Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon was one of the most popular operas of the 19th century, clocking up more than 1,000 performances in Paris alone in the decades immediately following its 1866 premiere at the Opéra Comique. Based on Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, it deals with burgeoning sexuality in a transient world. The waif-like heroine Mignon has unspoken feelings for the feckless Wilhelm, which ripen into love, jealousy and a growing awareness of her own femininity when she is faced with his attraction to the promiscuous actress Philine. Twenty-first-century taste is apt to find it coy, and some may now question its conservative stance on gender, but the score has a sad, elegant beauty that remains immensely appealing.
Harry Fehr’s striking staging for New Sussex Opera reimagines the work in terms of the hedonism and existential uncertainties of Weimar Republic Berlin, where Mignon’s boyish persona, defensively adopted as a response to childhood trauma, is taken for granted by a society that ignores her underlying heartbreak, and where she can only find genuine solace in her relationship with the half-crazed tramp Lothario, who, by a twist of fate, proves to be her long-absent father.
There are superb central performances from Victoria Simmonds as Mignon and Ruth Jenkins-Róbertsson as Philine. Simmonds, a fine singer-actor, makes Mignon’s anguish entirely credible in an interpretation that is all the more moving for being handled with unsentimental restraint. Jenkins-Róbertsson nicely conveys Philine’s manipulative self-aggrandisement, and her coloratura is simply dazzling. Ted Schmitz is the occasionally effortful Wilhelm, Adrian Powter the dark-voiced, touching Lothario. The score ideally needs a larger body of strings than the St Paul’s Sinfonia can muster, though Nicholas Jenkins conducts with great sensitivity and an admirable sense of Thomas’s often elusive style.
