Ariodante,
composed by George Frideric Handel,
with a libretto by Antonio Salvi.
Drottningholm Palace Theatre,
August 2019.
From the moment I first glimpsed the Drottningholm Palace Theatre—a well-preserved eighteenth-century gem located just outside of Stockholm—I was dying to see an opera there. On my initial visit, which took place in June of 2018, nothing was being performed, and I had to satisfy myself with a backstage tour that showcased all the building’s curious features. These included the wooden walls, floor, and ceiling, variously painted or papier-machéd to look like marble; the antique symmetrical sets that slid onto the stage from the left and right wings; a variety of low-tech devices for creating sound effects like thunder or wind; and chandeliers that had once held candles and now sported tiny incandescent bulbs which wavered just like candle light. I was charmed but also frustrated, since this small sampling of the theater’s wonders only made me long for the full display.
I had to wait over a year, but in the end I got my wish, and the manner in which it arrived could not have been better. Handel’s Ariodante is a great opera in just about any form (I loved Harry Bicket’s concert version when it played at Carnegie a few years back), and I would have been satisfied to see a straight eighteenth-century-style performance with good-enough singers. What I got instead was Nicola Raab’s spellbinding, imaginative production, carried out with superb aplomb by an excellent cast and the skilled musicians of the Drottningholm Theatre Orchestra, with the crucial support of choreographer Caroline Finn, lighting and set designer Linus Fellbom, and costumers Gesine Völlm and Sofia Ranow. It was one of those rare occasions when everyone involved in the production, onstage and off, seemed to have the same idea about what was taking place, emotionally and aesthetically. The interpretation was an adventurous one, but it in no way violated the feeling of Handel’s original. On the contrary, it expanded and deepened my sense of the opera, keeping me practically on the edge of my seat for much of the four-hour performance.
The experience actually began even before the opera started, as we audience members filed into the gradually raked auditorium and took our places on the rows of wooden-backed padded benches that together seated about 450 people. The room we entered was already dim, and there was no moment when the house lights went down, because the flickering candle-like bulbs (which, at the best of times, did not cast enough light to read by) remained on throughout the evening. Instead, the start of the performance was signaled by the traditional three knocks from backstage, followed by the onset of Handel’s entrancing overture, during which the stiff, painted curtain rose ever so slowly to reveal the mainly bare stage. I’d expected the acoustics in the long, narrow hall to be good, but nothing had prepared me for how well the all-wood environment amplified the sound of the twenty or so baroque instruments situated in the shallow pit. It was as if I were hearing the music for the first time, with all its native delicacies rendered at full force.
All the people appearing onstage at the beginning were garbed in traditional eighteenth-century costumes. The program had listed five dancers as well as seven singers, but initially one couldn’t tell who belonged to which category. That is, only when song emerged from the throat of Princess Ginevra, and then from that of her friend and courtier, Dalinda, could we actually tell which figures on the stage were singers. (This purposeful confusion was enhanced by the fact that Francesca Aspromonte, the talented soprano who played Dalinda, could dance at least as well as any of the professional dancers.) As Ginevra sang of her love for Ariodante, the assembled singers and dancers performed a series of gestures that combined baroque elegance with occasional flashes of angular modernity—as if to suggest that the agonies of romantic love were already attempting to break through the pleasing, well-polished surface of a royally approved courtly marriage.
And so it turned out. As the plot took shape, we watched the jealous Polinesso, Duke of Albany, destroy Ariodante’s marriage plans by defaming Ginevra, using a vile trick in which he made the love-blinded Dalinda into his unwitting co-conspirator. By the end of Act One, the evil duke (marvelously sung and acted by the burly, bearded countertenor Christophe Dumaux) had fully set his plan in motion, and it was clear that Ariodante (movingly performed by the mezzo-soprano Ann Hallberg) and Ginevra (the bright-voiced, tenderly expressive Roberta Mameli) would be put through hell as a result.
For the duration of this first act, the performance essentially remained in the eighteenth century, at least as far as sets and costumes went. The symmetrical panels emerging from the wings and the drop-cloths lowered from the back gave us, in turn, a king’s court, a forest glen, and a cloud-filled heaven representing fulfilled love. Both women characters, like their three female echoes among the dancers, wore full-skirted gowns with pannier-like side-bustles and closely fitted bodices, and their heads were adorned with distinctive wigs (curly red for Dalinda, powdered white for Ginevra). The men, too, were definitely of their period: the King of Scotland, Ginevra’s father, was dressed in a ceremonial-looking robe, while all the others, including the two male dancers, wore belted, padded-out doublets and boots.
There were only two hints, at this early stage, of the strange things to come. One was the king’s throne, consisting of a normal-looking chair outlined with a band of electric light, which became illuminated when the king’s servant very obviously switched it on. (If you’ve seen the way similarly anachronistic machinery gets prominently plugged in during Mark Morris’s Platée, you will have some idea of the effect.) And the other was a single dancer—just one man out of the five-person dance corps—who began appearing toward the end of the first act wearing a black leotard-and-tights outfit. “Who is this guy,” I remember thinking, “and why is he flitting around Polinesso like an evil angel or a bad conscience?”
By the time Act Two opened with Dalinda and Polinesso’s ill-starred sexual encounter, even stranger features had begun to accumulate. The opera plot has Dalinda disguising herself as Ginevra (for reasons she rather foolishly fails to understand, or even to ask about, when Polinesso makes this demand of her). Here that transformation was represented by a wigless Dalinda, clad only in her undercorset and lacy pantaloons, putting a Ginevra-like wig on her head. Poli-nesso was also half-undressed, with the skeletal struts supporting his doublet now revealed to us under his rucked-up coat. Ginevra, when she appeared, had lost her dress entirely: she came on-stage encased within the semi-circular wooden structure that had once bulked out her voluminous skirts, and was only freed from it by the five dancers —now all dressed in close-fitting black, as if they had turned into Bunraku puppeteers.
It was clear from the costuming alone that the dancers had by this time ceased to be mere physical echoes of the singers. They had become something at once more frightening and more comforting: caretakers, let us say, in the imaginary mental asylum to which the characters’ own miseries had transported them. That interpretation came through most forcefully in the scene where the despairing Ginevra, abandoned by a suicidal Ariodante and denounced by her own father, was put to bed by the five dancers acting in concert. This passage, an instrumental interlude that interrupted Ginevra’s long and wrenching aria, was designated as a “ballet” in the score, but the director and her choreographer brilliantly realized that any kind of structured dance would be utterly inappropriate at that moment. Instead, they had the dancers lay the underdressed Ginevra on a hospital bed, cover her tenderly with a blanket, and fold her hands gently across her chest. Every time Ginevra shifted or struggled or tried to lift her arms and legs (always in time with the regular but still anxious strains of Handel’s music), that tenderness turned into a nurse’s firmness, as the black-clad caretakers repeatedly restored her limbs and body to their original supine position. There was something incredibly haunting and moving about this whole sequence, and the feeling amplified rather than dampened the effect of Mameli’s searing voice.
It seems to me that if Handel’s obsessively repetitive operas are to work their vital magic on us from a distance of over three centuries, they practically have to be presented in this interior, psychological way. Director Nicola Raab and her collaborators clearly understood this, and that’s why they employed a combination of props, lighting, costuming, and gesture to show us the characters being stripped down to their fragile essence. The strange thing, though, is that this kind of emotional realism can be, and in some ways must be, combined with an acknowledgment of opera’s unreality. Here we had people standing on a stage singing their hearts out with a level of cultivated skill and innate beauty that should have been incompatible with bare, forked, naked misery—and yet it persuaded us all the same.
The geniuses behind this Drottning-holm Theatre production not only comprehended this contradiction; they emphasized it. So the final act took place on a stage where the painted eighteenth-century panels had been replaced by the unadorned plywood supports of a modern stage set (though still arranged in a receding symmetrical pattern, just as the old-fashioned sets were). The painted drop-cloth at the back had been removed to reveal the actual wooden wall of the theater, in which a wide door was at one point opened to let in daylight from the functional space beyond. And the singers were now stripped down even further, to modern underwear (boxers and T-shirts for the men, flimsy slips for the women), in which they nonetheless had to sing their most passionate and extended arias. Only Ariodante himself was fully clothed, first in full armor and then, after the dancers removed it piece by piece, in a black outfit similar to theirs.
Those Bunraku/dresser figures were supplemented, toward the end of the last act, by real stage-hands who crisscrossed the stage in order to set up the symmetrical wall-like sets that defined the final scene. As this work proceeded, the five dancers contorted themselves agonistically in front of us, while the silhouetted singers stood frozen and silent against the open doorway at the back. And throughout this whole sequence, the valiant little orchestra continued to play cheerfully on, elucidating the stark contrast between Handel’s chipper rhythms and his dark insights into human character.
It was the perfect set-up for the composer’s standard finale, in which the whole cast of characters (except, in this case, the dead and vanquished Polinesso) joined together to sing us to a happy ending. Forget about all that misery, such closing passages always suggest. It all came right in the end, and besides, it was just a play.
Do we believe this? Are we meant to? Hard to say. At his best, Handel sometimes enables us to hold all the contradictory feelings in our hearts and minds at once. And on that particular evening in Drottningholm, he was definitely at his best.
Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review. Her new book, Scandinavian Noir, will be out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next May.
