Dispiriting events
Michael Tanner
Hamlet Royal Opera La Damnation de Faust Opera North
The most celebrated English tragedy, and the most celebrated German socalled tragedy, each set to music by a Frenchman, within a few years of one another, in the middle of the 19th century, and their versions produced, in London and Manchester respectively, within three days — opera-going is enlivened by this kind of thing, even if the events themselves are fairly dispiriting. Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet has been absent from Covent Garden for many years, and there seems no pressing reason ever to bring it back. But presumably the eagerness of the team that produced and performed it in Geneva in 1996, together with the fact that they are very 'in' at the Royal Opera at present, was enough. So a largely bored audience — it is hard to imagine what it would be like to be interested by Thomas's music — sat through what was in almost all respects a first-rate account of an opera that should have been consigned to oblivion.
The last thing that matters is that Thomas and his two librettists created a work with not many resemblances to Shakespeare's play. What is irritating is that they came up with something which has so little to engage one on its own account. Obviously an audience, especially a British one, is bound to wonder what will happen to some of the most famous scenes and speeches, but it is hard to envisage any great opera composer being so misguided as to think he could add to the intensity of Shakespeare's poetry and drama, above all in this case.
The French team largely, and wisely, abridge, summarise and eliminate, and concentrate more on action than reflection, which seems a good thing given the quality of the music that Thomas comes up with for To be or not to be'. Actually, the best things are the confrontations involving Gertrude, with Claudius and with Hamlet. This Gertrude is complicit in the murder of her first husband, so her relationship with Claudius is more like that of the Macbeths, except that she is the one with bad nerves. Yvonne Naef was weirdly got up, almost seeming to be wearing a mask, but she gave a tremendous no-holds-barred account of herself, and so did Robert Lloyd as the King, so when, about an hour after the opera started, they had their big anxious scene together there was a flicker of interest to be had. Until then I had felt that Thomas was not so much a precursor of minimalism as a pre-empter of it, with precious little music at all, and that empty. Things continued to perk up, with the opera-within-an-opera, poor stuff itself, but performed with incandescent intensity by Simon Keenlyside, who bathed himself in blood-like wine to such a lavish extent that one felt they should start again and really make a Macbeth out of it.
Keenlyside was, naturally, the raisond'être of the show, but one is led to wonder why such a consummate and serious artist, as fine an actor as he is singer, and seemingly lacking in vanity, should wish to impede the winnowing processes of the test of time. There were moments of such quiet force in his performance that he almost persuaded me that he was rectifying an injustice by colluding in this revival, but overall even he had to stand around, or run around, to little purpose and with a feeble accompaniment. The absolute highpoint was his confrontation with his mother, a piece of vivid theatre which will stay in the mind.
Meanwhile Natalie Dessay sang Ophelie gorgeously, and almost rendered her mad scene tolerable — and it's not much worse than its more famous exemplars, I suppose. Louis Langree made what he could of the orchestral role; and the CaurierLeiser team once more showed that they don't believe in interfering much — the
Royal Opera seems to be going through a period of non-production, which may be encouraging.
Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust seems to be irresistible to producers, but they have never convinced me yet that the work needs staging, or that it can benefit from it. Opera North's new semi-staging is hard to judge, because two of the leading participants were ill and unable to perform, so Faust was sung by Stephen O'Mara, who made such a meal of using his score that it was hard to know whether it was part of the production. The chorus all used theirs, the other soloists didn't. Between the raked chorus and the soloists there was a screen for much of the time, on which projections of earth and water, wobbling queasily, appeared without discernible reason or to good purpose.
Petri Lindroos, a last-minute replacement for Alastair Miles as Mephistopheles, pranced a lot but failed to be sinister. The only stylist among the singers was the Marguerite of Lilli Paasikivi, appallingly got up for the role, and having to crawl slowly off stage after her great aria, wonderfully sung. The conducting of Frederic Chaslin failed to catch fire at any point, even the Ride to the Abyss was languid. This work, in my unfashionable view, needs all the help it can get, and on this occasion it got very little.
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