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Old story
lives again in new telling
Thebans
English National Opera
London Coliseum
*****
RECENTLY I conducted a brief interview for the
magazine Opera Now
to establish views of the great and the good about which operas from the
past half century – from the time of Britten onwards – would be likely
to survive and make the mainstream repertoire.
There were plenty of obvious candidates, but also several less so: the
Brussels premiere of Benoit Meunier’s
Spring Awakening; Benedict Mason’s
football opera Playing Away
at Opera North; Laurent Petitgirard’s
The Elephant Man; or at English
National Opera, David Sawer’s From
Morning to Midnight, an adaptation of
Georg Kaiser’s Expressionist play, and Nico Muhly’s revolutionary
internet-obsessed opera Two Boys.
Julian Anderson’s new opera
Thebans, a treatment of the three Oedipus Plays what is loosely
termed Sophocles’ Theban trilogy (in fact, Aeschylus’s Oresteia
is Greek tragedy’s only genuine surviving trilogy), which has opened in
Pierre Audi’s premiere production at ENO, is right up there with the
best of them. I heard reservations expressed about its lack of overt
tunes, perhaps even of Leitmotifs to characterise the main
individuals – Oedipus, Creon, Antigone, the two boys Eteocles and
Polynices - who form the essence of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. But I thought I did hear
something of the kind: there was plenty of logic to Anderson’s music,
and oodles of character per se; if he eschews direct borrowing
(though one melody owes some formal debt to Fauré), one can see he is an
ardent admirer of Xenakis’ Oresteia, and much else in 20th
Century operatic literature. that ‘Our fathers fail us, and
then we fail our fathers’, Anderson, who sketched a violin. Anderson’s librettist for this
Co-Production with Theater Bonn in
While McGuinness observes
concerto aged 12 and began the first steps towards this opera when
studying Sophocles at school aged 16, notes interestingly that the opera
explores the idea that Oedipus was a ‘bad father’; indeed in the
(deliberately out of order) last section of the opera, based on the
posthumously produced Oedipus at Colonus (401 B.C.), Polynices,
his younger - though here in the opera, if I heard aright, elder - son,
attacks and insults his blinded ex-father. There is too much to admire in
this score, and in the staging by the infinitely experienced Pierre
Audi, to be able to catalogue here adequately. Take first the massive vocal
and physical presence of baritone Roland Wood – ENO’s recent Bunyan and
Pilgrim in Vaughan Williams’s opera The Pilgrim’s Progress - as
the self-blinding Oedipus: one can see why the plague-ridden chorus
sprawling across the stage – it looks like a classic piece of David
Pountney - reveres him, turns to him; and why latterly, when the truth
of Laius’ death is exposed, they revile and turn against him. As the
anguished semitones of the clustering chords well up, one hears the
first utterances of clarinet – something of a signal character for
Anderson, used to marvellous effect, time and again, in and out of the
textures. All the chief characters wear
white for Part I (Oedipus Rex), apart from the garishly turquoise
Jocasta (Susan Bickley on Cassandra-like form). Ironic, amid a national
infestation. For Antigone the strutting Creon (the stupendous
tenor Peter Hoare, whose voice and characterisation alone would have
made this worth hearing) and all the others wear black. The feeling is
nasty: a modern dictatorship. Here and throughout, the dramatic pacing by ENO’s Music Director Edward Gardner gave the opera tremendous impact. The scenes with the - albeit comically - cross-dressed Tiresias (the blind prophet famously elected to try out life as a woman – witness Poulenc’s Les mamelles de Tirésias) of Matthew Best, as fabulous in the deep bass register as Hoare is in the upper tenor; and both wonderful and terrifying (he later smugly revels in Oedipus’s discomfiture – the proof of his own rightness) in the measured adagio underlined by double bass, percussion and bass clarinet Anderson first allots him, are pithy and loaded: gradually the chorus’s loyalties shift from Oedipus, who they thought knew the answers, to the seer ‘who knows all’. Here we see one of the other
devices the composer focuses on for effect: repeated words: ‘The truth,
the truth, the truth will be told’ booms Tiresias, and then the famous
Sophocles line (or part of it), ‘You do not know who you are…’ (as
of course Oedipus doesn’t, but is about to find out). McGuinness does indeed get the key bits in: following a teasing little scherzo for Oedipus and Creon, as the latter limbers up to seize power; or the outrageous and doomed hubris of Bickley’s Jocasta: ‘So Apollo did not succeed….Nor is there a shred of truth in oracles…’, as if a Delphic prophecy can be overturned. A pirouette for oboe and cor anglais, then a scintillating little soprano solo from the chorus, then curious oriental twirlings from the woodwind as Oedipus prises out the dread truth from the messenger and shepherd (who fatally exchanged him as a baby on Mount Cithaeron) and Jocasta’s suicidal shriek, ‘You are lost, lost. May you never know who you are,’ make this a sequence of breathtaking, edge-of-seat intensity.
It is the announcement of the
death of Jocasta which introduces one of the most riveting figures in
all three parts of this opera – one might incline to say, in the entire
trilogy: the countertenor. Here it is South African-born Christopher
Ainslie, who brings a voice of ravishing quality and huge character and
uneasy intensity. We will meet him again, the
harbinger of more dire news as the clouds gather around Creon in
Antigone; and as a strange, unearthly Theseus in Oedipus at
Colonus (constantly mispronounced: ‘This place is Collonus’: it’s
Coloh-nus - the second ‘o’ is an omega), who becomes virtually Hermes
psychopompos, the soul-guiding Mercury, at the end as he seems to
conduct Oedipus (actually it’s Oedipus leading him) to his final
transfiguration. Every time Ainslie sang, the temperature and the
tension rose. The subtle riches Matt Casey and baritone
Jonathan McGovern as the soon-to-be-at-each-other’s-throat Eteocles and
Polynices have a role in the final section – both revile their father –
but scarcely sing in the first part. Instead, Audi deploys them around
the stage, an eerie presence at different points. It became fun trying
to guess where he would place them next. They are like small boys,
students or apprentices, a kind of ‘see-no-evil, hear-no-evil,
speak-no-evil Leitmotif. Wide eyed. Deliberately spooky. ‘All that was sweet / is
spoilt and gone’ sings McGuinness’s text, frequently soaring into its
own non-Sophoclean (yet Sophocles-quality) poetry. At the bloody close
of first play, the feeling is like the desolation of, if not Titus
Andronicus, then King Lear. Jean Kalman’s pinpoint
lighting often speaks where the script does not – the final spot on an
increasingly militaristic Creon, hinted at several times earlier, was
classic. In ways it spoke louder than Tom Pye’s set: levels in the first
part served fairly well, and more starkly so in part 2. Colonus looked
like a strange, addled garden, plus a crumbling Antigone
(the attenuated Part 2) opens with a strangely Britten-like monody.
Creon calls the dead Polynices – Casey’s prostrate Eteocles is proudly
displayed on a bier – ‘filth’: a term that interestingly Oedipus has
used of himself at the end of the preceding part. It is clever the way
Audi launches with Creon preening himself on a frontstage curule chair,
only to replace himself with the interrogated Antigone on the same chair
facing upstage. Swedish soprano Julia Sporsén,
machinating Livia in ENO’s equally nasty Caligula (Detlev
Glanert’s opera), sounds superb in the lower ranges; with her, as
elsewhere, one felt Anderson - like some of his late 20th
C/early 21st C contemporaries - has carved a way back to
post-Wagnerian German opera and come close to its sometimes atonal
exponents – Franz Schreker, most obviously. Sporsén’s big lament, with
cor anglais as a kind of obbligato, is haunting. Tenor Anthony Gregory as
Antigone’s espoused prince Haemon (Creon’s son) gets short shrift from
his taunting, unyielding father, who ‘believes in rough justice’,
heralded by some rather fine Messiaen-like brass and Lutoslawskian
clustering in the strings. The scene in this taut play is a classic.
Indeed it’s the moments where However with the death of
Creon’s niece, and of Haemon as well, Antigone turns into a kind
of tragic, poignant pietà:
‘I took my life in my hands,
and
tore it to ribbons; too soon, too soon, too soon’. Might we even feel
sorry for Creon? The impressive thing in the
final part is the way, amid the débris, Wood preserves Oedipus’s
dignity. He is, for all his denials, every bit a king. Again
Tom Pye comes up with a
strange grey-yellow-greeny cyclorama, perhaps a light olive, or a green
timbre Dulux rather ironically terms ‘Wellbeing’: as a background to
desolation it is individualistic, rather original, and works rather
well; it would serve equally in Turnage’s The Silver Tassie, for
instance. Does the drama of Part 3 work
as well? Both composer and librettist were firmly agreed
Oedipus at Colonus should be placed last, to the three stages could
be ordered Past-Future-Present. I can recall other operas at ENO where
the finale slightly loses puff: Humperdinck’s marvellous Königskinder
is one; and Manon can come rather unstuck. McGuinness reintroduces the
young Antigone near the start and the close, Oedipus’s other guide, not
disloyal like her ambitious brothers, and turns her into nearly a
madwoman near the close, as if in anticipation of the horrors to come
(the ‘Future’ we have witnessed in the brilliantly compacted Part 2);
and to Sporsén he gives the final words of farewell. The chorus sing the voices of
the Gods near the end. They do a sterling job throughout, from
plague-ridden to celestially sublime: Anderson’s writing for them is
often gratifying, and Audi’s moving and blocking of them – surging like
a starving wave towards Oedipus, then Jocasta, then Creon, is one of
many visual masterstrokes: like an adagio in itself, replete with
dramatic good sense, beguiling to eye and intellect alike. All of this
is what makes the staging of Thebans, as well as the score -
which is what will surely last - a precious and durable find. Runs at the London Coliseum to
03-06-14 Roderic Dunnett
10-05-14.
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