Sarah Connolly and David McVicar interview: fury of an opera scorned

There is no more durable a legend, nor more vengeful a female. Medea, the woman scorned who murders her sons in repayment for their father’s desertion, has been haunting the stage since Euripides gave voice to her in 431 BC. In recent years she has been variously reincarnated on the London stage by Fiona Shaw and Holly Hunter, Diana Rigg and her daughter Rachael Stirling. The latest performer to test the sympathies of audiences is no less redoubtable, and unlike an actress she has an extra weapon in her armoury: the great mezzo Sarah Connolly will be singing Medea to life in the opera house.

Don’t feel embarrassed if Médée, Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s tragédie en musique, has passed you by. Exploding in Paris in 1693, it was soon suppressed and, for nearly three centuries, there is no record of a single performance. Connolly didn’t know it until William Christie presented her with his recording at Glyndebourne in 2007.

“He said to me, 'You have to do this, it’s your role,’ in the way that Bill says these things. So I had a look at the score and thought, 'This is amazing.’ There aren’t many mezzo roles that allow a singer to be a real, fully fleshed person, somebody who a composer truly understands.” When the ENO asked her to name her next role, she plumped for Medea and nominated David McVicar as the director she’d like to work with on the British premiere of the lost, Baroque gem.

It’s not difficult to work out why. It was the Scottish director who gave Connolly her first role in a new production, in the ENO’s Alcina, conducted by Charles Mackerras. “I had seen her do Ariodante,” he recalls. “She was just so strong on stage and the voice was so beautiful and luscious. I just instinctively knew it was going to work. And it did. We just hit it off from day one. And I like singers who bring a lot to the table.” Connolly for her part explains that it was McVicar who liberated her inner actress.

“He accepted my instincts. I didn’t think I had any and just did what I was told and stood where I was supposed to stand. I was to be given the freedom to go where my thoughts led. Singers all, without exception, love working with David because he looks after us. You never have any questions. I know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing and who I am.” They can’t quite work out how many collaborations they have had since.

McVicar reckons Medea will be “something like the 12th”. The highlights include Glyndebourne’s Giulio Cesare, three Rosenkavaliers, two Clemenza di Titos and, for the ENO, Agrippina and The Rape of Lucretia. Later this year they’ve another Agrippina in Barcelona.

Both in their late forties, they make for a contrasting pair – the impeccably well-dressed and carefully spoken Englishwoman and the gruff, grizzled Scot in denim. But both are equally comfortable shooting from the lip, particularly on the opera’s vexed relationship with theatre. Connolly talks darkly of “certain directors who come from theatre into the opera house who are very disparaging about us lot. They don’t expect anything and they are very patronising.” For his part McVicar describes himself as “a dying breed of director that’s chosen to dedicate their lives to one art form” but, as a trained actor, he wouldn’t say no to Hamlet or King Lear.

“Of course I have Shakespeares inside me. But I’m not going to get asked because for some reason it goes one way but not the other.” When Medea made its journey from the theatre to the opera house, it was appended by Charpentier with a substantial prologue. McVicar’s first act was to cut it. “It’s a 25-minute celebration of the peaceable reign of the Sun King, which is highly ironic since he waged war more than any other monarch of France.” He then yanked the action out of war-torn Corinth with its visits from the underworld and dragon-borne chariots, and also away from Louis XIV’s Versailles.

Mention is made of the Forties, suggested by sketches on the rehearsal room walls of neat twinsets and a large map of war-torn Europe. “It is about finding something where the stylistic mannerisms of the Baroque age can be brought more into the audience’s world,” McVicar explains. “I didn’t feel we could just schlep around in modern dress.” Christopher Cowell’s translation, as anyone who has been following Sarah Connolly’s daily snippets on Twitter will know, also avoids contemporary slang.

For most of his life, Charpentier was confined to writing chamber and religious music by the operatic monopoly of Jean-Baptiste Lully. When he was given his chance by the Académie Royale de Musique, he took the myth of Medea and, with a libretto by Thomas Corneille (the brother of Pierre), fired off a barely disguised broadside. Louis kept away from its 12 performances. Director and singer suspect that the character of the sorceress Medea covertly alluded to the Sun King’s mistress, Madame de Montespan, while the Lully faction will have seen it as a musical threat.

It’s telling, suggests McVicar, that when Medea’s deceitful husband, Jason, lies, “he tends to go off into little melismas. It’s almost like a sly nod at the Italian music of Lully, the liar who shows off with the effetti.” Connolly is attracted to the role because, “I’m much more interested in characterisation than in showing vocal pyrotechnics.” In short, this Medea may be a child murderess and not exactly a model mother, but she sings straight.

“Ultimately,” says Connolly, who will be the one wearing a searing red wig, “in Charpentier’s telling she is sympathetic in some bizarre, hideous way. I think he has identified with Medea as the outsider, being unable to write as his heart and his whole being needed to. It is an outpouring of frustration.” Together their investigation of Medea’s motives has taken them back to Euripides but also to Freud and into even the crannies of British custody law. It is all part of McVicar’s belief in giving performers the tools to understand their character. But that is not to underestimate the centrality of Charpentier’s recitative-heavy music itself. “Before we do a scene, we always sing it through one, two, three, four, five times. The shape of the vocal lines is telling me everything I need to impart to the singers.” Whether they can persuade a 21st-century audience of the merits of Charpentier’s Médée, this latest collaboration will have further cemented a relationship that lights up British opera. Not that it doesn’t have its secret side. Connolly confides that she sometimes rings McVicar from other directors’ rehearsal rooms.

“I’ve called up a few times and said, 'I’m not being directed in this show. What the hell do I do with this character?’ He gives me some advice on who I am. And nobody knows.”

“If the director is not directing the singers,” suggests McVicar, “they’re not going to notice anyway. They’re just going to think the singer had a wonderful road to Damascus moment.”

'Medea’ runs at the London Coliseum from February 15 until March 16