FROM AROUND THE WORLD: LONDON.(Review)

The seventy-fifth birthday of Hans Werner Henze was marked by the Royal Opera with a new production by Nikolaus Lehnhoff of Boulevard Solitude (March 20), an early work in the German composer's canon and his first full-length score. Given a successful premiere in Hannover in 1952, it has maintained at least a peripheral position in the European repertory ever since, though this was the first staging by a major British company. The Royal Opera's only previous Henze excursion was We Come to the River; a hard-hitting political parable inveighing against militarism and imperialism, it had a mixed reception at its world premiere at Covent Garden in 1976. The greeting for Boulevard Solitude, a piece now nearly fifty years old, was a good deal warmer.

Boulevard Solitude, to a libretto by Grete Weil (a German Jew who managed to survive World War II in hiding in Amsterdam), retells the Manon Lescaut story in the setting of postwar Paris. The position of Manon in the story is, however, less prominent than that of her on/off lover Armand des Grieux, whom she meets not in the courtyard of an inn at Amiens but at a large, anonymous railway station as her brother is preparing to pack her off to finishing school in Switzerland. Throughout, events depicted either in Massenet or Puccini (or both) are mirrored or suggested, though the tone is very different: gone is romantic tragedy, to be replaced by something altogether colder and more distanced. The spirit of existentialism, as represented in the work of Weil's contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre, informs the air of isolation and spiritual emptiness. Lescaut's selling of his sister to the elderly Lilaque pere is all the more blatant, while des Grieux's consolation for her loss lies not in religion but in cocaine.

Yet even in this piece, written when he was just twenty-five, Henze's ability to ...