This is what I told myself over and over again as we sat motionless on a wooded track in Hampshire yesterday. We'd already been en route 45 minutes. Under normal circumstances we'd be pulling into Waterloo. But now we were awaiting a signal from engineering works to go
backwards, then forwards, and eventually creep into London. Irritating at any time, but particularly distressing when you're on your way to town for a much anticipated outing to the Royal Opera House.ROH tickets are disastrously expensive, pushing well over £100 for the good seats. There are, however, a handful of "cheap" options at around £50 each up near the top of the theatre and, as reported in past entries (read about Turandot on 24.1.09, and Simon Boccanegra on 30.5.08) they still offer a great view. But to get them, you have to move fast. I booked yesterday's tickets to The Magic Flute five hours after they went on sale last October. Four months of planning, and I wasn't sure I was going to get to the performance at all.
We arrived at Waterloo at 12:40, ten minutes after the performance had started. Twenty minutes later we were walking into the historic foyer but, of course, couldn't disrupt proceedings to get to our seats. So instead of the spectacle of Mozart on a grand stage, we got the first half of the opera on a big TV screen set up in one of the grand reception rooms. Trying to look on the positive side, it did mean we were first at the bar at the interval, able to snag a table and enjoy a lunch of gourmet open faced sandwiches and champagne in the neo-Victorian glass house that is the Paul Hamlyn Hall.
Finally in our seats for the second half, Mozart's fantastic music soothed away what stresses remained from the journey, and within a few minutes I was fully engaged in the preposterous plot. Set in what's notionally ancient Egypt, but also bears a striking resemblance to Enlightenment Europe, a prince is engaged by the Queen of the Night to rescue her kidnapped daughter. Upon arriving where the princess (with whom, of course, he's instantly fallen in love) is being held, the prince discovers that the kidnapper is actually a good guy, and our hero instantly wants to join the sacred mysteries and intellectual nirvana of the kidnapper's kingdom. Thereupon follows a Masonic-inspired journey as our brave lad and his intrepid sidekick, who also provides the comic relief, undergo all sorts of tests to prove themselves worthy of joining the fellowship and winning the love of their respective fair maidens.
On paper, it's a stretch. A big chunk of the opera is taken up with Masonic mumbo-jumbo. You're given no good reason why we should suddenly see the Queen of the Night as the baddie, except that a key point of the plot is that women shouldn't be in positions of authority because they're not capable of rational thought. Not a plot you'd think would have maintained its popularity into the 21st century, really.
But none of this matters because of Mozart's score. The music is glorious from beginning to end, with the Queen of the Night's arias being some of the most beautiful ever written for the soprano voice. When you get a really top singer, as we did with Jessica Pratt, you find it hard to believe that it's actually a human generating the amazing trills of her famous vengeance aria. ("Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen".) Hearing it live is a literally breath-taking experience. The opera's pacing is quick enough to keep you from ever getting bored. The comic relief is truly funny and gets some of the best arias. The Queen of the Night and her vampish handmaidens have great costumes, and there are some strange child spirits who zip around in a flying cart and sing with the treble voices of angels. It was a magnificent production, and I could have happily sat through it again, immediately, for the evening performance.
It was an interesting contrast to the week's earlier operatic experience. The English National Opera, generally known as the cutting edge risk takers while the ROH holds up the grand tradition, brought in film director Mike Figgis to create a version of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia. Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, Internal Affairs) hadn't seen an opera until a year before he got involved in the project, so he brought completely fresh eyes. The result ran live on Sky Arts, with the full work playing on Sky Arts 2 and a director's commentary simultaneously on Arts 1.
Back on paper, while The Magic Flute shouldn't work, Lucrezia Borgia should. It's a ripping yarn of political intrigue, sex and jealousy loosely based on one of the most fascinating times in Italian history
, full of mistaken identities, guilt, violence and big surprises at the end. Figgis did some interesting stuff, particularly in designing sets lifted directly from famous Renaissance artists, such as the pictured banquet before our hero's friends all get poisoned, arranged to look just like DaVinci's last supper. He filmed a back story to cut into the overtures and longer musical interludes, giving you historical context and some character exposition for Lucrezia. It should have been great. The problem? Musically, it's just a bad opera.There's not a memorable tune anywhere in it. At no moment does the music make your heart soar with joy, weep with emotion, shudder with fear or melt with love. Mozart manages all of that in The Magic Flute. Repeatedly. More oddly, all the music sounds the same. Whether it's our hero and his buddies carousing, the Duke of Ferrara (Lucrezia's husband) plotting or Lucrezia herself collapsing in grief over her son's death, the music is all a vaguely cheerful, rather inane 19th century bundle of notes. It reminds you of all those forgettable, sound-the-same national anthems that run together at the Olympics.
Unfortunately Donizetti's ability to turn a great proto-mafia tale into pretty boredom scored a big point for my fiance in our enduring German v. Italian opera debate. I had to concede, Wagner could have done something great with that plot. And in the hands of Mozart? I tremble to imagine.
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