Staatsoper Unter den
Linden
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| Franziska Krug/Isa Foltin/ GETTY IMAGES FOR STAATSOPER UNTER DEN LINDEN |
Faust, Doctor Marianus – Roman
Trekel
Gretchen, Una Poentitentium –
Elsa Dreisig
Mephistopheles, Böser Geist,
Pater Profundus – René Pape
Marthe, Sorge, Mater Gloriosa –
Katharina Kammerloher
Not, Magna Peccatrix – Evelin
Novak
Mangel, Mulier Samaritana –
Adriane Queiroz
Schuld, Maria Aegyptiaca –
Natalia Skrycka
Ariel, Pater Ecstaticus –
Stephan Rügamer
Pater Seraphicus – Gyula Orendt
Soloists – Narine Yeghiyan,
Florian Hoffmann, Jan Martiník
Faust, Herold – André Jung
Mephistopheles, Lieschen –
Sven-Eric Bechtolf
Gretchen, Astrolog, Engel,
Türmer – Meike Droste
Zueignung – Anna Tomowa-Sintow
Jürgen Flimm (director)
Markus Lüpertz (set designs)
Ursula Kudrna (costumes)
Olaf Freese (lighting)
Gail Skrela (choreography)
Detlef Giese (dramaturgy)
Chorus (chorus master: Martin Wright) and Children’s Chorus (chorus master: Vinzens Weissenburger) of the Staatsoper Unter Den Linden
Staatskapelle Berlin
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
And so, at long last, the
Staatsoper Unter den Linden has reopened its doors to the public, its resident
company’s long exile – seven years – in Charlottenburg’s Schillertheater over.
It will close again at the end of the week, to re-reopen, as it were, in
December, some final work to do, but let us not worry too much about that right
now; as Daniel Barenboim said, in a speech at the reception following the
performance, the Opera has avoided the fate of Berlin’s new airport. Fasolt and
Fafner have more or less completed their work, and the gods have more or less
entered Valhalla without, it would seem, sealing their fate. We can but hope.
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| Franziska Krug/Isa Foltin/ GETTY IMAGES FOR STAATSOPER UNTER DEN LINDEN |
There was no rainbow bridge,
but there was certainly a red carpet – and considerable security too. A host of
dignitaries was present: gods, for better or worse, of this world. And hearing
some of them speak beforehand, it was difficult, at least for this
all-too-temporary exile from the United (sic) Kingdom, that Germany does not
have it so bad after all. It made me proud, indeed, to have found sanctuary, if
only for a Augenblick (‘moment’), in
a country that prides itself upon its status as a Kulturnation. There may be many problems associated with that;
there are problems, after all, with anything and everything – this side of
Heaven, death, communism, or whatever flavour of realised eschatology one may
favour. (Please, please do not say ‘Brexit’.) Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus stands as one of many
warnings to us on that; so too does the Bebelplatz, site of perhaps the most
notorious, even infamous, book burnings in history, immediately behind the
Lindenoper. Germany, however, is the country of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (‘coming to terms with the past’) par excellence; it is never a completed
work – Wotan, kindly take note – and yet, compared to anywhere else on earth,
or at least in Europe, I can think of, there remains a sense, to quote Angela
Merkel, of ‘Wir schaffen das’ (‘we can do it’).
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| Franziska Krug/Isa Foltin/ GETTY IMAGES FOR STAATSOPER UNTER DEN LINDEN |
Merkel was one of those in
attendance, although she did not speak. The President, Franz-Walter Steinmeier
did, however. And in this country, this city, he could speak meaningfully of
the crucial, life-giving importance of art. It is not just a hope, not just a
slogan, not just an idea, but a reality – and a ‘reality’ in something
approaching the complex notion offered thereof by Hegel, whose Humboldt
University bust lies only a few hundred yards away. It is not even a personal
matter; it would, of course, be impossible for the British Head of State, let
alone her Prime Minister, plausibly to utter such words, and it is impossible
to imagine either trying. However, even if one were to find a more personally
and politically sympathetic figure to the arts, such as the current Leader of
the Opposition, they would sadly, tragically, remain almost absurdly remote
from reality, however conceived. I wished then, to return to that idea – I
almost wish to capitalise it, but shall refrain – of the Augenblick; or, in the subtitle of this opening performance of
Schumann’s Szenen aus Goethes Faust,
‘Zum Augenblicke sagen: Verweile doch!’ (‘Say to the moment: tarry a while!’)
Alas, it was, with the best
will in the world – and I should like to think mine was well intended –
difficult to say the same about much of what took place on stage. And whilst I
do not wish to rain on anyone’s parade, critical honesty entails here a
considerable degree of throwing one’s hands up in the air and asking ‘why?’
Rarely if ever have I seen so many people leave the theatre and not return
after the interval; that was doubtless partly a matter of ‘celebrity’ guests,
and so on, but perhaps a few more would have stayed had this staging of
Schumann and Goethe not proved so utterly misconceived and often, sad to say,
tedious. Barenboim rightly paid tribute to Jürgen Flimm’s Intendancy, prolonged
so as to continue to care for the company during its prolonged exile, for Flimm
unquestionably helped enable its return to Unter den Linden. As an opera
director, however, Flimm’s record has proved at best mixed here in Berlin. To
take but a couple of examples, his Orfeo ed Euridice had a good few
things to recommend it, his Nozze di Figaro, shall we say,
rather fewer. There is, I think, little point moaning about what might have
been, had the company returned to its home earlier; yes, of course it would
have opened with another production, but so what? Still less would there be any
justification in complaining about the lack of another anticipated premiere,
thwarted by its composer’s serious illness. Nor need one rule out in principle
staging a work that was never intended to be staged, although it is perhaps a
little quixotic in reality, however construed, to reopen an opera house with a
work that is not only not an opera but which seems in its very essence to resist
most, even all, operatic tendencies.
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| Production images: Hermann und Clärchen Baus |
It might have worked; alas, it
did not. What we saw – and heard – was an awkward padding of Schumann’s
‘scenes’ with small pieces of Goethe; except it was not really padding, more
two different things going on, with little relationship to one another, not
even in any sense approaching the dialectical, let alone in a more
conventionally ‘smooth’ sense of drama. I suspect that anyone unfamiliar with
Goethe would have wondered – and not in an especially productive way – what was
going on. Anyone unfamiliar with Schumann would, I fear, have wondered what the
point of this exquisite, heartrending, yet exquisitely and heartrendingly fragile
tribute to Goethe’s work was, so diminished did it seem in this context, however
well performed (and in many, if not all, respects it certainly was).
Goethe follows his fond
imperative, ‘Zum Augenblicke sagen: Verweile doch’, with the exclamation, ‘du
bist so schön!’ (You are so beautiful!) Apart from the music – and I am afraid
it really felt as if it were quite ‘apart from’ – what then was schön? The work of set designer (and
celebrated painter, sculptor, poet, etc.) Markus Lüpertz could certainly lay
claim to have been so; I should happily have seen it in its own right. Alas,
Flimm seemed not to know what to do with them. Instead, we had an unclear
relationship between actors and singers, drama and music, any number of
potential dialectical opposites, without either reconciliation (let us say Hegel)
or radical negative failure to reconcile (let us say Adorno). Spoken and sung
characters sometimes looked the same, sometimes did not, sometimes appeared in
stylised ‘period’ (for Goethe) costume, sometimes not, or less so. Words were
help up on placards. Indicators of metatheatricality were to be seen: seats
from the theatre moved onstage, so that members of the chorus could watch and
‘interact’; music stands appeared, from which presumably some effort was being
made to suggest characters learning music from the spirit of drama; the chorus
suddenly appeared to sing from within the audience; and so on, and so on. There
was an irritating prevalence of silly dancing, quite unconcerned with whatever
music was being heard or not. Was there something of autobiography, or at least
a summation of a (semi-Faustian) career in the theatre? Perhaps, but frankly, I
am on the verge of making it up as I go along. That would seem very much to be
in the spirit of what I saw: essentially an expensive version of a university
student’s staging, enthused with some big ideas from other plays or
productions.
Enough of that! The orchestra
often sounded wonderful, recognisably the same band as we hear on Barenboim’s
(outstanding) recordings of the Schumann symphonies with them. There were
occasional fluffs here and there, and it would be idle to say that Barenboim’s
direction was always quite so commanding as on those performances in which he
had clearly ‘lived’ with the music for longer. He nevertheless conveyed a
strong sense of the music, with ideas very much of his own about how it should
go, not least a furiously driven Overture. (I am not sure that I necessarily
liked it that way, but it had conviction and, I think, its own justification.) Passages
that have much in common with the symphonies seemed – or perhaps this was my
imagination – subtly underlined, as if to suggest a commonality of purpose that
yet did not disrupt Schumann’s musical forms. (We had Flimm for that.) Choral
singing was likewise excellent – what a wonderful Children’s Chorus the company
can boast too! – although, towards the close, there were a few passages in
which chorus and pit were not entirely in sync. The acoustical work to the
theatre certainly seems to have paid off, the sound warmer than ever. (I was up
in the Second Circle, so probably in a good position to speak of a lack of
‘distance’ acoustically.)
If Roman Trekel’s performance,
thoughtful and intelligent though it may have been, remained rather dry of
tone, then René Pape’s rich bass, more sonorous than ever, pretty much stole
the vocal show. Anyone would have been persuaded by this Mephistopheles,
although Sven-Erik Bechtolf’s spoken version seemed quite at odds: not
interestingly opposed, just inconsistent. It was splendidly acted, I think, but
belonging somewhere else entirely, whereas André Jung’s shouty Faust (again,
perhaps this was Flimm’s intention) slightly baffled in itself too. Quite what
Anna Tomowa-Sintow was doing delivering a reading at the beginning is anyone’s
guess; I was very happy, for the first and presumably last time, to see her on
stage, but was that enough? Perhaps it worked as a metaphor for the project as
a whole. To return to the singers, Elsa Dreisig offered a clear, often radiant
soprano, with intriguing hints perhaps of a bell-like Tales of Hoffmann Olympia. I think Flimm may have been presenting
Gretchen as an all too evident construction by Faust and Mephistopheles, a
commentary worth pursuing on ‘Das Ewig-Weibliche’ (the eternal feminine), but
that sense at the close was fleeting and seemingly unprepared. That was
certainly not Dreisig’s fault, though. Katharina Kammerloher also stood out
amongst a cast that was, rightly, drawn entirely from the Staatsoper’s own
company.
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| Franziska Krug/Isa Foltin/ GETTY IMAGES FOR STAATSOPER UNTER DEN LINDEN |
This, then, was a surprising
Prelude to what we might think of as the ‘real’ reopening. Or rather, to return
to more complex conceptions of ‘reality’, the house and company will continue
to reopen, to develop; the task will never be completed, for it never can be, even
when the builders leave. Much will have been learned, and once the present
co-intendant Matthias Schulz has taken over the full reins of the company in
the spring, we should begin to gain a stronger impression of the drama ahead.
His first fully programmed season will be 2018-19. Wolfgang Rihm’s Saul, the work to which I alluded above,
will, it is hoped, still be heard in a later season. The house will re-reopen
with a new Hänsel und Gretel and a
new Coronation of Poppea. A tour of
the splendid new rehearsal facilities augurs well. There is, then, everything
to play – and everything to hope – for. We can aim for Wagner’s ‘artwork of the
future’, or aim to ‘fail better’, as Beckett would have had it; the two are far
from mutually exclusive. One of the very oldest orchestras in the world,
arguably the very oldest, founded as it was in 1570, was sounding at least as
good as ever. Opera is not solely a musical art, but it remains a musical art
nevertheless. The house should and doubtless will build on that – in as many
senses as possible, and then some. For crucially important though buildings may
be, the real business of building, the real business of Bildung too, is not principally about them at all.
(An edited version of this review appeared first in VAN magazine.)
