Usher, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 18 January 2020

Alter Orchesterprobensaal

Images: Martin Argyroglo
Lady Madeline (Ruth Rosenfeld)

Roderick Usher – David Oštrek

The Friend – Martin Gerke

Lady Madeline – Ruth Rosenfeld

Doctor – Dominic Kraemer

Philippe Quesne (director, set designs, lighting)

Christin Haschke (costumes)

Sébastien Alazet (sound design)

Members of the Staatskapelle Berlin and its Orchestral Academy

Marit Strindlund (conductor)

What to do with an unfinished artwork? It is not, perhaps, the right question: different works or part-works, different circumstances, different performers, different listeners, will have different answers. Right or wrong, however, we continue to ask it, and at that level of generalisation or abstraction, there is more than one possibility. One can perform a fragment, with or without reconstruction. The answer to whether to reconstruct will depend both on inclination and on possibility: the condition of fragments will be such that what one saw or heard would make little sense without considerable intervention. Tradition will also play a part: the much-abused Süssmayr completion of Mozart’s Requiem – to my mind, though not to many others, unfairly abused – has a standing, a familiarity, a performance tradition of its own. It also retains a mystery at its heart – and probably always will. If original writing is to be involved, does one attempt pastiche or something more adventurous, more personal? Where does this leave already fraught issues of fidelity in performance? Is that opposition a helpful one at all, begging far too many questions of its own?

Lady Madeline, Roderick (David Oštrek), Doctor (Dominc Kraemer)

Having raised such questions, I shall now move them a little to one side, neither forgetting them nor retaining my focus upon them. In that, I am echoing my own experience of having attended this LINDEN 21 performance of Usher in the old orchestral rehearsal room of the Berlin State Opera. What we saw and heard is not a reconstruction of Debussy’s La Chute de la maison Usher such as was first seen staged on the main stage at this very house in 1979 (courtesy of Juan Allende Blin’s reconstruction). Is it a completion? It depends what one means, but that was not in itself the point; this is not primarily an evening of metatheatre, nor does it seem intended to be. Better, then to say what it is: a chamber opera in three short acts, coming to about ninety minutes in total, by Annelies Van Parys and Gaea Schoeters, incorporating Debussy’s music and outline(s), themselves founded on Edgar Allen Poe’s story. (I suggest the plural ‘outlines’, given that Debussy wrote three libretti, each considering the story from a different standpoint.)

What especially interested me in what I heard was a particular aspect of the relationship between music by the two composers. It was not so much that I could not tell where one ended and the other began, as that it was in general very clear indeed where the one (Van Parys) had begun, without that sounding incongruent or even in a different voice. Debussy’s music evidently fascinates Van Parys. I have written before of her chamber version of Pelléas et Mélisande, as performed by English Touring Opera in 2015. Usher, however, not only presented a very different task; that task or, perhaps better, project was fulfilled and always intended to be fulfilled in a very different way. That itself is worked out in different ways. Musically, this is not a Debussyan ensemble, nor even an updated version thereof. There is malevolence, yes, such as one might extrapolate – reduce? transmute? – from Pelléas. But it is perhaps more akin to a spectralist standpoint taken upon what we might think, correctly or no, to be ‘original’, which approach would be in keeping with some of Van Parys’s other music.

Doctor, Friend (Martin Gerke), Lady Madeline, Roderick

There is a ‘horror music’ here far more interesting, at least to me, than anything popularly associated with the term. There is ‘atmospheric music’ too, though not necessarily of the Debussyan variety, one can sense a starting-point in Poe’s – Debussy’s? – mists, stagnant waters, and, perhaps inevitably with respect to the house itself, in Bluebeard’s Castle too. The ambiguity between house as building and house as family brings to the fore another, more contemporary (to us) focus: surprising, perhaps, yet undoubtedly disturbing. References to race offer clear resonances with far-Right politics. The figure of the doctor, already elevated by Debussy into a more important figure, a rival for Roderick in his incestuous love with his sister Lady Madeline, takes on an additional, political significance: a manipulator of emotions, of sickness, of beliefs and practices we might have thought we had gone beyond. Increasingly sinister, aggressive, and liable to speak as well as to sing, is he perhaps, rather than the hapless ‘house’, however understood, the real actor here? Roderick’s visitor is surely well advised to leave.

Roderick and ensemble

In the context of such interesting ideas and committed performances from all concerned – three fine baritones, David Oštrek, Martin Gerke, and Dominic Kramer; the multi-talented Ruth Rosenfeld, equially at home in spoken and vocal theatre; and an instrumental ensemble with excellent direction by Marit Strindlund – it is a pity that Philippe Quesne’s production, adept at making eerily domestic use of this rehearsal room, ultimately opts for a little too much in the way of a commercial horror film aesthetic. Multiple television screens showing the ill-fated house on fire add little to the drama. What we see too often neither resonates with nor works productively against the grain of the opera itself. There will, however, be opportunities for other productions, I am sure. In the meantime, the work having been co-commissioned by the Staatsoper Unter den Lindn and the Folkoperan Stockholm, three other companies (Opera Vlaanderen, Muziektheater Transparant, and Nanterre-Amandiers centre dramatique national) have joined with them for this co-production. There is no one way to ‘complete’, but this path has proved fruitful.

Pelléas et Mélisande (arr. Annelies van Parys), English Touring Opera, 1 October 2015

Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music

Arkel – Michael Druiett

Geneviève – Helen Johnson
Golaud – Stephan Loges
Pelléas – Jonathan McGovern
Yniold – Lauren Zolezzi
Mélisande – Susanna Hurrell 

Oliver Townsend (designs)

Mark Howland (lighting)
Bernadette Iglich (movement)
Zakk Hein (video)
James Conway (director)

Orchestra of English Touring Opera

Jonathan Berman (conductor)

 

In a better world, or even the same world with better audiences, the proportion of performances given by our opera houses of Pelléas et Mélisande and La traviata would at the very least be reversed. As it is, we find ourselves forced to make a virtue out of the relative rarity of performances of a work all consider to be a towering masterpiece. We are grateful when they come, and perhaps treasure them all the more. We are, or at least should be, especially grateful when a touring company with financial resources far more limited than our great opera houses, stages Pelléas, all the more so when it does so with such success. Once again, then: hats off to English Touring Opera!

 

Debussy’s opera is given in an arrangement for chamber ensemble by Annelies van Parys. One could, if one wished, spend the time wishing that one had the Berlin Philharmonic and Karajan, but that would seem a pointless pursuit. What strikes, with respect to a sound that is decidedly un-Karajan-like, although no closer, say, to Abbado, Boulez, or, for that matter, Désormière, is how much it convinces on its own terms. Balances are different, and perhaps not always at their optimum, wind instruments inevitably coming more to the fore without the cushion of massed strings. By the same token, however, solo strings sometimes evoke the Debussy of his chamber music, not least the String Quartet. One hears lines differently and yet, at some level, the same. Malevolence still stretches its fungal tentacles; elegance that is never ‘just’ elegance remains (as so often, when speaking about this work, one is tempted to lapse into French, and say demeure instead).

Two scenes are omitted entirely: a pity, perhaps, although I missed them far less than I should have imagined. Director James Conway takes the radical step of reintroducing words in spoken form at the end of the first ‘act’ (part way through the third). Golaud’s warning to Pelléas in some ways chills all the more for being spoken. Perhaps that is founded on the knowledge of what we ‘should’ be hearing, perhaps not, but I found it an elegant and dramatic solution.

In such circumstances, it is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to distinguish too strongly between instrumentation and performance. However, the playing of the Orchestra of English Touring Opera seemed to me throughout as alert and as sensitive as anyone could reasonably have expected, perhaps more so. What was being asked of these solo musicians was no mean task, and they played with the excellence we have come to expect. Jonathan Berman’s conducting was another strength. If I say that, for the most part, I barely noticed it, I do not mean that negatively. The ebb and flow of Debussy’s score rather seemed – and ‘seemed’ is surely the operative word here – to take care of themselves, with only occasional awkward corners, which may well be smoothed as the run progresses. One would not expect such a performance to be a ‘conductor’s performance’ as from those great names of the past I mentioned earlier; this was more a matter of subtly enabling and, yes, leading a company effort. In that and much else, it proved a great success.

Conway’s production emphasises, especially in the designs of Oliver Townsend and lighting of Mark Howland, the suffocation of the fin-de-siècle environment from which Pelléas springs. Light use of video (Zakk Hein) enhances rather than distracts. Characteristic wallpaper and costumes remind us that the castle here is as important a ‘character’ as it would be some years later in Bluebeard’s Castle, an opera which owes much to Debussy’s example. Longing for escape in nature and, perhaps, Tristan-esque oblivion may be vain but it is no more real for that. It is striking how much can be done with a single set and clever, well-achieved shifts of lighting: what will clearly be a necessity for touring here takes on unifying, escape-denying, imaginative virtue of its own. There seems, moreover, a hint at least of the road to the Poe opera Debussy would never complete.

I really have nothing but praise for the singing. The cast worked very well together, more than the sum of its parts, which in itself was considerable. At chronological extremes, Michael Druiett and Lauren Zolezzi convinced as ancient Arkel and young Yniold. Arkel’s ambiguity – what really is the nature of his fondness for Mélisande? Is that even the right question to ask – came through very strongly; so too did the boyishness of Zolezzi’s portrayal. Geneviève’s letter-reading generally makes a fine impression; that is no reason not to praise it again when it does, as it did with Helen Johnson. Susanna Hurrell’s Mélisande seemed to hark back in its light, bright quality to early assumptions; she achieved, for me, just the right balance between what might be self-assertion and discomfiting willingness – inability to do anything else? – to act as a blank canvas for male projections. In her first scene, I thought of Kundry; later, I found myself thinking of Lulu. Jonathan McGovern’s Pelléas initially came across with striking, almost but not quite child-like naïveté, and developed into something that was perhaps no more grown-up, but equally striking in its self-absorption: more pathological than one often sees, and all the more intriguing for it. The wounded masculinity of Stephan Loges’s powerfully-sung Golaud, quite contrasting in timbre, was a singular dramatic achievement both in its vocal essence and its dramatic consequences.  ‘Perhaps no events that are pointless occur,’ Arkel says. If a production has succeeded, one’s reply will most likely be ‘perhaps’. And indeed it was.

Pelléas et Mélisande will be performed again in London on 3 October, and will travel to Buxton, Malvern, Durham, Harrogate, Cambridge, Bath, Snape, and Exeter. For more details from ETO, click here.