Not mad for it

There are few creatures as delicate as mid-season “bel canto” opera, the rather wispy creature that peaked for a few years in the 1830s before the young Giuseppe Verdi materialised and beefed things up considerably. Vincenzo Bellini’s last opera is a kind of sickly poster-child for the whole movement, paring the genre down to its barest essentials: a rubbish plot and libretto, laughable action, neurasthenic cardboard characters, a sketchy and rather childish orchestral score… all fading into purest inconsequence beside the singing, the only point of the whole thing, the apotheosis of the human voice, the place where pure sound becomes the distilled essence of emotion, where time and space vanish, and an ineffable truth about life is conveyed through endlessly unspooling melodies and a firework display of often rather leisurely, tumbling notes, roulades, grupetti, trills, arpeggios, chromatic scales flashing and sparkling in the air. 

It is a gossamer creation that can collapse into pointlessness very quickly without the right ingredients. And so it doesn’t come around that often, only when they can gather a handful of the singers capable of performing these high-wire tricks to superhuman standards. That’s the theory anyway. Bel canto vanished from the earth for a century until the superstar generation of Callas, Sutherland and Caballé resurrected it seventy years ago. Now Covent Garden, capitalising on the fabulous voice of Cuban-American soprano Lisette Oropesa (who has also just sung it at the New York Met, in a production that everyone thought was terrible until this one came along), has decided to unearth it again. And besides Ms Oropesa, I have to say I rather wish they hadn’t bothered (or anyway done it better).

Actually, Act 2 is really fine, consisting as it does mostly of the heroine Elvira being mad, which is why we came (some paying an amusing £322, what’s more, though as usual we should note that in opera there are a lot of people doing a lot of work for us, unlike some crappy three-hander in the West End). The heroines of bel canto are like the form itself, droopy and pale, haunted, sick figures who drift about usually in a trance of “mental health” brought on by overtight clothes, crap diet and mild shocks. Elvira’s Act 2 showcase is the best place (along with Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, premiered the same year of 1835) to sample this variant, and Ms Oropesa no doubt the finest current purveyor of it. If the jolly Catherine-wheels of Act 1 ― the “happy Elvira” ― are expert and beautiful, they are also unaffecting, just circus tricks really. But sadface Act 2 is a different matter.

Puritan Elvira thinks her (Royalist) boyf Arturo has waltzed off with someone else, though actually in this historical farrago he is actually busy rescuing the Queen, Henrietta Maria, from captivity in the Puritan camp run by Elvira’s dad ― and definitely means to come back for Elvira. But it’s enough to drive her round the bend, where she proceeds, as noted, very prettily. Then the magic arrives, as the offstage Elvira, now a loon, begins to sing her signature tune, the signature tune of everyone who has lost their love since time began, “O rendetemi la speme…” ― bring back my love, or let me die. It’s the beginning of an immense scene where the heart becomes music, and Ms Oropesa carries it off magnificently ― not just the welter of notes, and the impossible, beautiful, winding melodic lines, but the incarnation of pure pathos that they represent… and (almost by the way) “acted” with understated sensitivity.     

This makes everything else seem a bit secondary, partly because though the other singers are fine or better, there’s no stylistic unity either among them or in Riccardo Frizza’s often rather blunt orchestra, which frequently channels the forthright early Verdi of the 1840s rather than melting Bellini; nevertheless, they sound very good. Tenor Francesco Demuro, singing Arturo, has a voice it takes a while to warm to, rather metallic (if you wanted to be polite you’d call it “ringing”) and tightening up the higher it goes ― where it goes, unfortunately, rather a lot. Tenors hadn’t yet started wanging it out like this in 1835, using instead a sort of head voice for the high stuff, a technique almost entirely lost, alas, and Arturo’s higher, emotional extremes are pretty hard to listen to (Rossini spoke of “a capon getting its throat cut” when a tenor first tried out the new, full-on can belto in 1837). Lower down, Demuro relaxes into the role, and in his Act 3 return to the scene there is some beautiful work, though it is still in a completely different bracket of style to what you might call Elvira’s fierce delicacy. The lower roles, Ildebrando d’Arcangelo as sympathetic Giorgio and Andrzej Filończyk as Arturo’s angry love-rival Riccardo, are great in their own terms, and share a terrific rousing duet at the end of Act 2, but again it sounds like a different show.

And rather a pointless one, thanks to Richard Jones’s idea — and insight-free production, a sort of costume-concert-staging with a selection of his signature moves ― people walking backwards onto the stage or running aimlessly around it with a peculiar loping gait ― for the chorus to occupy themselves with when not merely standing around in Puritanical ranks. Some of them construct a big cannon (with great regard for 21st-century health-and-safety guidelines) before wheeling it around without much purpose. I have a nasty feeling there is some symbolism intended here, echoed by the “female space” of the pointed Gothic window embrasure where the ladies do their thing, but best not go there. 

Not much else happens. “Enrichetta” is sprung from the clink by an exceptionally camp and directionless gang of Cavaliers looking like C&W enthusiasts from East Anglia. Our separated lovers evidently communicate by Morse code with electric torches (the setting is old-style, but with annoying modern touches) and the words of their letters sprouts upward in curlicues of fancy script onto a screen above the stage, which gives us a bit of help with the plot and is the least boring thing about the drab design. Jones was hardly a sensible choice as director for this, never having much of use to say about Romantic opera ― but on the plus side I guess at least we didn’t get Barrie Kosky.

Everyone is being nice about Ms Oropesa, correctly, but beyond her marvellous performance this is really not good enough: Puritani may not be in the Lucia or Norma bracket of proper, finished drama, but it’s a lot better than this makes it look.

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Runs until July 19