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L'anima del filosofo
“Finley's singing has all the warmth, generosity, colour and size that's missing elsewhere.” The Evening Standard
“Gerald Finley gives a performance of stature, singing like an angel as Euridice's father, Creonte” The Guardian
“Gerald Finley (Creonte) had lustrous tone and musical assurance” The Observer
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Composer |
Joseph Haydn |
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Librettist |
Carlo Francesco Badini |
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Venue and Dates |
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden 15, 18, 22, 24, 27, 31 October 2001 |
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Conductor |
Christopher Hogwood |
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Production |
Director: Jürgen Flimm Set designer: George Tsypin Costume designer: Florence von Gerkan Lighting designer: David Harvey Choreographer: Catharina Lühr |
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Performers |
Eurydice/Genio: Cecilia Bartoli Creon: Gerald Finley Orpheus: Roberto Saccà Plutone: Brindley Sherratt
Quentin Hayes Nigel Cliffe James Bobby Brindley Sherratt Robin Leggate Baccante: Alison Rayner Savages, Amorini, Furies, Baccanti The Royal Opera Chorus |
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Production |
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Notes |
What the critics say
Tom Sutcliffe for The Evening Standard,16 October 2001
Pillow talk costs dear
If it wasn't for Cecilia Bartoli, would anyone waste time on Haydn's Orpheus opera, L'anima del filosofo? That's unfair to Gerald Finley as Eurydice's father Creon, who injects a tidal wave of vitality into the show when he gets the rare chance. Finley's singing has all the warmth, generosity, colour and size that's missing elsewhere - and he acts coherently without playing to the gallery.
But the public is here for Bartoli, and her extraordinary vocal mechanics do not disappoint. There's the flexibility, the nerveless poise, the extreme rapidity in coloratura, the occasional idiosyncratic soft notes breathed sweetly out at us as if we were all on the same pillow.
Bartoli uses Italian with relish. Her impact is as heard on record. But I was surprised, after thrilling to her in Birmingham and Salzburg, to observe how small she actually sounds here, and how fatiguing wall-to-wall mezzo-forte can become.
It's scarcely director Jürgen Flimm's fault that most expressions of mutual love by the fated pair are totally unbelievable. The libretto makes them comment on their condition (such as poison coursing through their veins) - a strangely objective mode. But the flat, featureless musical interpretation is conductor Christopher Hogwood's fault. Even with only two or three worthwhile arias, Haydn's elegant writing need not sound so limp and feckless. No doubt that's Hogwood's "principle of historically informed performance".
Bartoli swashbuckles better in her second role as principal boy or Genio (Orpheus's guardian angel) with one fine number to deliver. Hades is more visual with the lost souls taking a communal shower. But poor Roberto Saccà, as the continually upstaged tenor Orpheus, he gets few of the vocal chances the myth demands. No big set piece before Pluto, and the second loss of Eurydice is almost instantaneous. The Bacchantes, with their friendly poison chalices, are about as alarming as the women of Coronation Street.
Even without the final act Haydn surely intended, it's nice for London to see an opera commissioned for here - even though 200 years late. But it's a borrowed show, made in Vienna in 1995, then seen in Zurich. No big deal.
Rupert Christiansen for The Telegraph, 17 October 2001
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2001/10/17/btfilo17.xml
Much more than a one-woman show
THIS could so easily have been the Cecilia Bartoli Show. The phenomenal Italian diva was making her long overdue British stage debut, in L'Anima del Filosofo (The Spirit of Philosophy), Haydn's rarely heard version of the Orpheus myth. With all tickets sold weeks ago, a sensational new record release and masses of anticipatory press coverage, expectations ran high.
Well, let me say at once that La Bartoli did not disappoint, and the audience duly roared its approval, but it is to everyone's credit that the performance proved to be much more than a star turn.
The opera, for one thing, is fascinating: written for a London impresario in 1791, it was apparently left unfinished and has never until now been performed here.
Although it lacks Mozartian fluency or Gluckian intensity, it has a sheer originality and oddity of character that make it more gripping than any other of Haydn's theatrical efforts. The recitative is richly expressive, the choruses are magnificent, and the arias generally free of baroque cliche.
At Covent Garden, the score was in the experienced hands of Christopher Hogwood: the orchestra didn't initially sound comfortable with his "authentic" approach, but soon warmed to the challenge. Jurgen Flimm's imported production, beautifully designed by George Tsypin and Florence von Gerkan, was elegant in concept - baroque costume and ambience, with surrealistic touches - and meticulously staged. I thought it stylish, witty and sensitive: quite why it should be so violently booed I have no idea.
Gerald Finley sang Creon with tremendous bravado, and as the hapless Orfeo, Roberto Sacca displayed a well-focused, sweet-toned and securely musical tenor.
The chorus was in excellent form. Yet again one noted with admiration how high the overall standards at the Royal Opera currently run.
And Bartoli herself? Her exuberant joy in the physical act of singing was irresistible. In Act 1, her Euridice was passionately declaimed, with exquisitely spun pianissimi and eloquent phrasing; in Act 2, however, where she doubles up as the Spirit who leads Orfeo through Hades, she went in for some wild coloratura gobbles and squawks above the stave. To me she will always be most fetching and convincing in the mezzo-soprano range.
Perhaps, too, the voice remains a little small for Covent Garden - I did mentally transplant the whole experience to the more intimate circumstances of Glyndebourne, where it would have been absolute heaven. But meanwhile, no complaints.
Fiona Maddocks for The Observer, October 21, 2001
Ever a fickle umpire, received opinion has judged Haydn's operas dull and unperformable. He wrote about two dozen, though before this week few of us could name one. Most are never performed. Haydn, even in his symphonies and string quartets, has for no explicable reason been edged out of fashion. As for his little known theatrical efforts, they tend to be yoked dismissively with those of Schubert, who could effortlessly squeeze a full-scale human tragedy into a two-minute song but was ponderously at sea with his stage works.
This coupling does Haydn no justice. For much of his career he was a man of the theatre, directing, coaching, conducting and composing operas as Kapellmeister at the Esterhaza court. Dare one say that Haydn had dramatic skills we have not yet learned to appreciate? Gluck is hardly easier to a modern listener but without the distraction of other musical outpourings in his name we concentrate on his operas and find them astonishing and rewarding. The same devotion to Haydn might pay off, as it has with Handel (I hear roars of disbelief). Without the dedicated enthusiasm of Cecilia Bartoli and her fellow performers it's hard to imagine the Royal Opera daring (or desiring) to stage one of his operas. Bartoli's long overdue ROH stage debut guaranteed their conversion, for which many thanks.
Haydn's final opera, L'anima del filosofo, was written for London but never performed in his lifetime. A version of Orpheus and Euridice, it bursts with extraordinary music and ends, shockingly, with a pianissimo chord on an empty stage. The Baccante, having poisoned Orpheus, sail off for pleasure but, amid thunderous orchestral roars, are drowned.
This abrupt finale has provoked some to suggest that a fifth act was intended. Yet Haydn never played by the book in the rest of his mature compositions. Why start now, so late in his career? Maria Callas sang Euridice at the first staged performance in Florence in 1951, since when the work has fairly comprehensively languished.
Bartoli has already sung the work in Europe and last year gave a concert performance - with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music - in Birmingham. Then, as now, she doubled as Euridice and Genio, who guides Orpheus into the underworld in his quest for his dead lover (she is not yet his wife). This gives Bartoli at least three dazzling arias from both the mezzo and the soprano range, providing her with a perfect vehicle for her phenomenal talents. No one should complain that she has the best of all worlds: the superb, virtuosic arias, full of rapid coloratura flourishes, combined with the most interesting dramatic roles in the opera.
As so often befalls those who are as glitteringly successful as Bartoli, she has come in for carping: too perfect, too flawed; too cool, too flamboyant; too small a voice, too big a publicity machine. Why she cannot be accepted for what she is - a remarkable and serious-minded singer who has a thrilling technique and excels in a focused area of repertoire - is a mystery.
Hogwood was again conducting, here with the Royal Opera orchestra, who provided some subtle playing, especially from brass and woodwind, even if the strings did not have quite the lithe flexibility of his period instrument players.
Roberto Sacca's Orfeo was expert if bland, while Gerald Finley (Creonte) had lustrous tone and musical assurance. The chorus surpassed themselves.
The downside (a word you might guess heralds an account of the staging) was the production, by the German director Jürgen Flimm, first seen in Vienna in 1995, with costumes by Florence von Gerkan.
George Tsypin's set is the now hackneyed metaphysical urban landscape of de Chirico with the familiar blank-faced buildings. From their arcaded doorways half-naked Furies emerge as if from bathing cubicles. Small shutters open and shut to reveal the chorus of Shades. Gormenghast creatures poke grotesquely extended limbs through these dark apertures and a scarlet figure rises from the deep like a massive lobster to prefigure Euridice's death. Elusive men in elongated top hats and tails appear as silent ringmasters. Had I not been cowed into political correctness by the Brazilian Circus Association who this week called for new linguistic respect for their profession, I would call it all a bit of a circus. But I've seen far worse, and the regulation boos were undeserved.
Tim Ashley for The Guardian, October 17, 2001
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,704541,00.html
Rating: Two out of five stars
Haydn's L'Anima del Filosofo (The Philosopher's Soul) is the work chosen by Cecilia Bartoli for her Covent Garden debut. It might be better to say she has foisted the piece on us: without her apparent insistence on it, I suspect that few of us would want to spend the evening in the theatre listening to such a strangely uneven score.
Written in 1791, the opera subjects the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to philosophical scrutiny. Orpheus's psyche is dissected after the Platonic model of the soul, in which reason and unreason are locked in conflict. Unreason proves Orpheus's undoing, as passion forces him to disobey the injunction not to look at Eurydice on their return from Hades. His rational self is represented by an allegorical figure, Genio, his guide through the underworld, who counsels the abjuration of intense emotion.
Bartoli has elected to play both Euridice and Genio, arguing that this enhances the work's cogency. And were she simply to sing Euridice, she would have nothing to do in the second half - taking on the role of Genio allows her to deliver the opera's major coloratura show-stopper. She does so bouncing around like a pantomime principal boy, inviting us to respond to her vocal athleticism with amazement. As Euridice, she took a while to settle. There were moments of sour tone in her opening recitative, and over-aspirated coloratura in her first aria.
You are acutely aware of the self-consciousness of Bartoli's artistry, which impresses but rarely engages. Only in Euridice's death scene, in which the tone slowly drains from her voice, is she genuinely moving.
What surrounds her is dispiriting. The paucity of inspiration in the score is more than once apparent, and among the rest of the cast, only Gerald Finley gives a performance of stature, singing like an angel as Euridice's father, Creonte. Roberto Sacca looks hunky as Orfeo, but his voice is reedy and unappealing.
Christopher Hogwood's conducting has moments of unaccountable dullness, and the staging by director Jürgen Flimm (booed at the end of the performance) is a symbolist mish-mash that helps nobody. The set is an apertured white box through which the chorus peers to interject comments. Euridice's death is heralded by an Alien-like creature erupting through the floor, while she is shovelled into her grave by characters who have strayed from Waiting For Godot.
Bartoli was cheered to the rafters, as might be expected. But a few members of the audience left during the interval.
George Hall, Opera News, November 2002
http://www.metoperafamily.org/operanews/_archive/202/InReview.202.html
Haydn's L'Anima del Filosofo, ossia Orfeo ed Euridice has a performance history so sparse that it might more fairly be described as a non-performance history. It all began in 1791 in London, where Haydn, the most admired composer of the day, was commissioned to write a work for the rebuilt King's Theatre in the Haymarket. Due to a rival venture that enjoyed royal backing, the new auditorium was temporarily denied a license, so Haydn's score was taken out of rehearsal and put on the shelf. And there it stayed. No one seems to have made another attempt to stage it, in fact, until 1951, when it was presented at the Maggio Musicale in Florence with Maria Callas (taking part in her only world premiere) as Euridice and Erich Kleiber conducting. So when it arrived on the stage of Covent Garden on October 15, it was effectively 210 years late.
The problem with the opera's main title -- The Philosopher's Soul -- is that no one seems quite sure to whom it refers. Is it Creonte (Creon, Euridice's father in this confusingly elongated version of the story), who sings an aria revealing a vaguely philosophical cast of mind at one point, or the Genio (Sibyl), who counsels Orfeo to be philosophical about his loss? It's also not quite certain whether Haydn finished the piece or not. After the inconsolable Orfeo has had a cup of poison forced upon him by some rampaging Bacchantes, they set off for their island of delight only to be drowned in a sudden storm. The music rises to a windswept climax before tailing off into a soft D-minor close, which could be interpreted as an arresting dying fall.
It may be inferred from all this that Haydn's final opera is not exactly a sure-fire winner, but purely as a musical experience it has much to offer, including some solemn choral scenes, striking orchestral passages and virtuoso vocal writing. It was a shame that Jürgen Flimm's production, with designs by George Tsypin, made such a visual mess of it. With its armies of grotesques and dancing extras, its choruses gazing on indifferently from windows opened in side walls, its general ugliness and clutter, this was a feeble and perverse visualization of a piece that needed clarity, not contrariness.
Christopher Hogwood made his ROH debut in the pit, and though the sounds made by the regular orchestra had a proper hint of period flavor to them, there was little sense of dramatic impetus from that quarter. The evening also marked another late arrival -- that of Cecilia Bartoli, only now making her Covent Garden stage debut. She doubled as Euridice and the Genio, who comforts and counsels Orfeo after his wife's death. Bartoli proved well worth waiting for. Her voice easily made its presence felt in the auditorium, and she engaged vigorously with the text. Her tendency to worry some of the coloratura passages as a terrier does a bone could be wearing, but at least it showed commitment. All the notes were emphatically there. She was less successful as the Genio, whose single, flamboyant aria took her up into higher regions that sound far less natural territory for her than does her richer mezzo range. Roberto Saccà coped impressively with the low-lying tenor role of Orfeo and matched Bartoli point for point in expressive power. Gerald Finley maintained a dignified presence as Creonte, though the character himself scarcely grabs attention -- which may explain why Gluck and his librettist left him out of their version of this tale.
Barbara Diana, Giornale della musica, 15 October 2001
http://www.giornaledellamusica.it/rol/scheda.php?id=817&ra&l=0
La prima volta di Orfeo a Londra
Translation will appear asap
Elizabeth Forbes, Opera Canada, 22 March 2002
At Covent Garden, the "new" production of Haydn's L'Anima del Fiosofo, ossia Orfeo ed Euridice, which originated in Vienna and had also been seen in Zurich, served for the Royal Opera debut of Cecilia Bartoli as Euridice. It did not do her any great service. The opera, possibly left unfinished by the composer, just stops when Orfeo (Robert Sacchi) is turned out of the Underworld by Pluto (Brindley Sherratt) without his Eurydice. As she dies halfway through and is not resuscitated in this version, Bartoli also sang the Genio or genie, who has a fiendishly florid aria, which she sang very well but entirely undramatically. The only character to introduce a hint of drama was Creonte, Euridice's father, sung by the ever-reliable Canadian baritone Gerald Finley. Christopher Hogwood conducted.