I’m afraid Glyndebourne has a turkey on its hands. The new opera by Peter Eötvös is thin and unfocused. Was it even finished? Stories that the composer was working on the opera rather late in the rehearsal period are not limited to Love and Other Demons, of course. Mozart was just as culpable. The difference is that Don Giovanni sounds finished, it knows what it’s about on hundreds of levels, and its music is involving. In every respect Love and Other Demons is the opposite. The musical fabric is dull. Vocal lines unfold with a monotonous up-and-down, slow delivery that fails to impress a single motive on the consciousness. In fact the opera sounds like a sketch, the orchestration awaiting filling out and completion. The story doesn't seem to know where it's at. highly varied images pour off the stage and from back projections, but quite what the substance is meant to be I could never decide. There are some sterling performances, but this awful tale of a 12-year-old girl allegedly possessed by demons, imprisoned in a convent, subject to exorcism, the turning of the tables so that by the end the girl is the only one not possessed, and her ambiguous death, if that's what it is, doesn't seem to know what it is doing or why.
I give just one instance of how annoying this piece is. Needless to say, a priest falls in love with the girl and they have a love scene. He sits miserably on a bench next to her, stripped to the waist. She gets up and removes the flimsy slip she's wearing and is nude for the first time in the opera (though we get various nude back projections that may be her). At this point the lights are dimmed so we don't see anything (and besides her very long, Melisande-like hair has been prudishly arranged to cover a large part of her front, so the slip is amply replaced). As soon as she has finished circling around the priest, not doing very much, she puts the slip back on and the lights go back up. Now I'm not denying that I wouldn't have enjoyed a glimpse of an unclad body: I would. I was so bored Gordon Brown would have sufficed. But a less erotic, more pointless and half-hearted gesture than this lighting performance is hard to imagine. (It turned to comedy later when she was tied up in a highly symbolic crucifixion position, a lot of blue lighting was used, which made the slip almost invisible. Shocked, the lighting engineer hastily rebalanced the lighting to restore decency.)
The performances were great, especially the girl (not 12, I'm sure), whose ludicrously stratospheric part was sung by the understudy Allison Bell. Felicty Palmer was good as the abbess and almost all the men were impressive. But what a wasted effort.
