Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Komische Oper, 13 December 2025

Schillertheater

Images: Iko Freese/drama-berlin.de

Leokadja Begbick – Ariana Lucas
Fatty the Bookkeeper – Ivan Turšić
Trinity Moses – Seth Carico
Jenny – Nadja Mchantaf
Jim Mahoney – Gerard Schneider
Jack O’Brien – Caspar Krieger
Bank-Account Bill – Hubert Zapiór
Alaskawolfjoe – Philipp Meierhöfer
Toby Higgins – Thoma Jaron-Wutz
Stage piano – Rui Rodrigues

Director – Barrie Kosky
Revival director – Katharina Fritsch
Set designs and lighting – Klaus Grünberg
Assistant set designer – Anne Kuhn
Costumes – Klaus Bruns
Dramaturgy – Maximilian Hagemeyer

Chorus of the Komische Oper Berlin (director: Jean-Christophe Charron)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper Berlin

Alexander Joel (conductor)

How do you like your Brecht? Or your Weill? Or your Brecht-Weill? Banal questions, doubtless, though that is not to say that nothing can come from them, just as with ‘Aimez-vous Brahms’? There is, though, a particularly strong case to say that however one does, one should not receive what one wants, that to do so, to settle back into ritual, comfortable nostalgia is still more than usually to miss the point. That is certainly nothing so banal as merely ‘épater les bourgeois’, though if we are honest, that will rarely be the worst of things, albeit never enough. 

Berlin, of course, has (had) traditions of its own in this respect, not least from the Berliner Ensemble, founded by Brecht and Helene Weigel: if not quite an anti-Bayreuth, then in something of a dialectical relationship to the Festival. They are not the only traditions; can often be misunderstood; and even where not, have no intrinsic right to be maintained; they will continue in any case to haunt performances, reception, and understanding. If the Theater am Schiffbauerdam, home to the Ensemble for all but the first five years of its existence, is even now most renowned for the 1928 premiere of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, yet also for the 1931 triumph of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, there remains the shadow of the notorious Leipzig premiere of the latter the previous year, disrupted by Nazi thugs who would proceed to ban ‘degenerate’ Brecht and Weill all too soon thereafter. The BE continues to present a broadly Brechtian, if increasingly varied, approach to theatre; indeed, Barrie Kosky’s Threepenny Opera premiered there in 2021, the same pandemic year that his staging of Mahagonny was first given about a mile away at the Komische Oper. It is now revived, during that building’s closure for renovation a little further away, at the Schillertheater—home to a good few spectres of its own. Both theatrically and musically, we inevitably feel some of their haunting, whether that be the intention or no, just as the text of Brecht and Weill (and Elisabeth Hauptmann) invites in and/or fails to repel guests as different as Christ, Luther, Bach, Marx, and, yes, Wagner and Schoenberg—often in tandem with dialectical antagonists—as well as Brecht and Weill themselves in earlier guise. Moreover, if it would make no sense, long after Brecht, Weigel, and indeed Ruth Berghaus and Joachim Herz (director of the Komische Oper’s first, 1977 production), to insist on some outdated Neue Sachlichkeit opposition to Wagner, perhaps even to Wagnerism, such negative, ‘anti’ ghosts will never die completely, nor should they. The present, a different present even from 2021, naturally makes its presence, as it were, felt too—often uneasily, as it should be. 

I do not think it was only on account of my finding eyes and ears, though maybe it was, that performance and production seemed to come a little from the past, real and imagined, in the first half and most strongly to come together, suggesting something new that was yet also a little old, after the interval. Kosky’s production certainly seemed to have its roots most clearly in a Berliner Ensemble lying somewhere between its (mis-?)remembered past and its present earlier on: not in a bad way by any means, but situating itself in a broadly post-Brechtian dramaturgy, knowing cliché and all, that set parameters for our response, all the better for certain surprises – alienating, if you like – to register later on. It took us lightly yet surely, then, on a little walk through imagined Mahagonnys, imagined Berlins, imagined dramatic histories, rather as our three initial protagonists fleeing from their previous home, had taken their leave from their previous city to journey to find their new one. 

If it is clear from the outset who (and what) Widow Begbick is, Trinity Moses and Fatty the Bookkeeper are initially presented, though surely only presented, as Christian and Jew, their dialogue somehow tending a little towards Beckett, whilst remaining the same as it has always been. It had me recall Kosky’s Bayreuth Meistersinger exchanges between Sachs and Beckmesser, especially as realised in the acting of Michael Volle and Johannes Martin Kränzle, that staging for better or worse also preoccupied, rather more controversially, with the 1930s. And indeed, here Seth Carico and Ivan Turšić also worked very well together, their characters coming ever more sharply into focus as the work progressed, whilst maintaining a certain dialectical relationship that also of course encompassed Ariana Lucas, a properly larger-than-life Begbick, at the apex or nadir of its unholy trinity. 

Work and city founded and in (im-)proper working order, a fantastic, typically Kosky ‘show’ experienced following a hurricane both ominous, almost Romantically so, and yet also knowingly, modernistically constructed, the true Weimar Passion (even passion) can emerge—with irony, doubtless, yet also on occasion without. Kosky’s conception of ‘an anti-Tristan und Isolde’ here is interesting, because, inclinations, dramaturgy, performing practices notwithstanding, a little can seep in and arguably must, to be ‘anti-’ in the first place. Ask Nietzsche, Adorno, or Stravinsky. Walls close in and open up, but is it, can it be, any more than an illusion, a delusion, when they do it with mirrors? Descended from Bach’s multivalent chorus as well as the Greeks’, and with all the layers of meaning that might entail, the crowd and thus the city seem larger than they are, but they still, fractious sheep that they be, need to be convinced, corralled, and implicated as individuals. They sing – often surprisingly slowly, echoing the Bach of yesteryear – their chorales but they also act as the Jews of the turba choruses, called upon each in turn to participate in the death sentence visited on Jim Mahoney for his ultimate, unforgivable, Mahagonny-blasphemous crime: buying a round and being unable to pay for it. Stabbing him in turn chills, just as it should, the law – the Law? – acting as it should, in a world without God, let alone humanity.

Yet it is not, of course, without God, as the hurricane may or may not have warned us. He may have been watching all along—though the inhabitants have not been watching Him. The children of Mahagonny, lost in the wilderness, have – in striking parallel with Moses und Aron – fashioned their own idols, a fattened calf included, only to dismember it for pleasure, in anticipating of what they will do to Jimmy. In a moment that is somehow both touching and not, Jenny declines to participate, paving the way for God to deliver His judgement. An ape in a machine, a Cabaret-racialised alienation of the traditional deus ex machina, wheels itself around pathetically onstage, in contrast not only with the loudspeaker but also with the groups of ‘character’ and ‘city’ voices, now heard surrounding us in a spatialised Passion. Ours is a world, nowhere more so than in Berlin, fashioned and even staged by National Socialism and the Holocaust. God, morality, or socialism might be right, but is not might right really? So maybe there was no God after all. Jimmy thought it was Nature, after all, and perhaps it was—though that vision might ultimately be worse vision (this side of socialism, anyway). What if Mahagonny does exist, is not a made-up word, and cannot but endure? What if, to quote from a high priestess of neoliberalism, ‘there is no alternative’?

So far, so (mostly) Brecht, but what of Weill—and indeed Brecht-Weill? Kosky’s direction certainly assisted the creation of the latter, attentive musically and in turn granting the impression that ‘musical’ and ‘dramatic’ worlds helped construct one another, even – particularly? – when they might come into conflict. As an opera, Mahagonny presents its own opportunities and difficulties; one cannot simply perform it as if it were The Threepenny Opera or even the Mahagonny Songspiel, even if one wished to, though the kinship remains clear at every turn and can hardly be ignored. Alexander Joel and the Komische Oper orchestra brought a strong sense of that ‘Twenties’ sound to us: hard-edged, band-like, yet also more clearly than ever founded a good deal of the time in the world of Weill’s teacher, Busoni. Some tempi surprised, but not in a bad way: they had one relisten and appreciate why they were as they were. The sense of a monument on which musical as well as other history might be inscribed came through, not despite but through the immediacy of the songs. That went for the excellent chorus too: a mass of individuals when called for, yet equally an implacable single mass as required—dramatically and musically. 

There would be no more point in trying to imitate Lotte Lenya than there would be Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeburg (conductor on the celebrated first recording) or indeed Alexander Zemlinsky (who conducted both Leipzig and Berlin premieres). Nadja Mchantaf, an extraordinarily versatile artists whom I have seen here in roles ranging from Fiordiligi to Rusalka, brought her own, vividly lifelike Jenny to the stage: beautifully sung and very much her own woman. There was some, yet not too much, ‘genuine’ feeling between her and Gerard Schneider’s Jimmy—with whom, likewise, one sympathised enough at times, without the work lapsing into something else. Indeed, our Jim-in-Gethsemane paved the way skilfully and properly for both the judgement of the final scene and its disregard. As ever with the Komische Oper, there was a strong sense of a company performance, many of the roles being drawn from its own principals—as, of course, one might expect at Brecht’s own theatre. Ultimately, message and ‘experience’ were starkly more than the sum of their parts—as they must be in a world such as this.

Image: my own ( Dorotheenstädtische Friedhof)

Le nozze di Figaro, Komische Oper, 27 April 2024

Schillertheater

Count Almaviva – Hubert Zapiór
Countess Almaviva – Nadja Mchantaf
Susanna – Penny Sofroniadou
Figaro – Tommaso Barea
Cherubina – Susan Zarrabi
Marcellina – Karolina Gumos
Bartolo – Tijl Faveyts
Basilio – Johannes Dunz
Antonio – Peter Lombert
Cherubino – Georgy Kudrenko
Count’s henchman – Nikita Kukushkin
Young man – Nikita Elenev

Director, designs – Kirill Serebrennikov
Co-set designer – Olga Pavlyuk
Co-costume designer – Tatyana Dolmatovskaya
Choreography – Evgeny Kulagin
Dramaturgy – Julia Jordà Stoppelhaar, Daniil Orlov
Lighting – Olaf Freese
Video – Ilya Shgalov

Orchestra of the Komische Oper

James Gaffigan (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus

It is currently fashionable to treat the three operas Mozart wrote with Lorenzo Da Ponte as a ‘trilogy’. There is nothing wrong with that in principle: that is, in commissioning a director (perhaps a conductor too and some of the cast) to stage all three. Nor is there anything wrong with attempting to draw out dramatic themes hold in common. What is sauce for the musicological goose should also be sauce for the performing gander, and vice versa. Results, however, seem more mixed: more, it seems to me, because the gander will not necessarily pay as much attention as he might, if not to the goose, then at least to the intrinsic qualities of the works themselves. Sadly, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s decision to entreat all three works to Vincent Huguet resulted in three productions that ranged from the merely vacuous to the catastrophic. Neither (relatively) recent experiments in this respect from the Salzburg Festival has resulted, to my mind in great success, though at least Claus Guth came up with a memorable, in the best sense provocative Marriage of Figaro. The jury must remain partially out on Kirill Serebrennikov for Berlin’s Komische Oper, with a Don Giovanni to come; yet, whilst this new Figaro has a number of things to commend it, it also proves considerably more problematical than his excellent Così fan tutte (premiered in Zurich). 

The set offers a literal upstairs-downstairs setting: eminently suitable, one might think, for a drama involving relations between masters and servants. In many ways, it is, though the sheer grubbiness of the ‘downstairs’, rows of washing machines to excite disgraced ex-MP Keith Vaz, seems in a not especially productive way to be a little too much. An old woman gets a great deal of ironing done, though, and cast members, especially male ones, freely change their clothes in an uninviting environment, which also plays host to a torture-interrogation scene for Figaro’s trial (again, perhaps a little too much, not least in its disregard for the words and music being sung and played). Above seems to be an art gallery, though it may just be that expensive works of art and, latterly, an exhibition are to be seen in the Almavivas’ private residence. An older painting is damaged and sent for repair, though I do not think we see it again; it is replaced by a shallow, kitschy installation-world with neon slogans, which, as video commentary and a spoken intervention by Dr Bartolo inform us, poses questions about contemporary relationships between hyperreality and simulation. ‘Capitalism kills love’; reads one; I presume the banal truism to be deliberate, although my wager would be small. One of the neon signs reads ‘FESTA FOLLIA’, ‘party madness’, which at least has relevance to what is going on and perhaps even to the folle journée of Beaumarchais’s title. We are, I presume, invited to read this into what else is unfolding dramatically, and that seemed to me at least a fruitful way to proceed, but connections both with what we saw and with the work might have been made clearer. 

I realise talk about ‘not trusting’ the work and its creators runs the risk of sounding, indeed perhaps being, unduly reactionary. It and they will survive to fight another day, and there is plenty of room, or should be, for productions that take their leave from a work to say something different, as well as those more evidently at its ‘service’. That said, I could not help find some of what we saw unduly provisional, as if the director had either run out of time, or simply could not be bothered. Serebrennikov certainly has ideas; this is not a Huguet-style disaster, far from it. Whether they are pursued with sufficient rigour to be comprehensible to an audience, let alone to form a coherent argument, is sometimes less clear. 

For there is much messing about with the text, without much in the way of gain from it. Characters are eliminated, redeployed, invented with scant justification, and the old(ish) trick of using titles to say something else begins to look a little threadbare. Why Bartolo’s first-act aria is cut, only to reappear in the third act I have no idea. The character’s sudden appearance in the second act finale is surprising, since no one will have any idea who he is, save for a text-message exchange (video again) between him and Marcellina earlier on. Text messages also feature heavily in the splitting of the role of Cherubino between a silent, highly physical male actor and a frumpily dressed ‘Cherubina’, who relays his messages to others. We read in the programme the extraordinary claim that Serebrennikov ‘gets round the operatic convention of casting a soprano in the role … (rather overstretching the imagination of the audience) and he makes Cherubino into a credible rival’. If high Victorianism could readily manage such gender fluidity and the ‘convention’ dates back not only to the premiere but to the entire conception of the work, it does not seem too much of an ‘overstretch’ to ‘imagine’ that Berlin in 2024 could cope. Perish the thought that disguise might also be crucial to the role and drama. The more fundamental idea, though, is that ‘a personification of eros’, who ‘cannot hear or speak’ uses as ‘his only weapon … passion, utilising his whole body’. Perhaps, though, presenting a hearing actor imitating deaf speech might have been rethought, so as to offer representation to a deaf actor. It is surely only a coincidence, though, that this gave Serebrennikov another opportunity to depict male undress and nudity. 

Barbarina is nowhere to be seen; I had thought her part might be united with that of ‘Cherubina’; that might have made some sense. It seemed to be in the third act, but then for some reason or none, the Countess sang her cavatina in the fourth act. A further odd claim, moreover, is that made by dramaturge Julia Jordà Stoppelhaar in the programme that Serebrennikov ‘becomes even more of a Kammerspiel [chamber play]’ by eliminating the chorus and allegedly ‘supporting roles’ (Nebenrollen). Since he adds a good few of his own, such as the bizarre, pet-playing ‘Count’s henchman’ – nothing necessarily wrong with bizarre, but even so – and another ‘Young man’, as well as other extras drawn from the Komparserie, the claim seems at best tenuous even on its own terms. The greater problem lies in what has been lost, musically too, nowhere more so than in the near nonsense of hearing much of the chorus music with orchestra alone (or, in the first act, shared between soloists and harpsichord). 

Interpolation of music from Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet to suggest (I presume) the neurotic, white-glove-wearing Count’s fragile state of mind, might have made greater impact had it been better played; it actually took me some time to realise what it had actually been (however obvious the selection). The debt owed to – no, let us be scrupulously fair, coincidence with – the better thought-through Calixto Bieito Fidelio incorporating Beethoven’s Heiliger Dankgesang was too obvious and not at all flattering. A pause would probably have been a better idea, if something must be done at all. I have little idea why the third act began with ‘Soave sia il vento’. The staging seemed to suggest the end of a threesome between the Count, Countess, and Susanna, though nothing that happened afterwards seemed to take that into account. At least, if so, it was a rare acknowledgement that women might have sexuality, or at least sexually attractive qualities, too. Moving Marcellina’s aria to the third act works well, precisely because there is dramatic motivation for the shift, observations on gender becoming part of her curatorial address. It also, to be fair, ensures that we hear a number all too rarely heard. Retention of Basilio’s aria, where it should be, is also greatly appreciated, not least given such an excellent performance, although Serebrennikov’s casual handling of action elsewhere in the fourth act often suggests a little more attention to what is ‘supposed’ to happen might have worked wonders for coherence. Moreover, the aria, sadly for something so rarely encountered in performance, made questionable sense in a portrayal that suggested the character to be far from elderly. 

Otherwise, tonal coherence seemed to be the least thing on anyone’s mind: a pity, given James Gaffigan led a bold, variegated account of Mozart’s music, the level of orchestral playing in general far higher than the unfortunate quartet sounds. Well paced and intelligently supportive both of singers and broader dramatic goals, too often it played second fiddle to Serebrennikov’s ideas, yet remained impressive. So too did much of the singing—and all of the acting. My criticism of the conception of ‘deaf Cherubino’ should not in any sense detract from Georgy Kudrenko’s performance in itself, though it did tend unfortunately to overshadow Susan Zarrabi’s performance. Hubert Zapiór’s made much of his difficult (though, I suspect, rewarding) task as Almaviva, in many ways a fascinating study in the fragility of masculinity. Tommaso Barea was an alert, agile Figaro; it is not his fault that his character seemed somewhat elbowed out by the production. Nadja Mchantaf, a fine singing actress as well as actress, seemed somewhat miscast as the Countess, especially in her first aria; recitatives fared better. Karolina Gumos, Tijl Faveyts,  and Johannes Dunz all shone in their roles. In many ways, it was the remarkably able Penny Sofroniadou who, as Susanna, held things together—which is probably as it ought to be. A little more of ‘what ought to be’, though, might more generally have assisted ‘what might be’.

Pelléas et Mélisande, Komische Oper, 15 October 2017

Komische Oper, Berlin

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Mélisande (Nadja Mchantaf)

Arkel – Jens Larsen

Golaud – Günter Papendell

Pelléas – Domink Köninger

Geneviève – Nadine Weissmann

Yniold – Gregor-Michael Hoffmann

Mélisande – Nadja Mchanthaf

Doctor, Shepherd – Samuli Taskinen

Barrie Kosky (director)

Klaus Grünberg (set designs, lighting)

Anne Kuhn (set designs)

Dinah Ehm (costumes)

Johanna Wall (dramaturgy)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin

Jordan de Souza (conductor)

Mélisande

And still they come. I went a good few years, a good few too many years, without seeing Pelléas et Mélisande in the theatre. More recently, I have seen several productions, every one of which has had something different to tell me, some different way of moving me – whilst all remaining very much faithful to what, in idealist metaphysical mode, I might term the inviolate spirit of the work. I might not, of course, but perhaps the temptation to do so tells us something about Pelléas and not just about me. Like Tristan und Isolde – another of the relatively small number of works Barrie Kosky said he was determined to direct, and has also ticked off – there seems to be no point in trying to turn Pelléas into something that it is not; like Tristan, there seems relatively little to do; like Tristan, it seems quite resistant to many typical directorial interventions. None of those is necessarily a categorical statement; such would be bizarre. (Indeed, such might make me something akin to a fevered writer for the Revue wagnérienne. Whatever my failings and/or eccentricities, I am not sure that I am quite there yet.) If something works, it works; and, like many, I can hardly wait to see what Stefan Herheim, present in the audience last night, will do with Debussy’s sole completed opera next year at Glyndebourne.

I shall have to, though, as shall we all. Barrie Kosky’s new production for the Komische Oper certainly proved plenty to keep us going in the meantime. Not, of course, that we should view it in anything other than its estimable own right. At its heart stands Arkel’s Allemonde castle. It is evoked clearly, claustrophobically, chillingly, and perhaps above all, simply. At the centre of the stage, concentric circles turn to reveal something that is always the same, moving yet not moving, just like the characters it transports. There is no way out; nor does anyone, save of course for Mélisande, seek one. (Whether Pelléas does in the opera is a moot point; I do not think he does here. Indeed he remains in the gallery of frozen souls, not unlike a Bluebeard collection, at the close: dead, yes, but was he, were they, always so? What on earth, or beyond, might it mean to be alive here?) Characters move simply, repetitively, if not quite so repetitively, certainly not with such meaninglessness, as in Christiane Pohle’s Munich production (roundly dismissed, I am tempted to suggest misogynistically, by ignorant journalists and audiences alike, but an unforgettable piece of post-Beckettian theatre). Parallels are drawn, easily discerned, given the essential simplicity of the pared-down action; for instance, Mélisande’s arms, her form as yet unseen, encircle – irony here, ‘Ne me touchez pas!’, doubled when it becomes clear quite how fearful she is of being touched – Pelléas at the opening of their final scene together just as they had Golaud at the start. She touches both, though barely. What is she doing? Finding her way? Through fear? Through the forest? Through a miserable, impossible life?

Mélisande's arms encircling Golaud ((Günter Papendell)

And there is no doubting her abuse. The fear is palpable, great tribute to the extraordinary performance given by Nadja Mchantaf, a worthy successor to her Rusalka for the same company and director. In context, many similar themes emerged, for that too had proved a highly concentrated piece of musical drama on Kosky’s – and everyone else’s – part. The fear is well-founded too, for in this world of highly damaged, highly damaging people, Mélisande will suffer horrendous violence. She has done before: you can see it in her eyes. Indeed, Mchantaf’s acting alone would be worthy of any stage: not, of course, that it really makes sense here to speak of ‘acting alone’. When she and Pelléas finally have their moment of sexual congress, she shows her ‘enjoyment’; but is that just what she has learned? Is that, in a sense, what many women have learned? What does it mean to be penetrated by the male gaze, as well as otherwise, on stage? Golaud’s quite shocking violence towards this heavily pregnant woman, his wife, the mother of ‘his’ child, having discovered her with his brother, now dead, is all the more shocking for taking its leave within a general increase of violence – which here seems to mean much the same as ‘action’ – following the interval. The gears of ‘fate’ grind, following relative nothingness. Yet what does it mean for us to label them as ‘fate’? Are we not thereby abdicating responsibility? Blood tells its own story, not just, or even principally, of childbirth, although it certainly includes that. We remember that disturbing moment, earlier on, when Mélisande had laughed childishly with Pelléas, at throwing away – here swallowing – her ring. Again, we both fall upon ideas of fate, and know that we should not. The final turning of the set’s concentric circles, the final display of things just as they always were, yet worse, brings the curtain down. The curtain, having been there all along, reminds us that our aestheticisation of such deeds is at least part of the problem; or at least, it is in itself unlikely to prove to be a solution. Does a performance of Pelléas make us in the audience better people? Who knows? Probably not, however. Things carry on as they always did.

Golaud, Pelléas (Dominik Köninger), Mélisande

If Mchantaf were, perhaps necessarily, first among equals, then that should be taken in its fullest, dialectical sense. Yet again, the Komische Oper under Kosky’s Intendanz – this certainly includes the work of other directors – showed itself to be a true company. Günther Paperdell and Dominik Köninger showed a near ideal blend of similar physicality – deliriously so at one point, the one almost assuming the role, or rather the behaviour of the other – and of difference, Dinah Ehm’s splendid, simple costumes very much contributing to that dramatic end. Theirs was a dialectical relationship, more strongly so than I can otherwise recall. Jens Larsen’s Arkel proved frighteningly creepy: finely sung, and repellent in his assault of Mélisande, all the more so for his grandfatherly concern. We knew whose rules, doubtless inherited, prevailed in this hopeless patriarchy. Nadine Weissmann’s Geneviève proved deeply compassionate yet – quite rightly – powerless. What could she do? Samuli Taskinen, a member of the Opera Studio, impressed in his small roles. And Gregor-Michael Hoffmann offered a sensational performance as Yniold: crystal clear of tone and words, effortlessly at home, or so it seemed, in a fiendishly difficult role both in work and in performance. It was an extraordinary thing indeed to learn afterwards that this was that outstanding treble’s first role on stage; it will surely not be his last.

Golaud and Yniold (Gregor-Michael Hoffmann)

Of course, so much of the drama, just as in Tristan, in whose waves Pelléas is soaked almost as much as it is as those of Parsifal, lies in the orchestra. It was on splendid form throughout, textures admirably clear yet never too clear. I always find myself in performances of this opera asking myself whether it is a more or less Wagnerian performance; I seem unable not to. The strange thing, however, is that, however different the path taken, the balance between Wagner and not-Wagner seems to end up being about the same; or at least that is so, in a performance worth its salt. This performance certainly was, wisely led by Kapellmeister, Jordan de Souza. There was no doubting his knowledge and understanding of Debussy’s tantalising, treacherous score, nor of his ability to communicate to both orchestra and audience. Again, I look forward to hearing more from him. For ultimately, as always, it is the music of those interludes that lingers longest, most insidiously in my mind. There is something almost evil about it; for it is the music of fate, of Allemonde, perhaps even, at one remove, of the Revue wagnérienne.

Petrushka and L’Enfant et les sortilèges, Komische Oper, 2 March 2017

Komische Oper, Berlin

Images: Iko Freese | drama-berlin.de

Petrushka – Tiago Alexandre Neta Fonseca

Ptitschka – Pauliina Räsänen
Patap – Slava Volkov
 

L’Enfant – Nadja Mchantaf

Le Feu, La Princesse, Le Rossignol –Talya Lieberman
Maman, La Tasse Chinoise, La Libellule – Exgi Kutlu
Une Pastourelle, La Chauve-Souris – Elizabeth Holmes
La Chatte, L’Ecureuil – Maria Fiselier
L’Horloge comtoise, Le Chat – Denis Milo
La Bergère, La Chouette – Mirka Wagner
Le Fauteuil, L’Arbre – Carsten Sabrowski
Le Petit Vielliard, La Théière, La Rainette – Ivan Turšić
Un Pâtre – Katarzyna Włodarczyk
 

Suzanne Andrade and Esme Appleton (directors)

Paul Barritt (animations)
1927, Pia Leong (set designs)
1927, Katrin Kath (costumes)
Diego Leetz (lighting)
Ulrich Lenz (dramaturgy)

Vocalconsort Berlin (chorus master: Andrew Crooks)

Children’s Choir (chorus mistress: Dagmar Fiebach) and Orchestra of the Komische Oper

Markus Poschner (conductor)

1927’s Magic Flute has been well-nigh universally lauded, both at the Komische Oper and subsequently on tour. I say ‘well-nigh’, since I felt more ambivalent, applauding some aspects of the reworking, whilst lamenting a lack of seriousness at its heart: for me a perennial problem with many stagings of that work. Maybe I was not in a very good mood, or maybe the combination of æsthetic and work was just not for me; maybe I missed the point. Or perhaps I was right: who knows? I am not terribly easy to please when it comes to Mozart. At any rate, I am delighted to welcome its successor, a double-bill of Petrushka and L’Enfant et les sortilèges.

 

Petrushka is 1927’s first completely non-verbal work, and, of the three I have seen, I think it comes off best of all. (A counter-argument might be that I know less of ballet than I do of opera, but I should like to think that I know a little about Stravinsky, at least.) Here we see it via the offices, once again, of Paul Barritt’s animation – and with three humanised puppets: Petrushka as ‘awkward clown’, alongside a ‘sensitive acrobat’, Ptitschka, and an ‘unrefined but good-natured muscle-man,’ Patap. The animations are a period-influenced, but not period-restricted, delight: from a little later than the writing of the work, as the company’s name, ‘1927’, might suggest. Russian constructivism and the world of silent films more generally loom large. Colours, aptly, are gloriously bright (even if the curmudgeon in me might have wished for the original score rather than the more ‘practical’ 1947 revision), yet monochrome plays its part too. We tumble headlong – not unlike Petrushka himself, a little later – into the world of the fairground. ‘Roll up, roll up,’ the Russian speech-bubble (thank goodness for the Komische Oper’s multi-lingual titles) beckons us; it really felt to me as though we were making an individual and collective decision to attend the show within a show.  

That show is beautifully presented, not only showing but dramatising a keen sense of the thin line between comedy and tragedy. Puppet shows have always done that brilliantly, or at least the best ones have, so why should not a multi-media reimagining of the format, a work about puppetry? Petrushka is the latter anyway, of course, and here the figure of the puppeteer looms large – not visually, although his (I think we can presume ‘his’) actions certainly do. The heartlessness with which Petrushka is toyed with – which yet endears him to Ptitschka, and indeed also elicits sympathy from Patap, following his necessary moments of self-display – moves us, as does the excellence of the onstage performers, seemingly effortlessly moving between the worlds of stage and film. The sad clown, for Barritt close to Buster Keaton, and dressed as such, is not for nothing one of our culture’s perennially recurring figures. He lacks the grace of Ptitschka, the physique of Patap, but he is human, he feels sadness even when, particularly when, he amuses us. The manipulator of his emotions – the puppeteer, that is – does not entirely succeed in manipulating ours.

 

As for the other manipulator, the composer who so notoriously declared music’s inability to express anything other than itself, his score in performance exuded colourful rigour, its opening nicely, intriguingly deliberate, as if the forces were limbering up yet undoubtedly in control. Like what we saw, what we heard sounded audibly ‘Russian’ in origin and spirit, but with some degree of distance from time to time as well: not unlike Stravinsky, one might say. A few minor frayed edges aside – one can readily forget what a difficult piece this is – the orchestra under Markus Poschner did it proud, reminding us that recreation is not simply a matter of a new production; it happens, or should happen, every time we play and hear Petrushka.

In a programme interview, Suzanne Andrade likens the figure of the puppeteer in Petrushka to that of the Mother in L’Enfant et les sortilèges. It makes for a good connecting motif: meaningful rather than merely neat. It also helps make the ‘moral’ of Colette’s story – I think Ravel remains more circumspect; does he not always? – both more explicit and open to question. (Perhaps it criticises itself anyway; I am genuinely not sure. If so, that tendency is stronger here.) Andrade says that she and her collaborators had originally intended the boy (sung by a woman, let us never forget) to be like ‘one of those upper-class boys from Great Britain … they are naughty and learn nothing from the experience, because the societal status quo is such that they need not learn anything.’ If those overgrown schoolboys (and their aspirant hangers-on) have ‘had enough of experts’, we, not least those of us recently pushed into exile, have had more than enough of their running amok with our lives and futures; it is therefore something of a relief to experience contrition and forgiveness, before asking ourselves: ‘but whose, and on what authority?’ Who is the Mother, whether personally or more broadly, and what does she intend to be the outcome of those trials through which she means to get her own way?

 

The visual inspiration here comes from comics and films involving naughty little boys. Andrade names Dennis the Menace and the American film series, Our Gang (which began in the 1920s). Again, the transitions between animation and staging are deftly, wittily presented. (They also help with doubling or tripling of parts: one need not always see the singer in costume.) If I did not feel that as much was added to my thoughts about the work as in Petrushka, beyond that intellectual and dramaturgical question of overarching agency, perhaps I am showing myself a little more resistant, as I suggested, in opera than ballet (if, indeed we consider Stravinsky’s work primarily as such). Perhaps I also missed the nostalgia evident in Ravel’s sophisticated conception of childhood: no child could or would ever think of its ‘hood’ like that. One might counter that the score is there to do that anyway.

 

The Komische Oper’s welcome change of language policy – are you listening, ENO? – meant that we did not have to hear Ravel in German. If not everything was delivered with the most assured sense of what we have come to accept as French style, it rarely, or never is, even with Francophone singers. Moreover, one could hear every word – which is not always the case with such singers. Nadja Mchantaf made for a splendidly tomboyish boy – if that makes any sense. As hapless and as clumsy as Petrushka, he will at least have another chance. (Those privileged boys always do.) Orchestra and conductor seemed – or perhaps this was just my imagination, given the context – to play the score as if informed by some Stravinskian elements, rhythm perhaps playing a more prominent role than harmony at times, although such hierarchies will always be a matter of degree. In keeping with what we saw, there was much in bright, primary colours, and an evident delight in the mastery of that ‘Swiss watchmaker’, as Stravinsky called him. The rest of the cast proved very much more than the sum of its parts. If I do not relist the singers, it is not out of disrespect, but at least in part to emphasise, as so often in this house, the nature of the achievement of the company in an emphatic sense.

Rusalka, Komische Oper, 30 October 2016

Komische Oper, Berlin

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Rusalka (Nadja Mchantaf), Ježibaba (Nadine Weissmann), and her son (Marcus Wagner)

(sung in German)

Rusalka – Nadja Mchantaf

Prince – Timothy Richards

Ježibaba – Nadine Weissmann
Vodník – Jens-Erik Aasbø
Foreign Princess – Karolina Gumos
Gamekeeper – Ivan Turšić
Kitchen Boy – Christiane Oertel
First Wood Nymph – Annika Gerhards
Second Wood Nymph – Maria Fiselier
Third Wood Nymph – Katarzyna Włodarczyk
Huntsman –Johannes Dunz
Ježibaba’s Son – Marcus Wagner

Barrie Kosky (director)

Anisha Bondy (revival director)
Klaus Grünberg (set designs, lighting)
Klaus Bruns (costumes)
Bettina Auer (dramaturgy)

Chorus of the Komische Oper, Berlin (chorus master: David Cavelius)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin

Henrik Nánási (conductor)

Prince (Timothy Richards), Rusalka, and Foreign Princess (Karolina Gumos)

 

I shall not beat about the bush: this was just what opera should be. It convinced this sceptic that a repertoire system can not only work, but work uncommonly well. Barrie Kosky’s intelligent, thoughtful production, Henrik Nánási’s similarly intelligent conducting of the excellent Komische Oper orchestra, and a splendid cast (with a true star, in the best rather than the ‘celebrity’ sense, in the title role) combined to enchant, to challenge, and to move. There is an openness to the production and performance typical of so much of the best opera at the moment

It is only a certain class of reactionary adults who will refer to something as ‘just’ being a fairy tale. Children and thoughtful adults know that the world of the fairy tale is dark indeed. (And yet, the number of anodyne productions of Hänsel und Gretel the world must suffer continues to grow! Thank goodness for bold exceptions, such as that of Liam Steel earlier this year, for the Royal College of Music.) Look closely, or even just permit yourself to be receptive, and you will find that it is all there: sex, violence, sorrow, tragedy. The Grimm Brothers and other collectors were not interested in an adult’s sentimental creation of ‘childhood’. Nor, however, were they out to shock. They did their collecting, their editing; they certainly were not passive. But they wanted to let the tales speak in some sense – however illusory this idea may be as an ‘absolute’ – ‘for themselves’. So, I think, does Kosky here, mediated, as it most likely must be, via the nineteenth century, in which the opera was (just!) written, and of course by what has happened since. Indeed, an interview with Kosky and Patrick Lange – the conductor, I presume, when the production was new, in 2012 – opens with Kosky declaring: ‘Rusalka muss ein Märchen sein!’ (‘Rusalka must be a fairy tale.’)

 

And so, without danger of prettification or ‘mere’ folklore or folklorism, the story is, with great strength, quite without varnish, placed centre stage, literally and figuratively. Klaus Grünberg’s set design unfussily suggests the Komische Oper’s interior itself; we are all staging, after all, not least those of us in the audience. The cold elegance, moreover, of the late Victorian wall and, crucially, door – that is where, even how, things change, the action moves on – is all the framing we really need. We concentrate on the wood nymph herself and her plight. Above all, her mermaid’s tail, with which she struggles in such heart-rending fashion, leaving her desperate to become ‘human’, only for matters to become worse when she does, sears itself into the memory, as does the fish skeleton that emerges from within following the shocking butchery of the witch, Ježibaba. A (Danse) macabre convention of skeletons, spirits of death, and so on we see in the third act (of the opera ‘itself’, for here, we have only one interval) chills without undue grotesquerie; all is very much in the spirit of a fairy tale that is anything but ‘mere’. (There is no literalist river by the meadow here, but there is water, which, when we see, even feel, it, thereby makes its point all the more clearly.) The subconscious is clearly at work, but never in laboured, didactic fashion. That, after all, is not the way of the subconscious. And we make what we will of it; that, after all, is its way.

 

At the heart, in more ways than one, of the performance was Nadja Mchantaf’s superlative performance as Rusalka. She captured, in gorgeous, never self-regarding, vocal tone, the longing, the dreaming, the sadness, the heartbreak. Her stage presence, again entirely at the service of the drama, was second to none. One could read into her frustration as much – or as little – more as one wished, or rather as one’s subconscious wished. Mchantaf’s ability to capture ‘girlish’ sweetness, not necessarily unalloyed, and desire, indeed desperation, for something more will linger long in my memory. Rusalka’s unknowing imitation of the Foreign Princess’s knowing sexual advances upon the Prince were perhaps saddest of all. Karolina Gumos herself brought old-style glamour to a stage-stopping performance as the Princess, seductive in voice as well as in her shameless yet never inelegant display. Timothy Richards’s honestly perplexed performance as the Prince occasionally edged towards vocal strain, but never excessively so. Jens-Erik Aasbø brought a sense of the deeply, sternly primæval to Vodník, the Water Goblin, lamenting Rusalka’s fate, refusing to grant her false hope. Nadine Weissmann, Frank Castorf’s Erda, was perhaps always going to court that comparison, especially when singing this opera in German, but I was just as interested to hear how the role differed; her malevolence and yet also her personal, hinted-at tragedy shone through with what was, I think, the blackest of humour. Kosky’s conception of both goblin and witch as mediators between two irreconcilable (dream?) worlds was in excellent hands – and voices. There were no weak links, and a true sense of old-fashioned – in the best sense – company lifted every contribution. One final mention should go to the splendid trio of Wood Nymphs, Rhinemaidens in the making – or is it the other way around?

 

Nánási’s conducting traced the ebb and flow of Dvořak’s score very well. Opening in perhaps more formalistic fashion – not at all inappropriately so – this reading acquired impetus, even aqueous dissolution, of its own, rather as if the composer were ‘progressing’ from something more Schumannesque to the world of Tristan. In a sense he is, and one can certainly here proximity in some of the later harmonies. The orchestra and chorus glistened and glowered, equal partners – at least – in a drama more compelling still than most of Dvořak’s symphonies. Lange, in that interview, actually drew comparisons with Mahler, and compared the opera to ‘eine gensungene Sinfonie’. Nánási seemed very much to follow in his footsteps, St Anthony’s preaching to the Mahlerian fishes as ever going (tragically) unheeded.