The Queen of Spades, Deutsche Oper, 20 March 2024

PIQUE DAME von Pjotr I. Tschaikowskij, Premiere am 9. März 2024 in der Deutschen Oper Berlin,
copyright: Marcus Lieberenz
Countess (Doris Soffel) and Hermann (Martin Muehle)

Hermann – Martin Muehle
Tomsky – Lucio Gallo
Prince Yeletsky – Thomas Lehman
Chekalinsky – Chance Jonas-O’Toole
Surin – Kyle Miller
Chaplitsky – Andrew Dickinson
Narumov – Artur Garbas
Master of Ceremonies – Jörg Schörner
The Countess – Doris Soffel
Lisa – Maria Motolygina
Pauline – Karia Tucker
Governess – Nicole Piccolomini
Masha – Arianna Manganello
Children’s commander – Sofia Kaspruk
Little Hermann – Aleksandr Sher
Little Lisa – Alma Kraushaar
Stage piano – Jisu Park
Old servant – Wolfgang Siebner

Director – Sam Brown
Designer – Stuart Nunn
Choreography – Ron Howell
Video – Martin Eidenberger
Lighting – Linus Fellborn
Assistant directors – Constanze Weidknecht, Silke Sense
Dramaturgy – Konstantin Parnian

Children’s Chorus of the Deutsche Oper (director: Christian Lindhorst)

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper (director: Jeremy Bines)

Statisterie, and Opernballet of the Deutsche Oper

Sebastian Weigle (conductor)  

The late Graham Vick was to have directed this new production of The Queen of Spades for the Deutsche Oper. According to the cast list, Vick laid down the principles for the production, but his successor Sam Brown, charged with bringing the project to completion, alongside designer Stuart Nunn and choreographer (and Vick’s widower) Ron Howell, will necessarily have brought much that his own to the piece. As he says in an interview, ‘I knew that the framework that he’d created provides a lot of room for conceptual freedom. … It may sound dramatic, but Graham’s ideas for PIQUE DAME outside of the equipment died with him. As a director, I have to walk my own path.’ Tempting though it may be to speculate what comes from whom, that is hardly the point. Having noted the situation, it is better to move on to discuss what it is we see and hear.

Chekalinsky (Chance Jonas-O'Toole), Tomsky (Lucio Gallo), Surin (Kyle Miller)

Layering of memory is a particular strength. Tchaikovsky – and his brother and librettist, Modest, as well of course as Pushkin – play with memories of the eighteenth century. That is doubled by the Countess’s memories of her ‘own’, earlier eighteenth century, Mme de Pompadour and all. The Grétry air is another case in point. In this production, without being merely indeterminate or arbitrary, which would defeat the point, further nesting occurs, for instance in the silent film excerpts (from a Russian adaptation of 1916), but also in the dressing and undressing of particular characters at different points, as well as in broader designs. Spanning three centuries – the nineteenth may not be overtly depicted on stage, but it is always present – is not an easy trick to bring off, but it is meaningfully accomplished here. Moreover, it is with us from the start, the opening scene with children’s chorus pointing to much of what is to come. A maltreated child, a social outsider even then, is abused by children and adults alike, only to have a little girl briefly come to him and show a little kindness. It prefigures what is to come, but perhaps it is also a memory. In this opera, though, it is always too late. The cards dealt by fate can never be changed, despite – or because of – their entirely random nature in what is no game of skill. 

Hermann, Countess

The cast acts out this game and propels it with great skill, heightening and extending its outlines in much the same way the production does. Martin Muehle’s Hermann is tireless, anguish-ridden, obsessive, perhaps a little on the Verdian side of Tchaikovsky, but I am not sure it behoves me, as one who speaks no Russian, to be too fussy here. It was above all his journey of catastrophe, and no one could doubt that Muehle grasped his fate and followed it. But it is not only his journey; part of the problem is surely that the characters are heading in different, mutually opposed and uncomprehending directions. Maria Motolygina’s Lisa, unable to escape from her childhood and clearly presented as such, was by the same token beautifully, often heartrendingly sung, her final scene powerful indeed. As expected, Doris Soffel’s Countess stole the show: not only a sterling performance, that ‘ancient’ air included, but one showing her sexual drives to be as strong as ever, perhaps even more so. Perhaps if she too had questioned her obsessions, she might have been happier—but is there any meaning in that ‘perhaps’? Thomas Lehman’s Yeletsky was finely sung indeed, as, in smaller roles, were Karia Tucker’s Pauline, Andrew Dickinson’s Chaplitsky, Chance Jonas-O’Toole’s Chekalinsky, Kyle Miller’s Surin, and many more, up to and including the chorus. Lucio Gallo’s virile, contemptuously masculine Tomsky showed how this singer can still absolutely hold the stage. Raunchy masked-ball choreography from Howell and excellent performances from the dancers not only returned to several questions already posed, but also asked a good number of their own.

Sebastian Weigle’s conducting had its moments, especially during the third act. (The opera was essentially given in scenes rather than acts, the interval given, as is often the case, following the arrival of Catherine the Great in the middle of the second act.) Then it became more idiomatic, conjuring up from the excellent Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper more of a Tchaikovskian sound than had previously been the case. We should not be too essentialist about such matters, but much previously had sounded rather on the Germanic side, albeit with distinctly odd balances, strings in particular notably subdued. A lack of dramatic sweep, without anything obvious put in its place, proved frustrating. 

Catherine the Great (Doris Soffel)

Singing and production continued, though, to offer considerable compensation. Soffel’s reappearance as Catherine the Great suggested she and the Countess were one and the same, her mocking laughter at the end of that third scene echoing the Countess’s ghostly reappearance (dressed as Lisa) to name the three cards. Was this all, then, just Hermann’s fevered imagination? And if so, to put it bluntly, what is the point? What we saw was not so cut and dried as that. Indeed, one of the projector quotations between scenes, from Dostoevsky, considering the nature of fantasy, how it must come close to reality, made that clear. 

If the scales here are tilted towards fantasy rather than reality, more so than any other production I can recall and than I have tended to think of it, then this remains a single production, concentrating fruitfully on a particular standpoint; another will be free to do something else. And it is only limited by it to the extent that almost any standpoint will limit: it enabled and heighted a strong sense of fate, from which not only Hermann, but also Lisa and indeed the Countess wish to escape, yet ultimately knew they cannot—and do not. 

There is, I think, something psychoanalytical to the approach. Certainly everything appears to be built on misunderstandings or downright lies: untruths, at any rate. What Hermann wants does not really exists; what Lisa wants does not really exist; what the Countess has wanted all her life has probably never existed at all. That holds for others too, not least Yeletsky. For all his apparent good fortune, he loses Lisa, and there is no sense of triumph in his final victory over Hermann. That it ends with a third and final death, all three ultimate protagonists departed, seems fitting in a sense that goes beyond Romantic death wish. Perhaps it is here, then, that the fantastic twist properly resumes, bidding us continue to question what we have seen and heard.

Hänsel und Gretel, Deutsche Oper, 4 January 2020

Images from the 1997 premiere: © Bettina Stöß

Peter – Noel Bouley

Gertrud – Heidi Melton

Hänsel – Jana Kurucová

Gretel – Alexandra Hutton

Witch – Andrew Dickinson

Sandman, Dew Fairy – Flurina Stucki

Andreas Homoki (director)

Wolfgang Gussmann (designs)

Silke Sense (revival director)

Children’s Chorus (chorus director: Christian Lindhorst) of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Donald Runnicles (conductor)

A lovely way to open my operatic year: a new—to me—production of an opera of which I never tire, Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel. Andreas Homoki’s Deutsche Oper production was first seen in 1997 and has clearly done sterling service for a mixed audience of children and adults. (There are matinee performances intended more specifically for families, but there were plenty of well-behaved—often far more so than the adults—children on the evening I attended.) There are clearly limits to what will be thought of as appropriate for such a production. In no sense does Homoki’s team, including revival director, Silke Sense, come close to what remains for me the finest exploration of the work’s dark side: Liam Steel’s 2016 Royal College of Music production. But then, that is not what they are trying to do. The story is told directly, without kitschy evasion or indeed kitsch of any variety. It offers an apt sense of wonder, colour—perhaps heat too, at least metaphorically?—increasing from the relatively drab, humdrum house from which the children have started. Clowns offer a hint or two of menace as the creatures of the forest: clowns always do. The witch is clearly a tormented soul as well as tormentor, a point concerning which, like others, one can make what one wishes. Children doubtless will have done: in no sense being condescended to in the recreation of ‘childhood’ many adults, declining to face up to their own anxieties and fears, wish upon their presumed charges.

I should have to go back, I think, to Sir Colin Davis at Covent Garden to recall so finely conducted a performance. Donald Runnicles and the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper did Humperdinck proud not only in presentation but in exploration. Here in the orchestra, one might say, we heard the most fruitful and challenging musical drama. It would be difficult, no impossible, and certainly perverse to play down Humperdinck’s Wagnerisms. Even when they verge on outright plagiarism they do not fail to charm—unlike those of many successors. To hear a performance, however, in which the conductor makes so much of the weblike connection of motifs that one fancies one might be hearing the work of The Master himself is a rare treat indeed. So too is to hear quite how much Humperdinck’s score owes—or can be made to owe—to the yearning of Tristan as to the more obvious candidates, above all to Die Meistersinger. What to make of that? There are psychoanalytical possibilities aplenty, for those willing to take them. Does that not after all penetrate to the heart of what fairy tales have to offer? Speaking of seduction, who could resist the polished tone, dark or golden by turn, of this orchestra at something approaching its best?

Jana Kurucová and Alexandra Hutton made for an engaging central pair: well contrasted and yet also complementary, as adept with stage business as vocal line in construction and development of character. Heidi Melton surely falls into the category of ‘luxury casting’ for their mother, Gertrud, and what a welcome luxury this proved to be, Wagnerian antecedents present for those who wished to consider them, yet perfectly scaled—not necessarily scaled down—and imbued with abundant warmth and humanity. Noel Bouley’s Peter sounded a little out of sorts toward the close, but it was nothing too serious. Andrew Dickinson’s Witch intrigued: no mere caricature, though ultimately an enigma. Flurina Stucki as the Sandman and Dew Fairy, together with the children’s choir and movement choir, all contributed to the evening’s enchantment. Next operatic stop: across town for something rather different, Beat Furrer’s Violetter Schnee.

Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Deutsche Oper, 24 October 2019

 Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Image: Bettina Stöß

Hoffmann – Marc Laho

Stella, Olympia, Antonia, Giulietta – Heather Engebretson

Lindorf, Coppélius, Miracle, Dapertutto – Byung Gil Kim

Muse, Nicklausse – Irene Roberts

Andrès, Cochenille, Franz, Pitichianaccio – Andrew Dickinson

Mother’s Voice – Ronnita Miller

Spalanzani – Jörg Schörner

Luther, Crespel – Andrew Harris

Hermann – Matthew Cossack

Schlemihl – Timothy Newton

Natanael – Ya-Chung Huang

Laurent Pelly (director)

Christian Räth (revival director)

Chantal Thomas (designs)

Joël Adam (lighting)

Charles Carcopino (video)

Agathe Mélinand, Katharina Duda (dramaturgy)

Chorus (chorus master: Jeremy Bines) of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin 

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Daniel Carter (conductor)

It is a strange piece, The Tales of Hoffmann. I can only speak from my own experience, but, irrespective of performance, irrespective of production, irrespective of textual issues, it never quite seems to come off. Perhaps it is that, as a friend said to me last night, it is too ambitious. That seems to me a better emphasis than ‘problematical’, though arguably the distinction in meaning is negligible. It also points, as that wise and learned friend went on, to the opera’s charm: a more fragile and yes, perhaps, problematical beast, given scale and forces, than the more intimate, often acutely satirical opéras bouffes with which Offenbach is more naturally bien dans sa peau.

Something could – should – be done with those and other tensions, with the work’s metatheatricality, with the fantasy of a work that, after all, is designated an opéra fantastique. Laurent Pelly, alas, would not seem to be the director for any of that. If there is nothing especially wrong with his production, new last year, nor is there anything especially right with – or, better, compelling to – it, either. There are handsome, if highly conservative, set and costume designs (Chantal Thomas, with assistance from Jean-Jaques Delmotte in the latter case), accomplished revival direction and Spielleitung (Christian Räth and Eva-Maria Abelein), and that is about it. Of questions arising from writing an opera based on a play about a writer we have nothing; of any subtexts, be they political, aesthetic, sexual, anything at all, nothing; of a critical standpoint, nothing; of anything approaching modern, let alone contemporary, theatre nothing; and so on, and so forth. There was not even anything in the way of spectacle; unless, out of desperation, you were to count a large video projection of Antonia’s mother’s face, to accompany her voice from beyond. Were this the n^th revival, replete with a new lick of paint, of something in the repertory for four or five decades, one might think something once present had been lost; in this case, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Pelly had presented precious little to get one’s teeth into in the first place. There is so much more potentially here – one need not look elsewhere – than is acknowledged by so reactionary a standpoint. Just when I thought there might be the glimmerings of a concept, however circumscribed, in the Olympia act, seeing the mechanical doll’s visible stage apparatus, it turned out to be no such thing: sometimes visible stage apparatus is just somewhat unfortunately visible stage apparatus. One can recognise and celebrate the skilled work of all involved backstage – true, valuable skills – while wishing it had been put in the service of something more interesting. The version employed had its virtues and its problems; I shall leave them for another day.

If there was little in the way of theatrical interest, however, there was much to admire musically. This was the first time I had heard Daniel Carter conduct, but I hope it will not be the last. If I say that his conducting did not attract attention to itself, I do not intend to imply that it was dull, far from it; rather, there was a rightness to his choices of tempo, of balance, and everything else that fed the illusion was ‘simply’ hearing Offenbach. The Deutsche Oper’s orchestra and chorus proved estimable partners in crime: incisive, fantastical, wry, full of body as required. French vocal style seems a well-nigh impossible thing for modern, international – even modern French – casts to bring off; or perhaps my expectations are at fault. That said, there was an uncommonly high success rate with the language: never something to be taken for granted. And if some singing tended unduly towards the Italianate, it was not so difficult to enjoy it for what it was. Marc Laho and Heather Engebretson worked tirelessly in the central roles, both vividly communicative, the latter distinguishing and yet combining the demands of her various characters with great success – and scoring higher in the stylistic stakes than most. Byung Gil Kim’s bass-baritone proved a joy from beginning to end; darkly suave, this is surely a Don Giovanni in the making, perhaps already made. Moreover, I can imagine Boris Godunov knocking on the door a few years down the line. Irene Roberts’s Muse and Nicklausse were beautifully, honestly sung and acted throughout: another artist from whom I hope to see and hear more. Andrew Dickinson and – offstage – Ronnita Miller also shone; as, highly creditably, did the excellent tenor, Ya-Chung Huang in the role of Natanael. There were no weak links, though; and, as so often, at this house, a proper sense of company. If only there had been a production to match.

Deutsche Oper Strauss-Wochen (3) - Die ägyptische Helena, 8 April 2016

Die ägyptische Helena © 2009, Marcus Lieberenz

Deutsche Oper

Helena – Ricarda Merbeth

Menelas – Stefan Vinke
Hermione – Selina Isl
Aïthra – Laura Aikin
Altaïr – Derek Welton
Da-Ud – Andrew Dickinson
First Servant – Alexandra Hutton
Second Servant – Stephanie Weiss
First Elf – Elbenita Kajtazi
Second Elf – Alexandra Ionis
Third Elf – Rebecca Raffell
Omniscient Mussel – Ronnita Miller

Marco Arturo Marelli (director, set designs)

Dagmar Niefind (costumes)
Andreas K.W. Meyer (dramaturgy)
Claudio Gotta (Spielleitung)

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus master: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Andrew Litton (conductor)

 

Gratitude to the Deutsche Oper for staging Die ägyptische Helena, in generally excellent musical performances, is, alas, mixed with sadness at Marco Arturo Marelli’s production. Works such as this really need help from a director. Here, the apparently non-ironic (if irony were intended, rarely if ever did it come across) glossiness of Marelli’s staging, the sort of thing that might be considered a little adventurous for the Met, threatened to smother the work completely. Were this a self-reflexive acknowledgement of that quotation from Schoenberg I cited at the beginning of this series, it might have been a splendid, meta-theatrical starting-point. To refresh our memories, Schoenberg responded to Strauss’s typically faux-philistine remark, ‘in each of my works, there must be a melody which can be understood by the most stupid fellow in the hall’, with the charge: ‘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, so that the public sees only the … world of a Marzipanmeister. This is not the way of thinking of a man whom God has given a mission.’ Maybe there is an apologia to be made for Marelli’s expensive high-camp, but I spoke to more than one friend afterwards who was resolutely of the mind that this was not a good opera at all. Opportunities to change their minds will not, alas, be frequent.

 

Is it a good opera? Well, I suppose it depends what one means. No one in his (or her) right mind would say this was another Elektra, or, for that matter, Capriccio. But what is lost here is any sense of lightness of touch. It is, I remain convinced, in many respects a work of considerable wit. Delve beneath the alluring surface and there is real bite. It is all too easy, when one does not listen to the work, to scorn Hofmannsthal’s ambition, inspired by the artistry of Maria Jeritza, to write a successor of sorts to La belle Hèlene, but an ear – and an eye – for irony are all that is needed. Glitziness, like any brand of spectacle, can generally be put to dramatic use, perhaps especially operatic use, but Marelli seems unable to distinguish between, say, Strauss and Korngold. Just when Marelli has an idea that might be worthy of development, for instance the light allusion to the background of warfare – it is, after all, all ‘there’ in the work – it is quickly dropped, so as not to scare away the horses. Non-ironic Orientalism, school of David McVicar, does not help: have we not gone beyond finding veiled women intrinsically ‘mysterious’? Even if Strauss and Hofmannsthal had not, that is all the more reason for a critical approach on stage. Something can be made of the undeniable differences between composer and librettist; something should be made of it. That is surely the thinking director’s task.

Where a Stefan Herheim – we desperately need more Strauss from him! – might perhaps have made such play of bad taste gloss in dramatic counterpart to any number of other themes, Marelli seems content, not only to take Strauss at face value, but to avoid any questioning of why Strauss might have been writing in the style that he did, of what the implications of such writing might be. There is little, or no, sense of actually listening to the contours of the score, let alone of a critical response to it. There are many possible avenues might take from a more Konzept-driven standpoint. Is this unhappy married couple not the next instalment in Strauss’s Intermezzo domestic saga? How might we relate the work to Elektra? To Crusading operas such as the Armide of Strauss’s esteemed Gluck? The sense given from time to time, and especially in the closing scene of luxury tourism is welcome, but alas it is not enough to provide a coherent concept, and is for the most part too little, too late. And could we not at least have some sense of the Omniscient Mussel – yes, I know it is really a shell rather than the bivalve itself, but that makes it no less bizarre – being more than a housekeeper with somewhat garish dress sense?

Enough, now, of all that! The musical performances offered a good deal of compensation. Once again, the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper proved itself to be a Strauss ensemble of the first rank. Even at his more dramatically dubious, as I shall admit he is here on occasion, Strauss is a prince amongst orchestrators. That is probably misleading, since there is not really material to consider separately from its orchestration; that was certainly how Strauss’s writing sounded under the loving care of Andrew Litton. Litton clearly relishes the score, and why would he not? We hear references to a number of earlier scores, both by Strauss, and others; sly Tristan-isms were certainly given their due on this occasion. And the colours! The gold, the purple, the scarlet, the azure, and so much else, the transformation of one into the other; the steel with which it is accomplished; all that and much more came across powerfully indeed – yes, luxuriantly, yet with a proper sense of tonal, timbral, and dramatic hierarchies, and their interaction, whether successful or, even on occasion, less so. Again, if only the staging had made something similar of the work’s terms of reference.

Ricarda Merbeth gave an excellent account of Helen’s part. A few instances of less than comprehensible diction could readily be forgiven for the many passages of gloriously Straussian lyrical abandon. Even I must admit that Menela(u)s does not signal Strauss’s finest hour: a graver indictment of his writing for tenor than the more celebrated, often exaggerated other ‘cases’. That said, Stefan Vinke barked more than is necessary, let alone desirable. On the positive side, he never flagged. If only we could hear Andreas Schager in this role. Laura Aikin’s performance as the Sorceress, Aïthra, seemed to me an unqualified success. She conveyed a great deal of the mysterious ambiguity missing from the production, without sacrifice to verbal and musical requirements. Derek Welton’s Altaïr was an intelligent, forthright portrayal. Andrew Dickinson’s Da-Ud revealed a beautiful lyric tenor. And yes, as the shell whom we do not call a shell, and who on this occasion was not a shell, Ronnita Miller excelled. Hers is a rich, deep mezzo voice. I look forward to hearing more from many of these artists.