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Wexford’s production of Guglielmo Ratcliff.
Emotional excess … Wexford’s production of Guglielmo Ratcliff. Photograph: Clive Barda/PAL
Emotional excess … Wexford’s production of Guglielmo Ratcliff. Photograph: Clive Barda/PAL

Guglielmo Ratcliff/ Le Pré aux Clercs review – excellent gothic gore and Parisian romance

This article is more than 8 years old

National Opera House, Wexford
Distinguished singing and colourful staging combine to make good cases for these operatic rarities by Mascagni and Hérold

Wexford’s exhumation of operatic rarities continues with Mascagni’s Guglielmo Ratcliff, based on a play by Heine and premiered in 1895, five years after the composer instigated the realist movement in Italian opera with his No 1 hit Cavalleria Rusticana. Ratcliff moves off in an entirely different direction: set in northern Scotland around 1820, the drama carries strong gothic overtones, and feels more like a subject that might have appealed to Donizetti.

Rejected lover Ratcliff has already murdered two of his three rivals before curtain up, and goes on to kill both Maria – unfortunate object of his unwanted attentions – as well as her father, before eventually killing himself in the gory final scene.

Wildly excessive emotionally, Guglielmo Ratcliff remained Mascagni’s own favourite among his operas, and both Francesco Cilluffo’s committed conducting and Fabio Ceresa’s surreal dreamscape of a production make a surprisingly good case for it.

The singing, too, has real distinction, with trumpet-toned Angelo Villari giving a trenchant account of the notoriously demanding title role, while Mariangela Sicilia’s impassioned Maria and Gianluca Buratto’s rock-firm MacGregor both excel – though only David Stout’s valiant-voiced Douglas manages to survive the total mayhem of the plot.

Much lighter in tone is Ferdinand Hérold’s Le Pré aux Clercs, a costume drama set during the 16th-century French religious wars, with a final scene located in the eponymous Parisian duelling ground.

Tomislav Lavoie and Magali Simard-Galdès in Le Pré aux Clercs. Photograph: Clive Barda/PAL

With its Catholics-v-Huguenots background and two temporarily thwarted romantic couples up front, the plot’s intrigues feel cumbersome, though for what proved to be his final work – he died aged 42 in January 1833, just a few weeks after the opera’s premiere – Hérold provided an attractive score.

Éric Ruf’s colourful and traditional staging does its best for the uneven piece, as does Jean-Luc Tingaud’s no-nonsense conducting. Leading an accomplished cast are Marie-Eve Munger as Countess Isabelle and Nico Darmanin as her lover, Mergy.

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