Opera - Impassioned, intelligent and close to perfection. By Peter Conrad Capriccio Palais Garnier, Paris

Opera began in 1607 when La Musi-ca, at the start of Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo, descended from heaven to harmonise human torments and deify the golden-voiced singer Orpheus. In 1942, Richard Strauss brought the form's history to an end - or so he thought - in an elegiac opera about a muse who can't reconcile the conflicts that assail her, and whose own shimmering voice resigns itself to powerless silence. The Countess in Strauss's Capriccio fends off the erotic urgency of a composer and a poet, and commands them to collaborate on writing an opera about her. But she fails to decide on a proper ending for the piece because she is unable to arbitrate between the rival claims of music and words. In any case, she wonders - after an agitated and ecstatic last soliloquy - whether the whole business is not inexcusably trivial.

Strauss addressed that demoralising question to himself: Capriccio had its premiere in blacked-out Munich, and the schedule of performances was juggled to avoid the bombing raids. In a wrecked city, and an opera house that was blasted to rubble a year later, the stage displayed a gaggle of 18th-century French aristocrats flirting and squabbling in the gilded cocoon of their otiose salon. Yet Capriccio could not resist conscription by contemporary history. The wistful, idyllic string sextet with which it opens was given an extra performance at the house of the thuggish gauleiter Baldur von Schirach.

Television trucks, I'm glad to say, encircled the theatre at the performance I attended, ensuring that the production will soon be available on DVD. Watch for it: at once impassioned and intelligent, this is as near to perfection as opera ever gets.

In his brilliant production at the Opera National de Paris, the director Robert Carsen has dared - with a single, sinister detail - to bring the France of the ancien regime and the Germany of the Third Reich into confrontation. The actress Clairon has been invited to participate in amateur theatricals; she arrives from Paris escorted by a driver in Nazi uniform, who leaves his cap on a table in the mirrored, chandelier-lit drawing room. Clairon might be Arletty, accused in 1945 of "collaboration horizontale" with Nazi officers; when taxed with treason, she apparently replied that her vagina was unpolitical. A photograph discreetly placed at the end of the programme underlines a nation's shame. It shows the Opera during the German occupation of Paris. The facade is obliterated by signs pointing to the Luftwaffe headquarters, military workshops and emergency medical clinics.

Though Carsen's gloss on Capriccio is deft and unobtrusive, it may have frightened off the conductor Christian Thielemann, whose debut was cancelled without explanation. Thielemann is a doughty right-winger, an apologist for what Wag-ner called "die heilige Deutsche Kunst". His replacement, Ulf Schirmer, expertly managed the complications of the parodic score, without quite eliciting the anachronistic, overripe beauty Thielemann might have found in it.

Capriccio is set at the time when Gluck - as the theatre director La Roche declares in his aria - was reforming opera by replacing mellifluous statues with people made of vulnerable, fallible flesh and blood. The Paris cast does not merely illustrate the quarrelsome options of what Strauss called a "dramaturgical treatise"; each contributor to the debate is sharply and fully individualised.

As La Roche, Franz Hawlata transforms his ten-minute monologue about the theatre into a desperate apology for his own menaced, marginal life. (The role is a sketch of Max Reinhardt, who by 1942 had fled into exile.) Dietrich Henschel's Count sounds noble but behaves with a swanky complacency worthy of Prince Charles: on his return from hunting, he needs three fawning servants to pull off his boots, slip on his shoes and pour him an invigorating dram. If he'd had to urinate, a fourth would probably have been on hand with the chamber pot. The Clairon of Anne Sofie von Otter is a true sacred monster, wrapped in furs donated by her Nazi admirers, strutting on im-perious heels and spitting haughty defiance. Rainer Trost as the boyish composer Flamand and Gerald Finley as the gruff, rugged poet Olivier complement each other with almost marital neatness.

Above all, Capriccio requires a Countess who, to justify the fuss, possesses a voice that combines sensuous enchantment and spiritual exaltation. Renee Fleming has exactly those qualities. Her radiance and ardour make the final scene a true vocal apotheosis, and for a moment the muse turns back into Monteverdi's La Musica. Then, in Carsen's last and most startling invention, the set falls away, and the divine songstress strolls off into a grey, bare, dusty gulf behind the scenes, where a stagehand offers her a plastic cup of water and escorts her back into real life.

We are left, as in a Shakespearean epilogue, asking Strauss's pained questions. What is the value of it all? Is the theatre merely illusory or a glimpse of some transcendent reality?

Michael Portillo's theatre column returns next week

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website