“Abandon all hope of comprehension, ye who enter here”, to paraphrase Dante. The elliptical libretto of Theatre of the World, Louis Andriessen’s fifth full-length opera, directed by Pierre Audi, should come with this warning, though not Andriessen’s masterly score. The work celebrates Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scholar who left an astonishing bibliography on manifold subjects, including fossils, volcanoes, antiquities and music. He invented the megaphone and developed theories that approached Darwinism, but he was also an unbridled fantasist. Hugely admired in his time, many of his theories and improbable inventions were later discredited.
The opera is subtitled “A grotesque in 9 scenes”. Andriessen has, in fact, contemplated the grotesque in Kircher’s intellectual intemperance and distilled it into a humorous, mysterious and diabolical creation. Kircher, who is dying, embarks on a journey through his own past and imagination, visiting places he wrote about, but never saw, such as China. With him is a Boy, voiced androgynously by soprano Lindsay Kesselman, who is really the devil, and a fearful Pope Innocent XI, an awful mess of clerical clichés saved by tenor Marcel Beekman’s canny performance. On the way, Kircher’s publisher, played by actor Steven Van Watermeulen, shows up, as do three witches who sing cabaret and murder for fun, and two lovers, She and He. Andriessen requires much from his amplified singers. They need to declaim and sing with reduced vibrato. Baritone Martijn Cornet (He) sang beautifully and vibrato-free during the lovers’ Classical duet, where Nora Fischer’s pop crooning sounded misjudged. Intermittently, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz appears, a poet-nun whom Kircher has never met, but knows through her letters. She is his Beatrice. Jazz singer Cristina Zavalloni, Andriessen’s muse, sang her reflections, recalling Mexican folk songs, with supple sensuality. Andriessen moulds endlessly shifting echoing figures, haunting melodies, peppery big band rhythms and more into an ever-changing but coherent whole, threaded with a recurring brass motif that, like the hero, has many guises.
Alas, the text is far less nimble. In spite of much expository dialogue, (“I wrote the singular comprehensive and intelligent book about China” [sic]), Helmut Krausser’s libretto reveals little about Kircher’s voracious curiosity or his flamboyant charlatanism. A physically and vocally intense Kircher, Leigh Melrose uglified his powerful baritone as necessary, but was given little by way of characterisation beyond twisting his chalk-white face into either “aghast” or “angry”. It was up to Reinbert de Leeuw and his fantastic Asko|Schönberg ensemble to radiate a sense of wonder and adventure. Inventive and full of surprises, the music clarified its subject’s contradictions. Low woodwinds and brass, including bass trombone and contrabass clarinet, furnished an irreverent streak. An awed Largo took in the scale of the pyramids, elsewhere a pert mambo detonated. Pulsating percussion crescendos whipped up the euphoria of discovery, abating to allow Sor Juana’s ballads to soar tenderly into the ether. The succession of quotes and prosaic phrases could not compete with the music for clarity and fluency and the seven languages of the libretto only rendered it more opaque. Kircher’s linguistic research, which included bogus translations of the hieroglyphics, beg a polyglot libretto. However, sentences such as “Siamo felici forever" suggest an expatriate struggling with globish rather than “the last Renaissance man”, one of Kircher’s epithets.