Opera
Here and There
By- BERNARD LEVIN
D' HERE, The Trojans at Covent .41‘ Garden;thhere,a Figaro says r s h o the e ta dGilsynncicee- b The e m sixtyis odd miles; don't you believe it. Glyndebourne, in Pro: . : fessor Ebert, has the greatest operatic producer alive; Covent Garden has Sir John Gielgud's production of last year very indifferently reproduced. Glyndebourne has a cast of thirteen and a chorus of not many more; Covent Garden has a cast of twenty-one and a chorus of seventy, not one of which can act, even badly. And finally, Glyndebourne has the world's one wholly flawless opera, while Covent Garden has the vast, almost unmanage- able mass of two operas in one evening, the music of which veers between the marvellously rich, yet delicate, and the outrageously banal. Still, Figaro is produced everywhere all the time; The Trojans has only had half a dozen productions anywhere in all its ninety-five years. We may go to Glynde- bourne with higher expectations than we take to Covent Garden, and we may be less often dis- appointed in Sussex than in Bow Street, but we couldn't really do without either.
The few excerpts from The Trojans that we hear in the concert hall give no idea of the riches to be found in the score. The orchestral texture is almost as thick as Wagner—thicker in places— but again and again it is handled with a delicacy that recalls Mozart. Scene after scene, even as done here, staggers the musical imagination. The duet between Cassandra and Chorcebus in the first scene, in which her despair beats against his incomprehension like a flood-tide; the shivering, evocative precision of the accompaniment to Andromache's celebration of the religious rites in the second; the unimaginably heroic end to the first part of the work, with the Trojan women calling 'Italia! Italia!' as they die; the beauty of lopas's song at the fete in Carthage; the shock of Mercury's entrance at the height of the love-scene between Dido and fEneas (not even the end of the first act of Die Walkiire has a more remark- able representation of physical love than Berlioz's score at this point); the blending of the Carthagin- ians' lamentations with the last strains of the Trojan March as the opera ends; these are musical treasures that we should hoard carefully, and for which Covent Garden deserves the gratitude not only of the collectors of operatic curios but of all lovers of things that delight the spirit and the ear.
Lovers of things that delight the eye had better keep theirs closed for most of the time. The clothes of the chorus seem to have been fished out of the dressing-up chest in a large and eccentric country house; the wickerwork Legs with which Chorcebus has been provided recall the notorious Dali Salome; the sudden appearance of Archbishop Makarios in a chef's hat is a grave shock, and nobody on the stage seems to have the faintest idea how to move, sit, or stand still. What is more, most of the 'business' seems to have been painted on almost haphazardly by Sir John Gielgud (whose great gifts do not, as far as is known—and certainly as far as can bel seen from this produc- tion—include the deep and wide musical know- ledge that an operatic producer, at any rate of so complex a work, must have); it does not, as Profes- sor Ebert's invariably does, seem to grow naturally out of the musical-dramatic demands of the work. Take an example from the present production of Figaro: In the third act, while the bridesmaids are singing their little song to Figaro and Susanna, Susanna becomes shy at the attention she is re- ceiving; she fidgets, puts one hand. behind her back. Figaro moves gently forward, slips his arm round her waist arid takes her hand; as she feels the touch of his fingers she looks up into his face, and their eyes meet in a glance of love and won- der. Throughout (and .this is the point) the music has been saying love-love-love as hard as it can go. This is typical of Professor Ebert's production— this, and an ability to get from the least member of his cast acting of a standard that would adorn any dramatic company.
There is some fine singing in both places. Graziella Sciutti is an enchanting Susanna, a lovely melting line never going soft or floppy; Geraint Evans crowns his series of Glyndebourne successes with a brilliant Figaro; and Teresa Berganza is the perfect Cherubino, breathless with calf-love yet never putting the effects before the music. At Covent Garden, Jon Vickers's fEneas is not in quite such ringing good voice as last year, but apart from a slight hardness at the edges his voice has the true heroic stamp'. Blanche Thebom's Dido began by wobbling all over the place (musically, that is, not physically), but came strongly up the straight. But did I mention that the sun was shining at Glyndebourne?
Previous page
