Sight or sound?

When Rita Hunter  sang Norma at the New York Metropolitan, you knew she was there.  Nicknamed Enorma,  in the same way as Joan Sutherland was La Stupenda,  she was a star in the grand manner (I remember her performance because I was there) and a classic example of what used to be called a fat soprano resplendently singing her way to her death scene. As she said herself, you can’t do Gotterdammerung on a slice of toast.

 It’s harder, however, to get away with such things today.   Tara Erraught is not built on Rita Hunter’s lines - far from it - but the way she looks in the role of Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne has clearly irritated some of London’s leading music critics, and their response to her has caused an uproar.

Yet it all boils down to the familiar old grumble about whether a singer should look the part or,  depending on her vocal ability, can be forgiven for not doing so. Not having seen her portrayal, I cannot comment on her qualities, good or bad, in the role of Richard Strauss’s adolescent boy who, as the curtain rises, is in love with a married woman but who, in Act Two, transfers his attention to someone younger in order to rescue her from a boorish old aristocratic who has been given permission to marry her.

Strauss’s outsize opera, with its outsize cast, provides scope for many interpretations, and an Octavian who is smaller than the Sophie with whom he has fallen protectively in love, and smaller also than his earlier beloved, is not necessarily one of Strauss’s grotesques or an example of poor casting.  She’s just a priggish boy, we need to remember, who is central to the action of an opera filled with unlikeable people, which Joseph Kerman, that most abrasive of critics, once summed up as being no more than a fifty-cent valentine.  Octavian is certainly not at all the nicest person on stage and, with his flashy silver rose and his gleaming white suit, he can be played in different ways.  So perhaps we should wait until the production is transferred to video or TV before we decide if  we find it convincing.

But the televising of major productions, or their transformation to DVD (which is the only way most of us can now afford to see them),  is surely partly responsible for what has come to create the demand for good looks.  In Wagner’s time, singers looked like battleaxes. It was their lung-power that counted. Even today a robust and stately Isolde and a heavyweight Tristan tend to win acceptance if they possess good voices. When Luisa Bosabalian sang Mimi in La Boheme for Scottish Opera in the 1960s, nobody complained in writing that she looked dumpy, which she certainly did. The point was that she sounded lovely enough to make you weep at her death scene. 

On the other hand the first Mimi I ever saw - the adorable Una Hale with the Carl Rosa company - looked so marvellous that I became an instant adolescent opera buff.  The art of video, with all its close-ups, now tries to make most performances look like that.  Opera today is expected to look as well as sound superb, as in David McVicar’s ravishing Julius Caesar at Glyndebourne, one of the glories of our time.

When the distinguished American dramatic soprano Deborah Voigt was dismissed by Covent Garden in 2004 because the director Christof Loy decided she was too stout  for the black cocktail dress he wanted her to wear in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, it marked a turning point in British operatic history.  The danger signals were by then apparent. Had a cocktail dress become more important than an outstanding singer? But once she had shed the required amount of weight she was taken back into the production, which suggested that singers sometimes accept that they may have lessons to learn. 

But since Glyndebourne has not dismissed its Octavian for being smaller or chubbier (or too “stocky,”  as one critic put it, which could actually be a plus point)  than its Sophie, Tara Erraught must be assumed to be doing something right. I look forward to seeing her Octavian before long on video, or hearing it from the BBC Proms - in which she may prove aurally sensational - on 22 July.

22 May 2014