Four Dead – Takshiro Namiki, Taiki Miyashita, Yauci Yanes Ortega, Matthias Spenke, Fermin Basterra
Thirteen Dying – Polly Ott, Agnes Dasch, Sarah Papodopoulo, Viola Weimker, Claudia Buhrmann, Orine Nosaki, Wiebke Kretzschmar, Martin Fehr, Christoph Eder, Hartmut Schröder, Martin Netter, Thomas Heiß, Werner Matusch
Fourteen Surviving – Angela Postweiler, Uta Krause, Veronika Burger, Claudia van Hasselt, Julia Hebecker, Ulrike Jahn, Hans-Dierer Gilleßen, Michael Schaffrath, Matthias Eger, Laurin Oppermann, Philipp Schreyer, Simon Berg, Enrico Wenzel, Frank Schwemmer
Henze’s Raft of the Medusa may lay
claim to the most celebrated non-premiere in musical history. In his
autobiography, Bohemian Fifths (one of the most beautifully readable and
enjoyable of composer autobiographies), Henze tells of how a media campaign
against him had been stepped up during rehearsals, its authors ‘a ghost writer …
also active as a composer … and a Hamburg-based journalist of ill-repute,’ somehow
pillorying the oratorio about to be given its first performance without having
seen or heard a note of it. It was neither the first nor the last time that his
enemies claimed that the desire of ‘someone who was not hard up but who had a
roof over his head and contracts with an appreciative Establishment … to become
a spokesman for minorities, for the underprivileged and for opponents of the
system’ must be bogus. Luigi Nono and Peter Weiss wrote letters on Henze’s
behalf; Theodor Adorno nearly did, then (according to Henze) backed out on
learning of such communist involvement. At any rate, a shot across the bows, at
least in retrospect, had been fired when, in an interview with two journalists,
eight days beforehand, they asked the composer what he would do in the case of ‘unpleasant
scenes’. Maybe they knew; maybe they did not.
At any rate, something already eerily amiss
backstage, the chaos initiated when someone unfurled a (small) red flag on
stage, and Henze quite reasonably declined a functionary’s demand that he
personally take it down – ‘I was there to conduct, not to keep the place clean’
– led first of all to withdrawal of the RIAS Chamber Choir, who had joined from
West Berlin to add to the numbers. They absurdly chanted ‘in unison: “Get rid
of the flag! Get rid of the flag!”,’ notwithstanding the fact that the very
same flag flew from the Hamburg and Schöneberg Town Halls at that time. Riot
police intervened, ‘ready for action with their clubs and shields’. The
orchestra had already left. ‘There was total confusion, brute force was used,
and a number of arrests were made. Ernst Schnabel,’ writer of the oratorio’s
text, ‘may have been a former controller of North German Radio, but that did
not stop him from being thrown through a plate-glass door by a representative
of the forces of law and order and from being briefly locked up in a cell for
opposing the state’s authorities.’ Someone, as Henze discovered only later, had
attached a poster to his desk, with the word ‘Revolutionary’, followed by a
question mark.
It was a traumatic event for Henze, however
fun or glamorous it may sound to us with distance. He, rather than the
disruptors, found himself the target of a boycott from German musical
institutions as a result. It has long seemed to me it would make a splendid
metatheatrical setting for a staging of the work (be it noted, if only in
parenthesis, that it was never intended to be staged). Yet, on reflection, and
in light of what was in many ways, doubtless near-necessarily yet also wisely,
quite a straightforward staging by Tobias Kratzer, perhaps that is the last
thing The Raft of the Medusa actually needs: a further overshadowing by
trumped-up debates and, let us not forget, state violence. Perhaps, actually,
what it needs is the ability to speak, however clichéd the expression, ‘for
itself’, in order to move and indeed to engage a new generation of listeners,
many of us, me included, being afforded the opportunity to hear it live for the
first time. There is probably, truth be told, room for both, though what do I
know? I am no director. What I can say is that this Komische Oper premiere was,
both intrinsically and judging by the audience reaction, a great success, indeed
handsome recompense for that West German sabotage at the end of the fateful
year of 1968.
We were not, however at the Komische Oper’s
usual base. We were in Hangar 1 of Tempelhof Airport, a spectacular (and
history-ridden) venue in what was and, in many ways still is, the West. Whilst
long-awaited renovation and expansion work, to last several years, proceeds at
the house on Behrenstraße, the company intends to deepen contacts with all
parts of the city. This certainly made for an excellent start. The action took
place, as it were, in the round—or rather the square, and a very large square
at that, the audience surrounding a giant pool representing the sea in which
the great tragedy of the French frigate Méduse took place, immortalised
for so many of us in Théodore Géricault’s painting of two or three years later
(an arresting tableau vivant on our arrival). Like the jungle, the
forest, indeed any ‘natural’ setting, the sea in itself lies beyond human good
and evil, but it all too often provides a setting for the latter to unfold. And
so, after a little initial splashing around, already brought into relief by
Charon’s dinghy narration, the tragedy unfolded, honouring where apt the
intentions of its original creators, yet not bound by them where it no longer
made sense. The chorus descended from all around us, indeed within us, ensuring
our identification and involvement from the very outset. Death, La Mort, called
from the side, and stepped in, luring many away. The dwindling band of
survivors fought, reconciled, sank, swam, hallucinated, met again with reality,
all clearly narrated and explained, always in danger—not only from La Mort, but
from the heartless, stratified, capitalist society that had sent them to her
and abandoned them.
A shipwreck necessarily evokes further
thoughts and images to us concerning our world’s (that of contemporary fascist
regimes in Italy, Greece, and Britain in particular) inhuman rejection of
refugees whose torment its
economic and political systems have engendered. That is neither to be
avoided nor regretted. Kratzer, rightly, I think, does not push that, for
whilst it is part of the same struggle against the ruling class, it is not
simply to be identified with it. This is also a more general struggle, indeed the
general struggle of class society. Charon’s line remains with us: ‘Die Überlebenden
aber kehrten in die Welt zurück: belehrt von Wirklichkeit, fiebernd, sie
umzustürzen.’ The survivors returned to the world, instructed by reality,
fevered, to overthrown it. They have not done so yet, of course, yet they were
some of many to have planted the revolutionary seed reaction, its lies and
distractions can never quite extinguish. And, at that point, the opening of the
hangar doors, revealing a vehicle to take away the survivors, welcoming them (like
Death, of course) though we know not to what, offered a glimpse of hope, whilst
the idea that it was anything but continued to gnaw at us.
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| Charon (Idunnu Münch) |
My sole reservation, and I should not wish
to make much of this, is that such a setting perhaps tended to emphasise the ‘dramatic’
and particularly the scenic over the ‘musical’—not, of course, that the two (or
three, or however many there are) should be dissociated in the first place.
Singers were miked, which in the setting made good sense, I think; this was not
an oratorio hall, nor was it pretending to be. Just occasionally, though, I
wondered whether Henze’s orchestra, the excellent Komische Oper forces conducted
with great wisdom and knowledge by Titus Engel, might have had a bit of a raw
deal. Opera (even when it is not strictly so) is beset with such compromises,
of course; indeed, it glories in them. Another performance would bring
something different to the table and there are certainly no grounds for
complaint. What I think I might have benefited from was a further opportunity
to hear the performance once I had become more closely accustomed to its general
outlines.
For there was no doubting the command of
detail, be it melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, or timbral to be heard here, nor its
inextricable combination both with the myriad of vocal lines and with the
staged action. In Henze’s own words: ‘The polyphonic style of writing that I had
acquired in such disparate works as Novae de infinito laudes, Der
junge Lord and Die Bassariden now acquired a very real power and a
realistic dimension: these were the voices of people thrown together, voices
that rose to a scream or died away to a murmur and to silence.’ Crucially,
moreover, Henze thought here – and wanted his performers to think – of instrumental
lines as vocal lines too, ‘as the music of wordless Greek choruses’. If there
is a whole world – this is most definitely a Mahlerian imagination at work – to
be discovered in these particulars, there is a score and there are recordings
for that. Moreover, the timpani call ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi-Minh’ prevails,
equivocally no doubt, yet ultimately it does and must. (So it did in those ‘events’
of December 1968, when socialist students, protesting against the culture
industry, showed explicit solidarity in the hall with Henze and vice versa,
so one part of the ‘message’, if you like, did reach performance after all.) Schnabel’s
use of German and Italian, the latter deepening the reach of Dante’s Inferno,
also helped point to a world that one day might just shed itself of national
boundaries—or perhaps not, given we hear it only from the dead.
The choral model in Bach’s Passions is
obvious enough and was acknowledged by Henze. At least as important, however,
is how he and Schnabel, as well as their performers, travelled beyond that into
more naturalistic realms, ‘including whimpering and screaming – even the
wailing of Arab women is audible here’ (Henze). That plurality, very much part
of his artistic and political vision, could at times only be hinted at, but out
of those hints could, and did, grow something larger and stronger. We should
not forget, though, that that, just as in Bach, could encompass something dark
too. The monstrous description of those (as yet) still alive, the
‘Vielzuvielen’, (the far too many), becomes imprinted by repetition: not quite
ritualistic, for Schnabel’s writing and Henze’s setting are more skilfully
varied than that, but not entirely un-ritualistic either. This is, after all,
an oratorio. They are individual human beings, all with a right to live, yet
their number is a crucial key to Death’s victory, such as it is. All of this
was finely balanced in a musicodramatic dialectic that was heard as well as
seen, felt as well as thought.
Whilst it would be invidious and, in many
cases, simply not possible to single out particular vocal contributions, something
should nonetheless be said of the central trio. Gloria Rehm welcomed the
sailors in sweet obscenity to their destruction, their choral (and solo vocal)
lines acknowledging her welcome, finding it all too easy to intertwine with it,
to forge a new ensemble. Idunnu Münch’s Charon kept us (just about) sane,
framing our understanding and response, a clear voice of goodness in the sense
that we knew her truth to be ‘the truth’. (At least, the alternative did not
bear thinking about it.) She mastered a very different kind of writing, taking us
back not only in her name to the earliest of opera, negotiating passage between
the living and the dead, and imparting a different kind of hope, in a
documentary truth that permitted of aesthetic expression. (We may remember here
that, as well as heading North German radio, Schnabel was a key figure in the
making and development of German radio documentaries.)
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| La Mort (Gloria Rehm), Jean-Charles (Günter Papendell) |
Jean-Charles is, to quote Kratzer in a
programme interview, ‘the primus inter pares any of us could be, almost
an Everyman in the Hofmannsthal sense. In this particular setting, it is that
that enables – and did in Günter Papendell’s towering performance –
identification, reading ourselves in, and thus exploration of some more
particular qualities too. It is a tricky balance, yet Papendell brought it off,
rising from the crowd and giving voice, without being a mere mouthpiece. There
are musical as well as ‘dramatic’ means to this, of course, and he very much
had the measure of Henze’s Pierrot-plus (that is, at times more
experimental) writing here. Thoughts of Fischer-Dieskau, quite simply, never
surfaced—alas, like so many others, lost in those treacherous waters, made all the more treacherous by man’s inhumanity to man. Yet each of those individual
singers and actors, as well as the massed choral forces, brought a crucial
individual presence to the performance without distracting: not the least of Krazter
and his team’s achievement here.
‘Ernst Schnabel and I,’ Henze wrote, ‘identified
with the figures in Géricault’s painting, not only in order to be able to deal
artistically with the subject matter of the piece and in order to give credible
expression to our shared experience and fellow suffering but because we felt a
sense of inner solidarity with these people and their struggle.’ Surely part of
the task of such a performance is to enable the audience to do so too; in this,
it seemed triumphantly to succeed. In Henze’s 1990 revision, there is even to
be heard a final glimmer of hope (or might we, irrespective of intention,
divine it in our administered society as reimposition of order?) An orchestral
hymn is heard above, perhaps structuring, the ongoing drumbeat. It – the idea
rather than the means – put me slightly in mind of Wagner’s revision of The
Flying Dutchman in light of Tristan’s equivocal thoughts of redemption.
Is that a good thing or not? The very question is doubtless silly, yet it
reminds us that we soldier on, sometimes taking a step back, sometimes a step
sideways, sometimes no step at all; and just occasionally, sharing a communal
and, yes, political experience such as this, those doors flung open, Fidelio-like,
we take a hesitant step forward. Or we imagine we do.
The greater number of the Komische Oper’s
activities this season will take place in the Schillertheater, known to many of
us as temporary home to the Staatsoper during its lengthy renovations, but
there will also be performances at the Konzerthaus, at Neukölln’s Kindl-Areal
(formerly the Berliner Kindl brewer, now a centre for contemporary art), in a
tent at the Rotes Rathaus, and at pop-up locations across the city. For the
meantime, do what you can to get a ticket for this, and take that hesitant step
forward into the freie Luft.
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