Hercules, Komische Oper, 3 March 2024

Hercules – Brandon Cedel
Dejanira – Paula Murrihy
Iole – Penny Sofroniadou
Hyllus – Caspar Singh
Lichas – Susan Zarrabi
Priest of Jupiter – Noam Heinz
Choral soloists – Martin Fehr, Taiki Miyashita

Director – Barrie Kosky
Designs – Katrin Lea Tag
Dramaturgy – Zsolt Horpácsy, Johanna Wall
Lighting – Joachim Klein
Assistant director – Tobias Ribitzki

Choral Soloists of the Komische Oper (director: David Cavelius) 

Orchestra of the Komische Oper

David Bates (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Dejanira (Paula Murrihy), Lichas (Susan Zarrabi)

Handel’s ‘musical drama’ – an interesting term, though we can sometimes make too much of such things – Hercules has never proved especially popular. The composer’s public at the time and for a long while after tended to prefer his Biblical oratorios. Since the revival and, latterly, the craze for his Italian opere serie, they have ruled the roost. Semele, another ‘musical drama’, ‘after the manner of an oratorio’, has fared better since its modern stage revival in Cambridge in 1925. Handel never intended it to be staged, though the librettist (William Congreve) and original composer (John Eccles) had. It perhaps comes closest to Hercules, whose first staging was also in 1925 – the very beginning of the modern Handel revival – though in Münster. Whilst perhaps not the most compelling, dramatically, of all Handel’s works, Hercules, to a libretto by the Anglican clergyman Thomas Broughton, is certainly not the least either. This new production from Berlin’s Komische Oper affords a valuable opportunity, certain shortcomings notwithstanding, for news audience to see and hear it for themselves—many doubtless for the first time, the present writer included. 

In a programme interview, Kosky tells how and why he has long found Handel’s oratorios, to which he reasonably assimilates Hercules, more compelling than his operas. Me too, though we seem to stand nowadays in a minority. One question presented by staging the oratorios (broadly considered), though, relates to how to treat the chorus. Its dual role in participation and commentary dates back to Attic tragedy, of course, as well as holding an obvious point in common with Bach’s Passions. There remains the question of how to stage this, especially when the chorus is being asked to sing some notably difficult music conceived for singers standing with their scores rather than darting around the stage. (Insofar as the Italian operas have ‘choruses’ at all, the music is far simpler, and in general we might consider them simply to be the cast coming together.) One needs an excellent chorus, of course, which was certainly the case. Its singers and their director, David Cavelius, deserve much praise; audience appreciation was rightly enthusiastic on the opening night. Kosky involved them directly in the action where required, including a disturbing scene of largely implicit violence when Iole is brought home (for Hercules, not for her) as spoils of war. There is also mesmerising choreography for the reflective role in which singing and movement combine to evoke and perhaps even provoke the deadly jealousy forming in Dejanira’s fevered imagination.

 

Chorus and Dejanira

For, as Kosky points out, Handel focuses everything not on Hercules but on his wife, Dejanira. ‘Everyone is constantly talking about Hercules,’ as is typical for a hero, or an idea of a hero, ‘but all one sees is one theme – and that is jealousy, which the chorus also sings about at a central point. What is jealousy, what does jealousy do, what is fantasy, what is projection, what is reality? Dejanira spins herself through jealousy into madness,’ in her obsessional belief, quite unfounded, that her husband has deserted her for the foreign princess Iole. Kosky’s suggestion that Broughton probably read Othello strikes me as eminently plausible, and certainly makes its way in here, with a good touch too of Ovid. This unfolds in an unsparing visual environment, situated at the dramatic trisection of antiquity, its eighteenth-century revisitation, and our twenty-first-century revisitation of both. Glaring light and whiteness impart a sense of nowhere to hide. We may not wish to watch at times, but we must—just like those taking part. Katrin Lea Tag’s designs here play a crucial role; indeed, one cannot imagine the action without them. A statue of Hercules, ever present, make Kosky’s point about constant reference when the drama is not really ‘about’ Hercules at all.

Dejanira, Hercules (Brandon Cedel)

We knit our own heroes, Dejanira to extremes, and in this respect Paula Murrihy’s performance must be accounted a striking success. Murrihy has much to do and not only did it very well indeed, but functioned, as she must, as the dramatic lynchpin. As Hercules, Brandon Cedel has a somewhat thankless part, but presented it with conviction and due collegiality, doing just what was required of him to have the apparently strange focus of the drama work. Kosky has an inventive solution, which tightens the bonds of family loyalty further, to the question of the role of the messenger Lichas. Handel made it an oddly large role; that is, oddly, until one knows that it was on account of the popularity of its creator Susanna Cibber. For revivals, it was cut. Kosky elects to make the herald, always sung by a woman, Hercules’s younger sister. It works well, I think, and helps make sense of something that can otherwise seem a little odd. Susan Zarrabi’s heavily accented performance might have been a little much for some English speakers, but it was certainly animated and dramatically committed; we should remind ourselves that German- and Italian-speakers face similar distractions frequently. Penny Sofroniadou’s Iole was beautifully, sparklingly sung, with just as keen an eye and ear for drama, her initial, well-nigh regal disdain for Hyllus, Hercules’s son, duly wounding. Caspar Singh offered a subtle, often moving performance of that difficult role: very much in his father’s shadow, his mother’s too, in need of space to become his own person. The small role of the Priest of Jupiter was well taken by Noam Heinz, from whom I shall likewise be keen to hear more. 

Hyllas (Caspar Singh), Dejanira, Lichas

The one significant drawback for me was David Bates’s direction of the orchestra. Clearly intent on making it sound as little like a modern orchestra as possible – in which case, why use one? – Bates often sounded as if he were presenting a caricature of rebarbative ‘early musicking’. Not only was there no longer line; there were barely orchestral phrases at all, which made for a peculiar contrast with such excellent singing. If it was, alas, too much to hope for even the slightest manifestation of string vibrato. The orchestra doubtless did as it was asked, but lunging extremes of tempo only highlighted the strange assumptions underlying Bates’s performance. Quite how we have backed ourselves into a corner where all manner of explorations are permitted on stage, yet a single, highly questionable idea of ‘correctness’ (or otherwise) in instrumental performance is all that can be allowed, I really do not know. One can only hope that, some day, wiser, more humane counsels will prevail. There are certainly far more alluring Handel performances on period instruments, let alone the all too rare occasions when more properly ‘modern’ readings are permitted.

Hercules, Hyllus

It would doubtless be an exaggeration to describe Hercules as an ‘Anglican work’, but it chimes well enough with a broadly Christian yet latitudinarian outlook. If part of the reason for the work’s ‘failure’ – it received only two performances in its initial run at the Haymarket – was, as has been claimed, its lack of moral and spiritual uplift, then it is tempting to conclude the audience was not paying as much attention as it might. From a modern standpoint, it might all seem a bit clean, the deus ex machina in need of questioning or undercutting. Kosky does not opt to do so too overtly, letting the work speak largely for itself. Yet in continuing his focus on Dejanira, for whom this is certainly not a happy ending, one can continue, as it were, to hear her pain, renewed and intensified by the sounds of rejoicing that surround her.

Così fan tutte, Komische Oper, 14 January 2024

Schillertheater

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Fiordiligi – Penny Sofraniadou
Dorabella – Susan Zarrabi
Guglielmo – Hubert Zapiór
Ferrando – Caspar Singh
Despina – Alma Sadé
Don Alfonso – Seth Carico
Sempronio – Amer El-Erwadi
Tizio – Goran Jurenec

Director, set and costume designer – Kirill Serebrennikov
Implementation of direction, choreography – Evgeny Kulagin
Staff director (Spielleitung) – Martha Jurowski
Co-costume designer – Tatyana Dolmatovskaya
Assistant set designer – Nikolay Simonov
Dramaturgy – Beate Breidenbach, Maximilian Hagemeyer
Lighting – Olaf Freese
Video – Ilya Shagalov

Choral Soloists of the Komische Oper (director: Jean-Christophe Charron) 

Orchestra of the Komische Oper 

Erina Yashima (conductor)  

There should never be a run-of-the-mill Così fan tutte: Mozart’s most exquisite opera, arguably his profoundest, and perhaps ultimately his greatest. (It is, at any rate, my current favourite, and not only because I heard it last.) This was certainly not it, whether in origin, direction, or performance. Indeed, this staging from Berlin’s Komische Oper is an outstanding achievement in almost every respect, giving one much to think about, much to relish, and much by which to be discomfited. On top of that, it is a long time since I have seen and heard so thoroughly accomplished a cast.

 

Kirill Serebrennikov’s production was first seen in Zurich in 2018, albeit under highly unusual circumstances stemming from the director’s house arrest. His choreographer and assistant Evgeny Kulagin, here credited with ‘Umsetzung Inszenierung,’ took Serebrennikov’s place in person, passing to Serebrennikov’s lawyer film recordings of what was developing in rehearsal for the director in turn to comment on via video message. Hence the somewhat involved list for the production team, which I thought important to include as a whole and with as clear a translation of terms as I could. Following several extensions to his house arrest, followed by conviction for fraud, probation, dismissal from the Gogol Centre, and bans on travel and leadership of any cultural institution in receipt of government support, Serebrennikov’s suspended sentence was eventually cancelled by another court on account of good behaviour and the travel ban lifted. Having been permitted to travel to Germany in 2022, he was able to direct the Berlin incarnation of the production, of which this is now the first revival. It would be difficult to deny that these circumstances make the production’s achievement all the more impressive; it certainly suggests some truth may yet lie in the double-edged, Romantic adage that adverse circumstances can foster great artistic achievement.    

Onwards, in any case, to the production ‘itself’. It has already begun when one enters the theatre. A horizontally split set (levels 1 and 2) reveals at this stage – it remains, whilst the settings it reveals change over time – two gym settings, male and female, extras working out. Exercise of a different kind, orchestral tuning, provides the accompaniment. The more physical variety onstage continues into the Overture, skipping noises proving something of an aural irritant, albeit a minor issue in the greater scheme of things. Guglielmo and Ferrando arrive, and eventually Don Alfonso, with much stereotypically, indeed performatively masculine behaviour to be observed as the stage is set. It soon becomes clear, though, that whilst Alfonso has some sort of hold over the men at the gym – not only our pair of lovers – he is also a deeply damaged person, broadening and deepening his characterisation from the typical stock-character cynic. This may be connected with war, which looms eerily large for a production conceived in 2017-18; I could not help but wonder whether some changes had been made in light of the invasion of Ukraine, which Serebrennikov publicly opposed. For, when Guglielmo and Ferrando are sent off to combat – it is unusually clear what might be involved, coffins and all, the women in mourning – the military video game whose control Alfonso is trying, indeed struggling, has him shaken, traumatised. Is that merely a metaphor? Perhaps. We may remember Monteverdi’s Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi and any number of other literary and artistic connections and constructions. Revelation of the betrayal or defeat he has suffered in battles of the heart, via a display of text messages, offers further context but does not exclude something darker and deeper still. My sense was of a veteran of both types of conflict—and more.

 

For when the opposing ‘team’ takes stock, led by Despina, now not a servant but a therapist, she shows Fiordiligi and Dorabella slides of typical male behaviour, especially in the armed forces. What better way to show her patients – the word is actually used in the subtitles, which alternate as faithful translation and guide to the production – what their lovers will really be up to, if they are still alive? Her visual aids pursue a number of lines, some frankly feminist, some more cynical. The therapeutic turn that has informed many of Dmitri Tcherniakov’s more recent productions (e.g. Carmen, Les Troyens, and the Ring; as well, I am told, as his own Così, which I have not seen) is first brought on board but also brought into question. If anyone is perpetrating a hoax here, it is arguably Despina, who also, far from coincidentally, seems the most resilient of the lot.

Clichés that elsewhere have become tired, for instance the use of mobile telephones, both for messages and pictures, are for once used to genuine dramatic ends. This is, after all, how modern communications work—and modern relationships, even sex, too. Nowhere is this clearer, yet also more genuinely complex, than when Guglielmo and Ferrando are replaced by their ‘Albanian’ – in this case, first Arab – counterparts, Sempronio and Tizio, here played by actors (Amar El-Erwadi and Goran Jurenec) whose time at the gym seems to have been still more successful. The ambiguity over whether they are actual, hired replacements – I think they almost certainly are – is such that one can take different views. ‘Different views’, though, may be understood in a different sense, action (of various kinds) being viewed from another level via video link (not necessarily ‘inspired’ by the director’s treatment, but gaining greater meaning nonetheless through that connection) or even ‘in person’ but as ghostly presence, apparently unseen by and indeed deceased for Fiordiligi and Dorabella. There are especially cruel touches, such as thinking all is well, only to hear the lavatory flush from the en suite bathroom: all very much in the spirit of those extraordinary horns of cuckoldry Mozart employs at crucial points in the score. Actual horns are donned by both ‘Albanians’ at one point, suggesting an assumption of quasi-divine status, Dionysus or even Zeus, enabling and initiating congress and conquest. 

For men now are as objectified as women. As a gay man, Serebrennikov will know this all too well, but so do many younger heterosexual men too. This remains a heterosexual opera on the most fundamental level, without say the step into overt lesbianism taken by Stefan Herheim in his reimagination of Die Entführung aus dem Serail as an exploration of love between and beyond the sexes. On the other hand, the bodies of all concerned, but especially Sempronio and Tizio, are so resolutely in the gaze of us all that boundaries blur and dissolve whether we like it or not—and the implication would be that most, perhaps all, of us do. We are all actors, playing roles here, Ferrando explicitly in assuming the metatheatrical, ambiguous with respect to diegetic status, role of ‘a singer’ in ‘Un’aura amoroso’, ‘credited’ at its close by Don Alfonso. That extends, moreover, to gender roles, surely a tribute to the much-maligned yet ever-relevant Judith Butler. It ultimately comes as no surprise, perhaps even as a strangely satisfying fulfilment, that the title scrawled at the back by Don Alfonso is corrected to ‘Così fan tutti,’ tellingly ‘girlish’ hearts atop the ‘i's a further turn of the dialectical gender-screw (as it were).

 

And yet, this remains a deeply disillusioning experience for all, the modern anomie of what are either hotel rooms or a modern apartment so fashionable it might as well be, not the least of the bridges constructed between deeper meanings to be drawn from Mozart (to a lesser extent, Da Ponte too) and Serebrennikov’s conception. Both women have incomplete, neon-lit crucifixes above their beds: probably only a ‘design feature’, but extending into something more in Fiordiligi’s case, allied to her little shrine (to what, though?) assembled for ‘Per pietà’, when she drags it across the floor, failing twice to maintain the electric connection. For Mozart, these parodies of opera seria have a message that is, among other things, deeply theological; that may or may not be the case here, but it is certainly not to be excluded. This is, after all, a Passion of Passion to rival – to my mind, even to surpass – Tristan und Isolde.

Credit should again be accorded the company’s extras (Komparserie) who had much to do throughout and did it well, not least dressing the two brides in full traditional Russian wedding dress – they might almost have been auditioning for Les Noces – only to have to undress them once again in acts of inflation, deflation, and revelation. In a brilliant coup de théâtre, we turn suddenly to an interpolated musical reminiscence – or premonition – of Don Giovanni’s Stone Guest Scene. The Albanians, seizing hold like twin Commendatores of ‘their’ women’s hands, may be standing in judgement over them or may simply be trying to keep them. It is a disruption that can doubtless only be visited once, unique to this production, but a highly productive one, reminding us that even in the most hedonistic, secular, ‘sex-positive’ society, the question of sin, of remoteness from the divine, does not disappear, far from it; we simply pretend it has and mistake euphemism for theodicy. As desolate as ever, probably more so, the characters attempting to draw some sort of lesson from events that have shattered their world seem quite unaware that, on the level above, an actual fire has begun to blaze. Narcissism, after all, is not the least of our contemporary sins—and/or ailments. 

All this, or most of it, would go for little, were it not brought to life by fine performances. This it certainly received. I can honestly find nothing of any importance to which to object, and much to praise. If I write less about them on this occasion, it is not because I consider them less important; for one thing, they are not to be extracted from what has been said above, but rather very much part of it. In any case, Penny Sofraniadou and Susan Zarrabi portrayed, from the outset, properly distinguished Fiordiligi and Dorabella, clean of line, if hardly of deeper intention. Both drew on varied palettes of vocal colour that could blend where dramatically and musically necessary, without loss to identities that shifted yet never merged. Much the same could be said – and this is Mozart’s laboratory of musical quasi-geometry at work, as well as their artistry – of the Ferrando and Guglielmo of Hubert Zapiór and Caspar Singh. Equally adept as actors and singers, their exploration of wounded masculinities was every bit as revealing as that of Seth Carico’s uniquely subtle Don Alfonso. Ferrando, as usual, had two rather than his full three arias: a pity but not the end of the world. Alma Sadé’s Despina likewise not only acquired new depth as Despina, but contributed that greater range. (And what a relief it was, for once, not to have to endure the usual ‘silly voices’.)

 

Erina Yashima’s direction of the orchestra proved similarly impeccable. Hers was not the sort of deeply personal reading that leads one to speak of a particular standpoint, ‘Böhm’s Così’ or ‘Muti’s’; but it performed a different, more readily theatrical function, near-faultless in its incitement, mirroring, and at times questioning of the action onstage. That I barely noticed her tempi as such speaks for itself: there was a ‘rightness’ in context that could not be gainsaid. Nor could the excellence of the orchestral playing in a score in which any false move, any slight infelicity of intonation or phrasing, will stand out like a sore thumb. The Komische Oper may be known primarily for its emphasis on theatre, but that should not mean the orchestra matters less, rather that it is part and parcel of the action. At any rate, so it sounded here. They may not have been singing, but our ‘Albanian’ actors Amar El-Erwadi and Goran Jurenec also contributed greatly to the action and its ultimate achievement. If, as I suggested earlier, the production was able even to reinvigorate well-worn directorial clichés with new meaning, I may as well offer as my own ‘a true ensemble performance’. Do not take my word for it, though: if possible, try to see and hear this Così for yourself. It has, for whatever this may be worth, my highest recommendation.