The Cunning Little Vixen, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 28 February 2026

Vixen – Vera-Lotte Böecker
Forester – Svatopluk Sem
Fox – Magdalena Kožená
Forester’s Wife, Owl – Natalia Skrycka
Schoolmaster, Mosquito – Florian Hoffmann
Priest, Badger – David Oštrek
Harašta – Carles Pachon
Dachsund, Woodpecker – Sandra Laagus
Rooster – Anna Samuil
Innkeeper’s Wife, Hen – Adriane Queiroz
Jay – Sonja Herranen
Innkeeper – Junho Hwang

Frog – Milla Aulibauer
Cricket – Paula Bredt
Grasshopper – Alexander Meieer
Young Vixen – Naz Yilmaz
Frantík – Otto Glass
Pepík – Alia Engel
First fox cub – Paloma Couloumy

Director – Ted Huffman
Assistant director – Sonoko Kamimura
Set designs – Nadja Sofie Eller
Costumes – Astrid Klein
Lighting – Bertrand Couderc
Choreography – Pim Veulings
Dramaturgy – Detlef Giese, Elisabeth Kühne

Children’s Choir of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (director: Vinzenz Weissenburger)
Staatsopernchor Berlin (director: Dani Juris)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Sir Simon Rattle (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Believe it or not, this was the first ever performance at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden of The Cunning Little Vixen, more than a century after its world premiere in Brno. It is not that it has never been performed in Berlin before, of course not. Walter Felsenstein’s 1956 (German-language) Komische Oper production was a landmark in the reception of the work and, more broadly, of Janáček outside the Czech lands. In 1965, Felsenstein’s production was made into a magical film for East German television, conducted by no less than Václav Neumann. Yet the house a few hundred metres away left the opera alone and indeed showed little interest in most of Janáček’s operas, even as they were revived elsewhere, in Europe or beyond. Simon Rattle’s passion for the composer, combined with his now long-term collaboration with the Staatsoper and Daniel Barenboim’s trust in Rattle, has now resulted in a number of Janáček house premieres, of which this must surely be the most surprising. Rattle conducted the opera for the first time almost fifty years ago, at Glyndebourne, in 1977. He has also conducted it with the Royal Opera and the LSO, as well as with the Berlin Philharmonic. So here we had an inviting blend of novelty and experience, mirrored onstage by the combination of adult professionals and child performers (acrobats as well as singers).

How did that work in practice? Rattle certainly conducted it with the knowledge, sympathy, and understanding that would entail. Pacing was such that one did not notice it; it proceeded naturally and, in general, at the rate of a sung play, as Janáček tends to require. The composer’s language had been fully internalised and put to good musicodramatic use, even if the Staatskapelle Berlin – understandably – did not always sound quite so much at home in this music as other opera orchestras (or indeed the LSO, which has taken to it like ducks to water). It was a golden, Straussian Janáček we heard: nothing wrong with that and indeed one might sometimes say the same about the most ‘authentic’ Janáček of all, from Czech orchestras. There is in their Janáček, though, something I did not quite hear in this case: not only ‘tradition’, that slippery, movable, even questionable feast; but also an instinctive feel of how the orchestral music speaks, sings, propels, and even bites, in its own extraordinary language. Playing was on its own terms, though, excellent throughout; I should not exaggerate a relatively minor reservation. 

As has been the case for his Janáček performances in both London and Berlin, Rattle had assembled and/or attracted a fine cast too. Vera-Lotte Böecker’s Vixen was characterful, animated, and sympathetic without being remotely cutesy. This world of Nature should never be sentimentalised. Magdalena Kožená offered a proper, more masculine complement with her Fox; the two matched one another at times as if in a Mozart instrumental serenade. Svatopluk Sem was a distinguished, humane Forester, his final hymn to Nature and its life cycles properly moving. (By now, the Staatskapelle too seemed more fully inside Janáček’s idiom.) Natalia Skrycka, Anna Samuil, David Oštrek, and Carles Pachon particularly stood out to me in their respective roles. Samuil’s Rooster proved a delightful, scene-stealing Rooster. But this was casting in depth too. No one disappointed, right down to the smaller animal roles very well taken by members of the Staatsoper’s International Opera Studio and also of its Children’s Choir. Choral singing in general was of a high standard throughout. 

Unfortunately, Ted Huffman’s production proved a disappointment. It had its moments, a highpoint being the imaginative presentation of the vixen’s running amok in the chicken coup, feathers flying across the stage as hens’ costumes were punctured. At that point, following a slow and disjointed start in stage terms, all seemed to be coming together nicely. It was, alas, difficult to discern much of a line in what followed, ideas briefly floated only to vanish without trace or recur arbitrarily, as in characters’ typing of letters towards Terynka during interludes, which added little other than confusion. All took place ultimately in a white box, Nadja Sofie Eller’s designs offering neither natural wonder nor obvious deracinated contrast. For some reason, great play was made of dressing the chorus in highly individualised human outfits: well designed as such by Astrid Klein, but it was unclear to what end. Lighting seemed to be little more than simple on and off; perhaps a point was being made, but again I am not sure what. There was scope for the children to display their skills, undoubtedly welcome; yet integration into the plot, be it of opera or production, proved elusive.

Insofar as there was an overall idea, it seemed to be to blur the boundaries between animals and humans: fair enough, but the blurring seemed, well, blurred in focus and ultimately arbitrary. This was a different attempt at realism from Felsenstein’s, from that of Peter Sellars too (for Rattle and the BPO in 2017). If preferable to the latter, which was often frankly bizarre, it could surely have learned something from the former, even at this distance, not least in terms of overall coherence and indeed of a sense of what the work, or the production for that matter, might be about. Elsewhere, the accomplishment of that one scene with the chickens threw into relief what came across as a lack of basic, general direction elsewhere. Some scenes more resembled an early stage of rehearsal than a finished staging. 

This is necessarily impressionistic, but I could not help noticing that younger and more international elements, visiting or resident, appeared distinctly less enthusiastic than the older, local core of the audience. If I were to hazard a potential explanation, I might note that it could hardly have been a matter of theatrical style and values. The production had nothing obviously in common with critical German theatre—unless that were why some approved, which I should not discount entirely. But I do not think it was only that; there seemed to be a genuine excitement at encountering the work, notwithstanding those Rattle performances at the Philharmonie in 2017. Those of us who have seen it in multiple stagings may be, according to taste, more critical or more jaded. Yet it is no bad thing to be reminded of the joy of encountering a Janáček opera for the first time; of that there appeared to be much in evidence.

Khovanshchina, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 2 June 2024

Prince Ivan Khovansky – Mika Kares
Prince Andrey Khovansky – Najmiddin Mavlyanov
Prince Vasily Golitsin – Stephan Rügamer
Boyar Fyodor Shaklovity – Georre Gagnidze
Dosifey – Taras Shtonda
Marfa – Marina Prudenskaya
Emma – Evelin Novak
Scrivener – Andrei Popov
Susanna – Anna Samuil
Varsonofyev – Roman Trekel
Kuzka – Andrés Moreno García
Streshnev – Johan Krogius
Two Streltsy – Taehan Kim, Friedrich Hamel
Henchman – Dmitri Plotnikov

Director – Claus Guth
Set designs – Christian Schmidt
Costumes – Ursula Kudrna
Lighting – Olaf Freese
Choreography – Sommer Ulrickson
Video – Roland Horvath
Live camera – Jan Speckenbach, Marlene Blumert
Dramaturgy – Yvonne Gebauer, Rebecca Graitl

Staatsoper Children’s Chorus (director: Vinzenz Weissenburger)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Simone Young (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Who writes? In history, as in its dramatisation, the question is crucial, its answer often complex. It is present, overtly, in Pimen’s chronicle in Boris Godunov, and it takes centre stage, later moving rightward, leftward, and above in Claus Guth’s new production of Mussorgsky’s successor work, Khovanshchina for Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden. There is also the fateful – perhaps more so than Marfa, in fortune-telling guise to Prince Golitsky – figure of the scrivener. How much, if at all, does his writing-for-hire set in course a series of unintended, world-historical consequences? Writing can be considered more broadly and narrowly, in close relation to what we now consider to constitute a ‘text’—and, of course, reading. At any rate, opening in the modern Kremlin, a statue of Peter the Great towering (as, eventually, would the two-metre-tall historical Peter) over an empty desk, with some goings on but the main character – probably wisely – never shown, just as the Romanovs could not be in Mussorgsky’s time. A functionary, seemingly somewhere between secretary and researcher, provides historical information on the characters and drama that will unfold, transcribed for us (in German and in English) on screens above the action. Given the knowledge of Russian history Mussorgsky’s drama more or less assumes (though also elides), the conceit serves both as framing device and more straightforwardly as source of useful background—or should it be commentary? Who writes, how and why? The framing is not overdone, though; part of me actually wished more had been made of it. Guth seems keener to highlight the work’s fragmentary tendencies, if anything drawing attention to the years passed between acts – themselves Rimsky-Korsakov’s grouping, whose reorganisation has not yet been generally accepted – where Mussorgsky, up to a point, brings them together. Someone other than the composer has to write here, in any case, and it will in practice prove to be more than a single person. 

If other Romanovs remain offstage, Peter, both as a young boy and as a co-tsar on the brink of adulthood sometimes watches, striding across the stage and (so I was told) also from a box above it (though sightlines prevented me and, I presume, a large part of the audience from seeing that). Otherwise, the action proceeds on stage pretty much as one might ‘expect’. It is difficult to imagine even the most hardened traditionalist objecting to the costumes – which, along with set designs, is usually all such a person cares about – but they are not fetishised. This forms, after all, some sort of investigation from the present as to how Peter attained and consolidated power, removing those who might have opposed him. Sometimes we see on film images from later Russian history. I can see the point, but I am not sure they add much, especially in the toppling of a statue of Lenin. (It could well be said that the dissolution of the USSR was a catastrophe for Russia, and not necessarily for the reasons Vladimir Putin would say it was, but it was unclear how that fitted in here.) Generic historical crowd scenes were less of a problem, presumably intending to show the Petrine settlement to be less conclusive than some would have claimed, though whether such doubling of the stage action is desirable was less than entirely clear. Likewise, whilst I think I can see the point of having Khovansky kill the Persian slaves, in a stylised representation of the bloodbath of order, restoration, progress (call it what you will), it arguably seems an arbitrary way of doing so.

A firing squad turning brutally on the ‘pardoned’ Streltsy at the end of the fourth act is a fine, properly harrowing touch, serving both to prepare the way for the self-immolation of the Old Believers in the final act but also, I think, to suggest these are different. Presenting their martyrdom as ‘resistance’, though, seems an unfortunate secularism, sadly typical of so many directors’ inability to take religious belief seriously. The idea that the contemporary ‘project’ breaks down is good: an almost Nietzschean view on the alleged ‘uses’ of history, one might say. The act, though, is real, moving, awe-inspiring, yet no more ‘resistance’ as is generally understood than the martyrdom in the final scene of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. It is more political than that, surely a crucial (and often overlooked, perhaps deliberately so, not least by Rimsky and his successor Shostakovich) note of questioning the entire Petrine and post-Petrine project of Westernisation. Peter’s troops initiate the apocalypse for some, a far stranger and more powerful drama than is allowed here. At the end, though, once the Old Believers have burned – use of video effective in conveying the nature of the act, if less so its horror – we return to the modern Kremlin. If the ‘lesson’ has been abandoned as useless or at least unhelpful, what, one might ask, has been the point? It still happened, one might reply; we have still been shown someone’s record, at least. And at least we do not become too entangled in the slightly embarrassing  ‘love story’, which, in the person of Marfa does its bit to bind things together, yet is surely a little too ‘operatic’ for comfort.

There is, also, the question of who compiles, orchestrates, and so on. Listening to the first-act Prelude in Rimsky’s orchestration, immediately before writing this, I remain far from convinced of the superiority of Shostakovich’s version of the opera (save for reversing Rimsky’s cuts and orchestrating those additional sections). It certainly has its merits, but so does Rimsky’s, and I cannot say I find it comes closer on the whole – sometimes it does; sometimes it does not – to my fantasy of how Mussorgsky ‘should’ sound. Perhaps, though, I am guilty of taking Boris Godunov – and increasingly its earliest version, given its recent favour – as a model, when Khovanshchina is a different work, rather as if one were to approach Lulu expecting it to be Wozzeck. There are also, of course, issues of performance, whichever version is used. I should dearly love one day to hear the work of Ravel and Stravinsky in full, but for now at least we had Stravinsky’s extraordinary ending, somehow more Mussorgskian even than Mussorgsky, and infinitely truer to any plausible view of the work’s dramatic message. (Shostakovich, as Richard Taruskin observed, not only ‘ratified Rimsky’s [melioristic] view’ of the Petrine reforms but ‘even managed to strengthen it’. The composer of The Rite of Spring showed himself better able to imagine and communicate the world of the Old Believers. 

Ivan Khovansky (Mika Kares), Persian slaves

Such choices were, I assume, the province of conductor Simone Young, probably in discussion with Guth. Young’s own conducting and the playing of the Staatskapelle Berlin were excellent throughout, the latter sounding as golden as it did transparent, and without loss to precision. All was well placed and well balanced. Changes of metre, the lifeblood of Mussorgsky’s conversational recitative, were throughout so well handled that one barely noticed them as such; they are not, after all, the jolts of Stravinskian neoclassicism, but rather founded in a speech rhythm very different from the German ‘norm’ (and which, of course, proved highly influential upon the younger Stravinsky in particular). This happens vocally, of course, but at least as much in the orchestral ‘accompaniment’ (the Italian accompagnato seems wildly out of place here). 

Mention of things Italian brings me to my principal reservation: one of taste more than anything fundamental. Khovanshchina is considerably more inclined than Boris to more conventional, even Italianate, vocal-melodic writing. This seemed to be the cue to a more generally Verdian approach, especially during the first three acts. Elements of Wagner – more coincidental than anything else, I suspect – surfaced from time to time too, as did slightly disconcerting kinship with Tchaikovsky. Something rawer is certainly possible and, to my ears, more ‘authentically’ Mussorgskian, textual issues notwithstanding. I should not exaggerate, though, and there could be no doubting either the sincerity or, on its own terms, the success of Young’s approach with the orchestra, nor indeed the warmth with which the audience received it.

Dosifey (Taras Shtonda)

The cast was excellent too, headed by a charismatic, characteristically detailed Mika Kares as Ivan Khovansky. Taras Shtonda exuded star quality in what can hardly be other than a charismatic role, that of Dosifey, leader of the Old Believers. Stephan Rügamer imparted his usual intelligence to the part of the thwarted reformer Golitsin. (His could, perhaps even should, have been the better path, but it was not to be.) George Gagnidze’s Shakolvity shone on each of his appearances, not only his moving account of Russia’s troubled history. Marina Prudenskaya gave everything, returned with interest, to an all-encompassing performance as Marfa, finely complemented by Evelin Novak’s characterful, tender Lutheran Emma and a spirited Susanna from Anna Samuil. Andrei Popov offered a well-judged Scrivener: one could sympathise with the predicament his lowborn status presented and appreciate why he might sing in more noble, even florid style, without losing sight of his fundamental opportunism. If I felt Najmiddin Mavlyanov’s Andrey at times a little less sharply drawn, he came more into his own later on and likewise relished the opportunities a more Italianate performance offered. 

Dancers, well choreographed by Sommer Ulrickson, contributed intelligently to the greater drama too. It was, though, the outstanding chorus, expertly trained by Dani Juris, that truly crowned the performance: dramatically, harmonically based, roots in a Russian past that may or may not be invented, but certainly came to life in the here and now. It was, quite simply, outstanding in every way. Surely in this work, as in Boris, there is a fundamental lesson on the people’s suffering to be learned therein.

Rusalka, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 4 February 2024

Rusalka – Christiane Karg
Prince – Pavel Černoch
Foreign Princess – Anna Samuil
Vodník – Mika Kares
Ježibaba – Anna Kissjudit
Gamekeeper – Adam Kutny
Kitchen Boy – Clara Nadeshdin
Nymphs – Regina Koncz, Rebecka Wallroth, Ekaterina Chayka-Rubinstein
Huntsman – Taehan Kim

Director – Kornél Mundruczó
Designs – Monika Pormale
Lighting – Felice Ross
Video – Rūdolfs Baltiņš
Choreography - Candaş Baş
Dramaturgy – Kata Wéber, Christoph Lang

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Gerhard Polifka)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Robin Ticciati (conductor)

Images:  Gianmarco Bresadola
Rusalka (Christiane Karg)

Director Kornél Mundruczó comes like a breath of fresh air to unsettle our conceptions of Dvořák’s penultimate and, by some way, greatest opera and thus to do precisely what the material demands; or rather, it comes as something bitterly stale, menacing, even poisonous to accomplish what fresh air on its own might not be able. It is certainly refreshing, though it should not be, to have a production that takes class seriously as a form of social distinction, a social barrier, though ultimately it will go beyond that, re-engaging with the opera in all its strange tragedy and tragic strangeness. By grounding itself in the here and now, but also a here and now our society largely wishes to ignore, it challenges, but it challenges further and with brilliant theatricality by the course subsequently taken. 

Rusalka – not strictly her ‘name’, but it is all we have, and ‘the rusalka’ or even ‘the sprite’ would seem unduly pedantic – lives in a shared, ground-floor Berlin apartment, a WG or Wohngemeinschaft, her flatmates the other three nymphs and Vodník (if you prefer, the Watergoblin). She does not fit in with, or has grown distant from, her female flatmates at least; they are so much more laid back, fun-loving, quite happy in their less-than-ideal home of disrepair. Theirs is a working class, it seems, the bourgeoisie simply cannot stomach, however much it might claim to act in its name. But nor, any more, can Rusalka, at least since she has seen signs of the life – above all, the Prince – upstairs. In his modern penthouse with balcony and views across the city including, yet far from restricted to the Fernsehturm and the Rotes Rathaus, he and his appallingly grotesque group of friends, the Foreign Princess (his ex-) included, have ‘made it’. They know each other inside and out, as it were; they probably even vote Green. 

Rusalka, Prince (Pavel Černoch), Gamekeeper (Adam Kutny),
Kitchen Boy (Clara Nadeshdin), and Ensemble

One can see why she would like to escape to that other world, embodied in an attractive, trendily dressed mysterious (to her, though not to us) stranger. For one thing, other than the drugs that may or may not be Ježibaba’s stock-in-trade (what is that fascinatingly beyond-good-and-evil or just-plain-evil neighbour doing?) she is hardly spoilt for choice in alternative paths. Needless to say, an actually existing working-class young woman is the most shocking sight of all to the Prince’s friends and they work immediately to exclude her, the Foreign Princess going all out to rekindle those embers until the culpably weak yet more sympathetic Prince succumbs. No wonder the two sides cannot communicate, at least not until it is too late. For it is important to recognise that Rusalka fits in on neither side of this social divide. She only discovers – and this is entirely faithful to the work – where she might have done far too late. There is, again as in the work, a sort of tragic communion in that the Prince realises too late; he can only do what is right (for him, as much as ethically) by surrendering his life, which, movingly he does. 

In a programme interview, Mundruczó says he kept thinking of Kafka when working on the opera: doubtless a surprising reference for some of us, the Prague connection, albeit intergenerational, notwithstanding. But that may be to fall for outdated ‘national’ histories of music. Why not, after all? It certainly comes into his own in the third act here, where the action transfers less to a house than a cellar of horrors. Having returned to Ježibaba, been scorned and perhaps even poisoned, Rusalka leaves behind the world of social realism in which we imagined we should remain until the end and morphs into an impossible creature, part human, part goodness knows what, although it is perhaps not coincidental that its black suggests the colour of refuse and its disposal. One can and perhaps should read that in social and environmental ways; after all, what could be more of a social issue, what could hit the working class harder, than the destruction of the planet? But the aesthetic is actually quite different; one can read it for ‘meaning’ in that way, but the vision seems to lie beyond that: something spellbinding, from which one wishes to avert one’s eyes in horror at the agony Rusalka is experiencing, yet cannot. It is more filmic than theatrically Gothic, I think, but that choice seems a deliberate decision, again, judging from the interview, to attempt to reach younger audiences with different frames of reference. Whatever one might think of that – I am not sure I am the target audience here – for me it works. It truly unsettles and actually leads us to reconsider clashes between ‘natural’ and ‘human’, or ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ worlds very much as the work does—yet which can become lost if the setting is too folk-like. A sort of deformed, already-dead tree-in-plastic has grown, suffocating and perhaps literally trashing all that approach it.

Rusalka, Prince, Third Nymph (Ekaterina Chayka-Rubinstein)

Fairy tales, told properly, are dark, even sick, not through a sort of tired, bourgeois exhibitionism – that might be better left upstairs in the deceased Prince’s apartment – but because they tell of dreams, fantasies, delights, and horrors. They are not of the sanitised, commercial world of Disney, but come from a place of sex, violence, and more. The mirror they hold up is truthful because it is distorted, not despite that distortion. This production recognises such twisted truths and turns them into a drama at least implicit in Dvořák’s –and Jaroslav Kvapil’s – work and world. It may predate Freud and Kafka, but it is not without connections and even presentiments. I have nothing at all against a production presenting a single-minded view of a work, incorporating more current concerns, and so on. The work, whatever it may be, will survive. But a particular point of interest here is that the director does not impose a framework, even a related conceptual framework, on the work, but rather presents such a related framework as a way in to experience or re-experience the very strangeness of the work ‘itself’. 

For Dvořák progresses in this score too; even in so late a work as this, written after (!) Pelléas et Mélisande, he does not rest on his laurels. If those laurels are too folk-like for some early on – their loss, but there is no accounting for taste – then they surely will not be by the third act. For me, conductor Robin Ticciati and the superlative Staatskapelle Berlin came truly into their own in this act, opening up a range of post-Wagnerian language and emotion, not just or even principally emotion, extending beyond what I have heard from Ticciati previously (save, perhaps, at Glyndebourne for the dramaturgically unfortunate Ethel Smyth opera, The Wreckers). Not that there was anything wrong with what he did earlier. I initially found it a bit hard-driven, but came to realise that this was probably as much a reading developed in tandem with the production as a conception ‘in itself’ of the score. Lack of what might be thought of as sentimentality – not necessarily so, but that is arguably another matter – was the point. It was not cold, but nor was it a kitsch (or readable as such) tale of forest life. 

Rusalka, Ježibaba (Anna Kissjudit)

The same might be said of performances from an excellent cast, only more so, for there was some singing of ravishing warmth—but not only of that. Making her role debut, Christiane Karg not only traced the journey(s) proposed by composer, librettist, conductor, director, and more; she was instrumental in creating them. Occasionally during the first act, I wondered whether she might be a little under-powered, and perhaps there were a few first-night nerves there, but this was more, I think, a matter of wise marshalling of resources and dramatic trajectory. In many ways, I liked the way the Song to the Moon did not become a stand-alone aria and indeed related strongly to the music surrounding it, but I can well imagine some not having done so. Whatever one’s position on that – mostly a matter of personal preference – this Rusalka grew in stature through shocking experience, a tragic heroine to remember for the denouement. 

There was tremendous acting on her part too. Pavel Černoch’s Prince was similarly, if differently, involving. Despite it all, and partly on account of twin vocal intelligence and beauty, one could not help but like him, and again shared his ultimate tragedy at the close. Mika Kares’s Vodník also grew as his character – and the truth that character told – increasingly gained our sympathy. Anna Samuil offered glamour and refulgence – just the thing – for the Foreign Princess. Anna Kissjudit’s already horrible Ježibaba became all the more splendidly, horrifyingly so on her return, just as the production demanded, without sacrifice to more ‘traditional’ vocal values. Smaller roles and choral parts were all well taken, all contributing to a greater musicodramatic whole. 

As for the audience member who not only booed the end of the first act, but through his failure to stop – I am trying to be polite – seemed determine to prevent the second from beginning, what part of that whole troubled him so much? And why?

Der Freischütz, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 28 September 2018

Images: Katrin Ribbe

Ottokar – Roman Trekel

Kuno – Wolfgang Schöne

Agathe – Anna Samuil

Ännchen – Anna Prohaska

Kaspar – Falk Struckmann

Max – Peter Sonn

Hermit – Jan Martiník

Kilian – Adam Kutny

Samiel – Peter Moltzen

Bridesmaids – Verena Allertz, Regina Emersleben-Motz, Konstanze Löwe, Julia Mencke, Claudia Tuch

Michael Thalheimer (director)

Caroline Staunton (revival director)

Olaf Altmann (set designs)

Katrin Lea Tag (costumes)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Berlin State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Thomas Guggeis (conductor)

Where it all began: well, not quite, but almost. It was in the newly opened Schauspielhaus no more than five minutes’ walk away on the Gendarmenmarkt that Der Freischütz received its 1821 premiere. Now Schinkel’s theatre serves as the Konzerthaus. Opera, however, continues to be the business of the older Linden house, which, following a somewhat bumpy reopening a year ago, seems now properly to have found its stride once again. Recent highlights for me have included Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Tristan and a revival of Claus Guth’s Frau ohne Schatten, of which I saw the dress rehearsal earlier in September, under the excellent – I should probably say ‘outstanding’ – revival direction of Caroline Staunton. This revival of Michael Thalheimer’s Freischütz stood also in her more than capable hands. Since this was my first viewing of this production, I cannot comment on any changes that might – or might not – have taken place. It stood very well indeed, however, on its own terms: a highly accomplished company performance.

In contrast, say, to Christian von Götz’s production for Leipzig, whose premiere I saw last year, this staging does not seem especially interested in the status of Weber’s opera as icon of German Romanticism. There is, whether we like it or no, darkness aplenty in such a concept for audiences today, just as there would be for this work’s lovechild, Siegfried, yet such is not the only possibility of darkness. This is more psychoanalytical – and again one can hardly help but think of the implications for that and many other of Wagner’s dramas. For, as Wagner, miserable, lonely, and close to starvation in Paris, wrote on seeing Der Freischütz there, the work ‘seems to be the poem of those Bohemian woods themselves, whose dark and solemn aspect permits us at once to grasp how the isolated man would believe himself, if not prey to a dæmonic power of Nature, then at least in eternal submission thereto.’

Here the action and those ‘woods themselves’ are seen and framed through the barrel of a gun. Sometimes, perhaps, a gun might just be a gun; it is certainly not here, no more than a forest is just a forest. Man, even men, are isolated; so too are woman and women. We look, as if the wrong way through a telescope to some source of light, perhaps even of life; or is it a nightmare? Nightmares certainly emerge from it; do they not always? Is this concerned with fear of or oppression of women? The either/or is irrelevant; we see, as the tale of a more or less bartered bride progresses, how it is both. We also see how her virginal white, hypocritically valued yet brutally blooded, is both ‘the story’ and anything but. Who dreams up Samiel, who plays a far more important role than usual, here? Wagner saw the work with Berlioz’s recitatives. Here the usual dialogue is rejected or modified in a different way, Thalheimer providing his own – convincing, I think, on its terms – to further and indeed to provoke the enhanced role of this ‘daemonic power’ (in Wagner’s words). Absurd – in a context of realism – stage directions, which seem quite to have confounded that first Berlin production, could therefore be reimagined, the forest and its spirit giving birth to a bestial array of animals without having a Wild Hunt embarrassingly traipse across stage.

Thomas Guggeis impressed me greatly this spring, standing in at the very last minute to make his house debut in Salome – and rightly receiving plaudits for having done so. On this occasion, it seems, he had a little longer if not so very long to prepare to replace another indisposed conductor. This was perhaps the sterner test, since he was more of a known quality and less of a hero of the moment. Whatever the truth of that, he once again emerged with great credit. For one so young – for one of any age – he seems instinctively, however much craft such ‘instinct’ might hide, to know how to ‘play’ this great orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin. It obliged with its statutory dark, ‘old German’ sound, apparently untouched by the ravages of Western orchestral homogenisation. It might have been the orchestra that played for Furtwängler – or, indeed, that does for Barenboim. There was no stiffness to Guggeis’s direction: quite the contrary. Difficult balances were always well struck: between the Romantically ‘organic’ and the needs of the number opera, of the moment too, between Mozartian inheritance  and Wagnerian future – clarinet solos standing out as much as horn calls – and between ‘French’ and ‘German’. We should never forget, however often German nationalists may have wished to do so, that the Huntsmen’s Chorus is based upon an eighteenth-century French street song, ‘Malbrouk [Marlborough] s’en va t’en guerre’.

Moreover, the grandeur and ambition of work, production, and orchestral performance notwithstanding, not to forget the work of the excellent chorus, there was something winningly intimate, in the opéra comique tradition to what we saw and heard from the singers on stage. That is not to suggest a lack of vocal scale, but simply to point to their convincing performances as characters on stage. If Roman Trekel and Wolfgang Schöne both proved somewhat dry and stiff, the rest of the cast more than compensated. Peter Sonn’s Max was fresh toned, enthusiastic, vulnerable, Falk Struckmann’s Kasper very much his dark, virile antagonist (even, in this context, alter ego?) Anna Samuil gave perhaps the strongest performance I have heard from her as Agathe, exhibiting a fine sense, scenic and vocal, of tragic catastrophe before the last. Anna Prohaska’s more colourful, spirited Ännchen, despatched words and coloratura not only with ease but with intent and meaning. Performed in this new ‘version’ without an interval, the work emerged, Goldilocks-like, just right: neither too short nor too long. That, however, should remain a dark fairy-tale for another day.

Ariadne auf Naxos, Staatsoper Berlin, 11 March 2017

Schillertheater

Ensemble (from 2015 premiere)
Image: Monika Rittershaus

 

Music Master – Arttu Kataja

Major-Domo – Elisabeth Trissenaar
Lackey – David Oštrek
Officer – Sergiu Saplacan
Composer – Katharina Kammerloher
Tenor, Bacchus – Roberto Saccà
Wig-Maker – Adam Kutny
Zerbinetta – Elena Sancho-Pereg
Prima Donna, Ariadne – Anna Samuil
Dancing Master – Manuel Günther
Naiad – Evelin Novak
Dryad – Natalia Skrycka
Echo – Sónia Grané
Harlequin – Gyula Orendt
Truffaldino – Grigory Shkarupa
Scaramuccio – Linard Vrielink
Brighella – Miloš Bulajić
Puppeteer – JARNOTH
 

Hans Neuenfels (director)

Katrin Lea Tag (set designs)
Andrea Schmidt-Futterer (costumes)
Stefan Bolliger (lighting)
Yvonne Gebauer (dramaturgy)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Eun Sun Kim (conductor)

The prospect of a staging from Ariadne auf Naxos from Hans Neuenfels was exciting indeed. His Bayreuth Lohengrin is well-nigh universally acknowledged, usual irreconcilable suspects aside, as a modern classic. Both Mozart stagings I have seen from him – Salzburg’s Così fan tutte, my first, and La finta giardiniera, here in Berlin – have been intelligent and probing. There is, of course, a much lengthier history to his work in spoken theatre and film, as well as his own writing, indeed in opera too, dating back even beyond his celebrated 1980 Aida for Frankfurt, whose landmark treatment of the work’s Orientalism outraged not only those aforementioned usual suspects but, it seems, a good few others aside. What would he do, then, with Strauss, whose twin musical gods were Mozart and Wagner, here in Ariadne, as so often, set in fruitful competition, contradiction, and perhaps reconciliation with each other?

Perhaps I should have known to expect the unexpected, but what I did not really expect was restraint, even conventionality, albeit shorn of a good deal of the theatricality and metatheatricality that lies at the heart of most productions – and indeed of the work itself. Such is largely what we see, or do not see, at least in the Prologue (save for the sudden, brief reappearance at the end, at the back of the stage, of Troupe Zerbinetta’s male members, as it were, replete with enormous strap-on dildos, enthusiastically waved around. I have no idea why in context, but it certainly attracted attention.) There is otherwise little sense of visual provocation; Andrea Schmidt-Futterer’s costumes convey a sense of modernity in its chic, allegedly ‘timeless’ form. Katrin Lea Tag’s set is relatively spare, as in the Opera proper; there is no sense, as has recently been fashionable (for instance, Christof Loy at Covent Garden or Claus Guth in Zurich), of attempting anything with self-reference to its particular location. I am not sure why it was necessary for the Major-Domo to extract money from a cash machine, suddenly revealed in the wall. Maybe it was just underlining a point concerning patronage; maybe it was a passing hint at vulgarity. (Do the super-rich have such things in their houses as amusements, or perhaps as safety deposit boxes?)  I did not especially care for the performance of Frau Neuenfels, Elisabeth Trissenaar, in that role; she is an excellent actress, and was so again here, but her delivery was strangely caricatured, not least in this otherwise straightforward context. The parody here is surely pretty much written in; adding more seems a little like caricaturing the musical caricatures of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Otherwise, all is rather as it ‘should’ be, well directed, well presented, but not especially interesting.
 

In the Opera, that changes somewhat, yet only somewhat. Another brief baffling moment – to me, at any rate, although perhaps I was being slow – is the arrival and speedy departure of an ecclesiastical procession. Again, the designs are not lavish; it is, after all a desert island. Again, the action is not complicated. There are, however, certain enigmatic, I should say suggestive, touches – and one important intervention. Threads are handed out (by the Composer, if I remember correctly) at the beginning, to Naiad, Dryad, and Echo; they snap, or were never woven together in the first place, suggesting and yet deconstructing the Fate of Wagner’s Norns. A mysterious puppeteer (JARNOCH) wanders on and off, on one occasion bearing Grecian masks (Theseus and Ariadne?), and parading ‘Schicksal’ (destiny) on the back of his T-shirt. His acts open up rather than close down possibilities for reflection: just what a production needs. Zerbinetta tries to instruct Ariadne, but the latter pays heed neither to her song nor to her written slogans.

 

For it seems that Ariadne has a death-wish, one which, revealingly, perhaps as an Adornian Rettung (‘rescue’) of the work, is fulfilled. She does not join Bacchus, but takes her life, highlighting the contradictions of the final scene, Hofmannsthal’s wish for ‘transformation’ dealt with at least as severely (and perhaps rightly so) as Strauss’s stubbornly materialist peroration. Tragedy is reinstated, as many a composer of opera seria – would like. And the Composer joins Ariadne in her death. Such, after all, is the lot of modernity, after Hegel: art would die and yet we will not, cannot, let it. We need our modernistic fragments, however much they refuse to add up. We certainly do not need what Adorno excoriated as the Happy End, although it is what mere ‘entertainment’ – paid for, because it gains ‘results’ – will give us. If only this might have been read back into the relatively disappointing Prologue.

 

There was much, then, to engage the mind. What about the ear (insofar as they may be distinguished from one another)? Anna Samuil, alas, offered a crude performance as Ariadne, her constant wide vibrato wearing and her acting ability rudimentary. Roberto Saccà’s Bacchus was better, although workmanlike rather than thrilling. (One cannot always, or even often, have Jonas Kaufmann, I suppose.) Katharina Kammerloher’s palpably sincere Composer was more impressive, although her vowels were sometimes distractingly strange – and she shaded dangerously close towards sentimentality at the end of the Prologue. Elena Sancho-Pereg, however, made for an excellent Zerbinetta. The coloratura held no obvious fears for her; just as important, she presented a more rounded character than one often encounters. Perhaps Ariadne should have listened to her after all. The other roles were all well taken, with a fine sense of company, Arttu Kataja’s Music Master, Gyula Orendt’s Harlequin, and Sergiu Saplacan’s Officer especially pleasing.

 

Eun Sun Kim’s direction of the orchestra was mostly competent, yet rarely more than that. She made a somewhat vulgar meal, surprisingly so, out of the Composer-Zerbinetta duet, otherwise tended to more of a Kapellmeister’s approach. The Staatskapelle Berlin sounded glorious, though: darker than, say, Vienna or Dresden and all the more intriguing for it, not only as Neuenfels’s staging shifted towards overt tragedy, but all along suggesting an alternative path to that which we ‘knew’. The players’ soloistic prowess was second to none throughout, yet they clearly listened to each other too, lengthy experience of chamber music telling. The musical art of performance, then, lived in the pit even as we witnessed the representation of its death onstage. Sometimes Zerbinetta’s ‘neue Gott’ turns out to be the god we have known all along, transformed.

 

Prom 20: Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim - Götterdämmerung, 28 July 2013

Royal Albert Hall

Brünnhilde – Nina Stemme

Siegfried – Andreas Schager
Gunther – Gerd Grochowski
Alberich – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Hagen – Mikhail Petrenko
Gutrune, Third Norn – Anna Samuil
Waltraute, Second Norn – Waltraud Meier
First Norn – Margarita Nekrasova
Woglinde – Aga Mikolaj
Wellgunde – Maria Gortsevskaja
Flosshilde – Anna Lapovskaja

Justin Way (director)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Staatskapelle Berlin                 
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

 

Images: BBC/Chris Christodoulou

 

 

By the end of the first act, I was convinced that, barring a catastrophe of, well, Götterdämmerung-like proportions, this would now turn out to be the greatest Ring since Bernard Haitink’s 1998 Royal Opera performances– also semi-staged, also at the Royal Albert Hall. And so it came to pass. Not only did we continue to hear superlative conducting from Daniel Barenboim and equally superlative playing from the Staatskapelle Berlin. (To guard my back, unlike Siegfried, I shall mention in passing very occasional signs of tiredness towards the end, if only so as not to have to return to such Beckmesserish thoughts.) We also at last heard a Siegfried and Brünnhilde worthy of the roles. Götterdämmerung, by virtue of its placing as the third ‘day’ of the Ring, should always be a special occasion, though sadly that is anything but a foregone conclusion; this performance, however went beyond ‘special’, to ‘great’.

 

The weight of history was apparent in those portentous opening chords to the Norns’ Scene, but so was sonorous magic. Wagner’s goal-orientation is not Beethoven’s, though it is not diametrically opposed either; Barenboim’s guiding of this crucial scene opened up possibilities rather than closing them, whilst at the same time ensuring that the drama’s tragic import won out. The bassoon line following the Second Norn’s ‘...woran spannst du das Seil?’ sounded as if it were itself the guiding thread of the Norns’ rope of Fate. More often than one might expect, conductors misjudge Wagner’s climaxes; often, indeed, they try to introduce irrelevant climaxes of their own. There was no such danger here, the outbreak of Dawn judged to perfection, the Staatskapelle Berlin in truly glorious sound, followed by a scene with an ebb and flow – Wagner’s melos – in which words and music truly melded together to form a musico-dramatic whole. And the tenderness of the strings, for instance when Brünnhilde here embraced Siegfried, far surpassed anything the BBC SO had been able to conjure up the previous evening, for Tristan. The final climax to the scene sounded as fully achieved as if Furtwängler himself had been at the podium; not that we should forget here the extraordinary contributions of Andreas Schager as Siegfried and Nina Stemme as Brünnhilde, on whom more below. As ever, Barenboim proved worthy of Wagner’s ‘most subtle art’ of transition, that wonderful Dawn followed by a masterly Rhine Journey, placed aptly midway between Beethovenian playfulness and Mahlerian contrapuntal involvement. (Special mention here should be afforded to the glockenspiel, veritable icing on the orchestral cake.) Once we reached the Rhineland proper, moving towards the Hall of the Gibichungs, we were afforded a veritable pageant, noteworthy not just in itself, but, in its ‘secondary’ diatonicism (to borrow from Carl Dahlhaus on Die Meistersinger, the mediated diatonic harmony being predicated upon the chromaticism it both negated and incorporated) already conveying the mediated unease of ‘civilisation’. Beneath the surface lay not only the nixies of the Rhine, but more worryingly, the snares of Hagen’s plotting. The aural stench of decay – how truly, truthfully ugly some of Götterdämmerung’s music is! – led us to the Hall itself. There was already something of the unhealthy air of Venice, of the Palazzo Vendramin.

 

And so to the first act proper. The sturdiness Barenboim imparted to Gunther’s rhythms – Lohengrin, as it were, aufgehoben – immediately made clear the hopelessness of that character’s plight. (If only Gerd Grochowski had managed a little better the difficult balancing act of a strong portrayal of a weak character, but anyway...) Throughout the act, orchestral exultancy would bid Siegfried to new deeds, all the more movingly for our knowledge of Hagen’s snares, his Watch again sick with chromatic decay, whilst the transition to Brünnhilde’s rock drew us into a more intimate, tragically fragile world. The phantasmagoria with which Brünnhilde’s anger was transformed into evening twilight again had to be heard to be believed, likewise the cruellest of interruptions – more so even the coitus interruptus of Tristan’s second act – upon Siegfried’s appearance (as Gunther). The violence of rape horrified, as it must, at the close.

 

How one relished the richness of the bass line – reinforced by those eight double basses – at the opening of the second act! The architecture of every act was perfectly in place: long familiarity, for conductor and orchestra alike, clearly pays off; the vengeance trio proved no mere set piece, but a true culmination. But moments told equally truthfully, whether the trombone interjections of ‘Hagen’ as Brünnhilde screamed of her deceit. Then the new sound-world of the third act came as a breath of fresh air, though just as soon as one had thought that, necessary doubts set in. The orchestra sounded languorous, almost Debussyan; one often hears Liszt here, in this first scene, but Barenboim’s balances imparted intriguing and apposite presentiments not so much of Pelléas as of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and even the Images. Integration was, as ever key, the Funeral March all the more impressive for acting as interlude rather than interposed set piece. Barenboim’s greatness in Beethoven now fully informs his Wagner, and did so until the closing bar, bathed in the after-glow of orchestral flames that might well have burned us. And yet, at the end there was a message of equivocal hope. Barenboim has no fear of comparisons with anyone, not even Haitink (from whom, in any case, we are extremely unlikely to hear another Ring).

 

From Siegfried’s very first line, we heard what had been missing earlier on. Lance Ryan had proved serviceable in the previous instalment, yet Andreas Schager proved preferable in every respect. The beauty of his voice alone here showed what earlier had been lacking, let alone the dramatic commitment he would show when acting his third-act narration or, indeed, stiffly as ‘Gunther’ with the Tarnhelm. It was clear even in the Prologue that this was a fully mature Siegfried, a man, no longer a boy, despite his fatal flaws; Schager’s interaction with the orchestra as part of a musico-dramatic whole that extended far beyond any single contributor was not the least of his virtues. Drinking the potion brought a touching hymn to lost innocence, soon enough followed by an eroticism entirely lacking in many portrayals (let alone Robert Dean Smith’s Tristan, the night before). There was, moreover, real anger to his contesting Brünnhilde’s claims in the second act, betokening a psychological understanding rarely present in this role. One might have taken dictation, of words and music, from either him or Stemme, for pretty much the whole of the performance. Anyone who did not respond both to the irrepressible vitality of this Siegfried’s swagger with the Rhinemaidens and to the detailed, loving narrative of his deeds recalled would be satisfied with no one, not even Lauritz Melchior. This might actually have been the first time I was moved as I should have been by the moment when he recalls Brünnhilde: a true monument to a truer love than I have heard.

 

Stemme’s Prologue ‘O heilige Götter!’ was a paean to a glorious age, an age which yet had passed; the realm of the gods was not belittled, but there was no doubt that the future held something different. The dramatic urgency she imparted to the Waltraute scene was every bit the equal of Waltraud Meier’s. ‘Denn selig aus ihm leuchtet mir Siegfrieds Liebe!’ revelled in tragic irony: Stemme sang in the present but the orchestra – and we – knew that she sang of the past, the ecstasy of her love notwithstanding. Her fear before Siegfried (as Gunther) was palpable, yet without loss to the commanding nature of her performance. And her Immolation Scene, delivered from the organ, somehow bringing together the strongest virtues of Flagstad’s womanhood and Nilsson’s authority, should become the stuff of legend. Meier’s turning to her sister as the latter asked ‘Weisst du, wie das wird?’ was a dramatic moment worth all (or most of) the stagings in the world. How she later made the words come alive as she told, for instance, of Wotan taming Loge! Though Meier’s Waltraute may be dangerously close to definitive, that is no excuse for overlooking the excellence of her contribution, here with a true sense of epic narrative in telling her tale of Wotan’s depression. Increasing desperation urged on the orchestra, as it in turn urged her on. Her departure had one think of Cassandra herself.

 

Mikhail Petrenko’s protean Hagen is now a known quantity. Sometimes, from force of habit perhaps more than from dramatic necessity, one finds oneself expecting a darker voice, but Petrenko’s vision is in many ways more dangerous than the traditional Ridderbusch-like performance. Rather than pitch-black ‘mere’ evil,  we hear someone devilishly intelligent, and troublingly alluring. Not that Petrenko’s voice is without heft, but, for instance, his ‘Heil! Siegfried, teurer Held!’ as the hero brought his boat ashore was curdled with a menace that went beyond brute force. (After all, it is through cunning that he will slay Siegfried, not though overpowering him.) ‘Dir ha ich guten Rat,’ seemed almost throwaway: ‘I gave you good advice,’ but the words were made to tell, to inform us that such advice to Siegfried was anything but ‘good’, however that might be understood. Aggression and restlessness suggested a power-lust that might have been enhanced by substances the modern would tends to deem illicit. This Hagen was one dealer no one would wish to encounter upon a dark night.

 

Johannes Martin Kränzle’s Alberich once again showed a fine way with words. His injunction to Hagen, ‘Hasse die Frohen!’ seethed with Nietzschean ressentiment, whilst the ghostliness of the regfrain, ‘Schläfst du, Hagen, mein Sohn,’ chilled as it should.  Our trio of Rhinemaidens if anything surpassed its excellence in Das Rheingold.  Anna Samuil, alas, proved somewhat on the shrill side as the Third Norn and blowsy as Gutrune, her vibrato, especially during the first act, uncomfortably unsteady. She was more honeytrap than dupe, and less interesting for it. There was, though, real vocal presence to be heard from Margarita Nekrasova’s First Norn. The Royal Opera Chorus excelled, its weight as impressive as its clarity.

 

All were rightly commended by Barenboim in a few closing words. Charming as ever, he praised the audience for its silence as well as for its most fulsome applause, and forewent to mention the selfish **** (fill in as appropriate) who had interrupted Hagen’s opening advice to Gunther with a mobile telephone call. There were many stars to this Ring, but once again, this proved above all others the achievement of Barenboim’s Staatskapelle Berlin, no secret to those of us enamoured with the German capital, but now firmly ensconced in Londoners’ hearts too. Wolf-Dieter Batzdorf took a well-deserved bow, retiring as concert-master – surely only Barenboim could get away with an implicit Führer gag here, explaining that Germans do not favour the English term, ‘leader’ – but applause resounded for the whole of Wagner’s Attic chorus. And, one hopes, for Wagner himself, a fitting tribute, which is really saying something, to the composer’s bicentenary. Now, please, someone, a CD release...!