Eugene Onegin, Komische Oper, 15 December 2023

Schillertheater

Eugene Onegin – Günter Papendell
Tatiana – Ruzan Mantashyan
Olga – Deniz Uzun
Lensky – Gerard Schneider
Mme Larina – Stefanie Schaefer
Prince Gremin – Tijl Faveyts
Filipievna – Margarita Nekrasova
M. Triquet – Christoph Späth
Zaretsky – Ferhat Baday
Captain – Jan-Frank Süße
Guillot – Alexander Kohl

Barrie Kosky (director)
Werner Sauer (revival director)
Rebecca Ringst (set designs)
Klaus Bruns (costumes)
Simon Berger (dramaturgy)
Franck Evin (lighting)

Orchestra and Chorus (chorus director: David Cavelius) of the Komische Oper

James Gaffigan (conductor)

Images: Iko Freese / drama-berlin.de

I first saw Barrie Kosky’s Eugene Onegin, premiered in 2016, in 2019, a few months before the theatres closed. Then it was at the Komische Oper’s permanent home on Behrenstraße. Now, the building having closed for several years for renovation, this latest revival may be seen across town in Charlottenburg’s Schillertheater, conducted by the company’s new music director James Gaffigan. The cast is a mix of old and new, Günter Papendell, Stefanie Schaefer, Tijl Faveyts, and Margarita Nekrasova survivors from 2019, the rest new (at least to me). 

Memory, though, is a strange thing; or rather, ‘memories’ are, since even one’s own will come into conflict with one another. Although I remembered liking what I saw, what I saw on this occasion did not always correspond to my recollections, which may indeed have been of other productions, real or imagined. Much the same might be said of what unfolds here (in many dramas, no doubt, yet it seems or seemed more than usually germane here). For there are certainly misunderstandings, missed opportunities, ‘bad timing’, and the rest in the relationships, not only Onegin and Tatiana’s, of Eugene Onegin. That of Tatiana and Prince Gremin may be an exception; yet if so, it is dependent on the failures of another. It is, in any case, hardly the central relationship; it serves as a contrast to what might have been, an antidote of reality to fantasy. Kosky’s setting the entire action in the same place, with one partial exception, brings with it some loss, not least in the inevitably lesser contrast between public and private, whose portrayal therefore becomes still more a matter for the orchestra. Yet its dramaturgical function here also brings with it considerable gain, anchoring character’s differing understandings, memories, and decisions in Rebecca Ringst’s almost pastoral, outdoor setting that yet takes in threatening woods behind. (It is not as if the libretto suddenly vanishes when all stage directions are not adhered to literally.) Although real enough – it is not abstract – it imparts something of a dream-like quality, in which not only memories but, at least as important, objects bind everything together.

 

Jam and jam-jars, for instance: when the opera opens, Mme Larina and the nurse Filipievna are making jam, readily eaten by Tatiana and Olga. When Tatiana sends her letter to Onegin, it is inside a jar sent as a gift. And so on, until the close, when it is there in what seems to be the same place: where it all (tragically?) began. There is something would-be bacchanalian to the ball scene, when it takes place outdoors. This, one feels, is as far away from civilisation as these characters, this society, dare travel. And, of course, it leads to the frozen, pointless misery of the duel scene. Onegin, moreover, does not face the decentring he sometimes can. There is plenty of and for Tatiana too, but we feel – and, I think, have suggested to us – more of his miserable wandering, his downward spiral than usual. Helplessly drunk when he arrives for the duel, he shows that it is already too late for him, let alone for Lensky. His early stiffness is probably a self-defence mechanism; at any rate, we feel its relationship to what is to come. All the while, subtle transformations in Franck Evin’s lighting aid the transformations, both gradual and sudden, in the drama itself. And when a room in Gremin’s palace appears, for the first St Petersburg scene, Onegin by now a sad, destroyed outsider, it is only to be dismantled onstage shortly after, in preparation for the ’return’ to a past which may or may not have ‘actually’ existed for the final scene.

 

Kosky’s conception remains the guiding one. The Komische Oper’s new music director, James Gaffigan, conducting his first production in the role, would appear to have been presented with certain challenges, not least among them caesuras when all stops, hearts included, all falls silent. On this, the first night of Werner Sauer’s revival, Gaffigan integrated these and other ‘givens’ to excellent effect. His reading, like Kosky’s, seemed to gain pace and depth as the evening progressed, the orchestra responding with eagerness to the vision with which it was presented. Almost chamber-like in scale to begin with, its Petersburg grandeur was undeniable, both in itself and in contrast. Choral contributions were likewise as well acted (and blocked) as sung.

 

Papendell’s Onegin follows and, to an extent, leads that trajectory too. It was a compelling portrayal in 2019 and is in 2023, his brokenness in the third act deeply moving. Ruzan Mantashyan travelled on a different, related journey as Tatiana, convincingly the shy, bookish girl at the outset, very much a woman at the close, albeit one struggling to keep herself in one piece. This she accomplished through musical and gestural means alike—as well as fine costuming (Klaus Bruns) and make-up. If I sometimes wished Gerard Schneider would adopt a less Verdian approach as Lensky, his was an undoubtedly committed performance, greatly superior to what I had heard from another singer four years ago. Deniz Uzun’s extravert Olga was a joy—and a telling contrast with her more complicated sister. Faveyts and Nekrasova at least matched memories of their excellent portrayals last time around: not a bad summary of the evening as a whole. The company may be on the move physically, but not aesthetically, whether that be in direction or quality.

Das Floß der Medusa, Komische Oper, 16 September 2023

Hangar 1, Tempelhof Airport

Images: Jaro Suffner

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

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

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

Movement Choir and Children’s Extras of the Komische Oper

Vocalconsort Berlin

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

Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin

Titus Engel (conductor)

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

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

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

 

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

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

Charon (Idunnu Münch)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Munich Opera Festival (4) - Dido and Aeneas/Erwartung, 20 July 2023

Nationaltheater

Dido/A Woman - Aušrinė Stundytė
Aeneas – Günter Papendell
Belinda – Victoria Randem
Venus – Rinat Shaham
Sorceress – Key'mon W Murrah
First Witch – Elmira Karakhanova
Members of the opera-ballet of the Bavarian State Opera – Aaron Amoatey, Erica D’Amica, Ahta Yaw Ea, Arnie Georgsson, Moe Gotoda, João da Gracia Santiago, Serhat Perhat, The Thien Nguyen

Interlude:
Paweł Mykietyn (music)
Maria Magdalena Gocał (vocalist)
Jarowsław Regulski (sound design)

Krzysztof Warlikowski (director)
Malgorzata Szczęśniak (designs)
Felice Ross (lighting)
Kamil Polak (video)
Claude Bardouil (choreography)
Christian Longchamp, Katharina Ortmann (dramaturgy)

Bavarian State Orchestra
Supplementary Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus director: Sergej Bolkhovets)
Andrew Manze (conductor)

 

Images: Bernd Uhlig

Purcell and Schoenberg: my kind of double-bill. Puritan ‘authenticity’, or whatever it is calling itself at the moment, is so all-pervasive when it comes to the seventeenth century that the fantasy has had little chance—until now. To be fair, the Frankfurt Opera last season revived ts Barrie Kosky double-bill of Dido and Aeneas and Bluebeard’s Castle, but I am not aware of any previous pairing of Dido with Erwartung. (Bluebeard and Erwartung, by contrast, is an accepted if hardly frequent match.) But is it, is it really my kind of double-bill? I think so; I cannot see why not and could certainly come up with arguments, persuasive or otherwise, in its favour. Sadly, Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production does not mark his finest hour, reducing Dido in particular to a level of almost risible banality, despite the evening’s musical virtues. That was more the case once I had read dramaturge Christian Longchamp’s brief conceptual summary in the programme than when watching, when I (more or less) simply felt baffled. 

What I initially saw was a woman notably more serious than her fun-loving companions, but who did not in any sense appear to be Queen of Carthage or any such equivalent. She stayed in a glass cabin close to a forest, apparently North American, whilst they came and went, Aeneas and Belinda apparently conducting an affair or at least having casual sex. Dido seemed to be in some danger during the second act as the Sorceress and her – his/their, since a countertenor had been cast? – entourage surrounded the cabin. She held up signs saying ‘HELP’ and ‘VAMPIRES’, so I assumed the latter to be the US popular culture equivalent to witches. That made some sense (sort of), even if I could not discern any particular motive, let alone political element. 

Once she had died, a transformational ‘interlude’ began, offering film of a voyage through an endless tunnel, some electronic music by Paweł Mykietyn, and members of the opera’s ballet corps excellent in contemporary dance. Since Dido rose at the end of that and the ‘vampires’ had been busy for much of it, I presumed she too had become a vampire and would join them. Instead, though, she went back to her cabin, which at some point had mysteriously separated into two, and with a rifle shot Aeneas and Belinda dead without feasting on their blood. Erwartung consisted scenically of Dido in that half of the cabin and a dancer in the other changing his clothes and preparing dinner, which she went over to taste but may not have cared for, since she left more or less immediately. There you have it; there was more, but I am not sure it would help to go into further detail, even if I could remember it. 

The vampire thing was, for better or worse, a red herring. It seems that much of what we saw had been in Dido’s imagination, in a concept at least verging on the misogynistic. I may as well quote Longchamp’s scenario (also given in English translation) in full; there seems little virtue to paraphrase in this case.

 

On the edge of a forest, a woman named Dido lives in a house that does not belong to her. She is a fugitive. Nothing is known about her except that she comes from far away. Her behaviour, her recurring references to very old stories, her fears suggest a psychological fragility. Past and present, reality and imaginery [sic] are so intertwined in her that one does not know whether the mysterious figures and evil spirits that appear at times inhabit the forest or her mind. Dido feels a mad, exclusive love for a man who is also a fugitive, Aeneas.

Together with two women, also uprooted, they make up this provisional community.

One evening Dido immerses [s’enfonce] into the forest or into her fantasies. 

One major problem is that very little of that may reasonably be deduced from what one sees on stage. We surely cannot be expected to have read the programme before the performance; the production team needs to do some work here. Even a verbatim projection would have helped. More fundamentally, though, to reduce the character of Dido to a ‘madwoman’, quite divorced from matters of state or any plausible substitute, is a pretty poor production concept. Dido is not unstable; she is wronged. Aeneas is not an apostle of free love. And so on. For some reason, the fourth member of this ‘community’ is, we learn from the cast list though nowhere else, is styled ‘Venus’ and assumes performance of what is left of the vocal writing. I cannot tell you what part the goddess of love is held to play in this reimagined drama. Perhaps it is just a name. Video projections of forest deer added less than nothing. And moving into Schoenberg, might we not at least have had a spot of psychoanalysis? 

Were it not for the genuinely impressive contribution by the dancers, which did, in its way, link both halves, I could not give you a single argument derived from this double-bill for trying to connect the two operas at all. The problem lay far more with the treatment of Dido than that of Erwartung. Once reduced to the level chosen for Dido and divested of its dramatic interest, the stage was literally set for the rest: strange and a genuine pity, since Warlikowski has show in productions such as his Paris Iphigénie en Tauride and his Salzburg Bassarids, as well as his work in spoken theatre, that he is perfectly capable of dealing interestingly with issues of political power and eroticism. To have a ‘mad’ woman possibly/probably imagine strange things was, sadly, nowhere near enough.

 

Aušrinė Stundytė offered a powerful, indeed extraordinary locus of musical connection and certainly did what she could with Warlikowski’s scenario, her acting evoking pity, even sympathy, in the first part, even if we did not really know why. As Dido, she was vulnerable yet proud, her English diction superb. As A Woman, Stundytė mastered Marie Pappenheim’s libretto, Schoenberg’s lightning response, and the alchemy of their combination with an ease that gripped despite, not on account of, the staging. Colour, articulation, dynamic contrast, phrasing, and so much more combined to offer as complete a portrayal as we are likely to here. Above all, and like Andrew Manze and the Bavarian State Orchestra, she treated the drama musically and not as a succession of effects.

Manze is a musician of wide and generous sympathies. From a ‘Baroque’ violinist background, he has always shown interest in earlier and different performing practices. It seemed to me that he relished the opportunity to perform Purcell with this orchestra and on this scale; it certainly sounded that way. There were a couple of odd textual decisions I did not follow, but this was a reading tender and powerful, ably supported by the excellent work of the house’s ‘supplementary’ chorus in the pit. However wide those sympathies, I doubt Schoenberg would be the first composer anyone would associate with Manze, but he did a fine job here too, very much at one with Stundytė’s approach, enabling the orchestra to present a host of voices, near-Brahmsian possibilities taking different turns with all the dramatic-psychological implications that suggests. Balance and colour were equally well projected, in what emerged as a grand operatic scena, almost an outsize accompagnato, albeit one that seemed over – as, in any performance worth its salt – in a thirty-minute flash. 

Aeneas is a dramatically thankless role, all the more so in this production, but Günter Papendell did what he could, emerging with credit. Victoria Randem greatly impressed as Belinda, her clear, stylish, yet never remotely precious soprano just the thing for the role. She can certainly act too. Key'mon W Murrah made an excellent musical case for a countertenor Sorceress in a performance of considerable dramatic verve. There was, indeed, nothing to disappoint on the musical front, and much to admire. What a pity it was to have memorable performances so sorely let down by a disappointing production.

The Bassarids, Komische Oper, 5 November 2019

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Dionysus – Sean Panikkar

Pentheus – Günter Papendell

Cadmus – Jens Larsen

Tiresias – Ivan Turšić

Captain – Tom Erik Lie

Agave – Tanja Ariane Baumgartner

Autonoe – Marisol Montalvo, Vera-Lotte Boecker

Beroe – Margarita Nekrasova

Dancers – Azzurra Adinolfi, Alessandra Bizzarri, Damian Czarnecki, Michael Fernandez, Paul Gerritsen, Claudia Greco, Christoph Jonas, Csaba Nagy, Sara Pamploni, Lorenzo Soragni

Barrie Kosky (director)

Otto Pichler (choreography)

Katrin Lea Tag (designs)

Ulrich Lenz (dramaturgy)

Franck Evin (lighting)

Vocalconsort Berlin

Chorus of the Komische Oper, Berlin (chorus director: David Cavelius) 

Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin

Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

I have been privileged to see – and hear – three excellent performances and productions of The Bassarids; I have also been privileged to attend many excellent performances and productions at the Komische Oper. In both respects, this new production by Barrie Kosky, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, was fully worthy to stand amongst any of its predecessors: complementary, in many respects highly contrasted, to stagings from Christof Loy (Munich) and Krzysztof Warlikowski (Salzburg), and perhaps still more highly contrasted in a typically formalist approach from Jurowski, whose relationship to Kosky’s staging proved thoughtful and revealing.

One enters to activity already proceeding onstage: not unusual in contemporary theatre, but important in its particularity. There are musicians, much of the large woodwind and brass sections, on stage as well as in the pit. (Alongside it too: even in Henze’s 1992 revision, as here, it is a large orchestra for which he calls.) There are others milling around too: later revealed to be chorus and dancers. But the milling around is perhaps the more important thing than who is doing the milling. There, as here (in the audience, that is), patrons, or, as we might prefer, citizens, are preparing for the performance, in whatever roles they might play. For, in this milling before the musicodramatic storm, it is part of an amphitheatre we see: not archaic, not archaeological, but of now – as it was for Euripides; as it is for him, for Henze, for WH Auden and Chester Kallman, for all of us. Attic drama, above all Attic tragedy, the cornerstone for our entire Western dramatic, including operatic, tradition, continues to live, to breathe, to adapt, and above all to enthral. Where Wagner, whether Henze liked it or not – in many ways, he did not – his most important predecessor, had seen decadence in the later tragedy of Euripides, and found greatest inspiration in Aeschylus, Auden led Henze here to a typically modernist conflict between immediacy and the highly mediated, a few turns of the dialectical screw on from Schiller’s naïve and sentimental, yet ultimately perhaps not so very different. On the one hand, Auden insisted that Henze, as part of his preparation for composition, attend Götterdämmerung: Karajan gave him his Vienna box. On the other, he and Kallman provided a highly literary, ‘poetic’, even in Wagner’s – and Nietzsche’s – terms, ‘decadent’ libretto, after Euripides, with which to work. All manner of dramatic conflicts in this opera, ultimately rooted in ancient tragedy and our reception of it, may be traced back to that – as well as to Henze’s own, personal musical conflicts: Germany and Italy, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, past and present, and so forth. The amphitheatre, of which we see only part, of which we, drawn in, are also part, stands as the arena for all that and more.

What Kosky proceeds to do is largely straightforward: direct, yet mediating between history’s various antiquities and today, belying most claims of ‘decadence’. The story is largely told straightforwardly, but with as fine a reinvention of the original artistic unity Wagner – and many German idealists – saw in the drama of Athens: a Gesamtkunstwerk, if you will. Every Kosky production, whatever one thinks of it conceptually, reveals him as a master of his craft; this is no exception. Individual and crowd scenes, both on stage and beyond it – around the enlarged pit, in the theatre of the Komische Oper, etc. – are blocked and executed with precision: not as some cold, clinical, ‘merely’ technical exercise, but so as to permit the drama to emerge. Mesmerising dance, as strange and alienating as it is mesmerising and erotic, heightens the sense both that we might have been ‘there’, that we might fall prey to Dionysus’s call, and that yet we can make sense of it, as spectators. Such is a Maenads’ Dance unlike any other I have seen, Otto Pichler’s choreography just the thing, as are the energy and sheer proximity of the dancers. The ultimate seduction, Pentheus by Dionysus; the ultimate tragedy, Agave’s bestial murder of her son; and her recognition of what she has done: these are presented with all the force and clarity one can imagine, however foolishly, one ‘might have’ experienced in Athens. Agave’s childish delight in the bloody quarry from the hunt is a particularly gruesome moment, but not for the sake of gruesomeness. To an extent I cannot previously recall, everything now seems to have led up to the moment of recognition. Dionysus’s self-revelation, intense vulnerability and all as wounded son of Semele, comes as an eminently musical coda to that.

For at the heart of the stage construction lies the orchestra, true locus of the Dionysian rite: for Kosky, just as it had been for Wagner, Nietzsche, and arguably Henze too. In an interview for Die Welt, to mark the first performance of The Bassarids, Henze proclaimed his belief ‘that the road from Tristan to Mahler and Schoenberg is far from finished, and with The Bassarids I have tried to go further along it.’ That will surely always come through, yet Jurowski’s approach also highlighted the countervailing force both onstage and in the pit, clarifying in Apollonian fashion Henze’s conception of this ‘music drama’ – he uses Wagner’s term – in symphonic form: four movements, with an intermezzo akin to the ancient satyr play (here rescored by Jurowski in keeping with Henze's revisions to the rest). One could not resist the sheer power of frankly superlative orchestral and choral forces, fully the equal of ‘starrier’ counterparts in Munich and Salzburg; yet, intriguingly mirroring, even extending the composer’s dramatised conflict between Schoenbergian and Stravinskian tendencies in Der Prinz von Homburg, a neoclassical, ordering element came with at least equal power to the fore. With Henze’s music, there is often a battle between expression, even over-expression, and the discipline required to express that raw expression, as it were. In this case, the Penthean, the monotheistic put up a stronger musical fight to the primaeval Dionysiac in Henze’s orchestral cauldron than I can hitherto recall. Occasionally, I longed for Jurowski to let go a little more, but even that slight frustration had its own dramatic rewards. The heartbreak, moreover, of Henze’s sacrificial quotation from Bach’s St Matthew Passion registered all the more starkly for being presented almost as an object, something removed from our religious and musical view.

Sean Panikkar as Dionysus offered a performance at least as frighteningly, irresistibly seductive as he had in Salzburg last year: a chilling yet smouldering portrayal of a being beyond good and evil, inhuman and yet palpably human, his movement almost as impressive as his more conventionally musicodramatic skills. This evening only furthered the thought that it is a role he was born to play. Günter Papendell’s Pentheus proved a moving, complex, yet ultimately hapless foe: an intelligent and powerful portrayal. Tanja Ariane Baumgartner’s Agave initially, quite rightly, kept us at arms’ length, before drawing us in movingly for the final tragic outcome, assisted by, among others, an excellent Marisol Montalvo, singing for an indisposed Vera-Lotte Boecker, who continued to act the role of Autonoe onstage, and a rich-toned, richly sympathetic Margarita Nekrasova as the nurse, Beroe. As so often with the Komische Oper, though, a sense of company among all concerned made for a Gesamtkunstwerk in another, related sense. A memorable evening indeed.

Eugene Onegin, Komische Oper, 20 September 2019

Images copyright: Iko Freese / drama-berlin.de

Eugene Onegin – Günter Papendell

Tatiana – Natalya Pavlova

Olga – Karolina Gumos

Lensky – Aleš Briscein

Mme Larina – Stefanie Schaefer

Prince Gremin – Tijl Faveyts

Filipievna – Margarita Nekrasova

Zareski – Changdai Park

M. Triquet – Alexander Fedorov

Zaretsky – Changdai Park

Captain – Carsten Lau

Guillot – Yuhei Sato

Barrie Kosky (director)
Rebecca Ringst (set designs)

Klaus Bruns (costumes)
Simon Berger (dramaturgy)
Franck Evin (lighting)

Orchestra and Chorus (chorus director: David Cavelius) of the Komische Oper

Ainārs Rubikis (conductor)

What’s in a name? Should Tchaikovsky’s opera – which, as Barrie Kosky states in the programme booklet, should be considered alongside Pushkin, not as its musical translation – really be called Eugene Onegin at all? Or would Tatiana Larina be the more fitting title? Eugene and Tatiana, perhaps? It is a silly question, really; for one thing, no one is going to rename the work, although someone, I suppose, might write another. But names aside, there will probably always be something of a tension between the centrality ascribed by a production to the opera’s two principal characters; and also something, moreover, of a tension between Tatiana and Onegin on one hand and Lensky, if more rarely Olga, on the other. It is difficult to imagine a successful or indeed pretty much any unsuccessful production that did not involve such tensions, although Achim Freyer, in his bizarre staging for the Staatsoper Unter den Berlin, a few hundred metres away, may be said to have accomplished that in his very typical way.

Kosky’s 2016 staging for Berlin’s Komische Oper, in co-production with Zurich, offers an intriguing, convincing blend of the broadly yet never lazily conventional; the slightly symbolic; and the point of detail, even the incidental, made more than that. The latter first: as the opera opens, Mme Larina and the nurse, Filipievna are making jam. I am not sure that I even recalled that point of detail, though I am sure that I will now. The jam jar, however, returns at a crucial point – in Kosky’s staging, that is – as container for Tatiana’s letter to Onegin. Her nurse, affecting not to understand for whom it is intended, keeps dropping it, casting it aside, until she relents and sets that train of events in motion. ‘So what?’ you may ask. So nothing, perhaps; but I think not. For the jar and its contents take us back to the opening, an apparently carefree summer afternoon, save of course for beneath the surface. Things have changed – and have stayed the same; such tends to be the way with life. And the chorus of local girls, more than usually an emanation of Tatiana’s unconscious – replication and contrast in Klaus Bruns’s costumes lightly make the point – has all along been framing, voicing, goading.

So too will the chorus, male and female, later on, as part of a more general pattern of contrasts and connections between public and private, indoor and outdoor, country and town; and the criss-crossing connections between those pairs of opposites. The fundamental setting, common to all scenes, is that of the meadow on which it all began: designer Rebecca Ringst’s simple, adaptable focus for development and memory. Franck Evin’s lighting works wonders in its partial transformations, highlighting (false or alienating?) community and Romantic loneliness, whilst never having us lose sight of where we are. So too, of course, do Kosky’s blocking and, more broadly, his story-telling. It does no harm for the ball to take place with torches outside for once; its stifling, tragic qualities are not lost. Only in the first St Petersburg scene is there an additional set design, but even then, the facade of Prince Gremin’s palace can, like all facades, readily be dismantled, so that we can turn to the inversion of our central pair’s fortunes and their resolution.

Like many directors, Kosky ignores the opera’s strong, at times overwhelming, homosexual subtexts: the ‘Romantic friendship’ between Onegin and Lensky and, of course, the figure of Tatiana herself as alter ego for Tchaikovsky, his fantasy of how a woman might feel and act. That, however, is simply not the concern of this particular production. For, in the programme booklet, Kosky expresses a preference for operas with ‘very simple stories and incredibly multifaceted themes and emotions – precisely as in Greek theatre,’ and also criticises composers who, over the past fifty years, have, allegedly, ‘simply set literature to music’. I am not quite so sure that it is as simple as that, nor that the comparison with ancient Greece is objectively meaningful in this case, as it certainly would be to Wagner; however, if it is to him, all the better. There is unquestionably a directness to Kosky’s telling of the story here, far from opposed to interpretation, but rather open to it, which works very well: as, say, in his Rusalka and his Pelléas, or indeed, harking back to Attic tragedy, in his Iphigénie en Tauride, all for the Komische Oper, yet sadly lacking in his Bayreuth Meistersinger. Whose opera is this anyway? Here, it conventionally, yet never stereotypically, moves from being Tatiana’s to Onegin’s; the latter character emerges in the reflection, the memories of the latter’s acts and emotions. That trajectory is delineated with a power only rarely achieved, at least in my experience.

Instrumental – or better, vocal – to that was Günter Papendell’s Onegin, thus perhaps rebalancing the scales slightly in that direction. To begin with, I felt somewhat nonplussed at the apparent woodenness of his portrayal, until I appreciated that it was a portrayal of woodenness, of coldness, to be humanly defrosted, as it certainly was during the course of the opera. This was a fine, memorable, and sophisticated conception of the role. It would be an exaggeration, indeed a vulgarisation, to say that Natalya Pavlova’s Tatiana moved straightforwardly in the opposite direction, but tension was present in that respect: the crossing of lines and lives that ultimately turns, we think, to tragedy. Her opening fragility, her heartfelt and beautifully sung Letter Scene, and her final struggle, seemingly achieved, for self-possession proved similarly memorable and sophisticated. Aleš Briscein’s Lensky was surprisingly coarse of tone to begin with, though it was an ardent performance; I could not help but wonder whether he were unwell. A spirited Olga in Karolina Gumos, a stylish and lively M. Triquet in Alexander Fedorov, a splendidly deep-voiced Gremin in Tijl Faveyts, and above all a richly expressive, compassionate Filipievna in Margarita Nekrasova had much to offer, in a typically strong company performance that had no weak links.

The chorus sang and acted well too, its stage direction always a Kosky strength. My sole, relative disappointment lay in aspects of Ainārs Rubikis’s conducting of the orchestra. At its best, especially in the middle scenes, there was a telling striving towards symphonism. Elsewhere, however, much was oddly hard-driven. There were striking disjunctures, moreover, between orchestra and chorus in the first scene. This was not, then, an Onegin to think of in the way of Semyon Bychkov’s (probably the best conducted I have heard in the theatre) or Daniel Barenboim’s (for Freyer, as mentioned above). This was Kosky’s Onegin rather than the conductor’s, yet it belonged as much to the singers and of course to their characters. That, I think, was a good part of its point: a point served well.

Pelléas et Mélisande, Komische Oper, 15 October 2017

Komische Oper, Berlin

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Mélisande (Nadja Mchantaf)

Arkel – Jens Larsen

Golaud – Günter Papendell

Pelléas – Domink Köninger

Geneviève – Nadine Weissmann

Yniold – Gregor-Michael Hoffmann

Mélisande – Nadja Mchanthaf

Doctor, Shepherd – Samuli Taskinen

Barrie Kosky (director)

Klaus Grünberg (set designs, lighting)

Anne Kuhn (set designs)

Dinah Ehm (costumes)

Johanna Wall (dramaturgy)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin

Jordan de Souza (conductor)

Mélisande

And still they come. I went a good few years, a good few too many years, without seeing Pelléas et Mélisande in the theatre. More recently, I have seen several productions, every one of which has had something different to tell me, some different way of moving me – whilst all remaining very much faithful to what, in idealist metaphysical mode, I might term the inviolate spirit of the work. I might not, of course, but perhaps the temptation to do so tells us something about Pelléas and not just about me. Like Tristan und Isolde – another of the relatively small number of works Barrie Kosky said he was determined to direct, and has also ticked off – there seems to be no point in trying to turn Pelléas into something that it is not; like Tristan, there seems relatively little to do; like Tristan, it seems quite resistant to many typical directorial interventions. None of those is necessarily a categorical statement; such would be bizarre. (Indeed, such might make me something akin to a fevered writer for the Revue wagnérienne. Whatever my failings and/or eccentricities, I am not sure that I am quite there yet.) If something works, it works; and, like many, I can hardly wait to see what Stefan Herheim, present in the audience last night, will do with Debussy’s sole completed opera next year at Glyndebourne.

I shall have to, though, as shall we all. Barrie Kosky’s new production for the Komische Oper certainly proved plenty to keep us going in the meantime. Not, of course, that we should view it in anything other than its estimable own right. At its heart stands Arkel’s Allemonde castle. It is evoked clearly, claustrophobically, chillingly, and perhaps above all, simply. At the centre of the stage, concentric circles turn to reveal something that is always the same, moving yet not moving, just like the characters it transports. There is no way out; nor does anyone, save of course for Mélisande, seek one. (Whether Pelléas does in the opera is a moot point; I do not think he does here. Indeed he remains in the gallery of frozen souls, not unlike a Bluebeard collection, at the close: dead, yes, but was he, were they, always so? What on earth, or beyond, might it mean to be alive here?) Characters move simply, repetitively, if not quite so repetitively, certainly not with such meaninglessness, as in Christiane Pohle’s Munich production (roundly dismissed, I am tempted to suggest misogynistically, by ignorant journalists and audiences alike, but an unforgettable piece of post-Beckettian theatre). Parallels are drawn, easily discerned, given the essential simplicity of the pared-down action; for instance, Mélisande’s arms, her form as yet unseen, encircle – irony here, ‘Ne me touchez pas!’, doubled when it becomes clear quite how fearful she is of being touched – Pelléas at the opening of their final scene together just as they had Golaud at the start. She touches both, though barely. What is she doing? Finding her way? Through fear? Through the forest? Through a miserable, impossible life?

Mélisande's arms encircling Golaud ((Günter Papendell)

And there is no doubting her abuse. The fear is palpable, great tribute to the extraordinary performance given by Nadja Mchantaf, a worthy successor to her Rusalka for the same company and director. In context, many similar themes emerged, for that too had proved a highly concentrated piece of musical drama on Kosky’s – and everyone else’s – part. The fear is well-founded too, for in this world of highly damaged, highly damaging people, Mélisande will suffer horrendous violence. She has done before: you can see it in her eyes. Indeed, Mchantaf’s acting alone would be worthy of any stage: not, of course, that it really makes sense here to speak of ‘acting alone’. When she and Pelléas finally have their moment of sexual congress, she shows her ‘enjoyment’; but is that just what she has learned? Is that, in a sense, what many women have learned? What does it mean to be penetrated by the male gaze, as well as otherwise, on stage? Golaud’s quite shocking violence towards this heavily pregnant woman, his wife, the mother of ‘his’ child, having discovered her with his brother, now dead, is all the more shocking for taking its leave within a general increase of violence – which here seems to mean much the same as ‘action’ – following the interval. The gears of ‘fate’ grind, following relative nothingness. Yet what does it mean for us to label them as ‘fate’? Are we not thereby abdicating responsibility? Blood tells its own story, not just, or even principally, of childbirth, although it certainly includes that. We remember that disturbing moment, earlier on, when Mélisande had laughed childishly with Pelléas, at throwing away – here swallowing – her ring. Again, we both fall upon ideas of fate, and know that we should not. The final turning of the set’s concentric circles, the final display of things just as they always were, yet worse, brings the curtain down. The curtain, having been there all along, reminds us that our aestheticisation of such deeds is at least part of the problem; or at least, it is in itself unlikely to prove to be a solution. Does a performance of Pelléas make us in the audience better people? Who knows? Probably not, however. Things carry on as they always did.

Golaud, Pelléas (Dominik Köninger), Mélisande

If Mchantaf were, perhaps necessarily, first among equals, then that should be taken in its fullest, dialectical sense. Yet again, the Komische Oper under Kosky’s Intendanz – this certainly includes the work of other directors – showed itself to be a true company. Günther Paperdell and Dominik Köninger showed a near ideal blend of similar physicality – deliriously so at one point, the one almost assuming the role, or rather the behaviour of the other – and of difference, Dinah Ehm’s splendid, simple costumes very much contributing to that dramatic end. Theirs was a dialectical relationship, more strongly so than I can otherwise recall. Jens Larsen’s Arkel proved frighteningly creepy: finely sung, and repellent in his assault of Mélisande, all the more so for his grandfatherly concern. We knew whose rules, doubtless inherited, prevailed in this hopeless patriarchy. Nadine Weissmann’s Geneviève proved deeply compassionate yet – quite rightly – powerless. What could she do? Samuli Taskinen, a member of the Opera Studio, impressed in his small roles. And Gregor-Michael Hoffmann offered a sensational performance as Yniold: crystal clear of tone and words, effortlessly at home, or so it seemed, in a fiendishly difficult role both in work and in performance. It was an extraordinary thing indeed to learn afterwards that this was that outstanding treble’s first role on stage; it will surely not be his last.

Golaud and Yniold (Gregor-Michael Hoffmann)

Of course, so much of the drama, just as in Tristan, in whose waves Pelléas is soaked almost as much as it is as those of Parsifal, lies in the orchestra. It was on splendid form throughout, textures admirably clear yet never too clear. I always find myself in performances of this opera asking myself whether it is a more or less Wagnerian performance; I seem unable not to. The strange thing, however, is that, however different the path taken, the balance between Wagner and not-Wagner seems to end up being about the same; or at least that is so, in a performance worth its salt. This performance certainly was, wisely led by Kapellmeister, Jordan de Souza. There was no doubting his knowledge and understanding of Debussy’s tantalising, treacherous score, nor of his ability to communicate to both orchestra and audience. Again, I look forward to hearing more from him. For ultimately, as always, it is the music of those interludes that lingers longest, most insidiously in my mind. There is something almost evil about it; for it is the music of fate, of Allemonde, perhaps even, at one remove, of the Revue wagnérienne.