Opera
Treading with caution
Rodney Milnes
It took a little time to work out why the first night of the Royal Opera's new Entfiihrung, conducted by Sir Georg Solti, seemed so desperately uninvolving. All the constituent parts — visual, vocal, orches- tral, directorial — were of appropriately high standard. Why was it all so flat and dreary? For the simple reason that most of the audience was neither listening to the music nor watching the stage with any degree of concentration. Instead, they were reading. Whether by chance or de- sign, first-night audiences tend to be spared the horror of subtitles. Maybe the management realises that the press dislikes them, and reserves them for the cannon- fodder audiences at later performances who like their opera to be no more intellectually demanding (or rewarding) than television soap.
So the almost total absence of audience response — the very life-blood of live theatre — makes it extremely difficult to assess Elijah Moshinsky's new production of Entfiihrung. What makes it even more difficult is a certain detectable hostility towards the press by opera producers. In the current Harpers & Queen, writers on opera are dubbed `dessicated fetishists' by Nicholas Hytner, while in the Sunday Telegraph of all places, that lightly pulsat- ing repository of all civilisation as we know it, Jonathan Miller confesses to being worried about what 'disgusting old opera queens' will write about his (as yet un- veiled) new production of The Barber at the Coliseum (watch this space, or rather other spaces). And I will be breaking few confidences if I reveal that one of the opera producers mentioned in this paragraph has recently been in not totally friendly corres- pondence with a member of the critical profession. The natives are plainly getting restless. I must tread with caution.
In fact, as far as I can tell in the circumstances, Moshinsky's Entfuhrung is really rather good, as good as his version for Kent Opera back in 1978. It is an impossible piece, especially in a big house, where the imbalance noted by Joseph II between trivial plot and distinctly untrivial music is all the more marked. Moshinsky gets round this by largely disregarding the plot (no boats, little truck with realism) and concentrating on the ideas and the relationships, at the same time emphasis- ing the theatricality of the Singspiel tradi- tion by setting the action within a false proscenium and soliciting period lighting effects from Robert Bryan. Timothy O'Brien's permanent set of orchard and crumbling North African palace is en- livened by Sir Sidney Nolan's lovely back- and front-cloths, and the whole show looks very pretty indeed — a good start.
Mercifully, Moshinsky recognises that Entfiihrung is a comedy. Much of the production is very funny. Osmin, although you wouldn't know it from many recent productions, is one of opera's great comic characters, and that is how Kurt Moll plays him in a wonderfully witty, faultlessly sung performance. His tea-party with Lillian Watson's equally dazzling Blonde is in — I tread with ever more caution — the camp old tradition once enjoyed by 'disgusting old opera queens'. Who could possibly admit to finding it amusing? (This one will run and run.) Farce sits cheek by jowl with drama, one of the prime characteristics of Singspiel and opera comique. And Moshinsky deals tactfully with the two trickiest characters. Pedrillo is potentially a thundering bore, but in Lars Magnusson's endearingly daffy impersonation he be- came almost likeable, and Belmonte, on the page quite the worst kind of public school hero (a bully, a racist and a snob), is presented as a fresh-faced, vulnerable loser by Deon van der Walt, who sings the role very accurately if, however, without ideal honey in his tone.
The most interesting relationship is, of course, that of Constanze and the Pasha. On the first night, Moshinsky's canny treatment of it was compromised by the Constanze (Inga Nielsen) running out of voice in her first aria and thus being at less than her ease, and by the miscasting of the Pasha: Oliver Tobias's actorish, high-heel- strutting Selim was more in the tradition of the principal boy of British pantomimes than that of Viennese Singspiel. But the thought is there; it can be made flesh at next year's revival, by which time half the extras will with any luck have been encour- aged to take early retirement.
There was one astonishing moment. The piece builds up to the line `Nichts ist so hasslich wie die Rache', a thoroughly Age of Enlightenment sentiment, which Solti threw away in double-quick tempo — strange. Otherwise he made the comic numbers sparkle and dance, and brought a romantic emotional weight to the serious music acceptable to all save the most bloodless authenticist. So, a good Entfilh- rung. If only there had been an audience to help it on its way.
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