Emotional impacts
Rodney Milnes
La Bohan% (Glyndelaourne) Hansel and Gretel (Scottish Opera) These operas have a lot in common. In both, characters dance to hide their hunger and misery; in both, the emotional climax is signalled by the only lines of spoken dialogue in each piece — in Hansel when the children realise that theirs is a communal, not a personal victory, in Boheme when Rodolfo realises the enormity of his and Bohemia's self-absorbtion; both operas were premiered in the 1890s; both are merciless tear-jerkers; both are considered lusciously romantic and escapist; both contain much more than meets the eye.
There will probably never be a production of Boheme to do justice to the score, but I must say at once that John Cox's in the Bardon/Walker decor is the nearest I have seen. The fault is Puccini's; his setting of the Giacosa/Illica libretto — in itself a masterpiece repaying the closest study — is simply too fleet of foot. How can any producer convey the detail of the second Act, in which virtually every line (many of them inaudible since they are set in ensemble) tells you something about the characters, their motivation and their development? There is a danger of this brilliantly but ruthlessly reduced version of Murger's fascinating sociological novel ending up as just a tragedy of young love in a naturalistic (i.e. abstract) setting. Boy meets girl, girl dies, curtain boo-hoo, boring.
How is the producer to convey the essence of Murger's Bohemia, or the subtle class distinctions? Emigrating to that country, or dropping out, is largely a matter of choice, especially for the men. Remember that in the novel they drop right back in again, settle down in sensible bourgeois marriages and achieve a degree of material success. For Musetta it is also a matter of choice — she drops in and out as it suits her, whatever havoc this may wreak on her emotional life. It is a matter of choice for the artisan Mimi, godmother to Charpentier's Louise, to enter Bohemia, but there is no way out of it for her. When she joins in, she is signing her own death warrant. There is (or rather was) no NHS in Bohemia. Thus Cox's direction of Parpignol's two lines, framing as they do the moment of Mimi's induction, might have seemed overstated at first, with the toy-seller's half-death-mask, the freeze, the light fade and spot on Mimi's face. But how many in the audience noticed it or saw what was meant? How can you convey what Schaunard's grudging words of greeting imply, or Colline's qualification of them? They sing them in Latin to make it harder — circumlocution, or distancing from reality, is part and parcel of survival in Bohemia.
I could fill the rest of the column with these unprofitable speculations, but, it is more constructive' to praise Cox's thoughtful glosses on the bones of the text. How right to emphasise the way Mimi makes the running in the first act: she is pathetically eager not for what Rodolfo assumes she wants, but for company (note the pointing of the word `soletta' in her aria, and also the curious mistake in the programme synopsis). Wholly admirable is the intensity of the relationship between Musetta and Marcello, which is no sense in comic counterpoint to that of Mimi and Rodolfo. In hands as sensitive as Cox's, and with such responsive playing as that of Ashley Putnam and Brent Ellis, the end of the second Act can and should pack as forceful an emotional punch as anything in the opera. The fourth Act, with Schaunard tallying round, is effectively managed, with the horseplay kept within reasonable and we,11 motivated bounds. But it is the third that really hits you: Cox's direction of Mimi's Farewell and the quartet is wonderfully eloquent, both in the way the dying Mimi, again, takes charge and in the white-hot passion of the exchanges between Marcello and Musetta. It is currently open season for Peter-Hall-worship, and quite right too, but there is no opera director working today to touch Cox when it comes to portraying the tenderness and the danger, of emotional commitment.
Outside the third Act he was not helped by the pretty but dramatically bland Rodolfo of Alberto Cupido, who amidst a welter of faulty intonation on the first night gave precious few hints as to how he came to be engaged. But Linda Zoghby's true, perfectly sung Mimi is a gem. Alan Charles (Schaunard) and Willard White (Colline) were not always clearly focused in the action — again, this is a communal, not a personal tragedy — and the latter's sacrifice of his overcoat was robbed of some of its impact by setting the last Act in summer (it is Christmas in the book). Nicola Rescigno's muscular conducting fitted the overall view perfectly: his speeds are brisk (like Toscanines) but he knows exactly when and, more important, how to hold back and draw the pain from the music. This is really rather a special Boheme. It-would be nice to see it develop over a season or two.
The emotional impact of Hansel is to some extent retrospective. The oven for cooking children in (rightly given semidetached prominence in Sue Blane's sets for Scottish Opera) has become one of the grisliest symbols of our age. The Wings beating over helpless infants have not been those of angels. The starved, gassed, napalmed children of this century are not preserved as gingerbread to be touched into life again for a lieto fine. In hours of greatest need God has not, as the last line of the opera suggests, been noticeably present. All of which makes the boundless optimism, the child-like affirmation of faith in Humperdinck's score ever more gulp-making.
Peter Ebert's aware production is superb. In Maria Bjornson's costumes, Peter's family really is near-starvation, the parents reduced by despair to drunkenness and cruelty (Malcom Donnelly and Judith Pierce respectively) and the children (Laureen Livingstone and Della Jones) raggedy and dirty. Ebert's and Bjornson's solution of the problem of the angels is too brilliant to give away — experience it for yourselves. Thewitch is sung by a tenor. There is no justification for this transposition, but it does less damage than the same practice in Fledermaus. After all, men are nastier than women. Francis Egerton was nasty and, funny. Humperdinck's witch is short-sighted: he should really wear rimless spectacles like — I think it is time I shut up.
The singing is excellent, and like Rescigno at Glyndebourne, Alexander Gibson gives a brisk account of the score but one lacking nothing in the way of emotional warmth. It was also ideally clear: the Meistersinger-like counterpoint was there for the hearing.
Previous page
