Ravel’s L’heure espagnole and L’enfant
et les sortilèges
Teatro alla Scala, Milan
June 3, 2016
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| What's a desperate housewife to do? Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala |
It was a rainy late spring evening in Milan that found us at La
Scala for a double feature of little-performed one-act operas by Maurice Ravel.
The program was virgin territory for both of us, so we arrived with a mindset
of pure discovery. Had it not been for the warm solicitations of an
acquaintance not to miss it, we would have skipped this one. Instead, we took
the Ravel plunge and were happily surprised.
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| Seize the day, says the true poet to her lover. Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala |
The first of the two, L’heure espagnole, was a one-act
opera comique, a Boccaccio-esque romp into the life of a desperate housewife,
along the lines of Peronella and her lover Giannello (Decameron, Day
VII, Story 2). Only this time in the place of her famous tub we find twin
grandfather clocks endowed with human-sized hiding places in their capacious
chests. The piece is a frivolous and fun divertissement, all about an
insatiable woman trying to lure into her bed a lover or two (actually, three!)
during the one hour her husband is out on business.
The production directed by Laurent Pelly that premiered at
the Glyndebourne Festival in 2015 updates the action of the opera from the 18th
century to the present day. The costumes have a distinctly 1970s feeling, but
the modern washing machine placed front and center in the active bottega of a
set brings it squarely into the last couple of decades, at least. The staging
is simple yet effective: a saturated store that clearly doubles as living
quarters for the clockmaker and his wife is developed into two levels, with a
staircase that leads into the wife’s bedroom and the related heavy traffic of
lovers being carried back and forth while hiding in grandfather clocks. The
very cluttered sets (clocks, next to mock bulls next to laundry baskets, next
to car parts) provided a lively, messy yet joyful backdrop for the comic action
and, at times, even seemed to mirror the multi-layered effects of the complex
score.
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| But the narcissist always has the spotlight on himself Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala |
Mezzo Stéphanie D’Oustrac sang the role of the lonely wife,
Concepcion, who seems to have a little too much time on her hands. She played
her character’s ennui with a real working class nonchalance and rendered her
desperate craving for sexual fulfillment with gusto. When her husband the
clockmaker, Torquemada, played here by tenor Jean-Paul Fouchécourt in a
mad scientist’s white wig and nerdy lab coat, is called away on his regular
mission to adjust the municipal clocks, the pussycat is free to play. This is
the moment in which she habitually receives her poet-lover, but today an
unforeseeable visitor has happened upon the shop: Ramiro the mule driver who is
looking to get his watch fixed. He is a hulking hunk of a man sung by baritone Jean-Luc
Ballestra in a form fitting t-shirt. The watchmaker has invited him to wait
until he returns. How inconvenient! How is she to get any satisfaction with
this unwanted guest hanging around. But like any desperate housewife: where
there’s a will, there’s a way, particularly if a hot man with bulging muscles
is around.
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| The ennui of a woman alone, while her men play hide-and-seek Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala |
The lover whom she awaits it turns out is none other than
Gonzalve, sung by tenor Yann Beuron. In bellbottomed pants and mutton
chops, he is an egomaniac of a lyric poet who is more consumed with the poetic
idea of being in love than ever turning his thoughts to consummating the actual
act of love that Concepcion is hungry for. She pines for him, gropes for him,
all but throws herself at him. All he can do is come up with lines for sonnets,
ballads and songs that only serve to keep her at bay. At one point she even
appeals to him twice saying, “Ne perdons pas, à de vaines paroles, / L’heure
qui s’envole, / Et qu’il faut cuellir.” In short: cut the crap and seize
the day! The real Horace in this play is not the poet but, as it turns out, is
none other than the sexually frustrated housewife. The satire on the impotence
of literati is acutely felt and evokes a series of laughs as the ongoing gag
plays out.
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| The superhuman strength of the muleteer Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala |
We have yet to meet one final caricature. The fourth of our
ridiculous male figures is Don Iñigo Gomez, sung by bass-baritone Vincent Le
Texier, a randy financier playing hooky from the bank. He is yet another
even more pathetic pretender to the affections of the highly sought after
watchmaker’s wife. She must have something to recommend her in order to justify
the attentions of so many men. And so the delicate dance steps up a notch.
Concepcion spends the rest of the opera playing duck and dodge as she attempts
to get what she wants from this steady stream of suitors during the short heure
her husband is away.
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| So much more than a love triangle Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala |
The poet and the banker alternately hide in the two grandfather
clocks that Ramiro carries back and forth from the showroom to Concepcion’s
bedroom, showing off his masculine strength as he effortlessly carries clocks
containing grown men up and down the stairs. After all of these shenanigans,
Concepcion comes out chaste and true to her husband who even manages to turn
the amorous entrelacement into a sale, much like Peronella's poor lover in Decameron VII, 2.
Both Don Iñigo and Gonzalve are persuaded to purchase their respective
grandfather clock hiding spots. It’s slapstick silliness that comes full circle
and it amounts to a level of Boccaccian revelry that I am just not accustomed
to seeing on the opera stage and for that it was a heck of a lot of fun to
watch.
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| Pelly's oversaturated sets Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala |
The vocal writing here is all sung through, mostly declamatory, to
add to the humdrum lack meaning in the lives of these self-consciously
caricaturesque characters. The only truly lyrical bits are those of the
poet-lover but there again, lyricism is used as a parody of artists being too
self-absorbed by their art to really live life. Another parodic moment is when
Concepcion sings her seduction aria in the finale, which amounts to a mocking
riff on the melodic line of Bizet’s Habanera, in a banalization of the
seductive gypsy of Carmen.
In Spain, it would seem, time works a little differently than it
does elsewhere. It can move slowly. It can open up – quite literally as men
emerge from clocks. Love awaits within its gates, and it’s all good fun.
* * *
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| The Enfant at his studies Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala |
The second opera of the evening, L’enfant et les sortilèges,
a fantasie lyrique in two parts, was an awe-inspiring tour de force.
Also directed by Laurent Pelly, however it could not have been more different
from the piece that came before. Oneiric, fantastic and beautifully enchanting,
this production brought to life the Ravel work with intelligence and excellent
stagecraft. With a fairy tale driven libretto by the great French polymath
Colette, Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges brings together a whole slew
of great narrative, theatrical and musical ideas all in the course of just fifty-five
minutes.
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| A child's perspective on an adult world Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala |
The opera opens with one of its highly memorable scenes. The
Enfant, sung by a brilliantly infantilized mezzo Marianne Crebassa, is
sitting on a larger than life chair on which he is perched on a stack of larger
than life books in order to reach his homework on an enormous larger than life
table. The curtain opens on him scribbling away there at this notebook, though
he seems none too happy. His conflict with the authoritarian iron fist of the
adult world becomes evident when his mother makes her way out in the form of Delphine
Haidan on a contraption that makes her seem larger than life too, like the
table. She too is none too happy that he isn’t concentrating. She scolds him
and makes all the threatening gestures of a clueless parent who is completely
out of touch with their children.
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| The furniture comes to live give a scolding Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala |
After his mother is wheeled away on her contraption, it is time to
rebel. The boy tears up his school work, jettisons the tea pot, cups and
saucers across the room, terrorizes the cat and defaces the wallpaper before
crashing out on an armchair to take a nap. Once he is asleep the real action of
the opera begins. The morality tale takes over and all of the objects and
animals on which he has wreaked havoc all of his young life suddenly come to
life to teach him one of life’s most precious lessons: we must be mindful of
the world in which we live. We have to be respectful and care for all of God’s
creation both animate and inanimate. A series of characters emerge like vivid
dreams from the darkness of the stage: a thundering clock, the fire, a
storybook princess, various duets (between teapot and teacup, armchair and
sofa, boy cat and girl cat) and ensembles (a class of math students, baroque
wallpaper characters, the garden’s plants and animals). Each vignette has a
different tone, from ironic to pity-inducing, to enraged, to gently scolding,
to dramatic storytelling. The overall effect is of a moral phantasmagoria, in a
whirlwind of dreamy fantastic fun, very playfully done.
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| Figures emerge from the wallpaper to teach a lesson Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala |
The music oscillates beautifully between traditional narrative
operatic passages and more oneiric purely fantasy bits. One of the more
traditional narrative moments in the score occurs in the brief interlude in
which the shepherds and the shepherdesses descended from the tear in the
baroque wallpaper singing bars of a rarefied rococo music, all oboe, flute and
tamburello. But, we also have the fire poking out of the fireplace, in a
quasi-Queen-of-the-Night coloratura fashion, harshly threatening the child. In
the garden, on the other hand, the various insects and frogs engage in an
extended and very surreal call and response that evoked something of a mating
ritual.
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| Sexuality oozed from much of the action Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala |
In fact, much of this staging was rather explicitly sexual. The
procreative call of nature was often boiling right at the surface of the
choreography. Very little was necessarily family friendly, despite its childish
appeal. This was an unabashedly Freudian universe. Many of the directorial
decisions were firmly rooted in the music and so I would even suggest that some
of this, let’s call it, Dionysian element is most certainly also in the score.
Ravel is no fool. The two operas of this double feature cannot be more
different from another, the unifying trait being really only the wondrous
complexity of the Ravel score, in both instances masterfully executed under the
baton of maestro Marc Minkowski.
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| The forest comes to life in the finale and the Enfant is redeemed Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala |
This Pelly production of L’Enfant first premiered at the
Glyndebourne Festival in 2012 and it was one of the most inventive works I’ve
ever seen on the stage of a major opera house. Ravel’s fantasy world was
imaginatively executed. The set and costumes were immaculate in their simple
attention to detail in the portrayal of a child’s perspective on the adult
world that surrounds him. And the stage direction was brilliantly conceived and
executed. The timing of all of the transitions and sequence of fantastic scenes
unfolded impeccably. I found myself on the edge of my seat wondering what was
going to come next. It was truly next level theater making. Some said that it
is the best thing that La Scala did this year. I would put it right up there
with this season’s big opener, Verdi’s Giovanna D’Arco, which is without
a doubt another personal favorite. But this production of Ravel ranks right up
there. And to think that we almost did not go writing it off like a kids’ show!
– Lui & Lei
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| The Queen of the Fire flashes out of the hearth Photo credit: Teatro alla Scala |
