Die schweigsame Frau, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 22 July 2025

Images: Bernd Uhlig

Sir Morosius – Peter Rose
Housekeeper – Iris Vermillion
Barber Schneidebart – Samuel Hasselhorn
Henry Morosus – Siyabonga Maqungo
Aminta – Brenda Rae
Isotta – Serafina Starke
Carlotta – Rebecka Wallroth
Morbio – Dionysios Averginos
Vanuzzi – Manuel Winckhler
Farfallo – Friedrich Hamel

Director – Jan Philipp Gloger
Set designs – Ben Baur
Costumes – Justina Klimczyk
Lighting – Tobias Krauß
Video – Leonard Wölfl
Choreography – Florian Hurler

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin 

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Christian Thielemann’s first new production as music director at the Staatoper Unter den Linden was always going to be a special event. A declaration of intent, no doubt: of respect for the house’s traditions, whilst subtly extending them. For all his superlative strengths, Daniel Barenboim was not much of a Straussian, at least in the opera house—and I think that points to a more fundamental difference between Thielemann and his predecessor, perhaps to be explored more fully another time. In any case, one might say that that regard for canon and tradition, whilst understanding and indeed aiding its mutability was tailor-made for the art of both Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig. So indeed it proved to be. 

Thielemann has been pretty much universally acclaimed for his Strauss—and rightly so. His ability to ‘play’ the orchestra as if it were a keyboard instrument is remarkable, yet equally worthy of note – and of hearing on this occasion – was his Barenboim-like willingness to have the musicians engage in Kammermusik that could be shaped, if needed, into something larger but never greater. The Staatskapelle Berlin, always the jewel in this house’s crown, played not only with perfection but palpable commitment. It could be a Mozart serenade writ large via Wagnerian polyphony; it could be a telling arabesque duet with voice; it could be a sly piece of word painting; it could, just occasionally, be the full orchestra letting its presence felt, but also felt as necessary. Everything felt ‘natural’, however much art there might be in that; everything felt both rehearsed and spontaneous. Most important of all, the orchestra told us what mattered most—to Strauss and, one hopes, to us, at least during those magical hours spent in the theatre. Art is not to be equated to life; it is both less and more. Strauss knew that; so did Thielemann and the orchestra; so, I think, did we. 

For Strauss – Zweig too – is here, as ever, intimately and, yes, beautifully concerned with music and its history, with art more broadly and its history too. The canon is not an immutable thing He can do no other, which is part of the wonder of his aestheticism. The craft from both is astounding, especially when one does not notice it. Everywhere an allusion, everywhere an illusion—all the more so when one barely notices. Some of that is doubtless unconscious; one might say the same of performances and staging too. None of us works, thinks, makes art, or indeed makes society in a vacuum. Is/was Henry and Aminta’s sheltering in another room whilst Sir Morosus finds rest – low D-flat for contrabassoon, organ, and his ‘Dank!’ – an echo of Walther and Eva doing likewise at the close of their second act in Die Meistersinger? It looked and even sounded like it, but may also be a function of genre, of the unconscious, even of chance. We make our own connections, though we are led along the way. Actual quotation is less mistakeable, or is it? How many of us waver over Rossini-Monteverdi here? Presentiments too: how much of Sir Morosus is there in Capriccio’s La Roche, or vice versa? Is he Baron Ochs partly wiser, even transfigured, or is that to partake in the cardinal sin of sentimentality? Perhaps it is all, as the Marschallin would counsel, a farce, no more but also no less. Yet what knowing irony there is in that claim, as Straussians will know all too well. 

Let us leave that on one side for the moment to consider Jan Phillip Gloger’s production. Thielemann and Gloger have collaborated at Bayreuth and in Dresden, so again this might offer a harbinger of sorts. I had my doubts at points yet ultimately was won around by Gloger’s concept, not least since it developed so finely in collaboration with musicians onstage and in the pit—what opera is or should be, and be about. There is none of Ben Jonson’s London here, though predicaments that faces Londoners still more than Berliners – yes, I know the latter will protest, but they should try living here – come to the fore: initially, the housing crisis, but increasingly that of loneliness and how society treats the elderly in an age of generational conflict in which the latter may seem to hold too many of the cards. (They do not, of course, or not straightforwardly; it is a useful culture-war camouflage for capital. But enough of that for now.) As the opera begins, we see increasingly desperate ‘refreshing’ of a screen by someone attempting to find city accommodation – many of us have been there – followed by the stage revelation of a wealthy, single, older person living in an expansive apartment to himself, attended to by housekeeper and barber (here, more general ‘wellness’ consultant). Yet we are also confronted – I can see, even hear, the raised eyebrows – with statistics before the second and third acts, that is on the curtain during the intervals, that challenge our preconceptions, for instance how many older people who might wish to move to smaller accommodation might end up paying more in rent if they do so (and they might not be able to).

That, however, becomes ever more a context than concept. More fundamentally, the tale is one of conflict and reconciliation, furthered by understanding and willingness to accept the new. A trick, in many ways quite horrible, is played on Sir Morosus. The characters relish it in some ways, yet are also not without guilt, faithfully following Zweig and Strauss. One may or may not like the garish way in which Sir Morosus is married to his apparently ‘silent’ woman, Timida/Aminta, but it makes its dramatic point. Perhaps some of the metadramatic interventions are, like the statistics, a bit crass, but they do no real harm. Holding up a sign saying ‘Regietheater’ both alerts some, less receptive in the audience, to what might be happening not only onstage but to the stage that has been enacted onstage, and may even remind them that all this is not nearly so new as some would have them believe. No one, after all, was a greater practitioner of the cause they excoriate than Richard Wagner, whose Hans Sachs, one of Morosus’s many progenitors, reminds us: ‘Es klangt so alt und war doch so neu!’ 

Reconciliation is arguably more problematical in Die Meistersinger than here, the world of what is ‘deutsch und echt’ notable by its absence (which may, admittedly, prove to some still more problematic). For the time being, though, we can share in the old man’s joy in true acquaintance with, perhaps even growing love for his nephew and adoptive son and his wife, their troupe, and even a little of the music he once so detested. We can share in theirs for him too, heartwarmingly portrayed – for once, I mean no irony, and Strauss appears not to do so either – in the closing display of a Morosus Community, in which none need be silent and, just as important, none need be alone. One can be, of course, and Morosus is grateful for time on his own, for peace and quiet, for the music to have stopped, but as a free choice rather than faute de mieux. Solitude, as any Romantic will tell you, can be a good or bad thing; it depends very much on context and will. 

Stage performances were outstanding. As Sir Morosus, Peter Rose was everything would have hoped for, placing the character somewhere justly between Ochs and La Roche – I have been treated to the former, though not yet to the latter – but above all creating an individual human being of his own, whose ‘difficulty’ we increasingly understood and sympathised with, coming to know a somewhat different person than the one we had assumed he was. His way with Zweig’s German was second to none. Siyabonga Maqungo presented an ardent, lovelorn, equally human Henry, well matched to Brenda Rae’s Aminta. Rae played that role in a very different production (Barrie Kosky’s) the only other time I have seen the opera in the theatre. Here, her vocal glitter and precision were matched, indeed exceeded only by her humanity. The animating presence of Samuel Hasselhorn as the barber Schneidebart was a joy from start to finish, as finely conceived theatrically as it was musically. It was a similar, if more fleeting joy, to welcome Iris Vermillion back to the Berlin stage as Morosus’s housekeeper. There was the finest sense of company from all concerned, not least a chorus superbly trained by Dani Juris, which reciprocated the ensemble favour in appearing very much as a cast of individuals brought together. 

This proved, then, an excellent and deeply moving evening. Strauss and Zweig’s Schweigsame Frau sang in and for itself; but also for music; for opera; for Berlin; and, I like to think, for this exiled Berliner back in town for all of twenty-two hours, a good few of them, like those of Sir Morosus, spent asleep before returning to the city in which the opera ‘should’ be set and in which Jonson’s Volpone not only is set but was first performed. These three-and-a-half hours, though, proved more than worth the journey, a reminder less of the horrendous world around us – though that made its presence softly, touchingly felt – than of what, if we can make it a little horrendous, we might actually live for. That is, it reminded us what Strauss and his aestheticism are ultimately concerned with and why this work from the 1930s, derived from and transforming an English comedy of more than three centuries earlier, might yet matter to us in 2025.

‘Wie schön ist doch der Musik!’ And just perhaps, as Morosus continues, ‘aber wie schön ist, wenn sie vorbei ist!‘ The music was indeed beautiful, and there was unquestionably something poignant, even painful in the beauty of its fleetingness, of its passing. That it cannot be grasped is worth our grasping; in that way and in reflection both upon it and upon its passing, it will often remain with us all the longer. As ever, at least in a performance worth its salt, one does not want the Straussian epilogue to end, but it does and it must, and we are better for it. And with that, both my opera season and that of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden draw to a close. The latter’s next will open with Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Ring, conducted by Christian Thielemann.

For the Anniversary of the Paris Commune (18 March 1871): Women's Revolutionary Experience in Nono's Al gran sole carico d'amore

A male-dominated picture if ever there were one...

From my After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from 'Parsifal' to Nono:

Al gran sole [carico d’amore], composed between 1972 and 1974, and premiered in Milan in 1975, was first directed by Yuri Lyubimov, head of Moscow’s Taganka Theatre. Lyubimov was already a specialist from stagings of repertoire works in many of the techniques he and Nono, as joint librettists, drawing upon a vast assemblage of other writers, would employ in Al gran sole: montage: simultaneity, representation of one character – insofar as ‘character’ does not mislead – by several actors or singers. Those ‘laterna magika’ techniques familiar from Intolleranza [1960] may thereby be understood to have been rejuvenated and extended. The historical scenes presented in this azione scenica – Nono by now rejected entirely the term ‘opera’, though so of course had Wagner – are told from different perspectives, albeit with a privileged place, allotted to women and their often unspoken, let alone unsung, histories, inverting the ‘normal’ order of things. (In a sense, though not necessarily in the same sense, [Olga] Neuwirth would attempt something similar in American Lulu.) Differing perspectives all serve to focus attention back upon the present, always a construct rather than a given, a state of affairs dramatically heightened by the productive tension between Nono’s present and our own. Texts originate – in alphabetical order, so as not to imply priority – with Brecht, Tania Bunke (the Argentine-East German ‘Tania the Guerilla’, who fought in the Bolivian insurgency alongside Che Guevara), Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov, Gorki, Gramsci, Lenin, Marx, the Paris Communard Louise Michel (herself a ‘character’ in the action), Cesare Pavese, Rimbaud, and the Cuban revolutionaries Celia Sánchez and Haydée Santamaria, as well as other popular sources, such as the Internationale and two Russian revolutionary songs. Those sources are in themselves indicative; one would hardly expect that gathering of writers to be transformed into a paean to American militarism and consumer capitalism.

 

By the same token, however, the specific nature of the assemblage, just as in Berio’s Sinfonia – or, for that matter, Bach’s music for the Mass in B minor – is the thing. Three European societies are visited in the throes of revolution or would-be revolution. We observe, construct, participate in the 1871 Paris Commune, the Russia of 1905, and the industrial travails of post-Second World War Turin (‘around 1950’). Nono’s and Italy’s own Cold War(s) find themselves situated both within that broader revolutionary context and within specific conflicts of Christian Democracy against Italian Communism, and – recalling Intolleranza – the problem of migration, in this case Italian workers from the south seeking work in the richer north, more specifically those car factories to which Nono took his music and to which friends such as [Maurizio] Pollini and [Claudio] Abbado took theirs.

 

European history is for Nono now understood through the prism of recent developments such as the Chilean coup that had overthrown Salvador Allende in 1973 – a setback that had sent shockwaves through the European Left, ensuring that Allende’s government and the succeeding terror under Augusto Pinochet would retain emblematic status for decades to come – and the American invasion of Vietnam. Nono’s collage-like vision also encompasses conflicts in the Third World, as it was still called: Cuba, Bolivia, and Vietnam.[1] Revolutionary situations are thus brought into contact with each other, workers of the world uniting, that dialectic of engagement standing at the very heart of Nono’s understanding. For instance, following a prelude in which we hear words from Guevara, Michel, and Marx, the first scene has Tania Bunke question – such questioning being crucial to Nono’s and indeed to our critical framework – Brecht on the Paris Communards. The expression and expressive form of that questioning is entrusted, as the score has it, to ‘chorus and orchestra’. As in Moses und Aron, only more so, we might understand, with the composer’s warrant, the principal protagonist to be the chorus; yet behind it, there lies, consciously or otherwise, another chorus: Wagner’s Greek Chorus of the orchestra.

 

The year 2009 marked something of a red-letter day for Al gran sole, Europe witnessing two major stagings. The first was at the Salzburg Festival, directed by Katie Mitchell. Peter Konwitschny brought his production, originally seen in Hamburg, to Leipzig later that year. Konwitschny’s short-lived appointment as director of productions at Oper Leipzig was an important factor in this case, enabling him to bring to his new house an already-existing production, which would nevertheless be modified in context, as Nono would have hoped. Likewise, in Salzburg, Jürgen Flimm’s artistic directorship was crucial. He had also produced the work before, for Frankfurt in 1978, his first opera production and the premiere of Nono’s revised version of the work. Although, on this occasion, Flimm ceded that role to Katie Mitchell, the role of individual champions should not be underestimated.

Despite the obvious attractions and relevance to the work of Mitchell’s overtly metatheatrical approach, Konwitschny’s attempt to elicit more of a conventional revolutionary narrative actually cohered better in practice. Mitchell’s framing of the artwork and its production – in the ordinary as well as the theatrical sense – seems often to work better when applied to a work that does not already contain so much of its metatheatrical apparatus to begin with. For instance, her 2009 After Dido, for the English National Opera at the Young Vic Theatre, ‘a live music and film performance inspired by Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’, at whose core stood a performance of Purcell’s opera, was able to go beyond the work to tell, in the words of the publicity material, ‘three contemporary urban stories of grief, lost love, departure, and death,’ which unfolded in self-contained locations on different sections of the stage. Yet After Dido was also to be found in ‘the making of’ these stories, unfolding before our eyes and ears. That ‘making of’ was not so much a story in itself, after the manner of the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos; nevertheless, it acquired a dramatic thrust of its own, not least since it was with those ‘workings’ that the piece opened, as the prologue to a radio broadcast, during which we heard recorded snatches of other theatre music by Purcell. (Dido’s own Prologue is, of course missing, the missing parts of the work having in the past offered a spur to composer-conductors such as Britten, as well as to directors such as Mitchell.[2]) Applying similar techniques to Al gran sole seemed less necessary and, for all the technical prowess involved, did not entirely silence suspicions that a ‘one size fits all’ metatheatricality was being imposed upon the work. Konwitschny’s more ‘operatic’ approach came across as the more radical, even the more interventionist, and also the more dramatically and politically fruitful.

 

It was both heartening and instructive to witness the warmth of the reception and the size of the house for the last night of Konwitschny’s Al gran sole. The immediacy of the almost ‘operatic’ experience came as quite a contrast after the familiar Mitchell onstage screening and re-screening of scenes – and not solely in terms of staging. For an interesting and commendable aspect of both productions was how closely integrated staging and musical performance seemed to be. Whereas Konwitschny, aided once again by Helmut Brade’s designs, took one very much into the heart of Nono’s revolutionary ‘provocations’ of which Nono spoke as being the origins of all his work, the Salzburg performance had tended to look back at such matters as more a thing of the past, presenting a more æstheticised experience.

 

Much doubtless depends upon how relevant today one considers the writings and experiences of the men and women involved; or, to put it another way, how ripe one considers the time for a more sober, historical, even distanced assessment of concerns, which, following the events of 1989, might no longer be considered to be our own. In addition, there is a strong ideological impetus to claim those concerns as of little relevance, not least from the standpoint of the apparent ‘victors’ of German unification, on either side of the erstwhile Iron Curtain. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, such an impetus seems at least as strong on the so-called Left as the Right; indeed, one of the more striking aspects of thoughtful right-wing commentary on the financial crisis has been its willingness to look to Marx.

 

In any case, more direct revolutionary experience, as opposed to the concerns of modern-day political economy, was granted heightened relevance by the location, Leipzig, where, as the production team pointed out, there was no need to ask whether the audience would understand the barrage of revolutionary texts presented, at least when it came to Marx, Lenin, Brecht, and Gorki.[3] Or perhaps there actually was every reason in 2009 to question that belief; old revolutionaries have a tendency to forget that the world has ‘moved on’. At any rate, the timing of the premiere on 8 October would have made its point to some at least in the specific audience: the eve of the twentieth anniversary of what was the largest protest to date in the GDR’s history, 75000 demonstrators attending the Leipzig Monday Peace Prayers, bravely defying a regime that had just congratulated its Chinese counterpart for its ‘success’ in dealing with demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.[4] In little more than a week, Erich Honecker would have resigned. The role assumed by the then Gewandhauskapellmeister, Kurt Masur, in the events of 1989 is well known. Many in the orchestra would have played under him; some of the audience would have heard him conduct at the Gewandhaus, just on the other side of the the Karl-Marx-Platz – now, once again, the Augustusplatz – from the Opera.

There were concrete settings: the Paris Commune for the first part and Turin for the second part’s industrial unrest, although that did not prevent additional voices – and faces – from participating. Lenin as chorus leader was a witty touch, likewise the Punch and Judy politicians’ act of Adolphe Thiers and Bismarck. The latter pair, even in the original ‘text’, if one can speak of such a thing, veered still more closely to the ‘operatic’ or even to the commedia dell’arte. But it was with the Gorki-Brecht tale of the Mother – did Nono here have an echo of the Prigioniero Mother in his mind? – and Pavese’s prostitute Deola, that Konwitschny went for the jugular, particularly with respect to the factory strike. Malevolence was brought to vivid theatrical life, not only on the part of the factory owner – though there was something splendidly agitprop about him and about the worker who betrayed his comrades – but also, more crucially, with respect to the entire mode of production upon which such structures were based. Nevertheless, an almost traditional evocation of theatrical or Parsifal-like compassion, true in spirit to Nono’s own responses, won out with respect to the workers hemmed in by the walls of Brade’s designs. There was anger, of course, but the human spirit came first, recalling Dallapiccola, especially in the defiance of the Mother’s son, Pavel, a martyr and true hero to the socialist cause.

Every member of the cast contributed wholeheartedly and it would be more than typically invidious to single out anyone in particular. Iris Vermillion’s mother provoked, however, perhaps the most powerful emotional response, through the human dignity of a lonely yet true contralto voice: quintessential Nono, one might say, in thought and in practice. Tuomas Pursio’s Pavel was just as impressive: an angry young man who could so easily have gone off the rails, he was in a sense saved by the desperation of the situation: his finest hour. Pursio exhibited a sense of dangerous attraction, which could finally be focused rather than dissipated. Perhaps though there was also a warning (from Konwitschny, if not from Nono), of how revolutionaries might go astray, the erstwhile GDR proffering an obvious example. Moreover, in the context of the relationships explored above of both Henze and Nono with their home and quasi-adoptive countries, the intervention of an Italian composer in a ‘German’ matter offers another standpoint from which one might consider such questions.

Neither librettist nor composer left any stage directions – an interesting case from our standpoint. Were the vigilantes of ‘fidelity’ to the work to come across this, who knows what they might make of it? It is unlikely, however, given that their energies appear concentrated more or less entirely upon ‘standard repertoire’, a telling point in itself.

And here, from La Scala, are Abbado and Lyubimov bringing Al gran sole into existence. (I am afraid I cannot embed it here, but the link should work.)

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[1] Nono would most likely have rejected the term ‘collage’. He certainly spoke unfavourably of it in his 1959 Darmstadt lecture, ‘Geschichte und Gegenwart der Musik von Heute’, though it is not entirely clear whether he intended this as a general critique or in specific reference to Cage: ‘The collage-method has its origin in colonialist thought, and there is no functional difference between a hollow Indian incantation drum, which serves in a European household as a dustbin, and the orientalisms which are used by an occidental culture to make its aesthetical tinkering with material more attractive.’

[2] Britten did not go so far as to compose new music for Dido and Aeneas. However, in the edition he made with Imogen Holst – less far-reaching in its interventions than for the more problematical semi-opera, The Fairy Queen – he added at the end of the second act a trio for the Sorceress and witches, borrowing music from The Indian Queen, a chorus from the 1687 Welcome Song, Z.335, and a dance from the Overture to the play, Sir Anthony Love or, The Rambling Lady. He also went beyond additions of dynamic markings, phrasing, and articulation, to realise the harpsichord continuo part. The Britten version, conducted by the (new) composer, may be heard on in a 1959 BBC studio recording on CD (BBC Legends BBCB 8003-2).

[3] Alexander von Maravić, ‘Post scriptum Leipzig 2009,’ to ‘Die Liebe – vom Leben beladen . Zu Stück und Aufführung. Helmut Brade, Johannes Harneit und Peter Konwitschny im Gespräch mit Albrecht Puhlmann in Hannover 2004,’ in Oper Leipzig programme to Luigi Nono, Unter der großen Sonne von Liebe beladen/Al gran sole carico d’amore (2009), p.37.

[4] Dirk Philipsen, We Were the People: Voices from East Germany’s Revolutionary Autumn of 1989 (Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 1993), p.200.

Al gran sole carico d'amore, Oper Leipzig, 19 December 2009

Pictures © Andreas Birkigt

Leipzig Opera House

Tania Bunke/Louise Michel/Deola/Communard/Vietnamese Woman – Carmen Fuggus, Kathrin Göring, Soula Parassidis, Tanja Andrijic
The Mother – Iris Vermillion
Pavel – Tuomas Pursio
Lenin – Stefan Schreiber
Thiers – Viktor Sawaley
Favre/French Soldier/Bismarck/Strike-breaker – Jürgen Kurth
A Fairy – Angela Mehling
Haydée Santamaria/Celia Sánchez/Sicilian Emigrant – Carolin Masur, Ruth Ingeborg Ohlmann, Jennifer Porto, Veronika Madler, Jean Broekhuizen
Sicilian Emigrant – Marko Cilic
Communard/Fidel Castro/Antonio Gramsci/Georgi Dimitrov – Tomas Möwes/Miklós Sebastyén/Morgan Smith

Peter Konwitschny (director)
Helmut Brade (designs, costumes)
Albrecht Puhlmann (dramaturgy)

Leipzig Opera Chorus (chorus master: Sören Eckhoff)
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Johannes Harneit (conductor)

I wonder how select would be the company in which I find myself, having now seen two different productions of Al gran sole carico d’amore within a few months of each other: first in Salzburg, at this year’s Festival, and now in Leipzig. Dawns have a tendency to be false, but I wonder whether Nono’s fortunes might finally be looking up. Peter Konwitschny’s recent appointment as director of productions at Oper Leipzig is an important factor in this case, of course, this being a production he has given elsewhere before. And in Salzburg, Jürgen Flimm’s artistic directorship was doubtless important. He had also produced the work before, although, on this occasion, he ceded that role to Katie Mitchell. Still, the role of individual champions should not be underestimated.

It was certainly heartening to witness the warmth of the reception and the size of the house for the final night of Konwitschny’s Al gran sole. Mitchell’s production was very Katie Mitchell, and had its strengths, but I found this a far more immediate experience – and not solely in terms of staging. For an interesting and commendable aspect of both productions was how closely integrated staging and musical performance seemed to be. Where Konwitschny, aided by Helmut Brade’s designs, took one very much into the heart of the revolutionary ‘provocations’ of which Nono spoke as being the origins of all his work, the Salzburg performance tended to look back at such matters as more a thing of the past, presenting a more æstheticised experience. Much depends upon how relevant today one considers the message of Nono, Marx, Brecht, Lenin, Castro, Che Guevara, et al., and of course the women, such as Louise Michel and Celia Sánchez, whose stories are treated – or, to put it another way, how ripe one considers the time for a more sober, historical, even distanced assessment of concerns, which, following the events of 1989, are no longer our own. Such issues were given heightened relevance by the location, Leipzig, where, as Konwitschny pointed out, there was no need to ask whether the audience would understand the barrage of revolutionary texts presented. (Or perhaps, in 2009, there is every reason to question that belief...?) Moreover, the premiere had taken place on 8 October, twenty years after the Leipzig protests had begun.

These are no mere chance circumstances, but very much part and parcel of how the work has developed and been received. Yet, of course, they are of relatively little importance in abstraction from the performance itself. The staging, arguably less true to Nono’s intentions than Mitchell’s, stood closer to opera as generally understood than her production. There were concrete settings: the Paris Commune for the first part and the second part’s Turin industrial unrest, though this of course did not stop the additional voices – and faces – from participating. Lenin as chorus leader was a witty touch, even more so the Punch and Judy act of Thiers and Bismarck. (The latter are, even in the original ‘text’, if one can speak of such a thing, more conventionally operatic, but one missed out on that in Salzburg.) But it was the Gorki-Brecht tale of the Mother, combined with Cesare Pavese’s prostitute Deola, which really went for the jugular: nothing sentimental, but gut-wrenching, particularly when it came to the factory strike. The malevolence not only of the factory owner – though there was something magnificently agitprop about him and the worker who betrayed his comrades – but, more crucially, of the entire mode of production upon which such structures are based, was searingly portrayed, though compassion, just as it should in Nono, won out when it came to the workers hemmed in by the walls of Brade’s designs. Anger, yes, but human spirit first, especially in the defiance of the Mother’s son, Pavel, a martyr and true hero to the cause.

Every member of the cast contributed to this. It is more than usually invidious to single out anyone in particular. The reader may feel a ‘however’ coming on, and so it is. Iris Vermillion’s mother provoked a powerful emotional response, not through the manipulations of a Strauss – for which, I admit, I fall every time, or just about... – but through the human dignity of a lonely, yet true, contralto voice: quintessential Nono, in fact. Tuomas Pursio’s Pavel was just as impressive as his Amfortas earlier in the year, which, coming but days after Hanno Müller-Brachmann in Berlin, I nevertheless found ‘outstanding’. A young man who could so easily have gone off the rails, he was in a sense saved by the desperation of the situation: his finest hour, not that that is to excuse anything. Pursio exhibited a sense of dangerous attraction, which could finally be focused rather than dissipated.

Moreover, the orchestra and chorus were on magnificent form. Where, in Salzburg, Ingo Metzmacher had led the Vienna Philharmonic, no less, in an astoundingly beautiful account of the score, here Johannes Harneit, like Konwitschny, played for immediate urgency, only possible, of course, through a complete command of Nono’s treacherous score. I doubt that the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra can have played Nono much more often than the Viennese players had, but it might have been Wagner they were playing, such was the commitment and understanding on display. The Leipzig Opera Chorus, fresh from a splendid performance in Lohengrin the night before, was equally at home here. Vocally and on stage their contribution drew one in to the very heart of the drama. Nono insisted that the chorus was the main protagonist in his azione scenica. If, on this occasion, it were a little less so than often, that is no reflection upon the chorus, but simply a consequence of the bravura contributions from all others. This, on reflection, may well prove to be my operatic highlight of 2009.