Parsifal, Vienna State Opera, 5 April 2018

Amfortas – Jochen Schmeckenbecker
Gurnemanz – Kwangchul Youn
Parsifal – Christopher Ventris
Klingsor – Boaz Daniel
Kundry – Anja Kampe
Titurel – Ryan Speedo Green
Squires – Rachel Frenkel, Miriam Albano, Wolfram Igor Dentl, Peter Jelosits
First Knight of the Grail – Benedikt Köbel
Second Knight of the Grail – Marcus Pelz
Flowermaidens – Maria Nazarova, Lydia Rathkolb, Rachel Frenkel, Hila Fahima, Mariam Battistelli, Stephanie Houtzeel
Voice from Above – Zoryana Kushpler

Alvis Hermanis (director, set designs)

Kristīne Jurjāne (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Ineta Sipunova (video)
Silvia Platzek (assistant set designer)

Children of the Vienna State Opera Opera School

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Martin Schebesta)

Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera

Semyon Bychkov (conductor)

 

Parsifal continues its strange career in the opera house, both its ‘home’, Bayreuth, and beyond – the ‘beyond’ Cosima Wagner haplessly, hilariously attempted to prevent with her Lex Parsifal. (Note to pious New York Wagnerians: next time you appeal to the Master’s alleged intentions, consider your house’s role in confounding them.) Wagner’s desire, as expressed to Ludwig II, to protect the work from ‘a common operatic career’ is understandable. Indeed, Pierre Boulez, a highly distinguished interpreter and critic of the work as well as compositional successor, understood this very well when he approvingly noted Wagner loathing a system in which ‘opera houses are … like cafés where … you can hear waiters calling out their orders: “One Carmen! And one Walküre! And one Rigoletto!”’ Bayreuth has veered from the very best, indeed the very greatest, in Stefan Herheim, to the very worst, with Uwe Eric Laufenberg’s festival of Islamophobia, bizarrely released on DVD whilst its predecessor languishes in the (virtual) vaults. I do not think I saw Vienna’s previous Parsifal, directed by Christine Mielitz; at any rate, I have no recollection of it. This first revival of Alvis Hermanis’s production had me wondering, however, whether it could have been any more vacuous.

 

Hermanis would not be my choice to direct anything, whether for his avowed Islamophobia – how he must have cursed Laufenberg for getting there first – or for the limitations of his craft, such as it may be. His Salzburg Liebe der Danae combined the two to an uncommon degree. I am astonished any theatre or opera house would still enlist his services, following his storming out of Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre on account of its having extended a welcome to refugees. What we have here, at seemingly great expense, is a series of impressive designs – with which, to be fair, he is credited too – and very little that could really be considered a production at all. There is just enough – again, to be fair – to permit one’s mind to work, to posit connections between what one sees, essentially tableaux from Vienna 1900. Yet, whilst I am certainly in favour of us all having to do some mental lifting, I cannot, hand on heart, say that my psychoanalytical thoughts had their roots in what I saw, whereas they unquestionably have done in Dmitri Tcherniakov’s outstanding Berlin staging.

 

The conceit, if we may call it that, is that two Wagners, Richard and Otto, shared the same, well, surname. Therefore the action takes place at the ‘Wagner Spital’ – alias Otto’s Steinhof psychiatric hospital. I wondered whether there might be a nod to Nietzsche and/or Thomas Mann on Parsifal, here, but suspect myself, perhaps unusually, of undue charity. A model of the human brain grows larger, amidst some books on shelves: ‘Durch Mitleid wissend…’? There is a half-hearted attempt, which nevertheless made me think, at pschyoanalysis, Kundry on Klingsor’s couch, in the second act, although it quickly becomes unclear, rather than fruitfully ambiguous, who, if anyone, amongst the characters, is analysing whom. Bits of Wagner’s (Richard’s) poem are flashed up above the stage from time to time; having hired someone for video, it must, presumably, have been necessary to find something for her to do. (Not her fault in the slightest, I hasten to add.) As for the final scene, in which a few Vienna 1900 celebrities join the chorus, bedecked in the most absurd winged helmets you will ever have seen, even as devotees of ‘Against Modern Opera Productions’, I simply gave up. The stage direction itself might as well have been a wet Wednesday’s revival of Otto Schenk.

 

Fortunately, musical matters were considerably better. The orchestra sounded better than I have heard it in Wagner for some time. It will always play well for conductors it likes: I can therefore only presume that, quite rightly, it likes Semyon Bychkov. The seamlessness of Bychkov’s account showed that, once again, as in, say, his Lohengrin, his Tannhäuser, and his Tristan, he both discerns and can communicate the Wagner melos. Some passages were thrillingly dramatic, not least an overwhelming close to the second act. Others seemed, perhaps, to tread water a little, but that may just have been my difficulty in dissociating what I heard from what I saw. No one, however, could justly have been disappointed with what (s)he heard here, those hallowed Vienna strings not far from the top of their golden game.

 

However, rather to my surprise, I found Christopher Ventris slightly disappointing in the title role – certainly no match for his 2008 self for Herheim and Daniele Gatti. Ventris can still sing the role, often beautifully, but his stage presence seemed almost tired, whether compared with ten years ago in the same role or indeed with his Bayreuth Siegmund last summer. Perhaps he just needed stronger direction; one can certainly sympathise. Anja Kampe’s Kundry proved thrilling, increasingly so as time went on, her laughter at Christ erotically chilling. Kwangchul Youn’s Gurnemanz has gathered wisdom over the years; this may have been the finest I have heard from him, utterly at ease in the role, without taking a single note or word for granted. At times, I found Jochen Schmeckenbecker’s Amfortas a little underpowered, even monochrome, but again there was much to be savoured from his way with the text, both verbal and musical. Boaz Daniel’s Klingsor had one wishing, as so often with this role, that it were at least a little longer. Choral singing, from boys, men, and women alike was excellent: clear, transparent, and yet weighty, having my mind flit back to Wagner’s work in Dresden, whether on his own, strange Liebesmahl der Apostel, or Palestrina’s Stabat Mater (which he edited, less interestingly than one might have hoped). There was, then, redemption to be had, but in a strictly musical sense.

 

Salzburg Festival (6) - Die Liebe der Danae, 8 August 2016

Grosses Festspielhaus

Images: © Salzburger Festspiele / Forster
Jupiter (Tomasz Konieczny)

Danae – Krassimira Stoyanova

Jupiter – Tomasz Konieczny
Merkur – Norbert Ernst
Pollux – Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke
Zanthe – Regine Hangler
Midas – Gerhard Siegel
Four Kings – Pavel Kolgatin, Andi Früh, Ryan Speedo Green, Jongmin Park
Semele – Mária Celeng
Europa – Olga Bezsmertna
Alkmene – Michaela Selinger
Leda – Jennifer Johnston
Four Watchmen – Hacik Bayvertian, Konrad Huber, Michael Wilder, Csaba Markovitz

Alvis Hermanis (director, set designs)

Juozas Statkevičius (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Ineta Sipunova (video)
Alla Sigalova (choreography)
Gudrun Hartmann (assistant director)
Uta Gruber-Ballehr (assistant designer)
Ronny Dietrich (dramaturgy)

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Ernst Raffelsberger)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Franz Welser-Möst (conductor)

 

It is not every year one has the opportunity to see two different productions of Strauss’s penultimate opera, still – still! – never staged by either the Royal Opera or ENO. Before the Deutsche Oper’s revival earlier this year, I had indeed only seen Die Liebe der Danae once in the theatre before, also in Salzburg, in Günter Krämer’s 2002 production. I can only wish that Krämer’s production had been revived, for, despite its faults, its Salzburg successor from Alvis Hermanis is truly atrocious.

At best, it is a total waste of money (and bizarrely, given the golden subject matter, a non-ironic one). The sets and costumes look – and surely must have been – very expensive indeed, the dimensions of Midas’s hut threaten to have Franco Zeffirelli, surely the unacknowledged progenitor of Hermanis’s ‘aesthetic’, seem a model of modesty in his garretted vision for La bohème; indeed, we veer dangerously close to Zeffirelli-Turandot-land (far from coincidentally, as we shall have cause to discover). If the very occasional image, notably the portrayal of the shower of gold through dancers, augurs well, everything else is empty indeed. Chorus members wear individualised giant – and yes, I mean ‘giant’ – turbans. Why? Who knows? No one even seems to care. A still-more-giant elephant is wheeled on and off the stage. At the beginning of the third act, someone walks a real donkey on and off the stage in bizarre hommage to Francesca Zambello’s Carmen, or maybe not. Nothing seems to have any meaning. There is a total lack of interest – truly extraordinary in our own times – in the dramatic meaning and possibilities of temptation by and rejection of gold. Nor, unlike in Krämer’s production – which took us from the period of 1944 dress rehearsal, through 1952 for the first production, also of course in Salzburg, to its own time – is there any interest whatsoever shown in genesis and reception. This opera needs help to release its myriad of musical riches; it receives none; indeed, none is so much as attempted in a lengthy essay in – at best – vacuity.

 

Danae (Krassimira Stoyanova) with dancers (gold)

In a valiant attempt to defend or at least to skate over Hermanis’s indefensible, dramaturge Ronny Dietrich writes: ‘This blend of the traditional with the fictitious … has induced Alvis Hermanis to stage Die Liebe der Danae as a fairy tale, especially as the opera’s storyline takes us to the Orient. Even if the libretto mentions Syria as the country in which the encounter between god and man, i.e. Jupiter and Midas, took place, Alvis Hermanis prefers not to commit himself to any location or period in his production.’ It is not, on a moment’s reflection, so valiant after all (and I have checked the original German, lest the words were mistranslated). Why is a ‘fairy tale’ ‘especially’ suited to ‘the Orient’. Did Edward Said, let alone any of his successors, never exist? And why is a fairy tale somehow held to be devoid of meaning, of all manner of implications, psychological, social, political, cultural…?

 

The claim that no location is committed to is at best questionable. Why, then, do we see, for no obvious reason, that most noble passage in the whole opera – the interlude depicting ‘Jupiter’s resignation’ – ruined by a procession on stage of women in burqas? Well, I say burqas, but, in contrast with the expensive if vulgar designs for everything else, they are simply white sheets: childish, if one were to be charitable, but more likely deliberately insulting? We return to Hermanis. Now notorious for his anti-migrant outbursts – one of his most staggering, brazenly untruthful, brazenly racist claims having been ‘While not all refugees are terrorists, all terrorists are refugees or their children’ – I think we can hazard a guess why he might wish to hold to ridicule Muslim women, in a setting that is anything but non-specific, whatever Dietrich might claim. Likewise why Hermanis might depict ‘the Orient’ – have we really not moved on from that? Yes, we, of course, have – with an essentialism shading between ludicrous and sinister. There is no reason whatsoever for those women to have trekked on stage at all, setting up shop with looms in Midas’s bafflingly large tent; Dietrich offers the claim that carpets, ‘which epitomise the oriental topos’ (we are long past the time to stop digging) establish ‘a connection to the genesis of the opera – a process of intertwining and interweaving themes and motifs’. You could have fooled me. Hermanis’s recent interview with Der Standard, in which he defiantly nails his ‘conservative’ – for which, we can read something a little more than that – credentials to the mast tell us, sadly, much more about what has been going on. Why theatres continue to hire someone whose directorial skills are as impressive as his politics is beyond me – more so than ever, given the results of this production.

 

We had, then, to rely on the singing for anything in the way of enjoyment or edification. It is just as well that much of it was very good indeed. I doubt that the role of Jupiter has ever been better sung than it was by Tomasz Konieczny; his was a towering, tireless performance, as impressive in its moments of tenderness as of godly pride. Krassimira Stoyanova’s Danae was, for the most part, beautifully sung, in an evidently heartfelt assumption. Both singers showed themselves excellently matched in that glorious final duet. Gerhard Siegel’s musical and verbal skill was never in doubt, but I was not always entirely convinced that the voice of an excellent Mime offered a plausible Midas challenge to our Wotan-Jupiter. Norbert Ernst made for a lively Merkur and Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke once again proved himself a fine singing-actor as Pollux. Jupiter’s wives – what to say about their painted-on nipples, another Orientalist ‘fantasy’? – struck me as an altogether superior collection of consorts. Mária Celeng, Olga Bezemertna, Michaela Selinger, and Jennifer Johnston worked so well together, both individual of voice and indeed of character, and yet also cohesive as a vocal quartet, that I longed to hear more from them: a spin-off, please.

 

That leaves us to consider the orchestra and the conductor. Franz Welser-Möst, lavishly praised by Hermanis in that Standard interview, conducted somewhat stiffly for much of the evening. If Hermanis thinks, as he claims, that Welser-Möst is an aural equivalent of ‘strong LSD’, he needs to find himself a new dealer. When the conductor relaxed, when he let the music yield a little more, the Vienna Philharmonic came more into its own. There is much more to this score in terms of harmony, colour, a myriad of orchestral melody than we heard here, though. It was not only Hermanis’s fault that the aforementioned ‘Jupiter’s resignation’, one of the most moving orchestral passages in all of Strauss’s operas, went for so little.

 

Salzburg Festival (1) - Gawain, 2 August 2013

Felsenreitschule

Gawain – Christopher Maltman

Green Knight/Bertiak de Hautdesert – Sir John Tomlinson
Morgan le Fay – Laura Aikin
Lady de Hautdesert – Jennifer Johnston
King Arthur – Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Bishop Baldwin – Andrew Watts
A Fool – Brian Galliford
Guinevere – Gun-Brit Barkmin
Agravain – Ivan Ludlow
Ywain – Alexander Sprague

Alvis Hermanis (director, set designs)

Eva Dessecker (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Multimedia Design Studio ‘Raketamedia’, Moscow (video)
Ronny Dietrich (dramaturgy)

Salzburg Bach Choir (chorus master: Alois Glassner)

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Ingo Meztmacher (conductor) 

 

 

Images: © Ruth Walz

If it has taken Salzburg a while to produce an opera by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, then it has likewise taken an unconscionable while for Gawain to receive its second staging; the Salzburg Festival thus deserves a great vote of thanks for having done so, as a highly imaginative replacement for the postponed premiere of György Kurtág’s new Beckett opera. Kurtág’s Endgame, should that be the opera’s name, will, we are informed, be shown next year instead.

 

Which brings me to Alvis Hermanis’s rather puzzling production of Gawain. I could not help but wonder whether his post-apocalyptic vision, a few years in the ‘science fiction’ future, had started life as a response, if you can imagine this, to a version of Endgame with hordes of characters. Shifting the action from Arthurian times, and indeed from the thirteenth-century world in which Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written, does not trouble me, and one might argue for parallels between post-Roman Britain and a world following some unspecified future apocalypse, but it was unclear to me that the vagrant setting really works, or rather that it does anything much beyond providing an alternative ‘setting’. Hermanis makes a case for ecological issues: the ‘green’ of the ‘Green’ Knight, Nature taking its revenge in a scenario apparently inspired by Joseph Beuys, and a strangely glowing ‘magic’ green belt as the sash Lady Hautdesert gives to Gawain. But it is difficult either to understand such issues as central to the opera or to credit the director with an entirely plausible commentary or reinterpretation. Hermanis’s interest in Beuys, for instance, simply seems transplanted upon an existing work, to the benefit of neither.

 

That said, I was made to think – and the production deserves praise for that. It does not close down avenues of response, eccentric though its own chosen terms may be. It tantalises – and I do not think this is entirely my own reading, though it may be – with a dialectic between parallelism and difference; that is, we both appreciate that the new setting has things in common with the ‘original’ yet also how utterly different it is, thereby being compelled to place work, staging, and ourselves. The need for ritual, so much a preoccupation of both poem and opera, shines through, almost despite the dubious talk (in Hermanis’s programme note) of ‘science fiction’. And whatever one thinks of the ‘movement’, whether from a host of actors or, most astonishingly, from the best trained dog I have ever seen, it is accomplished with excellence. At a time when one often endures productions in which the director seems apparently unable to direct, there is succour to be gained from such professionalism.

Laura Aikin (Morgan le Fay), Christopher Maltman (Gawain)

 

 

Nor, most importantly, did the staging get in the way of what was an outstanding musical performance of a modern operatic masterpiece, scandalously neglected by houses that prefer endlessly to churn out the profundities of Donizetti. Ingo Metzmacher’s performance with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra perhaps placed Birtwistle in a more international, or better cosmopolitan, context than Elgar Howarth’s Covent Garden performances. Although I missed a sense of that ineffably ‘English’ quality that haunts Birtwistle’s music just as strongly as it does, say, that of Vaughan Williams, there were gains to be had too, especially for an ‘international’ audience in Salzburg. The performance was perhaps less primæval in its violence than Howarth’s – how vividly I still remember what was only my second evening at Covent Garden! – yet pacing, flow, and both the sheer array of colours and, where necessary, weight and incision of orchestral attack were second to none. It would certainly have been well-nigh impossible to over-praise the ORF orchestra. Birtwistle’s formal ritualistic preoccupations came to the fore through the medium that matters above all else, the music. It is, moreover, not entirely appropriate to the dramaturgical precepts of either the composer or his librettist, David Harsent, that there be some degree of disconnection between ‘dramatic’ and ‘orchestral’ action. Busoni’s influence perhaps extends further into the twentieth and even the twenty-first century than many of us appreciate.

 

So, of course, does Wagner’s. And with the Proms Ring so fresh in my memory, Birtwistle’s portrayal of flawed ‘heroism’, accomplished via different narrative standpoints, I was bound to think of Siegfried in Gawain. Christopher Maltman swaggered as a cowboy, his singing still more than his bathing offering ample reason for Gawain’s charismatic following. His journey towards ‘Why do you ask for someone who isn’t here? Who do you want me to be? I’m not a hero’ was not merely plausible, but immensely moving, and increasingly so. John Tomlinson is the Green Knight, of course, yet, despite a highly committed performance, it now takes an uncritical ‘fan’ not to be disturbed by the vocal problems at the top of his range. Laura Aikin and Jennifer Johnston were excellent Morgan le Fay and Lady Hautdesert. The eroticism of the former’s performance grew as she and Johnston’s character grew apart, indeed transformed themselves from commentators into participants. Hermanis’s direction assisted with that, but the depths of vocal characterisation upon which both singers drew were undeniably their own. Jeffery Lloyd-Roberts proved a steadfastly engaging King Arthur, the singer in infinitely superior vocal form to the last time I had heard him; I especially liked the directorial touch at the end of having him step up from his chair and make his first tentative steps towards an uncertain – heroic or non-heroic? – future. If Brian Galliford’s Fool sometimes lacked vocal lustre, his was a typically observant performance, using his words to highly dramatic advantage. Gun-Brit Barkmin, Andrew Watts, Ivan Ludlow, and Alexander Sprague all acquitted themselves very well indeed in their smaller roles. Special mention, however, must be accorded to the stunning offstage choral contribution, the Salzburg Bach Choir fully worthy of comparison with the illustrious orchestra in the pit. Alois Glassner clearly deserves great credit for his choral training.

 

‘Then with a single step your journey starts,’ sings Morgan le Fay – repeatedly. Let us hope that Gawain’s journey has (re-)started with this fascinating second step.

Salzburg Festival (8) - Die Soldaten, 20 August 2012

Felsenreitschule

Wesener – Alfred Muff

Marie – Laura Aikin
Charlotte – Tanja Ariane Baumgartner
Wesener’s Old Mother – Cornelia Kallisch
Stolzius – Tomasz Konieczny
Stolzius’s Mother – Renée Morloc
Countess de la Roche – Gabriela Beňačková
The Young Count – Matthias Klink
Desportes – Daniel Brenna
Pirzel – Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke
Eisenhardt – Boaz Daniel
Mary – Morgan Moody
Haudy – Matjaž Robavs
Obrist – Reinhard Mayr
Three Young Officers – Andreas Früh, Paul Schweinester, Clemens Kerschbaumer,
Andalusian Woman, Servant – Beate Vollack
Countess de la Roche’s Servant – Werner Friedl
Petty Officer, Captain – Volker Wahl
Madame Roux – Anna-Eva Köck
Young Petty Officer, Young Hunter – Rupert Grössinger
Drunken Officer – Frederik Götz
Eighteen Officers – Svilen Angelov, David Fliri, Benedikt Flörsch, Simon Förster, Frederik Götz, Rupert Grössinger, Ludwig Hohl, Robert Huschenbett, Nikolaij Janocha, Petter Lindahl, Thomas Mahlknecht, Matuš Mráz, Kiril Stoyanov, Alexander Tröger, Tihomir Tonchev, Justus Wilcken, Wei Wei, Domink Worni
Artist – Katharina Dröscher

Alvis Hermanis (director, set designs)

Eva Dessecker (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Gudrun Hartmann (assistant director)
Uta Gruber-Ballehr (assistant set designs)
Götz Leineweber (dramaturgy)

Jazz Combo:

Johannes Bauer (guitar)
Tony Ganev (double bass)
Rudolf Matajsz (trumpet)
Petkov Nedialko (clarinet)

Markus Stepanek, Hans-Josef Knaust (organ)

Michael Richter (celesta)
Jory Vinikour (harpsichord)
Günther Albers (piano)
Christoper Brandt (guitar)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

Images: Salzburg Festival/Ruth Walz

 

 

If some of the decisions concerning opera at this year’s Salzburg Festival may have raised eyebrows – the Magic Flute eschewing the Vienna Philharmonic for the astringent sounds of Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s Concentus musicus Wien, programming of both Carmen and La bohème – then this staging of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten offered redemption. A towering masterpiece of twentieth-century opera, its demands have so far ensured that performances have proved infrequent, to put it mildly. A festival such as Salzburg’s is just the place to begin to put that right. This first night would have granted every member of the audience ample justification to return home and to agitate for a staging as soon as possible. A proviso, of course, must be that such a work is performed well, for a poor or even mediocre performance does no one any favours; Salzburg’s production passed the test of excellence with flying colours.

 

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra was on form as wonderful as that for La bohème a couple of nights previously, a rebuke to those who would question its versatility. It would be folly, of course, to doubt the VPO’s recalcitrance in certain situations; this orchestra, rightly or wrongly, needs a conductor it respects. Then, just as it has performed challenging modernist music with enormous success for conductors such as Claudio Abbado and Pierre Boulez, it will play Zimmermann as if to the manner born. One might have thought Zimmermann as regular a guest at the Vienna State Opera as Mozart. Clearly the Viennese trust Ingo Metzmacher and enjoy playing for him; he certainly had the measure of Zimmermann’s score, much as one could imagine the work’s first conductor, Michael Gielen, having done. Rarely, if ever, though, could such depth as well as precision have been heard from the orchestra, here joined by a number of other fine musicians, placed on either side of the Felsenreitschule’s pit.

Marie (Laura Aikin), Desportes (Daniel Brenna), Wesener (Alfred Muff)

 

It is no exaggeration, moreover, to say that there was not a single weak link in the cast; this was a true company effort, a state of affairs all the more extraordinary given the size of that cast. Laura Aikin’s Marie showed herself as true a successor to Berg’s Marie as Zimmermann’s opera is to Wozzeck. Aikin’s was an astounding performance, marrying precision and intensity to the nth degree, never sentimentalising – though perhaps there is not time to do such a thing – and thereby rendering the plight of the poor girl who becomes the ‘soldiers’ whore’ (Soldatenmensch) all the more chillingly plausible. Gabriela Beňačková was, quite rightly, acclaimed with enormous warmth as the Countess de la Roche. It is not just that hers is such a sympathetic character, seeking to understand Marie and to take her in, but that Beňačková, radiant of voice, treated and expressed the character’s situation with every bit as great humanity as one would expect in Mozart or Janáček. Alfred Muff’s Wesener, Marie’s father, was a conflicted soul, drawing one in and yet counselling against all-too-easy empathy. Tomasz Konieczny’s Stolzius was a tragic, lovelorn, and yet determined, figure, affording a fine contrast with Daniel Brenna’s Desportes, whom he would poison to avenge Marie’s fate. Brenna managed to render credible both the initial charms to which Marie fell victim and increasingly the repellent nature of the character and his class once he and it had had their fill. Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke made a typically memorable high-tenor impression as Pirzel, Boaz Daniel similarly impressing in philosophical debate as the army chaplain. But as characters came and went, interacted with each other, with memories of each other, their scenes unfolding or flashing past sequentially or simultaneously, the cast was so much more than even the sum of its very fine parts.

Captain Mary (Morgan Moody), Reinhard Mayr (Obrist,
Count of Spannheim), Ensemble

 

Alvis Hermanis’s production proved both faithful and unfaithful, productively so. Some may well have regretted the loss of film, but if film may be employed to clarify staging, I see no reason why staging should not be employed to attain similar ends to film. Perhaps there were elements in the production that simplified the almost diabolically – in a good sense – complex action of Zimmermann’s opera, but there was still a great deal with which to be taxing one’s mind, eyes, and ears. The stage constantly reinvented itself, and yet constantly remained the same. Some action took place behind windows through which we observed observers observing. Who were the voyeurs, the soldiers masturbating as they watched Marie, or us watching them? The use to which the Felsenreitschule itself was put was highly inventive, the building coming into its own through lighting (Gleb Filshtinsky) and increasing encroachments of the stage action. Marie’s – or rather Katharina Dröscher’s – tight-rope walking above the stage may not have been the most subtle of metaphors, but it enthralled, highwire ‘spectacle’ in the best sense. Indeed, so taken in was I that I initially thought it was Aikin, and that somehow she would walk the tightrope and sing – a tightrope of its own. Equally inventive use was made of straw, absolving us of the necessity to watch every act, whilst enticing us and yet reminding us of the eighteenth-century setting. Costumes, by the way, were almost impeccably ‘traditional’, and there were real horses as well as a stone Felsenreitschule horse's head to be provocatively ridden, not that ‘traditionalists’ would be likely to have much interest in a work such as this, preferring the vulgarity of opera as ‘beautiful’ entertainment.  

Katharina Dröscher

 

The truest compliment I can pay to this fine production is to say that, emotionally drained though I was by the end, I had no other desire than to see it again, to experience more of what, musically and scenically, I had doubtless missed from a single performance. Quotations, most celebratedly of all, the chorale, ‘Ich bin’s, ich sollte büßen,’ from the St Matthew Passion, inevitably haunted, questioned, brought into shattering perspective the entirety of the German musico-dramatic tradition that arguably had begun with Bach. Yet this was no exercise in nostalgia: it was raw, contemporary music drama (just, of course, as Bach’s works are, or would be, were  they performed as something more than a pseudo-archaeological exercise). The ‘excessive demands’ (Metzmacher) placed upon the singers in the third toccata, with which the fourth and final act opens, remained long in the minds ear, the most extreme complexity and simultaneity of all, here performed live rather than recorded, as has often been the case, at the composer’s recommendation. Emphasis was lain throughout upon live performance rather than recording or other electronic elements: not the only solution to the score’s difficulties, but on this evidence, a more than plausible, quite convincing, path to follow – assuming the requisite technical excellence. What perhaps lingered longest in the memory, indeed still does, was the final dying away into nothingness, Marie’s destruction at the hands of a brutal, militarised society finally put beyond doubt. For all the complexity of the work, Metzmacher’s words provide a simple, yet all-encompassing conclusion: ‘Marie lies destroyed on the ground. The father [who has failed to recognise in this beggar his own daughter] walks slowly away. One instrument after the other stops playing. The light is extinguished.’