Le Pre aux clercs

By Ferdinand Herold

At the National Opera House

Review: Tom Mooney

For director Eric Ruf, modernising a space dripping with antiquity doesn’t interest him, and with a sumptuously staged Le Pre aux clercs, he remains faithful to his roots.

Ruf not only directed Le Pre aux clercs but designed the stage, for in this opera comique production, it is essential that both disciplines are on the same wavelength.

He is a director for whom the conventions of an old opera – the music and the libretto – are not to be treated with disrespect.

Le Pre aux clercs takes place in 1582 in France during the Wars of Religion, but Herold is more interested in the vagaries and vicissitude of his impressive cast of characters than their crude historical predecessors.

Marie Lenormand’s Marguerite de Valois is no more the blood thirsty Le Reine Margot of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, than I am Ernest Hemingway.

So it’s the desire for beauty inherent in the libretto and music which Ruf so successfully fishes for and lands in a production which married recitative and pure singing with unabashed joie de vive, but on an epic scale.

Large casts require intensely dramatic scenes (dancing, fighting etc) in opera comique, so the orchestral score is marked by colourata and accelerando, hinted at in the overture, conducted like a river in spate by Jean-Luc Tingaud.

Though Lenormand and Magali Simard-Galdes (making her stage operatic debut) were impressive, it is Marie-Eve Munger as Isabelle de Montal who is as bright as the North Star with two quite gorgeous arias, Souvenirs du jeune age and Jours de mon enfance.

For a centuries old production to have wheels you want a director to exhume characterisation  from the aspic of the written word, and then have it mobilised by the music so that the conductor can emit emotions, both heart wrenching and playful.

Tingaud and Ruf did both in spades, and this is a production to live on in the memory.