This spring at WNO you will be spellbound, pinned to your chair, unable to move, charmed, beguiled, bewitched, bothered and be-whatever it was by the magical power of music. Your normally sane and rational self will be transported to, indulging in, succumbing to, even believing in the wonderful magical world that can make so much possible that shouldn’t be, or isn’t quite yet!
The magic flute itself is an instrument of such power – carved by Pamina’s mysteriously magical father – after all, a Dad who survived being married to the Queen of the Night (well, for a while at least!) – from an ancient oak tree at midnight as lightning carved the black sky – an instrument capable of taming wild animals and guiding people harmlessly through fire and water – surely there cannot be a more beautiful symbol of the power of music? Unless it be those charming little bells that turn Monostatos’s dirty thugs into dainty dancers, and best of all summon you a girlfriend just when you have despaired of ever finding one. We all need one of those at some point in our lives, don’t we?
The Magic Flute enchants us, as it is itself enchanted, with the delicacy of Mozart at his most refined, whereas the cautionary tale of Hansel & Gretel (say ‘NO’ to strangers) is accompanied by rich doses of whipped cream applied with a ladle – forbidden fruit but doubly delicious. We have had some stringent diets at WNO recently – death-threatening national struggles, people seeking their God in the desert, incautious young ladies falling from great heights – so it is a pleasure to welcome you to a season in which everything ends happily, with two pairs of young people surviving their trials and emerging stronger and more assured to face the future.
Alongside the magic of Mozart and The Magic Flute, and the wonderful, luscious chocolate cake that is Humperdinck’s score for Hansel & Gretel we also create a new version of Chorus! – the performance in which our justly famous chorus takes centre stage. The conflict between the mass and the individual is the theme, and the brave woman who confronts our massed singers is the wonderful star, Lesley Garrett.
We begin this celebration of the role of the chorus in opera with the opening scene from Prokofiev’s War and Peace – a selection that immediately demonstrates the chorus’s role as the expression of national, patriotic identity. What follows shows a not so attractive side: if the chorus is the mass, then the antithesis to that is the individual, and frequently an individual with a powerful identity of their own is at odds with the mass. The ‘lynch-mob’ scene from Britten’s Peter Grimes is a perfect expression of that conflict. Then, just as the conformist revolutionary chorus is at full power, they are silenced by a little gem from the baroque – Purcell’s ‘Hush no more’, and this introduces a night sequence in which we explore the atmospheric possibilities of massed voices used quietly. But of course night is also the realm of vice, and the dark hours are soon invaded by rampaging stag-night males and less than entirely virtuous ladies, and needless to say, such behaviour calls for the intervention of the police – an example of the chorus as a working group and, just for once, complaining about it.
In the second half we use an extract from Carmen to show the commonly used device of the procession, and then slyly segue into a religious section, which takes the famous Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah as the benchmark for the development of the chorus within the sacred repertoire.
We devote a large section of the second half to a long excerpt from Musorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina. It begins with a particularly Russian phenomenon, a hangover, as the Streltsy – the Tsarist secret police – wake up from a heavy night of drinking. This typically male scene is interrupted by their furious wives, shrilly accusing them, with justice, of being idle layabouts. The men respond by provoking the women with a vigorous dance, in which the women cannot help but participate, thus giving us a brilliantly lively slice of Russian peasant culture. This exuberant scene is in turn interrupted by the news that enemies have taken over the city and that they are threatened. They call for their leader who admits that their ‘good life’ is over, and this is followed by a chorus of exquisite mournful Russian soulfulness straight out of its powerful religious musical tradition. In the space of one 15-minute scene, Musorgsky shows us almost everything that a chorus can do, and what makes their contribution such an essential and enjoyable part of operatic literature.
This year of work sees us continuing to offer a balanced repertoire of the new and unfamiliar together with much loved titles, bound together with thematic ideas which we hope will encourage audiences to explore the links between them. Each work is a gem on its own, but there is a richness of association to be discovered by considering them in a different context. We hope they offer a year of deeply satisfying artistic and creative experience.