King Arthur, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 8 November 2019

Images: Ruth und Martin Walz (from 2017 premiere)

Anett Fritsch, Robin Johannsen (sopranos)

Benno Schachtner (countertenor)

Reinoud Van Mechelen, Stephan Rügamer (tenors)

Neal Davies, Arttu Kataja (bass)

Arthur – Michael Rotschopf

Merlin – Jörg Gudzuhn

Oswald – Max Urlacher

Osmond – Paul Herwig

Emmeline – Meike Droste

Grimbald – Tom Radisch

Conon – Roland Renner

Aurelius – Steffen Schortie Scheumann

Mathilda – Sigrid Maria Schnückel

Little Arthur – Béla Jim Ottopal

Sven-Erich Bechtolf (director)

Julian Crouch (director, set designs)

Kevin Pollard (costumes)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Gail Skrela (choreography)

Joshua Higgason (video)

Ein Skills Ensemble

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Martin Wright)

Akademie für Alte Musk Berlin

René Jacobs (conductor)

What to do with King Arthur? Rightly or wrongly, a ‘straight’ performance seems out of the question, even in the case of this, the only case of a Purcell semi-opera conceived as such (by Dryden), as opposed to adding music to an existing play. There are several problems here. Some might say, not without reason, that there are several opportunities too, that those very problems may readily be understood to be opportunities. For our purposes, doubtless too schematically, they may be summarised as: how to conceive of this genre; how to conceive of this particular example of that genre, likely written as an allegory whose meaning we shall never recover or, at best, at which we shall only hesitantly be able to guess, closing with an uncomfortably ‘patriotic’ final act; what sort of dialogue to use, most likely to write; and, last but not least, how to accomplish any of that for a largely non-English, indeed non-Anglophone audience. I shall not attempt fully to answer those in turn, but they are worth bearing in mind in consideration of what was seen and heard in this performing version by René Jacobs, with a little – or a good deal of – help from various friends, Sven-Erich Bechtolf and Julian Crouch included, in ‘updating’ a German translation by Wolfgang Wiens and Hans Duncker.

The fundamental conceit is far from a bad one; its framing permits for various standpoints, depending on the spectator, to be taken. Set in wartime, in the 1940s – it seems, though some designs appear, confusingly, to be from earlier in the century – this is a tale of a boy, Arthur, who has lost his father in action. His mother would like to move on with her life, but Arthur is resistant to anyone taking his father’s place. Various characters and situations – his mother, his father’s father, a puppet show, his father in a dream, etc. – recount to Little Arthur a story from Britain’s ancient past, of battle between Britons and Saxons, onto which some issues of the present may be read, and vice versa. Ultimately, the war comes to an end; Arthur’s mother remarries; and, both disturbingly and unconvincingly, Arthur learns, seemingly without irony or any of the double reading in which he or we might previously have engaged, that the King Arthur of whom he has learned – in this context, a somewhat odd King Arthur, more deeply engaged with retrieving his love, the blind Emmeline, than the activities for which we know him – should be his model as an English patriot. Almost all of the spoken theatre proceeded in German; Purcell’s music was always given in English, heightening a sense of separation.

The doublings of historical standpoint, if sometimes a little confusing, at least to start with, have much to be said for them, their often bizarre accoutrements rather less. I could not help, as an Englishman at present inevitably still more disenchanted with any show of ‘patriotism’ or nationalism, but wonder at the ideas other, neighbouring, still-friendly – whatever the provocations – countries have of Purcell’s ‘fairest isle’ right now. One is clearly of ongoing obsession with the Second World War: fair enough; one can hardly argue otherwise, however much one might wish it otherwise. Another enduring conception seems to be of a Monty Python-style humour that frankly irritates many of us, but which is certainly enjoyed by a number of my German friends. That combination of something not nearly so clever as it thinks it is with mere silliness certainly haunted a good deal of what we saw.

If, for instance, you had for some reason been longing to see a black-and-white-striped, exaggeratedly priapic version of the creepy 1980s BBC children’s television ‘character’, Wizbit, brought to us once upon a time in association with Paul Daniels and ‘the lovely’ Debbie McGee, this would certainly have been your night. (I can only presume, indeed hope, that the resemblance was coincidental, but who knows?) If, moreover, you were someone who found threats of rape on the part of that strange conical figure inherently amusing – disturbingly, much of the audience seemed of that persuasion – your dramatic cup would verily have run over. Mishearing of ‘Uhren’ (clocks) for ‘Huren’ (whores), farting and other ‘smell’ jokes (yes, afraid so), and so on and so on were largely suggestive of variety show rather than Dryden. Ribaldry certainly has its place in other works by Purcell, but hardly here. This show – that seems to me the right word – certainly seemed happier with the generalised rather than the particular. Occasional flashes of something wittier, more substantive, for instance a character musing on how the drama might have developed, had postdramatic theatre been yet invented, offered tantalising possibilities. Greater focus would have been no bad thing.

There was much to admire in the singing – in particular – but also the acting, overdone though some of the latter may have been. All singers covered numerous roles to excellent effect: Anett Frisch’s stylish and intelligently dramatic soprano, Benno Schachter’s hauntingly beautiful countertenor, and Neal Davies’s performance in the celebrated ‘Frost Scene’ – how manifestly superior it is to its likely model in Lully! – were the pick of the bunch for me, but there were no weak links. The Staatsoper chorus, as ever, proved on fine form. Some, I suppose, might have preferred a smaller body of singers; for me, however, it proved rather a wonderful treat. With the best will in the world, a band such as the Akademie für Alte Musik cannot approach the warmth of, say, the English Chamber Orchestra in Antony Lewis’s recording of this music, nor its easy way with Purcell’s idioms. However, there was fine playing on its own terms, to which my ears became more accustomed as time went on.

Jacobs’s tempi and general direction were for the most part unobjectionable, although there were times, doubtless predictably, when the music might have been permitted to breathe more openly. Various other music by Purcell was added, sometimes offering an orchestral background to dialogue: not a Purcellian practice, but in its borrowing from later ‘melodrama’ unproblematic and a welcome addition of textural variety. Jacobs seems also to have felt the need beyond that to ‘improve’ on Purcell’s scoring. I have no objection in principle to rewriting, reorchestrating, reordering, to anything really, so long as it works; there was nothing here to which I especially objected, though Jacobs’s amplifying choices were highly predictable in practice. On the other hand, the relative intimacy of Purcell’s writing here – compare it with, say, The Fairy Queen – was often lost, without sign of any true rethinking in modern terms.

As ever, then, pious talk of musical ‘authenticity’ proved about as plausible as a Liberal Democrat bar chart. Thoughts inevitably returned to our – Britain’s, that is – lamentable political present. There were lessons to be learned, even if far from straightforwardly. On reflection, that is doubtless as it should have been. However uncomfortable this may have been for an Englishman in temporary exile, if ever a failed state deserved to be the butt of ‘foreign’ humour, it was surely ours.

Il primo omicidio, Opéra national de Paris, 26 January 2019

Palais Garnier



Images: Bernd Uhlig / Opéra national de Paris

Caino – Kristina Hammarström, Hippolyte Chapuis

Abele – Olivia Vermeulen, Rémi Courtel

Adamo – Thomas Walker, Armand Dumonteil

Eva – Birgitte Christensen, Alma Perrin

Voice of God – Benno Schachtner, Riccard Carducci

Voice of Lucifer –Robert Gleadow, Léo Chatel

Romeo Castellucci (director, designs)

Silvia Costa (artistic collaboration)

Piersandra Di Matteo, Christian Longchamp (dramaturgy)

B’Rock Orchestra

René Jacobs (conductor)

The Paris Opéra celebrates its 350^th anniversary this year. Its archives preserve its founding document, the twelve-year privilege or monopoly granted by Louis XIV, ‘par la Grâce de Dieu, Roy de France et de Navarre,’ to the poet Pierre Perrin, to found anywhere in France, with whichever business partners he might choose, academies of opera. This ‘Privilège accordé au Sieur Perrin pour l'établissement d'une Académie d'Opéra en Musique et en Vers François’ was renewed up until the Revolution for Perrin’s successors, Perrin himself having been imprisoned just three years later and compelled to cede his privilege to Lully. The curtain at the much later Palais Garnier, as luxurious as anything one might imagine from St-Germain-en-Laye, or indeed Versailles thereafter, reminded us of that founding year: 1669. It is perhaps a fiction in some ways, since the first performance would not be given until 1671, but then such is the way with myths of creation.

Which brings us to our very own myth of Creation – or rather its aftermath: arguably the aftermath of its aftermath, following the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. We come, then in Christian genealogy, to the first murder, Il primo omicidio; or, to give it an ‘or’ perhaps more crucial than we find say, in the full titles of Figaro or Tannhäuser, Il primo omicidio, ovvero Caino. Every time we start, or start again, we qualify. Myths and their accretions are like that, whatever their deceptive simplicity. Such, at least, was one of many thoughts provoked by Romeo Castellucci’s staging of Alessandro Scarlatti’s 1707 Venetian oratorio, which, if not dating back quite to Perrin or indeed to Lully, stands considerably closer to them than to us – not entirely not unlike Cain and Abel to us as opposed to Creation itself.

Design tends to be an especially crucial element of Castellucci’s theatre: that is, not only of the expression of an idea, but perhaps as an idea or instead of an idea in itself. This staging is a typically painterly, or at least visual, creation, especially in the First Part; there is something of the installation to it, not at all inappropriately, given that an oratorio is not ‘supposed’ (‘sacred’ music’s forbidden fruit?) to be staged in any case. As in Castellucci’s Moses und Aron, which inaugurated Stéphane Lissner’s intendancy in Paris, and which surely acts as something – Biblical chronology here fruitfully entangled – of a progenitor to the present staging, much of the initial action, such as it is, is viewed through gauze or at least the effect thereof. This is pre-history, after all, or rather myth. Is that not often how we strain, or indeed even indulge? The remoteness has temptations as well as snares of its own; are temptations and snares not the same thing? Were they not for Eve – and for Cain?

The visual drama of blood sacrifice, again as in Moses, to whom some credit writing of the Pentateuch, may again be thought of as painterly, or at least akin to painting. An altarpiece suspended, upside down, reminds us where we are heading as well as where we are. Use of colour and fluid may well be familiar from other Castellucci stagings, but it is not straightforwardly to be reduced to a tic, even though our word ‘aesthetic’ contains the charge. Coincidence does not equate to genealogy: in a Christian or post-Christian tradition, the two can hardly stand further apart. Perhaps I failed to appreciate that in Castellucci’s Tannhäuser, which in general left me unimpressed; if the opportunity presents itself to give it another go, I shall try to take it.

Representation in the Second Part seems less distant; we see more clearly in the run up to Cain’s murder of his brother. However, then, or rather just before, an interesting doubling occurs. Each of the ‘characters’, including the ‘Voices’ of God and Lucifer, acquires a further visual representation from a child actor. We retain clarity but we see double without hearing double. What does that mean? The question is open; it can probably mean whatever you want it to mean – or not. For me, however, there are two principal points, one relating to the issue of representation itself – as in Moses, of course, but also as in the genre of oratorio, always hedging on the edge of representation and in this particular performance actually submitting or, if you prefer, acquiring visual liberation.

I shall return to that, but first, perhaps less or at least differently conceptual, is the dramatic role of children. This is a foundational myth, albeit with catches. Eve here acts very much as mother: a mother who essentially loses both of her children. She becomes, here explicitly in traditional Marian ultramarine, a forerunner of that other Mother of Sorrows. She is also, of course, mother to the human race. We witness the multiplication of Adam’s seed – but her progeny too. In some traditions, the date of the Feast of the Annunciation, 25 March, is also given to Adam’s Fall. We are also reminded, in one of those catches, that the population of the Earth takes place via neither Cain nor Abel. Such is Cain’s punishment: he is punished to live, as Antonio Ottoboni’s libretto makes repeatedly clear. Is that not our traditional tragic (which is to say, Greek rather than Hebrew) insight: Silenus’s it would be best not to have been born at all, and then better to die than to live? Christianity’s dialectic between Jewish and Hellenic traditions continues.

There is an historical, metatheatrical element to this too, which connects the issue of lineage to that of representation. Scarlatti wrote two operatic tragedies, Il Mitridate Eupatore and Il trionfo della libertà, in that same year, 1707, for Venetian theatres. (We seem not to know where Il primo omicidio was first performed, save for it being in Venice.) We know that Il primo omicidio was performed again, three years later, in 1710, at the Palazzo della Cancelleria, for the Venetian-born Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, nephew of Pope Alexander VIII and son of Scarlatti’s librettist and employer (as maestro di cappella), Antonio. Such keeping it in the family is intrinsic to our Christian genealogy too. In some cases, interestingly, the children’s gestures here proved more ‘operatic’, as conventionally understood, than those of the singers. Was oratorio once again leading to, even giving birth to, opera, however fraught the chronology? (If one wants fraught chronologies and genealogies, there are worse examples than the story that had begun in 4004 BC.) Oratorio a non orando, as eighteenth-century religious conservatives used to say? Was a performance, let alone a staging, of allegedly prayerful music so called because no one prayed? Interesting, difficult questions were raised concerning the objectification of children too, especially within the dominant patriarchal construct of ‘the family’.

Without wishing to denigrate the considerable virtues of Scarlatti’s score, it perhaps serves most clearly as a setting of Ottoboni’s libretto. That is surely what we heard and indeed saw on this occasion. We shall not get very far if we wish to hear it as if it were Wagner, or Mozart for that matter – by which I mean to refer to aesthetic and dramatic content rather than the restricting, deadening idea of ‘period style’, as foreign a concept to Scarlatti and Ottoboni as might be imagined. It would be dishonest to claim that there were no such restrictions to the present performance. If René Jacobs’s tempi were in general unobjectionable, the instrumentalists of the B’Rock Orchestra too often seemed encouraged to shy away from the operatic opening-up we witnessed on stage. The strings were not, mercifully, entirely without vibrato, but a little more Venetian and/or Roman colour would not have gone amiss. Likewise with the estimable vocal performances, which sometimes one wished might take a little cue from the enthusiasm of the doubling child actors. That said, there were no disappointments and there was much to savour, not least from the maternal sincerity of Birgitte Christensen’s Eva, the haunting innocence of Olivia Vermuelen’s Abele, and the otherworldly purity of Benno Schachtner’s countertenor as the Voice of God.

Jacobs reminds us in a programme interview that we had to wait centuries to hear Monteverdi’s Vespers once again. The comparison seems extravagant; I do not know Scarlatti’s other oratorios, so perhaps they do reach so exalted a level; if so, we should hear them as soon as possible. For me, this oratorio comes nowhere near. But it is of interest; it is worth hearing, worth thinking about. The conductor, moreover, is right to act as chief advocate for the defence. With a work such as this, that is what he is there for. Jacobs led a perfectly reasonable account, not least given the straitjacket of ‘period’ instruments and, more broadly, approaches. Imagine, though, what might have been revealed, had such extravagance of advocacy been lent also to the performance itself. Creation and its aftermath will always stand in need of recreation.