Munich Opera Festival (2) - Of One Blood, 28 June 2026

 

Nationaltheater

Production images: Monika Rittershaus

Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England – Johanni von Oostrum
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots – Vera-Lotte Boecker
Female Consorts I-IV – Seonwoo Lee, Mirjam Mesak, Lotte Betts-Dean, Meg Brilleslyper
Female Consort V, Jane Kennedy – Freya Apfellstaedt
Male Consort I, Lord Darnley – Michael Butler
Male Consort II – Joel Williams
Male Consort III, Rizzio – Andrew Hamilton
Male Consort IV, Scottish Lord I – Armand Rabot
Male Consort V, Scottish Lord II, Executioner – Pawel Horodyski
Solo harpsichord – Mahan Esfahani

Director – Claus Guth
Set designs – Etienne Pluss
Costumes – Ursula Kudrna
Sound design – Bob Scott, Sven Eckhoff
Lighting – Michael Bauer
Choreography – Sommer Ulrickson

Dramaturgy – Yvonne Gebauer, Lukas Leipfinger
Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus director: Christoph Hell)
Bavarian State Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

I remember, as a schoolboy, reading in a newspaper about ‘The Hecklers’, a pair of composers with highly reactionary aesthetics, who objected so strongly to Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain that they protested against its revival at Covent Garden. I would hear Gawain at a subsequent revival, as a student, and be swept off my feet. But at the time, I recall being puzzled by the idea that one would protest against something being performed simply because one did not like it, or even because one thought it not very good. I did not know much about the repertoire of opera houses at the time, but the idea that they were overloaded with new, or even modernist, work was patently absurd. I was equally puzzled, at the end of this performance of Brett Dean’s new opera Of One Blood, to hear loud booing from certain quarters of Munich’s Nationaltheater, when the composer, librettist Heather Betts, and (I think) director Claus Guth came onstage. It was not a premiere, so their appearance was slightly unexpected, if welcome. Could people who had contentedly, so it seemed, sat through two acts of a new opera have felt so strongly about its music – it could, I suppose, have been its libretto, or even its staging – that they felt they must bellow farmyard noises in an attempt to drown out applause? If they had not liked the opera, or had considerable criticisms of it, fair enough, but what was it that had led them to such a display? It was neither a mindlessly reactionary nor a vigorously avant-garde work; it was well crafted, well performed, and well directed. Would not refraining from applause – as, I am sure, many of us have done on occasion – have been enough? I am afraid reflection has left me none the wiser, but the experience was unsettling and has continued to be, not least from concern for those at the sharp end of that strange, bullying response.

 

The phrase ‘of one blood’ refers to a phrase Mary (Stuart), Queen of Scots used in a letter to her cousin and antagonist – historical and, here, dramatic – Elizabeth I, here ‘Elizabeth Tudor’: ‘We be both of one blood, of one country, and in one Island’. In their communications and other sixteenth-century sources lie the seeds of Betts’s libretto, assembled and constructed after the manner of many a dramatic confrontation between the two. Betts is a visual artist: an interesting case for a librettist in terms of scene-setting, for instance the opening and close of the work in contemporary or perhaps, in Guth’s staging, a future Westminster Abbey, in whose Henry VII/Lady Chapel the two queens lie at opposite ends, at the command of their mutual successor, James VI and I, who also commissioned their tombs. That struck her when visiting, as it might anyone, but its visual element seems to have been especially important to the librettist dramaturgically, focusing the action and the way it plays out, thereby also influencing the staging, as well as providing elements of a solution for the perennial problem of what to do in a drama concerning the entwined lives of two central figures who never met. Contriving an occasion on which they did is a common solution; it is good to welcome an alternative to the fold, in an intriguingly clinical white setting, albeit beneath a hint of English Perpendicular Gothic (which tilted at one point, perhaps as a reflection of changing fortunes and/or danger). 

And so, we see the two queens act separately in the beginning, later appearing partly at the same time in their own halves of the stage, with ‘consort’ retinues – I was puzzled before realising the word was intended musically rather than maritally – so as to react one another’s words and deeds, coming tantalisingly close, yet never quite meeting. Tellingly, their union in duet, as opposed to ‘written’ dialogue, takes place when both are offstage. There are oddities to the libretto, or at least features I did not understand: the archaic ‘-eth’ third-person singular is employed, yet we hear ‘will’ rather than ‘wilt’ with thou. It all serves its purpose well enough, though—and perhaps such inconsistencies, if inconsistencies they be, are simply reflections of a language that has always been in change. Titles were used not simply to convey but, at certain points, to add to the libretto, including indication of place, such as Richmond Palace, Holyrood, or of course Fotheringhay Castle.

Collaboration between husband and wife librettist (their daughter one of Mary’s excellent consort) seems to have been fruitfully close. What comes ‘first’, whether chronologically or aesthetically, is ever a fraught question in any such relationship, but there were no obvious signs of tension and many of complement. Likewise between them and Guth, the extraction of both tombs for cleaning and their return at the end an interesting element of the aforementioned framing rather than contrast or contradiction. A low opening pedal – electronic rather than acoustic, I think – sounds, Rheingold-like yet -unlike, the musical beginning, subsequent scraping noises, like a dental implement writ large, partaking of the drama and ushering in the Bayerische Staatsorchester, here on excellent form under Vladimir Jurowski’s wise, invigorating direction. Two worlds, then, collided and coincided in more ways than one: multidimensional yet bilateral dramatic conflict, one might say. This was further layered in the Elizabethan scenes with harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani onstage. Few if any harpsichordists have done more for new music than Esfahani; here his role once again bridged divides between old and new, his instrument inciting orchestral and electronic material, and on at least one occasion – if my ears did not deceive me – prefigured in the ‘purely’ electronic material of the very opening. The dramatic possibilities of such time travel were manifold—perhaps all the better for being left to us not necessarily to resolve but to ponder, and thus to engage as active dramatic participants.

Similarities with Berg – first a chord close to Wozzeck, then broader harmonic fields – suggested themselves to my ears at the opening of the second act, but I am not sure this was so much influence as my ears making sense of a new harmonic world with music I knew. More fundamentally, the expertise and artistry with which both acts, of roughly equal length, were planned and realised was striking, still more so in the second (perhaps a matter of my having become more at home with the work). In that, the role of the equally excellent chorus was apparent: first liturgical, in Westminster Abbey, but changing its role, like the Greek chorus so as both to comment and participate, in acclamation, rebellion, and more. 

In what was perhaps an inevitable nod to or at least coincidence with Donizetti, coloratura featured in both queens’ lines, but there was far more to them than that, especially as brought so vividly and sympathetically to life by Johanni von Oostrum and Vera-Lotte Boecker. Amongst the rest of a very fine cast, I might put in a word for Michael Butler’s feckless Darnley and Pawel Horodyski’s Executioner, but this was emphatically an ensemble performance as well as one of warring queens. Designs and choreography were stylish and suggestive throughout. Maybe our hecklers disliked the black coals of ruin that occupied much of the second-act stage, before being swept away by restoration workers in the present/future. I am grasping at straws, though. Who knows? Ultimately, who cares?

Applause from the premiere: Geoffroy Schied

 

The English Cat, Bavarian State Opera, 25 January 2026

Cuvilliés-Theater

Lord Puff – Michael Butler
Arnold – Daniel Vening
Mr Jones, Judge, Mr Fawn – Zhe Liu
Tom – Armand Rabot
Peter – Samuel Stopford
Mr Keen, Defence Counsel, Parish Priest – Dafydd Jones
Minette – Seonwoo Lee
Babette – Meg Brilleslyper
Louise – Iana Aivazian
Miss Crisp – Elene Gvritishvili
Mrs Gomfit – Nontobeko Bhengu
Lady Toodle – Jess Dandy
Mr Punkett, Prosecution Counsel – Bruno Khouri
Betty – Lucy Altus

Director – Christiane Lutz
Set designs – Christian Andre Tabakoff
Costumes – Dorothee Joisten
Lighting – Benedikt Zehm
Dramaturgy – Olaf Roth

Bayerische Staatsorchester
Katharina Wincor (conductor)

Images: Geoffroy Schied

For an opera derived from a French novel (Honoré de Balzac) by an English playwright (Edward Bond) and a German composer (Hans Werner Henze), The English Cat has had an appropriately international and multilingual performance history. Its 1983 Schwetzingen Festival premiere was given in German translation, followed by French translation at Paris’s Opéra Comique the following year, only the year after that finally being given in Bond’s English at Santa Fe. Brexit-Insel (as it then, blessedly, was not yet) had to wait until 1987 before it was given at the Edinburgh Festival, finally coming to London only in its revised version in 1991, that revision having first been given at Henze’s own Montepulciano festival the year before. And that is before one comes to the undeniable Brechtian influence on Bond’s writing; Henze’s multifarious musical influences, often though far from always German; or indeed his flight – political, aesthetic, and sexual – from an oppressive, even repressive Federal Republic of Germany south across the Alps to Italy, settling outside Rome with his beloved partner Fausto Moroni; or his apartment in Knightsbridge…

‘So what?’ one might ask. Apart from intrinsic interest, it perhaps helps provide justification for the Bayerische Staatsoper’s decision, surprising nowadays, to present the opera in its German version by Ken Bartlett as Die englische Katze. Henze’s English-language works have a performance history of their own of being given in German versions: The Bassarids, for instance, also given in German in Munich in 2008, and the first of Henze’s collaborations with Bond, We Come to the River, having a tradition of being given in translation in Germany. For a native English speaker, it was a matter of regret. Bond’s brilliant use of language cannot help be but missed. But I suspect much of the Cuvilliés-Theater audience also gained something in translation. Hearing an English text in Germany, moreover, arguably imparted a little sense of a German composer, however good his English, responding to an English libretto.

Is there, as Henze feared, a mismatch between English and German comedy? Perhaps, but if so, I think that fruitful as much as fateful, whilst noting he felt he had never quite found the right form or version for the work. As for the talented performers onstage from the Staatsoper’s Opera Studio young artists’ scheme, I am sure they could have sung it any language or none. Theirs was a splendid company effort, as clearly was their direction: led musically by Katharina Wincor and scenically by Christiane Lutz and her resourceful production team. And to see it in the magnificently rococo Cuvilliés-Theater – scene to, among other things, the premiere of Idomeneo in 1781 – suggested a little the premiere of this different, yet not entirely un-Mozartian opera buffa at the still-smaller-in-capacity Schlosstheater in Schwetzingen.

Henze recalled in his memoir Bohemian Fifths that, on receiving the libretto from Bond and reading it to his ‘assembled household’ at Marino, he had found it ‘quite different’ from his first encounter with something closer to the original, a dramatisation by Geneviève Serrault for a company of Argentinian actors. It was ‘far more witty, far more relevant in terms of social criticism. It could have been subtitled L’argent fait tout …. It was no longer a fairy-tale play but a Victorian comedy of manners.’ Alas about half of what Bond had written had to be cut, but so far as Henze was concerned, those essential qualities remained. They also did here, I think, in what we saw and heard. The vegetarian-cat Royal Society for the Preservation of Rats was certainly laid bare in all its respectable bourgeois hypocrisy, an additional (I think) murder presented at the opening, both to parallel the later killing of Tom and to present the background to Lord Puff seeking election as president. There was a vacancy because he and his fellow cats had created one. I can understand why they were not presented visually as cats, although the orphaned mouse Louise had more of her animal nature to her. It might all have seemed a bit too close to, well, Cats. Something was lost, I think, not least in post-Brechtian alienation, although the libretto reminded us who they ‘really’ should be, as did a select few acts, such as Minette’s mode of walking on the roof. It also seemed a pity to lose a stronger sense of the other animals: when it came to Tom’s trial, the counsel for defence as dog, members of the jury as birds, and so on. Perhaps, though, there was wisdom in not wanting to turn this into a Cunning Little Vixen sequel. Moreover, both the mercenary nature of the sanctimonious society’s reality and the contrast with true love and humanity (or whatever the correct term would be) from the naive Minette and the smitten Tom were clear and meaningful.

That was, of course, due in no small part to the excellence of their portrayals onstage. Seonwoo Lee and Armand Rabot made for an excellent pair of lovers, complemented in a not-quite-triangle as product of social coercion and expectation by Michael Butler’s Lord Puff. Lee’s coloratura was spot on: sparkling, precise, and expressive in a fashion reminding us of Henze’s love for Mozart. Rabot struck a fine balance between evident sincerity and lingering doubt that the tomcat’s motivation might have been otherwise; much the same might be said of Meg Brilleslyper as Minette’s astute sister, Babette. There was a sense of something better to Butler’s Lord Puff, but also an acceptance that it would never win out. His scheming nephew Arnold was well captured by Daniel Vening. Iana Aivazian’s Louise made the stage her own at the end, showering herself in money, albeit with fine musical, if not political, values. She had learned, after all, from her protectors. Throughout the dizzyingly varied succession of solos, ensembles (the trio between Minette, Tom, and Babette especially moving) and interludes, a focused drama emerged: cut, yes, but with sensitivity and intelligence. There was no weak link in a cast that was greater than the sum of its parts.

Henze’s expressive compositional method – something, I think, to be heard, not merely analysed – also shone through in the vibrant, committed playing of the Bayerische Staatsorchester under Wincor’s incisive yet affectionate direction: not least the relationship between counterpoint and harmony which clearly owes something to Mozart and still more to his love for Mozart. One can hear or at least in some way sense the workings of the note rows, as one might in Berg or Schoenberg, and it is both not entirely the point but also not entirely not the point. Berg perhaps also comes to mind in the closed forms, although they are more overtly ‘closed’: ‘lots of little songs,’ as Henze put it. He would recall Bond having advised him when writing the music ‘to think less of Gilbert and Sullivan [!] and more of Mozart,’ a key stimulus to formulating its harmonic world. Echoes of other music and, more importantly, their collaboration and confrontation also bubbled to the fore.

Only Henze, surely, could come up with the idea of a ‘Courante’ between the sixth and seventh scenes of the second act, that refers both to ‘a visual idea of the tubes and pipes through which London’s sewage is discharged with enormous force into the Thames,’ and to ‘William Byrd’s Coranto, which I allow to come to the surface out of this flood of water – the same flood of water that will soon carry poor dead Minette out into the North Sea.’ I missed some of that detail, some of that city specificity onstage – maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner – but any production has choices to make, and I return to the point that London and England would not necessarily have been foremost in the minds of many in the audience. Weill complemented the residue of Brecht; disconcertingly Brittenesque string halos of love; elements of earlier Henzes from Boulevard Solitude to Pollicino; the Prinz von Homburg’s unresolved conflict between Schoenberg and Stravinsky; anxiety of influence in the direction of Richard Strauss: these and more combined, but in a duly personal as well as eclectic fashion whose ultimate message was piercingly yet humanly imparted. More Henze in Munich and elsewhere please—and not only in this, the composer’s centenary year.