There’s no escaping how spectacular this new production of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre by the Catalan ‘total theatre’ company La Fura dels Baus (Alex Ollé and Valentine Carrasco) is. The opera overflows with symbols and allusions and these are masterfully amplified by the production and the performances.
      Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre was premiered on April 12 1978 in Stockholm’s Royal Opera, but Ligeti conceived the idea fifteen years earlier and it matured by way of his semi-staged pieces Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures and unfinished Oedipus. In the original version he sought the assistance of Michael Meschke (the Director of the Stockholm Opera) to adapt the 1934 play by the Belgian Michel de Ghelderode. C Characteristically of such modernist concepts, the work looks over its shoulder at past traditions so strong are these in both the opera house and the musical world. But it’s a double-take as Ligeti had witnessed some ‘anti-operas’ so decided on an ‘anti-anti-opera’.
      Originally the setting was to be a cluttered, filthy, decadent modern street scene. This represented an end of civilization on the brink of imminent self-destruction prophesied by a prophet from hell, Nekrotzar, a characteristically ‘significant’ name being both ‘tsar’ (leader) and ‘neckro’ (corpse) and on whose name puns, rhymes and homonyms crop up many times. He appears in the first scene with scythe, timer and ‘last trump’ fore-telling the end of the world, which will include the starry-eyed lovers (Amando and Amanda, a yin-yang, two-sides of one coin self-obsessed pair – both hermaphroditic and opposite gender) and the drunkard Piet the Pot. Piet is also the ‘realist’ translating the desired ‘love’ of the pair into what it ‘really is’, sex. Later we encounter Mescalina (Miss Whiplash) and her battered husband Astradamors (stars, death, astrologer all in the name). These act as a dark-sided counter-balance both to the idealistic lovers and Venus who appears as hope for Astradamors to match his wife’s appalling practices. In the third scene governmental corruption is scrutinized with the foppish Prince Go-Go being served again by a squabbling yin-yang pair, the White Minister and Black Minister. With telling irony in this production Susanna Andersson sings both Venus and the chief of the secret police, Gepopo, whose stratospheric vocal gymnastic suggest the conspiratorial paranoia such as post would have at the end of the world.
      The opera seems as though it is going to be a commentary on the kind of decadence and depravity that deserves an end like Noah’s flood. But the final irony is that there is no end, and Nekrotzar was wrong. The moral is defused; there is no lesson to be learnt.
      Alex Ollé and Valentina Carrasco have changed the original street scene into the body of a woman who seems to on the brink of death, but who in the end turns out only to be having a difficult bowel movement. Much of the action takes place inside her body (the stars are gazed through her head, characters disappear into her knees and arms, and most ‘shockingly’ of all Prince Go-Go emerges from her bottom which later opens to reveal her intestines. Plenty of verbally and aurally scatological jokes seep out from this would-be corpse! The body itself is a brilliant conceit: both an internalization and a synecdoche. It dominates and remains on stage throughout provides metaphor for the destruction of the world and an opportunity for some magnificent lighting projections. The woman’s dead eyes light up and watch with various emotions the goings-on emerging from her body. Her body at one stage becomes a skeleton or is consumed with flames.
      Le Grand Macabre is a complex work full of references, some more overt (such as to Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld) than others. It requires a great theatrical idea to match it, and this it receives magnificently from the directors. Their idea is superbly realized by the set designer (Alfons Flores), the lighting designer (Peter van Praet), the video designer (Franc Aleu) and the costume designer (Lluc Castells). Theatrically and visually this production is a stunner.
      But this is not all. The musical performance is equally outstanding. Ligeti intended the opera to be sung in the language of its audience, so purists can rest easy when they hear the work in English (mercifully with surtitles). The cast however is international. It would be invidious to pick out individuals the raunchy, paunchy Piet of Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, Pavlo Hunka’s lowering Nekrotzar, Susanna Andersson’s Venus and Gepopo, Andrew Watts’s queenly Prince Go-Go will stick in the mind for a long time. But pre-eminent amongst the performers is Baldur Brönnimann, the conductor. Ligeti’s score is a superb interweaving of multiple sounds (the huge orchestra includes whistles, 12 car-horns, duck-quacker, hum pots, a movingly evocative harmonica and a wind-machine to name just a few) and voices. It requires superb balance and co-ordination. Brönnimann is master of them all, right from the hocketing opening to the final passacaglia.
      Le Grand Macabre is a complex piece and this realizes this through multiple puns, references and allusions that sometimes fly by so fast it is difficult in the theatre to keep up. But it is all the better for this as the rapidity of all these is enthralling. It is not an easy evening in the opera-house, but it is superbly rewarding one. It also bodes well for English National Opera who had the courage to open its season with it. Prizes all round.
Roderick Swanston