EDINBURGH FESTIVAL SPECIAL
Music and melodrama
The 'Schiller and Verdi' theme has been an enormously valuable enterprise, says Michael Tanner This year's Edinburgh Festival has so many 'themes' that one needs to be a critical equivalent of Bach to combine them all con- vincingly. I shan't even try, but only say that none of the 19 artistic and discursive events I have attended has been anything less than good, and that most of them have been outstanding. I shall mention some of the Purely musical events later: among them have been the richest satisfactions of all.
But the most conspicuous theme has been 'Schiller and Verdi', the Glasgow Citi- zens Theatre Company putting on a pro- duction of Schiller's first, revolutionary drama The Robbers, and doing 'rehearsed readings' of the other three plays of which Verdi did operatic versions. This has been a bit daunting: the conscientious student of the theme attended a reading at the Queen's Hall for three or four hours in the afternoon, and then after an hour's break or so went on to the Festival Theatre for a Performance of the opera. There was also a Verdi/Schiller study day, some of which was very helpful, and a discussion of The Robbers. It's a great pity that funds didn't permit staging of all three dramas, and that only two of the operas could be staged too, Giovanna d'Arco and Luisa Miller being given concert performances. Nonetheless, this has been an enormously valuable enterprise, and one hopes that it's followed up at a future Festival with Shakespeare and Verdi.
At first sight it seems odd that Verdi should have been so attracted by Schiller. If one accepts what Isaiah Berlin claims in his celebrated article on 'The Naivete of Verdi', then Schiller, who proposed the dichotomy that Berlin exploits, turns up on the other side of it. He is the most 'senti- mental' of playwrights in his own sense, the one who refracts every experience of his characters through his own personality; while Verdi, if one follows Berlin, is the last artist to present feelings without inter- posing his responses to the world. I'm not at all sure about the distinction, certainly as it applies to these two, but the first thing that strikes one about Schiller's people is their passionate reflectiveness. Thus in The Robbers, a sprawling melodrama, but a very effective one, about two warring brothers, the younger of whom, Franz, is evidently derived from Edmund, Richard II, with a dash of Tourneur's Vindice, the sprawl is largely the result of the inveterate habits of self-analysis that they all, but Franz in par- ticular, indulge in; he also mounts a remarkably convincing attack on family val- ues. Meanwhile Karl, the idealistic son, finds himself in charge of a band of layabouts, and is given cause to meditate on the inevitable demise of idealism when it comes into contact with the world. Schiller's play has many faults, and the Cit- izens' production of it made matters worse in several egregious ways; the doubling of the roles of Franz and Karl was pointless, though a tour de force on the part of Benedick Bates, who hardly shut his mouth throughout the long evening. Yet even though there were moments of uninten- tional farce, and despite the creaking plot- mechanisms, one could accept that this is a serious, extraordinarily intelligent and pre- cocious work, and by the end I was more moved and convinced than I had dreamed possible. With some re-casting, some elimi- nation of contemporary slang from Robert David MacDonald's translation, and less ubiquitous dry ice, this would be a truly memorable dramatic experience.
That is more than one could ever claim for Verdi's and Maffei's version, which is nothing more, for the most part, than a set of Italian operatic clichés, interchangeable with a great deal else that Verdi was writ- ing around the time, especially with the first version of Macbeth. Indeed, one can fairly say that I Masnadieri bears the same relation to The Robbers that Verdi's Mac- beth does to Shakespeare's. Verdi's charac- ters feel and act, and one can't usually imagine them thinking. So only those who find Schiller prolix on account of the artic- ulateness of his characters will welcome what Verdi perpetrated. And given the exceptionally threadbare quality of his musical invention in this opera, the con- trast between the great teenage playwright in the first flush of genius and the exhaust- ed operatic opportunist still serving his years in the galley, becomes embarrassingly clear. The Royal Opera did what can be done. Edward Downes went for broke, conducting with huge vigour, sending the routine accompaniment figures pounding along in a way that makes one long to hear him conduct Sullivan. The most convincing music in the opera by far, and the most sat- isfactory performance — indeed, one might claim something like genius for it — is that given to the villain Francesco, incarnated in Dmitri Hvorostovsky. His voice seems to have grown vastly, his stage presence is now an epiphany. The rate of his artistic progress is staggering. Every scene in which he appeared was riveting. That only served to emphasise the poverty of all the other scenes, despite the energetic efforts of the rest of the cast. The object of both broth- ers' affections, Amalia, was taken by Paula Delligati, in a role Verdi wrote for Jenny Lind. Why this character should be afflict- ed with such reams of coloratura escapes me. They are wholly extrinsic to her per- sonality, and make no meaningful contrast with the rest of the opera. The equivocally good Carlo was adequately taken by Fran- co Farina. The production, by Elijah Moshinsky, was unobtrusive and lucid. Now that the Royal Opera has done all that can be done for the piece, it should be handed back to oblivion, for the sake of its composer's reputation.
His most magnificent achievement, and also one of the Royal Opera's, is Don Car- los, understandably the hot ticket of the Festival. Both Schiller's play and Verdi's opera are unwieldy messes, though of dif- ferent kinds. Schiller had too many ideas for the play's good, while Verdi, as is well known, had to prune the first version, had second, third, fourth thoughts, some suited to French, some to Italian. As Andrew Porter says in one of his programme notes, there is no version of the work which would include all the music Verdi wrote for it. The choices the Royal Opera has made for these performances are sometimes odd, but always interesting. I was sorry to miss out on the marziale section of the final duet between Elisabeth and Don Carlos, for instance, but fascinated to hear the music which Verdi composed, presumably earlier, for the same sentiments, which is probably better. A detailed listing in the programme of the choices made would have been most welcome. Anyway, the results were highly impressive, sung by a team that gave the sense that they had worked together often, though they haven't. As always with the French version, the effect is more intimate than in Italian. Partly that was a matter of the selections made, partly of Haitink's wonderfully flexible, detailed and under- stated conducting, partly of the singing of all the principals.
Karita Mattila's Elisabeth is a study in nuances, and looks as radiant as it sounds. She is one of the great operatic artists of our time. Beside her Julian Gavin's Carlos seems just a bit callow, but it is hard to know whom to blame for that. Gavin has a gauche presence, but so, maybe, has Verdi's central figure. Or, more accurately, he is a blank, filled in by others' percep- tions of him. Verdi doesn't award him his own idiom, as he so notably does all the other major figures. It is in this respect that the adaptation of Schiller's superb drama is at its weakest. It is necessary to point out, too, that there is a fair amount of routine music in the piece, which is carried by the splendour of the rest. As Lord Harewood used to put it in Kobbe, 'the auto-da-fe scene obstinately refuses to scale the heights'. More accurately, it fails to leave the depths. It's a work which gets greater as it goes along, so that the last segment, from the scene in Philip's study onwards, is flaw- less, apart from the hopelessness of the ending.
Luc Bondy's production ranges between the inane and the competent, with isolated moments of illumination. Why the Grand Inquisitor should be accompanied by five fire-crackers going off at random spots I prefer not to think; but more seriously for far too much of the time the characters are merely wrongly positioned in relation to one another; only Thomas Hampson, the ideal Rodrigue, made complete sense of his role. The sets, ugly and unfunctional, should be replaced. The glories of a very glorious evening were almost entirely musi- cal, sending us out exalted into the merci- less, taxiless Edinburgh deluge.
There's barely space to mention, let alone do justice to, the manifold glories of the remainder of the first week. For those who still had the energy to respond, Andras Schiff's performance, in two late-night instalments of Book II of 'The 48', may have provided the high point. I found them illuminating readings, in part, but too unvaried in dynamics and colour. Since he was playing a sumptuous modern instru- ment, he might have taken more advantage of it. The complete Sibelius cycle with the COE under Paavo Berglund was quite mar- vellous, lean in string texture, often fero- cious without crassness from the brass, who This urine sample has definitely been tam- pered with.' understandably tended to tire. At the Queen's Hall in the mornings, Schiff gave spontaneous readings of much of Schu- mann's solo piano music, to an alarmingly elderly audience — or is this the converse of policemen are getting younger? And Ian Bostridge was good without being special in Schumann and Wolf, while the Vienna Sextet played Mozart's string quintets, including movements he left unfinished, in performances which were decent, but not calculated to over excite so early in the day. The members of the Sextet are strikingly contrasted personalities, and that was enjoyably reflected in their playing.
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