Menotti’s The Consul opened on Broadway in 1950 and in a sense it still belongs there. Menotti would not agree. Broadway, he has been quoted as saying, is vulgar. Just so. The Consul may have won him the Pulitzer Prize, but it’s still a musical with airs, a high-minded melodrama with a social conscience. Kurt Weill’s Street Scene is an obvious parallel, except that Weill relished the Broadway ethos, seized it, embraced it, celebrated it. Menotti acts as if it never touched him, but his behaviour – and that of his opera – tells us otherwise. Hollywood touched him, too. The Consul is a kind of musical film noir. A grand piano lurks in the shadows of the orchestral texture, lending a suspenseful tone. There are stern declamations, moments of high intrigue underlined with Dragnet – like unsubtlety. And where the heart goes out, it does so unashamedly. The final pay-off is Now, Voyager and then some. Vulgar? Never.
And yet, for all its cliches, its indiscretions, its righteous posturing, The Consul works, it pushes all the right buttons and does so at precisely the right moments. Provided you accept what Menotti, it seems, could not – that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the common touch – then consider yourself well and truly entertained. Because The Consul is essentially tabloid opera: a popular exposition of weighty issues – fascist politics, dehumanizing bureaucracy. It’s interesting how often it wants to burst into song but cannot quite bring itself to do so. Menotti’s very primary text is set in a very primary, very melodious, fashion. Each new thought, idea, statement, reflection is offered like a song in embryo. Song-like repetitions make for song-like symmetry and in the context of the key scenes at the Consulate he’s happened upon a hypnotic way of conveying the mind-numbing, Kafkaesque monotony of it all: ‘Your name is a number, your story a case, your need a request, your hopes will be filed.’ It demands to be sung; it demands to be insidiously catchy. And it is.
Menotti is a natural tunesmith with a composerly ear for voices. Naturally, he’s Italian. So is the ‘Foreign Woman’ in the first Consulate scene. And once she starts singing – in Italian – you begin to realize how much like Puccini Menotti can sound. The ‘farewell’ trio at the close of Act 1 scene 1, is another case in point (Butterfly: final act). So there are haunting tunes in The Consul; big, tearful ones, too. And Menotti knows how best to deploy them as full-blown emotional climacterics. When our heroine Magda finally gives vent to her frustrations in the now famous scena of Act 2 (‘To this we’ve come’), the flood of melody underscoring the line ‘the day will come, I know’ is such as almost to invite an audience’s cheers, indeed to make them, at that moment, a part of the action. Susan Bullock whips the Spoleto Festival audience into a frenzy on the Hickox set. It’s like Tosca acknowledging applause for dispatching Scarpia. Menotti is acutely aware of his audience. He, too, plays to the gallery.
Which is why it is only fitting that these two new recordings of The Consul (the only other recording, on Brunswick, 10/52, is long deleted) should originate from live performances. In the event, there is really no contest. It is unfortunate for the Berkshire Opera/Newport Classic set that it should have to compete head-to-head with the Chandos version, but, for all the quality of individuals in the cast, it’s a non-starter. Play just the opening for sound and the difference is so startling as to be almost embarrassing. The first orchestral entry in the Chandos version is rather like hearing the Newport set after sand-blasting. Berkshire Opera’s New York Camerata sounds positively emaciated alongside Hickox’s Spoleto Festival Orchestra. It’s not just a question of apparent size (the Spoleto band is plainly bigger and better drilled), but levels of engagement. Richard Hickox’s dynamism far outstrips his American counterpart Joel Revzen. The former is possessed of an intensity and rhythmic imperative that the latter sorely lacks. I’ve no doubt that the Berkshire cast would have shone more brightly under Hickox. Just compare the aforementioned ‘farewell’ trio from the first scene. Hickox stretches the Butterfly analogy almost to breaking point. Then there is the masterly dirge-like ensemble ‘In endless waiting rooms’ which is again about collective musical tension. Menotti has a grand ear for vocal polyphony. These are the finest moments that The Consul has to offer.
The same might well be said of Susan Bullock who, by all accounts (now confirmed), gave the performance of her life as Magda. Beverly O’Regan Thiele is good on the Berkshire set, but it’s the scale, the guts, the defiance of Bullock’s performance that puts the opera in its place. She is every woman against the system and you’d better believe it. Magda is a diva in a shabby mac – which is why her ultimate sacrifice is not played out to the impatient ringing of the telephone (yes, if only Menotti had stopped there) but one final gush of orchestral verisimilitude. A big finish worthy of Tosca in the theatre. Vulgar? Absolutely.'