Les Vêpres Siciliennes, Royal Opera House - opera review

Stefan Herheim directs Verdi's story of a bloody Sicilian uprising against French oppressors, deploying Degas’s sexually objectified ballet dancers to critique patriarchal oppression
Les Vepres Siciliennes at the Royal Opera House
Alastair Muir
15 November 2013

Invited to compose a grand opera for Paris in the early 1850s, Verdi, with librettist Eugène Scribe, finally settled on a story of a bloody Sicilian uprising against French oppressors. The story appealed strongly to Verdi’s anti-imperialist sympathies, less so to the national pride of his French hosts.

The work has never established itself firmly in the regular repertoire but if anybody could salvage its reputation it must surely be the dream team of passionate Verdian Antonio Pappano and the brilliant Norwegian director Stefan Herheim, responsible for three outstanding Wagner productions in recent years.

With designs by Philipp Fürhofer, costumes by Gesine Völlm and choreography by André de Jong, Herheim draws on his trademark stage wizardry to offer something more multivalent than a traditional Parisian grand opera. Rather he deploys the imagery and associations of the genre (Degas’s sexually objectified ballet dancers loom large) to critique patriarchal oppression, while probing the role of art and theatre itself.

Thus depictions of Sicilian interiors morph into grand opera boxes inhabited by top-hatted phallocrats. In conjunction with Pappano’s taut but broadly phrased handling of the score, Herheim engages us from first to last in one of Verdi’s decidedly more uneven works.

In Herheim’s most controversial stroke, the long-planned uprising by the Sicilians — normally the climax of the final act — never actually takes place. The “massacre” is instead represented as a dream: an unrealised fantasy. At the signal, intense lights are turned on the audience: the literally blinding inspiration is, to judge by the programme essay of the dramaturg, Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach, that the opera is about not nationalities or politics but the illusion and disillusion of theatrical representation. One doesn’t have to buy the thesis to admire virtuoso stagecraft put to thought-provoking and dramatically powerful ends.

As Montfort, the tyrant with a conscience, Michael Volle imbued a superbly legato line with depth of feeling, while Erwin Schrott’s Jean Procida was less smooth of delivery if no less impassioned. Bryan Hymel rose to the challenges of the lead tenor role of Henri with aplomb, while Lianna Haroutounian was expressive, often poignantly so, as Hélène.

Until November 11 (020 7304 4000, roh.org.uk)