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Opéra de Lille, France
2009 - 2010

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NEWSREEL - November 2009 - The Opéra de Lille (in Northern France), presenting two operas of particular interest in October and November 2009, is providing a most powerful argument for the opera lover visiting the Cultural Capital of 2010, the Ruhr Gebiet surrounding Köln in Germany, to pay a visit to the charming city of Lille and attend an opera performance in its exquisitely renovated Opera House - the new production of the tragédie lyrique, Dardanus (Premiere 19 November 1739, Paris) - Jean-Phillipe Rameau's and Charles Gounod's opéra-comique, Le Médecin Malgré Lui (Premiere, Théâtre Lyrique, Paris, 15 January 1858). Both operas demarcate the French influence in style tendencies of traditional opera theatre, and both are among the finest examples of French creative authenticity. Gounod's lyrical instinct in the eighteenth century set in motion a shift that brought individual human emotion to the central stage and made it possible to dispose of the then-dominant political elements with which opera was burdened.

The tragédy lyrique came into existence with Jean-Baptiste Lully's (1632 - 1687) classic refusal to embrace the development of the seventeenth century popular opera bouffe. His novel emphasis on the lyrical fringe of opera proved to be the golden thread that was needed to fuse theatre, chanting, music and dance into a tight, congruent unit of theatrical experience. It contained the fertile spores from which the creation of the grand opera later became possible. Programming these two operas, the Opéra de Lille provides a unique introduction to what is really 'French’ in opera and the Opera House (although it is one of the smaller Opera Houses in France) has all the sought after modern facilities to bring to life spectacle and fantasy on a grand scale. On the 22nd of October, the performance of Dardanus - with the enthusiasm, engagement and professionalism of the Concert d'Astreé Ensemble and Emmanuelle Haïm's masterly conductive control - was superb. Her contribution had such an effect on the audience that shouts of jubilation acclaimed the performance's success. Claude Buchwald's stage direction and mise en scene that uses soft-gloss fragility to re-create and suggest an authentic eighteen-century fantasy and court performance, was the second decisive factor in the opera’s successful performance. And Daniel Larrieu's choreography that makes use of moments of incidental asymmetric spectacle, halting always ever so slightly in a quivering and frozen still, completed the jubilant merge of art forms in the performance. Larrieu and Buchwald's use of contrast between movement and pause (which created the mentioned 'moving stills') is, in its essence, more of a ‘looking towards’ the balance of 'unmoveable' action than an attempt to find it in the tableaux vivant. To have noticed the application of this subtle novelty in technique was exhilaratingly for the spectator. The machination of it blended completed with Jean-Phillipe Rameau's score and strengthened it - a feat that suggests solid professionalism. In the 'Dance of the Prince', the animated background contrasted with the play of slow motion occurring in the foreground and accentuated the stylistic graciousness of it. And when Venus, descending from the Heavens, hovered from her circle in the ceiling, a pastiche of painted skies in cathedrals, she too became a cutout figurine in a fantasy world suggesting Baroque, moving and stalling at the same time. And the Dervishly dressed up magician, hovering as well in his magnificent cave of aluminium-plastic folly, had that same element of contrast working with movement and stillness, caught in one single action, synchronising it with and amplifying the music score. The congruency between form and content was a pleasure to experience. Having no legs (symbolic of isolated stillness), the magician suggested a larger scope too. He became a magical body of movement when the rows of nodding icon heads in the galley below him appeared in the vision field of the spectator. The theme of (a fantastic) fantasy in Dardanus grabs the imagination and pays off with impeccable clarity in this present production. It is a well-balanced production that has the stamp of being moulded from source literature, the tragédie lyrique. It is a most fair, 21st century appreciation of Rameau's opera.

The second opera, Charles Gounod's chamber drama, Le Médecin Malgré Lui ('The Mock Doctor'), is opéra comique in three acts, bringing burlesque (coarse insensitivity) within reach of the sensitive soul. It is theatre of 'the mix' and the specific combination of literature and music has a strange effect on the spectator. He is confronted with the puzzle of who it was that 'invented' comic opera in the first place - Gounod ... or Lully? Opéra comique came into existence in the first half of the eighteenth century and served as an example for the German Zang Spielen (song spectacles) and Gezamtwerken that developed in Germany at the end of the century. Influences can be traced to Richard Wagner's immortalised antiquating of mythology - it contains spoken dialogue and recitatives in addition to arias and it deals with topics ranging from frivolous happiness to occasions of tragic darkness. The lyrical parts of the opéra comique include melodramatic pain and are deeply touching. The genre grew out of the popular comiques en vaudevilles in the seventeenth century and contains elements of comédie-Italienne, which combined existing popular tunes with spoken sections. It went out of fashion in the late eighteenth century - the last opéra comique composed was Carmen, by Georges Bizet (1875).

As Le Médecin Malgré Lui uses spoken dialogue and verse taken directly from Molière's play, the Comédie-Française (with its focus on literature) was outraged when it premiered in 1858. This brought its performance to a halt for several years after it was brought on stage for the first time. Since then it has rarely been performed and in recent years there have been only radio broadcasts of it, on the BBC in the 1950s and on French radio in the 1970s. Having it performed now in Lille, the Opéra de Lille provides another golden opportunity for the die-hard opera lover to experience Gounod's lyrical instinct and to get to know the genre in all its full genuinity. Jules Barbier and Michel Carré wrote the libretto after Molière's play and it will be conducted in the Opéra de Lille the 13th to 18th of November by Pascal Verrot and performed by l’Orchestre de Picardie. The mise en scène is from Sandrine Anglade.

For the travelling opera visitor the following information may be of interest too - The city of Lille is within 4 to 5 hour's reach from Köln (Germany) by train and the Opera House, situated in the heart of the city, is only about 200 yards walking from the main and TGV train station. It is imperative to recommend a visit to the Opéra de Lille when coming to the Ruhr for Opera in 2010.

Argo Spier, Opera Pages
Consulting editor, Joneve McCormick, USA

You Tube Sampel copy - opéra comique - Le Médecin Malgré Lui
You Tube Sampel Copy - tragédie lyrique - Dardanus

ARCHIVE - December 2008 - The Opéra de Lille, presenting Heiner Goebbels' and Klaus Grünberg's production of I went to the House but did not enter in November of 2008, makes a firm statement of its will to include avant-garde in its programming. Heiner Goebbels' work, a concert in three Tableaux, would manifest itself as a genre apart from any other as it explores the variable ill ‘location of a nowhere’, the ersatz of emptiness. The Opera’s programming later this year of Kurt Weill's 'City of Mahogany' in April, 2009 follows in the same direction. It too deals with vulgar ambiguity in reality and performs a searching, as does Goebbels’ work generally, into the essence of the operatic metaphor.

In I went to the House but did not enter, Goebbels introduces the spectator to mistrust as a prime mover of things. He confronts the spectator with a precarious reality of being in an Opera House, sitting in a velvet seat and watching a Gezamtwerk called I went to the House but did not enter. It is a timeless journey he makes. But the spectator never ‘enters’ the house. He came to the Opera but he, like everything else that happens on the stage, is fixture and onlooker. Neither characters, nor the storyline nor the libretto of I went to the House but did not enter provide a snug cocoon for him to revel in. The various tableaux fill the stage with a disconnected continuum. And questions, such as what is the purpose of it all, where am I, what is life, confront him throughout the performance. There’s ambiguity, dislocation and unreality in I went to the House but did not enter and yet Heiner Goebels uses texts with well-situated paradigms, found for example in the works of T.S. Elliot, Maurice Blanchot and Franz Kafka. But within Klaus Grünberg’s slowly processed and accurately dated early 50's mise en scene, the repetition of these texts by the Hilliard Ensemble leaves a feeling wrought of estrangement. The Hillard Ensemble, trained in mediaeval music, sings it ‘a la polyphonic’. Subjects such as love, madness and flight (into the mountains) become completely dislocated from their usual semantics. It's only at the end of the last tableaux, when a slide show showing a still of a water surface changes into a ‘moving’ one, showing running water, that these concepts find their real meaning -- the indescribable syntaxes of hope within the hopeless alienation of man.

I went to the House but did not enter is a well-spent evening for anybody interested in the contemporary opera scene and the Opéra de Lille has well succeeded in its goal to entertain its spectators with well-chosen avant-garde.

 

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