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Tragic tale of warring cousins
Judith Howarth (Mary Stuart) & Adina Nitescu (Queen Elizabeth). Pictures: Robert Workman Maria
Stuarda Welsh
National Opera Birmingham
Hippodrome ***** THE
three operas making up WNO’s hugely successful Tudor Season are all
tip-top Donizetti. Verdi, in his 20s, was not yet to be seen. Indeed,
pace
Rossini, 1830s opera didn’t get much better than
Maria
Stuarda
- events and barbed exchanges leading up to
the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots - staged in 1835 at La
Scala, Milan.
Other composers less known nowadays– Mercadante, Foroni, Pacini (who
wrote an opera about England’s Queen Mary), even the short-lived
Bellini, were the main rivals. Anna
Bolena (the similar sorry saga of a
doomed queen) came five years earlier;
Roberto Devereux
– the wretched tale of Elizabeth’s favourite
Earl of Essex, revisited in Britten’s
Gloriana
- two years later. Donizetti penned at least six
English operas, and the quality of Italy’s librettists of that time
shines. Felice Romani, who scripted Ann Boleyn, was Bellini’s
star librettist (La Sonnambula). Salvadore Cammarano, librettist
of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor as well as Devereux,
later adapted Verdi’s Luisa Miller from Schiller and scripted
Il Trovatore. Francesco Piave would write a swathe of Verdi hits (Rigoletto,
Boccanegra), before Arrigo Boito, with Otello and
Falstaff, hoisted Verdi to the operatic rafters. This is partly why Maria
Stuarda is such a stupendous,
All hinges on the blistering
set-to between the two Queens, one doomed to die childless, trapped by
duty and the mixture of the sinister and commonsense that is her chief
advisor, the elder Cecil (wonderfully cynical and seedy, a kind of
aristocrat Uriah Heep, sneeringly sung by Gary Griffiths who emerges
from the woodwork as the impeccable chief manipulator of the Third Act);
and the other, who will perish by the axe (skilfully engineered here:
the entire scaffold swings 180 degrees to reveal Elizabeth - the
stupendous Romanian soprano Adina Nitescu - on tenterhooks, but not
triumphant, at the moment the axe falls) - but will mother an entire
mixed-fortune English (indeed British) dynasty, the Stuarts. It’s this kind of torn-ness,
tension and unpredictability that makes Giuseppe Bardari’s
Schiller-libretto so superb. But if Nitescu’s strength and stage
presence – even in beehived ginger wig she is quite short – carried the
opera (except surely her first entry, which looked cramped and weak), it
was the presence of talents like the snakelike Gary Griffiths and
blusteringly passionate American Bruce Sledge in the tenor love role of
Leicester (who’s supposed to adore Elizabeth but has fallen for Mary),
and above all the magnificent Alastair Miles as Talbot of Shrewbury, the
beleaguered Marcher Lord who endeavours unsuccessfully to prevent the
squawking cousins’ deadly tiff and save Mary, who seems determined not
to save herself, which made this opera so powerful. There are duets and trios and
a quintet amid all this: every set-piece and ensemble was quite
wonderful. And then there was Judith Howarth. She is in a way WNO’s
diva, as Claire Rutter was ENO’s; but what a quality, wide-ranging,
convincing diva she is. Here Mary might have been more troubled, more
pessimistic, more anxious, more diffident – that is left to her
beautifully tender young amanuensis, Anna
Kennedy (Rebecca Afonwy-Jones, touching in the extreme), who stays with
Mary till the big chop. Howarth’s Mary proves every
inch a Queen: implacably proud, no subsidiary to the ‘Royal bastard’
Elizabeth, but Henry VII’s legal offspring, Henry VIII’s sister’s
daughter, with a royal line as long as the Plantagenets, and the potent
ally of France. Howarth’s major arias, fabulously varied in dynamic, are
without exception stunning, her duetting (with Talbot, and Leicester) as
sensationally well-staged as well-sung. What a top-notch offering from
David Pountney’s riveting company. WNO’s Tudor Season
continues, along with Puccini’s Tosca, at Venue Cymru, Llandudno,
Tues 19 to Sat 23 Nov: 01492 872000
www.wno.org.uk Roderic
Dunnett
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Shakespeare-quality
drama (it too stemmed from Schiller). And WNO’s production by
Salzburg-born Rudolf Frey, not hitherto known to me but a collaborator
with Robert Carsen, Luc Bondy and to me one of the great directors and
character baritones of our age, Martin Kušej, with its revolvable
rectangular centreset by the much-travelled Madeleine Boyd (suggesting
not just Mary but Elizabeth is caged by duty and circumstance) is not
just right up there with the best companies in Europe – it sets the pace
for them.