Bayreuth Festival (1) - Das Rheingold, 23 August 2017

Festspielhaus

 

Wotan – Iain Paterson

Donner – Markus Eiche
Froh – Daniel Behle
Loge – Roberto Saccà
Fricka – Tanja Ariana Baumgartner
Freia – Caroline Wenborne
Erda – Nadine Weissmann
Alberich – Albert Dohmen
Mime – Andreas Conrad
Fasolt – Günther Groissböck
Fafner – Karl-Heinz Lehner
Woglinde – Alexandra Steiner
Wellgunde – Stephanie Houtzeel
Flosshilde – Wiebke Lehmkuhl

Frank Castorf (director)

Patric Seibert (assistant director and dramaturgical collaboration)
Aleksandar Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)
Rainer Kasper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video)

 

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Marek Janowski (conductor)

 

And so, the time came for final check-in to Frank Castorf’s Golden Motel. It has been quite a ride, full of unexpected twists and turns: not entire unlike the history of our benighted late capitalist world since Wagner-Jahr in 2013 – although thank God, nothing like so far-fetched. I did not see the 2013 Ring; Per-Erik Skramstad reviewed it for wagneropera.net that year. I did, however, see it in 2014 and 2016. As with last year, I shall not re-read my earlier reviews until after having written those for the present year. That is not because I believe in some unsullied, unmediated experience in the Festspielhaus, quite the contrary. Such is an experience entirely foreign to Wagner, whatever (very) occasional nods he might have offered to the contrary. What I see, hear, and write will undoubtedly be informed by prior memories, thoughts, and interpretations – and so it should be. The same will certainly be true of the performances themselves, and of Castorf’s – and his collaborator, Patric Seibert’s – understanding and critical vision. By the same token, however, I – like they, I presume – hope that I shall be open to new understandings and do not wish to be unduly weighed down by ‘tradition’. Tradition is present any case; how can it not be in this of all houses and festivals? There is no need for it to become, in Mahler’s celebrated phrase, Schlamperei.

 

Perhaps more to the point, this is a production concerned with, or at least unusually amenable to, ideas and criticisms of narration, of the construction, criticism, and disavowal of memory. For good and for ill, we are all, to a certain extent, postmodernists now. The rejection of totality, of grand narrative, was understandable, even laudable, for so many artists and thinkers in the wake of the Second World War. It certainly was for Castorf. Just as Romanticism inescapably changed us – no one any more, at least in the Western world, really finds unrequited love intrinsically amusing, no matter what – so has the awareness of writing and deconstructing narratives. One might say it was already there anyway, even in this, one of the grandest of all artistic narratives. Like the Bible, Wagner presents two myths of creation: one here, one in the Norns’ Scene of Götterdämmerung; he arguably offers scope for a good few more too. That despite his own, post-Hegelian insistence on, pursuit of, totality. One might say the same of Hegel too – or indeed Marx. Come Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, Castorf does too, with his alternative Mount Rushmore. But let us not get too far ahead, whatever that quintessential Wagnerian temptation.

 

Narration and its unreliability come to the fore from the outset, both from Wagner and Castorf. We make the distinction, but should we, in performance, in the bringing of a work and far more than work into, as it were, dynamic form? Filming and reproduction, ‘live’ or otherwise, are at the heart of many a contemporary theatrical piece, not least Castorf’s own; I recently saw his Faust-ian Volksbühne farewell in Berlin. In lesser hands, such might merely be a gimmick, but we are no more concerned with lesser hands here than we are with Wagner, who is emphatically not responsible for bland, overblown, or merely offensive successors. We see things, via the cameras and the screen relay, that we would otherwise not see. But should we? There is the question of surveillance, of nowhere to hide, of course, not least in a society such as ours. (Theresa May, are you watching, courtesy of your Snooper’s Charter?) But should we, in another sense? Are we seeing things that are not even ‘there’, whatever that might mean? Some of the time, unquestionably yes, although it is often difficult to know. Just how many narratives or standpoints on narratives can we watch at the same time? It is no good just to throw up our hands in despair, and say we just want the one. The world does not work like that. Nor does being a ‘citizen of the world’ – which returns us to… Sometimes, then, we are certain concerning discrepancies. People are there who are otherwise ‘not’. What to make of Fricka’s brief, mediatised reinvention as ‘a blonde’ as Wotan (or another fun-loving, megalomaniacal, School of Playboy world ‘leader’) might call her. Gentlemen might not be the issue here, but power is; and being a ‘gentleman’, like all ‘manners’, is in large part a matter of power, of class and other conflict, however much we may feel the need to persuade ourselves otherwise. ‘No, you pinkoes are “constructing a narrative”; I am “telling it as it is”.’ Right…

 

Texas is where it all kicks off: on Route 66. The motel is a staging post, as motels are. So is wherever the gods ‘are’, before Valhalla. (So too will Valhalla/the new Golden Motel too, of course, for the gods are not, cannot be, immortal; we are all Feuerbachians now – or Wagner is, at least. We have even – most of us – now come to terms with the impermanence of capitalism, a few years ago a claim regarded as absurd by all save for a few of us ‘extremists’ who needed to recognise the Berlin Wall had fallen. Marx is back, as Derrida always insisted. But is it a postmodernist Marx we want? Who cares what we want, for is truth not anti-consumerist? And so on…

 

But back to Texas. The Confederate flag elicits more immediate resonances now; as does its ultimate replacement by the rainbow flag. Froh is pretty, after all, as Wagner seems to have intended in his creation of cipher gods and goddesses: Donner and Freia too, not really ‘characters’… A trashier Dallas remake seems in the offing: there is doubtless a closer reference to draw; but reader, I am afraid I am not the one to do so. There is certainly something of JR to our Wotan, perhaps still more Sue Ellen (of later years) to Fricka; in this narrative (whose?) there is, anyway. Some audience members – perhaps there is those whose mobile telephones do not go off en route to Nibelheim: an updating too far? – merely laugh whenever there is something a little post-watershed content to view. If Carry On be your narrative, carry on, I suppose; but Wagner and Castorf are deeper – yes, how Teutonic! – than that. (The scornful reaction from a man seated somewhere behind me to the appearance of the rainbow flag told its own story. Keep it in the family by all means: but please, between members of the opposite sex! What, as it were, would be the alternative for Deutschland? Fricka will offer him help in the next instalment.)

 

There has been no golden age. It is one of the most pernicious, yet perhaps also one of the most necessary, or at any rate, tenacious of myths. Wagner presents it and immediately undermines it. He had, he once said, every sympathy with Alberich, cruelly provoked as he was by the hedonistic Rhinemaidens. An ugly man in a ‘beautiful’ world: politics, as we quaintly used to say, is showbusiness for ugly people. (Are you there, Donald? Is this Götterdämmerung already?) There is delight to be had in the ‘Rhine’ waters, but they are really just a paddling pool. The ‘girls’ might almost be waiting for Melania to take her leave. Except not: they may not be moral – anything pre-culture, or post-culture, is not – but nor do they behave. Perhaps that affords us a little hope, illusory or otherwise. But we watch them, much as cameramen ourselves: sous-pornographers, perhaps. Wotan cannot do it all himself, nor can Wagner – or Castorf. The ‘girls’ do not depart the scene, not entirely. Indeed, they avail themselves of as much fun as they can in their room. They may no longer have a beach ball and water, but cocktails in bed may prove an upgrade. Our Everyman waiter/host, Patric Seibert would like to be part of their narrative, or rather would like to welcome them into his, but they banish him once he has brought them (yet more) drinks. ‘Do not Disturb’: the sign is thrust in his face. They seem even less troubled than usual by what happens in the world(s) of gods, giants, and dwarves. Do they know that they will, more or less, be all right? (What they tell Siegfried later on suggests so, at least at some stage.) But is that not to forget about oil? If theirs is the ‘natural’ world, their lot is rape. Alberich would like to, certainly. The petrol pumps suggest that in some sense he did. He renounces love, of course, and wins, if not the world, then at least a caravan competitor next door. The struggle between new and old money, even a sacerdotal order and capital, continues: perhaps not quite the main thing, as in Wagner or at least in many of our readings, but an important thing. Narratives are never tidy, neither here nor there. Let us no more be vulgar Wagnerians than vulgar Marxists.

 

Everyman looks ahead. We see him (on camera) reading a Sigurd comic-script. That is not Wagner’s narrative, though, is it? At more or less the same time, in Nibelheim, an earlier difficulty (deliberate or imposed?) more or less resolves itself; or is it that we understand better now than once we might have done? Alberich retreats into his van, and may partly be seen through the window all along. But a snake and toad appear on screen; they seem to be a reality in our Everyman’s world – presuming what we see of his reactions on screen is ‘real’, whatever that might mean. Do we identify with him? Should we? Is that all too easy, and if so, why might someone wish us to do so? And what did it mean earlier, for Alberich and Mime to be led into Nibelheim as hostages (paper bags and all, very much in ‘war on terror’ manner) by Wotan and Loge? We have not really left the motel at all; do those events have ‘meaning’, or are they a cynical divertissement in a world of ‘entertainment’? What, likewise, did it mean, shortly afterwards, for Everyman to have be presented with the ring and Tarnhelm? Why does Loge have the latter a little later, and what is his intention with it? Tenses conflict, depending where one is, or where one thinks one is. Do objects from the hoard have actual operative force, or is that just what some people wish us to think? Why always the either-or? The ring’s agency is, of course, a matter of obscurity throughout Wagner’s drama; whatever powers it may hold are rarely those its owners thinks it does. Wellgunde’s ‘measureless might’: well, one may not be able to measure it, but that is not quite what we usually understand by the phrase.

 

The final scene does not resolve, not really; nor should it. Wagner’s Entry of the Gods certainly does nothing of the kind, words and harmonies alike deconstructing not just this particular triumph, but the very notion and possibility thereof. Inclusivity seems to us and our ilk a definite improvement: in the pool and in the bar, Rhineboys (-boyz?) join our fun-loving ‘girls’. (Remember those tweets? There is one for every occasion, in any case; we hardly need remember them.) Whatever it is that Froh – or whoever is running ‘the show’ – accomplishes is clearly mind-altering, whether one had a mind before or no. Eye close-ups from the bar leave us in no doubt that something stronger than alcohol is being served, is in the air. They all claim to see a rainbow, after all – even walk upon it, to reach somewhere they probably were already. Freia’s ransom sort of happened, but everyone – even she – seemed to have lost interest: too many other narratives to write. The giants – undoubted sexual objects themselves, for a change – have left the scene; their deal has been concluded; and if Fasolt has paid with his life, it is all part of the game, the ‘show’. Our showstopping, fur-coated, deep-of-tone Nadine Weissmann as Erda has left the scene too: her ‘deal’ with Wotan brutally accomplished – yet only partly seen, however much we voyeurs may have strained to see more. (The man behind laughed once more.) There will be other acts to come.

 

Things have changed, though. Questioning history, questioning stories, does not mean they have not taken place. One thing I should be reasonably sure of in my own narrative is that the performances have mostly become more accomplished, more sharply focused over the years I have seen the production. I shall offer no comparisons as such here, but perhaps they are implicit; they will doubtless fall some way short, too, of even a less naïve conception of ‘objectivity’. After all, I am not the same watcher and listener, spectator and interpreter, that I was. Marek Janowski certainly seemed more at home in Bayreuth than last year. What sometimes had come across as uncertain – that acoustic? – and at times unduly peremptory now seemed much more grounded. It was still a relatively, though not excessively, swift traversal of the score; or so it seemed. (I never trust the narrative of the clock; or, to put it another way, I have no interest in it.) The proportions sounded ‘right’, though, and there was dynamism to the form: sometimes in tandem with the stage action, more often questioning and being questioned, constructing a properly critical relationship. (It is almost impossible not to ask, given earlier remarks Janowski is on record as having made concerning contemporary opera stagings, what on earth he is doing here conducting a Ring with Castorf. But that is not necessarily the point.) The orchestra was responsive, capable of depth, within a largely lighter, earlier Romantic framework. Those great natural world frescoes might have registered more immediately, or catastrophically, but then, they do not necessarily do so on stage either. Barring the occasional corner, Janowski offered developmental fluidity and continuity, which is more than one often hears.

 

The Rheingold Wotan is a tricky one: we lose something – probably – should he seem no different from the character we see and hear in Die Walküre, let alone from the Wanderer. There will be no such problem here, I suspect, for Iain Paterson’s thoughtfully sleazy portrayal staked out a claim for the chief of the gods in the all too familiar here and now. Paterson’s way with the text – for the nth time, that does not simply mean the words – was shared by his estimable consort, newcomer Tanja Ariana Baumgartner. Her facial expressions on screen, suffering as she does, yet possessed of strength and a far from negligible Trump card (sorry!), were almost worth the price of admission alone. Daniel Behle was another new addition to the cast, and much the same might be said of the beauty of tone and intelligence of delivery he offered. Albert Dohmen was faced with an unusually tricky task, given the uncertain status of Alberich vis-à-vis Wotan; he navigated his particular demands impressively, even if his tone were not so black as ‘tradition’ might prescribe. Roberto Saccà’s wheeling and dealing as Loge had him very much the incarnation of instrumental reason – or perhaps a bargain, Route 66 approximation thereto. If I have seen and heard a more rounded portrayal of Fasolt in the theatre than Günther Groissböck’s, then I cannot recall it. Torn between the darker, perhaps simpler impulses of his brother, Karl-Heinz Lehner’s Fafner, and something not so very far, perhaps, from the genuine goodness Wagner divines in him, he brought all aspects of the text to memorable and – unusually, for this frigid, showy world – moving life. The splendidly un-pigeonholed Rhinemaidens and all other members of the cast brought intelligence, individuality, and – just as important – common company purpose to a truly collaborative piece of theatre.

 

Postmodernist modernists, then, as historians, interpreters, musicians, dramatists, participants? Yes, of course. We always were, were we not? Or were we? Is the Ring more cyclical, more Schopenhauerian, than we sometime allow? Yes, no, and maybe – or maybe not; for the struggle between Hegel(ianism) and Schopenhauer remains as strong, as real (wirklich?), at any rate as dramatically all-consuming as ever. But then, having constructed the narrative of my first book in just such terms, perhaps I would say that…

 

Ariadne auf Naxos, Staatsoper Berlin, 11 March 2017

Schillertheater

Ensemble (from 2015 premiere)
Image: Monika Rittershaus

 

Music Master – Arttu Kataja

Major-Domo – Elisabeth Trissenaar
Lackey – David Oštrek
Officer – Sergiu Saplacan
Composer – Katharina Kammerloher
Tenor, Bacchus – Roberto Saccà
Wig-Maker – Adam Kutny
Zerbinetta – Elena Sancho-Pereg
Prima Donna, Ariadne – Anna Samuil
Dancing Master – Manuel Günther
Naiad – Evelin Novak
Dryad – Natalia Skrycka
Echo – Sónia Grané
Harlequin – Gyula Orendt
Truffaldino – Grigory Shkarupa
Scaramuccio – Linard Vrielink
Brighella – Miloš Bulajić
Puppeteer – JARNOTH
 

Hans Neuenfels (director)

Katrin Lea Tag (set designs)
Andrea Schmidt-Futterer (costumes)
Stefan Bolliger (lighting)
Yvonne Gebauer (dramaturgy)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Eun Sun Kim (conductor)

The prospect of a staging from Ariadne auf Naxos from Hans Neuenfels was exciting indeed. His Bayreuth Lohengrin is well-nigh universally acknowledged, usual irreconcilable suspects aside, as a modern classic. Both Mozart stagings I have seen from him – Salzburg’s Così fan tutte, my first, and La finta giardiniera, here in Berlin – have been intelligent and probing. There is, of course, a much lengthier history to his work in spoken theatre and film, as well as his own writing, indeed in opera too, dating back even beyond his celebrated 1980 Aida for Frankfurt, whose landmark treatment of the work’s Orientalism outraged not only those aforementioned usual suspects but, it seems, a good few others aside. What would he do, then, with Strauss, whose twin musical gods were Mozart and Wagner, here in Ariadne, as so often, set in fruitful competition, contradiction, and perhaps reconciliation with each other?

Perhaps I should have known to expect the unexpected, but what I did not really expect was restraint, even conventionality, albeit shorn of a good deal of the theatricality and metatheatricality that lies at the heart of most productions – and indeed of the work itself. Such is largely what we see, or do not see, at least in the Prologue (save for the sudden, brief reappearance at the end, at the back of the stage, of Troupe Zerbinetta’s male members, as it were, replete with enormous strap-on dildos, enthusiastically waved around. I have no idea why in context, but it certainly attracted attention.) There is otherwise little sense of visual provocation; Andrea Schmidt-Futterer’s costumes convey a sense of modernity in its chic, allegedly ‘timeless’ form. Katrin Lea Tag’s set is relatively spare, as in the Opera proper; there is no sense, as has recently been fashionable (for instance, Christof Loy at Covent Garden or Claus Guth in Zurich), of attempting anything with self-reference to its particular location. I am not sure why it was necessary for the Major-Domo to extract money from a cash machine, suddenly revealed in the wall. Maybe it was just underlining a point concerning patronage; maybe it was a passing hint at vulgarity. (Do the super-rich have such things in their houses as amusements, or perhaps as safety deposit boxes?)  I did not especially care for the performance of Frau Neuenfels, Elisabeth Trissenaar, in that role; she is an excellent actress, and was so again here, but her delivery was strangely caricatured, not least in this otherwise straightforward context. The parody here is surely pretty much written in; adding more seems a little like caricaturing the musical caricatures of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Otherwise, all is rather as it ‘should’ be, well directed, well presented, but not especially interesting.
 

In the Opera, that changes somewhat, yet only somewhat. Another brief baffling moment – to me, at any rate, although perhaps I was being slow – is the arrival and speedy departure of an ecclesiastical procession. Again, the designs are not lavish; it is, after all a desert island. Again, the action is not complicated. There are, however, certain enigmatic, I should say suggestive, touches – and one important intervention. Threads are handed out (by the Composer, if I remember correctly) at the beginning, to Naiad, Dryad, and Echo; they snap, or were never woven together in the first place, suggesting and yet deconstructing the Fate of Wagner’s Norns. A mysterious puppeteer (JARNOCH) wanders on and off, on one occasion bearing Grecian masks (Theseus and Ariadne?), and parading ‘Schicksal’ (destiny) on the back of his T-shirt. His acts open up rather than close down possibilities for reflection: just what a production needs. Zerbinetta tries to instruct Ariadne, but the latter pays heed neither to her song nor to her written slogans.

 

For it seems that Ariadne has a death-wish, one which, revealingly, perhaps as an Adornian Rettung (‘rescue’) of the work, is fulfilled. She does not join Bacchus, but takes her life, highlighting the contradictions of the final scene, Hofmannsthal’s wish for ‘transformation’ dealt with at least as severely (and perhaps rightly so) as Strauss’s stubbornly materialist peroration. Tragedy is reinstated, as many a composer of opera seria – would like. And the Composer joins Ariadne in her death. Such, after all, is the lot of modernity, after Hegel: art would die and yet we will not, cannot, let it. We need our modernistic fragments, however much they refuse to add up. We certainly do not need what Adorno excoriated as the Happy End, although it is what mere ‘entertainment’ – paid for, because it gains ‘results’ – will give us. If only this might have been read back into the relatively disappointing Prologue.

 

There was much, then, to engage the mind. What about the ear (insofar as they may be distinguished from one another)? Anna Samuil, alas, offered a crude performance as Ariadne, her constant wide vibrato wearing and her acting ability rudimentary. Roberto Saccà’s Bacchus was better, although workmanlike rather than thrilling. (One cannot always, or even often, have Jonas Kaufmann, I suppose.) Katharina Kammerloher’s palpably sincere Composer was more impressive, although her vowels were sometimes distractingly strange – and she shaded dangerously close towards sentimentality at the end of the Prologue. Elena Sancho-Pereg, however, made for an excellent Zerbinetta. The coloratura held no obvious fears for her; just as important, she presented a more rounded character than one often encounters. Perhaps Ariadne should have listened to her after all. The other roles were all well taken, with a fine sense of company, Arttu Kataja’s Music Master, Gyula Orendt’s Harlequin, and Sergiu Saplacan’s Officer especially pleasing.

 

Eun Sun Kim’s direction of the orchestra was mostly competent, yet rarely more than that. She made a somewhat vulgar meal, surprisingly so, out of the Composer-Zerbinetta duet, otherwise tended to more of a Kapellmeister’s approach. The Staatskapelle Berlin sounded glorious, though: darker than, say, Vienna or Dresden and all the more intriguing for it, not only as Neuenfels’s staging shifted towards overt tragedy, but all along suggesting an alternative path to that which we ‘knew’. The players’ soloistic prowess was second to none throughout, yet they clearly listened to each other too, lengthy experience of chamber music telling. The musical art of performance, then, lived in the pit even as we witnessed the representation of its death onstage. Sometimes Zerbinetta’s ‘neue Gott’ turns out to be the god we have known all along, transformed.

 

Bayreuth Festival (1) - Das Rheingold, 20 August 2016

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Wotan – Iain Paterson

Donner – Markus Eiche
Froh – Tansel Akzeyebek
Loge – Roberto Saccà
Fricka – Sarah Connolly
Freia – Caroline Wenborne
Erda – Nadine Weissmann
Alberich – Albert Dohmen
Mime – Andreas Conrad
Fasolt – Günther Groissböck
Fafner – Karl-Heinz Lehner
Woglinde – Alexandra Steiner
Wellgunde – Stephanie Houtzeel
Flosshilde – Wiebke Lehmkuhl

Frank Castorf (director)
Aleksandar Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)
Rainer Kasper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Marek Janowski (conductor)

And so, two years after my first viewing, I am returning to Frank Castorf’s Ring. I shall not re-read my first reviews until afterwards: not because I entertain some absurd fantasy about coming to the production anew, for my present experience will clearly be coloured by prior experience; yet, by the same token, I see no especial reason to have the former over-determined by the latter. One’s memory can play tricks, of course, and what I perceive as difference may or may not so; I may be misremembering, or indeed may simply not have noticed certain aspects before; I may also be viewing them in different contexts, the world – mostly to its disadvantage – having ‘moved on’ considerably since 2014. That, after all, is part of the message – at least part of the message I have taken – from the video work in this production. No one, perhaps, is so unreliable a narrator as the person convinced of the absolute truth of his or her recollections. Even if ‘correct’, that correctness is of limited use: few things are so pernicious as anti-historical elevation of the momentary to the permanent; one has only to think of the runes inscribed on Wotan’s spear, or, more generally, the bourgeois universalism of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Any Hegelian and/or Marxist – perhaps more to the point, any historian or philosopher of history – could tell you that. However, for anyone wishing to read my previous reviews, they may be found here: Rheingold, Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung.

Back, then, to the Golden Motel: the trashy Texan (Route 66) location for the action. On first glance, like much mass culture, it might seem to be all about sex. Like the first scene of Das Rheingold, one might say, for what Wagner called Alberich’s liebesgelüste (‘erotic urge’ he was at that time disdaining traditional capital letters for nouns). In both work and production, though, things are far more complicated than they might seem. How might we characterise that liebesgelüste? It may – as I have argued elsewhere – be understood partly, at least when considered from the standpoint of the history of ideas, as an important precedent for Nieztsche’s will to power. But Wagner is not Nietzsche – even if Nietzsche is far closer to Wagner than he ever, even earlier on, wishes to admit. For the question is social too: Alberich’s proto-Nietzschean ressentiment is born of his lowly place in Wotan’s society. That is the psychological – and, in some senses, socio-political – impulse for the challenge of capital to the established political order; or at least it was in Wagner’s time. The relationship between Valhalla and Nibelheim is not entirely different in the age of neo-liberalism, but nor is it the same.

The ressentiment is also æsthetic, of course: Wagner once remarked that he had every sympathy for Alberich’s turn against the Rhinemaidens. Hedonists reject and scorn the dwarf because he is ugly. Yet the relationship between the social and the æsthetic – and this is just one relationship amongst many in this complex world – also needs to be considered. (Rhine)gold is here crucial: as itself; as the oil that powers so much of what we see, petrol pumps in the forecourt; as the shiny stuff of hegemonic trash culture (think Donald Trump, on whom, more soon); as the agent of the motel’s ‘rainbow’ rebranding in the fourth act; even, perhaps, as something hallucinogenic, narcotic, when Donner’s mysterious ‘clearing’ of the air leaves the pleasure-seekers in the bar – something now, as the rainbow flag and tight-fitting costumes for all genders and orientations – in a state of trance-like animation. But the complexity of the web of power relations, not only between characters, but between forms of power, is really the thing.

Returning – or perhaps better, again trying to return – to the beginning, then, the hedonism of swimming pool, beach ball, sun loungers, of a supposed ‘golden age’ is lain bare, again both in work and production. It is a construction; it always was; it creates more gold for some, takes away that gold from others. Wagner makes it perfectly clear that the world into which Alberich intrudes is no idyll, no ‘natural’ state of affairs; so does Castorf. The Rhinemaidens, just like the gods and goddesses who come after them – in the hierarchy, do they come before or after? Intriguingly, it is the Rhinemaidens who take occupation of the gods’ room once they have vacated it to deal with the giants. Will they relive what has gone on between those crumpled sheets, or will they – hollow laugh! – put things right? There are, of course, many more options than that. It is, rightly, unclear, or at least complicated – are already social beings. They are clad, and they behave, in ways that many would consider attractive, others would consider exploitative and/or exploited, others ‘whorish’, and so on. They have agency, yes, but only up to a point – like the rest of us. ‘Men make their own history,’ as Marx, writing at the same time as Wagner, and under many similar influences, tells us, ‘but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’ So too, of course, does the weight of those with greater power – and so too does the source of that power itself.

What might seem initially arbitrary, and did so (at least to me) more, although not entirely, two years ago, now speaks of complexity: when Wotan and Mime initially bring Alberich and Mime onto the scene in Nibelheim, we are asked to consider who is ensnaring whom, and, when we think we have an answer, that answer is immediately called into question. Welcome to (late) capitalism. Similarly, the Trump-like – how prescient! – depiction of Wotan, as we initially see him, a pleasure-seeking playboy who has, we might guess, inherited power, whilst claiming to have earned it, a vulgarian who yet exercises brute force, whilst allegedly (at least to Donner) renouncing it, two constructed ‘blondes’ – what a custom that is, to refer to women simply by hair-colour! – not only on his arm, but in his bed: that poses still more questions than it might ever answer.

The video work to which I referred adds another crucial dimension. Often we see in close-up what we would see on stage, were we closer. Sometimes we see what we could not otherwise see, that action taking place in a space not otherwise at the moment visible. Sometimes we suspect that what we are seeing is different; at certain points, we know that it is. And there are stills too; where did they come from? Did those events, those scenes ever happen at all? We learn a great deal – and truly acclaim the magnificent acting of the cast (and their detailed direction). We appreciate the complexity of the action. But we are also, like the characters in Hans Neuenfels’s Lohengrin, like the viewers of the ‘reality television’ that seems to be being made before our eyes, being directed. There are interests, powerful interests, at stake here. And just as Trump-Wotan does not make history as he pleases, however much he might insist otherwise, nor do we, as spectators-cum-participants. Patric Seibert’s Everyman offers us almost conventionally dramatic opportunity to empathise – but, as soon as we do, the situation is again rendered more complex. Post-dramatic theatre actually seems to encompass that which it has negated; but is the dialectic Hegelian or Adornian? Brecht, it seems, has more Aktualität, even in opera, than we might have given him credit for.

That detailed direction is really worth saying a little more about. (I am afraid there is much I shall have to miss out, for there is far too much to say.) Whether it is the Rhinemaidens taking occupation of and apparently driving the flashy car on stage, the heartrending – pretty much stage-direction-literal – covering of Freia with gold, the truly shocking, yet utterly to the point, penetration of Erda by Wotan in the shower cubicle as giants and gods settle their accounts, or, to take a very different example, the extraordinary acting by facial expression of Sarah Connolly’s Fricka (on camera): there is so much to see, to think about. It is more coherent than one might initially suspect, irrespective, I suspect, of intention; and when it is not, the incoherence now seems far more a matter of policy, of criticism, than it did last time (to me).

 

Few, if any, Rheingold productions have for me so convincingly, completely combined vocal and acting skills. In that, this is an utterly Wagnerian, or neo-Wagnerian essay. The Rheingold Wotan is always a tricky one, often rendered comprehensible, or more so, by what comes afterwards, yet needing nevertheless to make a strong impression of his own in the here and now. Iain Paterson would always have had a good many balls in the air; in this production, he had a good few more. They were kept in motion with great conviction; it will be very interesting to see how things turn out. Connolly’s Fricka, as previously mentioned, was a tour de force of vocal acting; her disquiet, yet her need at some point to reconcile herself with what was going on, whatever her distaste (her character’s distaste, that is) for the sub-Dallas antics around her, were powerful, provocative, partly on account of their lack of exaggeration.  Tansel Akzeyebek’s Froh was beautifully sung, equally well acted. Markus Eiche’s Donner came into his more conventional own with the storm; his portrayal of the crazed, clearly dangerous playboy earlier on, was – even if one were to dislike the directorial concept – equally impressive. Caroline Wenborne’s Freia elicited as much as sympathy as the post-Brechtian framework permitted; again, her marriage of singing and acting – on stage and on camera – was worthy of the highest praise. Roberto Saccà offered a sardonic Loge, careful with his words, yet free with them at the same time. Nadine Weissman’s deep-toned Erda – what an entrance, in that joyously vulgar white fur coat! – proved as much a vocal pleasure as her character’s greater role was a provocative dramatic development.

Albert Dohmen, as Alberich, grew in stature – quite rightly – as the performance progressed. The earth-shattering moment of his curse was strikingly well prepared: as much verbally as musically. Andreas Conrad did a great deal with the relatively few lines that Mime has: his evocation of old Nibelheim struck an excellent balance between genuine sentiment and alienated narration (reliable or otherwise). The giants’ journey, not the least striking part of the production, was marked as powerfully in vocal-dramatic terms by Karl-Heinz Lehner and Günther Groissböck as it was in their costume upgrade: local thugs to (relatively) expensive-suited Mafiosi. Both performances were sexually charged (which takes us back to that liebesgelüste starting-point), and highly differentiated, especially as time went on. One would certainly not have blamed Freia at all had she opted for Groissböck’s Fasolt, whether on grounds of physical allure or acuity of response to Wagner’s alchemic blend of words and music. Alexandra Steiner, Stephanie Houtzeel, and Wiebke Lehmkuhl offered both excellent blend and, where necessary, commendable differentiation of character as the Rhinemaidens; their acting skills were, again, outstanding.

In this, in some ways, perhaps the most radical of all Wagner’s scores, the orchestra has a very particular role, or roles. It offers exposition, commentary, wonder, dialectical development, emotional and conceptual depth: all that and much more. Marek Janowski’s conducting often seemed – at least by comparison with the multivalent drama elsewhere – to be a little too concerned to keep the score on a tight leash. It was fast-paced, which is fair enough, but there is more to be revealed when the work relaxes too. Some balances were also peculiar; the conductor appeared to have a bizarre fascination with the composer’s clarinet lines, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. It was fascinating to hear the work almost as if from a clarinettist’s standpoint, but again a little odd, and one-sided. Perhaps it was an acoustical quirk. Against those reservations, of which I do not wish to make too much, Janowski clearly knew what he wanted and how to achieve it. His neo-Mendelssohnian persuasion has a degree of historical warrant, and there was no denying the ability of the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra’s ability in that respect. In Wagner, however, at least for me, there is never one single answer; one looks forward as well as back. Certain intimations of Schoenberg (Pierrot, and not only on account of the clarinet!) were most welcome. More standpoints, reconciled by the slippery conception of the Wagnerian melos, might have been brought to our attention in certain other performances, but this had coherence of its own.

Ariadne auf Naxos, Royal Opera, 13 July 2014

Royal Opera House

Music Master – Sir Thomas Allen

Major-Domo - Christoph Guest

Lackey – Jihoon Kim

Officer – David Butt Philip

Composer – Ruxandra Donose

Tenor, Bacchus – Roberto Saccà

Wig-Maker – Ashley Riches

Zerbinetta – Jane Archibald

Prima Donna, Ariadne – Karita Mattila

Dancing Master – Ed Lyon

Naiad – Sofia Fomina

Dryad – Karen Cargill

Echo – Kiandra Howarth

Harlequin – Markus Werba

Truffaldino – Jeremy White

Scaramuccio – Wynne Evans

Brighella – Paul Schweinester

Christof Loy (director)

Herbert Murauer (designs)

Jennifer Lipton (lighting)

Beate Vollack (choreography)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Sir Antonio Pappano (conductor)

 

I hope I shall be forgiven for keeping this relatively brief. Having been distinctly under the weather this week, I have fallen a little behind, and in any case have written about Christof Loy’s production of Ariadne auf Naxos before. This time, hearteningly, I recaptured some of my earlier enthusiasm, having found the staging looking somewhat tired last time around. Perhaps it was a matter of the revival direction, or perhaps it was a matter of sitting closer to the stage (the back of the Stalls Circle, the restricted view seemingly not much of an issue). At any rate, the virtues that I had originally hymned – a very real sense of the audience and the audience member being told that this was a tale told about them, a nice balance between the present and a re-imagined and then re-imagined again eighteenth century – were married to a well-acted company performance.

 

For the most part the singing was very good too. Thomas Allen’s Music Master continues to inspire; this time, he found a fine foil in Ed Lyon’s Dancing Master, his German as impressive as the French of the repertory in which I have previously tended to hear him. Both can act too – and did. Ruxandra Donose’s Composer was beautifully sung – and a character in whom one could truly believe, whom one could take to one’s heart. I am not sure that I have heard so distinguished a trio of Naiad, Dryad, and Echo, as Sofia Fomina, Karen Cargill, and Kiandra Howarth, whether corporately or individually. Markus Werba offered a predictably excellent Harlequin, well supported by the rest of his troupe. Jane Archibald reached for the heights and attained them with her lovely Zerbinetta: an object-lesson in the role. Disappointments? Roberto Saccà’s dry-toned Bacchus, fare more so than I had heard in Salzburg in 2012. And, I am afraid that, try as I might, I could not find Karita Mattila ‘right’ for the role of Ariadne. She is a wonderfully engaging artist, and there was much to enjoy, but I missed the floating of line that seems essential to the part, likewise the neo-Mozartian grace. Others have clearly felt differently, and I have tried not to be hidebound by recollections of great historic assumptions; ultimately, however, and with considerable regret, I thought Mattila miscast.

 

The other disappointment, perhaps more predictably, was Antonio Pappano’s conducting. Quite why he insists on inflicting himself upon a German repertoire for which he clearly has little sensitivity, let alone understanding, remains a mystery. Granted, this was not nearly so bad as his Wagner, and there was considerable life to the Prologue. However, the Opera soon became listless, with little sense of harmonic or indeed any other direction. The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House played very well, but how one longed for the wisdom, refinement, wit, and humanity the late Colin Davis brought to this work in this production.

 

Salzburg Festival (10) – Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 27 August 2013

Grosses Festspielhaus

Hans Sachs – Michael Volle

Walther von Stolzing – Roberto Saccà
Eva – Anna Gabler
David – Peter Sonn
Veit Pogner – Georg Zeppenfeld
Magdalena – Monika Bohinec
Sixtus Beckmesser – Markus Werba
Kunz Vogelgesang – Thomas Ebenstein
Konrad Nachtigall – Guido Jentjens
Fritz Kothner – Oliver Zwarg
Balthasar Zorn – Benedikt Kobel
Ulrich Eißlinger – Franz Supper
Augustin Moser – Thorsten Scharnke
Hermann Ortel – Karl Huml
Hans Schwartz – Dirk Aleschus
Hans Foltz – Roman Astakhov
Night Watchman – Tobias Kehrer

Stefan Herheim (director)

Heike Scheele (designs)
Gesine Völlm (costumes)
Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach (dramaturgy)
Olaf Freese (lighting)
Martin Kern (video)

Academy Mastersingers of the Young Singers Project

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

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Daniele Gatti (conductor)

 



Images: © Salzburger Festspiele / Forster

Salzburg’s new Meistersinger proves beyond a shadow of doubt, in the unlikely event that such proof were needed, that Stefan Herheim is the most intelligent, most thoughtful, most theatrical, and – most important of all – most musical stage director of Wagner and perhaps of opera tout court today. There is nothing worse, even the arbitrary setting of an opera in ‘an empty swimming pool or a slaughterhouse’ (see wagneropera.net’s revealing interview with Peter Konwitschny, perhaps Herheim’s only, though less consistent, competitor), than a mindless ‘traditional’ staging. As Speight Jenkins,  general director of Seattle Opera, argued in a career retrospective I heard him give in Seattle earlier in August, ‘traditional Wagner’ is a matter of a ‘rock and tree’, and let the singers get on with it; Jenkins recoiled from, indeed quite rightly attacked, the idea that Seattle’s ‘green’ Ring has anything to do with that. There is nothing Wagnerian – it is little exaggeration to think of Wagner as our first operatic stage director – about the bad old days of ‘park and bark’. Moreover, there can be few more gross insults to Wagner, theoretician of the ‘emotionalisation of the intellect’ (Gefühlswerdung des Verstandes), than to insist instead upon intellectual abdication; should you seek brazen ‘infidelity’ to the ‘Master’, look no further than the world-view, such as it is, of Nietzsche’s ‘Wagnerians’. (Concert performances are of course a different matter entirely; I face here the difficult truth that the two greatest Ring performances I have experienced have both been of that ilk, or rather semi-staged: those by Bernard Haitink and Daniel Barenboim at, of all places, the Royal Albert Hall. But then, I and the world at large are still waiting for Herheim’s Ring.)

Hans Sachs (Michael Volle)

There are countless ways to approach even a brief outline of Herheim’s staging – and even when one has seen it but once. (Doubtless, as with his Parsifal, subsequent viewings will reap further, dialectical rewards.) We might usefully start with the conception of Meistersinger as Hans Sachs’s dream, but fascinating though that idea and its implications may be, equally important, and indeed unavoidable in any discussion, is Herheim’s interrogation of dreams and indeed of his own Konzept. In that, of course, he both mirrors and interrogates Wagner’s own conceptions of dreams within the work. One is always aware of the latter, yet it is striking how heightened the role of dreams in poem and music becomes when an intelligent, sympathetic director heightens intellect and feeling, bids them become one. In the first act Prelude we see Sachs in his nineteenth-century workshop, dreaming, like Wagner, of a Nuremberg, which, like the ‘traditional’ productions of ‘traditionalists’, never was; we proceed to see – and to hear – how he creates, not recollects, before him and us a Nuremberg of his own time. Similarly, Wagner declines in the score to employ even the most cursory reference to Renaissance music; his guiding spirit here is Johann Sebastian Bach, or rather his own creation of Bach, the ‘history of the interior life of the German spirit,’ according to the contemporary essay What is German?  Invention of tradition is seen elsewhere, just as we hear it throughout the score. The Masters’ Nuremberg, now seen at a time of renewed crisis for the guilds and other corporate institutions, is shiny, new, a little insistent, a little desperate. I could not help but think of the Tand both of Sachs’s peroration and of Loge’s description of the Rhinegold. All that glistens, be it in the Rhine or at a guild meeting, is not necessarily gold; indeed Sachs, rightly or otherwise, will condemn it as the very thing the Masters insist it is not; ‘wälschem Tand’, foreign vanity.

 

The ‘real’ world – but is it ‘real’ at all, when we, like Wagner and perhaps like Sachs, read from Schopenhauer? – both disappears and yet remains, projected onto the curtain a night-capped Sachs opens and closes, with increasing difficulty, at the beginnings and ends of the first two acts. Yet the dream world, initiated erotically by Sachs’s sexual approach to Eva in the church, is made up of what he knows, and of what his – and Wagner’s – culture knows. His writing bureau, magnified, becomes the organ, as indeed the furniture generally provides a Nutcracker-like magnification and intensification for the Wahn of the second-act riot; a painting becomes Eva. Most challenging of all, Beckmesser finally becomes Sachs’s alter ego, emerging for a curtain call in matching night dress: a move equally alert to the comedy and to the darkness at the heart of a work whose profundity lies in precisely the matters faux ‘traditionalists’ from the Nazis, and indeed still further back, would ignore and preferably bury. Or is it the other way around? Does the organ, resplendent as a nineteenth-century, Gewandhaus-like invention of tradition, become Sachs’s bureau, and thus nourish via tradition, in a proper sense, his creations, whether artistic or social (manipulation of Wahn more generally)? It is not either-or, of course; Wagner and Herheim are both dialecticians, and so must we, as a responsive, responsible audience, be too. A bust of Wagner makes its ambiguous, multivalent point without exaggeration.

 

Perhaps most telling on a structural level is the way in which Herheim’s staging traces, or rather instigates, Sachs-like manipulation of Wahn – and doubtless Wahn’s manipulation of Sachs. Just as Walther, his song, and Nuremberg’s public are guided, so too are Sachs’s dream and Sachs’s reality. Yes, there are proto-fascist undertones there for those who wish to find them, as suggested by the chilling lighting of a semi-crazed Sachs during his final peroration, yet they may always readily be understood in a multitude of other or at least additional ways; a signal strength of Herheim, as Wagner, is that he asks questions that are too great to be banally ‘resolved’. When, then, the third act begins, the drama continues, but Sachs is in ‘real’, that is night, dress. Has he made the terrible realisation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy? Has he lifted, as does Wotan, through Brünnhilde, the veil of Maya, the principium individuationis, seeing and feeling in the carnage of the world, whether on the banks of the Pegnitz or of the Rhine, not only ‘suffering humanity’, but also a ‘world that passes away’? One can hardly fail to think of Tristan, too, when it comes to such clever game-playing between night and day. And yet, Meistersinger is not, of course, Tristan, not least since Sachs would not become King Marke. That truth is borne out not only in the third act, but even during the Prügelfuge at the close of Act II. The glow worm who could not find its mate, to whom Sachs will refer in the following act, is seen in the mêlée desperately – and graphically – trying to find a replacement. This is no world of idealised Romantic or even sexual love; it is clear-eyed, brutal as the Will itself. And so, the creation of the third act, Wagner’s and Sachs’s, both breaks with and incorporates what has gone before, like the Prize Song itself.

 

What else? The world of fairy tales enters explosively, erotically, frighteningly, during the second-act riot. They also reappear in the following ‘reality’, Red Riding Hood chased in Sachs’s workshop. The Brothers Grimm live in Wagner’s, Herheim’s, and our, imagination; so does Freud, even before the letter. A steam locomotive, recalling Germany’s very first railway line, between Nuremberg and Fürth, brings the girls from the latter, yet they are not quite what they might have been; instead, they are nightmarish dolls. Who is dreaming now, and of what? We also recall Adorno’s critical observations on technology and the instrumentalisation of reason, both in the stagecraft and the very idea of such a production itself; in Schiller’s well-worn yet indispensable typology, this is no ‘naïve’ art, but ‘sentimental’ art with a vengeance. One makes connections, and they will probably be different for each audience member, probably different for each viewing by the same audience member. That is successful theatre direction. For Herheim never forgets that this is theatre; every observation is keen, every member of the chorus is his or her own person; yet by the same token, he never presents effect without cause (Wirkung ohne Ursache: choose from Wagner on Meyerbeer, or Nietzsche on Wagner, according to taste, or indeed reject the terms of the choice itself).

 

If I have written at greater length on the staging than I shall on the musical performances, that is not because I think the latter realm of intrinsically lesser importance; quite the contrary. It is partly because I wished to suggest Herheim’s production formed part of the musical performance, but also partly because, all in all, it was the exemplary experience of this particular night. Daniele Gatti’s conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic surprised me somewhat, especially during the first act, which sounded – and, in terms of the number of strings, I suspect was – somewhat small-scale. Yet as the work progressed, one realised that Gatti’s conception was dynamic in a very real dramatic sense, complementary to that of Herheim, but not identical – representing, furthering the relationship between Wagner’s poem and music. The score bloomed, darkened, expanded as the drama itself; the orchestral performance could be understood to have instantiated a similar dialectical strategy to that of Sachs’s dream. It is certainly not the only way to perform Die Meistersinger, but the scattered boos Gatti – uniquely and undeservedly – suffered seemed more likely to have emanated from those who thought the work ‘must’ sound like a particular recording or misremembered performance from a ‘golden’ age that never was than from thoroughgoing critique. The VPO was not exactly on vintage form, however, sometimes offering a thinness of string tone that went beyond Gatti’s initial chamber imperative. ‘Tradition’ in that case had something in common with Mahler’s Schlamperei.

 

Michael Volle’s Sachs was the undoubted star on the stage. In full command and sympathy with music, words, and production, he inhabited the role, made it his own, and offered more rounded a portrayal than I have ever previously seen on the stage. The Wahn monologue was all the more moving for emerging from what had already passed; this was no mere set piece. Markus Werba offered a finely-honed Beckmesser, navigating with apparent ease – though, like the mediated Prize Song, that ease can only have been apparent – the tricky balancing act between malevolence and Malvolio, learning and charlatanry. Werba did not make the common mistake of unduly dignifying Beckmesser; nor, however, was his creation in any way a caricature. Roberto Saccà experienced certain moments of strain; yet, by any reasonable standards this side of Sándor Konyá, his was an estimable assumption, welding words, text, and stage action in a properly Wagnerian unity. Anna Gabler, as his intended, was at times a little bland of tone, but acted well. She was outshone, however, by Monika Bohinec’s Magdalena, who, in Herheim’s hands, offered a far more interesting second-act Magdalena-as-Eva than I have seen, a true dramatic engagement with and reaction to Beckmesser’s serenade without singing a single world. Not that she could not sing too. Peter Sonn’s David was bright and bushy-tailed, without offering anything especially distinctive, but there was experience aplenty in Georg Zeppenfeld’s Pogner and Oliver Zwarg’s Kothner. The other Masters were a characterful bunch, and not only on account of Herheim’s alert Personenregie, and the choral singing was pretty much beyond reproach.

 

This was undoubtedly the best Meistersinger I have seen. The Paris co-production and rumours of a trip to the Metropolitan Opera will offer opportunities that should be grabbed with open arms; if only Covent Garden would join the party...