It’s been a busy operatic week, with a nearly great concert performance of Parsifal in Birmingham on Sunday (reviewed by Anna Picard in last week’s Spectator), Carmen at the Coliseum on Wednesday, Donizetti’s Poliuto at Glyndebourne on Thursday and Carmen, also at Glyndebourne, on Saturday. A trajectory that Nietzsche would have approved of, moving from brooding northern transfiguration to sunlit, brilliant southern violence and destruction.
Poliuto is mostly known, if at all, in the live recording made at La Scala in 1960 as a vehicle for Callas’s return, in a role that made comparatively small demands on her, and much larger ones on Franco Corelli and Ettore Bastianini. That recording reveals the work to be mainly run-of-the-mill, requiring and, up to a point, rewarding artists of that stature. Donizetti made a French version of the piece, called Les Martyrs, which is coming in for a good deal of respectful critical attention at present, thanks to Opera Rara’s performance of it at the Royal Festival Hall last year and its recent release on three long CDs. The Italian original, as sung at Glyndebourne, lacks some items that were back-translated from the French, and is a compact work — one of those Glyndebourne evenings when, after a 90-minute food interval, you return to the theatre for slightly less than 30 minutes, as in the old days when Glyndebourne still performed operas by Janacek.
Is Poliuto worth reviving? In the present relativistic critical climate, the answer will be a simple Yes. That seems to me to diminish Donizetti’s status as a composer of two works of comic genius, and several that are at least the equal of Verdi’s works up until his middle period. But it wouldn’t be surprising if the composer of 65 operas, who died at the age of 50 after several years of tertiary syphilis, should have produced some mediocre works, and can anyone seriously claim that Poliuto is more than that? The Glyndebourne production doesn’t contain any sensational singers, though all of them are excellent or almost excellent.
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