I’ve just seen an opera from inside a wedding cake. Well, it’s an understandable mistake. France’s Troisième République Palais Garnier confection of an opera house, commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III in 1860, but not completed until 1875 when Napoleon was long gone, truly would look more at home in the window of one of the city’s Maîtres Confiseur-Chocolatière than at the end of Haussmann’s Avenue de l’Opera.
Napoleon devolved decisions about the building to Empress Eugenie, who was craftily blindsided by the Minister of Works, Count Alexandre Colonna-Walewski. He was determined to thwart her fuddy-duddy favourite, Violet de Duc, the architect responsible for repairing much of the damage done to the fabric of Paris during the French Revolution and famous for his comment on seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa: “It was extremely disagreeable to see”, he wrote, “it would have been infinitely better if it had been straight”.
Count Colonna-Walewski devised a competition – a ghastly foreshadowing of our current “The Apprentice” – which the inexperienced Charles Garnier unexpectedly won, 169 other entrants having been “fired”. When Napoleon’s Empire crumbled after the disastrous Franco Prussian War of 1870-71 and his capture, the project was seen as a hang over from a now despised regime and put on ice.
The second President of the Troisième République, the majestically-monikered Marshal Patrice of MacMahon, Duke of Magenta – a monarchist protagonist to boot – had the project completed.
The Palais Garnier stands at the end of the Avenue de l’Opera, the only one of Haussmann’s boulevards not to be lined with signature plane trees, so as not to deface M. Garnier’s handiwork, so revered was the Palais at its inception. Sadly, traffic lights now do the defacing job rather well.
Garnier had never designed an opera house – or anything much else – before and was a maven of other styles. He was also a magpie. His gilt-larded, marbled, copper-domed conception, topped off with Gumery’s winged statues of Harmony and Poetry, Lequesne’s matching versions of Pegasus, crowned with Millet’s Apollo mid-field the dome, rather makes “overdone” an inadequate description. Over the top? “Certainement pas!”
Look upwards before the curtain rises to see the magnificent Marc Chagall ceiling in the auditorium, controversially commissioned in 1964 – 2,400 square feet of flamboyant colour, with his typical flying figures paying homage to 14 composers and music itself. No mean feat. Chagall was 77 – and afterwards went on to paint the famous duo of massive murals that adorn the entrance to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
The opera inside the wedding cake was the well-known “Il Primo Omicidio,” by Scarlatti, whose familiar arias we happily hum in the bathtub of a morning. (Er … really? Ed.)
Ok, Ok, of course we don’t. Firstly, it was written by Allesandro, not Domenico Scarlatti, his better-known son; the one whose rum-ti-tum baroque tunes fill discounted CDs (downloads for the au courant), performed usually on original, “period”, out-of-tune, dusty old instruments dragged from the cupboards of moldering chateaux.
Secondly, the score was only recently discovered in the 1980’s, buried in the collection of Charles Jennens, an English 18th century landowner, collector and Handel librettist. They knew how to “do” pantomaths in the 17th century.
Allesandro Scarlatti, 1660 – 1725, whipped off a whopping 65 operas, or “dramas for music” as they were more properly known, designed to be performed in salons rather than large theatres. He is the true father of Baroque Opera.
Skip through his titles; “The triumphant virtue of hatred and love”, “The triumph of honour”; “All the bad does not come to harm”; and it’s evident that Scarlatti senior’s writing was guided by a strong, moralising compass. Opera buffo it was not.
And neither is “Il Primo Omicidio” – The First Murder. (Well, give me a break. You never know. There may be some readers from Alpha Centauri who don’t get simple Italian. To the rest of you, “sorry” for elaborating on the bleeding obvious). It’s the story of Cain and Abel. The department of further plot explanation is now closed. (Genesis 4:1-16). We all know it.
In the pit was Maestro René Jacobs, a highly respected counter tenor earlier in his career, and now leader of his Belgian band, B’Rock Orchestra. This is an accomplished ensemble. Their precision is not showy and does not get in the way of sinuous delivery, which made some slo-mo action onstage during the murder scene all the more effective, as the tempo relaxed to match. There are no tempo notes extant on the score, so Maestro Jacobs had a free hand. He used his discretion deftly.
Scarlatti’s score is enchanting and complex. He’s a pioneer of programme music, blending highly illustrative passages with action onstage. Pulling it all together was set, lighting, costume – and everything-else-designer, Romeo Castelluci.
Since the 1980’s Signore Castelluci has been seen as one of theatre’s avant garde. This production was grounded in a firm philosophical approach; that man’s spiritual nature has been hard-wired since creation. His interpretation explores the implications of that and seeks to shed light on “Des Origines du Mal” (Some Roots of Evil). Note the use of “some”, not “the”. There are no handy, simple explanations.
So, an engaging feature of this production is that it doesn’t pretend to have all the answers to the many moral ambiguities thrown up by the plot. Scarlatti and Signore Castelluci are gently pointing the way to understanding. The audience has its own work to do.
We kick off with a setting that is almost primeval, shrouded in mist, backdrops of solid, changing, back-projected colours. For my money they’re inspired by the Mark Rothko Chapel in Houston. We are at an early point of creation where light and earth coalesce.
Confessional aside: For years I’ve puzzled over what Rothko’s paintings of great slabs of contiguous colour – or just blackness were for. And for the first time I nearly get it – perhaps a window into the essential simplicity of the nature of creation. Those planning to attend my upcoming lecture series on Rothko interpretation should be aware it lasts only thirty seconds.
A gossamer effect created by voile screens made it plain from the start that we were entering a land of allegory. This became plainer still when the principals, Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, God and Lucifer were joined in the background by an ethereal crowd of children – the generations to come, perhaps?
One of them was pushing a bicycle. What? Baron Karl von Drais invented the bicycle in 1817. So, clearly Adam was ahead of his time, but had fouled up on the patent application. No lawyers around in Genesis. The bicycle wasn’t flaunted, maybe just a clever, disconcerting touch to put the viewer on guard. Hmmm…..
Part One was the scene setter – taking the story up to the point where Abel’s sacrifice is favoured by God over Cain’s. There were early flags that the Cain/Abel fraternal relationship was heading for the rocks – literally, as it turned out. Abel’s embracing of his brother was only reluctantly reciprocated and the direction built a febrile atmosphere.
Then in Part Two, the magic began. We were treated to one of the most astonishing coup de théâtres I have seen. Suddenly, the principals were singing, almost unseen, from the orchestra pit and the action was played onstage by children who were perfect, miniature, lookalikes, lip-syncing along.
The lip-syncing idea was fraught with the risk of – well, not actually lip-syncing; which happened once or twice. But on the whole the children were redoubtable, needle sharp in timing and as facially expressive as their adult doppelgangers.
We are in an austere, wind-swept (great whooshing sound effects), grassland landscape with another Rothko-dense horizon – the farmland from which Abel has gleaned his offering to God. Cain’s offering gains God’s favour because it is sacrificed to him in true love. For the record, Abel’s burnt lamb is ignominiously extinguished in Part One by God’s carelessly flung jacket over what looked like a badly-lit barbecue.
Abel is murdered, mercifully obscured by the grass, by jealous Cain, now played by a child remember, repeatedly striking downwards with a stone on his brother’s unseen head. This was a high point of chilling realism, accentuated by a sharp series of Scarlatti downward violin strokes. Truly shocking. Think, Shower Scene in Hitchcock’s “Pyscho”.
Other tableaux were similarly well-crafted. In the most moving scene Eve (now a child) is seen blue-scarved like a Madonna, bewailing the loss of her son, while in the background children pick up Abel’s bloodied body and bathe it tenderly, the arms extended – a premonition of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection, predestined in history because of this act of malice. In spite of the evil, the personas of God and Man will become redemptively combined.
Canadian bass-baritone Robert Gleadow, Lucifer, played the part as an East End spiv and with relish. His devilish pronouncements were the only comedic touch. Swedish mezzo Kristina Hammarström, Cain, and Dutch mezzo Olivia Vermeulen, Abel, were perfectly competent, but lacked “edge”. Norwegian soprano, Birgitte Christensen invested Eve’s character with meaning, as did British tenor Thomas Walker – Adam. The respected German countertenor Benno Schachtner played God.
Oratorio – back in the day sometimes a forced format for composers, as the authorities banned the portrayal of religious themes in opera – “upgraded” to the operatic form is a risky, potentially clunky exercise. Signore Castelucci has proved not only that it can be done, but that it should.
His razor sharp matching of the onstage drama and effects with Scarlatti’s sweeping score created a performance that made for a memorable evening, And in one of the most memorable performing spaces there is. Une évenément, indeed – and without a single gilet jaune in sight. Formidable!
(Image via Paris Opera)