Fromental Halévy's rarely performed opera "La Juive" directed by Peter Konwitschny was one of Opera Vlaanderen's undeniable successes under intendant Aviel Cahn in 2015. Barely seven years later, he is doing it again. Why this obsession with La Juive? David Alden's new production for Geneva cannot be called successful across the board but it is once again exceptionally well cast.
Whereas Heinrich Heine, a year before the premiere of La Juive, called Halévy an artist without the slightest spark of genius, the young Wagner admired him greatly. When he experienced a performance of La Juive in Naples with Cosima, two years before his death, that admiration was still intact : "I was very fond of him; it was a languorous sensual nature, but lazy." The success of "La Juive" guaranteed Halévy's rise in the Jewish and artistic circles of Paris and enabled him to marry a 21-year-old half his age. Afterwards, things would quickly go downhill as far as the "lazy" composer's artistic output was concerned.
It would be wrong to think that Halévy wanted to make a socio-cultural statement with La Juive. La Juive tells nothing about the situation of Jews in the 19th century. Halévy himself was searching for his own Jewish identity for a long time, and a "Jewish question" did not exist in the Paris of the 1830s. At the time, it does not seem to have occurred to anyone to connect the composer's religion to the theme of his opera. In his monograph on La Juive, Karl Leich-Galland shows, using an extensive collection of contemporary reviews, that not once was there any mention of Halévy being a Jew or any possible or hypothetical connection or parallels between the opera's subject and Jews in modern France. In "Jewry in music," David Conway sums it up this way : "Ironically, it seems very doubtful that the only great opera written by a Jew about a Jew had anything much to say about Jews at all". In our theaters of today we often see quite the opposite where Jewish victimhood is projected onto the play. Such is also the case in Geneva. It is a hobbyhorse of Aviel Cahn. We are easily reminded of "La Damnation de Faust" (2012), a production he purchased from ENO which had Terry Gilliam end up in the gas chambers of Auschwitz !
La Juive has one problem and that is the first act. The first 40 minutes have little to offer musically. There is the organ-supported Te Deum, said to have inspired Wagner's opening scene of Die Meistersinger, there is Leopold's meek serenade and an aria by the cardinal ("Si la rigeur et la vengance") that hints ahead at Verdi. For the rest, there is the empty, grandiloquence typical of many pages of French grand opéra. But once that cliff is taken, the characters gain depth and the dramaturgy becomes compelling, supported to the bitter end by vocal fireworks and thrilling ensembles. Of course there are substantial cuts such as the elimination of the ballet and pantomimes that reduce the duration of the opera to about 3 hours.
Both Jews and Christians have butter on their heads; all are capable of violence. With the Christians it is the mob that manages to bring itself to boiling point in no time; with the Jews it is the goldsmith Eléazar, a spiritual brother of Shylock and the archetypal Jewish usurer in his negotiation with Eudoxie over a necklace. His hatred of Christians is unrelenting. The only moment in which he applies for our empathy is during his great aria "Rachel, quand du seigneur," introduced by two imploring English horns, in which he sings out his being torn apart between his unquenchable desire for revenge on the Cardinal of Brogni and his love for Rachel, even though she is not really his daughter. The librettists from the Eugène Scribe factory have rather artificially exaggerated his humanity in the prequel to the opera where we are supposed to believe that he was able to raise his enemy's little daughter as his own when that same enemy has just executed his two sons. This is very unlikely especially since in the finale, in the hour of death, he will choose for revenge and not spare his daughter.
It is no coincidence that the opera is called La Juive and not Le Juif : the moral benchmark of the piece is Rachel who is well aware that she will pay for the revelation of Leopold's betrayal with her life and yet is able to exonerate her ex-lover from being burned at the stake at the insistence of his wife. With her engaging personality, the beautiful Ruzan Mantashyan portrays a dazzling Rachel . "Il va venir" and the duet "Que ton coeur m'appartienne" are obvious highlights. All in perfect French.
Elena Tsallagova manages to captures the complexity of Princess Eudoxie : as the demanding and fickle privileged woman in Eléasar's house, as a narcissistic young woman who likes to show off, as a sensual wife who is satisfied with her husband's return. David Alden also lets us witness her defeat when she fails to stimulate Leopold's libido. With her high wig, she has the looks of Marie-Antoinette; her bedroom is like an aristocratic theater. Tsallagova takes the numerous coloraturas effortlessly and her arias are all equally delightful. Her French is almost perfect.
In the third act, we understand that the marriage between Leopold and Eudoxie has long been consummated and has already produced four children for the imperial line. Leopold is presented from the first moment on stage as a spineless womanizer whose affair with Rachel is ultimately nothing more than a passing fancy. Ioan Hotea plays him fervently and elegantly, and he does not try to sing his part with voix mixte which is not always convincing in the high notes.
John Osborne's Eléazar is superbly articulate, drenched in perfect French and fairly scorching when two English horns lead him to his climax in "Rachel, quand du signeur." The timbre is beautiful, though I prefer an even brighter timbre like Roberto Alagna's. Especially in the empathetic "Rachel, quand du signeur," it makes a difference. Osborne hints at a portion of self-loathing. In the reddish light of prison, he often takes on the stature of Rembrandt's chiaroscuro figures.
Jewish victimhood is spread wide across the stage by Alden. The Christian mob is dressed in black, faces hidden behind commedia dell'arte masks and waving their Bibles. The men look like funeral undertakers. The director's bias is very clear from the start. Jews are clubbed out of their homes during the first act as if it were a pogrom; the violence of the Christians ends predictably with an evocation of the Holocaust. The oddest thing about this is that Princess Eudoxie, who has just saved her husband from the "funeral pyre" (actually a cauldron of boiling water!), discards herself of her aristocratic clothes and joins the silent procession of Jewish victims who willingly make their way to the container from which an ominous red-hot glow shines.
Dmitry Ulyanov as Brogni is full of humanity and doubt. The lowest notes do get him into trouble at times. His bass sounds best during the hysterical proliferation of Christian violence in the finale of the third act and during the introspective musings on Rachel's fate.
It seems to me that Marc Minkowski has the Orchestra de la Suisse Romande playing period instruments. A veil seems to be hanging over the orchestra, never will the orchestra revel in crushingly loud tutti. Never is there a balance problem. The orchestral score, by the way, is often thinly orchestrated.
The question remains why the Geneva audience reacted so coolly to such a great evening of opera ?
Watch the show on Arte Concert until 07.06.2023