WNO
stephen.walsh
A few months ago, while looking something up about Liszt’s piano piece “Chapelle de Guillaume Tell,” I discovered to my horror that William Tell – like Robin Hood – may never have existed. Even the apple, like the one in Genesis (there is no apple in Genesis), seems to have been made up by someone or other. Tell none the less lives on, if nowhere else, in Schiller’s play and Rossini’s opera based on it, of which everyone knows the overture and – perhaps without realizing it – some of the ballet music. But this is a long opera, even as somewhat cut in David Pountney’s new WNO production; it Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Fall of the House of Usher is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s mistier tales, and although it has been turned into opera a few times, there are obvious difficulties. Debussy struggled for a decade to materialise a drama out of its haunting, neurotic atmosphere, and in the end failed, I would argue, because he was unable to distance himself enough from the central characters to construct a stage action about them. He sketched, though, a good deal of fascinating music, and out of this material the musicologist Robert Orledge has put together a performable work that, if not entirely convincing as Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Schoenberg’s last, unfinished, opera, seldom staged, might almost have been written for the Welsh. At its heart is some of the most refined and intricate choral writing since Bach, but linked to stage directions so complicated that one wonders whether the composer had any idea of the technical difficulties he was putting in the way of a fully realized production. The fact that this new WNO production funks most of the stage business is not the fault of the company’s truly marvellous chorus, whose musical performance alone would be worth twice the ticket price.As a conception, Moses und Aron Read more ...
stephen.walsh
As before, WNO have a theme for their new opera season: this time it’s Fallen Women, a topic that might well attract the attention of the Equal Opportunities Commission. Surely men have the right to fall as well; we await, in June, The Fall of the House of Usher, a much fairer piece than Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, which opened the company’s winter season in a new production by the Polish director Mariusz Treliński. In Debussy’s Usher brother and sister both fall, and the house falls on top of them.Treliński is in any case much taken with the theme. Not only is his Manon (Chiara Taigi) already Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Whatever it was about the kings and queens of England that so intrigued Donizetti, it certainly wasn’t their politics. The third, and last, in WNO’s autumn cycle shows Elizabeth once again in a state of unrequited love with one of her rebellious (and much younger) nobility, but wholly unconcerned with affairs of state; and the one thing that distinguishes her from the average abandoned woman of Romantic opera is that she has the power to decapitate her uncooperative swains. Freud would have nodded sagely; but it’s unlikely that Donizetti was thinking of emasculation.Though neglected, Roberto Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Last week Anne Boleyn, this week Mary Queen of Scots. Donizetti’s trawl through the Tudor monarchs and their victims was more a recurrent obsession than a systematic exploration. WNO, on the other hand, seem to be implying some Ring-like continuity.Maria Stuarda has a different director in Rudolf Frey, but the same designer, Madeleine Boyd; and court fashion hasn’t changed in the half-century or so since Anne Boleyn went to the block – the same unflattering black skirts and suitings, the same gloomy box interiors. Only Mary defies the monochrome motif with a plaid skirt and knee-length boots Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“Let the florid music praise,” sing Britten and Auden in their On This Island cycle; and I suppose we must do as we’re told, though aesthetic duty can be a hard taskmaster. For me it cracks its whip in the three Donizetti operas that, inexplicably, comprise almost the entire autumn repertoire of WNO, while other companies are, ironically enough, celebrating Britten’s centenary. The Welsh have just done, it’s true, an admirable Paul Bunyan, Britten’s first opera. Anna Bolena was not Donizetti’s first, but his thirtieth; and – though it has its moments – it still leaves me hoping nobody revives Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Reading through WH Auden’s libretto for Britten’s first stage work – the so-called operetta Paul Bunyan – it’s sometimes hard to decide whether the intention was to participate in the great American dream or to make fun of it. In 1941 both artists were living in the United States and writing for Americans, who famously didn’t take to the work’s blend of folksy condescension and sententious eloquence. The combination is still faintly queasy. Towards the end, a Disneyesque dog and two cats pray for deliverance “from a homespun humour manufactured in the city”, and the mind inevitably strays Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Those who knew the composer Jonathan Harvey, who died of motor neurone disease last December, will remember him as the least demonstrative, least theatrical of men. His presence was gentle, soft-spoken, essentially inward – the physical image of the Buddhism that came to dominate his spiritual consciousness in the latter half of his life. That so intensely pure-minded and modest a musician should have been fascinated by a genius as ostentatious and self-advertising as Wagner is one of those attractions of opposites that are the stuff of art. Whether or not Wagner Dream, Harvey’s final Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What is one to make of Lohengrin, Wagner’s last “opera” (as opposed to music drama), in this day and age? Is it a medieval romance, like Weber’s Freischütz but with a deus ex machina at the beginning rather than the end; or is it a nineteenth-century domestic melodrama in disguise, with the hero revealed in the bedroom scene as a Papal Nuncio travelling incognito. Why mustn’t Elsa ask his name? Is it, as Lothar Koenigs hints in the WNO programme, some echo of Wagner’s doubts about his own (possibly, as he thought, Jewish) parentage? Or is it rather a pre-echo of modern password culture, with Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Janáček’s opera subjects – the 300-year-old opera singer, the composer with a mad mother-in-law, the Siberian prison camp – are by any standards a fairly rum collection. But The Cunning Little Vixen is arguably the most deviant of the whole bunch. Its foxy heroine (out of a Prague newspaper cartoon strip) is captured by the local Forester, lectures his hens about their subservience to the Cockerel, slaughters the lot of them, runs off, marries, starts a family, then allows herself to be shot by the poacher. All very charming, random and pathetic, one might feel. But Janáček typically has Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Last week Lulu, this week Cio-Cio San, next week the Vixen Bystrouška. These are the three exemplars of David Pountney’s “Free Spirits” – as he labels his first themed season with WNO. But it’s hard to see poor little Butterfly, pinned to a board by the cruel American sailor-lepidopterist, as a free anything. Like a trapped fly, Suzuki calls her; and if there’s a free spirit in Puccini’s opera, it might rather be Pinkerton himself, “dropping anchor at random,” as he boasts to Sharpless: not such an inspiring thought.Joachim Herz’s production, now 35 years old, was rough and aggressive when Read more ...