Vienna State Opera
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| Images: Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn Golaud (Simon Keenlyside) |
Arkel – Franz-Josef Selig
Geneviève – Bernarda Fink
Pelléas – Adrian Eröd
Golaud – Simon Keenlyside
Mélisande – Olga Bezsmertna
Yniold – Maria Nazarova
Doctor – Marcus Pelz
Pelléas’s father – Andreas Bettinger
Marco Arturo Marelli (director,
set designs, lighting)
Dagmar Niefind (costumes)
Dagmar Niefind (costumes)
Silke Bauer (assistant set
designer)
Anna-Sophie Lienbacher
(assistant costume designer)
Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Martin Schebesta)
Vienna State Opera Orchestra
Alain Altinoglu (conductor)
Debussy is like Gluck. No, of
course he is not; he would have been mortally offended had you told him so.
Indeed, Debussy regarded Gluck as having been responsible for killing off
Ramellian opera, delivering a lethal injection of Teutonic poison to a
flourishing genre. What does not kill you makes you stronger, of course, as
Debussy himself would, on a good day, have attested concerning Wagner at least –
and certainly in Pelléas et Mélisande.
But to return to Debussy and Gluck, their operas do, it seems to me, have
something very important in common, or at least their reception does. Pelléas and Gluck’s reform operas are
esteemed by all those who take opera seriously as drama, and disdained or
simply ignored by many for whom opera means something else. Their admittedly
very different aesthetics are quite clear, moreover, that playing to the
gallery is the last thing in which musical drama should be engaging. True,
there are occasional hangovers in Gluck, although they should not be
exaggerated, but there is not a single case, not one single case, in Debussy’s
sole completed opera.
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| Golaud and Yniold |
Moreover, what Debussy said, in
his article, ‘Pourquoi j’ai écrit Pelléas,’
could be taken, with a little adjustment, for what Gluck in his great reforming works was trying to
do (even if, yes, we know the Preface to Alceste
was written by his librettist, Calzabigi). Debussy explicitly praised the
symbolism of Maeterlinck’s play, which might seem to be – and indeed is – a very
different thing, but, ‘despite its dream-like atmosphere’, he was drawn to it
because it ‘contains far more humanity than those so-called “real-life
documents”. Like Wagner, a mediating influence between the two in certain ways,
myth was the thing. And somewhat like Wagner, if not so much like Gluck,
Debussy thrived on ‘an evocative language whose sensitivity could be extended
into music and into the décor orchestral’.
Those of us who love it shake our heads in bafflement at its neglect. Perhaps,
though, just perhaps, there is something to be said for every performance
remaining a special event – just as with, say, Iphigénie en Tauride. If an opera made it on to the list of works
Boulez conducted it is, after all, an unquestionable sign of quality.
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| Mélisande (Olga Bezsmertna) and Pelléas (Adrian Eröd) |
Is, then, this new production
from the Vienna State Opera able to live up to such expectations? (I shall pass
over less quickly than I probably should a tired and emotional British tourist
I overheard during the interval, boasting of having fallen asleep in such a ‘boring’
opera. ‘Can’t they just get it on?’) Musically, yes, and the production did not
do too badly either; I have certainly seen much worse. (I shudder to recall the
most recent, which is not to say very recent at all, production Covent Garden
brought in.) Marco Arturo Marelli’s staging makes an effort, is clearly the
result of consideration concerning the drama and what is going on, or what we
might think is going on. If I am not entirely convinced that everything
coheres, if I think that perhaps a stronger single, even if partial, line might
have worked better, there is enough to make one think – and, yes, feel.
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| Arkel (Franz-Josef Selig) and Geneviève (Bernarda Fink) |
In what seems to me a
relatively bold move, more unusual than you might think, there is a general
sense of Ibsen, of bourgeois drama: not just the costumes, but the
internalised, familial – and extra-familial – claustrophobia. It is not,
perhaps, how one initially thinks of, or feels, the work, but it is an
interesting standpoint that certainly has things to tell us. Pelléas’s father
is seen on stage, initially in bed, but actually becoming more of a real
dramatic character when his illness lifts. When Arkel has Mélisande kiss him,
the other old man joins them, and there is something discomfitingly
paedophiliac to the whole, strange episode. Whether it quite fits with the rest
of what we see and hear is another matter; the attribution of darker desires to
Arkel, at least in that particular case, is becoming a little clichéd by now.
An important, indeed the important, focal point to much of the action is a
boat. Not only do Pelléas and Mélisande go sailing in it, Mélisande lies in it
when she sings her extraordinary song; it becomes the ladder Yniold climbs; Golaud hurls it away in jealous anger; and, in the strange ending, Mélisande sails away in it with womenfolk seemingly
transformed from servants into spirits. Again, the almost Lohengrin-like (although not in gender!) conclusion intrigues, and
offers an important contrast with the important stage roles played earlier by
Golaud’s henchmen, who clearly threaten Pelléas during their walk. But the
bright skied conclusion sits a bit oddly, again, with the rest. Is it just
death? If so, would it not, especially in this context, be better just to leave
it as death? Marelli’s staging is at least having one ask such questions, although
I found the 2015
Munich production from Christiane Pohle – universally and, to my mind,
quite bafflingly condemned – a stronger, more coherent treatment, hauntingly
provocative in its Beckettian inheritance.
Perhaps, however, I am wrong,
for, in an interesting programme interview, conductor Alain Antinoglu, having
acknowledged – and how could one not? – the darkness in the piece, describes
the story as a ‘path from darkness to light’. Perhaps. I suppose there is
something to be said for that musically, and Altinoglu certainly imparted a Lohengrin-without-the-tragedy sense to
the conclusion. More importantly, he judged the ebb and flow, the colours and
the shadows, very well indeed. Those raw Wagnerian moments made their Tristanesque
and Parsifalian points, not only musically, but the phrases, the paragraphs,
and indeed the nature of the musical language quite rightly developed
differently too. The playing drawn from the Vienna State Opera Orchestra (the
Vienna Philharmonic in all but name) was quite outstanding, colours shifting as
imperceptibly as the ebb, the non-ebb, the flow and the non-flow, of the drama –
and non-drama.
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| Arkel, Geneviève, Golaud, and Pelléas's father (Andreas Bettinger) |
With no disrespect intended to
the rest of the cast, a particular cause of interest here lay in Simon
Keenlyside’s transition from Pelléas to Golaud. He managed it as expertly as
you might imagine – if anything more so. The jealousy, the vulnerability, the flawed
masculinity, and the way with both the French language and the specific quality
of Debussy’s lines: all were there, as if he had been performing the role all
his life. Keenlyside is not one, of course, only to concentrate on his own
part, so in a sense one might argue that earlier performances had helped
prepare him, but this was a splendid achievement by any standards. Adrian Eröd
made for a well-contrasted Pelléas: again, clearly flawed, but more
mysteriously so. As with all of the cast, the style of vocal delivery was spot
on: doubtless testament both to individual artistry and to Altinoglu’s overall
control. As Mélisande, Olga Bezsmertna judged the fine balance between
wide-eyed ingénue and the merely annoying with great skill, the competing
demands of character development and character stasis equally well balanced. I
am not sure that I had heard Franz-Josef Selig in French repertoire before; his
wise humanity shone through just as clearly, if, appropriately, with a different
touch of ambiguity, as if he had been singing Gurnemanz or Sarastro. I often
tend to forget how small the role of Geneviève actually is, so important is she
to the drama. Bernarda Fink nevertheless shone, in the most un-showy of ways.
My preference for a treble Yniold is not ideological, and in practice, it can
go horribly wrong. Nevertheless, I find, on stage, a woman impersonating a
child like this a bit odd (especially when I have known it done otherwise).
Yniold here had a considerably greater, more peculiar role than usual:
hyperactive, damaged, and very interestingly, consoling Golaud at the close and
preventing him from taking his life. Maria Nazarova did an excellent job at all
of that. This is no criticism of her performance as such, but I wish I had not
been made to think of Janette Krankie.
