As with the Perth Festival, so the Adelaide Festival (which is biennial rather than annual) generally likes to come with up an operatic blockbuster to generate excitement, indeed controversy if possible, as well as garner cultural capital. Ligeti’s Le grand macabre was famously described by its composer as an anti anti-opera, and, while one sees what he means, these days it can hardly be considered all that outré in the context of regular offerings of regietheater and 21st century works. It was premiered in the 1970s and revised in 1996. While there was some attempt to get South Australian tongues wagging, what might once have been considered offensive or daring is now greeted with a knowing laugh. One Adelaide citizen was impelled to write to the Weekend Australian (a national broadsheet) describing it as a “gruesome farce”, but that person was working round to a political analogy.

This is the first time Ligeti’s only opera (or “opera” as he designates it) has been performed in Australia, but anyone with an eye on the international music press would be well aware of this particular production, which has already been performed in London, Brussels, and Rome. The Adelaide version seems pretty similar, and has some of the same cast members and conductor as the European performances, but the casting includes some local singers, along with the State Opera Chorus and Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. It is a production well worth being touted around the world like this, and I am glad to have seen it so close to home, but one does also wonder why we couldn’t have had something more home grown or, at least, less exposed.

The inspiration for the opera lay in Ligeti’s encounter with paintings by Breugel, and indeed the action, based on a play by Flemish playwright Michel de Ghelderode, takes place somewhere called Breughelland. It is essentially an eschatological work with, particularly in this production, scatological overtones - a not uncommon combination in the 16th century and earlier. While it is sometimes described as being little more than a series of entertaining tableaux, there is a clear (if perhaps unlikely) narrative thread, concerning the encounter of Piet the Pot, a drunken everyman, with a grim reaper figure named Nekrotsar who is heralding the end of the world, and a series of other more or less grotesque characters along the way. There is also a cheering if somewhat simplistic moral, along the lines of carpe diem. The characters realize at the end that, despite believing otherwise, the world has not ended - they can’t be dead because they are thirsty (although of course a metaphysical twist might suggest that they are deluded about the nature of death.

The production is the work of Catalan collective La Fura dels Baus, represented in Adelaide by directors Alex Ollé and Valentina Carrasco. Before beginning, a black drop curtain with a fluorescent green skull and cross bones in a triangle projected on it greeted the auditorium. The work began with the now famous car horn prelude, and the curtain rose to reveal a scrim with a video projection. This presented a vista of junk food with a substantial woman partaking thereof; she appears to then suffer something like a heart attack, and the scrim rises so that the image appears to transform itself into a large fibreglass sculpture of a naked woman on all fours, her contorted face turned to the auditorium. This was brilliantly managed, and the sculpture dominates the rest of the staging, with occasionally flashing eyes, moveable tongue and removable nipples. At different times, figures come and go from her various orifices; a substantial portion of the second half (the work was performed with scenes 1 and 2 before an interval, scenes 3 and 4 after it) has her rear end towards the audience. At one point it resembles particularly the broken figure in the right side panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

Various scenes are projected onto this sculpture, and while many of them have obvious reference to scenes from Breughel, Bosch is just as frequently invoked. Perhaps the most stunning effect is at the end of scene 2, when the two lovers Amanda and Amando announce they will be loving and loved “until we are dead”: the sculpture is transformed by projection into a giant revolving human skeleton. Memento mori, indeed. Towards the end, in another excellent trompe l’oeil effect, the fraudulent, or delusional, or just ineffective, Nekrotsar appears to shrink to half his size. The evening concludes with a return of the woman in the film; we see only her face, again apparently undergoing agonies, and then she pulls the chain. OK, but a bit unnecessary.

The costuming, courtesy of Franc Aleu, is in the range of the predictably bizarre, Piet being outfitted as some sort of elevated working man in dull gold bodywarmer over a singlet with grubby trousers with plastic strips around the bottom, while Nekrotsar has a grey suit with crenellations like a naked brain. The lovers (described by Ligeti as wearing Botticellian vraiment) at first glance appeared to be dressed in fetching pink outfits but it became apparent they were in fact representing flayed bodies, with revealed muscles and tendons. Mescalina the dominatrix appeared to be almost naked under gauze, but it seems she was wearing some sort of unflattering drooping-breasted bodysuit. Her subordinate cross-dressing partner, Astradamors, had a female swimsuit and thigh-high boots. At the risk of sounding like an archetypal humourless feminist, I detected a note of misogyny in their characterization. Prince GoGo was respendent in a gold suit, and either Brian Asawa has been seriously taking advantage of the southern sun, or he was wearing very dark makeup. His two ministers, “White” and “Black” were dressed, and made up, in red and blue, a clever way of indicating that differences between groups of people can be completely arbitrary.

This is in some ways not an easy work to write about; many of opera’s traditional trappings or cue points are simply irrelevant. Some critics seem quite cross about the lack of emotional core, but then again this is absurdist theatre, perhaps to some extent theatre of alienation. There is no romantic involvement, no characters with whom to empathise. There are no arias per se, no call for legato, no long flowing lines. Musically, however, Le grand macabre is no walk in the park. While Ligeti’s idiom is one most followers of modern music and, one hopes, all but the most diehard traditional opera goers, would by now be comfortable with, it certainly presents challenges to the musicians and not least the singers. As well as the playful (the car horn preludes), the various allusions (Beethoven, Bizet, Offenbach, the Beatles), the jazzy and the atonal, there are moments of simple loveliness, as in the celebrated Passacaglia at the end. Conductor Robert Houssart clearly knows the work inside out, and maneuvered the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra nimbly through its thickets.

The Festival Theatre used to have diabolical acoustics. For the Adelaide Ring of 2004, some sort of electronic sound enhancement system was introduced, about which the management has always been a little cagy. During and after that heroic event, the acoustics have been vastly improved, with the proviso that it depends where you sit. Near the front downstairs is excellent. At the back of the stalls, beneath the underhang, the system seems to enhance the audience noises as much as what’s emanating from the stage. From the upper level circle (where your critic was on this occasion), there is no problem hearing, but sometimes soloists’s voices sound somewhat disembodied. Bearing that in mind, the singers turned in an outstanding ensemble performance. Piet the Pot was sung by celebrated American Rossini and 20th century singer Chris Merrit, who has also sung the role in Brussels. He can hardly be in the first flush of his youth, but his stamina was remarkable, and to the end produced lots of clean ringing tenor tone to accompany his entertaining drunken characterisation. Roderick Earle was a suitably firm and resonant Nekrotsar, essaying a decent falsetto at one point. The work was sung in English, as Ligeti apparently came to prefer; a rather distracting accent was sported by Ning Liang as Mescalina, but otherwise her piercing soprano was right on the money, if occasionally a little shrill. Norwegian bass Frode Olsen, also a veteran of European performances as Astradamors sang robustly, if at times his accent too was a little noticeable. Susanna Andersson, Swedish soprano who sang the dual role of Venus and Gepopo for the ENO as well as Adelaide, was outstanding, with clear shining tone and immaculate accuracy. While floating around dressed in pink as Venus was probably more physically demanding, the obverse role as chief of security police must be extremely vocally challenging, the singer having to emit strange staccato consonantal syllables as well as sing across a varied tessitura, not to mention bopping around the stage like a demented puppy.

Brian Asawa is undoubtedly better known, certainly in Australia, as a baroque specialist, but he also shone as Prince GoGo, his clarion countertenor projected out clearly. He even tried his hand at an Australian accent, certainly no worse than Meryl Streep’s. Local lads Adam Goodburn and Christopher Tonkin had a great turn as the White and Black Ministers, not only maintaining good voice while delivering an alphabet of vulgar abuse, but also performing with great choreographic skill. The two lovers who bookend the opera were sung with gorgeous blending tones by Annie Vavrille and Ilse Eerens.

Was anyone shocked, offended? I very much doubt it. Applause was unstinting. While controversy was not really an issue, there is no doubt that this was a work of stunning theatricality and a huge success for the Adelaide Festival.

Sandra Bowdler
Opera Britannia