Plotting their downfall ARTS
CHARLES REID
When in vacant, pensive or slothful mood, I sometimes crave for opera plots so basic that you can get a fairly clear idea what's happen- ing at first go, even if you don't catch—or, having caught, understand—more than a phrase here and there. All but mother's-knee opera is apt to be hard work : a lesson rubbed in by Covent Garden's first production of Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919) and Glyndebourne's of Francesco Cavalli's L'Ormindo, which, they say, has never until now been sung in any theatre since it came out in Venice three centuries ago.
As always when confronted by Die Frau, whether in the theatre or on Decca's five-disc recording, I find myself nagged by the grand tialala of Hofmannsthal's scenario. Symbols are thick on the ground. Magic and hocus- pocus get into everybody's hair. Fish for fry- ing, golden fountain, skiff or punt and vengeful scimitar are supposed to be whistled up from thin air (at Covent Garden they happen half- heartedly or not at all) to underline such homely truths as that selfishly childless marriages are no go, auto-frustrated wives something of a handful and full cradles a com- fort to all. Preached at us from two social levels, imperial palace and journeyman's hovel, Hofmannsthal's homilies, although they take a bit of puzzling out, came over with smugness and some grandeur, mutually exclusive assets that often get on uncommonly well together in Richard Strauss.
Two main things elucidated the night and gave it weight and massiveness. One was Rudolf Hartmann's touch, as producer, with a cast which included enough out-of-the-way acting talent to lift us high above well-meant, earnest labour. Inge Borkh (Barak's wife) and Regina Resnik (Die Amme), though not co-equal as singers (Miss Borkh's tone shone more), share one rare gift: that of decisive and finely shaped gesture of the kind which, when sparingly used, gives added weight and sharper edge to salient words and vocal phrases. And if Donald McIntyre (Barak), Hildegard Hillebrecht (Em- press) and James King (Emperor), all three in telling voice, didn't offer quite the same sort of eyeful, they nevertheless fell in admirably with the production's general spaciousness and simplicity. On the whole the acti6g is more im- portant to look at than Josef Svoboda's agree- able cut-out sets (I remember vague feet forms with bulbous, M(roesque toes) and stage- wide stair that goes halfway up to the flies, just the thing, I would have said, for the Riddle Scene in Turandot.
Second badge of the night: the tune-friezes, complexities and single-heartedness of Strauss's orchestra. If you feel like it, put your entire trust in Mr Solti, adorer and master of this score; shut your eyes and take the whole thing as a suite of tone poems with a sung super- structure.
At Glyndebourne things are the other way round. We bother about the words (Italian), by one Giovanni Faustini, for three reasons. First: because we've never heard them before and find it hard to take in and retain plot synopses. Second: because at short notice it's impossible to mug up Geoffrey Dunn's sprightly English translation (Faber) and relate it scene by scene to what's being sung. Third: because the words are well worth bothering about for their own sake. As between the story and the music, it's a fine run thing. Myself I would say that the story's ahead by a half a length. A legendary North African king, cuckolded or in danger of it, yet aloofly magnanimous and dignified, sentences his faithless queen and one of her lovers to death by poison but melodiously for- gives both when they suddenly sit up on their deathbeds, blinking and stretching in recovery from what turns out providentially to have been nothing more than a sleeping potion.
In its way as detached, ironical and amoral as Busenollo's unforgettable Incoronazione di Poppea libretto, Faustini's book modulates from skittishness to black butterflies, ends with smiles all round and treats us on the way to tart, cynical comment by the lower orders. Against sets and in costumes (designer: Erich Kondrak) which, abetted by Giinther Rennert's wily production, suggest superior Carnaby Street camp (at first they irritated, then hooked me), a page (Isabel Garcisanz), duftlebag on shoulder, thumbs in her jeans, propounded a school to cure men of women; Mirinda, queen's confidante (Jane Berbie), twinkled under a white conical hat about greybeard lovers, mocking them nasally; and Erice, pen- sioned royal nurse, wearing flesh-pink goggles, advised the audience with a dismissive flap of the hand that lovers are less important than the act of love. The Erice was Hugues Cuenod and couldn't have been anyone else. Who, in so freakish and mordant a role, could cope so incisively with a neo-Monteverdian vocal line and a dozen nuances of comic charac- terisation all at the same time?
'Realised' and, as to scoring, speculatively reconstructed by Raymond Leppard, who did the same a season or two ago for L'Incorona- zione, the score has string resonances, lute), twanglings and organ cooings and pipings similar to those of resurrected Monteverdi. Everything falls sweetly and piquantly on the ear. This judgment applies as much to the voices as to the orchestra pit. In Anne Howells (the Queen), Irmgard Stadler (the Princess), John Wakefield (Ormindo), Peter-Christoph Runge (Amida) and Federico Davin (the King), Mr Leppard had as interknit, well-schooled and web-groomed a principal group as could be hoped for anywhere on a first night-in so off- beat and exacting an idiom.
So much for sound and performance quality. Music, the essential operatic 'thing,' while in- corporating these two factors, rises above and beyond both. My first impression is of relative musical tepidity. There are pretty pages and charming ones and others that modestly try for tears. In and among, however, occur high dramatic moments which strike little musical spark or none at all. And isn't there overmuch leaning on conventional cadences? Some will say it's wrong in this context to make implicit comparison with L'Incoronazione. But cer- tainly, Cavalli's no Monteverdi.
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