Die Frau ohne Schatten, Semperoper Dresden, 27 March 2024

Evelyn Herlitzius (Die Amme), Miina-Liisa Värelä (Baraks Frau), Komparserie;
all images © Semperoper Dresden/Ludwig Olah

Emperor – Eric Cutler
Empress – Camilla Nylund
Nurse – Evelyn Herlitzius
Spirit-Messenger – Andreas Bauer Kanabas
Barak – Oleksandr Pushniak
Dyer’s Wife – Mina-Liisa Värelä
Apparition of Youth – Martin Mitterrutzner
Voice of the Falcon – Lea-ann Dunbar
Voice from Above – Christa Mayer
Guardian of the Threshold of the Temple – Nikola Hillebrand
The One-Eyed – Rafael Fingerlos
The One-Armed – Tilmann Rönnebeck
The Hunchback – Tansel Akzeyebek
Children’s Voices – Nikola Hillebrand, Sofia Savenko, Lea-ann Dunbar, Stephanie Atanasov, Dominika Škrabalová, Michal Doron
Servants – Bryndis Gudjonsdottir, Sofia Savenko, Dominika Škrabalová

Director – David Bösch
Set designs – Patrick Bannwart
Costumes – Moana Stemberger
Lighting – Fabio Antoci
Video – Falko Herold, Patrick Bannwart
Dramaturgy – Johann Casimir Eule

Children’s Chorus (director: Claudia Sebastian-Bertsch) of the Semperoper Dresden
Chorus (director: André Kellinghaus) of the Semperoper Dresden

Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden

Christian Thielemann (conductor)  

Dresden opened its week-and-a-half Richard Strauss-Tage with David Bösch’s new production of Die Frau ohne Schatten, premiered a few days previously, then as now under Christian Thielemann’s baton and with an excellent cast. By the very nature of the work, it tends to attract, if not quite only then preponderantly, fine performances; its forces imply a season highlight or festival outing. That said, it has attracted a variety of directorial approaches, some more convincing than others. At the least convincing extreme stands Christof Loy’s arrogant, disdainful, absurdly reductive effort for Salzburg, also conducted (outstandingly) by Thielemann. I am not sure I have seen a production of anything that engaged less with the work in question—although, to give Loy his due, he imperiously announced that he would not, since he did not care for it. Otherwise, some will heighten the work’s ritualistic tendencies, perhaps at expense of its complex symbolism. Some will adopt a Freudian approach. Some – many would say this was true of the work – will prove more perplexing than anything else. Bösch’s has something of these tendencies, whilst for the most part telling the story as clearly as any I can recall.

Oleksandr Pushniak (Barak)

 

That is far from a bad thing, especially in a work of this complexity, though it immediately raises the question: ‘whose story? Hofmannsthal’s or Strauss’s?’ What, if I am understanding correctly, Bösch does suggest is a contest between two worlds, not so much those of the born and unborn, as between heaven and earth, fantasy and reality, even sleep and waking. Set designs, costumes, and lighting create and contribute to this: a silken world of sheets and dreams leading, via a grim, even grimy portal, to the workshop-cum-living quarters of a modern-day dyer – washing machine and all – and his wife. And so, when both couples are transformed by their trials, so as to find a world of greater happiness in the third act, it is not only one of procreation, but of broader fulfilment, acceptance, and happiness. When all threatens to collapse into bathos with the Emperor and Empress welcoming children who seem to have wandered in from a school play, it is (at least for me) rescued by this broadening of focus. Hofmannsthal’s central ‘message’ – it is surely not the only one, but I do not think we can simply ignore it either – is of course a troubling one to many of us. We can understand it more broadly in terms of valuing life at a time when so many were being lost in the Great War, but we cannot convert it entirely into that. Like it or not, pronatalism is there; so is decided inequality between the sexes; so is heteronormativity; so are many things in which many of us no longer believe. If the two couples meeting again ‘on earth’ as friends for a few drinks might seem banal, then something needs to be done here, and there are surely worse alternatives. 

There are powerful moments: as when – perhaps unconsciously echoing Wagner’s Die Feen, for whose belated first performance the young Strauss acted as assistant conductor – the Dyer’s Wife picks up a baby (doll) and casts it into grisly oblivion. At the beginning of the third act, a television-watching Barak living a separate, miserable existence from his wife in separate, separated rooms, told a powerful tale simply and with great human sympathy. Although I have not seen the film, I could not help but wonder whether flooding the stage with pink – in general, coloured lighting was a great strength – was a reference to the fantasy worlds of Barbie and Ken. A selection of beautiful, youthly, apparently identical apparitions from which the Dyer’s Wife could choose was a nice touch: consonant also with a clue in the libretto. I was not wild about the appearance onstage of a giant falcon, though the kitsch seemed knowing. Likewise some of the video imagery seemed to me superfluous, though I am doubtless speaking as much of my own taste as anything more definite. It is difficult to imagine anyone finding nothing here to spark egngagement, just as doubtless many of us will have our cavils. (The idiot booing at the close was presumably an exception.) Literally breaking up the scene, the turn to ‘reality’ itself a bourgeois fantasy, is a crucial moment, returning us to the ambiguous world of the Nurse, who tellingly also seems broken by the experience. What might have been unduly reductive proves ultimately to question itself – and us – too.

Camilla Nylund (Die Kaiserin) 

What surprised me was how different Thielemann’s reading seemed from that Salzburg performance. Perhaps on account of the oft-noted ‘narrowness’ of his repertoire, which can be exaggerated, he is rarely a conductor to step twice in the same interpretative river. Where once he had gloried in the full throttle of Strauss’s huge orchestra, now he was far more sparing in unleashing it. This was a highly lyrical account, in the outstanding, never-erring Staatskapelle Dresden at least as much as onstage. Much might have been chamber music, though there was also a greater affinity, not unlike Kirill Petrenko in Munich, albeit softer, more soloistic, with the harmonic world of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces, op.16. It is here, surely, that Strauss comes closest to Schoenberg, as opposed to vice versa (ironically, given what by now he was saying about the composer to whom, not so long before, he had proved commendably generous). If I missed something of the extraordinary, grinding dissonance Thielemann conjured in his Vienna Philharmonic recording of the Fantasy on themes from the opera, I always do. Here, like the Dyer and his Wife, he had different fish to fry. 

There was an almost Karajan-like sense of line to the performance as a whole, characterised by enormous variation in tempo as well as dynamics. I do not think I have ever heard the close of the first act so beautifully, wondrously drawn out: luminous and, in context, both otherworldly and worldly. It seemed to capture musically the clash between Hofmannsthal’s message, via the Nightwatchmen’s words, and Strauss’s scepticism, adopting that ‘beautiful’ yet, through his Nietzschean materialism, strangely empty ‘holiness’ Strauss tends towards when setting anything approaching the Christian (or even transcendental). One might think of Salome’s John the Baptist here, or a song such as Allerseelen. Yet I found it deeply moving, albeit intriguingly as if it were delivered in a dream-like moment of temporal suspension and/or manipulation. The closed of the second act, often a thrilling, even terrifying climax, here seemed to function more as a summary of what had already happened, the Nurse’s ‘Übermächte sind im Spiel’ delivered in kind. Musical dramaturgy, then, was often unusual, yet never arbitrary. Thielemann had clearly considered his approach carefully.

 

 

Miina-Liisa Värelä (Baraks Frau), Evelyn Herlitzius (Die Amme), Camilla Nylund (Die Kaiserin), Tilmann Rönnebeck (Der Einarmige), Oleksandr Pushniak (Barak), Tansel Akzeybek (Der Bucklige), Rafael Fingerlos (Der Einäugige), Kinderchor der Semperoper Dresden

Vocal performances were, of course, part and parcel of all the above, and suggested similarly careful casting in a combination of celebrated exponents and newer comers. I cannot recall hearing an Emperor less strained than Eric Cutler. This doubtless had something to do with Thielemann’s new penchant for orchestral softness and lyricism, but also surely reflected Cutler’s own, more bel canto approach. It put me a little in mind of Boulez casting Chris Merritt in Moses und Aron. His relationship with the Empress, Camilla Nylund, was unquestionably a real one: no mere representation of something symbolic. Nylund rarely if ever disappoints; nor did she here, in a wonderfully human portrayal, that held in reserve great vocal power when called upon, yet impressed equally in more sensitive mode. One might say much the same of Oleksandr Pushniak as Barak and Mina-Liisa Värelä as the Dyer’s Wife, their acting equally impressive—and moving. As for Evelyn Herlitzius, her voice instantly recognisable, her total dramatic commitment hardly less so, I doubt there are many artists who have sung both this and the Dyer’s Wife. This, though, was unquestionably a world and a character she could completely inhabit. Andreas Bauer Kanabas made a strong impression as the Spirit-Messenger. Choral and ensemble parts were all very well taken. There was no weak link, but rather a multitude of musical, dramatic, and musicodramatic strands one could follow: not necessarily so as to answer any questions, but rather to pose a few more. In this work, there are too many conflicts for resolution ever to be an option.

Evelyn Herlitzius (Die Amme)

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (2), Ariadne auf Naxos, 14 July 2018

Théâtre de l’Archevêché

Images: Festival d’Aix-en-Provence 2018 © Pascal Victor / artcompress

 

Music Master – Josef Wagner

Major-Domo – Maik Solbach

Lackey – Sava Vemić

Officer – Petter Moen

Composer – Angela Brower

Tenor, Bacchus – Eric Cutler

Wig-Maker – Jean-Gabriel Saint Martin

Zerbinetta – Sabine Devieilhe

Prima Donna, Ariadne – Lise Davidsen

Dancing Master – Rupert Charlesworth

Naiad – Beate Mordal

Dryad – Andrea Hill

Echo – Elena Galistkaya

Harlequin – Huw Montague Rendall

Truffaldino – David Shipley

Scaramuccio – Emilio Pons

Brighella – Jonathan Abernethy

The Richest Man in Vienna – Paul Herwig

His Wife – Julia Wieninger

 

Katie Mitchell (director)

Chloe Lamford (set designs)

Sarah Blenkinsop (costumes)
James Farncombe (lighting)

Martin Crimp (dramaturgy, including additional dialogue, translated by Ulrike Syha)

Joseph W Alford (movement)

Orchestre de Paris

Marc Albrecht (conductor)

Ariadne auf Naxos is in many ways the ultimate opera about opera. (Or should that be Moses und Aron?) Many, perhaps most, operas would seem to be ‘about’ Orpheus and his art in some way or another. (In a shameless plug, I should add that such is the subject, or at least the starting-point, for a chapter on operatic culture I have written for the soon-to-be-published – i.e., proofs already checked – Routledge Research Companion to Musical Modernism, edited by Björn Heile and Charles Wilson.) It would be far from absurd to claim that an artwork can fail to be ‘about’ its art form, its genre, itself in one sense or another; or would it? Always we seem to be brought back to those oppositions, those dialectics, that haunt, arguably determine Western history and culture, whether we like it or not. Yet Ariadne seems to take it all in, the ‘business’ as and the ‘art’, the artists and the characters, the metanarrative and the narrative, ultimately also the transformation that may or may not transcend – Hofmannsthal and/or Strauss? – as well as the manifold absurdities and frustrations at which one can only laugh, except that is, when one can only cry.

 

Productions can approach such a work – in practice, with the possible exception of Elektra, almost any work! – in any number of ways. There is nothing wrong with emphasising one strand, one particular reading: single-mindedness has its place, just as much for, say, a Hans Neuenfels as for a Furtwängler or a Klemperer. (The idea of a Klemperer Ariadne in particular intrigues, not least on the basis of his Pulcinella Suite, but I digress – and I have no Music Master to restrain me or indeed to inflict cuts, justified or otherwise.) Ranking is a game for politicians and accountants – although donors perhaps have their place in this world too – but I am not sure that I have seen a production that has kept so many balls in the air at the same time, investigated their nature, and added a few of its own, as Katie Mitchell’s for the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence.

The Prologue comes across as relatively conventional: not in the sense of wanting ‘pretty’ frocks and so on, but it sets the scene, as perhaps it should, ready for the transformations to come. It is full of life, full of character; there is probably, as doubles would be the case in watching any ‘making of’ documentary, more than one can take in in a single viewing, yet by the same token there is no sense of overload. It is not ‘busy’ for the sake of it, as often seems to be a temptation – perhaps a valid one – here. One enjoys the splendidly camp yet undeniably successful and talented Dancing Master of Rupert Charlesworth: watch him rehearse his dancers and you will see that he knows his stuff as well as owning the room. One sees that room transformed into a stage and an audience – with, rightly, a flexible curtain of a barrier in between. Lights taken down and replaced suggest something afoot: a distinction being made between reception room and desert island. We are not yet sure, however.

 

Perhaps most important of all, we see and feel – this is a musical thing too, of course, but also in Mitchell’s staging – the emergence of Zerbinetta as a real person, as a human being, to an extent uncommon, perhaps even unparalleled, in my experience. The tenderness of Sabine Devieilhe’s performance is something; she can do the coloratura fireworks too, as we shall learn. So too, however, is the direction: her placing with (and not with) other characters at particular times, her reactions to them, leading up to a moment quite justified and yet also shocking: the furious slap she gives the Composer after his/her (self-)righteous words at the close. Has (s)he not listened to a word Zerbinetta has said? Most likely not; for even in a world such as Mitchell’s, in which gender is fluid, indeed performed, there is no doubting that masculinity rules the roost. Molière after all wrote Le bourgeois gentilhomme, after all, thus in a sense initiating or at least provoking this particular drama. In connection with that, it is perhaps worth noting that Marc Albrecht seemed particular attuned to the connections – and implicitly the contrasts – with Strauss’s incidental music too. His, overall, was a wise and splendid reading, never seeking attention for itself, yet fully aware of when the orchestra should soar – above all at the close. If an orchestra is unlikely ever to sound at its best outdoors, the Orchestre de Paris, a few scrappy string moments aside, offered warmth, clarity, and chamber-music responsiveness throughout. Albrecht’s gentle yet authoritative guidance nevertheless remained an absolute necessity.

 

Back, however, to the stage. (How difficult it is even to write about keeping all those balls in the air!) Already, in that Prologue, Mitchell and her team have slightly prised open the work (and its ‘work-concept’). The dialogue has not been quite as one remembered it, perhaps, although we all know how memories can play tricks. In ‘reality’, Martin Crimp has added some lines to fit what we see, some others have gone, and the surtitles seem to offer a further level of commentary and critique: never too much, but enough to have one wonder. Without returning to the 1912 version, with or without Molière – what a missed opportunity that was in Salzburg in 2012! – elements return or rather are rethought and transformed. The Richest Man in Vienna is there, in a dress, as his wife, who literally wears the trousers. They not only offer interjections, new yet rooted in memories of 1912, at least to begin with; they are offered opportunity to learn, to be transformed. Indeed, they interact with the ‘cast’ almost at will. It is, alas, not clear what, if anything, they have learned; audiences and patrons can be like that. Perhaps, though, it is too soon to tell, for which of us has not on occasion learned more from a performance than might initially have seemed to be the case? The final words, appropriately enough, are given to M. Jourdain’s successor: the experiment has been interesting, but it is unlikely to show the way to the future of opera. That, we may retort, and probably do, is at least as much up to us as up to you, however much you may throw your cash around.

 

Such is the metatheatricality. Perhaps the real truths of Mitchell’s, Hofmannsthal’s, and Strauss’s opera(s), however, lie in what is too often overlooked: what this Ariadne, partly the Composer’s, partly all manner of others’, does as an opera. Angela Brower’s Composer, beautifully, intelligently sung, has not left the stage; (s)he conducts, at times, although it is unclear whether anyone knows or cares. The Opera concerns, above all, Ariadne on Naxos. Lise Davidsen’s Ariadne proved one of the finest I have heard, possessed of an almost infinite dynamic range, subtly inflected, and endless reserves of breath for the longest of Straussian lines. I do not think I have seen – and this was surely Mitchell’s doing too – her suffer so greatly. The sheer misery of her condition shone through, long before it was revealed that she had been left with child, to be delivered and claimed by a rather nasty – should he not be just that? – Bacchus (Eric Cutler, who again can certainly sing the role). The taunts of Zerbinetta’s troupe – perhaps not intentional, yet no less hurtful for that – sting particularly in such a setting. Indeed, their erotic table-dancing, preening, and squabbling, stage realising words and music in properly post-Wagnerian fashion, seems rightly both beside the point and absolutely of it. When Bacchus offers Ariadne the choice of life or death, we have no idea what she will choose, nor for whom. Right up until the end, we fear she might use the revolver that is one of his ‘gifts’. Will she shoot herself, her child, him, someone else, the entire assembled company? In the end, she does not. A child has been born; so too has an opera. Perhaps, whatever our host may think and demand, the future or a future of opera has been too. We shall see and/or hear – or not.

 

Berlin Festtage (3) - Die Frau ohne Schatten, Staatsoper Berlin, 9 April 2017

Dyer's Wife (Iréne Theorin), Empress (Camilla Nylund), Barak (Wolfgang Koch)
Images: Hans Jörg Michel

Schiller Theater

Emperor – Burkhard Fritz

Empress – Camilla Nylund

Nurse – Michaela Schuster

Spirit-Messenger – Roman Trekel

Barak – Wolfgang Koch

Dyer’s Wife – Iréne Theorin
Apparition of Youth – Jun-Sang Han
Voice of the Falcon – Narine YeghiyanVoice from Above – Jane Henschel
Guardian of the Threshold of the Temple – Evelin Novak

Voice from Above – Anja Schlosser

The One-Eyed – Alfredo Daza
The One-Armed – Grigory Shkarupa

The Hunchback – Karl-Michael Ebner

Servants, Children’s Voices – Sónia Grané, Evelin Novak, Natalia Skrycka

Children’s Voices – Anna Charim, Verena Allertz, Konstanze Löwe

Voices of Nightwatchmen – David Oštrek, Gyula Orendt, Dominc Barberi

Claus Guth (director)

Julia Burbach (assistant director)

Christian Schmidt (designs)

Olaf Winter (lighting)

Andi A. Müller (video)

Ronny Dietrich (dramaturgy)

Dancers

Children’s Chorus (chorus master; Vinzenz Weissenburger)

Staatsopern Chor Berlin (chorus master: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Zubin Mehta (conductor)

Empress and Nurse (Michaela Schuster)

Claus Guth’s staging of Die Frau ohne Schatten, already seen in Milan and in London, now reaches Berlin, the Staatsoper the third of its co-producing partners. Here, I think, its psychoanalytical and, more broadly, dramatic focus is sharper, doubtless the consequence of certain reworking in the light of experience, whether by Guth or his assistants. Narrative clarity is anything but reductionist or lacking in conceptual framework, yet the danger of obscuring Hofmannsthal’s tendency towards the obscure is avoided throughout. We open with a sanatorium dumb show, a woman receiving treatment. In her dreaming, she becomes – or perhaps always has been: it does not really matter – the Empress. Dreaming is not, it should be added, a banal matter of waking up and discovering ‘it was all a dream’, almost as a way of rounding off something that could not otherwise have been rounded off; that was rather the impression gained, at least by me, in London. Here, with some sharpening up of the medical apparatus – a little more presence, perhaps, earlier in the third act would not go amiss – it comes across far more clearly as a mode of treatment. What our heroine – hysterical in more than one way, or perhaps not – undergoes is perhaps what she needs; at any rate, it is what she gets.

 

Emperor (Burkhard Fritz)

Navigation of the boundaries between reality and dream, accepting that sometimes they will remain unclear and that that is no bad thing, gains dynamic impetus through its interaction with Hofmannsthal’s idea of transformation; Ariadne auf Naxos seems to beckon, or perhaps it already has beckoned. The mythological world it continues to receive a relatively full due, echoes, however strained of The Magic Flute, heard (more to the point, seen), without overwhelming. Schmidt’s designs and Olaf Winter’s lighting come into their own here, although I could do without the strangely banal video explication. The shadows cast across the stage say far more than a projection of a pregnant stomach being rubbed. What last time I called ‘the sheer weirdness but also menacing sense of judgement emanating from a courtroom of strange creatures’, close to the end, seems perhaps more menacing in its imagined flights of fantasy than ever. Dreams and their interpretation remain indivisible. ‘Treatment’ is, moreover, not without its perils. Coming hard on the heels of the Freudian themes in Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Parsifal, the staging offers much to ponder.

 

Zubin Mehta’s conducting of the score was less probing. He knew ‘how it went’, although perhaps lingered a little too much at times when the singers – and the drama – might have preferred otherwise. Compared, however, with Semyon Bychkov’s truly outstanding account at Covent Garden, as fine as anything I know on record, let alone have known in the theatre, Mehta’s reading sounded generalised. Where Strauss’s score offers a myriad of opportunities for harmonic and, still more, colouristic fragmentation and reunion, ever transforming before our ears, this was often a little dogged and, if not monochrome, less kaleidoscopic and, more generally, multivalent, than one might have hoped for. The Staatkapelle Berlin nevertheless sounded excellent, solos well taken without exception, although there were times when I wished Mehta might have allowed it more of its head – and sheer heft. I could not help but recall Daniele Gatti’s shattering 2010 Elektra in Salzburg, as well as Bychkov’s FroSch, and finding something missing.

The Nurse

The cast, though, was first-rate, just as had been the case in London. I am not sure I have heard Burkhard Fritz on better form. The physical demands of the Emperor’s part are fearsome, cruel even by Strauss’s usual tenor standards. One can readily forgive a single wayward passage for the otherwise splendid performance heard here. Camilla Nylund’s Empress could hardly have been bettered. As well acted as it was well sung, as variegated in colour and dynamic contrast as it was clean of line, this was above all a performance that had one sympathise, believe in the ‘case’ before us. I likewise do not think I have heard a better Barak than that of Wolfgang Koch. His way with words and music certainly had me sympathise with the character like never before. The dyer’s predicament was ‘real’, not merely symbolic or dreamed. Iréne Theorin’s imperious yet also deeply felt Dyer’s Wife impressed similarly, its vocal roots in the figure of Isolde but also, one felt, once we knew she had not made the diabolical agreement, in the humanity of Mozart. If Roman Trekel’s Spirit-Messenger were somewhat dry of tone, the instrument of his message, Michaela Schuster, fully lived up to the high expectations elicited by her London performance, its ambiguous malevolence heightened by the Freudian setting. With choruses, adult and children’s alike, on splendid form too, blocked as well as they sang, there was much to celebrate here indeed – even if we cannot include that disturbing pro-natalism from which we shall never quite be able to rescue the work.

Deutsche Oper Strauss-Wochen (3) - Die ägyptische Helena, 8 April 2016

Die ägyptische Helena © 2009, Marcus Lieberenz

Deutsche Oper

Helena – Ricarda Merbeth

Menelas – Stefan Vinke
Hermione – Selina Isl
Aïthra – Laura Aikin
Altaïr – Derek Welton
Da-Ud – Andrew Dickinson
First Servant – Alexandra Hutton
Second Servant – Stephanie Weiss
First Elf – Elbenita Kajtazi
Second Elf – Alexandra Ionis
Third Elf – Rebecca Raffell
Omniscient Mussel – Ronnita Miller

Marco Arturo Marelli (director, set designs)

Dagmar Niefind (costumes)
Andreas K.W. Meyer (dramaturgy)
Claudio Gotta (Spielleitung)

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus master: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Andrew Litton (conductor)

 

Gratitude to the Deutsche Oper for staging Die ägyptische Helena, in generally excellent musical performances, is, alas, mixed with sadness at Marco Arturo Marelli’s production. Works such as this really need help from a director. Here, the apparently non-ironic (if irony were intended, rarely if ever did it come across) glossiness of Marelli’s staging, the sort of thing that might be considered a little adventurous for the Met, threatened to smother the work completely. Were this a self-reflexive acknowledgement of that quotation from Schoenberg I cited at the beginning of this series, it might have been a splendid, meta-theatrical starting-point. To refresh our memories, Schoenberg responded to Strauss’s typically faux-philistine remark, ‘in each of my works, there must be a melody which can be understood by the most stupid fellow in the hall’, with the charge: ‘Problems arise for him and are solved by him in the same way: he misunderstands them. But it cannot be disputed that he has dealt with them: he has hidden them under a coating of sugar icing, so that the public sees only the … world of a Marzipanmeister. This is not the way of thinking of a man whom God has given a mission.’ Maybe there is an apologia to be made for Marelli’s expensive high-camp, but I spoke to more than one friend afterwards who was resolutely of the mind that this was not a good opera at all. Opportunities to change their minds will not, alas, be frequent.

 

Is it a good opera? Well, I suppose it depends what one means. No one in his (or her) right mind would say this was another Elektra, or, for that matter, Capriccio. But what is lost here is any sense of lightness of touch. It is, I remain convinced, in many respects a work of considerable wit. Delve beneath the alluring surface and there is real bite. It is all too easy, when one does not listen to the work, to scorn Hofmannsthal’s ambition, inspired by the artistry of Maria Jeritza, to write a successor of sorts to La belle Hèlene, but an ear – and an eye – for irony are all that is needed. Glitziness, like any brand of spectacle, can generally be put to dramatic use, perhaps especially operatic use, but Marelli seems unable to distinguish between, say, Strauss and Korngold. Just when Marelli has an idea that might be worthy of development, for instance the light allusion to the background of warfare – it is, after all, all ‘there’ in the work – it is quickly dropped, so as not to scare away the horses. Non-ironic Orientalism, school of David McVicar, does not help: have we not gone beyond finding veiled women intrinsically ‘mysterious’? Even if Strauss and Hofmannsthal had not, that is all the more reason for a critical approach on stage. Something can be made of the undeniable differences between composer and librettist; something should be made of it. That is surely the thinking director’s task.

Where a Stefan Herheim – we desperately need more Strauss from him! – might perhaps have made such play of bad taste gloss in dramatic counterpart to any number of other themes, Marelli seems content, not only to take Strauss at face value, but to avoid any questioning of why Strauss might have been writing in the style that he did, of what the implications of such writing might be. There is little, or no, sense of actually listening to the contours of the score, let alone of a critical response to it. There are many possible avenues might take from a more Konzept-driven standpoint. Is this unhappy married couple not the next instalment in Strauss’s Intermezzo domestic saga? How might we relate the work to Elektra? To Crusading operas such as the Armide of Strauss’s esteemed Gluck? The sense given from time to time, and especially in the closing scene of luxury tourism is welcome, but alas it is not enough to provide a coherent concept, and is for the most part too little, too late. And could we not at least have some sense of the Omniscient Mussel – yes, I know it is really a shell rather than the bivalve itself, but that makes it no less bizarre – being more than a housekeeper with somewhat garish dress sense?

Enough, now, of all that! The musical performances offered a good deal of compensation. Once again, the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper proved itself to be a Strauss ensemble of the first rank. Even at his more dramatically dubious, as I shall admit he is here on occasion, Strauss is a prince amongst orchestrators. That is probably misleading, since there is not really material to consider separately from its orchestration; that was certainly how Strauss’s writing sounded under the loving care of Andrew Litton. Litton clearly relishes the score, and why would he not? We hear references to a number of earlier scores, both by Strauss, and others; sly Tristan-isms were certainly given their due on this occasion. And the colours! The gold, the purple, the scarlet, the azure, and so much else, the transformation of one into the other; the steel with which it is accomplished; all that and much more came across powerfully indeed – yes, luxuriantly, yet with a proper sense of tonal, timbral, and dramatic hierarchies, and their interaction, whether successful or, even on occasion, less so. Again, if only the staging had made something similar of the work’s terms of reference.

Ricarda Merbeth gave an excellent account of Helen’s part. A few instances of less than comprehensible diction could readily be forgiven for the many passages of gloriously Straussian lyrical abandon. Even I must admit that Menela(u)s does not signal Strauss’s finest hour: a graver indictment of his writing for tenor than the more celebrated, often exaggerated other ‘cases’. That said, Stefan Vinke barked more than is necessary, let alone desirable. On the positive side, he never flagged. If only we could hear Andreas Schager in this role. Laura Aikin’s performance as the Sorceress, Aïthra, seemed to me an unqualified success. She conveyed a great deal of the mysterious ambiguity missing from the production, without sacrifice to verbal and musical requirements. Derek Welton’s Altaïr was an intelligent, forthright portrayal. Andrew Dickinson’s Da-Ud revealed a beautiful lyric tenor. And yes, as the shell whom we do not call a shell, and who on this occasion was not a shell, Ronnita Miller excelled. Hers is a rich, deep mezzo voice. I look forward to hearing more from many of these artists.

Munich Opera Festival (2) - Arabella, Bavarian State Opera, 6 July 2015

Nationaltheater, Munich

Count Waldner – Kurt Rydl

Adelaide – Doris Soffel
Arabella – Anja Harteros
Zdenka – Hanna-Elisabeth Müller
Mandryka – Thomas Johannes Mayer
Matteo – Joseph Kaiser
Count Elemer – Dean Power
Count Dominik – Andrea Borghini
Count Lamoral – Steven Humes
Fiakermilli – Eir Inderhaug
Fortune Teller – Heike Gröyzinger
Waiter – Niklas Mallmann
Welko – Bastian Beyer
Djura – Vedran Lovric
Jankel – Tjark Bernau

Andreas Dresen (director)

Frauke Meyer (assistant director)
Mathias Fischer-Dieskau (set designs)
Sabine Greunig (costumes)
Michael Bauer (costumes)
Rainer Karlitschek (dramaturgy)

Bavarian State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Soren Eckhoff)

Bavarian State Orchestra
Philippe Jordan (conductor)

I had last seen Arabella as part of the Munich Opera Festival’s Richard Strauss Week in 2008. It is not, I am afraid, my favourite Strauss opera; in fact, it is probably my least favourite. However, I am always willing to be convinced. There was a great deal to admire in this performance, but I fear that asking for more than to admire it on the work’s own terms would have been to ask the impossible. A tale of operetta-ish Jane Austen – or is that of Jane-Austen-ish operetta? – the libretto unfinished (and set as it was written by Strauss, out of respect for Hofmannsthal), it is not a work that makes it easy for one to care about its characters, nor indeed for their plights, such as they are. Its outings other than in Strauss’s Germanic heartland, and sometimes even there, veer dangerously close to that dubious operatic phenomenon: the ‘vehicle’ for a star soprano. Yet Arabella herself remains a curiously blank canvas on to whom men, and to a certain extent women, project their fantasies. That is not in itself an unpromising idea, if one can steer clear of misogyny: after all, one can say the same, up to a point, about Lulu. But is Strauss’s – or indeed Hofmannsthal’s – heart really in it? Is this ultimately more than an unsuccessful rehash of certain themes in Der Rosenkavalier? Again, I remain to be convinced.

Enough of doubts, anyway, at least for the moment. This was a splendid performance. The Bavarian State Orchestra was on excellent form throughout, Strauss’s orchestral sound perfectly captured, with enough clarity and, at times, irony to guard against the sentimentality that is perhaps more of a snare in this opera than any of his. (And yes, I include Rosenkavalier in that.) Philippe Jordan clearly knew the score and communicated its twists and turns admirably. Waltz and other rhythms were well pointed, phrases taking their place within a greater whole to highly convincing effect. My only real misgiving was that very difficult end to the final act. One should certainly feel the accelerando and its frankly sexual implications, but here, as so often, the gear change seemed unprepared. It is perhaps only fair to point out that it is something very few conductors manage to pull off. (Sawallisch, Keilberth, and Böhm spring instantly to mind, but then, without an encyclopædic knowledge of the discography, I am floundering. I seem to remember Christoph von Dohnányi, always a fine Strauss conductor, convincing here too at Covent Garden; he certainly did in the score as a whole.) Jordan’s achievements here were real – and greatly appreciated, as were those of this magnificent orchestra.

Anja Harteros had been due to sing Arabella in that 2008 performance, but cancelled; this time, she was present, and that made all the difference. (Her substitute had, sadly, left a great deal to be desired.) Harteros, like Karita Mattila at Covent Garden in 2004 made the most of the role, turning Arabella into as convincing a flesh-and-blood woman as one could imagine, without distorting unduly the frustrating ‘purity’ of the role. This was a graceful and – in the final scene – sexy portrayal, sung with consummate ease, beauty, and indeed commitment. One could not have asked for more. Thomas Johannes Mayer contributed equally to the sexual frisson at the end. His performance as Mandryka was dark, even on occasion demonic, fully living up to the high hopes Hofmannsthal seems to have entertained for the character and – who knows? – might actually have accomplished more fully, had he lived. Mayer’s Wagner singing is by now well known; he is clearly an equally fine Straussian. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller’s Zdenka was lively, spirited, unfailingly well sung: everything one wishes for in such a trouser(-ish) role. Doris Soffel’s Adelaide provided an object lesson in ‘secondary’ character portrayal, making far more of the compromised mother – not least in her second-act amorous encounter with Elemer – than one would expect. Kurt Rydl complemented her perfectly as Waldner: again compromised, but with life and honour in him when called upon. The couple’s way with Hofmannsthal’s text was surely second to none. Joseph Kaiser made for an attractive Matteo indeed, as much vocally as on stage, a plausible possibility for Arabella, had she been interested. As for the Fiakermilli, surely the most irritating character, if one can call her that, in all Strauss, Eir Inderhaug did a good job, without elevating the coloratura quite into something one could simply enjoy for its own sake, there being little else to detain one’s interest.

I say that, but director, Andreas Dresen, did what he could. In what is otherwise a relatively conventional, though that is certainly not to say dull or unthinking, production, the Fiakermilli’s presentation as an S&M Mistress of Ceremonies can hardly be missed. Dresen sees her, as a programme note made clear, as the initiator of the night’s amorous events, ‘the anarchistic element’, testing the guests’ boundaries. It is an interesting idea, even if there seems to be a limit to how emphatically the work, at least as it stands, can support it. Still, it is part of the task of a good production to present such possibilities and to see where they will lead. In general, Dresen seems content to draw out the characters – as, indeed, he would claim to be doing with the Fiakermilli – and that he does with skill, without turning them into something they cannot really be. Psychological realism and exploration not unreasonably trump the search for a Konzept, although I should be curious to know whether a more challenging staging would deepen appreciation of the work, or simply disrupt it. Mathias Fischer-Dieskau’s set designs, Sabine Greunig’s costumes, and Michael Bauer work together to stylish effect indeed: black, white, and red were the order of the day: the Austrian triband with eagle, I suppose, although not of course the colours of the Austrian Empire of the day. I am not sure that the colours necessarily signify anything, though, or even if they do, that there is further meaning to be discerned. Not unlike the opera, one might say.




 

Die Frau ohne Schatten, Royal Opera, 14 March 2014

Michaela Schuster (Nurse), Emily Magee (Empress)
Images: © ROH/Clive Barda

Royal Opera House

Nurse – Michaela Schuster

Spirit Messenger – Ashley Holland
Emperor – Johan Botha
Empress – Emily Magee
Voice of the Falcon – Anush Hovhannisyan
The One-Eyed – Adrian Clarke
The One-Armed – Jeremy White
The Hunchback – Hubert Francis
Barak’s Wife – Elena Pankratova
Barak – Johan Reuter
Serving Maids – Kathy Batho, Emma Smith, Andrea Hazell
Apparition of a Youth – David Butt Philip
Voices of Unborn Children – Ana James, Kiandra Howarth, Andrea Hazell, Nadezhda Karyazina, Cari Searle, Amy Catt
Night-Watchmen – Michel de Souza, Jihoon Kim, Adrian Clarke
Voice from Above – Catherine Carby
Guardian of the Threshold – Dušica Bijelić

Claus Guth (director)

Christian Schmidt (designs)
Olaf Winter (lighting)
Andi A. Müller (video)
Aglaja Nicolet (associate director)
Ronny Dietrich (dramaturge)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Semyon Bychkov (conductor)

 

Magnificent! Following the first night of this new production of Die Frau ohne Schatten, I quipped that I could forgive an opera house anything for musical performance at this level, whether orchestral, vocal, or, in this case, both. Dread memories of Christof Loy (Tristan and Lulu, here in London, still more his unspeakable Salzburg travesty of Die Frau) made me wonder afterward whether I had shown undue clemency, but no: almost two days later, I am still reeling from the impact of so extraordinary a performance, one which no house in the world could conceivably improve upon, and which I doubt could even be matched. For whilst Claus Guth’s production had many virtues, which I shall come to a little later, it was Strauss’s astonishing, still widely misunderstood, score which, rightly, had pride of place. If any performance, anywhere in the world, does more for his cause in this anniversary year, I think I shall find myself in need of a new vocabulary of superlatives.

 

Above all, I must commend Semyon Bychkov and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. The very first time I heard this work was in 2001, the final outing of John Cox’s Royal Opera production, with celebrated designs by David Hockney; Christoph von Dohnányi’s conducting of the orchestra remains one of the finest I have heard of a Strauss opera. Then, I found myself lost in admiration both for his and for this orchestra’s achievement. Bychkov proved himself every inch Dohnányi’s equal; indeed, I am not entirely sure that he was not surpassed. No matter: it is not a competition. Bychkov’s command of the orchestra was nothing short of awe-inspiring. If in retrospect, the first act seemed seemed a little on the expository side, then that is surely a reflection of Strauss’s writing. Patiently building up not only the dramatic tension but the motivic material from which the score would truly, ravishingly blossom, Bychkov showed himself possessed in equal measure of an ear for colour so acute as almost to rival Boulez – now imagine a FroSch from him! – with the deepest of structural understanding. Horizontal and vertical presentation of the score offered in conjunction with voices and staging a three-, even four- dimensional performance  to rival that one sees in one’s mind when hearing Karl Böhm on CD. And if the Covent Garden did not sound quite with Böhm’s Viennese sweetness, it had phantasmagorical qualities all of its own: the refreshment of a true rival rather than the flattery of imitation. More than once, I found myself thinking, doubtless heretically: Klangfarbenmelodie! Strauss’s uncomprehending disdain for the ‘atonal’ Schoenberg notwithstanding, we did not stand so very far from the world of the latter’s op.16 Orchestral Pieces. Bychkov’s ear for combining musico-dramatical tension in the combination of sonority and harmonic tension ensured that we must think of him as not only an excellent, but a great Straussian.

Falcon, Emperor (Johann Botha), Empress

 

And then – the singing! That earlier Covent Garden performance had also marked my first encounter with Johan Botha. He proved at least as remarkable more than twelve years on. This Emperor, as mellifluous as he was vocally powerful, sounded every inch a Siegfried, and a golden age Siegfried at that. (If indeed such an age ever really existed.) Emily Magee had a few moments of relative fallibility, but by any reasonable standards, her Empress was an impressive achievement, all the more so given the wholehearted dramatic commitment offered in conjunction with the purely vocal. Elena Pankratova was making her Royal Opera debut as Barak’s Wife; hochdramtisch singing of the highest order was to be savoured here, her climaxes at the end of the first and second acts sending shivers down the spine. If Johan Reuter’s Barak at first sounded a little plain, that may as much have been character-portrayal as anything else; his performance grew into something genuinely moving, testament to the potential greatness of, as it were, Everyman (to borrow from Hofmannsthal’s future). As for Michaela Schuster’s Nurse, her offering of musical and dramatic malevolence – tonality on less the pre- than the post-Schoenbergian brink, though never beyond it – would have been an object lesson in itself, even had it not been heightened by such stage presence and intelligence. Smaller roles were almost all impressively handled, David Butt Philip’s attractively voiced Apparition perhaps especially worthy of note. The only disappointment was the tremulous Falcon of Anush Hovhannisyan. Renato Balsadonna’s Royal Opera Chorus was, as expected, excellent throughout.

 

Guth’s staging, first seen at La Scala in 2012, presents the Empress in a sanatorium, Christian Schmidt’s stylish designs highly evocative of the time of composition. Our heroine is, one might say, hysterical in every sense. To begin with, she – and we – are somewhat unclear concerning the boundaries of reality and dream. Is Freud being channelled or satirised? Unclear, and all the better for it, which renders the very ending, in which it appears ‘all to have been a dream’ something of a disappointment. That said, much of what we see in between is riveting. With the best will in the world, some of Hofmannsthal’s symbolism upon symbolism – The Magic Flute really is best left alone – can seem unnecessary; it certainly seemed – and seems – to do so to Strauss. Yet the poet’s idea of transformation gains a fair hearing, or rather viewing, and there is a proper sense of the mythological, even the fantastical, to the dreamed world we enter, never more so than at the spectacular close to the second act, Olaf Winter’s lighting crucial here, and the craggy opening of the third. Those problematical echoes of Tamino and Pamina’s trials are presented with greater visual conviction than I can previously recall – and indeed greater conviction than one often sees in productions of the ‘original’. The sheer weirdness but also menacing sense of judgement emanating from a courtroom of strange creatures close to the end not only testifies to imagination and its possibilities but also to the misogynistic pro-natalism, from which, try as we might, we cannot ultimately rescue the opera. By contrast, Loy in Salzburg arrogantly declared that the work did not interest him and made not even the slightest attempt to deal with it. It was the sort of thing that might appeal to those who do not care for Strauss, or indeed Hofmannsthal, in the first place, though even they would most likely have been bored to tears with the banal ‘alternative’ narrative presented. Guth, for the most part, successfully treads a tightrope between presentation and interpretation.

 

A good staging then, and a truly outstanding musical performance. My first act upon returning home was to visit the Royal Opera House website, to buy myself another ticket. Hear this if you can. The performance of 29 March will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, at 5.45 p.m.