Giving voice to villainy in both human and supernatural forms

Opera Prelude lecture recital — Villains and Cads!

Christ Church, Henley

Friday, October 31

SINCE the earliest years of opera, the low male voice has been used to portray the “baddies”, while the heroes of the story are sung by high voices. Hence the title of bass baritone Jacob Bettinelli’s lecture, accompanied by pianist Jack Redman.

This was the perfect fit for his powerful low voice and his choice of repertoire spanned the 18th to the 20th centuries. The lecture was divided into two — human villains and the supernatural.

The first villain we encountered was Mozart’s Don Giovanni, serial seducer and someone who commits murder when his attempted conquest of Donna Anna is interrupted by the victim’s father.

Despite this, Mozart gives him some charming music and Jacob sang for us the delicate mandolin aria, “Deh, vieni alla finestra”, where the Don is trying to tempt the gullible peasant girl Zerlina to “come to the window”.

Jacob switched character to the Don’s manservant Leporello, who begrudgingly recites the list of his master’s conquests across Europe ending in “in Ispagna... mille e tre”, the catalogue aria. Through gestures and facial expressions, he well portrayed the content of these songs.

Jumping to the 20th century, we encountered Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd from a short story by Herman Melville set on an English warship at sea. Billy is an innocent young deckhand who stirs contradictory feelings in brutish master-at-arms John Claggart. Claggart cannot accept his own attraction to Billy and vows to destroy him in this soliloquy, a mix of tenderness and anger — “O beauty, o handsomeness, goodness”. Jacob used the full power of his voice here.

In the 19th century, there were many operatic settings of the Faust legend. Jacob portrayed Mephistopheles as he taunts young Marguerite who is about to be seduced by Faust, now transformed into a handsome young man. Jacob gave us a raucous laugh as Mephistopheles triumphs.

Jacob informed us that the young Berlioz was completely obsessed by Goethe’s telling of the Faust story. He subsequently composed his own version, told in the form of a dream of Faust. In this dream, Mephistopheles sings of beautiful flowers with the delicate aria “Voici les roses”.

Jacob returned to the human villain persona as Baron Scarpia from Puccini’s Tosca. Scarpia is obsessed by his desire to possess the singer Floria Tosca, who is revolted by him. Jacob cleverly switched from his own voice to a video of the chorus ending to Te Deum.

Jacob gave a very animated and well-illustrated lecture about his subject matter.

Robin John