ENO orchestra
conducted by
Emmanuel Joel
Choir of the ENO
Palemon
Clive Bayley
Athanael
Richard Zeller
Nicias's servant
Paul Napier-Burrows
Crobyle
Sarah-Jane Davies
Myrtale
Stephanie Marshall
Nicias
Paul Charles Clarke
Thais
Elizabeth Futral
La Charmeuse
Victoria Joyce
Mere Albine
Rebecca
de Pont Davies
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Thais
by Jules Massenet
English National Opera
The Barbican
23 - 26 September 2003
What this concert performance of Massenet's sumptuous, erotic, moving Thais shows above all is that this opera cries out for a full staging. It has not had one since 1926 at Covent Garden, when convention prevented the full possibilities of the story and its musically voluptuous expression by Massenet to be told. The opera canon here contains a vast potential hit, and the only thing that can explain its not being properly staged is residual prudery.
Thais is an exquisitely beautiful courtesan, one of the most famous in history. So great is her power that the moral tone of all Alexandria is set by her. This fact distresses an early lover of hers, Athanael, now turned Christian monk and living in an austere desert community. He dreams of her in the most lascivious way, and on waking determines to save her soul. Struggling against the rebellion of his own flesh at the sight of her, for he witnesses a performance by her of the rites of Venus, he manages, after a struggle, to make her repent. She accompanies him to the desert, where she is to end her days in a convent of nuns. But even as her penitence and the mortification of her beautiful flesh eventually causes her death, so Athanael repents the inhuman, life-denying moralism of his cruel faith, and he rushes to her, trying to draw her back from the brink of self-renunciation, filled with love and ravenous desire for her. She dies, leaving him without either her or his faith, in the deepest agony of soul.
If the ENO can be persuaded to bring Thais to the stage in full-blooded form, who better to take the title role than Elizabeth Futral, whose performance in the Barbican concert version was outstanding. It is not just her great beauty both of voice and appearance which fits her to the role, but her obvious actorly instincts, which invest her every nerve. Standing at the front of the Barbican stage, limited by the constraints of concert performance, she nevertheless portrayed Thais in all her range: of irresistible seductress, votary of Venus, woman in a turmoil of conscience, gentle penitent, dying saint. She did it with such aptness of gesture and posture, and so vividly, that it made the audience half-believe they had witnessed a full staging.
Massenet's score is exquisitely theatrical. Richard Zeller as Athanael did not act his part as Futral did, but the music and his own richly satisfying voice did the work for him. Their roles, together with the very sympathetic and interesting part of the philosopher Nicias, excellently sung by Paul Charles Clarke, are pivotal, and the wonderful quality of their response to the music made the performance a supremely memorable one.
AC Grayling
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