Fin de partie, Opéra national de Paris, 30 April 2022

Palais Garnier

Hamm – Frode Olsen
Clov – Leigh Melrose
Nell – Hilary Summers
Nagg – Leonardo Cortelazzi

Pierre Audi (director)
Christof Hetzer (designs)
Urs Schönebaum (lighting)
Klaus Bertisch (dramaturgy)

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Markus Stenz (conductor)

Images: Sébastien Mathé/OnP

Modernism’s endgame, modernist opera’s endgame, opera’s endgame: all have been proclaimed time and time again. One might say the same for Romanticism, Classicism, sonata, symphony, and other isms and genres. Whatever the truths of the matter—we can no longer justifiably speak in the singular, if ever we could—this first opera by György Kurtág, first heard in Milan in 2018 and now receiving its French premiere, suggests that twilight, however prolonged, has once again proved as productive, as challenging, as illuminating as first dawn or zenith. The owl of Minerva may or may not be spreading its wings; Kurtág may or may not be almost the last modernist standing; opera may or may not be stronger, more varied, more resistant than ever before. These are inevitable and may even be important questions. What matters above all, though, is that Kurtág’s Fin de partie/Endgame emerges, even from a single hearing, a single experience in the theatre, as an unqualified masterpiece.   

Janus-faced, like most—all?—artworks of stature, Fin de partie takes Beckett’s masterpiece, which Kurtág first saw in Paris in 1957, and, in concluding a modernist chapter, perhaps even a book, appears also to open several more. Although it feels very much a finished work, it remains at least in theory a work-in-progress, to which Kurtág might add further ‘scenes and monologues’ from Beckett’s play—or even conceivably from elsewhere, given its second Prologue (the first being purely orchestral) is a setting for Nell, startlingly in English rather than French, of the poem Roundelay. This ‘dramatic version’ of the play, in most respects literal, with the slightest addition here or somehow seems always to have been conceived for music, indeed seems never to have existed without it. Libretto (if one may call it that) instructions are as detailed musically—‘comme une mélodie de Debussy’—as they are scenically, or both: ‘mouvement très lent d’interrogation avec la main gauche esquisse le “et puis” de Gr. C. et Piatti … assez grand changement de ton’. Many thanks are due to the Opéra national de Paris for reprinting it: an invaluable resource for future study and reflection, as well, I hope, as for subsequent preparation.   

The ultimate synthetic distillation, though, is musical—just as one often fancies Beckett’s words to point not only to the limits, the endgame, of language, but to the beginning, the necessity of music. (His Schopenhauerism extended way beyond mere ‘pessimism’, to the truly aesthetic.) Words here are everything—one hears, and hears measured every one—until they are not. That ancient operatic alchemy we trace back at least as far as Monteverdi is once more at work, and Monteverdi—the Monteverdi of the dramatic madrigals and the two surviving late operas in particular—comes to mind among many ghosts of the opera-as-sung-play past. Mussorgsky, Debussy, Berg, Janáček stand prominently among them, as well inevitably—if perhaps more tangentially—as Wagner, Bach (‘not an opera composer, but’), and even Boulez (ditto?) Are these affinities or similarities, or are they actual influences? Does it really matter? It seems both to do so, as we reach the end of the game, but also not. After all, what does matter when we reach the end of the game, that any game, any game? 

For, apart from his own voice—what a strange provision!—that which comes most strongly to mind is another supreme writer of vocal-dramatic music on the smaller scale, whom we yet imagine desiring, wishing, ultimately aiming to bring forth an operatic synthesis. As it was in the beginning, it still is now: Webern. Perhaps not even in Webern have I heard such sustained, certainly not such dramatic, development of intervallic relationships, in themselves and in relation to timbre (probably other parameters too) so as to fulfil the tragic necessity of rebuilding a shattered universe: the same task, yet always different. Every note counts, of course, yet every note is heard and felt, and bears the ultimate weight of tragic and tragicomic existence that we may know it counts. The affinity with Beckett’s language and what some understandably, straining at the bounds, will term in despair anti-literature is clear; but music is no representative mirror, any more than it is in Monteverdi, Wagner, or Webern. Its autonomy, its pairings—here as crucial as any in Bach or Bartók—and so much else continue: in hope, if you like, yet only in the strange sense that Beckett does. Until, I think, the close, when something strange happens, a musical synthesis taking wing and building, such as can often happen almost irrespective of intention. Think, for instance, of Wagner. This is less evidently redemptive, though stirrings of sympathy for Hamm and Clov are not entirely denied. Fin de partie, however, seems to speak or sing of something that might refashion redemptive ideas through shattered glass, shattered lives, the fragmentary challenges of modernity and modernism.

 

An orchestra used sparingly and with very different balances from that of the Romantic past—a modern ‘ensemble’ writ large—tells us that throughout. Just five first violins and five seconds, against eight violas, eight cellos, and six double basses, and indeed five flutes, six percussionists, two bayans (Beckettian vaudeville movingly transmuted via Sofia Gubaidulina), and so on have seeped into our consciousness, yet rarely if ever together. Mahler haunts, but he cannot live. Conducting, as he did earlier performances in Milan and Amsterdam, Markus Stenz understands or at least appreciates—can anyone ‘understand’?—communicates, and lets that fragility breathe and expire. We all listen, whether something can be said or sung, or not. For what else is there to do? Not listen, of course, but which of us wishes to assume Nagg’s fate? We know there will be no sugar-plum at the end, celesta notwithstanding. 

And yet, music endures, as does theatre—as, perhaps, do literature and drama too. A wonderful quartet of soloists ensures that, as does Pierre Audi’s careful direction, doubtless treading a minefield of what the dread estate, as well as the dedicated composer, would permit. Action/inaction takes place outside the house, but it looks very much as we should expect, without ever feeling expected: post-drama, we might think, of the post-absurd. Frode Olsen, struggling with illness, nonetheless held the stage with a fiercely committed performance as Hamm, holding it all together, in the tragicomic absence of any ‘it’ to hold. Leigh Melrose’s protean Clov, wounded yet spirited, alert and alive, yet quite without hope, struck me as definitive, however illusory the idea. An outstanding artist whenever I have heard him, Melrose may have given his finest performance yet. Hilary Summers offered a masterclass in extracting much from little, as Kurtág and Beckett do themselves. Transformation of a vocal line, through pitch, dynamics, shifting colour said, as with the rest of the cast, the rest of the work, both something and nothing, often in chamber collaboration with an instrument or two from the pit. Crucially, Nell’s death could neither have been more nor less heartbreaking. Leonardo Cortelazzi’s made for a fine sidekick, his Nagg splendidly, pointlessly excitable yet resigned. Steeped, like the others, both in the text and in its twin possibilities and impossibilities, he closed and opened the square that should have been a circle. 

Here, then, is a masterpiece in a way that seems, both modestly and defiantly, not of our age. Many composers would now, quite understandably, tell us such is not their interest. They are not attempting to write works such as Fin de partie and failing, ‘better’ or otherwise. Given the ideological issues at play, we can all understand that. When, however, a work—and this is, emphatically, A Work—such as this comes along, it brooks no dissent. To be there is akin to being there for Gawain (may its composer now rest in peace), for Mittwoch (likewise, on Sirius), maybe even for Wozzeck or for Tristan. Kurtág may or may not have been writing for posterity. Until one of our politicians hastens the final endgame, perhaps tomorrow, posterity will nonetheless hear and listen to Kurtág.

Munich Opera Festival (4) - Parsifal, 31 July 2018

Nationaltheater

 

Parsifal (Jonas Kaufmann) and the Flowermaidens
Images: Ruth Walz

Amfortas – Christian Gerhaher

Titurel – Bálint Szabó

Gurnemanz – René Pape
Parsifal – Jonas Kaufmann
Klingsor – Wolfgang Koch
Kundry – Nina Stemme
First Knight of the Grail – Kevin Conners
Second Knight of the Grail – Callum Thorpe
Squires – Paula Iancic, Annika Schlicht, Manuel Günther, Matthew Grills
Flowermaidens – Golda Schultz, Selene Zanetti, Annika Schlicht, Nolevuyiso Mpofu, Paula Iancic, Rachael Wilson
Voice from Above – Rachael Wilson
 

Pierre Audi (director)

Georg Baselitz, Christof Hetzer (set designs)
Florence von Gerkan, Tristan Sczesny (costumes)
Urs Schönebaum (lighting)
Klaus Bertisch, Benedikt Stampfli (dramaturgy)
 

Children’s Chorus, Chorus and Extra Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus masters: Stellario Fagone and Sören Eckhoff)

Bavarian State Orchestra
Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

  

And so, this year’s Munich Opera Festival and this year’s Bavarian State Opera season came to a close with everyone’s favourite Bühnenweihfestspiel, Parsifal, in the final outing this time around for Pierre Audi’s new production. With a cast of dreams, an orchestra of distinction conducted by Kirill Petrenko, not to mention a world-class opera chorus, what could be not to like? Nothing for much of the audience, it would seem. Alas, for me it proved a grave disappointment, for which the responsibility must either lie with me, Audi, or both of us.

Amfortas (Christian Gerhaher) and members of the chorus

I am not sure I have ever seen a production of Parsifal so lacking in – well, anything. Goodness knows one can argue about what this work is about, what its problems might be, what its extraordinary virtues might be, even what it might be made to be about, and so on and forth. Goodness knows directors can come up with execrable concepts or execute their concepts, good or bad, less than well. I speak from the bitter experience of having attended a good few, not least the present Uwe Eric Laufenberg farrago at Bayreuth, which somehow manages both to be intensely offensive in its Islamophobia and unbearably boring. Audi, however, seems to have no discernible thoughts about it whatsoever. I almost have nothing beyond that to say, so shall keep the rest of this very short. Its selling point – to some, anyway – seems always to have been designs by the strangely overrated visual artist, Georg Baselitz. They struck me as very much in keeping with what else I have seen from Baselitz; if you like to look at this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you would have liked to look at. The first act, all of it, is set in a forest. For some reason, the knights take off their outer clothes to reveal unflattering fattish naked suits, which suggest a degree of androgyny, although that suggestion seems later – by the Flowermaidens – to be refuted. The second act is barely staged at all, yet without any of the virtues of a concert performance. The third act returns to the forest. The end. To think that this succeeded a production by Peter Konwitschny beggars belief.

Parsifal and members of the chorus

Yet so oppressive are the designs, for that is really all the production can be, so different is the experience from a concert performance, that much very good – although not, I think, quite so good as many seem to have thought – musical work went largely to waste. Petrenko’s conducting was excellent, although it never seemed to me to dig so deep as, say, the work of a Barenboim or indeed, in days not so very distant, a Haitink. Still, there could be no real complaints either with Petrenko or his orchestra. His tempi in the first act, at least earlier on, felt relatively swift; I have no idea whether they actually were. Yet they never felt rushed; his was a fleet, at least slightly Boulezian conception, until it was not. For there was plenty of space, well taken, to manage the work’s ebb and flow – whilst seeming, and doubtless to a certain extent, being managed by the work’s ebb and flow. Interestingly, the opening of the third act, its Prelude in particular, sounded more anguished than anything in the second. If only some of the pain implied for Parsifal’s wayfaring had been otherwise reflected in the staging. This was certainly a reading that developed and, by any standards, marked a fine debut run in the work.

One oddity: I do not think I have heard such feeble Grail bells. According to the programme, however, this was a special instrument modelled by the Bayreuth piano company, Steingraeber, after the instrument used at the 1882 premiere. If so, the Meister was – not for the first time, nor even for the last – surely mistaken. The Bayreuth bells we know from, say, Karl Muck’s 1927 recording, in their 1926 design pack sound to my ears more impressive in every way. Or maybe I am just too wedded to what I think I ‘ought’ to hear.

Kundry (Nina Stemme) and Parsifal

 

Singing was certainly distinguished, although it was really the Amfortas and, perhaps more oddly, the Klingsor who stood out for me. Christian Gerhaher has recently, surprisingly, seemed more at home in opera than in Lieder, and so it was here. His fabled beauty of tone was never an end in itself but put to sweet, agonising dramatic work – alongside the fascinating suggestion, apparent in his eyes if nowhere else on stage, of a crazed, ecstatic religious visionary. Could that not have been the director’s concept, if he had no other? It would certainly have opened up all manner of possibilities. Wolfgang Koch’s way with words, music, and their combination marked him out as an uncommonly excellent Klingsor – even if Klingsors rarely disappoint. Again, one learned much simply from observing his facial expressions. Jonas Kaufmann offered lovely moments, lovely passages, and a great deal of verbal acuity too in his assumption of the title role. However, his voice really did not sound as I recall it from not so long ago; there were times when it sounded not only strained but worn. Let us hope that this was just an off-day (a highly relative off-day). He and Nina Stemme as Kundry were certainly not helped by Audi’s non-production. I am not entirely convinced that this is Stemme’s ideal role, but it is surely not unreasonable for us to adjust our expectations according to a particular artist’s abilities and conception. Something a little wilder either on stage or in voice, or ideally both, would not have gone amiss, but again there were no grounds for true complaint. Likewise with René Pape’s Gurnemanz. His beauty of tone remains, yet there is now far more of a sense of verbal response than once there was in his singing. If Parsifal, then, is for you primarily, even exclusively, about singing and more broadly about musical performance, you would have experienced something undoubtedly special. If, however, it needs to be for you a drama too, I cannot imagine your response would have been so very different from mine.

 

Julian Anderson: Thebans (world premiere), English National Opera, 3 May 2014

Coliseum

Oedipus – Roland Wood

Creon – Peter Hoare

Tiresias – Matthew Best

Jocasta – Susan Bickley

Stranger from Corinth, Haemon – Anthony Gregory

Shepherd – Paul Sheehan

Messenger, Theseus – Christopher Ainslie

Antigone – Julia Sporsén

Polynices – Jonathan McGovern

Eteocles – Matt Casey

Pierre Audi (director)

Tom Pye (set designs)

Christof Hetzer (costumes)

Jean Kalman (lighting)

Lysander Ashton (video designs)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Dominic Peckham)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Edward Gardner (conductor)

There can be no doubting the ambition to this, Julian Anderson’s first opera, with a libretto ‘by Frank McGuinness after Sophocles’. Its three acts adapt not just one play from Sophocles’s Theban trilogy, but all three. Starting in the past – as the opening curtain informs us – the first act entitled ‘The Fall of Oedipus’, we move to the future, ‘Antigone’, before concluding with the present, ‘The Death of Oedipus’. Initially, I found myself sceptical about the reordering, wondering what lay behind it other than a desire to be different; however, when the third act came, I felt the sense – prior to reading these words from Anderson, in an eloquent programme note – that the act was ‘all about endings … the mysterious, timeless atmosphere of this sacred wood’ at Colonus lending ‘a special and quite different mood … which would be impossible to place anywhere but at the end’. There did indeed seem to be a finality arising from subject matter and treatment, perhaps even from Sophocles having written it last.

McGuinness’s libretto is in many respects highly skilful; it packs a great deal in, without necessarily seeming to do so, not least in sometimes lengthy passages of narrative. There is what we might consider to be real poetry in it, though sometimes there are clichéd phrases – ‘done and dusted’, for instance – which seem in context slightly to jar rather than carrying knowing weight. Perhaps, though, I simply misunderstood, and the task of writing words intended to be sung, whilst at the same time not knowing what the music will be, is not an easy one.  I was not entirely convinced by the suddenness of the ending, whether in terms of words or music. Antigone was seemingly cut off in mid flow, shortly after the strangely anti-climactic death of her father: that anti-climax more a product, I think, of the music’s tailing off than the libretto. It was, however, clearly intended as such, Anderson claiming that there ‘are no clear answers’ in Sophocles, McGuinness, or his own contribution. Perhaps, again, more would become apparent upon a second hearing. At any rate, the Lear-like quality to this scene came across with considerable power, not only in terms of Antigone’s faithful love, but also the haunting by death. I can imagine it being objected that this is as much drama 'about' drama as the thing itself, but in practice, the telescoping, the selection of particular points in time, and the enabling of those points to encompass more of the action, works well. In any case, the Theban plays are so much part of our collective consciousness, that we do not always have to start from the very beginning.

 

Anderson’s own contribution proved, for me at least, more variable. His writing is, it hardly need be said, highly accomplished, the composer’s virtuosic command of the orchestra never in doubt. The first act in particular meanders. Perhaps one might claim that to be the point; but whilst timings in the programme put it at the length of the second and third acts combined, it seemed, if anything, longer still. Although those latter acts are tauter, even there I found it difficult to discern an individual voice. It is certainly not a ‘difficult’ work; a great deal of the musical language is tonal in quality, not necessarily a problem, but is it perhaps a problem that much of it sounds as if it might have been written by a Stravinsky imitator not so very much less than a century ago? At any rate, the contrast, however unfair, with the blazing originality of Œdipus Rex, is not a little glaring. Maybe composers feel that the time for problematisation of opera is over; if so, on this evidence, it is not entirely clear that they are right to do so.

 

That said, there are interesting touches and, indeed, rather more than that. Microtonal sliding, for instance, disrupts or at least questions the otherwise stultifying metrical regularity – clearly a deliberate choice – in Creon’s Act II police state, as well as responding to the narrative we hear introduced from outside. Tiresias’s otherworldly strangeness registers not only in his gender-bending scenic portrayal, but also in the alterity of his tuning. Indeed, in some respects, his prophetic truth and its musical portrayal seem to haunt the third act all the more, when he is not even present on stage; I have no reason to think that such a comparison were intended, but I was put in mind of the overpowering presence of Wotan in Götterdämmerung. At any rate, Anderson’s portrayal of ‘everything – including Oedipus himself – gradually becoming part of nature and leaving civilisation altogether’ is impressively achieved. I had the sense that if the findings of the second and third acts had been read back into a revised version of the first, a tauter, more integrated, structure might well have emerged.

 

Edward Gardner seemed, insofar as it is possible to tell with a work one does not know, to conduct a splendidly authoritative performance, rhythms razor-sharp, layerings of colour ever-discernible. The ENO Orchestra deserves the strongest of plaudits in that respect too. Similarly the chorus, which plays an important role throughout, whether seen, as in the first two acts, or unseen, as in the third, its ambiguous offstage identity – does, for instance, Oedipus imagine the gods, or are they all-too-divine? – a clear dramatic advantage. Dominic Peckham’s choral training clearly paid off as well as Pierre Audi’s onstage blocking; there was a true sense of identity and credibility, both corporate and, especially in the first act, individual.

 

Audi’s staging does its job very well. There is a proper sense of place to each of the three acts, even if the jackbooted totalitarianism of Creon’s state arguably errs on the side of predictability. (Perhaps, though, that is the fault of the work as much as the staging.) Lighting from Jean Kalman sets off the relatively simple yet powerful work of the design team (Tom Pye’s sets and Christof Hetzer’s costumes) to excellent effect. Composer and librettist could hardly have asked for more for a premiere.

 

The cast acquitted itself with honour too. Despite having fallen victim to a throat infection, Roland Wood offered a tirelessly committed performance as Oedipus, his acquisition of wisdom genuinely affecting. Peter Hoare’s Creon was properly nasty, an excellent foil for the humanity of Julia Sporsén’s Antigone. (Here I could not help but think of Wagner’s analysis of the myth in Oper und Drama, Creon’s state falling victim to the anarchistic love-curse of this progenitor of Brünnhilde.) Susan Bickley’s Jocasta was as well sung and acted as expected, leaving one wishing that she had more to do. Christopher Ainslie, having previously appeared as the Messenger, truly came into his own as the third act Theseus, the purity of his counter-tenor voice as startling in its liminality as his bronzed appearance, the latter a clever stroke indeed from the production team. Matthew Best startled in quite very different way as a deep-voiced transsexual Tiresias: insistent, impatient, and defiantly ‘different’.

 

ENO, then, should be congratulated upon its efforts. With the best will in the world, it would be difficult to speak of this opera in the same breath as works by Benjamin or Birtwistle. By the same token, when one recalls in horror the latest offerings from Judith Weir and Mark-Anthony Turnage – whatever happened to the composer of the visceral Greek? – the contrast is equally apparent. A new work requires excellence in staging and performance; that it certainly received.  
 

Götterdämmerung, De Nederlandse Opera, 30 November 2013

Het Muziektheater, Amsterdam

Siegfried – Stephen Gould

Gunther – Alejandro Marco-Buhrmester
Alberich – Werner van Mechelen
Hagen – Kurt Rydl
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Gutrune, Third Norn – Astrid Weber
Waltraute – Michaela Schuster
First Norn – Nicole Piccolimini
Second Norn, Wellgunde – Barbara Senator
Woglinde – Machteld Baumans
Flosshilde – Bettina Ranch

Pierre Audi (director)

George Tsypin (set designs)
Eiko Ishioka, Robby Duiveman (costumes)
Wolfgang Göbbel (lighting)
Cor van den Brink (choreography)
Maarten van der Put (video)
Klaus Bertisch (dramaturgy)

Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra

Netherlands Opera Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)
Hartmut Haenchen (conductor)

 

I shall try to make this relatively short, partly on account of time pressures, but also because I still have to watch the DVD set of this Amsterdam Ring from Hartmut Haenchen and Pierre Audi, and shall therefore be able to say more once I have seen the whole ‘cycle’. (I know the word is misleading in many ways, but it is now so ingrained that its use is sometimes well-nigh inevitable.) That said, a live experience can be very different from a filmed one; indeed, for me at least, the former is nearly always preferable. There is in any case a different cast for this run. Moreover, fellow speakers at the Internationaal Wagner Congres, which took me to Amsterdam in the first place, advised that Audi’s production, in particular George Tsypin’s brilliant set designs, did not really transfer very well to video. I shall see…

 

In many respects, it is Tsypin’s ring-like space – presumably developed in concert with Audi – that dominates proceedings: not in any sense limiting, but as a good production will do, enabling. (Stephen Langridge’s Parsifal, to which I shall come shortly, did quite the opposite: a rude, yet alas not-at-all surprising awakening, upon my return to London.) The ring is, cleverly, not circular but never meets, permitting a lengthy walkway up to the theatrical heights. Not only does that facilitate comings and goings, observations and retreats; it reminds us that Wagner’s Hegelian view of history – Schopenhauer notwithstanding – does not deal in the purely ‘cyclical’. In Götterdämmerung perhaps of all works, that is crucial. The audience is drawn in; indeed people watch – like the Immolation Scene ‘watchers’ themselves – from the extremities of the set. Equally innovative and provocative is the placing of the orchestra within the ‘ring’. It is, of course, quite a different conception from that of Wagner’s invisible orchestra at Bayreuth, which, bizarrely, no one seeks to follow.  Yet, in a sense, it has equally distinguished roots in Wagnerian æsthetics. Wagner’s conception of the orchestra as his Greek chorus does not rely upon an invisibility that was never the case in Athens; indeed, the complexity of the chorus’s engagement with drama is part of the point. We are reminded, moreover, of Patrice Chéreau’s stated Bayreuth wish, explicitly echoing Wagner, that ‘that the orchestra pit be, like Delphi’s smoking pit, a crevice uttering oracles — the Funeral March and the concluding redemption motif. The redemption motif is a message delivered to the entire world, but like all pythonesses, the orchestra is unclear, and there are several ways in which one might interpret its message. … Should one not hear it with mistrust and anxiety?’

 

Audi does not propose an overarching Konzept, at least not insofar as I could discern from this viewing of a single drama. Yet in no sense does his production seem vacuous. This is not Lepage (surely the very nadir: no criticism could be too harsh), Schenk, Braunschweig, or Cassiers. There is, may Wotan be thanked, no aping of a bad nineteenth-century naturalism, as Thomas Mann would have put it and whose utterly failure Wagner himself appreciated. Yet there is a sense both of myth – at some times vaguely eastern, the veils for Gutrune and Brünnhilde reminding one of Wagner’s (proto-)Schopenhauerian flirtations – and of its interaction with history: the very stuff of the Ring. Boundaries are fluid yet the presentation is far from formless. Thus the Gibichungs can sport stylised nineteenth-century fashion at one point, for instance Gutrune’s wedding dress, and Gunther’s hunting green with top hat, both admirably fitted to the attractive figures of Astrid Weber and Alejandro Marco-Buhrmester. At the same time there is a sense of the mists of myth and pre-history descending, the imaginative presentation of Brünnhilde’s final sinking into red oblivion a case in point: superficially similar, in its use of choreography and sheets, to that in the Berlin production of Guy Cassiers, yet so much more theatrical – and meaningful. Elegance is never exchanged for Loge’s anarchistic fire. And there is real fire too – somewhat mystifyingly at the end of the second act, but more meaningfully at the end of the third.  The Tarnhelm is used intelligently at the close of the first act, so that we see both mysterious visitors and their role in Brünnhilde’s fate. Too often - for instance, in Keith Warner's London staging - directors mess this up completely; not here.

 

Hartmut Haenchen’s direction had its moments. It was certainly preferable to the truly abysmal efforts of Antonio Pappano last year at Covent Garden. (I am beginning to think that legislation might be necessary to wrest Wagner from Pappano’s near-monopoly. A good musical director would recognise his strengths and more importantly his weaknesses, and distribute repertoire accordingly.) There was little of that stopping and starting, that driving hard and that grinding to a halt; yet, by the same token, there was some scrappy orchestral playing – the brass nearly inaudible at the end of the first act, when their steel should viscerally reflect the brutality of Brünnhilde’s rape – and Wagner’s melos was sometimes obscured.

 

Stephen Gould’s Siegfried was serviceable: more than one can often say, but it was neither an especially meaningful nor mellifluous performance. Catherine Foster displayed considerable dramatic commitment and, when her tone was properly focused, a fine command of Wagnerian line; intonation, however, was sometimes a problem.  Kurt Rydl, a wonderful Hagen in his time, showed that, whilst he can still act the part with the best of them, he should alas probably have retired a while ago, his voice often threadbare and lacking focus.  Weber, though her voice could sometimes prove attractive, had a tendency towards blowsiness. Marco-Buhrmester, though, was deeply impressive, his vocal delivery of text and music alike as elegant as his stage presence. Michaela Schuster’s Waltraute was the other star performance; as with Marco-Buhrmester, every word was made to tell, yet without exaggeration. Hers was a performance that drew one in as the production suggested. I only noticed afterwards that Eberhard Friedrich had trained the chorus; that made perfect sense, since its excellence put me in mind of Bayreuth at its best. More anon when I have watched the DVDs…