Meyerbeer: Les Huguenots (Deutsche Oper Berlin, 1991)
 
Reviewed by David McKee
 

Cast: Angela Denning (Marguerite de Valois), Lucy Peacock (Valentine), Camille Capasso (Urbain), Richard Leech (Raoul de Nangis), Martin Blasius (Marcel), Lenus Carlson (de Nevers), Hartmut Welker (St. Bris), David Griffith (Cossé), Otto Heuer (Tavannes), Friedrich Molsberger (Thoré), Ivan Sardi (De Rez), Josef Becker (Méru/Monk), Miomir Nikolic (Maurevert/Monk), Warren Mok (Bois-Rosé), Marcia Bellamy (Attendant), Raemond Martin (Monk), Klaus Lang (Guard), Bengt-Ola Morgny (Léonard), Chorus & Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, Stefan Soltesz (conductor), John Dew (director); Gottfried Pilz (designer), Brian Large (TV director) 

Arthaus Musik DVD 100157 (NTSC) 100156 (PAL)

Running time: 156 minutes

1991

Sung in German
 
Given the ascendancy of the stage director in opera, operagoers and critics alike regularly rail against the disease of 'produceritis', much of the time with good reason. Sometimes, however, a radical, innovative director can give an opera a new lease on life. Such is the case with John Dew's Deutsche Oper staging of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots.
 
The title, more properly, is Die Hugenotten, as the work is sung in a graceful German translation. Originally mounted in 1987, when the Berlin Wall was very much a reality, the opera was revisited for telecast four years later, when the Wall was history but nationalism and religious strife were again rearing their ugly heads in Europe. By violently wrenching Meyerbeer's depiction of genocide and bigotry into the modern world, Dew stiffens the spine of a work that can easily be as tasteless as a cheap paperback novel about the Holocaust. Instead, we see a frivolous costume drama reworked as a universal crisis-of-conscience parable. The redolence of operetta and Hollywood musicals continues to waft through the music but Dew takes these elements at face value, with great charm and without fatuity, integrating them into a plausible buildup to tragedy. Such is the director's alchemy that the music sounds, to this listener, better than before, allowing for Meyerbeer's endless plugging of 'Ein feste Burg,' (the text of which is scrawled in red on the wall against which the Huguenots are slain, at the end).
 
As might be expected, the cutting is heavy, with some consequent refocusing of the story. The dilly-dallying first act must, it seems, be kept long for its expository function. However, there are some drastic reductions in the later frames, with only an abbreviated version of Act III's cease-fire celebrations remaining: no ballet, no planned ambush of Raoul, no Valentine/Marcel duet and no wedding procession. These and other cuts push the romantic angle of the story into the background, the better to dwell on politics and the evolution of Raoul from a tuxedoed playboy into a trenchcoated, conscience-stricken man on the run.
 
The settings by Gottfried Pilz, who makes masterful use of line and color to create drama, act as an eighth protagonist. Repeatedly, the viewer is confronted with a giant urban wall. Painted along its base are the figures of men and women, their arms raised against the wall: Reaching for freedom or waiting to be massacred? The image invokes the Nazi pogrom in the Warsaw ghetto. Pilz's cityscapes become progressively fragmented and war-pocked, until the last surviving Huguenots are slaughtered along a low, bisecting wall such as the one that formerly severed Berlin. Yet we could be in Belfast, Sarajevo or any divided city in the world.
 
In a lengthy dumb-show prologue, Dew sketches in the gangster-like control exerted by the opera's Catholics. Meanwhile, Huguenots line up to surreptitiously receive badges bearing the sign of the Cross, enabling them to pass as Catholics. They scatter out into and around the audience (Dew makes much use of 'wraparound' ramps for processions and dramatic entrances) as De Nevers (Lenus Carlson) and his band of red-beret-wearing Catholic enforcers burst on the scene. Meyerbeer and Scribe's nobles are here a militaristic clique, with De Nevers a sort of Curtis Sliwa: part socialite, part vigilante.
 
The decadence that pervades the staging is apt and the singers play it with ease and conviction. The naturalistic choral behavior is particularly admirable, especially in the truncated third act. Under Dew's guidance, the choristers and bit players capture the unease and forced jollity of a 'unification' ceremony where long-festering hatreds remain close to the surface. The clannish, territorial demonstrations by each side look chillingly familiar and, when the Oath of the Swords is sworn, citizens from every walk of life take part in the blood vow. Earlier, we have seen a Marguerite de Valois (Angela Denning) who is closer to the dissipated Marguerite of history than the good-fairy-monarch painted by Scribe and Meyerbeer. We initially glimpse her playing at being a shepherdess, complete with crook and neon sheep. She is a fashionable poseur whose arms are covered with kisses by boys representing church and state.
 
Dew and Pilz set Act II beside a swimming pool, as the ladies of Marguerite's court lounge about in bathing suits and turbans. Their beachball tosses somehow fit with Meyerbeer's music just as Act V's final tableau of mass slaughter lends tragic weight to what can too often be empty melodrama. Denning's Marguerite, more screwball comedienne than monarch, wins in the swimsuit category but fares less well in the talent competition. Employing a throaty throb that is very scuola di Moffo, she makes heavy weather of her cavatina and renders its cabaletta sloppily. A trio of her ladies provides zany, Andrews Sisters like 'backup' during the tempo di mezzo. She also shows a disturbing proclivity for the upward, glottal whoop, a mannerism subsequently popularized by Renée Fleming.
 
Lucy Peacock's Valentine is a non-factor, given her colorless voice and ear splitting top notes, though she expires with a nice fil di voce. Actively bad is the Marcel of Martin Blasius, singing in a straight forte blare, his tones stiff and ill tuned and his low notes an indeterminate buzzing. Blasius' off-pitch droning in his Act V prayer is painful to hear. A bewhiskered Camille Capasso makes a personable Urbain, but quavery and lacking in tonal substance. Her top notes are vibrato-less stabs at the pitch. The baritones fare better. Carlson is still (c. 1991) meaty and resonant, his handsome voice holding up well. Those of his comrades in arms are more heavily worn in service, but long on character (though Warren Mok's early promise, as Bois-Rosé, is hard to miss). Dew generally makes sure that character behavior rings true, and Carlson conveys De Nevers' finer attributes with sensitivity and fine musicianship. A bespectacled Hartmut Welker (St. Bris) is in reasonably steady form, if lacking lower extension, and his role is much attenuated by Dew's performing edition.
 
The one extraordinary performance is Richard Leech's Raoul, a promissory note on greatness yet to be achieved. The Leech of a decade ago sounded extraordinary young and pingy, with an easy upward extension worthy of Fritz Wunderlich. In 'Plus blanche'/'Ich ging spazieren einst,' Leech matches his tones to the viola, with a piano that seem to hover in midair. The tenor's plangent throb is a mite Italianate, but welcome, and his top notes have enviable focus and squillo. Starting out as boyish and disarming, Leech's Raoul is always a real, complex person whose evolution bears watching. Not only does he caress the great phrases of the love duet gorgeously his paralysis at the call to arms shows credible human frailty and fear. Besides, you have to love a tenor who takes a leap at the baritone from halfway across the stage.
 
Meyerbeer also has stylish conducting from Stefan Soltesz. He savors Meyerbeer's orchestration with delightful contrapuntal play, drawing out the drolleries in the score and enjoying its sonorities. Alas, he can't do much with the composer's great sections of plonk-clonk recitative.
 
The sonics are four-star in quality, but Arthaus's subtitling system here proves impossible to activate. The generally informative booklet essay gives all the big numbers by their French titles, yet refers to a famous Offenbach operetta as 'Die Grossherzogin von Gerolstein.' Brian Large films Dew's production well and undemonstratively, making intelligent use of widescreen compositions.
 
 

 

'The Massacre of St Bartholomre's Day': a drawing of the 1858 production of 'Les Huguenots' at Her Majesty's Theatre
 
Meyerbeer: Les Huguenots DVD is published by Kinowelt Home Entertainment under the Arthaus Musik label and distributed by HNH International Ltd.
 
Related websites:
 
Kinowelt Home Entertainment (German and English) www.kinowelt-video.de
Naxos of America www.naxos.com
 
© David McKee, 11 June 2001
operanut@vegasnet.net
 
See also Michael Richter's Introduction to the DVD, for a list of other reviews see the DVD Project page.