18 MAY 2002, Page 35

What is a troubadour doing in the middle of a steelworks?

erdi's Il Trovatore has a strong claim to be considered the greatest of operas, if we concede Dr Johnson's point that opera is, by its nature, 'an irrational entertainment'. The story is fantastical and no work demands more insistently the 'willing suspension of disbelief' which Keats required for the appreciation of poetic art. But if we put our reason aside, plunge into the dark mixture of metaphysics, superstition and passion, and surrender to the awe-inspiring turbulence of Verdi's music, the impact is overwhelming in its horror and hellish grandeur. Verdi wrote like a man inspired, and as though the hairs on his head were standing up in terror. Though there is much mention of God in the frenzied singing, and a background of religiosity and bell-tolling, this is, in fact, a godless world of unremitting fury and hatred, in which the only deity is revenge, and love itself a mere justification for murder and suicide. The abrupt and fearful climax should leave one stunned, and one should exit from the theatre trembling and dreading a witch-haunted sleep.

Oh, how Verdi, a superb craftsman of operatic theatre who hated pretentiousness in any form and humbly insisted that he was 'a writer of music' rather than a universal genius, would have deplored the present production at Covent Garden. The orchestra plays and the singers sing as he would have wished, but all else is lead. In his quiet way, Verdi was a revolutionary and saw his opera as a unity. As he wrote round about this time, 'If in operas there were no more cavatinas, duets, trios, choruses, finales, etc., and if the entire opera were, let's say, a single piece, I would find it more remarkable and just.' In fact, he kept these traditional forms in Trovatore. But at the same time he imposed a remarkable unity of tone by deploying throughout enormous musical energy, expressed in insistent rhythms, which whisper, pulse or thunder throughout each scene, sometimes rising to electrifying climaxes of sombre sound, sometimes retreating to the background so that the sheer lyricism of the melodic line takes over, but never ceasing, always pushing the story along at an unrelenting velocity. Verdi's intention in thus encasing the entire opera in a series of dominant rhythms is to increase the pace, partly to make it more difficult for the audience to ponder the improbabilities of the story, but partly also to emphasise the power of fate which hastens the characters towards their

dark and inevitable destiny, everything speeding up in the second half and accelerating towards the catastrophic end with its hellish cry of satisfied vengeance.

Hence any meaningful production of this wonderful score ought to comply with or even reinforce Verdi's evident desire for gathering pace. The Covent Garden presentation has the opposite effect. Surrendering, as so often nowadays, to the whims of the director and the demands of eccentric scenery, everything is slow, plodding and punctuated with delays, which dissolve any tension the music creates and replace it with irritation and boredom. In each of the scenes the specific directions of the composer and librettist are ignored. Part I scene i is supposed to be 'a hall in the Aliaferia Palace-. What we are given is a Crimean war-type battery of howitzers. In the next scene, the Palace gardens', we have a stone colonnade, for no discernible purpose, which makes the enactment of the scene extremely difficult. Part II is supposed to be 'a ruined hovel on the lower slopes of a mountain'. The design for this scene. by Giuseppe and Pietro Bertoja, in the Venice production of 1853-4, survives (and is reproduced in Grove's Dictionary of Opera, iv, p. 826). Instead we get the interior of a steel mill, with colossal bottlefurnaces, which make nonsense of the famous 'Anvil Chorus'. The next scene, II 1 which is meant to be 'the cloister of a convent near Castellor'. is staged as the interior of an early Victorian railway shed or station, a labyrinth of wroughtand cast-iron, which might, alternatively, be an empty transept of the original Crystal Palace. And so it goes on. A 'military encampment' in Part III sees the reappearance, though in a completely different form, of the Crimean war howitzers. They again play no part in the action and are

never referred to. Further scene changes are equally puzzling and incongruous.

These settings are extremely elaborate and must have cost vast sums. They are maddeningly distracting, for while, on their appearance, the spectator is pondering their relevance, finally concluding there is none, the music and action have moved on. leaving him behind, Moreover, the bulk of these settings, of which there are eight in all, means that considerable time has to be spent in changing them, so that eight yawning holes have to be punched into the continuity of the opera. Each time the excitement built up by the music in the preceding scene vanishes, and the story has to be resumed, stone-cold, when the curtain finally rises again. Elaborate and numerous scene changes involving long delays are damaging to any play, and to II Trovatore, with its metaphysics of rhythm and pace, they are fatal. The tremendous score throbs and beats like a huge and fearsome animal, the artistes sing their hearts out, exhilarated or, more accurately, possessed by the haunting tunes and the terror which lies behind their beauty. But all in vain. Scene-shifters are at work. The Director Rules — OK?

It is not OK. The sign of a good director is that no one in the audience is aware he exists. A well-presented opera is one in which the production has no purpose except to help the musicians and actors give everything in their power to carry out the intentions of the composer and writer. These are the two great principles to be honoured in staging a work of art, and they should be engraved on the minds of the grandees who compose the boards or trustees of state opera houses to ensure that they impose them on their underlings. When in doubt, the views of the composer, the energiser of the entire artifice, must be allowed to prevail. We sneer at and deplore the ignorance and philistinism of those who, in the 18th and 19th centuries, altered, truncated, added to and censored the masterpieces of Shakespeare to suit the whims of prevailing fashion. But we, by surrendering to the majesty of whimsical or authoritarian directors, do just as much injury to the cause of art. Why can these people not grasp that great masters like Verdi knew their job, lived with their works for painful years in many cases, had thought deeply about what they were trying to do, and have a right to demand obedience? The true director is a humble servant of genius.