Salzburg Festival (1): ORF SO/Metzmacher - Henze, 18 July 2025

Felsenreitschule

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

  

Das Floss der Medusa

La Mort – Kathrin Zukowski
Jean-Charles – Georg Nigl
Charon – Udo Samel

Bavarian Radio Chorus (chorus director: Max Hanft)

WRD Radio Chorus (chorus directors: Paul Krämer, Alexander Lüken)

Salzburg Festival and Theatre Children’s Choir (chorus directors: Regina Sgier, Wolfgang Götz)

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

Hans Werner Henze’s oratorio The Raft of the Medusa has long been as celebrated for its abortive Hamburg premiere at the close of 1968, disrupted by riot police acting with as much justice as they do on Berlin streets and elsewhere today in pursuit of anti-genocide protestors. In rehearsals, the RIAS Chamber Choir, flown in from West Berlin to boost local forces, had been deliberately uncooperative, disdaining Henze’s politics. Hamburg waited for a new millennium finally to make amends, although the final rehearsal had been recorded, so it was broadcast instead. Even Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, according to Henze’s autobiography Bohemian Fifths, took out his fury at the composer rather than those actually responsible, whilst poor Ernst Schnabel, the librettist and former controller of North German Radio, responsible for recording that rehearsal and thus tempering further disaster, found himself ‘thrown through a plate-glass door by a representative of the forces of law and order and … briefly locked up in a cell for opposing the state’s authorities.’ It is a story worthy of staging or perhaps a film, and is told a little more fully in my review of the Komische Oper Berlin’s Tempelhof staging in 2023 and considerably more so in Bohemian Fifths. But whilst it is unavoidably part of what the work has now become, it is salutary to hear it more or less for itself, not least at the opening of this year’s Salzburg Festival with a considerable part of the local haute bourgeoisie in attendance—part of it at least, it seems, never happier than when being lectured on its depravity by an artist of the left. Indeed, unavoidable as reception becomes in this context, it put me in mind of the success of The Bassarids the first time around, in what was then Herbert von Karajan’s citadel, for its 1966 premiere: both in itself and because it proved a crucial station on the path to the more obvious political commitment of The Raft of the Medusa. Almost thirty years later, Henze would recoil from the prospect of having become a ‘world success’. What would that mean, he asked mischievously? Becoming a Leonard Bernstein? 

If it were merely a lecture, merely agitprop, The Raft of the Medusa would doubtless be of historical interest, but not so much else. Here, in outstanding performances from all concerned, it showed beyond doubt that it is far more than that: of its time, no doubt, but equally of ours, message as well as material as urgent as ever. The vast forces were superbly marshalled by Ingo Metzmacher; in a work such as this, there is a great deal of ‘crowd control’, but it was never only that, any more than in a fine performance of the larger symphonies of Mahler. Indeed, from its entry, the ORF orchestra played this with the familiarity and commitment one might expect from the greatest of ensembles in such repertoire—and Henze’s Mahlerian heritage was clear from reinvention of his predecessor’s division of the greater whole into finely tuned (in every sense) ensembles. The ship’s negative roll call sounded as if a bitterly ironic Wunderhorn reveille. 

The Choir of the Living was drawn from the Bavarian Radio Chorus, the Choir of the Dead from the WDR Radio Chorus. Make of that what you will; nothing ideally, for all choral singing, the Salzburg children’s choir certainly included, was excellent. The latter’s apparent childlike simplicity – far more difficult than it might sound, when set against orchestral slithering – was both exquisite and disconcerting. Without retrospectively wishing to dismiss the Komische Oper’s undeniable achievement at Tempelhof, this showed beyond doubt that, whilst good staging will do an oratorio no harm, an oratorio need not be staged and will probably work best without. The visual element of choral singers moving from left, the ‘Side of the Living’, to right, the ‘Side of the Dead’, in front of which initially La Mort stands alone, but to which she will soon recruit, is more than enough: starkly powerful without distraction from words and music, enabling the chorus to assume its true and indeed traditional vocation. ‘We speak with two voices,’ as Charon, spoken by Udo Samel, informed us in the Prologue: that of ‘Madame: La Mort,’ the chillingly seductive, strikingly clear Kathrin Zukowski, and that of Jean-Charles, ‘the mulatto from Djefara in French service, whom you will remember from Géricault’s painting’, less played than inhabited by a well-nigh possessed – and very un-Fischer-Dieskau – Georg Nigl. 

Henze’s use of ‘African’ percussion might raise eyebrows now, but it is unquestionably well meant and certainly atmospheric. It reminded us not only of the world beyond European shores, but of oppression both more specific and more general as truth, reality, and delirium closed in: a colonial oppression to which open resistance would break out in the drum-beat of the closing orchestral section. Ominous, fatal (this year’s Overture Spirituelle theme is ‘Fatum’), and a cry of solidarity, it grew to a climax, as if to incite through the implicit call of ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’, then Wozzeck-like, stopped: over to us. So far, so good, and that final message was overwhelming. Yet what happened to lead us there was just as important and involving. This was a tale of humanity, but also of class struggle, in which ‘lesser’ ranks were heartlessly betrayed – ‘we for whom there was no room in the longboat’ – yet those who survived ‘returned to the world again, eager to overthrow it’. Contest between Jean-Charles and La Mort was unequal, yet real; this was no foregone conclusion, save when it had happened. ORF wind beguiled and disturbed, in context perhaps – and recalling the actual premiere took place in Vienna – an ambivalent homage to Henze’s beloved Mozart. Ghosts of Berg, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg were also present in the harmonies – Wozzeck surely a case of more or less direct allusion – but so, I think, was Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero. Haunted above all by Bach, here was a secular, revolutionary passion: like Bach’s, both a work of mourning and yet imbued with some redemptive hope. Raising of the giant score at the end suggested where, aesthetically at least, some form of redemption might lie. If Berg's Violin Concerto, 'to the memory of an angel', echoed in harmony as well as violin solo, then here lay other angels, waiting to rise or even risen.

Surtitles came and went in what I assume was a technical malfunction rather than arbitrary selectivity. That was doubtless something of a pity for an international audience – probably less international than in August – although the vivid, visceral nature of communication in person was more than ample compensation. Bar a slight slip, unless I were mistaken, in Charon’s opening narration, and overmiking of Samel’s spoken contributions – at least we could readily discern every word – I am not sure I can find another cavil. This was an outstanding opening, then, to this year’s Salzburg Festival: as fine a Henze performance as I have heard, its 2018 revival of The Bassarids included, and unquestionably the most moving.

I shall return to Salzburg in mid-August to review several more performances. This, however, will take some matching. For those who missed it, cameras were present. There will also be two Munich performances next February in Henze’s centenary year, from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle, Anna Prohaska, John Tomlinson, and Nigl once more, conducted by longstanding advocate Simon Rattle. Now, let us remember the rafts and ‘small boats’ upon the treacherous seas, and the bodies and souls of those who cling to them.

Das Floß der Medusa, Komische Oper, 16 September 2023

Hangar 1, Tempelhof Airport

Images: Jaro Suffner

La Mort – Gloria Rehm
Jean-Charles – Günter Papendell
Charon – Idunnu Münch
Four Dead – Takshiro Namiki, Taiki Miyashita, Yauci Yanes Ortega, Matthias Spenke, Fermin Basterra
Thirteen Dying – Polly Ott, Agnes Dasch, Sarah Papodopoulo, Viola Weimker, Claudia Buhrmann, Orine Nosaki, Wiebke Kretzschmar, Martin Fehr, Christoph Eder, Hartmut Schröder, Martin Netter, Thomas Heiß, Werner Matusch
Fourteen Surviving – Angela Postweiler, Uta Krause, Veronika Burger, Claudia van Hasselt, Julia Hebecker, Ulrike Jahn, Hans-Dierer Gilleßen, Michael Schaffrath, Matthias Eger, Laurin Oppermann, Philipp Schreyer, Simon Berg, Enrico Wenzel, Frank Schwemmer

Tobias Kratzer (director)
Rainer Sellmaier (designs)
Marguerite Donlon (choreography)
Julia Jordà Stoppelhaar (dramaturgy)
Lighting – Olaf Freese
Sound design – Holger Schwark

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

Movement Choir and Children’s Extras of the Komische Oper

Vocalconsort Berlin

Staats- und Domchor Berlin (director: Kai-Uew Jirka)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin

Titus Engel (conductor)

Henze’s Raft of the Medusa may lay claim to the most celebrated non-premiere in musical history. In his autobiography, Bohemian Fifths (one of the most beautifully readable and enjoyable of composer autobiographies), Henze tells of how a media campaign against him had been stepped up during rehearsals, its authors ‘a ghost writer … also active as a composer … and a Hamburg-based journalist of ill-repute,’ somehow pillorying the oratorio about to be given its first performance without having seen or heard a note of it. It was neither the first nor the last time that his enemies claimed that the desire of ‘someone who was not hard up but who had a roof over his head and contracts with an appreciative Establishment … to become a spokesman for minorities, for the underprivileged and for opponents of the system’ must be bogus. Luigi Nono and Peter Weiss wrote letters on Henze’s behalf; Theodor Adorno nearly did, then (according to Henze) backed out on learning of such communist involvement. At any rate, a shot across the bows, at least in retrospect, had been fired when, in an interview with two journalists, eight days beforehand, they asked the composer what he would do in the case of ‘unpleasant scenes’. Maybe they knew; maybe they did not. 

At any rate, something already eerily amiss backstage, the chaos initiated when someone unfurled a (small) red flag on stage, and Henze quite reasonably declined a functionary’s demand that he personally take it down – ‘I was there to conduct, not to keep the place clean’ – led first of all to withdrawal of the RIAS Chamber Choir, who had joined from West Berlin to add to the numbers. They absurdly chanted ‘in unison: “Get rid of the flag! Get rid of the flag!”,’ notwithstanding the fact that the very same flag flew from the Hamburg and Schöneberg Town Halls at that time. Riot police intervened, ‘ready for action with their clubs and shields’. The orchestra had already left. ‘There was total confusion, brute force was used, and a number of arrests were made. Ernst Schnabel,’ writer of the oratorio’s text, ‘may have been a former controller of North German Radio, but that did not stop him from being thrown through a plate-glass door by a representative of the forces of law and order and from being briefly locked up in a cell for opposing the state’s authorities.’ Someone, as Henze discovered only later, had attached a poster to his desk, with the word ‘Revolutionary’, followed by a question mark. 

It was a traumatic event for Henze, however fun or glamorous it may sound to us with distance. He, rather than the disruptors, found himself the target of a boycott from German musical institutions as a result. It has long seemed to me it would make a splendid metatheatrical setting for a staging of the work (be it noted, if only in parenthesis, that it was never intended to be staged). Yet, on reflection, and in light of what was in many ways, doubtless near-necessarily yet also wisely, quite a straightforward staging by Tobias Kratzer, perhaps that is the last thing The Raft of the Medusa actually needs: a further overshadowing by trumped-up debates and, let us not forget, state violence. Perhaps, actually, what it needs is the ability to speak, however clichéd the expression, ‘for itself’, in order to move and indeed to engage a new generation of listeners, many of us, me included, being afforded the opportunity to hear it live for the first time. There is probably, truth be told, room for both, though what do I know? I am no director. What I can say is that this Komische Oper premiere was, both intrinsically and judging by the audience reaction, a great success, indeed handsome recompense for that West German sabotage at the end of the fateful year of 1968.

 

We were not, however at the Komische Oper’s usual base. We were in Hangar 1 of Tempelhof Airport, a spectacular (and history-ridden) venue in what was and, in many ways still is, the West. Whilst long-awaited renovation and expansion work, to last several years, proceeds at the house on Behrenstraße, the company intends to deepen contacts with all parts of the city. This certainly made for an excellent start. The action took place, as it were, in the round—or rather the square, and a very large square at that, the audience surrounding a giant pool representing the sea in which the great tragedy of the French frigate Méduse took place, immortalised for so many of us in Théodore Géricault’s painting of two or three years later (an arresting tableau vivant on our arrival). Like the jungle, the forest, indeed any ‘natural’ setting, the sea in itself lies beyond human good and evil, but it all too often provides a setting for the latter to unfold. And so, after a little initial splashing around, already brought into relief by Charon’s dinghy narration, the tragedy unfolded, honouring where apt the intentions of its original creators, yet not bound by them where it no longer made sense. The chorus descended from all around us, indeed within us, ensuring our identification and involvement from the very outset. Death, La Mort, called from the side, and stepped in, luring many away. The dwindling band of survivors fought, reconciled, sank, swam, hallucinated, met again with reality, all clearly narrated and explained, always in danger—not only from La Mort, but from the heartless, stratified, capitalist society that had sent them to her and abandoned them. 

A shipwreck necessarily evokes further thoughts and images to us concerning our world’s (that of contemporary fascist regimes in Italy, Greece, and Britain in particular) inhuman rejection of refugees whose torment its economic and political systems have engendered. That is neither to be avoided nor regretted. Kratzer, rightly, I think, does not push that, for whilst it is part of the same struggle against the ruling class, it is not simply to be identified with it. This is also a more general struggle, indeed the general struggle of class society. Charon’s line remains with us: ‘Die Überlebenden aber kehrten in die Welt zurück: belehrt von Wirklichkeit, fiebernd, sie umzustürzen.’ The survivors returned to the world, instructed by reality, fevered, to overthrown it. They have not done so yet, of course, yet they were some of many to have planted the revolutionary seed reaction, its lies and distractions can never quite extinguish. And, at that point, the opening of the hangar doors, revealing a vehicle to take away the survivors, welcoming them (like Death, of course) though we know not to what, offered a glimpse of hope, whilst the idea that it was anything but continued to gnaw at us.

Charon (Idunnu Münch)

My sole reservation, and I should not wish to make much of this, is that such a setting perhaps tended to emphasise the ‘dramatic’ and particularly the scenic over the ‘musical’—not, of course, that the two (or three, or however many there are) should be dissociated in the first place. Singers were miked, which in the setting made good sense, I think; this was not an oratorio hall, nor was it pretending to be. Just occasionally, though, I wondered whether Henze’s orchestra, the excellent Komische Oper forces conducted with great wisdom and knowledge by Titus Engel, might have had a bit of a raw deal. Opera (even when it is not strictly so) is beset with such compromises, of course; indeed, it glories in them. Another performance would bring something different to the table and there are certainly no grounds for complaint. What I think I might have benefited from was a further opportunity to hear the performance once I had become more closely accustomed to its general outlines. 

For there was no doubting the command of detail, be it melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, or timbral to be heard here, nor its inextricable combination both with the myriad of vocal lines and with the staged action. In Henze’s own words: ‘The polyphonic style of writing that I had acquired in such disparate works as Novae de infinito laudes, Der junge Lord and Die Bassariden now acquired a very real power and a realistic dimension: these were the voices of people thrown together, voices that rose to a scream or died away to a murmur and to silence.’ Crucially, moreover, Henze thought here – and wanted his performers to think – of instrumental lines as vocal lines too, ‘as the music of wordless Greek choruses’. If there is a whole world – this is most definitely a Mahlerian imagination at work – to be discovered in these particulars, there is a score and there are recordings for that. Moreover, the timpani call ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi-Minh’ prevails, equivocally no doubt, yet ultimately it does and must. (So it did in those ‘events’ of December 1968, when socialist students, protesting against the culture industry, showed explicit solidarity in the hall with Henze and vice versa, so one part of the ‘message’, if you like, did reach performance after all.) Schnabel’s use of German and Italian, the latter deepening the reach of Dante’s Inferno, also helped point to a world that one day might just shed itself of national boundaries—or perhaps not, given we hear it only from the dead. 

The choral model in Bach’s Passions is obvious enough and was acknowledged by Henze. At least as important, however, is how he and Schnabel, as well as their performers, travelled beyond that into more naturalistic realms, ‘including whimpering and screaming – even the wailing of Arab women is audible here’ (Henze). That plurality, very much part of his artistic and political vision, could at times only be hinted at, but out of those hints could, and did, grow something larger and stronger. We should not forget, though, that that, just as in Bach, could encompass something dark too. The monstrous description of those (as yet) still alive, the ‘Vielzuvielen’, (the far too many), becomes imprinted by repetition: not quite ritualistic, for Schnabel’s writing and Henze’s setting are more skilfully varied than that, but not entirely un-ritualistic either. This is, after all, an oratorio. They are individual human beings, all with a right to live, yet their number is a crucial key to Death’s victory, such as it is. All of this was finely balanced in a musicodramatic dialectic that was heard as well as seen, felt as well as thought. 

Whilst it would be invidious and, in many cases, simply not possible to single out particular vocal contributions, something should nonetheless be said of the central trio. Gloria Rehm welcomed the sailors in sweet obscenity to their destruction, their choral (and solo vocal) lines acknowledging her welcome, finding it all too easy to intertwine with it, to forge a new ensemble. Idunnu Münch’s Charon kept us (just about) sane, framing our understanding and response, a clear voice of goodness in the sense that we knew her truth to be ‘the truth’. (At least, the alternative did not bear thinking about it.) She mastered a very different kind of writing, taking us back not only in her name to the earliest of opera, negotiating passage between the living and the dead, and imparting a different kind of hope, in a documentary truth that permitted of aesthetic expression. (We may remember here that, as well as heading North German radio, Schnabel was a key figure in the making and development of German radio documentaries.)

La Mort (Gloria Rehm), Jean-Charles (Günter Papendell)

Jean-Charles is, to quote Kratzer in a programme interview, ‘the primus inter pares any of us could be, almost an Everyman in the Hofmannsthal sense. In this particular setting, it is that that enables – and did in Günter Papendell’s towering performance – identification, reading ourselves in, and thus exploration of some more particular qualities too. It is a tricky balance, yet Papendell brought it off, rising from the crowd and giving voice, without being a mere mouthpiece. There are musical as well as ‘dramatic’ means to this, of course, and he very much had the measure of Henze’s Pierrot-plus (that is, at times more experimental) writing here. Thoughts of Fischer-Dieskau, quite simply, never surfaced—alas, like so many others, lost in those treacherous waters, made all the more treacherous by man’s inhumanity to man. Yet each of those individual singers and actors, as well as the massed choral forces, brought a crucial individual presence to the performance without distracting: not the least of Krazter and his team’s achievement here. 

‘Ernst Schnabel and I,’ Henze wrote, ‘identified with the figures in Géricault’s painting, not only in order to be able to deal artistically with the subject matter of the piece and in order to give credible expression to our shared experience and fellow suffering but because we felt a sense of inner solidarity with these people and their struggle.’ Surely part of the task of such a performance is to enable the audience to do so too; in this, it seemed triumphantly to succeed. In Henze’s 1990 revision, there is even to be heard a final glimmer of hope (or might we, irrespective of intention, divine it in our administered society as reimposition of order?) An orchestral hymn is heard above, perhaps structuring, the ongoing drumbeat. It – the idea rather than the means – put me slightly in mind of Wagner’s revision of The Flying Dutchman in light of Tristan’s equivocal thoughts of redemption. Is that a good thing or not? The very question is doubtless silly, yet it reminds us that we soldier on, sometimes taking a step back, sometimes a step sideways, sometimes no step at all; and just occasionally, sharing a communal and, yes, political experience such as this, those doors flung open, Fidelio-like, we take a hesitant step forward. Or we imagine we do. 

The greater number of the Komische Oper’s activities this season will take place in the Schillertheater, known to many of us as temporary home to the Staatsoper during its lengthy renovations, but there will also be performances at the Konzerthaus, at Neukölln’s Kindl-Areal (formerly the Berliner Kindl brewer, now a centre for contemporary art), in a tent at the Rotes Rathaus, and at pop-up locations across the city. For the meantime, do what you can to get a ticket for this, and take that hesitant step forward into the freie Luft.