Staatsoper
Unter den Linden
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| Gretel (Elsa Dreisig) and Hänsel (Katrin Wundsam) Images: Monika Rittershaus |
Peter – Arttu Kataja
Gertrud – Marina Prudenskaya
Hänsel – Katrin Wundsam
Gretel – Elsa Dreisig
Witch – Jürgen Sacher
Sandman – Corinna Scheurle
Dew Fairy – Sarah Aristidou
Achim Freyer (director, designs,
lighting)
Geertje Boeden (assistant
director)
Petra Weikert (assistant
designer)
Sebastian Alphons (lighting)
Jakob Klaffs, Hugo Reis (video)
Elena Garcia Fernandez, Larissa
Wieczorek (dramaturgy)
Children’s Chorus of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (chorus master: Vincenz Weissenburger)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Sebastian Weigle (conductor)
The first performance of Humperdinck’s
fairy-tale opera, Hänsel und Gretel,
on the night before Christmas Eve, 1893, in Weimar, was conducted by Richard
Strauss. The work’s second staging, in Hamburg, in September of the following
year, was conducted by Gustav Mahler. It reached Berlin, this very house, then home
to the Royal Court rather than the State Opera, the following month, and has
belonged to the world ever since. Alas, that very popularity and a strange, seemingly
related, insistence on presenting a tale of child abuse with sugar coating have
tended to lead to the opera’s underestimation, or at least to insipid
presentation, even non-interpretation. What, after all, is a fairy tale, if it
is not an invitation to interpretation, for children, for adults, for all? For
those to whom the Brothers Grim(m) were something a little more interesting
than Eric and Donald Trump Jr, this would be mind-numbingly obvious; alas,
audiences being what they often are…
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| Hänsel, The Witch (Jürgen Sacher), and Gretel |
Achim Freyer does not penetrate so
deep as LiamSteel in his Royal College of Music staging; when I saw that, I more or
less instantly realised it was the production for which I had been waiting much
of my adult life. (Yes, as I never tire of pointing out, much of the best
London opera takes place in our conservatoires.) But nor does he try to; his concerns
are different. He is certainly not pandering to reactionary ‘tastes’, in the
manner of Adrian Noble in his Vienna Disneyfication. Where Freyer excels, as, at his best,
he always does, is in the creation of a world, both childlike and perhaps not.
I say ‘perhaps’, since who is to say what is ‘childlike’ and what is not, or
indeed what its opposite might be. Is that, again, not part of the essence of
fairy tales? Clowns are present, of course; there is that undeniable element of
Freyer house style, but why not? It does not look, like sometimes his staging
have, as merely more of the same, or one size fits all; nor does it feel like
it. The sense of theatre is keen, not without framing, for instance when the wondrous
flick of the lighting switch opens the metaphorical story book at the opening,
yet without ever seeming pleased with itself, or too clever-clever. Children,
of whatever age, do not like that; often they are right not to do so. We never
see the ‘real’ Hänsel and Gretel, or rather the ‘real’ singers, not really, for
their masks cover their faces several times over. But what is ‘real’? And what
is ‘real’ here? Perhaps the plot interests Freyer less: a pity, I think, but he
has other concerns. And the dream-like sense of proceedings, if only in
retrospect, acquires a more darkly, yet also brightly, sense of the political
and its possibilities, with a final unveiling of the sign ‘REVOLUTIO’.
Unfinished business, or a joke? Dreamers or anti-dreamers, from Novalis to
Brecht, may – or may not – have their say. Life with Freyer, life in many fairy
tales, is a circus; yet think of what a circus, that theatre of cruelty, of the
absurd, of society and anti-society, involves, suggests, incites.
If only the musical side of
things had lived up to those possibilities. Sebastian Weigle’s conducting was,
alas, throughout Kapellmeister-ish in
the negative sense. ‘Light’, as if attempting a demonstration that Mendelssohn
were not worth listening to, almost entirely without Wagnerisms, let alone the
kinship with Strauss Christian Thielemann in that Vienna performance had
imparted, rightly or wrongly to the score, the greater sin of Weigle’s reading
was listlessness. I do not think I have ever heard the first act drag so; nor
have I heard the music sound less magical. Weigle is certainly no Strauss or
Mahler. It would be a hard task indeed to have the Staatskapelle Berlin sound
bad in this music, and it did not; but this great orchestra was sadly undersold
throughout, achieving a few moments of wonder despite, not on account of, its
conductor.
It was not a vintage night for
singing either, although Elsa Dreisig sparkled as Gretel. Katrin Wundsam
sometimes sounded rather harsh as Hänsel. Marina Prudenskaja and Arttu Kataja
sang well enough as their parents, likewise Jürgen Sacher as the Witch, but
perhaps needed something more in the way of inspirational musical leadership –
I shall never forget Colin Davis in 2008 – to lift their performances to
something more memorable. There was hope, though, that in a subsequent revival,
not only better conducted, but perhaps more engaged with the possibilities
hinted at by Freyer, something more than the sum of the parts might emerge.
That hope is, after all, the fuel on which opera houses, especially houses now reborn
such as this, should burn.
