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. Shouldn’t two hours of inverting every value end with something a bit more surprising than that? And shouldn’t the progress of the chaos that is the work have more striking musical and dramatic features, instead of rapidly lapsing into the dreary predictability of the utterly unpredictable?
Still, like the women of the first world war, I still say ‘Go!’ For you will witness — no thanks to the composer — a feast of advanced stage technology which will have you gaping at what the Catalan company La Fura dels Baus has devised. Almost the whole stage is occupied by a gigantic female figure, apparently made of fibreglass, which swivels, dissolves and reforms, has gaping eyes out of which people stare, and in the second half rewards us with a view of her posterior, out of which a male character steps.
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