Opera
Marshmallow
Rodney Milnes
le Fledermaus (Covent Garden)
Prom the House of the Dead (Coliseum) al New Year's resolutions: give up using the ‘v. ord 'masterpiece', overworked into meanInglessness, and try to be nice. Both the °Peras under review are awfullygood-pieces, and indeed the extent to which You acknowledge the masterliness of tledermaus will colour your reactions to the iloyal Opera's new production. For me it is very nearly the last of the great operettas, great in the Offenbach tradition in that it examines with mordant wit the social attitudes of its times and clothes the examination in music of irresistible élan. This is an °Peretta about rentier-middle-class attitudes to adultery, set in a small resort Ileal. a large city — in English terms let us say Maidenhead at the turn of the century. Our hero is lured to a party at which the female I e°Mpany is provided by dancing girls, and ; we all know what that means and what the Party is for. 'Respectable' women come ; Masked, and before they all get down to What they have come for, there has to be a f qUaSi-formal launching of the anything,' :goes stage— the `duidu' ensemble Hypocrisy the name of the game, witness just one of c the lines, the one about it being all right to e eharry on with a ballet girl, but not a chamtmaid. And of course Fledermaus was e qrst performed the year after the Vienna I 'rash of 1873: the gaiety was already nos'. taigic. This new production is sponsored by 1 Viennese bank. Very neat. e No space to chronicle the decline of (3Peretta as an art form; it got just too tneomfortably close to its audience and for 'afety's sake took off into the never te never-lands of Lehar and Novello, which is i. vvhere, solecism number one, Julia Tre()elYan Oman sets Fledermaus, amidst acres f flapping, over-decorated canvas, the first 4Ct in far too grand a mansion, the second in olittle opera house — not, perhaps, the obvi o, sus place for an orgy. Not that there is any s,tteh thing, of course: party and guests are of d._`.°Itifying decorum. Then there is the logue, re-written in a variety of lannges. Falke, it is heavily hinted, is an old :C o'fver of Rosalinde's, and by telling her most t. the plot in the middle of the first act he hers meaningless the rest of it: she 1;'e°kIld be caught almost in medias res with thr gentleman caller; but instead she gives t"te maid the evening off for the wrong ason and orders Alfred to put on the dressltv, 't 6 gown as part of the new plot. Rats. The i:(luisite' line in the finale should be her kstting out of an awkward situation — she is 4.gliilty as her husband. But no, we are in ter-never-land. In a properly sharp pro duction, the inserted 'jokes' about Fidelio might have been tolerable, but amidst this marshmallow-mound of false sentiment they became profoundly offensive.
Then there is the musical text. Zubin Mehta says he 'cannot stand female
Orlofskys'. Well, of course, composers will keep making these elementary mistakes, and how lucky we are with musicians like Mr Mehta who know better and can tidy them up. I look foward to hearing a tenor Octavian and bass-baritone Cherubino when he gets round to giving us his Rosenkavalier and Figaro . Seriously though, the whole joyful joke of the eighteen-year-old sophisticate is lost when a tenor is used. 'For the rest,' Mehta continues in his Times interview, 'we have kept to the score as we know it.' As whb knows it? The setting of lines of dialogue to music never intended for them, the senseless 'traditional' cuts, and the insertion of concert pieces for ballet may be tolerated in Vienna, the capital of Schlamperei, but not in London, where for the past twelve years we have grown accustomed to hearing the complete score, sung by the right voices, and with the ballet music that Strauss wrote for the work.
All was not totally lost on stage, since we had Hildegard Heichele's deliciously common Adele, Michael Langdon's bemused Frank, and Joseph Meinrad's classic Frosch. Kin i Te Kanawa's Rosalinde was to some extent scuppered by the new plot, though she sang nicely, but Miss Oman will get into trouble on the bill page of The. Times for making her look so dowdy. Hermann Prey's travelling-salesman Eisenstein, all brilliantine and boyish grins, was a great deal better than he probably knows. Mehta, although labouring the rubato, conducted a fair performance. The production by Leopold Lindtberg (his programme biography, incidentally, makes for riveting reading-between-the-lines) is, as suggested, wide of the mark. The new dialogue is notable for containing an even worse Dracula joke than the Coliseum's, and to poor Benjamin Luxon fell the task of explaining the plot in English every ,ten minutes or so. Why, in view of the house's language policy, was this thought necessary? Or has the policy changed? Will he be engaged to explain the plot of Traviata to us next time it is revived? In sum, I thought this as much a travesty of a masterpiece as Oh! Rosalinda, or Pink Champagne. I shall give up smoking instead.
The only question about From the House of the Dead is, why have we had to wait so long? That Colin Graham's masterly production should have been languishing in store for ten years seems wholly dotty. The revival is pole-axing. The score expands wonderfully into the large auditorium, and while I don't believe the problem of verbal audibility will ever wholly be solved (it seldom is in Tristan either) I admired the way the large cast made every effort with Dennis Arundell's translation. For the orchestra under Charles Mackerras nothing but boot-licking worship. Ralph Koltai's set,
slightly enlarged, still looks ideal. The cast is oy and large stronger than in the old days at .he Wells, and there are two notable survivors in Gregory Dempsey's heart-rending Skuratov and the maniac prison governor of Denis Dowling, who made his debut with the company nearly forty years ago. Emile Belcourt and Geoffrey Chard are the other two main narrators, both excellent, Patrick Wheatley is stoically dignified as the Dostoievsky figure, and I found Sandra Dugdale extraordinarily touching as the boy prisoner (now there's another role for Mr Mehta to get his hands on). As for the work itself, what is there to say? Only Janacek could have plunged into the sink of Gulag degradation and extracted the essence of human goodness and compassion, the very meaning of life. A unique masterpiece, in a production in every way worthy of it.
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