BPO/Nézet-Séguin - CPE Bach and Brahms, 19 October 2017

Philharmonie

CPE Bach: Heilig, Wq 217

Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem, op.45

Hanna-Elisabeth Müller (soprano)

Wiebke Lehmkuhl (contralto)

Markus Werba (baritone)

Berlin Radio Choir (chorus master: Gijs Leenaars)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Yannick Nézet-Séguin (conductor)

A slightly – well, perhaps more than slightly – baffling programme this. One might have presumed that the short CPE Bach cantata (eight minutes according to the programme, but I did not check my watch), Heilig, were present as a curtain-raiser for Brahms’s German Requiem. Brahms, after all, thought highly of Emanuel Bach, editing some of his music. And perhaps it would also have offered another opportunity for one of the vocal soloists. But no, the vocal types are different, so we had Wiebke Lehmkuhl sing a short solo and disappear for the rest of the evening. Perhaps even odder, the two works required different platform arrangements, so we had an interval in between them. Might it not have made more sense to have heard a selection of earlier music – Schütz, perhaps, even JS Bach or Handel? – with a more overt connection to the specific Brahms we were about to hear?

 

Anyway, we did not. It was a welcome opportunity to hear this 1776 cantata, for solo contralto, double chorus, and double orchestra, its text drawn from Herder, Isaiah, and the Te Deum. I cannot say that I found anything, save for its forces, especially individual in the writing: far more conventional than, say, many of CPE Bach’s orchestral or piano works. It would be difficult to begrudge it its Berlin Philharmonic premiere, though, and I have no wish to do so. Orchestra and choir (Berlin Radio Choir) alike offered a glorious sound throughout, antiphonal (Handelian) contrasts registering – although perhaps not quite so strongly as they might have done. Lehmkuhl’s performance sounded beautifully sincere, verbally and musically. It is always enjoyable to hear a little trumpet-led rejoicing too, and so we did. Yannick Nézet-Séguin ensured, greatly to his credit, that there was nothing unduly hurried to the performance, encouraging and retaining a note of necessary grandeur. It was nevertheless soon over, though, and I at least was left wondering ‘why?’

 

There was certainly nothing ‘off-the-shelf’ to Nézet-Séguin’s German Requiem either, conducted from memory. If I cannot say that his conception of the work was particularly close to mine, that is no reason to disqualify it; indeed, it was every reason to try to engage with it on its own terms. As sound, it was difficult to fault the performances of choir and orchestral alike, and again I have no wish to do so. What a joy – although is joy really what we should feel here? – it was, for instance, to hear those lower strings at the opening of ‘Selig sind, die da Leid tragen’. The blend of orchestral sound, moreover, was irreproachable, whilst offering plenty of opportunity to hear individual instruments and sections: the three harps, in particular, stood out beautifully, even celestially. And there was real warmth, even consolation, to that opening chorus, although I have heard Brahms sound darker, much darker. I was not at all sure, however, why we heard quite so robust an emphasis on ‘Freuden’; it came out of nowhere and merely sounded mannered. The great second number, ‘Denn alles Fleisch’ was a little darker, as surely it must be, but with a strange touch of ‘glamour’ to it. It was certainly worlds away from Klemperer or Furtwängler. What the performance did have, in spades, was clarity. Nézet-Séguin shaped the movement well, preparing transitions, rendering them convincing, the winding down at the close was handled especially well. What I missed, I think, was a greater sense of ‘meaning’: not just theological or even verbal.

 

Markus Werba proved a relatively light-toned soloist, which seemed to fit with the general approach. In ‘Herr, lehre doch mich,’ however, I could not help but think that the orchestral sound was a bit too close to Strauss; there is no single way that Brahms sound, of course, but I am not sure, by the same token, that just anything goes either. It would be churlish, nevertheless, to deny the sonic pleasure of the build-up above the movement’s pedal-point. Following a duly lieblich ‘Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen,’ Hanna-Elisabeth Müller got off to a shaky start in ‘Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit’. Brahms’s solo writing here is exposed, even treacherous, and so it sounded. She settled down before too long, though.

 

Nézet-Séguin took the opening of the following number, ‘Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende Statt,’ very deliberately: not just pace, but choral enunciation too. It certainly focused attention on the words, whatever else I thought of it. However, the blazing, almost ‘operatic’ approach – more Strauss again, even Wagner, than Brahms, I thought – to the Last Trump seemed somewhat out of place. A cappella writing in the final ‘Selig sind die Toten’ reminded us that the choir was in itself just as impressive as the orchestra. It flowed nicely, and sounded consoling. Concerning what, however, did we need to be consoled?

Die Zauberflöte, Royal Opera, 23 February 2015

Royal Opera House

Tamino – Toby Spence

Three Ladies – Sinéad Mulhern, Nadezhda Karyazina, Claudia Huckle
Papageno – Markus Werba
Queen of the Night – Anna Siminska
Monostatos – Colin Judson
Pamina – Jania Brugger
Three Boys – Michael Clayton-Jolly, Matthew Price, Alessio D’Andrea
Speaker – Benjamin Bevan
Sarastro – Georg Zeppenfeld
Priests – Harry Nicoll, Donald Maxwell
Papagena – Rhian Lois
Two Armoured Men – Samuel Sakker, James Platt

Sir David McVicar (director)

John Macfarlane (designs)
Paule Constable (lighting)
Leah Hausman (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Cornelius Meister (conductor)

 

When, a couple of years ago, I last saw David McVicar’s production of The Magic Flute, I was pleased to note that Leah Hausman’s revival direction had brought new life to a staging which, at its previous revival in 2011, had begun to seem tired. In terms of staging, it seems to have perked up further in 2015. Part of the reason, I suspect, must be McVicar’s having returned to direct the revival himself: something I did not pick up on until after the event, but which, in retrospect, certainly told. Not only did the cast members appear perfectly clear what they were and what they should be doing; a considerable amount of movement (typically well planned by Leah Hausman) had been rethought, reinvented. I can be very touchy – many would doubtless say too touchy, but here I stand… – when it comes to Mozart, and regret what seemed to me a shift towards the merely comic. However, if my memory serves me correctly, and this is a production I have watched regularly on DVD too, it was a shift rather than a wrench. Many, in any case, will feel differently, should the widespread enthusiasm for Nicholas Hytner’s old ENO staging, an enthusiasm I never felt in the slightest, be anything to go by. There remains delight to be had in John Macfarlane’s designs; a visual, if less an intellectual, sense of eighteenth-century Enlightenment remains happily present too. At any rate, it is pleasing to see a twelve-year-old production – I shall never forget Sir Colin Davis’s conducting during its initial run – refreshed and reinvigorated.

Cornelius Meister’s conducting had its moments; comparisons with Davis would be pointless. Meister sometimes seemed hamstrung by the (presumably self-inflicted) size of his orchestra, nowhere more so than in an often scrawny account of the Overture. When will conductors recognise the crucial matter of the size of a house in suggesting the necessary, or at least desirable, number of strings? There was sometimes a tendency to rush, too, an especially noteworthy occasion being the merely glib conclusion to the first act; here, Mozart should sound at his most Beethovenian. However, there was orchestral beauty, albeit of a Fricsay-Abbado ‘light’, almost free-floating variety, worlds away from Klemperer, Böhm, or Davis, let alone Furtwängler. Harmony, then, might have been given more of its due. Some of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House’s woodwind playing was truly ravishing; I recall a particularly fruity bassoon line, but there were many other instances. If there were a few disjunctures between pit and stage, there was little that was grievous, and little, moreover, that seemed unlikely to be rectified in the progress of this run of performances.

Toby Spence proved an ardent Tamino, a little darker-hued than we often hear, and certainly none the worse for that. This was the first time I had heard his Pamina, Jania Brugger, but I very much hope that it will not be the last. Her performance balanced dignity and beauty of tone in properly Mozartian manner, her second-act aria an object lesson in pathos without exaggeration. ‘Bei Männern’ was an especial delight, given the participation of Markus Werba as Papageno. I do not think I have ever heard a less than excellent performance from him, and this was no exception. His Viennese way with the dialogue came as balm to the ears; but there was sadness too, as there must be beneath any clowning. Rhian Lois made the most of her role as his intended: an impressive Royal Opera debut. Anna Siminska’s Queen of the Night had the occasional slip, but this is a well-nigh impossible role; there was much nevertheless to admire. Georg Zeppenfeld’s Sarastro presented gravitas leavened by humanity, as did Benjamin Bevan’s Speaker. If the Three Ladies were not always ideally blended, the Three Boys proved delightfully aethereal, Mozart’s tricky chromaticism holding no fears for them. Colin Judson offered character that was more than mere caricature with his Monostatos. (Really, though, there should be a better solution to Sarastro’s line concerning the Moor’s blackness than stopping half-way through, pausing, and resuming later on!)

 

 

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.

 

Ariadne auf Naxos, Royal Opera, 13 July 2014

Royal Opera House

Music Master – Sir Thomas Allen

Major-Domo - Christoph Guest

Lackey – Jihoon Kim

Officer – David Butt Philip

Composer – Ruxandra Donose

Tenor, Bacchus – Roberto Saccà

Wig-Maker – Ashley Riches

Zerbinetta – Jane Archibald

Prima Donna, Ariadne – Karita Mattila

Dancing Master – Ed Lyon

Naiad – Sofia Fomina

Dryad – Karen Cargill

Echo – Kiandra Howarth

Harlequin – Markus Werba

Truffaldino – Jeremy White

Scaramuccio – Wynne Evans

Brighella – Paul Schweinester

Christof Loy (director)

Herbert Murauer (designs)

Jennifer Lipton (lighting)

Beate Vollack (choreography)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Sir Antonio Pappano (conductor)

 

I hope I shall be forgiven for keeping this relatively brief. Having been distinctly under the weather this week, I have fallen a little behind, and in any case have written about Christof Loy’s production of Ariadne auf Naxos before. This time, hearteningly, I recaptured some of my earlier enthusiasm, having found the staging looking somewhat tired last time around. Perhaps it was a matter of the revival direction, or perhaps it was a matter of sitting closer to the stage (the back of the Stalls Circle, the restricted view seemingly not much of an issue). At any rate, the virtues that I had originally hymned – a very real sense of the audience and the audience member being told that this was a tale told about them, a nice balance between the present and a re-imagined and then re-imagined again eighteenth century – were married to a well-acted company performance.

 

For the most part the singing was very good too. Thomas Allen’s Music Master continues to inspire; this time, he found a fine foil in Ed Lyon’s Dancing Master, his German as impressive as the French of the repertory in which I have previously tended to hear him. Both can act too – and did. Ruxandra Donose’s Composer was beautifully sung – and a character in whom one could truly believe, whom one could take to one’s heart. I am not sure that I have heard so distinguished a trio of Naiad, Dryad, and Echo, as Sofia Fomina, Karen Cargill, and Kiandra Howarth, whether corporately or individually. Markus Werba offered a predictably excellent Harlequin, well supported by the rest of his troupe. Jane Archibald reached for the heights and attained them with her lovely Zerbinetta: an object-lesson in the role. Disappointments? Roberto Saccà’s dry-toned Bacchus, fare more so than I had heard in Salzburg in 2012. And, I am afraid that, try as I might, I could not find Karita Mattila ‘right’ for the role of Ariadne. She is a wonderfully engaging artist, and there was much to enjoy, but I missed the floating of line that seems essential to the part, likewise the neo-Mozartian grace. Others have clearly felt differently, and I have tried not to be hidebound by recollections of great historic assumptions; ultimately, however, and with considerable regret, I thought Mattila miscast.

 

The other disappointment, perhaps more predictably, was Antonio Pappano’s conducting. Quite why he insists on inflicting himself upon a German repertoire for which he clearly has little sensitivity, let alone understanding, remains a mystery. Granted, this was not nearly so bad as his Wagner, and there was considerable life to the Prologue. However, the Opera soon became listless, with little sense of harmonic or indeed any other direction. The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House played very well, but how one longed for the wisdom, refinement, wit, and humanity the late Colin Davis brought to this work in this production.

 

La bohème, Royal Opera, 9 July 2014

Royal Opera House

Marcello – Markus Werba

Rodolfo – Charles Castronovo

Colline – Jongmin Park

Schaunard – Daniel Grice

Benoît – Jeremy White

Mimì – Ermonela Jaho

Parpignol – Luke Price

Musetta – Simona Mihai

Alcindoro – Donald Maxwell

Customs Officer – Christopher Lackner

Sergeant – Bryan Secombe

John Copley (director)

Julia Trevelyan Oman (designs)

John Charlton (lighting)

Extra Chorus
Members of Tiffin Children’s Chorus
Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Cornelius Meister (conductor)

Perhaps I have made life too difficult for myself; it would not necessarily be the first time. At any rate, since the last time I saw John Copley’s production of La bohème – it had actually been my first, something that certainly was not the case for much of the Royal Opera House’s audience – I have seen on DVD Stefan Herheim’s brilliant staging of the work for the Norwegian National Opera. A typically musical production which transforms one’s understanding of the work, or at least of the possibilities it offers, resolutely avoiding the slightest hint of sentimentality and instead tackling head on difficult realities of life, death, and memory, Herheim’s Bohème is perhaps bound to have many others suffer by comparison. That is not, of course, to say that every production should be like it, or indeed that any production should attempt to imitate it, but that it marks a turning-point in the reception of La bohème, and that as venerable a staging as this, even when revived in lively fashion by the original director, is perhaps more likely than before to have one feel that something is missing. Or at least that it is going to require especially outstanding performances to make it live as once it might have done.

 

The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House offered a predictable trump card, rarely if ever putting a foot – or bow – wrong, playing Puccini’s score with an assuredness that never toppled over into over-familiarity. Cornelius Meister’s conducting of the orchestra receives more of a mixed report. In its favour, there was a great deal of care taken to characterise individual scenes, moods, even lines. This was certainly not a routine reading. However, a longer line often proved elusive, partly because it was not clear how individual sections fitted together. Contrast is good but still more important is underlying unity. An opening scene took almost anti-Romantic jauntiness to excess, whilst declarations of affection – or their approach – often became a spur to indulgence.  Perhaps Meister’s is a conception that will tighten as the run proceeds; there was an undoubted intelligence to be heard. A few shaky moments of ensemble aside, he seemed eminently capable of drawing from the orchestra and his cast what he wanted.

Ermonela Jaho’s Mimì was beautifully, often passionately sung, drawing upon a splendid array of vocal colours, generally – if perhaps not always – with a dramatic point in mind. Alas, her acting abilities lagged behind; there was far too much of the stock gesture, which might have worked better in certain other Puccini operas, but which seemed both over the top and non-specific in this would-be Bohemian milieu. Bar an uncertain top – at one point in the first act, quite alarmingly so – Charles Castronovo showed himself to be an adept Puccini singer and actor. When I have heard him in Mozart, I have thought his style perilously close to Puccini; here, he seemed very much at home. Markus Werba offered a typically intelligent reading of Marcello, attentive to the words in a way that not all of his colleagues were. Simona Mihai’s Musetta was somewhat generalised in scope, not assisted by Copley’s insistence upon comedy in the second act. Jongmin Park’s deep bass Colline was beautifully sung, though it sounded at times a little close to the world of Boris Godunov. Luke Price’s Parpignol struggled a little too much in vocal terms. However, the choral singing was excellent.

 

Back, then, to staging, in conclusion. Copley’s production, perhaps above all Julia Trevelyan Oman evocative period designs, has done sterling service. However, I could not help but wonder whether the endless ‘activity’, especially during the second act, spoke a little too much of trying to breathe new life into something that has already had a very good innings. It has endured and delighted far longer than any production could possibly expect to do so. But now, as the Royal Opera has apparently realised, its era is drawing to a close. It will be back next year, but then, at last, there will be a new staging. What a pity, though, that, if only for a season in between, we could not have had Herheim’s probing, transformative drama brought to London. Maybe a thought for ENO…?

 

Salzburg Festival (10) – Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 27 August 2013

Grosses Festspielhaus

Hans Sachs – Michael Volle

Walther von Stolzing – Roberto Saccà
Eva – Anna Gabler
David – Peter Sonn
Veit Pogner – Georg Zeppenfeld
Magdalena – Monika Bohinec
Sixtus Beckmesser – Markus Werba
Kunz Vogelgesang – Thomas Ebenstein
Konrad Nachtigall – Guido Jentjens
Fritz Kothner – Oliver Zwarg
Balthasar Zorn – Benedikt Kobel
Ulrich Eißlinger – Franz Supper
Augustin Moser – Thorsten Scharnke
Hermann Ortel – Karl Huml
Hans Schwartz – Dirk Aleschus
Hans Foltz – Roman Astakhov
Night Watchman – Tobias Kehrer

Stefan Herheim (director)

Heike Scheele (designs)
Gesine Völlm (costumes)
Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach (dramaturgy)
Olaf Freese (lighting)
Martin Kern (video)

Academy Mastersingers of the Young Singers Project

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

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Daniele Gatti (conductor)

 



Images: © Salzburger Festspiele / Forster

Salzburg’s new Meistersinger proves beyond a shadow of doubt, in the unlikely event that such proof were needed, that Stefan Herheim is the most intelligent, most thoughtful, most theatrical, and – most important of all – most musical stage director of Wagner and perhaps of opera tout court today. There is nothing worse, even the arbitrary setting of an opera in ‘an empty swimming pool or a slaughterhouse’ (see wagneropera.net’s revealing interview with Peter Konwitschny, perhaps Herheim’s only, though less consistent, competitor), than a mindless ‘traditional’ staging. As Speight Jenkins,  general director of Seattle Opera, argued in a career retrospective I heard him give in Seattle earlier in August, ‘traditional Wagner’ is a matter of a ‘rock and tree’, and let the singers get on with it; Jenkins recoiled from, indeed quite rightly attacked, the idea that Seattle’s ‘green’ Ring has anything to do with that. There is nothing Wagnerian – it is little exaggeration to think of Wagner as our first operatic stage director – about the bad old days of ‘park and bark’. Moreover, there can be few more gross insults to Wagner, theoretician of the ‘emotionalisation of the intellect’ (Gefühlswerdung des Verstandes), than to insist instead upon intellectual abdication; should you seek brazen ‘infidelity’ to the ‘Master’, look no further than the world-view, such as it is, of Nietzsche’s ‘Wagnerians’. (Concert performances are of course a different matter entirely; I face here the difficult truth that the two greatest Ring performances I have experienced have both been of that ilk, or rather semi-staged: those by Bernard Haitink and Daniel Barenboim at, of all places, the Royal Albert Hall. But then, I and the world at large are still waiting for Herheim’s Ring.)

Hans Sachs (Michael Volle)

There are countless ways to approach even a brief outline of Herheim’s staging – and even when one has seen it but once. (Doubtless, as with his Parsifal, subsequent viewings will reap further, dialectical rewards.) We might usefully start with the conception of Meistersinger as Hans Sachs’s dream, but fascinating though that idea and its implications may be, equally important, and indeed unavoidable in any discussion, is Herheim’s interrogation of dreams and indeed of his own Konzept. In that, of course, he both mirrors and interrogates Wagner’s own conceptions of dreams within the work. One is always aware of the latter, yet it is striking how heightened the role of dreams in poem and music becomes when an intelligent, sympathetic director heightens intellect and feeling, bids them become one. In the first act Prelude we see Sachs in his nineteenth-century workshop, dreaming, like Wagner, of a Nuremberg, which, like the ‘traditional’ productions of ‘traditionalists’, never was; we proceed to see – and to hear – how he creates, not recollects, before him and us a Nuremberg of his own time. Similarly, Wagner declines in the score to employ even the most cursory reference to Renaissance music; his guiding spirit here is Johann Sebastian Bach, or rather his own creation of Bach, the ‘history of the interior life of the German spirit,’ according to the contemporary essay What is German?  Invention of tradition is seen elsewhere, just as we hear it throughout the score. The Masters’ Nuremberg, now seen at a time of renewed crisis for the guilds and other corporate institutions, is shiny, new, a little insistent, a little desperate. I could not help but think of the Tand both of Sachs’s peroration and of Loge’s description of the Rhinegold. All that glistens, be it in the Rhine or at a guild meeting, is not necessarily gold; indeed Sachs, rightly or otherwise, will condemn it as the very thing the Masters insist it is not; ‘wälschem Tand’, foreign vanity.

 

The ‘real’ world – but is it ‘real’ at all, when we, like Wagner and perhaps like Sachs, read from Schopenhauer? – both disappears and yet remains, projected onto the curtain a night-capped Sachs opens and closes, with increasing difficulty, at the beginnings and ends of the first two acts. Yet the dream world, initiated erotically by Sachs’s sexual approach to Eva in the church, is made up of what he knows, and of what his – and Wagner’s – culture knows. His writing bureau, magnified, becomes the organ, as indeed the furniture generally provides a Nutcracker-like magnification and intensification for the Wahn of the second-act riot; a painting becomes Eva. Most challenging of all, Beckmesser finally becomes Sachs’s alter ego, emerging for a curtain call in matching night dress: a move equally alert to the comedy and to the darkness at the heart of a work whose profundity lies in precisely the matters faux ‘traditionalists’ from the Nazis, and indeed still further back, would ignore and preferably bury. Or is it the other way around? Does the organ, resplendent as a nineteenth-century, Gewandhaus-like invention of tradition, become Sachs’s bureau, and thus nourish via tradition, in a proper sense, his creations, whether artistic or social (manipulation of Wahn more generally)? It is not either-or, of course; Wagner and Herheim are both dialecticians, and so must we, as a responsive, responsible audience, be too. A bust of Wagner makes its ambiguous, multivalent point without exaggeration.

 

Perhaps most telling on a structural level is the way in which Herheim’s staging traces, or rather instigates, Sachs-like manipulation of Wahn – and doubtless Wahn’s manipulation of Sachs. Just as Walther, his song, and Nuremberg’s public are guided, so too are Sachs’s dream and Sachs’s reality. Yes, there are proto-fascist undertones there for those who wish to find them, as suggested by the chilling lighting of a semi-crazed Sachs during his final peroration, yet they may always readily be understood in a multitude of other or at least additional ways; a signal strength of Herheim, as Wagner, is that he asks questions that are too great to be banally ‘resolved’. When, then, the third act begins, the drama continues, but Sachs is in ‘real’, that is night, dress. Has he made the terrible realisation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy? Has he lifted, as does Wotan, through Brünnhilde, the veil of Maya, the principium individuationis, seeing and feeling in the carnage of the world, whether on the banks of the Pegnitz or of the Rhine, not only ‘suffering humanity’, but also a ‘world that passes away’? One can hardly fail to think of Tristan, too, when it comes to such clever game-playing between night and day. And yet, Meistersinger is not, of course, Tristan, not least since Sachs would not become King Marke. That truth is borne out not only in the third act, but even during the Prügelfuge at the close of Act II. The glow worm who could not find its mate, to whom Sachs will refer in the following act, is seen in the mêlée desperately – and graphically – trying to find a replacement. This is no world of idealised Romantic or even sexual love; it is clear-eyed, brutal as the Will itself. And so, the creation of the third act, Wagner’s and Sachs’s, both breaks with and incorporates what has gone before, like the Prize Song itself.

 

What else? The world of fairy tales enters explosively, erotically, frighteningly, during the second-act riot. They also reappear in the following ‘reality’, Red Riding Hood chased in Sachs’s workshop. The Brothers Grimm live in Wagner’s, Herheim’s, and our, imagination; so does Freud, even before the letter. A steam locomotive, recalling Germany’s very first railway line, between Nuremberg and Fürth, brings the girls from the latter, yet they are not quite what they might have been; instead, they are nightmarish dolls. Who is dreaming now, and of what? We also recall Adorno’s critical observations on technology and the instrumentalisation of reason, both in the stagecraft and the very idea of such a production itself; in Schiller’s well-worn yet indispensable typology, this is no ‘naïve’ art, but ‘sentimental’ art with a vengeance. One makes connections, and they will probably be different for each audience member, probably different for each viewing by the same audience member. That is successful theatre direction. For Herheim never forgets that this is theatre; every observation is keen, every member of the chorus is his or her own person; yet by the same token, he never presents effect without cause (Wirkung ohne Ursache: choose from Wagner on Meyerbeer, or Nietzsche on Wagner, according to taste, or indeed reject the terms of the choice itself).

 

If I have written at greater length on the staging than I shall on the musical performances, that is not because I think the latter realm of intrinsically lesser importance; quite the contrary. It is partly because I wished to suggest Herheim’s production formed part of the musical performance, but also partly because, all in all, it was the exemplary experience of this particular night. Daniele Gatti’s conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic surprised me somewhat, especially during the first act, which sounded – and, in terms of the number of strings, I suspect was – somewhat small-scale. Yet as the work progressed, one realised that Gatti’s conception was dynamic in a very real dramatic sense, complementary to that of Herheim, but not identical – representing, furthering the relationship between Wagner’s poem and music. The score bloomed, darkened, expanded as the drama itself; the orchestral performance could be understood to have instantiated a similar dialectical strategy to that of Sachs’s dream. It is certainly not the only way to perform Die Meistersinger, but the scattered boos Gatti – uniquely and undeservedly – suffered seemed more likely to have emanated from those who thought the work ‘must’ sound like a particular recording or misremembered performance from a ‘golden’ age that never was than from thoroughgoing critique. The VPO was not exactly on vintage form, however, sometimes offering a thinness of string tone that went beyond Gatti’s initial chamber imperative. ‘Tradition’ in that case had something in common with Mahler’s Schlamperei.

 

Michael Volle’s Sachs was the undoubted star on the stage. In full command and sympathy with music, words, and production, he inhabited the role, made it his own, and offered more rounded a portrayal than I have ever previously seen on the stage. The Wahn monologue was all the more moving for emerging from what had already passed; this was no mere set piece. Markus Werba offered a finely-honed Beckmesser, navigating with apparent ease – though, like the mediated Prize Song, that ease can only have been apparent – the tricky balancing act between malevolence and Malvolio, learning and charlatanry. Werba did not make the common mistake of unduly dignifying Beckmesser; nor, however, was his creation in any way a caricature. Roberto Saccà experienced certain moments of strain; yet, by any reasonable standards this side of Sándor Konyá, his was an estimable assumption, welding words, text, and stage action in a properly Wagnerian unity. Anna Gabler, as his intended, was at times a little bland of tone, but acted well. She was outshone, however, by Monika Bohinec’s Magdalena, who, in Herheim’s hands, offered a far more interesting second-act Magdalena-as-Eva than I have seen, a true dramatic engagement with and reaction to Beckmesser’s serenade without singing a single world. Not that she could not sing too. Peter Sonn’s David was bright and bushy-tailed, without offering anything especially distinctive, but there was experience aplenty in Georg Zeppenfeld’s Pogner and Oliver Zwarg’s Kothner. The other Masters were a characterful bunch, and not only on account of Herheim’s alert Personenregie, and the choral singing was pretty much beyond reproach.

 

This was undoubtedly the best Meistersinger I have seen. The Paris co-production and rumours of a trip to the Metropolitan Opera will offer opportunities that should be grabbed with open arms; if only Covent Garden would join the party...

Ariadne auf Naxos, Royal Opera, 16 June 2008

Royal Opera House

Prima Donna/Ariadne – Deborah Voigt
Composer – Kristine Jepson
Music Master – Sir Thomas Allen
Dancing Master – Alan Oke
Wigmaker – Jacques Imbrailo
Lackey – Dean Robinson
Officer – Nikola Matišić
Tenor/Bacchus – Robert Dean Smith
Zerbinetta – Gillian Keith
Harlequin – Markus Werba
Scaramuccio – Ji-Min Park
Truffaldino – Jeremy White
Brighella – Haoyin Xue
Naiad – Anita Watson
Dryad – Sarah Castle
Echo – Anna Leese
Major Domo – Alexander Pereira

Christof Loy (director)
Andrew Sinclair (revival director)
Herbert Murauer (designs)
Jennifer Tipton (lighting)
Beate Vollack (choreographer)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Mark Elder (conductor)

Of the three occasions on which I have now seen this production of Ariadne auf Naxos, I enjoyed this the least. It still had its good points but there was in general less focus than upon either of the previous outings. Christof Loy’s production had been the first of Antonio Pappano’s new regime at Covent Garden. As such, it had made a considerable impression, with smart theatrical values lavished upon an extremely well-chosen work: in some senses, the ultimate ‘opera about opera’, which manages both to celebrate and gently to send up all of our ideas concerning what the art-form is and what it should be.

The opening scene, in which the house of the ‘richest man in Vienna’ is displayed, the ground floor gradually rising to reveal beneath stairs the multifarious preparations for the forthcoming entertainment, remains a considerable coup de théâtre. However, the recurrence of a problem from the very first night, in which the change of scenery had necessitated an interval longer even that that planned, seemed less excusable and more irritating on a second revival. The point of the production is surely that, by mirroring in the Prologue the surroundings of the Royal Opera House itself, the audience realises that the attitudes being expressed on stage relate to its own preferences and opinions. To quote Horace, as so many have since, ‘Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur’ (‘Change but the name, and the tale is told of you’). If attention is unduly drawn to the stage machinery, especially the on-stage lift, in itself, then the work is vulgarised; one can step out to the foyer during the interval, should one really wish to watch a lift in action. It seemed to me, then, that the tightness of Loy’s original production was lost in Andrew Sinclair’s revival. The Personenregie seemed at times somewhat aimless, more so in the Opera than in the Prologue. This applied especially to Zerbinetta’s troupe. The original delight one had taken in the inappropriate juxtaposition of the antics of a motley commedia dell’arte crew with Ariadne’s opera seria was replaced, at least at times, with a sense of the arbitrary. For one thing, the choreography sometimes seemed straightforwardly embarrassing, rather than representing embarrassment. I was also puzzled by an inconsistency, which I assume must have been there all along, although I do not recall it. It was not clear why Zerbinetta’s men all changed into white tie and tails at the end of the Prologue, in order to appear on stage, only to emerge on stage during the Opera dressed quite differently. I then realised that the other characters also emerged alternatively attired. If the preparation we had witnessed had not indeed been preparation at all but something quite separate, dissociated from the following entertainment, then Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s finely-wrought interplay between Prologue and Opera was considerably slighted.

Musically too, this was a less impressive performance than had previously been the case. Pappano’s direction of the initial performances remains one of the best things I have heard him do, although it was eclipsed by the subsequent wisdom of Sir Colin Davis. Mark Elder received extremely warm applause on arriving in the pit, which was perhaps a response to the news that he too will soon be a musical knight. His view of the work, however, did not really seem to have settled; it certainly lacked coherence. There were moments, often the most Romantic ones, at which everything, or almost everything, came together and sounded glorious, not least the daringly slow speeds at which some of the Composer’s most beautiful music was taken. During the Opera, however, some stretches of the score merely sounded inappropriately slow, even dragging. The earlier stages of the Prologue, moreover, often sounded rushed and there was little sense of a greater symphonic whole. Insofar as one may consider the orchestra separately from its direction, it generally sounded good, though not outstanding. There were some magical Mozartian moments from the woodwind and the strings, when given their head, soared as if they were no longer of chamber-sized proportions. On the other hand, there were a few rough edges and minor slips.

The cast also proved more mixed than on previous occasions. Sir Thomas Allen approached perfection in reprising the role of the Music Master. Every word and every phrase were made to tell, although it was a pity that he was saddled with a silly wig. Jacques Imbrailo presented a vivid, wonderfully camp cameo as the Wigmaker; this Jette Parker Young Artist deserves to go far. I was less sure about the Scaramuccio and Brighella, who were adequate, no more. As for the rest of Zerbinetta’s troupe, Jeremy White acted well and sang reasonably, but Markus Werba was truly first-class. Possessed of a charismatic and most imaginatively dark stage presence, he proceeded to lavish a Lieder singer’s attention to verbal and musical detail upon his part. He may be renowned as a Papageno, a role he assumed splendidly for the Salzburg Festival under Riccardo Muti, but I should now dearly love to hear – and to see – him as Don Giovanni. He and Allen outshone the rest of the cast, which is not really as it should be. It was nevertheless fun to have Alexander Pereira, director of the Zurich Opera, add another wryly nonchalant - and on this occasion, unscheduled - appearance as the Major Domo to his roster; it was also good to see the health fascists confounded by having him smoke on stage. Gillian Keith seemed to grow into the character of Zerbinetta during the Opera, having sounded a little too anonymously light of voice in the Prologue. She delivered her coloratura fearlessly but wanted the depth of character that many artists have brought to this most delightful of roles. Kristine Jepson was no Irmgard Seefried. Her closing moments, in which the Composer appears finally to be voicing Strauss’s own beliefs, were movingly delivered, yet too many of her earlier lines were curiously lacking in shading. It is a cliché to describe Bacchus, or indeed any of Strauss’s tenor roles, as thankless, yet it is and they are. Robert Dean Smith sounded better than many, although there were uncharacteristic moments of strain after Bacchus’s arrival. He rose splendidly, however, to the demands of his final peroration. Deborah Voigt, however, delivered rather less than I had expected. She proved a convincing Prima Donna but an oddly wayward Ariadne. There were moments at which her soprano sounded truly glorious: both secure and lustrous. There were also far too many passages in which not only was her vibrato unflatteringly wide but she was also simply out of tune. I have heard her in a number of Strauss roles; this was by some degree her weakest.

Of course, one must try to make the best of what circumstances throw at one. Such is the message of the Prologue. Yet, despite those three truly estimable performances to which I have referred, the sheer enchantment of Ariadne deserved better than it generally received here; its intricate constructivism needs surer hands on the directorial and musical tillers.