I saw three operas this week, all centrally concerned with spurned women. That’s not surprising, given the general subject matter of the art form, but it sometimes makes me wonder why we prefer to see, and more importantly to hear, love-tormented women more than men. The only major exception to spring to mind is Wagner’s Ring, which gets under way with a dwarf teased and rejected by three mermaids. But even Alberich spends much more time elaborating on his plans for world domination than on lamenting lost love; the Ring is quite a big exception, but one still wonders why it is female suffering from despised love rather than the male version of the same complaint that excites operatic composers and their listeners so much.
A lot has been written on this subject, much of it dubious. Opera North’s new double bill, of Poulenc’s La voix humaine and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, gives us extreme examples: the first is a monologue for an hysterical and suicidal woman, the second really has only one character, her lover Aeneas an even bigger cipher here than in Berlioz’s Les troyens. Dido actually does commit suicide, in a ritual way, but what makes her so moving is that, like Butterfly (to mention one of the greatest instances of the genre), she clearly sees what her fate is and embraces it with dignity and nobility.
Whatever other characteristics Cocteau’s and Poulenc’s Elle displays, those are not among them. Lesley Garrett performs Elle as a Marlene Dietrich figure, who begins gazing petrified into her dressing-room looking-glass. All Elle’s troubles with the telephone seem a bit dated now, with recalcitrant operators and crossed lines things that many in the vociferous audience at the Grand Theatre in Leeds must have been bemused by; an updated version incorporating the more sophisticated exasperations of cell-phones is required. I don’t find this one of Poulenc’s more sympathetic works, his usual compression and charm being dissipated in an opera that is only 40 minutes long, but whose point is made in ten. Garrett is admirable, though, and would be even better if all her words were intelligible, instead of about 75 per cent.
If La voix humaine seems too long, Dido and Aeneas must be one of the very few operas to seem too short. With a radical production such as the one by Aletta Collins one hardly has time to take in what the idiosyncrasies are before the curtain comes down. Last week I was complaining about the doubling of roles in the Royal Opera’s Eugene Onegin, but in this Dido there are so many replicas of the heroine onstage that I often had trouble spotting which the ‘real’ one was — or does my search for her only show how outmoded my approach is? Aeneas is a naval officer, 1940s-style, and poor Phillip Rhodes made of him what he could. All the minor characters — everyone except Dido, that is — did their little jobs well, though the immense bed in the middle of the stage sometimes made life difficult for them. Pamela Helen Stephen is Dido, a powerful and intense performance from start to finish. The chorus, singing in the pit, was as good as one expects, and Wyn Davies managed to conduct both operas with equal conviction.
At the Coliseum ENO presents an opera that few can have seen or even heard of: Charpentier’s Medea, minus its irrelevant Prologue. It still makes a long evening, which I admit I didn’t survive. I prepared for the performance by listening to an LP of highlights from 1953, conducted by Nadia Boulanger, and was bowled over by the sheer musicality of every aspect of the production; and by sampling at length the Erato recording from 1995 under William Christie, with Lorraine Hunt, as she then was, in the title role. That, too, was encouraging, even moving.
This new production I found boring, embarrassing, silly. David McVicar seems to have lost his sense of when an episode of extreme camp can be inserted into what is primarily a serious work, so after about 45 minutes of solemn recitative and arioso from the leading characters, a group of sailors 1940s-style — haven’t I already said that? — pranced on to the stage and did a high-kicking routine which at least raised a guffaw. The production, which is shared with Geneva, is lavish. The powers concerned seem to belong to the combatants in the second world war, which makes an enchantress, etc. seem odd, though the sudden intrusion of a fighter plane, spangled and pink, seems no less peculiar.
The (anti-)heroine is taken by Sarah Connolly, power-dressed and chalk-faced. I can’t help feeling, though, that this isn’t her role, since extremes of passion and jealousy, when communicated in Charpentier’s idiom, need a more fiery delivery, less composure than Sarah Connolly (I must be careful: on YouTube the singer writes ‘calling me Connolly is presumptuous’) is willing to give them. The sedate orchestra under Christian Curnyn isn’t helpful. Jason, another high-ranking naval officer, is taken, curiously, by Jeffrey Francis, a non-hero if ever there was one. Other singers, especially the ever-reliable Roderick Williams, give more pleasure. But the pervasive uncertainty of the production as to how seriously to take the work undermines sustained interest.
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