WFO, 28/10/2022

Dvořák : Armida

Chorus and Orchestra of Wexford Festival Opera

Norbert Baxa

Armida was Dvořák's last completed orchestral work, and his last opera.  After the success of Rusalka in 1901, he was keen to write another opera, but he had a great deal of trouble finding a libretto.  To begin with, Jaroslav Kvapil, the librettist for Rusalka, was unavailable, and Dvořák finally ended up resorting to one that had been presented to him a good dozen years earlier, and which he had rejected at the time.  Dvořák did not find the composition an easy process, rehearsals, once they commenced, were beset with problems, and the first night was very poorly received, with the opera being taken off stage after just seven performances.  A large part of the reason for this failure can be attributed to the libretto, which is sententious, inclined to be prolix, and brings nothing new to a subject that had already been set a good 100 times previously.  For example, a good part of the start of Act 3 is almost completely extraneous to the principal argument, and the music is not sufficiently inspired to compensate.  It is almost certain that Dvořák, who was not happy with the first staging of the piece, would have made revisions, and possibly very substantial ones,  but unfortunately he died five weeks after the premiere, so we'll never know what he could have made of it ultimately.

Jaroslav Vrchlický's version presents a fairly Classical argument of love versus duty.  Rinaldo (Rinald, in Czech) is not enchanted into love with Armida, he encounters her fleetingly and it's love at first sight on both parts, but he deserts his Frankish comrades-in-arms for her.  Similarly, she was meant to distract and cause conflict amongst the crusaders, and having done that, to kill Rinald, in order to further the Saracen cause, but of course, she has no intention of doing so.  Eventually, Rinald is brought back to his duty as a crusader through application of a holy artefact, and in an ending borrowed from the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, ends up unwittingly killing Armida in combat, and baptising her as she dies in his arms.  Woven through all this are the machinations of the sorcerer-prince Ismen, who is, of course, fighting for the Saracen cause, but has an equally important personal agenda in that he too is madly in love with Armida, who wants nothing to do with him.

Director and designer Hartmut Schörghofer has chosen to play the whole thing fairly straight.  The crusaders look like medieval knights, appropriately grubby after weeks in the desert, and the Damascenes look like Arabs, in muted tones and discreet robes, no harem fantasies here.  That said, Armida's first dress is a floating white affair with a corset bodice, and a ridiculous winged headdress that, depending on how the light struck it, either looked like lopsided bunny ears, or like the winged helmets of Wagner's first Valkyries.  That might have been the point, mind you, because the score is Dvořák at his most Wagnerian, with some very clear references to both Tannhäuser and Parsifal, which, to be honest, seem somewhat anachronistic for an opera completed in 1904, and bearing in mind that Janáček's Jenůfa had premiered just two months before Armida.  

The set was divided in half on the diagonal by a wall of sliding panels, of a kind of half-transparent mirror, so that you could see the rear half of the stage, a very handsome room in an Arab palace, all ornately worked white stucco, and filigree lamps, and yet all the people in front of it were clearly reflected in the panels.  However, this also allowed it to serve as a screen for video projections, which allowed Schörghofer to expand the set's visuals substantially.  In the first act, when Ismen is warning of the danger of the Frankish army, he conjures up a field of tents flying the crusader's cross, and you see those same tents a bit closer up in the 2nd act when we're in their camp.  Other effects include the desert, for the last act, Armida's magical garden and palace, the final battle (which is the one place where there's some updating - Schörghofer uses images of modern warfare) and most spectacularly, the dragon that rescues the lovers at the end of Act 2.  The CGI is a little crude - the desert sands ripple with what I think was supposed to be an impression of heat waves coming off the surface, and the way that distorts vision, but instead it looks like the sand is heaving in a rather nauseating fashion - but it was still impressive, and for a festival that habitually operates off a pretty tight production budget, this was really pushing the boat out.

Armida, Act 2
L to R, front : Jan Hynk (Petr), Rory Dunne (Bohumir), Jennifer Davis (Armida, kneeling), Gerard Schneider (Rinald)
© Clive Barda, 2022

Musically, it was a seriously crafted attempt at rehabilitation.  If it didn't persuade me that Armida deserves the same kind of exposure Rusalka gets, it certainly wasn't the fault of any of the performers.  Pick of the crop was, rightly, Jennifer Davis in the title role.  This is a lovely, creamy, expansive soprano, well-suited to the role, generous and fearless in her attack, but also capable of melting tenderness.  Gerard Schneider was a little more problematic as Rinald; it's a good tenor voice, but I thought him a little overparted at first in the ensembles.  However, I suspect that in fact he was keeping his reserves, because the fourth act rests almost entirely on Rinald's shoulders.  He has an enormous monologue right at the start, barely leaves the stage for the duration of the act, and by the end, the strain was showing a little in Schneider's tone.  However, he has a strong stage presence, and that monologue, which is full of horror and repentance, was excellently delivered.

Ismen is a fairly characteristic frustrated baritone role, but with a couple of big numbers that need almost Wagnerian fortitude, something which Stanislav Kuflyuk had in spades.  This was another outstanding presentation, very well sung, and very charismatic, one of those performances that, had the principal tenor been weaker, would leave you wondering what the female lead was thinking, opting for the latter rather than the former.  The three bass soloists - Jozef Benci (King Hydraot, Armida's father), Rory Dunne (Bohumir, the Crusader leader, and also doubling as the Muezzin) and Jan Hynk (the Hermit Peter) - were all admirable.  The chorus sang superbly, with a real feel for Dvořák's idiom, and conductor Norbert Baxa made the most of the richly detailed orchestration.

Despite some wonderful pages, and a great deal of really beautiful orchestral music, Armida does not have the cohesive structure (or the quality of libretto) of Rusalka, and you never quite engage with the characters the way you do in the earlier opera.  It was certainly worth giving it an airing, though, as is so often the case with Wexford Festival's choices of opera.

[Next : 29th October]