Prince Igor and Die Fledermaus, Vienna Volksoper, 25 and 30 June 2017

Volksoper

Prince Igor – Davide Damiani

Prince Galitsky – Martin Winkler
Vladimir Igorevich – Vincent Schirrmacher
Skula – Daniel Ohlenchläger
Yeroshka – David Sitka
Yaroslavna – Melba Ramos
Konchakovna – Annely Peebo
Ovlur – Jeffrey Treganza
Khan Konchak – Sorin Coliban
Boyar – Levente Szöke
 
Thomas Schulte-Michels (director, set designs)
Renate Schmitzer (costumes)
Teresa Rotemberg (choreography)
Christoph Wagner-Trenkwitz (dramaturgy)
Angela Schweiger (Abendspielleitung)

 

Gabriel von Eisenstein – Jörg Schneider
Rosalinde – Ulrike Steinsky
Adele – Anja-Nina Bahrmann
Ida – Klaudia Nagy
Dr Falke – Daniel Ochoa
Prince Orlofsky – Martina Mikelić
Alfred – Szabolcs Brickner
Prince’s Manservant – Heinz Fitzka
Frank – Daniel Ohlenschläger
Boris Eder – Frosch
Dr Blind – Christian Drescher
 

Heinz Zednik (Szenische Neueinstudierung)

Pantellis Dessyllas (set designs)
Doris Engl (costumes)
Evelyn Frank (original sketches)
Lili Clemente, Susanne Kirnbauer (choreography)
Karin Schynol-Korbay (Abendspeilleitung)

Youth Chorus (chours master: Lucio Golino), Chorus, and Additional Chorus of the Vienna Volksoper (chorus masters: Thomas Böttcher and Holger Kristen)

Vienna State Ballet

Orchestra of the Vienna Volksoper

Vienna State Opera Stage Orchestra

Alfred Eschwé (conductor)

 

As my time in Vienna drew to a close, I was lucky enough to make two visits to the Volksoper. I thought it might be interesting to treat the two evenings together, very different though they were, not least since the differences were not always what I had expected they might be. In the blue corner stood Borodin’s Prince Igor, new last year to the house, and thus still operating in the shadow of its premiere; in the red stood Die Fledermaus, this production alone, so it would seem, receiving its 499^th (!) performance.

I say ‘it would seem’, since I was a little unsure what was intended by crediting Heinz Zednik – yes, that Heinz Zednik – with ‘Szenische Neueinstudierung’, without naming a director. No matter, anyway. This is a straightforward staging, with little attempt to mine any Freudian undertones – how I wish Christopher Alden’s attempt at ENO had been better accomplished – but that is not what it is ‘for’, rightly or wrongly. It clearly brings in a large number of visitors, and actually has English titles (for the sung passages, the dialogue making do with brief summaries), whereas German titles are the norm for the German-language performances on other evenings: for instance, for Fürst Igor. In such a show – for that is essentially what this Fledermaus is – much, then, depends on the acting of the performers, and members of this cast were undoubtedly inside their roles. It is perhaps more akin to The Mousetrap than to contemporary theatre, but for a more general audience, which this undoubtedly attracts, it is an attractive way in. (Not that, for the moment, I am suggesting it is the only way in, far from it.) I do wish productions did not encourage over-acting to the nth degree by whoever plays Frosch, but there we are. The dancers of the Vienna State Ballet looked and moved beautifully; it was truly a joy to watch – and indeed to hear – their Johann Strauss waltzes and polkas. (At the ghastly New Year’s Concert – does anyone still watch that? – a little goes a long way indeed.) The one more overtly directorial touch sits a little oddly, I thought. Yes, Orlofsky is clearly a bit of an oddball, to put it mildly. But does that mean he must be gay? I tend to think he either needs more queering – the work too – or to be left alone; here, such treatment seems at best dated, at worst, something, well, worse…

 

Fürst Igor, by contrast, is a bit all over the place as a staging. That is partly the work, of course, insofar as one can consider it a ‘work’ at all. This almost new staging, by Thomas Schulte-Michels, comes across as unsure of what it is trying to accomplish (not helped, I admit, by decidedly peculiar choreography). Perhaps there is something to be said for treating the opera as a series of barely connected tableaux, but if so, it probably needs framing as such more clearly. Here, we have a more or less ‘stand and sing’ Prologue, followed by a bizarrely Orientalist first act in the Polotsvian camp. I assume, or hope, the latter were intended ironically, but without that framing it is difficult to tell. Following the interval, the second act, what we should have expected to be the first, seems to be from an entirely different production: full of violence and debauchery, much more contemporary – to us – in its visual impression at least. The third and fourth acts attempt, it seems, some sort of synthesis, which I presume to be the point. I should like to have been convinced more than I was. In the end, it made me appreciate just how extraordinary Dmitri Tcherniakov’s achievement at the Met had been, welding this problematical opera into searing, coherent drama. The comparison is doubtless unfair, but another – with the ultra-repertory Fledermaus – would not be in this staging’s favour either.

 

In both cases, the orchestra, under the same conductor, Alfred Eschwé, was excellent. Without bowing to Viennese operetta nativism, one can probably say that there is something to playing this music so often that can help – although equally, it could lead to something drearily routine, which it did not. Eschwé’s conducting of Die Fledermaus was no more interventionist than the staging, but it carried the action along well, and charmed, without ever hinting at sentimentality. If there were times when I might have liked something a little more yielding in Prince Igor, especially at certain tricky corners, there was a great awareness of colour throughout, and the orchestra came across as enthralled by the opportunity to play such music. Choral singing was excellent too.

 

If there were a stronger sense of company acting in Die Fledermaus, there would be, really, given the nature of the enterprise. Ulrike Steinsky (a former Adele herself) made for an elegant Rosalinde, Anja-Nina Bahrmann a characterful Adele, offering pinpoint precision in both pitch and timing. Jörg Schneider was somewhat hammy as Eisenstein, but Szabolcs Brickner afforded a degree more self-awareness – not too much – as Alfred; he has a fine tenor voice too. Martina Mikelić’s depth of tone as Orlofsky made me keen to hear her in other, deeper repertoire. Daniel Ohlenschläger, the one singer common to both casts, impressed equally as Frank and as Skula. His double-act with David Sitka’s Yeroshka had more than a hint of the mendicant menace in Boris Godunov to it. Davide Damiani’s Igor was well sung and capably acted. I should have loved to see what he might have made of a more coherent staging; likewise Martin Winkler as Galitsky. Melba Ramos tugged on the heartstrings as Yaroslavna. Annely Peebo and Sorin Coliban also stood out vocally. Much to enjoy then, and not a little on which to reflect.

On the anniversary of the first performance of Das Rheingold...

... and two days before the Ring opens at Covent Garden. (Alas, I have been unable to acquire tickets, but look forward to hearing from those who have.)





Valhalla is not only a stronghold of political power, but also a sacerdotal fortress — Ein’ feste Burg, in the words of the celebrated Lutheran chorale. Wotan’s initial greeting to his castle in the sky had possessed a similar magnificence to the chorale, both in the vocal line  and in the full statement of the noble Valhalla motif. His words upon awakening from his dream, ‘Vollendet das ewige Werk!’ resembled those employed by the angels in The Creation in praise of God’s creativity, ‘Vollendet ist das große Werk’: ‘Achievèd is the everlasting [Wagner]/great [Haydn] work.’ Yet one of Wagner’s fundamental claims is that Wotan’s proud edifice is thoroughly illusory. As Feuerbach had proclaimed in The Essence of Christianity: ‘Religion is the dream of the human mind,’ a dream in which ‘we only see real things in the entrancing splendour of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.’ It is through the imagination alone that ‘man neutralises the opposition between God and the world’. Boulez, at work on the Ring (he conducts here), noted that our first encounter with Valhalla is in no wise a moment of triumph, for ‘Valhalla is not clearly delineated but belongs to a world of dream, phantasmagoria, and mirage.’Religion, according to Marx’s critique of Hegel, ‘is but the illusory sun, around which man will revolve for as long as he does not revolve around himself’.

Nowhere is the claim of illusion more apparent than during the gods’ entry into Valhalla, when Loge turns upon the gods’ triumphalism. It is as if a Young Hegelian critic such as David Strauss or Bruno Bauer had entered stage left. Bauer himself recalled that prior to Strauss's Life of Jesus, Hegel’s followers had ‘lived in patriarchal calm, as blessed gods in the kingdom of the Idea.’ Thereafter, the ‘lightning of thought’ had struck in that realm, and ‘disturbed the dream’. In the words of another Young Hegelian writer, Max Stirner: ‘If you devour the sacred, you have made it your own! Digest the sacramental wafer,’ or burn Valhalla, ‘and you are rid of it!’ Loge thus speaks as both a Young Hegelian critic and a harbinger of Bakunin, with a distinct tinge of Mephistopheles — ‘I am the spirit that always negates!’ Consider Loge’s disdainful soliloquy, in which he also refers menacingly to his annihilating role as god of fire:

They hasten to their end,

they who imagine [wähnen, a usage preceding Wagner's encounter with Schopenhauer] themselves so strong and enduring.

I am almost ashamed to associate myself with them;

I am tempted to transform myself

once again into flickering flames.

To burn those who once tamed me,

rather than to die foolishly with the blind,

even though they be the most divine gods!

That does not seem stupid to me!

I shall think about it: who knows what I shall do?
 

Those words and the chromatic, negating destabilisation of his music with respect to that of the gods make a mockery both of Donner’s bravado in clearing the skies and of the alleged ‘splendour’ of the fortress ‘safe from fear and dread’, as greeted by Wotan. Wotan’s downcast, guilt-laden remark prior to the thunderstorm seems more apposite: ‘With an evil toll did I pay for that building!’ Froh, true to ineffectual form, constructs a rainbow bridge, as if that would seal a new covenant. To quote Peter Wapnewski: ‘The gods are on dangerous ground, but they fail to recognise the fact, dazzled as they are by their own splendour, their foolish arrogance, and their delight in illusions. They are participating in a glorious, richly costumed dance of death.’One can hardly dispute the glory and splendour of the blazing rainbow bridge theme, but the impression is that the brass doth protest a little too much — rather like those repetitions at the end of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, in which the composer seems vainly to be trying to persuade himself that all is well. The difference here is that the composer knows the score, as it were, only too well; the gods are human, all-too-human. Valhalla’s denizens are not unlike those dynasties of whom  the Watchman in Æschylus's Agamemnon’s had reported: ‘their shining blazoned on the air, these stars, upon their wane’. In Stirner’s words, ‘alienness is a criterion of the “sacred”. In everything sacred there lies something “uncanny”.’

Alberich’s world of capital may be no better — it may even be worse — but the Nibelung’s actions have helped lay bare the illusions of Valhalla, just as the cult of Dionysus had once shattered the serenity of Olympus and thereby initiated the great religious struggle between two opposing forces immortalised in the Bacchae of Euripides (or in Henze’s most Wagnerian opera, The Bassarids). The giants’ return to claim their wages and ransom sits uneasily with the ancien régime of the gods, bringing into question any notion of divine right — or, indeed, of divinity. As Marx pointed out, ‘the relationship of industry and, in particular, the world of wealth to the political [and religious] world is one of the principal problems of modern times.’ The present ‘ancien régime’ was but ‘the comedian of a world order whose true heroes are dead,’ which therefore instead sought ‘its salvation in hypocrisy and sophistry,’ just as the gods of Æschylus had been compelled to die a second, comic death in the dialogues of Lucian.

Such is the gods’ ‘new-found splendour’, in which Loge sarcastically suggests that the lamenting Rhinemaidens, deprived of their gold, might care instead to bask. Yet, rather than heed his none-too-thinly-veiled warning, the gods merely chortle, and stride across the bridge to Valhalla. Everyone, of course — not least the gods themselves, would they be honest — knows the new splendour to be no more real than the modern musicians’ trick, outlined in Opera and Drama, of building ‘shimmering golden towers of music on vapid and unworthy’ foundations. The final words of Das Rheingold are allotted to the Rhinemaidens, victims of the politico-religious war of emancipation against Nature:

Rhinegold! Rhinegold! Pure gold!

If only your lustrous glitter still shone in the depths!

Only in the depths is there harmony and truth:

false [falsch] and cowardly [feig] is the rejoicing above!

The music, now in the key of G-flat major, as far away as possible from the C major tonality of the gold, reminds us of the poverty of Valhalla’s grandiloquence as compared with the true splendour of the previously valueless gold. The C-flat minor chords on falsch and feig drive home the message further, piercing the unreality, the false consciousness, of Valhalla’s diatonicism. Valhalla, however recently it might have been built, is already a simulacrum — as Plato would have understood only too well. Indeed, one may doubt whether an ‘original Valhalla’ ever really existed. Those who would attempt to restore an unmediated ‘authentic’ Wagner Ring ought to take note.

Wozzeck, Staatsoper Berlin, 16 April 2011

Schillertheater

Captain (Graham Clark) and Wozzeck (Roman Trekel)
Images: Bernd Uhlig

Wozzeck – Roman Trekel
Drum Major – John Daszak
Andres – Florian Hoffmann
Captain – Graham Clark
Doctor – Pavlo Hunka
Marie – Nadja Michael
Margret – Katharina Kammerloher
First Apprentice – Jürgen Linn
Second Apprentice – James Homann
Idiot – Heinz Zednik
Marie’s Child – Fabian Sturm

Andrea Breth (director)
Martin Zehetgruber (stage designs)
Silke Willrett, Marc Weeger (costumes)
Olaf Freese (lighting)
Jens Schroth (dramaturgy)


Staatskapelle Berlin
Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)
Children’s Choir of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Marie (Nadja Michael) with her child
(Fabian Sturm)

Though it was the first opera I saw in the theatre – bar a reduced Don Giovanni – it had been quite a while since I had seen a staged performance of Wozzeck, most likely the greatest of all twentieth-century operas. Certainly its stature seems somehow to grow with every hearing. Keith Warner’s Covent Garden production had its detractors, but I thought it in many respects impressive. Andrea Breth, in her first production for the Berlin State Opera, presented a more ‘faithful’ reading, but fidelity should not be confused in this instance with lack of commitment. It was indeed in the cases where she presented a different interpretation from that suggested in libretto and score that the production seemed weaker. In what came across – even if it were not intended this way – as a strangely misogynistic reading, Marie’s inner conflict was minimised: she did not appear to struggle at all with her conscience in the context of the Drum-Major’s advances, and indeed submitted a few inches away from her son, in full view of him. (I did wonder, without being prudish, whether this was really something appropriate for a child to witness, though I have no reason to think that Fabian Sturm’s fear was not acted.) Moreover, not having Marie read from the Bible, but simply recall it from memory, eliminated an important point that she has struggled to attain literacy. Margret, meanwhile, seemed merely a tart, and a paralytic one at that. The other odd decision was to have Wozzeck, presumably dead, tell his son that his mother was dead; no other children were on stage, their rhyme being delivered from the pit. Presumably a point about the cyclical nature of the tragedy was being made, but the chilling nature of children’s callous insouciance was lost.

Wozzeck and the Doctor (Pavlo Hunka)

Andres (Florian Hoffmann) and Wozzeck

Otherwise, the oppressive nature of an inhuman society was portrayed starkly. There could be no doubt that the singers had been properly directed, a welcome contrast with the previous night’s Salome at the Komische Oper. Actions and scene changes were well choreographed throughout in a thoroughly professional display. Martin Zehetgruber’s dark stage designs were simple, unfussy, and always apt. Militarism was present, as it should be, but never overplayed. The form it takes is, after all, a product of capitalist society, not its cause. The same could and should be said of the Doctor’s nasty experiments and his lust for bourgeois renown. As for the miserable depravity of proletarian life, whether in the barracks or for Marie, ‘wir arme Leut’ indeed… But never were such broader themes, undoubtedly present in the work itself, trumpeted over and above it: this was Berg’s Wozzeck, not, with the exceptions outlined above, Andrea Breth’s.

In the barracks

Daniel Barenboim was on excellent form in the pit, likewise the Staatskapelle Berlin. I might have expected a more overtly ‘Wagnerian’ reading, but then Barenboim’s Wagner has always been more variegated than many seem to think, and his Berg followed suit. There were power and punch when required, which of course includes the wrenching D minor climax of the final Interlude: tonality aufgehoben in a way Schoenberg may sometimes have attempted but never quite accomplished. (Webern never tried.) Not once was there any doubt as to Barenboim’s command of line, but equally impressive were an ear for colour surely born of his experience in French music, not least Debussy, and his characterisation of the closed forms and genres of which the greater structure is composed.

Tavern scene

Roman Trekel’s was one of the best performances I have heard him give, a great improvement upon his disappointing Eugene Onegin, on a par with his fine Doktor Faust. The dryness that has sometimes affected his voice was not at all in evidence on the present occasion. His was not an overtly emotional Wozzeck, not perhaps as searching nor as terrifying as Matthias Goerne’s, but Trekel’s Lieder-singer attention to detail paid dividends nevertheless. Nadja Michael gave her all as Marie. At her best, she is a fine singing actress; here, her vocal power proved generally as impressive as her stage presence. It would have been good to have had more of the right notes, but she is far from the only singer in this role to stand guilty in that respect. The Captain is a role made for a Mime such as Graham Clark; he did not disappoint, nor did Pavlo Hunka in the dangerous, deranged role of the Doctor. John Daszak, replete with plastic muscles, made a virile thug indeed of the Drum-Major, though never at the expense of musical values. Florian Hoffmann proved fair of voice indeed as Andres, as well as convincing on stage: this is clearly a young singer to watch. And finally, it was a genuinely moving pleasure to welcome back Heinz Zednik to the stage in a typically finely observed performance as the Idiot. But the whole was so much more than the sum of the parts: a description of performance as well as work.

Final scene

Lulu will follow during next year’s Festtage, again conducted by Barenboim and directed by Breth. Barenboim said at a press conference a couple of days later that he hopes to conduct both works over a number of weekends, to allow visitors to experience a Berlin ‘Berg Weekend’, a mouth-watering prospect indeed.