Paer– LEONORA (or Conjugal Love)
Press reviews
A fascinating evening
Opera, October 2008
Pierre Gaveaux’s French revolutionary opera Leonore ou L’Amour conjugal, which appeared at the Theatre feydeau in 1798, and was published, had three successors in 1804-5: Ferdinando Paer’s Leonora ossia L’amore conjugale in Dresden in October; Beethoven’s Leonore oder Die eheliche Liebe at the Theater an der Wien a month later (the title Beethoven wanted, though the management changed it to Fidelio); and Simone Mayr’s L’amore conjugale in Padua in July. Paer’s Leonora had a Viennese private performance at the Lobkowitz Palace in 1806, and 12 performances (in German translation) at the Burgtheater in 1809-10. Beethoven attended, and scholars have speculated whether it may have influenced his 1814 revision of Leonore into the familiar Fidelio. After a live encounter with Paer’s opera, my conclusion is that it probably did – but chiefly in confirming the composer’s convictions about what not to do, what to avoid, when refashioning his own great, serious opera.
This was the first British performance of Paer’s work. Attending a Bampton performance is often essential for enthusiasts, but it’s not for the faint-hearted. No way of getting there except by motoring is listed on its website (whereas Glyndebourne is reachable, and indeed encourages access, by public transport). If we wish to sit during the performance, we are instructed to bring our own chairs. (Garsington provides tiered seating, some shelter from the British summer, and picnic tents and tables). So we lugged our chairs to the Deanery lawn, umbrellas in readiness (but there was only a drop or two on the first night), and on a cold, damp evening shivered beneath rugs and shawls as we prepared to enjoy the opera.
Enjoy it we did. Bampton Classical Opera offers operas that one wants to hear, albeit in modest stagings. Arne’s Alfred, Benda’s Romeo und Julie, Gazzaniga’s Don Giovanni, Salieri’s Falstaff figure in its annals. Promising young singers appear in its casts. Paer’s Leonora began well. The overture, led by Robin Newton, was eloquent. So was the prelude to the second act, and many another instrumental contribution in a score remarkable for its varied obbligatos. The orchestra played in a tent to the right of the stage whence the players couldn’t see the singers, and they occasionally lost contact. Bampton’s open-air acoustics, entirely without resonance, are curious. The first impression may suggest an acoustic recording played on a portable gramophone; but the ear swiftly attunes, and then welcomes an honesty of excellently audible sound. Paer’s instrumental inventiveness was again and again striking. Everything was clearly heard.
And the sung drama began well: Marcellina and Giacchino’s opening utterances were delivered, by Emily Rowley Jones and Samuel Evans, with every word clear. Bampton knows that opera ‘makes sense’ when the listeners understand what the singers are saying. Verbal communicativeness continued to inform the Bampton performance. Cara McHardy, the Leonora, though underpowered in the heroine’s biggest moments, didn’t push into stridency, and she matched Marcellina well in the flibbertigibbet flights that Paer write for them. Michael Bracegirdle was the Florestan, Adrian Powter the Rocco, Jonathan Stoughton the Pizarro (a tenor, with no aria), and John Upperton the Don Fernando. The action, directed by Jeremy Gray, was shifted from Spain to revolutionary Paris, and Gray was also the designer; his back-of-stage guillotine won a laugh when it made its first chippy-chippy-chop descent. The English translation, by Gilly French and Gray, had some Gilbertian rhymed moments but sang fluently and matched Paer’s music well enough, except when Rocco sang a jarring ‘OK’ and ‘get cracking’.
Most of Paer’s numbers begin well. The arias for Leonora and for Florestan are large-scale bigger than those in Beethoven’s opera; and the introduction to Florestan’s is particularly striking. (‘Paer at his least insipid’, Winton Dean called it.) Most of the numbers – though not these two – fail to sustain interest, go on too long, are extended by cliché. It was a fascinating evening, honestly, decently and ambitiously performed: a page of musical history brought to life, a first encounter that for opera-goers with long memories recalled the rewarding St Pancras adventures long ago.
Andrew Porter
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a high quality cast
Opera Now, November/December 2008
Bampton Classical Opera makes a habit of putting on less well-known operas. Ferdinando Paer’s Leonora, despite being the most famous of his 55 operas, thus received its UK premiere here. The story is based on the same plot as Beethoven’s work, and so comparisons are inevitable. Though this performance was sung in English, its Italian origins are shown in the continuity of its sung recitative, not the spoken dialogue of Beethoven’s Singspiel; a larger difference is more of a focus on the intimate relationships of the main characters that Beethoven’s epic portrayal of freedom.
Paer was, by all accounts, a thoroughly unpleasant character, not thinking twice at slandering his fellow composers and, according to contemporary sources, frequently putting away a staggering amount of booze with seemingly no effect. Notwithstanding these faults, his operas were extremely popular; the premiere of Paer’s Leonora was considerably more successful than Beethoven’s.
Into his struggle for freedom, Paer intersperses a fair amount of humorous moments, particularly seen in the comically turbulent relationship between Marcellina, Leonora and Giacchino, something that creates a reasonably well-rounded drama. Unfortunately, the arias hold up this drama to the extent that much of the sense of movement or dramatic tension is lost. Paer’s musical style is pleasant enough – much closer to Mozart than to Beethoven – but there’s something of a lack of variety here, and all those extended perfect cadences and repeats get a little wearing by the end.
The singers, however, brought the music to life. Marcellina (Emily Rowley Jones) was a pleasure to watch and hear; her voice was freash and enticing and she had a clarity that was beguiling. What Cara McHardy (Leonora) occasionally lacked in accuracy she made up for in power and richness of tone; their second-act duet was the stand-out highlight of the night. The jailer Rocco (Adrian Powter) was excellent, as was Michael Bracegirdle as Florestan, who only appeared in act II, but who made up for it by singing a succession of high-tessitura and high-tension arias with admirable strength and stamina. Samuel Evans and Jonathan Stoughton (Giacchino and the villain Don Pizzarro) were perhaps slightly less convincing, but this was a high-quality cast. Robin Newton did his best with the orchestra – it can’t be easy playing in a tent to the side of the stage as the sun and temperature go down; the set was simple but effective. I’m not sure I’d rush to hear Paer again, but the singers made the evening worthwhile.
Jonathan Wikely
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this imaginative, focused production
Opera Today, 22 September 2008
Musically and dramatically Ferdinando Paer’s Leonora and Beethoven’s Fidelio might be said to belong respectively to pre- and post-revolutionary ages. Based, like its more well-known successor, upon Jean Nicolas Bouilly’s play Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal, Paer’s opera has many textual similarities with Beethoven’s drama of heroic rescue and noble sentiments. The faithful wife who disguises herself as a boy in order to reach and rescue her unjustly imprisoned husband forms the core of both works; yet, in Paer’s opera it is not Leonora but the flighty daughter of the jailor who actually releases him from bondage. Indeed, from the light-weight dalliances of the opening moments to the exuberant, self-satisfied moralising of the final sextet (echoes of Don Giovanni or Cosí?), Paer reveals himself to be more comfortable with the world of petty intrigue and human foibles than with the exalted idealism of Beethoven’s utopian aspirations.
That said, this imaginative, focused production by Bampton Classical Opera, directed and designed by Jeremy Gray – and first presented under gloomy summer skies at Bampton Deanery on 18 July – made a strong case, both musically and dramatically, for this infrequently performed work. Act 2, in particular, revealed serious musical and dramatic intent, the dramatic momentum of the recitative and the emotional intensity of Florestan’s long opening aria of darkness and suffering, proving surprisingly progressive.
Paer makes little distinction between the music of the two female roles, Marcellina and Leonora/Fidele; both are high sopranos, but the star on this occasion was Emily Rowley Jones, who expertly conveyed the spirited passion, tempered by an essential kindness and innocence, of the jailor’s daughter. Rowley Jones possessed the stamina required of this demanding role, and her voice remained well-centred and sweet throughout; virtuosic flourishes were dispatched with apparent ease, and intelligently nuanced to serve the dramatic situation. She brought Mozartian grace and wit to the opening scenes; her movements on the small stage were well-choreographed and deftly executed. It was through the dynamic contrast between Marcellina’s unrequited passion for ‘Fidele’ and her impatient dismissal of Giacchino’s courtship that the drama gained vitality.
Both female roles demand a wide range and much staying power – Marcellina requires the compass of a Queen of the Night; in the title role, Cara McHardy initially seemed ill-at-ease, her breath control a little insecure and the more virtuosic passages not always firmly controlled. However, as the performance progresses she showed herself on occasion more than capable of rising to the challenges of the taxing coloratura and bringing both meaning and beauty to her interpretation. Unfortunately her lack of confidence dramatically was noticeable in the ensembles where she appeared uncomfortable and at times vocally subdued.
As in previous Bampton productions, Adrian Powter, as Rocco, revealed his instinct for the dramatic moment, moving confidently and establishing a strong stage presence. He injected appropriate weight and bluff into his boasting tirades, which benefited also from excellent diction. Samuel Evans, as the hapless prison janitor, Giacchino, similarly demonstrated sound comic timing and nuance, and together they significantly contributed to the dramatic momentum, which might have been hampered by the many long reflective arias and by the extensive duet for Marcellina and Leonora in Act 2.
The challenges of the twenty-minute aria for Florestan which opens Act 2 are many; but Michael Bracegirdle proved himself able to shape the various sections of his painful, desolate lament on his lengthy suffering in the darkness into a convincing whole, employing an extensive dynamic range and sensitive tonal variations.
Despite the foreboding guillotine and imposing dungeon walls which dominated the set, it was difficult for the cast to inject any real menace into Paer’s drama. There is no prisoners’ chorus to emphasise the themes of imprisonment and despair; and Pizarro, the prison governor, is a rather unconvincing stage-villain – his comic arrogance emphasised here by his Napoleonic cape and eye-patch. His bluster may be less than threatening, but Jonathan Stoughton sang securely if a little blandly. It was not Stoughton’s fault that, following a rather feeble confrontation with Leonora, Pizarro found himself cast in chains, and one immediately forgot about him. Indeed, there is a deflation of dramatic tension towards the close of Act 2: the arrival of Marcellina, demanding a marriage proposal from ‘Fedele’ somewhat dispels the threat of violence, and the arrival of Don Fernando, sung here with warm radiance by John Upperton, swiftly and effortlessly restores harmony and accord.
However, Paer’s opera does have many notable features, not least its strong melodic character. This is evident from the first bars of the overture, a seemingly simple medley of forthcoming themes, which has an original feature in the heroine’s romantic ‘motto’ theme, heard three times here and subsequently reiterated most effectively at crucial points in the action. Throughout the orchestration surprises and delights: while the rather clichéd trumpet call introducing the sinister dungeon setting and the three percussive chimes announcing the hour of Florestan’s murder may fail to send a shiver up the spine, overall the writing revealed some striking colours, exploiting unusual instrumental combinations, especially for the woodwind. The score was well-executed by the London Mozart Players. Situated behind the imposing set, conductor Robin Newton led them in lively fashion; indeed, he set off at a pace which left the singers somewhat trailing in the orchestra’s wake, anxiously glancing at the distantly-placed monitors; but secure ensemble was quickly restored and the overall balance between soloists and orchestra was well-judged.
Paer’s Leonora is an excellent example of its genre – a semi-seria opera, in which the frivolous and tragic co-exist and interact. It may be that the comic plot slightly overshadows the high drama of wrongful imprisonment and tyranny, but this intelligent, well-paced production by Bampton Classical Opera made a convincing case for the composer’s melodic lyricism and left this listener eager for another opportunity to hear this unfairly neglected work.
Claire Seymour
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something out of the ordinary
The Oxford Times, 25 July 2008
For those who haven't been, Bampton Classical Opera is rather eccentric, in an English sort of way. The audience bring their own chairs and the organisation has a charmingly quality. The singers are professional, however, and the repertoire usually provides an opportunity to hear something out of the ordinary.
Saturday's offering was Leonora, by Ferdinando Paer, a contemporary of Beethoven. The work is based on the same literary source as Fidelio. Paer specialised in semiseria operas with two plot lines - one serious and dramatic, the other comic. The wrongfully imprisoned Florestano and his wife Leonora (disguised as a man - Fidelio) provide the high drama, while Marcellina, the gaoler's daughter, and her suitor Giacchino deliver the comedy.
Dramas involving prisoners being rescued by faithful spouses were popular around the time of the French Revolution and the play on which this opera and Fidelio are based is a typical example of this genre. The central plot is overly melodramatic and plods along towards an outcome which is never in doubt.
Leonora has two affecting arias in the middle of the first act which temporarily elevate the overall tone, and Florestano sings a moving aria in which he pleads for water. There is also a fine dramatic moment in Act II when three chimes ring out from the percussion announcing the hour of Florestano's appointed murder. Otherwise the show is stolen by the comic subplot.
It was with Marcellina's unrequited passion for Fidelio, and Giacchino's clumsy wooing, that this production came to life. For me the young Emily Rowley Jones as Marcellina was the star of the piece. Both her singing and her acting were delightful. Adrian Powter was persuasive as Rocco and Cara McHardy (Leonora) was in fine voice in the arias in Act I, and in the lovely duet with Marcellina in Act II. The rest of the cast gave capable performances, and the orchestra provided good support.
Simon Collings
