After 350 Years, Paris Still Defines Opera

PARIS — The Opéra National de Paris has begun to celebrate its 350th anniversary. Let it sink in: 350.

Opera as an art form may be a few decades older than that, but no other modern company can trace its history nearly so far. Around the world it’s often referred to simply as the Opéra, as if it remains the very definition of the genre.

Its big birthday is starting not with nostalgia, but with two attempts to view past glories of French culture, the storied “patrimoine,” in a contemporary — even futuristic — light. And glories they once were: While Meyerbeer’s “Les Huguenots,” which opened Friday and runs through Oct. 24, has not been performed by the Opéra since 1936, it was quite possibly the most popular music drama of the 19th century. Blazing worldwide after opening here in 1836, it was the first title to be put on by this company 1,000 times.

“Bérénice,” a new work by Swiss composer Michael Jarrell that had its premiere Saturday and continues through Oct. 17, is based on Racine’s tragedy, written the year after the Opéra was founded, in 1669. (Louis XIV called it the Académie d’Opéra then, but it was soon renamed the Académie Royale de Musique, which is still emblazoned on the smaller of the company’s two theaters: the ornate, late-19th-century Palais Garnier.)

Racine’s play was largely ignored between the 17th and 20th centuries; “Les Huguenots,” like Meyerbeer’s other once-blockbuster grand operas, also more or less disappeared from the repertoire. The Opéra is sending a message with this high-profile pairing, perhaps one about opera in general: Great art, and great art forms, may have ups and downs in popularity, but quality is quality, recognizable in 1670, 1836 or 2018.

To see “Les Huguenots” today is to both understand Meyerbeer’s long eclipse and disbelieve it — and to root heartily for his current renaissance. He plays a sometimes agonizingly patient game, painstakingly building tension that explodes only toward the end of a substantial evening. (This Paris production makes significant cuts and still has nearly four hours of music.)

A story of unsettled romance at an unsettled time — August 1572, with tensions between French Catholics and Protestants, or Huguenots, ready to boil over — “Les Huguenots” takes its time establishing its characters and the way religious turmoil has infected their lives and relations. But conductor Michele Mariotti propels this often ferocious music forward; even passages of splendid dignity had an anxiously driven undercurrent that caught Meyerbeer’s unpredictable harmonic swerves. You hear in the score many later operas, particularly Verdi’s. Meyerbeer’s juxtaposition of private melancholy and sprawling historical canvas looks to “Don Carlos” and “Otello”; his blend of melodrama and courtly wit returns in “Un Ballo in Maschera.” His ingeniously complex choruses, demanding quicksilver singing and acute acting, anticipate “Rigoletto” and “Les Vêpres Siciliennes.” (The Opéra’s chorus, led by José Luis Basso, is superbly eloquent.)

And the aching, ruminative Act 4 duet for Raoul and Valentine, two not-quite-lovers trapped in a web of historical tragedy, clearly influenced the aching, ruminative duet for Carlos and Élisabeth, two not-quite-lovers trapped in a web of historical tragedy in “Don Carlos,” which had its premiere at the Opéra in 1867. Meyerbeerian majesty had an indelible impact on Berlioz and Wagner, who eagerly accepted the older master’s support before later disavowing him in bitter, anti-Semitic rants.

Meyerbeer’s characters can struggle to come to life; you sense that the interplay of social groups, embodied in intensely dueling choirs, most intrigued him. But passionate singers make these figures breathe. Here in Paris, the fiery soprano Ermonela Jaho was sensationally conflicted as Valentine, a Catholic nobleman’s daughter; soprano Lisette Oropesa sounded lucid and silky, radiating good intentions, as Marguerite de Valois, the queen-to-be who attempts to calm the internecine brutality.

The mezzo-soprano Karine Deshayes sang with dazzling fullness as the sprightly page Urbain. And the hint of strain in the upper reaches of Yosep Kang’s tenor actually made his portrayal of Raoul, a lovesick Protestant, more persuasive.

The director Andreas Kriegenburg sets the work in a late 21st century that’s simultaneously austere and decadent. Blindingly white contemporary-style sets (by Harald B. Thor) are filled with candy-colored Baroque costumes (by Tanja Hofmann). There’s something surreal about the staging’s aridity, a context of detachment that makes the work’s mounting emotional temperature feel extra unnerving.

It is perhaps irresistible to give the fifth-act St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre an aura of Nazi thuggery, and Kriegenburg obliges with armbands and severely side-parted hair for his Catholics. But even in this scene, there was a dreamlike sense of the attacks taking place out of time — or, more precisely, in any time.

Jarrell’s “Bérénice,” an elegantly poised union of theatrical classicism and musical modernism, also crossed periods. It’s meticulously crafted, with Racine’s precise alexandrine verse artfully relaxed in the libretto and resourcefully sung and acted by Barbara Hannigan, Bo Skovhus and Ivan Ludlow.

But the opera somehow ends up less than the sum of its parts, never objectionable and not quite memorable in its depiction of a tense love triangle — the Roman emperor Titus, his friend Antiochus, and Queen Bérénice, a foreigner — that exposes the gulf between sex and duty.

Jarrell, 59, is of the generation of European composers who grew up in a musical landscape dominated by Pierre Boulez and created work that largely — and often interchangeably — echoed his style. Cloudlike and smoky, the music of “Bérénice” whispers eerily, punctuating the clear, forceful vocal lines, which press the singers to the edges of their ranges, with eerie shadows and bronzed shimmers.

Catlike, the score whips into swift bursts of energy, then immediately, coyly recedes. Moment by moment, it’s stimulating, but as a whole — 90 minutes of four actlike “sequences” played without pause but connected by moody interludes — it feels repetitive, less cool than flat. Within an airy set, by Christian Schmidt, that evokes handsomely restrained French interiors of past and present, director Claus Guth maintains a general mood of calm stylization while exposing Racinian cool to more overt drama. (Antiochus, in one scene of frustration, throws himself repeatedly against the wall.)

A perfect leader for this paradoxical spectacle of restless serenity is conductor Philippe Jordan, the Opéra’s music director, through whom the score unfolds in a fluid exhalation, while also conveying a sense of analytical transparency and prickly detail.

In Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” running here through Oct. 9, Jordan — who comes to the Metropolitan Opera this season for the same composer’s “Ring” — also leads a performance of ardent clarity: a credit to a company that, at 350, is still youthful enough to play with its past.

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‘Les Huguenots’ continues through Oct. 24 at the Opéra Bastille, and ‘Bérénice’ through Oct. 17 at the Palais Garnier in Paris; operadeparis.fr.