Don Giovanni, Vienna Volksoper, 14 November 2015

Images: Volksoper, Vienna

(sung in Italian and German)

Don Giovanni – Josef Wagner

Commendatore – Andreas Mitschke
Donna Anna – Kristiane Kaiser
Don Ottavio – Jörg Schneider
Donna Elvira – Esther Lee
Leporello – Mischa Schelomianski
Masetto – Ben Connor
Zerlina – Anita Götz

Achim Freyer (director)

Sebastian Bauer (assistant director)
Petra Weikert (assistance with designs)

Chorus of the Vienna Volksoper (chorus master: Holder Kristen)

Orchestra of the Vienna Volksoper

Jac van Steen (conductor)

 

Achim Freyer still has it. There were times when I wondered whether he might have lost the plot, in more senses than one, but the final scene of his staging of Don Giovanni pulls things together brilliantly. That is not necessarily always accomplished rationally, but with a felt necessity rendering rationality but one option from the Ristorante Giovanni (®) menu, and not perhaps the most enticing one. Don Giovanni, after all, stands on the threshold of Baroque and Romantic theatre: the whole world a stage in the traditions of Shakespeare and Calderón – too often, we forget Tirso de Molina in the formation of the opera, or relegate him to mere ‘background’ – as well as of ETA Hoffmann and others to come. Herbert Graf – Freud’s ‘little Hans’ – did not forget such broader terms of theatrical reference, in his still wonderful Salzburg staging for Furtwängler, the Felsenreitschule the instantiation of ‘Salzburg World Theatre’. In his very different way, nor does Freyer. Indeed, something of the world of wonder I experienced when first seeing his Salzburg Magic Flute seemed re-born. At any rate, for this audience member, Freyer’s Don Giovanni proved a far more successful a staging than the same director’s Berlin Eugene Onegin (to put it mildly, not for me).

We find ourselves, unsurprisingly, in a world of clowns: different clowns whose visual identity certainly seems to have something in common with their musico-dramatic identity. There is no doubting that Don Giovanni is a dashing cavalier, nor that Masetto is a simpler soul. Donna Elvira, like him, has a wonderful punk look – I could not help but think of Mary Smith from the early days of EastEnders – and Da Ponte’s, less Mozart’s, somewhat misogynistic view of her ‘femininity’ is underlined by persistent recourse to her pink make-up box. Don Ottavio’s pomposity is there for all to see, as is Leporello’s street theatre. Zerlina, like her husband, is clearly of coarser stuff still. Donna Anna: I am less sure. Whereas in many stagings, she, taking after Hoffmann, seems the most central figure after Giovanni himself, here she seems initially undeveloped, then perhaps more of an outsider.

 

Why? How? The clue perhaps lies in language, which will surely prove this production’s most controversial feature. It has one attempting all sorts of rationalisations, soon disproved. I only noticed on the way to the Volksoper the intriguing claim that the operas was to be performed ‘in the Italian and German languages’. German, perhaps, for the recitatives? Spoken dialogue replacing some of them, as in Hans Neuenfels’s splendidly provocative La finta giardiniera? It soon becomes clear that the distinction will not be so – well, clear. Might it be explained by musical style, to the estate (‘class’ remains anachronistic here, a distinction worth maintaining, I think) of the character, to the level of passion expressed, to anything…? Zerlina moves to Italian, the ‘language of love’, to Don Giovanni’s tongue at that point, in 'Là ci darem la mano'; but whatever conclusion I might have drawn from that was soon confounded. What was I to make of Elvira – not Donna Anna, whom I might have expected to maintain her Italian, seria composure – singing only in Italian? Nothing, it turned out, since she eventually switched to German. What on earth is anyone to make of characters switching tongues within lines, repeating words in translation? I made a great deal of it, only once again to have my hypotheses torn to shreds. After the event, I read Freyer’s explanation, ranging from how he converses on holiday to Anna living ‘in Italian’ and never having learned German; I cannot say that it tallied with my experience, save for his interesting claim that we all speak in multiple languages. That, and the lack of sense at times in our communications, seem to me the key, although it seems the director has his own rationale. Does it confuse and bewilder? Yes. Somehow, however, it contributes to a far-from-bleak comedy of the meaningful and meaningless, mysteriously resolved – not just suspended – at, or after, the last.

 

For much seems to head towards Giovanni’s Last Supper: nothing heretical, save in the strict Roman Catholic sense, there; so it should. The table is cleared at the beginning by stage-hands who may or may not be part of the ensemble. (Of course they are, if their juggling skills are anything to go by, later on, but blurring of the boundaries is for once a cliché worth reference. I thought more than once of Ludwig Tieck’s Der gestiefelte Kater, or Puss-in-Boots.) It remains for the most part central as other aspects of the staging, helped by brilliantly, deceptively simple lighting, move in and out of our focus. The theatrical unities are all impressively present; indeed, if anything, we are slightly bludgeoned by their representation. (Can one be ‘slightly bludgeoned’? Freyer suggests so.) That of time, for instance, we experience with the moon moving across the stage in childlike, maybe even childish, simplicity. The characters still exist, though; they remain Da Ponte’s, and Mozart’s. And, of course, ours.

 

There is a great deal going on: more, probably, than one can take in on a single viewing. But is not life like that? Are not our attempts to make sense of life like that? Thinking in such terms, the admittedly bizarre switches between German and Italian make more sense – or, rather, their lack of sense seems increasingly more justified. One does not have to ‘understand’. Do you, after all, ‘understand’ Mozart? I should not dream of claiming that I did. In stagecraft, less is often more, but not always. There is certainly a world of difference between this playing on multiple levels with notions and experiences of meaning and mere ‘pretty action’ of, say, the David McVicar Upstairs Downstairs variety for The Marriage of Figaro. A crowd may be pleased; that, as any fule/clown kno, is not the same as being merely crowd-pleasing. I might be tempted to tone down my opposition to the wretched, customary conflation of Prague and Vienna versions under the rubric of ‘a great deal going on’, but no; it remains, however beautiful the music, a dramatic betrayal. Still, everywhere else does it, so the practice here is no better or worse. (At least we do not endure a horror on the level of the bizarre ‘version’ foisted upon us by the Royal Opera House, which really should know better.)

 

 

In his 1797 play, Puss in Boots, mentioned above, Ludwig Tieck resurrected – he was not the first, and would not be the last – the comic figure of Hanswurst, whose coarseness had had him banished time and again from the German stage. (Joseph II had prohibited improvisatory comedy and other such fripperies from Mozart’s Vienna, following the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1790.) The silliness of Freyer’s production, perhaps especially in a Volksoper context, might owe something to that tradition: often a dangerous tradition for authority, be it noted. It also, though, plays on the seriousness and bleakness of clowning. The two mysterious figures in black, fishing at the back of the stage, sometimes there, sometimes not, might have come straight out of Beckett. Tieck is not the only German writer with strong connections to the Theatre of the Absurd; Freyer, for all his Brechtian influence, surely partakes in this too.

 

In the final scene, the set turns into a restaurant. References to food, including the fish one of Beckett gentlemen had caught, begin to bind together our experience. (A boar's head amused this particular victim of Tory government.) Hospitality, it seems, is now the name of the game: so, perhaps more darkly, is capitalism’s ability to commoditise even the most Hellish of experiences. Apparent members of the audience, following what appears to be the ‘end’, leave the audience, become members of the cast, much to the initial surprise and perhaps bewilderment of those of us remaining on the ‘other side’. Will the ‘performance’ go on forever? It had, after begun, before we arrived. Pasta is served up, reminding me of Papageno in that Salzburg production; and should that not be your thing, a sign pointed to a Würst’l around the corner, an hotel, on stage with a chapel for most of the performance, offering an alternative venue, perhaps for those of a more seria disposition. Maybe this has been, to quote Lessing on the moralistic attempt to banish Hans Wurst from the stage, ‘die größte Harlekinade’. Harlequin and other clowns speak truth more often than many realise. There were a good few boos when Freyer, stood on the table to take his bow, but applause and cheering where louder. Freyer’s response weaved good humour and contempt in just about the right measure. Beaming, he started to dance. Achim Freyer certainly still has it.

 

I dwell overwhelmingly on the staging, because in this case it is undoubtedly the overwhelming impression one has, or at least I had. That is not meant disrespectfully. All contribute to it; it is certainly no matter simply for Freyer and ‘his’ team. I should, however, say something on the more ‘musical’ side. Jac van Steen led a beautiful, noble, wise performance of the score. Even where tempi did not tally with my inclination, I was won over by his generous musicianship. There was no ideological point-scoring here, but a clearly profound knowledge of the score, communicated with the ease – the apparent lack of any communicative act – that only the finest of Mozartians can command. His partners in crime, the Volksoper Orchestra, played beautifully throughout. Again, there was no silly ‘authenticity’, but there was music-making, whether in solo or ensemble terms, of a high order indeed. Both conductor and orchestra seemed naturally – whatever that might mean – attuned to the shifting colours, harmonies, and pace of Mozart’s miraculous score. Felix Lemke’s fortepiano continuo was certainly at the more ‘imaginative’ end of the spectrum, but wittily, musically so, provoking none of the irritation that overtly exhibitionistic accounts do.

 

The cast had a difficult job indeed. Imagine having to learn the words with constant switches between German and Italian, especially when you probably know the ‘original’ already. For that alone, they would deserve the warmest of applause. But they threw themselves into Freyer’s concept with enthusiasm, their clowning convincing throughout. At the centre, in the title role, stood an undeniably seductive performance by Josef Wagner, his gliding across stage at one with his silkiness of vocal delivery. I should very much like to see and hear more from him. Jörg Schneider’s beauty of tone almost made me forget my qualms about the inclusion of both of Ottavio’s arias. Kristiane Kaiser occasionally had trouble with Anna’s coloratura, but for the most part performed more than creditably; much the same might be said, albeit with greater stage ‘attitude’, for Esther Lee’s Elvira. (I should certainly never have guessed that the latter was a late stand-in for an indisposed Caroline Melzer.) Mischa Schelomianski seemed very much in his element with Leporello: a figure of fun in the best sense, perhaps a figure ‘for’ fun? Ben Connor and Anita Götz ably delineated the more plebeian roles of Zerlina and Masetto; they stand, rightly, as the heirs to Viennese popular theatre, whilst, perhaps ironically, attaining dramatic seriousness of their own. Andreas Mitschke proved a suitably imposing Commendatore. More than usual, though, the claim of a company performance won out. It had to – and how!

 

Intermezzo, Garsington Opera, 6 June 2015

Images: Mike Hoban

(sung in English)

Garsington Opera House

Robert Storch – Mark Stone

Christine – Mary Dunleavy
Anna – Ailish Tynan
Franzl – Louis Hynes
Baron Lummer – Sam Furness
Notary – Benjamin Bevan
Notary’s Wife – Sarah Sedgwick
Stroh – Oliver Johnston
Commercial Counsellor – James Cleverton
Legal Counsellor – Gerard Collett
Singer – Barnaby Rea
Fanny – Alice Devine
Marie – Elka Lee-Green
Therese – Charlotte Sutherland
Resi – Anna Sideris

Bruno Ravella (director)

Giles Cadle (designs)
Bruno Poet (lighting)

Garsington Opera Orchestra

Jac van Steen (conductor)

 

Hats off to Garsington for championing once again some criminally neglected Strauss. I overheard someone there opine, ‘Of course, you can understand why it isn’t done very often.’ Well, only if you take as given the increasingly untenable assumptions some ‘major’ opera houses trumpet concerning their audiences – and perhaps not even then. That Birmingham Opera can sell out Stockhausen immediately and that the Royal Opera House – by any standards, a different animal – can sell out operas by Benjamin and Birtwistle puts paid to lazy talk and should put paid to lazy programming, though does so far less often than should be the case. If one takes as one’s core lazy listeners, consequences will follow; if one leads, and especially if one acts upon widespread thirst for modernist repertoire, broadly conceived, other, better consequences will do so. Strauss, it might be countered, is a different matter again, and perhaps he is. But he is hardly unpopular, and if many people have not heard Intermezzo, despite a recent staging at Buxton, then grant them an opportunity such as Garsington has.

An excellent performance was given by the Garsington Orchestra – only once, early in the second act, did I sense a little tiredness – under the baton of Jac van Steen. The conductor’s deep knowledge and understanding of the score, of its post-Ariadne idiom, of its opportunities and challenges had been displayed in my interview with him; it was displayed just as clearly here. Everything was in its place, as it must be; Strauss at his most unsparing allows no room for error. The orchestral interludes put me a little in mind of the ‘closed forms’ of Busoni and Berg, whilst very much retaining their own character. It was perhaps most of all, though, Strauss’s economy, which yet never denies his love of musical proliferation, that shone through. Not a note is wasted; nor was it in performance.

The cast proved persuasive advocates too. Mary Dunleavy’s vocal security was matched to a subtle reading of Christine’s character that extracted her from the realm of patronising, even misogynistic caricature: no mere ‘shrew’ here, but a credible woman of strengths, weaknesses, above all agency. Mark Stone made a powerful impression as her husband, perhaps the closest of all Strauss came to a self-portrait. (The creator of the role wore a mask so as to make him resemble the composer all the more closely. As Norman del Mar observed, this was a ‘striking volte-face after Strauss’s anxieties over the Young Composer in Ariadne’.) One could have taken dictation, verbal as well as notational, from most of his crystal-clear performance: Lied writ large in the best sense. Sam Furnes’’s Baron Lummer offered a well-judged mixture of vocal allure and immaturity of character. Ailish Tynan’s perky Anna proved just the right sort of knowing, informed servant. In a fine company performance, other singers to stand out included Oliver Johnston’s finely sung – and acted – Stroh, Gerald Collett’s equally impressive Legal Counsellor, and Benjamin Bevan’s honourable Notary. Everyone, however, made a considerable contribution.

Bruno Ravella’s production takes the work seriously, on its own terms, and succeeds accordingly. Giles Cadle’s resourceful set moves us in and out of a Garmisch-style villa, modern (to Strauss), without being avant garde. There is always a strong sense of who everyone is, and why he or she is acting in the manner we observe. The card game is, as the conductor observed to me, wonderfully, knowingly realistic; such understanding could hardly be feigned. The crucial element of communication and its speed – the telephone, the telegram, Strauss’s pace of conversation delivery – offered an excellent example of musical performances and production acting as one.

One can speak of the plot being trivial, if one wishes. (I suppose one can speak about anything if one wishes, so that was an especially meaningless claim!) But some of that seems to be snobbery; would we think differently, were these gods, or indeed from another class, ‘higher’ or ‘lower’. In his original Preface, replaced when the score was published, Strauss not unreasonably claimed to break genuine new ground in the variety of everyday life he had brought to the stage; Hindemith and Schoenberg would follow suit in Neues vom Tage and Von heute auf morgen. Still more to the point, though, (high) bourgeois domesticity matters to those involved in it; it certainly matters to the little boy caught at the centre of marital dispute and potentially breakdown, as countless children, sleepless with worry at raised voices downstairs, will tell you. (Young Louis Hynes deserved great credit for his portrayal of that difficult role, here rendered more difficult still.) Now Intermezzo is not essentially ‘about’ that, although I think it is more concerned with it than, say, Elektra is; but a subtle yet perceptible shift in that direction from the production did no harm in opening up the work.

Only one gripe, really: it was a great pity that the opera was sung in English, and that Andrew Porter’s translation was the version used. Given surtitles, there really is no need; Strauss really does not sound right in translation, still more so as here, when odd words remained in German, the contrast jarring. Moreover, accents tended to slide – or at least to slide more noticeably to an English ear. But, as ever with Strauss, in the battle of Wort with Ton, there was little doubt which would emerge victorious. This was a far from insignificant victory over Strauss’s critics, Garsington’s latest estimable contribution to a hero’s after-life.

 

Strauss's Intermezzo at Garsington: Interview with Jac van Steen

Image: Ross Cohen/Herzberger Artists

 

 

Last year’s Strauss anniversary year – 150 years since his birth – offered, at least in the United Kingdom, a typical number of opportunities and frustrations. We heard a good number of excellent performances, not least a superlative Frau ohne Schatten from the Royal Opera and Elektra at the Proms, both, far from coincidentally, conducted by Semyon Bychkov. A fine Macbeth from Mark Elder and the LSO notwithstanding, there was not, though, so much in the way of rare, or even rarer, Strauss. For that, one would have had to travel further afield, or indeed – I should apologise for having slipped into ‘Fog over Channel: Continent Cut off’ mode – have been there in the first place. However, two eagerly anticipated treats for me this year will be Garsington Opera’s new production of Intermezzo and Die schweigsame Frau at the Munich Opera Festival, both works I shall see for the first time on stage.

Intermezzo has never fared well in this country, partly, I suspect, on account of unfounded fears concerning the speed of its dialogue. (If that be a problem, then so surely should it be in Der Rosenkavalier.) It came to Edinburgh in 1965, Glyndebourne in 1974, Buxton more recently still in 2012. Now a company that has long prided itself in Strauss performance has opted to perform it, staged by Bruno Ravella and conducted by Jac van Steen, whom I spoke to following rehearsals in East London. I began by asking why he thought the work, for which, following an initial approach to Hermann Bahr, Strauss wrote his own libretto, had been so neglected.

JvS: Let me start at the end of the answer. For me, it’s a challenge to prove that it is worth programming this opera more often. The reason I can only guess; it is not a symbolic, metaphorical opera with many layers, like those with libretti by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which also have so much psychology, so much Freudian background. This opera with very domestic action stands, in the Strauss repertoire, pretty awkwardly. Also, if you look to the title, it isn’t a Traviata: it isn’t called Christine.

MB: Or Ariadne, Salome, Elektra, and so on…

JvS: Exactly. What happens is that in Intermezzo, he opens a new path for conversational style in twentieth-century music, which is, in the early ‘20s, a very courageous thing to do. In the meantime, we have heard so many musical works that combine a play and opera that it becomes difficult to take seriously something so trivial as a change of names [a mistaken conclusion Christine draws from a letter written by her husband, the composer Robert Storch] to be the cause of a great fuss in Robert’s life. But the score is so brilliantly written that I want to convince everyone that it is worth listening to and programming it more.

The other reason I think it is so little performed is that it is so hard, so demanding, for everyone: all the singers have very difficult roles. The orchestra has an even more difficult role; it plays very sophisticated themes played against many other themes. So I try to find my way through the score to make most of it possible to understand; meaning, we worked very hard on understanding of the words. Not because it is in English, but because of the conversational style Strauss asks for.

We perform it in English, not in German, but it is set in a German parlando style, so now we have to adapt that style in translation, and then to back to Strauss, and discover what did he want this or that theme to sound like … so we discover that we need another word.

MB: … because it doesn’t work; it doesn’t sound as it should.

JvS: Exactly. The music is always number one.

MB: Which is interesting, given that the general idea is of a conversational piece. But then we see similar relationships in so many of the greatest opera composers when they ascribe greater importance to the poem: Wagner, Monteverdi. And there is Janáček too, who, in this case, we should think of as a contemporary.

JvS: Yes, indeed. Strauss took a lot of time over this work. For instance, he was on tour with the Staatskapelle Dresden. They had three weeks of touring in South America. If you go on tour, if I go on tour, I need a very good book and a good number of scores, because you are not there as a tourist but you have so much spare time. If you go to Buenos Aires, you have the atmosphere, but you are not a tourist; you do not go out because you know that, in the evening, you have to perform. So I imagine that he had so many creative ideas at this time. Of course, his life was composing, but at this time, his hobby was composing too, because he was there to conduct. He could ask himself: how can I make this character, how can I shape this theme? And I think that’s a special joy that composers feel. …

I’m very lucky in having a fantastic cast of singers and an excellent, thoughtful director, who is very sensitive to the text. He’s a very musical young man, who is very detailed, as detailed as Strauss is; and he makes the set and the setting so detailed that the combination of what you see and what you hear really fits together like it should, but as – let’s be honest – it does so rarely. And working every day six hours on that score must reflect a bit of the fun Richard Strauss had when he was in his hotel room in Buenos Aires. Performing a beautiful Strauss concert in the evening and then returning to write something very bright and intelligent.

MB: Also a little like the card games he so loved, which we see here in the opera. His love of skat, whose rules I’ve never been able to understand.

JvS: Yes, when we started to discuss the piece, he flew to Holland and came to my house. We had two lovely days and we said we’d play the game. I tried and it didn’t work, because it is so difficult. This is not a one-evening thing. But Bruno, he took a morning with the five card-players and explained the rules of the game. Not out of an idle desire to show off, to show how well he knew the rules, but to show the musical fun that Strauss knew in all of the biddings, the mistakes that colleagues make,  all of which is in the music. They did that all morning. … What you see on stage now is the official game as Strauss wrote it out. It’s not just Figure 25: someone puts his hand down, and so on. They actually play the game. Someone loses a great deal of money, for example, and the audience will see that it means something, and that we have a lot of fun in playing the game.

MB: So it will convince?

JvS: Yes, it will convince. It’s not only performing as an actor and giving your hand because you are told to do so, you are playing the game, and during that game, you are singing your line. It’s one of the hardest scenes in the whole piece. Five people talking with each other, against each other, over each other, through each other, and as a conductor, you have to cue them all in. But as long as they do what Strauss writes, then it works.

MB: There’s a lesson there then?

JvS: Very much. There is no room for improvisation and that is the motto of the whole opera. I don’t let them improvise, and then it sounds like you and me sitting here talking about the opera, having a good conversation with music.

MB: Do you find the shortness of the scenes, their almost filmic – silent filmic – quality, followed by orchestral interludes, a difficulty?

JvS: I understand your question but I try not to see it as a problem. What I did, as a parallel to the director playing a game of skat without music, I did the opposite. I asked the singers not only to learn their own parts but … to learn the orchestral, instrumental liaisons between the parts. Sometimes just one beat, sometimes [and then he sang] a short motif, the Eternal Love theme, maybe four bars in the orchestra, to avoid this short-breathed conversational, cinematographic, cartoon-like style.

MB: … which can be a big problem.

JvS: It can be a very big problem. You then do not see the whole story. So what they do is now, the moment they stop singing [in rehearsals: the orchestra had yet to join them at this point in the rehearsal schedule], they sing in their heads the music from the orchestra. They will sing a clarinet line and carry it on until they sing once again. That helps out, so the conversational, short motif-style has a much longer line behind it. It’s all chopped up into pieces, but we try to convince by having the orchestra as a vocal part, and the vocal parts as an instrumental part. And Strauss is such a genius, that if you understand that trick, then it is all doable. Then the enormous mountain that singers initially have to climb – all this jumpy music: ‘where am I?’ – is part of something else. So long as you understand that process, it is doable. Ok, it takes a bit more time than Traviata, a bit more time than Tosca, but it is doable.

MB: What you say makes it sound a bit like Webern, where if you take notes pointillistically, in isolation, they mean nothing at all, whatever Stockhausen and certain others might have said. The moment you hear the line moving between different parts, then it’s like Mozart.

JvS: Yes, exactly. I did a lot of Webern earlier on in my career; now I seem to be asked more to do Bruckner and Mahler. But I’m convinced that you must respect the tradition – and then I’ll come back round to Strauss too – of Mahler, of Strauss, of Wagner, in Webern too, and don’t treat it as a note which is difficult to pitch, because unless you have perfect pitch, you can only work it out…

MB: … by interval…

JvS: … by interval. What I do with Strauss too is respect tradition, in that Strauss was a fantastic Kapellmeister, a fantastic conductor, so what you hear in the score is the relationship with Strauss’s role as Kapellmeister. It’s like the game of skat my director played: my assistant and I, we have tried to find the quotations that come from the repertoire of German opera houses. We come to Freischütz; we come to Forza del destino; we obviously come to Nozze di Figaro. It’s in the score; it’s a bit hidden, but it’s in the repertoire. And if you respect that tradition, respect that it is an opera composer writing a conversational piece, with the opera that he conducts in the back of his head, then you really get somewhere. It would be a fantastic quiz: to see who could pick out fifty quotations. Not five, not fifteen, but fifty! But what happened eventually, as we did this, my assistant and I – he’s a very intelligent young man, so he wanted to go further, to find another one, which I hadn’t, and so did I; I’m pretty ambitious – was, one evening, we came to a passage, and we said: ‘What is that? It’s absolutely a quotation, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes, it is. Shall I look it up?’ ‘Yes, look it up, and play it.’ ‘I can’t find it anywhere.’ And then we have walked into the trap that we are treating Richard Strauss – not Heldenleben or Also sprach Zarathustra, but Intermezzo – as a quotation. It’s archetypal, and we couldn’t think which opera it was from; suddenly we realised that it was the music in which one of the male characters talks about Christine – F minor, the key – now we think we have a quotation, but it is from the work itself. It has become part of us. … The writing is almost Mozartian. If you look at the manuscript for Nozze di Figaro, you don’t see a line to which he then added a harmony. It’s all one. That’s what Strauss does as well.

MB: And of course no one loved Mozart more than Strauss did.

JvS: And I’m sure there are more things in Nozze di Figaro – not just the motifs, the tunes that you and I can sing – to be discovered musically. I conducted the work a lot, and I made a tonal clock: I connected, as with seventeenth-century Affekt, which feeling he related to a certain tonality. Strauss is exactly the same. G minor is for her, when she’s bitchy. A-flat major is when they are in love. And it’s all the same sort of pattern as Nozze di Figaro. …

And then, of course, there is the descriptive quality. As you know, Strauss can orchestrate the opening of a door.

MB: That pictorial element: you can almost see what is happening on stage, just by hearing the score. Just as much as you can in Till Eulenspiegel or the Alpine Symphony.

JvS: In my Weimar years, I did a lot of Strauss, because he was there and everybody was very proud of Wagner, Liszt, Strauss having been in Weimar. I was the twenty-fifth Kapellmeister. And through doing that you understand the quality of the handwork, of how to write for an orchestra. He knew exactly what was good for the instruments, and what was possible, and how to go a little bit further…

MB: … to extend its capabilities just a little. The level of craftsmanship is something I always find astonishing in Strauss. He’s probably the only person who could have revised Berlioz’s treatise on orchestration.

JvS: Very true. And this opera is set for a very small orchestra. I only know Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Divertimento – of course Ariadne is not so big, either – which need so small an orchestra. Frau ohne Schatten – it needs a gigantic orchestra. Intermezzo needs only Beethoven’s orchestra. It’s so abundant in its instrumental writing. I’m looking forward to working with the orchestra at Garsington, because for them, it is really tough. The London orchestras are very good: they can play anything. So now my task is to give them the fun that we have already had over the last four weeks. … There’s one thing that is always very special in Garsington: they have a Mozart and Strauss accent to the festival. I hope that the audience will not be afraid of the unknown aspect, and that we can convince, once you are inside, that you will have a fantastic evening: socially, Nature, the great music. …

What I would like is for the audience to feel what we did yesterday. We were all moved, almost to tears, when Christine declared her love to Robert. She sings six minutes of the most gorgeous music.

MB: That reconciliation is something quite special. As you were saying, the plot is trivial, but the relationship at this point doesn’t seem entirely unlike that of the Figaro Count and Countess – although responsibility is somewhat differently apportioned. It’s as if they’ve been dragged into the 1920s, have lost their titles, and have become a bourgeois couple; after all, Strauss calls the opera a ‘bürgerliche Komödie’, doesn’t he?

JvS: Very true. Everyone says that, in the opera, Strauss is giving his wife [Pauline, on whom Christine is based] a very bitchy character, but she has great love for him, and incredible respect. And, although she was a singer, she wanted very much to be a countess in life. They lived at the very height of Munich society. Strauss was a world star.

MB: That whole world of Thomas Mann…

JvS: …and Hofmannsthal, and so on. I think also of Prague, now, where I have a relationship with one of the orchestras. If you go to Prague and know that Alban Berg was there, Mahler too: they were all there: cultural centres with music of composers they loved to play every day.

MB: Mozart and Don Giovanni too.

JvS: Of course! Strauss is like that in Munich, Vienna, Dresden. All of these cities with such a rich tradition in opera. Prague had three opera houses, playing every evening.

MB: And so close to Dresden too, where this opera was first performed. One realises that when one visits, and sees the road signs, even the restaurants. Much more so than in much of the rest of Saxony, Leipzig for instance.

JvS: It’s a very interesting area. And in the 1920s, after the First World War, so alive! I love that era: I do a lot of Stravinsky, a lot of Alban Berg, a lot of Strauss.

MB: Schoenberg too?

JvS: Yes, although I’ve never done Moses. It’s very high on my list, but you need a good house that will let you do it, and I’m free on the market.

MB: The sort of work a Music Director will keep to him- or herself, then, as a statement?

JvS: Very much so. And as a guest, it is more the other repertoire.

MB: It would be wonderful to do Von heute auf morgen too, which is not entirely unlike Intermezzo with its ‘modern’, bourgeois plot. A similar dynamic, also a Zeitoper.

JvS: And the Hindemith opera, which resembles it a bit too, with a divorce situation…

MB: … Neues vom Tage.

JvS: That’s it. This conversational style has a very short history, but a very interesting one. With Pierrot lunaire, Schoenberg took Sprechstimme so far, but the 1920s offered something different, which we still know far too little.

Intermezzo at Garsington should offer a splendid opportunity for many of us to put that right.