Torment of languor
Michael Tanner
The Rake’s Progress Royal Opera House
It’s easy to see the way opera Inszenierung is going. We are in for a spate of US-located productions, just as we emerge from 19th-century industrial locations and nondescript car parks. Hollywood, Las Vegas, the prairies, Texas oilfields and the omnipresence of TV, something we are hardly likely to forget, are where Poppea, Giulio Cesare, Die Zauberflöte, Norma, all of Verdi and Wagner, Peter Grimes will find themselves next. Within a week two such disparate pieces as Candide and The Rake’s Progress have received broadly similar treatment, the locations dictating, to a large extent, the kind of characters and the range of their motivations. Absurd in Candide, this was wholly undermining of Rake, if it hadn’t already been a failure on musical grounds. It’s an opera with one of the most celebrated and overrated libretti, which naturally, being mainly written by Auden, contains many a memorable phrase, but is arch, badly constructed dramatically, and gives us a set of characters in whom there is no reason to feel any interest until very late in the day.
Robert Lepage’s appalling production, which is shared with four other leading opera houses, violates the ethos of the work by setting the opening pastoral — ‘The pious earth observes the solemn year’ and so on, a brilliant evocation of 18th-century England, with the element of pastiche which is so crucial to the whole work brought to the fore — in Texas, specifically recalling the set of Giant down to the contours of the distant house, here a cute model with lights going on in various rooms. Tom Rakewell as a cowboy, Nick Shadow arriving to promise him a big media career, the show becoming a send-up of Celeb. Culture, among other things. But then there are all those references to London, and we even see some London cops, but in LA. Probably we need to invoke postmodernism, which conveniently, since it means nothing, observes no rigours of time or place.
So it isn’t long before the show is a shapeless ruin dramatically. The trouble is that the opera is shaky on those grounds anyway, so every production needs to be a rescue operation, as the RCM’s was, for instance, or supremely Glyndebourne’s with Hockney’s famous sets. The designer and director have to give the characters some semblance of life and plausibility, since the music so often runs dangerously thin. The truth is, surely, that Stravinsky was not suited to write a fulllength opera, and often we can painfully hear him watering himself down, sounding almost helpless.
That is, until the last half hour. As soon as the graveyard scene begins, the first music that Stravinsky wrote for the opera, before he even had any of the text to work on, we are on a different level, the tension is soon overwhelming, the arachnean harpsichord music ‘creates an incomparable impression of numb crisis’, as Joseph Kerman puts it in his brilliant pages on the opera in Opera as Drama. It is astonishing that at this late point we do, in the work itself, suddenly have a Rake that we can believe in, after the wet, well-meaning, passive, in fact incoherent figure of the previous two hours. And then in Bedlam there is some of Stravinsky’s most exquisitely poignant music, which makes that notorious Epilogue a slap in the face from two poetic and one musical would-be naughty schoolboys.
Somehow the conductor has to contrive not to make the approfondissement too pronounced, otherwise the last part of the opera puts the whole earlier part in its place. Thomas Adès did not oblige: he took everything too slowly, so that the first half was a drag, the tedium palpable in the auditorium. And then he slowed down in Bedlam until it became a torment of languor. One had no feeling of contact between pit and stage, and the rather routine cast needed a lot more help than they ever got. Charles Castronovo as Tom, John Relyea as Nick, and Sally Matthews as Anne might be good in a better musical and scenic framework. Relyea is a singer with a majestically dark voice, and if he had been better directed he could have given us the creeps as the mockgenial Shadow should. The problem with Anne is how not to make her a duplicate of Carmen’s Micaela, as the composer recognised. She wasn’t exactly that here, but with this kind of setting she did seem too reminiscent of Natalie Wood, and her rather attractive voice needs a more compact setting than the Royal Opera. But then so does the Rake, though the sheer brilliance of its first performances in 1979 disguised that.
Baba the Turk will always be a problem, created to satisfy Auden’s craving for an acte gratuit. The music Stravinsky gave her is at least as irritating for the audience as for Tom, and although Lepage took the opportunity to camp things up to the maximum, with a rooftop swimming pool into which a tanned lifeguard dived, that merely emphasised that something was needed to conceal the threadbareness of both action and music at this point. Patricia Bardon sang well, and so did all the other minor figures. The powerful sense of being present at a flop could in no way be avoided, however.
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