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Oh brother, what a show
Lorili Maazei’s 1984, being staged largely at the composer’s expense, has been roundly denounced by some critics as a vanity project by a 75-year-old conductor with a minimal track record as a composer.
I myself found it both laudable and entertaining. Laudable that a man of Maazel’s years and reputation should be prepared to spend so much time, money and effort bringing to the stage one of the 2Oth Century’s most influential novels. A risk, too, given the predictable chorus of disapproval that greeted what I found its most enjoyable feature: the composer’s decision to write music that is relentlessly tonal and melodic.
To connect with his audience, Maazel has employed a range of devices, sniffily denounced by one broadsheet as smacking more of a musical, such as a wonderfully hummable cod national anthem for Big Brother, and some attractive subPuccinian love music for Winston and Julia.
The libretto by J. D. McClatchy and Thomas Meehan is a highly accomplished piece of work, not least, dare I say, because Meehan is the librettist of The Producers.
The staging by the Canadian Robert Lepage is also a great success, as slick as any Lloyd Webber musical, with fast set changes that never allow the tension to slacken. Lepage is nothing if not versatile: his credits range from Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle to the Cirque du Soleil. Covent Garden should recruit him for other projects. He’d do far better than some of the dud directors the Garden’s otherwise estimable Antonio Pappano has selected of late.
The truth is, the kind of con-temporary operas some of my colleagues want Covent Garden to stage generally sink without trace. After the death of Benjamin Britten, the last great composer capable of writing accessible operas, it’s hard to think of any new one that has properly entered the repertory beyond John Adams’s Nixon In China, which many of those critical of 1984 denounced with equal fervour.
If atonalism is indeed a blind alley, surely the way forward for modem opera is to build on the foundations of romantic opera and the healthy tradition of 2Oth Century musicals. Covent Garden had great success a year or two back with Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, and the English National Opera recently with Bernstein’s On The Town. There’s nothing wrong with opera houses buying into musicals from tune to time. Audiences love them.
Maazel’s project is much blessed by the quality of his singers. Nancy Gustafson is a winning Julia, Graeme Danby and Richard Margison respectively sinister and threatening as Charrington and O’Brien, but the show is stolen by Sirnon Keenlyside as Winston Smith. What an artist this outstanding British baritone is; flot just a singer of rare refinement, but an actor of distinction. His Winston comes alive, maybe a bit more glamorously than in the book, but stay a convincing portrayal of a faded idealist who briefly escapes, only to have his dreams ruthlessly crushed.
Sir Thomas Beecham once, tongue in cheek, founded a society for the second performance of new music, knowing full well most such pieces neither got nor deserved one. 1984 does. It isn’t a masterpiece. It’s a clever, jackdawish reworking of many composers’ inspirations from the pen of an accomplished musician who knows the operatic repertory backwards. I would gladly see it again.
