Our resident critic has spent his week at Handel and Mozart operas:
by Alastair Macaulay
In 1930, William Empson wrote a classic of literary criticism in “Seven Kinds of Ambiguity”. In subsequent decades, the title “Further Kinds of Ambiguity” could be applied to multiple productions in the theatre arts, not least opera.
It’s peculiar how many layers of meaning are often applied now to operas and oratorios that were composed,some four centuries ago, by George Frideric Handel. Sequences occur in which the words say one thing, the music another, while the theatrical action tells us that the characters mean something else again – perhaps several different things at the same time. Sometimes this gives us a theatrically remarkable kind of irony; sometimes it gives us coarser brands of insincerity.
Oliver Mears, the Royal Opera’s director of productions since 2017, has now staged two Handel oratorios at Covent Garden with hefty dollops of this kind of disconcerting insincerity. In his “Jephtha” (2023), the character Hamor sang at length of his happiness in returning from war while showing multiple signs of trauma; and Iphis declares (again at length) of her content in lifelong virginity, only then, contrary to Handel’s plan, to elope joyously.
Near the end of Mears’s new “Semele” (the staging’s premiere was on Monday 30 June), the character Athamas (sung by the countertenor Carlo Vistoli) sings a coloratura aria “Despair no more shall wound me” with a defiant intensity that indicates the opposite of what he’s claiming. This Athamas needs everyone to know he’s lastingly wounded. Poor silly Handel! What good luck for him to have Mears knowing when these characters are actually in denial! (and when they are being blatantly hypocritical!)
To a lesser degree, these problems also occur in the much-praised and often visually poetic “Saul” first directed in 2015 for Glyndebourne by Barry Kosky (currently in repertory there till July 24). During the opening scene, when the chorus praises the name of the Lord, the characters’ physical behaviour is secular bordering on intensely irreligious. Yes, this is a staging where a chorus line does Tiller Girl high kicks to illustrate the repeated word “Hallelujah!” Kosky also has his chorus whoop and scream across the music: which suggests he does not trust that music to express the kind of celebration he intends without help.
In passages like this, Kosky seems to be directing “Saul” from far outside Handel’s drama. Elsewhere, however, the full drama is illumined from deep within. There is stage imagery here I hope never to forget: the field of candles, the witch of Endor appearing as a solitary head from the floor between Saul’s legs, the battlefield strewn with corpses. Still, Kosky – a director intermittently capable of greatness – only sometimes here creates a real world onstage. It’s interesting that the two most talked-of performances – the countertenor Iestyn Davies as David, the bass Christopher Purves as Saul, both part of this production at its 2015 premiere and at most subsequent performances – take opposite approaches to their music. Davies sang with yet greater beauty than I have ever known him achieve, yet my mind kept sliding off him. Purves, absolutely riveting in presence and voice, kept adding unmusical speech or noise to his delivery.
“Semele” (1744), which uses a libretto by William Congreve (1670-1729) spiced up with lines from Alexander Pope, has often been played for charm. At Covent Garden, Mears makes it about the punishment of charm. Pretty Yende, unfortunately often singing under the note, makes the title role a study of misplaced values: this Semele a shallow-voiced and narcissistic sweetie who learns the hard way that sweetness will not suffice. Ben Bliss, though he brings very stylish honey to his singing of Jupiter, is encouraged by Mears to play Jupiter as a callow lightweight. Alice Coote makes his scorned wife Juno the most three-dimensional personal onstage.
Mears, his designer Annemarie Woods, and their singers do much to make this peculiar drama into a coherent and detailed stage world. But why does Fabiana Piccioli light so much of the action from behind or sideways? I kept trying to see the singers’ faces.
The new Covent Garden “Semele” had its premiere on the day after Glyndebourne’s new “Le Nozze di Figaro” (Sunday 29 June). Was this “Figaro”, directed by Mariame Clément, a silly staging redeemed by a whole number of moments when the multilayered humanity of Mozart’s opera shone through? Or was it a marvellous production marred by too many truly silly moments? This opera is a touchstone of artistic greatness. (When the word “great” was used, the late editor Robert Gottlieb – editor of Robert Caro, John le Carré, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, and dozens more – liked to ask “But is it ‘Marriage-of-Figaro’ great?”) Clément’s Glyndebourne production, every so often, reminded me of what he meant – yet the reverse was also true, with moments when I thought “How can you do THIS to the greatest of all works of art?”
Though this is an opera I’ve known all my life, but I don’t ever remember previously having tears in my eyes at the start of the sextet, with the true poignancy of Marcellina’s (Madeleine Shaw’s) discovery of her long lost son. Yet I was fuming before that same sextet was over, with its least important character, Don Curzio (Vincent Ordonneau), imposing fatuously comic business on proceeeings.
Central parts of the great Act Two finale were as wonderful as the drama, with the central four characters all so detailed – yet then Clément added a laboured, schoolboy level of humour about the overpoweringly smelly feet of the gardener Antonia (Alexander Vassiliev).
As designed by Julia Hansen, this is a pastel, flimsy-looking “Figaro”, where nothing encourages you to find the stage world substantial or absorbing. Yet there are many incidental charms: not just incidental costume details, but also the way in which the impetuous pageboy Cherubino (Adèle Charvet) – who so often manages to make the Count (Huw Montague Rendall) jealous by arriving first with every woman in fhe household – looks as if might well be this Count’s son.
Rendall made a big impression nine months ago as the Count at Covent Garden but didn’t quite have the heft for the bigger ensembles. At Glyndebourne, however, heft was not a problem. Here he fully possesses the role and indeed the production: Clément is at her most entertainingly inventive with him (Act Three begins with him in the bath). Michael Nagl played Figaro with a marvellously direct simplicity: when he replied “Mente il ceffo, io già non mento” (“Then it’s my face, not me, that’s lying”), he did so with a kind of Frans Hals naive simplicity that was perfection.
Most Susannas are pretty and pleasing; Johanna Wallroth seemed the latest in line, no more, until her fourth-act aria, when, floating a high note on the final vowel of the word “incoronar”, she suddenly – as if improvising – let the sound grow and then taper away (messa di voce), with no apparent calculation: ravishing. The role of the Countess requires line, line, line, whereas Louise Alder was all too tremulous. Yet Alder really took me into the milliseconds of the Countess’s thought.
Riccardo Minasi, conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, often brought out new sonoroties within this familiar score, with no loss of speed; and he presented it with multiple embellishments that all sounded wonderfully improvised. I’m grateful that neither Glyndebourne nor Covent Garden have set Kosky or Mears to work on reinterpreting “Figaro” and to slap on all the earnest meanings that never occurred to poor Mozart, but I salute Mears and Kosky for giving Handel the weight and intensity that he has often lacked.
@Alastair Macaulay 2025
Saul
In Glyndeborne repertory to July 24
Semele
In Covent Garden repertory till July 18.
Le Nozze di Figaro.
In Glyndebourne repertory till August 21.
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