In 2022, Opera Holland Park put on Giacomo Puccini’s neglected first opera, Le Villi. It was a great success, so why not follow it with his second, Edgar?
There’s just one problem: it is truly awful. Even Puccini thought so. Much of that is down to a ghastly, clunky libretto (by Ferdinando Fontana, based on a play by Alfred de Musset), with cardboard cut-out characters, a story full of holes and an anti-hero without a single redeeming feature. Puccini, usually a stickler for good librettos, blamed himself for setting it at all.
Worse, he went back and repeatedly revised it: we heard the 1905 version. Gentle Reader, he had already written Tosca and La Bohème by the time this little lot took its final form. The music is recognisably Puccini’s work – there are a couple of good tenor arias and a beautiful chorus at a fake funeral – but finally he disowned it.
It’s about a knight, Edgar, who has a virgin/whore complex over, respectively, Fidelia and Tigrana. He sets his house on fire, elopes with Tigrana, regrets it, joins the army, fakes his own death and returns in disguise to denounce himself (never underestimate operatic characters’ inability to recognise the person they love when he is wearing an unaccustomed hat). Eventually he declares love for Fidelia, upon which Tigrana kills her and the townsfolk murder Tigrana.
This is a “semi-staged” version (costumes but no scenery); fortunately they didn’t splash out any further. Director Ruth Knight moves the tale from medieval Flanders to 19th-century England and makes the seductive Tigrana into a meek, matronly Victorian. She, the story goes, was abandoned at the village by Moors. The villagers hate her for her beauty and the men are obsessed with her, but here it becomes all about racism and misogyny; and the result is both nasty and unconvincing at the same time. No amount of “relevance” can redeem it.
The lead singers, all well respected artists, seem vocally and visually miscast: Peter Auty (Edgar), Gweneth Ann Rand (Tigrana) and Anne Sophie Duprels (Fidelia) do what they can, but each sometimes appeared to struggle. The supporting roles, Julien Van Mellaerts as Frank and James Cleverton as Gualtiero, fared better. The City of London Sinfonia, the Opera Holland Park chorus and children’s chorus, and conductor Naomi Woo, music director of NYO Canada, make a valiant stab, but the result remains shaky.
Puccini wrote of Edgar: “E Dio ti GuARdi da quest’opera!” (And may God protect you from this opera!). Audience members around me were chortling over the worst of the lines. Back in the box with it.
To 6 July (operahollandpark.com)