Alemania
Tales of oppression and resistance
Jesse Simon
The
undoubted highlight of the Deutsche Oper’s Meyerbeer cycle from a few years
back was Le Prophète, a production that used the conventions of grand
opéra as the springboard for a sprawling, surprisingly modern revolutionary
epic. Five years later Olivier Py, the director of that
production, has returned to the Deutsche Oper for a new production of Les
Vêpres Siciliennes in its original French-language version. The opera,
which Verdi wrote specifically for the Parisian stage and which was modelled to
some extent on the grand scale of Meyerbeer’s greatest successes – it even
features a libretto by Eugène Scribe, albeit a recycled one – allowed Mr Py
similar scope to present a vast canvas of oppression and resistance. With the
addition of several great vocal performances and the taut musical direction of
Enrique Mazzola, the production turned Verdi’s most conspicuous attempt to adapt
his style to Parisian tastes into an engaging spectacle.
In
fact Les Vêpres occupied a world that shared many visual and thematic
similarities with Mr Py’s Meyerbeer staging. The setting had been updated from
thirteenth century Sicily to French-occupied Algeria – colonial oppression is
more or less the same regardless of how the oppressors are dressed or which
weapons they use – yet the precise geographic location was far less important
than the stylised urban landscape of monochrome brick buildings bathed in a
cool, pale light. These structures, clearly the work of the conquering rulers,
were in their own subtle way more oppressive than the armed soldiers who roamed
around them. Even the warmth of the golden boxes and proscenium arch of the
on-stage theatre in which parts of the first and third acts took place
suggested a luxury both alien and inimical to the oppressed populace.
Verdi: Les Vêpres Siciliennes. Enrique Mazzola, conductor. Olivier Py, director. Deutsche Oper Berlin, March 2022. © 2022 by Marcus Lieberenz.
In
addition to creating a distinctive setting for the opera, Mr Py proved himself
a master of expansive, intricately choreographed stage action, and he seemed to
thrive especially in those scenes accompanied by purely instrumental music, in
this case the overture and the ‘Winter’ section of the ballet music, which was
used as a prelude to the fourth act. Freed from the pressures of sung dialogue,
Mr Py was able to create minor masterpieces of visual storytelling – he would
undoubtedly have been a great director of silent films – in which the quotidian
and the violent followed one another in quick succession. The pantomime that
accompanied the overture managed to reenact the execution of Hélène’s brother
and offer an overview of the terrors of daily life in an occupied city within
the span of seven or eight densely plotted minutes. The ballet was even better:
the constant spinning of the stage offered the setting for a roundelay of
brutal executions interspersed with the leisure activities of bored soldiers.
(Mr Py used a similar technique for the ballet music in Le Prophète, but
it was so well realised that one was not unhappy to see it again).
If
the staging’s visual world was consistently striking, its approach to the drama
was somewhat less convincing. Not that Mr Py was ever lazy or inattentive. Each
scene was conceived according to a rigorous symbolic logic in which colour and
movement were used to frame and underline the action. The opening scene of the
third act began with de Montfort removing his bad-guy outfit under the pretext
of getting changed for the ball, and it was while still in his underclothes –
stripped, as it were, of his villainous surface – that he greeted Henri, who
was soon to learn the truth about his familial relationship with his hated
oppressor. A dancer with white face paint representing Henri’s dead mother was
present throughout the scene to give physical form to the emotional forces that
kept Henri estranged from his new-found father, and the movements of the three
characters, forever coming together and pulling away, seemed perfectly moulded
to the dialogue. Yet it was unmoving; for all the conceptual effort of the
scene, the characters remained monolithic and undeveloped, outlined by symbols
and ideologies but never entirely real.
Verdi: Les Vêpres Siciliennes. Enrique Mazzola, conductor. Olivier Py, director. Deutsche Oper Berlin, March 2022. © 2022 by Marcus Lieberenz.
Other
scenes suffered a similar fate. While Mr Py was clearly inspired by grand
tableaux of cruelty and injustice, the staging’s more intimate interactions –
the duos, trios and quartets at the heart of the score – often seemed laboured
or disinterested. Whether out of deference to the singers or lack of interest
in the passions of the characters, the staging seemed unwilling to cultivate a
credible relationship between Hélène and Henri, so necessary for their long
scene at the centre of the fourth act, and in the crucial fourth act quartet
the characters were arranged on different levels of a three-by-three matrix of
platforms and scaffolding, disconnected from one another and left to fend for
themselves. The relative neglect of the dramatic scenes may not ultimately have
been a fatal flaw in a staging with so much brilliantly rendered spectacle, but
the oscillation between sequences of great imagination and ones of
near-complete stasis gave the evening a slightly uneven quality.
While
the individual characters may not have been a great concern of the production,
a number of the more static scenes were elevated by the vocal performances.
Jean de Procida may be the smallest of the principal roles – he does not appear
until the second act and appears only briefly in acts three and four – but Roberto Tagliavini’s ‘Et toi Palerme’ was arguably the evening’s
finest moment; his rich tone, absolutely clear but glowing with warmth, his
sublime lyrical phrasing, and his authoritative presence came together in a
perfect evocation of the exiled revolutionary returning to his homeland after a
long absence. Other appearances, although largely in ensembles, were no less
distinguished, especially his brilliantly delivered contribution to the trio
that precedes the final massacre, in which the sympathetic warmth of the
earlier acts was replaced by ruthless calculation.
Although
the staging costumed Guy de Montfort in the black suit and long coat of an
unrepentant villain, Thomas Lehman’s nuanced performance remained attuned to
the complexities and ambiguities of the character; his energetic first act duet
with Henri was a promising start, but he reached even greater heights in his
solo scene at the beginning of the third act, a tumultuous piece of
soul-searching that arrived at a remarkably tender conclusion. By the end of
the fourth act, in which he allows Henri to spare the life of his comrades, one
could almost believe that paternal feeling had overcome his tendency towards
despotism.
Verdi: Les Vêpres Siciliennes. Enrique Mazzola, conductor. Olivier Py, director. Deutsche Oper Berlin, March 2022. © 2022 by Marcus Lieberenz.
Hulkar
Sabirova’s reading of Hélène came into its own as the evening progressed: her
song in the first act possessed beautiful tone in the higher notes but seemed
to demand greater projection in the lower passages. However her solo scene in
the fourth act and especially her sparkling aria at the beginning of the fifth were
assured and captivating. The staging treated the complicated romance of Hélène
and Henri as something of a subplot and one suspects that Ms Sabirova’s duets
with Piero Pretti might have benefitted from a more coherent
emotional bond between the two. Although Mr Pretti was strong in these scenes,
he was at his best in Henri’s encounters with de Montfort, notably that of the
first act in which Mr Pretti’s elegant tone and impassioned delivery conveyed
exactly the right mixture of contempt and foolish heroism.
Given
the staging’s penchant for dynamic crowd scenes featuring assemblies of
revolutionaries and soldiers, it was not surprising that the choir would play a
crucial role at several points in the evening. Their calls of ‘Courage’ in
response to Hélène’s song in the first act gave the scene a necessary fervour,
but their performance was nowhere more impressive than in the conclusions of
the second and fourth acts: in both scenes the choir was divided into on- and
offstage forces, and the movement back and forth between the two was impressive
as much for its heightened energy as its precision.
Enrique
Mazzola, who also conducted Mr Py’s staging of Le Prophète, presided
over a tense, exactingly controlled performance in which there was room for
neither excess nor untidiness. The grandly sculpted phrases and finely layered
climaxes had an exquisite, sometimes calculating perfection but they were mediated
by a spry enthusiasm that prevented them from
becoming mannered and cold. The ballet music used as a prelude to Act Four had a
graceful effervescence that matched the carefully conceived movements on the
revolving stage.
Neither
Les Vêpres nor its later Italian version managed to achieve the lasting
popularity of Verdi’s most successful operas of the 1850s, but the opera is
nonetheless an ambitious and frequently inspired attempt to place the desires
and duties of its characters against a grandly-scaled backdrop of political
upheaval. If Mr Py’s staging showed a decided preference for the political over
the personal, his light touch and ability to sketch complex situations with a
few deft strokes laid the foundation for a production that was rarely less than
enthralling.
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