Bayreuth Festspielhaus
Daland – Franz-Josef Selig
Senta – Adrienne Pieczonka
Erik – Michael König
Mary – Christa Mayer
Steersman – Benjamin Bruns
The Dutchman – Samuel Youn
Jan Philipp Gloger (director)
Christof Hetzer (set designs)
Karin Jud (costumes)
Urs Schönebaum (lighting)
Martin Eidenberger (video)
Sophie Becker (dramaturgy)
Bayreuth Festival Chorus
(chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Christian Thielemann
(conductor)
Assuming that Rienzi and Wagner’s two earlier operas
will not enter the regular Festival repertory, and discounting Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony, The Flying Dutchman was
my final work from the Wagner canon to hear at Bayreuth. Unusually, early
controversy was elicited not by the production, but by casting. Evgeny Nikitin,
as the whole world must now be aware, was forced to withdraw, or ‘asked to
resign’, owing to an absurd over-reaction to a tattoo claimed to be a swastika
but which was not. Bayreuth’s nervousness concerning the slightest possible
connection to its darkest period is understandable, but the Festival would be
far better advised to confront its past head on, as Katharina Wagner seems
commendably determined to do, rather than to resort to such quick-fix public
relations gimmicks, which will always backfire.
Nikitin is a fine artist and
was sorely missed, his replacement Samuel Youn to be lauded for acting as a
last-minute replacement but hardly for his performance. Whilst he started off
resoundingly dark and clear of tone, he did not reach the end of his monologue
before intonational problems set in. Alarmingly, there were entire phrases
during his performance when he was as much as a quarter-tone off-pitch; it was
not a matter of odd notes. Perhaps the audience was being indulgent on account
of the special situation, but this was some way by now from the first night; I
could not help but think that the warm reaction Youn received signalled an
audience for the most part unable to discern his tuning, even if one were to
put aside a rather dour stage presence.
His colleagues, save for a
rather nondescript Mary – why does this role seem so difficult to cast? –
provided a good deal of vocal compensation. Adrienne Pieczonka had a few
moments in which her tuning too left a little to be desired, also on occasion
her diction, but for the most part, hers was an impressive, unusually womanly,
performance. This Senta was no girl and seemed, which fitted well with the
production, to know very much what she was doing. Her Erik, Michael König,
showed himself possessed of a fine, mellifluous tenor, even if he were a little
stiff on stage. Benjamin Bruns was quite a revelation as the Steersman. His is
a still more mellifluous, at times ravishingly beautiful, voice; I wished that
more had been written for him. Perhaps best of all was Franz-Josef Selig’s
Daland, unerringly centred with respect to pitch and words, and just as
unerring when it came to tonal warmth. Perhaps he ultimately sounds a little
too kindly for the role, but that is really to nit-pick.
Christian Thielemann drew an echt-Bayreuth sound from the Festival
Orchestra. He certainly knows how to work both orchestra and Festspielhaus
acoustic. Not that this reading was undifferentiated in its darkness; there
were splendidly light, almost fairy-like, Mendelssohnian textures to be enjoyed
too. However, there were problems with Thielemann’s performance – at least for
me, though the audience again reacted almost ecstatically at the endless
curtain calls. A recurring trait in some, though far from all, of his
performances is a tendency to pull around the music arbitrarily, almost because
he can. Whilst it can occasionally prove refreshing, if only as a counterblast
to unimaginative or doctrinaire-metronomic performances, here there were too
many occasions, as in his Philharmonia recording of Schumann’s Second Symphony,
in which it sounded merely contrived and interrupted the flow. There was a
wonderfully pregnant slowing at the end of Senta’s ballad, fully justified by
the anticipation it engendered. Balanced against that were frankly bizarre
gear-changes such as a sudden slowing during the transition to the third act.
(The opera was performed in an unbroken span, and in Wagner’s later version.) I
was also a little surprised to hear the old operatic forms so clearly
delineated; yes, Wagner marks them in the score, but I have yet to hear a
performance of the ‘number-opera’ as opposed to the ‘music-drama’ variety that
has proved entirely convincing. More than once I longed for Klemperer’s
level-headed yet visceral communication of the score. Choral singing was first-rate
throughout.
I was left somewhat nonplussed
by Jan Phillip Gloger’s production, new this year. It has some excellent visual
touches, not least thanks to Christof Hetzer’s striking set designs and Urs
Schönebaum’s evocative and equally striking lighting. I liked the use of red to
denote Senta’s realm of adventure, drawing together her dress, the red with
which she daubs boxes to bring about her own modest Dutchman installation – the
equivalent to the painting – and the sometimes shocking use of blood. And the
way silhouetting is imaginatively employed to make the fantasy of not only a
boat but a liberating cityscape is impressive indeed. The modernity of Daland’s
factory is chillingly conveyed, but it is not entirely clear to me that it is
enough for a production of this work to indict contemporary capitalism –
contemporary to us, that is. I have no particular problem with the setting
being an electric fan factory: spinning of a sort, I suppose. Yet it did not
seem to add anything very much, save for the very end, when, courtesy of an
opportunistic mobile telephone picture taken by the Steersman, Wagnerian
redemption is splendidly undercut by transformation of the fan design into a memento
of the suicide of Senta and the Dutchman. That was by far the most savage
indictment of the evening of our sick and sickening system of production.
The presentation of the
Dutchman as a weird, android-like figure, presumably a product thereof, seemed
more odd than anything else. At his entrance, wheeling in – yes, you have
guessed it – a suitcase, he appeared to me to be injecting himself with a
syringe. He did not seem very practised at it, for a great deal of blood was
spilled. Apparently that was the point, cutting himself to show that he was
human after all, but I was not the only person to have missed that in the
theatre, having instead to resort to a programme interview. There were, indeed,
too many instances where the action, especially for a relatively small theatre,
was on too small a scale properly to understand, or was simply, at least to me,
obscure. I had the sense that there was a better production waiting to break
out; let us hope that the Werkstatt
principle will enable refinements in years to come.
