Pity the beautiful sorceress. You have everything – riches, beauty, royal lineage, an indefinite number of lovers under your spell... but this is opera, so you’re doomed to lose your head and your heart to the peerless and ruthless enemy knight, even when it’s perfectly within your power to destroy him. That pretty much sums up the plot of Gluck's Armide, which has returned to Paris after a century of absence for a short run of performances at the Opéra Comique. The new production is staged by Lio Baur, with musical director Christophe Rousset leading Les Talens Lyriques and the Chœur Les Eléments.
Where most current opera directors are afraid of magic settings such as you’d find in a storybook, intent on “making their opera relevant to the 21st century”, Baur is not: she and her designers create proper magic by the bucketload. Set designer Bruno de Lavenère gives us an extraordinary giant, gnarled tree: people can climb it, or demons can appear mysteriously from its inside. Fluorescent bars and rings are arrayed around arabesque patterned metal frames to help place us in crusader-era Syria. Alain Blachot’s costumes are broadly abstract but with a faint feel of Arthurian legend. There are some striking touches, most notably the scrolls of illuminated manuscripts used both for Armide and for her distorted doppelgänger Hate. Laurent Castaingt executes the lighting and video effects superbly, whether it’s shifting the time of day, portraying a seascape, depicting the weather or the appearance of spirits.
The singing was uniformly excellent. Véronique Gens dominated the stage as Armide should; every word was clear; she could manipulate the shape of a phrase with inexhaustible reserves of breath. Crucially, she portrayed our heroine veering between opposite moods without missing a beat, in a way that was completely convincing. Philippe Quinault’s libretto was written in 1686 for the court of Louis XIV, where it was set to music by Lully; the poetry is exquisite and Gens and the other singers did a wonderful job of bringing across its elegance.
Quinault’s work was widely considered a pinnacle of French theatrical writing, so when Gluck produced his remake, nearly a century later in 1777, he altered relatively little. Probably because the role of Renaud was written for the Sun King himself, his character is all-too-perfect to the point of tediousness, but Ian Bostridge made the most of it with mellifluous tone and intense accenting. As Armide’s uncle King Hidraot, Edwin Crossley-Mercer stole the show with a magnificent display of richly-toned bass legato. Anaïk Morel was a powerful figure of Hate; the duo of Florie Valiquette and Apolline Raï-Westphal sparkled as Armide’s rather ditzy confidantes and in their various demonic manifestations.
The trouble is, Armide isn’t the greatest opera ever written, or even the best that Gluck ever wrote, in two important aspects. The first is that it’s somewhat static. Too many of the events are simply reported to us rather than acted out on stage, so there’s not much to carry us forward dramatically. Several of the scenes start well but outstay their welcome. The second thing is that although the music is richly entertaining, it’s also very forgettable. Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques played it with vivacity and precision; balance with the singers was impeccable and the sound of the period instruments was clear and evocative. Still, the morning after the opera, I can’t remember a note.
So I’ll focus my memory on the scene that stood out most for dramatic thrills: Act 3, when Armide summons up Hate, demanding that the malign spirit should purge her heart of love for Renaud. Hate agrees to do so, but faced with the reality of becoming a creature without love, Armide vacillates wildly as to whether to go through with the plan. After a series of tortured flip-flops, she wimps out and decides to keep Renaud in her heart whatever the consequences, much to the disgust of Hate, who returns to the underworld, giving dire warnings. For this scene, everything came together: setting, poetry, singing and powerful, propulsive playing from Les Talens Lyriques.
I may not, in the end, have been completely convinced by Gluck's work as a piece of drama, but this production makes about as good a case for Armide as I think is possible.
