Berlioz - Benvenuto Cellini, at La Monnaie in Brussels

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday February 08 2025

Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Production and sets: Thaddeus Strassberger. Costumes: Giuseppe Palella. Lighting: Driscoll Otto. Videos: Greg Emetaz. Benvenuto Cellini: John Osborn. Giacomo Balducci: Tijl Faveyts. Fieramosca: Jean-Sébastien Bou. Le Pape Clément VII: Ante Jerkunica. Francesco: Luis Aguilar. Bernardino: Leander Carlier. Pompeo: Gabriele Nani. Cabaretier: Yves Saelens. Teresa: Ruth Iniesta. Ascanio: Florence Losseau. La Monnaie Orchestra and Chorus. La Monnaie youth choir.

Photos: Simon Van Rompay/La Monnaie

The last time I saw Benevenuto Cellini, it was in Terry Gilliam’s production at the Bastille, in 2018. It was busy. I quote: ‘For the first time ever in my opera-going career, as far as I can remember, I had the unlikely and illogical feeling that the music was drowned in the action, crowded out, overwhelmed…’ In other words, it was ‘Hugely busy, overwhelmingly and distractingly and unnecessarily busy, like some gigantic, high-budget fantasy musical, though I must admit skilfully done.’ It wasn't, however, tacky with it.

On YouTube, La Monnaie’s trailer has a caption that calls Benvenuto Cellini ‘Berlioz’s outrageously colourful opera’ and says ‘Let’s get this party started.’ I sent the link to a bright young friend: ‘Wah, c'est un club gay d’Ibiza !’ was his spontaneous reaction. Director Thaddeus Strassberger, new to me but with an international string of opera and event productions to his credit, from Tulsa and LA to Riyadh and Beijing, seems, rather than offering us new insights into the work or even supporting and developing the plot with care, to have thought no further than: ‘Carnival? Party time!’

His production treats Cellini as a whacky, whirlwind opéra bouffe, reducing both story and characters to incidentals in a kaleidoscopic, revue-style Kitsch-Fest positioned somewhere between the Moulin Rouge and Caesar’s Palace (my favourite Las Vegas hotel, as it happens: I’ve nothing against Kitsch per se). Had the piece been one of Hervé’s madcap farces, I might have loved it. But this was Berlioz.

The set could have been commissioned by Donald Trump himself to enhance - as he already has the Oval Office - the Forum Shops in Vegas. Those who recall the mall’s monumental animatronic fountain, that engulfs its talking statues in flames, will get my meaning. It is framed by a secondary, fake-marble proscenium, some of its panels back-lit in changing colours, with a row of busts where footlights might more usually be. The space is occasionally filled with a screen, for videos that reminded me of friends’ first attempts at digital animation a quarter-century ago: a golden bust of Cellini, or La Monnaie's own chandelier, spinning towards us through space. 

Under floating marble clouds and ‘SPQR’ in giant neon letters, sometimes joined by palm trees picked out in fairy lights, the rotating centrepiece is a monumental neo-Roman folly, a jumbled accumulation of near-random architectural elements: a portico with a triangular pediment, leading to a many-columned basement; a winding marble staircase, supported by a crouching Atlas, with gold or marble busts atop every newel; a gold-trimmed obelisk embraced by a marble giant; Trajan’s column, spiralled in gold and topped with a bust; Michelangelo’s David - so it seemed to me - bending to peer through an archway; the Capitoline Wolf with Romulus and Remus… On the left is a big marble foot, like Constantine's in Rome, and the whole is topped with an arched, curving loggia. Extra busts are scattered about; the numerous gold ones will come in handy later for the casting of Perseus. The lighting is pink, blue, green…

House lights pick out La Monnaie’s familiar statues - on the painted ceiling and holding candelabra by the stage - that, with the help of crafty projections, come to life as dancers in marbled costumes. They support the action throughout the show. Balducci’s home is cluttered with gilded, neo-baroque, nouveau-riche furniture and electrically-lit religious imagery. Characters in the soap opera on the gold-framed TV react to the live action on stage. Teresa, having stepped out of her gold-embroidered ‘Queen of Heaven’ frock and removed her starry crown, lounges around in layers of pink lace. Cellini, in a greenish suit and orange shirt and sporting a magnificent mullet, leaps, bedroom-farce style, on to Teresa’s marble four-poster. Fieramosca emerges from the sofa cushions still holding his bouquet, and is chased out of the house by a band of charladies wielding brooms and frying pans.

I can’t go on to describe every scene. Here are just some examples: Pompeo runs a mafia pizzeria where cooks spin dough on their fingertips; Balducci pulls entrail-like balloons out of his bulbous pig-suit, while a whole roasted pig is carved up on stage; the carnival cortege includes a grotesquely fat, larva-like pope with his head on a platter and winged, bare-chested gogo boys in the colours of the Swiss guards; a muscular centaur draws in a gilded chariot bearing a bearded drag queen, multi-breasted like Artemis of Ephesus, and a drag bitching-battle commences (this production retains a spoken passage, here performed in Brussels patois)…

There are jugglers juggling everything from luminous clubs to those spinning pizzas and wine bottles, aerial-silk dancers (of course), and when the time comes to cast the statue, assistants in fireproof silver suits and helmets, advancing stiffly like robots in a Daft Punk video. The furnace is a miniature Coliseum: Perseus springs from it like a stripper from a cake. A wedding cake, indeed, as at the end, Teresa’s dressed in a bridal gown and veil, and Benvenuto, mullet intact, in a matching white suit. There may have been gold confetti: I really don’t remember. It’s very distracting, very confusing, and leaves little room, if any, for character development and not much, even, for the music. It must have been a devil to rehearse. Not a bad production in itself, and one that raised many laughs. But to me, they chose the wrong opera.

As Balducci, Tijl Faveyts was announced sick, which was a wise decision. As the Pope (the ‘real’ one, in a glittering tiara, not the carnival parody), Ante Jerkunica boomed darkly and resoundingly, like the Fasolt he was in the same house’s superb Das Rheingold in 2023.

Florence Losseau, whom I’d only previously seen as a Maid in Elektra, was a juicy-voiced Ascanio. But as Ruth Iniesta has quite a dark timbre, the contrast with Teresa wasn’t marked: sometimes I had to peer through the on-stage maelstrom to see which was singing. Unlike many critics, I found Iniesta’s voice hard, loud and not always obviously in tune, though she tossed off some impressive high notes that rode above the din. Of course, the press are invited at the start of the run, when everyone’s fresh; and as I’ve often said before, Sunday matinees don’t necessarily suit all singers, so perhaps it wasn’t her best day.

Jean-Sébastien Bou, despite his tendency to bark, especially when playing bouffe character roles like Fieramosca (the Fieramosca of this production, at least), came across as the most fluent, idiomatic member of the cast.

Which may come as a surprise, as you might expect John Osborn, in the light of his experience, to be just as idiomatic. A sort of go-to tenor for near-impossible roles, he was also Cellini in Gilliam’s aforementioned Paris production, where I found him ‘perfect once more in this demanding role.’ That was eight years ago. On Sunday afternoon, I thought I heard a catch in his voice, a frog in his throat, so perhaps a winter bug of some kind was at work, bringing - at least in the first act - a touch of gravelly precarity to his top notes. Before the interval, I preferred him - and his Teresa - mezza voce rather than at full tilt. But in the second ‘half’ (a short half it makes, compared to the first), he seemed in better form, better able to sing out firmly. What’s missing, to my ear, is a degree of seductive charm. But in an orange shirt and a mullet…

I had, en revanche, no reservations of any kind about the orchestra and chorus, in peak condition under the saintly Altinoglu. I prefer Berlioz on period instruments, but on modern ones, this was as good as you’re likely to hear anywhere.

This teeming production was promoted by La Monnaie as having been especially labour-intensive and time-consuming to produce. I imagine it was expensive, too. Of course I’m not privy to the real reasons for the house’s abandoning Romeo Castellucci’s Ring after Die Walküre. I just hope Peter wasn’t robbed to pay Paul so the new management could make a splash. This is the first staging conceived under the mandate of La Monnaie’s new General and Artistic Director, Christina Scheppelmann, who replaced Peter de Caluwe last July. One swallow supposedly does not make a spring, but I wonder if it’s indicative of what’s to come.

Note: an edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.