Boris Godunov, Hamburg State Opera, 4 October 2023

Images: Brinkhoff/Mögenburg
Boris Godunov (Alexander Tsymbalyuk)

Boris Godunov – Alexander Tsymbalyuk
Andrey Schchelkalov – Alexey Bogdanchikov
Nikitch (Police Officer) – Hubert Kowalczyk
Mityukha – Julian Arsenault
Prince Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky – Matthias Klink
Pimen – Vitalij Kowaljow
Grigory Otrepiev – Dovlet Nurgeldiyev
Hostess of the Inn – Marta Swiderska
Varlaam – Ryan Speedo Green
Missail – Jürgen Sacher
Xenia – Olivia Boen
Xenia’s Nurse – Renate Spingler
Fyodor – Kady Evanyshyn
Boyar – Mateusz Lugowski
Holy Fool – Florian Panzieri

Frank Castorf (director)
Wolfgang Gruber (assistant director)
Aleksandar Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretzki (costumes)
Rainer Casper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Severin Renke (video, live camera)
Maryvonne Riedelsheimer (live editing)
Patric Seibert (dramaturgy)

  
Children’s and Youth Choir of the Hamburg State Opera (director: Luiz de Goday)

Chorus of the Hamburg State Opera (director: Eberhard Friedrich)

Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra

Kent Nagano (conductor)

It is, of course, the opera for our time; arguably, it is for many other times too. Boris Godunov, in whatever incarnation – a more complex question than it is even for a Bruckner symphony – has nonetheless come under attack from some frankly bizarre nationalists who consider it should not currently be performed. The Polish National Opera’s Waldemar Piotr Dąbrowski announced cancellation of a Warsaw staging with a string of non sequiturs he could not possibly have believed. Ukrainian protestors mobbed La Scala to demand cancellation there. The country’s Minister of Culture went further and, incredibly, demanded other countries boycott all Russian culture. What on earth do they think happens in the opera? Boris’s reign is hardly characterised by its success; whatever this opera is concerned with, it is certainly not a ‘how to’ guide. It is rather like those strange people who think Hitler might have been politically inspired by the Ring. We can be fairly certain he noticed what happened to Wotan, Siegfried, and any other hero. And if we are to take the claims made for Russian culture seriously, surely we should seek to understand it, as of course we should Polish, Ukrainian, and any other culture: all part of our world.

Frank Castorf’s new production for the Hamburg State Opera is arguably not so new. It was due to open in September 2020, but was thwarted by coronavirus. Three years later, it has its chance in a very changed Europe. (You will struggle to go far in Germany without seeing a Ukrainian flag.) Layers of resonance, like those in the work, make it more rather than less relevant, and show those who would cancel or ban artworks for the fools, as well as the knaves, that they are. All societies write and rewrite their history. All respond to myth as well as to evidence, to the present as well as to the past. This is what we see here, in a Russian Empire whose costumes (brilliantly designed by Adriana Braga Peretzki) may be of the twentieth century, but also look back all the way to the Time of Troubles and beyond, boyars from before Peter the Great had their beards shorn. (Is that not, after all, what Stalin did with his ‘Great Patriotic War’?) These pasts are, in many ways, now, whether in Pimen’s chronicle or the electronically changing and updating battle maps of Boris’s imperial quarters, whose billiard games afford little relaxation, yet provide plentiful metaphors for surrounding machinations.

The writing and the dramatising are the thing. Many of us have probably fallen into the trap of taking Pimen’s witness for the truth. He seems so plausible. Perhaps Grigory/Dmitri did too; that is left rather more to our imagination. And does not the tragedy make more sense if Boris was guilty? (Yet if he was, why not, as dramaturge Patric Seibert points out in an excellent programme essay, give the people what they want? Confess and crush his enemy, who is nowhere near victory, in any case?) Perhaps it would, if this were a ‘classical’ anything, yet the rough edges of Boris, its very problematical qualities, are itself the grit of its drama and, perhaps, of its truth. In this, the 1868-9 version (speaking of ‘original’ or otherwise only muddies the water further), we see and hear, to quote Richard Taruskin in typically trenchant yet not unpersuasive form: ‘a set of scenes very roughly hewn from Pushkin’s unwieldy block of poetic marble, selected according to diverse and unrelated criteria. … Far from showing how carefully Mussorgsky structured his dramatic conception, the first Boris boldly displays a quintessentially realist disdain for a well-made play.’ 

‘No Polish scene?’ I hear you lament. Well, yes or no. For Castorf, permitted a degree of leeway here in the opera house to draw on his theatrical practice of introduction of other texts, fills in some of the gaps on film between scenes. Avaricious, cynical, lustful, and a great deal more: it is difficult to imagine the Grigory and Marina we see there as offering much of a solution for the ever-suffering Russian people, whose manipulation by church and nobility is clearly signalled. So too is that of Poland and the Roman Catholic Church more generally, as we see in the presence, also on film, of John Paul II and dispersal of propaganda leaflets headed by iconic – for once, surely, the term holds – emblems of ‘Solidarność’. More traditional icons are to be seen amongst flags and other emblems too: here is nothing if not a contested sphere.

This is less a revisionist (or, if you prefer, historically informed) portrayal of Boris and his rule than one which, in Shakespearean style, declines to judge and leaves that to us, should we wish. We may, of course, learn more by similarly declining: a controversial message,’ if message it be, right now. We certainly learn more by being afforded the privilege. As the action progresses, framed by yet another superlative revolving set of contrasts and connections from Castorf’s longstanding collaborator Aleksandar Denić, we head towards more than one tragic denouement. There is that of Boris, and what we might read into him as representing: perhaps a more ideal form of Soviet rule? His concern for the people seems genuine enough and he feeds them: a point made clearly here. One thing, moreover, that differentiates Boris from today’s politicians – those in power, anyway – is, as Seibert notes, his a conscience. His personal tragedy, and that, it seems here, of Russia too, is that that conscience proves his undoing; it kills him. A Gorbachev, perhaps? For there is the greater political tragedy too. What comes of nefarious external interference, aided and abetted by the Shuiskys (and Romanovs) within?

Fool (Florian Panzieri)

Boris dead, the set revolves once more for Fyodor to see what the future holds: the swift substitution for socialist realism of Coca-Cola, in the form of a huge, again ‘iconic’ bottle centre stage, with a straw whose colours are that of Yeltsin’s (and Putin’s) Russia. ‘Flow, flow, bitter tears,’ as the Fool would have sung again in a different version; the words nonetheless ring in our ears and the curtain falls. What we have seen, whether on stage, on live video close-up, or on film, and what we have still not seen, that variety of sources notwithstanding, may have helped us make up our own minds. What does Pimen do when he retreats inside? Who is exploiting whom at the Polish court? To what extent, if you will forgive the school examination format, is Boris the victim of psychological manipulation? Or we may emerge all the more confused at the complications of art and reality. There are far worse lessons than that. 

Kent Nagano’s conducting of the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra intrigued me too. On the one hand, some of it sounded what I am tempted to call unidiomatic, though I should not exaggerate: closer to Tchaikovsky (though hardly Rimsky) than to Mussorgsky. Yet if we draw those lessons from the production, what of the musical performance? Should we not beware the idea that there is a correct or true path? If we cannot settle on a text for the work ‘itself’, should we not open that out in other ways? Nowadays, we pride ourselves on appreciating the radicalism of ‘pure’ Mussorgsky, even to the extent of preferring (to my mind, somewhat dubiously) the version heard here. What have we lost in the meantime? And can we seriously maintain that those before did not know what they were doing? For Nagano certainly knew where the music was going and, so it seemed, where it had more broadly come from. It was a reading that complemented and even complicated what we saw in stage, even if sometimes I longed for a little more starkness and bite.

 

Fyodor (Kady Evanyshyn)

In the title role, Alexander Tsymbalyuk offered a similarly thoughtful and complex portrayal: sympathetic yet never banally so. We might trust his witness no more than that of anyone else, but we could certainly trust the alchemy between music, words, and gesture. Matthias Klink’s wheedling Shuisky and Dovlet Nurgeldiyev’s sweet-toned faux-innocence as Grigory made their points in similarly thoughtful ways. Shuisky’s first-hand ‘happening’ to see Boris’s breakdown offered a duly chilling moment. Marta Swiderska presided in colourful, characterful fashion over a raucous hostelry close to the Lithuanian border, Ryan Speedo Green’s Varlaam a properly larger-than-life patron. Vitalij Kowaljow’s Pimen seemed very much the holy man we were given to believe, yet far from ruled out more sinister possibilities. All contributed to the greater whole, as of course did the chorus, whose disappointments, privations, and other sufferings were all too real. Not that they were not in some sense responsible too. Expertly trained by Eberhard Friedrich, with them we knew where we were—or rather, we thought we did.

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Munich Opera Festival (3) - From the House of the Dead, 30 July 2018

Nationaltheater

Images: Wilfried Hösl

Alexandr Petrovič Gorjančikov – Peter Mikuláš
Aljeja – Evgeniya Sotnikova
Luka Kuzmič (Filka Morozov) – Aleš Briscein
Skuratov – Charles Workman
Šiškov – Bo Skovhus
Big Prisoner, Prisoner with the Eagle – Manuel Günther
Little Prisoner, Bitter Prisoner – Tim Kuypers
Governor – Christian Rieger
Old Prisoner – Ulrich Reß
Čekunov – Johannes Kammler
Drunk Prisoner – Galeano Salas
Cook – Boris Prýgl
Smith – Alexander Milev
Pope – Peter Lobert
Prostitute – Niamh O’Sullivan
Don Juan (Brahmin) – Callum Thorpe
Kedrill, Young Prisoner – Matthew Grills
Šapkin, Happy Prisoner – Kevin Conners
Čerevin, Voice from the Kirghizian Steppes – Dean Power
Guard – Long Long

Frank Castorf (director)

Aleksandar Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)
Rainer Casper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert (video, live camera)
Stefanie Katja Nirschl (live camera)
Jens Crull (video, live editing)
Miron Hakenbeck (dramaturgy)
Martha Münder (revival director)

Bavarian State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Sören Eckhoff)

Bavarian State Orchestra
Simone Young (conductor)

  

Frank Castorf might have been born to direct From the House of the Dead. In this, his third opera project – or better, his third opera project in the opera house, for his Volksbühne Meistersinger must surely be reckoned with, even by those of us who did not see it – many of his hallmarks and those of his team are present, yet without the slightest hint of staleness, of anything other than being reborn for and in the work. And how the work suits such an approach; in many respects, the deconstruction has already been done. Probably Janáček’s greatest opera, indeed his greatest work of all, it is no accident that it is the one Pierre Boulez chose to conduct, towards the end of his life. Alas I never heard that live, although in 2014, I would see Patrice Chéreau’s production in Berlin. That was, of course, a fine piece of theatre, as indeed was Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Covent Garden staging, seen earlier this year. Castorf, however, revelling in its fragmentary nature – for it is in many respects his own – triumphantly, I should say dialectically, offers the strongest sense of a whole I have seen or could imagine. By taking it as it is, Castorf’s team and a magnificent cast, aided greatly by Bavarian State Opera forces under Simone Young in the finest performance I have heard from her, alert both to the needs of the minute and of the greater architecture, present and represent the opera as it is and might be. Quite without sentimentality, they write and rewrite, igniting and reigniting that Dostoevskian redemptive spark that is both present and absent throughout, depending when and where one looks and listens, how and with what one pieces together one’s own narrative, musical and dramatic.

We are in Russia – no doubt of that. It is Russia at a dark time – again no doubt of that. (When, however, was that not the case, save for a few years under Lenin, and even then…?) But is it a ‘real’ Russia? And what indeed could so impossibly naïve a formulation mean? Live camerawork performs all manner of tasks, questioning our ability to comprehend, to view, to narrate, whilst making it all the more necessary that we try to do so. There is little doubt concerning the realism – until, that is, a true Carnival of the Dead comes amongst the prisoners and the prison. Magic realism? Perhaps, but if so, it is the blackest of magic to follow, perhaps even to sublate, the blackest of comedy and (non-)redemption. Whereas, in his Siegfried and Gotterdammerung, Castorf took us to an alternative historical path for the GDR, an alternative that turned out not to be so very alternative at all, (Al)Exander Platz still a commercial, post-socialist wasteland, Wall Street still failing to burn, here we seem perhaps to have joined the USSR for an alternative 1930s.

Bitter Prisoner (Tim Kuypers), Prisoner with
the Eagle (Manuel Gunther),
Aljeja (Evgeniya Sotnikova)

Or have we? Trotskyist hints abound: the rabbit hutch (many thanks to my friend Sam Goodyear for having pointed out the connection), Mexico too (‘Partido liberal’, we read on one of many historical and/or imaginary signs), a film advertisement (in Spanish), starring Alain Delon. (Hang on, if we are in 1972…?) Even a carnival bird Aljeja, splendidly sung by Evgeniya Sotnikova, seems both to suggest and to disavow that possibility. Or are we, was I, confusing him/her – here most definitely ‘her’ – with the Prisoner with the Eagle, or his eagle? What might that mean here, whether the confusion or the eagle? Russia or the USSR, however, it certainly remains, even down to the affinity – which seems to have been overstated by some – with Aleksandar Denić’s Walküre set (Azerbaijan, 1942). What does a sign for Pepsi Cola in English and Russian tell us? And what, at the end, does the English poster invitation to travel to the USSR as a holiday destination mean, not least in such appalling circumstances? Stop trying to ascribe meaning to everything: is that not what, as an imprisoned intellectual, one is compelled to do? Are we to see the future and will it to work, or perhaps indict it? Is it just a joke, as suggested by the presence of a Ring crocodile? Who knows? We shall never make the journey, just like so many of those prisoners, yet unlike, perhaps, Gorjančikov, who thinks he has something written in his head. Like Dostoevsky, like Trotsky, like Castorf, like our writer, Alexandr Petrovič Gorjančikov, we write and rewrite. So too does the action all around, on stage, on film, seen and unseen; so too, of course, does the orchestra.

Šiškov (Bo Skovhus), Statisterie and Chorus

It is complicated, yes; how can a fragmentary drama with so many ‘characters’ or at least people not be? But it is also visceral, direct. Violence we see, we feel, whether we like it or not, be it in the Guard’s sadistic flagellation (a truly nasty Long Long, almost a match for the still nastier Governor of Christian Rieger) or in the metal of the steppes’ orchestra. Opera too, even in this most inhospitable of circumstances, is reborn. If the Wanderer seemed to have been an inspiration for our noble prisoner’s initial journey to this camp, Peter Mikuláš capturing both intelligence and a certain camouflaged nobility, then it is the Wotan of the second-act Walküre monologue who comes to mind in that of Šiškov. That is partly a matter of Bo Skovhus’s searing portrayal, quite the most powerful performance I have seen and heard from him in a long time. But everyone involved has played a role in putting these pieces together, in constructing something from these musico-dramatic shards. ‘A mother gave birth even to Filka,’ after all – and we know it, because, like Šiškov, he sings, not least in this devilish incarnation from Aleš Briscein. So too, earlier, do Don Juan (an outstanding Callum Thorpe) and his pseudo-Leporello (another excellent performance, this time from Matthew Grills), in a play-within-a-play. That, thanks to Castorf’s lengthy experience with and rejuvenation of post-dramatic commentary, seems more of a play-in-itself than I can recall – until, once again, it does not.

 

Šiškov, Cerevin (Dean Power)

For, like Don Giovanni, this is redemptive within and without, or seems to be: as I said, it takes life and drama as they are. A (post-)religious consciousness is at work here. It also, perhaps, suggests what they might be, or at least what one day, when the revolution comes again, the revolution to which we cling no matter what, we might hope it to be. The noble prisoner leaves, though, so most likely not. He has used, learned from his experience; so, we imagine, have we. The carnival of (Russian) death continues. There is a chink of something uncertain. In the blackest of comedies, we might even think it light. Humanity even – though are we not all now post-human(ist) as well as post-dramatic? Who knows, who cares? This human comedy and tragedy of which we are part rolls on, just as it did for those Calderón-like figures of a reimagined Salzburg World Theatre in the celebrated post-war Furtwängler Don Giovanni. The final scene alienates – like Mozart’s. And yet, like that too, it moves (us). We have experienced something, even if we have not a hope in our living hell of learning what it may have been. We have, like this Gorjančikov, written a work of sorts in our head. No one will read it or even remember it, perhaps it would be impossible for anyone to make sense of its difficult, even nonsensical fragments; yet that spark of creativity, of art, of that which Marx just as much as Schiller considered made us human, has flickered. At least we think it did. Perhaps. Or at least we thought it did. Once. Perhaps. We return, like Gorjančikov, like Trotsky, to watch the post/non-human (non-)drama for the rabbits in their hutch, caged like us and yet (to the sentimental?) more free. Perhaps.

Aljeja and rabbits in their hutch

Bayreuth Festival (6) - Götterdämmerung, 28 August 2017

Festspielhaus

Siegfried – Stefan Vinke

Gunther – Markus Eiche

Alberich – Albert Dohmen

Hagen – Stephen Milling

Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster, Andreas Rosar

Gutrune – Allison Oakes

Waltraute – Marina Prudenskaya

First Norn, Flosshilde – Wiebke Lehmkuhl

Second Norn, Wellgunde – Stephanie Houtzeel

Third Norn – Christiane Kohl

Woglinde – Alexandra Steiner

Frank Castorf (director)

Patric Seibert (assistant director)

Aleksander Denić (set designs)

Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)

Rainer Casper (lighting)

Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Marek Janowski (conductor)

All good things must come to an end. All bad things too, I suppose, or at least hope, although looking at the world outside the Festspielhaus… But then the Festspielhaus has always looked to the world outside, nowhere more so than in the Ring. I have no idea how one would measure – yes, neoliberals still wish to do so, however many years after the Frankfurt School, after Romanticism, after anyone possessed of any intelligence and/or humanity ever… – degrees of the ‘political’ in an artwork, but if one could, it is difficult to see what, all things told, and many, many things are told here, could beat the Ring in that respect. Nothing could be less ‘faithful’ to Wagner’s intentions, let alone to our own needs, than some idiotic Disney ‘experience’ such as that purveyed by the likes of Otto Schenk. At least, I think, we have been spared a Zeffirelli Ring. (Should that sound like a contraceptive device, there may be good reason for that.)

Bayreuth in particular is and always has been a workshop, a place for experimentation, tendencies towards sacralisation (Bühnenweihfestspiel, anyone?) notwithstanding. That was what attracted Boulez to Bayreuth in the first – and second – place; that was thus what brought Patrice Chéreau there, for what must surely remain, bar the very first, the most celebrated Ring production in history. The Boulez-Chéreau films remain a miracle: as watchable – and as listenable – as when they first appeared. Moreover, and without slight, say, to Harry Kupfer’s estimable successor – let us draw a veil over Peter Hall’s contribution – Chéreau’s staging changed the work forever. Arguably, there was a good deal in it, coincidentally or otherwise, presaged by Joachim Herz in Leipzig; but at least in the West, and indeed worldwide, given its filming, it was the ‘Centenary Ring’ that informed and reminded so many what the work was, or might be, really about. Having come to the end of my viewing of Frank Castorf’s Ring for the third time, I am happy to put my neck on the line and to say that, for all its problems and imperfections – not unlike the Ring itself – this is a production which, like Chéreau’s, Herz’s, and Kupfer’s too, has changed the work forever. I recoiled from some of it the first time I saw it, and freely admit that I was, in many cases, quite wrong to have done so, although I think it also fair to say that many of the performers have grown into it during its progress and also that it has itself grown in stature following revision. For that reason, it would be hypocritical of me to condemn too harshly those who found themselves lost or bewildered.

Let us hope, though, that there will be another opportunity for them, and for others who have never seen this Ring, to experience it, on DVD. Some of Bayreuth’s recent choices in that respect have frankly been bizarre: still no Herheim Parsifal, but an instant release for Laufenberg’s miserable successor. Wagner may have died owing the world a Tannhäuser; Bayreuth would do much to stave off any such demise by giving the world a Castorf Ring. Marek Janowski’s conducting has had its ups and downs, the first two acts of Die Walküre the nadir. Yet here, if still lacking much of the epic scale and dramatic thrust, let alone the critical stance, of what we see on stage, it acts well enough as a foil. Bar a few inevitable brass fluffs – I am not sure I have ever heard a Götterdämmerung in which that did not happen – the orchestra was excellent on its own terms. Moreover, the vocal and dramatic performances on stage have surely been better this year than in any of the previous instalments.

For Götterdämmerung, the cast was identical to last year’s – except for one partial, unforgettable exception. Wagner is and remains theatre, which entails a great deal of contingency. In this case, we were treated to our first – well, certainly my first – trans Brünnhilde. Having injured her leg during the curtain calls at the end of the first act, Catherine Foster, awe-inspiring in both her artistry and her professionalism, sang the part magnificently: on crutches, from the sidelines. Meanwhile, production assistant, Andreas Rosar donned a dress, wig, and so on, and acted the role on stage. Both deserve the highest of praise, not just ‘in the circumstances’. What deserves unmerited scorn and outrage is the small contingent in the audience that booed Rosar. Seriously: what piece of subhuman scum would act in such a way to someone who, at almost no notice, quite literally saved the show? It is not as if such is an unheard of practice in the theatre, and if, for some reason the AMOP delegation did not like it, why did they not just leave? If, somehow you have managed to escape the sound and sight of resurgent fascism all around us in ‘the real world’, here it was, frighteningly and sickeningly present, railing at the mirror Wagner, Castorf, and their performers held up to that world. I should love to have it revealed that the substitution was actually all along part of Castorf’s Konzept, but I think we can assume otherwise. At any rate, the same people booed his indefatigable assistant – in many ways the greatest star of the entire four-part show – Patric Seibert. His Everyman, surely unique in direction and participation in such a piece, has clearly both been on quite a journey and taken us on several others.

Back, anyway, to Castorf ‘proper’, whatever that may mean. The cosmic tittle-tattle (Thomas Mann) of the Norns takes place in an appropriately exhausted, end-of-the-world setting. Aleksander Denić’s set designs, Adriana Braga Peretski costumes, and not lest the gloomy lighting of Rainer Casper are very much in tandem with those world-weary E-flat minor opening chords; this is not a production that always criticises or works against the musical drama, far from it. Exhaustion in a well-nigh Beckettian sense rules: Fin de partie? A weird shrine, almost Marian, yet anything but, continues to draw attention and repel. But to what is this little room into which not only the Norns but many of their successors, canonical characters and others, continue to enter and, perhaps just as important, from which they continue to attempt to leave? It suggests exhausted consumerism, replete with plastic refuse, born, of course, of the oil that has run through the entire cycle. It advertises a deadly contemporary far-right politics, which, as the poster puts it, prefers ‘Oma’ to ‘Roma’. We also see glimpses of an eternally televised non-revolution such as we endure in our own late capitalist lives: as witnessed Andreas Deinert’s and Jens Crull’s video footage, both on the particular television screen within the shrine, and elsewhere onstage. East and West both led here: state capitalism as well as the still worse neoliberal variety. There is no escape. This is a world that takes its leave from Chéreau’s Götterdämmerung, or at least may be read as having done so: a world of rituals in a post-religious society that knows no morality, indeed finds it impossible even to ‘know’. Yet still, in this nihilist hell, it must somehow continue to ‘do’ something – just as the second act will offer up desperate, pointless evocations to gods who are already dead in any meaningful sense. The Norns are all dressed up for a ball to which they know they are neither invited nor capable of attending; but what else is there to do? They can sing, of course, and all three of them do – magnificent both in solo and in blend.

The Gibichungs, heirs in many ways to the ‘minor gods’ of Das Rheingold, are a still more desperate bunch. (Ultimately, the Norns need not care that much.) Gunther’s self-love, in a commanding, yet never too commanding performance from Markus Eiche is immediately apparent, vanity and insecurity two sides of the same black leather coin. Allison Oakes’s dolly bird Gutrune is certainly the victim of misogyny, but she is happy in her little smart car and would doubtless recoil, except again through the agency of song, from any feminist accusation that she should have attended to weightier, or at least different, matters. Stephen Milling’s powerfully sung Hagen has had her number all along; indeed, in a less common suggestion of incest than the usual Gunther-Gutrune one, his agency is confirmed in gaining her attention to participate in the plot in the first place. He does not need to do very much; Hagen rarely does. But what he does reminds us that he, or perhaps the mysteriously still-with-us – or is he? – Alberich of Albert Dohmen, in perhaps his finest performance here, is pulling more of the strings than anyone else; which is not, of coruse, to say that there are not forces beyond anyone’s control at work here. Wotan may have dismissed Erda as Fate, but what does that mean? Not very much, perhaps, in a world in which chemical works and Wall Street (both featured, both crucially, undefeated, even at the last) continue to rule.

Siegfried is no better. He may even be worse. It is, after all, only at the last in Wagner’s drama that he seems a character remotely worthy of the hopes invested in him – whether by Brünnhilde to Sieglinde or by the newly-human ex-goddess to herself, or indeed by us as bystanders (‘men and women moved to the very depths of their being’) to a revolution that fails. Humping Gutrune quickly, brutally, before asking Gunther his sister’s name is horrible enough, but the reality of his rape of Brünnhilde, video projections both clarifying and intensifying the horror of what is going on, and of who, via the Tarnhelm, is who, chills as rarely before. The brutality of Wagner’s score here does much of the work, of course – so too did Foster’s frighteningly imperious impassivity before Marina Prudenskaya’s heartrendingly imploring Waltraute beforehand – yet it can so readily be partly undone by an uncomprehending staging. Siegfried is leader now, his demeanour, his costume, the projections tell us: and what good has it done us? None.

What I said about Stefan Vinke in Siegfried counts doubly here: the voice may not ingratiate, but should it? He is tireless, almost inhumanly so, and that is surely a more important thing to register. That Gunther and Siegfried make their oath of blood brotherhood in the kebab stall kitchen, none too careful with hygiene, serves to underline not only echoes of Wagnerian Palazzo Vendramin decadence but the sheer bestial depravity of the world within and without the theatre. All the while, Wall Street, carelessly concealed in cloth, awaits its deliberately underwhelming revelation. No one really bothers to hide who is running the show any longer.

The second act is thus set for another attempt at revolution that fails. Think, perhaps, of the ‘anti-capitalist’ protestors who neither know nor care what they want, but like a bit of attention. There is real crisis here, real hunger. Or is there? Do the members of the crowd putting up posters to that effect, and acting as if their lives are at stake in their pillaging, really mean what they say? Or are they just engaging in desperate rituals, whose meaning – again, like those evocations to the gods – has almost passed from memory? There is certainly no doubting the brutality of their behaviour, sons of Siegfried and Hagen, to Seibert’s character, desperately trying to cater to their demands. Or is he ‘just’ an actor too? His ‘death’ at the beginning of the third act is certainly stage-managed. The video shows him smear himself in ketchup (from his stall, perhaps?) and leave himself for dead, awaiting the Rhinemaidens – like the Norns, equally fine individually and in ensemble – to bundle him into their car, prior to their cavorting with Siegfried and his subsequent brutal attack upon them. (Shades of Alberich in Rheingold, but in semi-reverse? To return to the second-act crowd: does it have any revolutionary potential left in it, when Siegfried clearly does not? Try as we might, it is difficult to find. A good few of its members seem more preoccupied with culinary and sexual excess; still, fake radicalism is a good way to win a girl, is it not? The shots Seibert serves to many – Gutrune included – only make matters worse, but he is hardly in a position to argue.

And so, when Brünnhilde threatens to set Wall Street alight, nothing really happens. Everything is even worse than we had feared. No more has the end of this miserable world come than a revolution has saved us. Various participants go through the motions; someone even pops a Picasso out of the window for safe keeping. Or is it just to put it on more brazen display to the plebs below? The Rhinemaidens survive – or at least they do on screen. (That someone was a Rhinemaiden.) They even give Hagen a kitschy Rhine funeral, or at least see him off. Video, as it had in Das Rheingold, both comments on, elucidates, and frustrates the action; it has done so in the Funeral March too, Hagen marching back in a ‘Romantic’ landscape such as one might always have wished for until, jarringly, one saw it – and thought ‘what a load of rubbish’.

It is all, perhaps, a bit Heimat 3: which, the more one thinks about it, the more appropriate it seems. As Herbert Marcuse put it, in his self-reflexive critique of Marxist aesthetics, The Aesthetic Dimension: ‘If art were to promise that at the end good would triumph over evil, such a promise would be refuted by the historical truth. In reality it is evil which triumphs, and there are only islands of good where one can find refuge for a brief time. Authentic works of art are aware of this; they reject the promise made too easily; they reject the unburdened happy end.’ Rejecting the catharsis unburdened tragedy, or gnawing away at it out of post- or non-revolutionary ennui, twists the dialectical screw further. What a world is ours.

Bayreuth Festival (4) - Siegfried, 26 August 2017

Festspielhaus

Siegfried – Stefan Vinke

Mime – Andreas Conrad
Wanderer – Thomas Johannes Mayer
Alberich – Albert Dohmen
Fafner – Karl-Heinz Lehner
Erda – Nadine Weissmann
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Woodbird – Ana Durlovski

Frank Castorf (director)
Aleksandar Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)
Rainer Kasper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video) 

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Marek Janowski (conductor)

Siegfried is now for me the highpoint in Frank Castorf’s Ring. It is surely the most difficult of all four parts to bring off, but Castorf’s – and his performers’ – grasp of the work’s epic quality may well be unsurpassed. One would at least have to go back – from productions I know – to Harry Kupfer, perhaps even to Patrice Chéreau. In Wagner’s drama, as in Castorf’s staging, so many of the Ring’s strands come together here – and how!

A crucial idea to the drama, to its realisation, and indeed to the epic tradition in which it so triumphantly yet challengingly stands is liminality. At a basic, or perhaps better immediate, level, the revolving stage does its work here. Forest or station? Both are quintessential liminal zones. The German Romantic forest has a long history, of course, extending back long before German Romanticism. Think of the invention of ‘Hermann’, a Teutonisation of Arminius: ‘Assuredly he was the deliverer of Germany,’ wrote the admiring Tacitus in his Annals. Arminius ‘had defied Rome, not in her early rise, as other kings and generals, but in the height of her empire’s glory.’ And for Romans, Germans such as Wagner, born in Leipzig in 1813, could substitute the French. Caspar David Friedrich contributed two paintings to an exhibition held in Dresden in March 1814 to celebrate the liberation of Germany from the French yoke, one depicting the imaginary grave of Arminius/Hermann. Wagner too rejoiced in the memory of those events in the Teutoburger Wald, even when he told Cosima in rather gloomy terms: ‘So far, we have been great in defence, dispelling alien elements which we could not assimilate; the Teutoburger Wald was a rejection of the Roman influence, the Reformation also a rejection, our great literature a rejection of the influence of the French; the only positive thing so far has been our music — Beethoven.’ The implication was, of course, that now things might change, although by then the strong, Schopenhauerian element in his world-view was already suggesting they might not. And so, enter the resigned Wanderer, more a hero than the rebel without a consciousness, Siegfried, born in that forest, and ignorant of anything beyond it, might ever prove in reality.

Castorf may be understood both to play on that characterisation and to question it. How, after all, could one not, concerned where – indeed knowing where – such Romanticism, even nationalism, might lead, or perhaps better, be understood by some to have led. And so, the fabled alternative Mount Rushmore presents a world in which socialism might appear to have won the day: Marx (great) – Lenin (good) – and then we on the Left do not quite know where to look when it comes to Stalin and Mao. Could we not have Adorno instead? The negative dialectic says no. Aleksandar Denić’s set design for the other side, Bayreuth (Al)exanderplatz station – S-Bahn, U-Bahn, post office, station restaurant, fountain, clock – is too real to be real. It is an astonishing sculpture and again an astonishingly apt liminal foil to the forest. What is more full of transience, more full of possibility, more full of the potential for foiling possibility, than a station? East Berlin seems to be going pretty well, or does it? Or is it East Berlin at all? It is what it is, just as those celebrated crocodiles are what they are. That does not stop us continually asking how, why, what, though. Like Mime, however, do we ask the questions whose answers we really need? Political leaders come and go above on the screens: is that Siegfried; is it Wotan; is it Mime? Or are they just faces of no one in particular, on to whom we (literally) project what we expect, what we want, what we have been led to believe? It is a question as much, perhaps for Honecker as for Merkel, for Lenin as for Stalin. And when actual projections of characters’ faces appear on Mount Rushmore again, what are we to make of them? Does it ‘mean’ anything that we see, or think we see, Siegfried’s face not on revolutionary Lenin or Mao but on ‘establishment’ Stalin, and Wotan (his eye damaged, yet playfully winking) on Stalin’s? Why do we insist on meaning at all? Have we not learned? Is Beckettian gloom perhaps all there is?

Maybe, yet there are other possibilities here we might grasp. Whether they are better or worse is for us to decide; perhaps Schopenhaurian renunciation would be better after all, but there is no short-circuiting of the question. Our supposed revolutionary hero, Siegfried, is a brutal figure by any standards. His Kalashnikov, heard to terrifyingly loud effect, should give us all pause for thought. Do we think of late Soviet, Brezhnev-era imperialism perhaps (Afghanistan?) or of our own, more fashionable heroes? We still all believe in Castro and Guevara, do we not? Meanwhile, oil continues to do its work; it always has, in West and in East. Patric Seibert, initially Siegfried’s chained bear, is literally covered in it. Alberich is still at large, watching and mocking – like the Wanderer and also like Mime. We draw connections between them; or perhaps we do not. It is up to us. And all the while, those awe-inspiring landscapes and cityscapes, with their wealth of associations, form our thinking, whether we like it or no.

Erda initially does not. But she must put on a show. The misogyny here of a newly revivified Wanderer – I am genuinely unsure as to whether the production participates in it, which is perhaps as it is uneasily should be – truly shocks. As soon as the tables turn – for Wagner, as soon as Wotan finally rejects Fate, but what does that mean here? – Wotan can treat the earth goddess as despicably as any other woman. There is no redemption for him here in the halting of a wheel’s turning; perhaps instead he transmutes it into post-Russian roulette. Desperate to have a piece of him, Erda debases herself in the now celebrated insistence on fellating the god. His response is to run after Siegfried and to leave her to pay the bill. She has even turned herself into one of his ‘favourite’ blondes, but to no avail. Nadine Weismann, giving a towering dramatic portrayal, quite unafraid to sound hurt, damaged, and cowed, cuts a movingly pathetic figure under the restaurant table at her last.

Will things go better for her daughter? Probably not. We fear the worst when she dons her wedding dress, sure that Siegfried will betray her. Our old friend, the Brazilian carnival Woodbird is still around, after all. But in an inversion of what we have seen in previous years, Siegfried returns to her and they embrace. Is Castorf reconciling himself somewhat with Wagner, with Romanticism? I admit that I felt a little disappointed – how much more powerful I found it for Brünnhilde to be left on her own, whilst Siegfried fucked the Woodbird. But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps we now stand at the point at which we need to deconstruct the ‘Castorf Ring’, which, like Wagner’s, we know too well. At any rate, Catherine Foster proved herself in glorious voice, movingly eloquent as events around her coincided with, commentated on her – or did not. She has unquestionably gone from strength to strength.

Stefan Vinke, in the title role, proved tireless, if not necessarily ingratiating. But then, how ingratiating should a Siegfried be? When one hears so many singers who are simply incapable of getting through the evening, one cannot but be grateful for one who can, and who continues to be heard. He was certainly unafraid to repel us dramatically; no fairy-tale Romanticism here. Andreas Conrad’s Mime was very much a plausible opponent, heightening the dramatic stakes. This was a tenor, as well as a character, who demanded to be heard – and was. Thomas Johannes Mayer was perhaps on occasion a little verbally bluff as the Wanderer, but acted the role to a tee. His callous dismissal of Erda, mentioned above, chilled more, I think, than any of his predecessors’. Other singers all impressed in their different ways, very much part of the company.

And if Marek Janowski’s conducting of the score was not so alive to its epic quality as, say, that of Daniel Barenboim, or to the great conductors of the past, there was, at its best, a quicksilver dramatic quality to be heard and, yes, to be experienced that had been lacking in swathes of Die Walküre. Was the scene between Alberich and Mime simply too fast, almost glib? Perhaps, but it is not difficult to come up with a reading, in this context, to justify such a portrayal of what Hans Mayer brilliantly dubbed an ‘evil stockjobbers’ satire’. If Karl-Heinz Lehner’s darkly dangerous, still alluring Fafner represented, to quote Mayer once again, ‘the world of shameless wealth, the concentration of capital as a sign of the rise of the middle classes … under which Wagner had to suffer so much,’ then there is again something to be said for a lack of majesty to his prowling around the station. So long, that is, as it retained musico-dramatic coherence, which it did; Janowski certainly knew where the score was going, even when he seemed a little impatient with it. Perhaps, then, that will prove the most intriguing dialectical legacy of all from Castorf’s Siegfried: seemingly having held the work to sometimes extreme account, it vouchsafed the possibility, even the plausibility, of new musical readings too.

Bayreuth Festival (2) - Die Walküre, 24 August 2017

Festspielhaus

Siegmund – Christopher Ventris

Hunding – Georg Zeppenfeld

Wotan – John Lundgren

Sieglinde – Camilla Nylund

Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster

Fricka – Tanja Ariane Baumgartner

Gerhilde – Caroline Wenborne

Ortlinde – Dara Hobbs

Waltraute – Stephanie Houtzeel

Schwetleite – Nadine Weissmann

Helmwige – Christiane Kohl

Siegrune – Mareike Morr

Grimgerde – Weibe Lehmkuhl

Rossweiße – Alexandra Petersamer

 

Frank Castorf (director)

Patric Seibert (assistant director and dramaturgical collaboration)

Aleksandar Denić (set designs)

Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)

Rainer Kasper (lighting)

Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video)

 

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Marek Janowski (conductor)

 

Opera is such a difficult thing to get right: so many variables, so many contradictions. They are, however, part of its attraction and, when everything or most things in some sense come together, its greatness too. Not for nothing did Wagner designate the orchestra as his Greek Chorus: framer of, participant in, commentator and critic on the drama. During the first two acts of this Walküre, I found myself wishing that someone had told Marek Janowski. His reputation – largely amongst those who disapprove of treating Wagner as drama, with a fair sprinkling of pseudo-‘authenticists’ – is a mystery to those who know great Wagner conducting either of the present or the past. The best that could be said of the way he led these two acts – splendidly played, it must be said, by the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra – was that it was efficient. There were no catastrophes; we were not, thank God, on London’s Planet Pappano. But nor was there any great insight. What had come across as possible, even plausible objectivity in Das Rheingold, a very different drama, here merely sounded non-committal: a bit like those churned out Beethoven cycles certain fashion-victims excite themselves about. ‘Modern instruments and period style’ or some such nonsense: anything to avoid commitment, let alone a critical standpoint. Perhaps we should call it ‘Macron-meets-Vänskä’, or ‘music for the high street’; a few years hence no one will have heard of it, let alone listen to it.

 

I have never heard a less storm-like prelude to the first act; it proceeded smoothly, as if mowing a sufficiently, yet not excessively, watered lawn. As for the inconsequentiality of the orchestra during Wotan’s second act monologue, it sounded like recitative as understood by people who do not understand recitative. There is so much going on there: past, present, and future. It is one of the great turning-points of the entire Ring.  John Lundgren’s estimable efforts as Wotan notwithstanding, the tendency was more towards preparing a list for the weekly shopping. There is domesticating Wagner and there is that. Even the great climaxes were undersold – on the terms of the performance, let alone on other terms. I do not know what had been secreted in Janowski’s second-interval oranges, but it proved most welcome. If hardly Wagner on the level of a Barenboim, a Haitink, a Karajan, or a Furtwängler, we heard a much stronger sense of generative drama in the orchestra, more – if still not enough – of a dynamic range, and a greater willingness, occasionally at least, to let the Bayreuth strings have their head at climaxes. Woodwind solos also proved beguiling and, in a few cases, intriguingly curdling, Tristan not so very far away – as indeed the harmony tells us anyway.

 

I am not sure Frank Castorf’s production helped in that respect either. Although I found more to admire in it last year than I had in 2014 – I think! Again I shall re-read later – there was, at least in actual performance, a little too much generalised standing around and singing. I think I understand the reasoning behind it, or at least a possible reasoning behind it, and shall attempt to explain, but it seemed to me to need to be more forcefully projected. A post-Brechtian critique of Wagner’s (post-)Romanticism is apparent, but might have been much more so. And if we are going to deconstruct, even mock, ‘Du bist der Lenz’ and so on, we really need the orchestra – as well as the splendid singers – to be offering the case for the defence, or at least the material to be deconstructed. Alone, there is only so much even singers such as Christopher Ventris and Camilla Nylund can offer – although I loved the camera close-ups on Sieglinde’s knowingly exaggerated expressions as she prepares Hunding’s potions. (One need not agree that such plot devices are hokum to appreciate the accomplishment of both direction and interpretation – especially when allied to such singing.)

 

The scene-setting is good, indeed thought-provoking: both at the time and afterwards. An agrarian yet industrialising society is in many ways ideal, not least on account of little – or not so little – scenic complexities, contradictions, provocations. Hunding makes excellent sense: a barbarous killer in Victorian clothing, ultimately very much Wagner’s vision too. Sieglinde is his chattel; he plays with her, wishes to destroy her (refusing her initial greeting), and then forces himself upon her. Such is marriage. When a bookish Patric Seibert seemingly willingly – yet driven by what compulsion? – takes the caged place of farmyard fowl, becomes animalised, is rescued, and takes his place again as Azerbaijani oil is hit, all manner of possibilities present themselves. Life – and the mind – is never dull when he is on stage; perhaps it is no coincidence that we must wait until the third act for that. For Castorf’s intelligent, illuminating contradictions come into far greater relief then too – doubtless assisted by the greater orchestral canvas. The gods having adopted traditional, patriarchal guise and customs – Fricka with conjugally enforcing whip as much as Wotan, the lazy patriarch drinking shots and reading Pravda – inflict themselves and their continued oil project upon the world, but they might have done more strongly, more clearly. The lack of clarity in who Wotan here is to begin with does not seem to me an especially fruitful ambiguity, at least on this occasion. But perhaps the fault lies with me. At any rate, the shift to alternative historical and geographical paths – Baku, 1942, Hitler in pursuit of oil, such pursuit to be denied, thereby enabling the world of Siegfried... – retains its force, if more in retrospect than in the white heat, and/or Brechtian alienation, of the theatre.

 

It speaks extraordinary well, then, of Ventris and Nylund that they made such an impression – in almost ‘traditional’ terms – as they did. The Volsungs’ musical achievement was unquestionably theirs, not Janowski’s. Ventris’s ardent singing, verbal clarity, and verbal meaning were quite exceptional. I am not sure I have heard a better Siegmund.  Nylund’s Sieglinde, if lacking the final ounce or two of ecstasy in that third act solo, was nevertheless beautifully, thrillingly sung – and, insofar as permitted, acted. Following a surprisingly uncertain entrance – anyone can make a slip – Georg Zeppenfeld’s Hunding proved very much the dark, heartless foil. Again, he never forgets the importance of the words; nor will he let us do. Lundgren’s stage presence, again insofar as permitted, was godlike, the anger of his delivery palpable, indeed terrifying, especially during the third act; Castorf’s touch of undermining, childish petulance – a silly act with a bearskin, whilst Brünnhilde sings – proved a truer instance of what we surely should have seen more of earlier on. This was, by any standards, a commanding performance, sadly let down by Janowski during that crucial monologue. Tanja Ariane Baumgartner’s Fricka was probably the most chilling of the three assumptions I have seen and heard, as merciless in her instrumental reason as with her whip. And Catherine Foster’s enthusiastic, even lovable Brünnhilde was just the ticket for the character at this stage in her development. One felt with her as well as for her; we wish her well in her transition to humanity, such as it might be. The Valkyries were truly outstanding; one might have taken dictation, such were the individuality and clarity, within bounds, of their contribution. Almost all of them, I felt, might readily have been singing ‘larger’ roles; of course, Nadine Weissman is.

 

Perhaps, then, my expectations were unfeasibly high after the previous night’s Vorabend. And in a way, necessary contrast was provided here, at least on stage. Was it always quite the right sort of contrast, though? It may yet be that, reading back Siegfried and even Götterdämmerung into the staging here, more will emerge. Let us hope, though, that Janowski will be on final act form.