Der Rosenkavalier, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 2 January 2024

Die Feldmarschallin, Fürstin Werdenberg – Julia Kleiter
Der Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau – Günther Groissböck
Octavian – Marina Prudenskaya
Herr von Faninal – Roman Trekel
Sophie – Golda Schultz
Jungfer Marianne Leitmetzerin – Anna Samuil
Valzacchi – Karl-Michael Ebner
Annina – Katharina Kammerloher
Police Officer – Friedrich Hamel
The Marschallin’s Major-domo – Florian Hoffmann
Faninal’s Major-domo – Johan Krogius
House Servant – Jens-Eric Schulze
Notary – Dionyios Avgerinos
Landlord – Johan Krogius
Singer – Andrés Moreno Garcia
Milliner – Regina Koncz
Vendor of Pets – Michael Kim
Leopold – Oliver Chwat
Lackeys, Waiters – Sooongoo Lee, Felipe Martin, Insoo Hwoang, Thomas Vogel
Three noble orphans – Olga Vilenskaia, Anna Woldt, Verena Albertz
Lerchenauschen – Peter Krumow, Stefan Livland, Mike Keller, Thomas Vogel, Ben Bloomfeld, Andreas Neher
Paper artist – Tomas Höfer
Mohammed – Joseph Umoh

Director – André Heller
Assistant director – Wolfgang Schilly
Set designs – Xenia Hausner, Nanna Neudeck
Costumes – Arthur Arbesser, Onka Allmayer-Beck
Lighting – Olaf Freese
Video – Günter Jäckle, Philip Hillers

Children’s Choir of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (chorus director: Vinzenz Weissenburger)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Gerhard Polifka)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Joana Mallwitz (conductor)

Image: Stefan Liewehr (from 2020 premiere, with different cast)

First seen in 2020, André Heller’s production of Der Rosenkavalier, ‘in collaboration with’ Wolfgang Schilly, is something of an enigma. Not only does there appear to be no overriding concept, nor even sense of what the work might be about; there also seems to be little, if anything, in the way of direction of the characters. There are striking set designs from Xenia Hausner and similarly striking costumes from Arthur Arbesser, although the latter dart about confusingly when it comes to chronology; insofar as one can discern any idea, it comes from the former—and that really seems to be it. On entering the theatre, we are confronted in lieu of a curtain with a playbill for a 1917 benefit performance for war widows and orphans in Vienna. I assume that has some relevance to what unfolds, though war and its consequences are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps the Marschallin is supposed to stand in some relationship to Princess Marie Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, under whose auspices the performance is listed as taking place. The costumes, to this untutored eye, suggest something later, perhaps progressively so, the setting European japonisme. (My heart went out to Michael Kim as Pet Vendor: ‘orientalism’ does not begin…) In the second act, Klimt’s Beethoven frieze and ostentatious vulgarity do a reasonable job in evoking something more up-to-date for Faninal’s palace, although dressing Faninal entirely in gold overeggs the pudding to the point of exploding it. Quite why the third act is set in a giant palm house, I have no idea, but Heller apparently has ‘never understood’ why Hofmannsthal set it where he did. Perhaps he might have tried harder, but no matter. 

There are occasional aperçus and likewise causes for bemusement. As an instance of the former, a full-grown Mohammed’s lingering over the Marschallin’s handkerchief at the close comes as a nice (or even nasty) surprise; he clearly loves her as much as the rest of us. Concerning the latter, I have no idea why a team of opera house crew walk on, in T-shirts saying ‘Staatsoper Unter den Linden’, to mob the Italian singer; such metatheatrical (?) presentism is not evident elsewhere. None of this does any particular harm; by the same token, none of it substitutes for an actual production, its thinking through or its accomplishment, although it might well have offered an attractive if slightly arbitrary mise-en-scene. If I remain some way off declaring ‘Come back Otto Schenk, all is forgiven,’ I could certainly forgive on this occasion someone for saying so. At any rate, it was unclear why it should have been thought necessary to replace Nicolas Brieger’s staging with this lavish Berlin successor. 

Joana Mallwitz unquestionably brought more in the way of ideas, as well as greater familiarity with the work—and with opera more broadly. (One might have thought such qualities sine quibus non, yet in this brave new world in which anyone other than an opera director can be an opera director, seemingly not.) The Preludes to the first act and the opening of the second were attacked with great energy, vividly pictorial or at least amenable to vivid pictorialisation. The Introduction and much of the Pantomime to the third were spellbindingly Mendelssohnian in lightness and balance of textures; I have never heard them quite like that, but should be keen to do so again. Tempi tended to broaden as the acts proceeded, and there were times when I felt the lack of something a little more classical (or indeed closer to Strauss’s own conducting), but there are far worse things than expansiveness in Der Rosenkavalier. At any rate, the Staatskapelle Berlin seemed to respond with enthusiasm to her approach and, if I have heard a greater range of kaleidoscopic colour drawn from the orchestra here, there remained much to admire. 

So too was there in the singing. It seems only yesterday I was making the acquaintance of Julia Kleiter’s artistry as Pamina; now she is the Marschallin, and a distinguished one at that. Her performance showed equal sensitivity to verbal meaning and deeper emotional currents, neither mistaking opera for Lieder nor painting with too broad a brush. Nor did she turn Strauss into Wagner, drawing on considerable Mozartian experience as well as natural, fitting stage presence. Plight, grace, and reassertion of control were moving indeed. Marina Prudenskaya’s Octavian was fruitier of tone than one often hears, though none the worse for that. She captured his ultimate cluelessness to a tee, and likewise offered due bearing for the role. The Faninals were hardly favoured by the production, but Golda Schultz’s unusually headstrong Sophie proved unusually likeable. Roman Trekel made much of his words in particular as her father. Günther Groissböck was audibly ailing, yet nonetheless offered a vigorous and far from off-the-peg performance as Ochs. His command of Bavarian came in handy for baronial rusticity. There were no weak links in this cast; for me, Katharina Kammerloher’s lively Annina, Anna Samuil’s stern yet caring Jungfer Marianne Leitmetzerin, and Johan Krogius’s double turn as intelligent Major-domo to Herr von Faninal and spirited (and far from unintelligent) third-act Landlord stood out. No one hearing these performances could reasonably have been disappointed; if only there had been more of a production with which to engage.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 21 April 2019

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Images: Bernd Uhlig (from the first performances, in 2015)

Hans Sachs – Wolfgang Koch

Veit Pogner – Matti Salminen

Eva – Julia Kleiter

Walther von Stolzing – Burkhard Fritz

David – Siyabonga Maqungo

Magdalene – Katharina Kammerloher

Kunz Vogelgesang – Graham Clark

Konrad Nachtigall – Adam Kutny

Sixtus Beckmesser – Martin Gantner

Fritz Kothner – Jürgen Limm

Balthasar Zorn – Siegfried Jerusalem

Ulrich Eisslinger – Reiner Goldberg

Augustin Moser – Florian Hoffmann

Hermann Ortel – Arttu Kataja

Hans Schwarz – Franz Mazura

Hans Foltz – Olaf Bär

Night Watchman – Erik Rosenius

Andrea Moses (director)

Jan Pappelbaum (set designs)

Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

‘Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding,’ sings Strauss’s Marschallin: a truth that seems to grow truer with our – at least with my – every advancing year. More prosaically, and more specifically, we might also say that openings and re-openings, constructions and reconstructions, creations and recreations, unifications and reunifications are strange things: rarely what they seem, and rarely what the fashionable, the non-critical presume them to be. Such ideas lie at the heart of Die Meistersinger: at its heart, concerned with the ongoing creation and performance of a song, within a society that has both placed such endeavour at its heart and also done its utmost to thwart the same. Perhaps all societies, at least all bourgeois societies – what could be more bürgerlich than this early modernity created and recreated by the nineteenth century? – are like that. As Schiller and Marx, Wagner too, insisted, left to his own devices, man – woman too? – will create as an artist; as all three lamented, that ‘natural’ state of affairs rarely, if ever, pertains. At best, a higher, mediated state of unity might be achieved; but how?

Such thoughts came very much to mind watching, for the first time, Andrea Moses’ 2015 production of the work. Not because it really engages with them: alas, this is a sorry piece of theatre, considered as staging. Nonetheless, the work and its traditions enabled, at least in retrospect, some manner of critique. The gravest charge against the production is its tedium, the second its hapless incoherence. (The two are not unrelated.) It seems to suggest ideas, yet they never seem grounded, never connected; its amateurism, in the worst sense, suggests what the Masters might think of Walther before he sings a note (and many of them do once he has). For the action plays out mostly as if this were the most hidebound of traditionalist stagings, albeit without either that sixteenth-century (or even nineteenth-century) ‘original’ context or a new one to put in its place. The first act takes place in something resembling a concert hall – there are apprentice ushers, or something like that, in black tie – or perhaps a corporate event, Masters’ names displayed as if sponsors. Nothing, however, makes much sense, since there is no apparent effort to explain, to criticise, to create, to recreate, and so forth. Or is it a sportsground sponsors’ lounge, competition here being the thing? Perhaps, for the second act takes place in what seems to be the backstage of a stadium. For some reason – or none – the inhabitants of Nuremberg are now in punk garb. That seems implicitly to be the reason, though surely not the intention, for their descending into a riot, in which football flags are waved. Beckmesser has meanwhile, bafflingly, squeezed himself into sixteenth-century costume. Everyone else has otherwise wandered around aimlessly, save for Walther and Eva who wrap themselves in an ever-present German flag. An Orthodox Jew walks across stage during the turmoil, untouched by and seemingly oblivious to it. I have no idea either…

The first part of the third act moves to a library: fair enough in itself, as setting for Sachs’s world chronicle, although there is no sense of how it relates to anything that has gone before, still less of who these people might be and why they might act as they do. The Festwiese scene attempts, I think, to tie things together, but not only is it too late, the message it appears to project is glib and disturbing, as well as ultimately incoherent. For the production’s origins now come more clearly to the fore. It had originally been intended that this Meistersinger should reopen the renovated eighteenth-century house on Unter den Linden. Work having fallen behind – or new work having been necessitated – that was delayed until 2017, Daniel Barenboim and the outgoing Intendant, Jürgen Flimm, then presenting a staged version of Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s ‘Faust’. Both ‘reopenings’, anticipated and actual – even the latter was a little false, the theatre soon closing again until December – were scheduled for Germany’s new national day, the Tag der Deutschen Einheit, which explicitly celebrates the anniversary of reunification in 1990. The first performance, it seems, took place in two parts: the first two acts on the day itself, the third the following day (the equivalent to Wagner’s Johannistag morning-after to Polterabend, I suppose).

With that in mind, one can perhaps see the celebrations by the Spree, our Pegnitz substitute, as trying, Sachs-like, to bring peace, even unity, to the revelry and violence of the night before. Alas, it is all terribly confused. Is the ‘night before’ the troubled German, past and the ‘morning after’ the here and now? If so, that makes little sense in terms of the premiere chronology; it also makes no sense of the settings, all ‘present’, if little related. The backdrop of the absurdly ‘restored’ old Berliner Schloss – ironically, a mere Potemkin façade, – suggests, however, that we are intended to reflect in such a way. Those who might have preferred a restored GDR Palast der Republik or something new will have had very different thoughts, uneasy at this banal, Disneyfied celebration of capital’s victory over socialism. (I saw the ‘new-old’ façade for the first time fully risen, whilst walking to the performance: a dispiriting sight indeed.) Seemingly as an afterthought, a few Kaiserreich flags are flown and, captured by Sachs, cast into the river. Given that the palace was the Hohenzollerns’, ‘modern’ rejection of that flag seems disingenuous. Most bewildering, though, is the appearance of two Arab ‘sheikhs’ with bodyguard. Our Master ‘sponsors’, their logos again proudly displayed, act with great solicitude to them, explaining events – would that they had to us – and caring for their needs. Have they funded the ‘event’? And if so, what might that mean? They notably leave the stage before the close, excluded or excluding themselves from the final celebration, replete with German flag. A celebration of corporate, ‘moderate’ nationalism, then, from which financially enabling non-Germans must absent themselves? Try as I might, I cannot come up with an inoffensive explanation – even should that prove to be mere cluelessness.

Faced with such irritating nonsense, I found it difficult to concentrate on the musical performances in themselves, though much was clearly admirable. Barenboim’s command of the outstanding Staatskapelle Berlin continues greatly to impress, flexibility, clarity, delight in the score’s Mozartian, conversational qualities, and a thorough grounding in Wagner’s harmonic plan unquestionably apparent. His idea of presenting an array of old Masters – some may recall a similar concept at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival to mark Brian McMaster’s farewell – was engaging. It was a delightful thing indeed to encounter and re-encounter so many great names from the past, such as Siegfried Jerusalem, Graham Clark, and Olaf Bär, all the way to Franz Mazura, due to celebrate his ninety-fifth birthday the following day. Matti Salminen’s Pogner fell into that category too, occasional instability a price well-worth paying for sheer likeability. Wolfgang Koch gave a typically thoughtful, musicianly performance as Sachs, interacting nicely with Martin Gantner’s Beckmesser, Julia Kleiter’s sprightly, sometimes radiant Eva understandably torn. Burkhard Fritz’s Walther had his moments – though they were not always happy; he kept going, though, which is something. Siyabonga Maqungo’s David and Katharina Kammerloher’s Magdalene both impressed in lively, detailed assumptions, making as much as could reasonably be expected from a difficult situation.

If, ultimately, many of these performances seemed more observed than felt, that may well have been the fault of the production – and my inability to rise above it. There will be other creations and recreations, though, other attempts to construct and reconstruct the past, present, and future. This production’s predecessor from Harry Kupfer still lingers in the mind; let us hope the next in line will prove worthier.

Staatskapelle Berlin/Mehta - Haydn, The Creation, 14 March 2017

Konzerthaus, Berlin

Die Schöpfung/The Creation, Hob. XXI:2

Julia Kleiter (soprano)

Christian Elsner (tenor)

René Pape (bass)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus master: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Zubin Mehta (conductor)

It is always a joy to return to Karl Friedrich Schninkel’s Konzerthaus in the Gendarmenmarkt, originally the Prussian Royal Theatre, but latterly, once its post-war restoration was finally completed in 1983, transformed into a concert house. The Staatskapelle Berlin tends, diplomatically, to give its subscription concerts twice: once in West Berlin’s Philharmonie, once in the East’s neo-Classical jewel. Its acoustic is glorious, despite or perhaps even on account of, its interior transformation; there is life in the old-fashioned shoebox auditorium yet, as the Musikverein or Concertgebouw would attest. For a refugee Londoner, to have just one concert hall of such quality is an extraordinary blessing. To have this, the Philharmonie, the new Pierre Boulez Saal…

 

Composed only a couple of decades before the construction of the theatre, Haydn’s Creation or Schöpfung seemed very much ‘at home’ here. Indeed, I could not help but consider the strong connections of its librettist, Gottfried van Swieten, to Berlin a little earlier. Joseph II – by then Holy Roman Emperor and co-Regent with Maria Theresa – had intended him to send him as Imperial Ambassador to Rome, but Swieten’s enthusiasm, noted by the Papal Nuncio to Vienna, for ‘moderno filosofismo’ put an end to that. Instead, Swieten was sent to Frederick the Great’s Berlin, where he encountered Handel’s oratorios and other alte Musik, then perhaps surprisingly well cultivated in Berlin circles (certainly when compared with Vienna). Some of the seeds for his collaboration with Haydn were sown here. (In the present climate, moreover, it was impossible not to think that there could hardly be a more European work by a more European composer and librettist. UKIP and the fanatics running the United Kingdom into the ground would doubtless object to a bilingual text: why cannot everyone speak English? Mostly everyone here can, generally very well indeed; how is your German, Mrs May?)

 

Under Zubin Mehta, the assembled forces gave a broad, central performance of Haydn’s imperishable oratorio, The Creation, neither noticeably ‘period’-influenced – one would hardly expect it to have been – nor especially assertive in its ‘traditionalism’. All such terms are at best problematical to the point of meaninglessness, I know; yet, by the same token, the reader will most likely have a good sense of what is intended. Save for the sparing use of the harpsichord during orchestral passages, then – something about which I cannot bring myself to become too excited either way – I cannot imagine that there would have been anything to scare the horses either way, which is not to say that this was dull, or boring. An equally problematical idea is that of permitting the work to speak for it itself, but that again is pretty much the impression one received. There was plenty of air in the orchestral performance, for instance, during the opening section of Uriel’s first aria, but, by the same token, scope for something darker, when, during that same aria, Hell’s Spirits briefly put in their not-entirely-frightening appearance.

 

Likewise, the real depth to the sound of the Staatskapelle Berlin – always a great strength of this orchestra – in Raphael’s ‘Rollend in schäumenden Wellen’ was not at all at the expense of variegation in sound. Much the same, far from incidentally, might be said about René Pape’s account of the solo line, about which more a little later. Orchestral solos and ensemble writing were, without exception, beautifully, even heart-rendingly, presented: take the clarinet in ‘Nun beut die Flur das frische Grün’, or the ravishing three flutes against pizzicato in Uriel’s Third Part opening number, ‘Aus Rosenwolken bricht’. Eden indeed, then, and the horns proved just as beautiful, as noble of utterance. Even the timpani underlay, subtle yet directed, had me think: ‘Have I actually heard it quite like that before?’ Whether I had or no was hardly the point, for I was made, or gently guided, to listen. Pictorial elements sounded as musical as well as illustrative as I can recall. Maybe even Berlioz would have recanted from his view that this was a work that made him want to murder somebody. A particular highlight of the orchestral playing for me was the sound of violas and cellos in Raphael’s accompagnato, ‘Und Gott schuf große Walfische’: the archaism conjuring up a reimagined viol consort, the modernity equally striking.

 

Tempi were generally much as one, or I, might have expected, sometimes a little slower – for instance, in a dignified reading of ‘Mit Staunen sieht das Wunderwerk’ – and sometimes a little faster – for instance, in a very swift reading of the final chorus – but never unreasonably so, and never with the impression that something was being done to the work. There was a Handelian sturdiness to choruses such as ‘Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes’, which enabled quietly spoken majesty to emerge. Perhaps there might on occasion have been a little more sense of theatre, but subtlety and a lack of grandstanding reap their own rewards. Certainly the choral singing was beyond reproach throughout. The clarity of, for example, ‘Stimmt an die Saiten’ such that Haydn’s imitative writing registered as strongly as I can recall, without prejudice to a necessary, or at least desirable, impression of heft too.

 

If Julia Kleiter might have seemed, on paper, somewhat lighter of voice than the rest of the assembled company, such a contrast did not manifest itself in reality. Indeed, if anything, it was the relative lightness of Pape’s voice that surprised: not exactly toned down, but with a keen sense of style, and splendid attention to the words. Their duetting as Adam and Eve proved a joy, rightly breathing the air of the opera house as much as the concert hall, the Konzerthaus’s staged past perhaps coming a little more to the fore of its historical palimpsest. Pape proved suavely seductive – the rolling of his ‘r’ in ‘Der Früchte Saft alone… – and Kleiter sweetly knowing in response (‘Der Blumen Duft’). Her phrasing and overall shaping of lines throughout was both stylistically irreproachable and happily dynamic in dramatic expression. Christian Elsner showed that a Heldentenor – he is, I read, a noted Parsifal, although I think I am yet to hear him in the theatre – need not shy away from Haydn, far from it. Indeed, there was something almost of Siegfried Jerusalem (think of his Seasons with Marriner, or indeed his Magic Flute with Haitink) to the fine balance struck between style, heft, and winning sweetness of tone. If I did not emerge from the performance with any of my ideas concerning the work notably upset or transformed, there is a good deal to be said, especially in such troubled times, for something that reminds us of the civilization, the Europe, the Haydn for which we should all be fighting.

Salzburg Festival (2) - Così fan tutte, 6 August 2016

Felsenreitschule

 

Images Ruth Walz/Salzburger Festspiele
Alessio Arduini (Guglielmo), Julia Kleiter (Fiordiligi), Michael Volle (Don Alfonso),
Dorabella (Angela Brower), Ferrando (Mauro Peter)

Fiordiligi – Julia Kleiter

Dorabella – Angela Brower
Despina – Martina Janková
Ferrando – Mauro Peter
Guglielmo – Alessio Arduini
Don Alfonso – Michael Volle

Sven-Eric Bechtolf (director, set designs)

Mark Bouman (costumes)
Friedrich Rom (lighting)

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Ernst Raffelsberger)

Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra
Ottavio Dantone (conductor)

 

I saw Sven-Eric Bechtolf’s production of Così fan tutte three years ago in the Haus für Mozart. It seemed initially to have been heavily revised for its new venue in the Felsenreitschule, until I realised that it was indeed a new production. Quite why, I am not sure, for his first Così seems to have been the most successful part of his Da Ponte trilogy for Salzburg. (The Don Giovanni was, in a fiercely contested field, one of the worst I have ever seen. I could not face seeing the Figaro after that, but nothing I have heard about it has had me regret that decision.)

Bechtolf here retains the eighteenth-century setting: ‘beautiful’ frocks and all, for those who care about such things. There are hints at good ideas, but rarely, if ever, are they seriously followed through. For instance, we see something we might associate with the subtitle’s school for lovers (‘La scuola degli amanti’) at the opening, although it seems to have more of a medical bent than one might expect. No harm done: there is, after all, a strong current of Mesmerism and other strange ‘natural philosophy’ to the plot. However, apart from occasionally seeing frock-coated members of that school hanging around the stage, that is more or less it. Likewise, the nod to the work’s artificiality in having painted backdrops, such as a ‘beautiful’ Bay of Naples, mounted and dismantled during the action; again, however, we really need more than that. Making use of the extraordinary Felsenreitschule setting is of course a good thing, but it needs to be more than simply having characters run around above the stage for the sake of it. Otherwise, we have a thoroughly ‘traditional’, even regressive, staging, interrupted in utterly philistine fashion by deeds of slapstick, which have no place whatsoever in Mozart – however much they might delight certain cretinous members of the audience. (They laughed, moreover, at the most peculiar times. Do they not realise this is the most agonising, heart-rending of all Mozart’s operas? Do they react similarly to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony or the St Matthew Passion? One can only assume they do not listen to the music at all.) I could go on at greater length about the production but see little point: half-baked to a – well, to whatever soggy point things that are half-baked are half-baked to…

 

Musically, things were much better. I had worried that Ottavio Dantone might bring a self-consciously ‘authenticist’ reading to the work, but there was little of that. His tempi were varied, judicious, and flexible: always sounding as if they were reached in cooperation with the singers. And the Mozarteum Orchestra was able to sound like itself, warm of string tone, with woodwind both fruity and aristocratic, with no absurd prohibitions on vibrato or other such mannerisms. The sweet sado-masochism of Mozart’s score was able to tell in all its cruel glory.

 

Guglielmo, Don Alfonso, Dorabella, Fiordiligi, Despina (Martina Janková), Ferrando

It was an excellent cast too. Despite a few intonational issues in ‘Come scoglio’ notwithstanding, Julia Kleiter gave a commanding performance as Fiordiligi. She was certainly alert to the cruel parody in Mozart’s mock-seria writing; if only her director had been. Angela Brower made for an excellent Dorabella, very much her own, freer character: silkier, perhaps, when compared with Kleiter’s fine Egyptian cotton. If I have heard a sweeter-, more seductively-toned Ferrando than Mauro Peter I have forgotten – which seems unlikely. Alessio Arduini’s Guglielmo was proud, assertive, flawed: just as he should be, whether vocally or in stage manner (Bechtolf’s absurd interpolated dances notwithstanding). Martina Janková, the sole survivor, from 2013, again impressed as Despina, hers a thoroughly musical rendition, rendering no quarter for caricature. Michael Volle’s Don Alfonso was simply outstanding: what presence vocally he has, and how it is matched with command of the stage! There was much, then, musically to delight, enabling this truly extraordinary opera’s message of existential despair to register as it should.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Paris Opéra, 13 March 2016

© Christian Leiber / OnP

Opéra Bastille, Paris

Hans Sachs – Gerald Finley

Veit Pogner – Günther Groissböck
Kunz Vogelgsang – Dietmar Kerschbaum
Konrad Nachtigall – Ralf Lukas
Sixtus Beckmesser – Bo Skovhus
Fritz Kothner – Michael Kraus
Balthasar Zorn – Martin Homrich
Ulrich Eißlinger – Stefan Heibach
Augustin Moser – Robert Wörle
Hermann Ortel – Miljenko Turk
Hans Schwarz – Panajotis Iconomou
Hans Foltz – Roman Astakhov
Walther von Stolzing – Brandon Jovanovich
David – Toby Spence
Eva – Julia Kleiter
Magdalena – Wiebke Lehmkuhl
Night-watchman – Andreas Bauer

Stefan Herheim (director)

Heike Scheele (set designs)
Gesine Völlm (costumes)
Olaf Freese (original lighting, realised by Phoenix (Andreas Hofer) and Stefan Herheim)
Martin Kern (video)
Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach (dramaturgy)

Choruses of the Opéra National de Paris (chorus master: José Luis Basso)

Orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris

Philippe Jordan (conductor)

Rehearsal picture, Stefan Herheim centre stage as director
© Elena Bauer / OnP

My experience in the theatre of Die Meistersinger has not always have been happy. There are, of course, the great might-have-beens: Pierre Boulez, who expressed a desire on several occasions to conduct the work, a wish never granted, and what might have happened in Paris under Gerard Mortier, who, disappointed in the chorus at his disposal, felt it impossible to do so. Whatever the justice of Mortier’s judgement, the present-day strength of choral singing at Stéphane Lissner’s Paris Opéra, as heard first of all in Moses und Aron, means that is no longer a difficulty. José Luis Basso’s work as chorus master is clearly paying off; the chorus was outstanding throughout. Then there are the disappointing – or worse than that – productions and performances; let us pass over them here in silence, without so much as a link. Stefan Herheim’s production, first seen in Salzburg in 2013, was of course anything but a disappointment then; now, extensively rethought, it is, I think, better still. It is difficult in so busy a spectacle to know, at least in some cases, what has been changed and what one simply missed. I shall largely refrain, then, from comparisons with respect to staging and simply recount what I saw on this occasion. Comparisons with respect to performance largely favour Paris; I shall come to those later.

 

 

 

© Christian Leiber / OnP

We begin in Hans Sachs’s nineteenth-century workshop. A key feature of Wagner’s Romantic conception of Sachs and indeed of Nuremberg relates to overcoming division of labour – or, the more cynical, perhaps Marxist, commentator might respond, never having reached it in the first place. Yet Marx and Engels too, had their poetic flight of fancy in a celebrated passage in The German Ideology: ‘in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, … it [is] possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.’ Wagner and Herheim portray Sachs in more post-Nazarene fashion. But he remains a polymath and, more than that, a rebuke to involuntary specialisation; he cobbles, he writes verse, he sings, he paints too, and so forth. Here, he also dreams, and with that Herheim reminds us of Schopenhauer, of Freud, of fairy tales, and of course of the centrality of dreams to the work ‘itself’. And when he dreams, objects in his workshop grow, Nutcracker-Christmas-Tree-style; or is it that he and the characters of his dreams shrink? There is certainly a strong sense in the Bastille amphitheatre, its scale perhaps more helpful visually than acoustically, of toy-town, even before the toys come out to play.

 

© Vincente Pontet / OnP

And so, the Prelude over, the curtain once again drawn back, the back of the writing desk – crucial, of course, to any poet, and what a gorgeous writing desk this is! – has become the church and indeed municipal organ. The green of the surface has become the arena for contest, never more so than in the remarkable agon – intensified, I think, from Salzburg, in very interesting ways – between Walther and Beckmesser. I thought there – but a personal train of thought, of course, yet the openness of Herheim’s approach permits such flights of association – of our own College Green in Westminster. Here, an undeniably charismatic Beckmesser – now that is a way to have him taken seriously, for which both Herheim and Bo Skovhus should take credit – had to fight for the backing of the Masters, initially enraptured by Walther’s song. They swayed, literally and metaphorically. Such seemed a contest as political as it was æsthetic, and we are of course very much in the realm of Walter Benjamin’s æstheticisation of politics, an idea which did not spring from nowhere but was very much rooted in ideas which, if not Wagner’s as such, were similar and historically related. We all know, sadly, where they could lead – and what role Nuremberg would come to play. It is up to us whether we dwell on that, but it would surely be wrong not even to think about it. (Memories of Herheim’s Berlin Lohengrin demand our attention; so do those of Peter Konwitschny’s darker staging of the same work.) Dancing in concentric circles around Walther, even after Beckmesser’s apparently successful intervention, the Masters and, in front of them, the Apprentices, might yet decide in either direction. They look outwards, though, not at Walther; are they looking at us? I think not, but perhaps they do. It is certainly not a benign scene, whatever its prettiness-on-steroids; the violence, just about sublimated, when Sachs comes close to striking Beckmesser is shocking.



© Vincente Pontet / OnP

 

What of the absorbing surface? My goodness, it is beautiful, at least in inverted commas, but that perhaps implies undue cynicism rather than multivalency and dialectics. The play-acting is unmistakeable. Let us remember that the nineteenth-century German monarchies as they stood were not ancient, far from it; they certainly laid no claim to Sachs’s Nuremberg. Nor, famously, does Wagner’s score, speaking of Bach: another century, another style, unless, perhaps, one counts Luther as a sublated participant too. Bavaria as it stood when Wagner wrote his work ‘for’ Munich had only been a kingdom since 1806; much of its territory was very newly acquired. Yet Maximilians and Ludwigs played alternating or rather intricately interconnected æsthetic games of modernisation and mediævalism. Franconia and Nuremberg were – here are – some of the pieces involved. The post-1815 Restoration here seems extended, perhaps as far as the time of composition; there is both clarity and obscurity in the minutely observed designs (wonderful work by Herheim collaborators, Heike Scheele and Gesine Völlm). Walther in noble regalia and heightened blondness looks the part; Ludwig II would surely have swooned. He is a peacock, and he knows – or at least wants to suggest he knows – how to wield a sword.

Books feature heavily. In the first act, Des Knaben Wunderhorn proves our Romantic inspiration. Towering above the characters, the giant volume is opened, to reveal, as such volumes often do, pressed flowers. They come to life; they are visual instantiations of David’s tones. In the second act, it is the Brothers Grimm, and it is their ‘characters’ who come to life, incite and participate in the Prügelfuge. Red Riding Hood as you have never quite seen her – or maybe you have, in your imagination, perhaps earlier in your life than you would care to admit or even to remember – is perhaps first among equals here. There is madness, delusion, illusion – let us say Wahn aplenty – in this dream of Sachs. What, however, are we to make of the part of the original workshop set, stage left, which shrinks in none of the three acts? There is a painting on the wall – not to be identified with the painting of Eva at which he has been at work in the third act, when, in the cold light of day, normal ‘size’ is resumed – and we might speculate about the nature of its young woman (or Jungfrau?) Perhaps more intriguingly, though, there is a puppet theatre. When Eva and Walther take refuge, it is there. They are playing roles; and someone, of course, is the puppet-master. The theatre is luxurious, like what we can see of Pogner’s house and its decor; one can imagine it, them, in the Louvre’s nineteenth-century galleries, or indeed in a Wittelsbach or Hohenzollern Schloss. The damask luxury has a touch of the absurd, to it, though, not unlike Wagner’s fabled – too fabled – pink silk. Wagner’s bust at this point remains out of sight, although other old German masters may be seen, in different sizes, from time to time. The puppet play of Herheim’s Lohengrin may again be instructive here.

© Christian Leiber / OnP

 

Meister Wagner comes into play properly in the third act, as does Sachs’s workshop in what seems now to be reality – although the conclusion will throw that all into disarray. Dreams, memories and interpretations of them, have a habit of doing so; the unconscious was not invented by Romanticism, but it was certainly placed centre stage, as it is by Herheim. So is Wagner, and in what is now surely an act of defiance against fashionable denigration or at least scepticism, all will bow before him in the final scene. (Again, though, I should remind you that Herheim has a final card up his sleeve, to which we shall come shortly.) There has, moreover, been no one single book in play here; rather, for the festivities, Sachs’s library, or part of it, has grown in size, so we may take our pick. Liberty or licence? There is danger in the very question, as the determinedly anti-liberal Wagner knew very well. Wagner’s work, even its stage directions, is acutely observed. The Master’s banners even have harps: resplendent, again a little too resplendent. Less trivially, although nothing in Wagner is really trivial, the moment of devastation earlier in the act, when the triangle between Sachs, Eva, and Walther is revealed has never moved, never wounded me so. Rent asunder, Sachs and Eva have never seemed so real a prospect; rarely, however, have Walther and Eva. One senses her plight as a plaything – however we try to dress it up, her father’s idea is monstrous; she is a bartered bride – but it is unclear whether Wagner or Herheim is actually indicting the situation. We must make up our own minds; there is something truly Shakespearean here about the lack of judgement being forced upon us.

 

© Vincente Pontet / OnP

 

 

© Vincente Pontet / OnP

 

 

All good, and bad, things must come to an end, however. Everything starts to unravel with Sachs’s shocking refusal to shake Beckmesser’s proffered hand. He has been humiliated, bruised in every sense, and yet seems willing to meet Sachs half way. No chance, it seems. Is Sachs actually the proto-fascist some have claimed him to be? Herheim remains a master of theatre, however, and not just in the echt-operatic spectacle to which Wagner and he have treated us. As the action freezes – I am sure you can guess when – the unravelling proper gathers pace. There is another awakening – was not the visible pain Sachs had suffered at ‘Wach auf!’ enough? – yet it is Beckmesser’s. Who has dreamed whom? It is not Sachs who, for the final time, draws the curtain. Or is it?

My review concentrates on the production not as an implicit denigration of the musical performances, but because not only was it really ‘the thing’ here, it was, almost as much as Wagner’s score, although of course springing in almost every respect from that score, the framework for the vocal performances. Concerning Philippe Jordan’s conducting, I wish that it had been more variegated, and thus more like the staging itself, but one cannot have everything all the time. It was generally light, sometimes too light, but it was more the lack of contrast that was a problem than the somewhat strange cross between Mendelssohn and Ravel we seemed to hear. There was no denying, however, Jordan’s fluency; again, I shall resist the temptation to draw contrasts with a number of other conductors. Nor was there any denying the magnificent playing of the orchestra itself. As with the Iolanta/Nutcracker double-bill two nights earlier, this spoke of one of the great opera house orchestras of the world. What we sometimes lacked was not only the last few ounces of grandeur, but also a real sense of the music growing upwards from the bass line; that, however, was clearly Jordan’s concept, which I found less than entirely convincing. Electrifying in Moses, and genuinely original in his conception, Jordan was perhaps too much the foil here; in Wagner, and in Herheim, the music enhances and is enhanced by the staging.
 

© Vincente Pontet / OnP

 

The cast was generally strong. If Daniele Gatti had convinced me more in Salzburg, the orchestra and singing were surely superior here in Paris. Gerald Finley’s Sachs was not a larger-than-life portrayal, and Michael Volle’s performance was unlikely to be bettered by anyone. Finley’s intelligence, vocally, verbally, and on stage, were in their very different way just as impressive, though; this was a Sachs who made one think. I can hardly say better than that. Brandon Jovanovich, as I have already said, looked the part as Walther; he sang it too, with the ease that the role requires yet does not always receive. Again, he had one believe in the part and think about it. So too did Skovhus’s Beckmesser, as provocative and intelligent a rethinking as I can recall. He must have been as exhausted as his character, yet it did not necessarily show. Julia Kleiter’s Eva was finely sung, often reaching the calculated radiance the production imparted to her appearance onstage. Toby Spence proved an eager David: a gift of a role, of course, but a demanding gift nevertheless, ably supported by Wiebke Lehmkul’s Magdalene. With a strong group of Masters, headed by Günther Groissböck and Michael Kraus, there could be no reasonable complaints concerning the singing. If it sometimes sounded a little distant, even small of scale, that was mostly, I think, to be attributed to the acoustic.

If any opera, or at least any nineteenth-century opera, is intended to have one reflect upon artistic creation, it is surely this one. That it did, and that it did in ways novel, remembered, and somehow both novel and remembered, even perhaps misremembered, stands in many ways testament to a successful staging and performance. I left the Bastille with a spring in my step, wishing only that I could see it all again, ‘so alt und … doch so neu’.

 

Salzburg Festival (6) - Fierrabras, 16 August 2014

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

 

Haus für Mozart 

Fierrabras – Michael Schade

Emma – Julia Kleiter

Eginhard – Benjamin Bernheim

Florinda – Dorothea Röschmann

Roland – Markus Werba

Charlemagne – Georg Zeppenfeld

Boland – Peter Kálmán

Maragond – Marie-Claude Chappuis

Brutamonte – Manuel Walser

Ogier – Franz Gruber

Two Young Ladies – Secil Ilker, Wilma Maller

Moorish Captain – Helmut Höllriegl

Knight – Michael Wilder

Peter Stein (director)

Ferdinand Wögerbauer (set designs)

Annamaria Heinreich (costumes)

Joachim Barth (lighting)

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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