Desperately Human
The Royal Opera House (Summer Season)
Umberto Giordano’s dramma istorico, Andrea Chénier, has plenty of crowd-pleasing numbers to be belted out (particularly in its final act) but, in truth, it isn’t terribly dramatic as musical theatre and the historical backdrop is a large part of the problem. This setting straddles the years in Paris immediately before the 1789 revolution and then up to the Reign of Terror, and presents the betrayal before the Tribunal of the idealist poet Chénier, lover of the aristocratic Maddalena di Coigny, by her admirer, the former servant and gradually wavering revolutionary, Carlo Gérard. Giordano intended the work to be a verismo account of the appalling injustices of a revolution that had lost sight of its principles and, as such, it is of a piece with other artistic representations of the period that British audiences might know better, such as Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities.
In the immediate aftermath of 1789, a number of writers (Burke and Wordsworth, among them) figured the revolution as a kind of dangerous theatrical phenomenon run amok but it is questionable how well it has ever really worked as a dramatic vehicle for the imagination. Most accounts follow a trajectory that is similar to Giordano’s with the hopes of revolutionary idealism suddenly overtaken by the furious and irrational blood-letting, and, the earliest commentators apart, it is hard to think of a version that is not ultimately conservative about the excesses of radicalism. This presents a clear problem that is quite straightforward: how at once to celebrate the revolution as an engine for drama while also censuring
it as a depressingly disappointing and inevitable course that leads from crushed optimism to the cruelty of terror; how to remain invested closely in events that are clearly travelling in only one direction? This is to say that the revolution’s excesses are not really something one can feel torn by – unlike, say, the Jacobite Revolt in the hands of Walter Scott, which might pull us one way intellectually and another emotionally.
The consequence is that historical forces always risk overwhelming local human interest, with the vagaries of choice more or less entirely taken out of the hands of the central participants. It’s just hard to see how things could work out any other way once history gets rolling, and this has a vitiating effect on realist intentions, which partly explains why Dickens’s allowed his natural tendency to sensationalise to take over. Wordsworth’s own account in the Prelude gets away with it because he converts the whole thing into a psycho-narrative of enthusiasm and dejection that is crucial to his own larger imaginative growth, but in the hands of Dickens (heavily in Carlyle’s debt) – and yet closer to Giordano – things always risk looking very hammy with ‘historical’ detail laid on very thick so as to shock. Giordano, who gives us lots of ‘reality’ (with all the worst Jacobins as extras), makes some effort to wrestle agency back for Chénier in the final act but does so only by having his hero welcoming death amid his love for Maddalena. It is the hoariest cliché about the revolution: he can’t wait for death to set him truly free in the real spirit of the Bastille, but this freedom in death is a pretty poor substitute for actual political liberty and no one can be very convinced for long. Self-sacrifice is an operatic commonplace but it works badly in the context of supposed emotional realism. The melodramma, Tosca, which ends with a similarly ostentatious act of immolation has no such problems because it has been all about theatricality from the start.
This is problematic. Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities of the ‘wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other,’ a useful thought when watching Chénier in the final act exactly because nothing there is a mystery about him, apart from his own self-delusion. We can have no sense
of doubt about the true nature of his avowed motives. Chénier’s final aria welcoming death is a mad (and dramatically unconvincing) commitment to La Patrie but we can hardly believe or follow him psychologically any more than we would a suicide bomber. Contrast the end of Tosca, where what is so dramatically compelling is that we see her stuck between two poles of convincing psychological being, both of which are desperately human: she has spent so much time on stage as an actor that she is confused about the nature of ‘reality’. She half-believes with us that the logic of the theatre will get her out of the bind she’s in, and yet at the same time, she shares with us an awareness of the illusion that she’s playing up to, which we must sense all along is likely to undo her. It’s a compelling collusion that has to remind even a Puccini-sceptic just how extraordinary a dramatic artist he was.
Andrea Chénier, composed a few years before Tosca, shares its librettist in Luigi Illica and to see them together is usefully instructive. Getting something artistically interesting, rather than merely enjoyable, out of Chénier is not easy and David McVicar’s production did a lot on the surface to confront the work’s verismo intentions head on, giving us a vision of the period that is precise and mimetically convincing but without much reflective interrogation. It felt like familiar territory: images drawn in part from the various stagings of Les Mis – though that was another, more obscure revolution: same people, same city; a different time. I would have appreciated a show that made me think more about the meaning of the revolution for our own time; not least because the revival is wellplaced, being thirty years on from the anniversary of the bicentenary commemorations of the Revolution, which I can dimly recall from the gang of students dressed as sans-culottes out on an any-excuse-for-a-piss-up rampage through the streets of my home town. How many of them realised amid the beery haze that another very real revolution, one with whose aftermath we are still dealing, was to be in train a few months later? Few can have imagined where we would be now. This opera, exactly because of its dramatic failings, ought to offer up questions about how we might view the revolution in our own complicated European moment, which this production fails to ask. Primary among these is the most obvious question:
whether the revolution was, for all its awful extremes, a price worth paying for dragging Europe towards a post-feudal modernity that could begin to capitalise properly (for better – if you were a member of the emergent bourgeoisie – or worse – if you were living in the soon to be colonised subaltern nations) on the developments of the Enlightenment.
There was little that spoke to this and, instead, the conservatism of Giordano’s work was reflected in uncomplicated ways in the production: Roberto Alagna, singing powerfully (and occasionally almost hoarse), stood front on, almost as though for a concert performance and the staging felt rather old-fashioned, in tableaux, throughout. Despite this, the Covent Garden audience got what they came for. Rosalind Plowright had a stage charisma that belied her years and Sondra Radvanovsky, as Maddalena, sang with true precision. It was a beautifully-costumed production held amid impressive spaces that worked above all for its stars. The same might be said for the eighth revival of Jonathan Kent’s highly effective, architectural 2006 production of Tosca, which was a vehicle for superstars. Kristine Opolais shared the title role with Angela Gheorghiu but the real draw lay in the brutal encounters between Bryn Terfel’s Scarpia, vast and brooding in his (almost) motiveless malignity, and Vittorio Grigolo’s frenetically energised, twisting and turning, Cavaradossi.
Terfel was back a few weeks later for the first of two shows at Covent Garden this summer based on canonical works of Russian literature. Richard Jones’s 2016 production of the original 1869 version of Modest Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov is riveting. Pushkin’s original play, on which the opera is based, employs a vast number of characters and a ranging, complex plot in over twenty scenes to chart the bewildering course of sixteenth-century Russian history known as ‘The Time of Troubles.’ In this version, Musorgsky stripped the action back to seven scenes in an economical, psychological exploration of the breakdown of sanity in the title character. It was conducted here over 130 taut and tense minutes without an interval and the result was an existential drama devastating in its analysis of power demolished by mendacity, ambition and guilt. The clever conceit of Miriam Buether, the set designer, was to split the stage into two
levels: the upper part, bright and clear, is the realm of past, of memory and, perhaps, of the superego in which Boris has had murdered the Tsarevich Dmitry, an event that persistently torments his through his own coronation and reign. These take place in the dark underworld that is the stage itself, the world of the Id in which he must now dwell until he is overwhelmed by madness and finally death.
Terfel achieves the pathetic majesty of Lear in this production and, under the fine musical direction of Marc Albrecht, it was an evening of treats with many of the minor roles assisting well. John Tomlinson and Anne Marie Gibbons in particular provided a moment of enjoyable levity in the inn scene during a performance that was otherwise low on laughs. Costumes and sets recalled Eisenstein’s magnificent Ivan the Terrible, and helped to reveal this opera as an emotionally-charged masterpiece of both music and spectacle. The same tightness cannot quite be said to exist in the show that came last in the summer season at Covent Garden, though this too richly rewarded careful attention: Prokofiev’s War and Peace in a version by David Pountney for the WNO. Written in the early 1940s and then much revised in line with the instructions of state censors over the decade up to Prokofiev’s death, this is a much more ragged adaptation of its original source text. This is hardly surprising given the enormous complexity of Tolstoy’s novel and the many competing impulses in the plot. Prokofiev intended, inevitably, to emphasise one above all others, which was the insistent connection between the Great Patriotic War and Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. The consequence of this – a solution to the difficult question of how to adapt already very familiar material in the highly charged context of the German invasion – is that Prokofiev offers us a version of the greatest hits from the novel through a set of scenes that hang together well only if one knows the original (as, of course, his audience would have done). The effect is reminiscent of Tchaikovsky’s handling of Eugene Onegin but without the economy and the scenes are stitched together with swirling orchestral interludes that might have scored socialist films from the period.
There were some clever solutions to tricky issues in staging such a long,
complex and vastly ranging work. The open stage, a bare amphitheatre, allowed the chorus to move freely and made the public crowd scenes work far better than the occasional moments of intimacy. As such, the second half of the staging, War, was more effective than the peaceful world of drawing rooms that makes up the first. To assist this further, images were projected onto a huge curtain that engulfed the back of the stage, bringing to life both pre-invasion Moscow and the ghastly world of battle, fire and snow. In particular, clever use of extracts from Sergei Bondarchuk’s extraordinary Soviet-era film of the novel helped to reconstruct elements in the opera, such as Borodino, that simply would have fallen flat without them, given the relatively small ensemble cast. Simon Bailey as Kutuzov, Lauren Mitchell as Natasha, and Mark Le Brocq as Pierre stood out among a number of fine performances but here the emphasis was not on stars but rather on bringing the huge whole to life with real economy. It made for an extraordinary evening that was impressive and poignant, and this was helped all the more by another intelligent intervention, which was the use of a nuanced libretto in English that was clearly sung and brought moments of occasional comedy to a very humane work.