Volume 21 Issue 2 - October 2015

Alden on Pyramus
One of the most
anticipated events
of the opera
season is the world
premiere of Pyramus
and Thisbe (2010) by
Canadian Barbara Monk
Feldman, staged by
the Canadian Opera
Company. It is the the
first Canadian opera that
the COC has produced
on its main stage since
The Golden Ass by
Randolph Peters in 1999.
This will also be the first
Canadian opera ever
staged in the auditorium
of the Four Seasons
Centre. In addition, this
Beat by Beat | On Opera
CHRISTOPHER HOILE
Director Christopher Alden rehearsing
a scene from Monteverdi’s Il
combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda
with mezzo-soprano Krisztina
Szabó and baritone Phillip Addis
will be only the second opera by a female composer that the COC has
ever staged, the first being L’Amour de loin (2000) by Kaija Saariaho in
2012, and the first ever by a female Canadian composer.
Pyramus and Thisbe is presented with two vocal works by Claudio
Monteverdi (1567-1643), the Lamento d’Arianna (1608) and Il
combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624). The first is the sole aria
remaining from a lost opera by Monteverdi, while the second, though
sometimes called an opera, is really a narrative sequence of madrigals.
Both are company premieres. Krisztina Szabó sings Arianna, Clorinda
and Thisbe; Phillip Addis sings Tancredi and Pyramus; and Owen
McCausland sings Testo, the Narrator in Il combattimento.
American Christopher Alden, who directed La Clemenza di Tito
for the COC in 2013, Die Fledermaus in 2012 and Rigoletto in 2011, is
the stage director for Pyramus and Thisbe. I spoke with him in mid-
September about the project.
About two years ago COC General Director Alexander Neef
approached Alden about directing the works. Impressed by Monk
Feldman’s score and the challenges it poses, Alden accepted: “It’s
always exciting to be offered a brand new piece since 90 percent or
more of my profession is dealing with pieces from the past where
the composers are long gone and there have already been so many
productions and interpretations of the piece you’re doing. So it’s
a breath of fresh air to be offered the chance to be involved in the
creation of a work yourself.”
About Monk Feldman’s work itself, Alden comments, “It’s an
amazing piece, very unique and unusual and intensely abstract and
non-literal. It’s the opposite of a new opera based on a film or something
like that. Barbara has created a piece in a very strong modernist
vein which is an exciting thing to come up against because it forces
one to reach into different areas to find a way to bring this piece to life.
It’s quite an exciting challenge.”
The idea of presenting the two Monteverdi pieces in conjunction
with Pyramus and Thisbe was there from the start because, as Alden
notes, “The idea was to pair Barbara’s piece which is on a mythological
subject with other pieces that come from that same world. And each
is about these different couples – Pyramus and Thisbe, Tancredi and
Clorinda and Ariadne and (even though he doesn’t sing in this piece)
Theseus. Three couples, all of whom have rather problematical relationships,
are connected in illustrating Shakespeare’s statement that
‘the course of true love never did run smooth.’ After this, the idea
came to us of tying the three pieces together even more by casting the
same two singers as each of the couples.”
The works will be presented beginning with Arianna, followed by
Il Combattimento and concluding with Pyramus and Thisbe. Faced
with staging three pieces without an interval, Alden says he “started
to come to terms with how to make a theatrical event out of these
three pieces, on the one hand, letting each piece play itself out telling
its own story, but also at the same time finding an overall shape to the
evening, so that one piece leads
into the next.”
There is no visual shift in
moving from the works from
the 17th century to the 21st.
Instead, Alden says, “This
production isn’t so much about
any particular time period, but
places all three pieces within
a rather abstract, rather openended
theatrical setting. It’s very
simple, very stripped-down and
very focused on the two soloists
plus the third soloist Owen
McCausland, the Narrator of Il
Combattimento. Even though
he sings only in the second
work, we’re finding a way to
give him [McCausland] some
strong personal involvement in
the whole theatrical event so
that he is actually on stage for all three pieces.”
Alden notes that “the issues involved in each of these three pieces
bleed in and out of each other – issues about relationships between
men and women – with Il Combattimento (which is to me the
ultimate piece about the battle of the sexes) in which there is a literal
fight to the death between a man and a woman in the dead of night
and the male doesn’t realize until the end that the guy he has been
CHRIS HUTCHESON
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