Hänsel und Gretel, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 11 December 2017

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Gretel (Elsa Dreisig) and Hänsel (Katrin Wundsam)
Images: Monika Rittershaus

Peter – Arttu Kataja

Gertrud – Marina Prudenskaya

Hänsel – Katrin Wundsam

Gretel – Elsa Dreisig

Witch – Jürgen Sacher

Sandman – Corinna Scheurle

Dew Fairy – Sarah Aristidou

Achim Freyer (director, designs, lighting)

Geertje Boeden (assistant director)

Petra Weikert (assistant designer)

Sebastian Alphons (lighting)

Jakob Klaffs, Hugo Reis (video)

Elena Garcia Fernandez, Larissa Wieczorek (dramaturgy)

Children’s Chorus of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (chorus master: Vincenz Weissenburger)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Sebastian Weigle (conductor)

The first performance of Humperdinck’s fairy-tale opera, Hänsel und Gretel, on the night before Christmas Eve, 1893, in Weimar, was conducted by Richard Strauss. The work’s second staging, in Hamburg, in September of the following year, was conducted by Gustav Mahler. It reached Berlin, this very house, then home to the Royal Court rather than the State Opera, the following month, and has belonged to the world ever since. Alas, that very popularity and a strange, seemingly related, insistence on presenting a tale of child abuse with sugar coating have tended to lead to the opera’s underestimation, or at least to insipid presentation, even non-interpretation. What, after all, is a fairy tale, if it is not an invitation to interpretation, for children, for adults, for all? For those to whom the Brothers Grim(m) were something a little more interesting than Eric and Donald Trump Jr, this would be mind-numbingly obvious; alas, audiences being what they often are…

Hänsel, The Witch (Jürgen Sacher), and Gretel

Achim Freyer does not penetrate so deep as LiamSteel in his Royal College of Music staging; when I saw that, I more or less instantly realised it was the production for which I had been waiting much of my adult life. (Yes, as I never tire of pointing out, much of the best London opera takes place in our conservatoires.) But nor does he try to; his concerns are different. He is certainly not pandering to reactionary ‘tastes’, in the manner of Adrian Noble in his Vienna Disneyfication. Where Freyer excels, as, at his best, he always does, is in the creation of a world, both childlike and perhaps not. I say ‘perhaps’, since who is to say what is ‘childlike’ and what is not, or indeed what its opposite might be. Is that, again, not part of the essence of fairy tales? Clowns are present, of course; there is that undeniable element of Freyer house style, but why not? It does not look, like sometimes his staging have, as merely more of the same, or one size fits all; nor does it feel like it. The sense of theatre is keen, not without framing, for instance when the wondrous flick of the lighting switch opens the metaphorical story book at the opening, yet without ever seeming pleased with itself, or too clever-clever. Children, of whatever age, do not like that; often they are right not to do so. We never see the ‘real’ Hänsel and Gretel, or rather the ‘real’ singers, not really, for their masks cover their faces several times over. But what is ‘real’? And what is ‘real’ here? Perhaps the plot interests Freyer less: a pity, I think, but he has other concerns. And the dream-like sense of proceedings, if only in retrospect, acquires a more darkly, yet also brightly, sense of the political and its possibilities, with a final unveiling of the sign ‘REVOLUTIO’. Unfinished business, or a joke? Dreamers or anti-dreamers, from Novalis to Brecht, may – or may not – have their say. Life with Freyer, life in many fairy tales, is a circus; yet think of what a circus, that theatre of cruelty, of the absurd, of society and anti-society, involves, suggests, incites.

If only the musical side of things had lived up to those possibilities. Sebastian Weigle’s conducting was, alas, throughout Kapellmeister-ish in the negative sense. ‘Light’, as if attempting a demonstration that Mendelssohn were not worth listening to, almost entirely without Wagnerisms, let alone the kinship with Strauss Christian Thielemann in that Vienna performance had imparted, rightly or wrongly to the score, the greater sin of Weigle’s reading was listlessness. I do not think I have ever heard the first act drag so; nor have I heard the music sound less magical. Weigle is certainly no Strauss or Mahler. It would be a hard task indeed to have the Staatskapelle Berlin sound bad in this music, and it did not; but this great orchestra was sadly undersold throughout, achieving a few moments of wonder despite, not on account of, its conductor.

It was not a vintage night for singing either, although Elsa Dreisig sparkled as Gretel. Katrin Wundsam sometimes sounded rather harsh as Hänsel. Marina Prudenskaja and Arttu Kataja sang well enough as their parents, likewise Jürgen Sacher as the Witch, but perhaps needed something more in the way of inspirational musical leadership – I shall never forget Colin Davis in 2008 – to lift their performances to something more memorable. There was hope, though, that in a subsequent revival, not only better conducted, but perhaps more engaged with the possibilities hinted at by Freyer, something more than the sum of the parts might emerge. That hope is, after all, the fuel on which opera houses, especially houses now reborn such as this, should burn.

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.