Spiked potion - Frank Martin Le vin herbé WNO

Frank Martin Le vin herbé starts today at the Welsh National Opera in Cardiff before going on tour.   From the synopsis, you'd think it was Tristan und Isolde, Martin's Le vin herbé is spiked, with a twist.  Martin's oratorio profane is an alternative to the extremes of Wagnerian excess.  Martin, a Swiss national, could hardly have been unaware of what was happening in Germany, and of the Nazi appropriation of Wagner. Le vin herbé represents a completely different antithesis to the Tristan und Isolde cult and to the aesthetic of Third Reich Bayreuth.

Martin had been reading Le roman de Tristan et Iseult, a 1900 romance by French medievalist Joseph Bédier, who based his work on early French sources of the legend, striving to "eradicate inconsistencies, anachronisms, false embellishments,and never to mix our modern conceptions with ancient forms of thought and feeling". By "modern", Bédier meant 1900, when Bayreuth's version dominated public taste. Martin's Le vin herbé is restrained, the very simplicity of its form connecting to the aesthetic of the Middle Ages.
 
Martin doesn't write pastiche medievalism though.  Le vin herbé is scored for chamber choir and orchestra, so the palette is clean and pure, "modern" in the sense that Martin was writing in the late 1930's, when many French and German composers used medieval subjects as metaphors for modern times. Martin  used dodecaphony to open up and refine tonality, and add subtle lustre and mystery.  The role of the choir is important. Just as in a Greek Chorus, the choir comments on events, creating distance from the frenzied fevers of the  herbal concoction which Tristan and Iseult imbibe. In a departure from medieval form, the choir sings in unison, not polyphony, so the words they sing are part of the drama rather than decoration for decoration's sake. Soloists sometimes sing alone, sometimes with the chorus, and chorus members sing solo parts. It's as if the voices emerge and retreat into background tapestry.

There are only eight instruments in the orchestra, all strings (3v, 2va 2vc cb) with piano. Just as the voices emerge from the choir, solo instruments emerge from the opera at critical  moments; the contrabass and celli reinforcing  Tristan's part. The cantilenas for solo violin are exquisite, operating as an ethereal extra voice, commenting without words. The piano provides a measured counter to the fervent, passionate heartbeat when the strings surge in unison, marking the moment when Iseult and Tristan drink the potion and fall in love. Martin was working on Le Philtre before he even received a commission for the full work.

Tristan and Iseult are joined together in a drugged state, beautiful but ultimately fatal. They run off to live in the forest of Morois,where King Marke find them but spares them. Tristan escapes and after three years in a foreign land marries the evil Iseult of the White Hands. He's injured in battle  by a poison-tipped lance. Now the piano tolls like a bell, and the violin melody soars as if it were stretching across the seas in search of Iseult, mounting frenzy in the orchestra and chorus, and Iseult bursts in with a wild "Hélas ! chétive, hélas !",  the strings swirling around her turbulently.  Tristan is dead but Iseult lies down by Tristan "body to body, mouth to mouth".  We don't get a Mild und Liese, but there's some mighty fine writing for the orchestra and other voices. In an Epilogue, the choir sets out the moral of the story,  perhaps when the effects of the drug wear off, Tristan and Iseult find the true meaning of love. "Puissant-ils trouver ici consolation contre l'inconstance,  contre l'injustice, contre le dépit,  contre le pein, contre tous les maux d'amour"

Martin's Le vin herbé is by no means a rarity. There was a major staging last year, in Berlin, with Anna Prohaska.  There are two recordings. the first from 1960 with the composer himself at the piano, and more recently, the recording with Sandrine Piau, with the RIAS Kammerchor conducted by Daniel Reuss: both indispensable, and both very different. How the WNO production will compare, I don't know.

Le vin Herbé is very different from Martin's larger-scale works like Golgotha and Der Sturm, but it is an insight into an important but neglected period in music history. Understand Le vin herbé and you get a key into Poulenc, Honegger, Hartmann, Orff, and Braunfels.  It also connects to the literature and visual arts, including film, of the time. I discovered Frank Martin by sheer accident, hearing Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (1942/3) another "medieval" piece with a modern twist.  Please read my other posts on Wagner Tristan und Isolde,  especially "More tradition than meets the eye" and THIS about the Christof Loy Tristan und Isolde at the Royal Opera House. There's much more to the opera than fake medieval costumes.Think about characterization, and the characters as human beings in a dramatic setting.

Rossini Mose in Egitto WNO

Rossini Mose in Egitto (Moses in Egypt)  from the WNO now on BBC Radio 3.  This broadcast was made during the run in Cardiff. Sounds pretty good. Please read Robert Hugill's review HERE in Opera Today.  I quite enjoyed it, though it sounded more like Handel to me than Rossini. That's no big deal and it's illuminating to listen from a different angle. Possibly I've been spending too much time listening to the Pesaro production (conducted by Roberto Abbado, nephew of Claudio) reviewed HERE by Michael Milenski in Opera Today. WNO isn't going to compete with Pesaro, so I don't at all have a problem enjoying some of the best British-based singers in WNO Mose in Egitto.

Incidentally, one of the interesting things about Rossini's Guillaume Tell  is how "German" it sounds, as if Rossini's been imbibing Carl Maria von Weber.

Rossini William Tell, WNO, Oxford

Rossini William Tell  (Guillaume Tell) from the Welsh National Opera at the New Theatre Oxford, last night. Companies that tour, like WNO, have to strike a balance between excellence in-house and portability on the road. Even when a production is designed tto travel, it's not easy to make it fit every venue, every time, especially on one-night stops.  A lifetime ago, I used to sit up in the gods. Now I can afford posh tickets but I'm fussier. You can't win. Next time, I'm going to Cardiff.

The New Theatre wasn't built for opera, so the orchestra is so close to the audience that it overwhelms. Had this been a sublime musical experience it might not have mattered so much, but this performance, conducted by Andrew Greenwood (instead of Carlo Rizzi) was pretty ropey. The singing wasn't much, either. The orchestra and much the same cast had been singing for four nights in a row. It would be asking far too much of them, as human beings, not to sound tired. In any case, Arnold is one of the most difficult parts in the repertoire, such a killer role that it's hard to cast at the best of times. All respect to Barry Banks for a good enough performance. By putting 'Asile héréditaire' two and a half hours into the performance, Rossini was expecting superhuman effort. No audience should expect a singer to jeopardize his voice for one night.  I discreetly removed myself after the Third Act, leaving with good memories of Banks and Gisella Stille's moving duet, where they sing alone together, surrounded only by atmospheric, beautiful lighting. A lovely image, which reinforces the idea that Guillaume Tell might indeed be an opera better suited to the imagination than to staging.

Since the Royal Opera House is doing a new production of Guillaume Tell next spring (with Pappano, who is brilliant) , and we've recently heard the Munich production (with divine, unequalable Bryan Hymel)  this is a good time to be thinking about how Rossini's music can be recreated visually on stage. The instructions for the First Act militate against easy depiction. Many small groups of happy peasants mill about doing what happy peasants are supposed to do.  Rossini's music is much too beautiful to spoil with fussy kitsch. Short episodes are great for dancing, though they don't sustain theatrical cohesion. David Pountney uses a backdrop of glaciers. One newspaper critic sniffily dismissed this as depicting Antarctica, not the forests of Switzerland. But aren't there glaciers in Switzerland?  In any case, a friend identified the backdrop as the painting by Caspar David Friedrich The Sea of Ice which also references the boat in which William Tell sails  across the lake.

The Alps kept Switzerland independent. They're much more than decoration.  Many operas set in the Alps, like Catalani's La Wally, are hard to stage because the Alps are just hard to beat in terms of spectacle. Much wiser, I think, to focus on what the music suggests - wide open skies, endless vistas and the fresh, pure air of freedom. In Rossini's music, we can hear local colour, even the suggestion of yodel, carrying across vast distances, wild mountain winds and craggy "hiking" rhythms.  The ideas in William Tell are so noble that the opera shouldn't be reduced to tourist kitsch. Pierre Audi's staging for Amsterdam let the music tell the story! But that's assuming opera audiences actually like music, which isn't always the case.


photos : Robert Hubert Smith, courtesy WNO