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Aix-en-Provence
Supercilious. Baffled. Preening.
These
words don’t describe the bright. plastic lobsters sitting on a rock at the center of
the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence stage. Instead, I’m thinking of the people with
black-with-white ruffles round their necks, who made their entrance one by one, then
nibbled grapes and stalks of celery with fierce, absent-minded need. These, clearly, were
supposed to be Renaissance aristocrats, arriving for a banquet where they’d hear a
group of Monteverdi madrigals, which had been assembled as an evening’s entertainment
under the title "Cena Furiosa."
My mistake was worrying that
the lobsters would distract me from Monteverdi. The last and longest madrigal, "Il
Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda," made history in 1638 when Monteverdi wrote it,
because he invented musical devices we take for granted today -- exciting rhythms, for
instance, which sound like horses galloping, or like the beating of an anxious heart.
These helped music evolve from private performances into public entertainment, and damned
if we didn’t see that happen right onstage, as the jaded nobles really listened, eyes
wide with rapt amazement.
This was a small but successful coup for stage director Ingrid von
Wantoch Rekowski, and for the European style of opera production, which deconstructs
classic scores to ask what they might mean to us. Not so another Aix attraction,
Offenbach’s "La Belle Hélène." How, just for a start, can you deconstruct
a giddy 1864 operetta that itself already scandalized and deconstructed the bourgeois
society of l9th-century France? It presents the gods and heroes of Greek mythology as
buffoons ("La belle Hélène"is a very horny Helen of Troy) and tells us
that the social order can only be preserved if everyone has lots of sex.
Enter director Herbert
Wernicke, who (yawn) dressed the Greeks in silly bathing suits and (quelle surprise) told
us, with blatant final images, that the irresponsibility onstage led directly to the
Trojan War. But Offenbach was way ahead of that, because his music, rife with can-cans,
makes the work seem far more delirious and irresponsible than Mr. Wernicke -- if this
production shows us what he thinks is funny -- ever could.
But then the music was
demolished, too, quite literally, with an incompetent new orchestration. The idea,
we’re told, was to deconstruct the score (whose original orchestration has been lost)
into separate instrumental parts. What happened, to give just one example, was that a
violin melody would be handed to a vague bassoon, playing in a range too low for anyone to
hear it clearly (an elementary orchestrator’s mistake).
Back to Monteverdi. I said I didn’t mind hearing madrigals from the
distracted point of view of bored aristocrats, but suppose I’d wanted to listen more
carefully? What could I have gotten from the music? This was one question Ms. Rekowski
couldn’t answer, and the third Aix production I saw, Monteverdi’s
"L'Incoronazione di Poppea," showed me how urgent it can be.
This wasn’t a bad
evening; on the whole, and Mark Minkowski, who flowingly conducted both Monteverdi
productions, knows how the music ought to go. So does mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt, who, in
one of the "Poppea" roles, lit each word and gesture from within. But the other
singers (while effective at moments of high drama) let their voices wander in and out of
focus. Later operas let them soar and float, but Monteverdi, despite his innovations, was
too simple for them. All they had to focus on, most of the time, was the words they were
singing and, not quite knowing how to do that, they floundered.
Which, along with "Belle
Hélène," made me wonder who in Aix takes charge of music. To drape new stagings
over classic works is easy; to reinvent their musical performance is much harder. But
isn’t that where any new approach to opera ought to start? Aix might be distracting
us with lobsters.
[One quick note on my final point. Opera, as performed
realistically, gets hopelessly routine. A work like "Rigoletto," with a
hunchbacked father carrying his dying daughter in a sack, should shock us; instead it
seems delightful, even comforting. So I'm all for surprising new stagings, that -- in
principle, at least -- confront us with the work anew.
But in some ways they're putting the cart before the horse. Or, more
specifically, they're not dealing with the real problem, which is the musical performance.
I might put it this way: When you do an opera, the one thing that's not going to change is
the musical text. So that should get your first attention. Since drama in opera starts
with the music -- the composer, in effect, has done the work of playwright, director,
actors, set designer, lighting designer, and many others -- a proper musical performance
will also be a proper dramatic one.
It's much easier, though, to reinvent operatic staging. You can
slather stage effects on venerable operas like butter over bread. To reinvent the musical
performance, though, would revivify opera from the ground up, though exactly how to do
that would be a long discussion.
The production of "La Belle Hélène" was, if anything,
even worse than I made it out to be. I didn't have much space for this piece, and skipped
over the singers, who were very badly cast -- veteran opera types played the Greek kings,
for instance, which are roles that could be sung (and acted more effectively) by musical
comedy performers. Meanwhile, the roles of Helen and Paris, which require real singers,
were cast with, well, kids, one of whom, the Paris, was pretty hopeless. The Helen wasn't
bad, but that's not enough for a role that was written for a killer cabaret performer, and
should dominate the opera. Is anyone in charge of music in Aix?
The new orchestration has a presumptive history. A year or so ago,
there was a production of Offenbach's "La vie Parisienne" in Berlin, where the
piece was reinvented as a kind of modern cabaret. To judge from a recording, this was
sensationally effective, not least because a new orchestration was so wildly inventive.
Maybe "Aix" -- premiering a production that will go to the
Salzburg Festival next year -- was trying to duplicate the Berlin success. But this
reinvention fell on its face, because the orchestration was neither interesting nor
competent. Whether you're doing a conventional production or a complete reinvention of a
work, you need some kind of vision, and in the Aix "Belle Hélène," vision of
any kind was conspicuously lacking.]
Wall Street Journal Europe, July 23, 1999
(This also appeared in the American edition, about a
week later)
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