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As a 16th-century girl boss, Mary, Queen of Scots, had a rough time of it. Caught in a web of Machiavellian intrigues, she had little opportunity to simply regulate.
Thea Musgrave’s 1977 opera, Mary, Queen of Scots, focuses on her journey to self-determination and its disastrous outcome. Her score, with its blend of Renaissance and folk references and late-Romantic harmonies, has taken it around the world since its Edinburgh premiere, with runs from San Francisco to Bielefeld.
For Leipzig’s new production, another girl boss, Ilaria Lanzino, is responsible for the staging. At Saturday’s premiere, she also jumped into the breach for a gender-bending acting job as Bothwell, with tenor Eberhard Francesco Lorenz singing the role from the wings; Sven Hjörleifsson, cast to sing the role, had fallen ill.
Dirk Becker’s sets and Annette Braun’s costumes are part of Leipzig Opera’s new push to present environmentally sustainable theatre: almost all of them are recycled from the house’s storerooms. Lanzino’s production boasts a neogothic steampunk vibe, with all the men in black kilts and stringy wigs. They slouch around the sets, clutching daggers, waiting for the chance to knife each other in the back. Only the poet Riccio and lover-boy Darnley wear civilian clothes, while the four Marys, her ladies-in-waiting, morph from backpackers to wenches as the evening progresses. To claim her power, Queen Mary ultimately dons the same outfit as the men. This does not save her.
Nicole Chevalier makes the title role her own, with singing of extraordinary power, agility and stamina; she is formidable. All of the men are well-cast, from Franz Xaver Schlecht’s wily James Stewart and Rupert Charlesworth’s feckless Darnley to Sejong Chang’s likeable Riccio. The chorus, too, is impressive.
Under Matthias Foremny’s capable direction, the Gewandhausorchester tackles the score as though it were core Germanic repertoire, with a lush, full string sound, a keen focus, and plenty of force where necessary.
It is a brutal tale, and Lanzino tells it unsparingly. Since the men are dressed identically, they tend to blur into one drinking, murderous, lecherous whole, with a wearying propensity to dry-hump the women without bothering to undress. The women, bemusingly, seem to want it — whether through a tangled misreading of third-wave feminism or for want of a better idea. Lanzino claims in a programme note that she sought to present ambivalence to Musgrave’s victimised heroine, but by making Mary ape the men, she somehow misses Musgrave’s point about female power.
Which leaves us with a gloomy tale about men. It seems a stretch to suggest that women in the 1500s had the liberty to pick self-objectification. Surely, if there was a way to be a woman without playing either a wench or a man, Mary embodied it. Not here. What a lost opportunity.
★★★☆☆
To February 11, oper-leipzig.de
