The brief life of Joseph Carey Merrick, known because of his pitiful deformities as the Elephant Man, has already proved its dramatic potential on film, and Eric Nonn’s libretto for Laurent Petitgirard’s four-act opera is a skilful piece of work. It paces the story well, delaying Merrick’s first vocal entry until Act 2 scene 2, by which time our sympathy for his plight has been so aroused that it seems perfectly right that his voice (in real life as distorted as his appearance) should be beautiful, and in fact a contralto. Each act is well structured and has a strong curtain, and the drama is further articulated by choral scenes, notably one of doctors singing the Hippocratic Oath (a passage rather like simplified Honegger) and another of patients praying for health, to a tune several degrees sweeter than its apparent model, Faure’s Cantique de Jean Racine.
Yes, the music is tonal, often close to minimalism in its repetitions, ostinatos and pattern- making, and its frequent use of scalic or stepwise figures. Its rate of change is, in fact, a good deal more rapid than that of most of the minimalists, but after you’ve been listening for a short while and have worked out that this or that passage is derived from a restricted number of notes or intervals, it does get quite easy to predict what the next rotation of them will be. The word- setting is fast and syllabic, often deeply insensitive to the text, in accord with the music’s motoric rhythms. When these subside to lyricism the result sounds at best like Lloyd Webber or Schonberg (Claude-Michel, not Arnold, a stave or two from whom would at times have been welcome), at worst saccharinely sentimental, as when Merrick discovers happiness in a taste for poetry or as he contemplates death, at which point the sub-Faure tune returns, played on stage by a child violinist. By that time, mark you, he has received a proposal of marriage from a coloratura soprano who has sung him an aria of such startling hideousness (like Strauss’s ‘Fiakermilli’ re-written for Yma Sumac, if you go back that far – it ascends to a high G) that after hearing it I wished myself in another world.
Nathalie Stutzmann, however, sings her central role with deep conviction; in her often-used lower register she sounds, disconcertingly but not inappropriately, androgynous. Nicolas Rivenq, as the sympathetic Dr Treves, is the best of the supporting singers, few of whom are helped by an unpleasant recording which places the voices forward and puts the orchestra in strangely unrealistic perspective, as though it were being aided by amplification.'