Stumbling on melons

Last week to the first night of Opera Australia’s revival of this. At present you can see the 1992 original from an ABC broadcast on Youtube.

There has been some expurgation. Gertrud, the mother, no longer smokes, which deprives us of one of my favourite bits of operatic business, when she absent-mindedly ashes her cigarette in the children’s pencil case.

Under the guise of celebrating Opera Australia’s 70th anniversary (dating back to the Elizabethan Trust company) this year’s season has rather a lot of revivals. Rather than bring back Johannes Fritzsch, conducting honours have been entrusted to Tahu Matheson, the company’s director of music. This is a snippet of the publicity, from Limelight Magazine:

For Matheson, tempo is key to the success of the show. “I like it all to be just slightly faster – certainly faster than it was when I first saw it. When you look at some of the original tempo markings, they’re very, very slow. You start to wonder whether Humperdinck’s metronome was working properly. You look at a passage and think, ‘Wow, can we really say things like that at this tempo?’ So we’ll be moving things along pretty quickly, about an hour each act. After all, this is Sydney in the summertime: it’s get on, get off!”

There will be no sacrificing of intricacy at the altar of speed, however. Conducting Hansel and Gretel is about finding an ideal balance – between musical refinement and dramatic immediacy, between voices and orchestra – so that the music supports meaning.

Forewarned or possibly just pre-sensitised by this, I felt that there were quite a lot of spots where Mr Matheson was rushing it along. Maybe that’s just the way he conducts but I could sense it in his forward driving beat when seen in profile from my point-seat eyrie. Sometimes things felt a bit fast for the singers and the words. Other times it was instrumental moments. It wasn’t so much intricacy as lyricism which was sacrificed at the altar of speed, as in this violin solo just before rehearsal mark 77:

I had to choose the violin part because the full score rather awkwardly goes over the page, but you can also find the spot starting here in the full score (set to Solti’s recording). Huy-Nguyen Bui tossed it off perfectly accurately but it was kind of a waste – blink and you’d have missed it. Something similar happened at rehearsal marks 116-117 in the second half though not so egregiously in terms of the musical [mis]affekt.

The moving moment where Hansel asks Gretel if she too saw their mother in their dream wizzed past with scarcely a consequence. Maybe it wasn’t there at all? (This can be a libretto issue as the revival adopts the Pountney translation on the whole.)

I hate the phrase but the company has also been going through a bit of self-imposed political correctness, as if to atone for the decade of Terracinism. This has already ended in tears (well-remunerated, I am sure) so far as the two women appointed in his wake are concerned. It’s worth quoting a bit more of the Limelight-propagation of this line:

Part of the opera’s appeal is that it treats children as real protagonists, not caricatures. It trusts the audience to journey with them through woods both literal and symbolic. “I think Claudia is doing a beautiful job as director in that regard,” Matheson says. “You can’t just look at the old videos and repeat what was done 20 years ago. Things have changed and nuances have shifted, particularly with regard to presenting gender. She’s using all the wriggle room.”

Hansel cannot be made less of a boy because there is already the need to overcome the credibility gap with a pants role. The gender issue basically means that Gretel is less girly. But the thing is, quite a lot of Gretel’s “girliness” is actually strategies for managing Hansel. It’s part of the plot. And played less “girly” makes Gretel a bit less like a child.

I had better stop being a critic. I enjoyed the performance. It’s a delightful work and production. It’s a bit of a mystery to me why it has not been revived more often. I will go once more, sitting in the opposite point seat. I am looking forward to it.