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Empress – Camilla Nylund
Nurse – Evelyn Herlitzius
Spirit-Messenger – Andreas Bauer Kanabas
Barak – Oleksandr Pushniak
Dyer’s Wife – Mina-Liisa Värelä
Apparition of Youth – Martin Mitterrutzner
Voice of the Falcon – Lea-ann Dunbar
Voice from Above – Christa Mayer
Guardian of the Threshold of the Temple – Nikola Hillebrand
The One-Eyed – Rafael Fingerlos
The One-Armed – Tilmann Rönnebeck
The Hunchback – Tansel Akzeyebek
Children’s Voices – Nikola Hillebrand, Sofia Savenko, Lea-ann Dunbar, Stephanie Atanasov, Dominika Škrabalová, Michal Doron
Servants – Bryndis Gudjonsdottir, Sofia Savenko, Dominika Škrabalová
Set designs – Patrick Bannwart
Costumes – Moana Stemberger
Lighting – Fabio Antoci
Video – Falko Herold, Patrick Bannwart
Dramaturgy – Johann Casimir Eule
Chorus (director: André Kellinghaus) of the Semperoper Dresden
Dresden opened its week-and-a-half Richard Strauss-Tage
with David Bösch’s new production of Die Frau ohne Schatten, premiered a
few days previously, then as now under Christian Thielemann’s baton and with an
excellent cast. By the very nature of the work, it tends to attract, if not
quite only then preponderantly, fine performances; its forces imply a season
highlight or festival outing. That said, it has attracted a variety of
directorial approaches, some more convincing than others. At the least
convincing extreme stands Christof
Loy’s arrogant, disdainful, absurdly reductive effort for Salzburg, also
conducted (outstandingly) by Thielemann. I am not sure I have seen a production
of anything that engaged less with the work in question—although, to
give Loy his due, he imperiously announced that he would not, since he did not
care for it. Otherwise, some will heighten
the work’s ritualistic tendencies, perhaps at expense of its complex
symbolism. Some will adopt a
Freudian approach. Some – many would say this was true of the work – will prove
more perplexing than anything else. Bösch’s has something of these
tendencies, whilst for the most part telling the story as clearly as any I can
recall.
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| Oleksandr Pushniak (Barak) |
That is far from a bad thing, especially in a work of this complexity, though it immediately raises the question: ‘whose story? Hofmannsthal’s or Strauss’s?’ What, if I am understanding correctly, Bösch does suggest is a contest between two worlds, not so much those of the born and unborn, as between heaven and earth, fantasy and reality, even sleep and waking. Set designs, costumes, and lighting create and contribute to this: a silken world of sheets and dreams leading, via a grim, even grimy portal, to the workshop-cum-living quarters of a modern-day dyer – washing machine and all – and his wife. And so, when both couples are transformed by their trials, so as to find a world of greater happiness in the third act, it is not only one of procreation, but of broader fulfilment, acceptance, and happiness. When all threatens to collapse into bathos with the Emperor and Empress welcoming children who seem to have wandered in from a school play, it is (at least for me) rescued by this broadening of focus. Hofmannsthal’s central ‘message’ – it is surely not the only one, but I do not think we can simply ignore it either – is of course a troubling one to many of us. We can understand it more broadly in terms of valuing life at a time when so many were being lost in the Great War, but we cannot convert it entirely into that. Like it or not, pronatalism is there; so is decided inequality between the sexes; so is heteronormativity; so are many things in which many of us no longer believe. If the two couples meeting again ‘on earth’ as friends for a few drinks might seem banal, then something needs to be done here, and there are surely worse alternatives.
There are powerful moments: as when – perhaps
unconsciously echoing Wagner’s Die Feen, for whose belated first
performance the young Strauss acted as assistant conductor – the Dyer’s Wife
picks up a baby (doll) and casts it into grisly oblivion. At the beginning of
the third act, a television-watching Barak living a separate, miserable
existence from his wife in separate, separated rooms, told a powerful tale
simply and with great human sympathy. Although I have not seen the film, I
could not help but wonder whether flooding the stage with pink – in general,
coloured lighting was a great strength – was a reference to the fantasy worlds
of Barbie and Ken. A selection of beautiful, youthly, apparently identical
apparitions from which the Dyer’s Wife could choose was a nice touch: consonant
also with a clue in the libretto. I was not wild about the appearance onstage
of a giant falcon, though the kitsch seemed knowing. Likewise some of the video
imagery seemed to me superfluous, though I am doubtless speaking as much of my
own taste as anything more definite. It is difficult to imagine anyone finding
nothing here to spark egngagement, just as doubtless many of us will have our
cavils. (The idiot booing at the close was presumably an exception.) Literally
breaking up the scene, the turn to ‘reality’ itself a bourgeois fantasy, is a
crucial moment, returning us to the ambiguous world of the Nurse, who tellingly
also seems broken by the experience. What might have been unduly reductive
proves ultimately to question itself – and us – too.
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| Camilla Nylund (Die Kaiserin) |
What surprised me was how different Thielemann’s reading seemed from that Salzburg performance. Perhaps on account of the oft-noted ‘narrowness’ of his repertoire, which can be exaggerated, he is rarely a conductor to step twice in the same interpretative river. Where once he had gloried in the full throttle of Strauss’s huge orchestra, now he was far more sparing in unleashing it. This was a highly lyrical account, in the outstanding, never-erring Staatskapelle Dresden at least as much as onstage. Much might have been chamber music, though there was also a greater affinity, not unlike Kirill Petrenko in Munich, albeit softer, more soloistic, with the harmonic world of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces, op.16. It is here, surely, that Strauss comes closest to Schoenberg, as opposed to vice versa (ironically, given what by now he was saying about the composer to whom, not so long before, he had proved commendably generous). If I missed something of the extraordinary, grinding dissonance Thielemann conjured in his Vienna Philharmonic recording of the Fantasy on themes from the opera, I always do. Here, like the Dyer and his Wife, he had different fish to fry.
There was an almost Karajan-like sense of
line to the performance as a whole, characterised by enormous variation in
tempo as well as dynamics. I do not think I have ever heard the close of the
first act so beautifully, wondrously drawn out: luminous and, in context, both
otherworldly and worldly. It seemed to capture musically the clash between
Hofmannsthal’s message, via the Nightwatchmen’s words, and Strauss’s
scepticism, adopting that ‘beautiful’ yet, through his Nietzschean materialism,
strangely empty ‘holiness’ Strauss tends towards when setting anything
approaching the Christian (or even transcendental). One might think of Salome’s
John the Baptist here, or a song such as Allerseelen. Yet I found it
deeply moving, albeit intriguingly as if it were delivered in a dream-like
moment of temporal suspension and/or manipulation. The closed of the second
act, often a thrilling, even terrifying climax, here seemed to function more as
a summary of what had already happened, the Nurse’s ‘Übermächte sind im Spiel’
delivered in kind. Musical dramaturgy, then, was often unusual, yet
never arbitrary. Thielemann had clearly considered his approach carefully.
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Miina-Liisa Värelä (Baraks Frau), Evelyn Herlitzius (Die Amme), Camilla Nylund (Die Kaiserin), Tilmann Rönnebeck (Der Einarmige), Oleksandr Pushniak (Barak), Tansel Akzeybek (Der Bucklige), Rafael Fingerlos (Der Einäugige), Kinderchor der Semperoper Dresden |
Vocal performances were, of course, part
and parcel of all the above, and suggested similarly careful casting in a
combination of celebrated exponents and newer comers. I cannot recall hearing
an Emperor less strained than Eric Cutler. This doubtless had something to do
with Thielemann’s new penchant for orchestral softness and lyricism, but also
surely reflected Cutler’s own, more bel canto approach. It put me a
little in mind of Boulez casting Chris Merritt in Moses und Aron. His
relationship with the Empress, Camilla Nylund, was unquestionably a real one:
no mere representation of something symbolic. Nylund rarely if ever
disappoints; nor did she here, in a wonderfully human portrayal, that held in
reserve great vocal power when called upon, yet impressed equally in more
sensitive mode. One might say much the same of Oleksandr
Pushniak as Barak and Mina-Liisa Värelä as
the Dyer’s Wife, their acting equally impressive—and moving. As for Evelyn
Herlitzius, her voice instantly recognisable, her total dramatic commitment
hardly less so, I doubt there are many artists who have sung both this and the
Dyer’s Wife. This, though, was unquestionably a world and a character she could
completely inhabit. Andreas Bauer Kanabas
made a strong impression as the Spirit-Messenger. Choral and ensemble parts
were all very well taken. There was no weak link, but rather a multitude of
musical, dramatic, and musicodramatic strands one could follow: not necessarily
so as to answer any questions, but rather to pose a few more. In this work,
there are too many conflicts for resolution ever to be an option.
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| Evelyn Herlitzius (Die Amme) |
