Excursions
Rodney Milnes
L'amoredei tre re, La Vestale, Crispin° e la comare (Wexford Festival) The well balanced Wexford programme presented one good bad opera, one good good opera and one amazing exhumation. Montemezzi's L'amore dei tre re (1913) held the stage in America and Italy until the second world war for reasons that are not altogether clear, apart from the meaty ham-role of the blind old king that proved irresistible to practically every great bass from Didur to Pinza. The music, interestingly scored but melodically unmemorable, is post-verismo neoimpressionist, and a Moritz-Zille-like allegory has been proposed for Sem Benelli's preposterous plot. Retired blind king (bass), his son and current king (baritone), and rightful king (tenor) all love the heroine (soprano). Blind king, the only one not to get to sleep with her, strangles her instead and smears poison on her dead lips, remaining kings' necrophilic farewell kisses have predictable results. • This may all have something to do with European attitudes to the reunification of Italy. On the other hand it may not. Either way, the bare-boned plots of expressionist allegories seldom make good dramatic sense (see Tote Stadt, Edgar, etc). But the piece is well put together and gets a move on, lasting barely 90 minutes. At such brevity anything is excusable. Amore was extremely lustily sung by Magdalena Cononovici, Neil McKinnon, Lajos Miller and Alvaro Malta, the latter's 'blind' contact lenses providing the right frisson. Pinches Steinberg worked wonders in realising a huge, lush score written for La Scala in Wexford terms, Stewart Trotter's production was efficient, and Douglas Heap's sets were much better designed than they were built. A good evening, but one to tick off on the list, really.
Spontini's La Vestale (1807), on the other hand, is a sort of masterpiece. Conceived with the austere grandeur of Gluck, with occasional injections of ltalianate lyricism and virtually through-composed, it had great influence on early Wagner, Berlioz, Meyerbeer, and countless others. It is also a true French Revolution opera. The eponymous vestal virgin receives a Roman general while guarding the vestal flame (which goes out) and is sentenced to be buried alive. In the nick of time — this is an escape opera too — Vesta herself re-ignites the flame with a flash of lightning, and we end with much praise of Venus. Wow. You breaks the rules and you gets away with it (Spontini was a protege of the Empress Josephine). Julian Smith's fine production did not get much of a chance on 3 November. The sticky substance applied nightly to the polished, steep rake of Roger Butlin's elegant white set had, unbeknownst to anyone, failed to gell, with the result that the Roman general (Ennio Buoso) entered with heroic abandon and promptly fell flat on his back. His centurion almost followed suit. As the stage filled, the panic-stricken cast, clutching at anything — the scenery, the sacred flame, each other — in desperate attempts to stay upright, resembled less a performance of a noble opera than an ill-equipped assault on the north face of the Eiger. The audience responded with much merry laughter and ovations expressing solidarity; a long and Wexfordianly convivial interval was no help, to Spontini at least, but it enabled the stage management to get going with the Ajax.
All of which was a pity. Mani Mekler, resourcefully shedding first her shoes and then her stockings (a divcstal virgin?), was stunning in the title role, her voice clear and incisive, her control of dynamic impeccable, her phrasing ideally poetic. And she had the heroic dignity for the role, lacking only communicative French — a fault shared by the rest of the cast save for Terance Sharpe's cleanly projected centurion — which took some of the power from the long accompanied recitatives and ariosi. Claire Livingstone, a rather mezzo mezzo, should never have been singing the dramatic soprano role of the Grande Vestale (in the first act she was jolly nearly a grande horizontale) and the chorus was awful.
The Ricci brothers' Crispin° (1850) is apparently the only Italian comic opera of note between Don Pasquale and Falstaff. The libretto, by Piave of all people, is straight 18th-century Venetian farce, and a satire on the medical profession. A suicidal cobbler (Crispino) is rescued by his fairy godmother (la comare) and turned into a doctor to the fury of the 'qualified' members of the profession. When he gets above himself,lacomare turns out to be Death and summons him to hell for judgment (he gets off). The music is a mixture of straight but skilfully turned buffb routines, waltz songs of Offenbachian zest and, suddenly in the last act, the supper scene of Don Giovanni. The Wexford performance was raised far above the level of mere fun by two elements: Tim Reed's commedia dell'arte costumes and his brilliantly contrived sets which, whizzing about on revolves, achieved some stunning transformations; and the singing and production by that great artist Sesto Bruscantini. Here was an object lesson, gratefully learned by the rest of the cast, in the true, robust buffo tradition, Would that every British producer of comic opera had been there to learn as well. The long trio of doctors, in which Bruscantini was joined by Gianni Socci and David Beavan, was one of those bons quarts d'heure that really deserved its encore. This marvellous staging must not be allowed to disappear. It would be a smash at Camden, in English.
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