Deborah Voight        Helena
Lyuba Kazarnovskaya   Aithra
Nancy Maultsby        Sea-Shell
Helen Field           1st Maidservant
Gillian Knight        2nd Maidservant
John Horton Murray    Menelaus
Wilhelm Hartmann      Da-ud
Alan Titus            Altair

Royal Opera Chorus

Christian Thielemann  Conductor
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

The concert performances of "rare" operas have been a major benefit of the
Royal Opera's period in the wilderness, and this was another good one.
Although it's a thoroughly theatrical work, with all the decorative and
thematic elements of a Viennese fantasy comedy, the symphonic texture of
the music and the witty libretto mean that there's plenty of mileage in a
concert performance. Especially when the RO orchestra are as stunningly
good as they were tonight under Christian Thieleman. (I wish I didn't know
about his politics -- he looks elegant even when leaping into the air knees
akimbo.)

Strauss and Hoffmanstal seem to have conceived Die aegyptische Helena as a
tough, Germanic version of A midsummer night's dream, a school for lovers
with  elves, but in heroic style. A bit as David Pountney did with the
Fairy Queen in the ENO production, they take the elements of the Greek
myths, especially Euripides' Helen in Egypt, and put them together to make
a contemporary (for 1923, at least) comedy of marriage.

Menelaus and Helena are shipwrecked in Egypt on the way back from Troy. He
still can't forgive her for running off with Paris, and suffers a recurring
madness in which he wants to kill her even as he is overwhelmed by her
beauty. Aithra, lover of the sea god Poseidon, sees them coming with the
help of the omniscent sea-shell, welcomes them into her home, and offers
Helena the drug of forgetfulness to stop Menelaus from hating her, though
he already believes in his madness that he has killed her and Paris. Aithra
spins Menelaus the traditional "true story", that Helena wasn't in Troy at
all, but was replaced by a phantom while the real Helena was in Egypt.
Aithra takes them to a desert oasis where no-one will mention the war, to
be alone, but after an ecstatic reunion, Menelaus relapses into murderous
jealousy, and Helena discovers that there is a drug for memory as well as
forgetfulness, which she resolves to use. Meanwhile, Altair, the bandit
chief and his son Da-ud arrive and both try to carry off Helena. Menelaus
kills Da-ud, a rather charming Italianate tenor, and comes to terms with
his jealousy as he realises that Helena loves only him. Poseidon arrives
and slaughters Altair's army, and they all live happily ever after.

This could be a brittle or ironic post-war comedy, with Menelaus as the
returning soldier who has to woo his wife again and get over the idea that
he can't resolve everything by killing people, and there's some of that in
it. But it's really a reflection on the role of memory and forgetfulness in
a relationship -- on the need to forget sometimes to recover intimacy, and
on the need to remember to recover love. Aithra's house is a warm
laboratory of domesticity, in which Helena and Menelaus sit down to dinner
as soon as they arrive, but which they have to leave to learn to live
together in the brutal world.

This evening's performance was thoroughly enjoyable. Deborah Voigt did the
diva thing to perfection. She's endearing rather than awesome, except
vocally, where she's both. Lyuba Kazarnovskaya was a witchy, slightly spiky
but very amiable Aithra, and Nancy Maultsby was a deep-sea contraltoid
sea-shell. John Horton Murray was dull as Menelaus, who is meant to be
charismatic, but confused and rather stupid. (He was a not particularly
late substitute for Thomas Moser.) Wilhelm Hartmann was suitably
Valentino-like as Da-ud and Alan Titus was good and heavy as Altair.

But, as I think in most of these concert performance, it was the Royal
Opera orchestra that really made it. They gave Thielemann every aspect of
the score, the Rousseau-neat crashing waves in the storm and the camp
military music of the bandit king, but also the romantic surges that never
quite broke into schlock. It was loud (just about not too loud for the
singers), but it was exactly right.

Definitely an opera that the ENO or RO ought to stage. It's probably much
easier to get right than Ariadne, because it's emotionally richer and
structurally and textually less complex, though with the same Straussian
musical sweep.

I'm going to have to go to the second performance on Monday. The elves
erased the magnetic strip on my bank card and I didn't have enough cash to
get a programme and check out the fine print in the libretto.