In March, the Nice Opera House offered us Rossini’s Semiramide. A dive into ancient history, into Babylon, Assyria.
We gather at the temple of Baal, the chief of the magi listens to an oracle. The opera begins. Semiramide is based on Voltaire’s five-act tragedy: Semiramis.
The librettist Gaetano Rossi transforms the play by the master of Ferney into a two-act opera. Semiramide, aside from the voices, we know the vocal difficulty of interpreting Rossini, with the success of the performers, we will focus especially on the staging by Jakob Peter Messer. It likely shocked the purists. Yet the director perfectly adapted this opera for a 21st-century audience.
A critic, when talking about modern stagings, compared it to cinema: “It’s like cinema, if we had stuck to the origins, we would still have silent films and black and white. With current techniques, we readjust stagings for contemporary audiences and tomorrow, other directors will make other innovations, thus making operas come alive.”
The temple of Baal, with its scorpion adorning its tympanum, is modest, bare, austere like a Protestant church; it gets to the heart of the matter: ‘Baal’. The queen, her court, listen to the grand priest’s pronouncements. The choir is dressed in black. All this gives depth to a set that seems to exceed the stage.
The curtain rises, falls, allowing the audience to enter this opera, even to step into the temple. The drama is always present, the specter of the king long ago assassinated by his wife and Assur. It’s the impossible love that unfolds before us and will reach a conclusion between three characters: the queen, Assur, and Arsace. Impossible? Yes, except for the incest. Arsace is Ninia, the queen’s son, long lost, hidden, a Moses saved from the waters. He fights with Assur, the queen is killed, Assur commits suicide, and Arsace receives his father’s crown.
The curtain falls, the ghost can disappear and return to his tomb. The audience applauds the performers, the director, a modern, ultra-modern staging featuring Ninia’s teddy bear and particularly Assur’s two bodyguards in Ray-Bans and carrying Colts.
A staging worthy of the Chorégies d’Orange, an innovative Nice Opera, yes the critic was right, opera is very much alive and that’s a good thing!
Thierry Jan
