Deutsche
Oper
 |
| RIENZI, DER LETZE DER TRIBUNEN von Richard Wagner, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Premiere am 24. Januar 2010, copyright: Bettina Stöß |
Rienzi – Torsten Kerl
Irene – Elisabeth Teige
Steffano Colonna – Andrew
Harris
Adriano – Annika Schlicht
Paolo Orsini – Dong-Hwan Lee
Cardinal Orvieto – Derek Welton
Baroncelli – Clemens Bieber
Cecco del Vecchio – Stephen
Bronk
Rienzi double – Gernot
Frischling
Philipp Stölzl (director, set designs)
Mara Kurotschka (assistant
director)
Ulrike Siegrist (set designs)
Kathi Maurer, Ursula Kudrna
(costumes)
Lorenzo Nencini (revival
director)
fettFilm (video)
Chorus and Extra Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus director: Jeremy Bines)
Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin
Evan Rogister (conductor)
At last, an opportunity for me
to see Rienzi, the only Wagner opera
I had yet to see in the theatre. A long-held ambition fulfilled, then? Yes,
just about. Alas, that was about it, though. There were two major, frankly
insurmountable problems: first, the miserable conducting of Evan Rogister; second,
the butchered version employed, so extreme as to render what we heard musically
and dramatically nonsensical. Rarely in the theatre and never in the Deutsche
Oper have I heard such a sustained display of incompetence in the pit as
Rogister’s. The number of times the Overture came close – or more than close –
to falling apart did not bode well. Singers, solo and chorus, often proved
alarmingly out of sync with the orchestra; there was, moreover, no sign of the
conductor so much as noticing, let alone putting things right. Occasionally,
the music came into focus; it was bound to eventually, I suppose, though never
for long. Interpretation? Forget it. It was hardly surprising that, for long
stretches, this great Wagner orchestra seemed to have given up. Was this in
fact Covent Garden’s dread Daniel Oren
working under a pseudonym? A dark thought indeed. One to avoid with equal
vigour, I fear.
However, even a Daniel
Barenboim – if only he would consider one day conducting Wagner’s Cinderella –
would have struggled with the version of the score handed to him. The composer
struggled with its unintentional length, of course. His witness in Mein Leben is instructive and
entertaining. Quite what it would mean to present a ‘complete’ Rienzi is unclear; the closest we may
come is the version conducted by Edward Downes for a BBC radio recording, and
even that falls short according to some understandings. Whilst there is
something to be said for glorying in its length, for rendering its problems a
virtue, that is unlikely to be an option any time soon. Cuts are, in principle,
not the end of the world – and may, for many, prove the opera’s redemption. This,
however, was something else, not only in the savagery of its cuts but in there
seemingly arbitrary nature, as if someone had attempted to present a
‘children’s version’, but had not really tried, and had succeeded only in
cutting it down to whatever the specified size had been. The number and nature
of non sequiturs, musical just as much as dramatic, straightforwardly defied
comprehension.
Of the work’s roots in
Meyerbeerian grand opéra, there was
well-nigh nothing remaining in structure, and merely the odd procession
(usually truncated) as meaningless evidential detail. It is difficult to
imagine someone making anything of the nobles’ role, let alone identity, nor
indeed of anyone else’s. Of the seeds of what was to come, often overlooked,
the little that remained ironically resembled, apparently more by accident than
design, Wagner’s notorious demolition of Meyerbeer in Opera and Drama: an ‘outrageously coloured,
historico-romantic, devilish-religious, sanctimonious-lascivious,
risqué-sacred, saucy-mysterious, sentimental-swindling, dramatic farrago’,
albeit hacked away at a bargain-basement cut-price quite at odds with anything
might could have imparted meaning to the experience. Poetic justice? Perhaps,
but to what end?
That
the work’s promise – more than promise, as any of us who knows it will attest –
nonetheless shone through is testimony not only to intrinsic merit, but also to
some fine singing and, to a lesser extent, to Philipp Stölzl’s 2010 production.
The latter is doubtless one-sided. In other circumstances, I might have been
more inclined to complain about its too-ready association of Rienzi with
fascism and, in the case of the Overture, with Hitler himself. The vision, in
more than one sense, is at least memorable there: a Rienzi body-double looking
out over the Alps from Berchtesgaden, listening to the music, conducting along,
and resolving to rule the world. Use of video – great credit should go here to
fettFILM – is unnervingly effective, permitting Rienzi as silent film speaker
to address the masses, to turn them, even as we see and hear something else. A
fascist design aesthetic in dress, colour, and architecture heightens the
unsubtle line; at least, though, it is a line. In any case, is subtlety really
what we are looking for in Rienzi? The
chorus in particular might nonetheless have been better directed. Stölzl’s
trademark tableaux vivants are one
thing; they work more meaningfully in his Deutsche
Oper Parsifal, I think, even
though that came later. Too often,
though, one had the impression poor chorus members were merely being left to
fend for themselves.
In the title role, Torsten Kerl
had his moments, although too often he proved vocally stretched. There could be
no faulting his enthusiasm, though, nor his skills as a film propagandist. (His
Overture body double, Gernot Frischling, deserves credit too.) Annika Schlicht,
however, in the Wilhelmine
Schröder-Devrient role of Adriano, proved the star of the show:
clear as a bell, bright and subtle as a speaking clarinet, and very much a
breeches mezzo on stage. (Schröder-Devrient seems to have struggled to learn
the part: there were clearly no such difficulties here.) I hope to hear – and see
– more from her. Insofar as the cuts permitted, Elisabeth Teige also impressed
as Irene, as did those assuming what were now less smaller than miniscule
roles. Rienzi, though, deserved so
much better. On the positive side, I stand all the more determined to see a
production and to hear a performance – preferably in tandem – that in some
sense do justice to this singular work. And if someone would kindly return the
manuscript from Russia, that would be nice too.
