Friday 17 July 2015. Guillaume Tell at the ROH

I had only the sketchiest knowledge of this work when I booked. It opens with a quite long (approx ten minutes) overture, comprised of four phases the last of which is the famous March of the Swiss Soldiers. Cleverly, this piece was accompanied by Tell’s son sitting at a table playing with soldiers and his actions were projected onto a screen that extended right across the stage. This seemed very effective and built up the sense of conflict.

Then we were into the tale with the Swiss countrypeople enjoying a Festival at which newly married couples are blessed. This is against the backdrop of their occupation and subjugation by an Austrian force under the Governorship of Gesler. Tell is one of the resisting Swiss patriots and is known as an accomplished archer. The festive scene is first interrupted by the arrival of Melcthal, another patriot who bemoans the fact that his son Arnold is unmarried. It transpires that this is because Arnold is in love with Mathilde who is unfortunately a Habsburg princess. The next interruption is by Gesler and his forces and then finally a shepherd Leuthold bursts upon the scene. He has just killed one of Gesler’s soldiers who was attempting to molest Leuthold’s daughter. The first act ends with Tell ferrying the man to safety across Lake Lucerne and the occupying army (under the command of Rodolphe) trying to extract the name of who aided Leuthold. Faced with a silence encouraged by Melcthal, the soldiers take revenge by killing Melcthal.

Act 2 switches to the location of the Austrian (sometimes called German) occupying forces.  The stage is dominated by a huge, very realistic, felled oak tree, its root ball exposed and lying on a desolate landscape. Mathilde is there and joined by Arnold and they declare their love for each other, as the tree rotates so that the root ball is directly in the face of the audience. No sooner has she left than Tell arrives to inform Arnold of the slaying of his father. He now resolves to fight the Austrians and the act closes with the congregation of patriots from three cantons ready to overthrow the oppressors.

Act 3 opens with Arnold telling Mathilde of the murder of his father and them both realizing that their love is impossible. The next scene is the castle where the occupying forces are garrisoned. It is the hundredth anniversary of Austrian rule and the scene is placed in the opera to emphasise the domination of the local population. The ROH chose a controversial was to illustrate this by enacting a gang rape of a local woman by quite a large group of the occupying soldiers. After a quite strong negative audience reaction at the opening night, the scene had been toned down in its explicitness and now seemed a bit of a compromise between realism and symbolism. It felt a bit contrived and disjoint from the rest of the action which immediately switched to Tell and his son being recognized in the crowd, arrested and Tell forced to perform the famous ‘apple on the son’s head’ feat of archery. Despite his success, Tell and his son are still arrested for execution because Tell declares his desire to kill Gesler. While the son is rescued by Mathilde, Tell is consigned to take a boat across the lake to be fed to the reptiles.

The final Act opens with Arnold joined by confederates and arming themselves with a handy cache of weapons stored by Tell and Melcthal. The next scene has a group of local women bathing and drying their probably five- or six year old children. This seems to take an inordinate length of time and it is remarkable that the children were well behaved enough to put up with this lengthy bathing. At last it is drawn to a close by the arrival of Tell’s wife and the action swiftly unfolds with Tell himself arriving back on his boat, rallying the locals and killing Gesler. Meanwhile, Arnold has liberated the garrison castle and he and Mathilde are free to pursue their love. The opera close with the old felled tree being transported to the heavens and one of the children at the front of stage coddling a sapling.

So, we are left with a strange opera and a need to separate criticism of it from of the production. The opera itself blends the two tales of the liberation of an oppressed people and the impossible love of people on opposing sides. Each is a subject in its own right. I felt that the love story intruded too much into the real political story of the opera. It is not a love story with a political backdrop but a political story using the love story as a vehicle. But it is a messy vehicle as the love is the usual rather nonsensical ‘at first sight’ sort and gets in the way. The political story is interesting. First, it is based on fact summarized as follows:

The extinction of the Kyburg dynasty paved the way for the Habsburg dynasty to bring much of the territory south of the Rhine under their control, aiding their rise to power. Rudolph of Habsburg, who became King of Germany in 1273, effectively revoked the status of Reichsfreiheit granted to the "Forest Cantons" of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden. The Forest Cantons thus lost their independent status and were governed by reeves.

In 1291, the cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden united to defend the peace upon the death of Emperor Rudolf I of Habsburg. Their union, one nucleus of the Old Swiss Confederacy, is recorded in the Federal Charter, a document probably written after the fact in the early 14th century. At the battles of Morgarten in 1315 and Sempach 1386, the Swiss defeated the Habsburgs, gaining increased autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire.

Second, it tells a timeless tale – People do not take kindly to occupation. If only, say, the French and then the Americans had heeded the message before trying to dominate the Vietnamese. Thirdly, it conveys the human story of the oppressed and the oppressor – the humiliation of being the former and the arrogant atrocities let loose by the latter. Maybe the human vehicle for the opera should have concentrated on individuals in the oppressed-oppressor theme rather than the dotty love story of Arnold and Mathilde.

The production by the ROH seemed to me to suffer from a lack of pruning and simplification. The best example was the children’s bath scene which was ludicrous in its length and idyllic domesticity. The staging seemed to hop uncertainly from the 13^th century archery to modern day dress and weaponry. We never knew quite where we were.  The gang rape was an ‘innovation’ of this production. It seems ridiculous to boo it because of squeamishness. Rape is a fact of conflict as is reported daily from the Middle East and Africa. However, with the watering down it all seemed a bit like an adjunct to the main action and needed stitching in better. We had the fact of rape introduced in the first act with the arrival of Leuthold, so maybe it was an unnecessary repetition of this fact of war. But it was used to illustrate the subjugation of the Swiss. It just did not work very well and seemed more an individual incident than an humiliation of a population. The production also hopped from modern effects – e.g., the use of video at the start and also the close and the use of searingly bright light  - to a much more traditional feel – e.g., the realistic tree that dominated the stage from Act 2. The modern twists felt much the more energizing and engaging.

The orchestra under Anonio Pappano got perhaps the greatest applause of the evening, especially when he joined the cast at the end.

Overall, I’m glad I went but this seemed to me a somewhat problematic production of a worthwhile but problematic opera. The music was excellently played and  the singers were all, as one would expect, accomplished with Malin Bystrom (Mathilde) and John Osborn (Arnold) particularly noteworthy.