Wallen, Purcell - Dido's Ghost (Buxton, 2021)

Errollyn Wallen & Henry Purcell - Dido's Ghost

Buxton International Festival, 2021

John Butt, Frederic Wake-Walker, Idunnu Münch, Matthew Brook, Nardus Williams, Jessica Gillingwater, Timothy Dickinson

Buxton Opera House - 17th July 2021

Although I had read up on it beforehand and was intrigued by the idea of a contemporary addendum that extended Purcell's 1688 opera Dido and Aeneas, I wasn't quite sure how this was supposed to work or how successful it would be. What was clear was that it's a considerable challenge to take on probably the most revered early English opera and dare to rework it. It was all the more remarkable to discover that the composer Errollyn Wallen not only managed to surprise in the manner in which she integrated the new with the old, but quite how successfully she managed to do so in Dido's Ghost.

It's not that Purcell is considered sacred and untouchable in any case. Only the bare bones of Dido and Aeneas have been passed down in terms of musical arrangements, and there are several lost sections. I've seen those compensated for in productions that have inserted other suitable Purcell pieces as well as included complementary music by some of his contemporaries. I've also seen Dido and Aeneas played without any significant additions and it has been none the worse for it, feeling in no way incomplete in its narrative or sentiments. I've also seen Purcell misused, in the case of Katie Mitchell and Raphaël Pichon's Miranda, so the warnings are there that you need to tread very carefully.

That has certainly been taken into account in the choice of Wallen and librettist Wesley Stace to set Dido's Ghost as a kind of sequel that looks back to the events covered in Dido and Aeneas. It's like a flashback but not quite, rather something cleverer than that. Using additional material from Ovid relating to Dido's sister Anna, the opera seamlessly blends past and present, just as the music blends past and present superbly. It doesn't attempt to mimic baroque style but even though it uses more contemporary instruments, including an electric bass guitar, the modern elements don't sharply contrast either but rather extend out on ideas suggested by Purcell and by the narrative itself.

One way of looking at it, as inappropriate and incongruous as it might seem, is the way that a rap song can take a hefty sample of a classic track wholesale as a hook and add something new to it without in any way diminishing what makes the original great. Rather than ruin the original in fact, it often gives it a new sense of life and purpose. Essentially Wallen does that with an entire opera, enfolding Purcell's Dido and Aeneas respectfully into a new context that doesn't just rely on the brilliance of the original or diminish it, but extends on it and - perhaps - makes it even greater.

In narrative terms, Purcell's opera is presented, somewhat in keeping with its style, acted out as a masque, Anna asked to relate for the Trojans in Italy what happened back in Carthage and how Dido came by her fate. It's hard for Anna to revisit those painful events, but harder still for Aeneas's wife Lavinia, jealous of Anna's similarity and connection to her sister. She becomes increasingly troubled the further the story of her husband's first great love is related and, in Hamlet-like fashion identifies with the story. Encouraged by Belinda, the Spirit of the Theatre, she takes her part in the masque as the Spirit of the Sorcerer and, becoming consumed with the role and the events of the story, she plots to kill Anna/Dido.

Rather than Purcell's opera being enfolded as a standalone piece within the bookends of a new opera - which would have been a valid enough idea - Wallen and Stace are much more adventurous, ambitiously weaving the two together. It works brilliantly, drawing additional subtexts out of Dido and Aeneas. It is perhaps a little dry in places and difficult to figure out when past bleeds into the present, but in the back of your mind you know that it's all building towards that incomparable climax of 'Dido's Lament'. That piece can certainly be the recontextualised with losing any of its power and beauty, working even in the Miranda setting, but putting the words in the mouth of Aeneas here, distraught at the realisation of what he has engendered, somehow even deepens the tragedy.

It's a stunning conclusion and the audience at Buxton responded accordingly, with huge cheers and applause when the composer took to the stage for the curtain call at the third and final performance of the work at the festival. Following their previous reworking of baroque opera into a new pasticcio context for Georgiana in 2019, this is another hugely successful and ambitious venture from the BIF, the festival continuing to support new and rare opera while also attempting to extend their range and audience.

The production was also hugely impressive in its musical performance and presentation, which despite the skill of the composer, couldn't have been easy for John Butt and the orchestra to blend the different styles of music and instrumentation. Aside from fine lead performances from Matthew Brook as an authoritative Aeneas and Idunnu Münch an impressive Anna, there was fine support and substantial roles for Nardus Williams, Jessica Gillingwater and Timothy Dickinson. There was excellent use made of a 12 person chorus, some of whom also provided secondary roles.

Director Frederic Wake-Walker would have had a challenge to separate or make evident the slipping between past and present and wisely chose not to, letting dreams, spirits and desires blend into this super-charged enhanced mythical reality. It was very much about establishing mood and character, using simple effects like a net curtain to symbolise Anna's transformation into a river that enfolds Aeneas at the conclusion. It may not become a canonical version of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, but Wallen has nonetheless created a marvellous tapestry out of it, exceeding all expectations, providing a wonderful and thought-provoking evening at the opera.

Links: Buxton International Festival

Mariotte - Salomé (Munich, 2014)

Antoine Mariotte - Salomé

Bayerischen Theaterakademie, Prinzregententheater - Munich 2014

Ulf Schirmer, Balázs Kovalik, Anna Maria Thoma, Eric Ander, Idunnu Münch, Heeyun Choi, Ingyu Hwang

BR-KLASSIK Web Streaming - 28 February 2014

One of the most pleasant and unexpected rediscoveries made during the 150th anniversary celebrations of Richard Strauss is actually likely to be not one of the composer's own works, but that of a little-known French contemporary of Strauss, Antoine Mariotte. Mariotte's claim to fame, and in most cases the only reason his name is remembered at all nowadays, is that he had the idea to write an opera based on Oscar Wilde's 'Salomé' at the same time as Strauss but unfortunately failed to secure the rights to the work.

The opportunity to see a very rare performance of the work, performed at the Prinzregententheater in Munich and broadcast by the Bavarian radio station BR-KLASSIK, suggests that the subsequent fall into obscurity of Mariotte's French version of Salomé has less to do with the quality of the work than the fact that it became tied up in legal problems that prevented it becoming more widely known. It was permitted one presentation in Lyon in 1908, after which all copies of the work were to be destroyed. Fortunately, more favourable terms were eventually agreed upon, but the work would never have been allowed the same exposure as the approved version by Richard Strauss.

While this new production of the work in Munich proves that Mariotte's Salomé is by no means an inferior work and undoubtedly unjustly neglected, it's also evident that Strauss's opera is by far the bolder and more experimental of the two works. Strauss's  one-act assault on the senses is not only more closely attuned to the dark psychology of the characters in Wilde's provocative drama, but it similarly set out to challenge conventional morality as well as the conventions of the artform. Written in 1891, Wilde wrote 'Salomé' without any real intention of it ever being performed, since the depiction of Biblical characters on the stage was prohibited in England by the censor. The work however unexpected enjoyed great success in both France and Germany, where it was seen by Richard Strauss. It in turn would inspire Strauss to make a musical leap that would prove to be immensely influential on the course of music in the 20th century.

By way of contrast, Mariotte's Salomé resides within the post-Wagnerian Romantic world, its lush arrangements and chromaticism reminiscent of Franz Schreker's decadent Entartete works (Die Gezeichneten), but with a intimacy and tone in its setting of French drama to music that inevitably brings Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande to mind. (Maurice Maeterlinck moreover being one of Wilde's dramatic influences here). As such, Mariotte seems to be more evidently in tune with the decadent and florid language of Wilde's play, which was actually written in French and lifted straight off the page by Mariotte. It seems like a perfect fit, and in many ways it is. It just isn't Strauss. It doesn't have the same dangerous edge of insanity and the desire to break conventions that make Strauss's Salome a true masterpiece.

Mariotte's score for Salomé is however not without its own sense of decadence and dissonance. The first encounter between Salomé and Iokanaan, for example, is quietly seductive as Salomé sings "Iokanaan. Je suis amoureuse de ton corp", but at the same time there are low discordant notes underlying this phrase that suggest that there's a darker and more perverse intent behind them. The use of the original French dialogue helps, although Wilde's often non-idiomatic French is heavily cut, mostly to remove repetition. Repetition is a device that Wilde uses consciously, but it's perhaps not as necessary when those sentiments are echoed in the music. Directed by Ulf Schirmer, a Strauss specialist and renowned for conducting German opera of this period, that's given a terrific account here.

Mariotte's interpretation most obviously differs from Strauss's version in the delivery of the sentiments expressed in the libretto. It's wonderfully scored for the voice in a way that makes the vital central encounter between Salomé and Iokanaan a highly charged one. The actual singing range is not as challenging and punishing as the contortions of Strauss's Salome, but it is certainly equally intimate, intense and dramatic, Mariotte choosing to close their encounter not with Salomé in a rage, but almost lamenting the outcome. Mariotte's version also tightens the focus, removing the scenes with the Jews and reducing the roles of Naraboth and the Page, yet somehow Strauss manages to use these scenes to heighten the sense of discord, corruption and menace.

Directed by Balázs Kovalik at the Prinzregententheater in Munich, the stage setting for this version of Salomé is clearly not Biblical period. Rather than be set within Herod's palace, it seems to all take place on the fire-escape outside it, the set a framework of interweaving steel staircases. It's a little more explicit where the actual text is vague, allusive and allegorical, although there are a few symbolic gestures. I'm not sure what is meant by the pink horse with an orange mane at the top of the staircase, but it's not unreasonable to show Salomé's split nature by using a young ballet dancer in one or two scenes, both of them dressed in black with a pink tutu.

There's little doubt about the corrupt and perverse sexual nature of the characters in this production (not that Wilde's suggestive phrases and Aubrey Beardsley's original illustrations were in any way ambiguous), since it is fully acted-out here. Naraboth's lustful voyeurism is indulged by Salomé here with the use of a direct video feed from underneath her skirt, and the curiously staged dance scene is also quite direct. While her young double enacts a dance of death with Iokanaan, the singing Salomé does a brief hand-jive while Herod lifts the layers of her tutu and removes her panties. Just so there's no question of what Herod's intent is, it's also fully enacted here in a bed alongside the dead body of Naraboth. There are plenty of sexual gestures then, but no actual nudity.

Interestingly, in Mariotte's version, Herod doesn't call out for Salomé's death at the end (the final line "Tuez cette femme!" is cut here), but it is carried out nonetheless in this production with Herod himself pulling the trigger. Regardless of the production and direction choices, its adherence to the words and the intent of the work is fairly accurate and dramatically effective. It's also very well sung with strong performances from Anna Maria Thoma as Salomé, Heeyun Choi as Iokanaan, Eric Ander as Hérode, Idunnu Münch as Hérodias and Ingyu Hwang as Naraboth. A sordid little bunch of despicable characters, you feel at the end of this eye-opening production of Mariotte's Salomé, which suggests that all the performers did their job very well.

BR-Klassik link - Mariotte - Salomé