Meyerbeer: Les Huguenots – Soltesz

Some operas resist translation. Les Huguenots resists everything — translation, cutting, modernization, even (on the evidence of most attempts since the Second World War) plain common sense. Meyerbeer built the piece as a five-act monument to the star system of the 1830s, stuffed with high notes and higher body counts, and it only really works when a theater is willing to throw absurd resources at it and trust the audience to sit still for four hours of political and erotic catastrophe. Take away either the resources or the trust, and you get something like this document from Bonn — well-intentioned, decently sung in places, and finally a kind of vandalism.

The decision to perform the opera in German isn’t itself the crime. Meyerbeer, ever the pragmatist — a man who rewrote and retooled his scores for whatever city was paying him, Paris or Berlin or Vienna — seems to have tolerated Castelli’s 1837 Vienna translation well enough, and the shift of Urbain from a trouser role sung by a mezzo to something else entirely reflects amendments the composer himself sanctioned in 1844. Nobody should be precious about the original French text as though it were scripture. Meyerbeer wasn’t.

But John Dew’s production, filmed here, does something Meyerbeer never authorized and would surely have loathed: it guts the piece. Whole numbers vanish. Act Three — which contains some of the opera’s most vivid crowd writing, the Huguenot soldiers’ chorus set against the Catholic wedding procession, the swaggering local color that gives the drama its social texture — is reduced to a torso of about ten minutes. Scribe’s libretto was never Racine, granted; the man cranked out scenarios by the yard for half the composers of Paris. But even a loose, melodramatic structure needs its joints. Remove them and the skeleton collapses. By the time we reach the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre — the opera’s entire reason for existing, the historical horror Meyerbeer and Scribe spent four acts building toward — the audience has lost the thread of who hates whom and why.

Dew’s updating doesn’t help. Relocating the sixteenth-century Catholic-Huguenot bloodbath to a vaguely defined Cold War Berlin, with East and West standing in for the old religious factions, might have felt urgent in 1987, when the wall still looked permanent and every European stage director wanted his Zeitoper credentials. By the time this performance was preserved for video, in 1991, history had already made the concept quaint — the wall was rubble, the metaphor already antique. Meyerbeer, incidentally, would likely have found the whole enterprise beside the point. A Jewish composer working in Catholic Paris and Protestant Berlin alike, he was interested less in doctrinal combat than in what factional hatred does to people who love each other across the lines — Raoul and Valentine, chiefly, doomed by circumstance rather than theology. Restage the politics and you can lose the persons.

Musically there’s real talent being spent on a hopeless cause. Richard Leech’s Raoul has the right heroic ping in the upper register — I recall him being an exciting, somewhat under-sung American tenor of that generation, one who never quite got the international ovations his voice deserved — and he phrases with more line than the production around him earns. Lucy Peacock’s Valentine has moments of real vocal warmth, if not always the last ounce of Meyerbeerian grandeur that a Sutherland or a Caballé (in the studio recordings and gala excerpts, since nobody has staged this uncut for decades) could summon in “Parmi les pupilles” — sung here, of course, in German, which blunts some of the sheer sonic glamour the French vowels give that music. Angela Denning’s Marguerite de Valois gets through the coloratura respectably without setting the house on fire.

None of it matters much when the drama itself has been amputated. Les Huguenots was already a curiosity by the mid-twentieth century — too expensive, too long, requiring seven principal voices of nearly impossible caliber, which is why the century’s great exponents (Nourrit and Falcon at the 1836 premiere, Tamagno and Melba later, the fabled “Night of the Seven Stars” at Covent Garden in 1894) have mostly become legend rather than living repertoire. Any modern revival, on disc or film, carries a special burden of advocacy. This one doesn’t advocate. It apologizes, cuts, relocates, and hopes nobody notices the opera has quietly bled out somewhere around the second intermission.

Collectors wanting to know why this score once filled houses from Paris to St. Petersburg would do far better with the 1969 New York broadcast under Henry Lewis, cast intact with Sutherland, Marilyn Horne, and Martina Arroyo — a rendition with all its scale and vocal splendor left in, sung in the original French, allowed to be the gorgeous, unwieldy, magnificent monster it actually is. This Bonn video, handsomely if drably filmed, stands mostly as a cautionary exhibit: a reminder that grand opera, once you start amputating the grand, stops being opera at all.