Opera
Conspiracy
Rodney MiInes •
One had hoped that the current outcrop of four new operas presented by London and regional companies would form some sort of cornerstone of a much-needed lyric renaissance. With two down and two to go, it looks more like a gravestone. To be faced with the end-product of months, indeed years, of careful preparation on the part of people one knows to be intelligent and serious and find the result, as in the case of Crosse's The Story of Vasco and now lain Hamilton's The Catiline Conspiracy, to be wanting in the most elementary essentials of stage-craft is about as depressing an experience as the man who, contrary to so much external evidence, still believes in opera can possibly undergo.
The subject of Ctitine, at present being toured by Scottish Opera, is promising enough, and one that few could fail to recognise as relevant particularly when the singer of the title role bears more than a passing physical resemblance to the late President Kennedy. There are moments in the Senate scenes when the piece comes briefly to life, but many many more when both of itself and in presentation it is strangled at birth. There is a great number of characters, and the opera is mercifully short; the music fails to characterise them save in the most superficial fashion, and the physical circumstances alone — minutes per character — are not solely to blame, since Berg managed quite well in Wozzeck. The intrigue is well suggested, but surely too complete for operatic treatment.
The dramaturgy is clumsy and the word-setting almost bloodyminded. A character is asked an important question, but his answer is set so low in the vocal range that the singer cannot make it—intelligible. Syllable emphases are sometimes of an awkwardness that would be acceptable if the work were sung in translation, but is scarcely so when it is set in English. Characters address each other by name all the time, even when there are only two on stage: the Hollywood-historical or "Dante-I'd-like-You-to-meet Beatrice" school of dialogue.
A character will breathlessly describe action that the audience has just witnessed, another will make an important point and then embroider needlessly upon it for the next ten lines or so. A welcome intrusion of physical action, when a tenor is fatally stabbed in public (every soprano's fondest day-dream), is followed instantly by a freeze during which an unfortunately surviving tenor sings an aria upon the subject, at the end of which, un-freeze, and on with the action. Nor is the Oxford Dictionary of Clichés left unconsuited. Wife: "I am not your servant, Catiline" (just in case we have forgotten who he is). Audience (in unison, just beating the baritone to it): "But you are still my wife." Damned subtle stuff.
Like so much post-Schoenberg dramatic writing, the continuous. music, for all its undoubted symphonic interest, is dramatically nondescript, utterly forgettable and uniformally paced. Whenever the atteption strayed from the stage, there was Alexander Gibson beating the same slow four-in-a-bar for scene after scene; even when a character arrives on stage in a state of some perturbation, the music takes not a blind bit of notice. There was plenty to encourage momentary strayings, since the action was set and costumed as every school boy's impression of what Rome
looked like as embodied in the paintings. of Alma-Tadema: as
pretty as it is anodyne. The whole sorry affair may be of absorbing interest to musicologists and those few individuals committed to the strange idea that opera must 1)e written in the through-composed narrative form that dominated
parts of Europe in parts of the nineteenth century, but as a piece of living theatre, Catiline is a non-starter.
More cheerful news at Covent Garden, where Gwyneth Jones is giving a sturdy if slightly breathless, vocal account of Strauss's Salome. Her dramatic interpretation, child-like and petulant, sexy and innocent,_ is the best I have seen for twenty years, and the production around her is crisp and purposeful. Rather less cheerful was the Prom performance of Fidelio. When the moment of recognition gets a laugh, something is very, very seriously wrong. Disparate acting styles presented in a vacuum. some less than adequate singing, and the absence of a firm directorial hand to banish such mindboggling vulgarities as Helga Dernesch's hat-trick scuppered much hard and convincing work from Colin Davis in the pit. The audience came on like Pavlov's dogs. I hope the Midland Bank, who sponsor the Proms, call in their overdrafts.
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