<<  -- 5 --  Roderic Dunnett    UNALLOYED GENIUS

Pavlo Hunka's Lysiart, hobbling ominously as he enters, and grimly isolated by the front proscenium (he and Adolar sizing each other up on either side frontstage), is a remarkable presence. Lysiart's features are a melting pot of emotion : eyes, nose, lips, jaw are constantly on the move, engaging in one surly or furtive look after another. Piled high with crimson and white flowers by the youthful Euryanthe, who seems to be taunting him mercilessly, his face is the very picture of unnerved confusion.

Hunka's villain seems doubly isolated : from his fellows; and from hope : his passion for Euryanthe is believable : Lysiart is not a no-hoper, as Kaspar is often portrayed, but a serious contender for love as well as lands. When Lysiart's dilemma emerges in Hunka's superbly delivered, psychologically torn, four-section operatic scena which begins Act II, the visual gamut of emotions becomes a musical one : this scene, along with Kaspar's invocation, is one of the most impressive bits of sustained operatic writing by any composer since Handel; Weber presages not just Wagner, but Verdi too.

'Rocks fall on me, fool that I was', Lysiart curses; sings; Hunka's twitching fingers echo the spikes of the set, stabbing and jabbing like the fatal knife with which he will polish off not happily Euryanthe but the thoroughly deserving Ortrud figure, Eglantine. 'Ganz ist die Wahrheit, ganz Natur, ganz Natur', he gloomily intones, and this was superb -- the repetition seeming to spell the onset of a black madness. 'Sie liebt ihn, ich muß untergehen' is a terrifying admission, for Lysiart will 'untergehen' in many ways -- yield the girl, crash to an emotional void, stoop to the Kasperian practices of the black abyss, and ultimately lose his life.

Lysiart's vengeful conclusion, towards the close of the scena, is that all he holds beautiful must be 'zerstört' -- destroyed. One is reminded, chillingly, of the terrifying word 'zerrissen' (meaning much the same -- the casting down of idols) in Bach's cantatas. Lysiart is a great role, a figure of truly Verdian stature, done right -- as it was, unmistakably, here. His duet with Flanagan's Eglantine (like her fingers-on-lips circling of her young rival) was wonderfully nasty; but listen to it closely, and I do believe it's a dark parody of the 'good' music of Euryanthe and Adolar. There's a whole cellarful of nuance going on in this score beneath the surface.

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