Dantons Tod, Vienna State Opera, 3 April 2018

Vienna State Opera

George Danton – Wolfgang Koch

Camille Desmoulins – Herbert Lippert
Hérault de Séchelles – Jörg Schneider
Robespierre – Thomas Ebenstein
Saint-Just – Ayk Martirossian
Herrmann – Clemens Unterreiner
Simon – Wolfgang Bankl
Young Man/First Executioner – Wolfram Igor Derntl
Second Executioner – Marcus Pelz
Julie – Alexandra Yangel
Lucile – Olga Bezsmertna
A Lady – Ildikó Raimondi
A Woman – Lydia Rathkolb
 

Josef Ernst Köpplinger (director, lighting)

Rainer Sinell (set designs)
Alfred Mayerhofer (costumes)
Ricarda Regina Ludigkeit (assistant choreographer)


Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Martin Schebesta)
Vienna State Opera Orchestra
Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

 

The major composer anniversary – in the strict sense, not including deaths – of 2018 is perhaps that of Bernd Alois Zimmermann. Zimmermann, alas, still needs all the help he can get, given a general silence from conservative, or rather reactionary, performing organisations. (I shall, however, shortly be reporting from an ORF Symphony Orchestra concert, including his Trumpet Concerto, ‘Nobody knows de trouble I see’.) Devotees of Leonard Bernstein will doubtless hear much of his music; whatever one thinks of it, it is hardly neglected. What, though, of other composers, still less celebrated? Anniversaries can prove genuinely useful in their case. Another hundredth birthday is that of the Austrian composer – often emphatically presented as such – Gottfried von Einem.

 

If hardly the most proselytising of houses for contemporary opera, at least since Mahler and Strauss, the Vienna State Opera certainly did its bit for Einem, including two world premieres. A staging of his first opera, Dantons Tod, written between 1944 and 1946 and premiered at the 1947 Salzburg Festival, thus has its roots in tradition: never a bad thing in Vienna – although ask Mahler for a second opinion on that. Offering works, whether entirely forgotten or just neglected, a new hearing is also never a bad thing. I am genuinely grateful to the State Opera for affording me, and indeed the wider world, the opportunity to see the opera in the theatre. Alas, I cannot say that I should rush to see, or indeed to hear, it again; yet far better that than the umpteenth revival of something whose place in the repertory remains a mystery to most of us in the first place. It has its cautious advocates, moreover, not least my friend and colleague Erik Levi, who, whilst voicing reservations, nevertheless ultimately describes it as ‘the most consistently impressive’ of Einem’s ‘operatic compositions’. If so, I am afraid I certainly should not rush to hear the rest. HK Gruber, another composer I have also so far proved incapable of ‘getting’, is one of many appreciative voices raised in the house’s handsome, invaluable programme documentation.

 

At the score’s best, there is enough imitation Hindemith and Stravinsky to keep the musical clock ticking over. I struggled, though, to discern an individual voice. Perhaps we become too hung up on that; this was, after all, a first opera. What I found more disconcerting, though – and not in a productive way – was the seemingly arbitrary musical progress. A bit of reheated Hindemith here, a slightly Stravinskian ostinato there, some competent if predictable choral exchanges there: what does it all add up to? It does not seem to be a declaration, avant la letter de Zimmermann, of exuberant polystilism. Nor do such changes, leaving aside a great deal of frankly nondescript writing, seem to have much basis in or relationship to the libretto, whose fashioning from Büchner by Einem and Boris Blacher again seems to dart all over the place for no particular reason.

 

It is not overly long, though: about an hour and a half. And there are a good few occasions to be impressed by a fine orchestra, chorus, and singers – which I certainly was. I cannot imagine – although how should I know? – that this would necessarily have been Susanna Mälkki’s first choice of opera to conduct, but she certainly did it proud, as did the Orchestra and Chorus of the Vienna State Opera. A full, warm sound did not detract from precision. Pacing seemed ideal, as did the attempt to integrate obvious influences within a dramatic flow. I cannot readily imagine it being performed better. The opera is similarly unlikely to have a better Danton than Wolfgang Koch, whose attention to musical line and words showed all the care, and ultimately the charisma, he would have brought to Wotan or Amfortas. Jörg Schneider’s Hérault de Séchelles impressed throughout too, as did the dark-hued, forbidding Saint-Just of Ayk Martirossian. Olga Bezsmertna certainly made what she could of Lucile (Desmoulins), who threatened to become a far more interesting character than ultimately the work ever seemed quite to permit.

 

Alas, Herbert Lippert, as her husband, proved less than ingratiating of tone, without obvious dramatic recompense. Thomas Ebenstein seemed somewhat hamstrung by a strange, foppish conception of Robespierre (both in work and staging, I think), yet he did what he could. I could not help, however, but wonder whether the opera needed something more interventionist than Josef Ernst Köpplinger’s seemingly non-ironic musical-style staging. It might actually have been a West End musical version of A Tale of Two Cities. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with setting the work where it ‘should’ be, but there was not a great deal to glean beyond (too pretty) period costume. Might it not perhaps have been more illuminating to consider the context in which Einem wrote the work? The initial inspiration, after all, seems to have been the failed assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944. That would surely have been something to work with – not least for a non-Jewish composer posthumously honoured by Yad Vashem as ‘Righteous among the Nations’.

Pelléas et Mélisande, Vienna State Opera, 18 June 2017

Vienna State Opera

Images: Wiener Staatsoper  / Michael Pöhn
Golaud (Simon Keenlyside)

Arkel – Franz-Josef Selig

Geneviève – Bernarda Fink

Pelléas – Adrian Eröd

Golaud – Simon Keenlyside

Mélisande – Olga Bezsmertna

Yniold – Maria Nazarova

Doctor – Marcus Pelz

Pelléas’s father – Andreas Bettinger

Marco Arturo Marelli (director, set designs, lighting)
Dagmar Niefind (costumes)

Silke Bauer (assistant set designer)

Anna-Sophie Lienbacher (assistant costume designer)

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Martin Schebesta)

Vienna State Opera Orchestra

Alain Altinoglu (conductor)

Debussy is like Gluck. No, of course he is not; he would have been mortally offended had you told him so. Indeed, Debussy regarded Gluck as having been responsible for killing off Ramellian opera, delivering a lethal injection of Teutonic poison to a flourishing genre. What does not kill you makes you stronger, of course, as Debussy himself would, on a good day, have attested concerning Wagner at least – and certainly in Pelléas et Mélisande. But to return to Debussy and Gluck, their operas do, it seems to me, have something very important in common, or at least their reception does. Pelléas and Gluck’s reform operas are esteemed by all those who take opera seriously as drama, and disdained or simply ignored by many for whom opera means something else. Their admittedly very different aesthetics are quite clear, moreover, that playing to the gallery is the last thing in which musical drama should be engaging. True, there are occasional hangovers in Gluck, although they should not be exaggerated, but there is not a single case, not one single case, in Debussy’s sole completed opera.

Golaud and Yniold 

Moreover, what Debussy said, in his article, ‘Pourquoi j’ai écrit Pelléas,’ could be taken, with a little adjustment, for what Gluck in his great reforming works was trying to do (even if, yes, we know the Preface to Alceste was written by his librettist, Calzabigi). Debussy explicitly praised the symbolism of Maeterlinck’s play, which might seem to be – and indeed is – a very different thing, but, ‘despite its dream-like atmosphere’, he was drawn to it because it ‘contains far more humanity than those so-called “real-life documents”. Like Wagner, a mediating influence between the two in certain ways, myth was the thing. And somewhat like Wagner, if not so much like Gluck, Debussy thrived on ‘an evocative language whose sensitivity could be extended into music and into the décor orchestral’. Those of us who love it shake our heads in bafflement at its neglect. Perhaps, though, just perhaps, there is something to be said for every performance remaining a special event – just as with, say, Iphigénie en Tauride. If an opera made it on to the list of works Boulez conducted it is, after all, an unquestionable sign of quality.

 

Mélisande (Olga Bezsmertna) and Pelléas (Adrian Eröd)

Is, then, this new production from the Vienna State Opera able to live up to such expectations? (I shall pass over less quickly than I probably should a tired and emotional British tourist I overheard during the interval, boasting of having fallen asleep in such a ‘boring’ opera. ‘Can’t they just get it on?’) Musically, yes, and the production did not do too badly either; I have certainly seen much worse. (I shudder to recall the most recent, which is not to say very recent at all, production Covent Garden brought in.) Marco Arturo Marelli’s staging makes an effort, is clearly the result of consideration concerning the drama and what is going on, or what we might think is going on. If I am not entirely convinced that everything coheres, if I think that perhaps a stronger single, even if partial, line might have worked better, there is enough to make one think – and, yes, feel.

Arkel (Franz-Josef Selig)
and Geneviève (Bernarda Fink)

In what seems to me a relatively bold move, more unusual than you might think, there is a general sense of Ibsen, of bourgeois drama: not just the costumes, but the internalised, familial – and extra-familial – claustrophobia. It is not, perhaps, how one initially thinks of, or feels, the work, but it is an interesting standpoint that certainly has things to tell us. Pelléas’s father is seen on stage, initially in bed, but actually becoming more of a real dramatic character when his illness lifts. When Arkel has Mélisande kiss him, the other old man joins them, and there is something discomfitingly paedophiliac to the whole, strange episode. Whether it quite fits with the rest of what we see and hear is another matter; the attribution of darker desires to Arkel, at least in that particular case, is becoming a little clichéd by now. An important, indeed the important, focal point to much of the action is a boat. Not only do Pelléas and Mélisande go sailing in it, Mélisande lies in it when she sings her extraordinary song; it becomes the ladder Yniold climbs; Golaud hurls it away in jealous anger; and, in the strange ending, Mélisande sails away in it with womenfolk seemingly transformed from servants into spirits. Again, the almost Lohengrin­-like (although not in gender!) conclusion intrigues, and offers an important contrast with the important stage roles played earlier by Golaud’s henchmen, who clearly threaten Pelléas during their walk. But the bright skied conclusion sits a bit oddly, again, with the rest. Is it just death? If so, would it not, especially in this context, be better just to leave it as death? Marelli’s staging is at least having one ask such questions, although I found the 2015 Munich production from Christiane Pohle – universally and, to my mind, quite bafflingly condemned – a stronger, more coherent treatment, hauntingly provocative in its Beckettian inheritance.

Perhaps, however, I am wrong, for, in an interesting programme interview, conductor Alain Antinoglu, having acknowledged – and how could one not? – the darkness in the piece, describes the story as a ‘path from darkness to light’. Perhaps. I suppose there is something to be said for that musically, and Altinoglu certainly imparted a Lohengrin-without-the-tragedy sense to the conclusion. More importantly, he judged the ebb and flow, the colours and the shadows, very well indeed. Those raw Wagnerian moments made their Tristanesque and Parsifalian points, not only musically, but the phrases, the paragraphs, and indeed the nature of the musical language quite rightly developed differently too. The playing drawn from the Vienna State Opera Orchestra (the Vienna Philharmonic in all but name) was quite outstanding, colours shifting as imperceptibly as the ebb, the non-ebb, the flow and the non-flow, of the drama – and non-drama.

 

Arkel, Geneviève, Golaud, and Pelléas's father
(Andreas Bettinger)

With no disrespect intended to the rest of the cast, a particular cause of interest here lay in Simon Keenlyside’s transition from Pelléas to Golaud. He managed it as expertly as you might imagine – if anything more so. The jealousy, the vulnerability, the flawed masculinity, and the way with both the French language and the specific quality of Debussy’s lines: all were there, as if he had been performing the role all his life. Keenlyside is not one, of course, only to concentrate on his own part, so in a sense one might argue that earlier performances had helped prepare him, but this was a splendid achievement by any standards. Adrian Eröd made for a well-contrasted Pelléas: again, clearly flawed, but more mysteriously so. As with all of the cast, the style of vocal delivery was spot on: doubtless testament both to individual artistry and to Altinoglu’s overall control. As Mélisande, Olga Bezsmertna judged the fine balance between wide-eyed ingénue and the merely annoying with great skill, the competing demands of character development and character stasis equally well balanced. I am not sure that I had heard Franz-Josef Selig in French repertoire before; his wise humanity shone through just as clearly, if, appropriately, with a different touch of ambiguity, as if he had been singing Gurnemanz or Sarastro. I often tend to forget how small the role of Geneviève actually is, so important is she to the drama. Bernarda Fink nevertheless shone, in the most un-showy of ways. My preference for a treble Yniold is not ideological, and in practice, it can go horribly wrong. Nevertheless, I find, on stage, a woman impersonating a child like this a bit odd (especially when I have known it done otherwise). Yniold here had a considerably greater, more peculiar role than usual: hyperactive, damaged, and very interestingly, consoling Golaud at the close and preventing him from taking his life. Maria Nazarova did an excellent job at all of that. This is no criticism of her performance as such, but I wish I had not been made to think of Janette Krankie.

Salzburg Festival (5): Fidelio, 13 August 2015

Grosses Festspielhaus

Florestan – Jonas Kaufmann

Leonore – Adrianne Pieczonka

Don Pizarro – Tomasz Konieczny

Rocco – Hans-Peter König

Marzelline – Olga Bezsmertna

Jaquino – Norbert Ernst

Don Fernando – Sebastian Holececk

Leonore’s Shadow – Nadia Kichler

Pizarro’s Shadow – Paul Lorenger

First Prisoner – Daniel Lökös

Second Prisoner – Jens Musger

Claus Guth (director)

Christian Schmidt (designs)

Ronny Dietrich (dramaturgy)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Torsten Ottersberg (sound design)

Andi A. Müller (video design)

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

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Franz Welser-Möst (conductor) 

Florestan (Jonas Kaufmann)
Images: Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg Festival

I shall start with the good news. It will not take long. Yes, no surprises here: it was Jonas Kaufmann. Kaufmann may not have been able to save the day, but his Florestan proved almost as impressive as it had in Paris more than six years ago. Perhaps I am being unfair or unduly cautious when I say ‘almost’; it may just have been a matter of a less than exalted setting, or simply an inability on my part to relive the thrill of hearing Kaufmann’s portrayal for the first time. Whatever the truth or otherwise of that, there was nothing for which I could fault him. His baritonal tenor seems just right for the role, but what he does with it – and it seems that he can do anything he wishes – is still more breathtaking. As I wrote in 2008, ‘He exhibited a heroism to rival that of Jon Vickers, albeit without the vocal oddness.’ There can be no arguing with his acting abilities either. Called upon to portray an apparent descent into madness, quite at odds with the text, such of it that remained, let alone with Beethoven’s score, Kaufmann marshalled all of his artistic resources to powerful effect.

What else? Hans-Peter König’s Rocco, after a somewhat indistinctive start, grew in humanity. The Two Prisoners made their mark well, and the chorus proved well-trained. Otherwise, there was little to inspire. Admittedly, Adrianne Pieczonka improved as time went on; Kaufmann’s presence seemed to lift performances, at least onstage, across the board. However, her tone was often harsh and her intonation was at best variable. Olga Bezsmertna’s Marzelline was blowsy, and Tomasz Konieczny’s Pizarro undistinguished, lacking even pantomime malevolence. On its own terms, the Vienna Philharmonic played well enough, but it was impossible for me to assent to those terms.

For that, Franz Welser-Möst was squarely to blame. Beethoven surely stands as the antithesis of mediocrity, but Welser-Möst proved quite unable to raise his game. At his very best, he sounded like a poor man’s Toscanini – a rich man’s is bad enough – but this was uncomprehending stuff indeed. Proceeding phrase by phrase, sometimes even bar by bar, there was not a hint of a longer line, let alone of the indomitable spirit with which this most noble of operas is infused. The orchestra was brash, harsh, often entirely lacking in tonal variegation. Chugging replaced development. The absurdly-inserted Leonore III Overture – a great conductor can just about get away with that regrettable ‘tradition’ – was an ordeal such as Florestan himself might have had to endure. The audience, bafflingly, gave it a rousing ovation. Still more bafflingly, conductor and orchestra stood to take their bows – yes, in the middle of the second act. How frustrating, then, to know that the greatest living Beethoven conductor, Daniel Barenboim, was also in town.

Leonore (Adrianne Pieczonka) and her 'Shadow' (Nadia Kichler)

And yet, there was worse. I approached Claus Guth’s production with an open mind. On the face of it, ridding Fidelio of its dialogue seemed a bad idea – is the dialogue really so bad? Why cannot people simply leave it alone? – but perhaps it might have worked in practice. It does not. I am pretty sure that, had I not know the opera, I should have had no idea whatsoever who anyone was or what he or she was doing. Fidelio without the dialogue is at best an interesting concert; that, however, would require at the very least a conductor up to the task. Worse, still, however is the Konzept which replaces Beethoven’s. Instead of a call to humanity, we had something one might just about dignify with the term ‘existentalist’. It is all, apparently, about freeing oneself from the imprisonment of one’s own mind. Or, as Norbert Abels declares in the programme, admittedly in translation, ‘In an ever-shrinking world of universal enmeshment, of the transcontinental interconnectedness of the globe, of the unlimited procedures of saving and monitoring data, Beethoven’s opera still navigates as the utopia of man’s escape from his self-inflicted imprisonment.’ Shorn of its verbiage, that might conceivably prove a fruitful addition to what we have already; as a replacement, it simply smacks of modern self-indulgence. ‘Fidelio,’ according to Abels, ‘is usually interpreted as a salvation and liberation opera with a political background.’ It is hardly ‘interpreted’ as such; it straightforwardly is that, and this is not a work that seems especially amenable to perverse reinterpretation. Whilst Guantánamo, Gaza, all manner of other actually-existing prisons, still exist, indelible stains upon humanity, is it acceptable to suggest that the solution is simply, to ‘find ourselves’? Weird sound effects punctuate the movements: presumably the workings of the unconscious. Or something. If they are intended to terrify, they sadly fail; they are not nearly loud enough. Instead, they merely irritate. Invoking Freud is not enough; it never was.

Claus Guth justifies himself, again in the programme, by disingenuously claiming that Beethoven’s revisions leave us with an ‘indefinite, indeed open form’. For some unspecified reason, the Salzburg Festival ‘in particular, offers us a place to open a space for non-normative ideas where we are able to experiment as if in a laboratory.’ All very well, if they work, but they do not. Instead, we have especially crass references to Beethoven’s deafness thrown in, a woman, Leonore’s ‘shadow’, frantically using what appears to be sign language, Florestan covering his ears in agony, and a banal narrative of personal self-discovery (I think, in Leonore’s case) superimposed upon the opera to no good effect. I shall leave the last word to designer, Christian Schmidt: ‘On our quest for a place for the events, we tried … to avoid any clarity.’ Quite.

Cardillac, Vienna State Opera, 22 June 2015

Cardillac (Tomasz Konieczny)
Images: Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn

Cardillac – Tomasz Konieczny
Daughter – Angela Denoke
Officer – Herbert Lippert
Gold Dealer – Wolfgang Bankl
Cavalier – Matthias Klink
Lady – Olga Bezsmertna
Police Officer – Alexandru Moisiuc

Sven-Eric Bechtolf (director)

Rolf Glittenberg (set designs)
Marianne Glittenberg (costumes)
Jürgen Hoffmann (lighting)

 

Is there at present any more unfashionable composer than Hindemith? Tippett perhaps runs him close, but I can think of no one else. Little has changed in that respect since I lamented this situation upon the Paris Opéra’s 2008 revival of Cardillac by André Engel. It is all the more welcome, then, that Vienna should not only stage but keep in its repertoire this wonderful opera, here given, as seems generally now to be the case, in its original, three-act form rather than Hindemith’s 1952 four-act revision for Zurich. (We miss, then, the performance within a performance of numbers from Lully’s Phaëton and the greater, post-Mathis der Maler sympathy accorded to Cardillac as artist.)

Daughter (Angela Denoke) and
Officer (Herbert Lippert)

Sven-Eric Bechtolf’s staging is probably the best I have seen from him. I opened my Paris review – bear in mind this was still the Gérard Mortier era of blessed memory – by saying, ‘Perhaps only Paris could turn in so stylish a production of the terminally unfashionable Hindemith.’ Bechtolf does not do so badly either, his stylisation fitting and lightly questioning the work too. The crowd scenes in particular benefit from carefully clockwork choreography, as if responding to the large timepiece (surely a more general nod to ETA Hoffmann, author of the original short story, Das Fräulein von Scuderi), and the black-and-white, top-hatted designs. The crowd both acts as a mob and retains, perhaps intensifies, its weirdness: not inappropriate for a Neue Sachlichkeit treatment of a German Romantic story. Sexual congress is again both plausible and stylishly removed from the merely representational. The realm of the master goldsmith himself offers powerful visual contrast – gold as much the order of the day here as in a later Schoenbergian orgy – and yet retains quirky, choreographed connection, as the action passes between different worlds. The work of Rolf and Marianne Gilttenberg as designers is very well fitted as frame and incitement to the exaggerated and musically-conceived, or at the very least musically-consistent, movement that ensues.  

For Hindemith’s motoric, extremely anti-Romantic conceptions of Bach – think of the Kammermusik transformed into opera – rightly came to the forefront here of our musico-dramatic attention. There were times, especially during the first act – all three acts were given, wisely, without an interval – when I missed the final degree of dry precision from the orchestral playing, but in general, Michael Boder’s conducting impressed, especially his handling – and the orchestra’s execution – of climaxes. Moreover, a relative relaxation of anti-Romanticism arguably held its own rewards, in preparing the way for the Officer’s compassion and, perhaps, whetting the appetite for a hearing of that later Zurich version. The Vienna State Opera Chorus’s contribution was excellent throughout, a credit to its chorus master, Thomas Lang.

Lady (Olga Bezsmertna)

 

 

Tomasz Konieczny offered a properly complex portrayal of Cardillac, permitting us to be torn between horror at his murderous narcissism, unable to permit his masterpiece to be owned by another, and his strange, increasing dignity as a craftsman. Vocal and stage presence were communicated as one. Angela Denoke, also Cardillac’s daughter in that Paris revival, gave quite the best performance I have heard from her in some time: lyrical and ever-meaningful verbally. As ever, she acted the role with passion and commitment. Herbert Lippert’s Officer struggled a little too often with Hindemith’s demands, but shared that sense of dramatic commitment. Olga Bezsmertna’s Lady showed true star quality. A member of the Vienna ensemble, she had me wishing her role offered more for her to sing. Wolfgang Bankl, Matthias Klink, and Alexandru Moisiuc all convinced in their roles. More Hindemith, then, please – in Vienna, but elsewhere too.