Opera The Chevalier at Bay
By DAVID CAIRNS
INVOKING 'the historical point of view' is the last ditch defence of musicologists. The phrase has a mortuary sound; it means the music has no vitality left to plead for itself. But with Gluck it is something more, a neces- sary adjustment of attitudes which, if we can make it, admits us to a world of limited but still living art. How easy to list the limitations of the Chevalier; how easy. and how negative! Nothing simpler than to show that com- pared with Mozart his range of emotion is nar- row, his psychology not subtle, his counterpoint rudimentary, his power of development crude, his idiom inflexible. Of course opera, even in Cluck's century, was to achieve vastly more than his re- forms could comprehend, and of course if few operas went beyond the `noble simplicity' of °deo and Alceste, life would be very dull. It is more rewarding, however, to try to accept Gluck on his own terms, to attune ourselves to his peculiar beauties and enjoy what is there rather than bewail what is not. The performance of I phigenia in Tauris at Covent Garden is an oppor- tunity to do this.
One accepts Gluck gradually. The first time I heard lphigenia I listened with impatient respect. The opening storm music was certainly too long, too repetitive, too four-square and formal; the recitative which followed exploited only the most obvious formulas of inverted and diminished chords; Iphigenia's aria '0 toi qui prolongeas mes jours' was beautiful in a stately way but lacked symphonic interest. And so 'on. But the more you hear it the more you see the validity of Cluck's dramatic claims and recognise the truth of Burney's statement about a Gluck opera that `the whole is a chain of which a detached, single link .i3 but of small importance.' Even the apparent weakness from the lack of inner parts proves an illusion; as Tovey says, `it is a remarkable fact in the style of a composer who really was not a contrapuntist that Cluck's accompaniments, basses and inner parts are never tiresome and are almost always beautiful and thrilling in colour'— especially when so superbly realised by the con- ductor as they are by Solti at Covent Garden.
The rigours of Gluck's msthetic theory are his chains but also his glory. In lphigenia almost everything is subdued to the logic of the drama. lphigenia's exquisite 0 minor aria 'D'une image h6las trop chdrie' could from a purely musical point of view be twice as long; the musician in us regrets that it is not. But Gluck's dramatic sense is inexorable. This -does not mean that we need feel starved of music. It is true that Cluck's contention that dramatic reasons could even per- mit the composer `to descend occasionally into triviality' cannot excuse the bottomless in- adequacy of the final chorus of rejoicing; true also that the idiom is limited beside Mozart's— only compare what Mozart makes of the dis- covery of Leporello's identity in the Sextet in Don, Giovanni with Gluck's bland response to the moment of mutual recognition between Orestes End lphigenia. But this does not matter once you know the music well enough to grasp the deeply satisfying shape of Gluckian opera as a whole—and the shape of lphigenia in Twirls is perfect. Could Gluck, as he liked to suggest, have written 'better' music if his theories had let him be 'only a musician'? The answer ceases to be important. Listened to in the right spirit—which is the least that great art has the right to demand of us—/phigenia imposes its own conception of beauty, style, completeness. The effort of imagin- ation is not so very great, and it is wonderfully worth while.
The casting of Rita Gorr, a mezzo-soprano, as lphigenia at Covent Garden has been assailed. I admit to being infatuated with the sound of her voice, but it is manifestly exaggerated to say that the whole role lies too high for her. The repeated Gs in the storm and the high tessitura of the aria '0 malheureuse lphigenie' tax her severely; the rest is eloquence. The staging, though adequate, is rather a disappointment, particularly from Goran Gentele, whose productions of A Masked Ball and Aniara at the Stockholm Opera are so Fidelio has stooped from the heights of last season's eminence, but rather because Mr. Horenstein, who now conducts, is unable to live up to the Klemperer conception than because he has rebelled against it. Not many of his tempos are substantially different (and several, like the final ensemble of Act I and the opening of the Dungeon Quartet, are slower); where he falls down, and fails to rise above competence, is in rhythm and phrasing. His rhythms move with stiff-jointed deliberation, his phrases sink for lack of breath; Beethoven's mighty paragraphs tend to come out in telegrammese. But the corn- • petence should not be underestimated. What of Miss Shuard's Leonore? Vocally it is as striking as anything she has given us in the opera house, and not only in sheer stamina and horse power: she blazes with her most splendid and radiant vehemence just at the point—the duet with Florestan----where many sopranos are gut- tering down from exhaustion—but also in sincerity and heroic conviction. But as a rounded portrait of Leonore, simply as a piece of accept- able heroic acting, it is no more than the sugges- tion of a sketch. Miss Shuard's stereotyped gestures and primitive facial expressions are con- tinually contradicting the force of her singing: the effect of her magnificent high 13, flat in the Dungeon Quartet--'TOdt erst sein Weib'--is immediately undone when she turns to the stam- mering Florestan with a smile like a bath litin that has heard good news. Her Leonore badly needs the attentions of a first-rate producer; it is promising enough to deserve them. The produc- tion of this revival, like the conducting, achieves respectable mediocrity; it wants the presence of Frick, Hotter and Jurinac to warm it into life. And why have we lost that fine stroke of dramatic continuity by which we saw, as the curtain fell on the first act, Rocco and Leonore about to begin their 'descent into the depths'?
Previous page
