Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Elizabeth I – Susan Bullock
Robert Devereux, Earl of
Essex – Toby Spence
Frances Devereux, Countess of
Essex – Patricia Bardon
Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy
– Mark Stone
Penelope, Lady Rich – Kate
Royal
Sir Robert Cecil – Jeremy
Carpenter
Sir Walter Raleigh – Clive
Bayley
Henry Cuffe – Benjamin Bevan
Lady-in-Waiting – Nadine
Livingston
Blind Ballad Singer –
Brindley Sherratt
Recorder of Norwich – Jeremy
White
Housewife – Carol Rowlands
Spirit of the Masque – Andrew
Tortise
Master of Ceremonies – David
Butt Philip
City Crier – Michel de Souza
Concord – Giulia Pazzaglia
Time – Lake Laoutaris-Smith
Richard Jones (director)
Ultz (designs)
Mimi Jordan Sherin (lighting)
Lucy Burge (choreography)
Royal Opera Chorus (chorus
master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera
House
Paul Daniel (conductor)
The Royal Opera offered a
strong performance and production, for the most part as excellent as we have
any right to expect, of what remains, alas, a very weak opera. Aldeburgh
fundamentalists, a highly vocal sect that is yet diminishing with age, will
maintain that Gloriana’s dreadful
initial reception was to be attributed to a philistine audience of coronation
dignitaries and the merely prejudiced. (Richard Jarman, General Director of the
Britten-Pears Foundation, writes in the programme of a composer ‘whose musical
conservatism was attacked by the avant garde in his lifetime but whose
reputation has outlived his critics.’ Well, he would, wouldn’t he?) The way
some speak of the debacle, one would think that a a masterpiece of the order of
Birtwistle’s Mask of Orpheus had been
slighted. It is certainly difficult to begrudge the opportunity to find out for
ourselves, in what is the first time since the brief 1954 revival that the
Royal Opera has staged the work, but the flip side of that opportunity proves
to be realisation that many of the criticisms levelled at the work in 1953 were
justified after all.
Though not really a criticism
of the work as such, it is extraordinary to think that anyone could have
thought this an appropriate subject for dedication and tribute to a new queen:
it would surely have been far better left to stand on its own feet, appearing a
few years later, after the composer had had more time to work on it. La clemenza di Tito, far and away the greatest of all coronation operas,
may have been written in breakneck time, even by Mozart’s standards, but,
wonderful conductor of Mozart though Britten was, he certainly lacked Mozart’s
combination of greatness and incredible facility. The opera is certainly not
helped by William Plomer’s dreadful libretto, laden down by unconvincing
archaisms and cringeworthy rhymes of which ‘duty’ and ‘beauty’ is far from the
worst offender; nor is it assisted by all too formulaic scene-by-scene
alternation between ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms, which encourages a
dramaturgy that barely advances, if indeed it does at all, beyond Verdi. (Half-hearted
applause greeted the end of each scene, whilst Richard Jones’s metatheatrical
production, about which more below, did its heroic to make the scene-changes of
interest.) Schiller or Boris Godunov
this conflict decidedly is not. Apart from Elizabeth I herself, and perhaps the
Earl of Essex, characters, such as they are, tend to be products of plot
situations rather than vice versa.
Yet even the manifold
dramatic weaknesses do not excuse the weakness of so much of the score itself. Even
the mild syncopations of the opening chorus sound shop-soiled: as if drawn from
a Britten manual of how to add a little ‘modernity’ without frightening away
the horses. Large sections of the orchestral writing seem little more than
padding. At their best, there is a kinship in vocal lines to Purcell; much of
the time, however, they veer between the merely nondescript and the
inappropriately Italianate (as in nineteenth-century Italianate, certainly
nothing contemporary). And if Norwich might not always be accepted as a heaving
metropolis, does it really deserve the tedium of the ‘masque’? (I could not
help but think of those dreadful shows the present Queen and Duke of Edinburgh
must sit through when on an official visit, doubtless longing to be taken as
quickly as possible to Balmoral or Newmarket.) Dramaturgically, there are signs
of hope there: at least Britten is doing something different. Rarely, however,
does his formulaic music rise to the occasion; it is actually more interesting
when it alludes most strongly to Tudor styles, though the ‘real thing’ would be
more interesting still. Matters were not helped by having the first and second
acts run together without an interval; it made for a very long time, scene
changes included, sitting through pretty insubstantial stuff.
That said, there could be no
gainsaying the commitment of the Royal Opera’s forces to presentation of the
work. If there were times when Paul Daniel might have sped things up a bit, one
did not need to know that he had conducted the score before, for Opera North,
to hear that he was fully in command of it. Likewise, the Orchestra of the
Royal Opera House and the Royal Opera Chorus, as ever excellently prepared by
Renato Balsadonna, responded with enthusiasm and sensitivity that lay almost
beyond the call of duty, regal or otherwise. Casting was of great strength, the
only real problem being Susan Bullock’s vocal fallibility in the title role;
without too much effort, though, one could accept that as reflecting the
fallibility of an ageing monarch. Otherwise, Toby Spence proved as fine an
advocate as the Earl of Essex could ever expect: ardent, sensitive, headstrong
as required. Mark Stone offered a finely-sung, equally finely-acted,
darker-hued foil as Lord Mountjoy. It was an especial joy to hear Patricia
Bardon’s true contralto, plaintive and full of tone, as the Countess of Essex, with
Kate Royal’s Penelope equally well sung, if less clear of diction. (The weird
outburst in the final scene, quite unmotivated by what little character
development has previously been offered, is certainly not her fault.) Smaller
roles such as Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Bayley), Sir Robert Cecil (Jeremy Carpenter), and Carol Rowlands's splendidly shrewish London Housewife
offered ample opportunity for care with words and music, however undeserving.
Likewise, Brindley Sherratt made the most of the tediously repetitive part for
the Blind Ballad-Singer; again, comparisons with a superficially similar role
in Boris Godunov are unfortunate, to
say the least.
Richard Jones pursued his
task as director with palpable relish. The production offers a metatheatrical
view of staging a 1953 celebration, framed by a small procession of
dignitaries. The idea might have been pushed further; as it stood, it did not
really do a great deal other than remind us when the work was written. Perhaps
that might have been more than the work could have taken, though Christopher Alden’s superb Midsummer Night’s Dream for ENO suggests bravery in staging may be the way forward for Britten’s
slighter operas. Designs by Ultz – just ‘Ultz’, presumably like ‘Jesus’, or
‘Voltaire’, his ‘mystery’ enhanced by the lack of a programme photograph – were
handsome, colourful, even witty. If we must have the 1950s on stage all the
time, this was a model of how to accomplish the task. Lucy Burge’s choreography
and the work of various actors and dancers were equally estimable. I could have
done without the cumbersome business of each scene being introduced by a gang
of children holding up letters to spell, ‘Nonesuch Palace’, ‘The City’, and so
on, but apparently some members of the audience found that side-splittingly
hilarious.
It is meet and right that opera
houses should grant the possibility to reassess works and indeed composers,
lest unfair historical verdicts go uncontested. The production earlier this
season of Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable
is a case in point. Yet I suspect that the uninformed vitriol poured upon a
flawed yet intriguing grand opéra
will be matched this time around by calls of ‘disgracefully neglected
masterpiece’. We should all like to find another operatic masterpiece, but
wishing does not make it so; for that, we should do better to turn our
attention to the future, not least to the new work Covent Garden has
commissioned from George Benjamin and Martin Crimp. Works as different as The
Minotaur and Written on Skin, masterpieces both, suggest ways forward; yet it does us no
harm occasionally to reflect that creation of masterpieces may not only
alleviate but also be facilitated by the possibility of failure elsewhere.
