Roberto Devereux, the final episode in Donizetti’s series of Tudor queens – and the culmination of director Jetske Mijnssen’s trilogy for Dutch National Opera – has it all: England’s most formidable female monarch; not one, but two complementary love triangles; a death warrant, treacherous embroidery, and the ill-fated regifting of jewellery. The work also brims with oodles of Italian bel canto charm courtesy of Donizetti’s almost relentlessly cheery score that, despite the murky goings on, remains for the vast majority of the opera resolutely in the major key. Hilary Mantel it is not, but if you like your tragedies as uplifting as a meringue, this is the one for you.
First performed in the year that the young Victoria acceded the British throne and in an Italy looking for a sense of unity, it’s perhaps no surprise that the daughter of Henry VIII is shown in a sympathetic light. In homage to events of 1837 in the British Isles, the overture features a picnic-perfect arrangement of God Save the Queen. After the thrilling éclat of the opening chord, conductor Enrique Mazzola has the strings of the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra spreading the butter all the way to the edges, smooth and light through the stately melody, before plunging full-tilt into jaunty Machiavellian intrigue.
That intrigue in full. Elisabetta is in love with Roberto Devereux who has come home early from Ireland on a charge of treason. The queen is willing to pardon him if he confesses his love for her. Unfortunately for everyone, Devereux is already the lover of Elisabetta’s friend, Sara, who is in turn married to Roberto’s best friend, the Earl of Nottingham. Lest we think that this is all getting a bit ‘hello suburbia’, let’s remember that The Tower awaits and Elisabetta (rhymes with ‘vendetta’) wields absolute power.
Or so she should. As the frustrated queen, soprano Barno Ismatullueva released all the royal fireworks; it’s all she could do to hold back the pyrotechnics in the earlier scenes. But for all her vocal power there was a strange lightness of touch over the matter of her majesty across Mijnssen’s otherwise well-nuanced production. Without the customary deference that would remind us of her executive power (for what is the strength of parliament against the will of a lovelorn Tudor?) the danger of this game doesn’t quite land.
Instead, as a chamber opera in which the four lead roles pretty much match each other for airtime and virtuosity, this Roberto Devereux unfolds a very modern story of love, sex, loyalty and friendship. The final tragedy is as much Sara’s – she has lost her friend and her lover – as it is Elisabetta’s... who has lost her friend because she has had her friend’s lover executed. Ben Bauer’s simple, sophisticated design moves between the fondant colours and silver coffee pots of a Phantom Thread-inspired boudoir and the oppressive gloom of rooms of state. The chorus of parliament’s all-night sitting that opens the second half is a stand-out moment and a musical reminder of the nation-building that opera heard here first before it became Verdi’s USP.
Ismael Jordi, making his third appearance in Mijnssen’s Tudor cycle, was vocally rich, warm and supple as Devereux, though occasionally his dramatic anguish got the better of his gravitas, while Nikolai Zemlianskikh was vigorous and authoritative as his love-rival, Nottingham. Thando Mjandana, dazzling briefly as Lord Cecil, was his own herald of greater roles to come. Angela Brower stole the crown with her full-bodied voice of apparently limitless emotional range and it felt entirely right that our sympathies were largely with her luminous Sara as the curtain fell on this very domestic take on a great drama of state.
There’s a fine line between historical romp and watching the mighty fall. Though Donizetti’s ebullience can’t help but suggest the former, Mijnssen’s well-balanced production manages to combine those virtuosic bel canto conventions with a sense of forces greater and darker than the score – however brilliantly the superb Netherlands Chamber Orchestra played it – will ever quite reach.
