I've written regularly about my frustration when the modern preference for "innovative" opera staging tips over into something that's incomprehensible and just plain ugly. From its birth, opera was an art form of lavish visual spectacle. While I appreciate that artists get bored repeatedly staging the same interpretations, and smaller opera companies can't afford the spectacle that Mozart, Wagner or Puccini would recognise, I'm becoming exasperated by the major opera companies' love affair with sparse modernism and the reinvention of the original work's time and place.
In the UK, however, the less an opera company looks to London, the more liberated they seem to be to embrace traditional staging. The word provincial usually comes with negative associations: rustics from small towns aping urban sophistication and never quite getting it right. I suspect that's the way Londoners would dismiss the production of Madame Butterfly I saw at the Anvil in Basingstoke last month. But with its abundant kimonos and traditional setting, it was a classic interpretation that was easy on the eyes and far less challenging that the production of Luisa Miller I saw at the English National Opera a fortnight later.
If you'd listened to a radio broadcast of this Luisa, you'd make no mistake about which one was the big-budget, top-of-the-food-chain production. The ENO's orchestra swells, powers, cajoles and stirs. This is one of Verdi's lesser known works but the music still moves the soul. Young American bass Soloman Howard was the best thing in the production; a spine-tingling voice and emotive acting that almost transformed the bad-guy Wurm into the hero of the story. He has the kind of headliner quality that pulls you to almost any opera just to see him. Elizabeth Llewellyn, playing the eponymous heroine, is a powerful soprano with an impressive range, and while David Junghoon Kim's Rodolfo sometimes lacked power he is a pure, sweet tenor in the classic style. Unfortunately, the love triangle that drives two of the three to a terrible death has no credibility. The acting is as wooden as the singing is lovely; I didn't buy Luisa as a sweet heroine or Rodolfo as an obsessed romantic hero.
But those issues pale in comparison to the stark, brutalist set. Luisa Miller was written as an exploration of class divisions in a 17th century Tyrolean village. (Luisa is the humble Miller's daughter, Rodolfo is the lord's heir who falls in love where he shouldn't.) But don't expect lederhosen, beer steins and sets with lavish mountain backdrops. The vast ENO stage was a brutal white rectangle with harsh light. A structure in the centre sometimes appears, just a ghost of a building made from white girders. The side walls sometimes come in and out. There's little to look at until characters start daubing graffiti on the white walls.
The lord of the manor seems to have morphed into a violent gangster ... at one point an enemy is executed in a hanging reminiscent of Catholic martyrdoms ... and the graffiti, daubed in thick black stuff that comes out of oil barrels, oozing with heavy menace. By the end it's dripping ominously from the top of the walls. Stark and horrific, the staging certainly made an impact. But it was exceptionally ugly. And I haven't even mentioned the bizarre costumes of the villagers, who seem to have been conjured out of one of Hieronymus Bosch's scenes from hell.
It was hard work.
Not so, our little provincial Butterfly. There wasn't an innovative thing about it. The set ... unchanged throughout ... would have been recognisable to anyone who saw the original in 1904. There was a charming Japanese house set in a blooming garden, regularly populated with a chorus of people in lavish silken robes. The singing was solid though not memorable, the acting occasionally over-the-top, but the total package was a delightful evening's entertainment. For about half the price of the middling tickets at ENO.
I'm not arguing that operas shouldn't evolve from their original staging. But if you're going to take chances, I'd like them to make sense. The ENO was pushing boundaries by casting a black woman as Luisa and a Korean man as Rodolfo. Why not run with that, and turn the class war Verdi wrote into an exploration of what happens when a poor girl from a rough bit of LA ends up in a relationship with a rich doctor's son? I also want operas that can attract the next generation. At Basingstoke's Butterfly I spotted a mother with her daughter, about 8 years old, dressed for a special occasion and alert with excitement. Butterfly's simple tale with its magnificent music and storybook visuals connected with a young audience in a way I can't imagine with Luisa's frightening modernism.
The ENO reportedly receives about £100 in public subsidies for every ticket it sells. That compares to £22 for the National Theatre and ... though I have no data on this ... probably a pittance for provincial companies. Surely with that amount of cash you can give me something better to look at? More importantly, if you're entrusted with public money, I think you should be aiming for entertainment that can reach a wider public rather than the shock value so beloved by opera's inner circle.
In the UK, however, the less an opera company looks to London, the more liberated they seem to be to embrace traditional staging. The word provincial usually comes with negative associations: rustics from small towns aping urban sophistication and never quite getting it right. I suspect that's the way Londoners would dismiss the production of Madame Butterfly I saw at the Anvil in Basingstoke last month. But with its abundant kimonos and traditional setting, it was a classic interpretation that was easy on the eyes and far less challenging that the production of Luisa Miller I saw at the English National Opera a fortnight later.
But those issues pale in comparison to the stark, brutalist set. Luisa Miller was written as an exploration of class divisions in a 17th century Tyrolean village. (Luisa is the humble Miller's daughter, Rodolfo is the lord's heir who falls in love where he shouldn't.) But don't expect lederhosen, beer steins and sets with lavish mountain backdrops. The vast ENO stage was a brutal white rectangle with harsh light. A structure in the centre sometimes appears, just a ghost of a building made from white girders. The side walls sometimes come in and out. There's little to look at until characters start daubing graffiti on the white walls.The lord of the manor seems to have morphed into a violent gangster ... at one point an enemy is executed in a hanging reminiscent of Catholic martyrdoms ... and the graffiti, daubed in thick black stuff that comes out of oil barrels, oozing with heavy menace. By the end it's dripping ominously from the top of the walls. Stark and horrific, the staging certainly made an impact. But it was exceptionally ugly. And I haven't even mentioned the bizarre costumes of the villagers, who seem to have been conjured out of one of Hieronymus Bosch's scenes from hell.
It was hard work.
Not so, our little provincial Butterfly. There wasn't an innovative thing about it. The set ... unchanged throughout ... would have been recognisable to anyone who saw the original in 1904. There was a charming Japanese house set in a blooming garden, regularly populated with a chorus of people in lavish silken robes. The singing was solid though not memorable, the acting occasionally over-the-top, but the total package was a delightful evening's entertainment. For about half the price of the middling tickets at ENO.
The ENO reportedly receives about £100 in public subsidies for every ticket it sells. That compares to £22 for the National Theatre and ... though I have no data on this ... probably a pittance for provincial companies. Surely with that amount of cash you can give me something better to look at? More importantly, if you're entrusted with public money, I think you should be aiming for entertainment that can reach a wider public rather than the shock value so beloved by opera's inner circle.
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