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NBR New Zealand Opera's Lucia di Lammermoor augurs well for the company's 2007 season with a string of sold-out performances in Wellington.
From tonight, Auckland catches up with the Donizetti opera that so affected Flaubert's Emma Bovary it seemed as if violin bows were passing over her nerve-ends.
"I relish the chance to take a well-known work like Lucia and find out what it is that underlines its status," says Australian director Lindy Hume. "It's well-known because of its recent performance history with Dame Joan [Sutherland]. But what is the authentic Lucia experience?"
This quest has meant going back to the original Walter Scott novel, The Bride of Lammermoor, which was published in 1819. We agree the book starts off with a witty discussion of the problems of being a writer but soon gets bogged down introducing the various characters and their clans.
"I passed over the clans," Hume says. "Where is the girl, where is the story? Scott does take his time, doesn't he?"
Nevertheless, the novel allows the reader to understand more - laying the grounds for the opera's plot about Lucia, duped into believing her lover has been unfaithful and forced to marry her brother's ally for political reasons.
"Early in the book we get signposts about the girl's mental fragility," Hume says. "In the opera she suddenly goes nuts and kills her husband. Up till then she has been a fairly docile and compliant creature, but I kind of think we need to see it coming a bit more."
Hume draws back and evokes some unsettling images when she discusses the issues behind the opera. There will be no grand entrance, with Lucia descending a central staircase.
"She is discovered, after a great deal of searching, crouched, like a hare, in a fireplace, gibbering," Hume says. "That's not an operatic entrance, by my reckoning.
"I wanted to create a world that was really brutal so this little girl who is wandering around in it is truly out of her depth. It's not picturesque, it's more film noir."
Talking visuals, there has been a strong bond between Hume and her New Zealand designer, Kate Hawley. This is their third production together.
"We are both fascinated by the characters and the psychology of these operatic roles and we both had the image of an adolescent girl running across a brutal Scottish landscape," Hume says.
She laughs when I ask what tartans we might be able to identify from the third row. "There's a bit of tartan on stage if you go looking for it, but Kate is about giving people clothes to wear rather than costumes. Tartan can end up so cartoony it doesn't mean anything."
It is no accident that Emma Bovary identifies so closely with the character of Lucia. Donizetti's hero has become a symbol of the oppressed 19th-century woman. Did Hume take this into account in her approach?
"You can't pretend the feminist movement hasn't happened, or that the last major production of Lucia di Lammermoor was made 40 years ago in the 70s.
"I'm a creature of my upbringing and social surroundings and so are the women in the audience and those playing the roles."
Yet her admiration for Donizetti is boundless.
"I love the challenge of bel canto, keeping the drama continuous while you have got this rumpty-tum music, particularly with the men's stuff.
"You push the narrative through this very tuneful score, and then there are huge slabs of dramatic insight such as the mad scene, or the scene between Lucia and Enrico, sister and brother, which is one of the nastiest scenes you could ever hope for."
For Hume, Russian soprano Elvira Fatykhova is the perfect Lucia. The singer was superb in NZ Opera's La Traviata in 2005.
"We are both drawing on our own experiences of our adolescence, the kind of confusion, high drama, quixotic tempers and almost wildness that you experience at the age when you are not really a woman but not a child any more."
It sounds as if Hume is a director who expects her singers to look and move, as well as sing.
She adds another prerequisite. "They have to think. I like a smart singer, I have to admit, I like them to keep up.
"Mentally, intellectually, they must be able to see the thesis. You need to be able to expound your argument. If singers can understand it and express it, the audience will get that.
"It's not just the director's ideas you impose, the artists need to be engaged intellectually in the story that we are telling as well as the broader shared purpose of why we are in the theatre tonight."
On stage
What: Lucia di Lammermoor, by Gaetano Donizetti; libretto by Salvatore Cammarano, after Sir Walter Scott
Where and when: Aotea Centre, tonight 7.30pm & July 14, 17 (1pm), 19, 21
