Until she was overhauled by spunkier dames along the lines of traviata Violetta and Floria Tosca, Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia was the archetypal Romantic heroine, triste, droopy, neurasthenic, and a useful standby for authors from Flaubert to Tolstoy to Forster who wanted to slip in a cute allegorical visit to the theatre, or just to have a quick laugh at opera.
There’s a fashion now for slightly higher-octane Lucias than in the old days, when the drifty little thing would only really get her full Dworkin on when she had officially flipped out thanks to her family’s assiduous campaign of gaslighting. Now, she’s often loaded with fem-dom credentials from the off. There’s not much of that in Cecilia Stinton’s largely non-interventionist new staging in West London, set in generic Victorian times (ie, lots of hats), but Jennifer France makes her nicely engaging, a bit sassy, teasing her bestie Alisa with ghost stories and slightly alarming descriptions of passion (sexed up in the surtitles), and eager to get it on with banned boyfriend Edgardo pretty much on top of her mother’s grave. The question is, why would such a self-possessed creature lose it so massively? — though perhaps that tombtop whoopie raises a few questions. Plus her actual visions of the ancestral ghost (white-clad, bloodstained young woman) that she and nobody else can see …
In fact this is a thoroughly satisfactory show, with a combination of forceful conducting and playing, a strong cast and little to no bullshit genuinely evoking the power of a seriously superseded art form. Lucia is nearly 200 years old and was created for a sensibility far from the one that enjoys stuff like Basic Instinct. Donizetti’s shock-and-awe weapons are the no-longer-very-scary diminished-seventh chord and the sweetly sad reminiscence motif, both lavishly deployed, but the donkey work is done by the miraculous, timeless bel canto illusion that these gorgeous sung melodies are a direct expression of the human soul, beamed straight into ours.
The apparent simplicity, if not simple-mindedness, of Donizetti stumps a lot of people, but the genius lies precisely in the way everything superfluous has been pared away, dramatically, schematically, musically. These are not long operas, and their focus is very exact. Lucia’s entrance, for example, is preceded by an opening ten minutes of such overwhelming maleness, centring on her desperate and unscrupulous brother Enrico and his household retainers, with baleful orchestra and a great atmosphere of violence and paranoia, that when her turn comes the accompanying harp and the tunes (as well as what seems a perfectly pleasant relationship between her and Alisa) hit you like an electric shock. After another ten minutes we know everything about Lucia: then up pops the boyfriend (José de Eça in marvellous, passionate voice), they exchange ecstatic promises and part rapturously — and, of course, basically forever.
What follows is sheer inevitability: the serial browbeating of Lucia, forced wedding, madness and death — with the notable exception of her extravagant mad scene, fifteen minutes alone on stage where she gets to sing for all the betrayed and wronged who ever lived, dreaming, raving, remembering, living out visions of loving bliss. This is hardly going to fail with a singer as accomplished as Ms France, but pathos is not her strongest suit and this is about the most purely pathetic scene ever written. And to be honest by this point the show has lost a bit of its mojo, with conductor Michael Papadopoulos never quite finding after the interval the terrific drive and momentum he’d built up in the first. That, and a slightly miscalculated upstage vision of Lucia chasing her unwelcome new husband around with a knife.
This opera is based on unresolvable confrontations with maximum stakes, so it was odd to downgrade Enrico’s troubles to merely financial ones: in Donizetti’s actual script it’s his neck on the line, what with having made unfortunate decisions in the Williamite carryon. In any case, Morgan Pearse does a great villainous job, very forceful and blustering, and his moments with Lucia and, later, taunting Edgardo with details of Lucia’s wedding night, are real highlights of super-concentrated anguish and malevolence.
The Holland Park orchestra can often sound a bit weedy — nine violins and three cellos are hopeless for this space — but Papadopoulos really sets them on fire here. Neil Irish’s designs leverage the Holland House backdrop, and Cecilia Stinton — helped by those three big voices at the centre of the show — does the important thing of negotiating the unhelpful stage, with the band plonked in middle between a distant upstage and a too-narrow apron in front.
Sure, it’s all a terrible cliché. But the magician Donizetti makes it work pretty much every time
Yes, it’s all about Lucia, as the title notes, and Jennifer France makes a really impressive heroine in one of the great (and massively challenging) roles — more loveable than pitiful, for once, and singing with complete assurance and control and passion. But in the end it’s Edgardo who finally breaks our hearts as he himself snuffs it on stage and sobs out his despairing prayer to the already-dead Lucia. Sure, it’s all a terrible cliché. But the magician Donizetti makes it work pretty much every time, and reminds us of the surprising fact that we still actually have hearts to break.
Until August 1. www.operahollandpark.com
