Glyndebourne Opera House
Music-Master – Sir Thomas
Allen
Major-Domo – William Relton
Lackey – Frederick Long
Officer – Stuart Jackson
Composer – Kate Lindsey
Tenor. Bacchus – Sergey Skorokhodov
Wigmaker – Michael Wallace
Zerbinetta – Laura Claycomb
Prima Donna, Ariadne – Soile
Isokoski
Dancing Master – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke
Pianist – Gary Matthewman
Naiad – Ana Maria Labin
Dryad – Adriana Di Paola
Echo – Gabriela Iştoc
Harlequin – Dmitri Vargin
Scaramuccio – James Kryshak
Truffaldino – Torben Jürgens
Brighella – Andrew Stenson
Katharina Thoma (director)
Julia Müer (set designs)
Irina Bartels (costumes)
Olaf Winter (lighting)
Lucy Burge (movement)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)
Katharina Thoma’s
Glyndebourne debut had been heavily publicised. Sad to say, not only does her
production of Ariadne auf Naxos fail
to live up to any expectations that might have been engendered; it fails
dismally to live up to Strauss and Hofmannsthal, indeed even so much as to
engage with them. Audience members would apparently erupt into uproarious
laughter when someone, anyone, so much as walked onstage seemed delighted, but there
was more sign of the artwork we know, love, and desperately wished to have
interrogated in the miserably paraphrased surtitles – is it that difficult to offer a reasonable
translation? – than on the Glyndebourne stage, at least during the Opera
proper.
The 1940s seem almost to be de rigueur for a certain breed of opera directors
at the moment; this staging follows in the dubious footsteps of David McVicar’s not entirely dissimilar Médéefor ENO. A pandering desire to ‘entertain’ – ironically here, given the
concerns of the Prologue, though the irony seems entirely accidental – replaces
genuine dramatic, or indeed almost any other variety of, engagement. And yet,
of course, Zerbinetta does not appeal to the lowest common denominator; that
she both amuses and touches is owed to an expected level of Kultur on the part of the audience.
Insofar as what she offers is ‘low’ culture, and that is a considerable ‘insofar’,
that only has meaning in terms of contrast with its ‘high’, seria antipode – or cousin. Here, we
simply have her reduced to a ‘mad’ person, straitjacketed in a wartime
hospital, who, tedious ‘joke’ of tedious ‘jokes’, sings some of her high notes
whilst having an orgasm induced by a visitor. I am not sure what is more
offensive: the transformation of mental illness, presumably a product of
wartime, into fodder for laughter, the refusal so much as to listen to the text
(and no, the orgasm does not betoken serious study of the score), or the fact
that so many seemed to respond so positively to Carry on Ariadne. Naiad, Dryad, and Echo are nurses, whose every
shaking of a sheet elicited helpless guffaws from that vocal section of the
audience.
A still greater indignity
suffered by the work comes at the end when Ariadne, reuinited with her fighter
pilot Theseus, has him land himself on top of her behind a curtain. It was
difficult to decide whether such prudishness were preferable to a more full-frontal
vision; either path would simply have been embarrassing in context – or rather,
weirdly out of context. Hoffmansthal’s concern with transformative myth receives
not so much as a nod, but then nor does the transformative power of Strauss’s
music. Goodness knows what the Composer has been doing, wandering around the
Opera, not unreasonably lost; to start with I thought he was a doctor, then a
patient, but he really seemed to be there to give the false impression that
what we see is somehow connected with the Prologue.
For that is the greatest problem
of all with this staging, bafflingly so, since one would have thought that,
whatever Konzept or none, it would have
been pretty straightforward to get right. Much of the Prologue is presented
reasonably enough: no particular insight is gained, but it does not jar
especially with what we are seeing and hearing. (Many audience members appeared
to be doing neither, instead reading the shoddy titles and responding
accordingly, that is when they were not simply chattering to each other. Stony
glances had no effect whatsoever upon them.) The setting is said to evoke the
Glyndebourne of the period, that is of the arbitrarily selected early 1940s,
though I am not sure one would have known that without being told. But things
happen pretty much as they should; rather in the sense of an ultra-conservative
staging, one gleans little but has ‘the story told’. (Christof Loy, as his wilful,
equally un-engaging Salzburg
Frau ohne Schatten shows, is not
necessarily the most sympathetic director of Strauss, yet he engages with the
Royal Opera House in a considerably more revealing version of the site-specific
approach in his staging of Ariadne.) Then
suddenly, at the close of the Oper, the melodrama of an air attack bursts upon
the scene. Some people, apparently, ‘just loved’ the ensuing fire: an effect
quite without cause, slightly to misquote Wagner on Meyerbeer. For the rest of
us, it seemed more akin to a desperate attempt to ‘do’ something with or to the
work, given that for some, unspecified reason, the richness of Strauss and
Hofmannsthal was not nearly enough for Katharina Thoma.
But far worse is to come, for
any idea of the Opera as a staging suggested in the Prologue appears to have
been thrown out of the window. There really is no connection between the two sections
of the work. Instead one has the house transformed into a wartime hospital, in
which for some reason Ariadne awaits the return of her aforementioned fighter
pilot. The very essence of the work, not just its delicious satirising of
responses to ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, but its metatheatrical probing of opera as a
performative art, has simply been passed over. Thoma comments in a programme
interview, ‘But sometimes when I leave the theatre and see the news, and there
are catastrophes, think, what have I been worrying about? There are more
important matters in the world.’ Unfortunately, the æstheticism of the work and
its creators is not so much undercut as rejected in favour of uninvolving
incoherence.
Musical performances were
better, though I suspect – and hope – they will improve as the run proceeds.
Vladimir Jurowski had the excellent LPO on a tight leash: often too tight,
harrying the score rather than giving it time to speak. Strauss of all
composers does not need to be sentimentalised, but, despite certain kinship or
rather pre-emption, this is not Stravinskian neo-Classicism. A half-way house,
akin to Busoni, would be perfectly justifiable, intriguing even; however, for
much of the time one desperately wanted to ask the conductor just to calm down
a little, perhaps more than a little. The Opera fared somewhat better than the
Prologue in that respect, though its musical course did not come across, as it
should, as if in a single, long breath. Strauss may be an ambivalent Wagnerian
here, but a Wagnerian he remains, especially in that requirement for
understanding and communication of the melos.
Although the voice is not
what it was, Thomas Allen still imparted to the Music Master a theatrical
authority so evidently lacking in the stage direction; Wolfgang
Ablinger-Speerhacke provided an effective foil as Dancing Master, though he was
perhaps inclined to overact. Of the principal characters, Laura Claycomb’s
Zerbinetta was by some distance the most successful. Notwithstanding an
unfortunate passage of extremely stray intonation during her big aria, she
otherwise managed her coloratura very well, and acted the part in as lively and
sympathetic fashion as the staging would permit. Soile Isokoski’s Ariadne
improved as the Opera progressed, her music before ‘Es gibt ein Reich’ having
suffered from severe inability to sustain, let alone, to float a Straussian
phrase. Yet, though matters improved in that respect, hers was not an involving
portrayal. (Much of the fault may of course have been the director’s, but not
all of it.) Sergey Skorokhodov experienced technical difficulties as Bacchus –
one can readily forgive some of them, given Strauss’s cruel writing – but also
managed on occasion to display greater mettle; his is certainly a performance I
can imagine becoming more impressive on subsequent evenings. Kate Lindsey,
though she threw herself commendably into the role of the Composer on stage,
disappointed vocally; the voice lacked any of the richness, even vocal
variegation, one longs for in the role, however unfair it may be to hark back
to Irmgard Seefried. Smaller roles were generally well taken, offering a properly
‘Glyndebourne’ sense of theatrical company; Dmitri Vargin (Harlequin) is a
singer whose future we might be well advised to watch.
Yet, despite the wonderful
surroundings and some more than creditable music-making, the evening was sorely
let down by Thoma’s staging. It offers neither ‘fidelity’, whatever that
slippery concept might mean, nor the courage to try something new and to pursue
its conclusions; the incoherence is its ultimate problem. Where the work
presents a myriad of possibilities, the production closes them down, without
offering anything satisfying in their stead. And if that makes me of the
Composer’s party, so be it. Ultimately, we all know that, though Strauss plays
his games of masks at least as cleverly here as anywhere else, the moment when
they drop, when we hear his voice, is
the Composer’s ‘Musik ist eine heilige Kunst...’. All of us, it would seem,
except Thoma.
