Only the second play to be published by Oscar Wilde, and predating The Importance of Being Earnest by over a decade, The Duchess of Padua is a rarely performed curio that deals in bloodshed, high passions and death. Under Fleur Snow's direction, composer Edward Lambert has adapted it into a self-styled parlour opera for four voices with the Music Troupe, now touring the UK.
The plot is fairly simple: the young Guido Ferranti is told he must avenge his father by murdering the dastardly Duke of Padua, but falls in love with the beautiful and suffering Duchess – with tragic consequences. There's an inherited dagger, a bottle of poison and a love duet referencing the natural world.
It's a sensationalised plot, one that is suited to musical adaptation, with lyrical and ornate – occasionally to the point of florid – blank verse and ceaselessly strong emotions. Lambert has embraced the Gothic style and sentimentality of this tale of love and murder effectively, with an ode to the human voice. Accompanied only by Alex Norton and Adrian Salinero in a Victorian-style piano duet, each one of his cast of four is assigned ferocious leaps in register, languid phrasing and startling tempo changes.
Playing Ferranti, mezzo-soprano Anna Elizabeth Cooper boasts a powerful voice, with real maturity in her lower register. She handled the leaps and bounds of the score deftly, focusing an intensity of emotion into the occasionally purple prose. In the style of Romeo, she portrayed Ferranti's naive idealism sweetly, but when resolving to kill the Duke and rid herself of pity, she had a fleeting powerful moment of Lady Macbeth.
Her counterpoint is Ellie Neate, the multi-dimensional Duchess of Padua. Neate's voice is clear and sparkling, the highest parts of her register impressively clean. She countered Ferranti's naivete with an almost feminist world-weariness, and portrayed the flickering changes in the Duchess's mindset convincingly.
Henry Grant Kerswell, as the scheming Count Moranzone, excelled in the small church space with his booming theatrical bass, with all the rolling "r"s and spat consonants of a man bent on revenge.
James Beddoe inflected a dangerous silky drawl into the Duke of Padua's voice and a chilling physicality into the role. His opening aria demands a fair amount of ornamentation that sometimes got lost as the music moved through a complicated bel canto style, but he recovered well.
While comprised of individually powerful voices, the quartet had moments of weakness in ensemble. Lambert has his cast sing the stage directions, setting the context of the church in Padua or describing death scenes. There were issues with fraying at the edges of this ensemble work, which improved as the performance went along but remained messy, so much so that it was hard to understand what was going on without keeping an eye fixed on the surtitles. This was not helped by the occasional lag or omission in those surtitles, but this was not a problem outside of the ensemble scenes.
For the most part, the melodrama was delicious, and the converted church at The Space proved the ideal Gothic setting for it. There are some brilliant flashes of Gothic shivers in the set design of Melissa Sofoian: the fragmented marble faces of the three previous duchesses at the dinner table, all with name tags, or the projections of pointed stone arches in the early scenes. A detached tenor-bass Kyrie eleison preceding the bloody end of the piece brings out goose pimples.
But it is melodramatic, and it is relentless. Emotions are high, always, and the operatic adaptation loses some of the chances for lightness in Wilde's verse, as in the famous line, “She is worse than ugly, she is good.” The second half, in particular, is an exercise in misery and the Duchess's complaint that the music “should be merrier – but grief is the fashion now” seems a bit on the nose.
But this is a slick and stylised production, and the scenes of violence are artfully done. Lambert and Snow have created an intimate piece that brings Victorian melodrama to the operatic stage.
