WFO, 29/10/2022

Halévy : La tempesta

Chorus and Orchestra of Wexford Festival Opera

Francesco Cilluffo

When Halévy accepted the commission from the impresario running Her Majesty's Theatre, in 1850, his star in France was beginning to wane, but he still had everything to play for in Britain, and La tempesta was given a very starry line-up of singers, including Henriette Sontag as Miranda, and the great bass Luigi Lablache, no less, as Caliban.  The end result was, apparently, a huge success, but the very concept of this opera is more than a little mind-boggling.  A Shakespeare-based opera, commissioned for a London opera house from a French composer, written to a French libretto, by Scribe, no less, that had originally been intended for Mendelssohn's use, and was now translated into Italian to suit London tastes?  Can we say Heinz 57 Varieties?  

The only work by Halévy I know at all well (like, I imagine, most of the audience here in Wexford) is his first major success, La juive, which pre-dates La tempesta by 15 years.  La juive falls squarely into the French grand-opéra category, and anything else I'd heard of from Halévy seemed to belong to the same genre.  I was wondering just how The Tempest, which is one of Shakespeare's most complex plays, was going to be shoe-horned into that very specific format.  The answer was, it isn't, but it doesn't much correspond to Shakespeare's play in any event, and really should be called Miranda.  What we got, to summarise very briefly, was a three-act opera with a brief prologue, in a musical style somewhere between late Donizetti and very early Verdi, which dispensed almost entirely with the politics, the philosophy and the magic of Shakespeare's text to focus nearly exclusively on Miranda and her relationships with her father, Ferdinand and Caliban.  

There was no desert island in director Roberto Catalano's vision,  but an occasional palace front, with a gaping hole in the centre, above which was carved the word "Nostalgia", and from which the black-clad spirits would from time to time transport loads of loose bricks.  In the second half, a giant head - I was inclined to think it was Aristotle, but it might have been Jupiter - dominated the stage for much of the proceedings, and it was the 'tree' in which Ariel is temporarily trapped.  Prospero, Miranda, Ariel and Ferdinand wore ivory-white, everyone else was in blacks and greys.  Miranda, infantilised as she often is in Tempest productions, at least at the start, looked rather like an Edwardian doll, short, bouffant dress, balloon sleeves, high neck-ruff, and ankle boots, but the arm and neck covering came off halfway through.  

However, there was nothing much in the production to fill the gaps left by Scribe's libretto, nothing to indicate Prospero's learning, to broach the issues of usurpation and colonisation, or many of the other complex questions posed by the play.  The only magic came from Sycorax - who never appears in Shakespeare, and is a disembodied voice in this opera, represented by a pair of station platform speakers that descend periodically from the flies, much to the amusement of the audience.  Nor did Catalano manage to make much of the extremely abrupt ending, which left us with more questions than answers. 

La tempesta (Act 2, final scene)
Hila Baggio (Miranda) and Georgi Manoshvili (Calibano)
© Clive Barda (2022)

Musically, it was a rather curious piece too.  The overture was strong and evocative, leading into the storm that wrecks the Neapolitan ship, but then we get introduced to Miranda with a piece of banal twittering.  The vocal writing is late belcanto, as mentioned, with most of the solo parts quite highly ornamented, and all the principals with at least one aria to their credit.  Miranda and Ariel are both sopranos, Ariel a high coloratura, Miranda more of a lyric soprano.  Ferdinand is, of course, a tenor, Prospero a baritone, Caliban a bass, and Sycorax a mezzo off-stage.  The chorus has a good opening scene, and later a rowdy carousing scene with Caliban, but not too much else.  The problem with Halévy's belcanto-inspired idiom, however, is mainly that he doesn't have - or at least, didn't show here - the kind of melodic inspiration that make Donizetti and Bellini's operas so enduring, and Scribe's libretto is unusually silly in far too many places.

The cast was of a good quality in the main, though I was not a fan of Hila Baggio's Miranda, finding her solo numbers somewhat inexpressive, and the finale, which she leads, completely perfunctory.  However, Miranda has some of the best of the vocal music, either in duet with Ferdinand (Giulio Pelligra, appealingly earnest and bright-toned) or, much more compelling, with Caliban, here sung by Georgi Manoshvili, very much the stand-out performance of the evening.  Most of the second act is dominated by Caliban, he has a succession of scenes, first alone, then with the voice of Sycorax, a brief scuffle with Ariel, then an explosive confrontation with Miranda, and finally the drinking scene with the sailors.  This production put the interval between the Miranda-duet and the drinking scene, which created quite a nice cliff-hanger for the end of the first part, and gave the singer a probably much-needed rest from what would otherwise be a hugely demanding sequence, and it's easy to see why a bass of the calibre of Lablache would have been needed to create the role.  Manoshvili gave an excellent performance, dark and sullen and lost, simultaneously dignified, pathetic and hateful, with a treacle-black timbre and plenty of well-controlled vocal fireworks.  

Alongside that performance, only Jade Phoenix's gleaming Ariel really stood out, and although Nikolay Zemlianskikh brought a fine quality, rich baritone to his role, Prospero is not the dominant figure he should be in this adaptation, and Zemlianskikh had little opportunity to really display his wares.  The chorus sang with the whole-hearted commitment and quality expected of the Wexford Festival Chorus, but most of the interest lay with the orchestra which provided very good support to all the singing, but came vividly to life under Francesco Cilluffo's direction in its solo passages, and provided much of the interest in overall musical terms.

Not knowing much of Halévy's work other than La juive, and the odd aria from other works, I still had the impression that La tempesta is an anomaly in his output, and its only true point of interest is the splendid bass role it offers to the interpreter taking on Caliban.

[Next : 30th October]