La Juive.(Concert notes)(Opera Review)

by the Vienna State Opera, Metropolitan Opera House, New York

Exemplified by the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer, French Grand Opera was among the dominant styles of the early nineteenth century. With the exception of Verdi's Don Carlos, however, the whole genre of Grand Opera has been out of favor since the beginning of the twentieth century. Productions of Grand Opera have been rare, and the few that have been staged have done little to revive the genre's reputation. A few years ago, for example, the Metropolitan Opera attempted a production of Meyerbeer's Le Prophete, but John Dexter's restricted presentation doomed it.

This season the Met has imported from the Vienna State Opera a production of Fromental Halevy's La Juive, one of the most famous examples of the form, which I heard on November 6. Although this too is far more austerely presented than what Grand Opera calls for, this Juive finds a measure of success, owing to the singing and the subject matter. As with all French examples of Grand Opera, however, the production can do little to overcome the innate weakness of the music. Halevy was an even less gifted composer than Meyerbeer, and the hours of his threadbare opera stretch long, despite the cuts the management has made in the work.

The tale is the product of Eugene Scribe, an assiduous workman who did much to define the form. As with most Grand Opera, the plot of La Juive is overtly sensationalist, revolving around love, hatred, and death, and delivering a Big Revelation at final curtain-fall. We are in Constance in 1414, celebrating the Catholic victory over the Hussites at a large church convocation. The Jewish jeweler Eleazar, who hates all Christians and is hated by them, is the protective father of Rachel. Despite her father's vigilance, Rachel falls in love with Leopold, the general who has defeated the Hussites. Unknown to Rachel, Leopold is married (in this production, with children) to Princesse Eudoxie, a niece of the Emperor. Meanwhile, Cardinal Brogny secretly searches for his long-lost daughter, the fate of whom is known only to Eleazar. Brogny's desperate desire to find his daughter is satisfied only at the end of the opera when Eleazar reveals that Rachel, who is to be executed for loving a Christian, is in fact Brogny's child (a shiksa, not a Jewess!), upon which revelation Eleazar goes to his own death.

Richard Wagner warned that French Grand Opera was a series of effects without causes, and the Met production (Gunter Kramer, director; Gottfried Pilz, designer) attempts to address this deficiency by staging La Juive in a vaguely modern setting, so suggesting parallels between the persecution of the opera's Jewish characters and that of European Jews during the 1930s and 1940s. We are no longer in historical Constance in 1414, but in an anonymous middle-European Durrenmatt-land where color is restricted to two ...