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Opera Review

A Stage on a Stage, and Reality in Illusion

Les Vêpres Siciliennes Verdi’s opera, directed by Stefan Herheim at the Royal Opera House in London, stars Bryan Hymel and Lianna Haroutounian, center.Credit...Bill Cooper/Royal Opera House

LONDON — This year has been a battle of operatic bicentennials. In May, Wagner turned 200. Verdi did the same last week.

The result has been even more performances than usual of these two titans’ works, with companies around the world scrambling to mount an inspiring new “Parsifal” or a gripping “Rigoletto.”

It speaks to the talent and ambition of Stefan Herheim, one of opera’s most searching, inventive directors, that even given the stiff anniversary competition, two of the year’s hottest new productions have been his: one Wagner and one Verdi.

In August, he mounted a widely acclaimed version of Wagner’s “Meistersinger von Nürnberg” at the Salzburg Festival. And on Thursday evening, Mr. Herheim, 43, made his highly anticipated British debut with Verdi’s sprawling “Vêpres Siciliennes,” the first time this French rarity had been staged at the Royal Opera House here.

Conducted by the Royal’s music director, Antonio Pappano, who has spent more than a decade making the house a Verdi stronghold, the performance carried the promise that it would boost Mr. Herheim’s career beyond the Continental companies where he has made his reputation. “Vêpres” will be broadcast in movie theaters worldwide on Nov. 4, and that Salzburg “Meistersinger” is scheduled to arrive at the Metropolitan Opera in a few seasons.

All the more disappointing, then, that his “Vêpres” pales in comparison with so much of his dazzling body of work. This Norwegian director is known for his deep, nearly archaeological layerings of narratives in any opera he is directing. But this new production explores several of the preoccupations he has memorably examined elsewhere — from the coexistence of past and present to the blurriness of the line between illusion and reality — and renders them clichéd and dull.

For his overarching concept, he has turned to the oldest trick in the book: the theater within the theater. “Vêpres,” which Verdi wrote for the Paris Opéra in 1855, tells the quasi-historical story of a Sicilian uprising against French occupation in 13th-century Palermo. Mr. Herheim has relocated his staging to the mid-19th-century Opéra itself, casting the Sicilians as the restive performers and the French as their audience.

Regular operagoers will recognize both these techniques — updating the action to the time of a work’s composition and setting a production on a “meta” stage — as directorial standbys, but the translation is effective at first. The curtain rises on a clutch of ballerinas posed stretching on the floor of a rehearsal room at the Opéra, as in a Degas painting. A man in black sits off to the side, smoking and reading a newspaper.

The music suddenly turns lyrical, and the dancers come to life, with the man — who turns out to be Procida, the opera’s Sicilian rebel leader — acting as ballet master. Mr. Herheim, a former cellist, is characteristically responsive to the score as the dancers swiftly sketch the opera’s back story: Monfort, a French leader, rapes a Sicilian woman, who gives birth to a son, Henri. She raises Henri to hate her attacker, without ever telling him that Monfort is his father. (This secret causes predictably agonizing complications later on.)

Then Philipp Fürhofer’s wondrous set begins to move. Mirrored walls rotate, converge and separate and, at times, seem to dissolve entirely, shifting the scene from the rehearsal room to a cross-section of the Opéra’s auditorium, lined with parterre boxes filled with French soldiers.

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Lianna Haroutounian and Erwin Schrott in “Les Vêpres Siciliennes,” conducted by Antonio Pappano.Credit...Bill Cooper/Royal Opera House

Things remain largely the same for the next few hours: the dilating walls, the soldiers in boxes, the occasional ballerina. There is a sense, rare in Mr. Herheim’s ceaselessly changeable work, of visual, temperamental and conceptual repetitiveness.

The result is that we get the point — that a theater, like this opera’s plot, is a place where the public and the private, the political and the personal, collide — and we get it again and again. If the bright lights being shined in the real-life audience’s faces as a French flag is burned at the end is meant somehow to implicate us, it’s unclear how or why, and it’s a hackneyed move, besides.

Mr. Herheim is more persuasive in the details: his reimaginings of characters we thought we knew. His Monfort (the rich-voiced baritone Michael Volle, who sang Hans Sachs in his “Meistersinger”) is not a mustache-twirling villain, but a sad, lonely aristocrat — not far from Prince Fabrizio in “The Leopard, ” Lampedusa’s novel of 19th-century Sicily — seeking a connection with a son who knows him only as a hated political opponent.

Procida (the resonant bass-baritone Erwin Schrott, who sings and acts with gusto) is no stirring revolutionary, but an obsessive, slightly sinister dandy. All of the members of the work’s central quartet seem isolated, lost in their fantasies.

But these stimulating ideas weren’t given to a cast fully capable of realizing them. This month, the volatile soprano Marina Poplavskaya, in the role of Hélène, a noblewoman and Sicilian partisan in love with Henri, announced she was ill and unable to sing the first three performances. Jumping in was Lianna Haroutounian, who also saved the Verdian day at the Royal in May, replacing Anja Harteros in “Don Carlo.”

Ms. Haroutounian deserves admiration for taking on a difficult part, but at Thursday’s opening, she seemed still to be tentatively finding her way in a staging clearly conceived with Ms. Poplavskaya’s febrile charisma in mind. (This is a Hélène who carries around her executed brother’s decapitated head like Salome with John the Baptist.) She had some fearless high notes, invariably loud, but struggled to project in lower registers, and she was pushed past her limits by the coloratura in Hélène’s boléro “Merci, jeunes amis.”

The tenor Bryan Hymel, as Henri, sounded stronger, his voice compact and secure. But he couldn’t sustain the tension Mr. Herheim seemed to want to foster between the character and his father.

That’s too bad, because Mr. Volle was a haunted, humane presence as Monfort; alongside a more subtle tenor, their duets might well have ached with melancholy. As it was, any mood the production had was due to the set, not to the acting, as when the curtain rose for Act IV on a shadowy, mist-choked backstage area, brooding and grand.

A replacement soprano and bland tenor were not the production’s only stumbling blocks. In June, the choreographer Johan Kobborg pulled out of the production, citing artistic differences with Mr. Herheim, and took the Royal Ballet with him. (They were replaced by a freelance troupe and dances staged by Andre de Jong.)

While the nature of the choreographic disagreement was not publicly revealed, it may illustrate the strains that are bound to surface when an avant-garde artist meets, and tries to adapt his style to, a mainstream institution. But if Mr. Herheim feels the need to simplify to become intelligible or acceptable at the Royal, he’s mistaken.

Some of his stagings — a glittery version of Dvorak’s “Rusalka” comes to mind — play radically with their source material, but end up more evocative for it. His seminal 2008 staging of Wagner’s “Parsifal” was potent because of, not in spite of, the many layers of its meanings. He showed the inner workings of a stage and dabbled in meta theater in a witty production of Handel’s “Xerxes” that was more conceptually nimble than this “Vêpres.”

While the straightforwardness of this production may be intended to make Mr. Herheim’s work more palatable to a new audience, it can’t equal the unforgettable power of the director at his complex best.

“Les Vêpres Siciliennes” will be performed through Nov. 11 at the Royal Opera House in London; roh.org.uk.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Stage on a Stage, and Reality in Illusion. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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