Donizetti - Bastarda: 1. For Better, For Worse... 2. ... Till Death Do Us Part

La Monnaie, Brussels, Saturday 15 and Sunday 16 April 2023

Conductor and Musical Arrangements: Francesco Lanzillotta. Concept, Script and Production: Olivier Fredj. Sets and Costumes: Urs Schönebaum. Costumes: Petra Reinhardt. Video: Sarah Derendinger. Choreography: Avshalom Pollak. Elisabetta: Myrtò Papatanasiu. Anna Bolena: Salome Jicia. Leicester: Enea Scala. Enrico: Luca Tittoto. Giovanna Seymour, Sara: Raffaella Lupinacci. Amy Robsart: Valentina Mastrangelo. Maria Stuarda: Lenneke Ruiten. Roberto Devereux: Sergey Romanovsky. Nottingham: Bruno Taddia. Smeton: David Hansen. Cecil: Gavan Ring. Elisabetta as a child: Hadley Dean Randerson. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie.

Photos: Bernd Uhlig, La Monnaie 

From La Monnaie's website:

Part 1: The first part of Bastarda focuses on the life of young Elizabeth: from her childhood, marked by the tragic death of her mother Anne Boleyn, through her unexpected coronation to the ultimate confrontation with her cousin and rival Mary Stuart.

Part 2: Challenged by the betrayal of her political enemies as well as her 'favourites', it is not just an older but also a more dangerous Queen Elizabeth I that we get to know in part two of Bastarda.

Bastarda is a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, in two parts, conceived by director Olivier Fredj. It's an ambitious, complex creation: according to La Monnaie's website, the house's various teams have worked on it over several years. It aims to tell the story, beginning with the fairytale 'once upon a time,' of Queen Elizabeth I, from birth to death, using narration, theatre, dance, scenes from Donizetti's four relevant operas, new linking passages composed by the conductor, videos, photos, mirrors, recorded music and more. It also attempts to dig into Elizabeth’s mind, particularly in relation to her childhood (and the ‘bastarda’ stigma) and relationships. The director’s stated intention is to transform La Monnaie into a palace, where we encounter the Tudor court, and where the action spills from the stage into the auditorium and beyond, during intervals, to the staircases, bars and foyers.

The production is knowingly, explicitly theatrical, the better to contrast the Queen’s control and projection of her own royal image, her representation and stage management of royalty, with the ‘real’, inner Elizabeth, the child in her (and beyond that, the child the director believes we harbor in all of us), her doubts, fears and hesitations. Her double, a young (13?) teen actor, sometimes playing out the plot with her dolls (and toy piano) calls her back to her childhood self, and the troubled, even tortured persona behind the commanding royal personage projected in public. She also expresses aloud, sometimes in ripe language, thoughts the queen keeps to her royal self.

The basic set is a dark, oval space. Tall, mobile piers shape smaller spaces and display images or mirrors; photos and videos of key characters are projected on a gigantic scale at the rear. Red-carpeted gangways on either side of the pit can be rolled together to make a bridge across it, leading to a catwalk amidst the audience. Elizabeth and her double wear extravagant farthingales and ruffs inspired by the official portraits of the period. Henry VIII is in full, swaggering Holbein. The two Robertos, Dudley and Devereux, wear identical white shirts, black doublets, breeches and boots. Smeton, Cecil and Nottingham, in plainer suits, act as MCs, guiding us through Elizabeth’s life, interacting with her child double, joining in her games, holding the show together. Dancers in black with corsets, ruffs and, sometimes, ruff-like tutus, represent the court in a comical and often irritating, epileptic choreography, recalling variously Monty Python’s silly walks, the Keystone Cops and Chicken Run, that invades La Monnaie’s public areas during intervals.

Excerpts from Donizetti’s ‘Tudor’ operas are used in any order, as the telling of the tale through Elizabeth’s musings and memories may require, chopped and changed so sometimes you aren't sure who's singing to whom and when. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are there till the end for example, and in Part II the two Robertos, identically dressed, are on stage together, singing alternate lines to the Queen from a single aria. Smeton is countertenor David Hansen, forced to switch jarringly, mid-phrase, from falsetto to natural voice and back again, according to the demands of his mezzo arias. ‘Al dolce guidami' is used as a nostalgic linking theme, starting out on a music box on stage, among the child Elizabeth's toys. 

It is in some ways a directorial tour de force, with many successful moments. The performance of ‘bleeding chunks’ linked by spoken passages, out of the original order, naturally undermines the dramatic thrust of the works as first conceived, especially in the rather confusing first part. But the deaths of Mary Stuart (against a grid of fire) and Elizabeth herself (now stripped of her finery; imprisonment in her farthingale was a clever, if risky, idea) have their own intrinsic power, and are thus highlights of the two-day project.

As regards voices… as well as a directing tour de force, this was a casting one. The decision to have characters from four different works on stage at the same time precluded most doubling, so two Robertos and numerous queens or consorts were needed, all up to meeting Donizetti’s demands. On day one, to be frank, all the voices initially sounded loud and hard and the sopranos were hard to tell apart. At the interval, my friends and I wondered, inconclusively, if some amplification had been used. I’ve seen no mention of any (for the singing) in articles I’ve read, but my French neighbour claimed he’d never heard such volumes before in nearly forty years in the house.

To Elizabeth, I preferred Ann Boleyn (rounder and warmer) Jane Seymour and Mary Stuart (both more lyrical). Lenneke Ruiten was, to me, best of all. Papatanasiu’s singing on the first day seemed edgy and laboured, as if it were tough going - as it no doubt is. But when, in the final scenes, stripped, as I said, of her stiff finery and really called on to act, she did, and that seemed to encourage her in her singing as well. She made the mistake of going for the top note at the end, but apart from that one curdled screech, she ended the two days very well, and scored quite a triumph.

Of the two Robertos, Sergey Romanovsky was, while not the louder, more at ease and more lyrical than Scala, who, while always sympathique, seemed rather to bash his way through the part (far more so than in Les Huguenots in the same house). ‘Ça passe ou ça casse,’ said my neighbour: it’s make or break. It was unfair to David Hansen to cast him as Smeton. The constant changes from falsetto to natural voice and back were ungainly and led, I saw, to some poor reviews - a ‘caricature of a countertenor,’ said one Italian. Gavan Ring was quite impressive as Cecil, though seldom singing; the same might more or less be said of dark-voiced Nottingham. Luca Tittoto was an adequate, rough and ready Enrico, occasionally unfocused and falling behind, causing the conductor to gesture vigorously to get him back in place.

The chorus was on great form, and this is music that suits La Monnaie’s orchestra. Lanzillotta conducted with the commitment to be expected from someone so thoroughly invested in the project: he composed the new musical linking passages, on themes from Donizetti.

La Monnaie has itself billed this project as ambitious, and it must have been expensive. There was a lot that could have gone wrong. Subscribers might not have appreciated having a two-day hybrid drama thrust upon them, instead of straightforward opera. Donizetti lovers might have hated their beloved works being divvied up over the two parts and sometimes sung by or to the ‘wrong’ person in the wrong place. Perhaps some stayed away. Casting must have been a nightmare and could have been disastrous. The whole thing might have been greeted as a ‘luvvy’ vanity project, and if the director had been less skillful, and failed, that would have made it worse. In the event, Fredj was very skillful indeed, but to my mind the second part of his project was more solidly coherent than the first, which was confusing to the point of exasperation, and half an hour too long. The press reception has been unusually positive*, and the Brussels crowd was unusually demonstrative at the end, standing (well, some of them) and cheering. Which is just as well, as La Monnaie has scheduled another two-day extravaganza, this time using early Verdi scores, for next season, with a different director, who will find the bar has been set high.

*When I wrote that, I hadn’t yet read the review on toutelaculture.com.

Here, the inimitable Wenarto sings Anne Boleyn’s mad scene: