For all its romance, Bard SummerScape’s indoor production of Ernest Chausson’s rarely performed opera resembles an action movie with an underlying message: Don’t let a girl into the boys’ club.
By Heidi Waleson
Updated July 27, 2021 4:21 pm ET
Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.
Some American festivals moved their staged operas outdoors this summer, but Bard SummerScape mounted this year’s repertoire rarity, Ernest Chausson’s “King Arthur” (“Le Roi Arthus”), inside its Sosnoff Theater as usual. Audience members were required to show vaccination certificates or negative PCR test results and to wear masks while in the building. There were more empty seats than in past years, but it felt strangely normal to be part of an indoor theater audience—sitting next to strangers, passing at close quarters in the aisles, and chatting with friends during the two intermissions of the unabridged show—even though the last time I did that was in March 2020.
Chausson’s opera, first performed in 1903, richly deserves to be rescued from obscurity. It boasts some familiar elements, starting with the story—the love triangle of King Arthur, his queen (here called Genièvre) and Lancelot. Musical and thematic echoes—Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande”—abound. But finally, Chausson’s highly colored, forthright musical voice is his own. In the composer’s shapely libretto, paced for dramatic impact, the desires and motives of the characters are clear, and while seduction and desire are part of the musical mix, Chausson doesn’t push harmonic boundaries or dissolve into sensuality and ambiguity as Wagner and Debussy do. “King Arthur,” for all its romance, is more of an action movie with an underlying message: Don’t let a girl into the boys’ club.
The opera’s first scene is all blaring trumpets and celebration of Arthur’s victory over the Saxons, but two brief asides hint at trouble: Mordred spits out his jealousy of Lancelot, Arthur’s favorite, and Genièvre sets up a tryst as she hands her lover a chalice. In the next scene, Genièvre and Lancelot luxuriate in their secret passion. But everything falls apart quickly: Mordred surprises the lovers, Lancelot wounds but fails to kill him, and Mordred reports what he knows. With the transgression revealed, the rest of the opera is about Lancelot’s struggle between love and honor, with Genièvre trying every possible persuasion to keep him, and Lancelot serially succumbing to her blandishments and then changing his mind. (Honor wins.) Ominous choirs of low brass instruments replace brilliant trumpets as a prevailing orchestral motif. Meanwhile, Arthur, troubled by the disintegration of his Round Table and his splendid, hard-won order, calls on Merlin for answers. “We were blind,” the wizard tells him. “We placed too much faith in the virtue of men.”
The fine cast featured baritone Norman Garrett as an affecting, mellifluous King Arthur and mezzo Sasha Cooke ferociously defending her turf as Genièvre. (I was not entirely convinced by her suicide, but self-strangulation with one’s hair is problematic in any case.) Matthew White’s Lancelot was captivating—the heroic tenor beleaguered by guilt and doubt. His death scene, which he sang lying flat on his back in a pool of light, mourning his wasted life, was especially arresting. Baritone Troy Cook was persuasive as Merlin, the adult in the room. Two poignant tenors eloquently supplied some of the Wagnerian touches: Andrew Bidlack, as Lancelot’s squire, Lyonnel, kept watch over the lovers like Brangäne in “Tristan”; Andres Acosta, as the Laborer, sang a folk-like tune at the start of Act II, lightening the texture as the Sailor and the Shepherd in “Tristan” do. The role of Mordred is small, but Justin Austin’s lively stage presence, which included a very realistic duel with Mr. White, was a highlight. The Bard Festival Chorale ably changed modes from the celebratory cacophony of the opening to the grand serenity of the opera’s mystical conclusion, dispatching Arthur into the next world to await rebirth. Leon Botstein was the vigorous conductor.
The production looked low-budget with its blocky, unadorned set pieces (designed by Matt Saunders ) and heraldic outfits for the knights (designed by Kaye Voyce ) that could have been drugstore Halloween costumes. Still, it worked. The Round Table became a platform for subsequent scenes—decorated with fur rugs and flowers for the love nest, for example. It was symbolically shattered into pieces for the internecine battle of Act III, and then cleared away altogether for the final scenes, suggesting the possibility of a clean slate.
Louisa Proske’s directing illuminated the personal interactions at the heart of the opera, as did Scott Zielinski’s lighting design, zeroing in on important moments and creating atmosphere. The production struck an elegant balance between the human and the mythic. As Mr. Garrett, stripped of Arthur’s armor, weapons and crown, mounted the stairs toward a descending white disc, with the white-clad chorus praising the enduring power of his idealism, the memory of the earlier scenes, and the messiness of real life with human beings, remained, a reminder that the next utopian plan should take that messiness into account.
—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).
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