I have noticed, in the course of my opera-going life, that other people go to opera for the singing. It is not that I ignore the singing—certainly I would be distressed if it were missing, or bad—but for me, when I am at a live opera, other things are equally important. I don’t just mean the quality of the orchestral music (though that is important too). What I look for, at an opera, is a sense of felt life, felt connection to reality, even if in a very distorted or exaggerated form, just as when I read a novel, I want to sense sympathetic or unsympathetic characters acting out a plot, however implausible that plot may be. And just as with a novel, I want to feel that there is an author guiding my path through the opera, which generally means a director, since the composer and librettist, even if they are alive (and they usually aren’t), can never bring the piece to the stage unaided.
Last Sunday’s performance of Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin had everything, to my taste, but the author. It had a director—the famous Scots opera director David McVicar, who crafted this production for Glyndebourne in 2005 and has now brought it to Berlin—but his take on the piece was so screwy (to use a highly technical term of art) that I had trouble figuring it out. In the opening scenes, Julius Caesar appeared to be a British soldier from roughly the late nineteenth or earlier twentieth century: he and his army were garbed in the traditional red uniforms, including a Scottish kilt in the outfit of his second-in-command. Much later in the performance, they came back in the kind of sunhats and shorts that would have suited explorers in Africa—no doubt because at this point they were invading Egypt, which is, I suppose, part of the African continent. But meanwhile, the performance treated us to a range of Egyptian figures—from Cleopatra and her evil brother Tolomeo, to Cleopatra’s aide and confidant Nireno, to Tolomeo’s henchman Achilla, to a whole collection of servants-as-backup-dancers—who all seemed to come from some undesignated Eastern location. Their costumes and movements suggested everything from ancient Greece to Turkey to India to the Roaring Twenties. (I realize that era is not exactly a geographical place, but Cleopatra nailed it perfectly in her one scene as a Louise-Brooks-style flapper.) In other words, they were all over the map, in what struck me as a particularly cavalier British attitude toward the “lower orders” of the Empire. Possibly this was all meant as satire on the colonialist English view—I wouldn’t put it past a Scotsman to do that—but to me it just came across as a mixed metaphor. And given that these comedic, sometimes cartoonish elements were mixed with the seriously tragic plot involving Cornelia and Sesto, the wife and son of the murdered Egyptian king Pompeo, I couldn’t figure out how to mesh them into the whole.
But then, Handel himself is notorious for mixing modes, leaping from serious tragedy to droll high spirits in the space of a few measures. And besides, I adore the music of Giulio Cesare, which I often stream for myself at home, all four hours of it. In this case it was played to perfection by the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper under the baton of Alessandro Quarta (an exuberant and unconventional fellow himself, to judge by his curtain calls). And the voices were sublime, every single one of them. I mean, what’s not to like about an opera with three countertenors, all of them operating at the top of their field? Christophe Dumaux, in the huge role of Caesar, was consistently wonderful and clear; Francis Gush as Tolomeo was suitably frightening, needy, and hateful; and Edu Rojas, as Nireno, played Cleopatra’s Gay Best Friend with panache and humor, all rendered in his diction-perfect countertenor voice. The African-American bass-baritone Michael Sumuel, who took on the thanklessly mixed role of Achilla, performed it with grace and persuasiveness. The young soprano Martina Baroni was so good in her pants part as Sesto that at the curtain call she got practically the biggest ovation in the house; and as her mother Cornelia, the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Wake-Edwards was suitably tragic and moving.
But without a doubt the star of the show was Elena Tsallagova as Cleopatra. A Russian-born soprano, she has been a regular performer with the Deutsche Oper Berlin since 2013, though I’ve never had the treat of seeing her before. It seems she can do anything: dance, sing, flirt with the audience, dress and undress onstage, wear period outfits and period wigs that look like they belong on her…her achievements are endless, and all without missing a note. In fact, I’d be willing to say that of all the outstanding voices in this production, hers was the most remarkable—but never as a voice in itself, always as a vehicle of what she was putting across in her performance. Because she was the singer who most thoroughly embodied McVicar’s slap-happy approach to the temporal unities, I was initially resistant to her charms. But it was Tsallagova herself, in her late-stage exuberant aria about Caesar’s boats (which she performed in a World War I flyer’s outfit, transcending even her back-up dancers in the precision of her movements), who finally caused me to burst into spontaneous and heartfelt applause