<<  -- 6 --  Roderic Dunnett    UNALLOYED GENIUS

The Glyndebourne audience came quickly onboard, enchanted by the music and playing alike before either of the women had even sung a note. Weber avoids introducing his central female characters until a whole series of largely male scenes, just as he delays Agathe and Annchen's appearance in Freischütz : Moniuszko, possibly Weber-influenced, does the same, and to similar fine effect, for Hanna and Jadwiga in The Haunted Manor, Tchaikovsky (certainly Moniuszko-influenced) for Lisa and Pauline in The Queen of Spades, and Janácek something not wholly dissimilar in delaying the Kátya-Varvara scene in Kátya Kabanová.

Macfarlane's set changes (the massive, cumbrously revolving sets occasioned one unscheduled total stoppage) were right at the heart of the imagery. Not just for practical reasons, sometimes they are phased and faded gradually into the next. The most ominous example was the deliberately preemptive suggestion of the spiky Act III forest, which glowers onto the stage just before the close of Act II. Equally aptly, the scene at Emma's tomb, terrifyingly enacted, seems to anticipate the desolate outdoor feel of Act III.

White-clad, with a whitish, almost pasty face picked out by blood-red lipstick, Schwanewilms, with subtle movement and the graceful look of a mouldering Van Eyck, already appears like sacrificial victim even before she faces abandonment and death. 'Has innocence no voice?' her Euryanthe inquires, amid the impenetrable hubbub of male affront. No reply, because no-one can hear her. This Euryanthe is indeed a Desdemona, an Isabella, an Imogen; and the female librettist, von Chezy, Shakespeare and Schiller-imbued, by no means the incompetent textual seamstress she is normally, partly because of her poetic and social aspirations, dubbed as.

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