Romaniw/BBC SSO/Kapuła - Henze, Schubert, Mahler, and Strauss, 9 September 2026

Royal Albert Hall

Henze: Erlkönig: Orchestral Fantasy on Goethe’s Poem and Schubert’s op.1
Schubert: Symphony no.8 in B minor, ‘Unfinished’, D 759
Mahler, arr. Britten: What the Wild Flowers Tell Me
Strauss: Four Last Songs

Natalya Romaniw (soprano)

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Paweł Kapuła (conductor)

Images: BBC/ Chris Christodoulou

September is a month of melancholy. Temperatures drop. Nights draw in ever more markedly. We return to work, studies, ‘normal life’, insofar as we have ever been away. The last gasp of the summer festival season draws to a close. For the Proms, this comes ultimately with the notorious ‘Last Night’. Occasionally I have wondered about giving it a try, if only to say that I have, but adventure takes one only so far. This year, Four Last Songs, its own ‘September’ and all, seemed a good time to bow out: Malven notwithstanding, Strauss’s farewell to the world, the Lied, the orchestra, and, in eerie familiarity once again, to a civilisation that had long since given up the ghost. 

Here, we worked up to that final farewell, first of all with a composer for whom the murderous, genocidal taint of that civilisation, from which he could nonetheless never break free, would condemn it for many years to come: Hans Werner Henze. His centenary this year has been extraordinarily muted. The buzz of his Erlkönig was better than nothing, but frankly the Proms, like many other organisations, could and should have done more. From the BBC SSO and Paweł Kapuła, it made for an urgent, typically abundant, and ultimately involving concert opener, very much what it said on the ‘orchestral fantasy’ tin, Schubert recomposed by one who would like to be more Stravinskian than Schoenbergian, yet cannot help who he is—and at the last, does not even wish to. It drew one in with a hint of Romantic magic and devilry. 

The concert moved to Schubert proper, in an unusually intimate, yet compelling account of the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, emblematic of that German Romanticism to which Henze continued to be drawn. Its first movement was relatively swift, yet never unduly driven, urgency and chiaroscuro rightly emerging from the material, sonata form ‘becoming’ rather than merely ‘being’. The fearful hush of its liminal passages sent shivers down the spine, building thereafter in Gothic horror, albeit without exaggeration. The second movement flowed as a drama in itself that was both consequent to the first and mysteriously, ‘unfinished’ or not, a satisfying finale, even farewell, with nothing left to say. It invited us to listen and rewarded us for doing so. 

The second movement from Mahler’s Third Symphony, rescored by Britten, was for me the only disappointment. It feels strange to hear this on a smaller orchestra, perhaps stranger than a more radical arrangement, but I do not think it was only that. Kapuła showed a tendency to fussiness, overtly moulding Mahler’s lines. Balances, especially earlier on, sounded odd, even on occasion inside out. Tempi never seemed quite in proportion, either a little too fast or a little too slow: not necessarily intrinsically, but in relation to one other. Later on, a welcome sense of irony tentatively asserted itself, but its motivation remained elusive.   

And so, Natalya Romaniw joined orchestra and conductor for the Four Last Songs, in the hall in which they were premiered (in 1950, by Kirsten Flagstad, the Philharmonia, and Wilhelm Furtwängler). What struck me in the orchestral introduction to ‘Frühling’ was how much the sound took its cue from the Schubert performance in the first half, detail and urgency again to the fore, neither rushed nor maudlin. (None of this should be, of course, but certainly not an evocation of spring, however backward-looking.) Romaniw was crystal clear, verbally and musically, perhaps with a slight musical ‘accent’, bringing the music closer, say, to Tchaikovsky than to Mozart, but there is no one way with these songs, nor should there be. In a programme interview, she said she intended ‘to make the meaning as clear as possible to listeners, even if they don’t understand German,’ which she certainly accomplished, adding the unquestionable truth that ‘the orchestra’s music says so much as well,’ which again it did here. From soloist, orchestra, and conductor alike, there was a sense of beginning—even if the beginning of the end. 

Our month, ‘September’, followed on ‘naturally’, however much art may conceal art here (an echt-Straussian idea in itself). Mood may have been changing and, more fundamentally, time passing, but this was the turning of the year (and life), nothing abrupt. The celebrated horn call was tender, moving, and paved the way for a darkened rather than dark close. Here, I am afraid I must register unhappiness with the audience, a good part of which insisted on applauding between every song, doing its damnedest to break mood and continuity. An elephantine sneeze, heard from the opposite side of the hall, was not the ideal introduction to a ‘Beim Schlafengehen’ that was nonetheless beautifully judged, imploring, and led but not determined by Hermann Hesse’s words. An exquisite violin solo soared, however soiled the cliché, like the ‘soul, unguarded … free in flight’, preparing the way for a noble close, beyond good and evil, as the avid Nietzschean composer would have understood. The final sunset of ‘Im Abendrot’ was painted in just the right colours. It lingered, yet justly no more than a little. Voice and words, moreover, were part of it, distinction between various forms of text dissolved. Larks sang, solo violin, orchestral horns, and more made their valedictory bows. It was a song, perhaps, closer to a verbal tone poem than to anything from the operas. Radiant, dignified, and beckoning a beyond in which Strauss may have claimed not to believe, it was, premature applause notwithstanding, a true last song.

Salzburg Festival (1) - Der Prinz von Homburg, 20 August 2026

Felsenreitschule

(concert performance)

Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg - Maximilian Schmitt
The Electress – Tanja Ariane Baumgartner
Princess Natalie of Orange – Kathrin Zukowski
Field Marshal Dörfling – Lauri Vasar
Frederick Arthur, Prince of Homburg – Georg Nigl
Colonel Kottwitz – Anthony Robin Schneider
Count Hohenzollern – Magnus Dietrich
First Officer – Konstantin Igl
Second Officer – Gabriel Rollinson
Third Officer – Philipp Schöllhorn
First Lady of the Court – Hanna Park
Second Lady of the Court – Freya Apffelstaedt
Third Lady of the Court – Brigitta Listra
Sergeant, Second Orderly – Marcel Durka
First Orderly – Johannes Bamberger

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

Mention, let alone celebration, of Hans Werner Henze’s centenary has proved surprisingly muted, if not entirely unmarked—at least in continental Europe. Simon Rattle, a longstanding advocate, has given performances of Henze’s oratorio The Raft of the Medusa with his new orchestra in Munich, following on from an outstanding performance here in Salzburg last summer. Munich, long an important centre for Henze performance, saw a new staging of The English Cat by the Bavarian State Opera over the winter of 2025-6, so strictly not a new production this year, although close to being so. El Cimarrón, a scenic music theatre piece rather than an opera, has been given in Rome, Aix-en-Provence, and the composer’s birthplace, the small Westphalian city of Gütersloh. By and large, though, opera and symphonic performances have proved little less frequent than usual over the past decade, which is to say strikingly less frequent than during his lifetime. 

Whilst it was difficult not to feel a certain disappointment at the Salzburg Festival’s decision to give Der Prinz von Homburg in a single concert performance – sold out, be it noted – rather than a full staging, we should still be grateful for this celebration of the twin centenaries of Hans Werner Henze and Ingeborg Bachmann, born but six days apart in 1926. Theirs was a fruitful partnership extending over roughly a decade, beginning in 1955 with the composer’s provision of incidental music for Bachmann’s radio play Die Zikaden, its German narrator having fled to an Italian island. (Both Henze and Bachmann had taken that road south too.) A crucial context for this opera, the first of two, was the 1957 song-cycle Nachtstücke und Arien, with which Henze, with typical theatricality, staged his separation from an avant-garde of which he had never really been part in the first place. (One should be wary of his accounts of what happened, but that in part makes them all the more valuable aesthetically. Yet, as so often with Henze, the more he voiced his dissociation from German art, the more he also found himself drawn to it. Kleist’s play Prinz Friedrich von Homburg had achieved and, in a sense, suffered great popularity during both the Second Reich and the Third, and thus stood potentially as tainted for Henze and Bachmann as German Romantic music, especially when dealing with a German stage and audience. That held, almost irrespective of the aesthetic admiration its recreators both felt. The effort, then, in this opera not to be German is palpable, doomed, and fascinating—which is not to say that it is only German. (What is, or would wish to be? Pfitzner, perhaps, and probably not.) 

The conflicts at work in the score, not only mirroring but extending and intensifying those in the libretto came through strongly in this account from the ORF Symphony Orchestra, Ingo Metzmacher, and a distinguished cast. If I felt occasional passages of softer focus earlier on, I think that was in part a matter of listening my way in and also in part also a reflection of Henze’s writing. After all, in In his own words, ‘Der Prinz von Homburg … sets itself against the blind unimaginative application of laws, in favour of an exaltation of human kindness, an understanding of which reaches into deeper and more complex realms than would be “normal” and which seeks to find a place for a man in this world even though he is a Schwärmer and a dreamer, or perhaps because of that.’ There is a distinctive basic sound-world to the opera, blueish in hue, which takes on and sublimates, even to an extent pacifies the militarism one might expect. There is also certainly a strange dream-world that extends from that, heading the cantata Being Beauteous of a few years later, yet nonetheless shaped in trauma by what has gone before: politically, aesthetically, and perhaps ethically too. 

To present march rhythms on the harp, for instance, rather than trumpets and drums, seemed a statement, an act of hostility towards authorities that had brought the world to war in drama as on earth, and might do so again—heightened by the sense of aesthetic persecution the composer himself undoubtedly, if exaggeratedly, felt for himself: cursed, as it were, to be a German composer, however much he may have wished it otherwise. If the orchestra often seemed driven, perhaps by Metzmacher, to tilt the scales, as did Henze and Bachmann, away from unwanted inheritance, in this case towards Stravinsky, victory ebbed away as soon as it was achieved—just as on the battlefield. If the strangely muted world of interiority took longer to become dramatically compelling, there is arguably point to that, both in work and in performance, Whether there is stylistic resolution or even quite coherence becomes a more pressing issue without staging; eclecticism can be too readily condemned, but also too readily celebrated. When, at its best, stylistic conflict is put to dramatic use, one heard it all the more readily. Registering with ever greater immediacy was Henze’s inner conflict between Schoenberg and Stravinsky – the Symphony in Three Movements and ‘whiter’ ballets sometimes too close for comfort – alleged determinism and freedom, calculation and dreams, depth and beauty, and so on registered with increasing power. 

So too did, if less in the guise of a mediating power then humanistic intervention, understanding of the Prince of Homburg as a strange, postwar (even in war) Wozzeck-, even Christ-figure in a heterodox passion of sorts. If a concert performance could less readily convey than full staging quite who the characters on stage all were, more musical patterns could suggest something of that narrative—arguably more strongly than the work itself warrants, mind and ear compensating in unusual ways. Georg Nigl’s Prince took on the contradictions and struggles – the Prince’s and Henze’s – as his own in a performance of dramatic commitment that outweighed ‘mere’ aesthetic considerations. If occasionally he sounded a little stretched, more often Nigel emerged invigorated by the challenge. Magnus Dietrich’s honeyed Hohenzollern and Anthony Robin Schneider’s dark-chocolate Kollwitz particularly caught my ear on the male side, as on the other side of the gender divide did Kathrin Zukowski’s imploring, inwardly strong Princess Natalie and Tanja Ariane Baumgartner’s rich-toned, quasi-contralto Electress. Maximilian Schmitt ensure that, whilst the Elector’s justice might be cold, it had its own tonal allure. If Henze sometimes tilts the scales a little too obviously – Bachmann less so, I think – the cast did much, even in concert, to present a conflict worth agonising over. If the Prince’s celebrated battle-cry, ‘In Staub mit allen Feinden Brandenburgs,’ bidding Brandenburg’s foes return to dust, can no longer offer Kleist’s jubilation, it was all the more notable that ambivalence that also undercut mere tragic inversion emerged at the close. 

Whether so understandably anti-militaristic, anti-Prussian a recreation ultimately quite adds up, given inevitable, nagging comparison with Kleist, remains an open question. A few years later than the opera, Pierre Boulez spoke scathingly of Henze as a ‘lacquered hairdresser, who pays homage to an utterly superficial modernism’, here specifically in ‘an unfortunate rehashing of Verdi’s Don Carlos’. (Henze, it is only fair to add, had made for his part considerably more outrageous claims against Boulez, Stockhausen, and others.) If imaginative staging might have been able to do more to address such claims head on, this concert performance pointed further to the need to find out for ourselves. It also connected us with another centenary, falling as it did 100 years to the day after the Felsenreitschule’s first use as a performance venue by the Festival: for Max Reinhardt’s staging of Goldoni’s Il servitore di due padroni. The riding school has of course been used since for a host of memorable stage and concert performances, most renowned of all a filmed Don Giovanni conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. Should the current encounter point the way to a staging somewhere soon for Der Prinz von Homburg, it will prove still more welcome, but this will remain an important evening in its own right.

The English Cat, Bavarian State Opera, 25 January 2026

Cuvilliés-Theater

Lord Puff – Michael Butler
Arnold – Daniel Vening
Mr Jones, Judge, Mr Fawn – Zhe Liu
Tom – Armand Rabot
Peter – Samuel Stopford
Mr Keen, Defence Counsel, Parish Priest – Dafydd Jones
Minette – Seonwoo Lee
Babette – Meg Brilleslyper
Louise – Iana Aivazian
Miss Crisp – Elene Gvritishvili
Mrs Gomfit – Nontobeko Bhengu
Lady Toodle – Jess Dandy
Mr Punkett, Prosecution Counsel – Bruno Khouri
Betty – Lucy Altus

Director – Christiane Lutz
Set designs – Christian Andre Tabakoff
Costumes – Dorothee Joisten
Lighting – Benedikt Zehm
Dramaturgy – Olaf Roth

Bayerische Staatsorchester
Katharina Wincor (conductor)

Images: Geoffroy Schied

For an opera derived from a French novel (Honoré de Balzac) by an English playwright (Edward Bond) and a German composer (Hans Werner Henze), The English Cat has had an appropriately international and multilingual performance history. Its 1983 Schwetzingen Festival premiere was given in German translation, followed by French translation at Paris’s Opéra Comique the following year, only the year after that finally being given in Bond’s English at Santa Fe. Brexit-Insel (as it then, blessedly, was not yet) had to wait until 1987 before it was given at the Edinburgh Festival, finally coming to London only in its revised version in 1991, that revision having first been given at Henze’s own Montepulciano festival the year before. And that is before one comes to the undeniable Brechtian influence on Bond’s writing; Henze’s multifarious musical influences, often though far from always German; or indeed his flight – political, aesthetic, and sexual – from an oppressive, even repressive Federal Republic of Germany south across the Alps to Italy, settling outside Rome with his beloved partner Fausto Moroni; or his apartment in Knightsbridge…

‘So what?’ one might ask. Apart from intrinsic interest, it perhaps helps provide justification for the Bayerische Staatsoper’s decision, surprising nowadays, to present the opera in its German version by Ken Bartlett as Die englische Katze. Henze’s English-language works have a performance history of their own of being given in German versions: The Bassarids, for instance, also given in German in Munich in 2008, and the first of Henze’s collaborations with Bond, We Come to the River, having a tradition of being given in translation in Germany. For a native English speaker, it was a matter of regret. Bond’s brilliant use of language cannot help be but missed. But I suspect much of the Cuvilliés-Theater audience also gained something in translation. Hearing an English text in Germany, moreover, arguably imparted a little sense of a German composer, however good his English, responding to an English libretto.

Is there, as Henze feared, a mismatch between English and German comedy? Perhaps, but if so, I think that fruitful as much as fateful, whilst noting he felt he had never quite found the right form or version for the work. As for the talented performers onstage from the Staatsoper’s Opera Studio young artists’ scheme, I am sure they could have sung it any language or none. Theirs was a splendid company effort, as clearly was their direction: led musically by Katharina Wincor and scenically by Christiane Lutz and her resourceful production team. And to see it in the magnificently rococo Cuvilliés-Theater – scene to, among other things, the premiere of Idomeneo in 1781 – suggested a little the premiere of this different, yet not entirely un-Mozartian opera buffa at the still-smaller-in-capacity Schlosstheater in Schwetzingen.

Henze recalled in his memoir Bohemian Fifths that, on receiving the libretto from Bond and reading it to his ‘assembled household’ at Marino, he had found it ‘quite different’ from his first encounter with something closer to the original, a dramatisation by Geneviève Serrault for a company of Argentinian actors. It was ‘far more witty, far more relevant in terms of social criticism. It could have been subtitled L’argent fait tout …. It was no longer a fairy-tale play but a Victorian comedy of manners.’ Alas about half of what Bond had written had to be cut, but so far as Henze was concerned, those essential qualities remained. They also did here, I think, in what we saw and heard. The vegetarian-cat Royal Society for the Preservation of Rats was certainly laid bare in all its respectable bourgeois hypocrisy, an additional (I think) murder presented at the opening, both to parallel the later killing of Tom and to present the background to Lord Puff seeking election as president. There was a vacancy because he and his fellow cats had created one. I can understand why they were not presented visually as cats, although the orphaned mouse Louise had more of her animal nature to her. It might all have seemed a bit too close to, well, Cats. Something was lost, I think, not least in post-Brechtian alienation, although the libretto reminded us who they ‘really’ should be, as did a select few acts, such as Minette’s mode of walking on the roof. It also seemed a pity to lose a stronger sense of the other animals: when it came to Tom’s trial, the counsel for defence as dog, members of the jury as birds, and so on. Perhaps, though, there was wisdom in not wanting to turn this into a Cunning Little Vixen sequel. Moreover, both the mercenary nature of the sanctimonious society’s reality and the contrast with true love and humanity (or whatever the correct term would be) from the naive Minette and the smitten Tom were clear and meaningful.

That was, of course, due in no small part to the excellence of their portrayals onstage. Seonwoo Lee and Armand Rabot made for an excellent pair of lovers, complemented in a not-quite-triangle as product of social coercion and expectation by Michael Butler’s Lord Puff. Lee’s coloratura was spot on: sparkling, precise, and expressive in a fashion reminding us of Henze’s love for Mozart. Rabot struck a fine balance between evident sincerity and lingering doubt that the tomcat’s motivation might have been otherwise; much the same might be said of Meg Brilleslyper as Minette’s astute sister, Babette. There was a sense of something better to Butler’s Lord Puff, but also an acceptance that it would never win out. His scheming nephew Arnold was well captured by Daniel Vening. Iana Aivazian’s Louise made the stage her own at the end, showering herself in money, albeit with fine musical, if not political, values. She had learned, after all, from her protectors. Throughout the dizzyingly varied succession of solos, ensembles (the trio between Minette, Tom, and Babette especially moving) and interludes, a focused drama emerged: cut, yes, but with sensitivity and intelligence. There was no weak link in a cast that was greater than the sum of its parts.

Henze’s expressive compositional method – something, I think, to be heard, not merely analysed – also shone through in the vibrant, committed playing of the Bayerische Staatsorchester under Wincor’s incisive yet affectionate direction: not least the relationship between counterpoint and harmony which clearly owes something to Mozart and still more to his love for Mozart. One can hear or at least in some way sense the workings of the note rows, as one might in Berg or Schoenberg, and it is both not entirely the point but also not entirely not the point. Berg perhaps also comes to mind in the closed forms, although they are more overtly ‘closed’: ‘lots of little songs,’ as Henze put it. He would recall Bond having advised him when writing the music ‘to think less of Gilbert and Sullivan [!] and more of Mozart,’ a key stimulus to formulating its harmonic world. Echoes of other music and, more importantly, their collaboration and confrontation also bubbled to the fore.

Only Henze, surely, could come up with the idea of a ‘Courante’ between the sixth and seventh scenes of the second act, that refers both to ‘a visual idea of the tubes and pipes through which London’s sewage is discharged with enormous force into the Thames,’ and to ‘William Byrd’s Coranto, which I allow to come to the surface out of this flood of water – the same flood of water that will soon carry poor dead Minette out into the North Sea.’ I missed some of that detail, some of that city specificity onstage – maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner – but any production has choices to make, and I return to the point that London and England would not necessarily have been foremost in the minds of many in the audience. Weill complemented the residue of Brecht; disconcertingly Brittenesque string halos of love; elements of earlier Henzes from Boulevard Solitude to Pollicino; the Prinz von Homburg’s unresolved conflict between Schoenberg and Stravinsky; anxiety of influence in the direction of Richard Strauss: these and more combined, but in a duly personal as well as eclectic fashion whose ultimate message was piercingly yet humanly imparted. More Henze in Munich and elsewhere please—and not only in this, the composer’s centenary year.

Salzburg Festival (1): ORF SO/Metzmacher - Henze, 18 July 2025

Felsenreitschule

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

  

Das Floss der Medusa

La Mort – Kathrin Zukowski
Jean-Charles – Georg Nigl
Charon – Udo Samel

Bavarian Radio Chorus (chorus director: Max Hanft)

WRD Radio Chorus (chorus directors: Paul Krämer, Alexander Lüken)

Salzburg Festival and Theatre Children’s Choir (chorus directors: Regina Sgier, Wolfgang Götz)

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

Hans Werner Henze’s oratorio The Raft of the Medusa has long been as celebrated for its abortive Hamburg premiere at the close of 1968, disrupted by riot police acting with as much justice as they do on Berlin streets and elsewhere today in pursuit of anti-genocide protestors. In rehearsals, the RIAS Chamber Choir, flown in from West Berlin to boost local forces, had been deliberately uncooperative, disdaining Henze’s politics. Hamburg waited for a new millennium finally to make amends, although the final rehearsal had been recorded, so it was broadcast instead. Even Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, according to Henze’s autobiography Bohemian Fifths, took out his fury at the composer rather than those actually responsible, whilst poor Ernst Schnabel, the librettist and former controller of North German Radio, responsible for recording that rehearsal and thus tempering further disaster, found himself ‘thrown through a plate-glass door by a representative of the forces of law and order and … briefly locked up in a cell for opposing the state’s authorities.’ It is a story worthy of staging or perhaps a film, and is told a little more fully in my review of the Komische Oper Berlin’s Tempelhof staging in 2023 and considerably more so in Bohemian Fifths. But whilst it is unavoidably part of what the work has now become, it is salutary to hear it more or less for itself, not least at the opening of this year’s Salzburg Festival with a considerable part of the local haute bourgeoisie in attendance—part of it at least, it seems, never happier than when being lectured on its depravity by an artist of the left. Indeed, unavoidable as reception becomes in this context, it put me in mind of the success of The Bassarids the first time around, in what was then Herbert von Karajan’s citadel, for its 1966 premiere: both in itself and because it proved a crucial station on the path to the more obvious political commitment of The Raft of the Medusa. Almost thirty years later, Henze would recoil from the prospect of having become a ‘world success’. What would that mean, he asked mischievously? Becoming a Leonard Bernstein? 

If it were merely a lecture, merely agitprop, The Raft of the Medusa would doubtless be of historical interest, but not so much else. Here, in outstanding performances from all concerned, it showed beyond doubt that it is far more than that: of its time, no doubt, but equally of ours, message as well as material as urgent as ever. The vast forces were superbly marshalled by Ingo Metzmacher; in a work such as this, there is a great deal of ‘crowd control’, but it was never only that, any more than in a fine performance of the larger symphonies of Mahler. Indeed, from its entry, the ORF orchestra played this with the familiarity and commitment one might expect from the greatest of ensembles in such repertoire—and Henze’s Mahlerian heritage was clear from reinvention of his predecessor’s division of the greater whole into finely tuned (in every sense) ensembles. The ship’s negative roll call sounded as if a bitterly ironic Wunderhorn reveille. 

The Choir of the Living was drawn from the Bavarian Radio Chorus, the Choir of the Dead from the WDR Radio Chorus. Make of that what you will; nothing ideally, for all choral singing, the Salzburg children’s choir certainly included, was excellent. The latter’s apparent childlike simplicity – far more difficult than it might sound, when set against orchestral slithering – was both exquisite and disconcerting. Without retrospectively wishing to dismiss the Komische Oper’s undeniable achievement at Tempelhof, this showed beyond doubt that, whilst good staging will do an oratorio no harm, an oratorio need not be staged and will probably work best without. The visual element of choral singers moving from left, the ‘Side of the Living’, to right, the ‘Side of the Dead’, in front of which initially La Mort stands alone, but to which she will soon recruit, is more than enough: starkly powerful without distraction from words and music, enabling the chorus to assume its true and indeed traditional vocation. ‘We speak with two voices,’ as Charon, spoken by Udo Samel, informed us in the Prologue: that of ‘Madame: La Mort,’ the chillingly seductive, strikingly clear Kathrin Zukowski, and that of Jean-Charles, ‘the mulatto from Djefara in French service, whom you will remember from Géricault’s painting’, less played than inhabited by a well-nigh possessed – and very un-Fischer-Dieskau – Georg Nigl. 

Henze’s use of ‘African’ percussion might raise eyebrows now, but it is unquestionably well meant and certainly atmospheric. It reminded us not only of the world beyond European shores, but of oppression both more specific and more general as truth, reality, and delirium closed in: a colonial oppression to which open resistance would break out in the drum-beat of the closing orchestral section. Ominous, fatal (this year’s Overture Spirituelle theme is ‘Fatum’), and a cry of solidarity, it grew to a climax, as if to incite through the implicit call of ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’, then Wozzeck-like, stopped: over to us. So far, so good, and that final message was overwhelming. Yet what happened to lead us there was just as important and involving. This was a tale of humanity, but also of class struggle, in which ‘lesser’ ranks were heartlessly betrayed – ‘we for whom there was no room in the longboat’ – yet those who survived ‘returned to the world again, eager to overthrow it’. Contest between Jean-Charles and La Mort was unequal, yet real; this was no foregone conclusion, save when it had happened. ORF wind beguiled and disturbed, in context perhaps – and recalling the actual premiere took place in Vienna – an ambivalent homage to Henze’s beloved Mozart. Ghosts of Berg, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg were also present in the harmonies – Wozzeck surely a case of more or less direct allusion – but so, I think, was Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero. Haunted above all by Bach, here was a secular, revolutionary passion: like Bach’s, both a work of mourning and yet imbued with some redemptive hope. Raising of the giant score at the end suggested where, aesthetically at least, some form of redemption might lie. If Berg's Violin Concerto, 'to the memory of an angel', echoed in harmony as well as violin solo, then here lay other angels, waiting to rise or even risen.

Surtitles came and went in what I assume was a technical malfunction rather than arbitrary selectivity. That was doubtless something of a pity for an international audience – probably less international than in August – although the vivid, visceral nature of communication in person was more than ample compensation. Bar a slight slip, unless I were mistaken, in Charon’s opening narration, and overmiking of Samel’s spoken contributions – at least we could readily discern every word – I am not sure I can find another cavil. This was an outstanding opening, then, to this year’s Salzburg Festival: as fine a Henze performance as I have heard, its 2018 revival of The Bassarids included, and unquestionably the most moving.

I shall return to Salzburg in mid-August to review several more performances. This, however, will take some matching. For those who missed it, cameras were present. There will also be two Munich performances next February in Henze’s centenary year, from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle, Anna Prohaska, John Tomlinson, and Nigl once more, conducted by longstanding advocate Simon Rattle. Now, let us remember the rafts and ‘small boats’ upon the treacherous seas, and the bodies and souls of those who cling to them.

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.

Liverman/Walker/Shibe/Gunnell - Henze, El Cimarrón, 11 March 2023

Wigmore Hall

Will Liverman (baritone)

Adam Walker (flute)

Sean Shibe (guitar)

Owen Gunnell (percussion)

I had waited a long, long time for a performance of Henze’s ‘recital for four musicians’ from 1969-70, El Cimarrón. Like other works from the zenith of Henze’s political commitment, it seems largely to be shunned by today’s performers and venues. Hats off, then, to both the Wigmore Hall and to the four musicians involved in this performance, baritone Will Liverman, percussionist Owen Gunnell, flautist Adam Walker and guitarist Sean Shibe, the last two doubling up on various percussion instruments throughout, both for putting on a performance at all and for giving so fine an account of the work. In a sense, one either does this properly or one does not do it at all, but that does not mean one should merely take for granted performing excellence. 

Any idea that El Cimarrón might seem merely dated was thus triumphantly despatched. Many of our ideas concerning cultural appropriation might have changed in the meantime, but the urgency of its message concerning capitalist-imperialist exploitation in general and enslavement of black people in particular, remains at least as apparent as ever. Moreover, Henze’s method of letting escaped slave Esteban Montejo’s testimony essentially speak for itself – albeit with that testimony noted first by the Cuban ethnologist Miguel Barnet, translated into German by Hans Magnus Enzensbeger no less, here further translated into English by Christopher Keene – holds up pretty well in terms of what we might consider respectful, whilst leaving open the question, as Henze explicitly acknowledged concerning works written at this time, of ‘bourgeois’ aesthetic value. 

The idea arose from a conversation Henze and Enzensberger had had round about 1968, concerning ‘the difficulties of writing political songs which would go beyond, or circumvent the achievements of Eisler, Weill, or Dessau’ (Henze). Henze thought some sort of song-cycle a likely result, but in the end El Cimarrón turned out to be, at least according to his understanding, ‘a trial run for a new type of concert’. This, I think, gave a flavour of that: recitation, some song, elements of music theatre, above all a testimony arising from true ensemble cooperation that ‘cannot be done in a few days of rehearsal’, not least when it comes to the necessity for the players to invent music themselves, ‘where only a “graphic” serves as clue, stimulus or signpost’. 

We could not know, of course, at least without detailed knowledge and memory of the score, quite what was notated and how. Nevertheless, a sense not only of ensemble, but of comradeship, emerged. There was no doubt that these were players who were listening closely to one another, listening moreover that was not only instinctive but had also been learned through a political process of rehearsal. The vast array of instruments before our eyes and ears was a mise-en-scène in itself, but also an invitation to a world partly known yet also quite new. Liverman’s move in the first song, ‘The World’, from wordless song to recitation, at times quite Schoenbergian – Henze, however much he distanced himself, could never help himself here – conveyed meaning both through words but also via their means and variety of delivery. Yet it was equally in the interludes, in instrumental transition, as so often in such music, that a good deal of the journey was to be had—and to be reflected upon. 

Elsewhere, music could be frankly pictorial; we all knew what inhuman catastrophe Liverman’s chains depicted, but there was far more: jew’s harp ‘which represents the stars in comic strips that, on such occasions, dance in front of the eyes of the injured party’; pounding African drums offering a truth in sharp contradistinction to that of imported, Roman Catholic priests, Henze and Montejo having no time whatsoever for the hypocrisy, economic, sexual, and otherwise, of the latter. It could also, however, effect mood and drama, for instance, in Montejo’s flight into the mountains—even though, perhaps especially though, this was not a straightforwardly dramatic piece. 

For me, the reflective and revolutionary centre came later than the mid-point; ‘The Rebellion’, ninth of fifteen numbers, went further, deeper, into something approaching true melancholy. The ensuing ecstasy of redress, of revenge, at ‘The Battle of Mal Tiempo’ was highly infectious. Agitprop? If so, it worked. An equally strong impression was made by ‘The Bad Victory’, which followed, the unease of its darkly military parade showing us everything was certainly not what it seemed. And if sounds from the opening returned at the end, this was not to denote something banally cyclical. As Henze explained, and as we seemed to feel, ‘the pre-revolutionary situation is reinstated, looking backwards is ruled out, everything is now directed forward towards a new identity’. 

Not long before El Cimarrón, Henze had resolved that he would no longer write, as he feared he might have fallen into doing, merely for himself and his friends, but rather ‘to help socialism’; that doing so would involving both embodying in his work ‘all the problems of contemporary bourgeois music,’ and transforming them ‘into something that the masses can understand’. That would not involve submitting to commercial considerations, but nor was there any ‘place for worry about losing elite notions of value’. From the beginning, that has led some to question the artistic and/or enduring ‘value’ of such interventions. To experience, however, something that spoke so vividly, if necessarily from its time, to the age of Black Lives Matter proved a necessary surprise and, in its way, a proper call to arms. 

Let us hope, then, that this will mark the beginning of many such opportunities, in London and elsewhere. What next? Perhaps the ‘vaudeville’ La Cubana, or the ‘show for 17 performers’, Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung Natascha Ungeheuers? Simon Rattle performed Henze’s Che Guevara requiem Das Floß der Medusa in Berlin in 2006; might he wish (and be enabled) to bring it to the LSO’s repertoire? (Its celebrated non-premiere, halted by police, might make interesting material for a drama of its own.) Surely it is long past time for the Royal Opera to revive Henze’s collaboration with Edward Bond We Come to the River, or indeed to stage one of Henze’s earlier or later operas. König Hirsch would come top of my list. As Henze’s 2026 centenary nears, a coordinated offering would be just the thing. One can dream...

Olga Neuwirth: Orlando (world premiere), Vienna State Opera, 8 December 2019

Images: (c) Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn

Orlando – Kate Lindsey

Narrator – Anna Clementi

Guardian Angel – Eric Jurenas
Queen, Purity, Friend of Orlando’s Child – Constance Hauman
Modesty – Margaret Plummer
Sasha, Chastity – Agneta Eichenholz
Shelmerdine, Greene – Leigh Melrose
Dryden – Marcus Pelz
Addison – Carlos Osuna
Duke – Wolfgang Bankl
Pope – Christian Miedl
Orlando’s Child – Justin Vivian Bond
Putto – Emil Lang
Doctor 1 – Wolfram Igor Derntl
Doctor 2 – Hans Peter Kammerer
Doctor 3 – Ayk Martirossian
Orlando’s Girlfriend, Lead Singer – Katie La Folle
Lead Singer – Ewelina Jurga
Two Actresses – Selina Ströberle, Antoannetta Kostadinova
Tutor – Andreas Patton
Russian Sailor – Felix Erdmann
Boat’s Captain – Michael Stark
Children’s Father – Tvrtko Štajcer
Officiant – Massimo Rizzo
Fiancée – Katharina Billerhart
Servant – Florian Glatt
Cameraman – Robert Angst

Polly Graham (director)

Will Duke (video)
Roy Spahn (set designs)
COMME des GARÇONS (costumes, masks)
Julien D’Ys (hair creation)
Stephen Jones (masks)
Ulrich Schneider (lighting)
Markus Noisternig, Gilbert Nouno, Clément Cornuau, Olga Neuwirth (live electronics and sound design)
Julien Aléonard (sound direction)
Jenny Ogilvie (movement)
Helga Utz (dramaturgy)

Vienna State Opera Choral Academy

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus directors: Thomas Lang, Stefano Ragusini, Svetolomar Zlatkov)

Band (Lucas Niggli (percussion), Stephan Börst (bass guitar), Edmund Köhldorfer (electric guitar), Annemarie Herfurth (synthesister), Martina Stückler (alto saxophone))

Stage Orchestra and Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera

Matthias Pintscher (conductor)

The first ever opera composed by a woman to appear on the main stage of the Vienna State Opera, let alone the first such to be commissioned and premiered by that house, not only did Olga Neuwirth Orlando defy expectations; not only, indeed, was it dramatically concerned with defiance of expectations; it accomplished those tasks and/or performed those roles with gestures of defiance such as that house had never previously seen. It was concerned with writing, yet also with performance; with sex, yet also with gender; with Vienna, yet also with the wider world; with art, yet also with violence. This was an historic evening that was also concerned with history—and with its uncomfortable bedfellows, present and future.

Based on Virginia Woolf’s novel, yet, as is common with Neuwirth’s work, drawing upon and quoting a number of other related sources—some quotations came from Sally Potter’s film—score, Polly Graham’s staging, and libretto, written collaboratively by Catherine Filloux and Neuwirth, take us from the Elizabethan era to the present, dangling an uncertain future before us. Orlando, the boy who time travels and reawakens as woman sees his/her story taken further than Woolf’s 1928, through spin of a filmic top and absorbing musical transition, right up until now, yet also peers into the future through her non-binary child, played here by performer Mx Justin Vivian Bond, whose non-operatic voice is doubtless more startling to many in a theatre such as this than are ideas of gender fluidity. Or rather, the latter should come as little challenge whatsoever to an artform and audience accustomed to a Nerone, a Cherubino, or an Octavian, yet sadly may still do so for some in this particular context. Perhaps, be it consciously or unconsciously, because this is not an opera written by men; because, like Neuwirth’s widely misunderstood American Lulu, it is an opera that purposely seeks to avert, even to neuter, the male gaze. How dare she/they? That the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, a renowned interpreter of all three of those roles, should feature here at the centre of the opera and do so with such excellence, should and, certainly in my case, did give pause for thought.

Hand on heart, in the house, I was neither so intrigued or convinced by libretto and Polly Graham’s often surprisingly conventional staging as I was by score and most performances. That said, I have since found myself considering their collaborative interaction more than I should have suspected. There is probably a lesson in that too: certainly collaboration and respect of difference lay, unsurprisingly yet with undoubted moral force, in occasion and opera alike. The scenes looking to the future, for all their polemical intent, seemed to me dramatically to descend into little more than a litany of demands to build a better world; I was going to say no one could reasonably object to them, but many objections—not least the hostility experienced from sections of the audience—are far from reasonable. Aesthetic judgement would probably have recommended a cut of half an hour: perhaps even more, with greater time being afforded earlier scenes that seem somewhat rushed through. That was not necessarily, however, the sole form of judgement to be exercised here. Perhaps this audience did need to see and hear Orlando with her girlfriend, to hear her child sing freely, to be reminded of the threat Trump-and-Johnson fascism poses us all, and so forth. Olga Neuwirth is not Richard Strauss. This was not really an occasion for l’art pour l’art. Mr Greene’s refusal to publish Orlando’s work and his anger when she dared question his critical judgement spoke of and to many: not so much when the mask dropped as when it was donned in all its horror.

I set to thinking about how Neuwirth’s work fitted—and did not fit—into received canons of modernist politically committed work. (How could I not, such having been a particular research—and life—concern of my own?) Not entirely coincidentally, Hans Werner Henze and Luigi Nono came to mind. Electronic manipulation of voices, here clearly a telling comment on and dramatisation of other possibilities and hopes for transition, formed part of a greater determination to offer as large a vocal range as possible, whilst rightly affording particular attention to the female voice in its various guises. As Matthias Pintscher pointed out in a programme interview, not only did Neuwirth specify that Orlando should be sung by a mezzo, but ‘exactly what kind of mezzo-soprano she has in mind. And always the spectrum: the three ladies Purity, Chastity, Modesty, or the three doctors or the poets, and especially in the choruses: a children’s choir, and the division in the voices.’ That went for vibrato, or not, and all manner of degrees in between. Interest in incorporation of music from far beyond the Classical canon, whilst subjecting it to procedures and development we may still reasonably consider modernist is a political as well as an aesthetic statement. The desire to give voice to those without a voice is common, of course, to both Henze and Nono, yet not necessarily in this way. It is difficult to imagine either incorporating pop music in this way, though Henze arguably came a little closer in a work such as Natascha Ungeheuer—or perhaps better, in his idea of a work that in many ways turned out rather differently: ‘the finished product,’ as he put it, ‘was to have a touch of arte povera.’

Quotation, allusion, reference: these are rife, incorporated into Orlando’s development as a writer, again more successfully in the score than elsewhere. The play between expectation, between what was new and what one ‘knew’, between those and what one may have been artistically convinced one knew was part and parcel not only of the opera’s aesthetic worth, but surely also of its political message. Tudor church music, Purcell’s Sound the Trumpet (to different yet related words, and sung by a different vocal type), a wonderful recording of Arnold Rosé and his daughter playing the Bach Double Violin Concerto (names of Holocaust victims projected), chordal progressions from Wozzeck (I think…), square manipulations of material from The Rite of Spring: they formed the drama but also led one to think what is ‘quotation’ and how does it differ from ‘allusion’ and ‘reference’? Traditionally, pitch has proved paramount. Should it be now, in a different age, with different music, different requirements, different forms of transition? Again and again, one’s ears come back to the interludes, to possibilities for change, for transformation—and to their achievement. There is messiness, often deliberately so. That was surely part of the point, just as it can be with Henze and indeed with much art, musical and non-musical. Neuwirth’s recent film score for Die Stadt ohne Juden could not help but hang in the air, not least since the strong presence of film sometimes afforded a narrative, yet aesthetically destabilising, sense of film to proceedings.

I could continue saying what the opera is not. It is certainly not primarily concerned with character, as conventionally dramatically understood. Neither is Fidelio, for that matter, still less Al gran sole carico d’amore—or any Nono opera, for that matter. There is often something to be said for a via negativa, perhaps: ask Aquinas, or the Schoenberg of Moses und Aron, with its ‘unrepresentable [etc.] God’. Again, though, I am not sure that that is the point here. Comparison with Al gran sole, an opera concerned with women’s revolutionary experience, written by a composer of undoubted importance to Neuwirth, may well illuminate. Yet it still presents a male composer as model. Many, most, even all of us can only avoid that path fitfully for the moment. Awareness may take us a little further along a path less trodden; or, to quote the thirteenth-century inscription that once so inspired Nono, ‘Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar,’ (‘Travellers, there are no paths, only travelling itself’). Easy, doubtless, to say, with privilege, yet nevertheless often helpful to bear in mind.

That certain threatened, entitled, privileged elements in the audience took it upon themselves loudly, violently, fascistically to boo the composer—not, be it noted, anyone else from a participant list of Meyerbeerian proportions—doubtless contributed to the first-night ‘drama’ in the demotic sense. Yet it was difficult to resist—and why would one resist?—asking why they had done so. Presumably those old, white, cisgender, heterosexual men had known that they were not in for an Against Modern Opera Productions evening of Donizetti and Zeffirelli. They had attended, it would seem, in order to boo, in order to attack—a woman and others in roles these self-appointed protectors considered not to be fit for them. We knew on whose side they would have stood—on whose side they still stood—when it came to accusations of ‘degenerate’ (entartet) art. That Neuwirth, longstanding collaborator with that most heroic of Nestbeschmutzerinnen, Elfried Jelinek, once again refused to be oppressed by the hegemonic either/or, to be ‘yodelled out of existence’ as she put it in a celebrated 2000 intervention against Austria’s far-Right FPÖ, that she and others fought back, was the crucial thing here to those angered by the slightest disruption to their unmerited, alleged authority.

What better way to oppose stark primary colours of exclusivity than through music, that most ambiguous of media? Those who would ‘defend’ it—against what and on whose authority?—proved, as ever, to be those most violent in their defamation of it. ‘I will continue,’ in Orlando’s final words, ‘because: “Nobody has the right to obey!” My hopes are fading, but my rage remains. –’ Yes, but… Just as in Così fan tutte or Capriccio, Götterdämmerung or, yes, American Lulu, music, still more than language, provides the ‘buts’. For that, however, one must listen, and to listen through the struggle to appreciate that there is no more one way to listen than there is to write or to perform. If that is not ultimately a political message, I am not sure what is. ‘Nobody has the right to obey!’