The Cunning Peasant review – Dvořák’s ‘flimsy’ opera transplanted to Hardy’s Wessex

Stephen Medcalf’s production of The Cunning Peasant for Guildhall School of Music and Drama reworks Dvořák’s 1877 folk comedy in terms of Thomas Hardy. Rarely heard, the opera is often described as flimsy and derivative, which is by no means entirely true. The score has all the charm and tuneful elan of the Symphonic Dances, written immediately afterwards.

It’s difficult to avoid the fact, however, that the libretto, by Josef Otakar Vesely, is basically cobbled together from The Marriage of Figaro and The Bartered Bride.

Medcalf argues that transplanting the work to the world of Far from the Madding Crowd heightens its sexual politics and makes us “take the comedy a little more seriously”. So Dvořák’s heroine Bětuška has become Bathsheba, in love with impoverished Joseph, though her bullying father Gabriel intends she should marry wealthy Reuben. The arrival of the local Duke and Duchess, Mozartian and feuding, complicates matters further when the Duke decides he’d like Bathsheba as his mistress.

But not all of it works. The “cunning peasant” of the title is actually Victoria, Gabriel’s busybody housekeeper, whose sole pleasure is secretly running the lives of others; Medcalf is good on women paying men back at their own emotional games. Less persuasive, however, is his decision to make Bathsheba’s unwanted suitor Jewish: the idea sits uneasily both with Dvořák’s less than sympathetic portrait of the original character and with the remote rural context of Hardy’s Wessex.

Musically, though, it’s strong, with fine singing from a good ensemble cast. The stand-out performances include Alison Rose’s ravishingly sung Bathsheba, Rick Zwart’s wonderfully sensual Duke, Robin Bailey’s elegant Reuben and Lawrence Thackeray’s heroic-sounding Joseph. There’s energetic conducting from Dominic Wheeler, too.