. Add in the celebrity baritones and conductors and you start to get a sense of the sheer operatic wattage accumulated.
But star power alone surely can’t explain such longevity. Or why the staging has changed so little, despite changes in everything from singers to health and safety legislation.
Eyre watched the revival last year. Why does he think it’s lasted so long? “I think the answer has to be because it isn’t subject to a ‘concept’: there is no overall grid that is imposed.”
Yet surely staging the opera in the composer’s own time is itself a concept? And Verdi explicitly wanted a contemporary setting, though the censor didn’t allow it. Eyre admits, “Whether I’d make the same decision [now] about the period, is an interesting question.” Yet, he explains: “The more I got into it, the more I felt, if you change the period, there is so much of the social context that simply doesn’t make sense.”
Andrew Sinclair, an ROH staff director and the revival director for six of La traviata’s recent outings, would probably agree. “I’ve seen productions,” he says, “where you ask the director, ‘Why are you setting The
Marriage of Figaro in a refrigerator surrounded by barbed wire?’ And their answer may be, ‘Why not?’ Those don’t tend to last, he argues, “because they’re very driven by fitting in with today and doing something new, instead of saying something about the period in which it was composed.” He continues: “The famous English director John Copley said to me, when I was starting out, ‘Andrew, we are there to serve the piece; the piece is not there to serve us.’”
Copley is a major figure in what we might call this conservationist approach to opera production. His staging of Puccini’s La Bohème for ROH opened in 1974 and closed 41 years later. Like Eyre’s traviata, Copley’s Bohème was set roughly in the era of its literary source and promoted as a staging that “brings Paris of the 1830s to life”.
Ditto the late Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Puccini’s Tosca – think monumental sets and real candlesticks – which made its debut at Covent Garden in 1964 and was only shelved 40 years later. As the Italian director insisted in a 2012 interview: “I felt strongly that if you inherit that kind of musical treasure, you must respect it. Everyone agreed we didn’t want a revolutionary approach.”
This rhetoric of inheritance and respect gets at what is simultaneously best and worst about today’s operatic warhorses. On the one hand, these long-running productions are loved precisely because they appear true to the intentions of their long-dead composers and librettists.
On the other hand, isn’t something of the original revolutionary spirit of some of these works lost if they’re treated solely as inherited “treasures”? What would Verdi make of his “opera for our time” (that’s what he called it in 1853) being forever preserved in 1994 aspic? Aren’t there bolder ways to respect a work?
Some productions move further from an opera’s original setting and still achieve “classic” status. Most obviously, two of Jonathan Miller’s beloved warhorses at English National Opera: his monochrome Thirties staging of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The
Mikado (first seen in 1986) and his Fifties mafia-set Rigoletto from 1982.
Ultra-reliable productions also play a major role in opera’s delicate finances. “It’s something that helps us pay the rent,” Brandsen admits of the Eyre production – and that also means enabling greater risks to be taken elsewhere in a season. In fact, the programming at any major opera house today makes one thing clear: you’ve got to schedule regular outings of the conservative warhorses to enable even occasional bouts of experimentation with lesser-known repertoire, more radical stagings or both. Eyre’s Traviata will get 21 performances in Covent Garden’s latest revival. The day after it closes, a major new production of Janáček’s
Jenůfa will come on stream: it’s a far less well-known opera than the Verdi and is directed by German director Claus Guth, whose recent creations include a staging of Puccini’s La
bohème set in space. Despite the fact that Jenůfa will feature the superstar soprano Karita Mattila, only six performances are planned.
Balancing “classic” productions and more radical approaches is only one answer to the practical challenges of staging opera in the 21st century, though. An alternative might look more like the London-based touring company Operaupclose, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year with a revival of its acclaimed 2009 modern-dress, small-scale production of La bohème, originally staged in an Islington pub. As artistic associate Flora Mcintosh explains: “Everything we do is an original English translation, and always a translation that takes a view. There are no dinosaurs and no museum pieces.” But she’s quick to reassure me that there are no wild reinventions either: “If you see our La bohème, you definitely see La bohème. What we’ve done is show that the repertoire has absolute currency for now.”
Operaupclose claims to have staged a staggering 12 per cent of the UK’S total opera performances in the past five years. While there’s no failsafe recipe for creating long-life productions, success in staging opera today clearly comes in many forms – and cultivating a symbiotic relationship between the self-consciously radical and the apparently conservative is one way to shore up its future.
‘La traviata is something that helps us pay the rent’