Metatheatre and the passage of time
I.
What were the Royal Opera House’s intentions when first it undertook, back in 2017, its current Handel project? Over several years (years during which it’s clumsily re-named itself Royal Ballet and Opera), it has been staging operas and oratorios by this great German-British composer – operas that fell out of most operatic repertories for the two hundred years after his death. It’s staging them not as period pieces in baroque costumes but as works that, it’s to be hoped, retain theatrical vitality.
And it, the Royal Ballet and Opera, is also doing this because George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), a British citizen for the second half of his life, directed much of his genius into operas and into several highly operatic oratorios, most of them written for British audiences. But all this is happening because Covent Garden is keeping up with operatic fashion: Handel operas have been re-entering general operatic repertory over the last several decades. At Covent Garden, however, a repeated problem has been that the directors of successive productions have shown that they believe Handel’s characters must mean the opposite of the words they’re using. (The stagings of “Jephtha” and “Semele” by Oliver Mears, director of opera at Covent Garden, have been object lessons in this.)
On Tuesday 9 December, Handel’s three-act “Ariodante” returned to its native theatre. When Handel created it in 1735, he was collaborating with the most exceptional female dance artist of the day, the ballerina-choreographer Marie Sallé, at the peak of her fame. She was drawing on traditions of not just Parisian ballet but London dance too (she had been appearing in London since her childhood; her brother, another dancer and her partner when they were children, had settled here). She inspired Handel to write first-rate ballet music. (When she left London, he cut the ballets.) Now that the Covent Garden company is called “Royal Ballet and Opera”, you’d like to think it would stage “Ariodante” with its dances, as the Paris Opera has done. But no: the Royal Ballet and Opera doesn’t take Handel (or dance) that seriously. Handel even dramatised dreams in the dances of “Ariodante” – you’d think any modern treatment would relish the psychological possibilities. But no: no ballet, no dreams.
“Ariodante” may be new to Covent Garden, but it’s by no means an unfamiliar item in operatic repertory. Many Londoners remember David Alden’s award-winning production for English National Opera; Robert Carsten’s production for the Paris Opera is just one of several other eminent productions in the last fifty years.
The director of this modern-dress Covent Garden production is Jetske Mijnssen, who staged Glyndebourne’s first “Parsifal” this summer. Like her “Parsifal”, this production is set in a palace with a disproportionately vast staff waiting on a handful of nobles (it’s what Pauline Kael labelled a “Come dressed as the sick soul of Europe party”) but Mijnssen also imitates other productions in Covent Garden’s Handel series. Like Katie Mitchell in the 2022 Theodora”, Mijnssen makes a feature of three different things happening simultaneously in three parallel spaces of the stage. Like Mears in the 2023 “Jephtha”, she stages a happy-ever-after-wedding, only to contradict it (and contradict Handel) by having the bride run away.
Yes, welcome back to Covent Garden’s Handel series, where the basic premise is that the characters don’t mean the words they’re singing. In Act One, the heroine Ginevra (the exceptional Jacquelyn Stucker) tells the anti-hero Polinesso (the arresting Christophe Dumaux) that she finds him repellent in an aria during which Stucker-Ginevra exhibits body language that assures him of the exact opposite: she caresses him and wraps his arms around her body. (Is Mijnssen eventually telling us that Ginevra runs away from her marriage to Ariodante because she always preferred Polinesso? Don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the answer to this.)
Fortunately for us all, much of Mijnssen’s “Ariodante” works powerfully, even along the psychological lines that Handel establishes. The mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo plays the title role incisively, vehemently, and often with expressive stillness. Ariodante’s aria “Scherza, infida” is an object lesson in words (scornful) and music (tender) working at cross-purposes to convey heartbreak without cancelling each other out. With D’Angelo, the aria holds the audience with a minimum of stage action. As for the heroine Ginevra, Stucker, persuasively, takes her into rare zones of tragic pain – into a bleak, simple, enactment of onstage self-harm, quietly cutting both wrists as she sings. But the greatness of her performance lies in the intensity and range of colour she achieves with her singing: her polychromatic voice is marvellously responsive to the music’s expression.
There’s enough here – Stefano Montanari conducts – to persuade us that “Ariodante” is either Handel’s greatest masterpiece of all or at least one of his supreme peaks, but not enough to persuade us that Mijnssen is a great director. Why does she spoil the final part of “Scherza, infida” by having two other characters make separate entrances while Ariodante is singing? Why does she later have Polinesso upstage Ariodante by blowing smoke-rings? Why does she give characters repetitive routines with dust sheets, wedding flowers, and wedding dresses that merely fill – or waste. the time?
II.
Standing ovations for far-out modern music are not the norm anywhere, least of all at the Wigmore Hall, but Barbara Hannigan’s recital on Saturday 6 evening brought a packed house to its feet soon after the conclusion of John Zorn’s closing “Jummalataret”. Hannigan, a woman both beautiful in person and glamorous in personal presentation (couture, coiffure), is the champion that modern music needs – and Zorn’s music needs a soprano or her audacity and accomplishment. “Jummalataret” included volleys of squeaked staccati, high above the stave, that I shall not soon forget.
III.
In repertory downstairs at Covent Garden in the Linbury Theatre until January 3, “Last Days” is a ninety-minute piece of operatic bizarrerie composed by Oliver Leith to a libretto by co-director Matt Copson, about the final days of the grunge star Kurt Cobain as shown in Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film of the Sam name. The dying Cobain, far from the madding crowd in the further reaches of Oregon, still lures groupies and hangers-on. As ninety minutes go, these one pass very slowly indeed. Leith’s music, however, gradually takes us through various layers of consciousness and feeling until in its final bars it truly enters a different realm.
IV.
When he left Covent Garden 2024, Antonio Pappano was the Royal Opera’s longest serving music director, having begun in 2002. Now, as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, he’s applying himself to the concert-hall repertory in ways that extend him. At present he is conducting a Vaughan Williams series at the Barbican Hall; I wish I could catch all of it. On Sunday 7, he, his players, the LSO Chorus, and guest vocal soloists delivered two pieces that showed the largeness of spirit that often distinguishes Vaughan Williams: the suite “Flos Campi” and the cantata “Dona nobis pacem”. “Flos campi” (1925) employs the wordless chorus of Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloë” without ever sounding like a Ravel imitation; “Dona nobis pacem” (1936) anticipates Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem”. Although it’s easy to think of English music as polite and jingoistic, here from Vaughan Williams are scores that transform our idea of what musical Englishness can be.
Pappano made both works sound new-minted, brave, heroic. The same was true of his opening account of Tchaikovsky’s stirring Fourth Symphony. (Note to self: catch more Pappano performances at the Barbican.)
V.
Some treatments of “The Red Shoes” return to the source material by Hans Christian Andersen, but Matthew Bourne’s 2016 staging approaches it by way not just of the Powell and Pressburger movie (Moira Shearer et al.) and other Powell-Pressburgers, but by way of Bernard Herrmann’s music, notably for the films of Alfred Hitchcock (“Vertigo”). For my taste, Bourne’s depiction of Victoria Page’s traumatic choice between career ballerinadom and love involves too many silent screams (a cliché already much used in the last century by Kenneth MacMillan), but I love the way his staging – probably more than any Bourne staging to date – multiple kinds of reality. We’re given the offstage worlds of the audience and the performers; the preparatory realm of the ballet classroom; the creative travails of the rehearsal; and the many heightened worlds of the stage creation.
This is metatheatre. Bourne’s vision is ideally theatricalised by two of his longterm colleagues, the composer Terry Davies (adapting music by Herrmann) and the designer Lez Brotherston. Brotherston’s most brilliant device is a proscenium arch that rises and revolves. It evokes the theatricality with which Powell and Pressburger dramatise the importance of curtains – I thought in particular of their intensely metatheatrical film of “The Tales of Hoffmann”.
VI.
Back at the Wigmore Hall, the bass Willard White gave a lunchtime recital on Friday 12 that included Schumann, Schubert, British and American folk songs as arranged by Britten and Copland, “September Song” from Weill’s “Knickerbocker Holiday”, a number from Stephen Flaherty’s “Ragtime”, and, as an encore, “Have yourself a merry little Christmas” (written, let’s remember, by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane for Judy Garland).
White is now seventy-nine; his intonation is fallible. But his is still a gorgeous voice, like molten marble, and he is still a superb presence, standing still with effortless authority. On this occasion, I loved him most in phrases that evoke the passage of time: he made the whole audience chuckle tenderly as he wrapped up “The Foggy, Foggy Dew” with his recollection of the many, many times that he held her in his arms; he made a superbly painful musical sculpture from the closing words of Schubert’s “Doppelgänger” (“So manche Nacht, in alter Zeitgeist?” – so many nights in times gone by); and, in the marvellous song “O Waly Waly”, he made a effect of mighty suffering in the words about an oak tree, “But first he bended and then he broke./ And so did my false love to me.” In “September Song”, just his calling of the names of the individual months became both moving and colossal.
I’ve seen White in opera and in “Show Boat”, but I wish now I had seen him in recital more often. Anyone can spot the limitations of his voice now, yet what authority and warmth he still projects. Writing a few hours after this concert, I feel that he has fortified and warmed my entire December.