The best way to spread Christmas cheer

This was commissioned by La Monnaie, either (depending on which article you read) at the suggestion of Ingmar Bergman’s son, or with his blessing. As usual with a new work, I’ll include something about the plot and something about the score, so this post will be relatively long. But if you know the film, you can skip the plot; if you’re mostly interested in singers, you can hop directly to them; and so on.

Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny och Alexander is apparently something of a national monument in Sweden. Though it’s a far cry from Home Alone and Elf, Swedish friends tell me it’s an indispensable feature of TV schedules there over Christmas. It’s also monumental in length: from about three to five hours, so I read, depending on the version. As it ‘lends itself to multiple readings’, as they say, it’s hard to sum up in a few words. Instead of trying, I asked ChatGPT to have a go, and the following is the result.

‘Fanny och Alexander is a semi-autobiographical drama by Ingmar Bergman that follows the lives of siblings Fanny and Alexander Ekdahl in early 20th-century Sweden. After their father’s sudden death, their mother, Emilie, marries the austere Bishop Edvard Vergérus, bringing them into a repressive and abusive household. Alexander’s vivid imagination clashes with the bishop’s strict authoritarianism, leading to a series of supernatural and dramatic events. The Ekdahls, a vibrant and loving theatrical family, ultimately rescue the children, restoring their freedom and creativity. The film explores themes of family, faith, art, and the intersection of the spiritual and the mundane.’

Condensing it into an opera – even an opera nearly three hours long – must have been quite a task, but I’ve yet seen no complaints about Vavrek’s libretto, even if it occasionally struck me as better suited to speech than singing. Ivo Van Hove’s production is visually strong and dramatically powerful: the best of his I’ve seen. His stage has mirrored sides, a screen across the back, and an occasional scrim. This makes it possible to alternate between infinite open spaces and the oppressive closeness of the Bishop’s house. Giant projections allow for some strikingly spectacular effects. The production opens with a small forest of firs on stage, expanded in video and reflection by more firs under gently falling snow. Grandmother Ekdhal wanders through the trees, singing dreamily, a cappella. Servants wheel in a table, two chandeliers descend above, the children set up their puppet theatre, and the stage is set for Christmas. Family members breeze in, laden with presents, though seasonal barbs soon crop up in the talk. They dance gaily round the ‘room’ with the staff and as entertainment, uncle Carl sets his farts alight, one of those intriguing bits of business where you wonder how it’s done.

The trees glide out, the video fades and as the chandeliers disappear, they are replaced by myriad, single-bulb industrial lights that sway gently but menacingly, all the while. The rehearsal space in the Ekdahls’s theatre is all black. When, after rehearsing Hamlet, Oscar, the kids’ father, dies, he’s laid out on a stark white cloth and swathed in black velvet brocade. This enshrouding is projected live, from a camera positioned above his chest, in gigantic close-up at the rear — one of those strikingly spectacular images I just mentioned. Another, later, is the grim face of Emilie’s sadistic second husband, Edvard (here, in fact, the grim face of Thomas Hampson) engulfed in flames as fire erupts magically from a table center-stage. I mention it now, because this equally gigantic vision of the Bishop’s death seems deliberately to recall Oscar’s, but a lot has happened in between.

Edvard’s house is spartan, dark and oppressive. It and everything in it, including everyone’s clothes, is a single shade of grey. The children are confined to a little, bare-bones house-within-the-house, and Alexander’s beating, for telling the tale of Edvard’s dead daughters (helped by projections of them looking something like Millais’s drowned Ophelia, but in smeary black and white) is vicious. After the children have been smuggled out, more projections, now colourfully variegated, kaleidoscopically conjure up the Jacobis’s magical old curiosity shop. This is the setting for Alexander’s ambiguous encounter with mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know Ismael, where he learns that fantasies – even fantasies of the bishop’s death – can come true. Cue Hampson’s head, aflame like a Christmas pudding.

At the end – I admit I’ve skipped a lot of carefully-directed detail – the family comes together again around the table, this time bearing christening presents. No Christmassy firs, but everything is bathed in golden light as Emilie inherits the theatre to put on Strindberg’s A Dream Play.

Van Hove’s directing throughout is, as I said, the best I’ve witnessed from him. Despite the complexity of the condensed work, the staging manages to stay simple and legible. It is visually coherent, neatly and niftily done (the servants position props with pinprick precision), convincing and engaging. The acting is well managed, evoking the family’s easy warmth and the tensions and stresses underlying it: the Bishop’s sanctimonious sadism, his housekeeper Justina’s strait-laced Lutheran strictness, Alexander’s multipolar, dreamy nature, and Ismael’s outright weirdness, all without excess. The production made, I’d say, a major contribution to the opera’s success with the public. My one reservation would be that Van Hove didn’t succeed in endowing each of the characters with a distinct personality; however, there are sixteen roles, some of them very brief. Bieito pulled it off in The Exterminating Angel, but he had Thomas Adès to help him.

Brief roles or not, having commissioned the piece and had it directed by a local hero, La Monnaie clearly decided to cast it proud. The voices were, however, amplified (perhaps to different degrees, or perhaps not; some, even amplified, remained barely audible, and at times I was glued to the supertitles). I’m not sure why. I’ve read it was so they could be heard over the electronics, but surely electronics can be turned up and down at will. Whatever; you had to peer closely at the stage to see who was singing, which was annoying, and some voices transcend (if that’s the word) the microphones better than others. Susan Bullock, whom I first saw as Elektra in the same house over 20 years ago, is now, at 66, the perfect grandmother figure, physically and vocally. Sasha Cooke, new to me, has a warm, expressive voice, and was one of the few, along with Bullock, given time to develop her character.

Alexander Sprague, also new to me, is a striking, powerful English tenor in the Robert Tear vein, one to look out for in future. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, whom I was hearing for the first time, was truly extraordinary, conjuring up the unsettling eeriness of James Bowman as Apollo in Death in Venice. Thomas Hampson and Ann Sofis von Otter remain instantly recognizable and as expressive as ever. It’s nice to see they’re still game for taking on brand-new works. Hampson’s familiar unctuousness suited the part, though it could have been played more menacingly, more violently even. In places his voice is now worn down to a thread, something amplification unfortunately makes more obvious. Von Otter was characteristically nuanced, her dynamic range unchanged, though of course her voice has matured and darkened.

I was glad to have a chance to hear US bass-baritone Justin Hopkins again, having been impressed by his firm, warm, chocolatey timbre and upright presence as one of the Gralritter in a concert Parsifal a couple of years back. Peter Tanstis’s voice was less compatible with the amplification, sounding boxy and congested, as if he had a cold. But I sympathized with his having to emote and agonise for minutes on end in that gigantic deathbed close-up. And finally, if I leave the title roles, Fanny and Alexander till last, it’s because, at least from where I was seated, they didn’t make much of a mark. In the opera, Fanny is practically non-existent; and while young Jay Weiner was an engaged and engaging actor, even amplified he was barely audible.

It’s hard to say how much control the conductor, Ariane Matiakh, wearing headphones to keep in step with the electronics, could have over the proceedings, but she kept things together, though it seemed to me La Monnaie’s orchestra struggled to play the complex, taxing score with precision.

Actually describing new music is always a challenge. You end up sounding like a wine blurb: ‘Perfumed nose with hints of deep, leesy yellow fruit, minerals, honeycomb, smoked meat and flowers, and Asian spices expanding in the glass.’ But here goes: Fanny and Alexander is scored for a full orchestra (with the help of an orchestrator, Michael P. Atkinson) and electronics. The hall is equipped for surround sound, as in a cinema, but the composer insists that the orchestra has priority, and the synthetic sounds are designed to blend seamlessly with it. In the program notes, he explains that the style of his music changes to fit the successive settings. We begin with something like Adams, chugging and chuntering along, embellished with a lot of string and wind fluttering and rippling that must be tiring to play. Modulations and harmonies sometimes recall the most magical moments in Nixon in China.

But this is not hardcore minimalism: at times you hear echoes of John Williams, even Canteloube. Early on, the piano evokes, intentionally or not, the ghost scenes in The Turn of the Screw; later it will hint at Messiaen’s birdsong. Karlsson likes deep, loud, sampled organ pedals. When the Bishop turns nasty, our thoughts turn to Verdi and his Grand Inquisitor. As the style changes to suit the scenes, the chugging gives way to airier, more lyrical writing, and when the electronics are given free range, we edge closer and closer to film scores, TV series, and eventually Disneyland. I personally found the prelude after the interval verged on Kitsch, and Emilie’s ensuing solo lamenting the fate of her children under the Bishop’s regime, which should be an emotional pinnacle in the score, fell flat. By the time we were all enveloped in ghostly electronic effects, as Ismael beguiled Alexander, I was switching off. The end, to me, sounded plain corny. The idea of changing styles as the story progressed may have seemed a good one, but ultimately, the score – never actually disagreeable to hear – came across as more episodic than organic, and merely illustrative, rather than proactively impelling the drama.

So – a good, chewy story, decent libretto, powerful production, strong cast, and (however ambivalent my own thoughts were) cheers at the end, a rarity in Brussels. Perhaps Karlsson’s immersive score really did live up to his aim of adapting opera to the experience and expectations of contemporary audiences. Other composers have made successful operas out of famous films. He was no doubt brave to have a stab at one variously described as Sweden’s greatest ever, the best film of the 80s, one of the cinema history’s top hundred, and so on. The question, to me, in fine, (and I was not alone in this, as interval chats confirmed), was whether his score really added anything to Bergman’s monument.

Those curious about this opera can hear it live over the radio this afternoon at 2:30 PM EST. It will also be available on La Monnaie’s website starting December 24.

Photos: Matthias Baus