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| Images: Tatjana Dachsel (from an earlier revival, with a different cast) |
Mélisande – Magdalena Kožená
Pelléas – Thomas Blondelle
Geneviève – Anne Sofie von Otter
Arkel – Stephen Milling
Yniold – Henrik Brandstetter
Doctor, Shepherd – David Oštrek
Director – Ruth Berghaus
Revival director – Katharina Lang
Designs – Hartmut Meyer
Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)
When, all too briefly, I lived in Berlin
Mitte, I would regularly take a short walk, often mid-afternoon, to the
Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof. Taking their place in the firmament of great
Berliners buried there, from Fichte and Hegel onwards, are Ruth Berghaus and
Paul Dessau, director and composer in a properly Brechtian line. (From the
house next to the cemetery, Brecht looked down at the graves of his
predecessors, later joining them, and being joined by Helene Weigel.) It is
little exaggeration to say that Berghaus saved the Berliner Ensemble from the
mortmain of Brecht’s heirs, only to be replaced with their connivance and that
of the ruling Socialist Unity Party. Berghaus’s most celebrated or at least
most concentrated work in opera followed that period, when she worked with
Michael Gielen in the 1980s at the Frankfurt Opera. Sadly, almost nothing of
her opera work survives on film, but three or four productions remain in the
repertoire: this Berlin Pelléas et Mélisande, her delightful Barber
of Seville (also Berlin), Tristan
und Isolde (Hamburg), and possibly Elektra (Mannheim).
The Pelléas was seen first in 1991, conducted by none other than Gielen;
subsequent conductors have included Daniel Barenboim, Simon Rattle, and now François-Xavier
Roth. This was its forty-third appearance performance at the Staatsoper:
perhaps less than one might expect for so enduring a staging – compare that
with over 350 for the Barber – but then the subtlety, depth, and
absolute refusal to play to the gallery of Debussy’s opera have never appealed
to sections of the operatic masses. (I once heard someone dismiss it as ‘boring’.)
So much the worse for them. If they would not have been converted by this, then
I suspect it would ever elude them; after all, we all have blind (deaf?) spots.
The only sense in which Berghaus’s staging seems a little dated is perhaps in
aspects of Hartmut Meyer’s designs: on reflection, not so much ‘dated’ as not
quite of our time. Had I looked at them innocently, I might have guessed early
twenty-first century rather than 1991. But they still function with great power
as part of a musicodramatic whole, as if Roth and his cast had been involved
from the outset: an astonishing achievement, when you think about it.
Like her fellow directors Harry Kupfer (now
also in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof), Götz Friedrich (across the city in
Zehlendorf), and Joachim Herz (in Leipzig, as one might expect), Berghaus was a
student of that great adoptive Berliner Walter Felsenstein (miles away at
Kloser, on the Baltic island of Hiddensee). They may have departed from Felsenstein
in post-Brechtian interpretation, but they all built upon his equal concern for
musical and dramatic elements (insofar as they may be separated at all). It is
perhaps no coincidence that their stagings, where they survive, have often
proved especially enduring. Or perhaps it is, for the sell-by-date of a staging
stands in a complex relationship to its initial qualities. Nothing, ultimately,
is forever—and some wonderful things can prove ultimately ephemeral.
Not this, in any case—and there must surely be something in the production, as well as in the intelligence and craft of those reviving it, that enables such integrated results even now. One certainly notices the stark colours, quasi-abstract yet never cold, from the outset, and one soon becomes emotionally and intellectually involved in the Allemonde they create. The lighting, for whom I can find no one directly credited, is at least as important and, if anything, still more powerful. The shadows it creates are terrifying, and all will attest to the dramatic role, literal and metaphorical, of shadow worlds in this opera. The near-stratospherically vertiginuous staircase, representing Mélisande’s tower far more directly than any more realistic attempt I have seen, provides sceno-dramatic focus for so much and offers terror of its own. Much is invested in every walk up and down, every place and occasion to take a seat, and the rest. Likewise Yniold’s ball: a childish toy, an object of motion, and something to follow Mélisande’s ring into the menacing well. Her deliberate, not careless, tossing of that ring early on into those depths offers a rare, momentary instance of lightness, even humour, albeit set within the ever-ominous, increasingly terrifying workings of Fate.
Costumes and their apparent meaning, or at least amenability to be read, play intriguing balancing acts: a hint, perhaps of the Brechtian commedia dell’arte we know from Berliner Ensemble and Barber alike, but turned both early-French and symbolist. At times, Pelléas and Golaud appear almost interchangeable; at others, characters and situations win through and make their similar costumes irrelevant. The role of letters, their reading, and their consequences, becomes more concrete when they appear in large form, passed from character to character, and at times pinned on the wall (again, perhaps a Brechtian inheritance, but one transformed by another great artist at work). There is a strong feminist element too: Golaud’s rape of Mélisande horrifying, her pregnancy almost intolerably vivid (without male-gaze exploitation); and at least as disturbing as anything else, Arkel’s pursuit and lying with her, founded in the text but extended with well-nigh perfect directorial judgement.
The Staatskapelle Berlin has long
experience of Debussy under Barenboim in particular. Roth’s reading brought
similar structural virtues and alertness to colour, the later inevitably of a somewhat
different nature, founded in his work with period instruments on this work.
Wisely, there was no attempt merely to replicate that; we can all do without
ever hearing ‘period style on modern instruments’ ever again. But that does not
mean music-making, like theatre, cannot, or should not, be in a more
intelligent sense ‘historically informed’. Timbre here played as important a
structural role as anything else, pointing the way forward to Boulez, as malevolent
harmonies, their progression, dramatic implication, and structural role led
back to multiple Wagner dramas. Throughout the playing of the Staatskapelle was
at least as outstanding as one could hope to hear anywhere.
Simon Keenlyside made the transition from Pelléas to Golaud a while ago, and continues to excel in this music and its drama (or should it be the other way around?) His triangle with Thomas Blondelle and Magdalena Kožená was as credible, revealing, and terrifying as any I can recall. Blondelle may have been indisposed, yet his Pelléas was fresh, alert, vivid and, listening between the lines, doomed. Kožená’s typically intelligent artistry, founded in profound communicative gifts, not least in French, proved almost horrifyingly moving. Anne Sofie von Otter’s Geneviève presided with similar intelligence—and perhaps the occasional hint of her youth and its travails. Stephen Milling’s Arkel was subtly yet powerfully sketched: a fascinating, compelling move from Hunding. No wonder Henrik Brandstetter’s Yniold received such warm and vigorous applause; so excellent was this performance from a soloist of the Tölzer Knabenchor, I confess I thought he must have been an adult singer successfully aping a treble. Even the small roles of Doctor and Shepherd were memorably assumed by David Oštrek.
This, then, was a highly moving and thought-provoking night in the theatre: in itself and for the questions it posed about stagings and their aesthetics, lineage, and longevity. I must try to see that Hamburg Tristan before it is too late.
