L’Aube Rouge review: One of those unfortunate works in which problems stand out more clearly than strengths

L’Aube Rouge

Wexford Festival Opera

★★☆☆☆

Camille Erlanger (1863-1919) is one of those composers whose music I hadn’t known a note of before hearing L’Aube Rouge (The Red Dawn), his 1911 opera, which is the second main offering at Wexford Festival Opera this year.

In fact, my first musical port of call for the name Erlanger was Baron Frédéric d’Erlanger (1868-1943), an Anglo-French composer and banker whose work was taken up by a number of leading international musicians, Fritz Kreisler, John Barbirolli and Antal Doráti among them.

L’Aube Rouge is one of those unfortunate works in which problems stand out much more clearly than strengths. Musically, it is a ragbag of ideas, many of them ideas that sound like retellings of other composers’ material. It’s as if Erlanger was undiscriminating about the use of musical fragments that went around in his head, not caring whether they were his own or actually someone else’s. He then processed them as “sujets musicaux” (his term for leitmotifs) in a way that leads nowhere but just creates a dull musical tapestry where the elements are juxtaposed in a higgledy-piggledy way.

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The plot is interesting. You could summarise it as love among the early 20th-century Russian nihilists. The main characters are Olga, daughter of a military man but sympathetic to the nihilists, and Serge, a new nihilist leader. They fall in love, and the opera’s action takes them to St Petersburg, Nice, Paris and Moscow. Love is more important for her, political action for him. He dies having carried out an assassination by bomb; she dies from the shock of his loss.

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The cast is large, with 23 roles for 20 singers, only a handful of whom manage to rise above the routine of Erlanger’s ideas. The soprano Andreea Soare’s Olga is full toned, rich and passionate, though even in her committed delivery there is not much in the writing to allow for emotional traction. The thin-toned and wimpy Serge of Andrew Morstein is almost like a ghost beside her.

The other strong presence is the solid-as-a-rock bass Giorgi Manoshvili, in stentorian form as the old revolutionary Kouragine. The opera is fleshed out with folk material and dances that sometimes seem to add little to the work but time.

The updating by the production’s director, Ella Marchment, and designer, Holly Pigott, looks well; their amusing touches include an emergency-room admission in which the wounded Serge is wheeled in on a supermarket trolley.

The Wexford Festival Orchestra plays a blinder under Guillaume Tourniaire (who is being replaced by Christophe Manien for the rest of the run), but not to the point where they can mask the disjointedness of the opera itself. Like so many revolutionary ventures, L’Aube Rouge fails to get off the ground.

It is interesting that Puccini, who is much echoed in L’Aube Rouge, wrote about his impressions of Erlanger’s Aphrodite in 1906. “The music which one hears in Paris just now is frightful,” he said. “Aphrodite is marvellous scenically, but there isn’t a page which one can understand. It is absolutely horrible stuff: a little colour and a conglomeration of perfectly hideous sounds.” The experience of L’Aube Rouge makes his response a lot more understandable.

L’Aube Rouge runs at Wexford Festival Opera on Sunday, October 29th, Wednesday, November 1st, and Saturday, November 4th; the festival continues until Sunday, November 5th