July At Bard SummerScape Presents HENRI VIII

As a highlight of its landmark 20th anniversary season, "Breaking Ground," Bard Summerscape presents the first major new American production of Camille Saint-Saëns's unjustly neglected grand opera Henri VIII. Starring bass-baritone Alfred Walker, Henri VIII will run for five performances in an original staging by visionary French director Jean-Romain Vesperini in the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center on Bard's glorious Hudson Valley campus (July 21, 23, 26, 28, and 30). All five performances will be anchored by the American Symphony Orchestra and Bard Festival Chorale under the leadership of festival founder and co-artistic director Leon Botstein.

Botstein will give an Opera Talk before the first Sunday matinee (July 23), and the third performance will stream live online (July 26) with an encore presentation three days later (July 29). Chartered coach transportation from New York City will be available for two matinees (July 23 and 30), and there will be a premiere party and intermission toast on the opening night (July 21), with a members' toast before the final performance (July 30).

Saint-Saëns and Henri VIII

The subject of the 2012 Bard Music Festival, Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) helped shape the course of French music over the course of his long and remarkable career. Today his operatic reputation rests solely on Samson et Dalila and, even during his lifetime, he was best known for his orchestral and chamber works. Yet the composer wrote no fewer than twelve operas, winning promotion to the rank of Officier de l'Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur with the help of his fifth, Henri VIII (1883). Set in England, the birthplace of Ralph Vaughan Williams - the subject of this year's Bard Music Festival, "Vaughan Williams and His World" - Henri VIII remained in the Paris Opéra repertoire throughout Saint-Saëns's lifetime, for a total of 87 performances, besides touring to Milan, Monte Carlo, Antwerp, Frankfurt, Prague, Moscow, and London, where its success was one of the biggest of his career. Subsequent revivals have been rare, however, even in Europe. Henri VIII only received its U.S. premiere in 1974, and this season's SummerScape staging marks its first major American production to date.

Owed largely to the prevalence of musical modernism, such neglect was far from justified. In its depiction of the historic love triangle between the Tudor king, his first wife, and the mistress who became his second, the opera boasts some of Saint-Saëns's richest orchestration and most exquisite vocal writing. Pronouncing Henri VIII "an opera to savour," Gramophone writes: "This work, though very rarely heard, is not only written with outstanding skill ... and some thematic distinction, but has a strong dramatic libretto with firm characterization."

The libretto is the work of Saint-Saëns's collaborators Léonce Détroyat and Paul-Armand Silvestre, who based their account on La cisma de Inglaterra ("The Schism in England") by Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Drawing additional elements from Shakespeare and John Fletcher's Henry VIII, Détroyat and Silvestre dramatize Henry's fateful split from the Roman Catholic church, which allowed him to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, in hopes of producing a male heir and ensuring the Tudor succession.

Director Jean-Romain Vesperini and his vision

To stage the opera, the Fisher Center at Bard turned to French director Jean-Romain Vesperini, whose previous credits include original productions for Paris National Opera, Opera Hong Kong, and Moscow's Bolshoi Theater. Well-versed in the French grand opera tradition and its roots in tragédie lyrique, Vesperini has mounted rarities by Benjamin Godard and Victorin de Joncières, while his original treatment of Gounod's Faust prompted Canada's Journal de Québec to marvel:

"The staging is of high quality and caliber. ... A production that will please both connoisseurs and those who want to learn about this art form, ... this house production is a success and one of the finest presented in recent seasons in Quebec."

Henri VIII marks the director's first foray into Saint-Saëns. He explains:

"One of the things that most interests me about Henri VIII is the way Saint-Saëns mixes French grand opera with psychological drama. It's not only about gigantic spectacle. There's one big trial scene, but the plot is also driven by the characters and their psychology. It's mostly about one man and his passions: love, jealousy, and betrayal. His relationships are very strong, and tensions run high."

Vesperini finds it telling that Henri VIII dates from the period that gave rise to Freud's theories of psychoanalysis. He says:

"The arias and conversations are about the inner feelings of a man who changes his mind from one day to the next. When Henri first meets Anne, they sing a beautiful love duet together. But the king has also ordered the beheading of his ex-best friend! At the exact same time that the couple is flirting, monks are chanting at the funeral procession for the executed man. We literally hear the mix of Eros and Thanatos within the music itself."

Thanks to the director's own French background, he understands the resonance Saint-Saëns would have found in his source material. In late-19th-century France, the relationship between divorce, Catholicism, and the law was all too topical. Following a brief period of legalization in revolutionary and Napoleonic France, a national ban on divorce was reinstated until shortly after the premiere of Henri VIII. Vesperini says:

"Saint-Saëns was not just an artist. He was a political man who was very involved with the public life of his country. He wanted to write a historical opera, but one that addressed contemporary issues too. Today the story of Henry VIII doesn't speak to us in the same way because divorce is normal and accepted. But that wasn't the case in Saint-Saëns's France. Divorce was a big topic of conversation in French society. Many people were in favor, but the most devout Catholics were still against it. That's why it makes sense that Saint-Saëns chose to tell the story of a king who had to split from the Catholic church to obtain a divorce."

Leon Botstein and the score

In preparing his production, Vesperini worked closely with festival founder Leon Botstein. The Fisher Center at Bard, Botstein, and the American Symphony Orchestra have long been recognized for their ardent championship of rare French opera. Past productions include the first fully staged American production of Chausson's King Arthur ("Le roi Arthus"), the first staged revival of the original version of Chabrier's Le roi malgré lui, a celebrated staging of Meyerbeer's extravaganza Les Huguenots, and concert accounts of Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-bleue, Lalo's Le roi d'Ys, and Henri VIII itself.

In the eleven years that have passed since that concert performance of Henri VIII, scholars have discovered new material in Saint-Saëns's autograph manuscript of the opera. After consulting this new material, Botstein and Vesperini collaborated to find what the director describes as "the most interesting version of the score - artistically, dramatically and musically." Together they made a number of key decisions. They expanded several scenes, restored a climactic vocal septet at the end of Act II, omitted the light ballet that would traditionally have followed it, and developed the character of Don Gómez de Feria, the Spanish ambassador introduced (somewhat anachronistically) by playwright Calderón as a lover of Anne Boleyn's.

The creative team and cast

To help realize his vision, Vesperini has assembled an outstanding creative team that includes some of his most trusted collaborators. Designed by Alain Blanchot, Henri VIII's costumes conjure the grandeur of traditional French opera with faithfully reproduced styles from the Tudor period. By contrast, Bruno de Lavenère's minimalist sets help position Henri VIII as psychological drama. Decorated with a pattern inspired by Henry's Hampton Court home, a simple raked platform grounds the action, while a circular mirror reflects it and doubles as the moon. For richness and depth, the platform is hung around with chainmail curtains that serve as a blank canvas for Thomas Ocampo's evocative video projections. Complete with lighting by Christophe Chaupin, the production concept is designed, Vesperini explains, "to develop the audience's fantasy and imagination."

SummerScape's Henri VIII will star bass-baritone Alfred Walker in the title role. Last seen at Bard in 2019's The Miracle of Heliane, Walker also appears this season at the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and San Francisco Opera, where, as Tosca's Scarpia, he previously impressed Opera News with his "beautiful bass-baritone and physical magnetism" as well as "the threat of psychological and physical violence [that] lurked behind his polished manners." Walker sings opposite the Catherine d'Aragon of soprano Amanda Woodbury, a Grand Finals Winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, with mezzo-soprano Lindsay Ammann - "a force to be dealt with" (Opera News) - as the beautiful but ambitious Anne Boleyn. Rounding out the quartet of principals is Canadian tenor Josh Lovell - "a handsome sounding tenor with a warm, liquid voice and easy high notes" (The Guardian) - as Don Gómez de Feria. The first-rate cast also features two returning basses: Kevin Thompson, last seen in 2019's "world-class production" (Opera Wire) of The Miracle of Heliane, sings Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury; and the Duke of Norfolk, Anne's uncle, is sung by Harold Wilson, who "command[ed] a sonorous bass" (New York Times) in the leading role of 2022's production of The Silent Woman, which confirmed SummerScape's reputation for "essential summertime fare for the serious American opera-goer" (Financial Times).