 |
| Michaela Schuster (Nurse), Emily Magee (Empress) Images: © ROH/Clive Barda |
Nurse – Michaela Schuster
Spirit Messenger – Ashley HollandEmperor – Johan Botha
Empress – Emily Magee
Voice of the Falcon – Anush Hovhannisyan
The One-Eyed – Adrian Clarke
The One-Armed – Jeremy White
The Hunchback – Hubert Francis
Barak’s Wife – Elena Pankratova
Barak – Johan Reuter
Serving Maids – Kathy Batho, Emma Smith, Andrea Hazell
Apparition of a Youth – David Butt Philip
Voices of Unborn Children – Ana James, Kiandra Howarth, Andrea Hazell, Nadezhda Karyazina, Cari Searle, Amy Catt
Night-Watchmen – Michel de Souza, Jihoon Kim, Adrian Clarke
Voice from Above – Catherine Carby
Guardian of the Threshold – Dušica Bijelić
Claus Guth (director)
Olaf Winter (lighting)
Andi A. Müller (video)
Aglaja Nicolet (associate director)
Ronny Dietrich (dramaturge)
Royal Opera Chorus (chorus
master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera
HouseSemyon Bychkov (conductor)
Magnificent! Following the
first night of this new production of Die
Frau ohne Schatten, I quipped that I could forgive an opera house anything
for musical performance at this level, whether orchestral, vocal, or, in this case, both. Dread memories of Christof Loy (Tristan
and Lulu, here in London, still more his unspeakable
Salzburg travesty of Die Frau) made
me wonder afterward whether I had shown undue clemency, but no: almost two days
later, I am still reeling from the impact of so extraordinary a performance,
one which no house in the world could conceivably improve upon, and which I
doubt could even be matched. For whilst Claus Guth’s production had many
virtues, which I shall come to a little later, it was Strauss’s astonishing,
still widely misunderstood, score which, rightly, had pride of place. If any
performance, anywhere in the world, does more for his cause in this anniversary
year, I think I shall find myself in need of a new vocabulary of superlatives.
 |
| Falcon, Emperor (Johann Botha), Empress |
And then – the singing! That
earlier Covent Garden performance had also marked my first encounter with Johan
Botha. He proved at least as remarkable more than twelve years on. This Emperor,
as mellifluous as he was vocally powerful, sounded every inch a Siegfried, and
a golden age Siegfried at that. (If indeed such an age ever really existed.)
Emily Magee had a few moments of relative fallibility, but by any reasonable
standards, her Empress was an impressive achievement, all the more so given the
wholehearted dramatic commitment offered in conjunction with the purely vocal.
Elena Pankratova was making her Royal Opera debut as Barak’s Wife; hochdramtisch singing of the highest
order was to be savoured here, her climaxes at the end of the first and second
acts sending shivers down the spine. If Johan Reuter’s Barak at first sounded a
little plain, that may as much have been character-portrayal as anything else;
his performance grew into something genuinely moving, testament to the
potential greatness of, as it were, Everyman (to borrow from Hofmannsthal’s
future). As for Michaela Schuster’s Nurse, her offering of musical and dramatic
malevolence – tonality on less the pre- than the post-Schoenbergian brink, though
never beyond it – would have been an object lesson in itself, even had it not
been heightened by such stage presence and intelligence. Smaller roles were almost
all impressively handled, David Butt Philip’s attractively voiced Apparition
perhaps especially worthy of note. The only disappointment was the tremulous
Falcon of Anush Hovhannisyan. Renato Balsadonna’s Royal Opera Chorus was, as
expected, excellent throughout.
 |
Guth’s staging, first seen at La Scala in 2012, presents the Empress in a sanatorium, Christian Schmidt’s stylish designs highly evocative of the time of composition. Our heroine is, one might say, hysterical in every sense. To begin with, she – and we – are somewhat unclear concerning the boundaries of reality and dream. Is Freud being channelled or satirised? Unclear, and all the better for it, which renders the very ending, in which it appears ‘all to have been a dream’ something of a disappointment. That said, much of what we see in between is riveting. With the best will in the world, some of Hofmannsthal’s symbolism upon symbolism – The Magic Flute really is best left alone – can seem unnecessary; it certainly seemed – and seems – to do so to Strauss. Yet the poet’s idea of transformation gains a fair hearing, or rather viewing, and there is a proper sense of the mythological, even the fantastical, to the dreamed world we enter, never more so than at the spectacular close to the second act, Olaf Winter’s lighting crucial here, and the craggy opening of the third. Those problematical echoes of Tamino and Pamina’s trials are presented with greater visual conviction than I can previously recall – and indeed greater conviction than one often sees in productions of the ‘original’. The sheer weirdness but also menacing sense of judgement emanating from a courtroom of strange creatures close to the end not only testifies to imagination and its possibilities but also to the misogynistic pro-natalism, from which, try as we might, we cannot ultimately rescue the opera. By contrast, Loy in Salzburg arrogantly declared that the work did not interest him and made not even the slightest attempt to deal with it. It was the sort of thing that might appeal to those who do not care for Strauss, or indeed Hofmannsthal, in the first place, though even they would most likely have been bored to tears with the banal ‘alternative’ narrative presented. Guth, for the most part, successfully treads a tightrope between presentation and interpretation.
