Love in time of the drug wars: a contemporary Tancredi at Bregenz

Warring families, arranged marriages, forbidden love, and an ever-suffering soprano: Rossini's 1813 Tancredi, a huge early success for the then-21-year-old composer, has all the bel canto hallmarks. All and then some: the title role, in line with the seria heritage of high-voiced heroes, is written for a mezzo-soprano. This is the aspect Jan Philipp Gloger seizes upon for his new staging for the Bregenz Festival. His Tancredi is portrayed as a woman, her love for Amenaide now literally forbidden within a brutally conservative society. 

Gloger's setting moves the action from medieval Syracuse to a South American drug cartel, cleverly mining the culture of machismo and a religious, repressive environment to create a framework in which the opera's key elements – the bloody rivalries, the ritualised violence of duels – still work. The violence enacted to maintain the extremely restrictive norms of masculinity is displayed in an early, gory example: one of the gang's own is beaten to death for being gay.

Within these bounds, the theme of forbidden love receives newfound urgency, greatly heightening the tension of Amenaide being caught between her father’s oppressive will and a hopeless love. Commendably, this revives the spirit of social critique central to the opera’s source, Voltaire’s Tancrède, and showcases the oppressive misogyny and the twisted, hollow sense of honour and glory driving the opera’s narrative.

There is much to admire in Gloger's production. The setting is vividly invoked through the set and costume designs of Ben Baur and Justina Klimczyk: the revolving set of Argirio’s colourful, somewhat worn villa, equipped with living quarters and torture chamber alike, is put to effective use throughout. Tancredi and Amenaide's portrayals are sensitively drawn – Amenaide, in particular, is no wilting flower, but a fiery, defiant young woman, constantly struggling against the boundaries imposed on her. The preening, aggressive bearing of the male chorus establishes a constant air of menace: moments such as the gang gathered outside Amenaide’s room, banging on her door and clamouring for her to come out in “Più dolci e placcide” are at once comical and a sobering display of misogynistic entitlement.

The way this well-constructed foundation collapses in on itself in Act 2, then, is a striking disappointment. The obsessive need for spectacle (as if to compete with the Seebühne), gunshots and stunt brawls abound, grow tired. The main issue, though, is Tancredi's treatment. Why the same woman who’s daring enough to dress as a man and routinely sneak into a drug lord’s home to court his daughter, and even to interrupt their festivities with her own macho display would have to be taught knife-fighting in a clownish dumb show is beyond me, as is her evidently newfound horror at the workings of Argirio’s house. 

A worse offender is the treatment of the tragic ending. Making a point about the lethal violence affecting queer people is laudable, but Tancredi coming out, immediately committing suicide by cop, and then being left to die alone, crawling around the stage until she bleeds out, strikes me less as poignant and empathetic, and more lurid and gratuitous. Her loneliness is particularly confounding: Amenaide, who fought tooth and nail for their love, being content to be led out by a police officer after seeing her lover shot, not only undercuts the dramatic power of this scene, but the production’s entire concept. (Some words could also be spared for the chorus mourning Tancredi’s death being given to the same gangsters who are happy enough to brutally murder one of their own the same way hours before.) Having immensely enjoyed an extremely witty and compassionate Rosenkavalier from Gloger last season, this is a perplexing letdown.

The performance had its musical highs and lows as well. Anna Goryachova and Mélissa Petit were a true Traumpaar as the doomed lovers, a dreamy match vocally and scenically a deeply affective, compelling pair. Goryachova displayed contralto-like, velvety richness of timbre, and her portrayal of Tancredi was commanding and highly sympathetic, sung to perfection. Negotiating her coloratura passages with limpid ease and naturalness, Petit performed Amenaide’s part with with remarkable grace and complexity, at turns charming, passionate and strikingly dramatic: the tragic nobility of her “Di mia vita infelice” lent her scena an almost Mozartian colour. Antonio Siragusa’s nasal, piercing tenor worked well enough for Argirio, while Andreas Wolf’s Orbazzano was duly nasty, making the most of his vocally minor villain role.

In the pit, Yi-Chen Lin and the Wiener Symphoniker gave a respectably dramatic reading, at times remarkably infused with symphonic richness. Often, though, Lin's conducting tended to be rather sanguine, leaving a highly energetic score sag, unable to compensate for the staging's own messy moments.