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In between there are long stretches of desperately banal dialogue, as might be found in the cheapest 1940s B-movies, delivered in Leeds for the most part in tolerable imitations of American accents, though often slurred. Since neither what the characters say nor what they sing differentiates them, it’s necessary to resort to melodrama or broad satire to generate interest in them separately and in their relationships, so we get the violent, then suicidal Billy Bigelow and the agreeably absurd and philoprogenitive Enoch Snow.
The director Jo Davies has gone for a completely traditional production, which seems sensible, with an updating to the mid-Forties. The cast is a mix of actors who can sing and opera singers, which does have the effect that the former tend to sound somewhat watery. Every time Billy sang, my operatic thirst was slaked, but as soon as he stopped — and he doesn’t have all that much singing — I needed more. The part is taken, except at matinees, by Eric Greene, who recently made a big impression in Birmingham singing in Life Is a Dream. No one else commands the stage as he does, though no one is less than competent.
The orchestra played with an intensity that the miserable scoring of the piece hardly deserves, and the conductor James Holmes balanced things well in the many passages where spoken dialogue is accompanied by soft music, which invariably incites the actors to tiptoe through their dialogue. It is such a period piece that I can’t help being surprised at how seriously it was taken by the audience, who only failed to respond to the feeble humour.
I wasn’t able to go to the Barbican in January for Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream, so I was delighted to catch it last week on the radio. It alternates scenes of spoken drama, on the last day of Wagner’s life, with the opera Die Sieger (The Victors), the prose sketch of which he wrote in 1856, but never developed, no doubt because its theme of compassion and renunciation overlapped too heavily with what he did write. The biographical drama is largely speculative, though the idea that Wagner was trying to have an affair with one of the Flowermaidens from the previous year’s Parsifal, this leading to a violent row with Cosima that precipitated his fatal heart attack, has been around for some time. As he dies Wagner envisages the music for his unwritten opera.
The performance, involving top-ranking singers, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and electronic music, under the control of Martyn Brabbins, seemed to be impeccable, and the work makes a vivid immediate impression, though none of the music, or almost none, attempts to sound like Wagner. The juxtaposition of Wagner’s last struggles, with both sensuality and illness, and the theme of his unwritten Buddhist work, is powerful and moving. How much repetition it would bear is another matter. Since it has just been issued on CD in a recording from the 2007 Holland Festival, it will be possible to find out.
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