Nationaltheater
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| Production images: Monika Rittershaus |
Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England – Johanni von Oostrum
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots – Vera-Lotte Boecker
Female Consorts I-IV – Seonwoo Lee, Mirjam Mesak, Lotte Betts-Dean, Meg Brilleslyper
Female Consort V, Jane Kennedy – Freya Apfellstaedt
Male Consort I, Lord Darnley – Michael Butler
Male Consort II – Joel Williams
Male Consort III, Rizzio – Andrew Hamilton
Male Consort IV, Scottish Lord I – Armand Rabot
Male Consort V, Scottish Lord II, Executioner – Pawel Horodyski
Solo harpsichord – Mahan Esfahani
Director – Claus Guth
Set designs – Etienne Pluss
Costumes – Ursula Kudrna
Sound design – Bob Scott, Sven Eckhoff
Lighting – Michael Bauer
Choreography – Sommer Ulrickson
Dramaturgy – Yvonne Gebauer, Lukas Leipfinger
Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus director: Christoph Hell)
Bavarian State Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)
I remember, as a schoolboy, reading in a
newspaper about ‘The Hecklers’, a pair of composers with highly reactionary
aesthetics, who objected so strongly to Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain that
they protested against its revival at Covent Garden. I would hear Gawain
at a subsequent revival, as a student, and be swept off my feet. But at the
time, I recall being puzzled by the idea that one would protest against
something being performed simply because one did not like it, or even because
one thought it not very good. I did not know much about the repertoire of opera
houses at the time, but the idea that they were overloaded with new, or even
modernist, work was patently absurd. I was equally puzzled, at the end of this performance
of Brett Dean’s new opera Of One Blood, to hear loud booing from certain
quarters of Munich’s Nationaltheater, when the composer, librettist Heather Betts,
and (I think) director Claus Guth came onstage. It was not a premiere, so their
appearance was slightly unexpected, if welcome. Could people who had contentedly,
so it seemed, sat through two acts of a new opera have felt so strongly about its
music – it could, I suppose, have been its libretto, or even its staging
– that they felt they must bellow farmyard noises in an attempt to drown out applause?
If they had not liked the opera, or had considerable criticisms of it, fair
enough, but what was it that had led them to such a display? It was neither a
mindlessly reactionary nor a vigorously avant-garde work; it was well crafted,
well performed, and well directed. Would not refraining from applause – as, I
am sure, many of us have done on occasion – have been enough? I am afraid
reflection has left me none the wiser, but the experience was unsettling and
has continued to be, not least from concern for those at the sharp end of that strange,
bullying response.
The phrase ‘of one blood’ refers to a phrase Mary (Stuart), Queen of Scots used in a letter to her cousin and antagonist – historical and, here, dramatic – Elizabeth I, here ‘Elizabeth Tudor’: ‘We be both of one blood, of one country, and in one Island’. In their communications and other sixteenth-century sources lie the seeds of Betts’s libretto, assembled and constructed after the manner of many a dramatic confrontation between the two. Betts is a visual artist: an interesting case for a librettist in terms of scene-setting, for instance the opening and close of the work in contemporary or perhaps, in Guth’s staging, a future Westminster Abbey, in whose Henry VII/Lady Chapel the two queens lie at opposite ends, at the command of their mutual successor, James VI and I, who also commissioned their tombs. That struck her when visiting, as it might anyone, but its visual element seems to have been especially important to the librettist dramaturgically, focusing the action and the way it plays out, thereby also influencing the staging, as well as providing elements of a solution for the perennial problem of what to do in a drama concerning the entwined lives of two central figures who never met. Contriving an occasion on which they did is a common solution; it is good to welcome an alternative to the fold, in an intriguingly clinical white setting, albeit beneath a hint of English Perpendicular Gothic (which tilted at one point, perhaps as a reflection of changing fortunes and/or danger).
And so, we see the two queens act separately
in the beginning, later appearing partly at the same time in their own halves
of the stage, with ‘consort’ retinues – I was puzzled before realising the word
was intended musically rather than maritally – so as to react one another’s words
and deeds, coming tantalisingly close, yet never quite meeting. Tellingly,
their union in duet, as opposed to ‘written’ dialogue, takes place when both
are offstage. There are oddities to the libretto, or at least features I did
not understand: the archaic ‘-eth’ third-person singular is employed, yet we
hear ‘will’ rather than ‘wilt’ with thou. It all serves its purpose well
enough, though—and perhaps such inconsistencies, if inconsistencies they be, are
simply reflections of a language that has always been in change. Titles were
used not simply to convey but, at certain points, to add to the libretto,
including indication of place, such as Richmond Palace, Holyrood, or of course
Fotheringhay Castle.
Collaboration between husband and wife
librettist (their daughter one of Mary’s excellent consort) seems to have been fruitfully
close. What comes ‘first’, whether chronologically or aesthetically, is ever a
fraught question in any such relationship, but there were no obvious signs of
tension and many of complement. Likewise between them and Guth, the extraction
of both tombs for cleaning and their return at the end an interesting element
of the aforementioned framing rather than contrast or contradiction. A low
opening pedal – electronic rather than acoustic, I think – sounds, Rheingold-like
yet -unlike, the musical beginning, subsequent scraping noises, like a dental
implement writ large, partaking of the drama and ushering in the Bayerische
Staatsorchester, here on excellent form under Vladimir Jurowski’s wise,
invigorating direction. Two worlds, then, collided and coincided in more ways
than one: multidimensional yet bilateral dramatic conflict, one might say. This
was further layered in the Elizabethan scenes with harpsichordist Mahan
Esfahani onstage. Few if any harpsichordists have done more for new music than
Esfahani; here his role once again bridged divides between old and new, his
instrument inciting orchestral and electronic material, and on at least one
occasion – if my ears did not deceive me – prefigured in the ‘purely’
electronic material of the very opening. The dramatic possibilities of such
time travel were manifold—perhaps all the better for being left to us not
necessarily to resolve but to ponder, and thus to engage as active dramatic
participants.
Similarities with Berg – first a chord close to Wozzeck, then broader harmonic fields – suggested themselves to my ears at the opening of the second act, but I am not sure this was so much influence as my ears making sense of a new harmonic world with music I knew. More fundamentally, the expertise and artistry with which both acts, of roughly equal length, were planned and realised was striking, still more so in the second (perhaps a matter of my having become more at home with the work). In that, the role of the equally excellent chorus was apparent: first liturgical, in Westminster Abbey, but changing its role, like the Greek chorus so as both to comment and participate, in acclamation, rebellion, and more.
In what was perhaps an inevitable nod to or at least coincidence with Donizetti, coloratura featured in both queens’ lines, but there was far more to them than that, especially as brought so vividly and sympathetically to life by Johanni von Oostrum and Vera-Lotte Boecker. Amongst the rest of a very fine cast, I might put in a word for Michael Butler’s feckless Darnley and Pawel Horodyski’s Executioner, but this was emphatically an ensemble performance as well as one of warring queens. Designs and choreography were stylish and suggestive throughout. Maybe our hecklers disliked the black coals of ruin that occupied much of the second-act stage, before being swept away by restoration workers in the present/future. I am grasping at straws, though. Who knows? Ultimately, who cares?
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| Applause from the premiere: Geoffroy Schied |
