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| DO Programme 2013 |
Craig Brown is just one of many writers to pay tribute to an
inspirational English master, and in my own small way, I would like to pay my
debt to Bill Currie, English master (and Colonel in Chief of the Cadet Corps)
at King Edward’s School in Bath. It was
Bill who introduced us to Coleridge’s famous remark about the ‘willing
suspension of disbelief’ which is necessary to take a work of fiction on its
own terms. Bill was the author of a
number of books about his times at KES, and less well known, he produced many
little editions of ‘crammer’ notes about literature for the publishing firms
which specialise in helping the less gifted among us learn the rudimentary
concepts behind some of the great works that examiners send to try us. Among these, Bill produced a masterly crib to
W.B.Yeats, though his researches on Yeats led him to believe, as he confessed
to me many years later, that despite the quality of the writing Yeats himself
was ‘a great big fake’. Still, when
called upon to believe in the fiction before us on stage or in film, Coleridge’s
words through the medium of Col. W. T. Currie tend to come back to me.
Before turning to opera, which is where one’s disbelief is sorely tested, parenthetically, the web leads one on to read about a wonderful term in this regard – that of ‘cognitive estrangement’. This is defined by James and Mendelssohn in the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction as ‘the sense that something in the fictive world is dissonant with the reader’s experienced world’. Science Fiction is the genre par excellence where disbelief must be suspended in order to enter the new world. But of course, the frisson of science fiction is that all of what one is reading might well be true. Many of the classic works of science fiction from the 19th and 20th centuries have in fact come true. Space exploration, and the Roraima plateau of Professor Challenger’s Lost World, are examples. In opera, the dichotomy between the fictive and experienced reality can be substantial. The consumptive heroine who sings at full blast only minutes before her death (where would the 19th century novel, play, and opera be without tuberculosis? Dicken’s description of the death of Smike comes to mind, but the list is long). So, to engage our passions and interest, such productions must be of the very highest quality. Was this the case with Dorset Opera Festival 2013?
In brief, the answer is yes. In their bicentenary year, DO chose works by Verdi and Wagner, and works that were remarkably dissimilar. La Traviata is full of expressive and poetic melody. I hadn’t seen it for many years, but as the action unfolds, one cannot help but be overwhelmed as the music of yet another aria starts up and one thinks, ‘Oh yes, I know this, how wonderful’. In the Flying Dutchman, rarely performed, the familiar music is limited to the overture and incidental music; but it is remarkable how familiar the style is, and how little Wagner changed some of his leitmotivs in subsequent operas. With only a few tweaks, it’s clear that the Dutchman’s theme, and some of the sea motifs become Siegfried and some of the Rhine music.
We went to see La Traviata on an English summer evening of
beauty and heat, picnicking in the grounds of Bryanston School, and then filing
into the auditorium for a hugely enjoyable performance of superb musical
playing, great sets, choral ensembles, and stunning soloists, particularly
Violetta and Germont. The heat of the
evening lent a rather healthy colour to the skin of Jessica Muirhead, the
British-Canadian soprano, but some white makeup and pallid lighting enhanced
the illusion of the tuberculous patient in the final scene. Very early in the 2013 plans of DO it was
announced that Jonathan Miller was to be the director of the production. Predictably it was a sell out. Some friends were only able to get tickets
front right, where their view was a little infringed upon by the double basses,
but as one of them remarked, ‘I was trying to empathise with the dying heroine
in the final act, only to have my eye caught by the trumpeter in the orchestra
pit, who was reading a magazine throughout.
“Railway Modeller” I think it was...’
Yes, only a few toots were required at key moments in La Traviata. As a doctor myself, I was deeply touched at
the devotion to duty of Violetta’s physician, who turned up at seven o’clock in
the morning (it’s true, it’s in the libretto), even though streptomycin had not
yet been invented, purely to confirm that our heroine had only hours to
live. ‘The doctor is allowed to tell
white lies’, he assured us. I may yet
need to use that before the GMC one day...
I feel sure that the brass section’s copies of the “Railway Modeller” had been left behind for the following evening when I attended ‘The Flying Dutchman’. Again, a wonderful heroine, in Lee Bisset, slinking around the stage in a red dress, and a rather surprising fur coat. Perhaps her would be lover, Erik the huntsman, had lovingly crafted it from the skins of his prey? Her outfit was attuned to the black spars and the red sails of the eponymous voyager, whose sea chest labelled FD had been carelessly left on the stage. To a Poole sailor, the FD is evocative of the much lamented Olympic class sailing dinghy, and the great Rodney Pattisson, Britain’s greatest Olympic sailor until Ben Ainslie. Further inland, in Blandford Forum, the weather had changed, torrential rain swept Dorset, and on stage storms swept the coast of Norway. Wagner’s love of brass was well in evidence, and our trumpeter was surely far too busy to think about the 4-6-2 of Sir Nigel Gresley. Once again, disbelief was difficult to suspend, particularly in the frequent references to the pale face of the accursed Dutchman, when the character was portrayed by the handsome black African-American bass-baritone Mark S. Doss. But what a voice and presence! On an evening when members of the audience were once again fainting with the heat in the auditorium, Mr Doss striding around the stage in a giant nautical greatcoat and gumboots, and Ms Bisset in her fur coat should be congratulated for their stamina, as well as their wonderful singing.
There is a little difficulty in staging the ‘Dutchman’ in that Acts 2 and 3 take place in differing locations, which at the Met would no doubt require two intervals, together with much scene changing. DO chose to put their one interval after act 1, which resulted in two ‘halves’ of 50 minutes and 90 minutes respectively. There has to be an interval between Acts 1 and 2, because the contrast is enormous. Act 2 opens with as close as Wagner can get to a scene of happy domesticity; with a spinning song which is so melodic one assumes it must have been written by Brahms. The scene soon changes however, and since this is Grand Opera, we know that things are not going to end well. To see two opera seria in successive nights and to get away with a body count of three (two if you don’t count the fact that Mr Doss is officially dead anyway) is pretty good going.
I could ramble on, like the three Norns at the beginning of
Götterdämmerung, but I won’t. Well done,
Dorset Opera, you were fantastic.
