Bayreuth Festival (3) - Lohengrin, 11 August 2019

Festspielhaus

Henry the Fowler – Georg Zeppenfeld

Lohengrin – Piotr Beczala

Elsa – Camilla Nylund

Friedrich von Telramund – Tomasz Konieczny

Ortrud – Elena Pankratova

King’s Herald – Egils Silins

Brabantian Nobles – Michael Gniffke, Tansel Akzeyebek, Marek Reichert, Timo Riihonen

Yuval Sharon (director)

Neo Rauch, Rosa Loy (designs)

Reinhard Traub (lighting)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

The origins of this production of Lohengrin, first seen at last year’s Bayreuth Festival, are interesting and unusual. Alvis Hermanis, an avowed ‘conservative, and proud of it’ – for which, as usual nowadays, we should read something considerably more extreme – had been due to direct the new production. Hermanis withdrew in 2016, to little sadness from the rest of the world, yet nevertheless bequeathing the Festival a serious headache. By that time, work on the designs by the New Leipzig School artists, Neo Rauch and Rosa Loy, was already far advanced. Yuval Sharon, as incoming director, was presented with a greater challenge than simply directing a new production of Lohengrin (and, incidentally or otherwise, being the first American director to work at Bayreuth). He had to formulate and put into practice his own production, using designs intended for another production.

Watching the dress rehearsal last year – I did not see a public performance, and thus did not write about it – I saw a productive tension, an immanent critique, which fascinated me: broadly, and thus misleadingly, politics pitted against fairy-tale, not unlike the work itself. It was doubtless in some respects still a work-in-progress: every production, every performance is. It made me think, though, and I was greatly looking forward to seeing it again this year, to seeing how it had progressed, hoping that the cracks, the fissures, the contradictions would have provocatively deepened. Alas, that did not seem to have been the case; if anything, the production seemed to have reconciled itself to the designs. Perhaps it is too much to ask of a staging that the two can continue to struggle like that, especially when performers have their own imperatives. I genuinely do not know and it may have been entirely my own fault, but I must confess that, to my great sadness, I missed a good deal of what I saw and gleaned last year.

At first, this was not apparent. Indeed, the first act engenders considerable expectancy (at least on my part!) It comes across, or at least did to me, in painterly fashion: a Romantic fairy-tale world, slightly frozen – so blue, so very blue! – from which things can and must progress. It is, then, waiting for Lohengrin; as are we all. When he comes, he ignites the world. He brings electricity, literally as well as figuratively. Is this the beginning of the route from an early-modern Brabant to socialism, a short-circuit, as it were? If so, only fitfully – and that, this time, does not necessarily seem to be a deliberate undercutting. Instead, the critique seems to halt, even to vanish, in the second act, not helped at all by Christian Thielemann’s sometimes interminable scenic-route reveries. At times, other than marshalling of the forces onstage, little else comes across. There is more in the third act, though even that seems considerably less bold. Lohengrin tying Elsa up comes across more as pretty choreography than a deadly game of sado-masochism. And the hints at green politics, culminating in a bizarre, if intriguing green Gottfried, do not come across nearly as strongly as they might. Ortrud’s rightful oppositional status – what if she is right, seems to be the question – is likewise considerably less clear. It is a pity, since I remain convinced that there is potentially much to be admired here. Perhaps 2020 will sharpen things up.

Thielemann’s conducting proved variable. Like the production, he was stronger in the first and third acts, although, as in his Tristan the night before, there was no doubting his extraordinary ability to have the superlative Bayreuth Festival Orchestra do whatever he asks of it. Speed, or otherwise, was not in itself the problem: indeed, speed is only a part, often a relatively unimportant part, of what we really mean by ‘tempo’. The listlessness and at times the self-regard we heard in the second act most certainly was. A little study of Wagner’s essay, Über das Dirigieren, might help. There were magical moments, magical passages, yet sometimes – only sometimes – they came at the expense of musico-dramatic momentum.

There was much to admire from the cast. A few vowels aside, Piotr Beczala’s Lohengrin approached the ideal. ‘Italianate’ might be a lazy way to describe his phrasing, but I hope it will be understood for what it is, in the very best sense. Not that it came at the expense of words, far from it. Beczala’s golden tone could be relished in and for itself, but that would have been to miss an acutely, astutely dramatic portrayal, one I should dearly love to hear again. Camilla Nylund’s Elsa had the occasional rocky moment in the first act, but hers was likewise an intelligent, committed, and beautifully sung performance. Tomasz Konieczny and Elena Pankratova offered similarly intelligent, highly musical portrayals of Telramund and Ortrud, although the latter’s diction occasionally left one having to fill in verbal gaps for oneself. Georg Zeppenfeld never, in my experience, disappoints; that is no reason to take singing such as that for King Henry for granted. Egils Silins’s Herald likewise compelled attention and admiration. So too, last but not least, did the outstanding performances of the Bayreuth Festival Chorus, vocal heft, stage versatility, and verbal comprehensibility all second to none.

Still a work-in-progress then? Doubtless. However, whatever work may remain to be done here – there is always work still to be done – we may give thanks that this was not an Alvis Hermanis production. Catastrophes such as his Vienna Parsifal and, perhaps still more, his Salzburg Liebe der Danae warn of what might have been.

Bayreuth Festival (3) - Parsifal, 25 August 2017

Festspielhaus

Amfortas – Ryan McKinny

Titurel – Karl-Heinz Lehner
Gurnemanz – Georg Zeppenfeld
Parsifal – Andreas Schager
Klingsor – Derek Welton
Kundry – Elena Pankratova
First Knight of the Grail – Tansel Akzeybek
Second Knight of the Grail – Timo Riihonen
Squires – Alexandra Steiner, Mareike Morr, Paul Kaufmann Stefan Heibach
Flowermaidens – Netta Or, Katharina Persicke, Mareike Morr, Alexandra Steiner, Bele Kumberger, Sophie Rennert
Contralto solo – Wiebke Lehmkuhl

Uwe Eric Laufenberg (director)

Gisbert Jäkel (set designs)
Jessica Karge (costumes)
Reinhard Traub (lighting)
Gérard Naziri (video)
Richard Lorber (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Hartmut Haenchen (conductor)

 

One of the great advantages of the Bayreuth Festival is its Werkstatt principle. Not only do production planning and rehearsal take place in something at least approaching what a festival should be; there is also, crucially, opportunity to revisit, to rethink a staging the following year. Alas, I could see no sign whatsoever of Uwe Eric Laufenberg having done so. That his production of Parsifal is here at all is in itself rather contrary to the principles of the festival. It was brought in, almost off the peg, a production originally intended for Cologne yet never staged there (lucky Cologne!), following the summary dismissal of Jonathan Meese, supposedly over budgetary issues. Who knows what Meese might have come up with? I find it difficult to imagine that it would have been boring, at least, certainly not when compared with this.

 

For if the shock value of Laufenberg’s Islamophobia has somewhat dissipated, it has left in its wake still more grinding tedium and banality. The production, should one stay awake, remains offensive, but it is so ill thought through – what on earth was Laufenberg’s dramaturge doing, or why on earth was he not listened to? – that it is difficult to imagine anyone offering more of a gesture to jihad than a shrug of the shoulders and a series of mighty yawns. Were it not a dereliction of duty that might, at a pinch, court comparison with the production itself, I should be tempted merely to cut and paste what I said last year and then add something about the performances. As it is, I hope I shall be forgiving by quoting myself here, before moving on to attempt to say something slightly different: ‘Indeed, this may well be the most boring staging of the work I have seen in the theatre; take away its attempt at contemporary “relevance”, it might as well have been by Wolfgang Wagner or Otto Schenk. Its premise – seemingly contrived by a nightmare team of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry, “introducing” George W. Bush as dramaturge – would have been more offensive still, had it been presented with some degree of coherence; one should, I suppose, be grateful for small mercies.’

 

Monsalvat seems to be some sort of Christian community in Iraq, in which some refugees – patronisingly presented as quite without agency themselves – have taken refuge, pursued, or worse, ‘protected’ by Western soldiers. Good for the community, one might say, even if one did not hold with its beliefs. Indeed one might, but Laufenberg is made of sterner stuff. These people are cretins, who deserve only to be mocked, even pilloried. (Perhaps they like Wagner too, or would, given half a chance! Who knows? They might even have taken the trouble to read his writings on religion. Losers!) Why? Because – drum roll – they are ‘religious’. I use the word deliberately, since it is not a word anyone with any real interest in religion, let alone theology, would be likely to use in such a context. It is the bastard offspring of ‘superstitious’ to a third-rate philosophe. And so, in a reframing of the ritual at the end of the act, which might be interesting if it laid claim to anything other than the merely arbitrary, Amfortas is himself crucified and these ghastly, non-liberal people drink his blood. Christians, eh? Presumably Amfortas’s weird nappy is intended to convey quite how infantile this savagery is. Not the sort of thing our dinner-party crowd would do. You mean these people are not centrists? Golly: how outré! Well, we were quite right to invade, then, as Tony said… As for the misunderstanding – a schoolboy would have made a far better stab at it – of Kant and Schopenhauer, as in ‘Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit’: the first Transformation Music glories in a filmic zooming out from Mesopotamia to outer space. It would almost be funny, except again, it is merely tedious – and mind-numbingly stupid.

 

We then shift to the real enemy in the second act. Let us follow in the footsteps of Danish cartoonists and rail at a ridiculous caricature of Islam. It is a ‘religion’, after all, and probably even worse than Christianity. Indeed, definitely worse: there may be no women at Monsalvat, save, perhaps, for the odd refugee, but have you seen these poor Muslim women? Burkini types, no doubt. And indeed, the Flowermaidens, initially dressed ‘modestly’, can reveal their true selves, when, liberated by Parsifal as Western soldier, they reinvent themselves as ‘exotic’ belly dancers. Now our Western hero is interested: what sort of self-respecting woman would not want to display herself to the first passing colonial soldier? Strange, but at least those silly souls – oops: forgive the quaint theology! – have learned their lesson. When things get a little more heated with Kundry, Klingsor the ‘religious’ hypocrite self-flagellates in front of his collection of crucifixes. Amfortas has joined proceedings to give Kundry what she needs – very briefly: very, very briefly. (Or is it just a crass – sorry: ‘provocative’ – visualisation of her recollections? Who cares?) I had almost forgotten: above Klingsor, above the rest of the ‘action’ for both of the first two acts, sits a weird blue mannequin in blue PVC. He does nothing; maybe he cannot. No explanation is given as to who he is, or why he is there. I fear he might be God, or rather those whom the credulous worship as such. Have they not heard? He is dead! Christopher Hitchens told us so. He wanted to invade Iraq too.

 

The mannequin disappears at the beginning of the third act. Has something changed? Yes, the West has won. Parsifal returns to Gurnemanz and Kundry, who share a wheelchair, yet seem perfectly capable of walking when it is the other one’s turn. (What, after all, is an opera production without a wheelchair? No suitcase? Now that is brave!) The Flowermaidens can now do what they were itching to do all along: take all their clothes off and take a soft-porn ‘lesbian for straight men’ shower together. Islam is over, thank God (if you will pardon the expression!) So is Christianity – Judaism too. The final scene – the mannequin ‘mysteriously’ returns: perhaps there is a remnant now of ‘belief’ still to be eradicated – shows members of the three ‘faiths’ shed their differences, eradicate the barbaric ritual, and just get on together after all. Imagine: there are still some diehards who think the invasion of Iraq was not a good thing. There are some, even, who still read Aquinas…! And yet, I fear I have made all of that sound far too interesting. In between, for most of the time, are long stretches of nothingness, designs shamelessly ripped off from other stagings, other images. If only I could believe that were a knowing commentary on nihilism. Confronted with a choice between Laufenberg and Parsifal, Nietzsche, I am confident, would have had no hesitation whatsoever in choosing the work he so despised.

 

What a waste, then, of such excellent singers. Andreas Schager’s Parsifal is by now, for many of us, a known quantity, but that does not make his true, thoughtful Heldentenor any the less worthy of praise. He did what he could dramatically, but it was impossible not to wish one were seeing him again in Dmitri Tcherniakov’s brilliant Berlin staging. Tirelessly committed, ‘what he could’ remained impressive indeed: in a different league from last year’s Klaus Florian Vogt. ‘What Elena Pankratova could’ was likewise deeply impressive, as alert as she could be to the changing requirements and possibilities of her role. It would be a wonderful thing to hear her Kundry elsewhere, I am sure. Georg Zeppenfeld’s Gurnemanz is deeply considered in its blend of words and music; if only Gurnemanz could have offered some words of wisdom on an anti-theology so out of its depth that it could not even reach Wagner’s shallows. That Zeppenfeld continued to command attention tells us much of what we need to know concerning the quality of his performance. Ryan McKinny gave another fine performance as Amfortas, keenly aware of the transformation of the character – staging aside – between first and third acts. Derek Welton’s Klingsor was one of the best sung I have heard: no mere caricature, deeply musical in its malevolence. The smaller roles were all very well taken, knights and squires in particular far more than near-anonymous ‘extras’. And the choral contribution was truly outstanding. Every word could be heard – an achievement in itself – yet never at the expense of musical values. Translucent and weighty as required, even simultaneously, the Bayreuth Festival Chorus, clearly well prepared by Eberhard Friedrich, did everything that could have been expected of it – indeed more.

Hartmut Haenchen kept the score going, but had little insight to offer. He prides himself, apparently, on being fast, indeed as fast as possible. He probably achieved that, although a quick featureless performance will seem to last far longer than a considered, dramatically fruitful reading. There were times when his speeds reached levels of absurdity, not least since they were not in proportion to other sections. (That is a good part of the secret to good, let alone Wagner, conducting, as the Master’s essay, Über das Dirigieren, ‘On Conducting’, would have made clear. Boulez often lauded it, rightly so.) The orchestra ‘itself’ sounded wonderful; this is, after all, its acoustic par excellence. One could even imagine it, in Debussy’s celebrated phrase, ‘lit from behind’, even if Haenchen seemed more concerned to switch the lights off as quickly as possible, and rarely, if ever, to let the orchestra have its luminous head. To think, such a Kapellmeister-ish despatch stands as an heir (if not quite the immediate successor) to the revelatory performances of Daniele Gatti – or indeed, in a very different mould, to Boulez. And alas, to think: Laufenberg is likewise Bayreuth’s ‘successor’ to Stefan Herheim.

 

Munich Opera Festival (4) - Tannhäuser, 9 July 2017

Nationaltheater

Wolfram von Eschenbach (Christian Gerhaher)
Images: Wilfried Hösl

Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia – Georg Zeppenfeld

Tannhäuser – Klaus Florian Vogt
Wolfram von Eschenbach – Christian Gerhaher
Walther von der Vogelweide – Dean Power
Biterolf – Peter Lobert
Heinrich der Schreiber – Ulrich Reß
Reinmar von Zweter – Ralf Lukas
Elisabeth – Anja Harteros
Venus – Elena Pankratova
Shepherd Boy – Elsa Benoit
Four Pages – Members of the Tölz Boys’ Choir

Romeo Castellucci (director, designs)
Cindy van Acker (choreography)
Silvia Costa (assistant director)
Piersandra di Matteo, Malte Krasting (dramaturgy)
Marco Giusti (video, lighting assistance)

Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus master: Soren Eckhoff)

Bavarian State Orchestra
Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

Romeo Castellucci’s aesthetic – if one may speak in the singular – is very different from almost anything else one on show in the opera house at the moment. That, I have no doubt, is unquestionably a good thing. Castellucci is a serious artist and it is all too easy for any of us to become stuck in an artistic rut, congratulating ourselves not only on our understanding but also,  may God help us, our ‘taste’ – as if so trivial a notion had something to do with anything other than ourselves. We thereby run the risk of becoming ultimately almost as conventional as those we think we have left behind. I shall happily admit that I have been wrong, should I see this staging again, crack the code – if code there be – and find greater enlightenment than I did on this occasion. As it stands, however, I found myself somewhat disappointed by a staging that seemed to pale beside Castellucci’s fascinating Paris Moses und Aron – to which there were perhaps a few too many visual resemblances for comfort, let alone provocation – or indeed to what I know of his other theatrical work. That Castellucci has thought intelligently about Tannhäuser is clear from an interview in the programme; I wish, though, that there were more of a sign, at least to me, that such thoughts had made their way into the staging. There were times, I am afraid, when this production, for all its stylised, internationalised ‘beauty’, veered close to the merely boring.

The setting is almost brazenly non-specific. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, especially when Wagner himself treads the line between myth and ‘historical’ drama. An air of mystery, even of mystification, concerning where we are, who these people may be, is in many respects welcome; not everything need be set in a present-day or time-of-composition warzone. The sinister quality of strange rituals is palpable. Is there perhaps a hint of ISIS or some such in the cult-like environment of the world beyond the Venusberg? Perhaps, but it all begins to look a little too much like the world we had seen in Moses and, more to the point, so what (without anything more on which to go)? Is there not a hint of Wieland Wagner without the content – he himself has often been accused of having, for ideological reasons, divested his grandfather’s dramas of much of their content – and in the achingly fashionable, yet vacuous, scenic language of the modern corporate art installation? Unlike many operagoers I am not, I hope, one to roll my eyes at the mere mention of interpretative – or non-interpretative – dance, but does the beautifully choreographed movement do anything more than, well, be beautiful? Is that the point? It may well be, but at some point, might it not be argued, or at least demonstrated? Or am I again missing the point, hidebound by my own, doubtless Teutonic or even Socratic preconceptions? Designers – Castellucci is to an extent his own – have their tics, of course, their house styles; but what is the idea, even the Idea, shrouded, often literally, by the undeniable style?

Venus (Elena Pankratova)

Great play – great scenic play, at least – is made of the kinship between the harp of the Minnesänger and the crossbow of the warrior. It is an interesting idea, not least in this most dualistic – at times, catastrophically if fascinatingly so, in dramaturgical terms – of Wagner’s operas. (In Tristan, even, there is more mediation than here, and it is of course infinitely more accomplished not only than Tannhäuser but than most other human drama in giving the appearance of reconciliation even when ‘reality’, whatever that may be, belies that appearance.) Alas, it never really progresses beyond a few striking visual signs, whereas an explanation, not necessarily didactic, of the relationship between art and war, love and death, is surely invited here. Even the ugliness of the fatty mound that is the Venusberg and its outgrowing creatures – the decay of boredom, satiation, and so forth, I presume – is so ‘beautifully’ stylised as to lose its dualistic edge. Or did it never have that edge in the perfect place? Lacan is clearly going round and round here, but is anything more than that happening? Again, is that the point? The second act has a great deal of slow business with people almost losing themselves in curtains; well, not a great deal, just much repetition of a little business, really. There is something intriguing about whether that mysterious thing is, flailing, writhing, maybe writing, in the central box, on which the singers’ principal concepts are inscribed; at the same time, there is a little, however inadvertent, of a Dr Who monster to it too.

I have no idea why the tombs in the third act are inscribed ‘Anja’ and ‘Klaus’ rather than ‘Elisabeth’ and ‘Heinrich’; whatever metatheatrical point may have been made quite eluded me. Likewise the passing of increasingly absurd increments of time, signalled in an o-so-‘beautiful’ typeface: from one second, to endless milliards of milliards of years. Meanwhile corpses rot – beautifully, tastefully, needless to say. The actual singers look on and occasionally move around. Eternity, perhaps, although it never actually reaches that state? Is that, again, the point? Is there a role for history after all? I certainly hope so, in this most Hegelian of composers, but I am afraid I had simply ceased to care. Having opened by saying how different Castellucci’s aesthetic was from what we tend to see in opera, I have to admit that the results, if not the intent behind them, were in some respects not so very different from Sasha Waltz’s explicitly balletic production (verging on non-production) for the Berlin State Opera. As I said above, I should be delighted to be proved, even to prove myself, wrong; none of us is infallible. I did so over Frank Castorf’s Bayreuth Ring. Perhaps I simply need to immerse myself more in Castellucci’s way of thinking; or perhaps this was not his finest hour. Time will tell.

Tannhäuser (Klaus Florian Vogt)

We need await no passing of time to reach some sort of critical judgement on the musical side of things: never less than good, in some cases quite outstanding. I do not think Tannhäuser is really the role for Klaus Florian Vogt; Lohengrin is. And yet, the unearthly, almost pre-pubescent (on steroids) beauty of the voice can bring fruitful contradictions of its own, intentional or no. What if Tannhäuser is just an overgrown choirboy after all? Vogt certainly has the stamina for the role, and can sings its notes – even if he relied a little too much, especially during the first act, on the prompter, whose sibillants were almost as audible as Vogt’s own. Anja Harteros gave an excellent performance, although I could not help but think that this was perhaps not quite the role for her. She seemed almost as if she would have been happier singing Verdi; at any rate, she gave the impression of trying to play a ‘character’, which Elisabeth is perhaps not, at least in a straightforward sense. Whatever Tannhäuser may involve, it is not straightforwardly a world of psychological realism. Christian Gerhaher’s Wolfram was at least as beautifully sung as any I have heard from him (which is saying quite something indeed). It was not just beautiful though; there was an edge, an anger even, suppressed or otherwise, which had the character, such as he is, become more rounded, more interesting than I can recall. Elena Pankratova’s Venus was finely, even movingly, sung, her reappearance in the third act from on high (unseen) quite magical. Georg Zeppenfeld’s Margrave and Dean Power’s Walther von der Wogelweide also stood out, making the most of their roles without exaggeration. Choral singing, once again, was quite outstanding, a tribute both to members of the chorus and to Soren Eckhoff, their chorus master.

Elisabeth (Anja Harteros)

Last but certainly not least: Kirill Petrenko’s direction of the outstanding (once again!) Bavarian State Orchestra, whose depth and variety of tone are truly second to none. Petrenko’s way with the score is anything but conventional, without ever so much of a hint of being ‘different’ for the sake of it. If my preference, lazy or otherwise, is for the more overtly symphonic line a conductor such as Daniel Barenboim brings to this music, Petrenko’s insistence upon the individuality of ‘numbers’ – which to all intents and purposes they are, or at least can be – within the score reaps its own, explicitly musico-historical rewards. He has clearly thought about each section, however defined, and how it might characterise it – and, moreover, is able to do so. The Overture, for instance, began in surprisingly Mendelssohnian fashion, blossoming, expanding into something more, as if to suggest Wagner finding his way from roots he may or may not have wished to acknowledge. In the second act, Wagner’s antecendents in French opera, not least Meyerbeer, came very much to the fore, without loss to a greater sense of the whole. The third act was more truly ‘symphonic’; here, one felt, the Wagner of the music dramas proper had arrived. Fascinating, instructive, provocative in the best sense: more so, alas, than what I was able to glean from Castellucci.

Munich Opera Festival (2) - Die Frau ohne Schatten, 5 July 2017

Images: Wilfried Hösl
Dyer's Wife (Elena Pankratova)
and the Apparition of Youth

Nationaltheater, Munich

Emperor – Burkhard Fritz

Empress – Ricarda Merbeth

Nurse – Michaela Schuster

Spirit-Messenger – Sebastian Heleck

Barak – Wolfgang Koch

Dyer’s Wife – Elena Pankratova

Apparition of Youth, The Hunchback – Dean Power

Voice of the Falcon, Guardian of the Threshold of the Temple – Elsa Benoit

Voice from Above – Okka von der Damerau
The One-Eyed – Tim Kuypers
The One-Armed – Christian Rieger

The Hunchback – Dean Power

Keikobad – Renate Jett

Servants, Children’s Voices – Elsa Benoit, Paula Iancic, Rachael Wilson

Children’s Voices – Elsa Benoit, Paula Iancic, Alla El-Khashem, Rachael Wilson, Okka von der Damerau

Voices of Nightwatchmen – Johannes Kammler, Sean Michael Plumb, Milan Siljanov

Krzysztof Warlikowsi (director)

Georgine Balk (Abendspielleitung)

Malgorzata Szczęśniak (designs)

Felice Ross (lighting)

Denis Guéguin (video)

Kamil Polak (video animation

Miron Hakenbeck (dramaturgy)

Children’s Chorus (chorus master: Stellario Fagone) and Chorus (chorus master: Sören Eckhoff) of the Bavarian State Opera

Bavarian State Orchestra

Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

Empress (Ricarda Merbeth) and Nurse (Michaela Schuster)

It was fascinating to see – and of course, to hear – Krzysztof Warlikowsi’s productions of Die Gezeichneten and Die Frau ohne Schatten on consecutive nights of this year’s Munich Opera Festival. First, and perhaps most important: both received outstanding performances, fully worthy of any festival in the world, let alone one such as this which offers both new productions and stagings from the repertory. This FroSch may have been the latter, but who would have known? There are clearly advantages to being conducted by the Music Director – not least the identity of this particular music director – but even so…

Both works offered the director considerable challenges. In the Schreker opera, Warlikowski rose admirably to the challenge of drawing out what was of greatest interest in a flawed work and, indeed, even to criticising certain of its more problematical aspects. Die Frau ohne Schatten is not without its problematical aspects either, of course, not least Hofmannsthal’s bizarre pronatalism – perhaps a staging that made more of its wartime context (or near-context) might help, but I have yet to see one – and, more broadly, the mismatch between Strauss and Hofmannsthal here. If Strauss misunderstands Hofmannsthal, though – and we should be wary of awarding priority simply on a chronological basis, especially with so complex a composer-librettist relationship as this – it is, to borrow a term from Webern and the post-war avant garde, a productive misreading.

Emperor (Burkhard Fritz), Nurse, and Empress

How does Warlikowski deal with that, in a production first seen in 2013? I am not entirely sure that he does, but it may well be that I am missing something. What he certainly does accomplish is to present a number of standpoints, which may, to an extent, like those presented in the work ‘itself’, be reconciled, or even set against each other. The world of medicalised hysteria, of the sanatorium is present, just as in Claus Guth’s production (seen at La Scala, Covent Garden, and the Berlin State Opera. Perhaps counter-intuitively, for a work in which, laboriously at times, Hofmannsthal at least seems to offer layer upon layer of symbolism, often highly referential or at least allusive, Warlikowski penetrates to a very human drama at the work’s heart. It might sound banal; perhaps in some ways it is; but why not actually present this as a drama concerning a woman, the Dyer’s Wife rather than the Empress, who wishes to have children, is pressured to renounce her desire, and then achieves what would seem to be genuine fulfilment by doing so? There are various answers to that, of course, or at least to why such a drama might be problematical; but they are not unanswerable answers.

Freud hangs less heavily over the production than he does over Guth’s, but he is there, glimpsed indeed in video projections at the end alongside a motley crew that includes (I think) Gandhi, Christ, the Buddha, King Kong, and Marilyn Monroe. (I have no idea, I am afraid; I suspect I am missing something terribly obvious, but never mind…) More overtly present is Last Year in Marienbad. Pictures from the film lead us in to the opening of the opera and accompany its course, far from obtrusively, yet offering connections should we wish to follow them. A sadness born of lack of fulfilment, perceived or otherwise, hangs over what we see – and interacts, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes less so, with what we hear. Even the Nurse seems a far more human figure than usual. There is, perhaps, loss there too, but to see her a broken woman, trying to deal with an impossible situation that is not of her choosing is fascinating: it certainly made me reconsider the role. 

Empress, Falcon(s), and Emperor

Where Ingo Metzmacher had given a commanding account of Schreker’s score the previous night, Kirill Petrenko went further still in Strauss’s score. It does no harm, of course, that Strauss is by far the greater composer and musical dramatist. But that can come to naught, or at least be severely diminished in the wrong hands. Musical performance is certainly not a matter of league tables, but I can certainly say, hand on heart, that I have never heard the opera better conducted or played. This was at the very least a musical performance to set alongside those by Christoph von Dohnányi and Semyon Bychkov at Covent Garden, and superior to any of the others I have heard. Petrenko’s ear for Strauss’s complex orchestral polyphony is second to none, not only amongst any conductor alive but any I know from recorded performances.

The similarities and differences between Strauss and Schoenberg – you will have to forgive me for having the latter very much on my mind at the moment – are as complex as their music ‘in itself’. There is, though, something here which, ironically, given Strauss’s reported remarks on Schoenberg’s score, brings Strauss closer than one might expect to the Five Orchestral Pieces, op.16. Alma Mahler just could not help herself in telling Schoenberg that Strauss had said Schoenberg would be ‘better off shovelling snow’ than ‘scribbling on manuscript paper’. (What is less often reported is that he recommended the younger composer for the Mahler Foundation grant in any case. Schoenberg, unsurprisingly, never forgave him; when asked the following year for a fiftieth-birthday tribute, he responded angrily: ‘He is no longer of the slightest artistic interest to me, and whatever I may once have learned from him, may God be thanked, [I had] misunderstood.’) Petrenko is a very fine Schoenberg conductor; indeed, it was in Erwartung at Covent Garden that I first heard him. The interplay between colour, line, harmony, every changing parameter was such that I could not help but think I was hearing Strauss with somewhat Schoenbergian ears – and that was not entirely to be attributed to my own present preoccupations. The Bavarian State Orchestra was at least equally responsible: in every respect worthy of the most exalted comparisons, past or present. I do not think I have ever heard the solo cello part played with greater tenderness and yet with such a sense of where, motivically and harmonically, it is heading. Nor have I heard the full orchestra sound more thrillingly present and yet more transparent. It was not only seeing the glass harmonica in one of the boxes overlooking the pit that meant I could hear it so well.

Barak (Wolfgang Koch) and the Dyer's Wife

Vocal performances were almost equally magnificent. Burkhard Fritz greatly impressed in Berlin earlier this year, and did so again here: quite tireless and perfectly capable of riding Strauss’s orchestral wave. The Emperor is, perhaps, the best role in which I have heard of him. Ricarda Merbeth was more than his equal as his consort: as tenderly moving as, when required, imperious. She truly drew one into her particular drama, as did the Dyer and his Wife, even, as mentioned above, the Nurse. Elena Pankratova and Wolfgang Koch were also in previous casts I had seen, London and Berlin respectively. Fine though their performances had been then, Petrenko’s conducting seemed to incite them to still greater things in Munich. (The more I consider Zubin Mehta in Berlin, the more uncomprehending his conducting seems by comparison.) Theirs was at root a human, commonplace relationship, exalted by particular musico-dramatic circumstance and by musical performance into something transformative, in a sense that both Strauss and Hofmannsthal might have acknowledged. The sadness both felt could be perceived in their faces, their body language, but still more in the alchemy of stage, words, and music that is opera at its greatest – and which, with the best will in the world, a lesser composer such as Schreker could never have summoned. To her trademark malevolence in the role, Michael Schuster was here fully enabled to offer a poignancy one rarely sees and hears in the Nurse. Sebastian Heleck’s Spirit Messenger was perhaps first among equals – intelligent, deeply musical singing – amongst the ‘smaller’ roles, but there was no weak link here. Choral singing and acting were equally outstanding. Likewise those roles played by non-singing actors: the Apparition of a Youth here our first among equals, sporting an excellent line in gigolo contempt when collecting his earnings for unachieved attempted seduction from the Nurse. As had been the case in the previous night’s performance, the dramatic whole was greater than the sum of its parts – just not quite in the same way. Now how about a Moses und Aron?

Bayreuth Festival (5) - Parsifal, 24 August 2016

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Amfortas – Ryan McKinny

Titurel – Karl-Heinz Lehner
Gurnemanz – Georg Zeppenfeld
Parsifal – Klaus Florian Vogt
Klingsor – Gerd Grochowski
Kundry – Elena Pankratova
First Knight of the Grail – Tansel Akzeybek
Second Knight of the Grail – Timo Riihonen
Squires – Alexandra Steiner, Mareike Morr, Charles Kim, Stefan Heibach
Flowermaidens – Anna Siminska, Katharina Persicke, Mareike Morr, Alexandra Steiner, Bele Kumberger, Ingeborg Gillebo
Contralto solo – Wiebke Lehmkuhl

Uwe Eric Laufenberg (director)

Gisbert Jäkel (set designs)
Jessica Karge (costumes)
Reinhard Traub (lighting)
Gérard Naziri (video)
Richard Lorber (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Hartmut Haenchen (conductor)

 

Stefan Herheim’s Bayreuth Parsifal – perhaps the greatest staging of any opera I have ever seen (reviewed here, here, and here) – was always going to be a difficult act to follow. Katharina Wagner showed considerable boldness, to put it mildly, in planning to have Herheim’s production succeeded by one from the performance artist and painter, Jonathan Meese, entirely untested as an opera director, although he had designed the sets for Wolfgang Rihm’s Dionysus in Salzburg, in 2010. The plug was pulled on that plan for financial reasons; or so it was said. Goodness knows what Meese’s Parsifal might have been; I tend to agree with Tom Service that it was ‘a shame … whatever else, it sure wouldn’t have been stultifying or conventional’. All is not entirely lost on that front, though, for a ‘new Parsifal opera’, seemingly deconstructionist yet nevertheless mythological, by Bernhard Lang will be directed by Meese next year in Vienna (at the Festwochen, I hasten to add, not at the State Opera!)

 

By contrast, I am afraid to say that all has been lost on the Bayreuth front with this new production by Uwe Erich Laufenberg. (And lest excuses be made about shortness of preparation time, it is actually a production originally intended for Cologne, which never materialised there.) Whilst I cannot say that earlier productions of Laufenberg’s I have seen, a Dresden Rosenkavalier and a Vienna Elektra, had proved earth-shattering, they were both intelligently put together, coherent, and with plenty of theatrical interest. None of that could be claimed of a production which is, to return to what Service said Meese would not have been, above all stultifying. Indeed, this may well be the most boring staging of the work I have seen in the theatre; take away its attempt at contemporary ‘relevance’, it might as well have been by Wolfgang Wagner or Otto Schenk. Its premise – seemingly contrived by a nightmare team of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry, ‘introducing’ George W. Bush as dramaturge – would have been more offensive still, had it been presented with some degree of coherence; one should, I suppose, be grateful for small mercies.

 

As it is, I can do no better than quote the opening Terry Eagleton’s magisterial LRB review of a book by the preposterous Dawkins (the review is more than well worth reading in its entirety):

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

 

It would be tempting to leave matters there, but alas, I should say something about the production myself, not least to attempt to justify the strong words above. Laufenberg takes us, with as much insensitivity as it would generally be possible, to Iraq. When the curtain opens, part way through the first Prelude, we see what appear to be refugees taking shelter in Monsalvat, which turns out to be a Christian community in war-torn territory. Running across the stage from time to time are some oldiers, presumably American, although I suppose they could be Blairite. Lest we feel unduly sympathetic, however, to people whose country has been invaded and their temple trashed, we learn that they are ‘fanatics’. If only they did not have such silly beliefs – no musician would ever consider the transcendent, would (s)he? – no one would ever have thought of destroying their lives; after all, Iraq was not about oil, was it? And so, in the sole powerful theatrical moment – however dubious – of the whole production, Amfortas is put on to the Cross himself, actually crucified for a while, and made to contribute blood himself to feed the community. Because that is what Iraqi Christians do, is it not? How good of a rational European to point that out to them and to us. The pornographic treatment of Ryan McKinny’s wounded, muscled body, naked, save, bizarrely, for what seems to be a nappy (!), suggests an object of devotion in itself. That might, in other circumstances, have led somewhere; Monsalvat is, after all, a dying community (cf. Dmitri Tcherniakov). Here, one can only presume, we are merely meant to appreciate that these simple folk are not only hopelessly deluded; they are sick perverts too. The rest is vapid nothingness – never more so than in what seems to be a bizarre misunderstanding of ‘Zum Raum wird hier Zeit’, the Transformation Music set to an expensive-looking video that takes us out into space, for an aerial view of the world, prior to homing in on our ‘conflict zone’. Religion, eh: what a terrible thing it is; how stupid it must seem to Martians and to enlightened earth-dwellers.

 

What to do for the second act? Let us be really brave, speak truth to power, spurn Western imperialism and racism, and have a go at Islam. Klingsor’s Magic Garden seems to be in ISIS-lite-land. Muslims, you see: they are both savages and hypocrites. Klingsor keeps a stash of crucifixes, perhaps stolen from the foolish Christian knights: perhaps he is ‘really’ a Christian himself, or perhaps it is just loot. Who cares? Later on, he flagellates himself (with his clothes on), excited by Kundry’s attempts at seducing Parsifal. There is worse, though, much worse. Soldiers again run across the stage from time to time; Parsifal, it turns out, is one of them. Being an American soldier of course means that he must be in the right. The Flowermaidens come onstage, hijab- or niqab-clad. (I do not think there was anyone with a full burka, but could not bring myself to look too closely.) Parsifal is not interested. They come back, having shed their modesty; interested he most certainly now is, and the Arab world is what it should be, an ‘exotic’ fantasy playground for white heterosexual men. So, having essentialised women’s bodies, reminded us  what they are really for, and having shown us what Islam is really about (probably even worse than Christianity, and equally lacking in subtlety, depth, or difference), we can sit back and endure a theatrically inert seduction. Amfortas – has the poor soul not suffered enough? – joins as a spectator, because otherwise we should not understand that he has some connection with what is unfolding. For anyone who might care, Parsifal makes no sign of the Cross at the end; I genuinely have no opinion whether that were a good or bad thing in context.

 

If there were at least some ‘offence interest’, however trivial, in the first two acts, the third commits, pretty much without exception, the ultimate sin of inducing boredom. Members of three faiths, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, get together, realise that they are all the same really, sing Kum ba yah (well not actually, but they may as well have done), and all is well; perhaps they will no longer even be refugees. En route to that revelation and revolution, we see some liberated (that is, naked) erstwhile Islamic Flowermaidens; relieved of their Islam, they are now able to show kindness to an elderly Kundry. Charity, of course, begins outside ‘religion’. Kundry and Gurnemanz take turns in a wheelchair, although the former seems quite sprightly the rest of the time: what a fraud! The final scene continues the eradication of theology: would it not be a grand thing indeed if we were to follow suit?

 

Musically, things were much better, although not good enough to offer ample compensation; that may, in any case, have been too much to ask. Hartmut Haenchen’s conducting was efficient; he clearly knew the score, but offered little beyond that. His briskness was, perhaps, in these particular circumstances, no bad thing; would we really have wished to linger? In the lead up to the Good Friday Music, however, the tempo was so absurdly fast that even that potential virtue was lost. Speeds in themselves are of little interest here; both Pierre Boulez and Daniele Gatti have had much to tell us about the work. But being fast is not a good in itself, any more than being slow might be. Far too often, the score seemed merely to be skated over. The Bayreuth Festival Orchestra played, as one might have expected, very well indeed, but was too often subdued and harried by its conductor. Although much better in the third act, and impressive in heft throughout, the chorus, to my surprise, proved somewhat erratic of intonation during the first act.

 

At least the singing was good, in two cases outstanding, those two cases being McKinny’s Amfortas and Georg Zeppenfeld’s Gurnemanz. Both showed something very close to the ideal musico-dramatic alchemy between words and music, heightening the meaning and impact of both. Zeppenfeld’s heroic stint at Bayreuth – I have seen him in the Ring, Tristan, and Parsifal! – must be regarded as one of this year’s great successes at the Festival. Reactions to Klaus Florian Vogt tend to focus on whether people like or dislike his highly controversial voice. It seems to me considerably better suited to Lohengrin than to Parsifal, but, on its own terms, Vogt’s performance was highly commendable. If the results were sometimes bland, at least to my ears, it is always a relief simple to hear a tenor capable of singing a Wagner role. Like McKinny and Zeppenfeld, Vogt can act too; so can Elena Pankratova, as one really noticed in the third act, when she has next to nothing to sing. If only the acting skills of all could have been put to better use. Whilst Pankratova’s vocal performance was sometimes a little wayward, it was nevertheless capable of thrilling beyond the more obviously histrionic passages, and often drew one with considerable subtlety to listen. Karl-Heinz Lehner and Gerd Grochowski offered laudable performances as Titurel and Klingsor respectively; so did a fine bunch, as it were, of Flowermaidens, likewise our Knights and Squires.

 

Who on earth (or beyond it?) the man seated above the stage, his back turned to us, may have been we never did find out. God? Wagner? Jonathan Meese? One had long since ceased to care. Perhaps we should let Meese have the next-to-last words: ‘Richard Wagner ist, wie Meese, ein Kunstfanatiker mit dem Tunnelblick K.U.N.S.T. Richard Wagner ist keine Ersatzreligion, Richard Wagner ersetzt alle Religionen. Richard Wagner ist die Machterzergreifung KUNST, Meese's Parsifal ist Kunstherrschaft. Meese dient dem Richard Wagner ohne Falsch.’ One does not have to agree, or even to understand, to sense that Meese might have offered something more engaging, perhaps even something more sympathetic towards Wagner’s complex relationships with theology and religion. Nach Wien, then…