Luisa Miller review: Neglected work brought back to passionate life

Verdi’s Luisa Miller, based on a Friedrich Schiller play and generally regarded as initiating the composer’s middle period that was to produce less grandly historical, more socially orientated operas including Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata, is unduly neglected.

Not only does it boast one of his finest overtures, but Verdi’s stretching of the boundaries of conventional “number” opera, combined with white-hot inspiration, especially in the final act, resulted in a work that deserves a much securer place in the canon.

Alexander Joel’s fine conducting, sensitive to the ebb and flow of Verdi’s paragraphs and moulding them into potent enactments of human conflict, makes the strongest possible case for the work in this new ENO production. He is aided by some outstanding singing: Elizabeth Llewellyn brings a warm, generous tone and touching empathy to the title role, while David Junghoon Kim, a recent Jette Parker Young Artist, adds another triumph to his early-career successes with a confident, impassioned Rodolfo.

If the love of Luisa and Rodolfo, challenging the power structures of their community with its loveless, arranged marriages, is the force for good, then Wurm, Count Walter’s steward, is evil incarnate. True to his name, this Wurm, sung with compelling authority by Soloman Howard, slithers about the stage, perching on ledges, prowling like a sleeker, more dangerous Caliban.

The two patriarchs, Count Walter (Rodolfo’s oppressive father) and Miller (Luisa’s over-protective parent) are sung strongly, if with a slightly hard edge, by James Creswell and Olafur Sigurdarson. Christine Rice is admirable as Federica.

In the production by Barbara Horakova, an associate of Calixto Bieito, much of the action takes place in a fiercely lit white box (designer Andrew Lieberman, lighting by Michael Bauer) representing a skeletal house. It’s clearly meant to be oppressive, and it is so, unrelentingly (even when “death veils my sight”, as Luisa puts it); indeed, it’s alienating in both Brechtian and literal senses.

Don’t expect a Tyrolean pastoral ambience in the first act: here the village community is presented ironically as a clownish circus troupe whose madcap cavorting masks a sinister social reality. The darkness is further corporealized by a quartet of zombie-like dancing Furies. Luisa and Rodolfo are evidently damaged by their controlling fathers, as we see from their younger doubles.

It adds up, I think, to a serious piece of work, faithful, in what may seem like a perverse way, to the social critique of Schiller’s original drama. There’s a lot one might object to: the graffiti-strewn walls, the effigy strung up and peppered with arrows, the disembowelled teddy bear. Others would have a longer list. But in Horakova’s production the drama is unfolded, in conjunction with Joel’s conducting and the superb singing, with visceral power, not least in Luisa’s two magnificent Act 3 duets (the first with her father, the second with Rodolfo).

Like it or loathe it, tremendous forces are unleashed here.

Until Mar 6 (020 7845 9300, eno.org)