Enoch Arden is “beautiful, profound and touching,” says Robert Reid, associate theatre professor.
Renowned Canadian tenor opera singer Ben Heppner will be taking the stage on June 18 in Montreal, a rare performance since he retired in 2014 due to what he called voice unreliability.
This time he won’t be singing, though — he’ll be narrating, under the stage direction of Robert Reid, an associate professor in Concordia’s Department of Theatre.
Accompanied by pianist Stéphane Lemelin, Heppner will be telling the story of Enoch Arden, a poem written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1864 and transformed into a piano-and-narration recitation by composer Richard Strauss in 1897. The performance is part of this year’s Montreal Chamber Music Festival.
Reid was asked by the festival’s organizers to stage direct Enoch Arden, a seldom-performed melodrama and an unusual choice. “In the musical landscape, Enoch Arden is an odd object because it’s not theatre and it’s not music,” Reid says. “It’s a very particular object.”
The performance is a tribute to another great Canadian singer, Jon Vickers, who died last year. “He was one of the greatest tenors, a bit like Ben, and he did this piece,” Reid explains.
The mission for this performance was to create a low-key environment that hinged on Heppner’s narration and Lemelin’s piano performance. But in order to help illustrate the story’s drama, Reid decided puppets — or as he calls them, performing objects — would help provide important visualization.
A handful of current and graduated Concordia theatre students, as well as Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater, helped with the mise en scène. Reid says it was crucial for him to make sure the performing objects didn’t command too much attention or come across as gimmicky.
“We’re just there to make some moments of Ben’s story come out … to help him and help the audience experience that story in a very beautiful, profound and touching way,” Reid says.
Tennyson’s poem tells the story of a sailor, Enoch, who leaves his family to find work but who is shipwrecked along the way. When he finally returns home years later, he finds a former friend and rival, Philip, has taken up with his wife, Annie. Enoch doesn’t tell her he’s alive and dies of a broken heart.
When Reid was first asked by the Montreal Chamber Music Festival to take on this melodrama, he didn’t know quite what to make of it. “But when you expose yourself to this and read it, and listen to the music … you discover the beauty and the coherence of the piece. Ben and I, we gave ourselves this mission — let’s make sense of this so that when we meet the audience, we’re telling the story as if it is our story,” he says.
Reid took away several personal lessons from the rehearsals for Enoch Arden. One particular line — “Philip gain’d as Enoch lost” — reminded him of his own experience being away from home and busy with work.
“We are sometimes asked to work a lot, and are therefore not present for our loved ones. We’re so involved in work, just like a sailor being abroad, and we’re missing a lot of things,” Reid says.
He also recounts a moment in rehearsal when he, Heppner and Lemelin fell silent after a particularly moving passage. “We hope now to have the audience experience what we experienced in that rehearsal room,” Reid says. “It’s not an extravagant show. It’s a very simple, but hopefully a very beautiful experience.”
Heppner and Lemelin’s performance of Enoch Arden will take place on Saturday, June 18, at 8 p.m. at McGill University’s Pollack Hall (555 Sherbrooke St. W.) as part of the Montreal Chamber Music Festival.
The festival is offering the Concordia community a 33 per cent discount on tickets for the entire program, with no time limit for purchasing.
