Die schweigsame Frau, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 22 July 2025

Images: Bernd Uhlig

Sir Morosius – Peter Rose
Housekeeper – Iris Vermillion
Barber Schneidebart – Samuel Hasselhorn
Henry Morosus – Siyabonga Maqungo
Aminta – Brenda Rae
Isotta – Serafina Starke
Carlotta – Rebecka Wallroth
Morbio – Dionysios Averginos
Vanuzzi – Manuel Winckhler
Farfallo – Friedrich Hamel

Director – Jan Philipp Gloger
Set designs – Ben Baur
Costumes – Justina Klimczyk
Lighting – Tobias Krauß
Video – Leonard Wölfl
Choreography – Florian Hurler

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin 

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Christian Thielemann’s first new production as music director at the Staatoper Unter den Linden was always going to be a special event. A declaration of intent, no doubt: of respect for the house’s traditions, whilst subtly extending them. For all his superlative strengths, Daniel Barenboim was not much of a Straussian, at least in the opera house—and I think that points to a more fundamental difference between Thielemann and his predecessor, perhaps to be explored more fully another time. In any case, one might say that that regard for canon and tradition, whilst understanding and indeed aiding its mutability was tailor-made for the art of both Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig. So indeed it proved to be. 

Thielemann has been pretty much universally acclaimed for his Strauss—and rightly so. His ability to ‘play’ the orchestra as if it were a keyboard instrument is remarkable, yet equally worthy of note – and of hearing on this occasion – was his Barenboim-like willingness to have the musicians engage in Kammermusik that could be shaped, if needed, into something larger but never greater. The Staatskapelle Berlin, always the jewel in this house’s crown, played not only with perfection but palpable commitment. It could be a Mozart serenade writ large via Wagnerian polyphony; it could be a telling arabesque duet with voice; it could be a sly piece of word painting; it could, just occasionally, be the full orchestra letting its presence felt, but also felt as necessary. Everything felt ‘natural’, however much art there might be in that; everything felt both rehearsed and spontaneous. Most important of all, the orchestra told us what mattered most—to Strauss and, one hopes, to us, at least during those magical hours spent in the theatre. Art is not to be equated to life; it is both less and more. Strauss knew that; so did Thielemann and the orchestra; so, I think, did we. 

For Strauss – Zweig too – is here, as ever, intimately and, yes, beautifully concerned with music and its history, with art more broadly and its history too. The canon is not an immutable thing He can do no other, which is part of the wonder of his aestheticism. The craft from both is astounding, especially when one does not notice it. Everywhere an allusion, everywhere an illusion—all the more so when one barely notices. Some of that is doubtless unconscious; one might say the same of performances and staging too. None of us works, thinks, makes art, or indeed makes society in a vacuum. Is/was Henry and Aminta’s sheltering in another room whilst Sir Morosus finds rest – low D-flat for contrabassoon, organ, and his ‘Dank!’ – an echo of Walther and Eva doing likewise at the close of their second act in Die Meistersinger? It looked and even sounded like it, but may also be a function of genre, of the unconscious, even of chance. We make our own connections, though we are led along the way. Actual quotation is less mistakeable, or is it? How many of us waver over Rossini-Monteverdi here? Presentiments too: how much of Sir Morosus is there in Capriccio’s La Roche, or vice versa? Is he Baron Ochs partly wiser, even transfigured, or is that to partake in the cardinal sin of sentimentality? Perhaps it is all, as the Marschallin would counsel, a farce, no more but also no less. Yet what knowing irony there is in that claim, as Straussians will know all too well. 

Let us leave that on one side for the moment to consider Jan Phillip Gloger’s production. Thielemann and Gloger have collaborated at Bayreuth and in Dresden, so again this might offer a harbinger of sorts. I had my doubts at points yet ultimately was won around by Gloger’s concept, not least since it developed so finely in collaboration with musicians onstage and in the pit—what opera is or should be, and be about. There is none of Ben Jonson’s London here, though predicaments that faces Londoners still more than Berliners – yes, I know the latter will protest, but they should try living here – come to the fore: initially, the housing crisis, but increasingly that of loneliness and how society treats the elderly in an age of generational conflict in which the latter may seem to hold too many of the cards. (They do not, of course, or not straightforwardly; it is a useful culture-war camouflage for capital. But enough of that for now.) As the opera begins, we see increasingly desperate ‘refreshing’ of a screen by someone attempting to find city accommodation – many of us have been there – followed by the stage revelation of a wealthy, single, older person living in an expansive apartment to himself, attended to by housekeeper and barber (here, more general ‘wellness’ consultant). Yet we are also confronted – I can see, even hear, the raised eyebrows – with statistics before the second and third acts, that is on the curtain during the intervals, that challenge our preconceptions, for instance how many older people who might wish to move to smaller accommodation might end up paying more in rent if they do so (and they might not be able to).

That, however, becomes ever more a context than concept. More fundamentally, the tale is one of conflict and reconciliation, furthered by understanding and willingness to accept the new. A trick, in many ways quite horrible, is played on Sir Morosus. The characters relish it in some ways, yet are also not without guilt, faithfully following Zweig and Strauss. One may or may not like the garish way in which Sir Morosus is married to his apparently ‘silent’ woman, Timida/Aminta, but it makes its dramatic point. Perhaps some of the metadramatic interventions are, like the statistics, a bit crass, but they do no real harm. Holding up a sign saying ‘Regietheater’ both alerts some, less receptive in the audience, to what might be happening not only onstage but to the stage that has been enacted onstage, and may even remind them that all this is not nearly so new as some would have them believe. No one, after all, was a greater practitioner of the cause they excoriate than Richard Wagner, whose Hans Sachs, one of Morosus’s many progenitors, reminds us: ‘Es klangt so alt und war doch so neu!’ 

Reconciliation is arguably more problematical in Die Meistersinger than here, the world of what is ‘deutsch und echt’ notable by its absence (which may, admittedly, prove to some still more problematic). For the time being, though, we can share in the old man’s joy in true acquaintance with, perhaps even growing love for his nephew and adoptive son and his wife, their troupe, and even a little of the music he once so detested. We can share in theirs for him too, heartwarmingly portrayed – for once, I mean no irony, and Strauss appears not to do so either – in the closing display of a Morosus Community, in which none need be silent and, just as important, none need be alone. One can be, of course, and Morosus is grateful for time on his own, for peace and quiet, for the music to have stopped, but as a free choice rather than faute de mieux. Solitude, as any Romantic will tell you, can be a good or bad thing; it depends very much on context and will. 

Stage performances were outstanding. As Sir Morosus, Peter Rose was everything would have hoped for, placing the character somewhere justly between Ochs and La Roche – I have been treated to the former, though not yet to the latter – but above all creating an individual human being of his own, whose ‘difficulty’ we increasingly understood and sympathised with, coming to know a somewhat different person than the one we had assumed he was. His way with Zweig’s German was second to none. Siyabonga Maqungo presented an ardent, lovelorn, equally human Henry, well matched to Brenda Rae’s Aminta. Rae played that role in a very different production (Barrie Kosky’s) the only other time I have seen the opera in the theatre. Here, her vocal glitter and precision were matched, indeed exceeded only by her humanity. The animating presence of Samuel Hasselhorn as the barber Schneidebart was a joy from start to finish, as finely conceived theatrically as it was musically. It was a similar, if more fleeting joy, to welcome Iris Vermillion back to the Berlin stage as Morosus’s housekeeper. There was the finest sense of company from all concerned, not least a chorus superbly trained by Dani Juris, which reciprocated the ensemble favour in appearing very much as a cast of individuals brought together. 

This proved, then, an excellent and deeply moving evening. Strauss and Zweig’s Schweigsame Frau sang in and for itself; but also for music; for opera; for Berlin; and, I like to think, for this exiled Berliner back in town for all of twenty-two hours, a good few of them, like those of Sir Morosus, spent asleep before returning to the city in which the opera ‘should’ be set and in which Jonson’s Volpone not only is set but was first performed. These three-and-a-half hours, though, proved more than worth the journey, a reminder less of the horrendous world around us – though that made its presence softly, touchingly felt – than of what, if we can make it a little horrendous, we might actually live for. That is, it reminded us what Strauss and his aestheticism are ultimately concerned with and why this work from the 1930s, derived from and transforming an English comedy of more than three centuries earlier, might yet matter to us in 2025.

‘Wie schön ist doch der Musik!’ And just perhaps, as Morosus continues, ‘aber wie schön ist, wenn sie vorbei ist!‘ The music was indeed beautiful, and there was unquestionably something poignant, even painful in the beauty of its fleetingness, of its passing. That it cannot be grasped is worth our grasping; in that way and in reflection both upon it and upon its passing, it will often remain with us all the longer. As ever, at least in a performance worth its salt, one does not want the Straussian epilogue to end, but it does and it must, and we are better for it. And with that, both my opera season and that of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden draw to a close. The latter’s next will open with Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Ring, conducted by Christian Thielemann.

Munich Opera Festival (2) - Semele, 18 July 2023

Prinzregententheater

Semele – Brenda Rae
Jupiter – Michael Spyres
Apollo – Jonas Hacker
Athamas – Jakub Józef Orliński
Juno – Emily D’Angelo
Ino – Nadezhda Karyazina
Iris – Jessica Niles
Cadmus, Somnus – Philippe Sly
High Priest – Milan Siljanov

Claus Guth (director)
Michael Levine (designs)
Gesine Völlm (costumes)
Michael Bauer (lighting)
rocafilm (video)
Ramses Sigl (choreography)
Yvonne Gebauer, Christopher Warmuth (dramaturgy)

Bavarian State Orchestra
LauschWerk (chorus director: Sonja Lachenmayr)
Gianluca Capuano (conductor)

 

Images: Monika Rittershaus

I was sceptical, I admit, for the first two acts of Claus Guth’s new production of Semele, but it came together and offered an anthropological and psychoanalytical interpretation of Handel’s opera such as I have not encountered before. It is not really my way of thinking, but that is neither here nor there. And what I had initially seen as a disappointingly ‘stylish’ (that is, stylish, but not much more) production, rather in the manner of Christof Loy, albeit with suggestions of something closer to Romeo Castellucci, proved considerably more than that, demanding that the end be read back into the beginning, the work very much treated as a whole. Semele meets Die Frau ohne Schatten? Not quite, yet not so far off either. And if my initial response to ‘why not?’ might have been ‘why?’, a good case was made. 

At the centre of Guth’s production – and this is, of course, shorthand for the production team as a whole – is a wedding, that of Semele and Athamas. That is how the work begins in any case, but here it extends over the entire three acts. Not only is the closing, alternative wedding, in which Ino takes Semele’s place, very much the same thing; no one has actually gone away, and time seems to have stood still. During that standing – should that make any sense – and partly superimposed upon it, is the action that leads to that replacement and Semele’s displacement. Guth’s reckoning seems to be that the apparently empty ritual of the modern, secular wedding is anything but. Indeed, its importance may in some respects actually have grown as people endlessly reproduce their ‘experience’ for the world to see. Depressingly or otherwise, marriage and its status are here to stay. After all, the promise of female and subsequently queer liberation from the deadly institution has largely been replaced with that of ‘equality’ within.

Semele and her doubts thus become all the more interesting. We have seen her and her vanity as manifestations of celebrity culture, whether ‘then’ or now. But what if she is actually right, even if not for entirely the right reasons? Has she seen a truth – withdrawn, if you like, the Schopenhauerian veil – and been traumatised so that her immortality is that of a ghost, albeit one who will bear Bacchus? To some of us, it makes more sense to use the Greek Dionysus. In a sense, then, The Bassarids, Dionysus’s revenge, awaits: Handel and Henze rather than Handel and Hofmannsthal. Apollo’s prophecy is brought to instant life as Semele sits, no longer ecstatic (screams of delight at the end of the first act), terrified (screams of fear at the end of the second), but numb save for her cradling role, to quote Andrea Leadsom, ‘as a mother’. The festivities continue without her, though Ino’s sisterly concern seems genuine. Perhaps, notwithstanding a greater love than what had essentially been an arranged marriage, she even fears amidst the rejoicing that she will make the error Semele managed, however catastrophically, to avert. There is much to disentangle, to consider, even to deconstruct here, but that broadly is what I took from the production. 

Not that it is all sober and serious. There is a crucial element of display which might initially seem superficial but proves rather more than that. Dance is employed, not only as ‘movement’ but as entertainment within an entertainment. In between – wherever that may be and whatever that may mean – the bored Semele finds herself unmoved by whatever show the increasingly desperate Jupiter puts on for her. In a stroke of luck, though, Guth has in Jakub Józef Orliński a breakdancer as well as singer at his disposal. When brought to life by Jupiter, suddenly the faltering Athamas can sweep Semele off her feet. That, intriguingly, is the dreamed (?) entertainment that fulfils her wishes. When the spell is cancelled, Athamas returns to earth, presumably remembering none of what had happened, if indeed it had. (It is a pity Guth resorts to having him take off his glasses to gain confidence and attraction, but there we are.) 

In the title role, Brenda Rae proved fully equal to the role’s challenges and added a few more of her own in the ornamentation stakes. Her performance was always tailored to the qualities of her voice, rather than sopranos who might have taken it on in the past, and it showed. Coloratura was spot on and, more to the point, a tool of the drama. Michael Spyres’s Jupiter proved strangely likeable – in a good way – and again musically outstanding. Orliński’s display of various kinds was typically excellent; he likewise offered a vividly human portrayal, as did Nadezhda Karyazina’s Ino. Emily D’Angelo’s Juno offered a decidedly class act, and all the smaller parts were well taken.

Jupiter (Michael Spyres), Semele (Brenda Rae)

If the first scene had a few too many disjunctures between chorus and pit, such difficulties were resolved thereafter. (It is perhaps worth recalling at this point that Handel’s oratorio writing, which is what it is, was never intended to be staged and presents very particular challenges for such a performance.) The young singers of LauschWerk acquitted themselves very well, both as singers and actors, Munich’s Statisterie also contributing considerably to the greater good. Gianluca Capuano’s direction of the Bavarian State Orchestra was, especially once past those initial teething difficulties, estimable and refreshingly non-doctrinaire. There were moments of real power and grandeur, sadly so often lacking in modern Handel performances. There was intimacy too, of course, as there were fireworks. Indeed, the range of Capuano’s interpretation, seemingly very much in sympathy with Guth’s, was not the least quality to a fine evening in the theatre.

Semele, Athamas (Jakub Józef Orliński)

Salzburg Festival (6) – Mozart, Die Zauberflöte, 27 August 2022

Grosses Festspielhaus

Images: SF / Sandra Then

 
Sarastro – Tareq Nazmi
Tamino – David Fischer, Mauro Peter
Queen of the Night – Brenda Rae
Pamina – Regula Mühlemann
Three Ladies – Ilse Eerens, Sophie Rennert, Noa Beinart
Papageno – Michael Nagl
Papagena – Maria Nazarova
Monostatos – Peter Tantsits
Speaker, First Priest, Second Armoured Man – Henning von Schulman
Second Priest, First Armoured Man – Simon Bode
Grandfather – Roland Koch
Three Boys – Stanislas Koromyslov, Yvo Otelli, Raphael Andreas Chiang
Old Papagena/Cook – Stefan Vitu
Third Priest – Valérie Junker

Lydia Steier (director)
Katharina Schlipf (set designs)
Ursula Kudrna (costumes)
Olaf Freese (lighting)
Momme Hinrichs (video)
Ina Karr, Maurice Lenhard (dramaturgy)

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera (chorus director: Jörn Hinnerk Andresen)

Angelika-Prokopp-Summer Academy of the Vienna Philharmonic (stage music)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Joana Mallwitz (conductor)

When Lydia Steier first presented her Salzburg Magic Flute in 2018, the world was, as they say, a very different place. The trials of the intervening years have left their mark on this wholesale revision. So, I think, has more general experience. Perhaps it is also a matter of my being more receptive; it is always difficult to know about oneself. (These are all, by the way, surely themes of the opera, as well as of this production and its way into the world.) At any rate, where I was far from convinced by its earlier, circus incarnation—not on principle, Achim Freyer’s enchanting, classic production remaining one of my favourites—I found myself intrigued and involved by many aspects of this Neueinstudierung.

It takes place in an upper-class household shortly before the outbreak of the Great War. Parallels, sadly, speak all too well for themselves here. Following an argument over dinner—staged as an overture pantomime—the three boys are sent to their room, and their grandfather reads them a story, his narration largely though not entirely replacing Schikaneder’s dialogue. (It is a pity, but Steier in the programme makes a good case that, given the realities of theatre and rehearsal, even at a Festival such as this, despatch of the dialogue by an international cast will often leave a good deal to be desired.) A fairytale unfolds, in words (by Steier and dramaturge Ina Karr, paying homage to venerable collections such as those of the Brothers Grimm), the imagination of grandfather and boys alike, and thus also in gesture and music. Members of the household—family, servants, and visitors—furnish the cast of the Singspiel. Tragedy from the grandfather’s past informs the action, when, in a magical feat fully worthy of the opera, his late wife, who took her own life, steps out of the painting on the wall. Will Tamino and Pamina fare better? Perhaps that hope, that intent, informs the story the captivating Roland Koch continues to tell.

Steier captures well many of the work's ambiguities, rightly saying (in a programme interview) that ‘there is no black or white in this opera, only grey’. Or rather a multitude of colours, but perhaps that amounts to the same thing ethically. In the second act, it becomes clear that a male-dominated society, Sarastro’s, will lead the boys—and the world—to war. There is a degree of excitement to that for the boys, of course, but we, quite rightly, fear. The sermonising of Sarastro and his order should not be taken at face value. Perhaps ‘wisdom’ is not always what it seems, and Papageno (the butcher’s boy) might have a better idea. Pamina’s boldness, quite different from that of the mute, veiled women we see elsewhere, permits her entry. But perhaps there was no right path after all; that will most likely be a story for another day.

Joana Mallwitz’s conducting was to my ears considerably more successful than that of her 1998 predecessor (Constantinos Carydis). It is fresh, almost modest, certainly worlds away from a Klemperer or a Böhm (or a Colin Davis, for that matter). But the production teaches us to beware male authority figures. In any case, this is clearly how Mallwitz hears the music; she and the Vienna Philharmonic communicate well its inner life, its sheer variety and, ultimately, many aspects of its miraculous unity.

Tareq Nazmi’s Sarastro was in something of a similar vein: less stolid than sometimes one hears, though with enough pomposity to fit role and production. Brenda Rae’s Queen of the Night startled in offering much more than mere set pieces; within the confines of the role, she hinted at greater humanity, more of a back story, and she acted as well as sang. An indisposed Mauro Peter’s last replacement, David Fischer—Peter continuing to act the role onstage—impressed greatly as Tamino. He would have done regardless of the circumstances. Ardent, sweet-toned, and well able to shape a clean yet infinitely touching line, Fischer offered Mozart singing of the first rank. Regula Mühlemann’s Pamina, possessed of clear inner resolve, likewise touched the heart-strings, not least in a well-judged ‘Ach, ich fühl’s, which resisted the unaccountable fashion of taking it as fast as possible. Michael Nagl’s lively Papageno chose to look on the brighter side of life, but hinted, sometimes more than that, at a broader emotional hinterland too. The chorus, unseen (Covid-safe, perhaps), impressed throughout.

Special mention, though, should go to the three members of the Vienna Boys’ Choir, Stanislas Koromyslov, Yvo Otelli, and Raphael Andreas Chiang: on stage pretty much the whole time, now with important speaking and acting roles, in addition to their singing, all of which was accomplished with convincing, indeed outstanding results. Maybe there is, after all, hope for a European future, whether in musical terms or beyond.

 

Die Zauberflöte, Royal Opera, 15 September 2021

Royal Opera House

Tamino – Bernard Richter
Pamina – Salome Jicia
Papageno – Huw Montague Rendall
Queen of the Night – Brenda Rae
Sarastro – Krzysztof Baczyk
Monostatos – Michael Colvin
Papagena – Haegee Lee
Speaker – Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Three Ladies – Alexandra Lowe, Hanna Hipp, Stephanie Wake-Edwards
Two Priests – Harry Nicoll, Donald Maxwell
Two Armoured Men – Alan Pingarrón, James Platt
Three Boys – Rafael Flutter, Benjamin Jardim, Victor Wiggin

David McVicar (director)
Dan Dooner (revival director)
John Macfarlane (designs)
Paule Constable (lighting)
Leah Hausman, Angelo Smimmo (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Hartmut Haenchen (conductor)

Images: Bill Cooper. (C) ROH 2021

David McVicar’s 2003 Magic Flute production is really starting to look—more to the point, feel—its age. When fresh and new, especially when conducted by Colin Davis, it had a winning sense of theatrical wonder. If it never tried to plumb the work’s Enlightenment, Rosicrucian, or other depths, it left open possibilities in performance for others to do so. There was striking imagery in John Macfarlane’s designs and the story was told with clarity and intelligence—even if the final scene always seemed a little trite. Now, however, on its n^th revival, much has degenerated into mere silliness. There is enough there to remind us of what it once was, with stronger direction, but enough missing to have one regret its lack. Seeing the first night of this revival on the same day that Nadine Dorries was named Culture Secretary suggested a rare moment of Dorries enlightenment, given her strange claim that ‘left-wing snowflakes’ had somehow managed to ‘dumb down’ pantomime. Once we reached the stage of fart jokes, I began to wonder whether, politics and flakiness aside, Dorries might, perish the thought, have unwittingly hit on a point. I suspect coronavirus restrictions played a part, getting in the way not only of interaction but some of the more ambitious mechanical elements, but it was difficult not to think more interesting solutions might have been explored. Perhaps there was simply not enough rehearsal time.

Tamino (Bernard Richter)

Singing, at least, was in another league. Bernard Richter’s Tamino was everything one could reasonably expect: alluring of tone, careful of words, warmly sympathetic. Huw Montague Rendall’s Papageno proved both lively and thoughtful, likewise respectful of the text, whist appreciating that it is the starting- and not the end-point for a performance. His was a properly physical performance, which nonetheless appreciated that there is much more to the character than that. Salome Jicia’s beautifully sung and acted Pamina and Brenda Rae’s astonishingly accurate, far from entirely unsympathetic Queen of the Night impressed similarly. The Three Boys can sometimes prove a weak link, but not here, Rafael Flutter, Benjamin Jardim, Victor Wiggin comprising an uncommonly fine trio. Krzysztof Baczyk initially sounded a little underpowered as Sarastro, but came into his own in the second act. Choral singing had its moments, in positive and less positive ways.

Brenda Rae (Queen of the Night)

Hartmut Haenchen’s conducting could have been worse. Indeed, I have heard much worse, though a rushed, scrappy Overture, the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House on decidedly sub-par form, was cause for concern. Thereafter, breackneck tempi were not, let us be thankful, the order of the day. Indeed, speeds in themselves were rarely a problem. There was rarely much sense of grace, light, or indeed, where necessary, wisdom and weight in the orchestra and its direction, though; for that, the singers seemed more or less left to themselves. Instead, we trudged from number to number, sometimes even from bar to bar, without much sense of a greater whole. It was dutiful Kapellmeisterei, neither more nor less, a world away from Constantin Trinks’s revelatory Don Giovanni in here July.

An unruly audience did not help, applauding, even cheering etween and sometimes even in the middle of numbers: the second-act finale, for instance. That may occasionally, regrettably, happen, but Haenchen seemed to go out of his way to facilitate it. (He even turned for a bow at one point.) So, still more, did the revival direction, which went so far as to leave pauses without anyone or anything on stage. There is quietly accepting the near-inevitable; there can even be metatheatrical framing; there is also pandering to the lowest common denominator. If The Magic Flute is not about about gently, joyously assisting Bildung or self-cultivation, then I do not know what is. Ultimately, though, this speaks of how tired McVicar’s production has become. Time for a change, I think.

Papageno (Huw Montague Rendall)

When a work such as this is given in the original language—German at least, though little sounded especially Viennese—the dialogue needs greater attention. Fidelio often suffers similarly. Some performers were excellent in this respect, Richter and Montague Rendall first and foremost, and there were other perfectly reasonable performances. A few, however, spoke in bizarrely laboured fashion, at barely half speed. The effect was more weirdly expressionist than humorous. Given the dialogue fulfils a similar role here to recitativo secco, it deserves the same care in terms of pacing and rhythm, as well as pronunciation. Appearing to mean something would be a distinct advantage too, as would more accurate titles for those who insist on laughing uproariously at them.

For what it is worth, most of the audience seemed to love it. I was delighted to hear some excellent singing. The production may be seen on ROH Stream from Friday 1 October and is rep until 7 October.

Lulu, English National Opera, 9 November 2016

Coliseum



Lulu (Brenda Rae) and Dr Schön (James Morris)
Images: Catherine Ashmore

(sung in English)

Lulu – Brenda Rae

Countess Geschwitz – Sarah Connolly
Dresser, Schoolboy Waiter – Clare Presland
Painter, Second Client – Michael Colvin
Dr Schön, Jack the Ripper – James Morris
Alwa – Nicky Spence
Schigolch – Willard White
Animal Tamer, Athlete – David Soar
Prince, Manservant, Marquis – Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Theatre Director, Banker – Graeme Danby
Fifteen-year old girl – Sarah Labiner
Girl’s Mother – Rebecca de Pont Davies
Artist – Sarah Champion
Journalist – Geoffrey Dolton
Dr Goll, Police Commissioner, First Client – Rolf Higgins
Servant – Paul Sheehan
Solo performers – Joanna Dudley, Andrea Fabi 

William Kentridge (director)

Luc de Wit (associate director)
Sabine Theunissen (set designs)
Greta Goiris (costumes)
Urs Schönebaum (lighting)
Catherine Meyburgh, Kim Gunning (video)

 

ENO’s new Lulu proved another triumph for the company: just what ENO should be doing; just, indeed, what ENO is for. Will the cabal of management consultants and the Arts Council – or, as it insists on calling itself, sans article, ‘Arts Council England’ – listen? No, of course not. Their priorities, as they have shown time and time again, and with increasing vindictiveness, are quite different. Whoever met a neo-liberal artist or, indeed a neo-liberal art lover? (How I wish the translation had not left ‘Jungfrau’, or ‘Virgin’, tactfully in the German original…) One might, I suppose, quibble, whether ENO needed a new production; Richard Jones’s excellent staging might well have received another outing. (It should certainly have been staged more regularly than it was, but that, I suspect is more a comment on opera audiences than on artistic design.) But ENO did not mount this by itself; it performed us ‘citizens of the world’ a signal service by granting us the opportunity to see this much-discussed William Kentridge production, already seen in New York and Amsterdam. To say we should only have one, is akin to saying that because we have heard Daniel Barenboim play Beethoven, we have no need to hear Maurizio Pollini. It is the language of enemies of art, of accountancy; worse still, it is the language of those journalists determined never to miss an opportunity to find fault.  



Joanna Dudley, Lulu, and Schigolch (Willard White)

I shall admit to having been puzzled by some of the discussion I overheard. More than once I heard people complaining about there having been too much going on, even ‘sensory overload’. Have such people, I wonder, ever seen a Stefan Herheim production? More to the point, did they not think of how visual layering, the interaction between layers, between the visual and the aural, might actually be the point, a point very much in keeping with the work? What I saw was actually a relatively conventional, but highly theatrical telling of the story, enhanced, questioned, developed by an extension of its painterly imagery both in expressionistic drawings and film – an exhibition of Kentridge’s art may be seen presently at Whitechapel – and in the alluring yet sometimes ironic commentary, still very much in allusive ‘period’ style, by the silent artists, Joanna Dudley and Andrea Fabi. It was not remotely too much; indeed, like Berg’s score, it left me wanting more. This blackest of comedies gained in darkness – this was the night following the US election, something readily observable on almost every face in the house – and in sophistication of comedic response. I began to think of Berg’s musico-dramatic roots in Mozart and Wagner, in particular, and also of what he had in common with Strauss, another heir to that exalted pair, yet one far too little thought of has having much in common with the more overtly ‘progressive’, yet perhaps equally ‘nostalgic’, Berg.

 

Lulu and Geschwitz (Sarah Connolly)

Mark Wigglesworth’s conducting of the score, superlatively played by the ENO Orchestra was, of course, crucial in that respect. As Boulez, at work on the three-act premiere, once observed, ‘It is not so much the use of symmetry as the exploiting of multiple musical forms that is one of the most complex and attractive features’ of the music. Rather it in the confrontation between what Boulez broadly considered to be characteristic Mozartian number opera and the continuous – to which, I might add, increasingly symphonic – forms of Wagner that Lulu, in a different, or at least more complicated, less overt, way than Wozzeck will best find its performative voice. For Boulez, ‘The great advance from Wozzeck to Lulu lies in the fact that, although the scenes are still separated by interludes, there is now no “passage” between them.’ He found himself, unsurprisingly, especially attracted by the ‘fusion between continuity and formal separateness’. That, I think, was very much what we heard, and perhaps also what we saw, or at least what was suggested by what we saw, here. An especially fine woodwind section could not help but bring Mozart to mind: not just the Mozart of Così fan tutte but the composer of the wind serenades too. It was not for nothing that, in one of his final recordings, Boulez returned to Berg’s Chamber Concerto, coupling it with the Gran partita, KV 361. Melodies, harmonies, audibly generated before our ears by Berg’s endlessly fascinating compositional processes, and yet audibly as ‘free’ as they were ‘determined’, tantalised, instructed, informed, criticised, rather as the drawings, films, words, actions did before our eyes. This was no mere mirroring; it was mutual enhancement and elucidation, a new path through the Bergian labyrinth.



 

An excellent cast was necessary too, of course, and an excellent cast we had. Brenda Rae, who so greatly impressed me in the Bavarian State Opera’s Schweigsame Frau – now there is an interesting Strauss-Berg comparison to consider – shone at least as brightly as Lulu. The canvas on which we more or less uneasily project our fantasies of Lulu was no more empty than the changing visual decoration of the set, but, amidst, or perhaps beneath, the despatch of the coloratura and the seduction of the more conventional melodic line, there was a fine balance struck between nihilism and defiant character. Sarah Connolly’s Geschwitz certainly had the latter in spades; if I have seen and heard a stronger, more compassionate performance from her, I cannot recall it (which seems unlikely). If James Morris’s Dr Schön was at times a little stiff, there was certainly authority to be felt there, and his way with the words was especially admirable. Nicky Spence’s Alva struck another fine balance, in this case between the ardent and the cowardly; again, an admirable way with words and music projected ambiguity without easy, or perhaps any, answers. Willard White’s Schigolch was less caricatured, less repellent than one often experiences; such ambiguity was also decidedly a gain. There were no weak links, and a host of splendid character performances, artists such as Michael Colvin and Sarah Labiner particularly catching my ear. At least as impressive, though, was the ensemble work. In the Paris Scene, one might almost have thought this a crack new music ensemble, such was the clarity and confidence with which the lines were projected and with which they were interacted. It might almost have been a rehearsal for, or a response to, Strauss’s homage to his adored Così in Capriccio.

Munich Opera Festival (1) - Die schweigsame Frau, Bavarian State Opera, 5 July 2015

Nationaltheater, Munich

Sir Morosus – Franz Hawlata

Housekeeper – Okka von der Damerau
Barber – Nikolay Borchev
Henry Morosus – Peter Sonn
Aminta – Brenda Rae
Isotta – Elsa Benoit
Carlotta – Tara Erraught
Morbio – Christian Rieger
Vanuzzi – Christoph Stephinger
Farfallo – Tareq Nazmi
Papagei – Airton Feuchter-Dantas

Barrie Kosky (director)

Esther Bialas (designs)
Benedikt Zehm (lighting)
Olaf A. Schmitt (dramaturgy)

Bavarian State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Sören Eckhoff)
Bavarian State Orchestra
Pedro Halffter (conductor)

If Strauss’s operas of the 1920s receive far too little performing attention, especially in the Anglosphere, those of the 1930s seem to fare worse still. Quite why is anyone’s guess; no one, I assume, would declare Die schweigsame Frau a greater work than Elektra, but it is clearly a better work than so many that continue to hold the stage. German theatres are different, of course, not least those associated with Strauss personally, so to see Strauss’s collaboration with Stefan Zweig and, at one remove, Ben Jonson, a visit to the Munich Opera Festival seemed like a good idea.

And so it was. One could not reasonably have hoped to hear Strauss in better hands. Not only could I find no grounds to fault Bavarian State Orchestra – not that, in imitation of the third act’s divorce proceedings, I was attempting to find such grounds – the orchestra reaffirmed its credentials as a Strauss orchestra to be spoken of in the same breath as Dresden and Vienna, and arguably more reliable than either, certainly more so than the latter. Precision and warmth – though not too much – were very much the hallmark of this performance, wisely guided by Pedro Halffter, who seemed keen to impart to his account a sense of, if not quite Neue Sachlichkeit, then at least of something that made Strauss’s writing here particular rather than generalised. Pacing was impeccable, quasi-autonomous musical structures coming fruitfully into contact with verbal demands: the sort of thing one longs for, generally in vain, in Rossini. The Straussian orchestral phantasmagoria is never far away, of course, but there is perhaps less overt dazzle in much of the score than in, say, Rosenkavalier or Elektra; Halffter and the orchestra appreciated its subtleties and responded to them in equally subtle yet undoubtedly sure fashion.  

I doubt that Brenda Rae’s Aminta could be bettered in any theatre today (although how would one know?) Just as sure of note and line as the orchestra and with greater, contrasting warmth, especially at those wonderful revelations, through the disguise of Timidia, of the fundamental humanity of Aminta, this was a performance to savour. Much the same could be said of her partner in crime – and love – Peter Sonn’s splendidly lyrical, often imploring Henry. Franz Hawlata’s Morosus was very much a character portrayal: too many notes, as it were, lacked a little when it came to the demands of intonation. But such was Hawlata’s identification with and communication of the role, it would be churlish to complain unduly; the audience responded warmly, and it was right to have done so. The quicksilver vocal and dramatic qualities of Nikolay Borchev’s Barber – despite the hideous green tracksuit he initially had to wear – were rightly appreciated by the Munich audience too. Okka von der Damerau captured to near-perfection the disapproving, ultimately amusing qualities of the Housekeeper. There was depth in the casting too: splendid rivalry to Timidia came from Tara Erraught (with, insofar as I could tell, a fine line in Bavarian dialect) and Elsa Benoit. There was indeed an excellent sense of company: no one disappointed and almost everyone shone.

Barrie Kosky’s production: well, it was considerably better than his Berlin Figaro. But I cannot help but think that his matching of high camp – the tasteless pink designs of the first part of the third act, splendidly realised on their own terms by Esther Bialas – and custard-pie slapstick is not really a match for Strauss, or for Zweig. The subtle, even sometimes not-so-subtle, æstheticism of both artists may well benefit from deconstruction. But might not a production that takes to heart the circumstances of the opera’s composition – this, after all, was the opera occasioning Strauss’s fateful letter to Zweig, intercepted by the Gestapo, which led to Goebbels having the composer resign from Presidency of the Reichsmusikkammer – offer a more fruitful, deeper (yes, I know, how Teutonic of me!) mode of questioning?  There is no doubting the skill with which Kosky and his production team accomplish their vision; I wish, though, that I could discern more in the vision itself. According to Kosky, quoted in the programme, ‘We have placed our protagonist in a world which swings [schwankt] uncertainly between Mel Brooks, the Muppets, and Vienna’s Josefstadt [Theatre].’ Make of that what you will.

Even for those of us who remained sceptical about the production, however, there was much to enjoy, for which many thanks should go to the Bavarian State Opera. This would surely make an interesting prospect for ENO, whose Strauss record has recently been anything but conspicuous, to bring to London. Now, how about an enterprising company offering us Salieri’s Angiolene, also based (loosely) on Jonson’s Epiocene? Or even a hearing for Mark Lothar’s 1930 Lord Spleen, written for Dresden? (Does anyone know the music of Lothar, a Schreker pupil whom Max Reinhardt enlisted as Music Director for Berlin’s Deutsches Theater in 1933, whether for this or for anything else? I freely admit that I do not.) George Antheil’s Volpone, which apparently owes a good deal to Zweig’s German adaptation of Jonson’s play, also awaits revival. And yes, more Strauss would be much appreciated too: Feuersnot, Friedenstag, Die Liebe der Danae, etc., etc. Opera houses of the world, unite: you have nothing to lose but Timidia’s timidity!