Lucia Di Lammermoor At The Bayerische Staatsoper
Before I get to Donizetti’s Lucia Di Lammermoor, and in the interest of full disclosure, let me begin by confessing my profound ignorance of classical music and all things operatic. Not only is it an art form for which I have no instinctive appreciation, I find most of the staging of the operas I have seen intensely annoying. There are exceptions, of course, but they tend to prove the rule.
I was, however, married to a beautiful woman who was not only musically knowledgeable but an opera lover who tried, over the years and with only partial success, to civilize me. Now that she has taken her final bows I find myself drawn to opera houses as something of an homage to her memory.
So it was that while passing through Munich I seized an opportunity to see Lucia Di Lammermoor with a dear friend of my late wife at the Bayerische Staatsoper.
Based on a novel by Walter Scott, Lucia di Lammermoor tells the sad tale of Lucia Ashton who has betrothed herself to Edgardo Ravenswood, a fatal enemy of the Ashton clan. Her brother Enrico pressures her to marry one Arturo, a liaison that will save his political neck. (The politics of all this were obscure to me.)
A forged letter is used to convince Lucia that Edgardo is unfaithful and she reluctantly signs the marriage contract. But her heart isn’t in it and she murders her new husband on the wedding night and promptly goes mad.
Secretly, I was hoping this Lucia would offer a resplendent example of regietheater, of which I had heard much but experienced not at all.
Regietheater is a movement (I suppose you might call it), seemingly ubiquitous in Europe but making inroads in the United States, which gives directors carte blanche to play havoc with the intent of the librettist by introducing all sorts of cockamamie elements in the staging. Lucia Di Lammermoor set in 18th century Scotland? Hah!
The Munich Lucia, helmed by Polish director Barbara Wysocka, is inspired by imagery from late 50s and early 60s America, or so I gathered from the €9 program I purchased. By the way, the image that accompanies this review is that program; don’t ask me to explain the iconography.
The set of this Lucia seems to represent a large room in a once grand, but seemingly abandoned, stately home. Not in Scotland, mind you, but somewhere undetermined. It contains a desk and a few broken down bits of furniture including a shattered piano. On the back wall someone has spray painted “ASHTON.” In a subsequent scene two workmen appear with a ladder and busily apply themselves to scrubbing the graffito off the wall, to no discernible effect, before gathering their tools and slinking off.
A little girl of perhaps eight years is kept up past her bedtime to appear periodically, wordlessly, and pointlessly to represent (I’m guessing here) the young Lucia.
Edgardo is a James Dean type in black leather jacket and white t-shirt who makes his entrance by backing a self-driving white convertible through the doors on stage right. In the second act (there is but one intermission in this production) that car has rammed a jagged hole in the rear wall.
It’s all in modern dress, naturally. The swords and daggers of the original have been replaced with large, clunky looking pistols and the guests at Lucia’s ill-fated wedding dance the twist. Lucia herself emerges for the famed “mad scene” in a smashing silver beaded gown that looks like something Jackie Kennedy would have worn to a state dinner. As she sings – and sings, and sings – she threatens the cowering wedding guests with her gun.
Despite all the regieteater nonsense I found myself warming to the production, thanks largely to some fine singing. Romanian soprano Adela Zaharia made for a most attractive Lucia, although I found her a mite screechy in places. My more knowledgeable companion admired her coloratura but found her high notes “astringent.”
Even so, I found the scene compelling, accompanied, as Donizetti intended, by a glass harmonica, something I’d never encountered before. (A flute is more frequently employed, I’m told.)
The slight-of-build Spanish tenor Xabier Anduaga seemed an unprepossessing choice for a smoldering romantic hero, but he sang beautifully. His last aria, bewailing the death of Lucia, was not only powerfully sung but also beautifully acted, something of a rarity in my opera going experience.
I suppose this Lucia Di Lammermoor will have to satisfy my curiosity about regieteater for now. But I suspect it has been topped before and will be again, some day, somewhere. I’ll keep looking.
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One Response
Oh my not the Lucia I know years before in Eve Quellars Carnegie Hall production but
Glad you acquired a taste in memory of dear Sally. Ah to be in Europe now away from the drama unfolding at home