From bad to worse
Rupert Christiansen on some terrible experiences in the opera house For some aficionados, the annual autumn pilgrimage to Wexford's Opera Festival is a trip to Cytherea, distilling all sophisticated earthly pleasures. Not for me, alas. My problem is not hedonistic — though I can't abide oysters or Guinness, the basic lubricant of the proceedings, and the seating in the pretty little Theatre Royal is so exquisitely uncomfortable that it must have been designed by the Spanish Inquisition. No, my dismay is the result of a fundamental aesthetic objection to Wex- ford's policy of presenting operas so obscure that they scarcely register outside the most arcane reference books. Many I revere regard this as a charming notion. In me, however, it induces a shudder: obscure opera is very likely to be bad opera, and bad opera is hell.
Trahison des clercs? I don't think so. Peo- ple assume that because I am a profession- al opera critic — and theoretically an initiate into the mysteries of the genre — I must feel a warm glow every time I enter an opera house. This is not the case. I have had plenty of opera in my life, and my appetite for it is finite. What I continue to relish is good opera, a quantity which — opera being an extremely complicated busi- ness — is not plentiful. Even at Glynde- bourne or La Scala, most of what you get is bad opera, and, rather than sit through bad opera, I would prefer to stare mutely at a brick wall. To my point. This year at Wexford I was writhing in agony as I listened to the tosh that is Giordano's Siberia. Set in the sort of prison camp that incarcerated Dostoevslry, its music evoked the nightmarish image of a Victorian lavatory reluctant to deliver a full flush: pull the creaking chain five times and nothing much happens; then, suddenly, comes an overwhelming torrent. I could not believe my ears: Siberia was even worse than the corker of the 1998 vintage, Zan- donai's I Cavalieri de Ekebu, notable only for a whip-cracking dominatrix called La Comandante.
Anyway, in the course of trying to dis- tract myself, my eyes idly wandered to the cast list. There I spotted a name which drained the blood from my face. The laws of libel and Christian mercy prevent me from revealing it, but 'Rambaldo' it was who gave without doubt the worst single performance I have ever heard — as the tenor Manrico in Ii Trovatore, at a well- known London opera house about ten years ago. Hideously out of tune and even further out of time with the conductor and his colleagues, Rambaldo cracked not only on the high C at the end of `Di quells pira' but on all his more modest forays above the stave. Roundly and squarely booed, he fled from his curtain call, never to return. Or so I thought. But there he was in Siberia, no longer a tenor and only marginally more accomplished as he bawled his head off as a baritone. I wonder if he knows how dreadful his singing is.
Rambaldo's return set me thinking, and I now offer, as my contribution to the millen- nial obsession with lists, a parade of the worst experiences of my quarter-century of regular opera-going. Among individuals, Rambaldo reigns without rival. In the cate- gory of contemporary opera, there are
more corners. How about Gavin Bryars's minimalist farrago Doctor Ox's Experiment? ('The performance will last approximately two hours and twenty minutes', a placard claimed in the foyer; it seemed more like two weeks and twenty minutes.) Or Jonathan Harvey's Inquest of Love, an alle- gorical affair in which a figure called the Psychopomp tells Ann and John 'that they must journey down to the City of Weeping to seek Elspeth's forgiveness'? Or the com- munity opera I saw in Birmingham based on the imprisonment of Steve Biko?
Three institutions have made outstand- ing contributions to the cause of bad pro- duction. With some sadness, I nominate Opera Factory. Run by David Freeman, a talented Australian, it did some good work in the 1980s, but lost its way and its funding over the last decade. I am trying hard to forget the mobile-phone jokes which punc- tuated its vision of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and its wildly ambitious attempt to encapsulate — with the help of a lot of wiggly-waggly nudity and some African stringed instruments — the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh in And the Snake Sheds its Skin.
English Touring Opera has sunk to some Stygian depths of mediocrity over the years: its version of Bizet's The Pearl Fish- ers dressed the eponymous gentlemen in gear which reminded me of suits worn by soldiers sent in to reconnoitre after the explosion at Chernobyl. English National Opgra has resorted to even more desperate measures, but I still can't imagine how it could have allowed Ken Russell's travesty of Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida to come before a paying audience. Bucking- ham Palace was never part of Gilbert's sce- nario in the first place, but turning it into Buck 'n' Yen Palace only added insult to the injury.
However, the golden biscuit is taken by the Georgian State Opera's rendering — I can hardly call it a performance — of Tchaikovslry's Eugene Onegin, which I saw in Tblisi in 1981. It took place on the night that the city was playing Moscow in the Soviet equivalent of the FA Cup, and in consequence there were only about 20 peo- ple, several of them centenarians, in the audience. Absenteeism had ravaged the orchestra — at times it felt as though one lone oboist was doing the work of the entire wind section, and on stage they sim- ply could not be bothered. No Onegin has ever looked more bored by his Tatyana — but then few Tatyanas have chewed gum when not actually singing. Perhaps Georgia had failed to meet its production target for athletic supports, because in the party scenes the legs of the men's chorus were clad in thin white tights through which their own underpants — spotty boxer shorts, baggy briefs and grandad's woollen combinations — were embarrassingly visi- ble. It amounted to one of the most sub- lime evenings of my adult life, and for once bad opera became absolutely wonderful.
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