Der Freischütz, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 28 September 2018

Images: Katrin Ribbe

Ottokar – Roman Trekel

Kuno – Wolfgang Schöne

Agathe – Anna Samuil

Ännchen – Anna Prohaska

Kaspar – Falk Struckmann

Max – Peter Sonn

Hermit – Jan Martiník

Kilian – Adam Kutny

Samiel – Peter Moltzen

Bridesmaids – Verena Allertz, Regina Emersleben-Motz, Konstanze Löwe, Julia Mencke, Claudia Tuch

Michael Thalheimer (director)

Caroline Staunton (revival director)

Olaf Altmann (set designs)

Katrin Lea Tag (costumes)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Berlin State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Thomas Guggeis (conductor)

Where it all began: well, not quite, but almost. It was in the newly opened Schauspielhaus no more than five minutes’ walk away on the Gendarmenmarkt that Der Freischütz received its 1821 premiere. Now Schinkel’s theatre serves as the Konzerthaus. Opera, however, continues to be the business of the older Linden house, which, following a somewhat bumpy reopening a year ago, seems now properly to have found its stride once again. Recent highlights for me have included Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Tristan and a revival of Claus Guth’s Frau ohne Schatten, of which I saw the dress rehearsal earlier in September, under the excellent – I should probably say ‘outstanding’ – revival direction of Caroline Staunton. This revival of Michael Thalheimer’s Freischütz stood also in her more than capable hands. Since this was my first viewing of this production, I cannot comment on any changes that might – or might not – have taken place. It stood very well indeed, however, on its own terms: a highly accomplished company performance.

In contrast, say, to Christian von Götz’s production for Leipzig, whose premiere I saw last year, this staging does not seem especially interested in the status of Weber’s opera as icon of German Romanticism. There is, whether we like it or no, darkness aplenty in such a concept for audiences today, just as there would be for this work’s lovechild, Siegfried, yet such is not the only possibility of darkness. This is more psychoanalytical – and again one can hardly help but think of the implications for that and many other of Wagner’s dramas. For, as Wagner, miserable, lonely, and close to starvation in Paris, wrote on seeing Der Freischütz there, the work ‘seems to be the poem of those Bohemian woods themselves, whose dark and solemn aspect permits us at once to grasp how the isolated man would believe himself, if not prey to a dæmonic power of Nature, then at least in eternal submission thereto.’

Here the action and those ‘woods themselves’ are seen and framed through the barrel of a gun. Sometimes, perhaps, a gun might just be a gun; it is certainly not here, no more than a forest is just a forest. Man, even men, are isolated; so too are woman and women. We look, as if the wrong way through a telescope to some source of light, perhaps even of life; or is it a nightmare? Nightmares certainly emerge from it; do they not always? Is this concerned with fear of or oppression of women? The either/or is irrelevant; we see, as the tale of a more or less bartered bride progresses, how it is both. We also see how her virginal white, hypocritically valued yet brutally blooded, is both ‘the story’ and anything but. Who dreams up Samiel, who plays a far more important role than usual, here? Wagner saw the work with Berlioz’s recitatives. Here the usual dialogue is rejected or modified in a different way, Thalheimer providing his own – convincing, I think, on its terms – to further and indeed to provoke the enhanced role of this ‘daemonic power’ (in Wagner’s words). Absurd – in a context of realism – stage directions, which seem quite to have confounded that first Berlin production, could therefore be reimagined, the forest and its spirit giving birth to a bestial array of animals without having a Wild Hunt embarrassingly traipse across stage.

Thomas Guggeis impressed me greatly this spring, standing in at the very last minute to make his house debut in Salome – and rightly receiving plaudits for having done so. On this occasion, it seems, he had a little longer if not so very long to prepare to replace another indisposed conductor. This was perhaps the sterner test, since he was more of a known quality and less of a hero of the moment. Whatever the truth of that, he once again emerged with great credit. For one so young – for one of any age – he seems instinctively, however much craft such ‘instinct’ might hide, to know how to ‘play’ this great orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin. It obliged with its statutory dark, ‘old German’ sound, apparently untouched by the ravages of Western orchestral homogenisation. It might have been the orchestra that played for Furtwängler – or, indeed, that does for Barenboim. There was no stiffness to Guggeis’s direction: quite the contrary. Difficult balances were always well struck: between the Romantically ‘organic’ and the needs of the number opera, of the moment too, between Mozartian inheritance  and Wagnerian future – clarinet solos standing out as much as horn calls – and between ‘French’ and ‘German’. We should never forget, however often German nationalists may have wished to do so, that the Huntsmen’s Chorus is based upon an eighteenth-century French street song, ‘Malbrouk [Marlborough] s’en va t’en guerre’.

Moreover, the grandeur and ambition of work, production, and orchestral performance notwithstanding, not to forget the work of the excellent chorus, there was something winningly intimate, in the opéra comique tradition to what we saw and heard from the singers on stage. That is not to suggest a lack of vocal scale, but simply to point to their convincing performances as characters on stage. If Roman Trekel and Wolfgang Schöne both proved somewhat dry and stiff, the rest of the cast more than compensated. Peter Sonn’s Max was fresh toned, enthusiastic, vulnerable, Falk Struckmann’s Kasper very much his dark, virile antagonist (even, in this context, alter ego?) Anna Samuil gave perhaps the strongest performance I have heard from her as Agathe, exhibiting a fine sense, scenic and vocal, of tragic catastrophe before the last. Anna Prohaska’s more colourful, spirited Ännchen, despatched words and coloratura not only with ease but with intent and meaning. Performed in this new ‘version’ without an interval, the work emerged, Goldilocks-like, just right: neither too short nor too long. That, however, should remain a dark fairy-tale for another day.

Der Freischütz, Oper Leipzig, 4 March 2017

Leipzig Opera House

Samiel (Verena Hierholzer) and Kaspar (Tuomas Pursio)
Images: © Ida Zenna

 

Agathe – Gal James

Ännchen – Magdalena Hinterdobler
Samiel – Verena Hierholzer
Max – Thomas Mohr
Kaspar – Tuomas Pursio
Kuno – Jürgen Kurth
Kilian – Patrick Vogel
Ottokar – Jonathan Michie
Hermit – Rúni Brattaberg
First Hunter – Andreas David
Second Hunter – Klaus Bernewitz
Bridesmaids – Katrin Braunlich, Estelle Haussner, Eliza Rudnicka, Teresa Maria Winkler
 

Christian von Göltz (director)

Dieter Richter (set designs)
Jessica Karge (costumes)
Heidi Zippel (dramaturgy)
Verena Hierholzer (Samiel’s choreography)

Leipzig Opera Chorus (chorus master: Alexander Stessing)

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

Christian Gedschold (conductor)

 

Agathe (Gal James) in front of the assembled company

‘It seems to be the poem of those Bohemian woods themselves, whose dark and solemn aspect permits us at once to grasp how the isolated man would believe himself, if not prey to a dæmonic power of Nature, then at least in eternal submission thereto.’ With those words, the homesick, indigent Richard Wagner, revolted by what he had experienced as the base superficiality of Parisian musical culture, reported on an 1841 performance of Le Freischütz (Berlioz’s version, with ballet music that was at least Weber’s own). In a piece addressed ‘to the Paris public’, Wagner ostensibly tried to explain the work to that public, yet seemed unable to prevent himself from turning his article into an attack upon – yes, you have guessed correctly – Parisian and, more broadly, French culture.

Kaspar, Samiel and her spirits, Max (Thomas Mohr)

 

The Freischütz (most certainly Der) we know and love is the quintessential German Romantic opera, and Wagner’s advocacy has played no little role in that. Upon returning to Saxony, to Dresden, he assumed a leading role in the longstanding if hitherto unsuccessful campaign to have Weber’s bones returned from London and reburied in the city whose German opera (as opposed to its long-flourishing Italian version) he had done much to build. Wagner eulogised his predecessor with music and a flowery address, proclaiming that there had never been a more German musician. Whilst the younger Wagner had stood far more critical, his first opera, Die Feen notwithstanding, of Weber and earlier German opera, now he placed his work in that tradition, as would others theirs. That is far from nonsense, of course, yet it is also far from unproblematical. For one thing, it is impossible, living in the face of what Friedrich Meinecke called in 1948 the ‘German catastrophe’, to assent to such nationalism any more, however differently it may have been intended. For another, much of Weber’s music, still more than Wagner’s, and perhaps still more in this than in Weber’s subsequent two ‘German Romantic’ operas, often questions, even resists, such identification.

Kaspar and Max

 

Why do I mention all that? Because it was very much in that spirit that, almost whether I wished to or no, I approached this new production of Weber’s opera in Wagner’s home city (itself long ambivalent concerning its greatest son, its concert tradition long, somewhat frustratingly, enjoying a higher profile to the fruits of its still lengthier operatic history). What struck me upon hearing the Overture from the excellent Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Christian Gedschold was, first, how fresh, how vernal (it had been a beautiful, almost spring-day in Leipzig) Weber’s score sounded from every section: the strings an ideal combination of the golden and something darker, the woodwind at times heartbreakingly characterful, almost as if partaking as woodland creatures in Wagner’s fancy, the brass as euphonious as one could hope for, horns tender to a degree. And yet, Gedschold’s direction did not, for me, take its place in the tradition I think of here as ‘German Romantic’: at least not wholeheartedly, or perhaps it was my mindset that had me hear it differently. Where Furtwängler, in his outstanding Salzburg life recording, puts us momentarily at peace, and has it, perhaps, sound more ‘German’ than the music ‘in itself’ always is, where Carlos Kleiber somehow makes his objectively hard-driven Dresden account sound equally at ease with itself, breathing where the tempi might suggest otherwise, this performance sounded more internationalist, perhaps even more at home with the French models Weber – and Wagner – so eagerly adopted in individual numbers. (I mean here a number of the arias and ensemble pieces, although even the Huntsmen’s Chorus, soon to become a staple of German books of allegedly ‘popular song’, actually derives from part of an eighteenth-century French street song, ‘Malbrouk s’en va t’en guerre’.) What sometimes, then, I missed in the seemingly unaffected German Romanticism that would grow into Wagnerian music drama an aural reassessment of the work as the number opera it undoubtedly is.



Opening scene

 

It was with such thoughts that I also set about watching Christian von Götz’s production, in part, I think, on account of his brilliantly thought-provoking Capriccio, in which Strauss’s work engaged with its own time to an extent, and to a fruitful extent, rarely seen. (Such are the perils, as well as the joys, of reception, whether of a composer, a director, or anyone else!) Perhaps, then, I was too preoccupied with understanding what I saw as part commentary on German history, but this is perhaps one of those works in which such a path is inevitable, and ultimately requires no apology. What struck me from its later nineteenth-century setting was how it enables, perhaps even invites, one to consider the work’s Rezeptionsgeschichte. Indeed, to begin with, I understood it more as a deliberately sanitised version of the period of composition, the hunting lodge too spick and span, even too grand (rather as one might visit such a place touristically today, or indeed in the later nineteenth century). Be that as it may, such sanitisation, displacement, alienation, however one might consider it, served to remember the work such as it never was, even if we have ‘always’ known it as such, something of a ghost, setting the scene for what became still more of a ghost story than one often sees.

 

Ännchen (Magdalena Hinterdobler), Agathe, and Samiel

It is here, though, a ghost story with a very particular twist, or at least standpoint. Looking at, if not listening to, Weber from a standpoint not so distant from Mahler (recall Die drei Pintos) and his world – the designs hint as much at Franz Joseph and Bad Ischl as at the Bohemian Woods, at least until we briefly enter the latter – we begin to understand the centrality of female experience to the horror tale unfolding. Fear and hysteria reign, Samiel – here, strikingly, a self-choreographed female dancer, Verena Hierholzer – seemingly a projection of some evil deed from the past, haunting the present, just as untruths from our retelling of history continue to haunt us. (Whatever the tribulations of German history, it is the English who do not have a word for Vergangenheitsbewältigung, resulting recently in a catastrophe that could hardly seem more likely over here.) Noting that the opera was originally to be called Die Jägersbraut, the director plays on Agathe’s fear of marriage, a fear born, it seems, of living in so unhappy, so haunted, a place. Samiel’s delivery of the funeral crown in the third act terrifies all the women; is it not, however, actually the perfect symbol for patriarchal hegemony and the fantasies it encourages? If the horror-film imagery of Samiel’s other appearances seemed more silly than anything else, perhaps it is all too easy for a man to say that in the face of female agency. (I am questioning myself more as Devil’s Advocate here than because I really think so, but the openness of the staging to such self-criticism is perhaps not the least of its strengths.)

Max and Agathe

 

Such would in itself count for much less, had it not been for an excellent cast, whose performances would have graced any stage. If Thomas Mohr, I am afraid to say, looked and acted too much on the old side for Max – however one might have framed the performance – his vocal delivery more than compensated. A tenor bright and clear, yet sensitive too, he complemented very well the sopranos of Gal James and Magdalena Hinterdobler, exhibiting many of the same qualities, and with fine coloratura to boot, Hinterdobler’s especially expressive as well as merely impressive. Tuomas Pursio’s darkly dangerous Kaspar stood very much in the line of other fine performances I have heard him give (from Wagner to Nono), yet there was nothing generic about the malady of his pride and delusion. Jürgen Kurth and Jonathan Michie offered intelligent, verbally acute performances as Kuno and Ottokar, whilst Patrick Vogel’s lighter, nimbler tenor (by comparison with Max) offered ample indication of why he might have won the title of king of the marksmen. Rúni Brattaberg’s dark, sonorous Hermit did what he should, although why anyone should necessarily take heed of the character’s words remains something of a dramaturgical mystery. Choral singing throughout spoke of music well known, 'in the blood', if you will, yet never taken for granted: it was as fresh as it was 'traditional'.

Final scene

 

There was then, plenty, of opportunity to rethink, to reassess, wherever that impulse may have originated. And yet, for everything I have said, and for all the outstanding quality of orchestral instruments’ ‘French’ solo moments (of which there are many), it remained the dark, undeniably Wagnerian tones of the Wolf’s Glen that made the deepest impression of all. Here, Saxon tradition spoke of an orchestra, one of the greatest in the world, that knew where this music led, and which was happy to guide us. Göltz made a better job of staging frankly impossible scenic directions than many (‘Gothic’ horror notwithstanding), but Weber’s extraordinary presentiments of Siegfried remained an aural experience above all. Wagner’s truths may not always be empirical; that does not necessarily render them untruths.

 

Der Freischütz, LSO/Davis, 21 April 2012

Barbican Hall

Ottokar, Zamiel – Stephan Loges
Kuno – Martin Snell
Agathe – Christine Brewer
Ännchen – Sally Matthews
Kaspar – Lars Woldt
Max – Simon O’Neill
Hermit – Gidon Saks
Killian – Marcus Farnsworth
Four Bridesmaids – Lucy Hall
Narrator – Malcom Sinclair

London Symphony Chorus
London Symphony Orchestra
Sir Colin Davis (conductor)


The unfashionableness of Der Freischütz in England is a little baffling. In its day, not only was the opera celebrated across Germany, it soon conquered other European stages and indeed theatres worldwide. Premiered at the Berlin Schauspielhaus in 1821, by the end of the decade it had already received productions in Danish, Swedish, Czech, Russian, English, French, Hungarian, Polish and Dutch, and by 1850, stagings had been mounted as far afield as Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, and Sydney. Of course, it is in many ways the quintessential German Romantic opera, though one should always remember how much influence other ‘national’ traditions wield over it, but it is saddening that we, or at least the powers that be, should apparently evince so little interest in this tradition. Oberon was programmed to appear this season at Covent Garden, a mouthwatering prospect, only to be cancelled in favour of yet another run – within the same season! – for La traviata. The only staging of Der Freischütz I have seen in London, or indeed elsewhere, was that by ENO in 1999. Meanwhile, Calixto Bieito has just presented a new production in Berlin for the Komische Oper, a must-see staging by all accounts. Perhaps ENO, with its reinvigorated interest in co-productions will bring it across the Channel at some point; we can but hope. Many thanks, in any case, are due to the LSO for this concert performance.

It is not, of course, a work without its problems, first and foremost of which is surely Johann Friedrich Kind’s libretto (even if that seems a masterpiece when compared with the ludicrous effort from James Robinson Planché for Oberon). The dialogue, especially in a concert performance, can present difficulties for a non-German cast, so it is understandable that a decision was made to ditch it in favour of an English narration by Amanda Holden. Whether the latter in any sense marked an improvement remained unclear, to say the least. Malcolm Sinclair’s delivery, whilst clear, was definitely on the ac-tor-ly side, the narration itself prosaic and yet lodged precariously between sanitised fairy-tale – fairy-tales should be anything but sanitised! – and camp. Of the work’s darkness there was little or nothing to be heard. In 1841, sickened and impoverished by the superficiality of Parisian musical culture, the homesick Wagner wrote of a performance: ‘It seems to be the poem of those Bohemian woods themselves, whose dark and solemn aspect permits us at once to grasp how the isolated man would believe himself, if not prey to a dæmonic power of Nature, then at least in eternal submission thereto.’ For a sense of that crucial quality, one had to turn to the music – and indeed, perhaps one always did.

Sir Colin Davis has a lengthy history with the work; he recorded it with the Staatskapelle Dresden – Weber’s own orchestra, of course, and Wagner’s too – twenty years ago, and these two performances have been recorded for release on LSO Live. This was not a reading of incendiary drama such as one hears on Carlos Kleiber’s legendary recording, also with the Dresden orchestra, but won over as one can hardly fail to be by that performance, it is easy to forget how unorthodox it is. Take, for instance, the waltz in the first act, preceding Max’s recitative and aria. Kleiber’s tempo is, on the face of it, bizarrely fast, though somehow it works. Furtwängler takes it far more slowly, as did Davis, though his reading sounded closer to the sound and at times implacability one might have expected from a Klemperer Freischütz. (Now there is a thought; he certainly conducted it in his youth; indeed he made his debut at the Prague Deutsches Landestheater with it, in 1907.) These were sturdier peasants; I can imagine some finding the results staid by comparison, but there was actually a subtler vigour at work.

The Overture was another case in point, its opening gravely Beethovenian. Despite the difference in tempo and almost everything else, I was somehow put in mind of Coriolan. An unfortunate split horn note was heard upon the horns entry, but thereafter, throughout the work, the LSO’s horns were on excellent form, just as required in this of all operas. There was a sense of fairy-tale: I thought of Davis’s Hänsel und Gretel for the Royal Opera. But there was also, and increasingly so, Wagnerian gravity to be heard, reminding us that, so many times in this work, Siegfried is but a stone’s throw away. Fafner’s lair takes form in the Wolf’s Glen Scene. And there was no shortage of dramatic drive to the conclusion of the Overture, but Davis and his wonderful orchestra saw no reason to resort to anything hinting at superficial display. Orchestral malevolence was to be heard in spades at the opening of Kaspar’s aria, ‘Schweig! damit dich niemand warnt,’ and a proper storm was cooked up in that celebrated finale to the second act. (Electronic sound effects proved slightly alienating, but what does one do in a concert performance?) If not exactly folksy – and does one really want that? – there was certainly a nice orchestral jauntiness to Ännchen’s ‘Kommt ein schlanker Bursch gegangen’. Whilst a list of notable orchestral solos would doubtless extend to almost every section principal, I feel I cannot fail to mention the superlative contributions of leader, Carmine Lauri, Rebecca Gilliver (cello), Gareth Davies (flute), and of course, the viola obbligato in ‘Einst träumte meiner sel’gen Base’ (it looked like Paul Silverthorne to me, although the programme said otherwise, so I should probably credit Edward Vanderspare too, just in case).

The London Symphony Chorus was on predictably fine form too. Its choral weight and attack registering unfailingly from the opening Huntsman’s Chorus onwards. Both the chorus and Davis were keenly aware of the echoes of Haydn’s Die Jahreszeiten – they recorded it relatively recently – a little later on during the first act. Would that one could hear more choral singing of such distinction in the opera house! Simon O’Neill performed a decent, professional task. He can sing the notes – and did. He can sing the words too, but there remains, as I have generally found with this artist, a lurking suspicion that he is not always entirely clear what the words mean. Moreover, the pinched quality of his voice is, despite its heft, becoming increasingly pronounced. It is perhaps easier to take here than in a work on the scale of Die Meistersinger, but one could hardly call it ingratiating. Christine Brewer again certainly has the required vocal heft for the work. Her wobble became unduly pronounced in her second act aria, but sincerity of spirit won through here, and in a lovely third-act cavatina. To start with, I found Sally Matthews’s timbre a little pallid, but was soon won over. There was certainly much to esteem in her clarity of line (not least vis-à-vis certain of her colleagues), and she handled the coloratura not only with ease but with a sure understanding of its dramatic purpose. A distinguished performance indeed! Lars Woldt was a late replacement for Falk Struckmann as Kaspar. He shone in the role, not least on account of his natural ease with his native tongue. I can imagine some might have found his vibrato a little heavy – I did not – but there was, vibrato aside, something impressively resounding to his tonal quality and delivery. The appearance of Stephan Loges as Ottokar – it is pretty much impossible to judge his electronic appearance as Zamiel – made one wish, from its elegance of delivery, that the character had more to sing. Gidon Saks wobbled a bit as the Hermit, but I am not sure that matters too much with respect to that particular role. I should also definitely mention a winning, stylish Killian from Marcus Farnsworth; again, it was difficult not to wish that the role might be expanded. Martin Snell and Lucy Hall rounded off with aplomb a cast of many virtues.

If it is difficult, then, quite to see those Bohemian Woods in the concrete jungle of the Barbican Centre, and the nature of the concert performance made for a less Romantic rendering than one would hope for in the theatre, this performance exhibited many singular qualities. It will certainly be worth hearing on CD.