Is there a fundamental, insuperable problem with staging Rossini’s Guillaume Tell on a budget, without the resources to conjure up the sense of scale that was part of grand opéra’s appeal and raison d’être? Take away the special effects, whip away the phantasmagorical curtain, and, as with any Hollywood blockbuster, you are left with a modest little plot whirring away at its centre. In Tell, this involves the love between Arnold and Mathilde across a national divide. It’s the struggle of the Swiss — in a time before neutrality and cuckoo clocks — against their Austrian oppressors that, along with the Alps, forms the backdrop.
Rossini’s score can occasionally seem stuck in pastoral mode, but it contains many glorious moments and is characterised by a broadness and symphonic ambition that is worlds away from some of his better-known works. It is perhaps the music, rather than the drama, that makes it a piece worth catching: never mind the famous overture; the concluding triumphant sunburst is surely one of the most thrilling moments in all opera.
In Cardiff, where WNO’s Tell will be followed shortly by a staging of his Mosè in Egitto, it took less time to get to that conclusion than it might have done. The score was heavily (but understandably) cut, while circumstances on the first night meant that Gisela Stille, unable to sing, acted Mathilde, while her cover, Camilla Roberts, herself recovering from illness, sang from the side of the stage. Roberts brought a big, rich sound to her assignment, but the decision was made to cut the character’s big scene. These things happen, of course, but it seemed a shame that Stille hadn’t been encouraged at least to mouth her words, which might have helped salvage some dramatic realism from her scenes with Arnold.
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