Salome, Vienna State Opera, 4 February 2023

Images: © Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn 

Herod – Gerhard Siegel
Herodias – Michaela Schüster
Salome – Malin Byström
Jochanaan – Wolfgang Koch
Narraboth – Daniel Jenz
Page – Patricia Nolz
Jews – Thomas Ebenstein, Andrea Giovannini, Carlos Osuna, Katleho Mokhoabane, Evgeny Solodovnikov
Nazarenes – Clemens Unterreiner, Attila Mokus
Soldiers – Ilja Kazakov, Stephano Park
Cappadocian – Alejandro Pizarro-Enríquez
Slave – Daniel Lökös
Executioner – Alexandre Cardoso da Silva
Cameraman – Benedikt Missmann
Little Salome – Margaryta Lazniuk
Little Salome (Dance/Video) – Anna Chesnova

Cyril Teste (director)

Céline Gautier (artistic collaboration)
Valérie Grall (designs)
Marie La Rocca (costumes)
Julien Boizard (lighting)
Mehdi Toutain-Lopez (video design)
Rémy Nguyen (video design (live camera))
Magdalena Chowaniec (choreography)

Sergio Morabito (dramaturgy)  

Vienna State Opera Orchestra

Philippe Jordan (conductor)

At last, a new Salome comes to Vienna, Boleslaw Barlog’s venerable (1972!) staging finally having been retired. Cyril Teste’s new production has much to recommend it, both in itself and as realised by cast and orchestra. At first sight, all is as one might expect from a contemporary staging. Herod’s court has a mix of modern(ish) civilian evening dress and military uniforms. Guests are seated at a long table and champagne flows. We see them not above, as in David McVicar’s long-running Covent Garden production, but behind. But we see greater detail through live video. Herod’s leering obsession with Salome is already apparent. A state banquet is the setting, but the tragedy for Teste is familial; in a programme interview, he sees parallels with Hamlet. I am not sure I see it that way, really. The aestheticism of both Wilde and Strauss seems, at least in Teste’s spoken outline, somewhat shortchanged. In practice, though – and this is surely more important – the production is open enough to allow one to approach it from one’s own standpoint and not feel disappointed, quite the contrary.

© Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn 

There is commendable attention to atmospheric detail, contributing considerably to a more detailed whole. Curtain movement chillingly – in more than one sense – conveys the sinister evening wind. More fundamentally, the detail of camerawork not only brings to life more that is going on, more than one can reasonably take in on a single viewing, but also enables Herod’s pornographic intent to reveal itself. For this Salome is not only a family tragedy; it is a tragedy of an abused girl/young woman. Salome’s dance is closely filmed, split between her and a memory of her still younger self. Initially parts of it seem odd, bizarrely awkward, as when she flexes her muscles, but one realises that is the point. Salome is both too knowing and not knowing enough; a part of her is shockingly, even heartbreakingly, innocent. And yet we must watch. Even the Tetrarch finds it impossible to watch some of it, head in hands toward the side of the stage, though that does not subtract from his glee at its close. He would probably prefer a private viewing. Aestheticism, then, comes here after all; we should always beware rulers who also think themselves artists.

I am (nearly) always surprised how most productions put entirely to one side Salome’s explicit reference to homosexuality; it is not even a subtext, but a text, Salome promising Narraboth a green flower if he will do her bidding. In my experience, only Hans Neuenfels’s brilliant Berlin staging has taken the opera at its word here (assuming we do not count David McVicar’s gratuitous nude executioner). The production certainly does not lack other sexual content, though, culminating in a gripping collision between Salome, the executioner, and the head of John the Baptist he has brought up from the cistern employed as a mask. Ultimately the executioner, at Herodias’s bidding, withdraws, but not before he too has had his piece of the girl. Moreover, the now common portrayal of Herodias’s page, sung by a female voice yet unquestionably a male role, as an androgynous woman poses, or at least suggests, further questions of gender, even as it takes us further from Wilde’s green carnation.

© Wiener Staatsoper / Ashley Taylor

This would count for relatively little, were it not for a host of outstanding performances onstage. Malin Byström fully inhabited the title role from beginning to end, in as fine a performance as one could hope to see and hear. Gerhard Siegel did not mistake grotesquerie of behaviour for a licence not to sing. His Herod was all the more plausible, as well as all the creepier and more sinister, for its vocal qualities. Michaela Schüster was surely destined for Herodias, her portrayal effortlessly iconic – for once, the much-abused word seems fitting – in its small observations as in its effortless hauteur. Ultimately, rule is hers, at least until eclipsed all too briefly by her daughter. Wolfgang Koch’s Jochanaan is a typically intelligent portrayal: necessarily direct in its prophecy, yet subtle in its interplay of words and music. The finest Narraboths always leave one wishing for more, that the officer’s tragedy might be averted. Daniel Jenz was no exception, his Narraboth sweetly sung, imploring and bewitched. Cast from seemingly endless depth, this Salome had everyone, however small the role, contribute to a greater whole. For me, the two Nazarenes, Clemens Unterreiner and Attila Mokus, especially caught the ear, but it may well have been others—and surely was for others in the audience.

© Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn 

The Vienna State Opera Orchestra was on excellent form too, full of rich, warm tone in which to luxuriate, yet ever precise and directed. It may not be quite the period instrument here, Salome having reached the house as late as thirteen years after its 1905 Dresden premiere; one might nonetheless have been forgiven for thinking so. That precision owed much, of course, to Philippe Jordan’s thoughtful conducting. If this were not a Salome on which he stamped an indelibly personal mark – one might think here of, say, Karajan’s Salome – that was surely not Jordan’s intention. In permitting the score, after the necessary cliché (and illusion), to speak for itself, he was less neutral than responsive to the particular requirements of the stage.

Wozzeck, Paris Opéra, 13 March 2022

Opéra Bastille

Images: Agathe Poupeney / OnP

Wozzeck – Johan Reuter
Drum Major – John Daszak
Andres – Tansel Akzeybek
Captain – Gerhard Siegel
Doctor – Falk Struckmann
First Apprentice – Mikhail Timoshenko
Second Apprentice – Tobias Westman
Fool – Heinz Göhrig
Marie – Eva-Maria Westbroek
Margret – Marie-Andrée Bouchard-Lesieur
Soldier – Vincent Morell
Actors – Nathalie Baunaure, Fitzgerald Berthon, Andrea Fabi, Manon Lheureux

William Kentridge (director)
Luc De Wit (co-director)
Sabine Theunissen (set designs)
Greta Goiris (costumes)
Catherine Meyburgh (video)
Urs Schönebaum (lighting)
Kim Gunning (video operator)  

Maîtrise des-Hauts-de Seins/Children’s Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus master: Gaël Darchen),
Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus master: Ching-Lien Wu)
Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

 

Four-and-a-halfyears ago, I saw William Kentridge’s then new Wozzeck at the Salzburg Festival. I found myself somewhat nonplussed by its more distanced, alienating aspects, thinking them better suited to Kentridge’s Lulu (seen the year before, at ENO). For whatever reason, I found them less of a problem and, in many respects, less apparent in this move to Paris than I had in Salzburg. Why might that have been? Such a question is necessarily speculative, since one never knows how much one is comparing like with like, but I do not think that invalidates the question. Part of the difference may simply have lain with my reception; having spent more time not only experiencing but thinking about contemporary theatre, musical and otherwise, I am probably now more receptive to more distanced approaches. I was also nearer the stage, which, given a staging that was dark in hue and involved quite intricate video projections, was a definite advantage, probably not to be ignored. But I think this was also a more intense musical and dramatic performance, offering greater emotional and psychological depth, enabling a more productive balance between distance and immediacy, to the benefit of both. 

Connected to that, more strongly than I experienced it before, was the overwhelming presence of war, in this case the Great War, though events elsewhere in Europe were doubtless on many minds too. Social brutalisation—remember Britten’s ‘the more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual’ for Peter Grimes—came strongly to the fore, not as a substitute for individual acts, but as a context and in many respects an intensification for them. This felt more strongly as if it were a drama founded in a military context, rather than having that context uneasily tacked on: tribute, I think, to some very fine dramatic performances. But the first in particular of the tavern scenes also felt more central, its madness and its malice seeping out in all directions, even retrospectively. Here, the haunted weirdness of masks (new resonances for a pandemic world) and puppets seemed to fuse more strongly with a post-Mahlerian musical sensibility: those marionettes from the ‘Rondo-Burleske’ of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony come once again to life; or perhaps better (or at least closer to the truth), to death. Here was an expressionism in which Kentridge’s artificiality participated, danced, and sang. 

Not that this was an especially Mahlerian performance. Mahler’s ghosts were present, of course. How could they not be in this opera? But listening again to that same scene from Claudio Abbado’s Vienna recording, I realise that Susanna Mälkki’s concerns were in many respects quite different. Musical processes came more strongly to the fore through Berg’s closed forms, but with a hint at least of the Neue Sachlichkeit of the Twenties (when, of course, composition was completed, and the work’s premiere given). That psychological depth was present in, to borrow once more from Britten, the turning of the musical screw. Individual lines went their different ways, brought together in harmony and in contrapuntal and/or suspended counterpoint, yet also recognising that, more often than not, there remained a distance (that word again) from Mahler’s world, that this was a world of atonality, which had already suffered the war whose catastrophic progress we saw tracked onstage. Mälkki showed a keen sense of the whole, but also of detail: absolutely crucial in this work. She was warmer, I think, than Vladimir Jurowski in Salzburg, or at least less unremittingly formalist, without taking Abbado’s (or, say, Daniel Barenboim’s) late Romanticism as her model. This seemed not only her Wozzeck, but a Wozzeck designed for this production and these singers. 

Much the same could be said of Johan Reuter’s assumption of the title role: tormented, yes, but very much within a particular context, spatial and historical as well as more conventionally expressionist. Reuter made much of the words, without making too much of them, gauging the level of speech and song unerringly, with apt fluidity and undeniable direction of purpose. Eva-Maria Westbroek’s Marie was formidable, flawed, and feisty, never a victim, in a performance that grew out of yet was never confined to the text. John Daszak’s hideously cocky Drum Major, Gerhard Siegel’s mysteriously commonplace (in a good way!) Captain, and Falk Struckmann’s similarly etched Doctor all shone in their different ways. So too did Tansel Akzeybek’s Andres, in what can sometimes seem a lesser role than it is, yet here offered an excellent counterpoint to Wozzeck: what might have been, yet tragically never really would (and would it even have been much better?) One might say the same of Marie-Andrée Bouchard-Lesieur’s Margret, vis-à-vis Marie. The whole sorry society was finely portrayed, with a fine eye and ear both to ensemble and individuality, all underpinned by typically excellent playing of heft, transparency, and a myriad of darkened colours from the Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris.

Whether I have answered my original question, ‘why might that have been?’ I am unsure. Attempting to do so, though, has helped structure my response. In a sense, delineating and structuring responses out of chaos is what Berg and his interpreters are all involved with. 

Hänsel und Gretel, Royal Opera, 13 December 2018

Royal Opera House

Images: Clive Barda /ROH (copyright 2018)
Gertrud (Michaela Schuster), Hänsel (Hanna Hipp), Gretel (Jennifer Davis), Peter (James Rutherford)

Gretel – Jennifer Davis

Hänsel – Hanna Hipp

Gertrud – Michaela Schuster

Peter – Eddie Wade

Sandman – Haegee Lee

Dew Fairy – Christina Gansch

Witch – Gerhard Siegel

Antony McDonald (director, designs)

Lucy Carter (lighting)

Lucy Burge (movement)

Actors, Dancers

ROH Youth Opera Company

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Sebastian Weigle (conductor)

First the good news: the Royal Opera’s new production of Hänsel und Gretel was certainly well sung, if ultimately lacking the sheer memorability of a great performance. Jennifer Davis and Hanna Hipp made for a highly likeable sister and brother. From the front of the stalls, where I was fortunate enough to be seated, their facial movements and other body language were just as telling as their musical performances, diction as excellent as vocal line. Lucy Burge’s skilled movement direction proved a definite boon, here and elsewhere. Michaela Schuster’s Gertrud offered luxury casting, finely assumed, even if it were wasted on a production which gave her little to do; Eddie Wade’s last-minute substitution for an indisposed James Rutherford as her husband likewise did all that might reasonably have been asked of it. If Gerhard Siegel’s Witch suffered most of all from the production’s inadequacies, having a veteran Mime in the role offered plenty of food for independent thought, especially when sung with relish and precision. The smaller solo roles were both well taken and the singing children from the ROH Youth Opera Company did themselves – doubtless their friends and families too – proud.

The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House played well too, if again some distance short of memorably. If only these musicians had been conducted by someone with greater charisma than the decidedly Kapellmeister-ish Sebastian Weigle. He made a considerably better job of leading the performance than in Berlinlast year: less incoherent, but ultimately still thin flat, and featureless, especially when compared to memories from just ten years ago of Colin Davis conducting this production’s predecessor here at Covent Garden. There was little to move, little to thrill. Worst of all, whatever the time on the clock, the performance dragged. This well-nigh perfectly proportioned Märchenspiel seemed at times as if it might never end. Hardly the thing for ‘children of all ages’, as the tedious cliché has it.

Sandman (Haegee Lee)

The greatest disappointment, however, was Antony McDonald’s vacuous production itself. Had this been a remnant from several decades ago, kept on rather than replaced, one might have smiled, or at least grimaced, indulgently. That it had been commissioned to replace the thoughtful staging from Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier first conducted by Davis beggared belief – especially when strongly rumoured that the mouthwatering prospect of a staging of Humperdinck’s Königskinder had been shelved in its favour. A late nineteenth-century, kitschy Alpine setting was presented entirely without irony, Hänsel’s resemblance to Jeanette Krankie seeming inadvertent rather than provocative. The story proceeded as it should, through the forest, without interest and more or less without incident. The Sandman merely looked peculiar. For some reason – presumably a bit of money was left over – various characters from the Brothers Grimm wandered and danced around during the pantomime dream sequence. In case you had not noticed, a large book was brought on with the Grimms’ name on it. Then it was on to a weirdly Americanised house of horror, with little sign of gingerbread at all. Subsequent action was messed about with for no discernible reason, to the extent that it made little sense. The Witch, who at one point seemed to have stepped out of a wisely undeveloped sketch for a Carry On film, was pushed into a vat of chocolate (?) whilst the oven went unused. The children’s choir’s appearance puzzled rather than fulfilled.

Kitsch to ineptitude: a Konzept of sorts, but only if it were knowing. The sole glimpse I caught of the semblance of an idea, albeit quite undeveloped, was the wolf following Red Riding Hood in the unsuccessful request for a kiss from Prince Charming prior to Cinderella’s appearance. That was it. Doubtless the third act signified an attempt to do something ‘different’, even vaguely ‘contemporary’ – in practice, about forty years old. Being different for the sake of it, however, does not an idea make. Children, still more than adults, deserved much better, as did the cast. A young audience is no excuse, quite the contrary, for a third-rate staging.

Hänsel, Witch (Gerhard Siegel)

If the evening dragged in the theatre, it did all the more in retrospect, when to test my response – and for the sheer joy of it – I played at home Karajan’s legendary EMI recording. Needless to say, it flew by in no time at all. For audio alone, that fleet, unsentimental, yet nevertheless lovely account remains a clear first choice. On DVD, return to Covent Garden for Colin Davis and company in far more luxuriant mode (musically, at least). The Royal Opera might not, alas, be able to bring back Sir Colin. It should nevertheless seriously consider ditching this pointless, enervating production for its intelligent, far from iconoclastic predecessor, or indeed learning from the superlative production Liam Steel created in 2016 for the Royal College of Music. Then, please, that Königskinder…

Salome, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 17 March 2018

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Annika Schlicht (Herodias's Page), Oscar Wilde (Christian Natter), Salome (Aušrine Stundytė)

Herod – Gerhard Siegel

Herodias – Marina Prudenskaya

Salome – Aušrine Stundytė

Jochanaan – Thomas J. Mayer

Narraboth – Nikolai Schukoff

Herodias’s Page – Annika Schlicht

Jews – Dietmar Kerschbaum, Ziad Nehme, Linard Vrielink, Andrés Moreno García, David Oštrek

Nazarenes – Adam Kutny, Ulf Dirk Mädler

Soldiers – Arttu Kataja, Dominic Barbiere

A Cappadocian – David Oštrek

A Slave – Corinna Scheurle

Oscar Wilde – Christian Natter

Hans Neuenfels (director)

Philipp Lossau (assistant director)

Reinhard von der Thannen (designs)

Kathrin Hauer (assistant stage designer)

Sommer Ulrickson (choreography)

Stefan Bolliger (lighting)

Henry Arnold (dramaturgy)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Thomas Guggeis (conductor)

‘These Germans: they are obsessed with sex.’ Such were the puzzling words I heard from an irate Frenchman in the queue behind me for the cloakroom at the close of this performance of Salome. Far be it to suggest that ‘the French’ might also have a reputation for an interest in such matters, but I could not help but wonder whether, if he were weary of at least implicit sexual context onstage, Salome were really the opera for him. As it happens, Hans Neuenfels’s excellent new production, provocative in the best sense, is far more concerned with the absence of sex, sexual repression, the ultimate inability to perform, and, following Oscar Wilde in particular here, the aestheticisation of such problems, than with sexual display or fulfilment. Prudishness and aversion take many forms, however, as Neuenfels also suggests.

For Wilde is placed, increasingly literally, centre stage. Not having looked properly at the cast list, let alone the programme, beforehand, I had not realised that this would be so. Instead, as intended, it gradually became clear that the actor, whose role I could not quite place, either in the work or more laterally, was Wilde himself. The neon sign, ‘Wilde is coming’, had announced it clearly enough,’ I realised – just as Jochanaan announced one who would follow him. Not that the accomplished, mesmerisingly versatile Christian Natter, in this entirely mute role, is made up to resemble the playwright: we are, let us give thanks, at a level of drama beyond the caricature of the impressionist. Eventually the green carnation gives the game away: the only instance throughout the entire evening of a colour on stage that is not black, white, or red (typically sharp, meaningfully coloured designs by longtime Neuenfels collaborator, Reinhard von der Thannen). But before that, a world of Victorian sexual repression, that of the society from which Wilde sprang, has been constructed. Its imperialism is nodded to, in very British Empire uniforms for the soldiers: let us play at governing the Middle East, with catastrophic consequences to be seen to the present day and beyond.

Jochanaan (Thomas J. Mayer), Herodes (Gerhard
Siegel), Herodias (Marina Prudenskaya)

More to the point, John the Baptist, foreteller of Christianity – perhaps, in this reading, more so than Christ himself, certainly more of a hypocritical moral fanatic – is encased in what Neuenfels calls ‘a phallus or rocket of indignation, a constant appeal to obdurate, concealed, packed away carnality. This results in a constant ban, a threat.’ The traditional cistern is gone, but as Henry Arnold, Neuenfels’s dramaturge points out, Strauss wrote to Ernst von Schuch, conductor of the first performance, that Jochanaan ‘should be understandable without a voice pipe. Maybe he could sing through a gaze veil (a hole in the wall, invisible to the audience) with his head two feet above the floor so that he sees the conductor and can sing directly to the audience. This is very important.’ Take that, alleged ‘respecters’ of ‘the composer’s intentions’. What is it that our proto-ayatollah objects to? In a sense, it does not really matter, for such things are more matters of opportunism than anything else, as the ‘religious Right’ backers of Donald Trump testify more clearly than ever. What Neuenfels opens up is the possibility of a more thoroughgoing exploration of gender and orientation. Salome herself becomes a significantly gender-bending figure, her absurd, ultra-stylised (which is, crucially, to say aestheticised) Victorian bustle transposed onto others, Wilde and Jochanaan chief amongst them. Who dresses up? Who dresses whom? With what intent?

Wilde, Salome

When Herod commands, or rather requests, ‘Dance for me, Salome’, does he too want as much of an aesthetic as a sexual experience? Do we err to distinguish the two? (Given recent reports of sexual abuse by conductors, the question seems especially relevant now.) He has his own reasons, as such ‘immoral’ rulers tend to, in many ways far less objectionable than those who loudly trumpet their ‘morality’; he is weak more than anything else, as signalled by Herodias’s theft of and refusal to return his ring of kingship. Make of that gesture, so rich in symbolism political and sexual, what you will. Meanwhile Wilde, increasingly confident, perhaps as in his play, in his denunciation of denunciation, allows his homosexuality to become clearer – and, more important still, to acquire greater dramatic agency. When he dances, as angel of death, with Salome, a game of omnisexual sadomasochism unfolds, the poet’s leather harness-corset (which?) and what he does with it speaking a thousand words (back at least as far as Neuenfels’s brilliant Salzburg Così fan tutte, a work Strauss, a true Mozart connoisseur, so adored).

But, in a world of such repression, what does one put in the place of sexual freedom? Aestheticism, of course, in Wilde’s case – and, surely, in Strauss’s too, throughout his career. Ever the student of Nietzsche rather than Wagner, Strauss believed in art above all else: indeed, perhaps only in art. Thus the constructions we place on stage, and the very constructions we make of them in our minds too, play their part in a similar game, perhaps even identical, at the very least related – depending, most likely, upon who we are, even how we feel on the night. Salome – sometimes a girl, sometimes a more progressive, perhaps older, woman with something of the caricatured lesbian to her, sometimes perhaps a surrogate for the young man Wilde, on and off stage, may be seeking – focuses her own aesthetics upon her construction of Jochanaan, who sometimes resembles what she thinks she wants, yet in other respects could hardly be more distant. The pent-up rage in which she smashes one of the multiple, ‘beautiful’ busts arranged on stage for her delectation following the dance is both a genuine act and a ‘work of art’, or at least an aspiration thereto, in itself. Has anyone learned of ‘love’ then? It seems unlikely. We have nevertheless learned a good deal about the lengths to which many of us will go in order to prevent ourselves and others from doing so.

Wilde, Salome

Thomas Guggeis, originally scheduled to conduct but one of these performances as assistant to Christoph von Dohnányi, ended up conducting them all. He did a very good job, the Staatskapelle Berlin seemingly very happy to play under his leadership. The weird musical world in which dances do not dance and non-dances do came across with considerable dramatic power. I have heard more outrageously, or at least phantasmagorically, coloured performances, but no single performance is likely in itself to respond equally to the manifold possibilities of Strauss’s score. There can be little doubt that this young conductor is a musician of great accomplishment, nor that we shall be hearing much more from him. What an opportunity, though, to have fallen to him!

Jochanaan

If tonal beauty were your thing, then Aušrine Stundytė’s Salome would most likely not be for you. Is the problematisation of such priorities, though, not one of the dramatic themes, at least possibly, of work and production? She certainly entered into the role with dramatic gusto and considerable stage presence. One heard, moreover, many more of the words, words moreover imbued with true verbal potency, than will often be the case. Thomas Johannes Mayer’s Jochanaan likewise navigated intriguingly between such polarities, offering a solution, however provisional, suited to his character and his portrayal. Looking at the royal couple from the other side of that (doubtless too) crude opposition, Gerhard Siegel and Marina Prudenskaya offered formidably sung performances, more so than one will often hear, without sacrifice to the drama. Nikolai Schukoff’s astute, enigmatic, vocally ravishing Narraboth was perhaps the single most impressive performance of all.

Narraboth (Nikolai Shukoff), Salome, Jochanan
Images: Monika Rittershaus

Indeed, at the time, one rather resented Narraboth’s being elbowed aside by Wilde – which is surely the point. And yet soon we did not, for criticism of society, his, Salome’s, and ours, becomes all the more necessary. Until the drama, musical rather than scenic, less closes than stops. It could be Wozzeck, almost, except in its aestheticism, it is anything but. Wozzeck does not die of boredom; Salome does, but whose? Patriarchy remains, but do we care - truly care, as opposed to claiming to?

Salzburg Festival (5) - Wozzeck, 14 August 2017

Haus für Mozart

Images: Salzburg Festival / Ruth Walz
Margret (Frances Pappas) and Wozzeck (Matthias Goerne)

Wozzeck – Matthias Goerne

Drum Major – John Daszak

Andres – Mauro Peter

Captain – Gerhard Siegel

Doctor – Jens Larsen

First Apprentice – Tobias Schnambel

Second Apprentice – Huw Montague Rendall

Fool – Heinz Göhrig

Marie – Asmik Grigorian

Margret – Frances Pappas

Chorus solo – Burkhard Höft

Actors – Mélissa Guex, Andrea Fabi

Mimes – Claudia Carus, Gregor Schulz

William Kentridge (director)

Luc De Wit (co-director)

Sabine Theunissen (set deigns)

Greta Goiris (costumes)

Catherine Meyburgh (video)

Urs Schönebaum (lighting)

Kim Gunning (video operator)

Salzburg Festival and Theatre Children’s Choir (chorus master: Wolfgang Götz)

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Ernst Raffelsberger)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

Marie (Asmik Grigorian) and Drum-Major (John Daszak)

Salzburg is certainly doing William Kentridge proud this summer: a new production of Wozzeck and an exhibition of his work, ‘Thick Time: Installations and Stagings’, split between the Rupertinum and the museum on the Mönchsberg, which together form the Museum der Moderne. The exhibition has also been seen at the Whitechapel Gallery; I missed it there. It will also be seen – or has: I am not quite sure which – at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk and Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery. The exhibition is certainly well worth seeing for its own sake. In some ways, though, I found it more revealing than the opera production itself, which I could not help but think relied a little too much upon an imposed association with the First World War – a little too easy? – and indeed upon figures and ideas from his earlier work. Both claims are, I am sure, debatable, but I was left relatively unmoved by the result – which is surely a problem with Wozzeck.

Distancing can doubtless work in different ways for different people. One person’s chilling alienation will be another’s ‘I could not relate to that’. For me, however – and I can hardly speak for anyone else – the device of placing Wozzeck outside the action, having him in some sense present it, at the opening switching on the slide projector from which so much of the setting is presented, leads to a staging more observed than experienced. If we do not share Wozzeck’s agonies, his mistreatment, if it is not even entirely clear whether he actually experiences them, then that is surely something of a loss. What worked very well in Kentridge’s Lulu, which I saw at ENO, seems here to be more a matter of going through the motions; what had been a powerful impression of information overload mirroring, even intensifying the score, here reduced to a display of battlefield maps with little evident motivation other than the fact that the Battle of Ypres had taken place a hundred years ago. Charcoal drawings, long a Kentridge staple, seemed just a little dark to glean anything much from, at least at a certain distance from the stage. (I was in the First Circle.) What of looking back to such events from after the war, as Berg did when completing it? There is certainly something to be said for that in principle; yet here, it comes across as more of a device than a dramatic strategy.

Perhaps ultimately, the problem, at least for me, is Kentridge’s apparent lack of interest in psychology, as discussed in a programme interview: ‘I never start with the psychology,’ he says, ‘When a singer says to me, “what am I thinking?’ I sawy, “well, let’s listen to the music and let’s look at what we see on stage rather than giving a pre-history’. It is not clear to me why there should be an either-or. Surely part of that ‘pre-history’ lies in the music and indeed in what happens on stage; nor is ‘the music’ somehow something separate from the drama and its associations, certainly not in Berg. ‘Characters are always more than you expect and different from what you expect,’ Kentridge goes on. Of course. Here, however, especially in the case of Marie, they seem, if anything, less than one had expected. Marie comes across as somewhat peripheral to the action, or at least to the wartime setting that threatens to overwhelm the action. Most of us, I hope, are opposed to war; still more of us think the Great War was a terrible thing. But is Wozzeck really about that; or, better, should it be? The weird, powerful crowd scenes, with marauding deformed survivors give a taste of what might have been, suggesting that yes, Wozzeck could be about this, and in retrospect too; the necessary contrasting, developing character introspection, however, seems strangely absent. Substituting a puppet for a child again seems too much of a stock device. Do we really want to avoid being shattered by his fate?

Wozzeck and Marie

That said, an impressive aspect of the evening as a total artwork – Gesamtkunstwerk, if you must – was that Vladimir Jurowski’s conducting seemed to me very much in keeping with Kentridge’s approach. One heard a wealth of detail, of musical process from the players of the Vienna Philharmonic, indeed to such an extent that any listener with musical training would be well placed to identify the particular closed form of any scene immediately. That was, famously, not Berg’s point, but that does not mean that there is no value in hearing the score differently, quite the contrary. What I missed from Jurowski’s conducting was a stronger sense of how the scenes connected; again, this need not be an either-or situation, and preferably should not be. Berg remains a son, or perhaps grandson, of Wagner – or should do.

Was there also a sense that he was keeping the excellent Vienna players – what sweetness of string tone in particular! – down? I suspect it may have depended upon where one was seated in the Haus für Mozart (the old Kleines Festspielhaus). For me, there were many occasions when I longed for the orchestra to be let off the leash. It is not just during the interludes that the real, the deepest drama lies there; as with Wagner, it always does. Others, however, complained that they could not hear the singers, which certainly was not the case for me. Matthias Goerne did a good deal to supply some of the introspection seemingly missing from the staging. A Lieder-singer’s approach tends to be just the thing for Wozzeck, if not necessarily the only way; this was no exception. Asmik Grigorian sang beautifully, a fine Marie, by any standards. If only the staging had not left her somewhat marooned: just standing there, singing, seemingly having to act for herself. John Daszak navigated well the balance between character and caricature in the role of the Drum Major. Gerhard Siegel and Jens Larsen both offered keenly observed – insofar as they were permitted – performances as the Captain and the Doctor. Frances Pappas’s Marget greatly impressed, as, still more did, Mauro Peter’s beautifully sung Andres; in both cases, I was left wishing they had had more to do. Choral singing was excellent, impeccably well prepared, it seemed, by Ernst Raffelsberger. If I did not feel that I had been moved as much, nor as deeply, as I should have been, it was no fault of the cast. And I was certainly made to think.

Salzburg Festival (6) - Die Liebe der Danae, 8 August 2016

Grosses Festspielhaus

Images: © Salzburger Festspiele / Forster
Jupiter (Tomasz Konieczny)

Danae – Krassimira Stoyanova

Jupiter – Tomasz Konieczny
Merkur – Norbert Ernst
Pollux – Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke
Zanthe – Regine Hangler
Midas – Gerhard Siegel
Four Kings – Pavel Kolgatin, Andi Früh, Ryan Speedo Green, Jongmin Park
Semele – Mária Celeng
Europa – Olga Bezsmertna
Alkmene – Michaela Selinger
Leda – Jennifer Johnston
Four Watchmen – Hacik Bayvertian, Konrad Huber, Michael Wilder, Csaba Markovitz

Alvis Hermanis (director, set designs)

Juozas Statkevičius (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Ineta Sipunova (video)
Alla Sigalova (choreography)
Gudrun Hartmann (assistant director)
Uta Gruber-Ballehr (assistant designer)
Ronny Dietrich (dramaturgy)

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Ernst Raffelsberger)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Franz Welser-Möst (conductor)

 

It is not every year one has the opportunity to see two different productions of Strauss’s penultimate opera, still – still! – never staged by either the Royal Opera or ENO. Before the Deutsche Oper’s revival earlier this year, I had indeed only seen Die Liebe der Danae once in the theatre before, also in Salzburg, in Günter Krämer’s 2002 production. I can only wish that Krämer’s production had been revived, for, despite its faults, its Salzburg successor from Alvis Hermanis is truly atrocious.

At best, it is a total waste of money (and bizarrely, given the golden subject matter, a non-ironic one). The sets and costumes look – and surely must have been – very expensive indeed, the dimensions of Midas’s hut threaten to have Franco Zeffirelli, surely the unacknowledged progenitor of Hermanis’s ‘aesthetic’, seem a model of modesty in his garretted vision for La bohème; indeed, we veer dangerously close to Zeffirelli-Turandot-land (far from coincidentally, as we shall have cause to discover). If the very occasional image, notably the portrayal of the shower of gold through dancers, augurs well, everything else is empty indeed. Chorus members wear individualised giant – and yes, I mean ‘giant’ – turbans. Why? Who knows? No one even seems to care. A still-more-giant elephant is wheeled on and off the stage. At the beginning of the third act, someone walks a real donkey on and off the stage in bizarre hommage to Francesca Zambello’s Carmen, or maybe not. Nothing seems to have any meaning. There is a total lack of interest – truly extraordinary in our own times – in the dramatic meaning and possibilities of temptation by and rejection of gold. Nor, unlike in Krämer’s production – which took us from the period of 1944 dress rehearsal, through 1952 for the first production, also of course in Salzburg, to its own time – is there any interest whatsoever shown in genesis and reception. This opera needs help to release its myriad of musical riches; it receives none; indeed, none is so much as attempted in a lengthy essay in – at best – vacuity.

 

Danae (Krassimira Stoyanova) with dancers (gold)

In a valiant attempt to defend or at least to skate over Hermanis’s indefensible, dramaturge Ronny Dietrich writes: ‘This blend of the traditional with the fictitious … has induced Alvis Hermanis to stage Die Liebe der Danae as a fairy tale, especially as the opera’s storyline takes us to the Orient. Even if the libretto mentions Syria as the country in which the encounter between god and man, i.e. Jupiter and Midas, took place, Alvis Hermanis prefers not to commit himself to any location or period in his production.’ It is not, on a moment’s reflection, so valiant after all (and I have checked the original German, lest the words were mistranslated). Why is a ‘fairy tale’ ‘especially’ suited to ‘the Orient’. Did Edward Said, let alone any of his successors, never exist? And why is a fairy tale somehow held to be devoid of meaning, of all manner of implications, psychological, social, political, cultural…?

 

The claim that no location is committed to is at best questionable. Why, then, do we see, for no obvious reason, that most noble passage in the whole opera – the interlude depicting ‘Jupiter’s resignation’ – ruined by a procession on stage of women in burqas? Well, I say burqas, but, in contrast with the expensive if vulgar designs for everything else, they are simply white sheets: childish, if one were to be charitable, but more likely deliberately insulting? We return to Hermanis. Now notorious for his anti-migrant outbursts – one of his most staggering, brazenly untruthful, brazenly racist claims having been ‘While not all refugees are terrorists, all terrorists are refugees or their children’ – I think we can hazard a guess why he might wish to hold to ridicule Muslim women, in a setting that is anything but non-specific, whatever Dietrich might claim. Likewise why Hermanis might depict ‘the Orient’ – have we really not moved on from that? Yes, we, of course, have – with an essentialism shading between ludicrous and sinister. There is no reason whatsoever for those women to have trekked on stage at all, setting up shop with looms in Midas’s bafflingly large tent; Dietrich offers the claim that carpets, ‘which epitomise the oriental topos’ (we are long past the time to stop digging) establish ‘a connection to the genesis of the opera – a process of intertwining and interweaving themes and motifs’. You could have fooled me. Hermanis’s recent interview with Der Standard, in which he defiantly nails his ‘conservative’ – for which, we can read something a little more than that – credentials to the mast tell us, sadly, much more about what has been going on. Why theatres continue to hire someone whose directorial skills are as impressive as his politics is beyond me – more so than ever, given the results of this production.

 

We had, then, to rely on the singing for anything in the way of enjoyment or edification. It is just as well that much of it was very good indeed. I doubt that the role of Jupiter has ever been better sung than it was by Tomasz Konieczny; his was a towering, tireless performance, as impressive in its moments of tenderness as of godly pride. Krassimira Stoyanova’s Danae was, for the most part, beautifully sung, in an evidently heartfelt assumption. Both singers showed themselves excellently matched in that glorious final duet. Gerhard Siegel’s musical and verbal skill was never in doubt, but I was not always entirely convinced that the voice of an excellent Mime offered a plausible Midas challenge to our Wotan-Jupiter. Norbert Ernst made for a lively Merkur and Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke once again proved himself a fine singing-actor as Pollux. Jupiter’s wives – what to say about their painted-on nipples, another Orientalist ‘fantasy’? – struck me as an altogether superior collection of consorts. Mária Celeng, Olga Bezemertna, Michaela Selinger, and Jennifer Johnston worked so well together, both individual of voice and indeed of character, and yet also cohesive as a vocal quartet, that I longed to hear more from them: a spin-off, please.

 

That leaves us to consider the orchestra and the conductor. Franz Welser-Möst, lavishly praised by Hermanis in that Standard interview, conducted somewhat stiffly for much of the evening. If Hermanis thinks, as he claims, that Welser-Möst is an aural equivalent of ‘strong LSD’, he needs to find himself a new dealer. When the conductor relaxed, when he let the music yield a little more, the Vienna Philharmonic came more into its own. There is much more to this score in terms of harmony, colour, a myriad of orchestral melody than we heard here, though. It was not only Hermanis’s fault that the aforementioned ‘Jupiter’s resignation’, one of the most moving orchestral passages in all of Strauss’s operas, went for so little.