Boundless Passion
Michael Tanner L'Amore dei tre Re Opera Holland Park Macbeth Proms, Albert Hall Montemezzi's L'amore dei tre Re has had a puzzling history. It was first performed at La Scala in 1913 and was quite successful; far more successful under Toscanini at the New York Met, until after the second world war, and a fair number of performances elsewhere, often as a vehicle for one of the great lyric sopranos. In 1952 it suddenly disappeared from the repertoire, and revivals since have been increasingly rare. As so often, Opera Holland Park has come to the rescue. With what seems to be a guaranteed audience, it can stage what it likes, and it likes so-called yerismo operas, though the label is absurd almost whenever it is applied, and certainly in this case.
L'amore was magnificently performed, though the production could have been more helpful. The minimalist flight of steps and Appia-style flat surfaces serve well, but having 20th-century uniforms for the men robbed the work of its heavily medieval atmosphere, even if its Middle Ages bear scant relationship to anything that actually happened. As everyone says, the work is heavily indebted to Wagner and Debussy, and Sem Benelli's play which it adapts virtually lifts the characters from Maeterlinck's Pelleas et Melisande. The much-in-demand heroine Fiora isn't much like Melisande, but her husband Manfredo is Golaudcum-Marke, grieving over his unattractiveness and therefore becoming punitive then penitent. Above all, the weird and sinister oldster Archibaldo, blind and prurient, is a rewrite of Arkel, even down to his fondness for portentous platitudes, though he is also uncannily active, managing to commit a murder which one would have thought any able-bodied person would have not fallen victim to. Fiora's lover Avito is passionate and without much character, rather like Pelleas. But more than these parallels, the whole atmosphere of incipient passion and violence, both becoming real and overwhelming the more or less passive people on stage, reeks of what is known as Symbolism, though I'm never sure why. The influence of the drama of Tristan is touchingly obvious in taking over such salient moments as the extinguishing of the torch and the waving of a scarf — though this one is for Fiora to send her husband packing, rather than to speed her lover on his way to her.
However, where Debussy practises chastity (musically speaking) and anti-Wagnerian restraint, until he doesn't, Montemezzi's idiom is one of tumescence, of what one might call musical priapism. Where you feel that some of the musical symbolists and decadents can't get it up, Montemezzi sometimes seems unable to get it down. As with other obvious Wagnerian disciples, he makes one realise anew how economical Wagner is with climaxes. In Act II, once Avito has worn down Fiora's defences, their torrid love duet carries on at top intensity and volume for ages, without any progress being made in their feelings; whereas in Wagner issues are always being worked out, even when his lovers are at their limit of passion, above all in Tristan. That might in one way make Montemezzi more realistic, in that most people don't cover much conceptual territory in their nights of love, but musically it translates into mere inflammation, though it has its allure, perhaps greater for audiences 70 years ago than for us. Montemezzi can characterise pithily, and is clearly a master of orchestration, almost in the Puccini class. His orchestra is in perpetual turmoil, over which his characters don't, for most of the time, declaim so much as strain towards a melodiousness which they never quite achieve. At the end of the opera there wasn't one musical phrase that I carried away with me, or that haunted me, and that is one big indicator of the viability of an opera.
Peter Robinson conducted with utter conviction, and the City of London Sinfonia played superbly what must be an exhausting score. Only the lack of a rich string section detracted a little from the impact. Amanda Echalaz was a tireless, pure-toned and ecstatic Fiora, and her adulterous beloved was Julian Gavin, just as intense and with a rich tenor voice. Mikhail Svetlov made an alarming and dark-toned Archibaldo, and Olafur Sigurdarson a bleak, dull-voiced but expressive Manfredo. They are all accomplished actors. This was as convincing an account of an opera which deserves to be heard more often as one will come across.
I listened to the Proms broadcast of Macbeth, hoping that, shorn of Richard Jones's preposterous production, I might enjoy the musical values of the account more than I had at Glyndebourne. I didn't. Sylvie Valayre's Lady Macbeth seemed if anything even more vocally inadequate than in the theatre, with no tragic grandeur, no propelling urgency, and a threadbare upper register. Peter Auty's Macduff stood out as the one accomplished vocal performance of the evening. A lot has been made of the Witches and 'the banality of evil', not least by the excellent conductor Vladimir Jurowski. But if the Witches and the ballet music are designed for that purpose, what is one to say of the similarity of their music to a lot of the pervasive rum-ti-tum in Verdi's other early operas, not to mention the music that accompanies Duncan's appearance? I look forward to a convincing reply by one of the work's advocates.
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