Lohengrin, Royal Opera, 7 June 2018

Royal Opera House

Images: Clive Barda

King Henry the Fowler – Georg Zeppenfeld

Lohengrin – Klaus Florian Vogt

Elsa – Jennifer Davis

Friedrich von Telramund – Thomas Johannes Mayer

Ortrud – Christine Goerke

King’s Herald – Kostas Smoriginas

Brabantian Nobles – Konu Kim, Thomas Atkins, Gyula Nagy, Simon Shibambu

Pages – Katy Batho, Deborah Peake-Jones, Dervla Ramsay, Louise Armit

Gottfried – Michael Curtis

                                        

David Alden (director)

Paul Steinberg (set designs)

Gideon Davey (costumes)

Adam Silverman (lighting)

Tal Rosner (video)

Maxine Braham (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus and Extra Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Andris Nelsons (conductor)

Elsa (Jennifer Davis) at her wedding

Since returning to London in January, I have been heartened by much of what I have seen – and indeed heard – from the Royal Opera. If Barrie Kosky’s Carmen proved something of a flop, there has been much to ponder and indeed to inspire from Krzysztof Warlikowski’s From the House of the Dead, superlatively conducted by Mark Wigglesworth, and most recently, George Benjamin’s new operatic masterpiece, Lessons in Love and Violence. David Alden is perhaps not the most obvious directorial choice for Wagner, though his ENO Tristan – the first I saw – certainly had its merits. He pretty much had the field to himself, though, given that Covent Garden’s previous staging was the lamentable fancy-dress pageant served up by Elijah Moshinsky, its final reheating coming as late as 2009. On the face of it, Alden’s move to the 1930s must have come to a shock to the more reactionary elements always present in a Wagner audience. That it does not seem to have done so suggests either a welcome opening of minds or something – at least, according to one reading, like Lohengrin – rather less substantial than one might have initially presumed.

I wish it had been the former but Alden’s production ultimately proved conventional, all too conventional: more a potential shell for something more interesting than a remotely finished – even ready – production in itself. Designs and some stage direction, notably that of the chorus, are suggestive, but where is the dramatic grit? To offer a Lohengrin come as redeemer to a society broken by war is of course to follow Wagner precisely; to shift the actual war to something closer to our modern concerns is no bad thing at all. He unifies a people in disarray through his charismatic authority, yet ultimately cannot fulfil his duty and rejects his people.

Lohengrin (Klaus Florian Vogt) and Telramund (Thomas Johannes Mayer)

Ortrud (Christine Goerke) and Telramund

Nazi parallels, or rather premonitions – like Marx, Wagner is often at his very strongest in pointing to where the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would go wrong – are obvious, yet none the worse for that. Even that level of critique will, after all, stand as a rebuke to those who follow that disingenuous old Nazi, Curt von Westernhagen, railing against the fresh theatrical wind of the 1970s: ‘Directors who deem themselves progressive when they transform the Ring back into a drama with a “message” have no idea how regressive this approach is in relation to the genesis of the work itself.’ Westernhagen’s scholarly methods are now as discredited as his ideology. Disciples remain, though, and few things get them so hot under the collar as Nazis on stage. Clue: they like it, really.

That said, simply to update is never enough. Indeed, it is to adopt the Westernhagen fraternity’s strange delusion that a production more or less is its designs (here, handsome indeed, for which great credit should be accorded to Paul Steinberg in particular). In many ways, when and where something is set, or is not, is the least interesting thing of all; at best, it is a starting-point. Save for that arresting, almost cinematic (Riefenstahl at a push) direction of crowd movement, its dramatic import obvious yet undeniably powerful, there is not much to get one’s teeth into. If the setting remains largely undeveloped, too much also seems awkwardly reminiscent of other productions. Had you never seen a German Lohengrin, you might remain, often literally, in the dark; Wagner and indeed many in his audiences surely deserve greater credit than that.

Henry the Fowler (Georg Zeppenfeld)

A King Henry whose hunched body language was a little too close to comfort to that of Hans Neuenfels’s Bayreuth production is one thing, but a falling of banners for war that aped the close of the second act of Stefan Herheim’s Parsifal is another again. If some point had been made about Wagner, the Nazis, and Bayreuth, it might have worked, I suppose; here, it seemed gratuitous and frankly derivative. What the point of describing the pages as ‘four women at the wedding’ may have been I do not know: if you like that sort of thing, then that will doubtless be the sort of thing you like. A sudden design apparition from Neuschwanstein seems merely a change of scene. Again, one can see why such an image might have a point in a fascist, even Nazi, setting, but it needs at some level to be made, not merely assumed. Dramatic motivation, then, largely eluded me. Such irritations pointed to a greater problem: a conceptual weakness at the heart. I suspect it can be remedied: if a shell, it is a fine shell. It will not, however, remedy itself.

Perhaps the same once had been true of Moshinsky. At any rate, this evening shared something else important with that final outing of 2009: musical excellence. Andris Nelsons, who conducted Neuenfels’s production at Bayreuth, was not at his strongest here, especially in the first act. Indeed, there both Nelsons and Alden seemed intent, consciously or otherwise, to underline what can often seem to be its rather static nature rather than to enliven the drama. However, Nelsons drew increasingly lovely playing from the orchestra, lower strings and woodwind in particular, and made often quite extreme second-act rubato – not to be confused with tempo variation – work, rather than seem merely mannered. His command of the architecture in the second and third acts impressed. Still more so did the outstanding singing from the chorus and extra chorus. William Spaulding’s work here is clearly reaping rewards, just as it did at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper.

Klaus Florian Vogt’s Lohengrin is a known quantity: known also, of course, to Nelsons from Bayreuth. I am less enthusiastic than once I was: the purity is less consistently apparent, the blandness more so. (Or maybe I am just tired of it.) However, it remains impressive on its own terms; one’s response to his singing will perhaps be more than usually personal. Replacing the originally advertised Kristine Opolais, Jennifer Davis impressed greatly as Elsa. This was by any standards a high-profile debut. Vocal and dramatic sincerity were matched by a security one had little right to expect. Thomas Johannes Mayer, also of recent Bayreuth fame, more than hinted at a properly complex Telramund, even if his artistry received little help from the staging. Christine Goerke’s Ortrud climaxed in properly blood curdling cries at the close, although again I had the impression a deeper production would have brought out something – well, deeper. Georg Zeppenfeld did what he could with the Neuenfels King-redux; that again was impressive indeed. Only Kostas Smoriginas, as his Herald, disappointed: often uncertain of verbal and musical line alike.

 

Ortrud waiting

The audience, part of one’s experience whether we like it or not – unless one happens to be Ludwig II, and even then… – proved something of a trial. Someone’s telephone vibrated throughout the first minute or so of the first-act Prelude, the culprit eventually shouting ‘Yes! I’m going to turn it off’. A friend heard someone else announce upon Lohengrin’s arrival: ‘I prefer it when he wears golden armour.’ Coughing, electronic terrorism, and inanity aside, they seemed to like the production: rarely a good sign. Given what they will boo… Still, there is, I am sure, room for something more to take shape within its framework; perhaps they will do so then. Moreover, there is, I assure you, a genuinely exciting prospect for the new Lohengrin at Bayreuth this year. At least on this occasion, my lips must remain better sealed than Elsa’s. The world, however, is likely to see a worthy successor to Neuenfels from Yuval Sharon, in a production that penetrates more deeply to the work’s essence and grapples with its implications.

Prom 59 - BBC SO/Bychkov - Elektra, 31 August 2014

 

Images: BBC/Chris Christodoulou
Dame Felicity Palmer as Klytemnestra

 

 

Royal Albert Hall

Elektra – Christine Goerke

Chrysothemis – Gun-Brit Barkmin

Klytemnestra – Dame Felicity Palmer

Orest – Johan Reuter

First Maid – Katarina Bradić

Second Maid – Zoryana Kushpler

Third Maid – Hanna Hipp

Fourth Maid – Marie-Eve Munger

Fifth Maid – Iris Kupke

Overseer – Miranda Keys

Young Servant – Ivan Turšić

Orest’s tutor – Jongmin Park

Aegisth – Robert Künzli

Justin Way (stage director)

BBC Singers (chorus master: Paul Wiegold)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Semyon Bychkov (conductor)

 

Anti-Strauss sentiment, Strauss-scepticism, call it what you will: it still runs high. In some ways, that is not a bad thing: the ‘case of Strauss’, which I have written about before and which I shall discuss further in a chapter of my new book, to be published next month, is complex and fascinating, and is certainly not to be resolved with a one-liner here or an affirmation or otherwise there. Strauss’s æstheticism, perhaps ironically, given its insistence upon the value of art as art, leads us to greater consideration of æsthetic questions than the work of many other composers. That holds even when, perhaps particularly when, one is not of a prosecuting party ranging from Karl Kraus (‘certainly more of a stock company [Aktiengesellschaft] than a genius’) to Stravinsky  (‘I would like to admit all Strauss’s operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant vulgarity. Their musical substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a musician today.’) However, even those who disdain much of Strauss’s later work – often, to my mind, for less than convincing reasons – will admit their admiration for Elektra. It may not be many people’s ‘favourite’ Strauss opera, but most, I suspect, will consider it his greatest. Adorno, who went to the extreme of claiming that ‘everything that follows Rosenkavalier  is either applied or commercial art,’ and who, in my view, quite wrongly, even took Strauss to task for the ‘entire final section of Elektra, [in which] banality is dominant,’ admitted the opera to a line of development ‘from Tristan to Elektra to Schoenberg’s Erwartung’.

 

And so, whilst in principle it was somewhat depressing that the Proms elected to perform the three most popular of Strauss’s operas for his anniversary season – surely if we were to hear, for instance, Friedenstag anywhere in this country, it would be here – it was difficult, both in principle, and certainly in practice, with so fine a performance, to object too strongly, or indeed at all. Justin Way’s semi-staging worked as well as it had for the Proms Ring last year. Often, though not slavishly, following Hofmannsthal’s explicit directions – Elektra and Klytemnestra did ‘stand eye to eye’, and to very good effect – it permitted the work to ‘speak for itself’, although in any case it generally does in full stagings, which tend perhaps more strongly to resemble one another than do those of any other opera that springs to my mind.

 

Semyon Bychkov, the Maids, and the Overseer

 

 

As with that Ring, the orchestra took centre stage, the BBC Symphony Orchestra on excellent form throughout. (The occasional moment of tiredness towards the end can readily be forgiven for any orchestra.) And likewise, we were fortunate indeed in the choice of conductor: Daniel Barenboim for the Ring; for Elektra, Semyon Bychkov, who was, if memory serves me correctly, the first conductor I heard in this work. Yet that should not be taken, any more than it had with a Ring that included Nina Stemme and Andreas Schager, to imply a downgrading of the vocal element. In proper Wagnerian style – and in this, if avowedly not with respect to metaphysics, or the lack thereof, Strauss remained a Wagnerian through and through – the various elements of the performance, even in a minimal staging, strengthened one another.

 

That could be heard in the first scene, in which a very nicely differentiated group of maids interacted with flickering intensity with conducting which really did emphasise that clichéd taking after Mendelssohn’s fairy music. The foresight of the Fifth Maid, Iris Kupke, was experienced as much in performance as in work. Miranda Keys’s Overseer was again well differentiated, though not exaggeratedly so, from the ‘mere’ maids. And then, in what might call the ‘interlude’ in which Elektra emerges from the house, Bychkov ensured that Strauss’s waltz writing disconcertingly reared its head and pointed ahead.

 

Christine Goerke’s Elektra announced herself in deeper voice than one often hears: more feminine, less harpy, though so certainly not lacking in volume where necessary. Sepulchral trombones complemented her lament, intensifying those baleful calls of ‘Agamemnon’ that were to follow. Throughout her lengthy soliloquy, Bychkov conjured up – and the BBC SO delivered – a truly Straussian orchestral phantasmagoria, in colour and in harmony. ‘Agamemnon! Vater!’: the orchestra sent shivers down the spine. But equally compelling was the tenderness from Goerke and orchestra alike, never more so than after ‘zeig dich deinem Kind!’ A daughter’s affection may have been twisted but, on one level, it remained childishly simple. Rhythmic and melodic details, for instance the baying of the dogs, both made their point in themselves and, when it came to material to be developed later on, sowed their musico-dramatic seeds with both mystery and expectant, Fatal clarity.

 

 

Gun-Brit Barkmin as Chrysothemis

The following scene, with Chrysothemis, was interesting. Elektra’s blood-curdling ‘spaltete dein Fleisch’ stood at one extreme. The flowering, in more than one sense, of Gun-Brit Barkmin’s Chrysothemis intrigued, if anything, more still. During her first lines, I wondered whether Barkmin would prove a little underpowered, even anonymous. But, as a panoply of woodwind colour to rival the composer’s ‘Indian summer’ worked its queasy magic, it became clear that this was a sister who would grow into her role at the crucial point: the voicing of what, in context, seems her very weird – or is it very ‘normal’? who knows any more? – obsession with child-bearing. Thereafter this was a woman indeed.

 

A woman indeed of a different nature is Klytemnestra. Her orchestrally-voiced arrival sent shivers down the spine, enhanced or perhaps ‘realised’ by Felicity Palmer’s splendidly grande-dame procession. If Palmer’s voice is vocally not what it was, it frankly mattered not a jot. But whilst this extraordinary confrontation worked itself out in words and singing, the orchestra broadened our terms of musical reference. You, yourself are a goddess, Elektra told her mother. What, then, did it mean to hear apparent echoes of Siegfried’s ‘Forest Murmurs’? Well, there is honesty in the German forest, but there is also redress, as Mime would find to his cost. The malevolent replanting of those Wagnerian seeds was suggestive, whether coincidental or otherwise. Fafner-like brass deepened the very real agony and sickness we heard from Palmer’s magnificently attentive outlining of that ‘Etwas’ which had fallen upon her. As for the intensity and sheer volume with which Goerke despatched ‘ich steh’ da und seh’ dich endlich sterben’ and likewise ‘der jauchzt und kann sich seines Lebens freun!’ What can one say other than superlative? Perfectly matched, by the way, by the orchestra as they stood, in that aforementioned scene, ‘eye to eye’.

 

Brittle, sardonic, orchestral mock-heroism ‘accompanied’ the appearance of the Young Servant. Sheer orchestral depravity ‘beautifully’ captured, in all its bizarre mixture of sincerity and insincerity, Elektra’s hymn to her sister’s female form. And finally, the relief of Orest’s arrival: not quite the first male voice but, my goodness, it sounded as if it were! Johan Reuter’s delivery of this difficult role brought bluff anger rather than the more ‘intellectual’ approach of a Matthias Goerne. There is room for both, but here, Reuter felt ‘right’. The final recognition hit as it should: a truly shattering dissonance on Elektra’s ‘Orest’ would be followed up by too beautiful remembrance of her former self, bathed in a narcissism that seemed almost literally, or at least verbally, skin-deep.

 

I do not know whether Palmer delivered her own off-stage scream. Whoever did it deserves mention in her own right, for it vied with the orchestral response – and Goerke’s truly terrifying steely response: Triff noch einmal!’ No compassion here, thank you. Again, Strauss’s insidious waltzing proved thematically, dramatically pregnant in the scene with Aegisth (a competent but less than exciting Robert Künzli). Rosenkavalier seemed less around the corner than already present as, following Elektra’s strange courtesies, he entered the house.

 

Christine Goerke as Elektra

Somehow, the voices of the BBC Singers seemed more than usually akin to Elektra’s ‘voices’ in a psychological sense. It was probably partly a matter of not seeing the singers, perhaps also a matter of the acoustic. Whatever the reason, it added an interesting, appropriately psychoanalytical deadliness to the final events. The insincerity, in context, of C major may here have been Strauss’s – and Bychkov’s, and the orchestra’s – crowning achievement. To speak, as Adorno did, of the discontinuity ‘between the wildness of most of Strauss’s music in Elektra and its blissfully triadic conclusion’ seems at the best of times wilful. Blissful? About as much as Handel’s use of the major mode in the ‘Dead March’ from Saul. After a brief period of ‘release’ with a ‘true’ operatic duet between the sisters, there came the final dramatic bludgeoning. And Elektra fell as shatteringly on stage as she did in the orchestra.

 

Elektra, Royal Opera, 23 September 2013



Image: Clive Barda
Ägisth (John Daszak) and Elektra (Christine Goerke)

 

 

Royal Opera House

First Maid – Anna Burford

Second Maid – Catherine Carby
Third Maid – Elizabeth Sikora
Fourth Maid – Elizabeth Woollett
Fifth Maid – Jennifer Check
Overseer – Elaine McKrill
Elektra – Christine Goerke
Chrysothemis – Adrianne Pieczonka
Klytämnestra – Michaela Schuster
Confidante – Louise Armit
Trainbearer – Marianne Cotterill
Young Servant – Doug Jones
Old Servant – Jeremy White
Orest – Iain Paterson
Orest’s Companion – John Cunningham
Ägisth – John Daszak

Charles Edwards (director, set designs, lighting)

Brigitte Reiffenstuel (costumes)
Leah Hausman (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Andris Nelsons (conductor)

 
Charles Edwards’s production of Elektra, first seen in 2003, and revived in 2008, now returns to Covent Garden under the baton of Andris Nelsons. There remains much to admire in the staging, though I found myself entertaining a little more in the way of doubt than I had on previous occasions. My impression was that it had become gorier, and it may well have done, though by the same token, it may have been that I was now more attentive to what it had in common with, rather than what distinguished it from, David McVicar’s Royal Opera Salome. (McVicar was present in the audience.) Violence had always been present, not least in the shocking torture of the Fifth Maid, her twitching and indeed at one point revivified corpse, long present on stage to remind us, lest we forget. Playing with time, the ‘present’ of Strauss and Hofmannsthal meshed with ancient Mycenae, or rather with an idea thereof, remains a strength. A sense of the archaeological is offered by Agamemnon’s bust, and the shadow it casts: at one point as towering as the motif associated with the murdered king. Perhaps that sense might have been stronger; there are moments when the relationship seems unclear and a stronger impression of recreating a past that never was might assist. But it is quite possible that that is the point; we are after all in the world of dreams, of psychoanalysis. A splendid touch in that respect is Elektra’s desk. One might read its role in various ways; I could not help but think of a more or less explicit consultation, not only when Klytämnestra comes to her in need of interpretation, but also in the scene with Ägisth. Piercing the darkness with the fierce ray of her desk lamp heightens that impression, Elektra’s lighting his way viewed from a new standpoint, both literally and more figuratively. A particularly troubling sense of familial sickness – I realise that in this opera, that is something of an understatement – is offered by the relationship of Elektra and Orest. It appears that there is something rather more than sibling affection between them, though that is not laboured. It certainly seems confused, as it would be: fleetingly maternal, fleetingly paternal, at one point apparently sexual. Or maybe it is that Edwards’s staging allows the audience the space to offer its own interpretation; whatever the ‘intention’, the result is provocative in the best sense. My present taste may lie more with relative abstraction; that, however, is no reason to dismiss other approaches.

 

‘Ob ich nicht höre? ob ich die Musik nicht höre?’ Elektra asks, commencing the last and most delirious of her monologues: ‘Do I not hear it? Do I not hear the music?’ She maintains that it comes from inside her, though we, in a sense, know that at best to be a partial truth; Strauss’s orchestra has shown itself true to Wagner’s Opera and Drama – for Strauss, the ‘book of all books’ on opera – conception of the orchestra as the modern Attic chorus. Far too often, however, we find ourselves lamenting the tone-deafness of stage directors, wishing to ask them, in the nicest possible way, or perhaps not, whether they do not hear it, do they not hear the music? Therein perhaps lies the greatest strength of Edwards’s staging, aided by Leah Hausman’s movement, in that it clearly hears Strauss’s music. It is not enslaved, but rather liberated by it. There are instances where movement is clearly tied to the score, others when it is more a case of heightening of tension on stage relating to the orchestra as much as to the libretto. Lighting – Edwards’s own – is as attentive and revealing as movement.

 

And what music, it is, of course, in what must surely be Strauss’s greatest opera. (It may not be our favourite, but that is a different matter.) Nelsons was often impressive, at his best offering an object lesson in transition: Wagner’s ‘most subtle art’, as it should be in Strauss too. The recognition scene was but one exemplary instance. Not only was dramatic process tightly and meaningfully controlled, with an aptly unsettling sense of release that was not at all release when Elektra’s slinky ‘Orest! Orest! Es rührt sich niemand’ stole upon us; Strauss’s phantasmagorical cauldron of orchestral colour here and in many other cases had been stirred so as to provide just the right sense of dream-world and nausea for us to receive what was unfolding. Indeed, there were numerous instances in which I heard the score sound closer to the Strauss of earlier tone poems than I can recall; it is doubtless no coincidence that Nelsons has been exploring that orchestral repertoire in some depth of late. Other transitions were handled with less security; the second scene, for instance, seemed to follow on abruptly from the first, indeed from a prolonged caesura rather than musico-dramatic inevitability. There may well, however, be good reason to believe that the flow will become still more impressive as the run of performances continues. Likewise, if Nelsons’s ear for colour seemed somewhat to desert him at the very close, that may well be rectified, and may have been more a matter of orchestral exhaustion than anything else. The orchestra itself was on good rather than great form, but it was only when one made comparisons, as inevitable as they are odious, with one’s aural memory – always a dangerous, deceptive game – thinking, for instance, of Karl Böhm’s magnificent Staatskapelle Dresden, or of Daniele Gatti’s astounding Salzburg Festival account, the Vienna Philharmonic at the very top of its form, that discrepancy became apparent.

 

Christine Goerke’s assumption of the title role may  be accounted a resounding triumph. There was dramatic commitment, to be sure, but also vocal security and clarity that are far from a foregone conclusion in this treacherous role. If there were moments of strain, I either did not notice, or have forgotten them; this was very much a sung rather than screamed Elektra. Adrianne Pieczonka gave the finest performance I have heard from her as Chrysothemis, her voice more focused and with considerably greater bloom than I recall from, for instance, her Salzburg Marschallin. (Perhaps this role is a better fit vocally for her, or maybe her time has more fully come.) Michaela Schuster threw herself wholeheartedly into a splendidly malevolent portrayal of Klytämnestra, with John Daszak as her husband finely managing the tricky balancing act between portrayal of a weak, contemptible character and convincing assumption of the role. Iain Paterson offered a typically musicianly, quietly chilling Orest. Smaller parts were all well taken, the individual lines and timbres of the five maids impressively apparent.

 

At the end, then, I felt duly bludgeoned, as that least affirmative of C major chords dealt the final blow. There is no redemption: a concept that Strauss never understood, as witnessed by his bemusement over Mahler’s desire for that most Wagnerian of goals. Here, however, as is not always the case with the composer, thoroughgoing, post-Nietzschean materialism and dramatic truth go hand in hand. Adorno’s attack upon Strauss’s concluding music seemed to me more wrongheaded than ever: testament, surely, to a staging and performance worthy of Elektra.