Opera
The Reluctant King (Opera North, Theatre Royal, Nottingham and The Palace Theatre, Manchester)
dodo
Robin Holloway
Chabrier's monster cornucopia — that Ravel said he'd rather have written it than Wagner's Ring suggests both the scale and the stylistic proclivity — has in all its 92 years resisted a British production. Now for the centenary of his death our most enter- prising company has taken it up and done it proud. The first performances were given at Edinburgh in the summer. I caught its last night at Leeds before it travelled to Nottingham where it has its last night on 29 October, before going on to Manchester.
The original glorious botch has been called, with Weber's Euryanthe, 'one of the two greatest casualties in the history of the musical stage'. A mismarriage of inspired score with shambolic plot is not so unusual. One need go no further than the other two operas in Opera North's autumn season, Trovatore and The Magic Flute. But in these, and other repertory works famous for their inconsistencies, there is a charge of sheer theatrical acumen that drives them over the threshold of suspended disbelief. With the Weber and Chabrier, a manifestly marvellous score has not sufficed. Both are held in such admiration that rescue opera- tions have extended to re-engraving the music with reshuffled order and a new text. In preparation for seeing The Reluctant King, I followed its live broadcast on Radio 3 two nights before with my copy of its 1929 re-write. Albert Carre's well-meant inten- tions paved the way to confusion worse confounded. It can be no accident that in the new version the invented King-figure is christened Albert the Bastard. works on stage. Above all, it truly does appear retrospecitvely to have occasioned the music that Chabrier poured so lavishly into the abject original it displaces. The endeavour is triumphantly vindicated. Well-honed absurdity replaces 'unresisting imbecility' so neatly that the preposterous costume fustian, with its maddening unfunctioning complications, vanish like a troubling dream.
Yet what struck me, following the score, was how faithful this new version remains. Internal cuts to the sometimes luxuriantly- long numbers are judicious. Indeed many ravishing moments missing from 1929 are restored. One number disappears, only to be replaced by another that is omitted even in the complete recording of the original. And the third-act finale is built up from a cop-out to a resounding conclusion. The cornucopia is not de-fruited.
More important, the nature of the music is treated with total respect. It can run sur- prisingly deep: there are stretches where the situation brought about by the new story-line actually brings it expressively into its own more powerfully than before. Chabrier was audibly so excited composing it that, like Schubert sometimes, he simply didn't stop to consider what nonsense he was setting but let the music sweep all before it.
The gains are everywhere, most conspic- uously in Act 3 where comic love-tangles begin to touch upon living emotions. This direct confrontation with serious feeling seemed stilted before, with so little warrant from plot and character. Now it convinces and moves, alongside and fused with the music which it brought about; they are for the first time commen- surate. While at the more simply verbal level it goes without saying that Jeremy Sams has come up with many a felicitous mot juste.
All these reactions were endorsed a thousandfold by seeing the show. It is a treat for the eyes too, stylishly designed, dressed and lit, directed (by Sams) with a musician's understanding of gesture and timing — the handling of the chorus as detailed as that of the principals, inventive, apt, but never fussy, and knowing when to be still. Live in the Grand Theatre with its clear warm acoustic and perfect size, the score under Paul Daniel shines with a qual- ity that eludes recordings and broadcasts. At once rich, transparent, and fiery, it bridges in one leap the space between Berlioz's impassioned melodism and Ravel's pungent precision. Which is not to say that it is not in all things wholly itself. The two 'forgers', then every talent by which the opera is seen and heard, have given Chabrier the most desirable of all possible 100th-birthday presents — life for his masterpiece, which deserves to be life immortal.
Details from Opera North Hotline 05632 445326.
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