Meyerbeer’s best opera
Les Huguenots was an instant success at
its
première in Paris. It maintained a firm foothold in the repertoire up
to
the time of the First World War. Since then it has fallen on hard times.
Even
at the height of its nineteenth century popularity it was often heavily
truncated.
Typically, the whole of the Fifth Act was omitted and cuts were inflicted
elsewhere.
In the modern era it has only ever received two recordings which
could be regarded as substantially complete. One was conducted by Richard
Bonynge in London in 1970. The other is the present recording taken from
live concert performances in Montpellier in 1988.
This Montpellier recording has been generally regarded by critics as
the better of the two, notably by Alan Blyth in his
Opera on CD and
the
Viking Opera Guide and by the
Rough Guide to Opera; the
Penguin Guide tends the other way. It has not been available for some
time, so its reappearance is welcome. It must be said however that the
balance of advantage between the two recordings is far from being clear-cut.
I will return to the matter of comparisons continually during the course of
this review.
The other sets drawn from live performances which have been
intermittently available often feature some superb individual singing. All
are heavily cut and many are sung in Italian translation, so they need not
detain anyone who is looking for a primary recording of this
quintessentially French
grand opéra.
One of the reasons most commonly cited for the neglect of
Les
Huguenots during the twentieth century has been the sheer difficulty of
finding singers of the right calibre to do justice to the music. The
performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York during the early 1900s
were dubbed “the night of seven stars”, and indeed one needs
seven very good singers to fill the major roles. The greatest difficulty of
all lies in finding a tenor who can sing the sometimes stratospheric role of
Raoul. It was originally written for Adolphe Nourrit, who had, some years
before, created the role of Arnold in Rossini’s
William Tell.
His sweetly lyrical voice was certainly what Meyerbeer had in mind when he
wrote the Romance in the First Act with its accompaniment for solo viola
d’amore. Towards the end Meyerbeer seems to be writing for a much more
robust singer, and he clearly had in mind the voice of Gilbert-Louis Duprez
who had taken over the role of Arnold in
William Tell and startled
Parisian audiences with his top Cs delivered from the chest - of which
Rossini thoroughly disapproved.
When Bonynge made his recording he prefaced the sessions with a
concert performance of the whole opera at the Albert Hall. By all accounts
Anastasios Vrenios then gave a solidly powerful rendition of the role. By
the time he came to make the recording something had gone drastically wrong
with his voice. The sound that comes across, while it delivers all the notes
precisely and correctly, is almost totally lacking in heroic strength. He
completely fails to rise to the challenge of the great duet in Act Four.
Richard Leech on the other hand has plenty of punch in his voice, but he
finds difficulty in fining down his tone for the Romance in the First Act.
This robs the music of the delicacy it really needs at that point. However
he is superbly dramatic later on, particularly in the nearly always omitted
opening scene of Act Five. Earlier this year I
reviewed a highly
unrecommendable German-language DVD with the same singer which cut this
scene entirely, as well as making horrendous large-scale truncations
everywhere else. He is a major asset to this recording.
The other role which causes real problems for any casting director
is that of Marguerite de Valois. Here the balance of advantage between
Bonynge and Diederich lies decidedly in the other direction. Ghyslaine
Raphanel in this set has all the accuracy of
coloratura that is
required, but by comparison with Joan Sutherland in the Bonynge set her tone
is almost totally lacking in either tonal warmth or regal splendour. With
Sutherland you are always conscious of a Queen who is well aware of her
power and determination to make peace between the warring religious factions
- a gross travesty of historical accuracy, but never mind. With Raphanel you
are simply given a canary-like
soubrette going through her
coloratura motions. As her page, Danielle Borst is similarly an
accomplished singer, but again she lacks the sheer sense of warmth and
personality that one gets with Huguette Tourangeau for Bonynge. On the other
hand, Borst, a soprano, manages to sound slightly more convincingly
masculine than the mezzo Tourangeau. She is deprived of her second aria in
Act Three (included by Bonynge) but nevertheless she is less obviously a
weakness than her mistress.
As regards the remainder of the casting, honours between the two
sets are much more evenly divided. Martina Arroyo as Valentine for Bonynge
was luxury casting, not ideally suited to the more elaborate sections of the
role but creamy in tone and exuding womanly concern. Françoise Pollet
in this Diederich set is just as good, and rather more at ease with the more
rapid passagework despite some moments of shrillness at the very top. The
extremely taxing end of her Act Four aria is omitted; Arroyo gave it
complete.
As Marcel, Nicolai Ghiuselev is common to both sets: in firmer voice
for Bonynge, but sounding more properly like the old soldier for Diederich
and bringing out the character with more assuredness even if with some
roughness of tone. The two Catholic noblemen, Saint-Bris and Nevers, are
well taken for Bonynge by Gabriel Bacquier and Dominic Cossa. For this
Diederich set, Boris Martinovich is not quite a match for Bacquier’s
subtleties of inflection, but Giles Cachemaille is more suave and
characterful than Cossa in his depiction of the playboy nobleman with a
conscience. The small parts here are all adequately taken, although Bonynge
scores with some luxurious casting such as Kiri te Kanawa, Alan Opie and
Arleen Augér in minor roles.
All of this brings us to the matter of the conducting. At the time
of his Decca recording, Bonynge does not always seem to have come to terms
with Meyerbeer’s score. The sometimes wayward nature of
Meyerbeer’s juxtapositions between sections of the music seem to find
him at somewhat of a loss. Diederich has a more fiery approach to the opera,
and generally gets more drama out of the action, although the Blessing of
the Swords might have been more ominous if it been paced somewhat slower.
Those who are allergic to such things should note that the generally very
well-behaved audience give generous rounds of applause to the singers at the
end of their various arias, which this recording preserves at full length -
over a quarter of an hour in total. Meyerbeer would have expected this and
the audience never interrupt the flow of the music. The applause is only
faded out at the end of Acts Four and Five and otherwise sometimes continues
for half a minute or more at a time. It is a shame that the dramatic tension
which Diederich generates should be dissipated in this way. On the subject
of dramatic presentation, we get the fusillade of shots offstage during the
final scene of the massacre, but oddly not the final one onstage when
Saint-Bris orders the soldiers to gun down his own daughter. It sounds as if
she simply drops dead of her own accord, which is not quite what Meyerbeer
and Scribe had in mind.
This brings us to the real problem with this Diederich set, which
lies in the recording itself. Meyerbeer’s score has a huge dynamic
range, from the whispering solo bass clarinet which accompanies the trio in
the last scene to the large ensemble plus stage band which bids fair to
out-volume the Triumph Scene from
Aida at the end of Act Three. It is
clear perhaps that some compression of this dynamic range is inevitable and
desirable for domestic listening, but the French radio engineers responsible
for the balances seem to have gone overboard in smoothing out the levels,
with the results that some of the most exciting passages - clearly being
delivered by the performers with full-throated enthusiasm - sound simply
under-powered, as the performance recedes into the middle distance. Nor are
the balances always consistent; for much of the time the singers are clearly
in front of the orchestra. At other times they are submerged by it and the
chorus are often almost out of the picture altogether. Twenty years earlier
the Decca engineers managed to obtain a much more satisfactory compromise
between delicacy and Meyerbeerian vulgarity than we are given here. Decca
too made a few small cuts in the music - mainly repeated passages in finales
- but their text is more complete than that used at Montpellier. Meyerbeer
may have his dull passages, but it is important to appreciate how they fit
into the context.
In the past I have had reason to complain about the paltry
documentation which accompanies Warner’s reissues; here we are at
least given a brief two-page synopsis (in three languages) of the action,
but this can hardly do justice to the considerable complexities of
Scribe’s plot. Anyone purchasing this set will need to look elsewhere
for texts and translations. The piano score can be obtained online complete
with English translation. The sung text is given in Italian only; there is
an alternative version with French text, but no translation. I was unable to
locate a libretto which could be downloaded online. One should obviously
note that the 2001 CD reissue of the Bonynge set does come with full texts
and translations, and this may well be the final consideration that weighs
the balance one way or another.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
