Opera review – Rubinstein’s Le Démon at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux
The Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux dominates its surroundings. So it should. It has stood majestically, as the link between the medieval cité and the northern quartiers which blossomed in the 19th century, since 1778. The architect, Victor Luis, gave his provincial Bordeaux sponsors a Paris-beating upscale edifice, boasting a frontage of twelve Corinthian columns, supporting entablatures on which stand huge statues of the nine muses, and, to make up the numbers, three goddesses – Juno, Venus and Minerva. Only Minerva was known to take an interest in the arts and attend the opera regularly.
A tour of the main building revealed hidden treasures; the small panel which opens up to show the original colours of the wall in which the auditorium is once more resplendent, royal aqua blue and gold; the monumental double staircase, an innovation in its day aped in Paris’ Palais Garnier, which allowed the Bordeaux great and good to strut their stuff in public; the fusty room of the Opera Club, which held its proceedings behind closed doors and had a secret bookcase-fronted stairway to spirit in discreet attendees for controversial agenda points during its meetings; a vast costume workshop in the roof.
The beautifully lit workshop was recently fitted out as a ballet studio, but when co-ordinated grands jetés made the chandelier in the auditorium shudder alarmingly, the costumiers opportunistically took over. They cut and sew in mirrored, sunlit splendour.
The building’s solid, locally mined, lime blocks have been restored to their unadorned, pristine condition and look as true as the day they were laid. Behind stage, the original, basic scenery moving equipment from the 19th century remains in place. The house is a cornucopia of nooks and crannies, redundant metalwork and mysterious levers. Don’t touch!
A truly atmospheric ten minute online tour is available to watch here.
Three hundred and fifty years on, the Grand Théâtre is still cock of the Place de la Comédie walk. It positively glowers down at the puny Intercontinental Bordeaux Grand Hotel opposite, thumbs an analogue insult to the digital Apple Store to the south and offers two Gallic fingers to the Le Bordeaux Gordon Ramsay on the north west corner. Pouf, Les Brits? We have our own Diderot inspired brasserie, Le Quatrième Mur, presided over by award winning Chef Philippe Etchebest, snuggled into our building – behind the fourth wall. So there.
Get it? I was reminded that Diderot conceived the notion of the fourth wall in a theatre, through which the audience watched the play. In Bordeaux the audience, sensibly, eats its dinner behind it. Sated by culinary curiosities, diners headed off to see another, Anton Rubinstein’s Le Démon, produced by Dmitry Bertman, music direction by Paul Daniel.
Composed in 1871, the opera is based on the poem of the same name by Russian, Mikhail Lermontov, from an aristocratic background, who wrote in the Romantic idiom and died at the age of 26 in 1841. Le Démon was banned until 1860 because it was sacrilegious. Banned works are excellent opera fodder.
It was a huge success, being performed over 100 times in the first decade following its premiere. But, when it was performed in Paris in 1911 it was panned as being old fashioned and consigned to the repertoire dustbin, except in homeland Russia, where it still has regular outings. Brave of Opéra National de Bordeaux to retrieve it, provide a makeover and re-stage.
What a triumphant job. After many years of opera-going, senses rendered a tad numb by all the truly excellent productions I have seen, it is increasingly rare to be completely overwhelmed. I was bowled over in Bordeaux.
Le Démon’s common-ish theme is easy to trivialise. Opera is stuffed with demons deflowering damsels. Think Mefistofele, Kate and the Devil, Faust, The Damnation of Faust, For a Few Fausts More … um, maybe not that one. Composers and librettists love to latch onto the supernatural to untie uber-complicated plot knots. Fiery furnaces are convenient repositories for villains – Don Giovanni.
Thumbnail sketch of the story. Skip on if you know it. During a storm in the Caucasian mountains, evil spirits call upon a demon to destroy the beauty of God’s world. Le Démon sings of his hatred for the whole universe. An Angel pleads for him to reconcile with heaven. Nope!
Beautiful Tamara, daughter of Prince Gudal, awaiting her wedding with Prince Sinodal, is by a river with her attendants. The demon sees her, has a quick double-take on his destruction mission, and falls in love with her. He promises – subliminally – that “all the world will kneel before her” and he will “show her the universe” if she returns his love. Tamara is fascinated, but frightened, by the voice in her head and returns to the castle.
Prince Sinodal’s caravan is making its way to Prince Gudal’s court for his marriage to Tamara, but is delayed by a landslide. The demon appears and vows that Prince Sinodal will never see Tamara again. The caravan is attacked by Tatars and Prince Sinodal is mortally wounded. Before he dies, he tells his servant to bring his body to Tamara.
Festivities for the wedding are underway. A messenger announces that Prince Sinodal’s caravan has been delayed. Tamara senses the presence of the demon and is fearful. When Prince Sinodal’s body is brought into the castle, Tamara is overcome by grief, but keeps hearing the supernatural voice of the demon and his promises. Dismayed by her own inconstancy, she begs her father to let her enter a convent.
Le Démon intends to enter the convent where Tamara is living, believing his love for her has opened his spirit to goodness. Really? The Angel tries in vain to stop him. Tamara prays in her convent cell, but is constantly troubled by thoughts of the demon, who appears to her in dreams.
The demon now appears in reality, declares his love for her and begs her to love him in return. Tamara tries to resist her attraction to him but fails. He kisses her in triumph. The Angel – spoilsport – suddenly appears and shows her the ghost of Prince Sinodal. In horror, Tamara struggles out of Le Démon’s arms, falling dead.
The Angel proclaims that Tamara has been redeemed by her suffering, while the demon is damned to eternal solitude. Le Démon curses his fate. In the final apotheosis Tamara’s soul is carried to heaven, ushered in by an angelic chorus.
Lermontov’s literary legacy has been fought over for more than a century. The banning of the poem was based on an interpretation that it prefigured the Nietzschean denial of God. Others argued the opposite, that it embraced the regenerative power of the Almighty. Lermontov did not hang around long enough to say what he really meant.
That hasn’t stopped others having their tuppence-worth. Try Robert Reid’s Lemontov’s Demon: A Question of Identity, published in The Slavonic and East European Review in 1982 (no kidding), for size.
Amidst much psychological mumbo jumbo and fannying about, I think Reid latches onto something when he quotes an interpretation by a 19th century art critic, Fedders: “The demon’s origins are unknown. He is an aggregate composed from the mass of lonely discounted people who have been injured by life.”
In staging Le Démon it is important to hang onto that fundamental reality, or the plot turns banal. The demon, the main character, is rooted in the world, so horns and forked tails are out. But, he is also apart from it, until he manifests himself before Tamara, to deliver the fatal kiss. A previous filmed production, from the Mariinsky Theatre, missed the point. It separated the two worlds of earth and heaven by using a horizontally split set, with the devil paradoxically above and Tamara below. The chorus sang through a slit in the middle. Descent to pantomime.
The producer in Bordeaux was the Russian, Dmitry Bertman, who founded Moscow’s Helikon Opera in 1990, specialising in unconventional works or settings. Bertman’s staging is ingenious and ambitious. This is a coproduction with Gran Teatre de Liceu, Helikon and Staatstheater Nürnberg. During my backstage tour, I came across puzzled representatives from the Staatstheater burrowing into the set, wondering how to disassemble and ship it back for a tour they had planned. Good luck. The shrugging French stagehands did not exude positivism.
The main action takes place in a large, ovoid construction whose entrance almost fills the proscenium, then recedes for about ten metres backstage, narrowing slightly. The interior consists of lightly coloured wood-effect panels. Seen from backstage it’s like a section of tunnel for a new tube line.
The rising walls of the ovoid are dotted with horizontal strakes, which allow the cast to, literally, climb the walls when need be. The attitude of the Bordeaux elf and safety tsars is unknown.
Much was made of a bizarre device, which caught my eye. Hanging limply, at the rear of the ovoid, was a massive burst balloon, extending from the top to the bottom of the set. My guide, Susan Capdequi, Directrice Technique Adjointe, explained.
Reveal. She was the reason I was in Bordeaux. Née Boyle, Susan hails from Glasgow. Her father, the late Sheriff John Boyle, was a close friend, well-kent Glasgow figure from a family of recognised artists, a founder of Scottish Opera and a “But you must do that, dear boy” mentor, who I still frequently consult in my head today – whenever caution needs to be thrown to the wind. I had been meaning to visit Susan in her Bordeaux lair for some time.
So, what was the balloon thingy? According to Susan, during the performance it was going to inflate, rise and fall during the action and depict – in turn the moon, an all-seeing eye, the sun, the whirling world and, ultimately, the vision of the face of Tamara, translated to heaven.
Oh yeah? All that from a raggedy, burst balloon? Susan turned out to be a master of understatement. The inflated balloon’s trick was not to rotate, but to give the appearance of doing so, using 3D images projected by special equipment from inside. The impact was magical. The balloon would rise and fall as the action demanded. And, when it descended, a trompe l’oeil effect of the narrowing set made it appear to advance towards the audience. It was a character in its own right.
The structure of the set allowed Le Démon to be always close to the action, not viewing from a distance, semi-detached, but visibly impacting Tamara’s emotions. The moot question of whether he was really a facet of Tamara’s mind rather than an externality was left deliciously unresolved. Clever. Ambiguity is more intriguing than certainty. And the Lermontov poem is certainly ambiguous.
Principal members of the cast: Le Démon, Nicolas Cavallie, “souffrant” on the night, so understudied by Aleksei Isaev, a Russian baritone, who interpreted the conflicted demon’s character masterfully; Tamara, Evgenia Muraveva, a young Russian soprano who shot the lights out at Salzburg in 2017 and provided a convincingly anguished Tamara in Bordeaux; L’Ange, Ray Chenez, an American counter tenor, with an ability to span an unusual breadth of repertoire for his register, brought real power to the role; Le Prince Goudal, Alexandros Stavrakakis, bass, a graduate from the Athens Conservatory in 2014, who has been winning a series of competition prizes since, and performing roles mostly in Dresden and the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg.
The chorus was a combination of Choeurs de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux et de l’Opera de Limoges under the direction of Salvatore Caputo and Edward Ananian-Cooper.
Paul Daniel, an English conductor, became musical director of Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine in 2012. With a background in opera previously with Opera North and English National Opera, he has evidently been taken to the hearts of his Bordeaux audiences. And rightly so. He dug huge emotion out of the Rubinstein score and provided beautifully detailed instrumental passages. At the post opera party, a brief chat revealed him as unfussy and shy of the limelight. He is well-settled in Bordeaux after a, latterly, torrid time at ENO.
During my tour I was treated to a close-up view of the fresco that adorns the dome of the auditorium. It was explained restoration was necessary because smoke from the pre-electric chandelier had darkened it beyond recognition. It was a typically classical, sylvan scene, nymphs, shepherds …. yah di yah. But on one side intruded a trading ship and a female African slave. Et in Arcadia commerce.
I wondered why. I think it makes the point that this opera house was always intended as an opening to the arts for the often-blinkered world of humdrum commerce. Perhaps, a potential escape from drudgery. Perhaps a cautionary reminder that art cannot survive without commerce.
Whatever, if the rude mechanicals of Staatstheater Nürnberg do not disassemble the set beyond any hope of reassembly, this production of a badly neglected work should be seen more widely. Opéra National de Bordeaux has done great service for the city’s good burghers, and opera fans everywhere, by re-polishing this forgotten gem so brightly.