Credit crunch opera

BOV Opera Festival

Le Pauvre Matelot

Manoel Theatre

No doubt some contemporary composer will dream up an opera about the credit crunch that has rendered our lives so precarious. Meanwhile, as part of the Opera Festival, we had Darius Milhaud’s opera Le Pauvre Matelot, the poor sailor, staged on a shoestring with piano accompaniment and in the courtyard of Palazzo Bonici. A far cry from the leviathans of Richard Wagner, the opera, if one can even call it that, with a libretto by Jean Cocteau, had all the melodramatic elements of a Tabarro or Pagliacci but on a miniature scale and with a particular Gallic twist.
It has always fascinated me how opera as a genre has always gone for the most improbably immoral and sordid stories that somehow become respectable once set to glorious music. Stories about prostitutes and gypsies, courtesans, parricides and infanticides abound amid an avalanche of crimes passionelles! Most of the protagonists die some horrible, lingering death while those who survive, and Amneris always springs to mind here, are condemned to lives
of perpetual remorse and sorrow.
Le Pauvre Matelot, composed in 1927, is no exception. The upshot of the plot is that one should never ever lie to one’s wife even if she does not recognise you. The sailor has been missing for many years and when he returns he is unrecognisable. For some reason, possibly to test her fidelity, he pretends to be his own companion who announces his own imminent return. The wife is informed that her husband is no better than a penniless vagrant probably with the ulterior motive that she might fall for the companion and his riches. The plot goes horribly pear-shaped and instead of falling for him the wife kills him without a qualm, thinking that the jewels that he obtained from the African Queen will pay the husband’s debts when he returned.
The poor woman would wait forever except that the husband had disclosed his true identity to his best friend which leaves a loose end the size of an anaconda.
Stephane Petitjean is a marvellous pianist. The Milhaud score, full of sinuous twists and gyrations based on sailors songs was executed with a virtuosic intensity that was the hallmark and the lynchpin of the whole event. The cast, a quartet of lovely voices that we could appreciate even more a cappella from tenor Jean Delescluse, the sailor, soprano Claudine Le Coz, the wife, bass Jacques Bona, the father, and baritone Jean Baptiste Dumora, the friend, performed the sometimes tortured and sinuous score with aplomb. Pity that most of the action could not be seen by anyone but the people sitting on the tables in front. What I imagine Christian Gagneron wished to create in this direction was a real bar atmosphere, however, the audience was hampered by it. It was all in all an interesting evening. Not one’s idea of opera but a refreshing change to be sure.
This sort of thing is so easily and economically realised that the theatre management really need not wait for the opera festival to come around but can stage it at the drop of a hat at any time during the season. We do need to diversify. The 20th century operatic output needs to be explored in greater depth.
Works like Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress or Prokofiev’s Fiery Angel are still way beyond their realisation although they were written so long ago. As in the visual arts, Malta has not even begun to explore the modern idiom, let alone the contemporary.
This is what a Minister of Culture should be doing alone with the Arts Council. Our cultural scenario is unbalanced and has huge lacunae that should have long been a cause for concern.
The programme of this year’s opera festival was a daring one and one which broke new ground. People may not have attended in droves as when a Joseph Calleja regales us with operatic bonbons, but the ones who did attend went there to listen to something new and different just to prove the point that life beyond Traviata and Rigoletto does exist.

Source: Weekender, March 28, 2009