Alemania
Musikfest 2: Fantastic Voyage
Jesse Simon
The touring production of Berlioz’s Les
Troyens featuring the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the
Monteverdi Choir ended up attracting higher-than-average levels of
international press attention after news of an alleged altercation between
conductor John Eliot Gardiner and bass William Thomas started doing the rounds.
By the time the opera had reached Berlin, both Mr Gardiner and Mr Thomas had
withdrawn from the production. With conductor Dinis Sousa in the driver’s seat
and all hints of contentious backstage drama far in the rear-view mirror the
audience at Berlin’s Musikfest were able to devote their full attention to a
majestic performance of a work that, more than a century and a half after its
composer’s death, still enjoys nowhere near the stature it deserves.
Admittedly Les Troyens has been
making steady inroads since Rafael Kubelik’s centenary production and the 1969
recording by Sir Colin Davis, in which the work was presented complete for the
first time; in the first decades of the twenty-first century it has become less
of a rarity on stage as opera houses display a greater willingness to embrace
its difficulties. Yet cautious acceptance has done nothing to diminish the fact
that Les Troyens remains a singular work, seemingly beholden to none of
the conventions that governed nineteenth-century opera. Not that this should
come as any surprise: whether Berlioz was constantly on the search for new
forms or merely dissatisfied with the old ones, most of his major works issued
formidable challenges to both the popular tastes and playing standards of his
day.
With one operatic failure behind him,
Berlioz embarked upon his adaptation of the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid unhindered by the practicalities of
production. If the resulting work – a five act grand opera on an heroic theme
with ballets, battles and other scenes of grand spectacle – sounds
passingly similar to the Meyerbeerian fare that was then at the height of its
popularity, Les Troyens occupies a world structurally and musically apart.
The first act introduces a group of characters who will mostly be dead by the
end of the second, while the final three acts – set in Carthage – treat
the titular survivors with notable suspicion. If Aeneas is the thread that runs
through the drama’s two halves, he is far from the central protagonist, eclipsed
in the first part by Cassandra and in the second by Queen Dido. Certainly the
tale of Dido and Aeneas would, on its own, have made for a far more unified
drama – and, indeed, early performances divided the work into separate operas
or, in some cases, simply omitted the first two acts – yet it is difficult
to imagine the tragedy of the second part being as potent without the tragedy
of the first.
The disregard of dramatic conventions and
the absence of a strong narrative centre can make Les Troyens seem far
more sprawling than other operas of a similar length, and the romantic filter
through which Berlioz views Virgil’s epic can occasionally result in scenes of
uncertain tone. Ultimately the opera succeeds as a work of drama only to the
extent that the viewer is willing to rationalise or accept its peculiarities,
and it is perhaps for this reason that it has been slow to find an audience.
The music, however, is another matter, and
it is here that we find the greatest argument for hearing Les Troyens in a concert hall rather than an opera house. Although
the evening was described as ‘semi-staged’ it was essentially a concert
performance: the singers delivered their lines without scores, and were free to
interact with one another in ways that matched the tone of the scene; but most
of the costumes could have passed for evening dress, and there was little
attempt to illustrate the story in any traditional sense. This worked to the
evening’s advantage: without the burden of action one was free to focus on the
sustained invention of the opera’s individual scenes, the restless vigour of
the orchestration, and the astonishing mastery with which Berlioz assembled
moments of vast emotional and thematic diversity into a rigorously cohesive
whole. What emerged from the singers and orchestra under Mr Sousa’s direction
was neither sprawling nor unwieldy, but a work of near-symphonic integrity in
which the drama was shaped less by the traditional interaction of well-defined
characters than by the architecture of the music itself.
Berlioz’s gift for creating unconventional
scenes of complex emotional extremes was made apparent in the opening moments
of the first act: the jubilant choir of Trojans soon gave way to the chilling
prophecies of Cassandra, but the disparity of moods was woven tighter in the
extraordinary duet that followed; here the orchestra shuttled back and forth
between the confidence of Chorebus and the tragic visions of Cassandra, until
finally resolving into something that resembled a love duet in its cathartic
power, but that sacrificed none of the foreboding that gave the scene its
distinctive unease. (The fact that Berlioz applied a similar structure to the
duet between Anna and Narbal early in the fourth act – in which Narbal’s fears
for Dido are insufficiently challenged by Anna’s assertions that love will
triumph – only reinforced the notion that the work’s two halves were united
more by musical than dramatic structure).
The success of the evening was due in large
part to Mr Sousa’s ability to convey the musical and structural essence of each
scene – he had a remarkable feel for the dramatic purpose of each brass swell
and woodwind intrusion – without trying to downplay their ambitions or
smooth over their peculiarities. While the opera features its share of arias
and duets, Berlioz was also inclined towards scenes on the grandest possible
scale, and the work’s human drama is forced to contend with marches, dances,
choral tableaux and other moments of pageantry; yet instead of overwhelming the
work, such scenes were revealed to be essential to the overall plan. The octet
with double choir in the first act was, on this evening, as thrilling as any
scene in nineteenth-century opera; and while the succession of divertissements
in the fourth act – starting with an extended pantomime of the royal hunt,
moving through a succession of dances, and concluding with a song from the
Carthaginian court poet – could have come across as unnecessary padding, their
relative frivolity only served to highlight the depth and intimacy of the duet
between Dido and Aeneas that brings the act to such a hypnotic conclusion.
The Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique
– who gave such a memorable performance of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis at
last year’s Musikfest – are an ensemble who apply period performance practices
to works from the nineteenth century. While Berlioz himself would undoubtedly
have welcomed the technical advances of the modern orchestra, the sound of the
ORR’s massed forces – especially the bright, unvarnished tone of the brass –
brought an immediacy to the score that might well have been sanded away by
modern instruments. Indeed, so many of the evening’s greatest moments achieved
their emotional impact through sound alone.
The evening’s vocal performances were
equally alive to the unusual dramatic potential of the work. Alice Coote had
both the commanding voice and charismatic presence to let Cassandra assume her
rightful place at the centre of the first two acts: her opening scene, a
gripping recitative followed by a charged ‘Malheureux Roi’ started the evening
at a high level of intensity, but the levels of tragic portent in her voice
only grew greater in the subsequent duet with Chorebus; when she spoke of dark
omens in the sky, it was hard not to believe her. If her second aria in the
first act was similarly haunted, she was possessed of fiery purpose in the second
act finale, exhorting the women of Troy to kill themselves before the arrival
of the Greeks.
As Queen Dido, the central figure of the
opera’s second half, Paula Murrihy built her performance with stealth and
patience. Her first aria in the third act, ‘Chers Tyriens’, was a model of
refinement, delicate in its phrasing but delivered with unconcealed nobility;
yet beneath her regal bearing one could sense a reserve that didn’t quite
disappear even with the arrival of the Trojans. The full magnitude of her
performance started to reveal itself in the magnificent duet with Aeneas at the
end of the fourth act, but it was in the emotional turmoil of the fifth act
that she reached her greatest heights: after the convincing anger in her final
meeting with Aeneas and her desperate summoning of the Carthaginian fleet to
destroy the Trojan ships, the sudden calm that overtook her farewell scene – as
though returning to her natural royal state – was all the more compelling.
As Aeneas, Michael Spyres had a strong
opening scene describing the death of Laocoön, but his performance shifted into
a higher gear in the third act. His arrival at Dido’s court in the Finale of
the third act brought a level of energy to the stage that had been missing
since the death of Cassandra, and he lost none of his heroic urgency even when
pausing to give advice to Ascanius. He revealed an equally convincing lyrical
side in the fourth act, luring Dido outside with gentle phrasing and joining
with her in a duet of sustained elegance. His emotional range expanded even
further in the fifth act when the tenderness of the fourth and heroism of the
third were eclipsed by agitation and doubt.
The work’s numerous smaller roles were also
well cast. It was difficult not to be entranced by the rich lower register of
Beth Taylor who, as Anna, offered tonal contrast with Dido in their excellent
third act duet, and whose faith in love was a worthy counterforce to Narbal’s
fears in the fourth. As Ascanius, Adèle Charvet delivered a charming
presentation of gifts to Dido, Lionel Lhote was convincingly ardent as Chorebus,
the lover unperturbed by Cassandra’s dark visions, and Alex Rosen, who also
served as the evening’s two ghosts, was at his best as the troubled Narbal,
unable to rescue his queen from her fate. And it would be impossible to
overstate the contribution of the Monteverdi Choir whose room-filling sound and
focussed ensemble gave so many of the evening’s scenes their elemental power.
Even in the face of such devoted advocacy, Les
Troyens remains a daunting work and anyone who comes to it looking for the
familiar pleasures of nineteenth-century grand opera may leave disappointed. On
this evening, however, the combined forces of the soloists, choir and orchestra
under Mr Sousa’s spirited direction offered eloquent proof that, given the
right performance, the works rewards far outweigh its potential difficulties,
and that anyone willing to approach Berlioz’s epic on its own terms will
discover a musical world no less intoxicating for being so unique.
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