The power of music: Turnage's Festen at Covent Garden
Festen, The Royal Opera
Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film Festen (a Danish word meaning celebration) now has an operatic treatment by the British composer Mark Anthony Turnage and his librettist Lee Hall. It’s a harrowing spectacle. After just 1 hour 40 minutes of conventional behaviour, and occasional misbehaviour, at a family party, the audience is left pole-axed. It begins with the guests arriving, and ends with breakfast the next morning, as if nothing much has happened. Yet I felt wrung out, and the audience thundered their applause after this world premiere.
It’s the music that does it. Largely conventional, yet hiding huge dramatic intensity, this is Turnage’s seventh opera. None of them lasts more than two hours. He knows how to achieve his effect almost effortlessly, and in this case he had the help of a libretto from the man who wrote Billy Elliot. As Turnage says, “Lee [Hall] knows which words sound good when they’re sung —because he’s written musicals”. He has invested the text with lightness despite it being an extremely dark comedy. For example, near the beginning the whole chorus is involved in speculating about what kind of soup has just been served. Later a couple have a screaming row about a badly packed suitcase.
Lightness is essential because the story is appalling: a paterfamilias sexually abusing his own children, the sort of thing that gets salacious coverage in the press, not to mention racism towards the younger daughter’s boyfriend. Yet everything seems so normal as the family gathers for his 60th birthday party. It is a collective act of denial, and the chorus plays a vital role, as it does in Britten’s Peter Grimes. In fact, in the final scene when the guests greet one another with their “Good mornings”, I was reminded very much of Britten’s opera, where the chorus is an accusing mob. Here, however, they collectively ignore and collude with what has gone on. The use of a chorus in opera is a very powerful tool, far more so than its role in ancient Greek drama, and here is used to great effect.
What with chorus, orchestra and a very large number of soloists, this is an expensive work to put on, but the Royal Opera have accomplished it brilliantly with luxury casting that includes Gerald Finley as the paterfamilias Helge, Allan Clayton as his eldest son Christian, and heaps more very well-known singers, including John Tomlinson as Grandpa, Susan Bickley as Grandma, Stéphane Degout as the younger son, and Natalya Romaniw as the younger daughter.
The musicianship of a vast cast, chorus and orchestra was superbly directed by conductor Edward Gardner, and the production by Richard Jones was subtly expressive of the mood throughout. It featured a device new to me at the end, where the wallpaper and small picture on the wall gradually increase in size until one sees a deceptively happy portrait of four children, their lives only blighted by the father whose birthday they are there to celebrate.
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