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Massenet’s Werther is a tricky opera, in fact may well not be susceptible of more than a production which leaves you feeling that you could easily live with its not very numerous highlights. One of its chief problems is highlighted in Gerald Larner’s incisive notes to the new Opera North production: ‘The problem with a Werther opera is that no libretto, unless it completely traduces Goethe’s original, can compensate for the obvious disadvantage that, because Charlotte is either engaged or married to Albert and is determined to give Werther no encouragement, there can be no mutual declaration of love, no full-scale duet for the two protagonists.’ Opera, as trendy theorists incessantly remind us, is crucially concerned with transgression, but in Werther there is none, so we have to make do with a hero who moves from misery to suicide, and the only climax Massenet can contrive is an inordinately protracted death scene (24 minutes, according to the producer Tom Cairns). So how does it become a full-length opera? By dint of lavish applications of local colour, including the notorious coaching of the children to practise Christmas carols in the summer, so that they can repeat them, hopefully to heart-breaking effect, in the background, during the last scene.
If there is one tenor who is expert in portraying lovelornness, it is Paul Nilon, and he gives a wonderfully complete account of a role which grants him one supreme opportunity to sing, the fine ‘Pourquoi me reveiller?’, and many opportunities, which he eagerly seizes, to act desperately. He does not cut a romantic figure, but it is hardly necessary that he should. Alice Coote, as his beloved Charlotte, is just as homely — this is an original take on the situation, and a convincing one. She sings as movingly as Nilon does, and it isn’t their fault that one is less upset than one had hoped to be. The stalwart Albert, her predestined husband, is a murderously ungrateful role, nobly taken by Peter Savidge.
The musical direction is exemplary, as one expects from Richard Farnes, whose sense for the idiom of anything that he conducts is infallible. He gets the fairly small orchestra to produce impressively rich tones at the rare climaxes, and to combine precision of ensemble with just the right fluidity for this cleverly contrived score. The work is updated to the early 20th century, with no particular losses or gains. And it is acted, thanks to Cairns, as if it were a ‘straight’ play, with no would-be comic stomping around, no exaggeration, a kind of watery version of verismo.
The next evening Opera North unveiled its new production of Janacek’s most problematic opera, The Adventures of Mr Broucek. That it is a musical masterpiece seems to me indisputable, but Janacek made life even harder than usual for himself by taking the least promising of texts, worked on by a series of unhappy librettists, and misusing his gifts by attempting a satire. Almost three years ago, when the opera was done in concert at the Barbican (subsequently released on CD), it was evident that most of us had been underestimating this music shockingly — but that was because we were able, there, to treat it simply as music. At Leeds, on a rather small stage, often over-populated and with much obscure action in John Fulljames’s production, bewilderment not only crept in but also threatened to take over. No criticism is intended of the musical side of the performance, which was cast, or even over-cast, with stars, and idiomatically conducted by Martin André. But I suspect that if I hadn’t known the music independently I’d have thought that Janacek had had a lapse of inspiration.
It doesn’t matter much that the date of the ‘real life’ scenes is moved to 1968, and the Soviet invasion of Prague. Mr Broucek still dreams that he travels to the Moon and to the 15th century. John Graham Hall’s Broucek, well sung, is tall and initially dignified, instead of being a bumbling fat drunkard. He is upstaged by Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts, in fine voice and with more interesting roles to play; while Anne Sophie Duprels is magnificent as Malinka, but still not singing the music in which she excels (I last saw her as the most moving Katya Kabanova at Holland Park).
I don’t see that Mr Broucek is a problem: for anyone who takes the view that the best thing to do with opera is listen to the music and remain in ignorance of the action and the words, it should be ideal. It is bursting with musical ideas on Janacek’s normal level of freshness and exuberance, and while Part I is predominantly lyrical, Part II tends to be more martial, with characteristic fanfares. There are no musical longueurs, but that is something you might easily make a mistake about if you see it staged.
At the Linbury Studio, the Jette Young Artists Programme staged a sui generis stage work, three song cycles interwoven, and called The Truth about Love, from the celebrated poem by Auden, set by Britten as one of his cabaret songs. There were three dark-clad performers on a stage with a few relevant props, and a pianist either side, one accompanied Schumann’s great cycle Frauenliebe und Leben, the other looked after the rest, the Britten and settings of excerpts from Rilke’s Diary of a Young Poet, the music for the latter being composed by the performer of it, Steven Ebel. The three figures, clearly destined to discover the worst about love from the outset, staggered round the stage, experienced brief moments of transparently illusory happiness, and retreated into wretchedness. Fortunately the audience was largely elderly, and so past being depressed by this demonstration. It was quite a good idea, and quite well executed, but a long interval in a short work is a bad idea, and concentration on both sides of the footlights, or whatever they were, tended to be dispersed. I felt, though, as I rarely do in the Linbury, that at least what they were doing was on the right lines.
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