The Makropulos Case, Royal Opera and Ballet, 10 November 2025

Royal Opera House

Emilia Marty – Ausrine Stundyte
Krista – Heather Engebretson
Albert Gregor – Sean Panikkar
Baron Jaroslav Prus – Johan Reuter
Dr Kolenatý – Henry Waddington
Vítek – Peter Hoare
Count Hauk-Šendorf – Alan Oke
Janek – Daniel Matoušek
Stage Door Woman – Susan Bickley
Security Guard – Jeremy White
Hotel Maid – Jingwen Cai

Katie Mitchell (director)
Vicki Mortimer (set designs)
Sussie Juhlin-Wallén (costumes)
James Farncombe (lighting)
Sasha Balmazi-Owen (video)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Jakub Hrůsá (conductor)

 

Image: The Royal Opera / Camilla Greenwell

If the Royal Opera and Ballet’s new Makropulos Case does indeed prove to be Katie Mitchell’s final opera production, we should think of it more as a culmination than a farewell. If the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk, the outlines of Mitchell’s operatic work – part, to be sure, of her broader theatrical work, but a distinctive part – may now seem clearer to us all. Rightly or wrongly, for I can lay no claim to oracular status on this or any other question, they certainly do to me following this superlative evening, dramatically and musically, in the theatre, a splendid addition to the company’s Janáček series? May we hope for a Mr Brouček, even a Šárka or an Osud? Hope dies last, as the ambiguous, even oracular, saying has it. 

And death lies at the heart of this work, as does life—as does their cyclical relationship both in Janáček’s work as a whole and this production, in turn both in its overt presentation and in its broader, metatheatrical, even symbolic frame. One might say the same of women, their role in society, and their role in opera, Mr Brouček’s Excursions the great exception, for even From the House of the Dead has one feel their absence. The Makropulos Case is centred, of course, around a great female singer, a great survivor, a woman seemingly infinitely blessed, but in reality, if not infinitely, then gravely cursed. She is literally the creation of men, in some ways figuratively too. I say ‘a woman’ and of course she is, but as such and as a human, she deserves to be named: Emilia Marty, Elena Makropulos, and the rest. (We may, if we wish, recall Kundry’s many names and incarnations. Wagner was not a feminist; to claim so would be anachronistic nonsense. But his works are not without feminist themes and, more to the point, opportunities—as well as themes and opportunities that are anything but. The same, of course, may be said of Janáček.) Mitchell takes a further step: this woman is queer, standing in no need of men, whatever the history with which she has been furnished (by them) may claim. She has fond memories; she has produced numerous ‘bastards’ with them, but now does not care for them (men or children). 

Now forty-plus = or so she claims and appears – EM seeks women on ‘dating’ apps. With a technological bent very much of our time, the opera begins, app and text message communications, courtesy of Sasha Balmazi-Owen, running parallel to, interacting with, and sometimes undercutting the work ‘itself’. Krista and Janek intend to rob her, the former (‘they/them’) ensnaring her prey 200 metres distant and securing an invitation to her hotel room. The proceeds, whose net worth Janek instantly checks online as Krista photographs them, include an eighteenth-century medallion and a rare, early twentieth-century playbill. Yet ultimately, Krista falls for EM, mesmerised as her male admirers, yet apparently feeling and sharing something deeper. Rather than absconding to Berlin with her (former) lover, she shoots him: shades of Lulu, perhaps, yet with the crucial distance that this is no blank canvas onto which male fantasies are projected. This is women in love, by women, for women.

Surtitles are contemporary English in tone, without becoming paraphrase. Additional communications fly across the ether: ‘Berlin or bust’, popular abbreviations, emojis, and so on. Like anything else, use of text messages – also here telephone calls, audio and video – can be a cliché, a gimmick, and too often is. Here, unlike in, say, Simon Stone’s tedious, extravagant, and tediously extravagant Cherubini Médée – if ever there were an opera crying out for the Mitchell touch… - or Kirill Serebrennikov’s silly Marriage of Figaro, it serves a useful dramatic purpose, both straightforwardly and more metatheatrically in its extension of live cinema to new realms in successful pursuit of Mitchell’s longstanding and, in this case, unapologetically queer subversion of the male gaze both generally and in specifically operatic guise. For when the diva comes at long last to die, she is not so much a creature of opera, but opera itself. Has the director killed the genre or let it die? More significantly, has it in its death, which may yet permit of rebirth though not artificial prolongation, at last been liberated of the male gaze. On an optimistic reading: yes, at least in part. The elixir is bequeathed to Krista as a gift of what appears to be love, but does it remain a poisoned chalice; can it be cleansed?

Janácek’s score naturally invites some degree of optimism, its increasingly rapt lyricism, orchestral motifs coalescing, combining, and expanding into something greater, brought home in wondrous, golden immediacy by Jakub Hrůsá at the helm of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. That Hrůsá is the real thing no one who has heard him will doubt, but this proved a significant achievement even by his standards, as intellectually as it was emotionally involving. The same must be said of Ausrine Stundyte’s all-encompassing assumption of the title role, rightly permitting of various readings whilst ever sure of its direction. No wonder the rest of her world lay in her thrall. All contributed something to the greater whole, showing what the world of opera can and should be. I shall note Sean Panikkar’s typically ardent, lyrical Albert Gregor, Peter Hoare’s sharply characterised Vitek, Heather Engebretson’s sparky Krista, and, in another tribute, conscious or otherwise, to the best of an opera company and its progress of time, Johan Reuter ‘moving up’ from, say, Orest and Birtwistle’s Theseus to Baron Prus, and Susan Bickley from numerous Covent Garden roles (and her ENO Dido with Mitchell) to the cameo of the Stage Door Woman. It was, though, a collaborative effort, as production, conductor, work, and any future for the genre demand.

From that ENO After Dido, Purcell’s jewel forming part of a greater theatre piece, through a Salzburg Al gran sole carico d’amore I imagine I might understand better now than I did in 2009, live cinema again offering a feminist corrective or at least enhancement to Luigi Nono’s project of telling European revolutionary experience from the standpoint of female revolutionaries,  the woman’s revenge of Written on Skin and queer love of Lessons in Love and Violence, the postdramatic feminism of The Blue Woman, and important reassessments such as her Aix Ariadne auf Naxos and Pelléas and Covent Garden Theodora, a path becomes traceable towards this Makropulos Case. Is it the end of the line? That should not really even be the question; it is certainly an important, musicotheatrically riveting contribution, one I am keen to see again, should I be able. 

Cathérine Clément notoriously described opera as the ‘undoing of women’. Perhaps, if one is extremely selective—and one treats it only in terms of libretti. Go back to Monteverdi’s Poppea or forward to Rebecca Saunders’s recent operatic debut and it seems anything but. Nevertheless, that book or at least its title remains, whether we like it or no, part of operatic discourse. Carolyn Abbate’s review said most, perhaps all, of what need be said about it. And here, as it must, that theory is realised in practice, without in any sense jettisoning necessary critique. Actually existing opera houses and their ways are, or can be, another thing. This is not in any sense intended to refer to the Royal Opera House in particular; indeed, its relatively recent, highly publicised appointment of an intimacy coordinator marked an important step forward in one respect. I know no details of the opera-world misogyny Mitchell has endured – her recent interview lies behind a Murdoch paywall – and I do not intend to speculate. What I can say is that operatic works, historical and contemporary, and performances offer greater scope for critique and, dare I say it, redemption than the day-to-day activities of any company will. This year’s greatest musical centenary, that of Pierre Boulez, reminds us of the necessary utopianism of his celebrated 1967 interview with Der Spiegel.

New German opera houses certainly look very modern—from the outside; on the inside, they have remained extremely old-fashioned. To a theatre in which mostly repertory pieces are performed one can only with the greatest difficulty bring a modern opera—it is unthinkable. The most expensive solution would be to blow the opera houses into the air. But do you not think that that might also be the most elegant solution? 

In turn, that echoes a Wagner’s diary entry from 1849.

8 May (Monday) Morning once again by roundabout route via barricades to Town Hall. At S. Anne Barricade guard shouts “Well, Mr Conductor, joy’s beautiful divine spark’s made a blaze.” (3rd perf. 9th Symphony at previous Palm Sunday concert; Opera House now burnt down. Strange feeling of comfort.

 

This latest death  will not destroy our opera houses and companies, nor even leave them peacefully to die, but should at least ask us whether that would be advisable. Is this, rather than opera as the undoing of women, then, women as the undoing and possible rebirth of opera? It might, considered in utopian fashion, constitute an act of operatic reform or revolution to be compared with the work composers such as Wagner, conductors such as Boulez, directors such as Stefan Herheim, and singers such as Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, noting ruefully and purposefully the gender balance of historical examples, whilst recalling Boulez’s own caution that, although Wagner’s Bayreuth project was in almost every respect right and necessary, it has not had the slightest effect on the day-to-day life of our benighted operatic culture. And yet, it has, for our revolutionary-reformers continue to offer a critique of patriarchy, of heteronormativity, and of capitalism many of us continue to heed. To do more than criticise, we must all play our part. The Royal Opera and Ballet has done so too, staging Janáček’s opera (incredibly) for the first time and supporting a new way forward. The Royal Opera and Ballet has done so too, staging Janáček’s opera (incredibly) for the first time and supporting, among many other things in its necessarily mixed economy, some seeds of a new way forward. 

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Deutsche Oper, 3 December 2023

Hans Sachs – Johan Reuter
Veit Pogner – Albert Pesendorfer
Kunz Vogelgesang – Gideon Poppe
Konrad Nachtigall – Marek Reichert
Sixtus Beckmesser – Philipp Jekal
Fritz Kothner – Thomas Lehman
Balthasar Zorn – Jörg Schörner
Ulrich Eißlinger – Patrick Vogel
Augustin Moser – Paul Kaufmann
Hermann Ortel – Stephen Bronk
Hans Schwarz – Tobias Kehrer
Hans Foltz – Byung Gil Kim
Walther von Stolzing – Magnus Vigilius
David – Ya-Chung Huang
Eva – Elena Tsallagova
Magdalena – Kathrin Göring
Night Watchman – Tobias Kehrer
Apprentices – Agata Kornaga, Freya Müller, Kangyoon Shine Lee, Yehui Jeong, Oleksandra Diachenko, Natalie Jurk, Jongwoo Hong, Thoma Jaron-Wutz, Leon Juurlink, Kyoungloul Kim, Sotiris Charalampous, Simon Grindberg

Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock, Sergio Morabito (directors)
Torsten Köpf (co-set designer)
Charlotte Pistorius (co-costume designer)
Olaf Freese (lighting)

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper Berlin (chorus director: Jeremy Bines)

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin

Ulf Schirmer (conductor)

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, premiere am 12.6.2022 in der Deutschen Oper Berlin, copyright: Thomas Aurin. (Some roles were taken by different singers.)

In the depths of the coronavirus Great Silence, I mused that its horror would be over, musically speaking, when I had once again heard live three works: Gurrelieder, a large scale work by Richard Strauss, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Why not, say, Les Troyens, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony or Moses und Aron, I am unsure, though the difficulty of hearing Moses anywhere at any time presents its own challenge. It was not so much about individual as representative works, though, so as to be indicative of some sort of resumption of ‘normal’ musical life, rather than tailoring performances to pandemic circumstances. Strauss’s Alpine Symphony I heard surprisingly early on, though I am tempted to say I should still wait for a Frau ohne Schatten (all being well, next year); Gurrelieder came a little over a year ago. Alas, neither was a very good performance, though I felt relief and gratitude nevertheless. Now, at last, came Die Meistersinger, my first opportunity to see the Deutsche Oper’s current production, new last year, from Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock, and Sergio Morabito. 

There are good ideas, here: often, if not always, well achieved. That the most overt and complex instance of cultural nationalism in Wagner’s dramatic œuvre should, in the wake of subsequent German history, be a site of controversy, even of discomfort, should not itself be controversial. It is the least of the debts we must continually settle in the wake of Friedrich Meinecke’s ‘German catastrophe’. That this might yet be controversial in ultra-reactionary circles need not detain us. No, of course, Meister does not mean Herr, and anyone claiming Hans Sachs’s call to honour your German masters is concerned with political domination should be taken no more seriously than the Nazis on this; nonetheless, rightly or wrongly – for me, it would be some of the former, and considerably more of the latter – Die Meistersinger has, like so much else, been tarnished by the ‘catastrophe’ and we cannot simply pretend it has not happened. And so, to frame the action with the wood-panelling of a music school that more than hints at a certain conservatoire on Munich’s Arcisstraße, reminds us, for the most part beneficially, of our historical and cultural duty.

 

The Hochschule für Musik and Theater – if that be what it is – is as prestigious a school of advanced musical instruction as can be found. The building in which it now stands was built between 1933 and 1937 as the Führerbau; if you walk past today, you will see a plaque acknowledging the Munich Agreement, signed there in 1938. What you will not see inside are the Stolpersteine laid down earlier this century; the city of Munich removed them as an alleged fire hazard. The interior may also be familiar – again, I suspect far from coincidentally – to those who have watched Edgar Reitz’s Heimat 2. This is where Hermann and others received their musical instruction and gave many of their performances. Encircling 1968, the hopes it engendered and its bitter aftermath, Reitz’s films inhabit a similar world to that shown here, fashions suggesting (to me) the later 60s or early 70s. Hans Sachs is, of course, in some ways a harbinger of les évènements, though with a healthy does of Schopenhauerian reflection and interpretation that might have given them greater staying power. The hand of historical discomfort is present, then, though it is really up to us, for most of the performance, how much we feel that.

There are shades of Katharina Wagner’s Bayreuth Meistersinger. Not only is this set in a music school and hers an art school; there is some throwing around of shoes, if not so much as at Bayreuth. In this case, that seems, somewhat awkwardly, to be consequent to a realisation that the new setting does not readily permit Sachs to be a cobbler too, yet something at some point must be done with shoes. There are a few other cases where what we see sits awkwardly with what we hear, without proving a productive contradiction. It seems strange, for instance, to have Walther and Eva copulate in two corners of the hall during the chorale, only for him immediately after to apologise, seemingly without irony, ‘Fraulein! Verzeiht der Sitte Bruch!’ Sachs running off with Eva a little while afterwards, having creepily approached her from behind, is at best a bit silly, more Carry On Nuremberg than anything else. The point of gender imbalance and, frankly, violence inherent in the work is better made elsewhere, with female students/apprentices having to resist or endure Magisterial advances, often in full view. Alas, we know only too well now the wrong sort of ‘permissive’ culture that has been nurtured and protected in conservatoire education.

 

The position of the apprentices and chorus deserves further attention. Since there is no town of Nuremberg here – a different sort of Meistersinger ohne Nürnberg from that of Wieland Wagner – some other solution for the latter needs to be presented. At the close, this, reasonably enough, is the audience for what appear to be final recitals of sharply contrasting quality from Beckmesser and Walther. Earlier on, in place of the guilds, we have what seems to be David’s nightmare, in which the clock (a little too crassly) goes back to 19:33, whose horror is inadequately characterised by ghostly dancing. Likewise, the orgy (free love?) in which the apprentices indulge at the beginning of the second act, though to begin with intriguingly balletic, goes on a bit so as to become frankly tedious. No wonder they slope off in dribs and drabs. Perhaps that is the point, though I am not sure I believe that. More disturbingly, Sachs’s final peroration oscillates between one-sided condemnation and further silliness. His transformation into threatening, at least proto- (or post-)fascist mob leader receives little or no adequate preparation, unless that is why the ceiling lights having been moving around for the entire scene. (It suggests sea-sickness, but I do not think we have moved to the Titanic.) A recurrence of still greater ill-matched dancing may suggest the crowd having fallen under his sway, a warning, but it seems more suggestive of an inability to conclude. This, for me, would benefit from rethinking, as would some loose ends elsewhere.

 

For the nationalist underpinning and final turn are only one aspect of a multivalent work, whose humanity – yes, one can hear it, and should be unashamed of saying so – ultimately exceeds however one wishes to characterise the above. The idea that a father should seek to award his daughter as a prize in a song contest, even if she may refuse, is of course monstrous, even when we allow for historical difference. But the point, ultimately, is that he does not, and that is Wagner’s doing. We can dispute many issues of gender here; with which nineteenth-century artwork can we not? Yet the pain Sachs and, to an extent, Eva must suffer, and the joy of requited love between Eva and Walther are real and of dramatic consequence. Both, whatever my misgivings concerning surrounding details, are present here. I am not sure the unmistakable sexual element of the former relationship is especially helpful, since its dramatic import is blurred by warnings of abuse elsewhere, but the chemistry between Magnus Vigilius’s Walther and Elena Tsallagova’s Eva is stronger, more all-enveloping, and in its way victorious. That the two elope and do not take part in the concluding minutes, whatever it might mean, seems to me important. Beckmesser does not return either: a relief, for it has surely become too much of a cliché and would have been out of place here. 

Vigilius and Tsallagova both gave strong performances throughout. The former, new to me, is shaping up to be a fine Heldentenor indeed. Golden yet far from unvarying of tone, he also displayed verbal sensitivity and stage presence in equal measure. Tsallagova, whom I cannot recall hearing in Wagner before, proved similarly spirited and adaptable. If there were, understandably, times when Johan Reuter tired a little as Sachs, he soon recovered, and offered a properly complex reading of the character, both for work and production. Philipp Jekal trod the difficult lines of Beckmesserian performance, neither too absurd, nor too dignified, with aplomb: another reading with acute attention to the alchemy of words, music, and gesture. Albert Pesendorfer rarely, if ever, disappoints, and certainly did not here in a big-hearted (bartering the bride notwithstanding) Pogner of great presence. Ya-Chung Huang’s David made much of the uncomfortable bullying and bashfulness his character suffered in this reading, offering fine musical virtues too. Kathrin Göring’s Magdalena was well sung and characterised, as were all of the smaller roles, this group of Masters no mere collective but rather replete with individual voices and temperaments.

After an underwhelming, oddly balanced Overture, thin and dragging, the orchestra under Ulf Schirmer soon got into its swing, all the more impressive in the second and third acts. Without wishing to make any obvious points, Schirmer directed the players (and, more generally, the singers on stage) with inobtrusive understanding and wisdom. If there were inevitably, in a performance of this length, occasional cases of stage and pit falling apart – one unfortunately so in the Quintet – they were soon remedied. Far more noteworthy were a lack of awkward corners and an abundance of musical continuity, very much in the spirit of the work. The chorus was excellent throughout.

A qualified welcome, then, to the first revival of this Meistersinger. Its predecessor was, I think, the last of Götz Friedrich’s Wagner productions to be replaced here in Charlottenburg. I saw it in 2010 and recognise both loss and gain in its replacement. As the work reminds us, though, nothing is for ever and certainly not in art. There was enough here, not least in fine sung performances, to remind me of my love for Die Meistersinger – I shall admit to having shed the odd tear, in the Quintet and in both the Trial Song and Prize Song – and quite how much I have missed it. Work, production, and performances invited us to reflect that we never simply return; nor can or should we ever shed our past. The myth of a Year Zero is as unwelcome as it is chimerical.

Wozzeck, Paris Opéra, 13 March 2022

Opéra Bastille

Images: Agathe Poupeney / OnP

Wozzeck – Johan Reuter
Drum Major – John Daszak
Andres – Tansel Akzeybek
Captain – Gerhard Siegel
Doctor – Falk Struckmann
First Apprentice – Mikhail Timoshenko
Second Apprentice – Tobias Westman
Fool – Heinz Göhrig
Marie – Eva-Maria Westbroek
Margret – Marie-Andrée Bouchard-Lesieur
Soldier – Vincent Morell
Actors – Nathalie Baunaure, Fitzgerald Berthon, Andrea Fabi, Manon Lheureux

William Kentridge (director)
Luc De Wit (co-director)
Sabine Theunissen (set designs)
Greta Goiris (costumes)
Catherine Meyburgh (video)
Urs Schönebaum (lighting)
Kim Gunning (video operator)  

Maîtrise des-Hauts-de Seins/Children’s Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus master: Gaël Darchen),
Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus master: Ching-Lien Wu)
Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

 

Four-and-a-halfyears ago, I saw William Kentridge’s then new Wozzeck at the Salzburg Festival. I found myself somewhat nonplussed by its more distanced, alienating aspects, thinking them better suited to Kentridge’s Lulu (seen the year before, at ENO). For whatever reason, I found them less of a problem and, in many respects, less apparent in this move to Paris than I had in Salzburg. Why might that have been? Such a question is necessarily speculative, since one never knows how much one is comparing like with like, but I do not think that invalidates the question. Part of the difference may simply have lain with my reception; having spent more time not only experiencing but thinking about contemporary theatre, musical and otherwise, I am probably now more receptive to more distanced approaches. I was also nearer the stage, which, given a staging that was dark in hue and involved quite intricate video projections, was a definite advantage, probably not to be ignored. But I think this was also a more intense musical and dramatic performance, offering greater emotional and psychological depth, enabling a more productive balance between distance and immediacy, to the benefit of both. 

Connected to that, more strongly than I experienced it before, was the overwhelming presence of war, in this case the Great War, though events elsewhere in Europe were doubtless on many minds too. Social brutalisation—remember Britten’s ‘the more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual’ for Peter Grimes—came strongly to the fore, not as a substitute for individual acts, but as a context and in many respects an intensification for them. This felt more strongly as if it were a drama founded in a military context, rather than having that context uneasily tacked on: tribute, I think, to some very fine dramatic performances. But the first in particular of the tavern scenes also felt more central, its madness and its malice seeping out in all directions, even retrospectively. Here, the haunted weirdness of masks (new resonances for a pandemic world) and puppets seemed to fuse more strongly with a post-Mahlerian musical sensibility: those marionettes from the ‘Rondo-Burleske’ of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony come once again to life; or perhaps better (or at least closer to the truth), to death. Here was an expressionism in which Kentridge’s artificiality participated, danced, and sang. 

Not that this was an especially Mahlerian performance. Mahler’s ghosts were present, of course. How could they not be in this opera? But listening again to that same scene from Claudio Abbado’s Vienna recording, I realise that Susanna Mälkki’s concerns were in many respects quite different. Musical processes came more strongly to the fore through Berg’s closed forms, but with a hint at least of the Neue Sachlichkeit of the Twenties (when, of course, composition was completed, and the work’s premiere given). That psychological depth was present in, to borrow once more from Britten, the turning of the musical screw. Individual lines went their different ways, brought together in harmony and in contrapuntal and/or suspended counterpoint, yet also recognising that, more often than not, there remained a distance (that word again) from Mahler’s world, that this was a world of atonality, which had already suffered the war whose catastrophic progress we saw tracked onstage. Mälkki showed a keen sense of the whole, but also of detail: absolutely crucial in this work. She was warmer, I think, than Vladimir Jurowski in Salzburg, or at least less unremittingly formalist, without taking Abbado’s (or, say, Daniel Barenboim’s) late Romanticism as her model. This seemed not only her Wozzeck, but a Wozzeck designed for this production and these singers. 

Much the same could be said of Johan Reuter’s assumption of the title role: tormented, yes, but very much within a particular context, spatial and historical as well as more conventionally expressionist. Reuter made much of the words, without making too much of them, gauging the level of speech and song unerringly, with apt fluidity and undeniable direction of purpose. Eva-Maria Westbroek’s Marie was formidable, flawed, and feisty, never a victim, in a performance that grew out of yet was never confined to the text. John Daszak’s hideously cocky Drum Major, Gerhard Siegel’s mysteriously commonplace (in a good way!) Captain, and Falk Struckmann’s similarly etched Doctor all shone in their different ways. So too did Tansel Akzeybek’s Andres, in what can sometimes seem a lesser role than it is, yet here offered an excellent counterpoint to Wozzeck: what might have been, yet tragically never really would (and would it even have been much better?) One might say the same of Marie-Andrée Bouchard-Lesieur’s Margret, vis-à-vis Marie. The whole sorry society was finely portrayed, with a fine eye and ear both to ensemble and individuality, all underpinned by typically excellent playing of heft, transparency, and a myriad of darkened colours from the Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris.

Whether I have answered my original question, ‘why might that have been?’ I am unsure. Attempting to do so, though, has helped structure my response. In a sense, delineating and structuring responses out of chaos is what Berg and his interpreters are all involved with. 

Prom 33 - BBC SO/Farnes - Musgrave and Brahms, 7 August 2018

Royal Albert Hall

Thea Musgrave: Phoenix Rising (1997)

Brahms: Ein deutsches Requiem, op.45
 

Golda Schultz (soprano)

Johan Reuter (bass-baritone)
BBC Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Neil Ferris)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Richard Farnes (conductor)

  

I am not sure I could find much of a connection between the two works on offer here. They offered ‘contrast’ of a sort, I suppose, yet not in a meaningful way such as I could discern. No matter: the concert was what it was, concluding in a truly excellent performance of Brahms’s German Requiem, infinitely preferable to a curiously vacuous one I heard last autumn – perhaps more the time of year for it – from starrier forces in Berlin.

 

First, however, came Thea Musgrave’s 1997 orchestral work, Phoenix Rising, its title taken from a sign outside a Virginia coffee shop, its programmatic subject matter that of, well, a phoenix rising from the ashes. Its opening éclat promised much, very much a presentiment of the sharpness – rhythmic, yet not only that – of the rest of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s performance under Richard Farnes. It could have been the prelude to a stage work; I could not help but wonder if it might have been better off that way. For the piece’s initial post-Peter Grimes dramatic tension dissipated somewhat, transforming in a different way from the phoenix, into a competent yet hardly earth-shattering tone poem. Unrepentantly tonal, it came to sound more like film music than a concert work. Visual theatrics, in which the excellent timpanist cued a bass drum player above, before downing his sticks and leaving the stage amused and/or puzzled, yet seemed to lack motivation in to the musical material (other than his ceasing to play for a while, before being heard at the end, off-stage). It was interesting to hear a Proms premiere from a composer long overlooked in this country; I doubt I should hasten to hear it again.

 

The introduction to the opening chorus of the Brahms, ‘Selig sing, die da Leid tragen’ – from the Beatitudes, of course – truly set the scene for the rest of Farnes’s reading. Combining serenity with a hint of harmonic grit often missed, he pointed to the location of meaning in Brahms’s harmony. It is all there, pretty much. In the words too, of course, but one might have a pretty good feeling for what this splendidly Lutheran humanist – in more than one sense – work was about even without. Or so one imagined. At any rate, the BBC Symphony Chorus, upon its entry, ensured that we never had to find out, its rounded tone of consolation just the thing – as was its diction. The movement remained founded, even grounded, upon its bass line, orchestral and choral. This was to be a ‘natural’, unaffected performance of the very best kind.

The following chorus’s roots in early music – not only Bach and Handel, not only Schütz, but earlier – were clear at its opening, without any need to underline, to highlight. Once again, the placing of chords, the path of harmonic progressions, mattered in work and performance, yet without a hint of pedantry. Soft, which is not to say weak, foreboding, ‘All flesh is as grass’, grew and grew through the great sarabande processional. Brahms may not have been a Believer, but he knew what belief and Belief were. The central section, ‘So seid nun geduldig…’, was taken more swiftly, with greater contrast, than often one hears; it worked very well indeed, heightening expectancy in words and music alike. A sense of return, musical as much as theological, was finely achieved thereafter, with the return of the opening material, prior to turning of the corner, clean and warm: the Lord’s Word would endure for ever. Again swifter than usual, the closing section worked splendidly, the foretelling of heavenly rejoicing almost akin to a choral climax in Haydn. Farnes shaped this music, as that of the whole, with powerful yet unobtrusive understanding.

 

Johan Reuter proved a sincere soloist, his diction also excellent, in ‘Herr, lehre doch mich’, the chorus engaged in a dark game, or perhaps better ritual, of versicle and response. Subtle darkening of instrumental colours as the psalmist reflected upon the humbreing of his days proved just as telling as the vocal line itself. A swift closing once again worked; it was not hard-driven, but a release that was again as much musical as a mere response to the words. Klemperer’s is not the only way. And yet, all the while, that pedal point resounded in a way the grand old man would surely have appreciated. The ensuing chorus, ‘Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen,’ flowed beautifully, indeed beguilingly, without a hint of sentimentality.

 

Golda Schultz’s solo work in the next number, ‘Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit’, offered a near ideal blend of the ‘angelic’ and the ‘womanly’: the ‘Ewig-Weibliche’, one might almost suggest, in Goethian homage. I was put a little in mind of Edith Mathis (on Daniel Barenboim’s early recording, although there was perhaps greater range here. Maternal comfort – the death of Brahms’s mother almost certainly played some role here, just as the death of Webern’s mother would for so much of his œuvre – was apparent, was felt, with a nice sense of homage to Mendelssohn, delectable BBC woodwind and all, towards the close.

 

I wondered whether Reuter might have been a little forthright in ‘Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende Statt’, but perhaps that was as much a matter of the Albert Hall acoustic as performance. At any rate, choral swallowing up of death and grave in victory proved a thing of awe, prior to another Haydn-Gloria-close: which, after all, is precisely what the words from Revelation suggest. This was not difference for the sake of it, but a keen response both to words and music. The final chorus, taken more or less attacca, reinforced the ‘cyclical’ element to Brahms’s vision. That is not quite the right word, I know, for we have been changed by what has happened in the meantime; yet tonally, there is – and here there was felt to be – a strong element of return. Farnes’s ability to maintain the longest of lines came in very handy here, as did his readily apparent long-term harmonic thinking. Blessed were these dead souls indeed.

Terror in Munich: Munich Opera Festival (1) - Der fliegende Holländer, Bavarian State Opera, 22 July 2016

Nationaltheater, Munich

Daland – Matti Salminen

Senta – Catherine Nagelstad
Erik – Wookyung Kim
Mary – Okka von der Damerau
Steersman – Dean Power
Dutchman – Johan Reuter

Peter Konwitschny (director)

Johannes Leiacker (designs)
Michael Bauer (lighting)
Werner Hintze (dramaturgy)

Chorus and Extra Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus master: Søren Eckhoff)

Bavarian State Orchestra
Asher Fisch (conductor)

Nationaltheater, Munich. Image: Felix Löchner

 

‘This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.’ It is, perhaps, a line quoted too often; yet, even though it may not have been entirely accurate on this occasion, it came to my mind. Its accuracy might be questioned in several respects. Although the Bavarian State Opera eschewed Wagner’s Tristan-esque revision – rightly, in my view, that working better for Tannhäuser than The Flying Dutchman – this was not Götterdämmerung. Moreover, the end, as we experienced it, came more as silence and alienation than a whimper; close, then, but probably not quite the same. More important still, in retrospect – hindsight was inescapable on this particular occasion – the real catastrophe, or rather news of it, came after the end of the performance, the ‘real world’, as is far too often the case at the moment, offering the keenest of tragedy. So perhaps I should start again; I shall not, however, since I should like to start at the end, indeed feel compelled to do so, lest tales of Mrs Lincoln and her critique of the evening’s dramatic proceedings hover too close for comfort. For this was an evening – thank God – never to be repeated, one that even the most ambitious of stage directors would have struggled to envisage, let alone to create. Without in any sense wishing to minimise Peter Konwitschny’s achievement in this typically arresting, provocative, yet ultimately deeply, if not unrelievedly, sympathetic production, only Karlheinz Stockhausen, and before him Richard Wagner himself, might have come anywhere near this – and even then, not so very near.

 

The music stopped, then, just before the final bars; the lights fell. Silence fell too, the singers looking uneasily at each other: splendidly acted, I remember thinking. Then, following that caesura – inevitable memories of Konwitschny’s celebrated Meistersinger, even for those of us who only heard tell – we heard the final bars, albeit from what sounded like a distant, wind-up gramphone. I even wondered whether it might have been Konwitschny père’s recording, rendered more ancient, not that that matters. Redemption, then, was undercut not only by Wagner’s Tristan-less ending. (I am skating over the more complex issues of earlier versions, but that is not really the point here.) It was ironised – few directors manage to ironise Wagner successfully; Konwitschny does – by hearing it as something we all knew, all expected, were more or less hearing in our heads anyway, and yet then did not hear as we should. It was a little like King Marke’s appearance in Die Meistersinger: meaningful, consequential, a modernist rather than a post-modernist quotation.

 

Then we spilled out onto the Max-Joseph-Platz, quite unaware of Munich’s terrorist lockdown. My telephone had no reception; I could not contact a friend, to see whether he had been there or not. (It later transpired that he had not.) Many of my fellow opera-leavers seemed puzzled. We could not, for instance, enter a restaurant on the other side of the square; although a few people in there were eating, the doors were locked. Whilst trying to find out what was going on, I eventually received a call from my father, to check that I was safe; he began to explain, and armed police came into view. I learned after that those who were less quick on their feet than I had been were unable to leave the Nationaltheater for quite some time. I, however, had little choice but to try to walk back to where I was staying, armed police and other advisors pointing me and others first in one direction, then in another, often seeming to disagree with each other. Meanwhile, so far as I was aware – this was not the case, but it was what everyone seemed to think at the time – the U-Bahn was closed, since one of several gunmen (there was, of course, only one) had gone down there, armed. Walking past Odeonsplatz station was a little frightening, then; but it was the eeriness of the evacuated beer festival in the square – when I had walked to the opera, it had been full of beer, music, Dirndls, Lederhosen – that, if anything, chilled more. Having spoken to my brother too, I made it back to my host’s, who filled me in on events unfolded and unfolding – and immediately poured me a much-needed drink.

 

I learned much later that what I ‘should’ have seen and heard – Barry Millington had sent me his review of the production, but I had not read it at the time – was Senta, clearly furious with the Dutchman for not having trusted enough, setting one of the quayside barrels ablaze and mount her own act of terror. The explosion I ‘should’ have heard – unlike Wagner’s music, I did not know it – never came; darkness and alienation, nevertheless curiously, chillingly effective, did. No wonder so many onstage ‘acted’ confused; they had not, it seems, been acting at all. Presumably many had suspected a technical problem. The Bavarian State Opera had, it seems, decided to pull the explosion. For those in the know, was this perhaps a bit like ‘hearing’ Mahler’s missing third hammer-blow in the Sixth Symphony? (Thank goodness this was not a Mahler evening: that really would have been too much.) And so, the business of interpreting, reinterpreting, a particularised version of Konwitschny’s staging – never, let us hope, to be repeated – truly got under way; or at least it did in the odd couple of seconds between replying to anxious Facebook and Twitter messages from friends. (Why, they wondered, had I not replied? Most of them had no idea, of course, that I had been in the theatre for nearly two-and-a-half hours, without an interval.) I shall never forget the non-bang and the gramophone whimper, nor the further step our wretched world made towards Götterdämmerung.

 

Let me turn, though, to what I had seen and heard before. My memory and my experience are doubtless coloured by the ‘other’ events of that night. Nevertheless, what I saw and heard was impressive indeed, on its own terms. Our friends at Against Modern Opera Productions – how chilling it was to see, that very night, them railing, as if Hitler had never fallen, against ‘degenerate’ artists – might even have liked, had they not seen the word ‘Konwitschny’, the realistic designs from Johannes Leiacker, with which the mise-en-scène opens. For it is a (German) Romantic, even Gothic landscape that provides the backdrop. Apart from anything else, this is a ghost story: every one of us, every society, is overwhelmed by ghosts from our pasts. So too, of course, is opera. Nevertheless, ships are definitely ships; the sea and sky are definitely the sea and sky. The Dutchman’s crew, moreover, are most definitely Golden Age Dutchmen. The painterliness is, in one sense at least, ironic. AMOP would not have ‘got’ that; representations and their deconstruction would have gone unnoticed, uncomprehended. They would surely, though, have noticed the heightened venality not only of Daland, but his crew too (modern Norwegians, but as yet, not with an overwhelming Wagnerian clash between ghostly visitors and the ‘present’). Daland’s pockets of a few golden chains; the Steersman crowns himself with a golden crown; the other lads eagerly join in the bonanza: there is much jewellery to be had from the new ship’s Cardillac-like cargo, unless, as one of Wagner’s less-eagerly acknowledged forebears might have advised him, ‘L’or est une chimère’. A chimera of another variety haunts the Dutchman: the Angel in white who visits the stage. This Dutchman is a man, with sexual fantasies of his own; they distract him, pave the way for tragedy; they lead us to the second act.

 

Our opera-as-Pegida acquaintances would certainly have started screaming degeneracy, at the deliberate scenic contrast when the curtain rose upon that act. This is a swish health club, in which the wheels that spin are those on the exercise bicycles. Mary leads the class, the girls engaged in the uneasy camaraderie and rivalry of the mindless heteronormative pursuit for an ‘ideal’ physical form to please ‘the’ men they have either hooked or would like to hook. (Or is it the other way round?) Spinning, one might say, takes more than one guise: old visiting new, new visiting old; connections abound. Senta does not fit in; she arrives late for the class, and is far more interested in her Romantic painting. Erik is a creepy yet impatient voyeur: no mere innocent he. Yet it is Senta’s disruptive presence, encouraged by the reappearing Angel, that ultimately, prophetically, proves the turning point. It sets in process the Brechtian – house lights on – lecture to the audience she and the Dutchman give at the close of the act. ‘Romantic love? Yeah, right…’ Everything, then, is set up to fail, as it increasingly does during the third act, modernity and caricatured Old Dutchmen engaging in violent combat, the past, as it so often is, victorious – not least because the present refuses to learn from it. And then – well, you have heard the rest. Explosion there comes – on this occasion, came there not.

 

The cast was distinguished. Catherine Naglestad trod to powerful, even searing effect the line between, on the one hand, twin incitement to Verfremdung and terror, and on the other, heartfelt, Romantic or neo-Romantic ‘feminine’ suffering. Her top notes – and not just her top notes – thrilled; we were reminded that the female redemption problematized by Konwitschny, by us more generally, is, not only in Wagner but in so much opera, often effected through vocal presence. Johan Reuter traced this complex Dutchman’s mood swings with great skill; we sympathised with, even followed, his distractions and his demons. Matti Salminen’s final Daland – so, at any rate, I was informed – was a bluff yet knowing performance, a fine tribute to a great artist. Wookyung Kim came close to stealing the show with his sensitively sung, far-from-pushover Erik. Okka von der Damerau imparted dramatic as well as ‘merely’ musical meaning to the role of Mary, and Dean Power proved as appealing and as intriguing a Steersman as I can recall having heard. Choral singing was wonderfully full-blooded too. All, then, engaged with Wagner’s work as living drama.

 

The Bavarian State Orchestra was, unsurprisingly, in its element here. Its playing encompassed all manner of shades from darkest, grimmest of musical tragedy to echoes of Mendelssohn and Weber, apparently – if only apparently – more blithe, even fairy-like. This was orchestral Wagner as outstanding as one might hear from Daniel Barenboim’s Staatskapelle Berlin. Asher Fisch might have benefited from a more Barenboim-like sense of the work’s melos; or at least he would have done for me, my preference being very much for a more ‘musico-dramatic’, less ‘number-opera’ approach to the work. The latter is, of course, perfectly justifiable in theory, but it tends, unless more strongly incorporated into a sense of an unbroken whole, to make parts of the work drag – especially when, as here, numbers such as Senta’s Ballad, are taken so slowly. Fisch undoubtedly knew what he was doing, though; he had me, on more than one occasion, rethink, rehear. The waltzing at the end of the first act – perfectly in keeping with fantasies venal and sexual, visually as well as musically realised – pointed far into the musico-dramatic future, to Strauss as well as to the integrative tendencies of later Wagner. The Flying Dutchman is in some ways the most difficult Wagner drama of all to bring off musically; no one would have been seriously disappointed, if at all, by this performance.

The rest was silence; until, that is, it became the noise of chaos.

Oedipe, Royal Opera, 23 May 2016

Images: ROH/Clive Barda

Royal Opera House

Theban High Priest – Nicolas Courjal

Shepherd – Alan Oke
Theban Woman – Lauren Fagan
Créon – Samuel Youn
Laïos – Hubert Francis
Jocaste – Sarah Connolly
Tirésias – John Tomlinson
Oedipe – Johan Reuter
Phorbas – In Sung Sim
Mérope – Claudia Huckle
Watchman – Stefan Kocan
Sphinx – Marie-Nicole Lemieux
Antigone – Sophie Bevan
Thésée – Samuel Dale Johnson

Àlex Ollé (La Fura dels baus) and Valentina Carrasco (directors)

Alfons Flores (set designs)
Lluc Castells (costumes)
Peter van Praet (lighting)

 

 

 

After the opening night of the first ever staging of George Enescu’s Oedipe in this country, I can say without the slightest hesitation that this will prove the most important event of the Royal Opera’s season. How, after all, could it not? I probably should be more cautious, given that it was my first hearing of the work, but it sounded very much as if it were the composer’s masterpiece to me. Indeed, my initial reaction was much akin to my hearing works – perhaps not entirely dissimilar, but not especially similar either – such as Szymanowski’s King Roger and Busoni’s Doktor Faust for the first time. Whilst others become enraged or, occasionally, enraptured by what Katie Mitchell might have done to a piece of drivel by Donizetti, a work surely quite undeserving of her talents as a director, the rest of us owe the Royal Opera and all concerned with this production a heartfelt vote of thanks. I should eagerly go again, if only I could make any of the dates work; I urge you, if you have not yet seen and heard the production and can, not to hesitate.

Sphinx (Marie-Nicole Lemieux) and Oedipe

First and foremost is the work itself. To my shame, I know little of Enescu’s music; he is one of those composers I have long been intending to ‘get around to’, but until now, have not really done so. He is known at least equally well as a conductor, violinist, and perhaps even as teacher, but unlike, say, Furtwängler, whose compositions are interesting yet hardly essential, Enescu was first and foremost a composer. One might actually draw another comparison with Busoni: unquestionably one of the greatest pianists of all time, yet with music (unforgivably ignored in this 150^th anniversary year) that will remain a still greater testament.

 

Jocaste (Sarah Connolly) and Oedipe (Johan Reuter)

The compositional language and structure intrigue. One might, I suppose, call the latter traditional; it is certainly not experimental. This is a four-act opera with ‘conventional’ yet highly powerful, well-crafted narrative (let us not forget Edmond Fleg’s libretto here), which stands in something of a Wagnerian tradition, but is certainly not overwhelmed by it. Likewise the vocal writing, which owes something to Wagner, or perhaps better to (post-)Wagnerism, but no more than Strauss does, and probably less. As Jim Samson puts it in his excellent programme note (the ROH programme is of particularly high quality on this occasion): ‘On the surface, Enescu’s vocal writing appears similar to the kind of quasi-recitative characteristic of many post-Wagnerian operas, but on closer inspection it reveals its motivic credentials as a characteristic component of the closely unified thematic substance. The composer himself referred to a “single flow of ideas”.’ So did it unquestionably sound in this outstanding performance – yes, there was no difficulty in ascertaining that upon a single hearing – from Leo Hussain. Not only did Hussain draw out playing from the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House of a quality of which we know it capable, but which has not always been heard recently, save for under a small number of visiting conductors such as Semyon Bychkov; his pacing and palpable understanding of the way the music and the musical drama work would have had one believe he stood at the helm of a work central to the repertory. Clearly it should be, but opera houses, alas, too often know better.

In the musical language, one hears strong French elements too: Debussyan and Ravelian elements (I even thought of Vaughan Williams at times), or at least parallels, albeit within a more Germanically-structured framework. Enescu’s use of voices within the orchestra almost as if they were vocal and not just orchestral commentary is striking, as his handling of choral forces. Samson again captures the former tellingly, speaking of an idiom ‘caught somewhere between Mahler’s fragmentation and Debussy’s variegation of the late-Romantic orchestra’. Not a note seems to be wasted, moreover; in this retelling of Sophocles, which involves a good deal of material implied or spoken of in the original tragedies, yet never seen on stage, the use of music not only to serve drama but as drama inevitably has one, once more, thinking of Wagner.

 

So too does the staging. If characterisation of the particular flavours and styles of each act, within an overarching framework is achieved with great musical success, Hussain’s conducting is complemented by a typically imaginative production from La Fura dels baus. The initial coup de théâtre haunts one’s experience throughout the performance, and indeed thereafter, the finely detailed, hieratic stage curtain melting, during the Prelude, into the ‘real thing’. A tableau vivant is what we see and static, tableau-like music – quite unlike that of Stravinsky’s inimitable ‘opera-oratorio’, which in any case yet lay in the future – was what we heard too. Interaction and support were indeed the hallmarks of production and performance throughout. The dialogue between certain archaisms – not really musical, but perhaps hinted at by the music, oboe and harps bringing to my mind Birtwistle’s later evocations of Greek antiquity – are always convincing, yet never entirely predictable. I am not entirely sure, or indeed at all sure, why the Sphinx lived within an apparently crashed aeroplane, but that offered nevertheless senses of wonder and of surprise, as well as of revelation. After all, the story is propelled by things and people not being quite what they seem to be (as well, of course, as having been condemned by Fate to do precisely what they have been ordained to do). Oedipus, in Enescu’s conception, is more Everyman than unapproachable hero; in that, he is ‘modern’ and so do we see him here. Likewise his fickle people and the treacherous army-man, Créon. It is, however, less heavy-worn conceptual communication than a fine sense of narrative theatre which, above all, animates what we see, Jocaste’s emergence, every inch the film star, from the city of Thebes is a case in point.

 

Oedipe

Covent Garden assembled an impressive cast too, considerably more than the far from inconsiderable sum of its parts. Johan Reuter’s assumption of the title role again had one believe this was a central, heroic, repertory performance. Each part of the hero’s life, from the beginning of the second act – the first celebrates his birth and quickly follows celebration with the desperate expulsion of this son to Laïos to Jocaste – to the end of the fourth has one experience an Oedipe both different and yet familiar. A lifetime was convincingly, powerfully portrayed, with fine command both of musical style and of verbal response. Sarah Connolly certainly exhibited those qualities in her Jocaste, with acting to match; her voice, however, sounded thinner than I can recall. It did not really detract from the performance, but I should like also to hear a richer voice in the role. John Tomlinson did his usual thing, and did it, as usual, very well, in the role of Tirésias. There was no gender-bending here, but the honesty and integrity of the poor, blind prophet shone through, in a role that generally fitted well the singer’s present range. Samuel Youn made for a suitably nasty, civilised Créon: what an unsympathetic character he is, and yet how necessary to the drama! I was less convinced than many seemed to be by Marie-Nicole Lemieux’s Sphinx; I heard her words less often than was ideal, although the timbre of the voice seemed well-suited to the role. From the rest of an excellent line-up, Nicolas Courjal’s authoritative High Priest, Sophie Bevan’s beautifully sung and beautiful-of-heart Antigone, and Samuel Dale Johnson’s calmly commanding Thésée stood out to me.

 

Tirésias (John Tomlinson)

 

Choral singing was, save for those hieratic scenes, of a very high quality, for which temporary chorus master, Genevieve Ellis deserves great credit. Sadly, the visually arresting quality of the tableau did not transfer so well into vocal terms; a friend suggested to me at the interval that the chorus members could not hear each other very well. Still, the scenes on the ground, as it were, benefited greatly from artists who could act as well as sing. Collaboration with La Fura dels baus seems definitely to have inspired them. As an audience-member, it certainly inspired me. This, I should repeat, is an important achievement indeed, not to be missed.

Prom 59 - BBC SO/Bychkov - Elektra, 31 August 2014

 

Images: BBC/Chris Christodoulou
Dame Felicity Palmer as Klytemnestra

 

 

Royal Albert Hall

Elektra – Christine Goerke

Chrysothemis – Gun-Brit Barkmin

Klytemnestra – Dame Felicity Palmer

Orest – Johan Reuter

First Maid – Katarina Bradić

Second Maid – Zoryana Kushpler

Third Maid – Hanna Hipp

Fourth Maid – Marie-Eve Munger

Fifth Maid – Iris Kupke

Overseer – Miranda Keys

Young Servant – Ivan Turšić

Orest’s tutor – Jongmin Park

Aegisth – Robert Künzli

Justin Way (stage director)

BBC Singers (chorus master: Paul Wiegold)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Semyon Bychkov (conductor)

 

Anti-Strauss sentiment, Strauss-scepticism, call it what you will: it still runs high. In some ways, that is not a bad thing: the ‘case of Strauss’, which I have written about before and which I shall discuss further in a chapter of my new book, to be published next month, is complex and fascinating, and is certainly not to be resolved with a one-liner here or an affirmation or otherwise there. Strauss’s æstheticism, perhaps ironically, given its insistence upon the value of art as art, leads us to greater consideration of æsthetic questions than the work of many other composers. That holds even when, perhaps particularly when, one is not of a prosecuting party ranging from Karl Kraus (‘certainly more of a stock company [Aktiengesellschaft] than a genius’) to Stravinsky  (‘I would like to admit all Strauss’s operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant vulgarity. Their musical substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a musician today.’) However, even those who disdain much of Strauss’s later work – often, to my mind, for less than convincing reasons – will admit their admiration for Elektra. It may not be many people’s ‘favourite’ Strauss opera, but most, I suspect, will consider it his greatest. Adorno, who went to the extreme of claiming that ‘everything that follows Rosenkavalier  is either applied or commercial art,’ and who, in my view, quite wrongly, even took Strauss to task for the ‘entire final section of Elektra, [in which] banality is dominant,’ admitted the opera to a line of development ‘from Tristan to Elektra to Schoenberg’s Erwartung’.

 

And so, whilst in principle it was somewhat depressing that the Proms elected to perform the three most popular of Strauss’s operas for his anniversary season – surely if we were to hear, for instance, Friedenstag anywhere in this country, it would be here – it was difficult, both in principle, and certainly in practice, with so fine a performance, to object too strongly, or indeed at all. Justin Way’s semi-staging worked as well as it had for the Proms Ring last year. Often, though not slavishly, following Hofmannsthal’s explicit directions – Elektra and Klytemnestra did ‘stand eye to eye’, and to very good effect – it permitted the work to ‘speak for itself’, although in any case it generally does in full stagings, which tend perhaps more strongly to resemble one another than do those of any other opera that springs to my mind.

 

Semyon Bychkov, the Maids, and the Overseer

 

 

As with that Ring, the orchestra took centre stage, the BBC Symphony Orchestra on excellent form throughout. (The occasional moment of tiredness towards the end can readily be forgiven for any orchestra.) And likewise, we were fortunate indeed in the choice of conductor: Daniel Barenboim for the Ring; for Elektra, Semyon Bychkov, who was, if memory serves me correctly, the first conductor I heard in this work. Yet that should not be taken, any more than it had with a Ring that included Nina Stemme and Andreas Schager, to imply a downgrading of the vocal element. In proper Wagnerian style – and in this, if avowedly not with respect to metaphysics, or the lack thereof, Strauss remained a Wagnerian through and through – the various elements of the performance, even in a minimal staging, strengthened one another.

 

That could be heard in the first scene, in which a very nicely differentiated group of maids interacted with flickering intensity with conducting which really did emphasise that clichéd taking after Mendelssohn’s fairy music. The foresight of the Fifth Maid, Iris Kupke, was experienced as much in performance as in work. Miranda Keys’s Overseer was again well differentiated, though not exaggeratedly so, from the ‘mere’ maids. And then, in what might call the ‘interlude’ in which Elektra emerges from the house, Bychkov ensured that Strauss’s waltz writing disconcertingly reared its head and pointed ahead.

 

Christine Goerke’s Elektra announced herself in deeper voice than one often hears: more feminine, less harpy, though so certainly not lacking in volume where necessary. Sepulchral trombones complemented her lament, intensifying those baleful calls of ‘Agamemnon’ that were to follow. Throughout her lengthy soliloquy, Bychkov conjured up – and the BBC SO delivered – a truly Straussian orchestral phantasmagoria, in colour and in harmony. ‘Agamemnon! Vater!’: the orchestra sent shivers down the spine. But equally compelling was the tenderness from Goerke and orchestra alike, never more so than after ‘zeig dich deinem Kind!’ A daughter’s affection may have been twisted but, on one level, it remained childishly simple. Rhythmic and melodic details, for instance the baying of the dogs, both made their point in themselves and, when it came to material to be developed later on, sowed their musico-dramatic seeds with both mystery and expectant, Fatal clarity.

 

 

Gun-Brit Barkmin as Chrysothemis

The following scene, with Chrysothemis, was interesting. Elektra’s blood-curdling ‘spaltete dein Fleisch’ stood at one extreme. The flowering, in more than one sense, of Gun-Brit Barkmin’s Chrysothemis intrigued, if anything, more still. During her first lines, I wondered whether Barkmin would prove a little underpowered, even anonymous. But, as a panoply of woodwind colour to rival the composer’s ‘Indian summer’ worked its queasy magic, it became clear that this was a sister who would grow into her role at the crucial point: the voicing of what, in context, seems her very weird – or is it very ‘normal’? who knows any more? – obsession with child-bearing. Thereafter this was a woman indeed.

 

A woman indeed of a different nature is Klytemnestra. Her orchestrally-voiced arrival sent shivers down the spine, enhanced or perhaps ‘realised’ by Felicity Palmer’s splendidly grande-dame procession. If Palmer’s voice is vocally not what it was, it frankly mattered not a jot. But whilst this extraordinary confrontation worked itself out in words and singing, the orchestra broadened our terms of musical reference. You, yourself are a goddess, Elektra told her mother. What, then, did it mean to hear apparent echoes of Siegfried’s ‘Forest Murmurs’? Well, there is honesty in the German forest, but there is also redress, as Mime would find to his cost. The malevolent replanting of those Wagnerian seeds was suggestive, whether coincidental or otherwise. Fafner-like brass deepened the very real agony and sickness we heard from Palmer’s magnificently attentive outlining of that ‘Etwas’ which had fallen upon her. As for the intensity and sheer volume with which Goerke despatched ‘ich steh’ da und seh’ dich endlich sterben’ and likewise ‘der jauchzt und kann sich seines Lebens freun!’ What can one say other than superlative? Perfectly matched, by the way, by the orchestra as they stood, in that aforementioned scene, ‘eye to eye’.

 

Brittle, sardonic, orchestral mock-heroism ‘accompanied’ the appearance of the Young Servant. Sheer orchestral depravity ‘beautifully’ captured, in all its bizarre mixture of sincerity and insincerity, Elektra’s hymn to her sister’s female form. And finally, the relief of Orest’s arrival: not quite the first male voice but, my goodness, it sounded as if it were! Johan Reuter’s delivery of this difficult role brought bluff anger rather than the more ‘intellectual’ approach of a Matthias Goerne. There is room for both, but here, Reuter felt ‘right’. The final recognition hit as it should: a truly shattering dissonance on Elektra’s ‘Orest’ would be followed up by too beautiful remembrance of her former self, bathed in a narcissism that seemed almost literally, or at least verbally, skin-deep.

 

I do not know whether Palmer delivered her own off-stage scream. Whoever did it deserves mention in her own right, for it vied with the orchestral response – and Goerke’s truly terrifying steely response: Triff noch einmal!’ No compassion here, thank you. Again, Strauss’s insidious waltzing proved thematically, dramatically pregnant in the scene with Aegisth (a competent but less than exciting Robert Künzli). Rosenkavalier seemed less around the corner than already present as, following Elektra’s strange courtesies, he entered the house.

 

Christine Goerke as Elektra

Somehow, the voices of the BBC Singers seemed more than usually akin to Elektra’s ‘voices’ in a psychological sense. It was probably partly a matter of not seeing the singers, perhaps also a matter of the acoustic. Whatever the reason, it added an interesting, appropriately psychoanalytical deadliness to the final events. The insincerity, in context, of C major may here have been Strauss’s – and Bychkov’s, and the orchestra’s – crowning achievement. To speak, as Adorno did, of the discontinuity ‘between the wildness of most of Strauss’s music in Elektra and its blissfully triadic conclusion’ seems at the best of times wilful. Blissful? About as much as Handel’s use of the major mode in the ‘Dead March’ from Saul. After a brief period of ‘release’ with a ‘true’ operatic duet between the sisters, there came the final dramatic bludgeoning. And Elektra fell as shatteringly on stage as she did in the orchestra.