Prégardien/Teztalff/Vogts - Janáček, Schumann, and Brahms, 26 January 2022

Wigmore Hall

Janáček: Pohádka
Schumann: Two Ballads, op.122; Liederkreis, op.39
Brahms: Cello Sonata no.1 in E minor, op.38
Schumann: Dichterliebe, op.48

Tanja Tetzlaff (cello)

Isabelle Vogt (narrator)

Julian Prégardien (tenor)

Lars Vogt (piano)

Hasty programme reorganisation proved necessary when another musician, violinist Christian Tetzlaff, fell victim to the dread virus. An all-Schumann programme, including one of the piano trios, became a feast of Janáček, Schumann, and Brahms; if one regretted the loss of such careful, thoughtful planning, it would have been difficult to feel short-changed by so generous and resourceful a new programme. Janáček’s Pohádka, for cello and piano, made for a splendid intrada from Tania Tetzlaff and Lars Vogt. Tension and its increase were finely gauged in an account as lyrical as it was lively, quite without sentimentality. Composer’s and performers’ eloquence imparted an impression, as so often with Janáček, of heightened, even at times ecstatic, speech.

An absorbing account of Schumann’s rarely heard Two Ballads followed, Isabelle Vogt a gripping passionate narrator. It was easy to imagine her recounting these tales around a crackling winter fire, the second, ‘Die Flüchtlinge’ (Shelley, in translation), the more evidently musical a work, daemonic in a manner close to that of the young Brahms. Julian Prégardien then joined Lars Vogt for Schumann’s Liederkreis, op.39. It was instructive to hear the varying balance between singer and pianist, the latter sometimes holding back somewhat, so as to make his fuller presence, as in the second song, ‘Intermezzo’, felt in heightened fashion. In the opening ‘In der Fremde’, by contrast, it was Prégardien’s imploring lyricism that introduced, that set the scene and led us by the hand. There were many transformations of mood, even of persona, as for the elfin ‘Die Stille’, the aptly silver-toned ‘Mondnacht’, or the unsettling half-lights of ‘Zwielicht’, its colours, shadows, and patterns seemingly the bedrock of music, words, and their fusion. Prégardien and Vogt could be declamatory too, as in ‘Im Walde’. The ghostly stillness of ‘Auf einer Burg’ took us back to the storytelling of the op.122 Ballads: canny programming and performance. 

In the second half, Dichterliebe opened not dissimilarly, Prégardien touching in the sincerity of his longing, Vogt etching the piano frame for the tenor’s ardent memories and intentions, leading inevitably to the breathlessness of ‘Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne’. When, in the following, ‘Wenn ich in deine Augen she’, the protagonist was moved to declare, ‘Doch wenn du sprichst: Ich liebe dich!’ the moment’s infinitely touching nature was felt as such not least because it had been so well prepared. The piano postlude, of course, said just as much. There were sterner moments, for instance in the first stanza of ‘Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome’. The close of ‘Ich grolle nicht’ showed Prégardien unafraid not to sound beautiful, Heine’s serpent gnawing at his heart. Ghostly, well-nigh Mahlerian irony in ‘Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen’ and ‘Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen’ was unmistakeable, as was an Innigkeit born of Schubert, yet ultimately quite different, in the intervening ‘Hör ich das Liedchen klingen’. The dangers of Schumann’s musico-poetic world, anything but Biedermeier, were not only apparent but experienced. As we reached the close in the mood swings of ‘Die alte, bösen Lieder’, we had learned much, properly chilled. We felt it had meant something—as, assuredly, did the encore, Schubert’s Schwanengesang ‘Ständchen’. 

In between the two song cycles, Tetzlaff and Vogt gave us Brahms’s First Cello Sonata. The first movement spoke, not entirely unlike Janáček had, with a rhetorical eloquence that confirmed Mendelssohn’s adage about music expressing things not too indefinite, but too definite, for words. Balance and direction were finely judged, so much so as rarely to be noticed in themselves. It was dark but with many shades, modernist as well as Romantic, travelling a finely constructed emotional arc. The second movement was captivating in its courtliness; it is marked, after all, ‘quasi menuetto’. It benefited from a delightful lyricism that knew not to push, not to exaggerate, which in turn contrasted with raw, passionate irascibility for the finale, abjuring cleanness where necessary for something more immediate, even primal. But it was a movement of many contrasts; that was only its opening. It could equally be subtle too. Most important, there were no easy answers.

Die Zauberflöte, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 28 November 2019

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Monastatos (Florian Hoffmann) and Pamina (Serena Sáenz)

Sarastro – René Pape

Tamino – Julian Prégardien

Pamina – Serena Sáenz

Papageno – Florian Teichtmeister

Papagena – Victoria Randem

Queen of the Night – Albina Shagimuratova

Speaker, Second Priest – David Oštrek

Monostatos – Florian Hoffmann

First Lady – Adriane Queiroz

Second Lady – Natalia Skrycka

Third Lady – Constance Heller

First Armoured Man – Jun-Sang Han

Second Armoured Man – Frederic Jost

First Priest – Andrés Moreno Garcia

Three Boys – Members of the Tölz Boys’ Choir

Yuval Sharon (director)

Mimi Lien, Marc Löhrer (set designs)

Walter Van Beriendonck (costumes)

Reinhard Traub (lighting)

Hannah Wasileski (video)

Markus Böhm (sound design)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Anna Milukova)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Julien Salemkour (conductor)

As operatic hits go, The Magic Flute takes some beating; it does even so far as Mozart is concerned. Unquestionably Mozart’s greatest popular success as composer—it is difficult not to sentimentalise or at least to dramatise, and say ‘too late’—it saw twenty performances in its first month alone. Soon almost every German city would have staged the work, usually in German but even in Italian translation (Giovanni De Gamerra, Mozart’s librettist for Lucio Silla) as Il flauto magico, for theatres and cities where that suited prevailing tastes. It had reached as far as St Petersburg by 1797, only six years after its premiere; Berlin in 1794, not actually here at the Linden house, but at the nearby Royal National Theatre on the Gendarmenmarkt (predecessor to Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus or, as it stands today, Konzerthaus). If ever there were a Viennese work, it is surely this, but it is above all a work for the world—and Berlin takes just pride in its particular tradition. Schinkel’s celebrated 1816 set designs for the Court Opera—today’s State Opera—live on, reconstructed in August Everding’s 1994 production: loved by many, though theatrically inert when I saw it ten years ago. Since then, it has continued in repertoire, reappearing most seasons, but was earlier this year joined by a companion version from Yuval Sharon.

Tamino (Julian Prégardien)

The question of ultimate agency is, I think, an important one in this opera. Who, ultimately is running the show? In part, that relates to the ludicrous claim, never quite killed off, that the libretto was not actually the work of Emanuel Schickaneder, but actually of the actor (First Slave at the premiere), writer, explorer, and later Dublin Professor of Mineralogy, Carl Ludwig Giesecke. (As with similarly absurd ‘controversies’ concerning the authorship of Shakespeare plays, there is not a little snobbery at work there, fascinating character though Giesecke may be.) A thesis entirely without external warrant—for most of us, internal too—of an incoherent wrench in plot direction, so that initially ‘good’ forces become ‘evil’ and so on has, for certain fertile imaginations, become connected with a change in authorship. That Mozart knew nothing of any of this is, apparently, neither here nor there.  Beyond that, however, questions remain. If change of standpoint there be, a change relating to Tamino’s and our enlightenment—Enlightenment too?—then how is that effected? Who are the Three Boys—note that they only sing—what are their powers, and who, if anyone, has sent them? What is the foundation of Sarastro’s and others’ authority, and what lies beyond it? I could go on, but you will get the idea. The point in this context is that children are pulling the strings: in a welcome nod to Heinrich von Kleist—and to Salzburg—we are in a marionette theatre, one that necessarily looks back, but is more of today than a rose-tinted remembrance of 1816.

Pamina and Papageno (Florian Teichtmeister)

As the curtain rises, we see the outline of a theatre within our theatre. Characters emerge on strings, seemingly coming to life—like Schikaneder’s libretto, some might say—with Mozart’s music. Sometimes they are suspended in mid-air, sometimes on the floor; sometimes they even break free of their strings (although that nagging question of agency and authority does not seem quite to be resolved there; perhaps it cannot or should not be). Their appearance, however, seems more calculated, not unreasonably, to appeal to today’s children than to older people’s idea of today’s or even yesterday’s children. There is something of the comic book to them, especially to our heroes Tamino and Pamina—although rightly, in a cosmos as varied as this, there is considerable costume variation. I cannot say that I was wild about some of the rewriting and reordering, but should one approach this as an opera for children—I am far from convinced one should, yet German tradition looms large—there is warrant enough for that. The lack of trials of fire and water, however, seems to me a great pity. Tamino and Pamina retreating into a kitchen (of marriage, presumably) to make a light evening meal does not seem calculated to appeal to a considerable proportion of children, fraught questions of gender notwithstanding, let alone to those of us who might appreciate a little light undercutting, at least, of the opera’s patriarchy and heteronormativity. Some effort, though, is made at least to address problems of race, Monastatos, a black robotic toy, has his treatment discussed by children, as the dialogue veers off-piste.

There is nevertheless an apt and—I suspect, for the target audience, winning—sense of theatrical wonder, even when, as on this evening, the stage machinery broke down part way through the second act, requiring an extra pause to put things right. Revealing the children, whose recorded voices we have heard throughout intoning the dialogue at the close, pulling the strings as the theatre is cut down to size is doubtless necessary, but it deflates any sense of triumph, of enlightenment, indeed of anything much but children somewhat irritatingly running around, at the close. I cannot help but wonder whether they would have been better shown at the start. Moreover, if I am honest, their voices, in place of those a little more theatrically experienced, did become wearing after a while.

Dancers and Tamino

Musically, the picture was somewhat mixed. Conductor Julien Salemkour seemed strangely concerned to keep the orchestra down, to limit it as much as possible to mere ‘accompaniment’. Although it was clearly small in size—I could not see how small from where I was seated—an unfounded fear of overwhelming the singers seemed paramount. Either that, or unaccountably, he did not much like the sound of the Staatskapelle Berlin, which, insofar as one was permitted to hear it, sounded warm and cultivated as ever. It was a pity, since, a couple of cases aside, Salemkour adopted sensible tempi and mostly—there are doubtless particular problems with a staging such as this—kept pit and stage together. If only Daniel Barenboim would finally conduct this opera here.

Papageno

I enjoyed most of the singing, though I wondered whether some had been understandably inhibited by demands of aerial acrobatics. There was one peculiar exception, though, with which I had better to deal first. The cast list declared that Florian Teichtmeister was assuming the role of Papegeno ‘in the tradition of Emanuel Schikaneder,’ as ‘an actor’. Well, yes and no. Schikaneder was an actor; he was a good many things, including composer—and singer. Unless one were to take the view—surely a slander on many singers—that singers are incapable of acting, it seems a decidedly peculiar virtue, in an opera house, to insist that a non-singer play the part. Teichtmeister did his best; he can certainly act. Ensembles in particular were uncomfortable, more through the miking this apparently necessitated than through any difficulty with pitch. This was surely an idea that should have been firmly knocked on the head. Otherwise, Julian Prégardien and Serena Sáenz made for a lovely central couple, both performances palpably sincere and beautifully sung. That René Pape’s Sarastro is a well-known quantity should not lead one to take it for granted; evidently, no one did. The role still suits him perfectly—and perfectly is how he responded to its requirements. Albina Shagimuratova’s Queen of the Night sounded somewhat distant on account of her placing onstage—or rather, above stage—but emerged as bright and precise as anyone has right to expect. If smaller roles made less impact than often they do, I think that was similarly more for stage than for vocal reasons.  

A welcome alternative, then, to Mahlerian tradition as Schlamperei? Yes, I think so, albeit with reservations. Sharon’s production certainly stands worlds away from what by 200 had already become essentially a non-production, singers were left to fend for themselves in front of ‘beloved’ sets. I was grateful not only for the alternative as such but for the thoughts it provoked. If nevertheless I felt that it could have gone further dramatically and conceptually and that technical complications came a little too close to becoming the point, perhaps I just need to see it again. If the choice were this or Everding, which I understand will continue to be the case, I should have no hesitation. Ambition may sometimes exceed achievement, but that is surely the right way around and leaves room for the production to develop: 'tradition' in the truest sense.