The Power to Hurt

Anyone who thinks that a night at the opera is like stepping into a warm bath needs to think again after Carrie Cracknell’s new production of Wozzeck.

Comfortable it certainly isn’t, being neither easy on the eye nor the ear. Although as Cracknell herself said at the pre-performance talk you could possibly hear something that might be considered redemptive in the heart-bending orchestral interlude with which Alban Berg links the two final scenes of his first opera:  Marie and Wozzeck dead in the penultimate scene and then after the musical interlude their son alone amongst a gang of taunting children at the edge of the rock bottom estate where this bleak ex-soldier’s tale has been played out. But hardly had the word ‘redemptive’ escaped then Cracknell was keen to recapture it.

Wozzeck, played by Leigh Melrose (c) ENO/Tristram Kenton

How can a mistress who has her throat cut by her soldier lover who then takes his own life leaving an abandoned child, offer any of us solace? Cracknell and her designer Tom Scutt tell their story in a world where better feelings and personal ambition have been squeezed out by economic necessity. In the grimy pub, the tawdry living room and on a concrete staircase that belongs to the meanest public housing, survival is the only imperative. And, for Wozzeck, surviving is also surviving what happened to him in uniform as a soldier, post-traumatic stress disorder to give his emotional dislocation a name.

This is a community haunted by dead comrades returning in flag draped coffins, a place where the principal currency is small plastic bags filled with white powder. So the persecuting Captain deals in cocaine, while his fellow officer the doctor performs terrible dietary experiments on Wozzeck in return for cash. Social control and the oppression of ordinary people; the themes you’ll find in Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck from the beginning of the nineteenth century and in the opera that Berg made from that play.

However, at the heart of Cracknell’s Wozzeck is a loving relationship that is also in a state of shellshock. If Wozzeck the dislocated ex-soldier wanders the town often not returning home, then should we wonder that Marie strays with the Drum Major?

Marie, played by Sara Jakubiak and Drum Major, played by Bryan Regiater (c) ENO/Tristram Kenton

If art can take us to places that we’ve never been, Carrie Cracknell leads us to corners of Britain that are for most of us no more than flickering images on a television news programme. Home once to another child who’s disappeared; another father who’s killed his partner; another housing estate struggling under the weight of its ASBOs. This Wozzeck looks at a terrible place where men and women are constrained to be less than they could and should and ought to be and it never blinks.

And nor should we. Music theatre - opera if you will - like this Wozzeck can wound. And if it has the power to hurt, then hopefully we’re wiser when we leave the Coliseum. That quotation from John Donne came to mind as I walked home. No, not ‘Death be not proud …  but ‘No man is an island,/Entire of itself./Each is a piece of the continent,/A part of the main.’

What do you think about Carrie Cracknell’s production of Wozzeck? Let us know either by commenting below, or tweet us using the #ENOBlog hashtag!

There are 2 further performances of Wozzeck remaining (until 25 May). Tickets are available here: bit.ly/ENOWozzeck

Christopher Cook gives pre-performance talks at English National Opera, for information about upcoming events vist: http://www.eno.org/see-whats-on/productions/production-page.php?&itemid=1356

Dating up in La bohème

La bohème 90 years on from 1840s?  Can that be right?   When Henri Murger published his stories about Bohemian Paris, Scènes de la vie de bohème, they were set in a Latin Quarter that was  riding on the flood tide of French Romanticism when to be an artist was the only real choice for a young man who knew that deep personal feelings were the thing that mattered. 

So why transport this most perfect of operas to the 1930s, to a Paris whose oddest corners were being mapped by photographers like Pierre Brassaï and which was suffused with melancholy for a film-maker like Marcel Carné. Leave well alone, the purists will say. This is a Romantic and a romantic story of boys and girls falling in and out of love, of ‘golden lads and girls [who] all must…come to dust.’ So bustles and bonnets please, not Marcel waves and brilliantine.

Richard Burkhard, Gwyn Hughes Jones, Kate Valentine, Duncan Rock, Andrew Craig Brown (L-R) in La bohème

But wait …. The opera was written in the middle 1890s, so Puccini and his librettists Giacosa and Illica, who naturally were all Italian, were imagining a Paris that they had never experienced at first hand. In this sense the La bohème is doubly nostalgic. It looks back to a time that has passed and as it does so it indulges perhaps incipient middle age dreams of the agonies and ecstasies of young love from the men who created it. And we, the audience? We live over a century after the first performance of La bohème in Turin and almost two centuries after Murger’s poet first kissed a neighbouring seamstress. The time period in which you set a production of an opera is not as straightforward as it seems. And if the work is as popular as La bohème it’s all too easy for a producer to encourage his audience to wallow in a warm bath of nineteenth century sentiment rather than ask themselves about the questions about class and gender, and what Bohemia is and why we need it and where it is. Matters that are at the heart of Puccini’s masterpiece. This is more than the story of a pretty working-class girl who falls for a handsome poet and then dies absurdly young from TB. 

So what are the rules about updating a production? Jonathan Miller, who’s a master of moving a opera to a new time and a new place, will tell you that the most important thing is that the world in which you relocate the work must be the equivalent of that in which it was originally set and in every respect. It has to make complete sense. So his Tosca was relocated to a Rome in the closing days of the brutal German occupation of Italy, just as Sardou’s original play and Puccini’s opera had the Neapolitan Bourbons attempting to destroy those aspirations to political liberty associated first with the French Revolution and then the invading armies of Bonaparte. The famous mafioso Rigoletto and The Elixir of Love à la James Dean in the American South West. They are all perfect fits.

Kate Valentine and Gwyn Hughes Jones in La bohème (c) Donald Cooper

So in this La bohème the bohemians are rich boys slumming it, pretending to be poets and painters and musicians. In time they’ll settle down to ‘real’ jobs as lawyers, bankers or in the family business; and they’ll remember sowing their wild oats when they lunch at the Club or meet for annual reunions. They will look at the photographs of the time when they were young, Brassaï’s bars, Doisneau’s street scenes and Cartier Bresson’s reimagined Paris as souvenirs of their salad days.  And that sense of relentless fate that haunts Mimi and Rodolfo – that’s surely the same fatalism you find in Marcel Carné’s work with Jacques Prévert, films like Le jour se lève and Le Quai des brumes. Ninety years on from Murger and almost another ninety years on from the 1930s this updated La bohème makes perfect sense.

What do you think about updating performances? Let us know either by commenting below, or tweet us using the #ENOBlog hashtag!

There are 10 further performances of La bohème  remaining (until 29 June). Tickets are available here: bit.ly/ENOBoheme

Christopher Cook gives pre-performance talks at English National Opera, for information about upcoming events vist: http://www.eno.org/see-whats-on/productions/production-page.php?&itemid=1356

English National Opera’s 2013/14 Season

We’re delighted to announce our 2013/14 season at English National Opera. Our forthcoming season features 12 international directors from the worlds of opera, theatre, film and visual arts, 10 new productions, 4 hit revivals and 4 works by living composers.

Highlights of the 2013/14 season include:

• Terry Gilliam returns to English National Opera to direct Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini following his critically-acclaimed, sell-out production of The Damnation of Faust in 2011
• The World Premiere of Julian Anderson’s first opera Thebans, with libretto by Irish playwright Frank McGuinness, directed by Pierre Audi
• A site-specific production of Thomas Adès’ Powder Her Face in Ambika P3, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins
• UK premiere of Matthew Barney’s and Jonathan Belper’s River of Fundament
• Ten new productions, including Fidelio, Die Fledermaus, The Magic Flute, Rigoletto, Rodelinda and Cosí Fan Tutte
• Four smash-hit revivals, including Satyagraha and Peter Grimes

John Berry, ENO’s Artistic Director  said, ‘This season shows the power of loyal artists - singers, conductors, directors, composers and designers - who are prepared to put themselves on the line in a remarkably diverse and exciting range of work. Our international partners are also an important creative and supportive influence and it is wonderful that so many opera houses and festivals from around the world want to collaborate so closely with us.’

Let us know what you think of the 2013/14 season, and what you’re most looking forward to! Simply comment below, or tweet us using the #ENO1314 hashtag. 

Public booking opens for all productions from Fidelio to Rodelinda on 10^th June.

Friends of ENO can book from 13^th May.

2013/14 Season in full:

Fidelio

Ludwig van Beethoven

Directed by Calixto Bieito

Conducted by Edward Gardner

Opens: 25 September 2013 (7 performances)

A co-production with Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich

Cast includes: Emma Bell (Leonore), Stuart Skelton (Florestan) excluding selected performances, Philip Horst (Don Pizarro), James Creswell (Rocco), Sarah Tynan (Marzelline), Adrian Dwyer (Jaquino), Roland Wood (Don Fernando)

Die Fledermaus

Johann Strauss II

Directed by Christopher Alden

Conducted by Eun Sun Kim

Opens: 30 September 2013 (11 performances)

A co-production with Canadian Opera Company

New production supported by Lord and Lady Laidlaw

Cast includes: Tom Randle (Gabriel von Eisenstein), Julia Sporsén (Rosalinde), Jennifer Holloway (Prince Orlofsky, Rhian Lois (Adele), Richard Burkhard (Dr Falke), Edgaras Montvidas (Alfred), Simon Butteriss (Dr Blind), Andrew Shore (Frank), Jon Pohl (Frosch)

Madam Butterfly

Giacomo Puccini

Originally directed by Anthony Minghella, Revival Director Sarah Tipple

Conducted by Gianluca Marciano / Martin Fitzpatrick

Opens: 14 October 2013 (14 performances)

A co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, New York and the Lithuanian National Opera

Original production supported by Lord and Lady Laidlaw

Cast includes: Dina Kuznetsova/Mary Plazas (Cio-Cio San), Timothy Richards/Gwyn Hughes Jones (F.B. Pinkerton), George von Bergen (Sharpless), Pamela Helen Stephen (Suzuki), Alun Rhys-Jenkins (Goro), Mark Richardson (The Bonze), Alexander Robin Baker (Prince Yamadori), Catherine Young (Kate Pinkerton)

The Magic Flute

Wolfgang Mozart

Directed by Simon McBurney

Conducted by Gergely Madaras

Opens: 7 November 2013 (12 performances)

A co-production with De Nederlandse Opera, Amsterdam and International Festival of Lyric Art, Aix-en-Provence, and in collaboration with Complicite

Cast Includes: Ben Johnson (Tamino), Devon Guthrie (Pamina), Roland Wood (Papageno), Mary Bevan (Papagena), TBA (Queen of the Night), James Creswell (Sarastro), Brian Galliford (Monostatos), Eleanor Dennis (First Lady), Clare Presland (Second Lady), Rosie Aldridge (Third Lady), Anthony Gregory (First Priest/First Armed Man), Stephen Holloway (Second Priest/Second Armed Man)

Satyagraha

Philip Glass

Directed by Phelim McDermott

Conducted by TBA

Opens: 20 November 2013 (6 performances)

A co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and in collaboration with Improbable

Original production supported by ENO’s Contemporary Opera Group

Cast Includes: Alan Oke (M. K. Gandhi), Janis Kelly (Mrs Naidoo)

Peter Grimes

Benjamin Britten

Directed by David Alden

Conducted by Edward Gardner

Opens: 29 January 2014 (8 performances)

A co-production with De Vlaamse Opera, Opera de Oviedo and Deutsche Oper Berlin

Original production supported by ENO’s English Opera Group

Cast Includes: Stuart Skelton (Peter Grimes), Elza van den Heever (Ellen Orford), Iain Paterson (Balstrode), Rebecca De Pont Davies (Auntie), Matthew Best (Swallow), Leigh Melrose (Ned Keene), Michael Colvin (Bob Boles), Felicity Palmer (Mrs Sedley), Rhian Lois (1^st Niece), Mary Bevan (2^nd Neice), Matthew Treviño (Hobson), Tim Robinson (Reverend Horace Adams)

Rigoletto

Giuseppe Verdi

Directed by Christopher Alden

Conducted by Graeme Jenkins

Opens: 13 February 2014 (11 performances)

A co-production with Canadian Opera Company

New production supported by a syndicate of individual donors

Cast Includes: Quinn Kelsey (Rigoletto), Barry Banks (Duke of Mantua), Anna Christy (Gilda), Peter Rose/Matthew Treviño (Sparafucile), Justina Gringyte (Maddalena), David Stout (Monterone), George Humphreys (Marullo), Anthony Gregory (Borsa), Barnaby Rea (Ceprano), Diana Montague (Giovanna)

Rodelinda

George Frideric Handel

Directed by Richard Jones

Conducted by Christian Curnyn

Opens: 28 February 2014 (8 performances)

A co-production with the Bolshoi Opera, Russia

New production supported by Colwinston Charitable Trust and a syndicate of individual donors

Cast Includes: Rebecca Evans (Rodelinda), Iestyn Davies (Bertarido), John Mark Ainsley (Grimoaldo), Susan Bickley (Eduige), Christopher Ainslie (Unulfo), Richard Burkhard (Garibaldo)

Booking for these shows opens later this year…

Powder Her Face

Thomas Adès

Directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins

Conducted by TBA

Opens: 2 April 2014 (9 site-specific performances at Ambika P3)

Thebans

Julian Anderson

Librettist: Frank McGuinness

Directed by Pierre Audi

Conducted by Edward Gardner

Opens: 3 May 2014 (8 performances)

A co-production with Bonn Oper

New production supported by The Boltini Trust, PRS for Music Foundation and ENO’s Contemporary Opera Group

Cast Includes: Roland Wood (Oedipus), Peter Hoare (Creon), Julia Sporsén (Antigone), Matthew Best (Tiresias), Susan Bickley (Jocasta), Christopher Ainslie (Messenger), Anthony Gregory (Haemon), Jonathan McGovern (Polynices)

Cosí Fan Tutte

Wolfgang Mozart

Directed by Katie Mitchell

Conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth

Opens: 16 May 2014 (12 performances)

A co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, New York

Cast Includes: Kate Valentine (Fiordiligi), Christine Rice (Dorabella), Norman Reinhardt (Ferrando), Marcus Farnsworth (Guglielmo), Roderick Williams (Don Alfonso), Mary Bevan (Despina)

Benvenuto Cellini

Hector Berlioz

Directed by Terry Gilliam

Conducted by Edward Gardner

Opens: 5 June 2014 (8 performances)

A co-production with De Nederlandse Opera, Amsterdam

New production supported by the Peter Moores Foundation’s Swansong Project 2013–2015 and a syndicate of individual donors

Cast Includes: Michael Spyres (Benvenuto Cellini), Corrine Winters (Teresa), Pavlo Hunka (Balcucci), Nicky Spence (Francesco), Paula Murrihy (Ascanio), Willard White (Pope Clement VII), Richard Burkhard (Fieramosca)

The Pearl Fishers

Georges Bizet

Directed by Penny Woolcock

Conductor: TBA

Opens: 16 June 2014 (9 performances)

Cast Includes: Sophie Bevan (Leila), John Tessier (Nadir), George von Bergen (Zurga)

River of Fundament

Composed by Jonathan Belper

Directed by Matthew Barney

Opens 29 June 2014 (3 viewings)

River of Fundament is presented worldwide on behalf of the artist by Manchester International Festival

Behind the scenes of La bohème with Kate Valentine

Soprano Kate Valentine (Mimi in La Bohème), also goes by the name of ‘Furtive Figaro’ due to her habit of filming rehearsals. Over the last couple of weeks, our Furtive Figaro has been working on The Daily Miller, capturing her favourite moments from the La Bohème rehearsals to give us an exclusive look behind the scenes.

First up, director Jonathan Miller offers some pearls of wisdom from W.H.Auden to the Chorus:


The men have a very funny dance rehearsal:


Jonathan Miller gives direction on dying…:


… and entrances and exits:


Jonathan talks about who we feel when faced with another’s death:


Some more dancing lightens the mood:


Jonathan talks about the importance of hand gestures:


Kate takes us on a tour of the set:

Gwyn Hughes Jones talks about mascots:

Kate talks to the cast about their experiences so far, part 1…:

…part 2:

La bohème is at ENO from 29 April – 29 June 2013.
#ENOBoheme

Sunken Garden. Or, how an opera which uses polarised images can polarise opinion…

Broadcaster Christopher Cook writes about how different people can have totally different experiences of the same work.

It’s a strange thing. Two people sit in the theatre and watch the same performance and then fight like cats and dogs about how much they liked it and how much they hated it. (Friendships have foundered on such differences of opinion.) How can it happen? Certainly, Sunken Garden has sorted out … I’ve said it, the sheep from the goats, but that’s because I’m a sheep and think that Michel van der Aa’s opera does wonderful things; and literally so when we put on our special 3D glasses.

Sunken Garden, Zenna Briggs (Katherine Manley) and the vertical pond (c) ENO/Mike Hoban

However, back to that difference of opinion, Of course no one person sees the same performance as another person. We’re all the sum of our own particular beliefs and prejudices and as we sit in the dark watching and listening we often wear them on our sleeves and to a great extent they frame the performance we’re attending (I’ve been struggling to ‘like’ Schumann’s orchestral music for years and I’m going to give up the fight soon.) So it’s not much use telling us that we should leave our opinions in the cloakroom with the hats and coats. As someone once said ‘an open mind is often an empty mind’!

To go back to Sunken Garden, I wonder if the often violent differences of opinion about this kind of music theatre have something to do with the idea that opera on stage has to be ‘opera’, that it ought to respect some agreed set of historical conventions and traditions. (Who exactly agreed them is never clear.) So if Strauss and Hofmannsthal set The Rosenkavalier in the reign of the Empress Maria Theresa, if Puccini wanted Cio-Cio San to wear a kimono and Norma and her tribe of ancient Gauls to have been conquered by the Romans, that’s how it has to be. The right sets and the proper frocks. We have to hold faith with the composer’s intentions and the way the work is always performed. So Tosca has to jump from the battlements of Castel Sant’Angelo and Gilda dies in a sack by the river in Mantua.

Are there people, then, who think modern opera is an oxymoron, for whom contemporary music drama is a kind of blasphemy. Of course opera has always been contemporary. and usually political – that’s a topic for another time. But perhaps one man or woman’s ‘contemporary’ is another’s source of deep anxiety as we are launched into a world that we don’t really understand. Michel van der Aa is a very contemporary artist, a filmmaker and a composer and a theatre director. And once we’ve arrived with Toby in the sunken garden, not just the score – a mix of live music and pre-recorded on a laptop – but the place itself are anchored in a contemporary digital world. Indeed one way of reading the climax of the work in front of the pool in the secret garden that can only be reached in our dreams is to see it as a video game of the kind that flouts the laws of physics and pits power against morality. But how many opera goers play video games? Most of us are what Marc Prensky has called Digital Immigrants. Is this the explanation for why a work like Sunken Garden polarises opinion? 

Sunken Garden is at the Barbican Centre until Saturday 20 April. Additional £16 tickets have just been released for the final two performances. Tickets available here: bit.ly/ENOGarden

To find out what our twitter followers thought of Sunken Garden, check out this Storify post: http://storify.com/E_N_O/sunken-garden-eno-at-the-barbican

Christopher Cook gives pre-performance talks at English National Opera, for information about upcoming events vist: http://www.eno.org/see-whats-on/productions/production-page.php?&itemid=1356

Sir Colin Davis 1927-2013

It is with great sadness that ENO acknowledges the death of Sir Colin Davis.  A former Music Director of ENO’s precursor, The Sadler’s Wells Opera, Sir Colin was a conductor who enhanced and strengthened the reputation of the company, both in terms of the musical standards he achieved and the repertoire he introduced.  During his time at Sadler’s Wells he introduced Weill’s Mahagonny and Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen to the repertoire and revived the then relatively unknown Mozart opera Idomeneo.  His wide range of influences is still reflected in ENO’s breadth of repertoire today.

ENO Music Director, Edward Gardner OBE said, “Sir Colin played an indelible part in the life of Sadler’s Wells.  He maintained a close link with the company through the transition into English National Opera, and many colleagues hold fond memories of a close working relationship with him.  Sir Colin brought Berlioz’s music to life in a way few others could, convincing the musical world of the dramatic depth and range of his music. We have Sir Colin to thank that Berlioz is heard as part of the repertoire of all the major opera houses.  As a young conductor at the Royal Academy of Music, he was an invaluable support, whose knowledge and enthusiasm was of great importance during the formative years of my career.”

Messages of condolence can be posted on the LSO’s website by clicking here: http://lso.co.uk/in-memory-of-sir-colin-davis

English National Opera nominated for 5 Olivier Awards

We’re delighted to announce that English National Opera has been nominated for 5 of the 8 available awards for opera at the Olivier Awards 2013. 

The nominations in full are:

Best New Opera Production

Billy Budd, English National Opera at the London Coliseum

Caligula, English National Opera at the London Coliseum

Einstein On The Beach at the Barbican theatre

La Traviata, English National Opera at the London Coliseum

Outstanding Achievement in Opera

Edward Gardner for his conducting of The Flying Dutchman and Billy Budd at the English National Opera, London Coliseum

Bryan Hymel for his performances in Les Troyens, Robert Le Diable and Rusalka at the Royal Opera House

Music Theatre Wales for In the Locked Room/Ghost Patrol at the Linbury Theatre, the Royal Opera House

The Stage Management teams at English National Opera, London Coliseum and the Royal Opera House

The Olivier Awards will be presented at the Royal Opera House on 28 April. You can listen LIVE on BBC Radio 2, or watch the highlights on ITV. 

Mauricio Kagel Music Prize for Michel van der Aa

English National Opera would like to congratulate Dutch composer, film-maker and director Michel van der Aa on winning the Maurico Kagel Music Prize. The North Rhine-Westphalia Arts Foundation has announced that the Mauricio Kagel Music Prize for 2013 will be awarded, by unanimous vote, to Michel van der Aa. The award will be presented on 28 April during the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik.

The Mauricio Kagel Music Prize is given to internationally renowned musicians whose work, like Kagel’s own, experiments with interdisciplinary concepts and techniques. It was established in 2011 and is awarded every two years; its first recipient was the French-Greek composer Georges Aperghis. 

The prize is worth a total of €50,000, of which €20,000 is to be used to fund a new project for the North Rhine-Westphalia region. It is the second major international prize to have been won by Van der Aa in just a few months, following his receipt of the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award for Up-Close in November.

Van der Aa’s own combination of visuals, theatre and music may be seen and heard in his forthcoming opera Sunken Garden, which will have its premiere at English National Opera on 12 April.

Watch a teaser of the opera below:

First teaser of Sunken Garden from English National Opera on Vimeo.

Who’s afraid of the French Baroque opera?

by Christopher Cook, writer & broadcaster

It’s a puzzle. After clasping the Italian and German Baroque to our musical bosoms, riding lifts in harmony with the Four Seasons, drumming our fingers in traffic jams to the Brandenburgs we have at last and rather late in the day acquired a taste for the French Baroque. And Opera in particular. First there was Phillipe Rameau’s Castor and Pollux and now Marc-Antoine’s Medea, which as far as most of us were concerned had been buried away in a bottom drawer since it was first performed in Paris in 1693. And where ENO goes Glyndebourne is about to follow with Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie.

Sarah Connolly plays Medea (c) Clive Barda

Hallelujah that it’s happened. But after the jubilation a question. Why has it taken so long, or, to put it another way, what was it that put the Anglo-Saxons off Rameau, Lully and their disciples when across the Channel they were staging opéra-ballets and tragédies lyriques the length of the Landes as soon as Ancient Music became the new music?

Was it perhaps because dancing was a vital part of the experience even when confined to an end-of-act divertissement in a tragédie lyrique like Charpentier’s Medea? Not so much a distaste for dance per se, but the way in which it seems to hold up the drive of the story. Who wants a ‘corp’ of demonic creatures bouréeing out of hell when Medea ought to be putting the final stitches into the dress that will dispatch her rival while gloating in a blood curdling revenge aria? When it comes to drama the British taste is, perhaps, for ‘what then?’ while the tragédie lyrique and certainly the Opéra-ballet tells us ‘what now?’

“…German dance good; French dance bad? That’s plainly absurd.”

But wait … when Bach composed his suites what were the musical forms that he borrowed from the French? The Gavotte, the Bourée, Gigue, Sarabande etc. All of them dances. So German dance good; French dance bad? That’s plainly absurd. A perpetuation of that rosbif chauvinism that coloured Anglo-French relations from the War of Spanish Succession until the Entente Cordiale.

Nevertheless Germany, or rather a German-born musician may be partly to blame for our neglect of the French baroque. Handel, shakes the dust of Hanover off his shoes and sets up in London and takes the town by storm with Italian operas! A composer-entrepreneur, too, who went out of his way to procure the most stellar Italian singers for his company, the most-admired women of the age and the castrati. And aristocratic London swooned at their vocal virtuosity.

Sarah Connolly in McVicar’s 2007 production of Agrippina (c) Clive Barda

How different the French vocal tradition with that ideal of declamation that could still stir Debussy when he began to think about one of the least conventionally declamatory operas in the repertoire, Pelleas et Mélisande in the 1890s. Then there’s the extraordinary rationality of the music itself, more Apollo than Dionysius. Order, reason, symmetry. Yes, of course that applies to Bach and others across the Rhine. But tell it not in Italy. And it was to Italy that Handel led his English opera lovers.

So strangely did Charpentier, who, like Handel later, had studied in Rome. Indeed there’s a view that it was it was the Frenchman’s Italian nuanced harmonic language that caused Medea to disappoint Parisian audiences at the Opéra in 1693.  We know better now. Or we will when you can see Lully’s Armide or Rameau’s Les Indes galantes staged on this side of the Channel. Or do I mean La Manche? 

Listen online to Christopher Cook’s podcast on Medea, where he talks to Dr Peggy Reynolds about Charpentier’s music and the murky world of French baroque opera:

https://soundcloud.com/englishnationalopera/medea-podcast

Let us know what you think about the resurgence of interest of British opera houses in French Baroque opera. Follow us on twitter (twitter.com/E_N_O) and use the #ENOblog hashtag