Auspicious send-off
Michael Tanner
The Tempest Royal Opera House
Ihave no idea what I shall eventually think about Thomas Ades's new opera The Tempest, but initial impressions are extraordinarily mixed. I was spellbound throughout its fairly considerable length, but that was partly because I was able to follow, thanks to the surtitles, the text with close attention. Meredith Oakes has fashioned out of Shakespeare's play a trim version in semi-rhyming, sometimes pseudorhyming couplets, often quite brief. To read the text through is to get the impression of something moving at great speed, and thus able to disguise its inconsequentiality (something of which the original play also has in generous measure). There are many quite close paraphrases of Shakespeare, a few direct quotations, but they only last for a short time, as with passages sung by Gonzalo and Caliban. Much of the text is prosaic contemporary: The prince is an outstanding swimmer! I've every confidence in that young man.' There is imagery, but most of the words are functional, giving a bare feeling, leaving the impression that the idea is for the music to do most of the work.
It would be convenient not to know Shakespeare's play, in this context, but I don't imagine many spectators will have that advantage. Though it would also be bewildering if one didn't, since the characters are so unrounded, the action so compressed and so abrupt in its changes of direction that only a secure grasp of the original narrative enables one to make sense of the action of the opera. While Oakes retains all the characters from the play, several of them have so little part in the plot, and so few words to sing, that their presence is mere clutter. And the relationships between the chief characters are altered, as are their individual personalities. Prospero submits, in the opera, to the power of love, which is, apparently, stronger than any he has, and the extremely beautiful duet for Ferdinand and Miranda near the end of Act II is followed by his saying, 'My child has conquered me/ A stronger power than mine/ Has set the young man free', sentiments which open up whole new perspectives on a fascinating figure, but ones, so far as I can see, unrelated to anything else that we learn about Prospero.
Caliban. too, makes quite a different impression than any we are used to, and indeed has the end of the opera to himself, with Ariel offstage. Caliban, still tipsy, is rakishly wearing a crown, singing his own name, while Prospero has departed, not especially impressively, and so the whole thing seems a triumph for post-colonialism, perhaps a foundation work for a cultural-studies course in opera.
The work begins, as it must, with a storm. There are many distinguished precedents for that, and it would be an heroic composer who wasn't daunted at the thought of them. Ades hasn't managed anything impressive here, and one waits as eagerly as the seafarers for it to abate. The visual element is good here, and indeed the sets throughout, designed by the director Tom Cairns and Moritz Jung, are striking in a Klee-like way, if not attractive. Miranda, the first solo singer, remonstrates with her father for his cruelty, as often in the course of the opera. Christine Rice, with her astoundingly lovely voice and her intensely sympathetic personality, makes a marked though, thanks to operatic convention, indelibly and mistakenly rather mature impression. Simon Keenlyside is Prospero, magnificently authoritative and eloquent, in a part that must have been written with him in mind — but that's how one feels about all the casting; never can a new opera have had a more auspicious send-off, with the composer in evident command of all his large forces.
Their long scene. with Prospero declaiming grandly, while she undulates winningly, gives way to Ariel. This stratospheric part is taken with amazing insouciance by Cyndia Sieden; but whereas I was anticipating charm. I found that Ariel's music was annoying, mere twittering, and prolix with it. From that point on I listened for the music as a force for deepening and filling out the characterisation, and listened in vain. Ades seems to be more interested in sound for its own sake than in its having any expressive role, so that the appeal of the work becomes mainly what kind of noises the isle is full of.
This is reinforced in a disagreeable way when we first encounter the shipwrecked characters, who are given such feeble music that one tires of them almost immediately. The scenes with Caliban and the two drunks interest Ades almost as little as they did Shakespeare, and one wonders why they weren't eliminated, since there is not much dramatic point in their foolery. Caliban is taken by Ian Bostridge, for the first time unrecognisable in appearance and sounding unlike his normal self, to welcome effect. What kind of monster he makes is another question, with a depressing answer, but it's hardly Bostridge's fault. It's odd, interesting, that the island's two natives should result in such dramatic failures, because Prospero, in the play, is so largely defined in terms of them. Here he is only of concern in his thoroughly worked-through relation to Miranda, and his evident jealousy of Ferdinand, a noble assumption by Toby Spence. But all this is provisional. I look forward to further seeings and hearings of an opera which had the same kind of initial effect on me as the middle operas of Tippett, a feeling that something remarkable but halfachieved has been created, and a hope that with subsequent viewings more will come to full life.
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