First UK production

Juliana Borderau       Catherine Hegarty
Aspern                 David Quah
Barelli                Benjamin Bevan
Sonia                  Veronica Reznikovskaya
Tina                   Louise Poole
The Lodger             Stephan Loges
Painter/Pasquale       Paul Reeves
Olimpia                Sylvia Tsimpanakou

Conductor              Clive Timms
Director               Martin Lloyd-Evans

Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Argento's Aspern papers is a kind of mirror of Britten's Death in Venice,
though Argento moves the location to Lake Como. The two original stories
both involve obsession and artistic creation among expats in an Italian
setting where the usual constraints do not necessarily apply. Where Mann's
story is based on evocative sensual and mythical symbols (how many papers
on rotten fruit in Death in Venice have you graded?), Britten and Piper
produced a rich set of musical and textual patterns. And where James's
story famously provides a nearly fractal-like pattern in the carpet (yes,
another freshman paper) that cries out for the Britten treatment, Argento's
score (on my first hearing) offers big gestures and near-melodrama, though
also some lyrical beauty.

Inevitably, Argento's adaptation can't reproduce the way James' narrative
enacts the quest for meaning, especially in biography, but also in reading
in general. James' focal point is that reading intrudes on people's privacy
even when, like the poet Aspern, they mean to express themselves. Replacing
the indefinite set of papers with a masterpiece opera loses the sense that
you can never get to the heart of a reading, or a person, which is
essential to the story's effect -- we never know what it really is about
Aspern for a reason.

Similarly, Argento's decision to interweave the events leading up to
Aspern's death in 1835 with the present of the story in 1895 makes clear
what should remain indeterminate. (Aspern is having an affair with Sonia,
his impressario's mistress, and he dies swimming across the lake to see her
after completing the opera for his official mistress Julia. Julia
suppresses the work out of jealousy, as Mrs Berg allegedly did act 3 of
Lulu.) The libretto in fact has an implicity very unJamesian omniscent
narrator, which of course makes things much easier for the audience and
allows some variety of settings and characters. Admittedly, Argento offers
only fragments of the opera, a bel canto Medea, and has the lodger/narrator
provide a summary of the plot. In this production, the singers mime the
Medea plot playing roles that correspond to their situation -- Julia as
Medea, Aspern as Jason, Sonia as Creousa.

The Guildhall production was cleverly done on one set, representing the
outside of the villa on Lake Como with mountains in the background. The
opera begins with Juliana, in 1895, trying to recall the images of eternity
that she and Aspern used as a kind of mantra of their love: the mountains,
a leaf, the ice age. The set keeps these constantly in the background.
There was a jetty from the front of the right of the stage over the pit, so
that Juliana and the narrator could address the audience directly in the
foreground while other things, including the Medea mime, went on behind a
transparent scrim. The furniture for the indoor scenes was lowered onto the
outdoor set when required. The basic set was rather tatty-looking, but the
lighting added mystery and glamour appropriately, especially to the "happy"
scenes in 1835.

There wasn't any great singing, but all the singers were well prepared and
dramatically effective. Catherine Hegarty was a monstrous Juliana, looking
as if she might gobble up sweet Sonia, when I think Argento had a more
matched catfight in mind. Louise Poole was opaque as Tina, but emerged as
strong as Juliana at the end. Stephan Loges was a solidly handsome
narrator, and David Quah sounded and looked glamorous most of the time as
Aspern.