Animal magic
Henrietta Bredin
Mozart’s Die Zauberfl6te opens with the hero, Tamino, being pursued by a terrible monster. It’s always a challenge to depict such a creature on stage but for the first performances of Nicholas Hytner’s now much revived production at English National Opera, a startling image was conceived. The tenor Tom Randle (then, as now, unaverse to showing off his well-toned torso) would appear, naked, wrapped in the writhing coils of a live snake. A snake handler was duly found and turned up for rehearsal with a battered brown suitcase from which emerged yard after yard of python. Serpent and singer got on well and all seemed set fair until the unfortunate discovery that one of the Three Ladies, whose job is to rid Tamino of the troublesome monster, suffered from acute and insurmountable ophidiophobia. Pawnee the python was promptly packed up again and removed from the premises.
Animals, as part of the plot, crop up in a surprising number of operas. Ravel wrote roles for a pair of cats, an owl, a dragonfly, a nightingale, a bat and a squirrel in L’enfant et les sortilèges, the heroine of Rameau’s Platée is a lovelorn frog and Janácek gave us the eponymous cunning little vixen, along with a fox, a litter of fox cubs, a dog, mosquito, woodpecker, cricket and a flurry of chickens. Britten’s Noye’s Fludde has an entire arkload of creatures but Walton’s The Bear, disappointingly, features a bearish or boorish central character, rather than an actual grizzly.
Some opera directors have been tempted (misguidedly in most cases) to bring animals on stage for a touch of local colour or artistic verisimilitude. Franco Zeffirelli was always particularly keen on spicing things up in this way, his 1996 Metropolitan Opera production of Carmen featuring dogs, horses and monkeys. Verdi’s Don Carlos at the Royal Opera House has, in different productions, included two enormous wolfhounds and a very large white horse from which Elisabeth de Valois was expected to view a mass burning of heretics. And of course Aida, with its triumphal march for the victorious Egyptians, has been known (thankfully only in outdoor, arena performances) to feature both elephants and camels. A few months ago, animal welfare groups in South Africa objected strongly to the involvement of two lions and a cheetah, transported daily through the streets of Johannesburg from safari park to their evening’s operatic engagement.
Again, in Die Zauberfl6te, Papageno the bird-catcher is frequently expected to deal with live doves, which do not always behave as they should. Indeed, there is a long tradition of incorporating birds into performances for effect, as noted by Joseph Addison in the original Spectator of 6 March 1711 after encountering a man in the street ‘carrying a Cage full of little Birds upon his Shoulder’, which he was told were ‘Sparrows for the Opera, to act the part of singing Birds in a delightful Grove’. On further enquiry, Addison discovered that ‘there have been so many Flights of them let loose in this Opera, that it is feared the House will never get rid of them; and that in other Plays they may make their Entrance in very wrong and improper Scenes, beside the Inconveniences which the Heads of the Audience may sometimes suffer from them.’ Birds are written into numerous operas, most notably Rossini’s La gazza ladra, or The Thieving Magpie, which is required to squawk loudly at key moments. Conducting the opera at Garsington a few years ago, David Parry provided the appropriate sound effects himself from the orchestra pit, to general hilarity. The same plot device is hijacked by Hergé in Tintin’s adventure of The Castafiore Emerald, featuring the redoubtable soprano Bianca Castafiore, whose favourite aria is the Jewel Song from Faust rather than anything to do with magpies. Rimsky-Korsakov’s last opera was The Golden Cockerel; Wagner has a swan in Lohengrin and, in the Ring, a Woodbird (who sings) and two ravens (who don’t); Judith Weir has a bird (and a mysterious dog) in Blond Eckbert; there’s Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol and, although the aptly named Jonathan Dove has not as far as I know written a role for a dove, he has done so for a pigeon and a parrot (in The Adventures of Pinocchio), along with a cat, a fox, a snail, some donkeys and a cricket. (He has also written two separate pieces with a pig in the title role.) Offenbach’s Vert-Vert features a parrot of that name whose death from constipation provokes a deliciously florid aria and chorus of mourning in the opening scene. And the German composer Winfried Zillig wrote an opera about Captain Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition which is framed by a chorus of singing penguins.
Monsters and dragons do their worst in Mozart’s Idomeneo, Weber’s Euryanthe and Wagner’s Ring cycle (he also expects stage directors to provide a toad, a bear and a horse that will be prepared to leap on to a funeral pyre); a bite from a snake sends Eurydice off to the underworld (Monteverdi, Gluck, Offenbach and many others); a bumble bee buzzes its way through Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan; Humperdinck’s Königskinder has a flock of geese; Harrison Birtwistle’s Yan Tan Tethera a flock of sheep; Respighi’s La belle dormente nel bosco a humming chorus for spiders.
I can’t right this minute think of an opera with a rabbit in it but Bugs Bunny makes a delectable Brünnhilde in What’s Opera, Doc?; just over six minutes of deliriously funny Wagnerian fantasy with Elmer Fudd singing ‘Kill the wabbit’ to the tune of the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. There aren’t too many singing fish either but there is an exquisitely silvery one in Broken Strings by Param Vir, based on an ancient Buddhist tale. Most bizarrely of all, in Strauss’s Die ägyptische Helena there is an omniscient mollusc, a sort of all-knowing melodious clam.
And, hot news from Opera North: in their new commission of an operetta about plastic surgery by David Sawer and Armando Iannucci to be premiered in January, the first half of the show is set in a clinic in the Swiss mountains. An avalanche brings events to a cataclysmic climax and the hunt is currently on for a well-trained St Bernard ... ❑
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