Opera Review: Opera of the Soul, Sparsely Staged

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Operas written for the Opéra Comique are not necessarily comic, as works like Cherubini’s “Médée” attest, but we know from Mr. Pelly’s productions of Offenbach operettas and Donizetti’s “Fille du Régiment” that this director has a gift for comedy. For whatever reason he put that gift to work in the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden’s new staging of “Robert le Diable” (“Robert the Devil”), a chivalric tale of the supernatural in which the title character is saved from the powers of Hell by the redemptive love of a woman (shades of Wagner operas to come).

His production has audiences drawing comparisons — surely for the first time in history — between a French grand opera and Monty Python’s “Spamalot,” thanks to the way knights in heavy armorial suits (Mr. Pelly also designed the costumes) make jerky synchronized movements, and to sets by Chantal Thomas depicting the Sicilian princess Isabelle’s palace as a child’s paper cutout castle. There is room for humor in French grand opera — one of the numbers is labeled “duo bouffe” — but Mr. Pelly abuses the privilege, most damagingly in the stirring final trio.

Here, forces of good, represented by Robert’s foster-sister Alice, and of evil, represented by Robert’s father Bertram (an incarnation of the devil), vie for Robert’s soul. But Alice appears in a bed of clouds, like an emissary of heaven, and Bertram sings in front of a grizzly black-and-white cutout of a dragon’s head. No wonder the audience laughed when Robert agonized over his dilemma. Nor did the celebrated ballet for the ghosts of debauched nuns — naughty girls sent to convent to be straightened out — realize anything like its erotic potential.

A work that changed the course of opera history after a staggeringly successful premiere in 1831 deserves better. Chopin, an astute commentator on Parisian opera, proclaimed, “If ever magnificence was seen in the theater, I doubt that it reached the level of splendor shown in ‘Robert’ ... It is a masterpiece ... Meyerbeer has made himself immortal.”

Meyerbeer, a German Jew who thrived in Paris, was a first-rate musician with a genius for stagecraft and a self-prescribed mission to entertain by wowing an audience. His failure to cultivate what might be called “holy German art” (Wagner’s term in “Die Meistersinger”) of a more elevated nature won him the opprobrium of composers as diverse as Schumann and Wagner, even though the latter was quick to appropriate Meyerbeer’s techniques when they served him.

One opera enthusiast’s idea of entertainment may spell tedium for another, but Covent Garden’s director of opera, Kasper Holten, strikes a chord in a program comment by applying the words “shamelessly entertaining” to Meyerbeer. If the composer’s French grand operas are to work today, their splendor must be recreated convincingly for modern audiences as a virtue, the way Chopin viewed it, and not something to be viewed condescendingly.

This is a tall task requiring expenditures that opera houses may not want to lavish on works created primarily to entertain, although there is always the possibility of discovering more, as happened last year with “Les Huguenots” at La Monnaie in Brussels. The alternative is to skimp, as Covent Garden has done, or not do them at all.

Still, the new “Robert” is hardly a total loss, and Mr. Pelly at least allows the singers to credibly enact their roles in line with the story. Bryan Hymel, the dramatic tenor who starred at Covent Garden last season in another French grand opera, Berlioz’s “Les Troyens,” scores another major success with a Byronic portrayal of Robert that brings out similarities to Offenbach’s Hoffmann, whose passions are also deluded by magic. Hymel’s gleaming voice is securely produced, right up to high D.

Patrizia Ciofi’s soft-grained soprano is a lovely, but smallish match for Isabelle’s music, which includes the opera’s most memorable aria, “Robert, toi que j’aime” with its poignant phrase, “Grâce, grâce,” in which she begs Robert to repent for the sake of them both. Marina Poplavskaya (at the second performance) was announced as singing despite laryngitis, but this arresting if imperfect soprano sounded as good as I have heard her recently, especially in rich midrange. The bass John Relyea sings heartily as the devilish Bertram, but his unscripted final appearance during the wedding of Robert and Isabelle is another of Mr. Pelly’s miscalculations. Jean-François Borras’s flexible tenor served handsomely for Alice’s fiancé Raimbaut.

The conductor Daniel Oren sanctions cuts to the score said to number more than 60. It may seem quixotic to complain when the running time is four hours and twenty minutes, but last year’s “Troyens” lasted a good hour more. Will “Robert” ever be treated with comparable respect? It ought to be by any opera company that stages it, but I’m not holding my breath.

Robert le Diable. Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London. Through Dec. 21.

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