Opera Disgust
Rodney Milnes
Le Grand Macabre (Coliseum)
T igeti's opera has been described as one 1—i of those comparative rarities, a suc- cessful post-war comedy, which it is, and like all good comedies the closer you look at it the less funny it is. Nekrotzar, the apocalyptic Grand Macabre of the title, comes to an imaginary, Ghelderode-based Brueghelland (mis-spelt in the Coliseum programme, which may or may not be a joke) to announce the end of the world. He encounters in turn an alcoholic voyeur, a pair of enthusiastic young copulators, a married couple whose life is one long sado- masochistic ritual, and an infantile ruler with two half-witted ministers. The com- pany gets Nekrotzar drunk in an effort to divert him, but the big bang still happens. Yet that is all it is: Nekrotzar shrivels up in shame at his failure and vanishes. Brueghelland gets back to the business of boozing, copulating and being half-witted.
Elijah Moshinsky has been criticised for setting his production on a slip-road ap- proach to the M4, though having just spent a week in the Low Countries conducting research for this review, 1 don't see that set- ting it in the Grote Markt of Brugge would have been that much of an advantage. Besides, the visual references are spread pretty wide. To balance the 27 bus in an eternal traffic jam and the Indian takeaway, Nekrotzar (leather and dark glasses) and Piet the voyeur (bowler and spats) are out of French cinema, and the coloratura soprano Chief of Police who warns of impending doom in trench coat and hawk-head mask is pure Magritte. It was perhaps unkind, though, to dress the child-prince in naval uniform, and this and the transvesto-masochist's fluffy pink mules bring us closer to home.
As may be surmised, there is a strong ele- ment of naughty-schoolboy obscenity in the verbal telling, and more in the Coliseum production than in the printed libretto which makes it all the odder that the copulators' names of Clitoria and Sperman- do should have been bowdlerised into the harmless.Miranda and Amando. That, it seems to me, is a serious error of judgment: a point about mechanical attitudes to love is glossed over, and dressing them as par- ticipants in Come Dancing doesn't quite compensate. There is schoolboy humour,
too, in the music. The opera is launched by a Monteverdian fanfare for car horns, and the second act by a jolly carillon for elec- tric door-bells. The orchestral forces in- clude clicking tin frogs and greaseproof paper. People react to schoolboy humour in different ways, and I'm ashamed to say 1 spent much of the evening cackling away merrily.
But not all of it. The dividing line be- tween farce and terror weaves a wavy course, and the Chief of Police twittering insane coloratura in his/her hawk mask soon crossed it. The jokes in the score are far outweighed by musical substance, in such passages as the magnificent passa- caglia-based ensemble leading to the big bang, the interlude of Wozzeck-like inten- sity that follows it, and the weird but genuine lament for the death of Death. Nor does Ligeti have it both ways: the music for Clitoria and Spermando is sometimes sickeningly obscene, that for the sado- masochistic couple pitilessly grotesque. What we have here is a comic opera of moral disgust, one whose views of contem- porary society, its rulers and its preoccupa- tions seem horribly accurate, one in which the failure of the apocalypse can pnly spell tragedy, one that lives and grows long after curtain-fall, and one that appeals enor- mously to this tight-lipped old puritan. I long to hear it again.
At first hearing, the performance seemed a total success. Moshinsky's broad yet pro- perly acid production, mercifully free of modish bomb metaphors, caught the am- biguity of the work perfectly, and Elgar Howarth's control of the complex musical content was faultless. The smoothness of the first night suggested the careful prepara- tion for which the ENO is noted, and the cast had obviously worked tirelessly to master the specialised vocal writing. Kevin Smith was gloriously, complacently fatuous as the infantile Prince Go-Go in a beauti- fully controlled comedy performance, and Marilyn Hill Smith's command of the Police Chief's coloratura, which makes Zerbinetta sound easy as ABC, was as im- pressive as her disturbingly threatening appearance. Ann Howard, generously `What is E.T.?'
booted, suspendered and whipped, it have stirred many a tired libido whipped, than The Spectator 18 December 191: that of the grumpily submissive rie.11nbi: Wicks. Penelope MacKay and Jean Righ; warbled Prettily as the lovers, and Kane and Roger Bryson timed their crack double act as the ministers to a 16c Geoffrey Chard (Nekrotzar) and 10de° Keating (Piet) completed a first-rate caston There is one further performance Tuesday 21 December, also to be br°5d, cast, but I trust the management wirll 5ecilit way to reviving this eminently evi%!ai and important opera as soon as is Practt I
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