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by Julien Bilodeau

Canadian Opera Company & Opéra de Montréal, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto

January 31-February 15, 2025

Christine: “Je suis épousée à la Suède”

The advent of a new, large-scale Canadian opera is always a major cultural event. It seems that Canadian audiences are ready for new things. In 2018 the COC gave us Rufus Wainwright’s Hadrian, in 2017 a revival of Harry Somers’s Louis Riel and in 2015 Barbara Monk-Feldman’s Pyramus and Thisbe. Before those, the last new Canadian opera from the COC on the main stage was Randolph Peters’s The Golden Ass in 1999.

Now the first-ever co-commission and co-production between the COC and Opéra de Montréal brings us La Reine-garçon by Julien Bilodeau to a libretto by Michel Marc Bouchard. The singing of the all-Canadian cast is flawless and Bilodeau’s music is compelling and often beautiful. The story of Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-89), a woman raised as a man, has much to say about gender politics. But Bouchard’s libretto, based on his 2012 play Christine, la reine-garçon, has so many oddities that it threatens to undermine the work’s effectiveness.

The opera begins with the court out in the forest near Stockholm observing reindeer. They are suddenly overtaken by a fierce storm. The macrocosm mirrors the microcosm in that Count Karl Gustav is simultaneously overtaken by a storm of passion for Christine. He asks her to marry him and when she refuses, he forces himself on her. Luckily, Christine is so strong and trained in combat that she is able to cast Karl Gustav off her. Bouchard has always favoured exciting action over logic so here he has Karl Gustav attempt to rape Christine on the ground just after a blizzard, in full view of the court which, who knows why, is happy to look on and offer no help.

One would think attempted rape would at least lead to the malefactor’s banishment, but in Bouchard’s version of the Swedish court Karl Gustav remains present for the rest of the opera and is unashamedly able to speak to Christine. Karl Gustav is still in love with Christine and sends her mother to plead his case for him. This idea made no sense in Bouchard’s play and makes no sense in the opera. Christine and her mother, Marie-Éléonore de Brandebourg, have not spoken for 30 years because they both hate each other. As the dowager-queen reveals, when she saw that her baby was a girl, she wanted to expose it to die. Marie-Éléonore thus makes the worst choice possible to advocate any course of action to Christine.

Bouchard has Marie-Éléonore accompanied by an “Albino”, who prances about her in an ape-like manner. Since no one will likely know that some 17th-century aristocrats found dwarfs and fools entertaining, no one will know what this “Albino” is supposed to represent. The historical Christina is known to have despised this fashion. Bouchard could have made a point of this but does not.

One might think one attempted rape in Act 1 would be enough, but those familiar with Bouchard’s work will know that restraint is not his style. Later in Act 1 he has Count Johan Oxenstierna, the egocentric son of the Lord Chancellor, also attempt to rape Christine in public. Johan fails in the attempt and, like Karl Gustav, unaccountably receives no punishment. One wonders whether Bouchard thinks court life in Sweden is so debauched that attempting to rape the Queen is considered a normal occurrence.

The one good aspect of Bouchard’s libretto is that he attempts to broaden the theme of the play beyond that of a homosexual ruler who does not fit into society. Bouchard makes clear that Christine is in love with her lady-in-waiting Countess Ebba Sparre and she with Christine. Nevertheless, Christine is perturbed by this emotion she has never previously experienced and asks her resident philosopher René Descartes (who did actually visit in 1649-50) how to cure herself of this passion.

The introduction of Descartes allows Bouchard to raise the question of Cartesian mind-body dualism since Christine wishes to live a life of the mind unencumbered by the distractions of the body, such as passion. It is enough for Descartes to explain his concept of free will, but Bouchard is so enamoured of the grotesque anatomy scene from his play, which serves no purpose, that he includes it in his libretto. In it Descartes dissects the brain of a cadaver and removes the pineal gland of the deceased. Here, according to Descartes, is where man’s soul resides, although, since the man is now dead, the gland must be empty. Somehow showing the gland to the onlookers makes Descartes sing his most famous idea, “Cogito ergo sum”. Not only does the pineal gland have nothing to do with Descartes’s “Cogito”, but it also has nothing to do with the story.

Another puzzling feature of Bouchard’s libretto is his treatment of Johan Oxenstierna. For all of Act 1, Bouchard depicts Johan as a narcissistic young man devoid of any aesthetic or intellectual interests. His father suggested seducing Christine so he would be king. Then in Act 2, after Christine leaves, Bouchard pictures Johan rolling on the ground, distraught that that Christine has left with all her books, paintings and scientific instruments. Bouchard gives no clue to explain Johan’s radical change of personality.

Yet, despite a libretto full of far-fetched scenes and internal contradictions, composer Julien Bilodeau has created a compelling score for an orchestra of over 60 players. Bilodeau’s music is inspired by a wide range of styles from Debussy to John Adams, but Bilodeau welds them together by the same sombre tonal range throughout. The orchestra frequently plays in widely separated octaves to give the impression of vast opens spaces, and Bilodeau makes much use of violins, the piccolo and the vibraphone playing their highest notes to suggest the cold, with sweeps through the strings and the use of whistles to portray the wind.

Some characters are associated with certain combinations of instruments. Christine is often surrounded by the sounds from the vibraphone and violins while Johan is linked to the brass, especially the trombone. Other characters, like Descartes, are associated with a style of music. When Descartes explains what passion is to Christine the orchestra sloughs off its 21st-century sound to adopt a mode quite like Vivaldi. The general pattern throughout the opera is to create a melodic pattern for each scene that begins to crumble into dissonance as it metamorphoses into the succeeding scene.

Bilodeau writes gratefully for all voices. Bouchard has thoughtfully supplied monologues for the major characters that Bilodeau handily transforms into arias. Bilodeau gives Christine a particularly beautiful aria accompanied by repeated rising arpeggios in the cellos in which Christine contemplates her purpose in life. Bilodeau is also especially adept at writing choral music. Even though the chorus is often placed behind the scenes, their often wordless contributions amplify the opera’s overall atmosphere of unease and menace. In outdoor scenes Bilodeau makes impressive use of Anne-Marie Beaudette performing a kulning (the ancient call of female Nordic shepherds to their flocks and to each other) which, with its use of head voice and microtones, will to most ears sound eerie and forbidding.

The cast could not be better chosen. Kirsten MacKinnon, last heard here in 2019 in Così fan tutte, has a gloriously rich soprano, full of colour, capable of gorgeous sounds from her lowest to highest notes. Her voice and her acting are immensely expressive and convey Christine’s wide range of emotions from rage to quiet contemplation, from the first inklings of love to heroic determination. It is a thrilling performance and worth seeing the opera just for its sake.

As her beloved Ebba Sparre, Queen Hezumuryango, heard here last year in The Cunning Little Vixen, has a lovely, strong mezzo-soprano. In Ebba’s scenes with Christine in Act 1, Hezumuryango sings with a beautiful delicacy. In Ebba’s scenes in Act 2, when Ebba is forced to spurn Christine, Hezumuryango conveys the full depth of Ebba’s pain and despair.

The only other female character is that of Christine’s hateful mother Marie-Éléonore, sung by coloratura soprano Aline Kutan, last heard here in 2011 as an electrifying Queen of the Night. Kutan plays Marie-Éléonore with her two walking sticks as kind of spider in human form. Bilodeau has given her a fantastic aria punctuated with sky-high staccato laughter that Kutan delivers with such wild zest that she sounds like Mozart’s Queen gone mad.

Strangely enough, except for the figure of Johan Oxenstierna, Bilodeau seems not to have much inspired by the male characters. Johan’s vanity and nihilism are perfectly embodied by tenor Isaiah Bell, best known here for his portrayal of Antinous in Hadrian in 2018. Johan is a much showier role than Antinous so that we can recognize how fine an actor Bell is as well as a singer. His rounded voice is full of shifting hues which makes it an ideal vehicle for Johan’s personality. Bell is able to bring out a taste of the self-hatred that lies deep under Johan’s presentation of himself as a superficial, frivolous creature. It’s too bad that Johan’s greatest expression of emotion, his despair after Christine’s departure, comes out of nowhere since it is otherwise a fine showcase for the power Bell is capable of.

Bass-baritone Philippe Sly, last seen here in Les Contes d’Hoffmann in 2012, has the difficulty of playing Karl Gustav, a man with filled with uncontrollable passion who is given music that barely reflects this state. Sly can sing “Je t’aime” to Christine all he wants, but Sly inevitably communicates hopelessness rather than passion.

Bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch is incredibly only now making his COC debut after having sung leading roles around the world for the past 20 years. Neither Bouchard nor Bilodeau give his character, Axel Oxenstierna, much to do until the scene in Act 2 when Alex condemns Christine for even contemplating converting to Catholicism. The power of his dark, velvety voice makes us hope he returns here in a major role.

Owen McCausland, who sings frequently with the COC, is René Descartes. While the presence of the French philosopher adds general existential questions to those of sexual politics, both Bouchard and Bilodeau appear to satirize the figure. Bouchard portrays him as a humourless pedant while Bilodeau shows the man, unlike Christine, as sonically stuck in his period. This is even more peculiar since at the very end of the opera Christine champions herself as an embodiment of the new idea of “le libre arbitre” (free will). McCausland sings the role dutifully and does nothing extra to make Descartes comic.

Anick La Bissonnière’s sets serve primarily as unornamented cutouts and screens animated by Alexandre Desjardins’s moody, wonderfully effective projections. Unlike projections in other theatre productions, Desjardins’s are still for indoor scenes or betray only the slightest movement of wind, snow or mist. This makes La Bissonnière’s screens appear, appropriately enough, very like the old-fashioned painted drops of 18th- and 19th-century theatre. The main exception to this is the raging snowstorm that begins the opera with falling snow projected onto both a front scrim and the back screen. Blending well with the sets and projections is Éric Champoux’s muted lighting.

Although the creators of La Reine-garçon probably consider the opera finished, the work could be vastly improved if Bouchard could make adjustments to his libretto to remove some of its more illogical elements. A new opera should try to avoid the fate of Carl Maria von Weber’s Euryanthe (1823) whose music is seldom heard because of its weak libretto. In performance the COC Orchestra under Johannes Debus plays with the utmost commitment creating cascades of shimmering sound. The force of Bilodeau’s score and its wholehearted advocacy by the orchestra and cast are persuasive enough at present to make us overlook the flaws in the libretto, but how much better the work would be, and how much more likely the work would succeed elsewhere, if there were no flaws in the libretto to overlook.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Kirsten MacKinnon as Christine and Queen Hezumuryango as Ebba Sparre; troupe of dancers led by Isaiah Bell (far right) as Johan; Kirsten MacKinnon as Christine; Aline Kutan as Marie-Éléonore and Kirsten MacKinnon as Christine; Philippe Sly as Karl Gustav and Kirsten MacKinnon as Christine. © 2025 Michael Cooper.

For tickets visit: www.coc.ca.