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The Royal Opera’s press and marketing departments, normally no slouches when it comes to alliterative vulgarities, have missed a golden opportunity. With Berg’s Lulu drawing thin houses, getting thinner as the evening proceeds, alternating with La Traviata, Renée Fleming starring, and a packed house, more smartly dressed than for anything else this season, why did they resist calling the pair ‘Tragic Tarts’ and even selling a two-for-one specially priced deal? Was it just a coincidence, or purely subconscious planning, that opera’s two most celebrated sex workers were there to be compared and contrasted? Perhaps next time round they can swap sets, with Traviata effortlessly surviving the minimalism of the new Lulu, while that would fit snugly into the now rather tired designs of Bob Crowley, and gain some of the atmosphere that it desperately needs.
Last time round, I found the Royal Opera’s Traviata the most moving I had seen, thanks to Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann. This time I reverted to my default position on the opera, which is one of resentment that Violetta capitulates to the dreadful Germont père and agrees to leave Alfredo, who anyway should put one and one together and work out what has been going on. Fleming is not a particularly individual performer, rather the characters she creates are compounds of other readings; there is a lack of spontaneity and identification. Her voice has lost much of its bloom, too, and she produced hard, edgy tone, though she produced a miraculously good trill in her Act I aria.
She received little help from the Alfredo of Joseph Calleja, a performer whose high reputation bewilders me. He has a continuous quick vibrato, which gives him little chance to vary the expressive force of what he is singing, and suggests that he is perpetually petulant. Nor is he anything of an actor: he lumbers round the stage, and one could see why his father gave way to a sudden urge to give him a good push and send him sprawling, though that is not how one expects that pillar of rectitude to behave. Thomas Hampson was born to sing this role, and does so very finely, in a voice that time has only enriched. Germont’s appalling bullying of Violetta was delivered in the silkiest of tones. It was hardly his fault that his lethal aria seemed even longer than usual. The conductor Antonio Pappano was in one of his push-and-pull moods, with very fast tempi giving place to funereal ones, and hushed tones rudely interrupted with sledgehammer attacks on chords that should merely punctuate the singing. He built up the finale to Act II well, but Fleming was unable to shape her contribution to it, so that — tricky scene as that always is — one felt that section to be no more than a conventional ensemble, when occasionally it is more than that.
After several failed efforts I managed to get to Opera Holland Park’s last performance of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux. This institution has now achieved an all-round level of performance which compares with anywhere else in the country, and the creation of period and atmosphere by costumes rather than sets — what is there all the time is delightful — works perfectly. This was a starry cast, too, which Donizetti certainly needs. In his finest operas — the two great comedies and a handful of the serious works, Lucia, La favorite and Dom Sébastien in particular — good performers are required to do justice to the works. In his less fine pieces, though ones with decided merit, which is where I place Devereux, something approaching a rescue operation is needed. They are in large part formulaic, and though the formulae are sometimes good, they can easily seem inert. There were reasons why this large oeuvre disappeared for more than a century.
This opera demands four first-rate singers, and some decent ones, and that is what it got. Majella Cullagh’s Elisabetta carried the big guns for some really torrid music, and Yvonne Howard’s Sara, Duchessa di Nottingham, was much more varied than her recent Norma with ETO. They made an excellent sparring pair. The male leads were at least as impressive, with Leonardo Capalbo producing wonderfully smooth but inflected lines as Devereux, and Julian Hubbard as impressive as the Duca. All of them acted adequately, too.
Yet the opera remained obstinately, utterly, irremediably dead as drama, thanks to the sure touch of Richard Bonynge, who does everything for singers except encouraging them to put any expression whatever into what they are singing. You might have expected that they would take things into their own hands and find more enjoyment in being engaged in a genuine action than in merely vocalising, but none of them did. After a short time, when it became apparent that they were merely emitting pitched sounds, the effect of lifelessness was positively eerie. One does think of Donizetti as a composer with an excess of vitality, but this dismal account showed it can be quelled.
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