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| Images: Monika Rittershaus |
Dionysus – Sean Panikkar
Pentheus – Günter Papendell
Cadmus – Jens Larsen
Tiresias – Ivan Turšić
Captain – Tom Erik Lie
Agave – Tanja Ariane
Baumgartner
Autonoe – Marisol Montalvo, Vera-Lotte
Boecker
Beroe – Margarita Nekrasova
Dancers – Azzurra Adinolfi,
Alessandra Bizzarri, Damian Czarnecki, Michael Fernandez, Paul Gerritsen,
Claudia Greco, Christoph Jonas, Csaba Nagy, Sara Pamploni, Lorenzo Soragni
Barrie Kosky (director)
Otto Pichler (choreography)
Katrin Lea Tag (designs)
Ulrich Lenz (dramaturgy)
Franck Evin (lighting)
Vocalconsort Berlin
Chorus of the Komische Oper, Berlin (chorus director: David Cavelius)
Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)
I have been privileged to see –
and hear – three excellent performances and productions of The Bassarids; I have also been privileged to attend many excellent
performances and productions at the Komische Oper. In both respects, this new
production by Barrie Kosky, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, was fully worthy to
stand amongst any of its predecessors: complementary, in many respects highly
contrasted, to stagings from Christof
Loy (Munich) and Krzysztof Warlikowski (Salzburg), and perhaps still more highly contrasted in
a typically formalist approach from Jurowski, whose relationship to Kosky’s
staging proved thoughtful and revealing.
One enters to activity already
proceeding onstage: not unusual in contemporary theatre, but important in its
particularity. There are musicians, much of the large woodwind and brass
sections, on stage as well as in the pit. (Alongside it too: even in Henze’s
1992 revision, as here, it is a large orchestra for which he calls.) There are
others milling around too: later revealed to be chorus and dancers. But the
milling around is perhaps the more important thing than who is doing the
milling. There, as here (in the audience, that is), patrons, or, as we might
prefer, citizens, are preparing for the performance, in whatever roles they
might play. For, in this milling before the musicodramatic storm, it is part of
an amphitheatre we see: not archaic, not archaeological, but of now – as it was
for Euripides; as it is for him, for Henze, for WH Auden and Chester Kallman,
for all of us. Attic drama, above all Attic tragedy, the cornerstone for our
entire Western dramatic, including operatic, tradition, continues to live, to
breathe, to adapt, and above all to enthral. Where Wagner, whether Henze liked
it or not – in many ways, he did not – his most important predecessor, had seen
decadence in the later tragedy of Euripides, and found greatest inspiration in
Aeschylus, Auden led Henze here to a typically modernist conflict between immediacy
and the highly mediated, a few turns of the dialectical screw on from
Schiller’s naïve and sentimental, yet ultimately perhaps not so very different.
On the one hand, Auden insisted that Henze, as part of his preparation for
composition, attend Götterdämmerung: Karajan
gave him his Vienna box. On the other, he and Kallman provided a highly
literary, ‘poetic’, even in Wagner’s – and Nietzsche’s – terms, ‘decadent’
libretto, after Euripides, with which to work. All manner of dramatic conflicts
in this opera, ultimately rooted in ancient tragedy and our reception of it,
may be traced back to that – as well as to Henze’s own, personal musical
conflicts: Germany and Italy, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, past and present, and
so forth. The amphitheatre, of which we see only part, of which we, drawn in,
are also part, stands as the arena for all that and more.
What Kosky proceeds to do is
largely straightforward: direct, yet mediating between history’s various
antiquities and today, belying most claims of ‘decadence’. The story is largely
told straightforwardly, but with as fine a reinvention of the original artistic
unity Wagner – and many German idealists – saw in the drama of Athens: a Gesamtkunstwerk, if you will. Every
Kosky production, whatever one thinks of it conceptually, reveals him as a
master of his craft; this is no exception. Individual and crowd scenes, both on
stage and beyond it – around the enlarged pit, in the theatre of the Komische
Oper, etc. – are blocked and executed with precision: not as some cold,
clinical, ‘merely’ technical exercise, but so as to permit the drama to emerge.
Mesmerising dance, as strange and alienating as it is mesmerising and erotic,
heightens the sense both that we might have been ‘there’, that we might fall
prey to Dionysus’s call, and that yet we can make sense of it, as spectators. Such
is a Maenads’ Dance unlike any other I have seen, Otto Pichler’s choreography
just the thing, as are the energy and sheer proximity of the dancers. The
ultimate seduction, Pentheus by Dionysus; the ultimate tragedy, Agave’s bestial
murder of her son; and her recognition of what she has done: these are
presented with all the force and clarity one can imagine, however foolishly,
one ‘might have’ experienced in Athens. Agave’s childish delight in the bloody
quarry from the hunt is a particularly gruesome moment, but not for the sake of
gruesomeness. To an extent I cannot previously recall, everything now seems to
have led up to the moment of recognition. Dionysus’s self-revelation, intense
vulnerability and all as wounded son of Semele, comes as an eminently musical
coda to that.
For at the heart of the stage
construction lies the orchestra, true locus of the Dionysian rite: for Kosky,
just as it had been for Wagner, Nietzsche, and arguably Henze too. In an
interview for Die Welt, to mark the first performance of The
Bassarids, Henze proclaimed his belief ‘that the road from Tristan
to Mahler and Schoenberg is far from finished, and with The Bassarids I
have tried to go further along it.’ That will surely always come through, yet
Jurowski’s approach also highlighted the countervailing force both onstage and
in the pit, clarifying in Apollonian fashion Henze’s conception of this ‘music
drama’ – he uses Wagner’s term – in symphonic form: four movements, with an
intermezzo akin to the ancient satyr play (here rescored by Jurowski in keeping with Henze's revisions to the rest). One could not resist the sheer power
of frankly superlative orchestral and choral forces, fully the equal of ‘starrier’
counterparts in Munich and Salzburg; yet, intriguingly mirroring, even
extending the composer’s dramatised conflict between Schoenbergian and
Stravinskian tendencies in Der Prinz von
Homburg, a neoclassical, ordering element came with at least equal power to
the fore. With Henze’s music, there is often a battle between expression, even
over-expression, and the discipline required to express that raw expression, as
it were. In this case, the Penthean, the monotheistic put up a stronger musical
fight to the primaeval Dionysiac in Henze’s orchestral cauldron than I can hitherto
recall. Occasionally, I longed for Jurowski to let go a little more, but even
that slight frustration had its own dramatic rewards. The heartbreak, moreover,
of Henze’s sacrificial quotation from Bach’s St Matthew Passion registered all the more starkly for being
presented almost as an object, something removed from our religious and musical
view.
Sean Panikkar as Dionysus offered
a performance at least as frighteningly, irresistibly seductive as he had in
Salzburg last year: a chilling yet smouldering portrayal of a being beyond good
and evil, inhuman and yet palpably human, his movement almost as impressive as
his more conventionally musicodramatic skills. This evening only furthered the
thought that it is a role he was born to play. Günter Papendell’s Pentheus
proved a moving, complex, yet ultimately hapless foe: an intelligent and
powerful portrayal. Tanja Ariane Baumgartner’s Agave initially, quite rightly,
kept us at arms’ length, before drawing us in movingly for the final tragic outcome,
assisted by, among others, an excellent Marisol Montalvo, singing for an
indisposed Vera-Lotte Boecker, who continued to act the role of Autonoe onstage, and a
rich-toned, richly sympathetic Margarita Nekrasova as the nurse, Beroe. As so
often with the Komische Oper, though, a sense of company among all concerned
made for a Gesamtkunstwerk in
another, related sense. A memorable evening indeed.
