Fin de partie, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 24 January 2025

Hamm – Laurent Naouri
Clov – Bo Skovhus
Nell – Dalia Schaechter
Nagg – Stephan Rügamer

Director – Johannes Erath
Set designs – Kaspar Glarner
Costumes – Birgit Wentsch
Lighting – Olaf Freese
Video – Bibi Abel
Dramaturgy – Olaf A. Schmitt

Staatskapelle Berlin 

Alexander Soddy (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Just short of his 99^th birthday, György Kurtág sees Fin de partie, his sole opera to date, receive a new full staging, what I believe to be its third. The first, by Pierre Audi, was seen in several European houses. I reviewed its 2022 French premiere here; it had already been seen in Milan and Amsterdam. Last year, Ingo Kerkhof directed Fin de partie anew in Dortmund, its German premiere; Herbert Fritsch directed the Austrian premiere in Vienna; and both London and Cologne offered semi-stagings. There have also been concert performances in Budapest. There may have been others of which I am unaware. Not bad, then, for a new opera, but to call this crowning masterpiece of the last man standing from what once we called the postwar avant garde ‘not bad’ would be akin to saying that of the Beckett play in which its ‘scenes and monologues’ have their origin. At a point in which the titans of Kurtág’s generation reach their centenary – Nono last year, the unholy alliance of Boulez and Henze this year, Kurtág himself next – the twin urgency and poignancy of this work and others become ever more apparent. The wider musical world at last seems ready to recognise and acknowledge them. 

That Paris performance made a huge impression on me. Indeed, it inspired a chapter due to be published later this year by Edinburgh University Press (part of a volume edited by colleagues Christine Dysers, Peter Edwards, and Judith Lochhead, The Music of Absence: An Aesthetics of Loss in the New Millennium). Coming to my second production – if only I had known of the Dortmund staging – following a period of further and, I hope, deeper acquaintance with the work, was necessarily a different experience, as will be the case for all of us as the opera takes its place in the repertoire. (For that reason, I do not intend here to give an account of the work ‘itself’; my initial review may be read for first impressions.) I do not think it was entirely down to me that it seemed more conventionally ‘operatic’ – these things are relative – under Alexander Soddy’s musical direction than when conducted by Markus Stenz, though that may well be part of it. This was for the most part a fluent account, keenly alert, as was the Staatskapelle Berlin, to Kurtág’s colouristic invention. That a sort of Klangfarbenmelodie could and did work motivically was triumphantly affirmed in dramatic context. 

Soddy’s conception of the work and his role seemed, moreover, concerned to consider and highlight the role of the singers; indeed, a vocal conception, extending to instruments and their combination, may be a good way of considering it. Taken as a whole, the work’s course seemed more sectional, even on occasion dragging a little, although a sectional quality can work both ways: Kurtág’s description is, after all, of ‘scènes et monologues’. (That may also have been in part a consequence of Erath’s production, conceived more as a succession of scenes than Audi’s.) What I missed above all was a greater sense of the intricacy of texture—even, paradoxically or rather dialectically, when spare. There seems in Kurtág’s writing to be a Beckettian implication of loss or absence, rarely apparent here. How sympathetic one’s response to a performance that came across as locating Kurtág in surprising succession to Verdi – not unlike Antonio Pappano’s Covent Garden occasional forays into contemporary music – may ultimately be as much a matter of taste than anything else, though I think this was also, to its advantage, more conversational than that might imply. 

Erath’s staging offered further surprises, perhaps all the more so given not only the familiarity of the play but also the familiarity of what it should look like and how it should unfold, carried forward into the premiere production. I had assumed familiar issues with the Beckett estate had played a part in determining the ‘fidelity’ of Audi’s approach, and perhaps they did; perhaps they even played a part in permitting the transformation into an opera in the first place. I was therefore a little taken aback by a staging that would not necessarily have seemed radical in any other case. Designs from Kaspar Glarner and Birgit Wentsch brought a fitting (in a more meaningful sense, ‘faithful’) sense of vaudeville to proceedings, culminating in visual transformation from living room domesticity to the external, even metaphorical world of a crashed Ferris wheel. That definitely separated Hamm and Clov, only for Nell (at least in the guise of the reader of the opening Roundelay) to reappear at her mound at the close. 

There was, then, a strong suggestion something circular, similarly in the emergence of the new, differently apocalyptic scene as if through the looking glass of the dustbin lid. Like Soddy, Erath seemed keen, moreover, to emphasise the opera’s conversational qualities, very much including the crucial blind alleys, non sequiturs, and misunderstandings. Changes of perspective and scale incorporated such disruption, in some ways heightening the episodic sense discussed earlier, though perhaps also helping put things ‘back together’.

A key difference, one of relatively few, between Beckett and Kurtág is the treatment of Nell’s death. What passes unnoticed in the play, Nell unmourned, is signalled by a terrible cry of grief from Nagg and the orchestra in the opera. Soddy treated the latter in duly operatic fashion, whilst Erath hinted at the dislocation between the two genres. having a giant, video-founded Clov take out a body bag – presumably Nell – earlier. Dislocation was the name of the game, or at least of one of the games. Whether in Kurtág, as in Beckett, we can ‘know’ anything beyond the text, whether the question borders on the illegitimate, was a question not only posed but also given a provisional and unsettling answer.

Laurent Naouri’s Hamm is unlikely to have provoked any such controversy. His ready, communicative way with the French text and its musical expression seemed not only to serve Beckett and Kurtág, but also to act as an animating as well as controlling presence for the cast as a whole. Bo Skovhus’s Clov, powerfully physical, not only of gesture but of character too, contrasted with whimsical performances from Dalia Schaechter and Stephan Rügamer as Nell and Nagg, though I confess to missing the deeper and perhaps more deeply familiar tones of Hilary Summers in the former role for Stenz and Audi. That we are already in a position, though, to draw comparisons between different interpretations, even to form views on emergent performance practice, testifies not so much to the work’s stature – there are many fine pieces never heard again – as to its popular acceptance. Endgames may be more ominously apparent than ever in the world around us; this is anything but an endgame for opera.

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (2) – Pelléas et Mélisande, 9 July 2024

Grand Théâtre de Provence

Images: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence 2024 © Jean-Louis Fernandez

  

Pelléas – Huw Montague Rendall
Mélisande – Chiara Skerath
Golaud – Laurent Naouri
Arkel – Vincent Le Texier
Geneviève – Lucille Richardot
Yniold – Emma Fekete
Doctor, Shepherd – Thomas Dear
Actors – Sarah Northgraves, Kamila Kamińska, Olivia N'Ganga

Chorus of the Lyon Opera (chorus master: Benedict Kearns)

Orchestra of the Lyon Opera

Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

  

Opera, or the Undoing of Women is a celebrated treatment of the genre by the French philosopher Cathérine Clément. Clément’s book has rightly come in for a good deal of criticism, not least since it signally fails to treat opera as a musical genre, looking solely at plots and ignoring the liberation the female voice in particular can embody. I heartily recommend Carolyn Abbate’s review, entitled ‘Opera, or the Envoicing of Women’ (not, as my autocorrection has just insisted, ‘the Invoicing’, though some might nod wearily at that too). That said, no one could seriously deny the treatment of female characters in most repertoire works is to our mind problematical. Katie Mitchell certainly would not; that indeed, is the starting point for her landmark production of Pelléas et Mélisande, first seen here in Aix in 2016, and on which I am now catching up.

What Mitchell does might well, in 2024, seem an obvious and necessary thing to do, yet it is difficult to think of a previous case (just as with, say, Joachim Herz in the Ring or Wieland Wagner in Parsifal).That it seems obvious must in large part to be ascribed to her work and that of other feminist directors. Ultimately, the idea is to present the work from Mélisande’s standpoint, rather than have her – as one might argue the work does – as a blank canvas on which men and, more broadly, patriarchy paint their fantasies. The means of doing so is to present the drama as Mélisande’s dream. An opening dumb show has her, on her wedding day, take a pregnancy test – some people, for reasons unclear, found this amusing – which, one presumes, gives from a concurrent relationship a positive result. Quite a predicament, and thus the dream-drama is set in motion, Pelléas representing the father, Golaud the husband. The castle extends from the bedroom in which the action has begun, and to which it often returns. Sometimes there is one Mélisande; sometimes, seeing herself in the way one sometimes can in dreams, there are two. 

Golaud is a serial abuser; not only does Mélisande sees herself raped, but the girl (in this production) Yniold too. Pelléas is a nervous wreck and mummy’s boy yet retains his allure, ultimately satisfying Mélisande in a way Golaud never could, in highly erotic scenes that ensure one level of musical meaning hits home as rarely before, whilst a charismatic, creepy Arkel ultimately rules the roost. There is even a prize won for non-irritating, non-gratuitous use of mobile telephones, Golaud sending Yniold to Mélisande’s room to report on the lovers and continuing to bark commands via that medium. The castle’s claustrophobia is highly realistic, as is the rest of the drama, but visual Symbolism will live to fight another day and Debussy’s score remains.

Susanna Mälkki and the accomplished Lyon orchestra generally had it unfold at what gives the excellent impression of being its ‘own’ pace, however chimerical that ideal may be in practice. (It takes a good deal of work to sound ‘natural’.) Inspiration from Wagner, Tristan and Parsifal in particular, was strong, dramatically pointed without overwhelming. There was, though, plenty of room for other stars in this musical constellation, French forebears not the least of them. Whether this were conscious or otherwise, letting the score do ‘its’ work, does not really matter. Debussy remained questioning, ambiguous, yet never merely vague; this was drama, not mere ‘atmosphere’, especially in combination with Mitchell’s staging.   

Chiara Skerath rose to Mitchell’s challenges and more, offering a multi-faceted Mélisande as finely sung as it was acted. She and her alter ego were not on stage the whole time, but one could have been forgiven for thinking, still more feeling, that they were. Huw Montague Rendall’s damaged yet alluring Pelléas was, in some ways, the most striking of all, beautifully, elegantly sung, yet with a halting scenic awkwardness that only at the height of passion could be put to one side. Laurent Naouri’s brutal Golaud and Vincent Le Texier subtler, yet in some ways darker still, Arkel, cunningly calculating far ahead of the rest, were similarly memorable in and faithful to their roles. Ironically, even here, one could not but hear Mélisande’s standpoint via their voices. That is not intrinsically a bad thing, of course, since opera performance is an ensemble effort. All involved played their part, not least the stage hands at work revealing and concealing different parts of the world Mélisande’s unconscious had created. We now (usually) have intimacy coordinators, but that development is very recent; here, Ita O’Brien was credited. Given the level of intimacy, her contribution will have been greatly valued by all. 

For what we saw and heard made us think and rethink on the spot. Even seeing the word ‘comédiennes’ in the programme gave pause for thought. In English, we have at last begun to move on from ‘actors’ and ‘actresses’ save in historical usage, but that development is also recent and I recall thinking it read oddly on my first encounter; French is meanwhile, given its lack of a neutral gender, beginning to pursue a project of ‘feminisation’, encouraging parity in the use of female forms. Who is ‘further on’? Are there important questions when horrifying abuse rages unacknowledged? Answers may or may not be clear, but Pelléas will never quite be the same again.

Philippe Sands, A Song of Good and Evil (premiere), 29 November 2014

Purcell Room

 

Vanessa Redgrave and Philippe Sands (narrators)

Laurent Naouri (bass-baritone)

Guillaume de Chassy (piano)

Nina Brazier (director)

 

A Song of Good and Evil received its premiere as part of the Southbank Centre’s Literature Autumn Festival 2014. It is a piece difficult, perhaps impossible to classify – a point not entirely without relevance to its subject matter. Perhaps it is better simply to describe. With the help of pictures, music, and narration we learned of the intersection of three lives in Lemberg/Lvov and Nuremberg: the lives of two lawyers, Hersch Lauterpacht, Rafael Lemkin, and Hans Frank. Both Lauterpacht and Lemkin studied at the University of Lemberg or Lwów (the city had, yet again, changed its name and indeed country, in the very few intervening years); both, indeed, were taught by the same jurist. Frank visited as Governor-General in August 1942. All three would be crucial figures at the Nuremberg Trials, Frank of course meeting his death as a consequence, Lauterpacht and Lemkin leading advocates, indeed international legal originators, of the concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide. The conflict between the two concepts, between protection of individuals and that of groups, was clearly explained – and, in a postscript, pursued in more recent years. Frank, it should be added, was certainly in some sense responsible, and held by Lauterpacht and Lemkin to be responsible, for the deaths of their relatives.

 

Such, apparently, is part of the material for a book by Philippe Sands, to be published in 2016. This piece also offered opportunity for reflection on the role of music, always so crucial to German culture and to German reflection upon culture. We all know how indelibly pieces of music can become associated with particular times, places, and events. There is something truly disconcerting about the thought that both Lauterpacht and Frank derived inspiration and solace from Bach’s St Matthew Passion during the final days at Nuremberg. Laurent Naouri, fresh from Thursday’s performance of Pelléas et Mélisande, and jazz pianist, Guillaume de Chassy offered musical excerpts and in some cases whole performances, one of which was ‘Erbarme dich’ (usually, of course, heard from a mezzo, but sounding not at all out of place in a moving, direct performance). Opening with Ravel’s Yiddish ‘L’enigme éternelle’, one of his two Mélodies hébraïques, we ended with what, in context, we could hardly fail to consider a call for universal human rights in Leonard Cohen’s Anthem. Along the way, other music included a snatch, albeit for piano alone, of Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, the beginning of the slow movement of the Pathétique Sonata (played by Lautenbach’s wife when they met), some Bach-Busoni (‘Ich ruf’ zu dir’), Paul Misraki’s Insensiblement (heard by a reporter in a French café when news of Frank’s execution reached him), and other pieces.

 

Perhaps the most controversial inclusion was a setting by Frédéric Chaslin (‘in the style of Richard Strauss’) of Wer tritt herein, so fesch und schlank? Strauss set the words in praise of Frank in 1943, but the music seems to have been lost. It is difficult to imagine it being sung often, even if it had survived. Chaslin’s setting did a passable imitation of Strauss, without truly convincing, but then that was not really the point. It was difficult, however, to feel that Strauss, described as a ‘friend’ of Frank was being treated entirely fairly; we might have been informed of the cat-and-mouse game the Nazi authorities played with him, or at least of his Jewish grandchildren. But then, one has to admit that there are far more deserving recipients of our sympathy than Strauss.

 

The material was well selected and presented. Sands and Vanessa Redgrave shared the narration; it was certainly quite a treat, even in such difficult circumstances, to hear Redgrave’s way with words. Naouri proved himself adept in various languages and styles, as did his pianist. A sobering, fascinating, and in the best sense provocative evening.

Pelléas et Mélisande, Philharmonia/Salonen, 27 November 2014

Royal Festival Hall

Mélisande – Sandrine Piau

Pelléas – Stéphane Degout

Golaud – Laurent Naouri

Geneviève – Dame Felicity Palmer

Physician – David Wilson-Johnson

Arkel – Jérôme Varnier

Yniold – Chloé Briot

Shepherd – Greg Skidmore

Narrator – Sara Kestelman

 

David Edwards (director)

Philharmonia Voices

Philharmonia Orchestra

Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)

 

This was an extraordinary performance of an extraordinary work, one which has rarely been given its due in London and which, bafflingly, our opera houses still shy away from staging. I have only seen Pelléas et Mélisande ‘live’ once before, in a performance at Covent Garden superlatively conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. The best that one could say about the accompanying staging was that the excellence of the performances still shone through. Here, we had a minimal staging from David Edwards, excellently lit (so important in Debussy, both physically and metaphysically!), which let the opera speak for itself, but which, having the characters seated in the Choir watching, walking down slowly to the stage, offered something of a frame to the action. The narration, though well delivered, seemed entirely superfluous and would have been better off cut.

That really is my one and only cavil. Esa-Pekka Salonen led the Philharmonia in a performance as fine as anything I have heard from him and/or the orchestra. Like Debussy’s score itself, it drew one in to listen, rejecting ‘operatic’ gesture for symbolist drama. (Is that, perhaps why we find it so difficult to stage the work, finding ourselves so remote from æsthetic tenets from which it is far from readily sundered?) Debussy’s words from his 1902 ‘Pourquoi j’ai écrit Pelléas,’ might almost have been written as a review of what we heard:  ‘The drama of Pelléas, which, in spite of its dream-like atmosphere, contains far more humanity than so-called “real-life documents”, seemed to suit my intentions admirably. In it there is an evocative language whose sensitivity could be extended into music and into the décor orchestral.’ And so, not only was the performance, aurally still more than visually, ‘lit from behind’, as Debussy so memorably claimed of Parsifal, but it seemed to emerge from Materlinck, or perhaps even from words and a simple yet deep story that somehow had always been there.

That emergence was the musical story offered by Salonen and the orchestra. There is of course no one ‘right way’ to perform Pelléas. But the refusal to play to the gallery, in conjunction with a refusal to highlight any one particular strand or influence and a near-incredible sensitivity to the subtlest of changes, or indeed continuities, in pitch, timbre, and any other parameter you might care to mention made for an absorbing experience. Line was maintained without realising: it was simply ‘there’. The drenching of the score in Tristan and, perhaps still more, Parsifal had, as with Puccini or Elgar (in some senses, at least, closer spirits than one might suspect), no need to be hammered home. Pierre Boulez was accused in 1969 of having ‘Wagnerised’ Debussy at Covent Garden. (What I should have given to hear that!) He quite rightly responded that there was no need, since Debussy’s music was already ‘Wagnerised’. Although no one now would doubt that, it is interesting to reflect that many, especially from a French nationalistic standpoint, did so at the time. It is also a decidedly individual variety of Wagnerism, so close to Wagner and yet so utterly distant from Beethoven. Here, in 2014, the melos, the post-Amfortas pain, the motivic cohesion and propulsion, the turns of orchestral phrase: all reminded us where we had come from, without insisting that we were still there. Climaxes, as in Wagner, though not as in his lesser successors, were sparing and carefully marshalled – but how they registered when they came!

Such was, of course, very much the due also of the soloists. No climax registered more overwhelmingly than in the fourth act, thanks both to the orchestra and to the towering portrayal of Pelléas by Stéphane Degout, every inch the equal (at least!) of Simon Keenlyside in 2007. This Pelléas found himself, Tristan-like, in death; his was a frank yet still subtle sexual awakening perhaps, given its pace, more powerful still. Degout’s way with the French text was second to none; its alchemic union with Debussy’s music was not the least of the wonders we heard. ‘Musical’ and ‘dramatic’ values were utterly as one, a hallmark of the performance as a whole. Sandrine Piau’s pure-voiced Mélisande had her own tale to tell, or perhaps not to tell; one was more enchanted than infuriated, but the circularity that incites, and not always positively, was tangible throughout. There was no need for Piau to raise her voice, no need to play the vulgar game of so much actually-existing ‘opera’. Indeed, her ‘early music’ experience was put to spellbinding use, for, whether it be actual influence or no, there is also affinity in Debussy’s work with the earliest of opera. The ghosts – or prophecy – of the stile rappresentativo made their presence felt, without being forced upon us.

So, naturally, did the ghost of Mussorgsky. One heard it in the bells of the fifth act, but also in the alluring, yet slightly distancing delivery of so many vocal lines. Laurent Naouri’s Golaud was not always vocally ‘beautiful’, but why should he have been? There was something far more valuable here, dramatic truth: again, not in the sense of vulgar display, but in the emergence of a tortured soul from Maeterlinck, the vocal line, and the décor orchestral. The modern cliché of ‘feeling his pain’ was in a better sense entirely justified. Jérome Varnier hinted at a more interesting Arkel than one often feels, managing adroitly the difficult balancing act between young voice and old role. His psychological insights led nowhere, it seemed, and yet one knew at some level their truth. I sensed grave responsibility, even if its nature and grounding remained unspoken. Felicity Palmer’s Geneviève showed that artist’s typically acute response to text as words and music, whilst Chloé Briot offered a perky and, in the best sense, disconcerting Yniold.

 

Riddles were posed, then, yet never answered. The ambiguity that lies at the heart of so much of Debussy’s music, whatever ‘artistic’ label we seek to pin upon it, won out. For this was a musical triumph through and through, reminding us of what opera might be, yet sadly, so rarely is. Fauré was reported by Princess Edmond de Polignac as having remarked after the premiere, ‘If that be music, then I have never understood what music was.’ Quite.