Violetter Schnee, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 10 May 2024

Silvia – Anna Prohaska
Natascha – Clara Nadeshdin
Jan – Gyula Orendt
Peter – Jaka Mihelač
Jacques – Otto Katzameier
Tanja – Martina GedeckDirector – Claus Guth

Revival directors – Caroline Staunton, Tabatha McFadyen
Set designs – Étienne Pluss
Costumes – Ursula Kudrna
Video – Arian Andiel
Lighting – Olaf Freese

Vocalconsort Berlin
Staatskapelle Berlin
Matthias Pintscher (conductor)

Image: Monika Rittershaus

Beat Furrer’s Violetter Schnee was one of the last operas I saw, early in 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic closed theatres and halls, much else besides, across the world. It fascinated me then and has done again, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden having taken the amply vindicated decision to revive its 2019 premiere production not for the first but the second time. Broadly, my reaction proved somewhat different – not unusual for re-encountering a work – in that it seemed considerably clearer what was happening dramatically, which certainly includes the musical contribution to that drama, although, probably not unrelated, I felt myself less mesmerised and yet more horrified by its course and outcome. 

Timing has doubtless played its part too. It is certainly not the case that in January 2020 all was well with the world, generically or for an Englishman in temporary exile from Brexit-Insel, awaiting the end of one particular aspect of that world. However, the pandemic, followed by further global manmade catastrophes in Ukraine, Sudan, Palestine, and elsewhere, and humankind’s similarly incomprehensible and inexorable determination to destroy what is left of the planet it calls home have taken their toll for all, even for those of us less directly in the (often literal) firing line than others. For this is an apocalyptic, even a post-apocalyptic work – that elision may be important, not only to the work but to our present condition – in which the horror of what we have done to our world stares us in the face. Händl Klaus’s libretto, after Vladimir Sorokin, and Furrer’s score alike fuse, so that one can hardly tell what came first, with Claus Guth’s production and of course performances onstage and from the pit to present what, by most readings, would seem a hopeless episode in which climate change has done what we as a species have willed it to do. 

The ‘violet snow’ of the title is key: is this world – are we – on the way to a frozen future, a new Ice Age echoing the world of the drama’s lynchpin, Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow? Or will it continue to warm, as the characters’ speak and sing of strangely warm snow, albeit while they all the while wrap up for winter, might suggest. Is the final coming of a violet sun – we see that, for ourselves, unlike the ‘violet snow’, which looks like any other, leading us to ask whether it might be a mirage – the end, or a second chance, an entry to the new world with which technology-soothsayers would seduce us? Paired characters react differently, yet perhaps to no avail, their ensembles ultimately suggesting frenetic futility, and seem at one point to settle, perhaps not unreasonably yet chillingly, on nihilistic partying, before moving on to confront once again the cold, dark world beyond their flat. In a sense, it has all been foretold in the opening scene but one, the first without words or characters, in which Tania, a spoken role played unforgettably by Martina Gedeck, sees Breughel’s painting at a museum, becomes transfixed and ultimately collapses, only to wake up (I think) in the dwelling of the others. 

Furrer’s orchestral writing seems both to drive long-term change in something akin to Klangfarbenmelodie that often, tellingly, suggests electronic sounds without including them, and also to heighten passages and moments of particular drama. Vocal writing, though doubtless enormously complex and difficult, is as it is for a reason: this is no easy situation, nor should any of us pretend it is. Something, we feel throughout, has already happened, as well as is about to happen. It is probably too late, but what if it is not? I recalled a very different work, with goings-on both very different yet in a sense not so different as they first may have seemed: Thomas Adès’s Buñuel-derived Exterminating Angel. Not the least suggestion I gleaned here was that I should give that opera, which I admit to having been nonplussed by when I first saw it, like many other things another chance. 

We surely owe each other that, as we dance on the edge – or beyond it – of the volcano, just as we owe thanks to an outstanding team of musical collaborators led by Matthias Pintscher, all directing their contributions to a common goal. Their voices, individual and in ensemble, eventually joined by the excellent Vocalconsort Berlin, had something to tell us, but would we, could we, listen? Their inability to hear – how, after all, can one hear snow – warned us, as did the mildness of the evening as we spilled out once more onto Unter den Linden, a very different experience from the January performance I attended and doubtless the January of the previous year. Would we simply dissolve into a world that has already been damaged, as voices did time and time into the orchestra, and/or would we emerge once again from it? Can we defy the brutal, surprising, yet necessary stop with which the opera comes to a halt?

 

Beat Furrer, Violetter Schnee, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 10 January 2020

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Silvia – Anna Prohaska

Natascha – Elsa Dreisig

Jan – Gyula Orendt

Peter – Georg Nigl

Jacques – Otto Katzameier

Tanja – Martina Gedeck

Dancers – Uri Burger, Alexander Fend, Gernot Frischling, Annekatrin Kiesel, Victoria McConnell, Filippo Serra

Claus Guth (director)

Étienne Pluss (set designs)

Ursula Kudrna (costumes)

Arian Andiel (video)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Vocalconsort Berlin

Staatskapelle Berlin

Matthias Pintscher (conductor)

Silvia (Anna Prohaska), Tanja (Martina Gedeck)

The word Gesamtkunstwerk should probably be retired – especially with respect to Wagner, who, not that one would know from 99%+ of the ‘literature’, barely used it. Or perhaps it should not, so long as we separate it from Wagner and acknowledge a broader context and understanding, both preceding and following the Master of Bayreuth (or, better, the ‘artwork of the future’). For Gesamtkunstwerk retains a certain ‘ideal’ force in many respects, just as do, say, ‘epic’ and ‘postdramatic’ theatre, both of which will generally be understood partly as reactions to it. In 2020, any serious consideration of one, be it theoretical, practical, or both, will almost certainly entail consideration of the others. This evening, the first of two revival performances of Beat Furrer’s 2019 opera, Violetter Schnee, elicited such thoughts of quasi-Adornian Rettung in that I found it difficult as well as undesirable to try to separate Claus Guth’s production from either work or performance. Whether you call that a Gesamtkunstwerk matters little; however, depending on your standpoint, perhaps the idea’s modernist heritage will. At any rate, I shall not attempt to dissect, but rather to give an impression of the whole, illusory or otherwise.

Those of us who spend a good deal of time in museums and art galleries will have been familiar, perhaps too familiar, with the scene of the opening. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Die Jäger im Schnee enjoys – and suffers – a painting’s usual fate, at least when not snowed under by visitors. However, one visitor, Tanja (played in distinctive, declamatory fashion by actress Martina Gedeck), takes more notice, becomes immersed, affording the starting point for something, like snow, difficult and undesirable to pin down: an aesthetic, but perhaps also a dramatic, odyssey. That, at least is how it might seem; or does the world that emerges from the painting, breathtakingly constructed from enlargement and development of its detail by Guth’s team (Étienne Pluss, Ursula Kudrna, Arian Andiel, and Olaf Freese), actually exist first, and give rise to her visit, perhaps to the painting too? Apocalypse deferred or frozen in both soon seems neither to have been deferred nor frozen at all.

Winter snow may be an object of aesthetic contemplation for us: more so than ever in an age of ecological catastrophe in which we rightly fear that soon we may never see it again, or we may see little else. It is too for the cast, led by spellbinding performances from sopranos Anna Prohaska and Elsa Dreisig, pure, seductive, and dangerous as the falling and driven snow. Yet it is also for them the key to catastrophe; any attempt to distinguish seems once again to miss the point. Where some characters, if one may call them that, acknowledge that - Otto Katzameier's Jacques most consistently – others seem, or is that just us as spectators, more partial. A house in which characters are trapped, from which they continually escape to the rooftop to experience the snow that will claim them soon enough, offers form, visual, dramatic, even musical; or so we imagine. At any rate, its confines, like those of the score, those of the stage, those of the opera house, both permit and prevent our eyes and ears zooming in on detail – as in (imaginary outsider?) Tanja’s (imaginary?) gallery. 

Furrer’s word-setting acknowledges and extends partiality and wholeness of experience, yet also calls them into question. Its metrical intricacies do not merely mirror the snow; do they perhaps in some aesthetic, even aestheticising sense, incite or create it? Shifting orchestral timbres, Klangfarbenmelodien for an age in which snow might eventually turn violet, seem at times to form the basis for pitch, rhythm, and other parameters, at other times to carry on regardless: like snow, like humans lost therein. What about the meantime? Those humans might ask each other that, but do they, and what would be the point? Maybe there is no meantime, for the end is soon upon us. Guided by Matthias Pintscher’s typically expert direction of the superlative Staatskapelle Berlin, we know and yet do not know that the magic of a Gesamtkunstwerk, of nature, of art, of aesthetic contemplation, of activism, have passed before us and yet also have not. Sun will come, will vanquish – and it does. Viole(n)t snow and life? Certainly. Why? Who knows and who cares? Frame and stage remain: faithful reflection, artifice, or both? 

London Sinfonietta/Furrer - Furrer, FAMA, 11 November 2016

St John’s, Smith Square

Isabelle Munke (actress)

Eva Furrer (contrabass flute)

EXAUDI (chorus master: James Weeks)

Sophie Motley (staging advisor)

London Sinfonietta

Beat Furrer (conductor)

 

Premiered in 2005 at Donaueschingen – how reassuringly modernist that sounds! – Beat Furrer’s sound theatre piece has now, finally, reached London. First performed in a large ‘box’, in which about 300 audience members were seated, the musicians outside, the speaker/actress moving within and without, it must have sounded – and indeed looked – very different from its incarnation at St John’s, Smith Square. There was here, of course, no question of opening and closing the walls and celings, but instruments and choir still moved around the audience, making use of the balcony too. If a work is not to remain entirely site-specific – in any case, the box apparently no longer exists – then it will need to take on new life. That goes for Parsifal as much as for the Monteverdi Vespers, for FAMA as much as for Nono’s Promoteo.  

 

Besides, one can imagine; as Wagner, Nono, and doubtless Monteverdi would tell us, imaginary theatre is often most powerful of all, or at least differently powerful. A young woman, her roots in Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, will adapt in the theatre of our imagination, but will and should remain a stranger to herself, looking in dramatically as well as physically. She will still find herself eventually in the house of Ovid’s Fama, ‘entirely of sounding ore, resonating ubiquitously it hurls back in imitation what it hears,’ but it will always be for us to construct that house, as well as to make it resonate, perhaps visually as well as aurally. Whether I quite managed to do so on first acquaintance, I am less than sure, but deepening acquaintance, in something worth acquainting oneself with, will always be a Beckettian case of failing better. I should certainly like the opportunity to do so again.

 

One of the most arresting, even fantastical, passages for me came with the opening Latin ensemble. The sense of fantasy – not in the debased, modern usage – was as much instrumental as it was vocal, and in any case the border, in the best music-theatre tradition, was far from clear. Highly rhythmical, colourful exuberance played intriguingly with this particular acoustic. The London Sinfonietta and EXAUDI, both on typically outstanding form, were certainly not especially large of number, the latter only eight, but the ‘scale’ of work and performance sounded much larger. At times, one might have been forgiven for hearing a full-scale orchestra rather than ensemble, even if one should accept that distinction. A sense of falling away, of dissolution, more than once put me in mind of Wozzeck; but that was perhaps just my finding my bearings.  Swimming against the tide as the instrumental music sometimes seemed to be, Isabelle Menke’s role as speaker took different routes, sometimes connecting, sometimes at odds. At any rate, and not only because it opens with ‘ich höre das Feuer,’ it proved equally incendiary, paving the way for further musico-dramatic development – if I may borrow so Classical a term – in the wordless second scene.

 

An intriguing reinvention of recitative as well as Sprechstimme was suggested in the third scene, a pulsating instrumental tapestry both backcloth and participant. Instruments came close to speech, and vice versa. A quite different sound-world and sensibility were experienced in the short fourth scene. I do not think it was just the Italian language that made me think of Nono and Sciarrino, although that doubtless did no harm. A whistling riot of sound seemed to encapsulate the concept both of scene and work. Oh! Vi doveva pur essere, sulla terra di tutti i dolori, un giardino profondo, lontano, silente… One found the silence of that garden in sound, in music, not in silence: a liminality, perhaps, one might compare to Fama’s house. That sense of the numinous could be traced, albeit in different form, into the fifth scene. It was almost pictorial, at times, but the ‘almost’ was as important as the ‘pictorial’. Post-Romantic? Doubtless; for we all are, are we not? The experience remained fresh, though.

 

In the sixth scene, interaction between actress and contrabass flute solo (the excellent Eva Furrer) stood on the boundary between an acting ‘two hander’ and a post-operatic duet. Are not such confrontations, reinventions, always at the heart of music theatre? Ominous, antiphonal trombones inevitably brought resonances from the past in the seventh, before the final, eighth scene for ensemble, in which the music, the drama seemed to subside, open-ended. It struck a note that came close to, without ever quite ‘being’, or being capable of reduction to, tragedy.

 

The performance was recorded by BBC Radio 3 for subsequent radio broadcast (date as yet unknown).