Le Grand Macabre
English National Opera
Don Carlo
Royal Opera House
Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre has opened the season at ENO in a production of spectacular, amazing brilliance. Every aspect of the piece, visual, musical, dramatic, is dispatched with such panache that it seems a pity to enter any reservations at all, and for anyone in two minds about getting a ticket I’d unhesitatingly say ‘Go!’ The reservation is that the work itself is so feeble a piece, and by Ligeti’s standards shockingly thin, that one is forced to regret directorial and designer’s inventiveness amounting to genius for so unworthy a cause. Anarchy in art, as in life, is a wonderful concept but is a bitter disappointment when realised. Macabre is a genuinely anarchic work, making merry with many things we hold dearest or have a terror of, but it is a sign of its weakness that it ends by telling us to ‘live merrily in cheerfulness’, because you never know when you are going to die, though you know you will.
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