The Makropulos Case, Royal Opera and Ballet, 10 November 2025

Royal Opera House

Emilia Marty – Ausrine Stundyte
Krista – Heather Engebretson
Albert Gregor – Sean Panikkar
Baron Jaroslav Prus – Johan Reuter
Dr Kolenatý – Henry Waddington
Vítek – Peter Hoare
Count Hauk-Šendorf – Alan Oke
Janek – Daniel Matoušek
Stage Door Woman – Susan Bickley
Security Guard – Jeremy White
Hotel Maid – Jingwen Cai

Katie Mitchell (director)
Vicki Mortimer (set designs)
Sussie Juhlin-Wallén (costumes)
James Farncombe (lighting)
Sasha Balmazi-Owen (video)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Jakub Hrůsá (conductor)

 

Image: The Royal Opera / Camilla Greenwell

If the Royal Opera and Ballet’s new Makropulos Case does indeed prove to be Katie Mitchell’s final opera production, we should think of it more as a culmination than a farewell. If the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk, the outlines of Mitchell’s operatic work – part, to be sure, of her broader theatrical work, but a distinctive part – may now seem clearer to us all. Rightly or wrongly, for I can lay no claim to oracular status on this or any other question, they certainly do to me following this superlative evening, dramatically and musically, in the theatre, a splendid addition to the company’s Janáček series? May we hope for a Mr Brouček, even a Šárka or an Osud? Hope dies last, as the ambiguous, even oracular, saying has it. 

And death lies at the heart of this work, as does life—as does their cyclical relationship both in Janáček’s work as a whole and this production, in turn both in its overt presentation and in its broader, metatheatrical, even symbolic frame. One might say the same of women, their role in society, and their role in opera, Mr Brouček’s Excursions the great exception, for even From the House of the Dead has one feel their absence. The Makropulos Case is centred, of course, around a great female singer, a great survivor, a woman seemingly infinitely blessed, but in reality, if not infinitely, then gravely cursed. She is literally the creation of men, in some ways figuratively too. I say ‘a woman’ and of course she is, but as such and as a human, she deserves to be named: Emilia Marty, Elena Makropulos, and the rest. (We may, if we wish, recall Kundry’s many names and incarnations. Wagner was not a feminist; to claim so would be anachronistic nonsense. But his works are not without feminist themes and, more to the point, opportunities—as well as themes and opportunities that are anything but. The same, of course, may be said of Janáček.) Mitchell takes a further step: this woman is queer, standing in no need of men, whatever the history with which she has been furnished (by them) may claim. She has fond memories; she has produced numerous ‘bastards’ with them, but now does not care for them (men or children). 

Now forty-plus = or so she claims and appears – EM seeks women on ‘dating’ apps. With a technological bent very much of our time, the opera begins, app and text message communications, courtesy of Sasha Balmazi-Owen, running parallel to, interacting with, and sometimes undercutting the work ‘itself’. Krista and Janek intend to rob her, the former (‘they/them’) ensnaring her prey 200 metres distant and securing an invitation to her hotel room. The proceeds, whose net worth Janek instantly checks online as Krista photographs them, include an eighteenth-century medallion and a rare, early twentieth-century playbill. Yet ultimately, Krista falls for EM, mesmerised as her male admirers, yet apparently feeling and sharing something deeper. Rather than absconding to Berlin with her (former) lover, she shoots him: shades of Lulu, perhaps, yet with the crucial distance that this is no blank canvas onto which male fantasies are projected. This is women in love, by women, for women.

Surtitles are contemporary English in tone, without becoming paraphrase. Additional communications fly across the ether: ‘Berlin or bust’, popular abbreviations, emojis, and so on. Like anything else, use of text messages – also here telephone calls, audio and video – can be a cliché, a gimmick, and too often is. Here, unlike in, say, Simon Stone’s tedious, extravagant, and tediously extravagant Cherubini Médée – if ever there were an opera crying out for the Mitchell touch… - or Kirill Serebrennikov’s silly Marriage of Figaro, it serves a useful dramatic purpose, both straightforwardly and more metatheatrically in its extension of live cinema to new realms in successful pursuit of Mitchell’s longstanding and, in this case, unapologetically queer subversion of the male gaze both generally and in specifically operatic guise. For when the diva comes at long last to die, she is not so much a creature of opera, but opera itself. Has the director killed the genre or let it die? More significantly, has it in its death, which may yet permit of rebirth though not artificial prolongation, at last been liberated of the male gaze. On an optimistic reading: yes, at least in part. The elixir is bequeathed to Krista as a gift of what appears to be love, but does it remain a poisoned chalice; can it be cleansed?

Janácek’s score naturally invites some degree of optimism, its increasingly rapt lyricism, orchestral motifs coalescing, combining, and expanding into something greater, brought home in wondrous, golden immediacy by Jakub Hrůsá at the helm of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. That Hrůsá is the real thing no one who has heard him will doubt, but this proved a significant achievement even by his standards, as intellectually as it was emotionally involving. The same must be said of Ausrine Stundyte’s all-encompassing assumption of the title role, rightly permitting of various readings whilst ever sure of its direction. No wonder the rest of her world lay in her thrall. All contributed something to the greater whole, showing what the world of opera can and should be. I shall note Sean Panikkar’s typically ardent, lyrical Albert Gregor, Peter Hoare’s sharply characterised Vitek, Heather Engebretson’s sparky Krista, and, in another tribute, conscious or otherwise, to the best of an opera company and its progress of time, Johan Reuter ‘moving up’ from, say, Orest and Birtwistle’s Theseus to Baron Prus, and Susan Bickley from numerous Covent Garden roles (and her ENO Dido with Mitchell) to the cameo of the Stage Door Woman. It was, though, a collaborative effort, as production, conductor, work, and any future for the genre demand.

From that ENO After Dido, Purcell’s jewel forming part of a greater theatre piece, through a Salzburg Al gran sole carico d’amore I imagine I might understand better now than I did in 2009, live cinema again offering a feminist corrective or at least enhancement to Luigi Nono’s project of telling European revolutionary experience from the standpoint of female revolutionaries,  the woman’s revenge of Written on Skin and queer love of Lessons in Love and Violence, the postdramatic feminism of The Blue Woman, and important reassessments such as her Aix Ariadne auf Naxos and Pelléas and Covent Garden Theodora, a path becomes traceable towards this Makropulos Case. Is it the end of the line? That should not really even be the question; it is certainly an important, musicotheatrically riveting contribution, one I am keen to see again, should I be able. 

Cathérine Clément notoriously described opera as the ‘undoing of women’. Perhaps, if one is extremely selective—and one treats it only in terms of libretti. Go back to Monteverdi’s Poppea or forward to Rebecca Saunders’s recent operatic debut and it seems anything but. Nevertheless, that book or at least its title remains, whether we like it or no, part of operatic discourse. Carolyn Abbate’s review said most, perhaps all, of what need be said about it. And here, as it must, that theory is realised in practice, without in any sense jettisoning necessary critique. Actually existing opera houses and their ways are, or can be, another thing. This is not in any sense intended to refer to the Royal Opera House in particular; indeed, its relatively recent, highly publicised appointment of an intimacy coordinator marked an important step forward in one respect. I know no details of the opera-world misogyny Mitchell has endured – her recent interview lies behind a Murdoch paywall – and I do not intend to speculate. What I can say is that operatic works, historical and contemporary, and performances offer greater scope for critique and, dare I say it, redemption than the day-to-day activities of any company will. This year’s greatest musical centenary, that of Pierre Boulez, reminds us of the necessary utopianism of his celebrated 1967 interview with Der Spiegel.

New German opera houses certainly look very modern—from the outside; on the inside, they have remained extremely old-fashioned. To a theatre in which mostly repertory pieces are performed one can only with the greatest difficulty bring a modern opera—it is unthinkable. The most expensive solution would be to blow the opera houses into the air. But do you not think that that might also be the most elegant solution? 

In turn, that echoes a Wagner’s diary entry from 1849.

8 May (Monday) Morning once again by roundabout route via barricades to Town Hall. At S. Anne Barricade guard shouts “Well, Mr Conductor, joy’s beautiful divine spark’s made a blaze.” (3rd perf. 9th Symphony at previous Palm Sunday concert; Opera House now burnt down. Strange feeling of comfort.

 

This latest death  will not destroy our opera houses and companies, nor even leave them peacefully to die, but should at least ask us whether that would be advisable. Is this, rather than opera as the undoing of women, then, women as the undoing and possible rebirth of opera? It might, considered in utopian fashion, constitute an act of operatic reform or revolution to be compared with the work composers such as Wagner, conductors such as Boulez, directors such as Stefan Herheim, and singers such as Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, noting ruefully and purposefully the gender balance of historical examples, whilst recalling Boulez’s own caution that, although Wagner’s Bayreuth project was in almost every respect right and necessary, it has not had the slightest effect on the day-to-day life of our benighted operatic culture. And yet, it has, for our revolutionary-reformers continue to offer a critique of patriarchy, of heteronormativity, and of capitalism many of us continue to heed. To do more than criticise, we must all play our part. The Royal Opera and Ballet has done so too, staging Janáček’s opera (incredibly) for the first time and supporting a new way forward. The Royal Opera and Ballet has done so too, staging Janáček’s opera (incredibly) for the first time and supporting, among many other things in its necessarily mixed economy, some seeds of a new way forward. 

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (2) – Pelléas et Mélisande, 9 July 2024

Grand Théâtre de Provence

Images: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence 2024 © Jean-Louis Fernandez

  

Pelléas – Huw Montague Rendall
Mélisande – Chiara Skerath
Golaud – Laurent Naouri
Arkel – Vincent Le Texier
Geneviève – Lucille Richardot
Yniold – Emma Fekete
Doctor, Shepherd – Thomas Dear
Actors – Sarah Northgraves, Kamila Kamińska, Olivia N'Ganga

Chorus of the Lyon Opera (chorus master: Benedict Kearns)

Orchestra of the Lyon Opera

Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

  

Opera, or the Undoing of Women is a celebrated treatment of the genre by the French philosopher Cathérine Clément. Clément’s book has rightly come in for a good deal of criticism, not least since it signally fails to treat opera as a musical genre, looking solely at plots and ignoring the liberation the female voice in particular can embody. I heartily recommend Carolyn Abbate’s review, entitled ‘Opera, or the Envoicing of Women’ (not, as my autocorrection has just insisted, ‘the Invoicing’, though some might nod wearily at that too). That said, no one could seriously deny the treatment of female characters in most repertoire works is to our mind problematical. Katie Mitchell certainly would not; that indeed, is the starting point for her landmark production of Pelléas et Mélisande, first seen here in Aix in 2016, and on which I am now catching up.

What Mitchell does might well, in 2024, seem an obvious and necessary thing to do, yet it is difficult to think of a previous case (just as with, say, Joachim Herz in the Ring or Wieland Wagner in Parsifal).That it seems obvious must in large part to be ascribed to her work and that of other feminist directors. Ultimately, the idea is to present the work from Mélisande’s standpoint, rather than have her – as one might argue the work does – as a blank canvas on which men and, more broadly, patriarchy paint their fantasies. The means of doing so is to present the drama as Mélisande’s dream. An opening dumb show has her, on her wedding day, take a pregnancy test – some people, for reasons unclear, found this amusing – which, one presumes, gives from a concurrent relationship a positive result. Quite a predicament, and thus the dream-drama is set in motion, Pelléas representing the father, Golaud the husband. The castle extends from the bedroom in which the action has begun, and to which it often returns. Sometimes there is one Mélisande; sometimes, seeing herself in the way one sometimes can in dreams, there are two. 

Golaud is a serial abuser; not only does Mélisande sees herself raped, but the girl (in this production) Yniold too. Pelléas is a nervous wreck and mummy’s boy yet retains his allure, ultimately satisfying Mélisande in a way Golaud never could, in highly erotic scenes that ensure one level of musical meaning hits home as rarely before, whilst a charismatic, creepy Arkel ultimately rules the roost. There is even a prize won for non-irritating, non-gratuitous use of mobile telephones, Golaud sending Yniold to Mélisande’s room to report on the lovers and continuing to bark commands via that medium. The castle’s claustrophobia is highly realistic, as is the rest of the drama, but visual Symbolism will live to fight another day and Debussy’s score remains.

Susanna Mälkki and the accomplished Lyon orchestra generally had it unfold at what gives the excellent impression of being its ‘own’ pace, however chimerical that ideal may be in practice. (It takes a good deal of work to sound ‘natural’.) Inspiration from Wagner, Tristan and Parsifal in particular, was strong, dramatically pointed without overwhelming. There was, though, plenty of room for other stars in this musical constellation, French forebears not the least of them. Whether this were conscious or otherwise, letting the score do ‘its’ work, does not really matter. Debussy remained questioning, ambiguous, yet never merely vague; this was drama, not mere ‘atmosphere’, especially in combination with Mitchell’s staging.   

Chiara Skerath rose to Mitchell’s challenges and more, offering a multi-faceted Mélisande as finely sung as it was acted. She and her alter ego were not on stage the whole time, but one could have been forgiven for thinking, still more feeling, that they were. Huw Montague Rendall’s damaged yet alluring Pelléas was, in some ways, the most striking of all, beautifully, elegantly sung, yet with a halting scenic awkwardness that only at the height of passion could be put to one side. Laurent Naouri’s brutal Golaud and Vincent Le Texier subtler, yet in some ways darker still, Arkel, cunningly calculating far ahead of the rest, were similarly memorable in and faithful to their roles. Ironically, even here, one could not but hear Mélisande’s standpoint via their voices. That is not intrinsically a bad thing, of course, since opera performance is an ensemble effort. All involved played their part, not least the stage hands at work revealing and concealing different parts of the world Mélisande’s unconscious had created. We now (usually) have intimacy coordinators, but that development is very recent; here, Ita O’Brien was credited. Given the level of intimacy, her contribution will have been greatly valued by all. 

For what we saw and heard made us think and rethink on the spot. Even seeing the word ‘comédiennes’ in the programme gave pause for thought. In English, we have at last begun to move on from ‘actors’ and ‘actresses’ save in historical usage, but that development is also recent and I recall thinking it read oddly on my first encounter; French is meanwhile, given its lack of a neutral gender, beginning to pursue a project of ‘feminisation’, encouraging parity in the use of female forms. Who is ‘further on’? Are there important questions when horrifying abuse rages unacknowledged? Answers may or may not be clear, but Pelléas will never quite be the same again.

Written on Skin, Deutsche Oper, 1 February 2024

Images: WRITTEN ON SKIN, Regie: Katie Mitchell,
Deutsche Oper Berlin, Premiere: 27. Januar 2024, copyright: Bernd Uhlig

Protector – Mark Stone
Agnès – Georgia Jarman
First Angel, The Boy – Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen
Second Angel, Marie – Anna Werle
Third Angel, John – Chance Jonas-O’Toole
Angel archivists – Leander Gaul, Yasmina Giebeler, Milli Keil, Maximilian Reisinger

Director – Katie Mitchell
Revival director – Dan Ayling
Designs – Vicki Mortimer
Lighting – Jon Clark

Dramaturgy – Sebastian Hanusa  

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper
Marc Albrecht (conductor)

   

More than a decade has passed since I first saw George Benjamin’s second opera, Written on Skin, at Covent Garden. The premiere, both of the work and Katie Mitchell’s well-travelled production, took place at Aix in 2012. Now it reaches, for the first time, Berlin in a further revival of Mitchell’s staging for the Deutsche Oper. It is my fourth hearing, since I attended both the Royal Opera’s 2017 revival and, the year before, a concertperformance at the Barbican with Aix’s original Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Greater acquaintance leaves my admiration undimmed; if anything, it glows all the brighter. For whilst the casts of my previous encounters had much, though not everything, in common, and Benjamin conducted them all, here we have something new in all but the staging, ably revived by Dan Ayling. 

I shall not attempt a broad overview, whether musical or dramatic, of the work, as I did in 2013. (My review can be read here, for those interested.) Rather, I shall point to some aspects of work, production, and performance that struck me on this occasion. First, I cannot now understand my lukewarmness concerning Mitchell’s staging. Maybe I have grown more accustomed not only to her work but to contemporary theatre more generally. If anything, the danger for me is perhaps the opposite, that I now associate the work with this particular production. There have, astonishingly for a new work, especially a new work that is not, shall we say, of the US ‘easy listening variety’, been numerous productions already; for now, though, this is the only one I have seen. Vicki Mortimer’s split-level set enables us to see the world of angels and that of men (specifically, the Protector, Agnès, her sister and brother-in-law, and The Boy) and, crucially, their transformative interaction, as, for, instance one of the angels is apprised of the situation – narratives already building upon one another – and assumes, as it were, the role of the Boy who will chronicle his patron’s life in words and images. That includes the liberating sexual relationship that arises between him and the brutalised Agnès, the Protector’s ‘property’, truly coming to life in an authentically musicodramatic marriage of words, music, and staging. Indeed, the eroticism here of Benjamin’s score struck me more strongly than ever before, perhaps a hallmark of conductor Marc Albrecht’s approach to the work.

 

So does what might seem a commonplace of drama, yet here seems particular, unique, partly because one is led to feel, not only observe, it in its very particular character: inexorability of fate. As tightly organised a score as The Turn of the Screw, yet less obviously so, holds us captive, almost like Agnès herself. It beguiles, perhaps even breaths a little of the Occitan air, mediæval and now, but never via an attempt to reproduce or even to represent. Illumination, in whatever sense we care, is both more complex and more immediate than that.  There is certainly commentary; it is inscribed, as it were, upon the very skin of the work. Yet however much the angels might classify, file away, their real work is in transformation: of persons and perhaps ultimately of souls.

Senses of time passing, of claustrophobia, of fate closing in – though never merely mirroring – the work – and indeed of an uncontrollable, dangerous joy that must be controlled, yet in that act of controlling requires new life are conveyed scenically in new layers of an activity that conspires both to be particular and quotidian. It is almost a religious ritual, bringing further to life a quasi-Passion of passion to join works such as Così fan tutte and Tristan und Isolde, as well as the more obviously (and musically) related Pelléas et Mélisande. In work and performance, this intriguing, almost mythical combination of straightforward action and elusive allusion that may or may not be symbolism suggests a temporal palimpsest. (Not for nothing, perhaps, is one of Benjamin’s major orchestral works an exploration of that idea.)

By the same token, though, there is no doubting the rawness and immediacy of acts, of things also being very much what they seem. In Agnès’s words not only of liberation, but also of the Boy’s instruction: ‘Love’s not a picture; love is an act.’ This and so many other moments confirmed and furthered my admiration for Martin Crimp’s libretto. Unlike so many attempts at writing for opera, Crimp’s work for Benjamin here and elsewhere permits plenty of space for music. Indeed, if one did not know, one might struggle to guess which came first; it would be fascinating to read any correspondence they may have had about this.

 

Performance is itself a necessary act. We are not here speaking merely of something written or drawn on the page. Albrecht and the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper gave a commanding performance, with all the freshness of discovery yet also an understanding and conviction that might have been born of repertoire status. (It is, arguably, a repertoire opera now, yet not yet in this house, for this was only its second performance.) Georgia Jarman made the role of Agnès very much her own, fully inhabiting a character come to life through the alchemy of music as well as words and staging. One felt her predicament strongly, shared her struggle and ultimate revenge, without the drama being reduced merely to them. Mark Stone’s Protector was cruel and, in his own way, righteous, torn himself between two loves, the question of his feelings for The Boy opened up rather than ‘dealt with’. Pride and vulnerability were both present. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen’s performance as The Boy might almost have stolen the show in its uncannily angelic combination of the worldly and otherworldly; that is, it might have done, had the cast not worked so closely together. Anna Werle and Chance Jonas-O’Toole, doubling as Angels and, respectively, Marie and John offered equally fine performances in smaller roles. For in richness of layering and sureness of fatal direction, this was a performance as well as a work created and recreated through its writing on skin.

The Blue Woman, Royal Opera, 6 July 2022

Image:Camilla Greenwell, ROH

Linbury Studio Theatre

Woman 1 – Elaine Mitchener
Woman 2 – Lucy Schaufer
Woman 3 – Gweneth Ann Rand
Woman 4 – Rosie Middleton
Cellos – Louise McMonagle, Su-a Lee, Tamaki Sugimoto, Clare O’ConnellPercussionist – Angela Wai-Nok Hui
Actor – Eve Ponsonby
Voice-over Artist – Eleanor Henderson

Katie Mitchell (director)
Lizzie Clachan (designs)
Emma Doherty (assistant director)
James Farncombe (lighting)
Grant Gee (video)
Ellie Horne (dramaturgy)

Matthew Fairclough (sound design)
Jessica Cottis (music director)
Jamie Man (conductor)

What is opera? It may seem self-indulgent to begin by repeating, rehearsing, even reheating that question. It both matters and does not. The Tête a Tête Festival has surely shown London opera-goers that opera can be pretty much anything one wants it to be. And that, I think, is the point here. One may think The Blue Woman as much a theatre piece or even an installation as an opera, but does it matter? In some cases, it might—or at least might be interesting. This collaboration between composer Laura Bowler, librettist Laura Lomas, director Katie Mitchell, and a fine creative team of live musicians and electronics makes the question seem somewhat beside the point.

Images and narration, words and music come together to represent—or something akin to representing—the aftermath of a rape. Postdramatic in more than one sense, the fractures of memory, the circular tricks it plays are apparent. Time, which may or may not qualify as action, passes between unbearable, empty desolation of an abandoned south London flat—where it happened, where it is remembered, both, or a metaphor?—and beyond its horrible, familiar suffocation. Walking the streets leading from Clapham Junction to Clapham Common—uncanny enough for to see it pass the end of my old street in Battersea, rather more than uncanny for women in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder—the woman’s psyche is rent asunder, awareness both heightened and dulled by rupture. Four outstanding women singers, shadowed neither sequentially nor arbitrarily by four outstanding female cellists, bring that home. Witnesses yet also participants, their commanding performance is clearly inspired by Mitchell’s guiding hand, Lomas’s evocative broken verse, and the sounds, transformations, and connections Bowler summons ‘live’ and otherwise.

Music, poetry, image, gesture present ‘the room I was raised in/Hard edges/Brick walls…’ and yet ‘In the splintered light/… I am dancing’. It is not hope, at least I do not think it is, but rather reality, beyond good and evil in an almost Nietzschean sense, although, for obvious reasons, this is not the place to pursue such philosophy. Perhaps I cannot help myself. I even began to wonder whether, as a man, I should be there, let alone comment. But then, it would surely be too easy a way out simply to absent oneself. Rape is not a ‘women’s problem’, but a men’s problem. There is a search going on here, for the woman she was before: if we cannot help, and surely I cannot, then at least we owe this woman an hour or so of our time. Observing and, ultimately, experiencing some fellow-feeling, engenders solidarity and maybe—I am not sure—defiance. I did not feel it was for me to define the piece’s terms. Song, speech, face, hands, solo, ensemble: things never quite come together, for they cannot, whilst remaining clearly, even fatally connected. There is no escape, least of all in escape. 

If it were all the more real and hallucinatory for those of us who knew the streets concerned, how much more must it have been for those who knew something akin to what this women knew. At the close, I might have found myself asking once more what opera is (and is not), but I did not. Instead, I felt a degree of necessary numbness: not enough, yet not nothing. It was the artists’ achievement, not mine. Opera may not be witness, but bearing witness is something it does, or should do.

Theodora, Royal Opera, 31 January 2022

Royal Opera House

Theodora – Julia Bullock
Irene – Joyce DiDonato
Didymus – Jakub Józef Orliński
Septimius – Ed Lyon
Valens – Gyula Orendt
Marcus – Thando Mjandana
Actors and dancers – Aquira Bailey, Browne, Ben Clifford, Sarah Northgraves, David Rawlins, Holly Weston, Kelly Vee

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Harry Bicket (conductor)

Katie Mitchell (director)
Chloe Lamford (set designs)
Sussie Juhlin-Wallén (costumes)
James Farncombe (lighting)
Sarita Piotrowski (movement)

ROH Theodora 2022, (c) Camilla Greenwell

Theodora received its first performances at Covent Garden in 1750. Now, at last, Handel’s oratorio came home, albeit staged—and in a staging Handel, Thomas Morrell, their singers and their audience might have had difficulty in understanding. That qualification is, of course, irrelevant as only a truism can be, for much of we might do would be largely incomprehensible to eighteenth-century London, let alone fourth-century Antioch. The question, as ever, is how performance—which emphatically includes the audience—might mediate between different societies, between different ideologies, between text, act, and critique. 

Katie Mitchell adopts, unsurprisingly, a feminist standpoint. She updates the action to a modern embassy, lorded over by Valens as Roman ambassador (rather than governor), where Christians work as an oppressed class. One of their number, Theodora, is pushed to the extent of attempting and, more controversially, succeeding in destruction of the embassy. That already points to a shift in standpoint, crucially apparent from the opening. We should normally wait until the third scene before seeing (hearing) Theodora or indeed the Christians more generally, the first two scenes being devoted to Valens, Didymus, Septimius, and the Chorus of Heathens. Here, we see Theodora and her people from the start, in the kitchen (traditionally, the female ‘domestic’ sphere, of course, ‘top chefs’ notwithstanding). When we view and hear the Romans, it is through their eyes and ears as much as our own. That continues to be the case when Theodora has been sent to the brothel (the other side of the main public room from the kitchen) as a sex slave and continues, moreover, to be the case for Didymus when they have exchanged clothes, when he takes his first, literally faltering steps in heels to learn what it might be to view the world as a woman, and to be treated by that world as a woman. He experiences female solidarity with fellow sex workers, as had Theodora. They teach him how he might survive, by pole-dancing.

 

Yet we also remain wise to what continues to divide them; there is far more to womanhood than clothes and a blonde wig. For where Mitchell’s achievement hits home most powerfully, often shockingly so, is in its unflinching portrayal of violence against women, Theodora humiliated, molested, ‘remade’ in an appearance acceptable to those in power, and awaiting rape. Septimius may speak of Theodora as a ‘prostitute’, but she is not that; there is no payment. She is entirely at the mercy of those who possess her—until, that is, she fights back. Mitchell’s determination to avoid, to demolish, the male gaze is meet and right. Indeed, in having Didymus stand as the object of our gaze, male and female, first in the baptismal rite conducted at the end of the first act, renewed and parodied in the second loss of his clothes (his masculinity too), she reminds us that even such fragile ‘equality’ as that will constantly be under attack. We recognise it as inversion, even if we pleasure in it. And should we not instead wish for and bring about liberation instead? 

Whereas the libretto has us move in our mind’s imagination from one camp to the other, the embassy setting enables exchange, sometimes by splitting the stage into different rooms, sometimes by having their worlds collide. This has evident dramatic consequences, but they can be arrestingly aesthetic too. In Irene’s ‘Defend her, Heav’n!’ for instance, the action taking place simultaneously in the brothel is seen in magnificently crafted slow motion (movement: Sarita Piotrowski) that interacts with vocal and orchestral music in astonishing fashion. Mitchell appreciates the difficulties attendant to staging in ‘modern’ fashion arias which, if even if they had been intended to be staged—we need not be too hung up on that, for Handel would have written them similarly, even identically—would not generally have been conceived as purveyors of dramatic action. Here, and on certain other occasions, she lets the world continue to move. How, after all, could she stop it? Yet there is a suspended quality to that action, a recognition that beholding it can be exquisite, can be spellbinding, and can be harnessed, dare I suggest, to good and evil.

 

Harry Bicket’s conducting of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House—in a welcome break with much recent practice, the Royal Opera has not consigned Handel’s music to an imported band—impressed most when, as often it did, it appeared quite indivisible from the stage action. I had a sense—right or wrong, it barely matters—that he might have done it differently in a performance without Mitchell’s staging. At times, more often than not with the chorus, it took a little while to settle down; indeed, some of the faster choral writing, arguably too fast on this occasion, ran a little ragged. This, however, was by and large a thoughtful and compelling musical performance, with some utterly ravishing woodwind playing in particular. And what a joy not to have to endure Handel with toothpaste-squeezing strings!

 

What a joy, moreover, to be treated to such a cast of Handel singers, who of course contributed greatly to much of what I have said above. Julia Bullock’s patient strength and unshowy sincerity seemed to me just the ticket for Theodora. Charles Burney described her predecessor, Giulia Frasi, a few years earlier as having for Handel ‘a clear and sweet voice, free from defects, and a smooth and chaste style of singing; which, though cold and unimpassioned, pleased natural ears, and escaped the censure of critics.’ Doubtless that meant something different then from what it would now, but I sensed, however fancifully, a dialogue between our two Theodoras, in the broader spirit of what we saw and heard elsewhere too. If I felt the production a little less clear what to do with Irene—perhaps I was simply failing to understand—Joyce DiDonato’s performance of heartfelt clarity likewise challenged one to imagine it sung otherwise. Likewise Jakub Józef Orliński’s Didymus, as athletic and as melting as his stage presence. Movingly, intelligently compromised as a character between worlds, Ed Lyon’s Septimius was again an object lesson in vocal style, clarity, and tenderness. If Gyula Orendt’s task as Valens in this production was rather thankless, he emerged nonetheless with vocal and dramatic credit. Dramatic credit certainly went to the non-singing actors in the cast too, crucial to Mitchell’s vision—and to our increasingly discomfited gaze.

 

I have a ‘but’. (Does not one always?) I can see why Mitchell and her team resist Theodora’s martyrdom. In many ways, I sympathise, though surely we have all moved beyond Cathérine Clément’s notorious Opera, or the Undoing of Women (notorious not least for treating opera as if it were not a musical genre). Yet ultimately, to have the heroine survive and kill her oppressors points to a lack of interest I find more troubling than any inversion or deconstruction; it is a lack of interest shared by most opera directors and indeed by most beyond our theatres too. For Theodora is supposed to be a Christian in more than name. Didymus is supposed to convert in more than word. Who are these ‘Christians’? One could adopt a Nietzschean attitude towards their ‘slave morality’ if one did not want to take their faith, or Handel’s, at face value. One could make them another oppressed group: Muslims, say. There is surely, though, interest in that for which they are willing, even joyful, to die; to lose that completely seems an unnecessarily bitter pill. Religious belief and a broader theological framework seem neither here nor there, which surely is to sidestep why Theodora ‘should’ have died and to fail to recognise her on terms more radical still than anything attempted here and which ultimately resist victimhood more strongly too. That, of course, is not what Mitchell has chosen and she is perfectly entitled to have made the choice she has, but it is surely not incompatible with feminism (at least as this male voice understands it). We are nevertheless left with much to consider.

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (2), Ariadne auf Naxos, 14 July 2018

Théâtre de l’Archevêché

Images: Festival d’Aix-en-Provence 2018 © Pascal Victor / artcompress

 

Music Master – Josef Wagner

Major-Domo – Maik Solbach

Lackey – Sava Vemić

Officer – Petter Moen

Composer – Angela Brower

Tenor, Bacchus – Eric Cutler

Wig-Maker – Jean-Gabriel Saint Martin

Zerbinetta – Sabine Devieilhe

Prima Donna, Ariadne – Lise Davidsen

Dancing Master – Rupert Charlesworth

Naiad – Beate Mordal

Dryad – Andrea Hill

Echo – Elena Galistkaya

Harlequin – Huw Montague Rendall

Truffaldino – David Shipley

Scaramuccio – Emilio Pons

Brighella – Jonathan Abernethy

The Richest Man in Vienna – Paul Herwig

His Wife – Julia Wieninger

 

Katie Mitchell (director)

Chloe Lamford (set designs)

Sarah Blenkinsop (costumes)
James Farncombe (lighting)

Martin Crimp (dramaturgy, including additional dialogue, translated by Ulrike Syha)

Joseph W Alford (movement)

Orchestre de Paris

Marc Albrecht (conductor)

Ariadne auf Naxos is in many ways the ultimate opera about opera. (Or should that be Moses und Aron?) Many, perhaps most, operas would seem to be ‘about’ Orpheus and his art in some way or another. (In a shameless plug, I should add that such is the subject, or at least the starting-point, for a chapter on operatic culture I have written for the soon-to-be-published – i.e., proofs already checked – Routledge Research Companion to Musical Modernism, edited by Björn Heile and Charles Wilson.) It would be far from absurd to claim that an artwork can fail to be ‘about’ its art form, its genre, itself in one sense or another; or would it? Always we seem to be brought back to those oppositions, those dialectics, that haunt, arguably determine Western history and culture, whether we like it or not. Yet Ariadne seems to take it all in, the ‘business’ as and the ‘art’, the artists and the characters, the metanarrative and the narrative, ultimately also the transformation that may or may not transcend – Hofmannsthal and/or Strauss? – as well as the manifold absurdities and frustrations at which one can only laugh, except that is, when one can only cry.

 

Productions can approach such a work – in practice, with the possible exception of Elektra, almost any work! – in any number of ways. There is nothing wrong with emphasising one strand, one particular reading: single-mindedness has its place, just as much for, say, a Hans Neuenfels as for a Furtwängler or a Klemperer. (The idea of a Klemperer Ariadne in particular intrigues, not least on the basis of his Pulcinella Suite, but I digress – and I have no Music Master to restrain me or indeed to inflict cuts, justified or otherwise.) Ranking is a game for politicians and accountants – although donors perhaps have their place in this world too – but I am not sure that I have seen a production that has kept so many balls in the air at the same time, investigated their nature, and added a few of its own, as Katie Mitchell’s for the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence.

The Prologue comes across as relatively conventional: not in the sense of wanting ‘pretty’ frocks and so on, but it sets the scene, as perhaps it should, ready for the transformations to come. It is full of life, full of character; there is probably, as doubles would be the case in watching any ‘making of’ documentary, more than one can take in in a single viewing, yet by the same token there is no sense of overload. It is not ‘busy’ for the sake of it, as often seems to be a temptation – perhaps a valid one – here. One enjoys the splendidly camp yet undeniably successful and talented Dancing Master of Rupert Charlesworth: watch him rehearse his dancers and you will see that he knows his stuff as well as owning the room. One sees that room transformed into a stage and an audience – with, rightly, a flexible curtain of a barrier in between. Lights taken down and replaced suggest something afoot: a distinction being made between reception room and desert island. We are not yet sure, however.

 

Perhaps most important of all, we see and feel – this is a musical thing too, of course, but also in Mitchell’s staging – the emergence of Zerbinetta as a real person, as a human being, to an extent uncommon, perhaps even unparalleled, in my experience. The tenderness of Sabine Devieilhe’s performance is something; she can do the coloratura fireworks too, as we shall learn. So too, however, is the direction: her placing with (and not with) other characters at particular times, her reactions to them, leading up to a moment quite justified and yet also shocking: the furious slap she gives the Composer after his/her (self-)righteous words at the close. Has (s)he not listened to a word Zerbinetta has said? Most likely not; for even in a world such as Mitchell’s, in which gender is fluid, indeed performed, there is no doubting that masculinity rules the roost. Molière after all wrote Le bourgeois gentilhomme, after all, thus in a sense initiating or at least provoking this particular drama. In connection with that, it is perhaps worth noting that Marc Albrecht seemed particular attuned to the connections – and implicitly the contrasts – with Strauss’s incidental music too. His, overall, was a wise and splendid reading, never seeking attention for itself, yet fully aware of when the orchestra should soar – above all at the close. If an orchestra is unlikely ever to sound at its best outdoors, the Orchestre de Paris, a few scrappy string moments aside, offered warmth, clarity, and chamber-music responsiveness throughout. Albrecht’s gentle yet authoritative guidance nevertheless remained an absolute necessity.

 

Back, however, to the stage. (How difficult it is even to write about keeping all those balls in the air!) Already, in that Prologue, Mitchell and her team have slightly prised open the work (and its ‘work-concept’). The dialogue has not been quite as one remembered it, perhaps, although we all know how memories can play tricks. In ‘reality’, Martin Crimp has added some lines to fit what we see, some others have gone, and the surtitles seem to offer a further level of commentary and critique: never too much, but enough to have one wonder. Without returning to the 1912 version, with or without Molière – what a missed opportunity that was in Salzburg in 2012! – elements return or rather are rethought and transformed. The Richest Man in Vienna is there, in a dress, as his wife, who literally wears the trousers. They not only offer interjections, new yet rooted in memories of 1912, at least to begin with; they are offered opportunity to learn, to be transformed. Indeed, they interact with the ‘cast’ almost at will. It is, alas, not clear what, if anything, they have learned; audiences and patrons can be like that. Perhaps, though, it is too soon to tell, for which of us has not on occasion learned more from a performance than might initially have seemed to be the case? The final words, appropriately enough, are given to M. Jourdain’s successor: the experiment has been interesting, but it is unlikely to show the way to the future of opera. That, we may retort, and probably do, is at least as much up to us as up to you, however much you may throw your cash around.

 

Such is the metatheatricality. Perhaps the real truths of Mitchell’s, Hofmannsthal’s, and Strauss’s opera(s), however, lie in what is too often overlooked: what this Ariadne, partly the Composer’s, partly all manner of others’, does as an opera. Angela Brower’s Composer, beautifully, intelligently sung, has not left the stage; (s)he conducts, at times, although it is unclear whether anyone knows or cares. The Opera concerns, above all, Ariadne on Naxos. Lise Davidsen’s Ariadne proved one of the finest I have heard, possessed of an almost infinite dynamic range, subtly inflected, and endless reserves of breath for the longest of Straussian lines. I do not think I have seen – and this was surely Mitchell’s doing too – her suffer so greatly. The sheer misery of her condition shone through, long before it was revealed that she had been left with child, to be delivered and claimed by a rather nasty – should he not be just that? – Bacchus (Eric Cutler, who again can certainly sing the role). The taunts of Zerbinetta’s troupe – perhaps not intentional, yet no less hurtful for that – sting particularly in such a setting. Indeed, their erotic table-dancing, preening, and squabbling, stage realising words and music in properly post-Wagnerian fashion, seems rightly both beside the point and absolutely of it. When Bacchus offers Ariadne the choice of life or death, we have no idea what she will choose, nor for whom. Right up until the end, we fear she might use the revolver that is one of his ‘gifts’. Will she shoot herself, her child, him, someone else, the entire assembled company? In the end, she does not. A child has been born; so too has an opera. Perhaps, whatever our host may think and demand, the future or a future of opera has been too. We shall see and/or hear – or not.

 

Lessons in Love and Violence, Royal Opera, 15 May 2018

Royal Opera House

King – Stéphane Degout

Gaveston, Stranger – Gyula Orendt

Isabel – Barbara Hannigan

Mortimer – Peter Hoare

Boy, Young King – Samuel Boden

Girl – Ocean Barrington-Cook

Witness 1, Singer 1, Woman 1 – Jennifer France

Witness 2, Singer 2, Woman 2 – Krisztina Szabó

Witness 3, Madman – Andri Björn Róbertsson

Katie Mitchell (director)

Vicki Mortimer (designs)

James Farncombe (lighting)

Joseph Alford (movement, associate director)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

George Benjamin (conductor)

Girl (Ocean Barrington-Cook), Isabel (Barbara Hannigan), King (Stéphane Degout), Boy (Samuel Boden)
Images: © ROH 2018/Stephen Cummiskey

 

If Harrison Birtwistle remains acknowledged as England’s greatest musical dramatist since Purcell, then Lessons in Love and Violence may well come to be seen as the work with which George Benjamin mounted his challenge. There is no reason, of course, why such matters should be adversarial, and such is hardly Benjamin’s style, whatever the grisly subject matter of his third opera. He is more someone to knock on the door, enter and delight us with what he brings to the party, without any need to elbow anyone aside. Let us instead rejoice in the creation of another masterpiece, darker and perhaps deeper still than Written on Skin. (Not, of course, that we should forget Benjamin’s first opera either: the wonderful Into the Little Hill.)

As you will doubtless know by now, Benjamin has been reunited with Martin Crimp for this, Crimp’s third libretto, and Katie Mitchell, who directed the excellent first staging of Written on Skin, and who has also worked with Crimp on his other theatrical works, has rejoined the team too. This seems, almost a priori, to have given rise to a degree of ennui in certain quarters. (I have tried to avoid hearing what others have thought about the work, but have not been entirely successful.) One objection seems to have been ‘more of the same’, more or less. I can only presume that the same people would have regretted Mozart’s decision to ‘pursue a collaboration’ with Lorenzo da Ponte after Don Giovanni, perhaps even after Figaro. After all, one often hears the most ridiculous nonsense spoken of Così fan tutte. But there is no reason to be defensive here; I only mention the matter since, for better or worse, it is being spoken of already. Upon leaving the theatre, I hastily typed an ‘instant reaction’ tweet, even, for once, remembering to use the ‘hashtag’: ‘#ROHLessons is a towering masterpiece, its intellectual brilliance and sensual wonders matched, at the very least, by its emotionally overwhelming dramatic path. Drained and satisfied as if by Wozzeck or Katya Kabanova; or, the work that increasingly came to mind, Boris Godunov.’ I have no argument with that almost a day later, and shall try to explain why.

Are such comparisons less odious than ridiculous? Perhaps. Not entirely, though, since I think this is how we often approach new works, not least in so repertory-bound a genre as opera, perhaps especially with a house and company such as the Royal Opera (House). They are far from exact and the tragic trajectory is not the same; here, in the story of Edward II, it is nicely doubled at the end. Essentially we see (and hear) here Edward’s (never, I think named as such) inability to say no to his lover, Gaveston, resulting in the banishment of the clever, unscrupulous politician, Mortimer, who returns, having manipulated the people to his end, to restore himself in something equivalent to a queen’s coup, ridding the court and realm first of Gaveston and then of the king. But the young king, again not named as Edward III, having watched, with his sister, everything unfold, including that violence which is often yet not always subtly hinted at or stylised, turns upon the usurpers and truly becomes king himself.

Boy, Girl, Isabel

Tragedy or restoration? That rightly does not quite seem to be the question, just as that bald outline omits the mess of motivations that characterises this horrible, political world. Much is hinted at, there for one to join the dots, but much is portrayed too. The audience member is, rightly or wrongly, treated as an intelligent human being, a participant, not a consumer of Verdi or other tedious kitsch. It is certainly not so straightforward as portraying a situation in which no one is sympathetic. Rather, as in ‘real life’ – and what, alas, could be more real than our present, not so different high or low ‘political’ life? – motivations are complex, contradictory, and, between characters at least, irreconcilable. Such is surely not the least of the lessons of love and violence that unfold – whether one does not believe in love, as Mortimer, or in violence, as the younger young king does not, yet must. Mortimer, after all, schools him, too, perhaps better than he intended. Likewise, Isabel seems – perhaps is – wronged at the start; we can understand why she, a mother and a wife as well as a queen, acts as she does. Yet she is far from white to start with; in her aestheticism – her love of music and her chilling dissolution of a pearl in acid, a pearl that would have given houses to petitioning subjects – she actually seems a good, or rather deadly, match to her husband, as well as a potential rival to Gaveston. There is horror, too, in her children turning upon her, however deserved that turnaround might be.

But we must return to music, so beloved of these unpleasant people, yet puritanically or sadistically prohibited by the Young King. (Or so he claims: we never quite know the truth of many claims, for who is narrating? We almost seem to know better in the play within a play, that of David and Jonathan, in which Isabel almost literally begins to call the shots, and in the non-musical reprise of such ‘entertainment’ which is threatened, and yet which turns out to be ‘real’, a tortured Mortimer about to be shot dead by the Young King’s sister.) Yes, we must, that too lengthy parenthesis notwithstanding. For it is music that seems – apparently or otherwise – to structure the words and the drama, or perhaps to re-structure them. It is music that creates them, in many ways, regardless of empirical priority. It also creates, and is created by, the situation: its colour, its tensions, its possibilities. ‘It’, whatever it may be, is always, ultimately, about the music; for when the music stops, so does the opera. Perhaps that has always been Isabel’s fear: the fall of the curtain. Mitchell certainly seems to hint at that, but so do Benjamin and Crimp – and, of course, the outstanding cast and orchestra.

Madman (Andri Björn Róbertsson) restrained, Queen, Girl, Boy, Mortimer (Peter Hoare)

Benjamin’s ability to create a sound world has always been one of his hallmarks; in that sense I could not help but think of Janáček and Mussorgsky, both in general and in particular, as mentioned above. Yet, as with those composers, it is certainly not a matter of simply providing atmosphere, a setting, although that certainly is created. Just as Vicki Mortimer’s plush, power-dressing – dressing itself becomes, in true royal fashion, almost a ritual in itself – claustrophobic designs, both for sets and costumes, provide a framework, both to contain and to be broken by the action, so do timbres, often in combination, and harmonies, likewise. There is almost infinite variegation within. The old problem, almost yet not quite Schoenbergian, of reconciling musical antimonies between freedom and determinism, gains new clothes – aural and visual. And the inevitability of the action, at least viewed from the close, of what has happened, takes upon itself an almost Bergian thrust, not least through the characters of and connections between particular scenes. The orchestra follows Benjamin, whether as composer or conductor; or rather, it leads the action with all the confidence and, more to the point, understanding it might once have shown Bernard Haitink in Wagner. And, as with Wagner, still more so with the Debussy of Pelléas, so much action, so much of the truest, wordless action, occurs in the interludes, the transformations between scenes. It is perhaps in those, as in Pelléas, that the stature of Benjamin as a musical dramatist is most immediately manifest.

Or does it? Does the orchestra lead? Do not the singers? Yes, they do too. There is much leadership: too much in the plot, just enough in performance. For song, or at least singing, is crucial to this opera; it is certainly not to be defined as a ravishing, horrifying symphonic poem with voices, although it is perhaps partly that. Benjamin and his co-creators and co-performers refuse the either-or that many of us, seeking for a way in to account for our reactions, would seek to foist upon him. There is drama in melisma: what could be more traditionally operatic than that? There is drama in the entwining and the opposition of melisma? Again, what could take us back more closely to that first zenith of the genre, to Monteverdi? Perhaps the encounter between Isabel and Gaveston, in which she verbally bids him come closer to her, that she might also come closer to the King (who remains distant on stage), is most instructive of all here, for it expresses and creates a musico-dramatic situation more complex than, and still more deadly than, the duet of two baritones so full of sensual delight between the king himself and his lover. Both, and other duets and ensembles, are necessary of course, in the structuring of the drama, just as in the still sorely misunderstood Così. Post-Mozartian Harmoniemusik occasionally seemed to make that point, at least to me; likewise the haunting death rattle avant la lettre emanating from harps and cimbalom, as the Stranger took the King’s life in his cell. The King thought this stranger was Gaveston; so did we, even though he told us he was not, and Gaveston was dead. One could hardly fail to think of the careful, meaningful symmetries of Lulu.

Isabel and Mortimer

And, as with Mozart, although whether through design or through the sheer excellence of these artists on stage, one had the sense that the roles had been written with them in mind. They were, of course, for Mozart, but here, who knows? We are not so much concerned with process, as with each artist having inhabited his or her role. Stéphane Degout’s velvet tones cloaked the impetuous, arbitrary deeds of a weak tyrant, who was also a wronged and wronging man. One made no distinction between role and performance; he simply was the King. So too, and increasingly so, as her role came into focus, was Barbara Hannigan, as his consort. That she played so well in the initial background speaks just as well of her as the display of that extraordinary ability we all know and love – think, for instance, of her Ligeti – to encompass so many modes of vocal delivery within a single line that remains spun from the same silk. Gyula Orendt’s seductive, nasty, manipulative way with Gaveston mirrored and contested the politician’s path of Peter Hoare’s clever, calculating, just as (in)human Mortimer. Not the least of the evening’s performances was the coming of age through politico-emotional stunting of Samuel Boden’s Boy and Young King. Dressed like a boy, he acted unerringly like one too: almost a Prince William, whilst Diana was still around, or shortly after. Ably assisted by his sister, Ocean Barrington-Cook (a mute role), the crown was, again if only in retrospect, his for the taking – once he had learned his deathly lessons. Smaller roles were all very well taken, by Jennifer France, Krisztina Szabó, and Andri Björn Róbertsson: suggestive of a greater number of voices and faces than was actually present, drawn, as it were, as if from an imaginary chorus.

Isabel, King, Gaveston (Gyula Orendt)

For, as in Boris, we observed and felt the people’s grief, feared equally for what we knew to be their largely hopeless future. As the Third Witness had accused the Queen, in a shocking intrusion, orchestrated by Mortimer, into her chamber, the poor had no choice, unlike the decadent rich, to sleep three to a bed. The miracle here was that fury, both external and internal to the drama of princes and nobles, manifested itself through three single voices, an orchestra, and, not least, an endlessly inventive, supportive, and questioning production. Mitchell too did the work the necessary honour of treating it as a mature drama, as she had in Written in Skin; this was not something to be introduced, hesitantly, but to be directed with the critical modernity she would bring to any other work. This may be a quiet operatic manifesto; such, as discussed, is Benjamin’s way. It may even be a manifesto without intention to be a manifesto. Perhaps that makes it all the more convincing, all the more accomplished.