Medea in Madrid misses the mark

Madrid is going mad about Medea. Two Medeas. Cherubini’s Medea premiered in Paris in 1797. Yes, even in the dark days of the revolution’s Directory there was time for opera.  And Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Medea, first performed in Paris in 1693, when the rays of the Sun King still shone brightly.

The Charpentier is scheduled for the Teatro Royal in June 2024, in a semi-staged version conducted by the superb William Christie, founder of baroque ensemble, Les Arts Florissants. Medea in any version is a rarity. Charpentier’s version is sighted as rarely as black panthers in Buckinghamshire. Well, maybe not so often. The last reliable UK sighting was at the ENO’s Coliseum in 2013.

I took in the Cherubini opera at Teatro Real on Wednesday. Nutshell review. He is the musical bridge between the classical and romantic worlds. Mozart to Verdi. The performance was musically brilliant under the experienced baton of Ivor Bolton.

Sadly, also dramatically incoherent under the direction of Spanish director Paco Azorin. Medea, soprano Saioa Hernández, was rubbish, too. There you go.

One reason the work is not staged often is the need to find a soprano of the weeping/belter/drama queen tradition to pull it off. Cherubini’s score is a soprano’s torture chamber. In the 1950’s Maria Callas made the role her own, and probably ruined her voice prematurely from giving it laldy too often. The range, vocal gymnastics and constant full-on volume put huge demands on the vocal chords.

The challenge is so taxing that Teatro Real has scheduled no fewer than three sopranos to cover the eleven performances. I saw Spanish soprano Saioa Hernández, who, sadly, crashed and burned. Yes, yes, I know Medea always crashes and burns. That’s the plot.

But, how can I put it charitably, in taking on one of the most vibrant, terrifying, intimidating roles in the repertory, Hernández turned out to be a dull, deadpan disaster. With a mediocre voice that teetered towards occasional shouting. And as they used to say at the ruthless Glasgow Alhambra – “Couldn’t act for toffee.”

Cherubini’s Medea is a divisive opera. Too bloodthirsty for some. Goes with Euripides’ territory. Get over it. I shall assume the plot of the original play is familiar. Here is the essence of the opera version.

Act I – Creon’s Palace, Corinth

Dirce, princess of Corinth, is preparing for her wedding to the hero Jason. Yet when she should be filled with joy, her emotion is fear: For years, Jason has been married to the sorceress, Medea, the mother of his two children. Jason claims he had been under a spell. Oh, yeah?

Dirce knows Medea and Jason have a long and complicated history—the sorceress used her magic to help him steal the Golden Fleece, murdered her own brother and Jason’s uncle in her efforts to help him regain his throne, and ultimately accompanied him into exile in Corinth.

For the record, the BBC has never engaged either of these characters as comedians on Radio 2. Aware of this previous, Dirce worries that Medea, still in love with Jason, may do something to stop the wedding. Jason promises Dirce that the spell is broken, protests he no longer has any interest in Medea, and preparations for the wedding feast begin.

The celebrations are interrupted when Medea is found outside the castle and demands Jason return to her. Jason rejects Medea’s pleas, saying that now he is no longer spellbound, he has chosen Dirce. Medea, enraged, curses Jason, calling on the gods of Olympus to help her take revenge.

Act II – A wing of Creonte’s Palace

Medea is still burning with fury over Jason’s betrayal. Concerned by Medea’s obvious distress, her loyal companion, Neris, suggests that she leave Corinth. King Creonte arrives. He, too, demands Medea leave the city. Medea pleads with Creonte to be allowed “just one more day” with her children. When Creonte agrees, she seems to calm down, and she even orders Neris to deliver a gown and diadem as presents to the bride-to-be. As the wedding procession passes by, however, Medea expresses cruel wishes for the newlyweds and casts evil spells.

Medea is to Dirce as Putin was to Alexander Litvinenko. Diadem and gown are laced with fatal poison. Amazing to think that Putin was inspired by Euripides.

Act III

Medea greets her two children. A dark storm appears in the sky. Suddenly, cries of lamentation are heard from the palace: Medea’s presents have taken their toll and Dirce is dead. As an outraged crowd assembles, Medea, her children, and Neris escape and hide in a nearby temple. Now Medea, who has been equivocating over the fate of the children, has something even worse in store. 

When Medea and Neris finally emerge from the temple, the sorceress is holding a bloody knife. Thinking only of hurting Jason as much as possible, she has murdered her own kids – a son and daughter in this version. More usually, two sons. Jason, realizing what has happened, collapses in grief.

Medea delivers a final curse, sets the temple on fire, and exits. She should vanish into thin air, but not tonight. Thunder roars and lightning flashes through the sky as the terrified crowd flees the blazing temple.

The dramatic success of Medea depends on; building the tension between Medea and Jason, revealing Jason’s still equivocal relationship with his wife; highlighting the doubts that Dirce harbours about Jason’s relationship with Medea; unlayering the weakness of Creonte in allowing the sorceress “one more day” so she can have access to the children; and, most importantly, dramatising the tempestuous mood change of Medea in Act III as she oscillates between sparing the children and murdering them.

Azorin’s production creates no tension and was confused by dividing the action temporally between the era of classical legend and the present day. The overture saw a mute play of Jason in traditional Corinthian helmet, fuzzy plume and all, wedding Medea, oddly, while the two children, wearing traditional fustian clothes, played with wooden horses nearby. Something wrong with the timeline.

Curtain up and we were…well, where now, exactly? A large lift shaft reached up from stage to the flies. Soldiers in modern combat uniform swarmed, unpacking the Golden Fleece from an ammo box marked “Fragile”, Creonte was kitted out in a white uniform better suited to a Gilbert and Sullivan admiral and Jason wore a snazzy Victorian suit that made him look like Sherlock Holmes.

And how did the most villainous sorceress of all time dress to kill? Medea was got up in a shiny black tuxedo and white shirt. More the local Maitresse D’ bearing tapas. Donning Gucci sunshades in Act III and sitting silently on a chair did not make her more sorcery-ish.

Bizarrely, she first appeared, her girth contained in an ammo belt rather than a cummerbund. Dumped the bullets quickly. She scared the socks off no-one. Throughout, Hernández persisted in singing directly to the audience and her emotional Richter scale rarely flickered. This was fatally bad direction from Azorin.

A large stage-wide white screen descended and ascended as the mood took it, from time to time, bearing bien pensant messages about child abuse and various unobserved global protocols to stamp it out. I was waiting for Medea to announce she was postponing her net zero children target.

Medea was surrounded by demons, and mute sorcerer companions from her underworld who gyrated, tumbled and somersaulted skilfully, but added little to the drama.

The children now appeared as troubled, punk prepubescent horrors. All leather jackets, backwards baseball caps and tattoos. The boy resembled Prince Harry. They behaved so badly that for a – just fleeting – moment it was possible to wonder if Medea had a point. That said, as a constant presence onstage Carla Rodriguez Martinez and Ismail Palacios, the two troublemakers, were true stars in the making. They acted their socks off.

For some reason Azorin had largely written personal confrontation out of the action. Maybe there was an emotional intimacy coach lurking offstage. Medea and Jason sang at each other mostly from a distance. Sardinian tenor, Francesco Demuro, Jason, had a fine tenor voice, but came across as a bit of a wally, bending to the whims of Dirce and Medea rather than a heroic inspiration to his Argonauts.

Spanish soprano Marina Monzó, is my shout-out of the evening as Dirce. Cherubini gave her a powerful Act III emotional aria and she pulled it off, technically and emotionally. Hers was the most convincing stage presence.

It is a hell of a role. Loyal to her mistress, no matter how deranged, she struggles to save the children, yet stays by Medea’s side when they are murdered, and the house comes tumbling down. Boris Johnson’s No. 10 special advisers probably shared her sort of pain. 

Scottish bass baritone, Michael Mofidian was a handily voiced Creonte, but again poor direction, especially at the moment when he caves to Medea’s plea for “one more day”, gave a sense of disengagement. And another gripe. In Azorin’s staging Creonte simply walked off. Usually, he is portrayed as being slain with Dirce. Here Dirce disappeared in a cloud of poison gas on a gallery high above the stage, which was bad enough. Difficult to spot amidst the action below.

Comparisons may be odious, but this one is apposite. Medea opened the New York Metropolitan Season in fall 2022, a controversial, dark David McVicar blood fest. It was direct, uncompromising, uncluttered with temporal tricks, and terrifying. Sondra Radvanovsky delivered a sinuous, snake-like, snarling bundle of evil. This was how to do Medea. Boy, did that scare the bejeesus out of the audience. 

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