You have to admire the optimism of any opera company that chooses to stage Puccini’s biggest flop. Edgar – his second opera – was dismally received at its world premiere, failed to persuade in a revised version and was eventually condemned by the composer himself as “warmed-up soup”, its subject “rubbish”.
In the rediscovered-gems stakes, though, Opera Holland Park isn’t just any opera company. It stages rarities as a matter of course, often from the verismo tradition and often with impressive results. Puccini’s first opera Le Villi featured in OHP’s 2022 season, so perhaps Edgar – even rarer, with bags more sensationalism – seemed a logical next step.
There were some high points. Conductor Naomi Woo negotiated the score’s rapid changes of pace and texture with skill and absolute focus. In their 20th anniversary season at OHP, the City of London Sinfonia served up both sumptuousness for the glorious passages of chromatic schmaltz (the composer was audibly at the height of his youthful enthusiasm for Wagner) and moments of exquisite delicacy. Puccini fans might spot promising traces of things to come. An organ and pieces of pastiche church music for immediate atmosphere. Sprawling set-piece finales with hints of his later virtuosity in orchestrating multiple elements into a compelling foreground and background. Rhythmic nattiness, deeply cleaved unisons, some tunes to make the heart soar.
Major problems are nevertheless baked into the opera. The plot is lurid: a Carmen-ish pitting of virgin (Fidelia) against whore (Tigrana) for the love of Edgar – and possibly also his frenemy Frank – with bribery, a fake funeral and a murder. Much is told, little shown. The revised version performed here simultaneously harbours longueurs (“Puccini is reduced to banalities,” admits one of the programme notes) and lacks any convincing, coherent establishment of its main characters.
In performance, OHP’s tent acoustic didn’t help: even these heavyweight voices struggled to project from the back of the stage over Puccini’s heftiest orchestral passages. Peter Auty was a gutsy Edgar (in Ruth Knight’s semi-staging a mutton-chopped Victorian rather than a medieval gent), his tenor providing some of the heroism we never see. As Fidelia and Tigrana, Anne Sophie Duprels and Gweneth Ann Rand were musically at their best in their quieter, more intimate moments. Julien Van Mellaerts’s rich, beautifully controlled baritone made Frank the one character who briefly came to life: his entrance aria became an unlikely erotic climax in an opera supposedly centred on sexual attraction.
But this was, alas, a chemistry-free zone, populated by cardboard cut-outs. “What does lust mean?” asked a small voice in the row behind me in response to one of the surtitles. A good question – but I’m afraid whichever parent took it on themselves to answer won’t have found much to support their explanation in this performance.
