Gluck's genius
Michael Tanner
Paride ed Elena Barbican riluck is a composer who tends to divide opinion more than one might expect, given that his art is hardly one of extremes. While many of us insist on his dramatic cogency, his nobility and austere grandeur, the urgency and economy of his means, there are plenty of people who feel that those are all really code-words for 'boredom'. Yet his two most ardent advocates, Berlioz and Wagner. had a low boredom threshold and a strongly developed sense of what made for long-lasting musico-dramatic power. However passionate a Gluck-lover one may be. though, it's unlikely that many of us would have placed Paride ed Elena high on our list of his master-works.
The performance that was given at the Barbican by the Gabrieli Consort and Players under Paul McCreesh last week, related to a DG recording to be issued next year, should change that for ever. It was one of the most thrilling evenings I have spent in the theatre in many years: exhilarating, moving and often funny. A packed house responded with rapture; perhaps Gluck's perpetual doom of semineglect is at last over.
It's instructive to compare this with the tedium of the Royal Opera's present production of Handel's Orlando. Paride was enormously helped, I suspect, by not being produced at all: the three characters (there are others, but even Pallas Athene is incidental) sat, if not participating, and stood while they sang, making economical gestures — it was enough, and hard to see what would be the point of offering more. I'm not thinking of what would happen if one of our present-day directors lay their hands on it, but of how unnecessary a staging of it would ever be, if the drama is conveyed through the musical performance with this degree of intensity.
But more important than the absence of a director was the presence of a conductor of genius, for McCreesh is certainly that. If he had been conducting Orlando at the Royal Opera, the evening would have seemed half as long, would probably have actually been quite a bit shorter. Not that he is a speed-merchant, but from the moment he launched his players into the galvanising overture it was clear that this was going to be a performance with no dead notes: inner parts (there aren't many in Gluck, but they tell) glowed and sang, rhythms were crisp and propulsive, the music breathed with a naturalness that almost no purveyors of authenticity on period instruments are willing to allow, and the shape of each act emerged with satisfying inevitability.
On the face of it, Paride is a strange opera for one of the great reformers of the genre to have written, since it is lacking in incident, consisting mainly of the two title characters meeting and admitting their love, with minimal impediments, at least of an external kind, and plenty of encouragement from Cupid — even if he is disguised for most of the time, his effects are plain. But then you could say the same of Act I of Tristan, the most dramatic act in the history of opera. Even so, with its fairly numerous dances, its euphuistic text, its impression — from reading the libretto — of dilatoriness, it seems more suited to the singers' concert which Gluck railed against. In fact it turns out to be the most psychologically detailed and penetrating opera between Monteverdi's Poppea and Mozart's Figaro, the vacillations, insistences, irritations and relieved abandonment to feeling being delineated with poignancy and often with sly wit.
Ifs wonderful the way that Cupid, played and sung with insolent charm by Carolyn Sampson, is not only a mischievous though finally serious character, but also behaves, as it were, just like love feels, so that Gluck does convey a sense that love is a state of being at the same time as it is a terrifying force into whose grip one may fall. That's just how Susan Gritton. the Elena, looked and sounded: her two worries were What is going on? and What is happening to me? And only towards the end was she prepared to give in gracefully.
Both these characters are subordinate, however, to Paride, and when Magdalena Kozena is taking that role it's just as well they are. She is a prodigious presence, vocally without any doubt, but also conveying in her demeanour and gestures a supercharged inner life which might be almost intolerable in a tragic work. Elena never stood a chance, and neither did the audience. No one since Callas has conveyed so much in every inflection. Paride is a work, largely, of supple, accompanied recitative, with brief, tense arias. Kozena showed how to make every phrase tell in the tension of the drama, and established herself as the foremost exponent, today, of the classic heroic style. I long to see her as Gluck's other mezzo heroes and heroines. For the time being, it is enough that she took part in what will surely count as a milestone in the understanding of his idiosyncratic and now, surely, undeniable genius.
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