Charles Gounod’s opera Romeo et Juliette, based on Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy of star-crossed lovers, has captivated audiences for over 150 years. The climactic Act V, depicting the ill-fated couple’s double suicide, is a pinnacle of romantic opera. Two contrasting modern productions showcase how differently this heart-wrenching finale can be interpreted. The 2017 Metropolitan Opera production, directed by Bartlett Sher, starred Diana Damrau as Juliette and Vittorio Grigolo as Romeo (Romeo Et Juliet.mov). Their electric chemistry and commitment to the youthful, wide-eyed innocence of the characters made for an emotionally riveting, if somewhat chaste, portrayal.
In contrast, the 1994 Covent Garden film directed by John Pascoe featured Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna in more overtly impassioned, even sensual performances that embraced the characters’ sexuality as well as their idealized love (WocomoMUSIC). While both are laudable interpretations of Gounod’s lush score, the contrasting takes on the pivotal tomb scene of Act V reflect divergent understandings of young love’s nature – one more dreamily sheltered, the other confronting carnality. This dichotomy raises questions about how we receive and understand one of literature’s most influential love stories centuries after its creation.
The divergent portrayals of the central love story in The Met’s 2017 live production and the 1994 film stem from differing directorial visions and lead performances that emphasize, respectively, the romantic naivete or the erotic passion of young love. These contrasts reveal an ongoing tension over-interpreting Shakespeare and Gounod’s depiction of teenage amour in a modern context – as an expression of pure, if tragic, idealism or a tumultuous awakening of adult desire.
This essay will analyze the portrayals of the tomb scene side-by-side, comparing and contrasting the two productions’ handling of critical elements like set design, lighting, blocking/choreography, vocal performances, and unspoken dramatic choices made by the lead actors. It will then explore how these differing interpretive lenses impact the overarching themes regarding the nature and meaning of rapturous young love.
The set designs framed the action through distinctly different aesthetics. Sher’s Metropolitan Opera production situated the famed tomb scene within a massive, dimly-lit Gothic crypt. The muted stonework and dramatic shadows cast across the cavernous space evoked a solemn, almost monastic atmosphere befitting the doomed romanticism of the story. The set’s sheer scale and ominous darkness amplified the sense of inescapable tragedy looming over the young lovers, with the weight of their forbidden passion seeming to echo through the centuries-old architecture. This grim, imposing setting established an overarching tone of melancholy that infused even the most intimate moments with a palpable aura of fated suffering and inevitable loss.
In stark contrast, Pascoe’s more intimate film interpretation featured a crypt set centered around a raised, candle-lit bier. The warm glow from the flickering candles provided gentle illumination that highlighted and surrounded the lovers’ entwined forms with a sensual, inviting radiance. Rather than feeling oppressed by the imposing weight of tradition or inevitability, this lighting evoked a more passionate, present-tense urgency to their romance. The soft, flattering light suggested the unfolding events were something akin to an erotic, operatic fever dream playing out in its own insulated rapture, disconnected from tragic consequences. The intimate crypt space and candle-lit ambiance fostered a more sensual, lived-in-the-moment interpretation of the famed love scene.
Sher’s production emphasized a stately, archetypal approach to romantic imagery. For much of the extended duet between the star-crossed lovers, Damrau and Grigolo remained separated, mirroring each other’s movements but from opposite sides of an invisible divide on the stage (Romeo Et Juliet.mov). This staging choice created a palpable tension and longing between the two characters, heightening the sense of their forbidden love. Though they moved in perfect synchronicity, they could not physically connect until the very end of the duet. When their bodies finally intertwine, it becomes a powerful dramatic payoff after the extended buildup. However, even this culminating embrace maintained a sense of chasteness and restraint, befitting the archetypal romanticism that Sher had established throughout.
In contrast, the Pascoe film interpretation took a decidedly more erotic approach. Rather than being primarily separate, Alagna and Gheorghiu frequently embraced, caressing and cradling each other’s bodies with smoldering intensity, making the desire between their characters feel vividly carnal (WocomoMUSIC). The physicality reached its climax in one particularly erotic moment when Alagna mounted Gheorghiu from behind, her nightgown slipping tantalizingly off her shoulders as they sang of rapturous, consummated love. While the story still operated within the realm of romantic tragedy, the overt depiction of physicality and sexual desire was constantly displayed in this adaptation, far more so than Sher’s relatively chaste interpretation.
Both Damrau and Grigolo are widely heralded for their extraordinary vocal mastery, and they brought that consummate technical skill to bear in their respective portrayals (Romeo Et Juliet.mov). Damrau, in particular, earned rapturous raves for her exquisite handling of Juliette’s transformative journey from a flighty, naïve girl into a mature, all-consumed woman over the opera’s course. Her tender, bell-like soprano conveyed an ethereal, almost disembodied sense of innocence in the early acts that made Juliette’s eventual awakening and capitulation to tragic death feel all the more lacerating. Damrau’s impeccable control and storytelling genius imbued every crystalline note with youth’s delicate fragility, slowly giving way to the shattering epiphanies of experience and loss (Romeo Et Juliet.mov). The tour-de-force performance tracked every nuance of the character’s evolution.
In stark contrast to Damrau’s masterful ingenue, Gheorghiu and Alagna saturated their performances with unabashed, lush, full-bodied vocalism from the very outset that smoldered with an unrestrained carnality (WocomoMUSIC). If Damrau embodied the definitive innocent, Gheorghiu was earthy, womanly, and decidedly unlaced – her luscious, voluptuous tone combined with Alagna’s virile, martial tenor to create vocal raptures that oozed with unbridled passion and desire (WocomoMUSIC). There was no naiveté to shed, no childlike essence to outgrow, but rather an interpretation rooted in unguarded amorous surrender from the first breath. It was a ferociously sensual take that made even the work’s most intimate moments drip with eroticism before finally ceding to poignant tragedy in the closing bars.
Beyond just vocals, the two Romeos and Juliette made telling interpretive choices that reinforced their characterizations. A key example came when Juliette awakened to find her beloved Romeo dead beside her. Damrau awoke with an expression of innocent, childlike shock and dismay, her face crumpling with girlish devastation as she cradled Grigolo’s body and struggled to comprehend his lifeless form (Romeo Et Juliet.mov).
Gheorghiu, on the other hand, initially recoiled from Alagna’s corpse with a look of erotic longing morphing into anguish, trailing her fingertips across his bare chest before descending into despair (WocomoMUSIC). Already entrenched in adult sexuality, her grief was that of a woman stripped of her lover in the most visceral sense, not a romantic dream curdled. In both cases, committed acting reinforced the core characterizations of each production’s vision.
So, while both interpretations channeled the core tragedy of Shakespeare and Gounod’s romance, these granular artistic choices resulted in substantially different depictions of the essence and stakes of that romance. For Damrau and Grigolo’s more virginal, gauzy-hued characterizations, the tomb scene was a thwarted apotheosis of young, idealized love – a sublime union severed before transcendent bliss could be tasted, let alone consummated (Romeo Et Juliet.mov). There was profound sorrow, abiding beauty, and an airiness rooted in naivete and inexperience.
Conversely, Gheorghiu and Alagna’s sensual, rapacious take framed the tomb scene as a shattering deprivation of erotic fulfillment, all-consuming passion cruelly stolen at its apex (WocomoMUSIC). Here was the crushed id, not merely the devastation of romantics robbed of Courtly Love. The stakes were more grounded, visceral – carnal love severed before its natural climax. Instead of a shimmering, romanticized dream cut short, it was an admission that the frantic lust we associate with heedless youth was genuine and all too real for these particular starry-eyed hedonists. Essentially, it was two lenses on the nature and meaning of youthful amour – sighing, sanitized poetic ideals dissipating like morning mist versus hormonal fevers catalyzing the throes of experienced sensuality. Even mortality could not dull the thrall of the latter’s all-consuming desire.
In a nutshell, both productions’ contrasting interpretations of Romeo and Juliette’s climactic tomb scene reveal an enduring tension over how to depict the essence of rapturous young love in a modern context. Is it a fleeting, chaste fairy tale to be enshrined in wistful idealism? Or a more grounded awakening of erotic desire that embraces the visceral complexities of youthful sexuality? Sher’s production honored the romantic purity at the story’s core, framing the tragedy as a consummation severed before innocence could transcend. Pascoe’s film, however, unapologetically highlighted the feverish carnality of adolescent passion, making the loss no less heartbreaking but rooted in rawer, more corporeal devastation. While both resonated powerfully, the dichotomy prompts reflection on whether we receive such seminal love stories as escapist allegories of perfected ideals or unflinching representations of the messy realities of human experience in all its sublime and fallen permutations. Artistic interpretations can reveal as much about ourselves as the tales they tell.
“Romeo Et Juliet.mov.” Dropbox, www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ctdo0bw69fygunwbgvfui/Romeo-et-Juliet.mov?rlkey=0jm8kaso8op9lh267qhoskhw3&dl=0.
WocomoMUSIC. “Charles Gounod – Romeo and Juliet (Opera film with Roberto Alagna, Angela Gheorghiu, Tito Beltran).” YouTube, 22 May 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YN3H773tkM. Accessed 6 Apr. 2024.