Quando presi a far la Musica dell’ Alceste mi proposi di spogliarla affatto di tutti quegli abusi, che introdotti o dalla mal intesa vanità de Cantanti, o dalla troppa compiacenza de’ Maestri, da tanto tempo sfigurano l’ Opera Italiana, e del più pomposo, e più bello di tutti gli spettacoli, ne fanno il più ridicolo e il più nojoso. Pensai restringere la Musica al suo vero ufficio di servire alla Poesia per l’espressione, e per le situazioni della Favola, senza interromper l’ Azione, o raffreddarla con degli inutili superflui ornamenti.
(“When I undertook to write the music for Alceste I resolved to divest it entirely of all those abuses introduced either by mistaken vanity of singers or by the too great complaisance of composers, which have long disfigured Italian opera and made of the most splendid and most beautiful spectacles the most ridiculous and wearisome. I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story without interrupting the action or stifling it with useless superfluity or ornaments.”)
Preface to Alceste, Vienna, 1769
Christoph Willibald Gluck was ferociously proud of his uniquely reformist Euripedean tragedy, his urgent call for revolutionary operatic change — in all likelihood revoiced by trusted librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi (Orfeo ed Euridice, Alceste, Paride ed Elena) — defiantly appended by way of a landmark manifesto-cum-preface to the restless pan-European composer’s original Italian published score.
Popular opinion was decidedly not always in wholehearted agreement with the sum total of his radical ideals.
Alceste, restaged in Paris in 1776 in an extensively revised all-French iteration complete with requisite ballets penned by Gluck himself, landed in the midst of a nasty war of words known as the Querelle des Bouffons. Imported opera buffa had become increasingly popular among the petite bourgeoisie, its enthusiastic defenders squaring off against a clique of diehard opponents wildly loyal to the operatic ancien régime of Lully and Rameau. Leading philosophers of the time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau among them, leant their weight to the pro-Italian side of the cultural scales and, in the process, turned a once rather harmless debate between overwrought critics and pamphleteers dangerously toxic with an abundance of less than covert political subtext. French opera championed oppression and absolutism. Italian opera was humane, liberated, free of constraint.
Opera was a perilous game in the increasingly tense French capital. Supported by Marie Antoinette, who had known Gluck in her native Vienna, the outspoken visionary newcomer set out to do his artistic best to quell the mounting flames.
Relocating from its 50-year old venue in TO’s architecturally brutalist St. Lawrence Centre to the sheltering splendour of Trinity-St. Paul’s Jeanne Lamon Hall, Voicebox: Opera in Concert struck something of a revolutionary pose of its own last Sunday with an appealing, splendidly sung Alceste, stark, semi-staged, powerfully resonant, Gluck’s uncompromising drive for modernism splendidly upheld.
An anguished tale of spousal devotion and self-sacrifice stripped from ancient Greek mythology, Alceste grapples with the all-too real pain of love and death. Set in the harsh, unforgiving kingdom of Thessaly, the plot is as stark as it is humane punctuated by frequent bursts of vivid psychology.
Alceste’s willingness to trade her life for that of her husband’s in a desperate attempt to foil fate as dictated by divine decree, is powerfully Jungian in its evocation of archetype and ritual, a testament to Gluck’s perceptive pre-clinical analysis of human behaviour.
Mozart and Wagner greatly admired Gluck’s brisk dramaturgy. There are essentially only two characters of consequence in his updated opera seria turned tragédie lyrique — the doomed and dying King Admète and his self-sacrificing queen. An unmistakeable echo of Alceste’s journey from darkness — both active and metaphorical — to liberation permeates The Magic Flute with more than a little heroic Alceste inhabiting Die Walküre’s fearless Brünnhilde.
Soprano Lauren Margison, sporting a persuasive dramatic soprano Fach, and tenor Colin Ainsworth, a dynamic haute contre in all but name, presented a formidable duo, Margison stunningly commanding with a seemingly boundless range, possessed of exquisite technique and directness of engagement, splashing Alceste’s best known aria, Divinités de Styx — a favourite concert piece of Maria Callas — with unexpected rich contralto-like colours. Ainsworth, ringing and crystalline, his voice soaring upwards to Trinity-St. Paul’s immense, superbly designed acoustically reflective vault, proved every bit as dynamic, particularly evident in Admète’s pivotal Act II rendezvous with wife Alceste, ending the final scene on at least several literal high notes, his gloriously impassioned rendering of Gluck’s penultimate anthem to love and desperation, Non, sans toi je ne puis vivre glowing with pathos.
Gluck’s score, robustly sketched by collaborate pianist, Music Director Suzy Smith, spoke forcefully, tirelessly for itself, arias limpid and buoyant, recits declarative and centred, the division between the two invariably blurred, as Gluck intended, allowing story to leap forward without pausing, emotion scrambling to keep pace.
Much additional evidence of compositional reinvention — and singing — visibly emerged during the course of the afternoon, any number of spirited comprimari stepping from the ranks of Chorus Director Robert Cooper’s excellent chorale to lend vital vocal colour. Tenor Marcus Tranquilli appeared as Evandre, Admète’s friend and comrade in arms. Lyric sopranos Anastasia Pogorelova and Jada Alexiou brought delightful charm to their cameo roles as women of Thessaly. Baritone Austin Larusson sang a fine High Priest, his polished handling of Gluck’s godly invocation, Dispensateur de la lumière, stern and resonant. Fellow baritone Sebastien Belcourt sang a prideful, strutting Hercules. Third baritone Joseph Ernst was a suitably reassuring Apollo.
Directorial flourishes, courtesy Dramatic Advisor Guillermo Silva-Marin, were unapologetically restrained as might well be expected, Silva-Marin only occasionally exploring the boundaries of Opera in Concert’s new home. A pair of boxy, all-white risers did tireless duty, substituting for a tomb, an altar, statuesque Apollo’s exalted plinth. Eerie Carnival masks for the Chorus signalled a hellish descent into the depths of the Underworld.
Lighting was minimal, opportunities for chiaroscuro largely denied by a double set of Craftsman-style, clerestory windows, the low-angled midwinter sun streaming through the lovely unostentatious stained glass imparting a marked sense of naturalness not entirely inappropriate for illuminating Gluckian reform.
Una bella semplicità. (“A noble simplicity.”) Meeting the challenge of the new.