Parisian grand opéra, for generations neglected, has in recent years enjoyed something of a comeback. At least that's the way it would seem from the schedules of opera houses across Europe: all but one of the principal works of the genre were staged this season.Footnote ¹ Top of the 2011–12 must-see list for enthusiasts will surely have been La Muette de Portici at the Opéra-Comique, almost half a century after it was last heard in Paris.Footnote ² There was even the added frisson of its having been given in a co-production with the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, site of the famously incendiary performance in 1830 that supposedly sparked off the conclusive battle for Belgian independence.Footnote ³ But while the political potency of the work proved gloriously undiminished (the Brussels performances were postponed until 2015 in light of the recent parliamentary stalemate and on-going debate over what ‘Belgian’ might actually mean), its staging seemed somewhat less than epoch-making. As one colleague summed it up, ‘No bloody volcano!’.Footnote ⁴

Naturally, the scenic effects that were so important to the success of the genre in the nineteenth century are also part of the reason examples of it became much rarer in the twentieth. And, arguably, it was their very extravagance that hastened the demise of the operas composed around them as aesthetic fashion changed.Footnote ⁵ The large casts of principals – at least by comparison with the Traviatas, Fausts and Carmens that replaced grand opéra at the centre of the international repertory – were also an obstacle, but it is the volcanoes, explosions and shipwrecks, among other catastrophes intrinsic to the stage action, not to mention the indispensable richly-costumed chorus-members in their hundreds, that make the genre such a difficult proposition.

For fans of grand opéra spectacle unable or unwilling to travel the lengths of the continent in search of companies and festivals willing to rise to the challenge, the armchair alternative is even more disappointing. Not only are the available DVDs threatened by the same basic drawbacks as other films of opera performance, with intimate cinematic close-ups revealing not nuances of acting or film-star beauty but rather the tension that comes from the effort of singing to the rest of the auditorium as well as the microphone, they also suffer from some that are more or less specific to the genre: volcanoes aside, to pan across the stage in one of those massed choral scenes that took nineteenth-century Paris by storm is to reveal its modern descendant as laughably small. Moreover, for all the reasons alluded to so far, there are very few to choose from: apart from Don Carlos, which was easily the least-performed example of the genre in the nineteenth century but is today the best known by far, it appears that only Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, somewhat less cataclysmic than the others in terms of the need for stage machinery, exists in more than one easily obtainable version on DVD. There are precisely two, and both are more than twenty years old.Footnote ⁶ A survey of DVDs of the former would be beyond the scope of the present review, and – such is its canonic history since that initial poor showing – would in any case probably end up being more about Verdian performance traditions than those of grand opéra. As it happens, a comparison of the available productions of the latter provides more than enough to ponder regarding the genre's reliance on the visual (and above all the visually spectacular), its associated institutional and repertory history, and how both come across on film.

John Dew's production begins with an empty stage and silence. An oppressive downstage backdrop depicts a building, all its windows bricked in and its façade pitted with bullet-holes, some faceless grey figures, arms raised in supplication, and (slightly labouring the point) several red target signs. One by one and in twos and threes, various people assemble and line up by a door downstage right, which eventually opens. They are waiting to receive badges – yellow crosses, which they hesitantly and somewhat shamefacedly put on. Then there is disagreement: a badge is thrown down, picked up; a struggle ensues. The door is closed. Before the situation can be in any way clarified, the group is scattered by men in uniform wielding truncheons. These, it seems, are the Catholics, for they immediately break into the music of the Introduction, ‘Des beaux jours de la jeunesse’. The others, who escape via a passarelle into the audience, must therefore be the unfortunate Huguenots. Perhaps it was already clear enough from the music: the Overture, which starts unobtrusively a minute or so into the action, is based on the Lutheran chorale ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’, which of course becomes the signature tune of the Huguenots in the rest of the opera, and Dew's prologue plausibly mimes what is happening in the score, where the chorale grows progressively more agitated. In doing so, like all productions that colonise the music before curtain-up (and, even more, the stage before baton-down), it also advertises the interpretative zeal of the staging to come: this is not merely a performance in modern costume, it announces, but a self-consciously strong re-reading of the work—one would have expected nothing less from a production from the heyday of German Regietheater.Footnote ⁷

Considering that re-reading from the point of view of grand opéra magnificence, it seems unwontedly – even aggressively – drab. If it imposes itself as spectacle at all, it is in moral rather than aesthetic terms. For, while the costumes are more or less 1980s, most of the rest of the recognisable visual vocabulary is adapted from images of the Second World War, with the Huguenots’ badges looking in retrospect like the Star of David worn by Jews in Hitler's Germany, and, later in Act 1, the Catholic nobles being served drinks (during ‘Bonheur de la table’) not only by a pair of camp waiters but also by a group of young women dressed in high-heels, fishnet stockings, studded jackets and SS caps. This is a relatively colourful interlude – less Charlotte Rampling in ‘The Night Porter’, more ‘The Producers’Footnote ⁸ – but it subtracts little from the weightiness that representations of the Holocaust inevitably have, in Berlin surely as much as anywhere. In Act V, where the action chimes uncomfortably well with the superimposed visual references, underlining how depressingly little things had changed between the 1570s and the 1940s, Valentine is humiliated as a collaborator before being murdered: the Catholic thugs hang a hand-written sign around her neck that means something like ‘I'm the dirtiest pig around—I only do it with Huguenots!’.Footnote ⁹

By contrast, the visual aspect of Lotfi Mansouri's ‘Huguenots’ seems genteelly unchallenging: the acting is elegant and orderly, and the décor is rich, with elaborate, solid-looking sets and especially luxuriant costumes. The Catholic noblemen sport embroidered doublet and hose and pearl earrings, the Huguenots wear the traditional black, and Joan Sutherland, as Marguerite de Valois, dazzles in one splendid dress after another. The sets are tastefully naturalistic – literal but not slavishly so – and beautifully lit. Yet none of these mise-en-scène details seems calculated to amaze in true, historical grand opéra style; if the production aspires to magnificence, it is more in its textual expansiveness. More of the numbers Meyerbeer wrote for the opera are included here than in the Berlin performance, even if the Sydney one is only a quarter of an hour or so longer overall.Footnote ¹⁰ But it is above all through his choice of which numbers to include that Mansouri is able to get across such an impression of indulgence. It is an excess that is picturesque rather than cataclysmic, one to remind the viewer that an equally important part of the appeal of grand opéra was its incorporation of dance: the Act 3 ‘Danse bohémienne’ is retained almost in its entirety. Mansouri's unhurried reading of the opera even has space for the page's ‘Rondeau’ in Act 2, ‘Non, vous n'avez jamais je gage’, which was not part of the original libretto and is usually cut because it is (at least dramatically) completely superfluous.Footnote ¹¹

Dew, on the other hand, doesn't just make cuts, he undertakes quite a radical reshaping of the material, excising entire scene-complexes and creating a work of very different proportions and emphasis. Far from keeping the divertissement, he prunes Act 3 right back, lopping off the Valentine–Marcel duet, the duel, the entrance of the Queen and both appearances of the wedding party. Drastic though it is, this slimming-down is little different from nineteenth-century practice, when danced interludes were often jettisoned and some grands opéras regularly given only as torsos, in combination with independent ballets or with each other.Footnote ¹² But Dew goes still further. His ‘performing edition’ of the libretto is not only a translation (after Ignatz Franz Castelli),Footnote ¹³ it is also in places a transformation, in more than the usual sense of re-envisioning or conceptually updating: in places the text of the libretto has been moulded to the stage action rather than the other way around. The Introduction, already mentioned, is no longer the classic hymn to hedonism of Scribe's libretto, but a bigoted rant about the brutal lesson the Catholics are going to teach the Huguenots. The couplets of the two Bohemians (who look like holiday-camp animateuses) are changed from a distraction from the conflict to a commentary on it, and the announcement of the curfew becomes an attempt at reconciliation by one of the Catholics, predictably short-lived. Even this kind of intervention, however, would have been familiar to, perhaps almost expected by, Meyerbeer: within a few years of its first performance, Les Huguenots began to be given outside France in censored versions, with various different stories – ‘Die Anglikaner und Puritaner, I Guelfi e i Ghibellini, Renato di Croenwald, and so onFootnote ¹⁴ – superimposed on what was, after all, still a potentially inflammatory episode from the real historical past. In some ways Dew's retelling remains comfortably within that tradition.

In any case, none of this comparing of versions, historical or contemporary, is to suggest that a performance of Les Huguenots might be more or less effective at putting the grand back into grand opéra by virtue of resembling the premiere or any other individual performance. Indeed, for questions of musical-textual continuity to impinge at all on how these DVDs continue to be received, there would probably have to be a great deal more continuity of performance tradition of the work than there currently is, recent comebacks notwithstanding. What's more, if Meyerbeer's opera may not now exist as a coherent enough entity in the mind of its potential audience for even radical alterations to libretto or score to matter much, to some extent it never did: composers always seemed to write far too much music for these prestigious Opéra commissions, and the ensuing flurry of cuts over final rehearsals and first performances never failed to generate alternative versions, potential or actual.Footnote ¹⁵ More to the point, the sets, costumes and stage effects of 1836, even if they could be reproduced in all their bank-breaking glory, would be unlikely to inspire the same kind of awe nowadays.

This is not, or only partly, because we are used to higher standards of technological illusion. Even updated, their effect on audiences would be different. Rather, the magnificence of the really successful grands opéras derived above all from being part of the magnificence of the Opéra itself, to an extent unmatched by any works before or since.Footnote ¹⁶ According to a particular, perhaps unique canonic discourse, one that depended on a mutual shoring-up of status, Les Huguenots (along with only a handful of similar works) was deemed not only to meet but fully embody the standard appropriate to the ‘first national stage’, and hence became de rigueur for those who wanted to be part of a (in some ways the) national institution. Because the latter were numerous, and because opera-going was a weekly (potentially even twice- or three-times weekly) activity, demand was high, which in turn further enhanced the special status of the work.

This specifically nineteenth-century Parisian sense of opera as participation – essentially in nation-building, a sense for which the usual French word, assister, seems perfectly suited – goes beyond even the most radically event-centred views of music history. In today's international world of opera production, even the great old houses of the capital cities of Europe are no longer national artistic institutions to quite the same extent. If there is a modern equivalent in France, it is cinema: by the 1990s, the lengthy, big-budget costume dramas flying the flag for France (and accordingly benefiting from hefty state subsidies) were films rather than operas.Footnote ¹⁷ Around the same time as the performances preserved on these DVDs were being recorded, Patrice Chéreau was beginning to make La Reine Margot, which tells a story closely related to that of Les Huguenots. After its release in 1994, the film was criticised for being incoherent but nonetheless adored for its visual beauty, just as grand opéra had always been; again like a grand opéra, its production (featuring the then leading lady of French cinema, Isabelle Adjani) had been a national event for years before it opened.Footnote ¹⁸ To be sure, reviewers of La Reine Margot often used the word ‘operatic’ to describe its visual opulence, especially in the crowd scenes – yet only occasionally were they referring to his experience as a director of the lyric stage, and never, ironically, to Meyerbeer's opera.Footnote ¹⁹

In purely visual terms it would indeed be difficult for a DVD of a stage production of Les Huguenots to compete with Adjani and co., filmed on location in some of the most beautiful places around France and Europe, supported by a cast of thousands in arty (or graphic, depending on one's point of view) scenes of historically documented sex and violence.Footnote ²⁰ And the same ought to be even more true on the institutional level, one would think, especially given that the DVDs in question were made far from Paris, in Berlin and Sydney respectively, a century after grand opéra began to drop out of the repertory. But what makes these discs interesting as modern instantiations of grand opéra – what makes up for their not being in every respect properly magnificent – is that each represents precisely an appeal to the genre's historical susceptibility to reflecting and articulating the institutional, to contributing to the national discourse. Dew's production does so through grand opéra's ancestral function as vehicle for political commentary: premiered in the German capital two years before the dismantling of the wall, the staging plays heavily on the physical ambience of the divided city.Footnote ²¹ What begins as a crack in the building at the back of the stage in Act 3 opens into a blood-red wound in the edifice for Act 4; in Act 5 a wall runs diagonally through it across the stage, and it is against this icon of twentieth-century Berlin that the Huguenots are executed. Just as Meyerbeer's original Parisian audiences were acutely conscious that the St Bartholomew's day massacre was a Parisian event, albeit from more than 250 years earlier, Dew's will not have been able to avoid meditating on the consequences of ideological conflict right on their doorstep – in this case, rather than a cliché of Regietheater, the various references to totalitarianism were doubly to the point. Equally, watching the DVD, it's impossible not to reflect that the performance in question was recorded two years after the wall came down – that is, once much of the euphoria had ebbed away to reveal the distance still separating East and West.

The DVD of the Sydney production, though it has none of these baleful resonances, is just as institutional, just as national-political, even: it shows Joan Sutherland's farewell performance, clearly an emotional one for cast and audience (not forgetting her husband, Richard Bonynge, who is conducting). The mountains of flowers and streamers, and the lengthy applause and presentations (which go on for fully half an hour after the opera is over), represent what was a fittingly appreciative send-off for a singer whose international career had spanned four decades, and, just as much, a swell of national pride: Sutherland is described in the speeches as not only famous, but a famous Australian; her encore is ‘There's no place like home’. No doubt at the back of everyone's mind (not least Dame Joan's) were the so-called ‘Nights of the Seven Stars’, legendary performances of the opera at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in the 1880s and 1890s, many featuring that other great Australian Marguerite de Valois, Nellie Melba.Footnote ²² Now that la stupenda has also taken her place in operatic history, it's a sentimental spectacle as well as a historical one.

In purely vocal terms neither of these two recordings is quite as magnificent as those preserved in Met legend: both the pages do well, Amanda Thane's Valentine is rich, Richard Leech's Raoul is passionate (if a bit too Italianate in ‘Plus blanche que la blanche hermine’), and John Wegner's Saint-Bris is convincingly stern, but the rest of the principals fail to impress. Some, particularly in the Berlin production, sound stretched. Sutherland herself is properly regal, but, at almost sixty-four years old, not as on top of the role as when she recorded it for LP in 1962 and 1970.Footnote ²³ If there is a clear distinction to be made, it is between the two choruses, especially the Catholic aristocrats: in Sydney they sound enthusiastic and full of verve, in Berlin from time to time somewhat ragged (they are, after all, rough and ready storm troopers rather than noblemen). But, as outlined here, these DVDs exhibit other kinds of magnificence. And if neither is quite epoch-making, each also has its own, different, historical interest.