by Stephen Pettitt
Annabel Arden is deeply committed to Donizetti, but it’s his tragic works that are her first love. In 2007, however, she found herself in charge of Glyndebourne on Tour’s production of The Elixir of Love. It’s surely the silliest of stories, about a peasant who, fuelled by an elixir of love which is really a bottle of plonk sold to him by a quack, gets his previously seemingly unattainable girl.
“Yes, it’s silly. Or, actually no. I think it’s naïve, in the very best sense, and it’s sweet and poignant. It’s about simple people. But it’s also very brilliant, and a lot more profound than it appears. It’s full of a real sense of life. And the more I’ve worked on it, the more I find it believable.”
Believable? Th at requires a little explanation and Arden obliges, drawing intriguing parallels with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, who like Adina doesn’t go anywhere or meet anybody, and with the plot of Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, whose heroine, Bathsheba Everdene, is a landowner who also finds herself in something of a social straitjacket until she eventually unites with Gabriel Oak, the humble shepherd she had previously overlooked.
“Even though this is a comedy, for Adina it’s equally tricky socially. So when a soldier — Belcore — comes to town that’s fantastic for her.” Belcore, Arden reminds me, means “beautiful heart”: “That gives a good clue of how to play him. He’s a total rascal, an overt womanizer, but there’s not a bad bone in his body.” Likewise, Nemorino’s name means “a little nobody” and Adina apparently has connotations of stubborness. “It’s a really difficult role to play. It is as if there’s a missing scena or aria, and she’s got only one line in the big finale, which is a bit strange.
“The tone of the opera is very diffi cult to catch. It must be good fun, yet you also have to be touched. The structure is also difficult. Donizetti was writing at a time when musical repetition was heard in a very different way from today, and that’s problematic, in terms of the narrative. There has to be a certain level of pattern and play and dance. At the same time you have to make the characters really human. You have to engage their hearts. But I really believe in the humanity of the characters. Life is more like The Elixir of Love than we think.”
Excerpted from the Glyndebourne program for The Elixir of Love, 2009
