Being There First

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I’ve often wondered what it must be like to hear a great piece of music the first time it is performed. What must the crowds have been thinking the first time they heard Handel’s “Messiah”, or Mozart’s “Requiem”, or Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony” or “Carmen”? (Well, actually, in the latter case, the critics were so bad that they drove Bizet to an early grave. Yet another reason I take them all with a pinch of salt.) Tonight, I got to be in one of those crowds.

The Royal Opera House is putting on a brand new opera called “The Minotaur”. Tonight was its third showing, so I had to go along and see it. The critics have been positive, but the reviews talk in very technical terms about the music. I wouldn’t know an F flat if it jumped up and bit me! My review, therefore, is from the point of view of someone who goes to opera to listen to the music first and watch the action second.

The show had its good points and it had its bad. Let’s start with the bad. The music is modern. I couldn’t really sense any melodies as such, nor could I see where the poetry was. This is not really a criticism on anyone other than myself!

The acting was extraordinarily bloody and brutal, but what should I have expected? The Greeks were extraordinarily bloody and brutal. There were scenes in the labyrinth of bloody hearts being torn from bodies and smeared all over other bodies. When the Minotaur was killing his victims, it all got a bit messy on stage.

There was also a fair amount of sex. The heroine, Ariadne, graphically shows the conception and birth of the Minotaur. She tries to seduce Theseus in a way that left nothing to the imagination. The Minotaur rapes his first victim to death. I don’t think I’m particularly a prude, but this was all a bit much for me.

There were still some staging issues to work out. The Minotaur can only communicate with himself, so there was a mirror on stage when he was doing this. All fine and good, except that the conductor was reflected in it and tended to draw attention away from the stage with his arms moving all the time. Every time the actors needed “blood”, they had to go offstage to get it.

There was a lot of repetition. While I understand that themes and tunes need to be reprised, we heard the entire story of the birth and conception three times. By the second, I think most people had gotten it.

But it wasn’t all bad - and some of it was positively brilliant. Ariadne is on stage nearly the entire time. The woman singing her is called Christine Rice and she has a magical voice. She was beautifully able to convey not only the desperation of a young woman trying to change her life, but the deceitfulness of her as well. Truly something to watch. A cool fact I learned from the programme: Ariadne was the heroine of one of the first operas ever written. It is from her name that we get “aria”. More useless trivia that I just love.

The man who sang the Minotaur is called John Tomlinson - a fixture at the ROH. What made this performance so amazing is that he had to sing through a bull’s mask. This mask was amazing. In some lights, it looked complete while in others one could see that it was actually mesh so that Tomlinson’s voice could be heard. An ingenious bit of staging. To not only pull off singing through a mask, but also to actually make the audience care about the monster of the piece was one of most awesome opera achievements I have ever seen.

While Theseus is journeying into the labyrinth with his ball of twine, a screen came down and created a labyrinth right in front of us. Breathtaking. The whole audience gasped.

Finally, as befits such a Greek story, there was a Greek chorus. At some points, there were upwards of 100 people on the stage. At the curtain, they could all barely fit on to take their bows.

When the lights came up, I knew I had had a life experience. I’m so glad I went to see it. I don’t think I would rush to see it again, but now I will always know what it feels like to be one of the lucky few who experience music for the first time. Something to tell the next generation and the one after that.

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