Even if there are, this side of the never-to-be-produced-again Harvey Milk, no gay operas per se, we all know there are gay operas, and Karol Szymanowski's Krol Roger (King Roger) has a place of honor among them. First staged in 1926, it has never quite left the active repertoire, but it's never quite caught on, either. Kasper Holten's Royal Opera Covent Garden production, recorded live last May (Opus Arte DVD and Blu-ray), augurs to change that.
The word "out" would not have had its current meaning any more than "gay" did in Szymanowski's time, but his homosexuality was hardly a secret, and significantly, he did nothing to make it one. In addition to indulging in homoerotic themes in his text-based music, he wrote a gay novel that he chose not to publish only because his mother was still living. And even though he predeceased her, he sent a portion of it he had translated into Russian to a love interest there, the only part of the novel that survives. Legendary pianist and fellow Pole Arthur Rubinstein, among the most prominent of his advocates, commented that he sensed the composer was gay and learned so from Szymanowski himself in 1921, on his return from several trips to Sicily with a wealthy friend. "Now he was a confirmed homosexual. He told me all this with burning eyes."
Szymanowski's music of that period burns, too. In the air at the time was a genre of fundamentally overheated music that eked out an existence in the harmonic valley between Mts. Wagner and Stravinsky �" music liberated from tonality but not bound by new rules of atonality. A lot of it was explicitly, extremely sexual, particularly the operas of Schreker, Zemlinsky and Rudi Stephan, whose opera Die Ersten Menschen retold the Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel story with added doses of interfamily incest and other exoticisms the late gay director Nikolaus Lehnhoff called "kaput." No one would have missed the homoeroticism in Krol Roger, which would have made it stand out even among the sexually charged works of Szymanowski's contemporaries, which were also popular and much produced until the purifying Nazis intervened.
A seldom-mentioned key to understanding Krol Roger is learning how to say its name. It's not "Roger" as in "over and out," but something closer to long-o ROW-gur. No disrespect, but it's harder to take seriously a king named Roger as in Corman, and this king is nothing if not serious. Szymanowski based his own libretto, written in collaboration with his cousin, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, on the 13th-century Sicilian King Roger. Not at all coincidentally, they wrote it after the composer's life-changing experiences traveling in Sicily, the ones that made his eyes burn. Southern Europe was to central Europe's wealthy homosexuals what Germany was to British and American starving artists, a place where the berries were darker, their juice sweeter and freshness and availability were assured.
For all that, the libretto is pretty cerebral, fairly shouting out the Nietzschean Apollo-Dionysus dichotomy in response to the strictures of orthodox religion. And even by the standards of opera, there's little that would qualify as realistic. Without subtitles, the work would surely not stand a chance on today's opera stages, but in London Holten did everything in his considerable power to make the action clear and telling. He solved the problem of how to get inside Roger's head by installing a giant sculpted head center stage that rotated, in Act II, to expose the king's three-story library.
Roger, who is torn between his autocratic desire to uphold the useful state religion, an unstable, failing marriage and the stirrings of some strange new desires that want out, is confronted by a Shepherd whose preaching about the spiritual imperatives of the senses is causing the flocks to stray. When the Shepherd appears, so do some nude-ish male dancers, who writhe about the stage fetchingly. It works.
It might work less well if the baritone singing Roger were not Mariusz Kwiecien, a Pole who can use his native language like a sword and who sings with complete command of his music as well as the words. Despite his Johnny Depp good looks, and the inevitability of his shirt coming off in Act III (in no way an anticlimax), he's as good at the king's rage over his rapidly thawing emotions as he is at the ecstasy of surrender to them, which is, of course, his undoing.
Even though designer Steffen Aarfing gives the Shepherd an unflattering peach-colored long coat for his first appearance (he's in an altogether hotter business suit for his command private audience with the king), tenor Saimir Pirgu lets it rip vocally. Georgia Jarman is a searing Queen Roxana, singing blisteringly difficult music as if it were Mozart. In the pit, Antonio Pappano is a pagan god.