With this season’s run of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux, the Grand Théâtre de Genève closes the so-called “Tudor trilogy” staged by Mariame Clément with Elsa Dreisig, Stéphanie d’Oustrac and Edgardo Rocha. As these works were never intended to be staged as a combo, one cannot blame the composer for the impression of inconclusiveness, and yet there is some point in staging them together as some sort of “scenes of the story of a woman of power in a world of men”. To be precise, the funny feeling has less to do with the works itself, which are all of them musically and dramatically interesting, but rather with their ability to survive outside the realm of bel canto. Here in Geneva we had a psychologically revisionist staging and two leading ladies whose background could not be less related to Romantic Italian opera. So, yes, nobody expected this to be “authentic” and I don’t even believe that the creative team wanted it to be so. The whole issue here is the possibility of performing Donizetti’s, Bellini’s and Rossini’s works with artists who are not specialized in this repertoire. Are these works universal enough to survive a different approach?
In terms of staging, the question is easier to answer. This is not the first non-traditional staging of a bel canto opera. Roberto Devereux, for instance, was famously staged in Munich by Christof Loy in a present-day setting. However, Loy’s production could be still called traditional in its linear narrative (as much as David Alden’s production in Zurich in spite of its expressionistic touches). Ms. Clément, on the other hand, draws on a time/space flexible landscape, a mix of events from the past and the present and an interventionist handling of the libretto. For instance, Devereux and Sara love each other but they keep they behave minimally respectable (as he protests in his dungeon aria where he is very much alone and doesn’t need to lie about it). Ms. Clément begs to differ and with the help of an unwritten pause (which elicited laughs from the audience) shows the ill-starred lovers in a post-coital situation. Although Julia Hansen’s sets predictably deal with wood panels, hers is a scenography of emotions, the wintry landscapes often used to reflect a state of mind rather than having any concrete relation with the action itself. There is an excess of scenic elements at some points – two video portraits of the queen, more distracting than illuminating. A writing table downstage on a corner look like an afterthought and a bit sloppy in aesthetic terms. But this as a matter of taste. What matters here is, in spite of the music’s rather agitated tempo, it is possible to bring some extra insight to a work like Roberto Devereux. In this sense, Ms. Clément and her collaborators have succeeded in bringing some fresh air to bel canto without making too much violence against it.
I am not sure that Donizetti’s music travels as well as the libretto. The composer was a connoisseur of the art of singing, even able to coach singers in what regards technique. In other words, he knew what he expected, and this was: voices trained in the Italian tradition. Even in a French work such as La Fille du Régiment, a French soprano like Juliette Bourgeois (the first Marie) had perfected her style with Ferdinando Paer and had a career in Italy under the name of Eufrasia Borghese beforehand. This means that, when Donizetti wrote a high or a low note in a score, he did it with a specific sound in his mind. With her tubular soprano à la Gundula Janowitz (lisp included), we could guess that a singer like Elsa Dreisig was not what he intended for the role of Elisabetta. This does not mean that she sang poorly. On the contrary, she showed great strength in the middle and low register, dealt commendably with passagework, displayed understanding of the text and acted superbly. She even tried some high variations and puntature. And yet the high register does not blossom in the way one expects to hear in a soprano in that repertoire. Even if one argue that Edita Gruberová was light-toned for the role in Munich, the way her acuti climactically flashed in the hall made the final scene gripping in the wide dynamic contrast to her floating mezza voce. Ms. Dreisig sang it musicianly in firm tone and purity of line, but one could call the results rather Mozartian and hardly varied, exciting or touching. In any case, if the purpose of the experiment was to try a different kind of singer in the prima donna role, it is praiseworthy than someone as talented and serious about the challenge such as Elsa Dreisig has been chosen.
The case with Ms. d’Oustrac requires a little bit more consideration. With her smoky tonal quality, hers is a voice that sounds really exotic in Italian roles. Moreover, her Italian tends to the indistinct, what is always problematic in this repertoire. As much as all the remaining members of this cast, she fared better before the interval, when her high register sounded more solid and freer than in the previous items in this “trilogy”. The scene with Nottingham in her apartments caught her on the wrong foot and from the point on her singing tended to the screechy and intonation left more than something to be desired. Ms. d’Oustrac can be a persuasive actress and, even if her voice goes to the category of “acquired taste”, she has proved (mainly in French repertoire) to create an aura of seduction and intensity in a variety of roles. Sara does not seem to agree with her personality and vocal resources, though, and the final impression was, most curiously for this artist, rather blank.
When it comes to Edgardo Rocha, one cannot say that bel canto is not this Uruguayan tenor’s repertoire, as he has made a reputation in Rossini. There is a difference between Rossini’s and Donizetti’s writing for the tenor voice. For all his technical finesse, Mr. Rocha’s voice sounds on the small and nasal side in these works. This means, he tended to pale in ensemble with the other singers, but there was compensation in hearing someone unfazed by high notes in Roberto’s big aria. The presence of Nicola Alaimo as Nottingham in this cast added a “scientific” interest to this experiment, as he was the single piece of traditional casting this evening. Singing his mother language in a style he is comfortable with in a baritone big and colorful enough, he couldn’t help stealing the show whenever he was on stage, even if he too somewhat succumbed to the decrease in confidence in the second part of the performance, sounding a bit off-steam in the above-mentioned scene with Sara.
If conductor Stefano Montanari was an extremely helpful conductor to his singers – always ready to supply a useful breath pause, to keep the orchestral volume manageable and to find tempi that made long or florid phrases easier to navigate – a sense of caution was inevitable, right when one would expect for some sort of animation, more so with an orchestra whose sounds lacks a bit of the bright edge one normally finds in Italy. I myself am unable to answer the question in the first paragraph. On one side, this was a performance that generated interest in its unusualness. On the other hand, after a while one wanted a bit of the raw excitement one is supposed to experience in this repertoire rather than an intellectual appreciation of the material. In this sense, I’d say that it would be rather unfair to Donizetti to say that a score never intended to respond to this kind of demand ultimately fell short of an unreasonable (?) expectation.
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