It took a while, but La reine garçon (in English: Christina, the Girl King) originally a COC commission during Alexander Neef’s directorship, finally had its world premiere - in Montreal. I took a train to see it last night, without having a clue if the other co-producer, the COC, intended to do anything about it but have meanwhile heard that it’s indeed coming next season. This has not yet been announced, so you can have it as an exclusive. Long Play: come for the rants on the rising illiberalism in Canada, stay for the exclusives on operas about eccentric Swedish queens.
The opera-heads among you will remember that the original pair of creators for the Girl King were Ana Sokolovic as the composer and playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, who was going to rework his Christina, the Girl King play into a libretto. A couple of years into the process, Sokolovic left (over artistic differences, this piece in the weekend Le Devoir suggests) and another Quebec composer, Julien Bilodeau, happily took over. The cast in Montreal was pretty much all-Canadian, about half-half Anglo-Franco, with Joyce El-Khoury in the title role. Production was directed by the German-born director Angela Konrad, currently the artistic director of Montreal’s Usine C. (There’s some excellent programming at the Usine this year, notably Angelica Liddell in Liebestod and Konrad’s own collaboration with Virginie Despentes on the theatrical version of Despentes’ popular Balzac-ian novel about life in contemporary Paris, Vernon Subutex I.)
There’s a long tradition in opera of taking liberties with historical record. Don Carlos? Nero and Poppaea? Titus? Julius Cesar and Cleopatra? Mehmet II? Xerxes? They all live on in operas which are only operatically accurate. Bouchard continues this tradition and just like the librettists who worked for Verdi, Handel, Monteverdi or Rossini, he zooms in on the love story and uses the individual v. social forces dramatic framework. As much as the opera is about the reign of one of the most learned Queens of the 1600s or possibly in history (not a lot of nobles have been intellectuals, whatever the period), it is even more about unrequited love - falling for the wrong person. Melodrama has always been a key ingredient in historical opera.
There is some evidence that Christina loved women, but it’s contradicted by other records and interpretations (jury is out on whether she was asexual, bisexual, sporadically heterosexual, or lesbian - with an understanding, nota bene, that these concepts did not exist in her own era). Her letters to the countess Ebba Sparre read very ardent today, but what can we really know for sure? (Unless some sort of Anne Lister-like diaries exist - and they usually don’t.) This, luckily, didn’t deter Bouchard and he made the Queen-Ebba relationship — its impossibility, the power differential, the Queen’s limitless capacity for self-deception — the core of the work.
The recurring problem in the story of the Queen’s refusal to get married and bear children is accurate, as is her “life as a man”, studying philosophy, theology, sciences, alchemy, drama. Some of the politics, not a great deal, are mentioned in the opera — certainly not a word about her almost bankrupting the country with some creative economic measures — and the wars conveniently end in act 1 so the story can stay focused on matters of the heart and “duty to the realm”. A prominent character in the opera is René Descartes, and it’s true that Christina invited him to her court as one of the philosophy stars of the era. They spent some time conversing on matters philosophical, but the actual Christina disagreed with Descartes’ mechanical view of the human body while the operatic one is intrigued by it, and the anatomy class — which is a brilliant scene in the opera, with Bilodeau employing all kinds of wacky percussion sounds, and Konrad staging it as the famous Rembrandt painting — almost certainly did not happen. But it’s a way, and a good one, to illustrate some of the Cartesian ideas on the rise and the soprano gets an extraordinary aria on the topic of ‘where in the pineal gland exactly the uncontrollable passions emerge to overrule the reason’ (paraphrasing here). Descartes, the poor man, having been dragged to Sweden to entertain a monarch and help her set up an academy of science, catches pneumonia there and dies. Sweden was the end of him, but we wouldn’t learn that from the opera - this is not his story.
Bouchard is excellent on the agonies and misunderstandings of lovers and people hopelessly in love or in lust, including the gents who vie for Christina’s hand. All the men are well cast, and into this sombre baritonal sea (Etienne Dupuis as Count Karl Gustav and Daniel Okulitch as Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna) jumps the bright tenor of Isaiah Bell as the young Count Johan Oxenstierna and steals every scene with his over-confidence and preening.
What works so well in this opera is the alternating between the comic and the tragic elements - and this is reminiscent of the operas of the standard rep of the 18th and 19th centuries. Each character comes with their own musical material, and this is particularly obvious in the scenes with Johan, Ebba, and Christine’s mother, the Dowager Queen Marie Eleonore of Brandenburg (Aline Kutan), who is imagined as an unholy mix of Suor Angelica’s Aunt Princess, the Duchess of Krakenthorp from La Fille du Regiment, and Mozart’s Queen of the Night. (No, seriously.) Kutan makes the most of her one important scene. I will not forget the old queen’s spiky coloratura laughter any time soon.
There are other contrasts too: scenes so vast and open that they include the sky (a Norther Lights scene and a snow storm scene are mandatory in a Scandi opera) and others that are so intimate that they appear to be scored for a set of glasses half-filled with water (but this is the orchestra mimicking, of course).
The music from the pit sometimes echoes what the characters are saying, other times comments on their words, and sometimes straight up contradicts them. Operas are multi-level like that and music can easily undermine the truthfulness of the uttered word and characters’ self knowledge. The score, if I had to put it in a tradition (and I am simplifying here) sounds like some of the modernist clang has been sprinkled over an otherwise full-blown late Romantic, Richard Straussian fare. And that is quite my thing if accompanied by a decent production. The cool kids may find it too “traditionally operatic”. To that I say, in French, peu importe. Not every new opera can be an adaptation of Beckett.
Video projections (Alexandre Desjardins) do a lion’s share for the sets (Annick La Bissonière), which themselves are fairly basic: the royal court of a Lutheran country before electricity. Projections add perspective, depth, extra rooms, and in the outdoors scenes, the forests and the changing skies.
The gents plot to remove Ebba from the court, and Ebba herself is eager to get married, so the big love was not to be. This was probably not the reason the real Christine abdicated, converted to Catholicism and moved to Rome, to spend the rest of her life among artists and philosophers, enjoying her unmarried state. But the pressure to get married was probably high among the reasons. As Hilary Mantel pointed out, the upper echelon royal women tend to be treated as vessels.
Here, because it does make for a beautiful story, Christine abdicates for freedom, yes, but also for freedom to love who she pleases, and be who she is meant to be. Authenticity and self-fashioning are inventions of later eras, but we can only watch from our own, we cannot unlearn our values, so this Christine is an Enlightenment figure, a little bit like Mary Wollstonecraft and a little bit like Anne Lister.
I look forward to seeing this in my home opera house and, rumour has it, with another set of singers. Who would I like to see in this role? Hmm. Barbara Hannigan? Ambur Braid? Or maybe even one of the youngest kids on the block, someone like Midori Marsh? TBC.