On October 1, 1789 some 200 members of the King’s elite Gardes du Corps, assembled for a lavish banquet in the Opéra Royale de Versailles to celebrate the arrival of an illustrious dragoon regiment hurriedly summoned to bolster palace security.
It was a tense time at the Château.
Five months earlier, an increasingly restive Estates General had demanded vastly expanded control of taxation and bourgeois voting rights. Two months later an enraged mob had overrun the Bastille, seizing significant stocks of arms and gunpowder.
King and Queen, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, did their best to conceal their apprehension. Wine flowed freely in the opulent opera house the night the nervous royals stepped on stage. An orchestra played. The King’s Bodyguards reportedly burst into spontaneous song, voices raised in tribute, echoing an air from a wildly popular latter day musical extravaganza, Richard Cœur-de-Lion, composer André Grétry’s poignant aria, O Richard, O mon roi, an excruciatingly prophetic gloss on the disaster that was to come.
The Revolution had begun. No amount of heightened loyalist protection could withstand its fury. The King and Queen would never return to Versailles. Grétry’s glowing, intensely resonant anthem would be the last one sung at the the fabled château for over two centuries.
Channeling a profound depth of enduring emotion, Voicebox: Opera in Concert showcased a fine, minimalist Richard last weekend, a bright, instantly engaging, semi-staged offering flashed with energy and youth. A Canadian premiere of a remarkably vivid work, if not entirely forgotten then certainly undeservedly overlooked, Grétry daringly leaps from chronicle to comedy to action drama often within a single scene. Opportunities to exploit character and atmosphere abound. Realized with great enthusiasm on Trinity-St. Paul Centre’s Jeanne Lamon Hall stage by a boundlessly boisterous cast and chorus — pianist Suzy Smith, music director; Robert Cooper, choral director — Opera in Concert’s stark, visually monochromatic, vocally kaleidoscopic treatment utterly enthralled.
History has played more than a passing role in the rise and fall and rise of Richard Cœur-de-Lion, an irrepressible example of archetypal opéra-comique cloaked in the guise of rescue opera, original spoken French text by master mason turned librettist, Michel-Jean Sedaine, providing rock solid evidence of considerable poetic flair.
Ludwig van Beethoven, a great admirer of Grétry, quite clearly took ample note of the latter composer’s opus when creating arguably the single greatest rescue opera in the canon, his much critically abused Fidelio, trading the identity of Grétry’s less than trustworthy jailer, Florestan, for that of his own entirely self-originated character, a hapless, grim-minded political prisoner. Tempting to think that Beethoven — who knew Richard Cœur-de-Lion well and had written a set of piano variations based on Grétry’s Act II duet, Une fièvre brûlante — may have intended the reversal of names to be read ironically as a bitter indictment of creeping post Revolutionary imperialism which he thoroughly abhorred. Napoleon: self-crowned; neo-absolutist; tyrant. Liberté, égalité, fraternité betrayed. The Rights of Man under lock and key.
Story-telling in Grétry’s decidedly taut, resoundingly febrile piece follows a relatively straightforward course of linear development despite a rather tangled wealth of backstory, specific details largely undisclosed, period audience familiarity assumed.
Returning from the Third Crusade, Richard I of England, is taken prisoner by Leopold V, Duke of Austria who has long held the King responsible for the murder of his cousin, Conrad of Montferrat, following his kinsman’s refusal to ally himself with the English cause. Enter Richard’s loyal squire, Blondel de Nesle, disguised as a blind troubadour who has travelled far and wide in search of the missing sovereign. Playing a tender melody on his violin, a gentle, plaintive song often sung together by both the King and himself, Blondel succeeds in locating Richard behind bars in a nearby castle. Aided by the lionhearted monarch’s devoted fiancée, Marguerite, Countess of Flanders and Artois, Blondel hatches a plan. Scheming with Laurette, lovestruck daughter of a local expatriate Welsh innkeeper, the quick-witted squire distracts the prison governor — who, in turn, has lost his heart to Laurette —with the promise of a feigned assignation with his true love. Amid the ensuing confusion, Marguerite’s troops storm the castle. King Richard is freed.
The grand finale that follows, interlaced with joyful spawling chorus and exuberant principals, is worthy of Mozart.
Appearing as Blondel, tenor Yanik Gosselin, brought an endless wealth of rich expression and vibrancy to the wide-ranging role, singing with tireless vivacity, his warm, attractive timbre and roundness of tone ideally suited to Grétry’s frequent excursions into much older medieval harmonic territory. Blondel’s quasi traditional troubadour ballad, Que le sultan Saladin, with its profusion of heartfelt phrasing and evocative minor chords, sung with great clarity and feeling, graced the afternoon with one of many timeless moments, Gosselin’s gentleness and sincerity touching in the extreme.
Mezzo-soprano Madeline Cooper sang a busy, bustling Antonio, Blondel’s ubiquitous factotum, her charming rendition of Antonio’s flirtatious petite chanson, La danse n’est pas ce que j’aime, an all too fleeting delight.
Slated to sing King Richard, haute-contre Colin Ainsworth, sadly vocally sidelined by sudden illness, bravely soldiered on, lionhearted, heavily marking, yet still somehow managing to evoke a goodly measure of characteristic singer-actorly charisma.
Soprano Alice Macgregor appeared as perennially appealing soubrette, Laurette, sweetly lilting in her character’s lovely Act I love song, Je crains de lui parler la nuit, fiercely high-spirited in an earlier mad trio with Blondel and Laurette’s father, Sir Williams — robustly inhabited with irresistible pomposity by baritone Joseph Ernst.
Nicole Katerberg sang La Comtesse Marguerite, a consistently stately, dignified presence in the otherwise rambunctious proceedings of Saturday last, her luminous soprano positively ringing with jubilation at news that Blondel has found her husband to be. Ah, grand Dieu, mon cœur se serre!
Baritone Taylor Gibbs was a fine, robustly conflicted Florestan. Sean Curran sang Le vieux Mathurin, Maeghan Symon La femme de Mathurin, lively compramari roles both. Marcus Tranquilli was Florestan’s eternal whipping boy, Guillot.
The men and women of the Voicebox: Opera in Concert Chorus, 24 voices strong, performed with enormous enthusiasm and boundless expertise, populating an endlessly variable succession of simulated theatrical settings — a peasant celebration in the countryside; a tipsy gathering of locals at Sir Williams’ inn; a troop of stalwart soldiers on the march. Chansons, chansons!
Persuasively integrated into the brisk ebb and flow of action, dramatic advisor Guillermo Silva-Marin’s largely imagined mise en scène delivered unexpectedly urgent context. Choristers and soloists were granted considerable autonomy to roam the length and breadth of the church — a house left perimeter aisle defining a narrow road through a vaguely suggested spotlit-patterned forest; the front row of the house right balcony, towering castle ramparts; violinist Soltan Mammadova’s elevated perch house left, an ethereal evocation of memory — haunting, insistent, everywhere always.
A stirring of imaginings on a cold rainy autumn afternoon. Richard Cœur-de-Lion greatly impressed.