Tristan und Isolde Programme Notes

Historical Context of the Opera

Tristan und Isolde is indisputably one of the high water marks of the Western classical canon, and has a unique significance in the history of music, probably influencing (positively or negatively) more subsequent music than any other single work. In the context of other operas written in the middle decades of the 19th century, it represents a truly radical departure from the operatic norms of its era, and was received with a decidedly mixed reaction when it was first heard publicly in 1865 (a full six years after its completion in 1859). It took a further nine years to secure a second performance, but by the end of the 19th century it had secured its reputation as the towering and pivotal masterpiece it is considered today. Despite all this, key aspects of the work remain profoundly mysterious and ambiguous, quite remarkably so for a work of such central importance, and one that has been endlessly dissected by commentators from a wide variety of academic disciplines. These ambiguities at the heart of the piece I think are a key part of its fascination and special aura, a feeling which is still undimmed for contemporary opera audiences now 166 years after its composition.

Like Nietzsche, Wagner realised that the Enlightenment project had precipitated the slow death of Christianity in the West by carving out its foundations, and his philosophical project throughout his life was to find a mythic underpinning and foundation for a post Christian world that could be expressed in his music dramas. Though not a philosopher or intellectual on the level of Nietzsche, he was remarkably prescient and knew instinctively that moral systems that humans actually lived by were not just a list of abstract rules to arbitrarily abide by, but rather best expressed and understood in narrative, which is to say dramatic form. By observing characters with different sets of values in conflict we can see what ethical orientations, modes of living, and decisions lead to what outcomes. This is why the Bible for instance is a series of stories, rather than simply a set of maxims - no amount of commandments would ever be enough to cover the infinite panoply of possibilities that life confronts us with, and nor would we be motivated to memorise and follow a gigantic list of pedantically enumerated rules. Stories however can encode a mode of being that we can imitate and embody ourselves, and so are a less explicit and more sophisticated way of communicating modes of being down the generations. They also have the advantage of being much more memorable to us than a list of rules, because they are so much more interesting and enjoyable for us to pay attention to.

With Christianity in decline, Wagner reached for other Western myths that had emerged from pagan peoples and also the epic narratives of the middle ages and Medieval period, as fertile ground in which to explore his ideas for how to reconstruct a moral and existential basis on which modern man could live. Tristan und Isolde is one such example - it derives from several 12th and 13th century poetic and prose versions that had become popular again in the 19th century, and Wagner had immediately felt drawn to them when he had discovered them for himself.

Wagner’s own pronouncements about his Tristan und Isolde being an unwitting expression of Schopenhauerian philosophy (i.e. that we suffer because we are pushed around by the Will, a sort of philosophically abstracted extension of what we might today call our drives, temptations, and desires, and that by extension true freedom comes from an abnegation of this Will), which he had discovered subsequent to drafting the libretto, is to be taken with a huge pinch of salt. The idea that pursuing love and sex at any cost, even into death, can be squared with the Eastern inspired Schopenhauer’s abnegation of desire (not to mention his famous misogyny and distrust of women) requires a huge set of mental gymnastics that lead everywhere to paradox. Many Wagner biographers point to the unconsummated and forbidden love he had for Mathilde Wesendonck, who was the wife of his patron Otto Wesendonck. The story parallels here are obvious, and there is no question that this love had a huge influence on Wagner’s creation of the work, but to reduce it merely to an expression of his sexual frustration would also be absurdly reductive. In Tristan und Isolde, it is clear that Wagner is seeking to express something extremely personal that he cannot put fully into words (otherwise he would simply have written an essay!) - the opera is his best attempt at expressing this intuition in the language of symbolism and music.

All of Wagner’s operas are both deeply philosophical and psychological, and Tristan und Isolde might be the most philosophical and psychological of all. The action, such as it is, is extremely simple - all three acts lead up to one key piece of action (the accidental drinking of the love potion in Act 1, the discovery of the lovers by Marke in Act 2, and Isolde returning to Tristan in Act 3). The rest of the work’s massive architecture concerns exploring the inner lives of Wagner’s carefully orchestrated cast of characters and the wider philosophical ramifications of what their actions mean. 

The Characters

The lovers, Tristan and Isolde start out in total opposition. They each treat the other with disdain, until the fateful love potion is accidentally imbibed. Their publicly stated desires are totally at odds, but Wagner also portrays them as possessing hugely contrasted personalities - Isolde is by turns implacably furious and desperately depressed in the first act, these wild fluctuations set in stark relief by Tristan’s infuriating (to her) level-headed indifference and avoidance. Tristan and Isolde each have a servant to provide a further foil to them - Tristan’s taciturn mannerliness, and later poetic introspection, is contrasted with his devoted servant Kurwenal’s boisterous coarseness. A blokey bloke if ever there was one. Isolde’s affronted idealism is contrasted by her attendant Brangäne’s more pragmatic, worldly outlook. These contrasts are of course superbly characterised in the music. Kurwenal’s music is consistently robustly diatonic, and rhythmically virile for instance, which makes it quite jarringly and comically different from the yearning chromaticism and ambiguous harmony of the music that characterises the lovers. In act two we properly meet the last of the quintet of major characters as King Marke catches the adulterous couple in the act. In this moment, the fervent passion and freeflowing, boundless sensuality of the lovers’ duet comes to a grinding halt, and the most famous musical coitus interruptus ever composed. During Marke’s subsequent monologue to Tristan, in music characterised by painful lucidity and grandeur, the crushing weight of societal norms flaunted, moral codes violated, and above all the deep personal betrayal they have perpetrated, comes fully to bear on the couple.

Themes, Plot, and Message

Once you get behind the conventional love triangle of the plot, what is Tristan und Isolde actually about? Tristan and Isolde are in an impossible situation. They are in love, but their love is forbidden by all conventions of family, country, propriety, and even by their own felt sense of morality. These forces prove to be too strong for them, and results in their deaths, but in spite, or even because of their deaths, they have somehow transcended their suffering, and the end is felt as redemptive, rather than tragic.

You can’t get far in the literature on Wagner without coming across the words Redemption and Transcendence, with great big capital letters. Despite the fact that these abstractions are used so much to discuss the piece, it is perhaps hard to understand what Redemption precisely means in a post Christian worldview. Redemption from what? If sin is a Christian idea that evaporates with Christianity, what do we need redeeming from? What in Wagner’s opinion do we need to transcend? Nevertheless, these ideas undoubtedly persist in Wagner’s operas, and in my opinion are only really experienced fully when his music gives body to the libretto, which on its own necessarily cannot be fully explicit about what is going on metaphysically in the story, but rather just point us in the direction of something that Wagner is trying to understand himself, and also communicate to us.

In Tristan und Isolde, almost uniquely amongst 19th century operas, the unitary God (Christian or not) is tellingly not referred to once. King Marke calls up to the heavens, but only in a negative sense to say that there is no heaven that can redeem his suffering, and that he is in a personal hell. The lovers do refer to ‘Frau Minne’, a sort of female spirit of love, but this seems metaphorically illustrative of their love rather than a pagan goddess they truly worship - i.e. they say they have given themselves to Frau Minne, but they never formally pray to her or pay her homage in any way. In a godless world, Tristan und Isolde can only really appeal to themselves to define their values, and they are bound by conventional language and tropes to express these new ideas and feelings.

The lengthy discussion about Day and Night in the love duet is really about stepping out of the buttoned up strictures of rationality, society, and normal life (Day) and into the boundless world of instinct, intuition, and feelings (Night). The darkness of Night is then further associated with the ultimate abyss, death, as Tristan and Isolde know that their love cannot in fact exist in the cold reality of Day. From the beginning of Act 1, there is a drive towards death in the piece, specifically the mutual death of Tristan and Isolde together.. To atone for Tristan having killed Morold, In Act 1 Isolde asks Tristan to willingly drink a death potion. Secretly she also plans to drink the death potion and kill herself, leading to their double suicide. However, unbeknownst to them, Isolde’s servant Brangaene has switched death potion with a love potion, and so instead of dying, the two fall desperately in love.

Wagner makes it extremely clear from many hints in his text and music that this love already exists strongly for both Tristan und Isolde - they cannot admit this love to each other because of their own moral codes, and the society they find themselves in. So for Wagner, the potion does not cause there to be love where there was none before, but rather, it enables them to transcend their moral scruples and shame, and act out what they had previously only fantasised about, but denied to themselves. 

I can’t help but be amused by how acute an observer of the anglo-irish psyche Wagner proves himself to be, given that there is hardly a couple in the British isles that did not get together by first imbibing a quantity of mind altering liquid (AKA alcohol) to overcome their embarrassment and switch off their inner monologue of self restraint! 

Less flippantly, both Tristan and Isolde fully expect to die, and willingly so, at the end of Act 1. If we are to look at this moment symbolically, it is only because they are willing to die to their old identities and self images, that they are able to be reborn in their identities as lovers.

Then in Act 2, Tristan and Isolde seek to enter the realm of Night together, which is associated with ego death and ultimate oblivion, but only as an ultimate consummation of their love. It’s hard or perhaps impossible to know exactly what this means in a strictly analytical sense and it is perhaps the opera’s central ambiguity, but it’s clearly Wagner’s most important theme as he approaches the subject again and again in different ways. 

In Act 3, Tristan is tortured by the endless Day he has to suffer through, and the unquenchable yearning that Tristan feels for Isolde. Their indissoluble love that shines for him still and that he feels is the realest part of him, means that neither his wound can heal, nor can he die, until he is reunited with Isolde. Fascinatingly, in a passage that marks the climax of his narrative arc, Wagner presages the psychoanalytic movement by 40 years: it is only when Tristan has gone back to his earliest traumas, the memories of learning of the deaths of his parents, and come to the realisation and fully taken on the responsibility that it was he himself who has concocted his own predicament (“The terrible draught, I myself brewed it!”), that he can die to his identity as a victim and sufferer, and find Isolde again. Symbolically this moment of realisation is the event that allows Isolde’s return in the drama. Wagner’s music in this Act conjures both a bleakness and searing suffering unmatched in the rest of his oeuvre, and is the place where Wagner is most unbeholden to anything previously composed by himself or others. 

One might summarise the central idea of the opera by saying that the blazing ideal of Tristan and Isolde’s love cannot exist during the Day (that is in the lucid realm of normal life with its rules and strictures) and so it is only in dying together to the limitations of this life that the ideal of their love can truly live. But in what sense can their love, which is a surely a relational thing between the two of them, truly exist if both of their consciousnesses have evaporated, and either simply ceased to exist as the atheist materialist might have it, or dissolved into unity with everything, as an Eastern mystic might see it, and which Isolde’s words during the final scene strongly suggest is her felt experience of what is happening to her in that moment? That is left unexplained in the text by Wagner, yet the overwhelming potency of Isolde’s final scene (known as the Liebestod or Love-Death) which is experienced as an extraordinarily satisfying and moving conclusion of the dramatic and musical tensions in opera, is an intuitive and deeply felt indication that something real and true has been expressed by Wagner, however mysteriously. 

Wagner as Dramatist

Above I have expressed my scepticism that the meaning of this opera can be reduced to a neat formula or philosophy. Wagner’s works deal with true symbols, which mean that they are truly the artist’s best attempt at expressing what he has to express, as opposed to the artificial symbolism of lesser creators, where the symbol is calculated merely to arbitrarily ‘stand in’ for something else, without also itself deeply expressing the qualities of the thing that is trying to be expressed. 

In this production I have as far as possible tried to remain true to the story that Wagner intended to tell. This means telling the story as vividly and clearly as possible, but also honouring the ambiguities in the piece, and not trying to give trite answers to what are insoluble mysteries. Tristan und Isolde is to me Wagner’s best attempt to express something that is in essence inexpressible using language alone - the ambiguities in the text are fulfilled in the music, which is itself a language that communicates things in a way that we can’t express in analytical terms. 

Of the great operatic composers, Wagner is only matched in the slowness of his dramatic pacing by Handel at his most extreme. He brings the pregnant pause to a level never before seen on the operatic stage and perhaps not since. In alternating slow with very rapid action, this sets up massive contrasts in the huge arcs of his acts, but by occasionally straining his audience’s attention right to the edge of (dare we say it?) boredom, I think Wagner is also deliberately allowing us to reflect on the material in real time, and so then also enter a state of self reflection. I feel certain also that it was Wagner’s intention that his works would resonate differently for each audience member, and so the many layered ambiguities of plot and symbol allow each audience member to complete the work internally by experiencing it then and reflecting on it. What can seem interminable on a first listen, can become fascinating with increased familiarity, and as one’s relationship with the work deepens, this world of private meanings and resonances can be elaborated within, as new musical and emotional links are noticed in the incredibly intricate web that he creates his works out of.

So much has been written about Wagner’s use of Leitmotifs to structure his operas that I will offer only a brief description here for the uninitiated. Wagner characterises every recurring idea in his operas with a musical motif. These musical ideas then return, evolve, recombine with other ideas, and cross pollinate with each other so that he tells the story on the plane of the music simultaneously to the libretto, giving the operas an unusually deep and rich subtext. Although it is a fascinating exercise to trace these patterns through the opera, the effect of it works on a subliminal level, and does not require study to have the effects of this massive technical undergirding to be immediately felt in a visceral way.

The musical language of Tristan und Isolde was radically new in 1859 in its use of unresolved dissonance (and in virtually every other parameter), so aptly depicting the endless yearning of Tristan and Isolde with unflinching insight. The opera famously never fully resolves musically until the last few seconds of its over four hour duration: never before or since had the philosophical meaning of an opera been so deeply allied to very means with which it was expressed musically.

Notes on this Production

In this opera, Wagner makes Isolde’s reticence, anger, and shame the focus of Act 1. She is furious at Tristan because he killed Morold and then tricked her into healing his wound whilst in disguise as ‘Tantris’, and also because she feels humiliated that he does not appear to return the feelings of love she feels for him, and has instead come to claim her for returning the love she feels, and instead has chosen to claim her as a bride for his uncle. 

But I think there is another potent wellspring of her anger and shame - namely, the fact that she has fallen in love with her betrothed’s killer. This makes her a war bride, an understandably very controversial but not unstudied phenomenon, whereby a woman can genuinely fall in love with the warrior who killed her previous husband (and often also her children with that man). If we think about it in coldly evolutionary terms, the ability to be brutally pragmatic and accept the new circumstances in which a war bride finds herself in, could be biologically extremely beneficial in comparison to the alternatives. Given the bloody history of the human race, some have suggested that our ancestors are more likely to have been those women who in times of tribal warfare most fully managed to move on and made the most of their situations. What Wagner brilliantly illustrates in my opinion is that this massive shift in allegiance likely wouldn’t come without some seriously intense inner conflict and strife, and Isolde’s outward fury at Tristan is mirrored by an equally intense self disgust at what she perceives to be a moral weakness in herself, and a betrayal of her first love for Morold. In the first act she is tormented by the young sailor’s song - in this production he becomes an internal reminder of the voice of that first love, haunting her thoughts and causing immense inner turmoil.

It has often been remarked that the drama virtually pauses during this massive Love duet of Act 2, which is at risk of devolving first into philosophising and then at times even into grammarless word salad. Many famous productions have left it essentially unstaged, allowing the music to do its potent work. But to me this misses the point of this crucial central panel of the opera. Tristan and Isolde are at this point living outside of all the normative practises of their society: in the pursual of their overweening passion for one another, Tristan and Isolde are committing adultery, betraying a best friend, a King, an uncle, a husband, and putting the entire kingdom in jeopardy. They know this, but they have to make the case to themselves and each other that the depth of their feelings justifies it. 

Freed from their past identities, In the love duet I think we see Tristan and Isolde constructing together their own personal mythology, which must include definitions of good and bad, right and wrong, a cosmology, and also a symbolic language to express the inexpressible. This also implies requiring a set of rituals by which they can embody, remember, keep track of, and share this mythology with each other. Man can not live without rituals, a fact that Wagner was keenly aware of. The death potion that turns out to be a love potion is one of the most important parts of their shared mythology, as it precipitated the moment when they could first admit their love to themselves and each other, which they experience as a moment of seeing things clearly for the first time, and their previous identities being merely dreams or illusions.

To sustain this private world of meanings, rituals and symbols, it stands to reason that they would gather these from half remembered traditions and myths that they assemble together, as well as moments from their own short history together. I felt the love potion was central to this, as a sort of drink of communion for them and so they continue to reenact the moment with each other. Each has become the centre of gravity for the other as they endlessly spiral in towards each other, dramatically and musically. This feeling of yearning and falling towards the other is something that perhaps could never be consummated as fully physically as the depth of their feelings require of them.

The unbridled flow of adjectives and abstract nouns in their love music that might unkindly be termed ‘word salad’ is a reflection of the still unbounded and ill defined realm that Tristan und Isolde find themselves in: they are desperate to articulate and communicate to each other thoughts and feelings for which they have no clear language for. In this Tristan und Isolde are not accidentally doing what Wagner himself was doing in all his works - as discussed above, in his post-Christian worldview, Wagner spent his entire career trying to construct from the foundations a mythology by which he and other Europeans might live. 

Without wanting to say too much, in the design of the opera, I sought with my designer Caitlin Abbott to mirror the transformations of the plot in the costumes and the set designs. Just as Tristan carries his history inescapably with him as he transforms his identity throughout the opera, so the items that create the boat in Act 1 cling to him and accompany his journey, until he is carrying the full weight of his history about him in Act 3.

In Act 3, Tristan has suffered a complete breakdown of identity - he can no longer return either to the model of honour and knightly devotion that he acted out in his life prior to drinking the love potion in the realm of ‘Day’, nor, deprived of Isolde, can he be the unbounded lover in the realm of ‘Night’. In the full arc of the story, he almost dies three times (twice willingly) before his final death at the end of Act 3. Tristan lives in a sort of limbo in Act 3, unable to be released of his inner torment until he is reunited with Isolde, to whom he has cleaved himself spiritually. Mirroring Act 1, we are at sea again, as he awaits her on a jetty, looking out to sea with Kurwenal, the two of them waiting and hoping.

In the final moments of the opera, Isolde is clearly having a moment of profound revelation, expressed in the terms she knows, and she asks her surviving friends King Marke and Brangane a series of questions - do they not see it to? For years I have wanted to see it staged in a way that makes it clear that she is trying to express something vital and revelatory and immediate (rather than epic and abstracted and philosophical), and so it has been a pleasure to work with this wonderfully talented cast to bring the drama to this conclusion.

Die Fledermaus Programme Notes

Overview

Johan Strauss II’s operetta Die Fledermaus was an instant hit at its premiere in 1874, and has never left the repertoire since. Virtually all other operettas from this era have faded into oblivion, so why has this one survived?

Most obviously of course, we can credit the astonishing score, carried by a never ending stream of superbly catchy melodies, served up on a ravishingly refined orchestral canvas and deliciously piquant harmonies, that add just enough spice and musical zest to the slightly conservative world of the waltz tune. There’s no dead wood either - every number either furthers the plot, develops characters and relationships, or offers moments for vocal display (and usually all three at once!). It’s all just so much better than it needs to be, for what could easily have been a throwaway entertainment to fill another gap in another Vienna opera season. 

However, musical refinement and quality is a feature of much of Johann Strauss II’s oeuvre, and so it is perhaps the piece’s dramatic and comic values that set this operetta most apart from its contemporaries. Famously, comedy very often dates badly, especially when it is very topical in its references or parodic of a particular time and place. Die Fledermaus has not suffered this fate because it deals with timeless themes. While on the surface much of the piece is farcical and absurd, because the characters are so strongly drawn, sympathetic, and recognisable, and the situations are so astutely observed psychologically, there’s real life that animates the confection and artifice and touches on deep archetypal truths hiding just behind the frothy surface fun. 

Themes

Hugely beneficial to Die Fledermaus’ success is that the piece is sex obsessed (what could be more timelessly audience pleasing than this?!) though without ever lapsing into obscenity, brilliantly treading the tightrope between surface respectability and scandal, naughty but nice, guilt free thrills for a high brow audience seeking a little saucy entertainment on a night off from the exalted peaks of Wagner, and Verdi. 

Not coincidentally, this temporary lapse into frivolity and excess is also a main theme of the operetta as a whole: while the plot flirts constantly with infidelity, it never actually crosses the line. So despite the fact that consciously Eisenstein has every intention of being unfaithful to his wife, in actual fact, the central image of the plot is that of the husband aroused by and seducing his own wife in unfamiliar dress up clothes - an unconscious example of how to keep a bourgeois marriage interesting, without the associated scandal and heartbreak that a real infidelity would bring. The fact that Rosalinde forgives her husband at the end might seem implausible, until we realise that she has also actually enjoyed and benefited from the process of reinventing herself. She has gained more pleasure from it than she had from her almost affair with her tenor. 

That renewal gained by a night of exotic fun, is mirrored in the structure of the piece as a whole - from bourgeois conformity in Act I, to excess and intoxication in artificial high society in Act II, followed by the hard yet oddly reassuring hangover of real life the next day in the prison of Act III. This is no different from the renewal and refreshment we get from going on holiday to a far off country, or from the Christmas period at the end of the year, or even a trip to the opera house - a short period of indulgence and novelty, where the normal rules don’t apply, before returning to our little lives, reinvigorated and revitalised, but also gently relieved to be back home with our familiar routines and burdens!

The dangers of always living in the luxurious, the extreme, the unusual, are depicted most acutely in the alarming character of Prince Orlofsky (made more uncanny by his part being sung by a woman, a man in arrested development who sings in the vocal register of a young boy). He has seen everything, tried everything, and for all his fabulous wealth, he is utterly bored by and disenchanted with life, his pitch-black depression punctuated only by episodes of extreme violence towards his guests. He teams up with Falke to aid and enable the latter’s revenge plot on his friend Eisenstein, served up as an entertainment for the prince. Like us, Orlofsky is genuinely entertained by the suffering of Eisenstein, and the multiple instances of other characters donning various costumes, pretensions, and social masks to get what they think they want. This entertainment seems genuinely curative for him, a curious mix of sadism, and genuine catharsis brought about by the little social drama that is unfurling in his house, and he is finally able to laugh again. And so it is for us too!

Parody of our Favourite Artform

Another key to this work is the games it plays with the genre - the piece constantly parodies and skewers the operatic world itself. This happens most obviously in the character of Alfred, a brilliantly funny portrait of a narcissistic and supremely self confident tenor. Rosalinde only truly finds him enticing when he sings, the domain in which he is truly competent, and from which he generalises hs general brilliance, though of course in his profession he is only impersonating a heroic male ideal. Clearly our own culture’s confusion about the status and worth of celebrities and entertainers is not at all a new phenomenon…

Adele of course wants to escape her humdrum life as a servant, and join her sister Ida in the operatic and theatrical world, and her Act 2 aria becomes a sort of audition piece for finding the financial backing that this will require. Elsewhere, the conventions of 19th century operatic form are ably parodied in the music, where the overwrought pathos of the farewell trio in Act I, incongruously flips to manic jollity and back again, while the libretto doesn’t seem to notice these changes at all.

The Production

All this is a rich brew that provides a satisfying undergirding to what is above all hilarious and farcical comedy. Without wanting to over explain the present production, by setting it in the 1920s, an era that felt a keen tension between the last vestiges of Edwardian propriety and morals, and the need for carefree revelry and excess in the wake of the First World War, we hope to create a fun and cogent setting for this brilliant piece, that encompasses the concerns of the libretto, elucidates the characters, tells the story, without giving it a heavy handed “concept” that would interfere with the sheer joy of the piece, which is its ultimate meaning. 

Above all then: please enjoy!

Hansel und Gretel programme notes

Premiered in 1893, Engelbert Humperdinck’s* Hänsel und Gretel is the king of children’s operas. In it, Humperdinck manages to integrate two huge currents in 19th century German music. The first is the rich tradition of folk song, a deep well of melody and direct sentiment that also inspired Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, and informed their forest centred Romanticism, and kept the whole highfalutin project of German music grounded in the vernacular. The second is the gigantic music dramas of Wagner, which represented the most advanced, complex, and radically up to date music by any composer of the era. Humperdinck was a protégé of Wagner’s, and heavily involved in the first production of Wagner’s final opera Parsifal in 1882.

The result of these rich ingredients is a delicious confection, truly the best of both worlds, unbeatable both in its winsome tunefulness, and also in its ravishingly lush harmony and orchestration. As some admirers have remarked, such lavishly well made beauty is really too good for children! But the opera is also a tremendous amount of fun and is a great entry point into German opera. The opera’s influence was far reaching too - Richard Strauss conducted the premiere and he directly borrowed and stole from it in his operas his entire career. Dvorak’s Rusalka also owes a huge debt of gratitude to this work, not just in its superb handling of folk song in the context of 19th century symphonic music, but also in the orchestral colours and delicate evocation of the forest that Humperdinck manages.

The subject is extremely deep and potent too. Fairy tales represent some of the oldest cultural endowments that we have, and many can be traced back to sources older than the founding texts of the world’s major religions. These stories, iterated and refined endlessly through hundreds of generations of parents retelling these bed time stories to their children, represent perhaps the most profound body of knowledge that we have about how children should properly navigate the many difficulties of becoming adults.

Hansel und Gretel contains many astonishing psychological insights, mostly centred around the dangers posed by the ‘devouring’ mother (as portrayed by the witch). While their real mother is not caring enough, and, poor and at the end of her wits, sends her children out into the forest to gather berries (perhaps never to return), more pernicious for being so appealing and sweet, is the all-too-caring mother, who destroys her children through coddling. This mother, terrified of being abandoned, implicitly offers her children a deal: I will continue to provide everything for you; you can stay infantile and in a world of idle pleasures (sweets, games, relaxation) and are not required to strive to make anything of yourself in the world. In exchange, all I require is that you never leave me. This is a remarkably effective and seductive deal as it appeals to a deep desire in us for simplicity and an end to our suffering, and when this path is taken it ensures that children remain useless and impotent and ever less able to face the challenges of the world. The drawback is that it also breeds deep, dark resentment in the child for the parents and the world. This is the sort of home situation that leads to children creating elaborate revenge fantasies against a world that they are incapable of navigating - the school shootings in America are the most extreme end of this type. One of Freud’s achievements was delineating this family dynamic very vividly in his writings (in its many degrees of severity), pointing out that it is very peculiar to humans because our period of infancy and maturation is so extremely long compared to other species. But it’s all there encoded even more vividly in the story of Hansel and Gretel, hundreds of years before, in the image of the witch who lives in the house made of sweets, who ultimately desires to devour the children in her grasp.

But Hansel and Gretel do not succumb to the witch and the story offers a way out of this archetypal predicament. Indeed, just as potent as the image of the witch, is the image of the children overcoming their situation by using their own inner resources - their instincts and cunning - to destroy the witch and steal her jewels. In Humperdinck’s opera, the children are initially a bag of impulsive desires and fears, at war with one another and their parents, but by the by degrees find a way to cooperate and overcome their individual weaknesses, and at the end the family are reunited and healed. We even get a tacked on Christian moral that reminds us that this ancient wisdom is trying to be squeezed into a very Victorian set of manners that sit uneasily with the gruesome murder that the kids have just triumphantly performed!  

This all seems very heavy and dark, but the miracle of art is that it can treat deep themes with a light handed touch, and my aim with the production has been above all to entertain and tell the story with the fun and wit and clarity it deserves! Above all, I invite you to enjoy the show!

*To clear up any confusion: the 1960s pop star stole his name from the 1860s original!

Dido and Aeneas Programme Notes

About the Piece

Henry Purcell (1659-1695) was the greatest English composer of his age, and though he died at only 36, he was recognised and celebrated during his life as a master of sacred, dramatic, and occasional music. He left us over 700 works, whose overall quality is of a very high order, but Dido and Aeneas (likely composed c.1789) has become his most performed piece, and has captured the modern imagination as few other pieces of Baroque theatre have.

It is a remarkably compact work, the whole tragic narrative compressed by composer and librettist into the span of less than an hour. The libretto by Nahum Tate is unusually strong, the whole piece unfurling in rhyming couplets, each of which both pithily moves the plot on, and unambiguously reveals the inner lives of the characters and their attitudes towards each other. If anything, the pace can feel alarmingly fast (very rare in opera!), the action moving in the recitatives especially at a blinding pace, and requiring the singers to respond to each new line with quicksilver shifts of feeling and attitude– no generalised operatic emoting here!

Tate uses book four of the Aeneid as his starting point, which tells the entire Dido saga in a few blisteringly intense pages. The context is that Dido, queen of Carthage, has been ruling her city state alone since the death of her husband. She has forsworn remarrying, but finds herself hopelessly in love with Aeneas against her better judgement. At the opera’s opening she is tormented by her love, feelings that she thinks cannot be shared with anyone at court. Tate is an astute psychologist though, and reveals that this ‘secret passion’ which Dido thinks she is concealing so well, has in fact already been long guessed and is later encouraged by Dido’s courtiers, led by her confidante Belinda and the mysteriously unnamed Second Woman.

In the Virgil, it is the gods that intervene with this burgeoning romance, and Mercury appears as a messenger from Jupiter to tell Aeneas to leave Carthage and go to found Rome. Tate changes the source of this supernatural force of separation - he realises that in theatre, a true antagonist is required, and so he introduces the resentful Sorceress, who leads a (very 17th century English) coven of witches. Dido and the Sorceress never meet in the opera - the latter is simply a source of chaos and ruination, motivated as she says by loathing and envy of all those “in prosperous state”.

About the production

In his libretto, Tate compresses Virgil’s already taut narrative still further, and I have sought to reintroduce a few details from this source material so as to tell the story more fully. One example is Dido and Aeneas’s wedding in the grove (or cave as it is in the original). Its impromptu, unofficial nature leads to a bitter and irreconcilable disagreement as to how binding it is. Another is that nowhere in Nahun’s libretto do we see Aeneas interacting with his sailors, and nor do we get Dido’s desperate reaction to seeing the ships being prepared to leave Carthage’s harbours for Rome.

We have also been thinking a lot during our rehearsals about the fact that the story of Dido and Aeneas has been told, and retold so many times over the last three millenia. Already for Virgil, writing in the first century BC, the story of the Aeneid was more than 700 years old. Then, four centuries later, in about 350 AD, the magnificent Low Ham Mosaic (which can be seen in this very room) was created for a Roman villa situated nearby in Somerset. The mosaic depicts in several panels the whole story of Dido and Aeneas, and formed the basis of my ideas for this production - the nature of story telling, fate, and how we relate to our history and transmit stories in our culture.

In the early 14th century, Dido is depicted in Dante’s Inferno as an inhabitant of the second circle of hell, eternally buffeted by the torrid winds of desire. Later in the Renaissance she was still a figure of fascination and became the subject of a play by Christopher Marlowe, and was obviously an important figure for Shakespeare too, who refers to her no fewer than twelve times in his plays. Purcell and Tate’s opera is a very 17th century take on the story, looking back to Virgil, but with the addition of the English witches already mentioned, and the name Belinda too, very evocative of their own age, rather than that of the ancients (Virgil calls her Anna). An ideal tragic operatic heroine, there are dozens of operas in which Dido is further depicted; after Purcell most famously as a central character in Berlioz’s masterpiece The Trojans of 1860.

Then, after a period of neglect, Purcell’s opera was dusted off and resurrected in several productions in the early 20th century, and a new generation saw his incarnation of Dido. The Low Ham mosaic was uncovered in Somerset in 1938, but had to wait until the mid 1950s to be fully excavated and placed in its present location. The opera increased in prominence in the late 20th century as the historically informed performance movement made performances of Baroque opera both more frequent, and more central to the musical and cultural life in the UK and abroad. And here we are today, presenting it to you, our audience!

Somerset Opera has now existed for half a century, and I wanted to use costumes in this show selected from the dozens of previous productions in this company’s history, encompassing many different operas and historical periods that those operas were set in. In doing this, I hope it encourages us to reflect again on how we have told the story of Dido in Somerset, reaching from the present production in 2024 AD right back to the Low Ham mosaic in 350 AD.

French Cantatas: The Theatre of the Salon

Programme

  • Ouverture from Sylla et Glaucus (& Overtura no III op XIII) - Leclair

  • La Morte di Lucretia - Montéclair

  • Orphée: Laissez-vous toucher par mes pleurs - Clérambault

  • Musette for Viola da Gamba - Marin Marais

  • Les Regrets: Venez chère ombre - Louis Antoine Lefebvre

  • A Storm from Les Boréades - Rameau

********* Interval ********* 

  • Entrée de Polimnie from Les Boréades - Rameau

  • Sans freyer dans ce bois - Charpentier

  • Le Berger Fidèle - Rameau

  • Six dances: Tambourins and tunes by Rameau, Mouret, Montéclair, Duval

  • Les Génies: Final chorus - Mademoiselle Duval

Hello, and welcome to our show! We are serving up a sumptuous musical feast of music from the 18th century French Salon, a selection of the finest dishes and delicacies that these largely unknown composers offered up 300 years ago, that we can still sample all these centuries later. We are delighted to have you join us!

Sarah and I had a wonderful time at the beginning of this year, looking through all sorts of forgotten music by little known French composers writing between 1700s and 1730s, in the generation between Lully and Rameau. Rameau, the summation and crowning glory of the French Baroque, we knew of course and loved already, but names like Courbois, Lefebvre, Montéclair, Clerembaut, Leclair, and Duval were either largely unknown to us, or entirely new. We discovered that many of them had written chamber cantatas intended for salon performance, a genre that is the introvert cousin of the grand operas that were happening on the great stages of Paris and Versailles. Virtually all of them are written for a solo voice, and would not originally have been acted out - the aim was more a sort of musical storytelling, often with a classical subject and an improving moral messages about virtue or love. For Rameau, his early works in this genre (such as Le Berger Fidele of 1728) were an innovative testing ground for the revolutionary operas that were still to come from him.

These pieces were a thrilling discovery for us, not just for the ravishing musical beauty and vitality contained within these gems of compression, but also for their potent dramatic intensity. I realised that by splitting the solo vocal parts up between a small cast of singers, the theatricality, psychological acuity, and humour of these wonderful works could be released in an exciting new way. 

Although this is an all French program, you’ll notice that Monteclair’s superb cantata, La Morte di Lucretia, is actually sung in Italian. There was great debate in French musical circles throughout the 18th century about the value of Italian influence on French music, though usually this was a stylistic debate about the place of melody in the hierarchy of musical concerns and the treatment of words in word setting. It is rarer to get an actual example of a French composer setting an Italian text, and here Monteclair beautifully marries the French style to certain tricks he learned from the Italians, to devastating effect.

Framing the cantatas are overtures, dances, folk tunes, and orchestral storms from some of our favourite operas by Rameau and his contemporaries. In fact, this concert shows the whole span of Rameau’s composing life. Included are two excerpts from Rameau’s Les Boreades, his last opera. Composed in 1763 in the last year of his life, it shows the octogenarian’s powers of invention not just undimmed, but more vital than ever. We have made chamber arrangements of these orchestral pieces to juxtapose this final dramatic flowering of Rameau’s oeuvre with his Salon cantatas, the nursery of his writing for the dramatic stage.

Several of the works on this program have never been played in the UK before, and certainly none of them staged, so we hope you enjoy these tasty offerings!

Synopses

Monteclair - La Morta di Lucretia

Lucretia (a real historical noble woman who died in 510BC) has just been raped by Tarquinius, a tyrant prince of Rome, who is fleeing the scene of the crime. She calls after him and tells him to end her suffering. Her conscience tells her that the only noble thing to do now that she is impure, is to kill herself. Her rape and suicide had enormous political consequences - it lead to a rebellion which meant the end of the Roman monarchy and the beginning of the Roman republic.

Lefebvre - Venez, Cherie hombre

A woman calls to her deceased beloved to return to her. When he doesn’t, she rails against Fate who has brought her this suffering, and asks that Fate at least grant her death so that she can join him.

Rameau - Le Berger Fidele

Amaryllis is about to be sacrificed to the goddess Diana. Her lover Mirtis, a shepherd, appeals to Diana saying that breaking their sweet bond of love is too cruel a punishment. He decides that the true lover should sacrifice himself for his love so vows to take Amaryllis’s place on the altar. This impresses Cupid. At the very last moment, Diana gives a sign that she is content, and that Hymen, god of marriage, has lit his torch, signifying marital happiness. Mirtis praises Cupid, god of Love.

The Elixir of Love Programme Notes

Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love (L’elisir d’amore in Italian) is one of the few indisputably great opera comedies and is in my opinion his greatest comic piece. It was already a hit during its debut performances in 1832 and has remained in the international repertory ever since. Why is this?

The first reason is the music of course. Though composed in just six weeks, the score is a string of memorable charmers, replete with hummable tunes ranging from the heart-breaking to the absurdly comical – Donizetti at the peak of his inspiration. Chief among them is Nemorino’s famous ‘Una Furtiva Lagrima’, which is to the early 19th century as Puccini's ‘Nessun Dorma’ is to the early 20th: a perfect jewel that never dulls with repeated exposure. But there is so much more that is brilliant – Adina’s aria (‘Prendi’) that follows immediately afterwards for instance is just as exquisitely beautiful, as are the endless profusion of inspired duets for every pairing of the four principal singers (shades of Così fan Tutte which was presented by Wild Arts last season).

These satisfying symmetries and patterns in the large-scale structure of the piece – bookended as it is by an aria each for the leading couple to underline how far the twisting story has taken us in two short hours – are the result of an expertly crafted libretto by Felice Romani, one of the best that Donizetti set to music. The plot (taken from Eugène Scribe’s libretto for Daniel Auber’s Le philtre) doesn’t feel dated – the situations are still just as funny, the keen psychological insights into the nature of human courtship, desire, pretence, and illusion remain just as telling, and we can still care about the plot and characters. This is seriously rare in opera librettos of this era. As with all timeless comedy, the humour is born of the situation rather than gags or topical references, and so we find as an audience that we are involved and moved as much as we are amused.

Alongside his already mentioned gift for melody, Donizetti responds musically to Romani’s text with unerring dramatic insight into his characters’ inner lives and outer actions. Like Handel, the astonishing thing with Donizetti always is that he can do so much with so little – so much of his harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic material is cut wholesale from the pop music formulas, routines, clichés even, of his era. And yet, at his best, as here, he is consistently able to catalyse the dramatic moment, finding just the right musical phrase for the situation. The result is a wonderfully lovable, quirky, and three-dimensional set of people, that we as an audience get to enjoy spending an evening with.

In The Elixir of Love, Romani’s basic theme (and that of Scribe before him) is deception versus sincerity. This theme is endlessly revisited among the other early romantics in more serious fare, but it always shows the greatest sophistication to be able to treat a high-minded theme with a light hand in a humorous way. As with Shakespeare’s plots, the central idea is examined in many different ways in the same piece which makes it unconsciously satisfying for us, the audience. Most obviously illustrating the theme is the quack doctor Dulcamara, a loveable rogue and huckster, selling people their own dreams in the form of the titular elixir. In the puffed-up masculinity and bravado of Belcore we see another type of illusion – someone hiding behind uniform, rank, and association, to stand in the place of genuine virtue and strength of character. His presumptuousness makes him the villain, but he is loveable in his blindness and self-belief.

Even witty, sassy, independent, modern Adina, not so obviously a charlatan, is deceiving herself about what she really wants, manipulating others to declare themselves so that she can remain a closed book and cut herself off from the dangers of genuine feeling and of a relationship. She’s too clever for her own good, which she touchingly realises by the end of the piece. Finally, with his heart on his sleeve and too simple to deceive, only Nemorino is a (mostly) honest actor, though Romani’s ingenious use of a magic potion that isn’t in fact magic, shows the power of belief to change our fates – sometimes a little bit of feigned indifference and playing hard to get is all that is needed to lure a match in the game of love – the cat with the string!

The funny twist that means that Nemorino suddenly finds himself the centre of sexual attention in Act II (no spoilers!), is another astute observation about the nature of human desire: the problem of what to value, given the infinite set of facts that lay themselves out in front of us, is an acute one for humans. Usually we outsource this intractable problem to our tribe, and discover what is desirable by watching the behaviour of others, which is especially revealed by where their attention is directed. This is a profound human phenomenon, baked into not just our psyches, but our physiology. Unlike other primates, humans have evolved to be able to see the whites of each other’s eyes, allowing us to observe with incredible accuracy not only the objects of other people’s attention, but also the feelings engendered by that object. This is a huge clue as to what they value, and by implication what we should be valuing but are missing. And so it is for Adina, another little push in her journey from controlled artifice to vulnerable sincerity.

In this production we wanted to stay true to the spirit of this admirable libretto and the warmth of the score, so I sought with my designer Sophie Lincoln to find a setting and visual language that speaks to this. We’ve chosen to set it at the seaside, a place where people seek fun and good times, a place between the known categories of solid land and chaotic sea, where there’s a sense of carnival, possibility, and searching for the unexpected. Not for nothing do so many romances start there! Belcore’s preening masculinity is amplified by making him a captain in the navy, rather than a sergeant in the army. We’ve also set it in the 1950s, an era of incredible glamour and sensitivity to image, with impossible claims in cartoonishly deceptive print advertising underlining Dulcamara’s role, and Nemorino serving as a link to old world, home-spun sincerity, while also being just a hair’s breadth away from the new culture of cool – a feigned impression of not caring what others think of you.

Above all we want you to have fun! So… sit back and enjoy the show!

A Child in Striped Pyjamas Programme Note

How to put the Holocaust to Music?

About Noah

I first met Noah Max in 2018 during his father Robert’s 50th birthday ‘cellobration’: a gathering of cellists Robert had taught and admired, playing together in a monumental cello concert. Here was Robert’s shockingly articulate and confident 19-year-old son (who had recently quit the Royal Academy of Music after one term to forge his own path in the classical world as a composer, conductor and painter), standing in a packed hall of eminent musicians singing ‘Under the Sea’ from The Little Mermaid.

In the intervening five years Noah has made good on this extraordinary courage and self-belief. He has premiered many new works with his Echo Ensemble, mounted several public exhibitions of his paintings, entered a publishing deal with United Music Publishing and seen an album dedicated to his music released on Toccata Classics.

About the music

Noah has set himself a huge aesthetic challenge in writing this piece: how does one set the Holocaust to music? What musical sounds are the right ones to reconjure the darkest chapter of human history? Is it ethical to try? Noah feels it is inevitable that artists will be moved to respond to something as epoch-shattering as the Holocaust, not only to comment on it but also to help us understand it better. As a director my goal is primarily to realise Noah’s piece as fully as possible. Secondarily, it is to reveal to Noah what he has produced so that he can understand his own work more thoroughly.

Though the work contains various formal elements that harken back to classical models (for instance, the first scene is structured in a broad sonata form), I think Noah has created an opera with an immediately discernible large-scale structure which will resonate powerfully with audiences.

Blocks of tonal choral music, redolent of Synagogue service music, frame the work. This establishes a musical space which feels like 'home' - powerfully rooted in traditional, recognisable harmony and cadences, arching cantorial melodic gestures and four-square rhythm.

After this sonorous opening the familiar world gradually melts away, the music 'retuning' the ensemble with perfect fifths resounding in all registers. We transition  into  a  dissonant landscape that is still broadly tonal yet spikier, unfamiliar, unanchored. Very often the vocal line will be accompanied by instrumentation in painfully close harmony, clusters of semitones contradicting the characters' utterances. This, coupled with angular, wide-ranging vocal leaps, adds to the sense of unease and dislocation that both children feel in the new world that Nazism has fashioned around them.

Within this dissonant sound-world are islands of glowing tonality that appear at key moments in the children’s evolving relationship. The piece makes subtle use of leitmotifs: this 'friendship chorale’ recurs and transforms throughout as their friendship grows. These oases of respite serve as reminders of normality and beauty in a place that is distant from both whilst always avoiding mawkishness and sentimentality.

Alongside these moments of connection, the 'home' Synagogue music regularly appears, punctuating the uneasy mists and screaming barbarity with powerful pillar-like hymns. We are brought gently out of the linear dramatic flow as if by a narrator. This gives us space to reflect on what feels like a memory of what has been left behind, as well as the eternal spiritual values that have outlived every tyranny of mankind.

Castor et Pollux Programme Notes

(A shorter version of this article originally appeared in May 2022 edition of Opera Now)

Like Mahler, Janacek, Bruckner and Ives, Rameau is no longer a ‘cause’: his works have been widely recorded, his importance and genius recognised and lauded, and his operas are regularly performed, in France and Germany at least. Yet in Britain, we still lag behind. This rare performance of his masterpiece Castor et Pollux is a stepping-stone towards changing this. 

When Jonathan and I started talking about putting on a Rameau opera before lockdowns struck in 2020, we discovered that we had in common that not one person had mentioned Rameau during either of our very British musical educations. For me, discovering Rameau's music whilst at university felt like uncovering a secret world of sensuous delights – the endless originality and vitality of his melodic invention and harmonic exploration, the staggering ear for orchestral sonority, unmatched in his era, the luminous beauty of his choruses, the incredible modernity and psychological depth of his operatic characters. He inherits and reinvigorates the by-then tired conventions of French opera, and finds in them endless freshness and opportunity for new means of dramatic expression. 

Castor et Pollux is a case in point. The very fine libretto, by Pierre-Joseph Bernard, tells of the quest of the immortal Pollux to save his slain mortal twin brother Castor from Hades; this at the request of the princess Télaïre, Castor's betrothed, who Pollux is of course also in love with. So far, so predictable, you might think: typical Baroque fare - an ancient Greek myth with the Baroque obsession with love triangles, quadrangles, pasted on top. But unusually here, the characters are exceptionally strongly drawn, revealing a complex inner life, and in scene after scene we see their brilliant rhetorical abilities as they twist against the hand that fate has dealt them, manipulating and consoling one another in equal measure. 

Rameau responded to his text with a score of incredible richness, subtlety and contrasts.  Télaïre’s ravishingly bittersweet solo lament ‘Tristes Apprêts’ with its nimbus of luminous string and bassoon writing surrounding the fragile vocal line, is all the more moving, for instance,for coming after the chromatic desolation of the chorus's funeral march for Castor ‘Que tout gémisse’. 

We found in rehearsal that with its basis in a strongly declamatory style, Rameau's vocal writing invites gesture and movement in every phrase. This links it more seamlessly into the element of dance, which in this piece is brilliantly integrated into the work as a whole. In Act 2, Pollux's father (Jupiter) reminds his son of the pleasures of immortality with the help of Hebe and her beguiling entourage. Pollux's terse interjections keep the drama going, rather than everything grinding to a halt for a divertissement, as so often happens with operatic ballet sequences. Later, the dancers and chorus, now demons, bar Pollux's entry to the underworld at the gates of Hades. This demon music was enough to send at least one other composer mad – poor overlooked Jean-Joseph Mouret was heard singing this chorus in the madhouse before his death, at least according to legend. 

Rameau was very much influenced by his conversations and collaborations with Voltaire, who had a vision for how to reform opera: simple stories with clear action told in depth. Why did we choose to revive the 1737 version, and not the much more commonly staged 1754 revision? For me, the earlier work is much more serious and moving than the later piece – the character motivations are more convincing, especially for Phébé, the fourth member of the love quadrangle. In the earlier version she loves Pollux who spurns her, and she rouses first the Spartan citizens, and then demons to block his entry to Hades. In the later version, her affection switches to Castor, which hugely vitiates the impact of this impressive scene. The many excisions that Bernard made for the later version speed up the action, but often at the cost of the drama's logic. We also lose much fine music in the pruning undertaken for the later version including the superb trio ‘Je ne verrais plus’ in Act 3.  

The characters 

Taking a cue from the very last line of the prologue, Minerva can be seen as an interesting framing device. She briefly serves a metatheatrical function, introducing the opera proper after the allegorical Prologue (which charts a course from war to peace). She celebrates the possibility of art which can only happen in a time of peace, and sets up the broad thematic arc of the opera (from war to loving reconciliation) that is about to follow. It’s a deft touch from Bernard which we’ve tried to emphasise here. 

As we’ve rehearsed the piece, it became obvious to us that the Prologue has painful contemporary resonances with the current war in Ukraine. The Prologue’s text makes allegorical reference to the Polish War of Succession which had concluded not long before the opera’s premiere. Minerva is the goddess of defensive war, an embodiment of a concept deeply rooted in the European psyche for at least three millennia. NATO is certainly a late flowering (at least partly) of this same idea. Minerva however, is powerless to resist Mars’s attacks, and calls on Venus, goddess of beauty and love to quell Mars. 

In the opera proper we are no longer dealing with cyphers and we find characters of real flesh and blood, possessing astonishingly subtle intentions and feelings, however mythic the setting. Telaire is a peculiarly modern 18th century woman in a world of Spartan expectations. Hers is the strongest depiction of mourning that Rameau ever attempted, and her desire to escape this suffering sets off the entire plot. Quite different from her friend Phébé (or, for that matter Pollux, the Spartan hero), she finds no satisfaction in blood vengeance as an amelioration or cancellation of her injuries. She will not accept her fate, and instead, with terrifying single mindedness, follows through with a plan which leads others to sacrifice themselves entirely. Her music is exceptionally beautiful throughout the opera, and the libretto constantly reinforces this impression by showing us the effect on all who come into her presence. In the manner of an Ancient Greek tragedy, her unassailable rhetorical skill is both powerful and emotive. 

Phébé, another woman of immense force of character, has entirely different qualities. She has not captivated the men in her life in the manner that Télaïre has, but has very potent compensations: not only is she able to convincingly command the Spartan people to the mouth of Hades to block Pollux’s passage, she is also in contact with darker forces beyond the threshold, summoning demons to erupt forth and assail her recalcitrant lover. These events occur in Act 3. Near the end of Act 5, Pollux states rather matter of factly that her only crime was too much love, which is perhaps true. Télaïre’s love has trumped Phébé’s however, and won the day.

The piece as a whole has an interesting dramatic construction. Each of the first four acts centres around a particular character, who sings the principal aria near the beginning of it. Though Télaïre sets the drama going, it is Pollux’s progress from vengeful brother, to unrequited lover, to conflicted, self-sacrificing hero, to constellation in the heavens, which is the common dramatic and emotional thread through the piece. Though he is the immortal twin, he constantly finds himself buffeted by fate, choosing a course of action that is painful to him at every turn, torn as he is between filial and romantic love, most typified in Act 2. Castor is spotlighted in Act 4, located in the Elysian Fields, where despite being offered endless pleasure and play, he yearns still for a life with Télaïre. His quietly radiant aria is the mirror image of Télaïre ‘s earlier lament.

The fifth act focusses on Télaïre and Castor’s relationship finally restored, culminating in a superb storm sequence (the fourth (!) and finest of the opera), and then all are brought back for the final ensemble, a moment which depicts the cosmic dance of the universe. 

Cupid (L’Amour), the main protagonist of the Prologue, remains a hidden force throughout - he is mentioned by both Castor and the Shade (Ombre) in the Elysian fields, his darts reaching even into the underworld. The spirit of love returns at the end as the uniting force of the world, in the wonderful finale, newly discovered by Jonathan and the first time it has been heard anywhere in 285 years! The beautiful aria for Venus, ‘C’est assez regner par les armes’, suffered a similar neglect, so we are delighted bring you both tonight! 

Finally, a note on the structural element in the music and how it relates to the drama. The tense battling string lines of the overture (perhaps representing Mars’s war), return at the end of Act V transfigured into major majesty, just as we were told they would be in the Prologue by Minerva. There are a number of little details like this which provide musico-dramatic continuity throughout the piece. These are very forward looking ways of thinking about musical construction for the time Rameau was writing in, especially if one compares Handel or Vivaldi, his direct contemporaries as opera composers. It is yet one more thing to marvel at in this sublime masterpiece, which has been a joy to work on for all of us. 

108 Operas I would love to direct

A list of 108 operas that I would love to direct. I’m sure there are others that I’ve forgotten to list, but these ones jump out at me! From it you get the gist of where my principal interests are, even if the specific piece isn’t listed here - German, Slavic, and French repertoire, 18th and early 20th century, with a few pieces from other places and times as well (Bel Canto, late Verdi, some British and American operas etc.). Overall, my favourite opera composers are: Mozart, Strauss, Janacek, Rameau, and Schoeck. As you will see as you read down the list, a lot of my favourites are somewhat off the beaten track, alongside the evergreen masterpieces that are staged more often. Most are pieces that are superb musically and dramatically, others are simply wondrous scores, that need a bit of careful thought and love on the dramaturgical side! I have also devised several shows using music that I love, and another interest is staging and developing new work and helping composers and librettists find a shape for their projects - obviously I can’t list as yet uncomposed works here!

Semi staging, full staging, scenes etc. I would jump at the chance to work on any of these. :) The order is vaguely by period and region, not preference! (I’ll update it regularly as I think of more).

Monteverdi - L'incoronazione di Poppea

Purcell - Dido and Aeneas

Rameau - Castor et Pollux

Rameau - Dardanus

Rameau - Hippolyte et Aricie

Rameau - Les Boreades

Rameau - Pygmalion

Rameau - Nelée et Myrthis

Mouret - Les amours de Ragonde

Handel - Alcina

Handel - Orlando

Mozart - Le Nozze di Figaro

Mozart - Don Giovanni

Mozart - Cosi Fan Tutte

Mozart - Die Zauberflöte

Wagner - Lohengrin

Wagner - Die Meistersinger

Wagner - Das Rheingold

Wagner - Die Walküre

Wagner - Siegfried

Wagner - Götterdämmerung

Humperdinck - Hansel und Gretel

Strauss - Salome

Strauss - Elektra

Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier 

Strauss - Ariadne auf Naxos

Strauss - Die Frau Ohne Schatten

Strauss - Intermezzo

Strauss - Die Agyptische Helena

Strauss - Arabella

Strauss - Die Schweigsame Frau

Strauss - Daphne

Strauss - Capriccio

Berg - Wozzeck

Schoeck - Venus

Schoeck - Penthesilea

Schoeck - Massimilla Doni

Schoeck - Das Schloss Durand

Schoeck - Vom Fischer un syner Fru

Schoeck - Don Ranudo

Schoeck - Das Wandbild

Korngold - Violanta

Korngold - Die Tote Stadt 

Korngold - Das Wunder Der Heliane

Korngold - Die Kathrin

Korngold - Die Stumme Serenade

Schrecker - Der Ferne Klang

Schrecker - Die Gezeichneten

Schreker - Christophorus oder Die Vision einer Oper

Goldschmidt - Der Gewaltige Hahnrei

Goldschmidt - Beatrice Cenci

Von Schillings - Mona Lisa

Zemlinsky - Der Zwerg

Zemlinsky - Der König Kandaules

Pfitzner - Palestrina

Braunfels - Die Vögel

Busoni - Doktor Faustus

Hindemith - Mathis der Maler

Hindemith - Die Harmonie der Welt

Ullmann - Der Kaiser von Atlantis

Tchaikovsky - Eugene Onegin

Dvorak - Rusalka

Weinberger - Švanda dudák (Schwanda the Bagpiper)

Janacek - Sarka

Janacek - Jenufa

Janacek - Osud

Janacek - The Cunning Little Vixen

Janacek - Katya Kabanova

Janacek - The Makropulos case

Janacek - From the House of the Dead

Bartok - Bluebeard’s Castle

Stravinsky - The Rake’s Progress

Barber - A Hand of Bridge

Barber - Vanessa

Barber - Antony and Cleopatra

Bernstein - Candide

Hermann - Wuthering Heights

Previn - A Streetcar Named Desire

Holst - The Perfect Fool

Holst - Savitri

Walton - Troilus and Cressida

Britten - Peter Grimes

Britten - Gloriana

Britten - Curlew River

Rossini - Armida

Rossini - La Cenerentola

Rossini - Il viaggio a Reims

Bellini - Il Pirata

Donizetti - L’Elisir D’amore

Donizetti - Maria Stuarda

Donizetti - Lucrezia Borgia

Donizetti - Maria di Rudenz

Cherubini - Medea

Verdi - La Traviata

Verdi - Simon Boccanegra

Verdi - Otello 

Verdi - Requiem

Leoncavallo - Pagliacci

Puccini - Madama Butterfly

Berlioz - Les Troyens

Berlioz - Beatrice et Benedict

Bizet - Carmen

Massenet - Herodiade

Massenet - Manon

Massenet - Thais

Debussy - Pelleas et Melisande

Ravel - L’heure espagnole

Boulanger (Lili) - Faust et Helene

Die Agyptische Helena Synopsis

(Taken from my programme notes, for my production with Fulham Opera)

It is ten days since the fall of Troy and the end of the Trojan War. The Trojan War had raged for ten years, the city besieged by Spartan forces led by King Menelaus, who had launched a thousand ships to bring back his wife, Helen, secretly brought by Prince Paris to Troy. With the famous wooden horse, Troy finally fell, and Menelaus recaptured Helen, bringing her aboard his ship, now sailing back to Sparta.

Act I

Poseidon’s palace on an island near Egypt

Aithra, a sorceress, is waiting for her lover, Poseidon, to return to her for dinner. An Omniscient Seashell that he has left with her tells Aithra that Poseidon is in Ethiopia. Her maids try to pacify her with a lotus Potion of Forgetting, but she complains bitterly that she wants company. Suddenly, the Omniscient Seashell gets a vision from the sea – she sees Menelaus, homeward bound on a ship, poised to murder his sleeping wife Helen below deck. To prevent this, Aithra summons a storm to shipwreck them onto her island.

The unhappy couple enter Aithra's great hall, and immediately Helen tries to convince Menelaus to join her for a meal and to act as husband and wife again. Appalled, Menelaus reminds her of her infidelity and threatens to kill her with a sword. The sword has a history: it belonged to Paris before Menelaus disarmed him and murdered him with his own weapon.

Just as he is poised to strike Helen, Aithra, who has been observing all this time, freezes Menelaus and instructs her malicious female elves to plague Menelaus with visions and nightmares. Menelaus hesitates in killing Helena. The elves get to work and soon Menelaus thinks that Paris is alive again, and he runs outside to kill Paris a second time. The elves laugh at him, engaging him in a phantom battle. 

Exhausted, Helen collapses, and Aithra heals her back to health and youth. She administers her Potion of Forgetting to soothe her. Helen, amazed by her new friend’s magic, soon becomes sleepy and is put to bed in Aithra’s sleeping chamber.

Menelaus storms back in, thinking he has now killed Paris a second time and also Helen (actually just phantoms created by the elves). Aithra greets him and offers him a soothing drink (secretly the forgetting potion). She also invents a story so that he can reconcile with Helen. She tells him that the real Helen was in fact whisked away to an island ten years before and has been innocently sleeping all this time under Aithra's protection. The wanton Helen who ran off with Paris was in fact a lascivious spirit. (None of this is true and Menelaus initially finds it hard to believe.) She tells him to prepare himself to meet the real Helen who is sleeping in the next chamber. 

Menelaus’s anxiety melts into an uncanny calm as the potion has its effect. He is overwhelmed, not knowing how to act, and not thinking himself worthy of this ‘untouched’ Helen, having obsessed about revenge on his wife for ten years. With Aithra’s encouragement he joins Helen in the bedchamber. 

Helen is too scared to return to Sparta immediately, however, so Aithra sends Helen and Menelaus to a desert oasis in the Atlas Mountains, so far away that no one will have heard of the famous Helen of Troy. She also sends with them more lotus potion so that they can continue living in this fantasy together. The elves look on with mocking laughter at their mistress’s plan.

 

Act II

A tented pavilion in an oasis at the base of the Atlas Mountains

After a night of passion, Helen gratefully recounts this ‘second wedding night’. But as morning dawns and Menelaus awakens, the effects of the potion are beginning to wear off. Menelaus is confused about the identity of the woman he is with. He remembers having killed his wife yesterday (actually a phantom conjured by the elves) and believes that the woman who he is with is herself the phantom Helen given to him by Aithra (actually the real Helen of course). Helen realises that living in a drug-dream will not cure Menelaus of his confusion and resolves never to use the lotus potion again.

Suddenly, out of the desert Prince Altair rides in, accompanied by his son Da-ud and his slaves. He reveals he has been sent to protect the couple by Aithra and her sisters. Altair is instantly smitten with Helen, who he has not heard of in this distant land, but instantly recognises her as the most beautiful woman in the world. His son Da-ud is similarly overwhelmed by her divine beauty, and pledges to protect her forever. Menelaus is reminded of Helen amongst the Trojan princes, all of them inflamed with passion for her. At Altair’s suggestion, Menelaus and Da-ud go off to the desert to hunt gazelles.

A disguised Aithra bursts in revealing that her servant erroneously sent Helen off to the desert with a Potion of Recollection, alongside the Potion of Forgetting. Aithra is relieved to find that they haven’t yet drunk the potion as she is convinced that if Menelaus remembers the truth, he will murder Helen. Helen, however, is convinced that this Potion of Recollection is the only thing that will allow a reconciliation with Menelaus. 

Altair returns and, while Menelaus and Da-ud are still out hunting, attempts to seduce Helen. In the distance the hunt is seen, and the confused Menelaus kills Da-ud, thinking the young prince to be Paris (thus making this the third time Menelaus thinks he's killed Paris). Menelaus returns with Da-ud’s body. At Helen’s prompting, he slowly realises that he has mistakenly killed an innocent in his attempt to punish Helen. Altair is indifferent to Da-ud’s death, saying he has plenty more sons, and goes off to prepare a feast in Helen’s honour. 

Menelaus says he needs to prepare himself for death so that he can join Helen in death and be reunited with his spouse (he still believes that he has murdered the ‘real’ Helen and the woman standing next to him is the phantom Helen). Helen prepares the Potion of Recollection for him, which he takes, thinking it to be a potion of death. As the potion has its effect he suddenly realises that the real Helen stands before him. He prepares once more to kill her, but then a miracle occurs – he sees Helen for who she truly is, not the whore, and not the goddess, but a woman of flesh and blood.

Prince Altair returns, and seeing the couple reconciled, orders that they be seized and Menelaus put in chains. Aithra steps in, summoning Poseidon’s phalanx of soldiers who quickly pacify Altair and his men. Aithra announces the arrival of Helen and Menelaus’s daughter Hermione. The reunited family leave for Sparta.

Guido Martin Brandis

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