La Chartreuse de Parme, Opéra de Marseille

Sébastien Guèze and Nathalie Manfrino

Every opera house outside Paris hopes to carve out its own individual personality. Jacques Karpo in Marseille pushed the boat out with big house repertoire – Strauss’s heady Die Frau ohne Schatten was typical – hiring monstres sacrés who were on the decline but still capable of whipping up a storm. Divas brought the house down, fans fought for tickets.

Subsequently, Renée Auphan’s stewardship focused on resurrecting forgotten French works, a salutary move in a country that never misses an opportunity to sneer at its own composers. She started with Jean-Michel Damase’s reworking of Washington Square (L’Héritière) and then programmed his opera on Anouilh’s Colombe. Damase is not a major-league composer but Auphan’s astute casting and traditional, savvy stagings turned both events into interesting evenings. Paris-based critics boarded the TGV and Radio France broadcast performances. Auphan had put Marseille back on the operatic radar.

She has had less luck with Henri Sauguet’s opera on Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, first performed in Paris in 1939. Damase’s sub-Poulenc style may be despised by contemporary music ayatollahs but he certainly knew how to set French to music. Sauguet, in dismaying contrast, frequently tries to cram too many words into every bar and tramples on French prosody. It is as if he had never heard Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. And the irony is that Armand Lunel’s gossipy, trivial libretto needed urgent trimming: it is full of long sentences, useless character signposts (“Now that I am prime minister of Parma”) and toe-curling reminders – “Silence, don’t forget that we are at La Scala!” booms Gina, Duchess of Sanseverina, to the other occupants of her theatre box.

Meanwhile, Sauguet’s classically restrained score motors on agreeably and forgettably, injecting the odd rogue note to claim 20th-century kinship but largely skirting dramatic involvement. The one exception is the final scene when Fabrice renounces Clélia in favour of a monastery. Suddenly, the music comes alive even if the scene outstays its welcome. The rest is merely competent ballet music, a genre Sauguet is best remembered for.

Auphan has returned to stage the opera in her conventionally efficient style. Bruno de Lavenère’s sets provide a tasteful foil but updating the action from the early 19th century to the 1900s only shows off Katia Duflot’s gowns and jars uselessly with a story enshrined in pre-unification Italy.

Nor is casting quite up to usual scratch. Sébastien Guèze is on impressive form in the taxing role of Fabrice and Eric Huchet’s breezily confident Ludovic makes a small part into something bigger but Nathalie Manfrino’s Clélia goes horribly squally above the stave and mezzo Marie-Ange Todorovitch sounds unusually worn as Gina. The chorus is equally ragged.

Lawrence Foster, now music director in Marseille, gets the best out of a feeble score notwithstanding a badly behaved brass section.

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