Spankingly naughty, riotously melodic and brilliantly performed, Anna Nicole which received its world premiere at the Royal Opera House this week, is a fabulous show. That needs to be said straight off. It displays Covent Garden at its technical best: it looks stunning and – as far as you can tell on first hearing – is faultlessly sung and played. It was also fast-moving, often funny, lightly tragic, insidiously anti-American and oddly, frustratingly hollow. Whether it was great opera, and whether it pushes forward the art form, are harder questions.
It opened on Thursday after a near fatal overdose of hype and a hurricane of enthusiasm for its rags-to-richesse-to-tristesse American playgirl subject matter, the late Anna Nicole Smith, brought to life by librettist Richard Thomas (of Jerry Springer: the Opera fame) and composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. As the heroine slipped back lifeless in her body bag for her ultimate Big Sleep – the real Anna died in a hotel room in 2007 aged 39 – the specially installed sugar-cerise curtain fell and the audience roared and whooped, many on their feet cheering the singers, conductor Antonio Pappano, director Richard Jones and the creators themselves. I can't recall any new opera at Covent Garden, even the successful ones such as Harrison Birtwistle's Gawain and The Minotaur or Thomas Adès's The Tempest, generating quite this fizzing, triumphant level of excitement and glamour interest.
Let's scotch one misapprehension. Far from being outlandish, the life of Anna Nicole is quintessential operatic fare: vulnerable, tragic women struggling for a better life litter the repertoire, from Carmen and Butterfly, to Mimi, Violetta, Tosca, Salome, Lulu. Male heroes, no surprise, tend to be kings and emperors. Silicone implants and drug abuse are no more shocking than incest or adultery and it's always baffling to see how a few dirty words create such a frisson of tabloid interest and audience hysteria. "I had no idea swearing was deemed so amusing," one student opera fan texted me after the show, having had a bad evening. Another, with similar youthful and musical credentials, thought exactly the opposite and loved every minute.
Once the excitement dies down, no doubt this polar response will prove typical. Nothing is new under the sun and in many respects, with its arias, big choruses and show tunes, Anna Nicole adheres to convention: a fact, not a complaint. Opera North's recent Skin Deep (by Armando Iannucci and David Sawer, 2008) explored a similar seamy world of nip-and-tuck, with an equally wordy libretto and a rich lexicon of filthy language. It even went one better in setting "testicle" to music, which was unaccountably omitted here.
But Anna Nicole works far better as a night out, not least because of the ready-made focus of a recognisable anti-heroine, played with extraordinary esprit and vocal finesse by Eva-Maria Westbroek, a dramatic soprano with formidable acting skills, as anyone who saw her in Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the ROH will know. Gerald Finley, a Turnage veteran who starred in his The Silver Tassie (2000), throws muscle and soul into the role of Stern, Anna Nicole's manipulative lover-lawyer. Is there anything this glorious singer cannot do? Alan Oke excels as Anna Nicole's 89-year-old husband Howard Marshall II, who in a melancholy death scene curses the decrepitude of long life while his ghastly family – echoes of Gianni Schicchi – chant "Not dead yet". Susan Bickley plays her mother, Virgie, with Peter Hoare, Rebecca de Pont Davies and Wynne Evans leading a strong ensemble cast. Lap dancers, meat-rackers, truckers, Wal-Mart employees, black, jackdaw-like human cameras and a host of other nightmare characters peopled the stage in Miriam Buether's fluorescent, garish designs, lit by Mimi Jordan Sherin and DM Wood.
Turnage, 50, has called this a "comic horror story", a fair description. It adds little psychological complexity to the heroine, relying on the quickfire episodes of her shocking life to provide drama. To an extent they do. Any depiction of a woman ululating over her dead child, especially with Mahler's Kindertotenlieder echoing in the score – one of several musical quotes – must elicit sympathy. But Anna's own death is as swift as a light being flicked off. Maybe that nothingness is exactly the point. She repeats her opening double entendre – "I want to blow you all – a kiss" and the opera ends, four bars and nine fortissimo chords later, in blackout. We are left feeling like ghoulish outsiders staring in at a zoo full of caged, maimed humans.
In one sense Turnage's stage works over more than two decades have moved from low-life to high, from the coruscations of the working-class, Oedipal Greek (1988) to the sensational, Hello!-style frail celebrity of Anna Nicole. His one-act 1997 chamber pieces Twice Through the Heart, a monologue about a woman who murders her lover, and Country of the Blind used tiny forces to plumb human pain. The Silver Tassie for ENO evoked the trauma of war. Unafraid of emotion and growing up as much influenced by jazz and rock as the classical mainstream, Turnage has always had a singular power to hint, without heavy-handedness, at moral truths.
On first hearing, this element is missing in Anna Nicole. Turnage feels straitjacketed by the internal rhymes and relentless dazzle of Richard Thomas's text. The regrettable late decision to use surtitles, unnecessary since the singers are lightly amplified, tips the balance towards words and pushes the score, undoubtedly packed with riches, into the background. In Act I, a high-profile jazz trio (consisting of the excellent Peter Erskine, John Paul Jones and John Parricelli) colours the sound with sexy, bluesy riffs. But it was hard to hear what the orchestra was up to. This changed radically in Act II, where Turnage's own, spikier voice, full of smoky, plangent woodwind, wah-wah muted brass and elegiac, at times waltzing strings, at last found room to breathe. It's possible that opera novices will like Act I while fans prefer Act II.
Decadence, to continue a theme, hovers over Wagner's Parsifal like bacteria on a stagnant pool, as a revival of Nikolaus Lehnhoff's 1999 production at ENO, with an outstanding cast, reminded us. In this ash-grey, post-apocalyptic staging, there is barely a hint of colour beyond the witchy Flower Maidens dressed as a host of deadly angel's trumpet blossoms. John Tomlinson was astounding as Gurnemanz, with Stuart Skelton in herculean voice as Parsifal. Iain Paterson's beautiful Amfortas deserves praise. Mark Wigglesworth conducted with discreet, burnished amplitude.
On the subject of contemporary opera, one work regularly cited as a modern archetype is Nixon in China (1987) by John Adams. Its overdue New York Met premiere was relayed in live HD in cinemas worldwide this week with a top cast led by James Maddalena, still performing the role he created, and Scottish soprano Janis Kelly as Pat Nixon. Director Peter Sellars, explosive in interview, pointed out that China may have changed since the events of 1972, but only hours before this performance another dictator, Egypt's Mubarak, had resigned. "The heroes are the people now," he chanted, recalling one of the work's most memorable singalong moments. This opera surgically probes the human fabric of history and gets under our own skin in doing so. Anna Nicole, piled high with implants and additives, is at the opposite extreme. It may well prove to outlive its risky cosmetics.
