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Dashed expectations...
At The Rake’s Progress last night I was taken aback when my seat mate growled “terrible libretto” at the intermission. I practically know the Augustan pastiche cobbled together by W.H. Auden by heart. Its witty gilded poetry meshes perfectly with the score’s witty plays on Handel. Auden generously included the name of his unruly lover Chester Kallman on the libretto, but I have my doubts. Stravinsky’s opera has long been a pet of mine – I even own a dim radio air check of the premiere from Venice in 1951. That first night was a shambles. The composer couldn’t keep the ragtag orchestra together, and ruin quickly followed. The Rake pleases music lovers but rarely audiences – Rudolf Bing staged it at the old Met, one of his few gestures toward modernism, and he later claimed that infuriated patrons spat on the box office. The more fools they.
At the opposite extreme, there’s a perfect gem of a production from Glyndebourne in the Seventies on DVD, energetically conducted by Bernard Haitink. The plot was inspired by Hogarth etchings of a country bumpkin who comes to wrack and ruin in London, swilling away his money, contracting the pox, and drowning in dissolution by the end. For Glyndebourne a young David Hockney devised cross-hatched sets that look like 3-D etchings and went so far as to cross-hatch the singers, too – a perfect harmony of wit and style.
With such an elegant example as my model, along with Stravinsky’s wonderful stereo recording (made years after the Venetian debacle), I avidly anticipated the new Royal Opera production, even though it seemed iffy to update the London of Samuel Johnson and the Hellfire Club to Hollywood in the 30s – a Babylon depraved enough to ruin any rake but rather out of step, don’t you think? I can report that the succinct brass fanfares serving as a mini-overture before the curtain rose were entirely successful. After that, uh oh. The wunderkind composer Thomas Ades, who cannot pen a jingle without causing London critics to pass out, deserves acclaim as an all-around musician. As a conductor of Stravinsky, however, he was pure stinko. Lagging and dragging, unable to help his singers, who floundered on stage with frozen terror barely disguised on their faces, Ades made such a hash of the score as to deserve a healthy round of boos. I don’t know if he got them since I crawled away, very dejected, at intermission. The rest of the audience repaired to the Crush Bar upstairs. I have no idea if they got drunk enough to put up with the second half.
So, what shall we talk about now? None of the singers can be judged fairly since they were treading water, hoping not to run out of breath before the next lugubrious phrase. Anne Truelove was sung by Sally Matthews, about whom much has been made over here. She’s slim and attractive, but her voice, with its plummy bottom notes, sounds too mature for Anne, and despite accurate and brave high notes, Matthews stabbed at the coloratura rather effortfully. Let’s see, what else? The Hollywood glam was nonsensical, made worse by the 18th-century English of the libretto with its many London references. (A movie set camped out in the Mojave desert doesn’t seem a lot like St. Giles.) Nick Shadow played Josef von Sternberg riding up and down on a camera dolly, which occasioned three seconds of interest, as did the opening scene, set in Texas to look like George Stevens’ Giant, complete with a donkey oil well pump. Did anyone care that Giant wasn’t made in the Thirties? I suppose not, since a later scene featuring a Hollywood premiere gave us a line of security guards dressed like bobbies. To go along with the quaking economic news from the States, a ticket to this failed production costs as much as two barrels of crude oil. Do the Saudis like Stravinsky, maybe?
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