The Teatro Real does not take the action of opening the season lightly. For the Madrid lyrical coliseum it implies a contribution of novelties that go beyond productions and star artists. And yesterday wanted to be a doubly comme il faut party, giving the public – Kings included – the world premiere of a new musical version of Cherubini's Médée that could represent a new canon, since it is in French and with music for the recitatives added by the American Alan Curtis (1934-2015). All of this is also provided under that window to the Madrid sky that the artist and sculptor Jaume Plensa projects in the dome of the room.
This dreamlike illusion of seeing the clouds pass by from the audience, which is what the Zen installation titled Sky, half mapping, half real image, consists of, was inaugurated yesterday before the performance began, with the Barcelona artist on stage calling “friends of beauty” to the attendees. From the box, King Felipe and Letizia, the president of the congress, Francina Armengol, the Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta, and the mayor of Madrid, José Luís Martínez Almeida, applauded him, joined by Gregorio Marañón, president of the Foundation. Royal Theatre. The piece had been financed by the patron and businessman Juan Antonio Pérez Simón -with about 180,000 euros-, while Plensa donates his artistic work to the theater, as it did at the Liceu with the porch doors.
At the end of the evening, there were those who would have preferred to leave with the taste of those clouds in their mouths.
The nine minutes of applause for Médée were punctuated by some isolated booing at the production by Paco Azorín who, in an attempt to innovate, had wanted to offer Euripides' Greek tragedy from the point of view of Medea's children, the kids - here already teenagers - whom the demigoddess kills to take revenge on her execrable and treacherous husband, Jason. But that point of view was based on projecting labels with statistics of abused minors today.
In any case, the world of musicology turned its gaze towards the Real yesterday, as it was the first theater to put on stage the new version, now the eleventh, of this Cherubini.
Why so many? The point is that Médée was composed in Paris after the French Revolution, so the Opéra de Paris preferred to refrain from programming such a gloomy and savage tragedy. Hence it ended up in the commercial opéra-comique circuit, which was characterized by having recitatives without music.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, different musical contributions were made to these fragments. Maria Callas made famous the Italian translation that she made in 1909 of the German version by Franz Lachner, from the mid-19th century, with music for recitatives composed in the Wagnerian manner. Thus, the style halfway between classicism and romanticism that Cherubini used appeared mixed with a later style. But now that melange of styles has finally given way to a version in the original French, with the music for the recitatives inspired by what Cherubini, that "god of dramatic music", as Brahms called him, would have done.
The soprano Maria Agresta raised a standing ovation with her interpretation of the role of Medea, much longer and equally demanding than the one that catapulted Callas. The fatal act of her execution was served coldly on the stages of the Real and in the middle of an industrial set presided over by an elevator, a symbol of the descent into hell. Sara Blanch was a Dirce with a beautiful voice, the daughter of Creon (Jongmin Park) with whom Jason (a very celebrated Enea Scala) marries, arousing the wrath of Medea... All the artists have had to study this new version from scratch of the opera, here directed from the podium by the Real's musical director, Ivor Bolton. By the way, the Intermezzo choir, which does not seem to be going ahead with its strike threat, debuted a new director yesterday, José Luis Basso.
