Michael White enjoys an environmental Rheingold, a quest for happiness and an epic celebration of Stephen Sondheim.
As someone put it to me last month, Wagner’s Ring is “fairy tales with music”. But it’s more: a history of the world from start to finish, told by somebody with an agenda and some questionable prejudices, but a moral compass too. In the four operas of his mighty operatic cycle he surveys the whole world order – humans, gods and things between – and finds it wanting. Lacking love, driven by greed, en route to self-destruction. Though con- ceived in the mid-19th century, none of this is hard to recognise today. There was a time when stage directors liked to read the Ring with hindsight as a horror story about Nazi Germany, and smother it in swastikas. More recently the horror has become environmental. The Rheingold that has just begun the new Royal Opera Ring, directed by Barrie Kosky, indicates that climate change and despoilation of the earth are going to be central issues as the Cycle unfolds.
Kosky’s staging is comparatively modest and low-tech: no flashy sets, no digital extravaganzas. All the act-ion takes place around a fallen tree: the World Ash, symbolising nature. Erda – Mother Earth – is onstage the entire time, represented as a fragile, old and startlingly naked woman. The Rhine-gold that’s the basis of the story – stolen from its natural custodians and causing trouble ever after – is presented not as solid ingots but as liquid sap, sucked through industrial tubes clamped to Erda’s helpless body: a shocking piece of visual theatre.
With a strong cast and an orchestra on good form under Antonio Pappano, this was a Rheingold that promised well for the Cycle’s future instalments. And whatever it brings, you can expect something serious to challenge the idea of opera as mere entertainment. In the right hands, on the contrary, it’s life and death.
Also at the Royal Opera last month was a new piece – small-scale, short but powerful – by George Benjamin, whose track record in opera is disting-uished, with four fables of uncertain meaning, written in partnership with the playwright Martin Crimp. The latest, Picture a Day, concerns a woman who believes her dead child can be returned to life if she can only cut a button from the sleeve of a truly happy person. It becomes a quest. The “happy” people she encounters all prove otherwise.
The piece is magical – written with Benjamin’s hallmark refinement, and creating a rich sound-world with fastidious economy of means. Not a note is without purpose: there’s no hint of padding. The Royal Opera staging had an equally spare sense of purity and focus. I was captivated – not least by the singing of Ema Nikolovska (as the woman) and John Brancy (playing several not-so-happy people).
Someone else whose work explored the possibilities or otherwise of happiness was Stephen Sondheim. When he died two years ago, the world of lyric theatre lost a master whose achievement rose above conceptual divisions between musicals and opera – which is why so many opera companies perform his work. Almost every show is, in its way, a celebration of what makes us human.
There is wisdom in the works of Sondheim: a profundity of thought that makes most other Broadway musicals look vacuous. A place to start is Old Friends, the all-singing/dancing tribute show now running at the Gielgud Theatre, London. It unfolds like cabaret, with a conveyor-belt of Sondheim numbers seamlessly and stylishly delivered on an epic scale. The energy is overwhelming. There’s a starry cast. And at its centre is a Broadway legend: the amazing Bernadette Peters, who has been so closely connected with Sondheim’s output across the decades it’s as though she speaks for him. His voice out of the grave.
Now 75, her own voice has grown fragile but retains a presence. To hear her in a Sondheim classic like “Send in the Clowns” or “Not a Day Goes By” is to be struck, deep in the solar plexus, by the sound of truth. Raw, absolute, soul-seeking truth. To call it powerful would be an understatement: on the night that I was there the audience erupted, time and time again, into a sort of ecstasy, caught somewhere between pain and joy.
The pain/joy paradox goes to the heart of Sondheim. What his music tells you is that life is complicated, messy, compromised and without obviously happy endings. But we stay the course because occasionally clouds part, and we glimpse a possibility beyond. For Catholics the possibility is God: a word I don’t think Sondheim would have used though, having known him slightly, I believe he understood. His words and music have a lot to teach us. Old Friends has it all, chapter and verse.
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