Shopping trolleys in heaven: an arthouse staging for Messiaen's testament of beauty in Geneva

It is not too fanciful to propose that this French-Swiss premiere of Saint François d’Assise marked a homecoming for Messiaen’s opera, more than 40 years after its premiere in Paris. Take a stroll through the horticultural park on the west bank of Lake Geneva, and you hear many of the Alpine birds which sing and squawk through the score. The quiet and ordered nature of the city accords with that of the composer. As the founder of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Ernest Ansermet may have had little time for Messiaen’s music, but he schooled his musicians in a Stravinsky-Debussy style, prizing transparency over weight, which opens up the layers of colour and harmony in Saint François like a 3D picture book.

Front and centre for much of the opera’s four and a quarter hours, Robin Adams sang the title role with heroic strength of voice and character. The tessitura of his baritone is higher than the likes of José van Dam and David Wilson-Johnson, who made the role their own in times past; it could hardly be said that Adams made the role sound easy, but his steady lyricism gave us a natural sequel to Debussy’s Golaud rather than a pre-emptively beatified paragon; an intensely human Francis, touched with humour as well as grace, growing in confidence through the evening. The natives may have picked up on some scrupulously “learnt” French, especially in contrast to the vibrant articulation of Claire de Sévigné’s Angel, but Adams ensured that the text always supported the line.

With a dancer’s grace of movement as well as unsullied vocal radiance, de Sevigné also presented an unusually rich account of her role. Assertive rather than aloof in her second-act dealings with the brothers, she maintained remarkable control of a piercingly sweet tone – perhaps not so far from the heavenly music Messiaen had in mind for the fifth scene – while skipping about the stage. In complement, Aleš Briscein underplayed the elements of self-pity and caricature which the role of the Leper can attract, making his revelation of self-realisation and redemption all the more powerful when it arrived. All the supporting roles were strongly cast and sharply characterised, doing the maximum possible with what little Messiaen gives them by way of fleshed-out personality.

The most positive aspect of Adel Abdessemed’s production – I hesitate to say staging – is that it allowed these vocal talents to shine to the full. Known as an artist rather than a stage director, Abdessemed had designed installations for each scene, requiring lengthy pauses mid-act, and the singers mostly occupied the space in front of them. He costumed Francis and his followers as authentically mendicant outsiders, struggling to establish a community in a consumerised world of generically “spiritual” values.

There was a tawdry inevitability to the shopping trolleys and plastic oil-drums in lieu of an ecclesiastical setting for the “Lauds” scene of Act 1. Other interventions (a naked Eve/Mary figure crossing the stage; a hammam scene to illustrate the spiritual baptism of the Leper; the Angel flashing glimpses of toned thigh) introduced notes of eroticism, foreign to this writer at least: not so much “No sex, please, we’re Swiss” as “No breasts, please, it’s Messiaen.”

A more practical objection to the installations was their muting effect on the vast choral and orchestral forces ranged on the stage behind them. At the work’s point of highest spiritual crisis, as Francis undergoes the Stigmata in Act 3, Adams shuffled around in the shadow of a scale-model chapel, while Messiaen’s swirling lines of mingled suffering and ecstasy were distanced at subsidiary, soundtrack-level significance. When a specially expanded opera chorus visibly singing at full tilt has to be piped via speakers into the auditorium, there has been a serious miscalculation.

Some of these problems may be laid at the feet of the composer, for scoring the piece with an extravagance that outstrips opera-pit dimensions, and for resisting dramatic conventions of psychological depth and development in his characters. Nevertheless, effective solutions to these problems may be found in modern opera houses, as Pierre Audi triumphantly demonstrated with Dutch National Opera in 2008. On this occasion, the painstaking work of Jonathan Nott and the OSR deserved better. Messiaen’s theology places that extravagance in the service of beauty – an antipode to Geneva’s spiritual father, John Calvin – and the musical values of this Saint François carry the day. It is an “everything piece” to stand alongside the St Matthew Passion, Parsifal and the Licht cycle, a universal statement of faith now hopelessly unfashionable, and the impact of this Grand Théâtre de Genève production left the mind reeling as well as the ears ringing for hours afterwards. 

Peter's press trip to Geneva was funded by the Grand Théâtre de Genève