UK Edition
Review
Figaro Gets a Divorce – a modern opera with emotional clout
Beaumarchais did write a sequel to The Marriage of Figaro, the play on which Mozart based his masterpiece, but this new opera composed by Elena Langer only relates to it at one remove. The more direct source for David Pountney’s libretto is a sequel to the sequel written by Odon von Horvath, that sad Austro-Hungarian relic who died in 1937 and is remembered now only for the occasionally revived Tales from the Vienna Woods.
Pountney’s version of Horvath’s version shows the central figures of The Marriage of Figaro time-travelling forward to the inter-war era of Fascism and uncertainty. Older and wiser, Count and Countess Almaviva and their servants Figaro and Susanna have become refugees in an unspecified foreign land, beholden to a mysteriously charismatic Major who blackmails the Countess with secrets of her amorous past. Susanna becomes a night-club chanteuse and flounces out on Figaro, who opens a tonsorial salon. Cherubino, meanwhile, emerges in another guise.
At first, I feared the whole enterprise would be merely whimsical, and perhaps there are too many twists to the picaresque plot before it reaches its melancholy conclusion. But the angst of dislocation and dispossession becomes a uniting theme, charged with contemporary resonance, and this soon becomes that rare thing: a modern opera that exerts an immediate emotional impact.
An upcoming young Russian composer based in Britain with several theatre-based works to her credit, Elena Langer must of course take much of the credit: her music is lush and inventive, patently influenced by Berg’s Wozzeck without being fearsomely atonal. The vocal lines are gratifyingly expressive, the orchestration colourful – sometimes excessively so, in its hectic urge to illustrate and emote. But that is a fault on the right side, because it radiates warmth and allows personality to shine through – notably in the case of the Countess, who has two impassioned arias, quite beautifully delivered by Elizabeth Watts.
She is one of several singers also cast as the same character in WNO’s rather limp production of The Marriage of Figaro, and she is much more impressive here, both vocally and dramatically. So is Mark Stone as her husband, singing and acting with a touching sincerity that eluded him in Mozart. The remainder of the cast – notably Andrew Watts as a wonderfully unexpected reincarnation of Cherubino – all do an excellent job. Pountney’s clean-lined, crisply drilled staging, imaginatively designed by Ralph Koltai, is exemplary, and the conductor Justin Brown leads the orchestra in an engagingly vivid account of a score I want to hear again.
WNO, Wales Millennium Centre until 3 March, then touring to Plymouth, Milton Keynes, Llandudno, Birmingham and Southampton. Tickets: 029 2063 6464; wno.org.uk