Salzburg Festival (3) – ORF Vienna RSO/Pascal: Nono and Dallapiccola, 25 July 2024

Felsenreitschule

Nono: Il canto sospeso
Dallapiccola: Il prigioniero (concert performance)


Caroline Wettergreen (soprano)
Freya Apffelstaedt (contralto)
Robin Tritschler (tenor)
Tobias Moretti (reciter)

Mother – Tanja Ariane Baumgartner
Prisoner – Georg Nigl
Jailer, Grand Inquisitor – John Daszak
First Priest – Andrew Lepri Meyer
Second Priest – Timo Janzen

Bavarian Radio Chorus (chorus director: Peter Dijkstra)

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Maxime Pascal (conductor)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

If the ‘mainstream’ operatic fare of this year’s Salzburg Festival looks a little thin on paper – certainly for those of us resistant to the alleged charms of Tsar Currentzis’s new clothes – this concert of two masterpieces of mid-twentieth-century music proved a more or less unqualified success. It clearly made a deep impression on the Felsenreitschule audience, bearing witness in ways faithful to, yet extending, the intentions of the works’ creators: Luigi Nono, this year celebrating his centenary, and Luigi Dallapiccola, twenty years his senior.

Performances of Nono’s music have proved a welcome, sustained focus of the Festival during Markus Hinterhäuser’s intendancy. Il canto sospeso, once past a (very) brief early passage of uncharacteristically tentative playing from the ORF Symphony Orchestra under Maxime Pascal, received a performance of deep comprehension and commitment, framed by readings by Tobias Moretti of the texts set by Nono in what he considered, as in the music of Gesualdo, to be a ‘pluridimensional whole’, a counterpoint of sounds in musical declamation. Even in that first, orchestral movement, the burning humanity of Nono’s vision seemed to possess all who listened (and played). Taking its leave from Webern, Schoenberg, and Mahler too, the music’s fragility, darkness, and perhaps hope were rendered immanent. The second movement’s a cappella writing from the excellent Bavarian Radio Chorus offered a contrast remarkable for its different yet complementary conception of beauty and what – terrible and wonderful things alike – that might mean, or at least be. Solo vocal lyricism, Freya Apffelstaedt’s deep mezzo and Robin Tritschler’s passionate elegance included, cast its own spell as modernist fragments both retained their integrity and constructed something beyond themselves. The expressive quality of listening as well as writing and performing music can rarely have felt more apparent.

The Dies irae-like sixth movement could hardly have reflected Esther Srul’s 1942 witness more powerfully in the most ‘direct setting’; indeed, it would surely have done less so.

The gates are opening. Our murderers are here. Dressed in black. They’re wearing white gloves on their dirty hands. They drive us out of the synagogue in pairs. Dear sisters and brothers, how hard it is to say goodbye to this beautiful life. You who are left alive, never forget our innocent little Jewish street. Sisters and brothers, avenge us on our murderers.

Sweet musical agony at its close spoke of overwhelming pain within, turned inward and outward, as did a spellbinding, harrowing account of the next movement, for alto, chorus, and orchestra, in which every note as well as every interval seemed to take upon itself the weight of the world. Following Moretti’s last readings, the final two movements sounded as if more tender, readily communicative progenitors of Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles, profound differences in aesthetic and technique notwithstanding. Closing silence, magical yet fragile, may not have ‘transcended’ – can or should anything, following the horrors of which this music was born? – but it moved nonetheless, not unlike Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, which Nono greatly admired. 

Dallapiccola came from the generation in between Schoenberg and his posthumous son-in-law Nono, a living link to complement Nuria Schoenberg-Nono. In Con Luigi Dallapiccola for six percussionists and live electronics (1979), Nono honoured the memory of his predecessor, whom he had first met in 1947, the year in which Dallapiccola completed his one-act opera. Il prigioniero, here unstaged and seemingly in no need of staging, so powerful was the performance (as it usually is) from its twelve-note Puccini opening to the final question, ‘La libertà?’ and similar, unbroken silence to that which had followed Nono’s cantata.

There lies a world in between, though: one that belies the work’s brevity—again, as in Nono and indeed Wozzeck, whose example looms large. The passionate precision of that opening was matched and heightened by similar passion and precision from Tanja Ariana Baumgartner as the prisoner’s Mother, so vivid one could ‘see’ the scene she painted before us, dream of Philip II and all. The chorus’s interventions overtly reinstated a liturgical quality already implicit in Nono. All the while, the workings of the ‘system’ seemed not only to mirror but also to create an antinomy between freedom and determinism Dallapiccola may have inherited from Schoenberg, but which he made indelibly his own. Mahlerian marching, Tosca-like torture, and the twin contrast and complementary between the Prisoner’s anger and his Gaoler’s wheedling insinuation sent us hurtling toward the tragic denouement, hope unmasked in devastating inversion of Fidelio as the greatest torture of all. John Daszak and Georg Nigl gave defiantly un-score-bound performances, to which one might possibly have harboured purist objections on paper, but any such objections evaporated into thin air in the heat of such committed performance. Deafening bells and sonically disappointing organ likewise mattered not a jot in practice. This was a confession to which all, listeners and performers alike, must contribute and did.

Ensemble Modern/Benjamin - Milliken, Mason, Dallapiccola, and Benjamin, 5 March 2019

Wigmore Hall

Cathy Milliken: Bright Ring (UK premiere)

Christian Mason: Layers of Love

Dallapiccola: Piccola musica notturna

Benjamin: Into the Little Hill

Anu Komsi (soprano)

Helena Rasker (contralto)
Ensemble Modern

George Benjamin (conductor)

This week, the Wigmore Hall presents two concerts from George Benjamin and Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern, the first ‘at home’ on Wigmore Street, the second moving north to Camden’s Roundhouse. For the first, we heard Benjamin’s now classic first opera, Into the Little Hill, prefaced by three ensemble works by Cathy Milliken, Christian Mason, and, for the evening’s spot of ‘early music’, Luigi Dallapiccola.

An Ensemble Modern commission, here receiving its United Kingdom premiere, Milliken’s Bright Ring spoke, to quote the composer, of ‘fields of energy that I perceived whilst performing with the Ensemble Modern,’ an energy ‘of collaboration and interaction, whether pulsing or still (or both)’. I initially read such lines with a degree of scepticism, but having heard the piece, they made a good deal of sense, the idea furthered by the title reference to the line, ‘Bright is the ring of words’, from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem, and the rings of Saturn. Two violins vied with each other at the opening, joined by viola and intermittently others, in music that seemed to depict and/or express both pent-up rhythmic violence and something (ring-like?) more numinous, often led by flute or tuned percussion. There was, I think, a sense of something akin to an extra-terrestrial landscape and narrative, not in a filmic way, but perhaps more akin to the tone poems of the past. The close, in which a flickering cello line initiated a final explosion, thereafter subsiding, seemed once again to encapsulate that tension between ensemble and solo instrument, planet and ring, pulse and its withdrawal.

Christian Mason’s 2015 Layers of Love, written for and recorded by Klangforum Wien, announced itself with slithering, mysterious microtones. Movement in various ways, rhythmic and harmonic, was initially slow and hard won, yet undeniable. There was a strangeness that seemed more of this world than Milliken’s other, but I am not sure I could explain what, practically, I mean by that. Certainly there was drama, albeit less pictorial than in the previous work. More than once, Bernd Alois Zimmermann came to my mind: again, I am not entirely sure why, but think it may have had something to do with the ultimately achieved rhythms and their relationship to sound, not least from the double bass.

Dallapiccola’s Piccola musica notturna spoke with the distilled mastery of a true classic, as perfectly formed in work and performance as a piece by Mozart, Schoenberg, or Debussy. Indeed, rather to my surprise, I found something naggingly Debussyan, if only in correspondence, to the turns of several phrases, however different the serial method one could hear and feel as clearly as if chez Schoenberg or his pupils. It was not difficult to understand what might have attracted Benjamin to so exquisitely logical, warmly expressive a miniature. If ever there were a composer whose music we should hear far more often…

I had last heard Into the Little Hill only in September, in Berlin, also conducted by the composer, albeit with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Its small performing forces (two vocal soloists and ensemble), formal perfection, and dramatic power render it a highly attractive work for regular performance, whether on stage or in concert; yet possession of such qualities does not always translate into such (relative) popularity. In this case, as with Benjamin’s two subsequent, larger-scale operas, Written on Skin and Lessons of Love and Violence, it is heartening to report that widespread enthusiasm continues. Stravinskian incision, violence, and economy, marked the opening – not just for itself, but as the opening to this complete (compleat) drama of modern political life, more bitingly relevant, so it seems, with every hearing. Whether it were the cool hieratic (Symphonies of Wind Instruments?) quality to the Minister’s addressing the crowd; the latter’s controlled yet increasing hysteria; the deathly tension of electric woodwind lines as the Minister meets the Stranger; or the latter’s wheedling, seductive way (heightened no end by Anu Komsi in particular, likewise her bloodcurdling cries ‘Swear by your sleeping child’): one could have cut the air with a knife – and that only in the first scenes to Part One.

As so often, operatic mastery shows itself particularly in the interludes between scenes. What a composer says and does not, unconstrained by words and indeed voices, will often – not always – penetrate to the heart of his or her musical dramaturgy. Such was certainly the case here, both in work and performance; so too in orchestral writing and playing elsewhere, as for instance in the terror of the intricately inviting processional that underlies the scene between Mother and Child. ‘The rats will stream like hot metal to the rim of the world.’ Indeed, they would – and did. A similar observation might be made of the division into two parts, the latter’s opening sounding and feeling strongly as if a new act, as if marking the return from an interval for the opera’s final, fatal events to unfold. ‘And music?’ ‘All music – smiles the minister – is incidental.’ Not at all. For the true rodent ghosts were now in the machine; so too, led by far-from-incidental music, was the child whose grasping, mendacious politician of a father had stolen its future. The will of the people had been enacted: The Little Hill meant The Little Hill.

Today is Book Launch Day!

 

 

 

 

A favourite lecturer at Cambridge would, at least once per lecture, break down into a state of very public self-doubt. Having been discussing Plato's forms or Nietzsche's Hellenism, Professor X would suddenly look up, cradle his head in his hands, and turn to us students, asking, in Woody Allen-like fashion: 'I'm sorry. Am I boring you? Please forgive me. I'm trying to give some impression of the subject, but I fear I'm failing completely.' Needless to say, this display, stage-managed or otherwise, would prove a favourite moment of the lecture, actually encouraging our minds to focus once again. At the risk of boring you with self-repetition, my readers, I hope you will not mind my mentioning that today is the official launch day for my new book, After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from 'Parsifal' to Nono. (Not from 'Parsifal' to Wagner, as I mistyped it the other day, however intriguing that 'progression' might be.) I should like to thank from the bottom of my heart those who have encouraged me, whether early on, or during the past week or so. The interest shown by many of you has been heartening indeed, and even has me think that I might not be boring you after all.

 

As I have mentioned once before here, my publisher, the Boydell Press, is offering a 25% discount to my readers. For anyone who is interested, please click here. The link also offers a summary of the book's contents. I thought it might also be of interest to reproduce a few snippet, to give a flavour of my concerns.

 

 

 

 

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Wagner as 'purveyor of "Eurotrash"'? Over to you...

Special offer: 25% off my new book, After Wagner

My new book, After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from 'Parsifal' to Nono will be published this month. My publisher, Boydell & Brewer, has kindly offered 25% off the recommended price to readers of this blog. Please click here for the online flyer, which includes a discount code for any of you who might be interested. I reproduce below the blurb and front cover, which features a scene from Stefan Herheim's Bayreuth production of Parsifal:

 

 

This book is both a telling of operatic histories ‘after’ Richard Wagner, and a philosophical reflection upon the writing of those histories. Historical musicology reckons with intellectual and cultural history, and vice versa. The ‘after’ of the title denotes chronology, but also harmony and antagonism within a Wagnerian tradition. Parsifal, in which Wagner attempted to go beyond his achievement in the Ring, to write ‘after’ himself, is followed by two apparent antipodes: the strenuously modernist Arnold Schoenberg and the æstheticist Richard Strauss. Discussion of Strauss’s Capriccio, partly in the light of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, reveals a more ‘political’ work than either first acquaintance or the composer’s ‘intention’ might suggest.

 

Then come three composers from subsequent generations: Luigi Dallapiccola, Luigi Nono, and Hans Werner Henze. Geographical context is extended to take in Wagner’s Italian successors; the problem of political emancipation in and through music drama takes another turn here, confronting challenges and opportunities in more avowedly ‘politically engaged’ art. A final section explores the world of staging opera, of so-called Regietheater, as initiated by Wagner himself. Stefan Herheim’s celebrated Bayreuth production of Parsifal, and various performances of Lohengrin are discussed, before looking back to Mozart (Don Giovanni) and forward to Alban Berg’s Lulu and Nono’s Al gran sole carico d’amore. Throughout, the book invites us to consider how we might perceive the æsthetic and political integrity of the operatic work ‘after Wagner’.

 

After Wagner will be invaluable to anyone interested in twentieth-century music drama and its intersection with politics and cultural history. It will also appeal to those interested in Richard Wagner’s cultural impact on succeeding generations of composers.

 

 

 

Manning/Bernstein/Portugheis, et al. - Zemlinsky, Dallapiccola, Nono, Gerhard, and Schoenberg, 4 March 2014

Hall One, Kings Place

Zemlinsky – Three Pieces, for cello and piano

Dallapiccola – Ciaccona, Intermezzo, and Adagio
Nono – ¿Donde estás, hermano?
Gerhard – Dances from Don Quixote
Schoenberg – Pierrot lunaire, op.21

Jane Manning (reciter)

Marie Jaermann, Seljan Nasibili (sopranos)
Katie Coventry (mezzo-soprano)
Anna Migalios (contralto)
Benjamin Baker (violin/viola)
Rohan de Saram (cello)
Susan Milan (flute/piccolo)
David Campbell (clarinets)
Julian Jacobson, Alberto Portugheis (piano)
Giora Bernstein (conductor)

 

With Schoenberg, I tend to take every opportunity I can – at least since my first visit to the Salzburg Festival, when understandably I chose to see Figaro over Boulez conducting Moses und Aron, though I have rued the loss ever since. Whether that be a matter of travelling to Leipzig to see the brilliant triple-bill of Schoenberg’s one-act operas, ‘Moderne Menschen’, or missing out on Leif Ove Andsnes playing Beethoven a couple of miles away at the Barbican, Schoenberg tends to exert a special call. Whether I should have been better off ignoring the call on this occasion remains unclear. Certainly if the standard of the first half of the concert had been repeated in the second, I should have been far better off staying at home. But then a good Pierrot lunaire more or less managed to save the day.

 

Jane Manning remains a force of nature, having given her first broadcast performance with Pierrot almost fifty years ago, in 1965. No one is ever likely to agree – even with his or her own thoughts, let alone anyone else’s – about how this work ‘should’ be performed. It is far better to allow that different performers bring different qualities to it on different occasions. If truth be told, Manning was probably wise to downplay the sung element in her recitation. The moments, relatively few, when she moved towards song suggested, not surprisingly, a voice that had known better days. And yet, her vast experience – not just of this, but of more than 350 (!) world premieres, a good number of which would have taken inspiration from Schoenberg in one way or another – shone through nevertheless. The words and their possibilities she clearly knew backwards. (Now there is an idea for another Pierrot-ensemble piece.) She knew, in a way composers such as Luigi Nono or Helmut Lachenmann would surely have appreciated, how to make the most of vowels, consonants, the journeys between them. Above all, she appreciated and communicated the strong element of cabaret. Manning’s was in every sense a performance, and all the better for it.

 

Not, of course, that the reciter is all there is to Pierrot, far from it. Giora Bernstein led a highly musical account from an excellent bunch of players. Perhaps balance was tilted a little too much away from the ensemble, but we have a host of other performances in which we can savour still more strongly what Stravinsky quite rightly considered an instrumental masterpiece. There were virtues aplenty, nevertheless. The passacaglia registered as such as strongly as I can recall, Night eventually obscuring in more than one sense. Dance rhythms made their Viennese impressions without exaggeration, the ‘Heimfahrt’ an especially fine example. Benjamin Baker’s violin and viola playing was perhaps particularly impressive, perfectly attuned to shifting mood and context, but the ensemble as a whole, including Julian Jacobson’s piano, such a relief after the first half, had no weak links.

 

As for that first half, well… Doubtless Alberto Portugheis’s heart was in the right place. The concert seems to have been his project; he was listed as ‘curator’. But sadly, it marked a triumph of ambition over even rudimentary technical ability; this was piano-playing that would have disgraced many an amateur performance, and may well have been the worst I have heard in a professional context. The opening Zemlinsky’s 1891 Three Pieces for cello and piano would most likely have done the composer no favours in a stronger account. Apparently rediscovered recently by Raphael Wallfisch – I am placing my trust in a programme note which, in many respects, proved otherwise highly fallible – they are at best apprentice works, straining towards, yet never coming remotely close to Brahms. Here, Portugheis and, much to my surprise, Rohan de Saram sounded as if they were sight-reading. There was little or no sense of musical collaboration; indeed, the players fell noticeably out of sync on more than one occasion. De Saram fared better in Dallapiccola’s Ciaccona, Intermezzo, and Adagio, though even when playing solo, it took him a while to get into his stride, the chaconne initially hesitant. At least, though, the performance offered some sense of the stature of the piece, its dodecaphonic lyricism and structural integrity a wonderful introduction to this appallingly neglected composer.

 

Nono’s ¿Donde estás, hermano? was provoked – the composer spoke of his need for such a ‘provocation’ to compose, to bear witness – by the ‘disappearances’ in Argentina. The music comes from Quando stanno morendo, Diario Polacco, no.2, but here without electronics. (Not that one would have known from the programme, which bathetically informed us that Nono had ‘strongly-held political views’.) The vocal quartet – Marie Jaermann, Seljan Nasibili, Katie Coventry, and Anna Migalios – seemed excellent. Alas, their performance was compromised by Portugheis’s insistence on conducting; they would surely have better off without. Plodding and without technique, Portugheis’s contribution was summed up by his score falling off the music stand towards the end. As for his solo rendition of Gerhard’s Don Quixote dances, the first opened quite strongly. At last, I thought, we might hear something from him equating to a real performance. I should not have tempted fate. Much of the rest sounded closer to a bumbling amateur’s initial read-through. From time to time, some sense of rhythm or pulse emerged, only roundly to be defeated.

 

Sadly, then, I was reminded of Boulez’s observation about the self-defeating nature of the occasional performances of music by the Second Viennese School in his youth. The technical standard had been so poor that they did more harm than good, an incitement to him to mount his own performances, leading to the foundation of the Domaine musical. If only, if only…

 

Puccini, Schoenberg, Dallapiccola

I find myself in the middle of writing a chapter on Dallapiccola, focused on Il prigioniero. Now is not the time to give too much away - for one thing, my thoughts tend very much to emerge through the act of writing, so I do not yet really know what I am going to say - but a letter of 9 September 1949, which Dallapiccola wrote to Schoenberg, rather touched me. Dallapiccola is recalling the 1924 Italian premiere of Pierrot lunaire, which Schoenberg conducted at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. It was that performance, Dallapiccola, would later recall, which made the young musician, studying at the Florence Conservatory, resolve to concentrate his energies upon composition. Puccini, as is well known, made the journey to hear Schoenberg's work too. Whilst many laughed, he listened intently throughout, and afterwards asked Alfredo Casella, whose Corporazione della Nuove Musiche had organised the concert, to introduce him to Schoenberg, who would relate how moved he was by the presence of that 'great man'. Dallapiccola, a quarter of a century later, recalled:

I had seen you in Florence at the time of the first Italian tour of Pierrot lunaire, but how could I, a Conservatory student, find the courage on that evening to come and shake your hand? In any case, I have never forgotten the attitude of Puccini with regard to you on that 1 April 1924, and since that evening I have considered the popular Italian composer to be of an intelligence and a humanity that I had not suspected.
 

Philharmonia/Salonen - Beethoven and Dallapiccola, Il prigioniero, 26 January 2012

Royal Festival Hall

Beethoven – Symphony no.5 in C minor, op.67
Dallapiccola – Il prigioniero

The Prisoner – Lauri Vasar
The Mother – Paoletta Marrocu
Gaoler/Grand Inquisitor – Peter Hoare
First Priest – Brian Galliford
Second Priest, Fra Redemptor – Francisco Javier Borda

David Edwards (stage director)
David Holmes (lighting)

Philharmonia Voices (chorus master: Aidan Oliver)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)

Luigi Dallapiccola

There are Beethoven cycles and there are Beethoven cycles. Arguably eclipsed in recent years by Mahler, le grand sourd (Ravel) has never gone away, but he has been at least as unlucky in the quality as well as the quantity of the attention devoted to him. Many conductors – less so, it would seem, pianists and quartets – simply do not know what to do with Beethoven’s music. Daniel Barenboim does, and will bring the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra to the Proms this summer: it almost makes it worth enduring London’s Olympic Hell to hear that. A few years ago, Bernard Haitink conducted a memorable cycle – at least those concerts I heard were memorable – with the London Symphony Orchestra, though the results on disc perhaps shine less brightly. (Sometimes one has to be there.) Others I shall pass over in silence, except to suggest avoiding like the plague one recent, heavily-promoted CD set. Esa-Pekka Salonen, however, is offering something quite different, potentially more interesting: Beethoven’s symphonies in intelligent, provocative couplings. I do not know whether anyone before has presented the Fifth Symphony with Dallapiccola’s one-act masterpiece, Il prigioniero; someone certainly should have done and will, I hope, do so again. The archetypal Romantic journey of hope from darkness to light receives its tragic twentieth-century response.

And yet, despite a truly shattering performance of Dallapiccola’s opera, there was a problem. Salonen, at least on the basis of this performance, would seem to have no feeling for Beethoven. Even the change of orchestral clothes from evening tails to open-necked black shirts, doubtless intended for dramatic reasons, served only to underline the apparent, tragic remoteness of Beethoven to our concerns. We were not treated to the indignities of the perverse, alla Rattle or Norrington. Nevertheless, the Fifth Symphony was rendered dull; stripped of meaning, it emerged not in intriguing modernistic abstraction, but rather as if it were ballet. Beethoven as Delibes? It just about approaches the status of a point of view, I suppose, but it is not one I wish to hear voiced again. Perhaps surprisingly, the first movement exposition did not come off too badly, rhythmically and motivically insistent. Salonen’s reading showed musicianship at least, and Beethoven’s concision came through clearly. (There was some splendid kettledrum playing too, from Andrew Smith.) But of course, that was not enough. We had to wait until the coda for anything approaching vehemence, first from the cellos and then from the other strings, though even here, the final bars were on the light side. The slow movement emerged as an accomplished set of variations, which certainly did not dawdle and yet which nevertheless suffered at times from rhythmic slackness. There was no sense of striving: at best, this was an intermezzo. The scherzo was impressive enough in its own way, but one cannot start here; alas, the trio simply sounded too fast. Perhaps worst of all, the transition to the finale, one of the greatest passages in all music, entirely lacked mystery, even sounding dull. It pains me to say that the finale less evoked the opening of the portals of Heaven than the opening of a swish private health club. Enough: to hear the Philharmonia in this symphony, turn to Thielemann, to Boulez, or best of all, to Klemperer.

If our world, with a few heroic exceptions, simply does not know what to do with symphonic Beethoven, it desperately needs to hear from Dallapiccola, just as much as his own world of fascism and apparent liberation did. Were there any justice, Il prigioniero would long have been a staple of every opera house. There is no such justice, of course, whether in the operatic or the wider world; instead, we discover that L’enfer, c’est les autres opéras, more often than not the latest rerun of La traviata. However, a performance such as this can still offer us that hope so utterly denied in the story enacted (though not, perhaps, in the musical form?)

The bite and conviction absent from Salonen’s Beethoven could scarcely have registered more powerfully; the Philharmonia sounded reinvigorated, the prologue’s opening chords screaming less as twelve-note Puccini than in startlingly Stravinskian fashion. They were matched, moreover, even surpassed, by the anguished Mother of Paoletta Marrocu. Her delivery was unabashedly emotional, and all the better for it, those terrible final cries of ‘Figlio’ (son) haunting us, angering us, inciting us. Lauri Vasar’s Prisoner was equally fine. The occasional sob in his voice early on could readily be forgiven, for this proved not only a scrupulous but a searing portrayal, all-engrossing with a truly hallucinatory power when it came to the poor soul’s own hallucinations. For that, of course, Salonen and the Philharmonia must also be credited. A wealth of orchestral detail was revealed, not with cold, clinical clarity, but with dramatic direction founded upon evident understanding and communication of Dallapiccola’s motivic and serial working. This was most certainly a post-Bergian labyrinth – at times, I even fancied that I heard foreshadowing of Boulez in the woodwind – but for a purpose. We, like the Prisoner, were tempted by the possibility of escape, only to have it all the more cruelly denied by the sweetness of orchestral phantasmagoria. (Zsolt-Tihámer’s first violin solos were especially noteworthy in that respect.)

The Gaoler and Inquisitor of Peter Hoare and the First Priest of Brian Galliford were more ‘character’ portrayals than anything else, but in context that mattered not at all. Any verdict upon the former’s use of head voice would be largely a matter of taste: there was certainly an apt sense of wheedling casuistry. The invitation ‘Fratello …. andiamo…’ sickened as it must. Francisco Javier Borda’s Second Priest impressed vocally as well as dramatically. No one, though, not even the orchestra, could overshadow the stunning contribution of the Philharmonia Voices. Absolute vocal security combined with surprising weight for a choir of under fifty, to assault both conscience and consciousness. Quasi-liturgical repetition of responsorial words our modern predicament would deny straightforwardly terrified, the precedent for a work such as Nono’s Intolleranza 1960 starkly apparent. In such a context, the Prisoner’s standing seemed ambiguously to evoke celebrant and crucifixion; however, Fate – such as we ought to have heard in the Fifth Symphony – was to be the sole victor. Hope was indeed the final torture: ‘La speranza … l’ultima tortura’. We all knew the answer to that final, faltering, ironic question: ‘La libertà?’ In a world of prisons such as Guantánamo and Gaza, we know it all too well.

Ode to Napoleon and Il Prigioniero, Opéra National de Paris, 15 April 2008

Palais Garnier

Schoenberg: Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op.41

Dale Duesing (reciter)
Frédéric Laroque, Vanessa Jean (violins)
Laurent Verney (viola)
Martine Bailly (’cello)
Christine Lagniel (piano)

Dallapiccola: Il prigioniero

La Madre – Rosalind Plowright
Il Prigoniero – Evgeny Nikitin
Il Carciere, Il Grande Inquisitore – Chris Merritt
Due Sacerdoti – Johan Weigel and Bartlomiej Mlaluda

Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris
Alessandro di Stefano (chorus-master)
Lothar Zagrosek (conductor)

Llula Pasqual (director)
Paco Azorin (designs)
Isidre Prunés (costumes)
Albert Faura (lighting)

It was an excellent idea to preface Il prigioniero, Dallapiccola’s one-act opera – strictly, ‘un prologo e un atto’ – with Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon. The last time I had seen Il prigioniero it had represented almost the only adventurous selection for the English National Opera’s 2000 ‘Italian season’, combined with Berio’s Folk songs – which just about worked and absolved ENO from having to stage a Berio opera – and, bizarrely, Nino Rota’s film score, La strada. Paris made far more sense, offering two fiercely immediate responses to European fascism (assuming that we count National Socialism as such).

It has generally been considered, although I do not think the composer ever explicitly made the connection, that Schoenberg had Hitler in mind as he set Byron’s sardonic ‘ode’ from his American exile in 1942. Many on the English side of the Channel, whilst they would not go so far as to identity Napoleon and Hitler, would still consider the former to have been and certainly to have become a monstrous dictator. Yet such a reaction is far less common in France, where Bonapartism dies hard. This Anglo-Austrian onslaught therefore gained an extra frisson, to which an additional layer of historical meaning was lent by the location: not the Opéra Bastille, but the old house, the Palais Garnier, ‘in the style of Napoleon III’. The production, however, dwelled upon the era of Schoenberg rather than that of Byron. I have heard Schoenberg’s Ode taken to task for hectoring, which seems rather like criticising Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ for rejoicing. The combination of subject matter and Sprechgesang more or less guarantees such a characterisation, should one be so inclined. (Incidentally, it has much in common with Schoenberg’s psalm settings and, indeed, with his Moses.)

Llula Pasqual’s production created an illuminating context for such hectoring – ‘ranting’ has been the word more often employed – by introducing the element of cabaret. As the curtain rose, I could not imagine why reciter Dale Duesing was in drag, but the penny soon dropped, not least since the instrumentalists, male and female, of the onstage piano quintet were dressed in black tie à la Weimar. I wondered how far Duesing’s striptease would progress, until it became clear that not only would he perform his dressing-room ablutions, but he would also don pyjamas in preparation for the concentration camp. There was also the suggestion – if only from me – that Napoleon and Hitler were, as Nietzsche would have understood only too well, essentially ‘actors’ themselves. Intriguingly, Duesing appeared to have something of a German accent to begin with. It worked rather well, although was rather puzzling since he is American; perhaps it was more of a response to Schoenberg’s word-setting, or perhaps it was just ‘staged’. In any case, Duesing’s vocal contribution was impressive, although there were just a couple of instances where he seemed to fall very briefly out of sync with the players. Their musicianship was manifest from the opening bars, surely some of the most immediately memorable music Schoenberg ever wrote. (If it is too ‘busy’ quite to be hummable, one can certainly hear it in one’s head after a single audition.) Conducted by Lothar Zagrosek, they expressed not only the fury of Schoenberg’s admonitions, but also the neo-Brahmsian musical integrity of this astonishing score, leading inexorably and shatteringly to the unforgettable E-flat major reference to Beethoven’s Sinfonia eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire d'un grand'uomo. In this performance, ‘hero dust’ was indeed as ‘vile as vulgar clay’.

Il prigioniero was composed at much the same time, although it was not completed until 1948, after the full horrors of wartime experience were known to all. Equally dodecaphonic, and rejoicing in its homage to each member of the Second Viennese School, the score is also undeniably Italian. The opening motif, redolent of a distorted fanfare, is equally suggestive of twelve-note Puccini, and its recurrences are every bit as memorable as one of his melodies. So was the almost unbearable false hope of the three-note ‘fratello’ motif, as we follow the Prisoner in the hope engendered by his gaoler having called him ‘brother’, only to have it dashed by the startling revelation of his would-be-friend as the Inquisitor himself. I was in two minds about the production identifying the two, if indeed this were the intention. It was certainly the effect and in practice the two roles are often sung by the same tenor. It sealed the hopelessness in hope of the Prisoner’s fate and identified, as does the score, the Inquisitor’s ‘fratello’ with the terrible ‘sogno’ (dream) of the Prisoner’s mother, but it made it more difficult for us to hope, through prayer, of freedom (each of these three concepts being symbolically associated with one of the opera’s three note-rows). Either way, this is the ultimate anti-Fidelio. Where Beethoven could still dream of bourgeois freedom in noble fashion, this is now impossible; hope is itself the worst form of torture.

The production certainly scored in its depiction of the prison in which a variety of torture takes place. Paco Azarin’s designs, with their Piranesi staircases, created a suitably labyrinthine setting. Likewise the treadmill effect as the Prisoner edged towards ‘freedom’. Moreover, whilst it might seem wearisome in the abstract retelling, this was an instance of Guantanamo on stage that worked. The parallels between sixteenth-century Europe, torn apart through ‘religious’ strife and our own time are clear, as are those of the responses. Truly shocking was the choral intermezzo between the Prologue and Scene One, in which the chorus was directed on stage to sing the words, ‘Fiat misericordia tua, Domine, super nos,’ as a hanging and other behaviour of ‘our’ troops proceeded. Having witnessed similar scenes very recently in the Komische Oper Berlin’s Iphigénie en Tauride, I noted how immediately relevant they were to two such very different dramas. This was not the shock of épater les bourgeois; this was confronting our world with crimes indistinguishable from those of sixty or more than four hundred years earlier. It is worth adding that the choral singing was superb, both here and later, when its Latin was heard from behind and above, adding a powerful spatial dimension to the drama. The songs of praise when freedom is apparently attained were overwhelmingly chilling.

So too was Evgeny Nikitin as the Inquisitor – and, owing to their identity, as the Gaoler. He exhibited majesty as the former and an horrific ‘compassion’ as the latter. I thought his final deed, administering a lethal injection to the Prisoner, a melodramatic miscalculation, but that was not Nikitin’s fault. Otherwise, he succeeded in projecting the absolute evil so unsparingly depicted in the drama (a rarer accomplishment in terms of artist and work than one might imagine). Hagen came to mind during the final scene. Chris Merritt sang well for the most part as the Prisoner, and certainly gave a powerful stage performance. He appeared to tire somewhat at one point, although in fact this actually worked in terms of the drama. Rosalind Plowright was close to perfect as the Mother. The twin emotion and clarity of her performance precisely mirrored the role and the text. It is a wonderful role, and she was wonderful in it. It would be excessively faint praise to say that the singers were well supported by the orchestra, although they were. For much of the drama lies within the orchestra, not least in the Bergian ricercares, in which that powerful dialectic between expression and precision, both aspects gaining power from the interplay, was searingly brought to the fore. Lothar Zagrosek, who in my experience has always been at his best in twentieth-century music, should be credited for steering a clear line through the score. Lyricism was not overlooked, far from it. Equally crucially, the power of the musical work’s structure and construction was permitted to stand as a sign of resistance. There may not be hope in an administered world, yet, as Adorno signalled, twelve-note music, for all the complexity of its relationship with that world, somehow continues to resist. Now will someone stage Dallapiccola’s Ulisse?

It was, then, certainly worth making a special trip to Paris for an extremely powerful and provocative theatrical experience. Afterwards, having found a restaurant in Montparnasse, I was heartened that the waiter, spying my programme, declared, ‘Le prisonnier – c’est magnifique!’ and proceeded enthusiastically to discuss his experience of the first night with me. I suppose something similar could have happened in London, but suspect that any such hope would be without foundation.