In 18th century Italy there was an acknowledged division between opera buffa and opera seria. I have been thinking of this because a year ago two of my children were in their school production of Les Miserables, and I have become reluctantly familiar with its mixture of revolutionary chanting and grand sweeping mush.
We all went to watch the film last week. Hugh Jackman is fantastic, Anne Hathers not bad either and Russell Crowe - more on him in a moment - not as bad as you think he's going to be. Even Eddie Redmayne, whilst departing not one whit from the blubber-lips public schoolboy stereotype, did his Eddie Redmayne thing as well as I've seen him.
I didn't cry, though clearly I was meant to and when Jackman does "Bring Him Home" (or whatever it's called) mid-way through the film, I could see that crying was perfectly possible. Quite a lot of it was going on either side of me. I was palpably moved, although less so when Jackman attempted the climactic top A, an unforgiving note sung softly for any tenor, and an ugly one in Jackman's heroic but grating attempt.
Les Mis is really an opera, so why people think of it as a musical I don't know. If it isn't an opera it's because the music is too sentimental and exploitative. But these are adjectives that could very well be applied to Puccini. Perhaps it's an operetta then. But operetta is meant to be light in subject, which The Glums definitely isn't.
In homage to the old Italian tradition then, I have devised a new category for Les Mis alone - depressing and trashy at the same time, it is an operetta seria.
But back to Russell Crowe. It isn't that he sings badly. It's that his voice is wrong for the part. Javer, the policeman ultimately undone by his corset-tight sense of righteousness, needs to have a voice fit for the day of judgement. Instead Russell Crowe sings him like a traffic-warden.
£60 fixed penalty please Monsieur Valjean!
