The only staged performance at the Festival de Radio France this year was C'était Marie-Antoinette, a musical and dramatic invocation of the life of the guillotined queen, conceived, directed and designed by Jean-Paul Scarpitta, with Fabio Biondi and his Europa Galante in the pit.

It seemed a shame, when there were three operas on the Montpellier calendar that called out for a staging, that the festival chose to devote so much time and money to this show. The organizers should not forget that extravagance was a contributing factor to the Revolution that brought about the downfall of the French monarchy. For extravagant was what Marie-Antoinette was, with fabulous period costumes by Milena Canonero — who designed the costumes for Sofia Coppola's lavish 2006 film about the French queen — and evocative sets by Scarpitta, who has an aesthete's eye for a good stage picture but is less sure-footed when directing actors.

The show, seen July 29, traced the life of Marie Antoinette though the writing of French historian Evelyne Lever, whose 1991 biography was translated as Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen of France. The music ranged from Rameau to Salieri, via Grétry, Gluck, Piccinni and Sacchini, before culminating with the Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem. The score is an operatic commentary rather than a dramatic entity, and the show resembled a docudrama that might have made compelling television but in the theater fell flat.

The text never sounded as if it had been written to be staged: as Marie Antoinette, actress Natacha Régnier struggled to find an appropriate tone in what was almost a monologue; lumbered as she was with a pedestrian script, Régnier could hardly be blamed for the dullness of the evening. Putting words in the mouths of historical characters convincingly requires a Shakespeare, as underlined by Marie-Antoinette's clunking references to "my harpsichord teacher, Gluck," discussion of the sexual performance of King Louis XVI, and yards of historical filler.

Fortunately there were the beautiful stage pictures and Biondi's conducting. His every entry produced light and energy. The opening extract from Rameau's Les Indes Galantes was thrilling; the Gluck extracts captured the spirit of the time, in a way in which the text failed.

The principal burden of the singing fell to soprano Sonya Yoncheva and mezzo Stéphanie d'Oustrac. Yoncheva was grand and exciting, but the top of the voice tended to saturate, perhaps due to an understandable quest to raise the temperature of the evening. D'Oustrac was superb: she adds to her growing reputation with each performance. Here, she was particularly moving in Gluck's "J'ai perdu mon Eurydice," sung with an impressive sense of pacing. This provided a brief moment of total pleasure in an unnecessary evening, which far from promoting Marie Antoinette as an iconic victim of political machinations, left the public at the Opéra Comédie with renewed feelings of revolutionary zeal.

STEPHEN J. MUDGE

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