Bellini - Beatrice di Tenda, at the Paris Opera

ONP Bastille, Thursday March 7 2024

Conductor: Mark Wigglesworth. Production: Peter Sellars. Sets: George Tsypin. Costumes: Camille Assaf. Lighting: James F. Ingalls. Beatrice di Tenda: Tamara Wilson. Filippo Visconti: Quinn Kelsey. Agnese del Maino: Theresa Kronthaler. Orombello: Pene Pati. Anichino: Amitai Pati. Rizzardo del Maino: Taesung Lee. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos: Franck Ferville/ONP

In a recent issue of France's Opéra Magazine, Peter Sellars, interviewed during rehearsals, explained that he'd wanted to stage Beatrice di Tenda for 25 years, in particular for its contemporary relevance:

'Beatrice di Tenda asks these fundamental questions: what is a dictatorship? How does it work, and how does it manage to impose itself? Is it possible to oppose it with beauty and culture? Bellinian melody rises up as the most sublimely human expression, to counter brutal force (...) It is very important to stage Beatrice di Tenda at a time when everyone is so sad, so desperate, in the atmosphere of extreme violence that surrounds us, including - and perhaps above all - within our great democracies, where I feel it is particularly important to make this fragile voice heard. After all the hopes pinned on change, particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there have never been so many dictatorships in the world as there are today! And everywhere, more walls and more prisons are being built...' (Translated using DeepL).

Hence my surprise, last Thursday, at the end result: a flabby, old-fashioned production, reminiscent of Garnier at the end of the 80s, with soloists left to their own devices, the chorus standing in blocks, arms dangling, and hapless extras doing silly things. Plus the odd machine gun, but we've had those at least since the eighties, even in Offenbach, so nothing modern there. This was so not a contemporary production that the gimmicks: a laptop computer, Beatrice's smartphone, Agnese watching the trial on a flat-screen TV... looked anachronistically out of place. It was hard to believe any serious director had been near it in years, let alone that it was a new one, by somebody famous (and presumably expensive) and once seen as an enfant terrible... or that this was the last night, when an extra degree of excitement might have been expected. Between Sellars' throwback to the worst of 35 years ago, Mark Wigglesworth's unrelenting delicacy and restraint (to put it politely; the score could have done with a bloody good shake)... 'Ça ne décolle pas,' said my neighbour as we left - it never took off.

Just to prove I'm not a lone voice, here's a machine translation of parts of Christian Merlin's review in Le Figaro (skip it if you don't need the corroboration):

'Alas, three times over! How can this immense artist, one of the few of whom it can be said that there is a "before" and an "after", and whose name thirty years ago was synonymous with an abundance of invention and a kaleidoscope of emotions, now deliver such a banal, conventional and static production, a lazy succession of threadbare clichés in a kitsch décor? And precisely in a libretto that needed help to extract all its resources of intensity! (...) If not from the stage, the intensity could have been aroused by the music (...) But in this case, it's the conductor, Mark Wigglesworth, who is to blame. He, too, loves Bellini, but he loves him the wrong way: in his desire to abandon himself to the long, meditative melodies that fascinated Chopin, he forgets to sustain the thread of the discourse and conducts the cabalettas at the same tempo as the cantabile, a generalised adagio that quickly becomes monotonous and reduces the orchestra to an accompanying role.'

What's more, Opéra Magazine, now reviewing the production at the end of February, similarly (so skip this too if you so wish) writes:

'Unfortunately, Peter Sellars (...) has nothing to offer. His directing of the acting, usually his strongest point, remains conventional and static, as if he were unable to transcend the constraints of Felice Romani's libretto. Whatever the intentions stated in the programme (... 'Beatrice di Tenda speaks openly of dictatorship, injustice and torture, but also, in a visionary way, of humanity's aspiration to freedom'), Bellini's penultimate opera is neither Dallapiccola's Il prigioniero nor Fidelio (...)  Mark Wigglesworth stretches the tempi to the point of breaking the dramatic tension, with many superfluous pauses and lulls. The Paris Opera orchestra, which we have known to be more homogeneous and convincing, seems anaemic.'

The single set is the sterile winter garden of a gloomy palace, with a maze of hedges, stylised cypresses and topiary globes, all in green-painted steel, laser-fretted in swirling leaf patterns. There are dark mesh walls divided by Ionian pilasters, and a couple of cantilevered gantries, high on either side, rarely used much - though Agnes eventually watches the trial up there on her screen. When the curtain rises, workmen are using a tall stepladder to install or repair security cameras, that wink throughout the performance. While the lighting is usually low, with sharp, green highlights, at moments of drama it turns red, and sometimes the mesh walls are illuminated from within to reveal stacks of what I supposed was surveillance equipment: walls have ears. Most of the costumes are a kind of late 80s, neo-sub-Mugler knock-off in style, with lots of crinkly black leather. Even the stagehands wear black leather boiler suits. The inevitable extras, dashing around excitedly but superfluously with machine guns, are, it goes without saying, all in black, too, along with the the chorus (sometimes on stage, sometimes not, curiously). These clothes are all so badly cut, so ill-fitting, that I find it hard to believe they were made in the ONP's workshops. The weird exception to this outdated fantasy of futuristic formal wear is Beatrice's pleated, pale green 'diva dress', of a kind Callas might have worn in Norma, unflattering to Tamara Wilson.

The directing was as flaccid as Wigglesworth's conducting. Even on the last night, for example, Pene Pati, not knowing what to do with his hands while he sang, still simply grasped his lapels. And various details were just silly: that business with the stepladder, merely to draw attention to the cameras; Pati strumming a dummy guitar to Agnese's 'Ah! Non pensar che pieno'; the unfortunate extras raising a giggle by 'air-clipping' the leafless hedges, washing the walls with rags on long poles, 'air-digging' with empty spades, cartoon style... I won't go on (for a change).

The cast was of course strong, as you can tell just by reading the names, but the feeble directing undermined their efforts. Quinn Kelsey sang firmly and warmly: sandalwood and cinnamon (I thought spices might be a change from different kinds of metal), but was dramatically expressionless, wearing the same frown all evening. He looked, in profile, remarkably like Lenin. Pene Pati was vocally quite radiant but physically gauche; I think I preferred his brother Amitai's more lyrical tenor sound and more natural presence. Theresa Kronthaler was faultless, and yet... This reads like faint praise, but it wasn't their fault if the whole evening was nerveless.

The main reason I was there was to hear Tamara Wilson for the first time. I could have heard her in Bob Wilson's Turandot, but I saw that - not his most convincing effort - last year and therefore preferred to plump for a new production. It's rare to hear a voice that, without any sense of being a 'sledgehammer', on the contrary quietly but firmly fills the Bastille with beautiful, silvery sound, both rhythmically precise and perfectly tuned. The score doesn't, however, offer much in the way of fireworks, especially when the conducting is so droopy; the flabby production brought no energy of its own; and the extra buzz you might hope for on a last night simply wasn't there. Perhaps, too, after three hours of it, Tamara Wilson was tired. Whatever the case, the end of the opera just seemed to fizzle out, like a damp squib. The applause was more polite than ecstatic, and, last night or not, brief. We were out in good time for dinner.