Spontini - La Vestale, at the Bastille in Paris

ONP Bastille, Paris, Monday July 8 2024.

Conductor: Bertrand de Billy. Production: Lydia Steier. Sets: Etienne Pluss. Costumes: Katharina Schlipf. Lighting: Valerio Tiberi. Julia: Elza van den Heever. Licinius: Michael Spyres. La Grande Vestale: Eve-Maud Hubeaux. Cinna: Julien Behr. Le Souverain Pontife: Jean Teitgen. Le Chef des Aruspices, un consul: Floren Mbia. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

All production photos: Guergana Damianova/ONP

Last year, the ever-excellent Palazzetto Bru Zane issued a new recording, under Christophe Rousset and with a strong case, of La Vestale. As it's considered a historically important work, I dutifully listened, more than once, but it didn't click at the time. Still, when it popped up in the Paris Opera's season, in a brand new production (albeit by Lydia Steier - not exactly, based on her Salome, a positive pointer), I bought tickets. I'm glad I did because, despite some misgivings I'll outline below, having seen it staged, I now wonder why it's become so rare.

Photo from 'Concours National de la Résistance et de la Déportation', no credit.

Though it isn't logical to begin at the end, in this case a quotation from Voltaire projected at the final curtain sums up much of Lydia Steier's vision for La Vestale: 'Le fanatisme est un monstre qui ose se dire le fils de la religion,' i.e. 'fanaticism is a monster that dares to pretend it is a child of religion.'

The single set reproduces, on a smaller scale, the Grand Amphithéâtre de la Sorbonne (see above), here sorely dilapidated, its statues and stucco crumbling, Puvis de Chavannes' frescoes faded. A warning, I guess, to the French, as elections loomed, (supposing they recognised the amphitheatre: I admit I wouldn't have) about what might happen to learning and the arts under a far-right government. In the first act, an incongruous street lamp presumably hints we are in a public arena. In the second, we are in a library, its shelves empty and covered in dust, where the Vestals tip piles of books from wheelbarrows on to the sacred fire. In the third, the set is rejigged to resemble a courtroom.

Dissidents are bludgeoned to death and strung up by the feet against a concrete wall that slides in and out from time to time, bearing the (ubiquitous) motto 'TALIS EST ORDO DEORUM.' The Souverain Pontife and his men wear black uniforms with jodhpurs and jackboots recalling the Waffen SS and the Italian fascists. The pontife has a swaggering cape, clasped at the neck with chains. The Vestals are in long, strait-laced black, with tightly-coiled wigs they take from racks; in the last act they wear peaked bonnets inspired by The Handmaid's Tale - here black, not red, so they also vaguely recall the Salvation Army. The Grande Vestale is almost certainly inspired by the evil queen in Disney's Snow White: her full-length black cloak has sharply-padded shoulders, with epaulettes and swags of gold braid marking her official status within the regime, and purple silk lining. The Roman populus wear convincing fascist-era mufti.

Steier piles on the totalitarian pomp and violence, adding plot to an opera that would otherwise be of Gluckian simplicity and candour. I mentioned dissidents being beaten to death and strung up as an example, horrors that drive Licinius to drink. They are also - like Julia, before she's whipped and forced into gold brocade for her errand in act one - copiously spat on, and paraded before the public, amid swaying purple banners, crammed into wheeled cages that steam mysteriously, or in one case, tied to a post, naked, and flayed alive with relish. In this reading, in the second act, the lovers are spied on (like Tristan and Isolde) by Cinna, who, at the dénouement, after the storm and lightning and the appearance of Vesta as a gigantic, golden virgin of the kind shouldered by men in pointy hats in Spanish processions (but here advancing under her own steam), takes power, crowns himself (like Napoleon), and, having had the dissident Julia, Licinius, the Souverain Pontife and the Grande Vestale machine-gunned (loudly: it made the person seated in front of me jump) behind the Sorbonne's frosted glass doors, sweeps aside the happy end (Tosca-wise, you might say) and restores totalitarian order.

There's something of the sledgehammer cracking the nut here. 'Overwrought' was a word I used when summing the production up for friends, with quite a lot of déjà vu in the ideas, corniness in the action (traditional stand-and-deliver soloists, old-fashioned 'imploring' gestures by the chorus...), a general feeling of tub-thumping ('TALIS EST ORDO DEORUM' everywhere, though I suppose under a dictatorship it might be), and the Grande Vestale's nod to Disney wickedness (Eve-Maud Hubeaux was a picture of officious evil) flirted with ridicule. But perhaps it was thought necessary to beef the work up and pile on the spectacle to keep contemporary audiences alert.

For the revival of La Vestale after 170 years' absence, it's evident that the Paris Opera decided to field a strong cast. But all evening, despite the all-round excellence of the singing, I wished we were in a smaller theatre with a period band - under Rousset, perhaps, like the Bru Zane recording, or probably better still Minkowski, with his caution-to-the-wind drive and vivid sense of drama. I know there are still people who expect Wagnerian sopranos in Gluck and Heldentenors as Max, but I'm not one of them. Elza van den Heever sings Julia with style and nuance and TLC, and her silvery voice is certainly the right size for the Bastille. She had a really super second act. But she is not a declamatory 'tragédienne' of either the Antonacci or the Gens sort; her singing is all smooth Germanic line, and her diction is correspondingly smoothed out, so you need the supertitles. Is an Empress, a Chrysothemis or a Salome the right kind of voice for Spontini?

Michael Spyres, on the other hand, is at just the right stage in his interesting vocal trajectory for Licinius, ably if not so charismatically supported by Julien Behr. Eve-Maud Hubeaux, with her rich, even 'chewy' mezzo sound and perfect diction would be too, only at the Bastille (possibly hampered by her strict characterisation), she was surprisingly lacking in impact. Jean Teitgen's charcoal black bass isn't to everyone's taste, I know, but it's perfect for a 'Grand-Inquisitor-style' reading of the Souverain Pontife. So, overall, the cast was strong, yes, but was it really the right cast in the right place?

The chorus was on great form, but the orchestra seemed sometimes sleepy and sometimes puddingy-sounding under Bertrand de Billy's attentive, ever-temperate, never excessive conducting. Hence my yearning for a period band, injecting more bite and excitement into the (super) score, and a conductor like Minkowski, sometimes criticised for almost martial violence, to shake it up a bit. It's a pity Rousset's 2022 performance at the TCE wasn't staged. At any rate, as I said at the start of this post, having now seen La Vestale at the Bastille, I find it hard to understand how it's slipped out of the repertoire.