A sprawling opera that made me weep
Michael White reviews two brilliant but unruly works
4 July 2008

The bottom drawer of music history is full of pieces that officially "don't work" and therefore don't get performed but still manage to be wonderful scores whose very unobtainability gives them cult status. And the past couple of weeks have brought two examples of this flawed but fabulous hidden-treasure genre to London stages.

The first was Vaughan Williams's extraordinary Pilgrim's Progress: an epic setting of John Bunyan's fable of the journey of the Christian soul through life to death that occupied the composer for some 40 years and was, at his own insistence, an "opera" for the theatre - although modern judgment is that it's more properly a pageant for a church, should any have the resources to stage a piece with 41 solo roles and full orchestral accompaniment.

VW himself was a devout and principled agnostic who made a token attempt to sidestep Bunyan's spiritual allegiance by calling his central character Pilgrim rather than Christian; and this, no doubt, was one reason why he was so keen for the piece to play in secular rather than religious circumstances. But the fact remains that its rambling narrative has never succeeded as conventional theatre. It works, if at all, on its own maverick terms, to which the audience surrenders (or not).

The one thing I can say, as someone who happily surrenders to VW's Pilgrim given the chance, is that it's provided several of the most powerful music experiences of my life. And this semi-staging at Sadler's Wells, conducted by Richard Hickox, directed by David Edwards, performed by the Philharmonica Orchestra and a superb cast of Hickox regulars, was one more.

It's something that no critic should be proud of, but I wept throughout the second act. And if you ask me why, it was partly because the whole thing was done with such utter conviction - especially from Hickox, who's been championing Pilgrim for years, and from the baritone Roderick Williams who was nothing less than magnificent in the title role.

But it was also, I think, because the piece communicates something I can only describe as visceral goodness. Great artists are rarely great human beings, but I believe VW to have been a good man. And I believe that in some way, more the province of metaphysics than art, his music speaks it - at the deepest gut-level, and never more inexplicably than in Pilgrim which, for all its flaws, its awkwardness, its failure to deliver one of the truly great VW tunes, and its open invitation to hokey staging with characters like 2nd Shining One and 3rd Heavenly Being, comes loaded with the very DNA of the composer. And it hits your heart like a bullet.

Leonard Bernstein's operetta Candide doesn't have that calibre or firing power, but it is another of those near-misses that graze the target of genius - choked with wisdom, wit and death-defying tunes, and far too clever for its own good, which is why, ever since it premiered in 1956, it's had endless rewrites / adaptations / reinventions to make it work.

None of them quite do. But the reinvention now playing at the ENO is the best I've seen: a staging by Canadian director Robert Carsen that doesn't solve the incoherence of the second act (where Bernstein's pen runs away with itself) but otherwise leaves you gasping with the sheer virtuosity of its showmanship.

The big idea behind this show is that, although the piece sets Voltaire's famous story of a young innocent buffeted into the realisation that life is neither good nor bad but riddled with compromise, it was intended by Bernstein as a veiled indictment of the smug self-righteousness of McCarthyite America in the 1950s. So what Carsen does is strip away the veil.

Voltaire's imagined land Westphalia becomes West Failure: a paradigm of America in all its arrogance and awfulness from the 1950s to the present day. And the events of Candide's journey to wisdom become events of modern history - played-out in cathode ray colours on a set designed like an enormous television screen.

American apologists may find this heavy-handed, but it isn't: Carsen's touch is playful, sharp. His storytelling gets confused in act two but that's surrendering to the inevitable (see above). And he's assembled an extraordinary cast that sells the show like a true company of stars.

Toby Spence was born to play Candide and does it with heart-breaking charm. Anna Christy plays the worldly Cunégonde like something out of Desperate Housewives, tossing off her dog-pitch coloratura with off-the-shoulder venom. And Alex Jennings is so accomplished in the multiple roles of Voltaire / Pangloss I don't know whether to call him a singing-actor or acting-singer. Either way, he's a class act. And for him alone it's worth clearing your diary to see this show before its absurdly short run ends on July 12.