Clemency, Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, May 2011

In Genesis Chapter 18 three unknown men visit Abraham. He welcomes them warmly and gives them food. In return they tell him that his wife Sarah will have a child, though “it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women”. She laughs, but the Lord promises to return a year hence when she will have a son. The men then rise up to go and destroy the twin cities, but Abraham negotiates — not an easy task when you’re dealing with omnipotence. He asks for clemency if there be but fifty righteous within Sodom, and the Lord agrees. Then Abraham reduces the number to forty-five, then forty, thirty, twenty, ten, and always the Lord agrees to relent. In the end, however, we move to Chapter 19, and Sodom is destroyed.

Grant Doyle as Abraham, all photos Stephen Cummiskey

This opera by James Macmillan deals just with Chapter 18, powerful and riveting stuff. Here is the Sumerian god Enlil, angry and willing to destroy as he did in the flood story, though in that ancient Sumerian tale the wise god Enki contrives to preserve life, by advising one man to build an ark. In the Biblical narrative, however, there is only one God, embodying multiple natures, and Genesis 18 is fascinating in the role Abraham plays, almost as if he were Enki, whose Sumerian name means earth lord. Of course Abraham is not a god, though he does later become lord of many flocks and a great household.

Doyle with Janis Kelly as Sarah

In this opera, however, Abraham and Sarah still live very simply, and the beginning was entirely silent, the only sound coming from the running water that Sarah is using to wash vegetables and prepare dinner. Eventually Abraham sings unaccompanied as if chanting a prayer, and at the end of his chanting the orchestra enters. Gradually the opera picks up momentum, and the three men enter. It might seem from this slow start that we are being prepared for a long evening, yet the whole thing lasts less than an hour, and Macmillan’s harmonious music creates a strong impression. This is a composer who has the ability to remain quiet and subdued but yet bring forth the full weight of the orchestra when it suits him.

His new work Clemency is one I would be very happy to revisit, but it’s not easy to catch the words as they are sung, so I recommend getting there early enough to read through the short libretto by Michael Symmons Roberts, which is included with the programme. It’s also worth reading Genesis 18 before you go. As many people will know, this is the 400^th anniversary of the Authorised King James translation of the Bible, hence the Biblical topic, and it’s an excellent one to choose.

The music was beautifully played by the Britten Sinfonia conducted by Clark Rundell, and Grant Doyle and Janis Kelly sang strongly as Abraham and Sarah, as did Adam Green, Eamonn Mulhall and Andrew Tortise as the three men. The set design by Alex Eales is a triptych with Sarah’s kitchen in the left frame, and the three visitors appear only in the centre, reflecting the three-in-oneness of this story. The strangers are three, yet they act as one, and in the Biblical narrative it is sometimes God who speaks.

Performances of this ROH2 co-production with Scottish Opera continue at Covent Garden until May 14  — for more details click here.

Genoveva, University College Opera, UCL, Bloomsbury Theatre, March 2010

Genoveva and Golo, photo by Josh Blacker

This is the two hundredth anniversary of Robert Schumann’s birth, and the fact that this is his only opera reflects rather sadly on his desire to help create a new type of German opera, without conventional recitative. In fact it was Wagner, three years his junior, who had already accomplished this by the time Schumann composed Genoveva in 1848. They both lived in Dresden at the time, and while Wagner’s Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser had already premiered in that city in 1843 and 1845, Schumann was galled to find he could not obtain a production of his own opera. Its first performance was in Leipzig in 1850, the same year Wagner’s next opera Lohengrin appeared. The heroines of these three Wagner operas, Senta, Elisabeth and Elsa, appear as models of feminine faithfulness and sobriety, but in operas about men. Schumann’s Genoveva, by contrast, is about a woman, who wins through in the end. Where Senta and Elisabeth die, and Elsa is left bereft of her hero, Genoveva lives to claim back both her life and her husband Siegfried. But Wagner criticised Schumann’s libretto, and the opera failed to find a performance in Dresden.

Siegfried, photo by Josh Blacker

Its weak libretto has left it without a safe niche in the operatic repertoire, but the music is good and was well conducted here by Charles Peebles. The story is roughly as follows. The knights of Brabant are urged by the Bishop of Trier to join the army of that brilliant eighth century general Charles Martel against Muslim armies that had swept across the Pyrenees from Spain. Siegfried, the Count of Brabant, entrusts his new wife Genoveva to the care of his young servant Golo, but the wretched Golo makes advances to her, which she robustly repulses. As revenge he contrives to have the old retainer, Drago hide in her room, and thus be entrapped and exhibited as her lover. The servants then conveniently kill Drago. This is all done with the connivance of a sorceress named Margaretha, who later uses a magic mirror to show imagined scenes of Drago’s seduction to the wounded Siegfried, while she is attending him as his nurse. Siegfried breaks the mirror and with the loss of her magic, Margaretha has to face the ghost of Drago who predicts a fearful end for her unless she admits the truth. In the meantime, executioners have been dispatched to kill the innocent Genoveva, who clings to a crucifix and holds them off just long enough for Siegfried to rescue her.

Drago's ghost, photo by Josh Blacker

One can see why this opera doesn’t work, but the performance was wonderful. The tenor role of Golo was very strongly sung by Richard Rowe, and Bibi Heal looked delightful and had a lovely tone as Genoveva. Adam Green sang forcefully in the baritone role of Siegfried, Lynton Black sang an excellent bass as Drago, and Magdalen Ashman was a convincing Margaretha. The production was full of youthful energy, well directed by Emma Rivlin, with some very realistic fight sequences directed by Nicholas Hall. Sets by Christopher Giles and costumes by Ryszard Andrzejewski gave the right sense of period to this story, and the massed appearance of the chorus in the auditorium near the end was a nice touch, except that Siegfried did not join them, and his entrance on stage was entirely overshadowed by the confusion. The ‘sublime’ ending in which the assembled company enters church is all a bit much, but that’s Schumann’s doing, not the director’s. I would have loved to see the villains punished, but they simply disappear into ethereal obscurity, rather like this opera, despite its lyrical and dramatic music.

My criticism of its libretto notwithstanding, University College London have done a superb job of staging this work, continuing a tradition of putting on a relatively obscure opera every year for over half a century. Next year they plan to produce Weber’s unfinished opera Die drei Pintos (The three Pintos), completed by Mahler, which like Genoveva, was revived by the Bielefeld Opera in the 1990s.