The Makropulos Case, Royal Opera and Ballet, 10 November 2025

Royal Opera House

Emilia Marty – Ausrine Stundyte
Krista – Heather Engebretson
Albert Gregor – Sean Panikkar
Baron Jaroslav Prus – Johan Reuter
Dr Kolenatý – Henry Waddington
Vítek – Peter Hoare
Count Hauk-Šendorf – Alan Oke
Janek – Daniel Matoušek
Stage Door Woman – Susan Bickley
Security Guard – Jeremy White
Hotel Maid – Jingwen Cai

Katie Mitchell (director)
Vicki Mortimer (set designs)
Sussie Juhlin-Wallén (costumes)
James Farncombe (lighting)
Sasha Balmazi-Owen (video)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Jakub Hrůsá (conductor)

 

Image: The Royal Opera / Camilla Greenwell

If the Royal Opera and Ballet’s new Makropulos Case does indeed prove to be Katie Mitchell’s final opera production, we should think of it more as a culmination than a farewell. If the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk, the outlines of Mitchell’s operatic work – part, to be sure, of her broader theatrical work, but a distinctive part – may now seem clearer to us all. Rightly or wrongly, for I can lay no claim to oracular status on this or any other question, they certainly do to me following this superlative evening, dramatically and musically, in the theatre, a splendid addition to the company’s Janáček series? May we hope for a Mr Brouček, even a Šárka or an Osud? Hope dies last, as the ambiguous, even oracular, saying has it. 

And death lies at the heart of this work, as does life—as does their cyclical relationship both in Janáček’s work as a whole and this production, in turn both in its overt presentation and in its broader, metatheatrical, even symbolic frame. One might say the same of women, their role in society, and their role in opera, Mr Brouček’s Excursions the great exception, for even From the House of the Dead has one feel their absence. The Makropulos Case is centred, of course, around a great female singer, a great survivor, a woman seemingly infinitely blessed, but in reality, if not infinitely, then gravely cursed. She is literally the creation of men, in some ways figuratively too. I say ‘a woman’ and of course she is, but as such and as a human, she deserves to be named: Emilia Marty, Elena Makropulos, and the rest. (We may, if we wish, recall Kundry’s many names and incarnations. Wagner was not a feminist; to claim so would be anachronistic nonsense. But his works are not without feminist themes and, more to the point, opportunities—as well as themes and opportunities that are anything but. The same, of course, may be said of Janáček.) Mitchell takes a further step: this woman is queer, standing in no need of men, whatever the history with which she has been furnished (by them) may claim. She has fond memories; she has produced numerous ‘bastards’ with them, but now does not care for them (men or children). 

Now forty-plus = or so she claims and appears – EM seeks women on ‘dating’ apps. With a technological bent very much of our time, the opera begins, app and text message communications, courtesy of Sasha Balmazi-Owen, running parallel to, interacting with, and sometimes undercutting the work ‘itself’. Krista and Janek intend to rob her, the former (‘they/them’) ensnaring her prey 200 metres distant and securing an invitation to her hotel room. The proceeds, whose net worth Janek instantly checks online as Krista photographs them, include an eighteenth-century medallion and a rare, early twentieth-century playbill. Yet ultimately, Krista falls for EM, mesmerised as her male admirers, yet apparently feeling and sharing something deeper. Rather than absconding to Berlin with her (former) lover, she shoots him: shades of Lulu, perhaps, yet with the crucial distance that this is no blank canvas onto which male fantasies are projected. This is women in love, by women, for women.

Surtitles are contemporary English in tone, without becoming paraphrase. Additional communications fly across the ether: ‘Berlin or bust’, popular abbreviations, emojis, and so on. Like anything else, use of text messages – also here telephone calls, audio and video – can be a cliché, a gimmick, and too often is. Here, unlike in, say, Simon Stone’s tedious, extravagant, and tediously extravagant Cherubini Médée – if ever there were an opera crying out for the Mitchell touch… - or Kirill Serebrennikov’s silly Marriage of Figaro, it serves a useful dramatic purpose, both straightforwardly and more metatheatrically in its extension of live cinema to new realms in successful pursuit of Mitchell’s longstanding and, in this case, unapologetically queer subversion of the male gaze both generally and in specifically operatic guise. For when the diva comes at long last to die, she is not so much a creature of opera, but opera itself. Has the director killed the genre or let it die? More significantly, has it in its death, which may yet permit of rebirth though not artificial prolongation, at last been liberated of the male gaze. On an optimistic reading: yes, at least in part. The elixir is bequeathed to Krista as a gift of what appears to be love, but does it remain a poisoned chalice; can it be cleansed?

Janácek’s score naturally invites some degree of optimism, its increasingly rapt lyricism, orchestral motifs coalescing, combining, and expanding into something greater, brought home in wondrous, golden immediacy by Jakub Hrůsá at the helm of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. That Hrůsá is the real thing no one who has heard him will doubt, but this proved a significant achievement even by his standards, as intellectually as it was emotionally involving. The same must be said of Ausrine Stundyte’s all-encompassing assumption of the title role, rightly permitting of various readings whilst ever sure of its direction. No wonder the rest of her world lay in her thrall. All contributed something to the greater whole, showing what the world of opera can and should be. I shall note Sean Panikkar’s typically ardent, lyrical Albert Gregor, Peter Hoare’s sharply characterised Vitek, Heather Engebretson’s sparky Krista, and, in another tribute, conscious or otherwise, to the best of an opera company and its progress of time, Johan Reuter ‘moving up’ from, say, Orest and Birtwistle’s Theseus to Baron Prus, and Susan Bickley from numerous Covent Garden roles (and her ENO Dido with Mitchell) to the cameo of the Stage Door Woman. It was, though, a collaborative effort, as production, conductor, work, and any future for the genre demand.

From that ENO After Dido, Purcell’s jewel forming part of a greater theatre piece, through a Salzburg Al gran sole carico d’amore I imagine I might understand better now than I did in 2009, live cinema again offering a feminist corrective or at least enhancement to Luigi Nono’s project of telling European revolutionary experience from the standpoint of female revolutionaries,  the woman’s revenge of Written on Skin and queer love of Lessons in Love and Violence, the postdramatic feminism of The Blue Woman, and important reassessments such as her Aix Ariadne auf Naxos and Pelléas and Covent Garden Theodora, a path becomes traceable towards this Makropulos Case. Is it the end of the line? That should not really even be the question; it is certainly an important, musicotheatrically riveting contribution, one I am keen to see again, should I be able. 

Cathérine Clément notoriously described opera as the ‘undoing of women’. Perhaps, if one is extremely selective—and one treats it only in terms of libretti. Go back to Monteverdi’s Poppea or forward to Rebecca Saunders’s recent operatic debut and it seems anything but. Nevertheless, that book or at least its title remains, whether we like it or no, part of operatic discourse. Carolyn Abbate’s review said most, perhaps all, of what need be said about it. And here, as it must, that theory is realised in practice, without in any sense jettisoning necessary critique. Actually existing opera houses and their ways are, or can be, another thing. This is not in any sense intended to refer to the Royal Opera House in particular; indeed, its relatively recent, highly publicised appointment of an intimacy coordinator marked an important step forward in one respect. I know no details of the opera-world misogyny Mitchell has endured – her recent interview lies behind a Murdoch paywall – and I do not intend to speculate. What I can say is that operatic works, historical and contemporary, and performances offer greater scope for critique and, dare I say it, redemption than the day-to-day activities of any company will. This year’s greatest musical centenary, that of Pierre Boulez, reminds us of the necessary utopianism of his celebrated 1967 interview with Der Spiegel.

New German opera houses certainly look very modern—from the outside; on the inside, they have remained extremely old-fashioned. To a theatre in which mostly repertory pieces are performed one can only with the greatest difficulty bring a modern opera—it is unthinkable. The most expensive solution would be to blow the opera houses into the air. But do you not think that that might also be the most elegant solution? 

In turn, that echoes a Wagner’s diary entry from 1849.

8 May (Monday) Morning once again by roundabout route via barricades to Town Hall. At S. Anne Barricade guard shouts “Well, Mr Conductor, joy’s beautiful divine spark’s made a blaze.” (3rd perf. 9th Symphony at previous Palm Sunday concert; Opera House now burnt down. Strange feeling of comfort.

 

This latest death  will not destroy our opera houses and companies, nor even leave them peacefully to die, but should at least ask us whether that would be advisable. Is this, rather than opera as the undoing of women, then, women as the undoing and possible rebirth of opera? It might, considered in utopian fashion, constitute an act of operatic reform or revolution to be compared with the work composers such as Wagner, conductors such as Boulez, directors such as Stefan Herheim, and singers such as Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, noting ruefully and purposefully the gender balance of historical examples, whilst recalling Boulez’s own caution that, although Wagner’s Bayreuth project was in almost every respect right and necessary, it has not had the slightest effect on the day-to-day life of our benighted operatic culture. And yet, it has, for our revolutionary-reformers continue to offer a critique of patriarchy, of heteronormativity, and of capitalism many of us continue to heed. To do more than criticise, we must all play our part. The Royal Opera and Ballet has done so too, staging Janáček’s opera (incredibly) for the first time and supporting a new way forward. The Royal Opera and Ballet has done so too, staging Janáček’s opera (incredibly) for the first time and supporting, among many other things in its necessarily mixed economy, some seeds of a new way forward. 

Die Walküre, Royal Opera, 17 May 2025

Royal Opera House

Siegmund – Stanislas de Barbeyrac
Sieglinde – Natalya Romaniw
Hunding – Soloman Howard
Wotan – Christopher Maltman
Brünnhilde – Elisabeth Strid
Fricka – Marina Prudenskaya
Gerhilde – Lee Bisset
Helmwige – Mauda Hundeling
Waltraute – Claire Barnett-Jones
Schwetleite – Rhonda Browne
Ortlinde – Katie Lowe
Siegrune – Catherine Carby
Grimgerde – Monika-Evelin Liiv
Rossweisse – Alison Kettlewell
Erda – Clare Almond
Actors – Illona Linthwaite, Lucy Brenchley, Clea Godsill, Maria Leon, Virginia Poli, Nadia Sadiq, Jay Yule

Director – Barrie Kosky
Set designs – Rufus Didwiszus
Costumes – Victoria Behr
Lighting – Alessandro Carletti

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Antonio Pappano (conductor)

The Royal Opera’s new Walküre proved very good in every respect, often excellent, offering some degree of solace for having come close to taking out a bank loan to buy a ticket. Our ultra-neoliberal, genocidal government will no more fund the arts than its kindred, ever-so-slightly-less genocidal, ever-so-slightly-more-separatist predecessor. As the last remnants of humanity crash down livestreamed before us, an historic half a million-plus citizens protesting but a stone’s throw away to stop the genocide in Gaza, Wagner’s message could hardly be more urgent. Will anyone listen? Doubtless. Will any of the people who need to listen do so? Almost certainly not, as signalled by the unpleasant experience of passing a key architect of Brexit Britain’s malaise, Michael Gove, on the stairs. What do these people think the Ring is about? It is a question as old as the work itself, but then the same question could be asked – doubtless was – in the theatres of Athens. A politically committed artist such as Wagner could not have been less concerned with l’art pour l’art: that was at best the world of actually existing opera houses and their ‘absolute music’. Such is never all we have, though sometimes it may feel like it. As once again, Wagner and his performers sought to ‘make clear to the men of the revolution the meaning of that [non-]revolution,’ it was possible, whatever the catastrophes outside and perhaps even on account of them, once again to be moved and challenged by Wagner’s drama in the theatre. 

I missed Das Rheingold, though if the final Götterdämmerung has not by then subsumed us all, I hope to catch up when the whole Ring is staged. Barrie Kosky’s outward-looking Kammperspiel of a Walküre seemed nevertheless to stand perfectly well on its own merits. Hallmarks not only of Kosky’s direction, indeed not only of the cast onstage, but also of Antonio Pappano’s direction of a splendidly responsive Orchestra of the Royal Opera House were listening and collaboration: qualities in shorter supply than ever as fascism deepens its grip with every day—over Starmer’s ‘island of strangers’. Trump’s politics-as-gameshow, and almost anywhere else one can think of in the benighted ‘West’ (and not only there). 

I have not been a fan of Pappano’s Wagner in the past; here, both his conducting and that orchestral response sounded transformed. (In retrospect, there may have been something of an augury in the unusually Wagnerian Turandot I heard him conduct in 2023, but the Ring is a challenge of quite another order.) Now it seemed to spring directly from the words – perhaps a little too much, rather than asserting itself as an equal partner – but, if one wanted an Opera and Drama Wagner, at least according to many readings, here it was. There was none of the orchestral scrappiness, none of the merely following (‘supporting’) singers that had bedevilled earlier Ring performances I had heard. (I skipped the last outing of Keith Warner’s Ring, or rather could not afford to go.) No Wagner performance, not even Barenboim’s or Furtwängler’s, will cover every base; this is music, as it is drama, that encompasses and suggests more than any one performance can. On its own terms, it convinced, and there was no doubting the strong relationship built with the production.   

Kosky’s production is in many ways straightforward, its overriding concept of the despoliation of Nature (chapter four of my book on the Ring) clear and fatally apparent. A tree and all that has been felled from it, presumably beginning with Wotan’s spear (in the work’s prehistory as recounted to us by the Norns in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung), offer the roots and present of the tragic calamity that has befallen this world. Designs, especially set and lighting, contribute powerfully, a black-grey-white colour scheme occasionally bloodied in red, for instance that on Siegmund as Wotan chillingly watches him expire. Perhaps at some level he cares; perhaps not. Ambiguity renders it all the more chilling. There is perhaps a touch of the actor-politician Zelensky to him: a fascinating figure, with whom the Nietzsche of The Case of Wagner would have had a field day. Continuation and re-emergence of that red, flowing from the tree and seeping into the scene with the Valkyries and their carts of heroes (also tree-like, Nature’s wholeness still just about intact), made its point unmistakeably. So did Wotan’s brutal violence: no Rheingold ‘Nicht durch Gewalt’ here, should we take it seriously. Even Fricka’s glamourous arrival in a vintage car, which could readily have seemed an expensive distraction, took its place against this backdrop, connected to it in clear musicodramatic terms, as did Beckettian emergence of characters, Endgame-like, from holes in the savaged tree in the final scenes of the second act. For all the fuss about Erda, her appearance seemed in many ways of lesser importance, though the painterly provision of her spring fruits at the end of the first act was a nice touch. The tree doubled as Brünnhilde’s rock; in lesser hands, that might have confused, yet here seemed perfectly in order, aided by interventionist surtitling. 

Binding together musical performance and stage direction was of course the cast, which worked together very well indeed—almost as if this were a repertory spoken theatre with singing, in which company members worked together day in, day out. This made for moments of extraordinarily powerful emotional impact: Sieglinde’s ‘Lenz’ jubilation; Brünnhilde’s quandary following Wotan’s monologue, spotlit simply in front of the curtain; her embrace of Sieglinde following her decision to defy Wotan; and above all, Brünnhilde’s sobbing on her separation for the rock. Natalya Romaniw and Elisabeth Strid offered powerful portrayals of our two heroines, if we may call them that, founded, like the performance as a whole, in a word-driven approach that proposed rather than detracted from musical possibilities. Stanislas de Barbeyrac’s subtle Siegmund grasped at vocal steel when required, a fine match for Soloman Howard’s Hunding-as-policeman, as rounded a portrayal as any I can recall, perhaps more so, with unforgettable physical presence. Christopher Maltman’s Wotan occasionally lacked heft, but more than often than not impressed, in another highly text-driven performance. Marina Prudenskaya seems always to offer a class act, and certainly did here as a proud Fricka, marshalling instrumental reason just as her consort has always done. Individual direction (and performance) of the other Valkyries was put to excellent dramatic ends, one daring to tarry, so as to confront Wotan with the heinousness of his deeds, only to be brutally dismissed. 

I look forward to Siegfried. 

Le nozze di Figaro, Royal Opera, 8 July 2023

Royal Opera House

Figaro – Mattia Olivieri
Susanna – Siobhan Stagg
Bartolo – Maurizio Muraro
Marcellina – Dorothea Röschmann
Cherubino – Anna Stéphany
Count Almaviva – Stéphane Degout
Don Basilio – Krystian Adam
Countess Almaviva – Hrachuhí Bassénz
Antonio – Jeremy White
Don Curzio – Peter Bronder
Barbarina – Sarah Dufresne
Two Bridesmaids – Helen Withers, Miranda Westcott

David McVicar (director)
Tanya McCallin (designs)
Paule Constable (lighting)
Leah Hausman (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Joana Mallwitz (conductor)

Images: Clive Barda
Cherubino (Anna Stéphany), Figaro (Mattia Olivieri), Susanna (Siobhan Stagg)

‘Figaro is the opera that a critic sees most often, and it is right that it should be.’ An opera critic I greatly admire wrote those words concerning a relatively early outing for this production in 2008. Michael Tanner proceeded to commend Charles Mackerras’s conducting of that revival of David McVicar’s staging, first seen in the Mozart Year of 2006, comparing it favourably even to that of his fellow knight of the realm, (Sir) Colin Davis. He even found that what had previously irritated him in McVicar’s staging, bar the intrusive ‘action’ that drowned out the Overture, did no longer, seemingly preferring Leah Hausman’s revival direction to the original. Seeing and hearing the same thing, I was notably cooler, in some ways downright hostile, though we certainly agreed on the distinction of the cast. I am not sure I should have expected still to be seeing the same production fifteen years later, but here we are. And though I am not certain, I think I may have seen Figaro more often than any other opera. Surely only Don Giovanni or perhaps The Magic Flute would rival its frequency, though I am well aware how often Covent Garden presents La traviata for those less impervious to its charms than I.

Marcellina (Dorothea Röschmann

I cannot claim to like McVicar’s staging any more than I did, and with the best will in the world, it looks tired and – partly a function of its mysterious updating to the nineteenth century – heavy, for all its playing-to-the-gallery silliness and strangely inconsequential Upstairs, Downstairs busyness from an additional troupe of actors. There could doubtless be a host of reasons to shift the action to what seems from the costumes to be at least the 1830s, but none comes through here, other than a liking for its fashions. That a class-based society, as that increasingly was, needs to be distinguished from one still largely founded on social orders seems not to have occurred to the director. If we want 1780s-themed anachronism, we can turn to Der Rosenkavalier. There seems, though, to be no message here, no justification for its move from where it ‘should’ be. A large part audience, though, seems enamoured of both the designs and the additional activity; there is little accounting for taste, it seems, let alone for judgement. 

That Mozart’s music is phenomenally difficult to conduct, or more generally to perform, ought to go without saying, though it seems to bear repeating. I never cared for Mackerras’s Mozart, though many did, and I admired him greatly in a good deal of other repertoire. Having heard Sir Colin in this music spoils one forever, though it also offers the instructive that one does not need to ‘do’ much. (See also Bernard Haitink.) There was doubtless a great amount of accumulated wisdom behind that ability to do little, as there was on the numerous occasions I saw Daniel Barenboim cease conducting his orchestras altogether, trusting in them and they in him. Joana Mallwitz did not get in the way and set largely sensible tempi: that already distinguishes her from far too many conductors, some of them ‘period’-inclined, some not. There was little of the former to her performance, at least overtly; her performance had, in the best sense, something of the Kapellmeisterin to it. That is to say, it was not about her; she was supportive, reasonable, and largely drew good playing from the orchestra. If there were a few disjunctures between pit and stage, that often happens, especially on an opening night, and she dealt with them with minimum fuss. Why the fortepiano rather than the harpsichord – it is certainly not historically 'correct' – I do not know, but the affectation is now commonplace.

I cannot get used to the ‘Moberly-Raeburn’ reordering of the third act, which places the sextet before ‘Dove sono’, nor do I find arguments for it remotely convincing, but I think it has generally been adopted in this production; it was unlikely, at any rate, to have been solely Mallwitz’s idea. (If I remember correctly, Davis and Mackerras used it too.) Likewise the ‘traditional’ excision of two arias in the fourth act, said to ‘hold up the action’, but in reality (and good performance) doing nothing of the kind.

The production has had its fair share, perhaps more than that, of excellent casts. Those who have attended a few times over the years will have our favourites. Comparison would be odious and, more to the point, unrevealing. It speaks well of the Royal Opera that it granted role debuts to two fine singers as Figaro and Susanna: Mattia Olivieri and Siobhan Stagg. I am reluctant to speak of the advantages of having ‘native’ Italian speakers in the cast; the last thing this international art form needs is any form of nativism. But Olivieri’s ‘natural’, readily communicative way with the language seemed to act as an energising presence to all around him, as well as to enable him to present a myriad of different ways of singing: from parlando to ardent lyricism. He has a splendid stage presence too, balancing the necessarily cocksure with hints, and sometimes more than that, of something more wounded and vulnerable. That he looks good in livery certainly does no harm either. Stagg sounded just ‘right’ in her role, at least for me. ‘Soubrette’ can sound dismissive; I certainly do not intend it that way, when I say that it formed the basis of her approach, tonally and otherwise, permitting growth in stature as she revealed more of the character to her. It is, we should always remind ourselves, a lengthy and difficult role; Stagg navigated its challenge with winning ease. 

Susanna

Stéphane Degout is more of a known quantity on London stages. He offered a duly commanding Count Almaviva, complemented and put properly to shame by Hrachuhí Bassénz’s Countess, whose ‘Dove sono’, audience disturbance notwithstanding, brought tears to the eyes. So did their final moment, beseeching and granting forgiveness. Anna Stéphany’s was a classic Cherubino: very much what would one expect, and certainly none the worse for that. It does not seem so long ago that I saw Dorothea Röschmann on this stage as Pamina for McVicar (and Davis). Now she is Marcellina, and what a wonderful job she made of it, a more fully drawn portrait than I can recall: a woman in her prime, no mere has-been, with feelings of her own that demand to be heard. Krystian Adam’s sharply observed Don Basilio marked him out as one to watch, as did Sarah Dufresne’s Barbarina. 

Figaro

Opera is, of course, theatre, and that, for better or worse, entails theatre audiences. Sadly, last night’s offered behaviour that seriously detracted from the ability to appreciate, even to hear, what was going on. The uproarious laughter – do they really find these things quite so funny? – was one thing, at least until the unforgivable (ironically) disturbance following ‘Contessa perdono’. Anyone listening to Mozart, or indeed simply to Degout’s Count, would have known there is nothing remotely amusing to this infinitely touching moment. But if one could, by and large, deal with that, what of applause within numbers, ‘Dove sono’ included, widespread use of mobile telephones, and the stench of goodness knows what foodstuff somewhere in the Balcony? There is no real ‘etiquette’ to this, merely an imperative to show consideration for others; or at least there should be. A great pity.

And with that, with the opera I may have seen more often than any other, it is time to say au revoir to London stages and halls. I shall be spending the next academic year on research leave in Berlin and hope to be writing regularly of the musical riches on offer there. There is nothing about poor audience behaviour that is exclusive to London or the United Kingdom; I have experienced as bad in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, and elsewhere. But without, I hope, being unduly pious, perhaps we might all try a little harder to refrain from impinging upon the appreciation of others in the audience. Anyone can fall victim to a fit of coughing, but (almost) no one need chatter, look at telephones, and the rest. Theatres and concert halls are places of precious experience not to be readily be recreated elsewhere. Without undue gatekeeping, let us try to keep them that way. They and we, in all our fallen humanity, are worth it.

Rusalka, Royal Opera, 27 February 2023

Royal Opera House

Rusalka – Asmik Grigorian
Prince – David Butt Philip
Vodník – Rafał Siwek
Ježibaba – Sarah Connolly
Duchess – Emma Bell
Kuchtík – Hongni Wu
Hajný – Ross Ramgobin
Wood Spirits – Vuvu Mpofu, Gabrielė Kupšytė, Anne Marie Stanley
Lovec – Josef Jeongmeen Ahn

Ann Yee and Natalie Abrahami (directors)
Chloe Lamford (set designs)
Annemarie Woods (costumes)
Paule Constable (lighting)
Ann Yee (choreography)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Semyon Bychkov (conductor)

Images: Camilla Greenwell

A strange evening: I very much enjoyed this new Rusalka, though found myself slightly haunted by the suspicion I did so more than I should have done. Musically magnificent yet theatrically inert: opera should intrinsically be more than that, yet I suppose we should be grateful that it can still partly satisfy, even when one crucial component misfires. 

The production is oddly listed as having been ‘created by Natalie Abrahami and Ann Yee’ but with ‘Ann Yee and Natalie Abrahami’ as directors. Equitable, perhaps, but does such re-listing really merit a line in the programme? (Does it really merit three lines in a review, one might also ask, I suppose.) I mention it only as a minor instance of something more irritating. Equity, sustainability, so much else: these are of course causes toward which we should all be working, a great deal faster and harder than we are now. They do not, however, in themselves make a production; they are certainly no substitute for one either. For here, whilst one could read an interesting programme note, promising much, by Jessica Duchen on ‘A Sustainable Rusalka for the Royal Opera House’, the results were actually neither sustainable – for that, ‘wed have to have started the control systems much earlier’ (Abrahami) – nor, contra what we read, saying anything much about sustainability or wider ecological issues. Instead, there was a strange boast, admittedly fulfilled, of having ‘worked with our creative team to create the illusion of water, using paint effects and lighting, and a set that can hold this without having to turn over actual water’. Fine, if hardly unprecedented. Is that not more often the case than not with water? How many productions will theatregoers already have seen that did just that?

Ultimately, the directors (or ‘creators’) feel the story is ‘not about nature’s conflict with humanity, but rather humanity’s need to connect and meld with nature’. It is a point of view: not one that makes a great deal of sense to me, either intrinsically or in the case of Rusalka, but worth a hearing or viewing. What, then, do we have? A sort of non-directed cartoon with words and music attached. Singers generally have to fend (creditably) for themselves. A mossy fairytale without irony or magic turns mildly trashy in the second act, presumably out of a desire to be ‘contemporary’. It looks as though a few items from Claire’s Accessories have been magnified on stage to frame the ‘party’. Inflatable toy animals are presumably intended to imply distance from Nature’s real animals, yet since no one seems to know what is going on, they just look silly. We return more or less to a slightly broken version of the setting for the first act. Alleged intentions go unrealised, as if our ‘creators’ have failed to appreciate that stating you will do, let alone explore, something is not the same as doing or exploring it. As a framework for the story, it works reasonably. Paule Constable’s lighting pretty much steals the visual show, saying so much more than Yee’s tedious, seemingly tone-deaf choreography.

And save, mercifully, for the musical performances: singers, orchestra, and conductor. My two other big house Rusalki over the past decade or so have been Paris in 2019, not so long before the end of the world, and Covent Garden’s first (!) staged performance in 2012. An excellent Komische Oper staging in Berlin was a slightly different animal, built as it was around a thriving company, as opposed to an ‘international’ cast; it offered by some way the most interesting, penetrating production (Barrie Kosky). Paris had Camilla Nylund, Klaus Florian Vogt, Karita Mattila, Thomas Johannes Mayer, and Michelle DeYoung, Covent Garden 2012 also had Camilla Nylund, working with Bryan Hymel, Petra Lang, Alan Held, and Agnes Zwierko. At this level, comparisons are often more a matter of taste than anything else, but I should unhesitatingly plump for David Butt Philip’s Prince from Covent Garden 2023 and consider its cast every inch the equal of its illustrious predecessors. 

One of my first thoughts was that surely we must be due a Lohengrin from Butt Philip soon; lo and behold, on later reading the programme biographies, one (Deutsche Oper Berlin) is forthcoming. Beautifully, unerringly musically phrased, his Prince conveyed a vulnerability and complexity of character considerably beyond either of the aforementioned performances. This was a considered character development, conveyed through words and music. Asmik Grigorian’s Rusalka likewise had it all: effortlessly scaling the vocal peaks, drawing in through hushed intimacy, and offering almost everything in between. Her stage presence likewise was second to none. Sarah Connolly’s Ježibaba and Emma Bell’s Duchess – I am not sure why the usual ‘Foreign Princess’ was not used here, but no matter – represented luxury casting. The former’s expressive range, controlled in technique yet with dramatic spontaneity (or the impression of such), could hardly have been bettered. The latter’s star quality shone through: both in itself and as something akin to metacommentary on the role. Rafał Siwek’s dark-toned Vodník was just the thing too, in voice and presence. Lively and warmly sympathetic performances from Hongni Wu (Kuchtík) and Ross Ramgobin (Hajný) were also highly worthy of note.

 Excellent conducting from Susanna Mälkki (Paris) and Yannick Nézet-Seguin (Covent Garden, 2012) notwithstanding, Semyon Bychkov was for me in a different league. His was world-class conducting, the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House sounding the equal of its very starriest peers. One might expect operatic symphonism from Bychkov, but the extent to which the entire work sounded as if heard in a single, variegated breath nonetheless astonished. A symphony in three movements emerged, its first two acts strongly contrasted. The first was doubtless ‘objectively’ on the slow side, but emerged as an exquisitely conceived, quasi-Wagnerian tapestry in absolute commanded of our musical attention. The second entered more Italianate waters, enlivened by a welcome dash or two of Tchaikovsky, and the third effected due synthesis, culminating in a climax that can surely have never sounded closer to the pantheistic ecstasy of Janáček. Not, of course, that this was not first and foremost Dvořák, but it was a generous, cultivated and culturally broad performance that denied national, let alone nationalistic, clichés. 

Mention should also go to the language coaches, Lada Valesova and Lucie Spickova. I do not speak or understand Czech, save for odd words and phrases I have picked up. But I could have had a stab at transcribing some of it here, such were the clarity of diction and, insofar as I could tell, evident meaning with which words in their alchemic union with music were treated. All in all, then, a splendid evening—yet despite, rather than on account of, the inconsequential production.

Tannhäuser, Royal Opera, 1 February 2023

Royal Opera House

Images: Clive Barda / ROH

 
Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia – Mika Kares
Tannhäuser – Stefan Vinke
Wolfram von Eschenbach – Gerald Finley
Walther von der Vogelweide – Egor Zhuravskii
Biterolf – Michael Kraus
Heinrich der Schreiber – Michael Gibson
Reinmar von Zweter – Jeremy White
Elisabeth – Lise Davidsen
Venus – Ekaterina Gubanova
Young Shepherd – Sarah Dufresne
Elisabeth’s Attendants – Kathy Bathko, Deborah Peake-Jones, Louise Armit, Amanda Baldwin
Dancers – Matthew Cotton, Camilla Curiel, Donny Ferris, Evelyn Hart, Liudmila Loglisci, Risa Maki, Sean Moss, Andrea Paniagua, George Perez, Thomas Kerek, Hobie Schouppe, Juliette Tellier

Tim Albery (director)
Jasmin Vardimon (choreography, Venusberg scene)
Michael Levine (set designs)
Jon Morrell (costumes)
David Finn (lighting)
Maxine Braham (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Sebastian Weigle (conductor)


‘R. slept well and has decided to have a massage only once a day,’ writes Cosima Wagner in one of her last diary entries, from Venice, only twenty days before Richard’s death (when Cosima’s world and thus her diary came to an end). The day took its course, via Cosima’s characteristic desire ‘not to thwart or overburden the cherished workings of his mind,’ a ride to the Piazzetta during which Wagner extols Bach’s fugues, luncheon, visitors, R. yet again reading Gobineau, to: ‘Chat in the evening, brought to an end by R. with the “Shepherd’s Song” and “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Tannhäuser. He says he still owes the world a Tannhäuser.’

With those celebrated words—and the tantalising prospect of hearing Wagner, even at that stage in his life, playing from his Grosse romantische Oper at the piano, perhaps singing along—the composer pointed not only to ongoing dissatisfaction with the form Tannhäuser, revisions notwithstanding, had yet reached. He also drew attention to the potential he believed his material, musical and dramatic, still had to reach a more satisfactory, perhaps more ‘finished’ state. Should one agree with Wagner—a sizable contingent has long preferred to shun changes made for Paris and Vienna, adhering to something close to what was originally given in Dresden—these twin, related issues will inevitably inform musical performance and staging alike. (Arguably, even if one returns to Dresden, less easy than some claim, one cannot forget what comes after, and that will continue to colour in one way or another the approach one takes. ‘Authenticity’ is always an illusion and usually a pernicious one.) Whether problem, opportunity, or both, it was difficult not to sense such questions hanging over what was seen and heard in the second revival of Tim Albery’s production for Covent Garden, now conducted by Sebastian Weigle.

 

It is certainly difficult to imagine a Tannhäuser in which the dichotomy between Venusberg and Wartburg does not loom large—some might say damagingly so, crushing the prospects for more plausible psychological motivation. (Some, equally might say this is Wagnerian myth, not Ibsen; psychological realism is hardly at issue here, at least not straightforwardly so.) Take the opening Venusberg scene, where the greatest difference between ‘Dresden’ and ‘Paris’—whatever qualifications we can and should add, still the fundamental distinction between versions—will always be seen and heard. It is rare, though not quite unheard of, in my experience not to regret the loss of the additional music written for Paris, should director and/or conductor opt for Dresden. In many ways, the Overture and Bacchanale were promising. Weigle’s way with the former, in particular, seemed to look (listen) back, a more Mendelssohnian Wagner than one often hears, with what at times sounded like—though surely were not—more chamber orchestral forces. What, surely, one then should hear is an invasion from the realm of Tristan; one—or I—never quite did. The stylistic incongruity of later material, such as it is, should be enabled to present immanent critique. Here, I am afraid, it simply seemed to go on for a bit too long: surely missing one of several points. It was, to a certain extent, made up for by the excellence of the dancers, strangely choreographed by Jasmin Vardimon, in a way that more often suggests school PE lessons than something more conventionally erotic. (Maybe that is the point, but it is probably better not to go there.) The dancing itself, though, deserves credit as first-rate; without that, it would have been a long trudge, and without the excuse of being a pilgrimage.

Albery’s production itself has its moment of greatest promise here—probably not coincidentally. The opera house, however many times we have seen this before, is fruitfully reflected onstage. Whether Tannhäuser has made it as artist and stands in need of a fresh, perhaps less sticky, challenge, or whether he was mad to leave is left to us, which is fair enough. But the conflation of Venusberg, Royal Opera House, and, in couplings with dancers, the Paris Jockey Club too has something to be said for it—if only its implications had been pursued. For, apart from when it necessarily returns close to the end, the idea of Tannhäuser as artist seems pretty much to be dropped. The proscenium arch lies as a ruin in the second act, but why we are in what seems to be a guerrilla war zone—Bosnia, we originally thought, perhaps now Ukraine—I have no idea. I cannot imagine the idea is that, without Covent Garden, love it as we may, there will be civil war, but who knows? No one I have spoken to, at any rate. Much of what unfolded seemed barely directed at all, as if the singers had been left to fend for themselves; perhaps they had.

 

Weigle proved more variable. The first act increasingly dragged. I do not know how long it actually lasted on the clock, but it seemed to last longer than any I could recall. Part of that, doubtless, was the production, but there was a near-fatal lack of inner, musical tension, recovered, albeit fitfully, during the second and third acts. What was ultimately lacking, though, was any real sense of the musical architecture. This can, arguably should, be understood in various ways. It need not all be Klemperer (though what I should give to hear that putative performance), nor for that matter Furtwängler (likewise). Likewise, it need not all be Wagner’s various musical inheritances, grand opéra included, just as it need not all be aspiration towards music-drama proper. But some sense of being more than number opera joined up is surely essential, or at the very least strongly desirable. The orchestra, likewise, came and went, strings sometimes sounding scrawny, at others blooming nicely. Offstage brass, however, was magnificent. There were many pleasures to be heard from vernal woodwind too.

Another, more prosaic, type of problem was presented by Stefan Vinke in the title role. Four nights previously, on the first night, he had withdrawn through illness. This time, he sang, but his voice and, with it, the drama came close to being lost altogether in the Venusberg scene. He rallied and, a similar yet less extreme example in the Rome Narration notwithstanding, showed great professionalism in doing so. It was not a great omen, though, and seemed to unsettle audience and cast alike—maybe, to be fair, it did the conductor too. Otherwise, Vinke’s straightforward way with the role had much to be said for it: no great revelations, but capable of despatching it, clear of words and musical line, and physically enthusiastic. Lise Davidsen, though, was the true star of the show, as she was when I saw her previously in this role, at Bayreuth in 2019. She strikes a wonderful balance between Nordic cool (a reprehensible yet perhaps inevitable cliché) and warm humanity, as indeed she has in everything in which I have heard her. There is no doubting her ability to sing Elisabeth; that is a given. But she does much more with it too, whilst leaving the character open to our own thoughts. Arguably, Elisabeth will always remain something of an enigma, and that is no bad thing; or, alternatively, for her to be more than that, Wagner would have to have rewritten the part, and he did not.

 

Anyone daring to succeed Christian Gerhaher as Wolfram as his work cut out, but Gerald Finley succeeded in making the role his own through song; not, I hasten to add, that this was not a well-acted performance too, for it was, but rather that it was musically and, indeed, verbally conceived in the first instance. Ekaterina Gubanova’s Venus held the stage through abundant personality, of stage and vocal varieties. Mika Kares’s Landgrave cut a powerful presence. Sarah Dufresne’s beautifully sung Shepherd had one wish the part might be extended. The Royal Opera Chorus was on very good form, well prepared by William Spaulding.

 



Nevertheless, firmer hands on the ultimate rudders, both scenic and musical, would have lifted the evening considerably. Is Wagner, as sometimes I have heard claimed, to blame, here, for still owing us his later thoughts on (and with) the work? That would be far too easy a get-out clause. Tannhäuser may not be perfect; it may not even be finished, or capable of being finished. But I am not the only one to have seen and heard other, more convincing near-solutions to its riddles. From Barenboim to Thielemann, from Götz Friedrich to Tobias Kratzer, it can be done. Oddly, though, my impression is that a number of the shortcomings on offer here, as well as the virtues, may actually have set many in the audience thinking about the nature of the work and its problematical dramaturgy. Perhaps it is time to intone, affecting an Anglican rather than Catholic or Lutheran voice, that we all, ‘in a very real sense’, still owe the world a Tannhäuser.

The Rape of Lucretia, Royal Opera, 16 November 2022

 

Linbury Studio Theatre

Lucretia – Anne Marie Stanley
Female Chorus – Sydney Baedke
Male Chorus – Michael Gibson
Tarquinius – Jolyon Loy
Collatinus – Anthony Reed
Junius – Kieran Rayner
Bianca – Carolyn Holy
Lucia – Sarah Dufresne

Oliver Mears (director)
Annemarie Woods (designs)
DM Wood (lighting)
Sarita Piotrowski (movement)

Aurora Orchestra
Corinna Niemeyer (conductor)

This new Rape of Lucretia, seen first at Snape, now in the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio Theatre, fittingly features singers from two young artists’ programmes: Britten Pears and Jette Parker. In many ways, its greatest strength is theirs—and that of the young Aurora Orchestra players too. (We tend to speak of a chamber orchestra here; were this ‘newer’ music, we should doubtless call it an ensemble.) Conducted by Corinna Niemeyer, this was an immediate, urgent performance which, like Oliver Mears’s immediate, urgent staging, was experienced to excellent, arguably heightened effect in a small theatre. For all aspects of production and performance came together to have us believe they had been conceived as one, almost as if a new work: a vindication not only of an opera whose different components can sometimes sit a little awkwardly with one another, but also of the very genre, currently under such devastating attack from the Arts Council. 

Mears’s staging responds to the postwar trauma of the work, bringing it very much into the foreground. I initially wondered whether that might be too much, too one-sided, whether participants in a modern conflict, brutal and brutalised, might find themselves instrumentalised, barely given chance to tell their own tale. That fear proved unfounded, though in this particular case I am not in general without sympathy with calls for greater abstraction or at least historical remove. The more I watched and listened, the more this seemed an entirely justified, indeed illuminating reading of the work. It was, after all, premiered in 1946. Violence, political and sexual—in war, in general too, they are rarely if ever to be dissociated—asked us difficult questions, from different standpoints, letting none of us off the hook. And the cast, crucially, brought this drama, these questions to life. 

Swaggering officers, with their own stories to tell, none the same, were the perpetrators. War did not let them off the hook; it was, after all, their war.  Britten’s pacifism loomed large, if unspoken. Even Collatinus was involved in an initial assault on an unnamed woman, though Junius and Tarquinius were more so, in increasing intensity. There was no doubting the heat of the night in which the rape took place, no denying this Tarquinius’s arrogant, damaged animal power, as Jolyon Lee stalked his prey in words, music, and gesture. We were led, if leading were necessary, to adopt the most troubling of male gazes, perhaps in some sense to share in guilt as well as horror. The servants knew what had happened too, one of the most discomfiting scenes being the morning after, when they could see what must have been, yet resolutely tried to carry on, not to mention it. Doubtless it did not befit their station, but it was also a matter of their trying to cope, as women, in this world. How many times had they seen such things before, indeed been assaulted themselves? Carolyn Holy and Sarah Dufresne brought these characters, here far from secondary, to vivid life in gesture and in voice, as indeed did all the cast in their roles. 

The tragedy of Anne Marie Stanley’s broken Lucretia’s suicide was spellbinding, the savagery of the deed not spared. She took centre stage, of course, but at what cost? As Collatinus trembled—horrified, weakened, and perhaps ultimately destroyed too—in Anthony Reed’s subtle portrayal, Kieran Rayner’s chameleon-like Junius, seized the aesthetic moment, capturing the corpse on camera for further dissemination. For we like to bestow the dubious, quasi-theological honour of sacrificial lamb after the event, once the deed has been done. Too late for Lucretia, as for the refugees fallen in our seas, on our beaches. Photography renders them literally iconic, especially when one can also hymn their tragic beauty. This was a properly disconcerting moment of self-recognition, or should have been. 

Instrumental obbligato lines took us back to Bach, to the cantatas and passions: in the case of oboe towards the close uncomfortably so, given the Chorus’s problematical Christian framing. Mears, for what it is worth, is the first director I have seen to tackle the issue of that framing head on. He did not, I think, offer an answer to the question, but the attempt by Male and Female Chorus to narrate and to explain seemed properly compromised. Were they, at the moment of their prayer of supplication, essentially attempting to convince themselves—and failing? The crisis of this peculiar pair, researchers into crime, perhaps even voyeurs, was increasingly apparent: surrogates in some sense for us, although surely the more ‘active’ participants were too. 

All the while, Britten’s score, its eery repetitions vocal and instrumental, its constructivist tendencies already presaging elements of The Turn of the Screw, held us in its thrall, not as something separate from what we saw on stage, but as driving force and still-more-troubling commentary. The sheer creepiness of what we call ‘fate’, yet which has all-too-human as well as divine and sociopolitical roots, is what Britten conveys so well; so too did his performers here.

The Blue Woman, Royal Opera, 6 July 2022

Image:Camilla Greenwell, ROH

Linbury Studio Theatre

Woman 1 – Elaine Mitchener
Woman 2 – Lucy Schaufer
Woman 3 – Gweneth Ann Rand
Woman 4 – Rosie Middleton
Cellos – Louise McMonagle, Su-a Lee, Tamaki Sugimoto, Clare O’ConnellPercussionist – Angela Wai-Nok Hui
Actor – Eve Ponsonby
Voice-over Artist – Eleanor Henderson

Katie Mitchell (director)
Lizzie Clachan (designs)
Emma Doherty (assistant director)
James Farncombe (lighting)
Grant Gee (video)
Ellie Horne (dramaturgy)

Matthew Fairclough (sound design)
Jessica Cottis (music director)
Jamie Man (conductor)

What is opera? It may seem self-indulgent to begin by repeating, rehearsing, even reheating that question. It both matters and does not. The Tête a Tête Festival has surely shown London opera-goers that opera can be pretty much anything one wants it to be. And that, I think, is the point here. One may think The Blue Woman as much a theatre piece or even an installation as an opera, but does it matter? In some cases, it might—or at least might be interesting. This collaboration between composer Laura Bowler, librettist Laura Lomas, director Katie Mitchell, and a fine creative team of live musicians and electronics makes the question seem somewhat beside the point.

Images and narration, words and music come together to represent—or something akin to representing—the aftermath of a rape. Postdramatic in more than one sense, the fractures of memory, the circular tricks it plays are apparent. Time, which may or may not qualify as action, passes between unbearable, empty desolation of an abandoned south London flat—where it happened, where it is remembered, both, or a metaphor?—and beyond its horrible, familiar suffocation. Walking the streets leading from Clapham Junction to Clapham Common—uncanny enough for to see it pass the end of my old street in Battersea, rather more than uncanny for women in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder—the woman’s psyche is rent asunder, awareness both heightened and dulled by rupture. Four outstanding women singers, shadowed neither sequentially nor arbitrarily by four outstanding female cellists, bring that home. Witnesses yet also participants, their commanding performance is clearly inspired by Mitchell’s guiding hand, Lomas’s evocative broken verse, and the sounds, transformations, and connections Bowler summons ‘live’ and otherwise.

Music, poetry, image, gesture present ‘the room I was raised in/Hard edges/Brick walls…’ and yet ‘In the splintered light/… I am dancing’. It is not hope, at least I do not think it is, but rather reality, beyond good and evil in an almost Nietzschean sense, although, for obvious reasons, this is not the place to pursue such philosophy. Perhaps I cannot help myself. I even began to wonder whether, as a man, I should be there, let alone comment. But then, it would surely be too easy a way out simply to absent oneself. Rape is not a ‘women’s problem’, but a men’s problem. There is a search going on here, for the woman she was before: if we cannot help, and surely I cannot, then at least we owe this woman an hour or so of our time. Observing and, ultimately, experiencing some fellow-feeling, engenders solidarity and maybe—I am not sure—defiance. I did not feel it was for me to define the piece’s terms. Song, speech, face, hands, solo, ensemble: things never quite come together, for they cannot, whilst remaining clearly, even fatally connected. There is no escape, least of all in escape. 

If it were all the more real and hallucinatory for those of us who knew the streets concerned, how much more must it have been for those who knew something akin to what this women knew. At the close, I might have found myself asking once more what opera is (and is not), but I did not. Instead, I felt a degree of necessary numbness: not enough, yet not nothing. It was the artists’ achievement, not mine. Opera may not be witness, but bearing witness is something it does, or should do.

Mavra and Pierrot lunaire, Royal Opera, 17 May 2022

Linbury Studio Theatre

Parasha – April Koyejo-Audiger
Hussar, Mavra – Egor Zhuravskii
Mother – Sarah Pring
Neighbour – Idunnu Münch
Pierrot – Alexandra Lowe

Anthony Almeida (director)
Rosanna Vize (designs)

Lucy Carter, Alan Mooney (lighting)
Anjali Mehra (movement)

Britten Sinfonia

Michael Papadopoulos (conductor)

Images: Helen Murray / ROH

The Royal Opera’s Young Artists Programme celebrates twenty years with a Linbury double-bill of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Mavra and Pierrot lunaire. It is an odd combination: one of Stravinsky’s less-loved works, a very short opera, with a cabaret melodrama that is no opera, yet is probably its composer’s single most celebrated work. If one tried hard enough, one could doubtless fathom a tenuous connection, but then one could probably do so between anything. Director Anthony Almeida, then, is probably right to have left his guiding thread at little more than surface level, concentrating instead on presentation of two unequal halves. 

All too readily underestimated, Mavra, here given in a chamber arrangement by Paul Phillips, is in many ways emphatically a Russian work. If aspects of Stravinsky’s very particular sound world are necessarily lost—it was not solely on account of where I was seated that my experience was piano-heavy—an imaginative realisation, alluding consciously or otherwise to scores such as The Soldier’s Tale, presents other possibilities. Pushkin, in any case, seems unusually apparent, even, perhaps especially, in a staging that emphasises the formalism of something akin to face. Stravinsky always revels in patterns, in allusion, in parody, and in disjuncture: this has it all, musically and scenically. Colour and ‘look’ are to the fore, part of a surface that may or may not preclude discovery of anything beneath. The drag transformation of officer Vasily into maid Mavra amounts in a Warhol-like way to something, despite its essential nothingness. Is that, perhaps what a host of bin bags tell us? It also engineers a connection of sorts to Pierrot, where Almeida has a woman by contrast turn period androgyne. Indoors becomes outdoors; lighting becomes both alternative lighting (moon) and pitch blackness. Reappearance of Mavra’s cast seemed to me a little more forced, the sign interpreter more animated. Pierrot’s presence early on in in Mavra added little other than mild confusion, at least for me. Thought had been given, though, to an attempt to combine; that was enough, really. 

Michael Papadopoulos, members of the Britten Sinfonia, and an able, alert cast captured well the knowing devices of Stravinsky’s score. It twists and turns, so long as one listens, and provides a splendid counterpoise—it certainly did here—to stage action that continues to surprise in its entirely unsurprising course. April Koyejo-Audiger reminded us, throughout, that whatever the games Stravinsky may have been playing, a Russian heart beat, sometimes irregularly, always metrically, beneath. Egor Zhuravskii offered dislocated bel canto contrast and complement. Sarah Pring and Idunnu Münch navigated with wit the fine line between stock characters and their light deconstruction, Glinka and the 1920s. If there were times when I missed the full instrumentation, the youth of this eternally young work nonetheless shone through. 

Stravinsky must surely rank as one of Pierrot’s most quoted admirers. ‘The solar plexus as well as the mind of twentieth-century music,’ he called it, hailing on another occasion the ‘instrumental substance’ that had ‘impressed me immensely. And by saying “instrumental”, I mean not simply the instrumentation of this music but the whole contrapuntal and polyphonic structure of this brilliant masterpiece’. That came through, clearly, in a performance whose lines, reciter’s included, were supremely well balanced, wandering in tonality as in character. A touch more expressionism might not have gone amiss, but there are many worse things than a somewhat classicising Pierrot. Given its all-encompassing yet contradictory nature, the work doubtless resists a ‘complete’, let alone ‘ideal’, performance. It was nonetheless difficult to imagine Alexandra Lowe’s personal combination of speech, pitch, and gesture being readily improved upon.

If Pierrot took a slightly Stravinskian turn, what could be more contextually appropriate? Not that there was not darkness too, likewise catastrophe and sheer weirdness, but the balance had shifted. There will be other Pierrots, other attempts, as Beckett had it, to ‘fail better’, but this will have made new converts, who, like the rest of us, should prepare to be surprised once again by this ever-surprising chameleon of a work.

Lohengrin, Royal Opera, 24 April 2022

Royal Opera House

Henry the Fowler – Gábor Bretz
Lohengrin – Brandon Jovanovich
Elsa – Jennifer Davis
Friedrich von Telramund – Craig Colclough
Ortrud – Anna Smirnova
King’s Herald – Derek Welton
Brabantian Nobles (‘Four Followers of Telramund’) – Elgan Llŷr Thomas, Thando Mjandana, Matthew Durkan, Thomas D. Hopkinson
Pages (‘Four Women at the Wedding’) – Katy Batho, Deborah Peake-Jones, Renata Skarelyte, Louise Armit
Gottfried – Alfie Davis

David Alden (director)
Peter Relton (revival director)
Paul Steinberg (set designs)
Gideon Davey (costumes)
Adam Silverman (lighting)
Tal Rosner (video)
Maxine Braham (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Jakub Hrůša (conductor)

Considering the first night of David Alden’s (then) new production of Lohengrin in 2018, I found ‘a conceptual weakness at ... [its] heart. I suspect it can be remedied: if a shell, it is a fine shell. It will not, however, remedy itself.’ Rather to my surprise, I found this first revival, notably under a new director, Peter Relton, much stronger. It is not always easy to be sure what has actually changed, and what one is viewing differently for oneself. I shall not try; the earlier review remains for anyone who wishes to read it. In at least partial recantation, then, I am happy to say this made for a far more satisfying evening, dramatically and musically, than that experienced four years ago. Moreover, for Wagner to have returned so emphatically to one of the city’s main houses marked a step-change in London’s operatic recovery. However much one wished it to succeed, ENO’s autumn Walküre proved a bitter disappointment. If Lohengrin did not quite match the success of Covent Garden’s astonishing recent Peter Grimes, it stood closer to that than to November’s dispiriting evening at the Coliseum. 

An interwar fascist regime, on the verge at least of further war, is the setting (albeit with certain irritating Alden anachronisms of the sort that conceive postmodernism as style rather than philosophy). The aftermath of war, presumably the Great War, that haunts the first act in particular, every character seemingly damaged, mentally and often physically too. The charge of war and of preparations for another has obvious resonances to spring 2022; they could hardly fail to speak. If King Henry cowers like a question mark—in his throne, with crown, he seems an all-too-obvious rip off from Hans Neuenfels at Bayreuth—and the Herald wears his injuries anything but lightly, others struggle to stand too. Telramund and Elsa act and react in caricatured expressionist style. Even Lohengrin adopts a foetal position of comfort with Elsa, presumably seeking a mother figure lacking in the Grail brotherhood. (As Nietzsche did not say, let us not go there.) 

Only Ortrud, doubtless significantly, operates as normal. Perhaps it is her ‘magic’, or perhaps that magic is a metaphor for something broader; that is really up to us. A fine touch, at the close of the second act, is her apparition in a box, toasting (cursing) with champagne the unhappy couple. Hemmed in by Paul Steinberg’s sets, their crossings and their disjunctures a striking visualisation of catastrophe, the action is never likely to end happily. This, after all, is a tragedy, probably the purest in Wagner; a signal strength here is that we do not forget that. That is not, of course, to say that it always need be played exclusively as such, but there is an ultimate trajectory here less in evidence than last time, which certainly strengthens the drama in this context. 

So too did Jakub Hrůša’s conducting of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House—and the golden orchestral playing itself. Hrůša is not afraid to take his time, the first act feeling especially broad, though never merely slow. Careful attention to detail and to its place in the whole had Wagner’s score veritably glow with inner life. The old operatic forms on which much of Wagner’s conception is ultimately based were clear. In Mein Leben, Wagner recalls Schumann’s puzzlement at a Dresden reading of the poem; he ‘liked it, yet couldn’t figure out the musical form I had in mind for it, as he couldn’t find any passages suitable for traditional musical numbers. I then had some fun reading him different parts of my poem just as if they were in aria and cavatina form, so that in the end he smilingly conceded the point.’ Full performance can heighten that sense further—yet also more dialectically. For equally clear were the development of those forms and the forces energising that development: harmony (especially that of Ortrud), of course, but also an energised conception of Gluckian accompagnato arising from Wagner’s work as conductor, editor, and director. 

At any rate, not only did Hrůša show a fine Wagnerian’s ability to hear vast structures—acts, at least—in a single breath, but he inspired the finest playing from all sections of the orchestra throughout. Each act had its own way of unfolding; no one-size-fits-all approach, but rather a patient, powerful strategic ear and mind. Moreover, he often favoured—unfashionably—long, quasi-vocal orchestral lines: not so much Straussian as with kinship to the Wagner of a conductor such as Karajan. The vertical was not ignored, but experience suggested ultimately a more horizontal conception of Wagner’s—‘endless melody’, perhaps—and convincingly so. 

Brandon Jovanovich offered a finely judged portrayal of Lohengrin, as acute in verbal as musical terms, its clarion heroism shielding—and sometimes not—a vulnerable and decidedly ambiguous inner core. Craig Colclough’s Telramund, tragically in thrall to Anna Smirnova’s sensational Ortrud, presented similar ambiguities, those similarities engaging sympathy and our appreciation of dramatic complexity. If there was something winningly ‘old-school’ to Smirnova’s vocal delivery and sheer star presence, that was not at the cost of more ‘modern’ engagement with directorial concept, far from it. Jennifer Davis’s movingly human Elsa grew in stature throughout a committed performance. Gábor Bretz vividly captured the King’s instability. Derek Welton made for an uncommonly vivid Herald, hinting intriguingly at psychological complications from a wartime past. 

Last but far from least, William Spaulding’s Royal Opera Chorus sounded on as fine form as I can recall for some time. How welcome, moreover, it was to have a large chorus seemingly unrestricted—reality may have been different—by pandemic restrictions in what it could do and, above all, how it could sing. Ultimately, then, it was that crucial, yet often elusive, sense of a dramatic whole that served to distinguish revival from first incarnation.