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Rossini may not be especially subtle, in this opera anyway, but its humour arises from character as expressed in its endlessly enchanting music, not in fools bumping round the stage. That didn’t only affect the oldsters; the Figaro of Cozmin Sime was perhaps guiltiest of all, and unsure in coloratura into the bargain. Surely, however, there is a star in the making in Kitty Whately, whose Rosina was my ideal in the role. She is an excellent actress, her mischievousness seeming to be an intrinsic part of her, she’s very attractive, and gave a personal, fresh account of ‘Una voce poco fa’, and wasn’t deterred by her colleagues’ overacting. The orchestra, under Paul McGrath, was underpowered, and the sets, by Rhys Jarman, featured an inappropriately El Greco-esque series of skyscapes.
But Eugene Onegin offered a cast of admirable actors and singers, without a weak link. For once — the only time in my experience, and it would probably have been a big shock for Tchaikovsky — the most interesting, concerning character was Onegin himself. Despite the librettist’s and composer’s attempts to blacken him, or worse to make him just boring, he is, for all his Byronic posturing, courteous to Tatyana, and absolutely right to reject her impetuous advances. Just think of the poem Pushkin would have had to write if they had got married, a poem Tchaikovsky wouldn’t have dreamed of making into an opera. At the fatal ball it is Lensky, not Onegin, who makes a fool of himself and insists on duelling.
The trouble is that when it gets to the final scenes, when Onegin returns from his Wanderjahre and sees the mature Tatyana, Tchaikovsky can’t find the music of passion for him, as he had done so wonderfully for Tatyana, so ends up quoting passages from her letter aria. Still, Nicholas Lester managed to overcome these obstacles, was quite winning enough in appearance to make one see Tatyana’s point, and displayed a rich, warm baritone that I can’t believe opera-goers won’t soon be treated to in many roles. The Tatyana of Sarah-Jane Davies had all the right intentions, but too often her tone hardened. The limelight fell, to a remarkable extent, on Frances McCafferty as Filipyevna the nursemaid: whatever this marvellous performer does is full of life.
Apart from omitting the reapers’ chorus in scene one the work was done complete. With a huge, slanted quasi-mirror centre stage, one saw the conductor, Michael Rosewell, throughout the second half, distractingly; but his conducting was superb.
Detlev Glanert’s opera Caligula, from Camus’s 1938 play, has been hailed, according to ENO’s press release, as ‘perhaps the finest German opera of the 21st century’. I’m not in a position to decide, but I can only hope the claim is mistaken. Heard ‘cold’ one would swear it was written in the late-1950s or a bit later, when German composers were discovering the music that they hadn’t been allowed to listen to in the Third Reich and to learn from it. Furthermore, Camus’s play, dealing with absurdity and nihilism and their relationship to power and dictatorship, is so existentialist in the once-fashionable sense that I’d swear I could smell espresso and Gauloises in the Coliseum.
The setting is a section of a modern sports stadium, and the opera begins with a woman in white collapsing on the stands and Caligula emerging from a tunnel and screaming. The dead woman is his incestuously beloved sister, and her death naturally leads him to conclude that all values are baseless and that anything is permitted, especially if you are Emperor. This leads him to behave with predictable lust and rage, until his courtiers round on him and finish him off, after which he cries, ‘I am still alive!’ — thus warning us about the perpetual danger of dictatorship.
As to Glanert’s music, it seems to fit the text of the play to perfection, at least in conveying a period feel, if not charm. I found this music, with its exploding chords and periods of sinister near-silence, a lengthy cliché. The performance seemed immaculate: Ryan Wigglesworth was in control of the pretty large forces, coaxing vast amounts of sound from them, as well as much delicate playing. The cast, with Peter Coleman-Wright in the title role and Yvonne Howard as his wife Caesonia, attacked their roles with relish. All ENO needs to do now is to find a new opera worthy of the attention it is prepared to devote to it.
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