"Where shattered dreams and stolen love collide", reads the caption on posters and handbills for the Royal Opera's new production of Hans Werner Henze's Boulevard Solitude - the opera that so dramatically launched him onto the international stage back in 1952. The phrase "shattered dreams" tells us a little about where he was coming from, a German seeking to regrow something in the cultural desert of the Third Reich. But it is the title Boulevard Solitude and what that says about librettist Grete Weil's take on Abbé Prevost's novel Manon Lescaut, 180 years on from its publication, which is yet more telling. Suddenly the opera is less about Manon - the young woman who chases dreams over reality only to find them counterfeit - and more about the world in which she is isolated. Welcome to war-time Europe Paris A city in disarray People in disarray. The natural orders - life as we once knew it - have broken down Fear, anxiety, disillusionment rule Money talks Corruption buys You are a part of it, or not But you go on Survival is duty You are lucky to be alive and there's an end of it Or rather there isn't an end of it. Boulevard Solitude is long but Henze's opera is short - and that in itself is a statement The speed of Manon's decline and fall is fast.
Like a film noir narrative, dissolving, jump-cutting its way to the inevitable tragedy And the inevitable tragedy is survival, not death We get freeze-frames in Nikolaus Lehnhoff's new production But they never last. There's even a Lana Turner moment for Manon at the top of a flight of stairs. That doesn't last, either.Lehnhoff's terrific staging is centred on the concourse of designer Tobias Hoheisel's grandly imposing and subtly transformable art deco railway terminal Life, like history, repeats itself here. Look closely and the precisely choreographed human traffic is on some kind of aimless loop Images re-occur. And underlining them from the very outset is a percussive ostinato that never really lets up.
One of the most telling musical statements Henze makes in his score happens within moments of Manon and Armand meeting. In finding each other they are suddenly at the still centre of the universe, their soaring vocal lines gliding over the busy mechanistic rhythms.These vocal lines - particularly Manon's elaborate melismas (wonderfully sung by the charismatic Alexandra von der Weth) - owe much to Berg's Lulu, of course. How could they not? But the acc-ompanying saxophone and shim-mying vibraphone here finds a more rampant purpose in Henze's wilfully "degenerate" (the Nazis' word, not mine or his) jazz breaks. The biggest and brashest of them comes as Manon shoots her way into a life of penal servitude.
In a moment of terrible irony, her own brother - effectively her pimp (a suave Wolfgang Rauch) - gives her the gun.Elsewhere, the sweet smell of decay is reflected in a series of extraordinarily beautiful intermezzi, the most beautiful reserved for the transition into Manon's new-found life of patronage: a sweet, ineffably sad string melody which draws like a veil over her impossible dreams. It's a remarkably brave, vital, and accomplished score for one so young and so inescapably scarred by the Nazi scourge. Indeed, Henze might have done well to heed its transparency in some of his later orchestral scores. It's funny how it sounds even more contemporary now than it will have in its day In a way, we're back to before The wheel has turned full circle.And keeps turning. At the close of the opera, Armand (the excellent Par Lindskog), gun in hand, is so busy contemplating an end to his misery that he doesn't even notice the architect of it, Manon, being frogmarched through the station where their dreams began Like everyone else, he must survive. Like everyone else, he is finally, and completely, alone.Further performances tonight, 26 and 29 March, 2 and 4 April at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020-7304 4000) www.royalopera . In the seminal 1978 movie National Lampoon's Animal House, the inspiration for some of the worst films of all time, there's a great party scene in between the fart gags.
John Belushi wanders up some stairs at the frat house of the title to find his way blocked by a sensitive type with an acoustic guitar (this is meant to be 1962, after all), who is performing an ancient folk song to an audience of adoring girls. In the seminal 1978 movie National Lampoon's Animal House, the inspiration for some of the worst films of all time, there's a great party scene in between the fart gags. John Belushi wanders up some stairs at the frat house of the title to find his way blocked by a sensitive type with an acoustic guitar (this is meant to be 1962, after all), who is performing an ancient folk song to an audience of adoring girls.Suddenly, Belushi grabs the instrument and smashes it against a convenient wall, until the red mist lifts and he hands back the remains with a plaintive, "Sorry." Good work. The most famous Albanian-American ever, Belushi is still fondly recalled - and not only by the drug dealers whose kids he put through college - but who now remembers the once-popular soft-rocker (and protégé of Art Garfunkel!) Stephen Bishop, who played the guitarist? See: loud rules.The overweight drug-hound had no taste for such insipidity in real life either, preferring to massacre soul classics or hang out with the scuzziest of punk bands. But his response to such po-faced "authenticity" remains an example today.