Delius: The Magic Fountain
National Opera House, Wexford
★★☆☆☆
Frederick Delius’s The Magic Fountain is by some margin the most neglected of this year’s main operas at Wexford Festival Opera. It was completed in 1895, first recorded before an invited audience by the BBC in London in 1977 (this was later issued on disc with some retakes), staged in Kiel in 1997, and produced by Scottish Opera in 1999.
Sadly, Wexford’s new production, directed by Christopher Luscombe, designed by Simon Higlett, choreographed by Amy Share Kissiov and conducted by Francesco Cilluffo, is unlikely to appeal to many beyond the already converted.
The story, set in the 16th century, is about a Spanish nobleman, Solano, who gets shipwrecked off the coast of Florida while in pursuit of gold and the fountain of eternal youth. He is the sole survivor from his ship, and after he is washed up, unconscious, he is cared for by an Indian princess, Watawa, whose tribe has been wiped out by white invaders. They fall in love, and she finds a way to take him to the fountain he desires, knowing that its waters will poison him.
On the surface it might seem that the work’s biggest problem is the words of Delius’s own libretto. Here’s a sample: “Years ago when all my people / were destroyed by thine own race / I determined to revenge them / blood for blood. / So l planned that I would kill thee / brought thee here to take thy life / but each step my hatred lessen’d / ’twas in vain I raised my knife,/ duty, vengeance all forgotten / love, my treason, saved thy life.”
READ MORE
But there are many awkward and convoluted texts in operas that still hold the stage. Delius’s vocal lines simply meander in nondescript patterns that highlight the awkwardness of a kind of doggerel that suggests the composer thought that reordering the words in sentences was an infallible poetic tool.
The orchestral writing is lush in colouring and quite persuasive over short spans. The effect is not unlike a kind of sophisticated precursor of ambient music, with connectedness and a sense of direction sacrificed for the pleasures of the moment. On the opening night it doesn’t help that the playing of the Wexford Festival Orchestra under the generally sensitive Francesco Cilluffo is unusually off-colour.
The production begins well, with the depiction of the becalmed then storm-racked ship, but is altogether less successful once the action (such as it was) moves on to terra firma.
The singers cope mostly valiantly with what seems an impossible task. The American tenor Dominick Valdés Chenes’s pinched tone prevents his Solano from eliciting any sympathy. The South African baritone Kamohelo Tsotetsi commands attention as Chief Wapanacki, the man whose decisions steer the direction of the plot. But it’s the French mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel, an arresting presence as Watawa, who most persuasively holds the stage in the few moments that Delius gives her something to work with.
The Magic Fountain is at the National Opera House, as part of Wexford Festival Opera, on October 23rd, 25th and 31st
