Pagliacci
By Robert Thicknesse
July 12, 2003
"LIFE isn't the same as theatre," says Canio, the cuckolded clown. But
it is for Franco Zeffirelli, who is so lost in showbiz that the distinction
long ago ceased to exist.
This jawdroppingly awful
half-evening is a triumph of glitz over guts, an attempt to reduce opera to the
status of a West End musical - albeit with production standards 20 years out of
date; a travesty of everything that opera should be about, and a betrayal of
every element of its make-up. So much for poor Ruggero Leoncavallo and his
"bleeding slice of life".
You might not mind so much if the elements weren't so wonderful: Pag is an
opera so viscerally effective; Placido Domingo and Angela Gheorghiu singers of
such indescribable talent; Antonio Pappano the best thing to have happened to
Covent Garden in living memory, that reducing
the show to a Baz Luhrmann-style Oliver! romp leaves you dumb.
Zeffirelli uproots it from Calabrian soil and plonks it beneath a 1990s
Neapolitan flyover where knees-up lowlife finds no cliché too demeaning:
Gheorghiu's Nedda cavorts with oddly clean-knickered street-urchins, happy
balcony-dwellers shower a nuptial couple with Arborio rice, and everyone is
delighted to come and view the players' dim little commedia even though there
are sure to be stripping housewives on Rai Uno.
This is opera for those who find Bombay Dreams the height of theatrical
sophistication, as Zeffirelli packs the stage with 140 chorus and supers doing
handstands and three-ball juggling. You bàrely notice that there is a rather
shocking little drama of love and death going on in the
middle of it all, something the director finesses by sacrificing any sympathy
we may have for the characters within the first five minutes. And then, just
when Canio (Domingo) has discovered Nedda canoodling with her paramour Silvio
(Dmitri Hvorostovsky in self-loving mode), we get a
half-hour interval to dissipate any drama that may have accrued.
It's easy to miss that there is someone making an effort amid all this rubbish,
and it is naturally Pappano, getting the orchestra to play as only he knows
how: tortured and blissfully Romantic strings worthy of Richard Strauss and
Mahler, an intermezzo so gorgeous you can ignore its
musical inconsequence, ecstatic transformations and heavenly rustlings for Nedda's
trilly aria.
Domingo pulls out the stops for the bloody denouement, but otherwise it is
unbelievably vocally underpowered. Meretricious, castrated, denatured: these
clowns should get back to the circus where they seem to think they belong.
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