Photo credit: © Philippe Delval / théâtre de Caen

Charpentier’s “David et Jonathas” is a forgotten gem. The French composer was an expert in dramatic pace. His operas flow as normal plays do. The singing line hardly distorts the text, making the watching experience extremely accessible even for intermediate French speakers. Moreover, in “David et Jonathas” we find some of the most beautiful lyrical moments of all baroque music. Such an extraordinary opera does have one major challenge to modern audiences, however: its plot.

Even in the most progressive societies, it is still taboo to explore the relationship between David and Saül’s son, Jonathas. Even after in light of the evasions enabled by intellectual and scholastic accounts of the nature of their love, David and Jonathas make clear how uneasy Western society can be made by male intimate “friendships.” It is not necessarily that David and Jonathas had a homosexual relationship—though it is very possible that they did have—, but that the image of their union provided a gateway for a legion of artists to express their own visions of homoeroticism. From medieval bibles to the drawings of Gustave Doré, the representation of such a loving couple is a pictorial course book of queer love. Fundamentalists should be thankful that Edouard-Henri Avril did not draw the couple.

Charpentier’s work gives many openings for homoeroticism—both textually and musically—and adds another layer of problems for modern audiences: pedophilia. First performed at a Jesuit school for boys (…), the Charpentier’s opera is explicit on how young Jonathas is supposed to be: he is a child departing from his original alliance to his father (Saül) towards the object of affection and desire (David). The age gap between the two protagonists is vocally evident: a boy soprano and a tenor or haute-contre (a high tenor voice, typical of French baroque literature). “David et Jonathas” seems like an opera waiting for a Pedro Almodóvar production.

Stage director Jean Bellorini’s reading of the opera is, in my opinion, cowardly. Do not get me wrong; the production is visually beautiful. Few times have I seen more beautiful scenarios without any grandiloquence or unnecessary opulence. But when confronted with such polemic subject, Bellorini takes the easy road, and seeks to erase any possible conflict, making his production extremely anticlimactic and, progressively nonsensical.

The main idea is to make the opera a nightmare afflicting an ailing King Saül. He is hospitalized, under the care of a nurse who is also the “queen of the forgotten.” She speaks only in voiceover, uttering the words of celebrated author Wilfried N’Sondé. Although N’Sondé is not an uninteresting author, his textual insertions made little sense in the plot and presented the most enigmatic language possible. This linguistic opacity might be derived from difficulties of digesting the greatness of his poetical text in the course of a single performance; in any event the amplification of the voiceover did not help. It came in complete contrast with the delicate and colorful soundscape constructed by the orchestra and vocalists. Moreover, it became evident that Charpentier knew better how to maintain a dramatic flow; the textual additions seemed to delay the progress of the action, and, in the end, promoted the most uncompelling of all anti-war discourses. It was full of the most unnecessary proselytism.

I understand that in the time of Trump, Orbán, Putin, and Bolsonaro, many artists want to explore the psychology of the authoritarian leader. On a superficial layer, Saül might be this populist figure failing into disgrace. Nevertheless, the intense tragedy of the Israeli king seems so psychologically dense and touching that it is almost offensive to affiliate him with kakistocracy politics of today. There is also today a great urge, especially in Europe, to denounce the terrible deeds of war. Even before the concert started, I overhead more than a few comments by operagoers who feared the expansion of the Ukrainian conflict to the rest of the continent—and, of course, a myriad of commentaries on the Palestinian crisis. All that said, there are certainly better (artistic) ways of addressing these issues. And they do not come through the sublimation of debates over dissident desire.

Bellorini submerged the scenario in oneiric darkness, with beautiful light setting. The characters, with the exception of the Nurse and Saül, were dressed in beautiful costumes that resembled an orientalism of the Mediterranean Sea (a more colorful version of Pasolini’s mythological films). The singers were placed along some fairly compelling human-sized dolls—with the idea being to mix who is human and who is not. The effect was interesting and alluded to the strange quasi-humanity that we create when, in the face of the war, we learn to ignore countless spectral deaths.

The problem is not the photography, but the whole film of the staging. The looming love between David and Jonathas becomes disturbing for reasons completely contrary to the opera’s possibilities. On the one hand, all homosexuality was meant as much as possible to be erased. Jonathas has never been so close to being represented as a woman. Gwendoline Blondeel—a very good singer, by the way—has almost unambiguous feminine characterization. There was a little androgyny as possible, so that any eroticism that the audience finds in the protagonists’ relationship will be converted to heterosexuality. On the other, the main relationship was softened as much as possible. When they gathered with the shepherds to explore the “most sweet of the joys,” they played an innocuous patty-cake with their hands. In a certain way, their relationship was more of a foster-parentage than of friendship per se. N’Sondé quotes Montesquieu’s text on friendship, trying to alleviate the lack of sexual discussion, but I think for a generation that has seen “Call Me by Your Name,” it created more damage than help.

The focus on Saül’s drama was both a missed opportunity in exploring the mind of those who tyrannically hold power and a non-sensical approach to the drama. Some moments were so stupid that it was hard to control cringing laughter. Saül’s “death,” for example, was represented by his receiving a scenic gun from David—and using, however, not that gun but his fingers to shoot himself in the head, supplementing that gesture with an onomatopoeic noise. The nurse then rescues him, claiming it was all a dream. The audience could not stop giggling in a scene that clearly was meant to be extremely solemn.

The final words condemning the war sounded so out-of-touch that they seemed written for a regional newspaper editorial, dispelling the gravitas of the opera’s actual depicted loss, David’s of his beloved Jonathas. Bellorini ignored the actual love-affair (regardless of its nature) central to the opera. His solutions, as I said before, stayed in a cowardly comfort zone, especially in a theater like the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, which has never shied away from challenging its audience. After all, it was there that Igor Stravinsky premiered “The Rite of the Spring.”

Musically, the performance was very compelling. The audience was pleased with a striking performance of the “Correspondances” ensemble under the leadership of Sébastien Daucé. The reading was lively; the dramatic text was vibrant, and some of the preludes had a dramaticism unmatched by any of the recordings I have consulted. Such dramatic colors came specifically through a certain overlapping vivacity in the string section with perfect balance with the theorbo and clavichord. It was beautiful to hear, especially against the production’s fifty-shades-of-darkness scenarios.

Petr Nekoranec made great efforts to emphasize the hautecontre nature of David’s role. The tenor embraced the dramatic break of his passaggio and used and abused his falsetto as much as he could. It is extremely commendable for a singer to undergo such risks for the sake of musicality; however, Nekoranec exposed not small problems with intonation and breath when singing in the higher register. His difficulties were so great that much of his nuanced expression was confined to his lower register.

The hautecontre repertoire is extremely demanding, so it might be a matter of time for Nekoranec to overcome some of these challenges—his voice has a rich vibrato and has capacity for a tenderness that is very congenial, especially when portraying David. His version of the Israelian king was tender, delicate, and adolescent. It is surprising to imagine that this is the same man who has killed a giant and conquered a whole kingdom—what we see on the stage is a sweet boy who in the flourishing of his emotions almost fathers the even younger Jonathas.

In spite of the femininization of Jonathas by the costume design, Gwendoline Blondeel embraced an infantile—but boyish—sonority that was extremely compelling. Her voice was without any inch of vibrato, sharply cutting into our ears and hearts while Jonathas faced the most undeserved of deaths during the war.

As King Saül, Jean-Christophe Lanièce did an amazing corporal job walking and moving as an old, ill man. Although much of his characterization is due to the work of Cécile Kretschmar in the make-up and wigs, the baryton seemed extremely bound to his character’s mannerisms so that even his voice seemed an outcome of such commitment. His voice, extremely rich in lower tones, might have been the only one that made the text a little bit (but just a little bit indeed) harder to understand. His coloraturas were solemn and languid, as a king who deep inside of him already knows his battle is lost. In fact, his voice and physicality sounded so fragile and humane that it was hard to have even the minimal disdain for Saül during the opera. If anything, he was the tragic hero. The kerfuffle in the end about the forgotten victims in the war was even more unnecessary in the face of such a compelling tragedy of a man.

Alex Rosen shone as the ghost of Samuel in the prologue—perhaps one of the most chilling moments of the night—, and was more than omniums as Achis.

Etienne Bazola was solid as Joabel, up to the high standard of the night.

Lucile Richardot offered a striking characterization of the Prophetess in the prologue and clearly made an impression with her highly dramatic and almost androgynous voice in the role.

Finally, the spoken texts by Hélène Patarot were well-performed. The problem was not the interpreter, but the felt need of the drama to include her character in the spectacle. The actress also had a strong scenic presence: even though she hardly moved, she knew how to portray a nurse whose power is very ambiguous: is she the queen of the forgotten? Is she just an ailing figure to Saül? Nobody can tell.

“David et Jonathas” is certainly one of those operas that I would like to hear again, and the musical direction of Daucé certainly left us with a good impression of the dramatic potential of the work. Bellorini’s staging has gorgeous scenarios—aesthetic, but never opulent. The main issue was the staging’s obliquity in actually dealing with the elephant in the room. When staging such remarkable works, not dealing with the (in this case, intergenerational homoerotic) elephant seems merely to ignore the reasons why some works are, after all, extraordinary.