Unleashing the power of Baroque opera

In 1966, while he was a student at Harvard, the young William Christie heard a recording that would change his life. It was of Janet Baker singing ‘Quelle plainte en ces lieux m’appelle’ from Anthony Lewis’s pioneering recording of Hippolyte et Aricie. ‘This was, without any exaggeration,’ Christie says, ‘a moment when time stood still, a magical introduction to Rameau’s theatrical universe.’ Some 47 years later Christie is finally about to realise a longstanding ambition to stage a great, shamefully neglected, opera as the most exciting element of this summer’s Glyndebourne Festival. I went down to Glyndebourne to talk to Christie and to the director, Jonathan Kent, as rehearsals got under way for the Sussex opera house’s first foray into the relatively unploughed field of French Baroque opera.

‘It was one of the most important moments of my young life when I was able to listen to Anthony Lewis’s 1965 recording of Hippolyte et Aricie,’ Christie told me. ‘It was one of the most important things to have happened in music in the 20th century – the first complete modern recording of what is arguably Rameau’s masterpiece. Listening to that particular recording was the moment I was able to make a decision in my very young life to stop fooling around and concentrate on becoming a professional musician.’

Theatre director Kent, meanwhile, has had his own dealings with the Racine on which Simon-Joseph Pellegrin’s libretto for Jean-Philippe Rameau’s first opera is based. ‘It is a tragedy and Pellegrin’s libretto is marvelous,’ Kent says. ‘It lifts things straight from the Racine and then, set by Rameau, things which are pretty astonishing in the Racine become completely heartbreaking.’

Dance is key to Kent’s production. How important are the ballet sequences, which feature in each of the five acts, I ask Christie. ‘The dance and ballet sequences are immensely important,’ he says. ‘We can dismiss some of the ballet music in Handel’s Alcina or in some of those long superfluous ballets in the Gluck operas, but in this stuff, no. They are an integral part of the tragic action.’

According to Kent, people seem to be able to accommodate Baroque aesthetics today in a way they couldn’t 20 or 30 years ago. ‘I think that’s because we’ve become more visually literate or we accept visual delight in a way that we didn’t then. Our task is to find an idiom for Baroque style in the 21st century.’

Rameau, who was born in 1683, was 50 by the time he completed his first – and possibly greatest – opera, which is based on a well-trodden segment of Greek mythology. Hippolyte and Aricie may be the lovers of the title, but much of the interest will focus on the more complex psychological character of Phèdre, wife of Thésée (Theseus) and stepmother of Hippolyte. Thésée has descended to Hell in an attempt to rescue his friend Peirithous, who had attempted to abduct Persephone but had been captured and held captive by Pluto. In his absence, and inflamed by the fiery Venus/Cupid/Amour, Phèdre has developed an all-consuming passion for her stepson and when he rejects her she allows the suddenly returning Thésée to believe his son guilty of raping his wife. Thésée calls on Neptune to punish Hippolyte, who is dragged into the sea and drowned by a monster. Act 5 seems almost to be a denial of much of what has gone before.

But, bearing in mind that the opera will be entirely unfamiliar to much of the Glyndebourne audience, how has Kent approached the work? ‘Of course one has to tell the story, but one has to find images and 21st-century equivalents of what would have confronted a French audience at the time. It outraged people at the time when it was first done and Rameau did several versions, partly as a response to that. And the great thing about working with Bill [William Christie] is that, quite apart from his talent as a conductor, he is a great animator of theatre and he’s interested in the theatrical experience and event, which is critical for something like this.

‘Of course it’s not remotely the same as Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, which we did together here in 2009, but we have taken the lessons of The Fairy Queen in that there was a degree of spectacle, of delight and surprise. I hope we can achieve that, but within the confines – and that’s the difficulty – of a tragedy.

‘And that’s difficult in this piece because Act 5, again following the conventions of the time, sort of wraps it up and it all ends cheerily, which I think we find difficult to understand today. So there has to be an irony, I think, in that last act and that again is why it’s great to work with Bill, because he’s prepared to shape things and shape the whole piece, changing little bits at the end. And I think that’s essential. It’s not doing any violence to the work – it’s revealing it for a new audience.’

I ask Christie about the troublesome final act. ‘It isn’t out of place,’ he says. ‘I don’t think the tragedy is diminished at all. The fact is we have to come back to a cosmic order of things. The initial argument is essentially that we have someone who believes in rectitude and self-control and a certain sort of order – that’s Diane – and someone who represents exactly the opposite, Cupid. You can be killed off and then come back to life after all. That happens in some of the better-known aspects of Western culture, in Christianity: happy endings!’

I ask Kent if he thinks Pellegrin’s ending works? ‘I think there was no choice really,’ he says. ‘Order needed to be restored in that society. That was the point. The equilibrium had to come back under a just and benign ruler. That was a given. I think perhaps we’ve lost our faith in benign rulers now, so there has to be an irony to it. The dilemma of the piece is a discourse between the cool, rational, austere and chaste (except within marriage) Diane and the anarchy of unrestrained passion, which is Amour [Cupid]. By the end Diane has triumphed.

‘Now I think a life lived without passion is a life diminished and what we have to do is allow an audience to see that. She may have triumphed but at an awful lot of collateral damage and cost. So that’s what I would like an audience to feel at the end; that this is not an entirely happy ending. Of course you need a balance between the two. One cannot obliterate the other. I mean a life of unrestrained passion would be pretty catastrophic too!’

I put to Kent that he had a lot of fun with the masques in The Fairy Queen. Hippolyte et Aricie seems to me to adopt a more linear approach to story-telling. So is he you introducing fantastic and amazing elements to enhance the spectacle? ‘Yes, fantastical, certainly, and I hope amazing. It seems to me you can do Baroque in several ways. One way is simply to do it in a very spare world where you have perhaps extravagant period costume. Or, and this is the approach we have taken, you can try and recreate the astonishing spectacle that was deemed necessary for an opera at that time. We have not gone minimal!’

I ask Kent about his previous involvement with Racine’s Phèdre (an Almeida Theatre production from 1998), where he directed Diana Rigg. ‘Yes, it’s very interesting having done it before. Now, of course, I did it in English and we commissioned Ted Hughes to do the version. Ted Hughes’s version was an astonishing avalanche of language but it didn’t have the rigour and the form of the French Alexandrine of the Racine. The opera, of course, has the form of Rameau, so that sets constraints which are in some ways very useful because in the Racine the potency and power of the piece lies in these huge emotions beating against the framework of the language, of the form.'

Christie says he has chosen Hippolyte et Aricie because ‘it’s the best piece Rameau ever wrote. Rameau had been waiting 50 years to do his particular piece and its brilliant, and I think the original 1733 version is certainly the most energetic, the most honest. I’ve thought about a few of the arias from the 1757 collection, but it’s 99 per cent 1733. Are we cutting? Yes. I’m doing exactly what everyone did back in those days. If the dances are too long, if there are certain longueurs, yes, we are trimming.

‘Handel’s Italian Baroque is the world of the great singer, of great virtuosity. Rameau is far more subtle because it’s linked up with language. Language becomes a kind of music itself and it’s grafted under this extraordinary thing which is the Rameau musical style.'

I put it to Christie that Rameau’s humans are to some extent pawns, manipulated by deities fighting their own private wars by proxy. Do any of the principal characters have free will or is the outcome predestined? ‘Predestination is something which doesn’t effect just mythology or mythological characters. One is manipulated by something, by forces unknown, by gods and goddesses who are using us as marionettes, this is all part and parcel of Western culture. What I love is that you can be a deity, a god or a goddess in classical mythology and simply be essentially a human with magnified faults. What I love in all these pieces is that we’re at the end of one of the great humanistic experiments in Western culture.

'Hippolyte, Aricie, Phèdre, Thésée, these people are human, they are also demi-gods. But it’s essentially about human shortcomings and human grandeur, people rising to great height in terms of dignity and nobility and people descending very far in the opposite sense.’

I’m interested in what makes the Christie/Kent collaboration work. ‘He’s one of the best collaborators I’ve ever worked with. He’s remarkably open to ideas, he’s excited by ideas. He’s prepared to be surprised and excited, which is a wonderful quality for any of us, and he has it in spades. 

‘In lots of ways I’m an interloper in opera. I’ve been directing opera for nine or 10 years, but I was, and suppose still am, principally a theatre director. I love opera, but to work on something like this is as exhilarating as working on anything, partly because we’re fashioning it. It’s plastic and it’s possible to mould it as one goes. It’s a very exciting thing to work on. What I’m very keen on is that things are layered, that they aren’t just bits of singing, bits of dance, bits of visual. Everything has got to become a unified and organic whole and that’s an interesting and difficult thing to do. And also to keep the narrative going, because it is a wonderful narrative, it’s a universal narrative, and that’s what gives it its potency.’

The Fairy Queen was a surprise triumph in 2009. Glyndebourne’s first Rameau has been a long time coming. I think we are in for some thrilling nights.

Listen to William Christie discuss Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie in the Gramophone podcast below: