Deutsche Oper Strauss-Wochen (4) - Die Liebe der Danae. 9 April 2016

Die Liebe der Danae © 2011, Barbara Aumüller

Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Jupiter – Mark Delavan

Merkur – Thomas Blondelle
Pollux – Andrew Dickinson
Danae – Manuela Uhl
Xanthe – Adriana Ferfezka
Midas – Raymond Very
First King – Paul Kaufmann
Second King – Clemens Bieber
Third King – Thomas Lehman
Fourth King – Alexei Botnarciuc
Semele – Nicole Haslett
Europa – Martina Weischenbach
Alkmene – Rebecca Jo Loeb
Leda – Katharina Peetz

Kirsten Harms (director)

Bernd Damovsky (set designs)
Dorothea Katzer (costumes)
Manfred Voss (lighting)
Silke Sense (Spielleitung)
Andreas K.W. Meyer (dramaturgy)

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper , Berlin (chorus master: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin 
Sebastian Weigle (conductor)

Strauss’s penultimate opera has been unlucky, more a victim of circumstances than of its intrinsic qualities, although Joseph Gregor’s libretto admittedly falls somewhat short of Hofmannsthal. Its 1944 would-have-been premiere at the Salzburg Festival fell victim to ‘total war’ and closure of theatres, so the only time Strauss himself heard it was at the Generalprobe. Thereafter, despite a successful posthumous premiere in Salzburg, it has never secured itself in the repertory; so much the worse, as so often, for the repertory. A committed performance such as this will have done it no harm whatsoever, although, as with the only other performance I have attended (Salzburg again, 2002), I am not convinced that the production (then Günter Kramer, now Kirsten Harms) made the best of its opportunities. Perhaps Salzburg’s third attempt, this year, will do better.

In the meantime, there could be no doubting the work’s musical qualities. That extraordinary evocation of sadness – not tragedy, ‘just’ deep sadness – in the third-act Interlude is not the only candidate from this score for Strauss at his greatest. ‘Jupiter’s resignation’, as Strauss called it, is not the only time one cannot help but draw parallels with Wotan; indeed, such parallels suggest themselves in the libretto perhaps all too readily. At any rate, in the very capable hands of Sebastian Weigle – quite the best thing I have heard him do – Strauss’s musico-dramatic empathy spoke as eloquently as one could hope for. Throughout, Weigle’s pacing convinced, as did his balancing of the Deutsche Oper orchestra, which once again proved itself worthy of the most exalted comparisons in the music of a composer long so close to its heart.

At the risk of becoming unduly repetitive, I should like again to draw attention to the skill with which each conductor in this mini-festival (arguably not so mini- a festival!) and the orchestra have commanded and communicated Strauss’s phantasmagorical wizardry, not just with respect to orchestration, not just with respect to shifting of timbres, but perhaps most important of all, in the marriage of timbral to harmonic shifts. (I promise that I shall try to restrain, even to eliminate, my use of the word ‘phantasmagorical’ for a month or so, once these Strauss reviews are done and dusted.) This is undoubtedly an old man’s score; it sounded all the more loved for recognition of that, in a reading that was unhurried without ever losing its impetus. The aristocratic refinement of Capriccio is not Strauss’s way here. (It is certainly not Gregor’s!) However,t the Strauss of Die Frau ohne Schatten is here at times, albeit perhaps softened (I am not sure that is quite the right word), and what a joy it is to hear that Strauss one last time. Indeed, more than once I was put in mind of Strauss’s reworking of Idomeneo, the Wagnerian and Mozartian tendencies in his work performing their endlessly fascinating interaction, even battle.

 

Manuela Uhl proved a moving exponent of the title role, especially as the opera progressed. To make a distinction between the ‘vocal’ and ‘dramatic’ is always, or should always be, to err; here, there was no doubt of that, for the sympathy with the character as engaged by Uhl was part and parcel not only of beautiful tone but its alliance with her stage action. Raymond Very was equally impressive as Midas. Apparently he was ailing, but one would rarely have known it, so secure were his technique and his similar ability to engender sympathy. Mark Delavan’s Jupiter was occasionally a little bluff, but that is arguably in keeping with the character, or at least a perfectly respectable interpretation thereof. His sadness, as well as the orchestra’s, in the third act reminded us that the Wotan parallel would have been even stronger when the role was created by no less than Hans Hotter (at the rehearsal, that is, not the public premiere). Thomas Blondelle was quite the stage animal, and quite the vocally winged messenger, as Merkur. I had no complaint with any of the singers; the Deutsche Oper can cast from depth, and regularly does. Its chorus remains one of the finest jewels in its crown; this performance was no exception.

 

Harms’s production does no especial harm. It is ‘stylish’ enough, in a generalised fashion, but does not seem to me to offer any particular insights. Apart from a predictable updating – or should that be demythologising? – this is a somewhat conventional staging, but in a work unfamiliar to many, that might not always be a bad thing. I am not sure why Pollux’s auctioned-off piano is suspended in the sky during the third act. Is it to come crashing down, with catastrophic or even Zerbinetta-like, consequences (a troupe perhaps concealed within it)? No; it simply remains there, arresting in visual terms, yet seemingly contributing little beyond that, except perhaps a vague reminder of what has gone before. Transformation into gold relies upon suggestion, and is probably all the better for that. Personenregie is generally impressive, although that will presumably long since have been delegated from the original director. In this case, however, Strauss’s score was definitely the thing. How it glowed!

 

 

Tannhäuser, Deutsche Oper, 12 February 2010

Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia – Reinhard Hagen
Tannhäuser – Stephen Gould
Wolfram von Eschenbach – Dietrich Henschel
Walther von der Vogelweide – Clemens Bieber
Biterolf – Lenus Carlson
Heinrich der Schreiber – Jörg Schörner
Reimar von Zweter – Jörn Schümann
Venus/Elisabeth – Nadja Michael
Shepherd – Martina Welschenbach
Tannhäuser double in the overture – Stefan Siedler

Kirsten Harms (director)
Bernd Damovsky (designs)
Inga Timm (assistant costume design)
Silvana Schröder (choreography)

Chorus and Supplementary Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus master: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin
Ulf Schirmer (conductor)

Of the ‘canonical’ Wagner Romantic operas and music dramas, that is from The Flying Dutchman onwards, Tannhäuser must surely be the least fashionable. It certainly seems to be the least performed. I had only seen it in the theatre once before, the very same theatre as it happens, though in the Deutsche Oper’s previous production, by Götz Friedrich. How then, did the present performance, from the first revival of Intendant Kirsten Harms’s 2008 production, compare? On balance, favourably in musical terms, less so when it comes to the staging.

I am afraid I found Harms’s direction as confusing as I had in December’s Die Frau ohne Schatten. Both that work and Tannhäuser need a degree of directorial assistance. To clarify or to problematise would seem the two obvious paths from which to choose. Here, it was difficult to detect a unifying idea beyond the refusal to opt for the either/or principle, of which Harms speaks in a programme interview. It seems to me that either this was not pushed hard enough, to go beyond portraying Venus and Elisabeth as ultimately one and the same, or it was insufficient as a Konzept; to go beyond that dichotomy of my own, I might add that the two are not mutually exclusive. So if Elisabeth is ‘revealed’ as Venus – this ‘revelation’ seems especially weak, since it is creakingly apparent all along – then where does that leave Tannhäuser? If the choice between Wartburg and Venusberg were a false one, then perhaps his fate might be considered tragic, yet it did not seem so here. Is he thereby redeemed? Perhaps, but again it is difficult to discern that from the staging. Venus/Elisabeth seems to move centre stage, but is that merely to evade the issue? (In fairness, it arguably makes Elisabeth a more interesting character.)

Moreover, there is no cumulative element to the settings and designs; we simply move from one setting to another: sometimes with a certain mediævalism, which does not seem to be ironised, sometimes not. Stage mechanics are displayed at the act openings, but it is difficult to discern any attempt thereby to frame, to ‘deconstruct’, or to alienate. I have no idea at all why the pilgrims of the first act appear in Hell, mediæval monsters and all, a setting which is difficult to relate to the rest of what we see. A mediæval musicologist friend informed me that a good number of the heraldic costumes for the second act are copied from the Codex Manesse – Walther von der Vogelweide appears in that manuscript himself, I might add – yet, whilst the effect is undeniably colourful, I can discern no dramatic point beyond a further blurring of time and location, a blurring whose point is in turn unclear. Likewise, the point of airborne suspension and gradual, albeit interrupted assumption of suits of armour eluded me. Finding the third-act Elisabeth as a Florence Nightingale character, tending the sick in modern hospital beds, refers of course to the deeds for which the historical figure was canonised, but the connection with the rest of the production, or indeed with the work, remained obscure, at least to me. I can see a good case for highlighting a tension between the Middle Ages, Wagner’s time, and our own, but the decisions here seem merely arbitrary – if a critique of Wagner’s dramaturgy at this time, then it needs to be made clear, and I do not think that it was – and sadly lacking in dramatic tension.

Ulf Schirmer, however, delivered an eminently dependable account of the score. There were no especial revelations – and he was hamstrung by the decision, whoever made it, of performing the Dresden version – but it is no mean achievement to hold Wagner’s structures together and to delineate them so clearly. Moreover, the playing elicited from the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper was often of a very high quality indeed. I was especially taken by the golden glow from the strings – more Vienna than Berlin, I thought – and by the purity of the woodwind, especially during the faux-archaisms, conjuring up, quite appropriately, a nineteenth-century world of ‘early music’.

An initial casting disappointment was that Stefan Siedler, the unusually credible ‘Tannhäuser double’ from the overture –incidentally, is it not a bit of an odd Bacchanale that does not include other men? – turned out to be just that, or rather not that at all. Just when one had thought that one might be able to believe in the stage presence of the central character, he was replaced by an artist of rather more ‘traditional’ build and countenance: a bit like Brad Pitt acting as a ‘double’ for me. Anyway, Stephen Gould did a very good job vocally as Tannhäuser. He could sing the role, which far from goes without saying in the Heldentenor world; he could shape his phrases; there was no appreciable tiring. Nadja Michael, perhaps unsurprisingly, proved a variable Venus/Elisabeth. At her best, she provided just the dramatic credibility often lacking elsewhere. Presence and commitment were very much in evidence. There was too much wayward vocalism, however, to be able to ignore the flaws; some passages from the Venusberg were at best approximate in their tuning. Rather to my surprise, her Elisabeth was probably, on the whole, more successful than her Venus. It is not clear to me that, the production notwithstanding, it is really possible for one singer to do justice to both roles, but that is not Michael’s fault. Dietrich Henschel provided a Lieder-singer’s attention to detail as Wolfram, but his tone sometimes turned dry; I could not help but think that Fischer-Dieskau would have purveyed this sort of interpretation more successfully. I thought it a pity not to have a boy’s voice for the Shepherd, but Martina Welschenbach certainly sang the part well. The chorus, under William Spaulding’s direction, was most impressive throughout, providing both weight and clarity.

But why the Dresden version? Was this the director’s decision or the conductor’s, I wonder? Or should I stop posing either/or questions? I know that many, Christian Thielemann included, claim its virtue to be coherence, yet Tannhäuser remains problematical. Wagner famously told Cosima that he still owed the world a Tannhäuser, and if anything, what Carl Dahlhaus identified, in Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas, as the works’ ‘abruptness …, lack of mediation … [and] casualness of motivation,’ is greater in the earlier version, since the later, often Tristan-esque music permits instead the case of Wagner’s music criticising itself, a dramatisation of the Elisabeth-Venus conflict in musical terms. I am certainly not saying that the Dresden version should never be performed, but so much is lost when one forgoes Wagner’s Paris additions: musically and in terms of the history of the work – with, it seems to me, little gained beyond fulfilling an interest in first thoughts. I have heard it responded that we should be quite happy with the Dresden version, had Wagner not made his revisions for Paris, but that is no response at all; one might as well say the same of Leonore and Fidelio, though the situations are different. At any rate, my lament is more a comment concerning current fashions than upon this production in particular. Would someone, somewhere kindly permit us to hear the Paris Tannhäuser?

Die Frau ohne Schatten, Deutsche Oper, 13 December 2009

Photo: Marcus Lieberenz im Auftrag der DEUTSCHEN OPER BERLIN
(Kaiserin: Manuela Uhl; Amme Doris Soffel; Geisterbote: Stephen Bronk)

Deutsche Oper, Berlin

The Emperor – Robert Brubaker
The Empress – Manuela Uhl
The Nurse – Jane Henschel
Barak – Johan Reuter
The Dyer’s Wife – Eva Johansson
The Spirit-Messenger – Stephen Bronk
Voice of the Apparition of Youth – Yosep Kang
Voice of the Falcon, Guardian of the Threshold of the Temple – Hulkar Sabirova
Voice from Above – Katharine Tier
The One-Eyed – Simon Pauly
The One-Armed – Hyung-Wook Lee
The Hunchback – Paul Kaufmann
Maidservants – Hulkar Sabirova, Heidi Stober, Julia Benzinger
Children’s voices and unborn voices – Hulkar Sabirova, Heidi Stober, Julia Benzinger, Stephanie Weiss, Fionnuala McCarthy, Katharine Tier
Guards’ voices – Ben Wager, Lucas Harbour, Krzysztof Szumanski, James J. Kee

Kirsten Harms (director)
Bernd Damovsky (stage and costume designs)
Andreas K.W. Meyer (dramaturge)
Christian Baier (artistic production manager)

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus master: William Spaulding)
Children’s Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus master: Dagmar Fiebach)
Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin
Axel Kober (conductor)

I had previous reason to admire Axel Kober’s conducting in the Leipzig Opera’s marvellous triple-bill of Schoenberg’s one-act operas, Moderne Menschen. Arguably every bit as great a challenge, Die Frau ohne Schatten proved just as successful under Kober’s baton. Well shaped and with a clear sense of the structure, this was a reading which, if it did not quite match the sensational account I heard a good few years ago from Christoph von Donhányi at Covent Garden, had nothing to fear from most recorded competition, and was certainly superior to Gustav Kuhn in Paris. There were a few shaky moments, especially during the first ten minutes or so, when it sounded as though the orchestra was settling down, and occasionally afterwards from the brass. On the whole, however, the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper proved fully equal to Strauss’s demands. The sheen of its strings, sometimes more Viennese, sometimes darker – rather like Strauss’s score, one might say – and the character of its woodwind section were especially worthy of mention. Whatever Strauss’s notorious criticisms of Schoenberg’s Op.16 Orchestral Pieces, they did not sound so very far away. For, poised between the previous sound-worlds of Elektra and Rosenkavalier, with something of the Alpine Symphony about it, and possessed of a magical, fantastical expressionism very much of its own, one of Strauss’s most truly extraordinary scores was truly able to resound. If the grinding dissonances immediately prior to the final resolution were not nailed in quite the way one hears on Christian Thielemann’s Vienna recording of the orchestral fantasy, I have never heard anyone else, even Karl Böhm, achieve that – and a purely orchestral performance is a different matter in any case. This was a distinguished musical account.

The singing, however, was considerably more variable. Robert Brubaker’s Emperor improved as time went on, though his tendency to sharpness and indeed to shouting was never quite surmounted. Strauss wrote a cruel part, but there it is. Brubaker, however, was vastly preferable to Eva Johansson as the Dyer’s Wife. Awkward on stage, she managed the right notes from time to time, the right vowels even less so. She also exhibited a curious tendency – certainly more curious in her part than his – simply to stand and shout. Manuela Uhl occasionally struggled as the Empress, but an announcement had been made concerning her indisposition; in any case, she more often proved perfectly equal to the composer’s demands. Given the circumstances, this was a creditable assumption. Jane Henschel was predictably fine as the Nurse – what a wonderful, ambiguous role this is – but such excellence should not be taken for granted. Strange links with the spirit world were very much in evidence in her portrayal. Johan Reuter’s fine form as Barak might also have been expected, but again, remains equally worthy of praise. Carefully observant of words and music, he penetrated to the lovable heart of the dyer’s character.

Intendant Kirsten Harms’s production did not seem quite to add up. There was nothing especially wrong with it, and Bernd Damovsky’s stage designs were often rather striking, but I am not sure that someone relatively unfamiliar with what can sometimes seem a rather baffling drama would have found a way in here. Robert Wilson in Paris could perhaps be judged to have over-simplified Hofmannsthal’s layers of symbolism, though I rather enjoyed that production. Taking more of a ‘line’, almost any line (within reason), might not have been a bad idea in this case, though. The work benefits from a degree at least of help. Still, there was a great deal to savour from the conductor, orchestra, and much of the singing. Die Frau may have its flaws, but there are sections as great as anything Strauss wrote, music that was here largely heard to considerable advantage.