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.

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.

Munich Opera Festival (1) - Die Gezeichneten, 4 July 2017

Foreground (in white): Duke Adorno (Tomasz Konieczny) and Count Tamare (Christopher Maltman); Staatisterie of the Bavarian State Opera
Images: Wilfried Hösl

Nationaltheater, Munich

Duke Antoniotto Adorno/Capitaneo di giustizia – Tomasz Konieczny

Count Andrae Vitelozzo Tamare – Christopher Maltman

Lodovici Nardi – Alastair Miles

Carlotta Nardi – Catherine Nagelstad

Alviano Salvago – John Daszak

Guidobald Usodimare – Matthew Grills

Menaldo Negroni – Kevin Conners

Michelotto Cibo – Sean Michael Plumb

Gonsalvo Fieschi – Andrea Borghini

Julian Pinelli – Peter Lobert

Paolo Calvi – Andreas Wolf

Ginevra Scotti – Paula Iancic

Martuccia – Heike Grötzinger

Pietro – Dean Power

Youth – Galeano Salas

Friend/Servant/Giant Citizen (!) – Milan Siljanov

Girl – Selene Zanetti

Senators – Ulrich Reß, Christian Rieger, Kristof Klorek

Little Boy – Soloist from the Tölz Boys’ Choir

Servant – Niamh O’Sullivan

Father – Yo Chan Ahn

Mother – Eleanor Barnard

Citizens – Harald Thum, Thomas Briesemeister, Klaus Basten, Burkhard Kosche, Tobias Neumann, Sebastian Schmid

Krzysztof Warlikowski (director)

Malgorzata Szczęśniak (designs)

Felice Ross (lighting)

Claude Bardouil (choreography)

Denis Guéguin (video)

Miron Hakenbeck (dramaturgy)

Children’s Chorus (chorus master: Stellario Fagone) and Chorus (chorus master: Soren Eckhoff) of the Bavarian State Opera

Bavarian State Orchestra

Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

There is a host of fine operas out there languishing more or less unperformed (in some cases, quite unperformed). A few of them might even qualify as ‘great’. (Feel free to remove inverted commas, should that be your thing.) Franz Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten, whatever its proponents might claim, is certainly not one of those: not even close. Nor, however, is it a piece that fails to merit the occasional outing. Whether it merits the torrent of productions seemingly in store is rather less clear. For what it is worth – and this is partly a matter of taste, or lack thereof – there is not a single opera by Mozart, Haydn, or Gluck I should not rather see before sitting through this again. That said, I was immensely grateful not only for the opportunity afforded by the Bavarian State Opera not only to see the opera staged, but to see and hear it performed and staged so well – so much so, indeed, that the whole experience was enjoyable, absorbing, very much more so, I think, than the intrinsic merits of the opera might suggest.

That might sound odd, but it is not really so very odd – at least not necessarily. A peculiarity, indeed a fascination, to the opera is that almost every charge one might lay at its door might conceivably meet with the rejoinder: ‘that is the point’. It depends whose point, really: it is less often the point if we focus narrowly on ‘intention’, but why should we? Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production seems to nod to this thorny question by interpolating, immediately after the interval, before the third of the three acts, Schreker’s own character sketch of 1921, in which he presents – even, to an extent, ‘reclaims’, as we might say – accusations thrown at him and his art. It is, we may be reasonably sure, intended ironically or, perhaps better, with understandably vicious sarcasm, having been constructed from criticisms he had received:

  I am an Impressionist, Expressionist, Internationalist, Futurist, a musical purveyor of verismo; Jewish, and rose through the power of Jewishness; Christian and was ‘made’ by a Catholic clique under the patronage of a Viennese arch-Catholic countess.

 I am a sound artist, sound fantasist, sound magician, sound aesthete, and have no trace of melody (other than so-called short-breathed empty phrases, newly known as Melodielein). I am a melodist of the purest blood, as a harmonist however, anaemic, but perversely in spite of this a full-blooded musician! I am (unfortunately) an erotomaniac and work balefully upon the German public (eroticism is obviously my innermost contrivance, despite Figaro, Don Giovanni, Carmen, Tannhäuser, Tristan, Walküre, Salome, Elektra, Rosenkavalier, and so on). ... 

 

The rest, in which he continues, to explain that he is not of the true modernistic ‘left’ (Schoenberg and Debussy), owes something to Verdi, Puccini, Halévy, Meyerbeer, et al, and so on, may be read here. (It is well worth doing so, if you have the German.) It made for a powerful moment, or rather few moments, in the theatre, not least since Warlikowski has it read by the tragic, ugly hero-artist (the libretto was originally intended for Zemlinsky), who thus becomes at least in part an explicit realisation of Schreker’s plight. The problem, however, remains that, insofar as we may dissociate criticism of Schreker from anti-Semitism – perhaps it is impossible historically, but it need not be so now – many of the criticisms levelled tend actually to be born out; either that or the comparisons (Figaro, Tristan, etc.!) are rather embarrassing, doing neither composer nor opera any favours at all.

Carlotta (Catherine Naglestad) and Salvago (John Daszak)

What we have, then, is an evening in the theatre in which that problem is, if not worked out, at least explored. The slipperiness of artistic creation and agency is embodied in Alviano Salvago. Is he a good artist or a con artist? There are many other possibilities; we do not end up necessarily falling short of Mozart and Wagner because we are not trying. Salvago has created a garden of delights, an island park of Elysium, which he wishes to give to the people of Genoa. Is the suspicion of its establishment justified? In part, perhaps. Dark things clearly go on there. Are they the creator’s doing? Not intentionally, but they can be readily understood, made out to be, especially by other, more attractive noblemen who wish to be able to pursue something far more dastardly, indeed truly shocking – such as to leave our aesthetic-moralistic sniping at Schreker-Salvago look at best misguided. Do we really want to be the ones to say ‘yes, I’m sorry, your music is overblown, verging on the formless, an illustration or at least a piece of evidence, moreover, that Schoenberg was right: once a certain point of chromaticism has been reached, there really is nowhere else to go other than somewhere you would not…’, and so on? Of course we do not, especially when we know with whom we are allying ourselves, especially when we know how the crowd may be swayed – either by Salvago or by his opponents. On the other hand, Goebbels is not the only option: there is Schoenberg too; there is Moses und Aron, where we can see and hear these antinomies, or better dialectics, actually treated with the seriousness they deserve.

Give ourselves a third hand, though, or, Blair forbid, a ‘third way’, and perhaps we may wish to tarry. It is not as bad as Korngold, say. There is genuine fascination in the harmonic and instrumental colour: evidence of the most extraordinary ear. Alas, there is such an utter lack of variety that it all sounds more or less the same. One may like the sound; I might, for a few minutes. But for three acts? Three acts, that is, intruded upon only by a strange vulgarity in the third: dramatically effective, to a certain extent, as a suggestion of crowd dynamics, yet ultimately incongruous and, more to the point, unconvincing. The lack of ‘traditional’ melodic invention is not the end of the world in itself, but let us not convince ourselves that this is replaced by the still well nigh incredible perpetual self-transformation of Erwartung. Nor is the lack of musical characterisation necessarily fatal, although it is clearly a flaw, for this is not Fidelio, in which characterisation is simply not the point. Returns, however magnificent they sound in themselves, diminish all the time, without ever being replaced by something which, in that old Romantic way, we might consider to be true inspiration. Contrivance is all very well; who cares, ultimately, if the result is good. But is it?

Warlikowski proves himself, unsurprisingly, a dab hand at the erotomaniac side of things. The burlesque dance performed before the angry Schreker-Salvago is not the half of it, although it is perhaps the most memorable side. He shows also, quite unsparingly, how evil one side of the accusers is: that is, the party of Vitelozzo Tamare. Rich, unscrupulous, deceiving, plausible, violent: it is they who do the real harm, who have kidnapped and abused Ginevra Scotti, whilst framing the poor Salvago. How many other productions manage to incorporate a boxing training session into proceedings, as if to underscore the lavish obscenity of the violence? The humanity of the genuine artist, Carlotta, is underscored equally well, not least given an exemplary, heartfelt performance from Catherine Naglestad. She looks for the soul and perhaps she finds it: or perhaps, given her fate, she realises there is none at all, and is better off out of the game entirely. In that, encasing herself, she becomes an installation, perhaps an artwork of her own. The raging rodent crowd – more than a nod to Hans Neuenfels’s Lohengrin – would neither understand nor care. Salvago does though – we think.

The Bavarian State Orchestra under Ingo Metzmacher played with such glorious golden tone that it might have been the Vienna Philharmonic in Strauss – other, that is, than the score itself not having Strauss’s sense of drama, of direction, of characterisation, and so on, and so on. There was no sense of hurrying, which may or may not have been an unalloyed advantage. I think it was pretty much an advantage, for one certainly gained the impression of the score being permitted to speak for itself, even if to be hoist by its own petard. John Daszak gave a deeply moving account – like so many of the performances, seemingly moving beyond the limitations of the work ‘itself’ – of the central role. Christopher Maltman proved diabolically irresistible as his wicked opponent in love, art, and so much more; there was more than a hint of an ultra-decadent Don Giovanni here (definitely without the idealism – or Idealism). Tomasz Konieczny gave a magnificently forthright performance as Duke Adorno: duly ambiguous as to whose side he was on, if any, never anything but fully committed, though, in vocal terms. The doubling of his part with that of the Capitaneo di giustizia – gleefully ripping off his mask to confirm what we suspected – only heightened the troubling implications. The huge cast did not, so far as I can recall, have a single weak link to it; this, and the equally fine choral contribution showed just what an opera house and company can achieve. The extraordinarily self-reflexive quality of the evening and its aftermath will, I suspect, continue to intrigue. The Vorspiel zu einer Drama, the concert version of the opening Prelude, says it all - and yet, in another way, says none of that.

Salzburg Festival (2): Die Eroberung von Mexico, 10 August 2015

Cortez (Bo Skovhus) and Montezuma (Angela Denoke)
Images: Monika Rittershaus

Felsenreitschule

Montezuma – Angela Denoke

Cortez – Bo Skovhus
Soprano – Susanna Andersson
Contralto – Marie-Ange Todorovitch
First Speaker – Stephan Rehm
Second Speaker – Peter Pruchniewitz

Peter Konwitschny (director)

Johannes Leiacker (designs)
Manfred Voss (lighting)
fettFilm (video)
Peter Böhm, Florian Bogner (sound direction)
Bettina Bartz (dramaturgy)

Mixed Choir (on tape)

Movement Choir

ORF Symphony Orchestra, Vienna

Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

This was a magnificent evening in the theatre, to which my immediate reaction was to wish to see – and to hear – it all again. Partly, that was of course a matter of a rich work, experienced for the first time, in a rich staging, experienced for the first time, in rich performances, experienced for the first and last time. I am sure that I missed a great deal. I will do so in a staging of Parsifal, which I flatter myself I know reasonably well; how much more so will that be the case in a work hitherto unfamiliar? But I hope here to give a taste of my vivid theatrical experience of Wolfgang Rihm’s Die Eroberung von Mexico (The Conquest of Mexico).

 

 

Director Peter Konwitschny is at pains, in a programme interview, to dissociate the work from the merely ‘Mexican’. ‘We saw,’ he claims, ‘the sign warning us not to turn off into the dead-end marked “Mexico”’. Before that, we read Konwitschny: ‘It’s not about Europe/America or Mexico/Spain, but Man/Woman.’ Such might be the case for Konwitschny’s staging, though not, I think entirely, but I am less sure that it is the case for the Musiktheater (an interesting, not-quite-Wagnerism) itself. It is certainly not to be reduced to any one particular polarity, as the oft-repeated, Antonin Artaud-derived, ‘Neutral, Weiblich, Männlich’ (‘Masculine, Neuter, Feminine’ – not always, notably in that order) seems to remind us. And the space available for the mediating – or original? – ‘Neutral’ is not always clear, perhaps does not even survive, or at least survive in its initial form. Is it perhaps – and this might be a Wagnerism of sorts – in the orchestra? In Rihm’s own libretto, which, taking Artaud’s Le Théâtre du Séraphin as one of its building blocks, would thus both suggest and reject some form of verbal (perhaps even colonial?) supremacy?

 

With such an enterprise, it is, of course, difficult to know where to start, and I have probably stepped ahead of myself on one strand already. I shall attempt no clear division between work and staging, since such was not my experience – and indeed would not be possible on the basis of an initial encounter. (Frustrating, yet inevitable and indeed in some sense fruitful?) There is a perhaps predictable, yet already surprising, identification of Montezuma with the feminine – and not only in voice – and Cortez with the masculine. Rape occurs early on; does it not always? But before that, and returning at long last to my initial point concerning Mexico, we have had a long, introductory, introduction, or perhaps immersion, into the landscape. The first of three parts, ‘Die Vorzeichen’/’Omens’; ‘Bekenntnis’/’Confession’; ‘Die Umwälzungen’/’Upheavals’) has drummers surrounding the audience lead us in for a few minutes before the conductor has even arrived, and indeed before the audience has received the signal to sit and to be quiet. The drum melodies, Rihm writes, are ‘the melody “of a landscape that senses the approach of a thunderstorm”’. They do not – or at least, did not to me – feel ‘Orientalist’, or better ‘Occidentalist’; yet, at the same time, it is difficult, upon reflection, not to think that in some sense they must be, and, as the action unfolds, that they have, perhaps knowingly, been presented, even constructed as such. Oppositions, then, not entirely straightforward, continue to frame, to participate, to incite.

 

 

 

Rihm’s score, as often with this composer, covers a broad canvas in any number of respects. Yet, doubtless partly as a matter of the excellence of staging and all performances, though not only, I think, as a matter of that, it offers the composer at his integrative as well as his discursive best. Schoenbergian Sprechstimme – can we not but think of Moses at times? – vies or collaborates with choral writing and vocal amplification that bring to mind Nono and Lachenmann. Something far more Romantic, the ghost of Mahler perhaps, or of Strauss, swells up in the orchestral strings (fewer than one perhaps realises). Lyricism – whether vocal, or solo instrumental – that would surely have brought a smile to the face any of those composers has one melt, and at the same time has one suspect, has one question, not least in light of what we see and do not see on stage.

 

Konwitschny makes a strong case for his conception of male-female incomprehension. Not just in the violence, whether it be of Cortez towards Montezuma, of the movement choir (which, in a brilliant coup de théâtre, stands up and reveals itself as initially having been seated in the audience) towards the golden (yes, gold again brings us back to Moses and, of course, to the idea of the New World) female, danced portrayals of Malinche, ‘who speaks with her body’. The living room in which most of the action takes place – the rest surrounding that space – has at its centre Frida Kahlo’s The Wounded Deer: both image and knowledge of Kahlo’s relationship with Diego Rivera contribute to our understanding. In perhaps the most arresting image of all, still more so than the movement choir’s gang-rape of Malinche, Montezuma gives birth, we presume to Cortez’s child: the offspring is the offspring of Apple. fettFilm’s video images plunge us into a world of projected ‘apps’ and video games: Cortez’s war is virtual – remember those television images of Baghdad, and so many other victims of Western imperialism – but the virtual appears to be real and, of course is. Both sides suffer; both sides die, kill each other, and yet appear still to be in some sense alive. What is going on? What has gone on? The information age threatens to disclose all, yet leaves us all the more alienated. Montezuma’s transformation into a statue – here, a marrying, apparently pacified doll – does nothing to resolve, everything disquietingly to disturb, as does the further violence that ensues. And yet opera, the primæval and/or modern cry, reassert themselves at the end of each part, with verse from Octavio Paz, a striking, harrowing duet for Montezuma and Cortez at the very close. Or is it? Rihm’s libretto ends: ‘Ende (?) der Oper’. Images from the (Spanish/Mexican) past have fleetingly passed before our eyes: are they a clarification, or a ‘dead end’? Log in, to find out? Or should we turn away from our screens? Perhaps to listen?

 

 

Performances, as I suggested, were uniformly excellent. Angela Denoke and Bo Skovhus offered near-superhuman efforts as Montezuma and Cortez, range as impressive in dynamic terms as in pitch, in stage presence and conviction as in musical and verbal delivery. Cortez, backed up by speakers, never elicited sympathy, but suggested a broadening of our experience and understanding. Montezuma, shadowed by spectacular high soprano and deep contralto (Susanna Andersson and Marie-Ange Todorovitch) was anything but a sentimentally conceived victim. We did not – and surely should not – know what to do with him/her, and in some sense (s)he survived. I should probably add: in another sense, sadly, not at all. The contrast with the trendy banalities of Peter Sellars’s The Indian Queen, loudly proclaiming itself post-colonial, whilst all the time forgetting the ‘post’ bit, could hardly have been greater. This approached Wagnerian music drama, not on Wagner’s terms, but not opposed to them either. And, as with Wagner, the orchestra was perhaps most crucial of all. There could certainly no be gainsaying the outstanding contribution made by the ORF Symphony Orchestra, Vienna, wisely, viscerally, reflectively directed by Ingo Metzmacher. Yes, this work needs to be seen – and heard – again.

 

 

 

Salzburg Festival (6) - Fierrabras, 16 August 2014

Images: © Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus
Florinda (Dorothea Röschmann) and the chorus

 

Haus für Mozart 

Fierrabras – Michael Schade

Emma – Julia Kleiter

Eginhard – Benjamin Bernheim

Florinda – Dorothea Röschmann

Roland – Markus Werba

Charlemagne – Georg Zeppenfeld

Boland – Peter Kálmán

Maragond – Marie-Claude Chappuis

Brutamonte – Manuel Walser

Ogier – Franz Gruber

Two Young Ladies – Secil Ilker, Wilma Maller

Moorish Captain – Helmut Höllriegl

Knight – Michael Wilder

Peter Stein (director)

Ferdinand Wögerbauer (set designs)

Annamaria Heinreich (costumes)

Joachim Barth (lighting)

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Ernst Raffelsberger)
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)
 

We owe the Salzburg Festival – and Alexander Pereira – a considerable debt for staging Fierrabras. Dedicated to the memory of Claudio Abbado, whose celebrated Vienna production with Ruth Berghaus, marked a milestone in the fortunes of Schubert’s opera, this new production will surely have opened new ears to the work’s considerable virtues, as well as to its undeniable shortcomings, upon which it is not unreasonable to look with a little indulgence. Schubert, after all, never had the chance to hear Fierrabras performed, despite a commission from the Kärtnertortheater, and despite its staging having been advertised. (The ‘failure’ of Weber’s Euryanthe seems to have been a factor in dissuading the theatre’s director, Domenico Barbaia, from staging another new German Romantic opera, likewise the perennial Viennese problem of Italian singers having supplanted Germans. Look at the Vienna State Opera today, and wonder at the proportion of nineteenth-century Italian opera on the menu!) Indeed, although excerpts were heard in concert in Vienna in 1835 and 1858, the opera would not be staged until 1897, in Karlsruhe – and then in a version in which both words and music were ‘revised’, the latter by Felix Mottl.

 

This production was originally to have been conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. His replacement by Ingo Metzmacher will doubtless have been a matter of sadness for some, though certainly not for me. I can happily do without speed bumps, arbitrary caesuras, and the like. In Metzmacher, Schubert certainly found a committed advocate, both in words – in a fascinating programme note – and in the pit. If there were moments when I felt the lack of something grandeur, perhaps recalling at least subconsciously the wondrous symphonic Schubert of the morning before, from the Vienna Philharmonic and Riccardo Muti, then not only would it be curmudgeonly to cavil; one could also make an argument that something a little more modest was truer to this particular work, whatever its ‘heroic’ trappings. (Not that I necessarily should subscribe to such a claim, but it is not inherently implausible.) At any rate, once past a slightly plodding account of the overture, which sounded more exciting in Metzmacher’s prose description, the conductor’s ear for harmony and its dramatic implications proved invaluable. He seemed most inspired by the passages which, I later read, he considered most inspired of all: for instance, the music for the Moorish princess, Florinda, perhaps above all in the melodrama at the end of the second act, ‘a passage that climaxes in the unfathomable,’ though, one might add, not unusual for Schubert, ‘key of E-flat minor’. For Metzmacher, although ‘much ink has been spilt over the question whether Schubert was ever really able to write an opera,’ this melodrama would leave no one entertaining ‘any doubts on the matter’. It was certainly fortunate in the playing of the VPO, old hands in Schubert, if not necessarily in his operas.

So long, then, as one does not expect the Schubert of his greatest songs, or indeed of the chamber and piano music, one has no real need to be musically disappointed. One of the oddities of much of the music is how, whilst one can believe the composer to be Schubert, it does not sound so very much like much of the rest of his œuvre. Likewise, so long as one does not expect Mozartian characterisation, the drama can be dealt with – at least on that level. Its Orientalism is undoubtedly problematical for a modern audience, but that may prove a spur to interesting stage direction. (I shall leave that matter just for the moment.) We should, moreover, consider this an interesting early work, had Schubert lived longer. Of course, we have what we have, and there is no point in performing something on the basis that we are sure the composer would eventually have written something better, but it is perhaps a particular reason for charitable reception in this case. The work as it stands is in any case a manifestly better work than many from the same period, and indeed from later, which continue to hold the stage. Less than top-drawer Schubert remains infinitely preferable to any Donizetti or Verdi.

 

Florinda (Dorothea Röschmann), Eginhard (Benjamin
Bernheim), Roland (Markus Werba), chorus 

Fierrabras was also fortunate in the cast assembled, albeit with one unfortunate exception. In many operas, such a failure in the title role might have been catastrophic; here, however, the cast is large, and the opera is not so closely focused upon the good and faithful Moorish prince accepted into the ranks of his erstwhile Frankish foes. Salzburg’s enthusiasm for Michael Schade remains a mystery, though. True to form, and even given the most charitable listening, his singing proved a trial: unpleasant of tone and often hectoring. (To think, Zurich had Jonas Kaufmann!) No such complaints, however, concerning the rest of the cast. Georg Zeppenfeld proved a stentorian Karl/Charlemagne, ably surrounded by a throng of excellent knights: Benjamin Bernheim’s touchingly lovelorn Eginhard, Markus Werba’s virile yet thoughtful Roland, and Franz Gruber’s attentively sung Ogier. Peter Kálmán offered a suitably dark-voiced Moorish king, Boland; the problems with the role are not his fault. Perhaps even more impressive were the women, Julia Kleiter’s lyrical Emma presenting winning contrast with Dorothea Röschmann’s brilliantly hochdramatisch Florinda. Choral singing was excellent too.

Fierrabras (Michael Schade), Eginhard, and Emma (Julia Kleiter)

 

Other than Schade, the principal problem lies with Peter Stein’s production. Whatever has happened to him? I have heard tales, all of them rueful, of his recent stagings, but admit to wondering whether they might have been exaggerated, or at least to whether there might be more to salvage. Alas not. The stage business often resembles a well-budgeted school play. There are cod-mediæval costumes and flimsy backdrops, which most would have thought so ludicrous that they must be intended to be sent up, or deconstructed. And that is about it. Of deconstruction there is not a sign. There is certainly no attempt to address the ‘Orientalist’ problem. Does Stein really think it does not matter? One shudders to think how he might approach The Merchant of Venice. It may be an all-too-obvious route, but a setting in the contemporary Middle East would surely have offered more opportunity for reflection than this. Watching Stein’s staging seems less a matter of viewing through a time warp, than of capitulation to those who think that productions of the past were simply a matter of ‘pretty’ stage design and costumes. There is no denying the drawback of the staging, but at least one was free to imagine what might have been, or what might yet be. The music was the thing, and it was well served.

 

Salzburg Festival (1) - Gawain, 2 August 2013

Felsenreitschule

Gawain – Christopher Maltman

Green Knight/Bertiak de Hautdesert – Sir John Tomlinson
Morgan le Fay – Laura Aikin
Lady de Hautdesert – Jennifer Johnston
King Arthur – Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Bishop Baldwin – Andrew Watts
A Fool – Brian Galliford
Guinevere – Gun-Brit Barkmin
Agravain – Ivan Ludlow
Ywain – Alexander Sprague

Alvis Hermanis (director, set designs)

Eva Dessecker (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Multimedia Design Studio ‘Raketamedia’, Moscow (video)
Ronny Dietrich (dramaturgy)

Salzburg Bach Choir (chorus master: Alois Glassner)

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Ingo Meztmacher (conductor) 

 

 

Images: © Ruth Walz

If it has taken Salzburg a while to produce an opera by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, then it has likewise taken an unconscionable while for Gawain to receive its second staging; the Salzburg Festival thus deserves a great vote of thanks for having done so, as a highly imaginative replacement for the postponed premiere of György Kurtág’s new Beckett opera. Kurtág’s Endgame, should that be the opera’s name, will, we are informed, be shown next year instead.

 

Which brings me to Alvis Hermanis’s rather puzzling production of Gawain. I could not help but wonder whether his post-apocalyptic vision, a few years in the ‘science fiction’ future, had started life as a response, if you can imagine this, to a version of Endgame with hordes of characters. Shifting the action from Arthurian times, and indeed from the thirteenth-century world in which Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written, does not trouble me, and one might argue for parallels between post-Roman Britain and a world following some unspecified future apocalypse, but it was unclear to me that the vagrant setting really works, or rather that it does anything much beyond providing an alternative ‘setting’. Hermanis makes a case for ecological issues: the ‘green’ of the ‘Green’ Knight, Nature taking its revenge in a scenario apparently inspired by Joseph Beuys, and a strangely glowing ‘magic’ green belt as the sash Lady Hautdesert gives to Gawain. But it is difficult either to understand such issues as central to the opera or to credit the director with an entirely plausible commentary or reinterpretation. Hermanis’s interest in Beuys, for instance, simply seems transplanted upon an existing work, to the benefit of neither.

 

That said, I was made to think – and the production deserves praise for that. It does not close down avenues of response, eccentric though its own chosen terms may be. It tantalises – and I do not think this is entirely my own reading, though it may be – with a dialectic between parallelism and difference; that is, we both appreciate that the new setting has things in common with the ‘original’ yet also how utterly different it is, thereby being compelled to place work, staging, and ourselves. The need for ritual, so much a preoccupation of both poem and opera, shines through, almost despite the dubious talk (in Hermanis’s programme note) of ‘science fiction’. And whatever one thinks of the ‘movement’, whether from a host of actors or, most astonishingly, from the best trained dog I have ever seen, it is accomplished with excellence. At a time when one often endures productions in which the director seems apparently unable to direct, there is succour to be gained from such professionalism.

Laura Aikin (Morgan le Fay), Christopher Maltman (Gawain)

 

 

Nor, most importantly, did the staging get in the way of what was an outstanding musical performance of a modern operatic masterpiece, scandalously neglected by houses that prefer endlessly to churn out the profundities of Donizetti. Ingo Metzmacher’s performance with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra perhaps placed Birtwistle in a more international, or better cosmopolitan, context than Elgar Howarth’s Covent Garden performances. Although I missed a sense of that ineffably ‘English’ quality that haunts Birtwistle’s music just as strongly as it does, say, that of Vaughan Williams, there were gains to be had too, especially for an ‘international’ audience in Salzburg. The performance was perhaps less primæval in its violence than Howarth’s – how vividly I still remember what was only my second evening at Covent Garden! – yet pacing, flow, and both the sheer array of colours and, where necessary, weight and incision of orchestral attack were second to none. It would certainly have been well-nigh impossible to over-praise the ORF orchestra. Birtwistle’s formal ritualistic preoccupations came to the fore through the medium that matters above all else, the music. It is, moreover, not entirely appropriate to the dramaturgical precepts of either the composer or his librettist, David Harsent, that there be some degree of disconnection between ‘dramatic’ and ‘orchestral’ action. Busoni’s influence perhaps extends further into the twentieth and even the twenty-first century than many of us appreciate.

 

So, of course, does Wagner’s. And with the Proms Ring so fresh in my memory, Birtwistle’s portrayal of flawed ‘heroism’, accomplished via different narrative standpoints, I was bound to think of Siegfried in Gawain. Christopher Maltman swaggered as a cowboy, his singing still more than his bathing offering ample reason for Gawain’s charismatic following. His journey towards ‘Why do you ask for someone who isn’t here? Who do you want me to be? I’m not a hero’ was not merely plausible, but immensely moving, and increasingly so. John Tomlinson is the Green Knight, of course, yet, despite a highly committed performance, it now takes an uncritical ‘fan’ not to be disturbed by the vocal problems at the top of his range. Laura Aikin and Jennifer Johnston were excellent Morgan le Fay and Lady Hautdesert. The eroticism of the former’s performance grew as she and Johnston’s character grew apart, indeed transformed themselves from commentators into participants. Hermanis’s direction assisted with that, but the depths of vocal characterisation upon which both singers drew were undeniably their own. Jeffery Lloyd-Roberts proved a steadfastly engaging King Arthur, the singer in infinitely superior vocal form to the last time I had heard him; I especially liked the directorial touch at the end of having him step up from his chair and make his first tentative steps towards an uncertain – heroic or non-heroic? – future. If Brian Galliford’s Fool sometimes lacked vocal lustre, his was a typically observant performance, using his words to highly dramatic advantage. Gun-Brit Barkmin, Andrew Watts, Ivan Ludlow, and Alexander Sprague all acquitted themselves very well indeed in their smaller roles. Special mention, however, must be accorded to the stunning offstage choral contribution, the Salzburg Bach Choir fully worthy of comparison with the illustrious orchestra in the pit. Alois Glassner clearly deserves great credit for his choral training.

 

‘Then with a single step your journey starts,’ sings Morgan le Fay – repeatedly. Let us hope that Gawain’s journey has (re-)started with this fascinating second step.