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| Production Photo of Król Roger© ROH. Photograph by Bill Cooper, 2015 |
Working out what was triggering the synapses of the former is perhaps a little easier than figuring out the electrical (but not, maybe, musical: for they were plentifully supplied by Pappano and the orchestra) sparks of the latter.
It's mildly disconcerting, anomalous even, to be faced with a twelfth century Norman King in a business suit, let alone a prophet-shepherd in a kind of mid-sixties Elvis costume, wearing some of the widest flares ever seen on stage, even at the Hammersmith Apollo. Or a 20's bright young thing Queen missing only the foot-long cigarette holder.
Perhaps that accounted for what I thought was somewhat more reluctant applause at the end of the second act than it deserved. It could be much of the audience was taking longer than might have been expected to grasp we were in the head of Szymanowski in the 1920's, not ahead of him.
Though in this production, by the end of the opera, we are a good couple of decades ahead; and, if we're thinking properly and are alert enough, or we bought the programme with its photos of a Dionysiac cult in Venezuela which I for one had never heard of before, a good eight decades on. Having passed through, with this time nothing more than the orchestration and playing to aid us, rather hurried through Timothy Leary's time and the 'Me Generation'.
Well up, in fact, if you think about it with the 'Millennials' so-called, whose minds, I take it, far from being expanded, have contracted to a narrowed vision of self and a near total withdrawal from the general tribulations of climate warming and almost perpetual war. Or, in other words, any philosophical regard beyond mere introspection and any political activism that might outlast the life of a YouTube video of sitting demonstrators being pepper-sprayed or black boys being shot by the cops for the better future good of mankind.
The programme, in fact, was a model of its kind, though I would have liked to have been warned rather more in advance that I was expected to think about Nietzsche (whose Also Sprach, having got hooked on the Strauss version, I read at school and though it's still on my shelves have never had the psychological strength to go back to) or Schopenhauer, with whom I only have a passing acquaintance, and something of a second-hand one at that.
Now, while Schopenhauer and Nietzsche may have helped us to get our heads around the heads (both the towering one on stage, and Kaspar Holten's) I'm not entirely convinced it altogether lifted the top of Szymanowski's cranium at least as far as the music, more than the libretto, was concerned.
For all the hints in the programme at Debussy and orientalism—a neighbour I overheard during the interval mentioned Ravel too; Ravel?—it was Scriabin I kept hearing. Scriabin with words, instead of scents and lightshows. And by the end, and, for all we'd been warned at the interval that Marius Kwiecien was feeling unwell—it didn't show—in the King's aria to the sun I couldn't help but feel this was all, in Szymanowski's head, as much, if not more, about his homosexuality as the rise and collapse of the Superman.
Though perhaps I was led there partly by the curious effect of listening to an opera in a totally unfamiliar language and having to rely entirely on the English surtitles.. It is odd, I realise, how much one normally takes from the nuances and phrasing in opera, even when your knowledge of French, Italian or German may not be fluent.
The singing was extraordinarily powerful. So was the orchestra, So was the production. So was the applause at the end. (By then most of the audience must have got over the Elvis costume; perhaps the Shepherd changing into a suit helped.) It is a terrible shame that it has had such a short run. Please, Covent Garden, bring it back.
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