Welsh National Youth Opera has had fun with its new staging of Judith Weir’s The Black Spider, her first full-length opera, written in 1984 and conceived specifically for children. Yet, with its touches of humour as well as its slightly subversive punning and parodying of opera forms, there are appealing elements that can be enjoyed by anyone, though perhaps not arachnophobes.
It’s a good versus evil morality, in which Weir adapts and interweaves apparently separate narrative threads. One is based on Jeremias Gotthelf’s gothic retelling of a 15th-century tale set in Poland, where a plucky young woman, Christine, strikes a marriage bargain with a huntsman in order to save her fellow villagers from the oppression of their tyrannical feudal lord. The huntsman, however, is the Devil incarnate, whose toxic black-spider bite quickly poisons Christine before being transmitted to the rest of the village. The second story – told in dialogue – is the account of the opening of the tomb of King Casimir IV in the 1970s, in Krakow’s Wawel Cathedral, where – just as at the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun – the subsequent deaths of those who’d worked on the excavations seemed like the curses of the dead. Microbiological research would later identify the curse as the pathogenic aspergillus flavus, a biological time-bomb.
