Die tote Stadt, English National Opera, 25 March 2023

Coliseum

Paul – Ralf Romei
Marietta, Voice of Marie – Allison Oakes
Brigitta – Sarah Connolly
Franz – Audun Iversen
Juliette – Rhian Lois
Lucienne – Clare Presland
Gastone – Innocent Masuku
Victorin – William Morgan
Count Albert – Hubert Francis
Marie – Lauren Bridle

Anniliese Miskimmon (director)
Miriam Buether (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)
James Farncombe (lighting)
Imogen Knight (movement, intimacy)

Members of the Finchley Children’s Music Group (chorus director: Grace Rossiter)

English National Opera Chorus (chorus director: Avishka Edirisinghe) 

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Kirill Karabits (conductor)

Images: Helen Murray
Brigitta (Sarah Connolly), Paul (Ralf Romei), Franz (Audun Iversen)

A few years ago, I should have said it was a problem with the work itself. Having seen Die tote Stadt for the first time, in a performance and a production that had both seemed very good, I had emerged finding it somewhat laboured and ridiculous: more than a curiosity, perhaps, yet not something whose appeal for others I could share. In the meantime, a concert performance of another Korngold opera, Das Wunder der Heliane, did little to change my mind. Then I decided to test my initial judgement by seeing Die tote Stadt again in Munich, when the Bavarian State Opera put on a new production, staged by Simon Stone, conducted by Kirill Petrenko, with Jonas Kaufmann and Marlis Petersen in the two central roles. And I was won over. So I know that it can work very well, or at least that it did for me once and there is no reason to think it could not do so again. Quite why this new production from ENO did not, I found hard to put my finger on, since there seemed to be much that was admirable and little or nothing that was not, reviving my doubts concerning the work itself.

The key, I think, may have lain in the production, which seems unfair, since there was nothing really to object to in what Anniliese Miskimmon and her team presented. But whereas I have often disliked Stone’s reductionist way with drama—his Medée for Salzburg and a recent Phaedra in London cases in point—in this case, it seemed to be just what the work, which can readily seem overblown to no particular end, needed. Without Stone’s stronger interpretative stance and strategy and however attractive Miriam Buether’s sets and Nicky Gillibrand’s costumes (with one unfortunate exception), drama lagged behind ambition. It was difficult not to feel that something smaller in scale, perhaps a one-act chamber opera, might have come close to hitting the spot, thus again returning one to the problem of the work ‘itself’. 

The dream world, in which Paul meets Marietta and works through his morbid attachment to his deceased wife, Marie, seemed confused—but not in an especially dream-like way. It seemed to imply that either Paul had actually entered a hospital or sanatorium, or he had been in one along; but no, it was only a dream. Marietta’s troupe invited unflattering comparisons with Ariadne auf Naxos. The 'dead' city of Bruges, or some substitute, did not get much of a look in – partly Korngold’s fault – and the strange religious procession came unfortunately close to the world of Carry On films, even for those of us who know the cited Robert le Diable. Certain other ‘religious’ details gestured in another, potentially more fruitful direction, though no more than Strauss does Korngold seem able to take religion seriously.

Juliette (Rhian Lois), Lucienne (Clare Presland), Count Albert (Hugh Francis), Marietta (Allison Oakes), Victorian (William Morgan), Innocent Masuku (Gastone), Franz

 

Singing, though, was mostly good, if sometimes hampered by a clunky English translation (‘based on’ Kelly Rourke) of a libretto that is in any case far from exemplary. Korngold and his dreadful father were no composite Hofmannsthal, to put it mildly. Though struggling with illness, Ralf Romei put on an impressive performance as Paul, only noticeably tiring some way through the third act—which is something that could happen to anyone. It is a cruel role, and Romei’s artistry proved something of a revelation. Allison Oakes was a nicely Wagnerian Marietta, with welcome echoes of Brünnhilde, though it was not always the most subtle of portrayals. Sarah Connolly left one wishing there was more to the role of Brigitta in a typically human, beautifully sung performance. Audun Iversen’s Franz was similarly first-class, offering fine attention to detail. Kirill Karabits knew exactly how to draw the best out of the ENO Orchestra, ensuring – rightly, I think – that the score sounded closer to Puccini than to any of Korngold’s Austro-German colleagues. But there were times when something sharper – and Puccini can be as sharp as anyone – seemed required, just as on stage. I imagine this might tighten over the run, but a greater dose of chamber-like intimacy might also be a good thing. 

I recognise also that much of the scepticism I voice concerning the opera others might with respect to Die Frau ohne Schatten, but there not only do we have Strauss and Hofmannsthal, even in mutual misunderstanding, at the very height of their powers; we also have a symbolism that attempts to elevate us to some sort of ‘higher’ ideas and even, more controversially, a message. Pronatalism is a deeply unfashionable message, one with which many of us would take issue, but drama is not there primarily for us to agree with it—and the message becomes more readily understandable in the face of the loss of life occasioned by the First World War. How to get on with one’s life in the face of more strictly personal loss is a perfectly reasonable subject for a drama; part, of what Die Meistersinger – another opera interested, albeit pre-Freud, in the interpretation of dreams – is about is how to cope with the sufferings of life and love in the actual, phenomenal world. Perhaps the problem is that the intermittent attempts at symbolism and, above all, the ‘it was only a dream’ idea are a convoluted and contrived way to get there. Even viewed psychoanalytically, it seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill; not, of course, that grief is nothing, but it seems less here than it might. The dream sequence comes across more as an idea for an opera than a dramatic necessity. That, at least, was what I emerged feeling, though I had felt more positively in Munich.

Paul, Brigitta, Chorus

Whatever my doubts, though, this was a justly ambitious, laudable project from ENO: a reasonably well-known twentieth-century opera, only staged twice previously in this country and never by this company, deserved its debut and clearly won new converts. Perhaps the fairest thing is to view the opera as a fragile flower, in need of great care and good fortune in cultivation; or, to turn it back on myself, to say that it may not ultimately be an opera for me.

Bayreuth Festival (6) - Götterdämmerung, 25 August 2016

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Siegfried – Stefan Vinke

Gunther – Markus Eiche
Alberich – Albert Dohmen
Hagen – Stephen Milling
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Gutrune – Allison Oakes
Waltraute – Marina Prudenskaya
First Norn, Flosshilde – Wiebke Lehmkuhl
Second Norn, Wellgunde – Stephanie Houtzeel
Third Norn – Christiane Kohl
Woglinde – Alexandra Steiner

Frank Castorf (director)

Aleksander Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)
Rainer Casper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Marek Janowski (conductor)

 

It would be a poor excuse for a Ring that did not change those taking part in it, whatever their roles – and that includes, or should include, members of the audience. Frank Castorf’s Ring of 2016 vintage will, I suspect, most likely prove to have changed me more than most. There remains an abiding irony that the two greatest live Ring performances I have heard have been concert stagings: both, believe it or not, at the highly unpromising venue of the Royal Albert Hall, under Bernard Haitink and Daniel Barenboim. I shall not even claim that I felt something was missing on either of those occasions, since I did not. It was, though; one does not have to be a crazed ‘authenticist’ to believe that, ideally, opera should be staged. An excellent staging, moreover, is all the more likely, at least in many cases, radically to transform one’s understanding of a work and its possibilities. For all its flaws, which I should neither wish to exaggerate nor to ignore, Castorf’s Ring has accomplished that in spades for me. Many of the intriguing ideas hovering, sometimes more than that, in 2014 have more fully come of age. Some, perhaps especially in Götterdämmerung, have yet properly to do so. This has clearly become, though, a striking achievement for Bayreuth.

 

There is, however, another signal irony to mention: Castorf, it seems, has washed his hands of the production, dissatisfied with certain of the conditions in which he had to work. Quite when the changes took place, I cannot say, since I did not see the production in 2015. I think it is only fair, however, to credit Patric Seibert, not only the production’s Everyman, but Castorf’s assistant, who has remained with the staging, as well as the rest of the production team. This thought must remain speculative, but it seems quite possible that it took some distancing from Castorf to achieve a more satisfactory dialectic between engagement with and alienation from, even criticism of, Wagner’s work. Perhaps that may even be owed to Seibert’s engagement onstage with Wagner’s characters, whom Castorf himself may, at least initially, have underestimated. Whatever the precise truths concerning responsibility may be, however, we should celebrate both the achievement in itself and the reminder that opera is of its very essence a collaborative effort. Wagner, his near-superhuman efforts as provider of words and music notwithstanding, knew that very well. He did not, after all, conduct the Ring at Bayreuth, knowing that he had more than enough on his plate supervising the production. Perhaps more importantly still, he was deeply dissatisfied with the results, offering those concerned and us his celebrated exhortation, well heeded by Castorf et al.: ‘Kinder, macht neues!’

 

There is apocalyptic atmosphere aplenty in this grand denouement. The Norns’ cosmic tittle-tattle gains both in portentousness and in gossip-quality as they and their strange costumes – somehow both redolent of extravagance and of bag-lady existence – make their way across the stage and into a little shrine, whose function remains mysterious in its apparent meaningless. The end of the world is truly nigh, it seems. Writing on Patrice Chéreau’s legendary Bayreuth production, Günter Metken spoke of Valhalla as ‘no longer the undamaged place it once was,’ with ‘something of the unhealthy air of Venice … It is one of those choice apparitions of death conjured up by the previous [nineteenth] century, in order to repress the rapacity of daily life.’ He went on to liken the entry of the gods into Valhalla to a tableau vivant of Bruegel’s Parable of the blind — astute commentary upon both Chéreau and Wagner. It also seems rather well to fit both this Götterdämmerung, and perhaps even its relationship to Chéreau as well as to Wagner.

 

‘The people’, or whatever we want to call them, have not, hitherto, been entirely absent from this Ring. Indeed, their intriguing inclusion, not only in the person of Seibert’s character, but also on video (think, for instance, of the community in Die Walküre’s Azerbaijan), and its collision with a world of cruel gods, dwarves, heroes, and so on, has proved an important device not only of alienation, not only of ‘relevance’, of Aktualität, but also of dramatic interaction between those ‘kinds’ of being Wotan would rather keep apart. They are nevertheless far more present here; such, after all, is the nature of the work, in which the grand opéra chorus, as well as certain other Meyerbeerian phenomena, is triumphantly reinstated, aufgehoben. Part of the question posed seems, at least insofar as I understand, to be a classic Marxist, and indeed more generally socialist, one. In a world of abundance, the genuine achievement of the bourgeois mode of production, how can we achieve redistribution? The world can feed itself, can provide for the needs of its inhabitants, many times over, and yet does not. Hence, I think, the importance here of food. As my friend and former pupil, Sam Goodyear has pointed out to me, Wotan has previously proved conspicuous in his wastefulness. What does he care if he orders several times over at the Alexanderplatz café in Siegfried? Money is no object.

 

Yet there are many, labouring under the yoke of Wagner’s multiple post-Feuerbachian divinites – the state, capital, religion, power, etc., even ‘love’ – for whom the denial of food, and indeed the denial of other necessities and freedoms, most certainly does. So long as the Gibichung regime provides for the people, it seems that Gunther and Hagen will have their loyalty; and the frantic nature of provision as the crowd is worked up by Hagen in the Vassals’ Scene seems suggestive both of the relationship, increasingly stretched, between supply and demand, and of dangerously fascistic frenzy, such as we see increasingly on our streets in a Trumpist, Faragist, burkini-prohibiting world. The petty flags of different ‘nations’ underpin the violence as members of the crowd set upon each other and, perhaps most crucially, the poor Everyman who must serve them, perhaps echoing, even if unknowingly, the brutal treatment of the Migrant from Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza 1960. Video both relays the action and invite others, us included, to take pornographic pleasure in watching the goings-on, just as we do with ‘the news’. When the Rhinemaidens find the body of the murdered Everyman, and put him in the boot of their car, the end seems closer still, which, of course, it is. Their mermaid seduction of all three men, Siegfried, Gunther, and even Hagen, pleasuring them in that same car, makes a chilling point of decadence.

 

There are still certain parts of the drama, as I implied, which seem to me to work less well, with Aleksander Denić’s magnificent set designs being relied on to do a little too much of the work for themselves. The temperature drops, or at least seemed to me on this occasion to do so, for the Waltraute scene, Castorf’s impatience with Wagner’s Romantic heritage a little too prominent in the mix. And even the final scene has something of a provisional air to it at times, although it was now strongly assisted by a commanding performance from Catherine Foster as Brünnhilde. For the most part, however, a greater willingness for characters to perform their role in a greater dramatic whole, as well, perhaps, as a greater ability from a number of them to perform that role, has led to a significantly more impressive achievement.

 

Foster’s Brünnhilde now seemed to own the stage, equally at ease with the demands of character and production. Stefan Vinke, moreover, offered a huge improvement over Lance Ryan. The latter could act but, to put it bluntly, could not sing the part. Vinke accomplished both, even though there were understandable signs of strain at times (especially, though, early on, so it was perhaps as much a hangover from Siegfried as anything else).  Alejandro Marco-Buhrmester, an excellent Gunther indeed, found a worthy successor in Markus Eiche: darkly dangerous, no mere pushover, with violent tendencies of his own, intriguingly internalised more than externalised, nowhere more so than at the end of the second act. Stephen Milling’s Hagen initially sounded slightly on the gentle side, but quickly grew into the role – or my assumptions died away. One sensed both sadism but underlying fear too: this was anything but a one-dimensional reading. Allison Oakes’s Gutrune was very well sung, also treading well the thin line between manipulator and manipulated. As I said, I missed a degree of dramatic engagement in the scene with Marina Prudenskaya’s Waltraute, but think that may have been as much a matter of the production as anything else; it was certainly not something I could put my finger on, in what was an accomplished performance.

 

If Siegfried were the highlight of Marek Janowski’s reading of the score, then there was nothing to complain about in Götterdämmerung. The strange balances heard in both Das Rheingold and, to a lesser extent, in Die Walküre, were gone. There was, moreover, in general a fine sense of ebb and flow, Janowski unafraid to relax as well as to push forward. There were times when I longed for a stronger sense of the orchestral ‘voice’ as Greek Chorus reimagined, but that was a matter of degree. Towards the end of the first act and at the beginning of the second, there was a sense of coasting, of the orchestral temperature dropping somewhat, but again I should not wish to exaggerate. There was much to admire in Janowski’s navigation – and it was, after all, only his first year at Bayreuth, a theatre and acoustic with very specific difficulties. Both orchestra and chorus should be highly praised for their achievements; they, as much as anyone else, were crucial contributors to a truly challenging Ring. The final, distinctly unsettling feeling, mixed with the exhilaration of the conclusion of such an experience, was much as Boulez, at work on in this work in this theatre, said it should be: ‘Wagner refuses any conclusion as such, simply leaving us with the premisses for a conclusion that remains shifting and indeterminate in meaning.’

 

Deutsche Oper Strauss-Wochen (1) – Salome, 6 April 2016

Images: Monika Rittershaus
(The Salome pictured is Catherine Naglestad)

 

Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Herodes – Thomas Blondelle

Herodias – Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet
Salome – Allison Oakes
Jochanaan – Michael Volle
Narraboth – Attilio Glaser
Page – Annika Schlicht
First Jew – James Kryshak
Second Jew, Slave – Gideon Poppe
Third Jew – Andrew Dickinson
Fourth Jew – Clemens Bieber
Fifth Jew – Andrew Harris
First Nazarene – Dong-Hwan Lee
Second Nazarene – Thomas Lehman
First Soldier – Alexei Botnarciuc
Second Soldier – Tobias Kehrer
Cappadocian – Michael Adams
Salome as child – Alix Heyblom, Elisabeth Johanssen, Laura Meyer, Leonie Schöning, Maria Schulz, Katharina von Stackelberg
Dancers/Dummies – Uri Burger, Floris Dahlgrün, Alexander Fend, Nikos Fragkou, Oren Lazovski

Claus Guth (director)

William Robertson (revival director)
Muriel Gerstner (designs)
Olaf Freese (lighting)
Sommer Ulrickson (choreography)
Yvonne Gebauer, Curt A Roester (dramaturgy)

Statisterie and Male Dancers from the Deutsche Oper

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper

Alain Altonoglu (conductor)

 

Five consecutive nights of Richard Strauss: how could anyone resist? Plenty of opera-goers would have little hesitation, and not just those for whom Donizetti and Verdi are the height of musical sophistication. Strauss, as I have discussed in one of the chapters of my book, After Wagner, remains an object of distrust for many. Their problems often seem to be moral, or at least to be couched in moral terms; perhaps Strauss has turned out to be the Nietzschean Anti-Christ after all. (Had Strauss called his Alpine Symphony, as was his early intention, The Antichrist, it and we might have been saved a great deal of spectacularly uninformed sniping.) We shall see; perhaps more to the point, we shall also hear. Will this prove too much of a good, a bad, or even an evil thing? I doubt it, but perhaps I am already a lost cause. At any rate, the Deutsche Oper’s Strauss festival offers an extraordinary opportunity, for which I nobly put myself forward as moral-æsthetic guinea pig.

Schoenberg accused – at least he had good reason to feel personally affronted – that Strauss’s was the art of a Marzipanmeister: ‘Problems arise for him and are solved by him in the same way: he misunderstands them. But it cannot be disputed that he has dealt with them: he has hidden them under a coating of sugar icing ... This is not the way of thinking of a man whom God has given a mission.’ One can well imagine Strauss’s materialist response to that. Stravinsky was, if anything, more hostile still: ‘I would like to admit all Strauss’s operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant vulgarity. Their musical substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a musician today. That now so ascendant Ariadne … makes me want to scream.’ Well, scream away, Igor – although perhaps not this week, in which Ariadne auf Naxos, which surely stole from your neo-Classical future, will not appear. However, Salome, Elektra, Die ägyptische Helena, Die Liebe der Danae, and Der Rosenkavalier will.



Artists include: Thomas Lehman, Tobias Kehrer, Noel Bouley, Jörg Schörner

 

Claus Guth’s Salome, first seen here in January, sets the bar high for what is to follow. It offered a splendid follow-up, perhaps less profound (but is not the work itself?) but even more chilling than Dmitri Tcherniakov’s outstanding Parsifal for the Staatsoper. Childhood horrors loom large, obscuring, perhaps even obliterating, the boundaries between ‘then’ and ‘now’; memory and above all trauma are like that. Can we ever recover? Do we even really want to? And what are our coping strategies? Do some of us, perhaps as self-proclaimed æstheticists or, worse, protectors of the artwork (c.f. the Donald Trump-like ‘Against Modern Opera Productions’, or its provisional wing, ‘Gegen Regietheater in der Oper’), try to take refuge in the very thing that should be challenging us, waking us up, and leading us to confrontation, even catharsis?

 

If opera is, to you, ‘about’ pretty frocks, then you might be out of luck here; but salvation of sorts it at hand, for there are some handsome suits and sportcoats instead; indeed, clothes rails are full of them. Indeed, dressing up – attempting, like AMOP to avoid the questions, or to misunderstand, to smother them, as Schoenberg accused Strauss of doing – is thrust to the forefront of Guth’s staging, once the lights have been switched on, Olaf Freese’s lighting very much at the heart of the drama and its (would-be) turning-points. However, we must first travel the road to the superior (deceptively so?) gentleman’s outfitter – wonderful designs by Muriel Gerstner! – in which  stylish ‘solutions’ will be no problem, though likewise no solution.

Jochanaan (Michael Volle) and Salome

 

For the first scene has been dark, grim, at times in a weirdly twilit state of suspended animation; it has been far from clear who the actors in this drama even are, or might be held to be. Salome tours the set – her mind, or something more? – in agitation but, at times, in the pleasure that might, uncomfortably for all of us, especially as audience-voyeurs, accompany such agitation. The table at which she has sat – will sit? still sits? should sit? wishes to sit? – with her parents is at the centre. Does she wish to relive or to pre-empt what will happen there later? It is unclear, as our recollections often are. Shop dummies haunt her. Or are they ‘real’ people, acting as dummies? Who is operating them? How can they be stopped? Should they be stopped? We only really begin to make sense of this – we cannot, just as the opera says we should not, see Jochanaan for quite some time – once the lights have been switched on; or do we just delude ourselves that we make sense of it? For much of what happened there happens again, albeit in a shrine to fashionable consumption, Herodias making the most of the readily available alcohol. Might you not too, in such circumstances?

The child versions Salome has seen of herself earlier come into play most starkly for the Dance of the Seven Veils. There are six of them, seven including her, and they are the playthings, the instantiations of trauma. There is no need for titillating nudity (although not in the sense that our ‘conservative’ friends would understand); whatever has happened and is continuing to happen is genuinely shocking. Should Werktreue fanatics complain that they have been denied the opportunity to play Herod? Over to them. Salome tears the head off Jochanaan herself. But he had somehow become a dummy in the meantime. Was he always? What was it she really wanted from him. An answer is perhaps suggested by the similarities, physical as well as dramatic, between our prophet and the Tetrarch, productively rather than negligently at odds with the differences in soundworld. (Strauss simply could not ‘do’ religion, which, given his materialist credo, does him a certain degree of credit. Or does it?)

 

The return to darkness is most traumatic of all. Like many a victim, we feel, indeed we are, disoriented. Yet we have the additional guilt of that aforementioned voyeurism. Is Strauss’s sensationalism being given especially disconcerting musico-dramatic form? Julius Korngold wrote of the composer: ‘The Germans want a priest, someone who will champion an art with deep intentions. Strauss is driven by the ego sensibility of the modern artist, who wants above all to serve himself and his sensations.’ Is he right? If so, is that a problem? Herod orders Salome dead, but nothing happens; or does it. Her child form begins again; or does she? Have we returned to childhood, or never left it? We do not seem to have ‘moved on’.

Such a reaction certainly seemed to be suggested by those dreadful closing chords. For whilst I had sometimes been a little unsure about aspects of Alain Altinoglu’s conducting, I was not here. The deadness, the modern(ist) materialism, at least as shocking as that of the conclusion to Elektra, registered as powerfully and yet as dully (in a positive sense) as I have heard. It was at such moments of modernist crisis, quite in keeping with the staging, that not only Altinoglu’s fastidiousness but also his ear for marriage between timbre and harmony registered with great musico-dramatic import. I have heard performances of Salome which have danced more freely, and to start with I found that more of a problem. As time went on, I began to suspect that I was relying too much upon my own memories, false or otherwise; a performance today of Salome, in this particular production, need not, perhaps even should not, sound like the Salome of Böhm or Karajan. There was certainly no gainsaying the quality of the performance from the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, whose colours phantasmagorically shifted as the harmonies ground – and ground us down. (Or should that have been vice versa?)



Herodias (Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet) and Salome

 

Catherine Naglestad had been due to sing the title role. Her replacement, Allison Oakes, proved an outstanding replacement. I had not come across her previously, but certainly hope that I shall do so again. Hers was a tireless, unceasingly rewarding performance, vocally and ‘dramatically’, insofar as the two may be distinguished. Her lyricism called into question her trauma and yet justified it; in this case, there is no doubt as to the necessity of the vice versa. Herodes is a larger role than I tend to remember. (What was that about faulty remembrance?) Thomas Blondelle offered a detailed, disturbing portrayal: far better sung than one often hears, yet just as heedful of dramatic requirements. Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet was a splendid grande dame Herodias; elements of caricature are surely justified, indeed written in. She was a monster and proud of it. Michael Volle's Jochanaan, suave, brutal, thoughtful, by turns and sometimes simultaneously, was just the thing for this production. Attilio Glaser’s sweetly sung, sincere, hopelessly lovelorn Narraboth left one wanting more. But more, of course, was not his fate on this night.

Above all, though, this felt like a strong company achievement; those singing smaller roles, those engaging as dancers and as ‘extras’, as much part of the dreadful events as the rest of us, whether on stage or in the audience. With trepidation, I should like to see this again, to try once again to make sense of what I might see, hear, and remember.