Parsifal, Vienna State Opera, 5 April 2018

Amfortas – Jochen Schmeckenbecker
Gurnemanz – Kwangchul Youn
Parsifal – Christopher Ventris
Klingsor – Boaz Daniel
Kundry – Anja Kampe
Titurel – Ryan Speedo Green
Squires – Rachel Frenkel, Miriam Albano, Wolfram Igor Dentl, Peter Jelosits
First Knight of the Grail – Benedikt Köbel
Second Knight of the Grail – Marcus Pelz
Flowermaidens – Maria Nazarova, Lydia Rathkolb, Rachel Frenkel, Hila Fahima, Mariam Battistelli, Stephanie Houtzeel
Voice from Above – Zoryana Kushpler

Alvis Hermanis (director, set designs)

Kristīne Jurjāne (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Ineta Sipunova (video)
Silvia Platzek (assistant set designer)

Children of the Vienna State Opera Opera School

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Martin Schebesta)

Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera

Semyon Bychkov (conductor)

 

Parsifal continues its strange career in the opera house, both its ‘home’, Bayreuth, and beyond – the ‘beyond’ Cosima Wagner haplessly, hilariously attempted to prevent with her Lex Parsifal. (Note to pious New York Wagnerians: next time you appeal to the Master’s alleged intentions, consider your house’s role in confounding them.) Wagner’s desire, as expressed to Ludwig II, to protect the work from ‘a common operatic career’ is understandable. Indeed, Pierre Boulez, a highly distinguished interpreter and critic of the work as well as compositional successor, understood this very well when he approvingly noted Wagner loathing a system in which ‘opera houses are … like cafés where … you can hear waiters calling out their orders: “One Carmen! And one Walküre! And one Rigoletto!”’ Bayreuth has veered from the very best, indeed the very greatest, in Stefan Herheim, to the very worst, with Uwe Eric Laufenberg’s festival of Islamophobia, bizarrely released on DVD whilst its predecessor languishes in the (virtual) vaults. I do not think I saw Vienna’s previous Parsifal, directed by Christine Mielitz; at any rate, I have no recollection of it. This first revival of Alvis Hermanis’s production had me wondering, however, whether it could have been any more vacuous.

 

Hermanis would not be my choice to direct anything, whether for his avowed Islamophobia – how he must have cursed Laufenberg for getting there first – or for the limitations of his craft, such as it may be. His Salzburg Liebe der Danae combined the two to an uncommon degree. I am astonished any theatre or opera house would still enlist his services, following his storming out of Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre on account of its having extended a welcome to refugees. What we have here, at seemingly great expense, is a series of impressive designs – with which, to be fair, he is credited too – and very little that could really be considered a production at all. There is just enough – again, to be fair – to permit one’s mind to work, to posit connections between what one sees, essentially tableaux from Vienna 1900. Yet, whilst I am certainly in favour of us all having to do some mental lifting, I cannot, hand on heart, say that my psychoanalytical thoughts had their roots in what I saw, whereas they unquestionably have done in Dmitri Tcherniakov’s outstanding Berlin staging.

 

The conceit, if we may call it that, is that two Wagners, Richard and Otto, shared the same, well, surname. Therefore the action takes place at the ‘Wagner Spital’ – alias Otto’s Steinhof psychiatric hospital. I wondered whether there might be a nod to Nietzsche and/or Thomas Mann on Parsifal, here, but suspect myself, perhaps unusually, of undue charity. A model of the human brain grows larger, amidst some books on shelves: ‘Durch Mitleid wissend…’? There is a half-hearted attempt, which nevertheless made me think, at pschyoanalysis, Kundry on Klingsor’s couch, in the second act, although it quickly becomes unclear, rather than fruitfully ambiguous, who, if anyone, amongst the characters, is analysing whom. Bits of Wagner’s (Richard’s) poem are flashed up above the stage from time to time; having hired someone for video, it must, presumably, have been necessary to find something for her to do. (Not her fault in the slightest, I hasten to add.) As for the final scene, in which a few Vienna 1900 celebrities join the chorus, bedecked in the most absurd winged helmets you will ever have seen, even as devotees of ‘Against Modern Opera Productions’, I simply gave up. The stage direction itself might as well have been a wet Wednesday’s revival of Otto Schenk.

 

Fortunately, musical matters were considerably better. The orchestra sounded better than I have heard it in Wagner for some time. It will always play well for conductors it likes: I can therefore only presume that, quite rightly, it likes Semyon Bychkov. The seamlessness of Bychkov’s account showed that, once again, as in, say, his Lohengrin, his Tannhäuser, and his Tristan, he both discerns and can communicate the Wagner melos. Some passages were thrillingly dramatic, not least an overwhelming close to the second act. Others seemed, perhaps, to tread water a little, but that may just have been my difficulty in dissociating what I heard from what I saw. No one, however, could justly have been disappointed with what (s)he heard here, those hallowed Vienna strings not far from the top of their golden game.

 

However, rather to my surprise, I found Christopher Ventris slightly disappointing in the title role – certainly no match for his 2008 self for Herheim and Daniele Gatti. Ventris can still sing the role, often beautifully, but his stage presence seemed almost tired, whether compared with ten years ago in the same role or indeed with his Bayreuth Siegmund last summer. Perhaps he just needed stronger direction; one can certainly sympathise. Anja Kampe’s Kundry proved thrilling, increasingly so as time went on, her laughter at Christ erotically chilling. Kwangchul Youn’s Gurnemanz has gathered wisdom over the years; this may have been the finest I have heard from him, utterly at ease in the role, without taking a single note or word for granted. At times, I found Jochen Schmeckenbecker’s Amfortas a little underpowered, even monochrome, but again there was much to be savoured from his way with the text, both verbal and musical. Boaz Daniel’s Klingsor had one wishing, as so often with this role, that it were at least a little longer. Choral singing, from boys, men, and women alike was excellent: clear, transparent, and yet weighty, having my mind flit back to Wagner’s work in Dresden, whether on his own, strange Liebesmahl der Apostel, or Palestrina’s Stabat Mater (which he edited, less interestingly than one might have hoped). There was, then, redemption to be had, but in a strictly musical sense.

 

Tristan und Isolde, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 18 March 2018

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Tristan – Andreas Schager

King Marke – Stephen Milling

Isolde – Anja Kampe

Kurwenal – Boaz Daniel

Melot – Stephan Rügamer

Brangäne – Ekaterina Gubanova

Steersman – Adam Kutny

Young Sailor, Shepherd – Linard Vrielink

Tristan’s Mother – Kristin Becker

Tristan’s Father – Mike Hoffmann

English horn (onstage) – Florian Hanspach-Torkildsen

Dmitri Tcherniakov (director, set designs)

Elena Zaytseva (costumes)

Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)

Tieni Burkhalter (video)

Tatina Vereshchagina, Detlef Giese (dramaturgy)

Berlin State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Raymond Hughes)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Tristan (Andreas Schager) and ensemble

No one doubts the supreme challenge presented in performing Tristan und Isolde. After seventy-seven rehearsals, the intended 1861 Vienna premiere had to be abandoned. A work that had taken less than three years to write took more than double that, as John Deathridge has observed, to ‘overcome prejudice about its viability. … Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Dresden, Hanover, Stuttgart, Prague, and Vienna: in the end none of these opera houses would touch it.’ When Munich finally did, in 1865, Wagner’s Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, died after just four performances. Wagner’s foes, political, aesthetic, and ‘moral’, seized on the opportunity to claim, ludicrously, that Tristan, rather than typhus was the agent of death. If audiences today avoid quite such high (melo)drama, more often than not they meet the curse on the other side of Wagner’s melodramatic coin: ‘only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, - I cannot imagine it otherwise. This is how far I have gone!! Oh dear! – I was just in full career! Adieu!’

The twin dangers of unviability and necessary mediocrity were avoided in this outstanding performance from the Staatskapelle Berlin, Daniel Barenboim, and a cast headed by Andreas Schager and Anja Kampe. When I last heard Barenboim conduct Tristan, in 2010, I observed that this, ‘of the three Tristans in the theatre’ I had heard him conduct, had ‘surely [been] the best, above all in as searing a first act as I have ever heard, reminiscent of Karl Böhm at Bayreuth.’ This proved a more powerful musical experience still, and quite different. Yes, the first act was ‘searing’, but it had little in common with Böhm, save perhaps for the visceral, overwhelming quality to the close, which left me in quite a state of shock: not so far from Wagner’s ‘perfectly good ones … bound to drive people mad’. Barenboim now appears to be hearing Tristan more overtly through ears transformed by his recent Parsifal performances – or at least leading us to do so. (Perhaps it is not entirely a coincidence that they too have been collaborations with Dmitri Tcherniakov – and Schager, and, oneyear, Kampe too.)

Some people have, apparently, been complaining that his tempi were ‘slow’: do they really want a ‘fast’ Tristan? I fear that, unconsciously or even consciously fearful of Wagner’s ‘perfectly good,’ they actually might. Perhaps sometimes they were. I have no idea, not being a clock-watcher. More importantly, there were ample space and tension, for the ebb and flow of Wagner’s Schopenhauerian Will to find orchestral representation. For, still more than Parsifal, the music of Beethoven – and Barenboim’s recent Beethoven, as heard in a life-changing symphonic Proms cycle with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – made its harmonic mark. The ‘growth’ of harmony from the bass line, even when, indeed particularly when, Wagner’s extreme chromaticism tugs away from it, ensured both musicodramatic comprehensibility and a placing between Beethoven and Schoenberg, yet reducible to neither. The Staatskapelle Berlin might almost be taken for granted in this, so inveterate is its Wagnerian excellence; it should not be. Without its dark, ‘German’ tone, ‘traditional’ and yet probing so many of those new musical worlds seemingly born in this score, we should come nowhere near The World as Will and Representation at all, still less to a ‘perfectly good’ Tristan.

Isolde (Anja Kampe), Brangäne (Ekaterina Gubanova)

Likewise Barenboim’s excellent cast, crucial to far more than the ‘surface’ role Schopenhauer’s aesthetics might suggest. Schager again might readily be taken for granted. (Remember when we had no such Heldentenor? It was not so long ago.) His was certainly the finest account of the role I have heard in the theatre, fully worthy of comparison with the great, doubtless mythologised performances of the recorded past, although again certainly not to be reduced to them, nor indeed to comparisons therewith. If the seemingly infinite vocal resources Schager can call upon to make his way through the third act monologue – it was to that in particular that Wagner referred in his letter – suggest Lauritz Melchior, there was none of the laziness or, at least, somewhat cavalier attitude that could afflict the latter’s work. Schager can sing the part and he does, but dramatically it needs to be hard work; we need to feel, to share in, Tristan’s struggle, even as it frightens, repels us. We did, in this, a performance for the ages. Kampe’s Isolde was perhaps not on quite so grand a scale; nor did it need to be. She offered her own detailed portrayal, again matching ‘musical’ and ‘dramatic’ imperatives – as if they might ever formally be separated! – to a degree it would be difficult to match, let alone to surpass. Boaz Daniel and Ekaterina Gubanova offered far more than support as Kurwenal and Brangäne, the latter’s ‘operatic Lied’ approach, unfailingly sensitive to words and their implications, without permitting them to override the imperatives of the musical line. King Markes rarely disappoint: what a gift of a role it is in a more traditional sense. Nevertheless, Stephen Milling’s depth of tone and grace of character impressed greatly. Amongst a strong ‘supporting’ cast, Linard Vrielink’s beautifully sung Young Sailor and Shepherd stood out.

There remains, however, another common danger, increasingly common, to contemporary Tristan performances – more strictly, to productions. That is of missing the point of the work entirely. I hope it will not be taken that I am referring in some generic reactionary fashion to the ‘creator’s intentions’. However, Tristan seems in practice to prove unusually resistant to attempts even to question what it might be ‘about’. The idea of the work being shoehorned, for instance, into a justified protest against anti-immigration policies hardly bears thinking about. Tristan is certainly not in any emphatic sense ‘about’ its ‘characters’, insofar as they be characters at all; it seems to come closer than any other of Wagner’s dramas to that all-too-celebrated description of ‘deeds of music made visible’. Prior to Tcherniakov’s staging, I had yet to see what might broadly be termed an ‘interventionist’ staging that worked.

King Marke (Stephen Milling), Tristan, Melot (Stephan Rügamer), Kurwenal (Boaz Daniel)

Does Tcherniakov change that? I hope it is not unduly pretentious – it may already prove a little late to sound that alert – to say I think it too soon to tell. What I can say is that his production has made me think about the issues involved like no other: an achievement I think worth lauding in itself. By contrast with his perhaps atypical, unquestionably brilliant Parsifal – the best I have seen since Stefan Herheim – we return to Tcherniakov’s homeground of the unpleasant rich. Fair enough: with kings, queens, and princes, that is what we are dealing with. Elena Zaytseva’s costumes and Tcherniakov’s own set designs – in the first act, a true luxury vessel, replete with ‘bespoke’ anything you might care to mention; in the second, a ‘tasteful’ Jugendstil indoor forest ‘theme’ we want to hate, yet secretly want – instantly evoke the excesses of a corporate, materialistic world we know only too well. The third act by contrast retreats to a homely comfort zone for Tristan, an old moneyed boy who never grew up (haunted, as his monologue tells us, by the circumstances of his birth, visions of his parents appearing in his delirium).

Is that all too specific, though? Does it fall into the trap of making Tristan about the trappings of wealth? Not really, for there is an intriguing, deadly game afoot. Tcherniakov does not treat the lovers as identical, as two mere parts of ‘Tristan and Isolde’. He does not accept Wagner, let alone Schopenhauer, at face value. Instead, he implicitly, even explicitly, criticises some of their (neo-)Romantic premises. Is Tristan, perhaps even Isolde at times, actually mocking whatever it is they play out? It is not always clear, but there is a degree of unnerving alienation to the proceedings that intrigues, questions, even (metatheatrically?) frightens. A woman fainting in the second act seems to fall into their trap, or is she in on the game too? Or, perhaps most important, is this a critique of the game we play, when we sit around, almost as Nietzsche’s ‘Wagnerians’, ‘disciples – benumbed, pale, breathless!’, both at the performance, enraptured, and afterwards, discussing how singular this work is, how it refuses directorial interventionism? The question of aestheticisation is live, just as in the Staatsoper’s newproduction by Hans Neuenfels of Salome, which I saw the previous evening: a fascinating, provocative pairing. Who, both productions seem to ask, is the Wagnerian now, whether on or off stage? The English horn player on stage (the excellent Florian Hanspach-Torkildsen) perhaps asks us something similar, his deeds of music rendered unusually visible.

Shepherd (Linard Vrielink), Florian Hanspach-Torkildsen (English horn)

Tcherniakov seems to me on balance to succeed where many others have failed, presenting an element of alienation that holds work and musical performance at arm’s length, without descending into mere reductionist banality. In the separation of ‘work’ and staging, even of musical performance and staging, the two become problematically, rather than mystically, reengaged. Romanticism is decisively rejected, whether in work or reception. It need not always be, perhaps, but it is here – and fruitfully. For instance, Karol Berger has recently argued that that is, part way through Tristan’s monologue, it ‘is clear thus far … that the escape from the separating illusions of Day into the unifying truth of Night remains Tristan’s goal, but a goal he cannot accomplish in Isolde’s absence, since they need to escape together.’ Perhaps. I should certainly allow, at least, that that was Wagner’s intention, most likely even what he thought he had achieved. The work here, though, I think, knows better than its creator. Wagner’s need to ‘transcend’ at the close already betrays the relative poverty of such Romanticism, just as Mozart’s terrifyingly clear-eyed coda to Così fan tutte does (more knowingly, I think, although that may be debated).

Tristan and Isolde

Tcherniakov’s treatment of the so-called Liebestod – Wagner’s own ‘Verklärung’ is worth fighting for against Liszt’s well-meaning misunderstanding – seems to me of particular interest here, sharing, even intensifying the ambiguity of work, conception, and tradition. Tristan’s room returns to darkness, Isolde having cocooned herself with him, safe from prying eyes – whether ours or those on stage. The prior onstage separation between Shepherd and his instrument, the scenic and the musical, seems thereby at a remove almost to have been overcome. We could believe in what she is doing, she doubtless could too; but we do not, and we doubt whether she does. Wagner’s reconciliation is false. Which returned this listener at least to one of the most searching – as well as, on occasion, utterly wrong-headed – of Wagner’s critics after Nietzsche: Theodor Adorno. On the final page of his Essay on Wagner, we read: ‘Tristan’s curse upon love [Minne] is more than the impotent sacrifice intoxication offers up to asceticism.’ It is rather music’s rebellion against its own ‘constraint of Fate’. In that rebellion, music will often benefit from enlisting the services of ‘drama’, and vice versa. Negative dialectics indeed.

Prom 19: BBC SO/Bychkov - Tristan und Isolde, 27 July 2013

Royal Albert Hall

Tristan – Robert Dean Smith

Isolde – Violeta Urmana
King Marke – Kwangchul Youn
Kurwenal – Boaz Daniel
Brangäne – Mihoko Fujimura
Melot – David Wilson-Johnson
Steersman – Edward Price
Young Sailor/Shepherd – Andrew Staples

BBC Singers

BBC Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Stephen Jackson)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Semyon Bychkov (conductor)

 

For those whose Wagnerian thirst had not yet been quenched by three parts of the Ring, the Proms now offered Tristan und Isolde. Semyon Bychkov, whom I heard conduct the work in Paris in 2008, once again proved a sure guiding presence, though perhaps without the final ounce or two of delirium that is required to elevate the work to the deserved status of Nietzsche’s opus metaphysicum. The opening Prelude underlined the crucial importance of the bass line, even in – arguably particularly in – this work, straining as it does at the bounds of tonality, without ever quite transgressing them. As Theodor Adorno wrote, in his Versuch über Wagner, ‘‘It is with good reason that the bars in the Tristan score following the words “der furchtbare Trank” stand upon the threshold of new music, in whose first canonical work, Schoenberg’s F-sharp minor Quartet, the words appear: “Take love from me, grant me your happiness!”’ I never felt that quite so much was at stake, but this remained a distinguished reading in a more conventionally dramatic sense. Part of that, perhaps, was to be attributed to the orchestra. Whilst on fine form, the BBC Symphony Orchestra could not, with the best will in the world, be said to have conjured up the tonal, metaphysical depth of Daniel Barenboim’s Staatskapelle Berlin, especially when it came to the all-important string section.

 

That said, Bychkov worked wonders at times. The orchestral swaying at the beginning of the first time managed to convey just the right mixture of physical and metaphysical turbulence. Sinuous woodwind as Isolde told of her ‘art’ looked forward to the Flowermaidens. The orchestra as a whole, even if it sometimes lacked true depth, still assumed its role as Greek Chorus, or, in Wagner’s later terms, representation of the Will. As Isolde instructed Kurwenal to have Tristan come to her, there was a true sense of tragic inevitability both from orchestra and singer. Bychkov, here and elsewhere, understood and communicated both musical structure and its interaction with the external ‘drama’. (In this of all Wagner’s works, the drama lies more in the orchestra than anywhere else; indeed, more than once, I found myself thinking how much I should love to hear him conduct Schoenberg’s avowedly post­­-Tristan symphonic poem, Pelleas und Melisande. The stillness of Hell, as much as Nietzsche’s ‘voluptuousness’, truly registered as Isolde drank the potion; moreover, the shimmering sound Bychkov drew from the BBC SO violins had them play to a level I have rarely heard – certainly not under their recently-departed absentee conductor.

 

The Prelude to Act II was unusually fleet, but not harried: probably wise given that one was not dealing with the traditional ‘dark’ German sound of an orchestra such as Barenboim’s Staatskapelle. Offstage brass, conducted by Andrew Griffiths, were excellent. Again, the BBC SO often surpassed itself, its scream at the opening of the second scene – responding to Isolde’s ‘Tristan – Geliebter!’ – offering a somewhat embarrassing contrast with the puny sounds heard from Tristan himself. Woodwind again excelled, at times, for instance after Isolde’s ‘O eitler Tagesknecht!’, evoking Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. As Tristan – just about – harangued the spite and envy of day, we heard an apt orchestral sardonicism, mid-way between Loge and Schoenberg. (I thought in particular of the First Chamber Symphony.) And the deadly slowing of the heartbeat – Karajan truly worried about this Act II music, fearing it might literally take the lives of conductors – was well conveyed. I liked the idea – and practice – of having the Shepherd’s English horn solo piped from above, as if from the ramparts. The spotlighting of the (very good) soloist put me in mind of Stockhausen’s later practice of blurring the boundaries between instruments and ‘characters’. If the level of orchestral playing was not so impressive during much of the third act, most obviously earlier on, that may have been part of a doomed attempt to enable Robert Dean Smith’s Tristan to be heard. There was, though, also a problem with balance at times, the brass tending to overpower in a way never heard in Barenboim’s Ring performances. Dramatic urgency was regained, however, after Tristan’s death.

 

Violeta Urmana opened in somewhat shrill fashion, her words often indistinct. She improved quickly, though, and as early as the second scene, was both more sensitive in terms of tonal variegation and far more comprehensible. There were times, especially during the first act – for instance, on the ‘preis’ of ‘mit ihr gab er es pries!’ – when her climaxes were a little too conventionally operatic, but hers remained a committed performance. She had no difficulty in riding the orchestral wave in her transfiguration: impressive, if not necessarily moving. Mihoko Fujimura excelled as Brangäne; indeed, it seems to be more her role than Kundry.  There was true musical satisfaction to be gained from the ‘rightness’ of her phrasing, as well as dramatic truth from the honesty of her character portrayal. Her second-act Watch was radiant, euphonious, somehow sounding as if from a greater distance than the RAH organ, as if carried to us by an opportune, clement breeze. Andrew Staples put in excellent performances as both the Shepherd and the Young Sailor. The latter role, sung from above, was very nicely shaded, and with diction of an excellence that put many other cast members to shame. As Shepherd, his voice was audibly, somewhat awkwardly, more virile than that of the lamentable Tristan.

 

Robert Dean Smith was, alas, a grave disappointment as Tristan. From his ‘Fragt die Sitte!’ to Isolde, matter of fact in the wrong way, there was little dramatic involvement to be gleaned. He often sounded more like Isolde’s grandfather, about to expire, even in the first act, than her lover.  The orchestra, as guided by Bychkov, often  compensated for him, but it should not have had to do so.. When Tristan sang that he and Isolde were ‘ungetrennt’ (undivided), the division was all too glaringly apparent. It was not just that he lacked charisma and volume, though he certainly did, but that his performance throughout seemed entirely unaware of the deadly eroticism in which it should have been soaked; he often sounded more like an attempt, a couple of sizes too small, at Beckmesser, than Tristan. Boaz Daniel proved an ardent Kurwenal, his ‘Heil Tristan!’ a proper reminder of a doomed attempt to return to the chivalric mores of Lohengrin, of the day. David Wilson-Johnson’s Melot was unpleasantly blustering, the only other real disappointment in the cast. Kwangchul Youn gave an excellent performance too. I have often found him a little dull in the past, but here his tenderness and passion showed King Marke to be a true human being, not a mere saint. Had I been Isolde, I should certainly have stuck with him on this occasion.

 

The combined male forces of the BBC Singers and BBC Symphony Orchestra made for a goodlier crew than I can recall, a veritable male voice choir. There was no compromise between heft and diction; the former quality had the excellent consequence of already emphasising the threatening nature of the external, phenomenal world of the day. If not necessarily a Tristan for the ages, then, there remained much to admire.

 

Salzburg Festival (8) - Die Soldaten, 20 August 2012

Felsenreitschule

Wesener – Alfred Muff

Marie – Laura Aikin
Charlotte – Tanja Ariane Baumgartner
Wesener’s Old Mother – Cornelia Kallisch
Stolzius – Tomasz Konieczny
Stolzius’s Mother – Renée Morloc
Countess de la Roche – Gabriela Beňačková
The Young Count – Matthias Klink
Desportes – Daniel Brenna
Pirzel – Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke
Eisenhardt – Boaz Daniel
Mary – Morgan Moody
Haudy – Matjaž Robavs
Obrist – Reinhard Mayr
Three Young Officers – Andreas Früh, Paul Schweinester, Clemens Kerschbaumer,
Andalusian Woman, Servant – Beate Vollack
Countess de la Roche’s Servant – Werner Friedl
Petty Officer, Captain – Volker Wahl
Madame Roux – Anna-Eva Köck
Young Petty Officer, Young Hunter – Rupert Grössinger
Drunken Officer – Frederik Götz
Eighteen Officers – Svilen Angelov, David Fliri, Benedikt Flörsch, Simon Förster, Frederik Götz, Rupert Grössinger, Ludwig Hohl, Robert Huschenbett, Nikolaij Janocha, Petter Lindahl, Thomas Mahlknecht, Matuš Mráz, Kiril Stoyanov, Alexander Tröger, Tihomir Tonchev, Justus Wilcken, Wei Wei, Domink Worni
Artist – Katharina Dröscher

Alvis Hermanis (director, set designs)

Eva Dessecker (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Gudrun Hartmann (assistant director)
Uta Gruber-Ballehr (assistant set designs)
Götz Leineweber (dramaturgy)

Jazz Combo:

Johannes Bauer (guitar)
Tony Ganev (double bass)
Rudolf Matajsz (trumpet)
Petkov Nedialko (clarinet)

Markus Stepanek, Hans-Josef Knaust (organ)

Michael Richter (celesta)
Jory Vinikour (harpsichord)
Günther Albers (piano)
Christoper Brandt (guitar)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

Images: Salzburg Festival/Ruth Walz

 

 

If some of the decisions concerning opera at this year’s Salzburg Festival may have raised eyebrows – the Magic Flute eschewing the Vienna Philharmonic for the astringent sounds of Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s Concentus musicus Wien, programming of both Carmen and La bohème – then this staging of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten offered redemption. A towering masterpiece of twentieth-century opera, its demands have so far ensured that performances have proved infrequent, to put it mildly. A festival such as Salzburg’s is just the place to begin to put that right. This first night would have granted every member of the audience ample justification to return home and to agitate for a staging as soon as possible. A proviso, of course, must be that such a work is performed well, for a poor or even mediocre performance does no one any favours; Salzburg’s production passed the test of excellence with flying colours.

 

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra was on form as wonderful as that for La bohème a couple of nights previously, a rebuke to those who would question its versatility. It would be folly, of course, to doubt the VPO’s recalcitrance in certain situations; this orchestra, rightly or wrongly, needs a conductor it respects. Then, just as it has performed challenging modernist music with enormous success for conductors such as Claudio Abbado and Pierre Boulez, it will play Zimmermann as if to the manner born. One might have thought Zimmermann as regular a guest at the Vienna State Opera as Mozart. Clearly the Viennese trust Ingo Metzmacher and enjoy playing for him; he certainly had the measure of Zimmermann’s score, much as one could imagine the work’s first conductor, Michael Gielen, having done. Rarely, if ever, though, could such depth as well as precision have been heard from the orchestra, here joined by a number of other fine musicians, placed on either side of the Felsenreitschule’s pit.

Marie (Laura Aikin), Desportes (Daniel Brenna), Wesener (Alfred Muff)

 

It is no exaggeration, moreover, to say that there was not a single weak link in the cast; this was a true company effort, a state of affairs all the more extraordinary given the size of that cast. Laura Aikin’s Marie showed herself as true a successor to Berg’s Marie as Zimmermann’s opera is to Wozzeck. Aikin’s was an astounding performance, marrying precision and intensity to the nth degree, never sentimentalising – though perhaps there is not time to do such a thing – and thereby rendering the plight of the poor girl who becomes the ‘soldiers’ whore’ (Soldatenmensch) all the more chillingly plausible. Gabriela Beňačková was, quite rightly, acclaimed with enormous warmth as the Countess de la Roche. It is not just that hers is such a sympathetic character, seeking to understand Marie and to take her in, but that Beňačková, radiant of voice, treated and expressed the character’s situation with every bit as great humanity as one would expect in Mozart or Janáček. Alfred Muff’s Wesener, Marie’s father, was a conflicted soul, drawing one in and yet counselling against all-too-easy empathy. Tomasz Konieczny’s Stolzius was a tragic, lovelorn, and yet determined, figure, affording a fine contrast with Daniel Brenna’s Desportes, whom he would poison to avenge Marie’s fate. Brenna managed to render credible both the initial charms to which Marie fell victim and increasingly the repellent nature of the character and his class once he and it had had their fill. Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke made a typically memorable high-tenor impression as Pirzel, Boaz Daniel similarly impressing in philosophical debate as the army chaplain. But as characters came and went, interacted with each other, with memories of each other, their scenes unfolding or flashing past sequentially or simultaneously, the cast was so much more than even the sum of its very fine parts.

Captain Mary (Morgan Moody), Reinhard Mayr (Obrist,
Count of Spannheim), Ensemble

 

Alvis Hermanis’s production proved both faithful and unfaithful, productively so. Some may well have regretted the loss of film, but if film may be employed to clarify staging, I see no reason why staging should not be employed to attain similar ends to film. Perhaps there were elements in the production that simplified the almost diabolically – in a good sense – complex action of Zimmermann’s opera, but there was still a great deal with which to be taxing one’s mind, eyes, and ears. The stage constantly reinvented itself, and yet constantly remained the same. Some action took place behind windows through which we observed observers observing. Who were the voyeurs, the soldiers masturbating as they watched Marie, or us watching them? The use to which the Felsenreitschule itself was put was highly inventive, the building coming into its own through lighting (Gleb Filshtinsky) and increasing encroachments of the stage action. Marie’s – or rather Katharina Dröscher’s – tight-rope walking above the stage may not have been the most subtle of metaphors, but it enthralled, highwire ‘spectacle’ in the best sense. Indeed, so taken in was I that I initially thought it was Aikin, and that somehow she would walk the tightrope and sing – a tightrope of its own. Equally inventive use was made of straw, absolving us of the necessity to watch every act, whilst enticing us and yet reminding us of the eighteenth-century setting. Costumes, by the way, were almost impeccably ‘traditional’, and there were real horses as well as a stone Felsenreitschule horse's head to be provocatively ridden, not that ‘traditionalists’ would be likely to have much interest in a work such as this, preferring the vulgarity of opera as ‘beautiful’ entertainment.  

Katharina Dröscher

 

The truest compliment I can pay to this fine production is to say that, emotionally drained though I was by the end, I had no other desire than to see it again, to experience more of what, musically and scenically, I had doubtless missed from a single performance. Quotations, most celebratedly of all, the chorale, ‘Ich bin’s, ich sollte büßen,’ from the St Matthew Passion, inevitably haunted, questioned, brought into shattering perspective the entirety of the German musico-dramatic tradition that arguably had begun with Bach. Yet this was no exercise in nostalgia: it was raw, contemporary music drama (just, of course, as Bach’s works are, or would be, were  they performed as something more than a pseudo-archaeological exercise). The ‘excessive demands’ (Metzmacher) placed upon the singers in the third toccata, with which the fourth and final act opens, remained long in the minds ear, the most extreme complexity and simultaneity of all, here performed live rather than recorded, as has often been the case, at the composer’s recommendation. Emphasis was lain throughout upon live performance rather than recording or other electronic elements: not the only solution to the score’s difficulties, but on this evidence, a more than plausible, quite convincing, path to follow – assuming the requisite technical excellence. What perhaps lingered longest in the memory, indeed still does, was the final dying away into nothingness, Marie’s destruction at the hands of a brutal, militarised society finally put beyond doubt. For all the complexity of the work, Metzmacher’s words provide a simple, yet all-encompassing conclusion: ‘Marie lies destroyed on the ground. The father [who has failed to recognise in this beggar his own daughter] walks slowly away. One instrument after the other stops playing. The light is extinguished.’