The Queen of Spades, Deutsche Oper, 20 March 2024

PIQUE DAME von Pjotr I. Tschaikowskij, Premiere am 9. März 2024 in der Deutschen Oper Berlin,
copyright: Marcus Lieberenz
Countess (Doris Soffel) and Hermann (Martin Muehle)

Hermann – Martin Muehle
Tomsky – Lucio Gallo
Prince Yeletsky – Thomas Lehman
Chekalinsky – Chance Jonas-O’Toole
Surin – Kyle Miller
Chaplitsky – Andrew Dickinson
Narumov – Artur Garbas
Master of Ceremonies – Jörg Schörner
The Countess – Doris Soffel
Lisa – Maria Motolygina
Pauline – Karia Tucker
Governess – Nicole Piccolomini
Masha – Arianna Manganello
Children’s commander – Sofia Kaspruk
Little Hermann – Aleksandr Sher
Little Lisa – Alma Kraushaar
Stage piano – Jisu Park
Old servant – Wolfgang Siebner

Director – Sam Brown
Designer – Stuart Nunn
Choreography – Ron Howell
Video – Martin Eidenberger
Lighting – Linus Fellborn
Assistant directors – Constanze Weidknecht, Silke Sense
Dramaturgy – Konstantin Parnian

Children’s Chorus of the Deutsche Oper (director: Christian Lindhorst)

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper (director: Jeremy Bines)

Statisterie, and Opernballet of the Deutsche Oper

Sebastian Weigle (conductor)  

The late Graham Vick was to have directed this new production of The Queen of Spades for the Deutsche Oper. According to the cast list, Vick laid down the principles for the production, but his successor Sam Brown, charged with bringing the project to completion, alongside designer Stuart Nunn and choreographer (and Vick’s widower) Ron Howell, will necessarily have brought much that his own to the piece. As he says in an interview, ‘I knew that the framework that he’d created provides a lot of room for conceptual freedom. … It may sound dramatic, but Graham’s ideas for PIQUE DAME outside of the equipment died with him. As a director, I have to walk my own path.’ Tempting though it may be to speculate what comes from whom, that is hardly the point. Having noted the situation, it is better to move on to discuss what it is we see and hear.

Chekalinsky (Chance Jonas-O'Toole), Tomsky (Lucio Gallo), Surin (Kyle Miller)

Layering of memory is a particular strength. Tchaikovsky – and his brother and librettist, Modest, as well of course as Pushkin – play with memories of the eighteenth century. That is doubled by the Countess’s memories of her ‘own’, earlier eighteenth century, Mme de Pompadour and all. The Grétry air is another case in point. In this production, without being merely indeterminate or arbitrary, which would defeat the point, further nesting occurs, for instance in the silent film excerpts (from a Russian adaptation of 1916), but also in the dressing and undressing of particular characters at different points, as well as in broader designs. Spanning three centuries – the nineteenth may not be overtly depicted on stage, but it is always present – is not an easy trick to bring off, but it is meaningfully accomplished here. Moreover, it is with us from the start, the opening scene with children’s chorus pointing to much of what is to come. A maltreated child, a social outsider even then, is abused by children and adults alike, only to have a little girl briefly come to him and show a little kindness. It prefigures what is to come, but perhaps it is also a memory. In this opera, though, it is always too late. The cards dealt by fate can never be changed, despite – or because of – their entirely random nature in what is no game of skill. 

Hermann, Countess

The cast acts out this game and propels it with great skill, heightening and extending its outlines in much the same way the production does. Martin Muehle’s Hermann is tireless, anguish-ridden, obsessive, perhaps a little on the Verdian side of Tchaikovsky, but I am not sure it behoves me, as one who speaks no Russian, to be too fussy here. It was above all his journey of catastrophe, and no one could doubt that Muehle grasped his fate and followed it. But it is not only his journey; part of the problem is surely that the characters are heading in different, mutually opposed and uncomprehending directions. Maria Motolygina’s Lisa, unable to escape from her childhood and clearly presented as such, was by the same token beautifully, often heartrendingly sung, her final scene powerful indeed. As expected, Doris Soffel’s Countess stole the show: not only a sterling performance, that ‘ancient’ air included, but one showing her sexual drives to be as strong as ever, perhaps even more so. Perhaps if she too had questioned her obsessions, she might have been happier—but is there any meaning in that ‘perhaps’? Thomas Lehman’s Yeletsky was finely sung indeed, as, in smaller roles, were Karia Tucker’s Pauline, Andrew Dickinson’s Chaplitsky, Chance Jonas-O’Toole’s Chekalinsky, Kyle Miller’s Surin, and many more, up to and including the chorus. Lucio Gallo’s virile, contemptuously masculine Tomsky showed how this singer can still absolutely hold the stage. Raunchy masked-ball choreography from Howell and excellent performances from the dancers not only returned to several questions already posed, but also asked a good number of their own.

Sebastian Weigle’s conducting had its moments, especially during the third act. (The opera was essentially given in scenes rather than acts, the interval given, as is often the case, following the arrival of Catherine the Great in the middle of the second act.) Then it became more idiomatic, conjuring up from the excellent Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper more of a Tchaikovskian sound than had previously been the case. We should not be too essentialist about such matters, but much previously had sounded rather on the Germanic side, albeit with distinctly odd balances, strings in particular notably subdued. A lack of dramatic sweep, without anything obvious put in its place, proved frustrating. 

Catherine the Great (Doris Soffel)

Singing and production continued, though, to offer considerable compensation. Soffel’s reappearance as Catherine the Great suggested she and the Countess were one and the same, her mocking laughter at the end of that third scene echoing the Countess’s ghostly reappearance (dressed as Lisa) to name the three cards. Was this all, then, just Hermann’s fevered imagination? And if so, to put it bluntly, what is the point? What we saw was not so cut and dried as that. Indeed, one of the projector quotations between scenes, from Dostoevsky, considering the nature of fantasy, how it must come close to reality, made that clear. 

If the scales here are tilted towards fantasy rather than reality, more so than any other production I can recall and than I have tended to think of it, then this remains a single production, concentrating fruitfully on a particular standpoint; another will be free to do something else. And it is only limited by it to the extent that almost any standpoint will limit: it enabled and heighted a strong sense of fate, from which not only Hermann, but also Lisa and indeed the Countess wish to escape, yet ultimately knew they cannot—and do not. 

There is, I think, something psychoanalytical to the approach. Certainly everything appears to be built on misunderstandings or downright lies: untruths, at any rate. What Hermann wants does not really exists; what Lisa wants does not really exist; what the Countess has wanted all her life has probably never existed at all. That holds for others too, not least Yeletsky. For all his apparent good fortune, he loses Lisa, and there is no sense of triumph in his final victory over Hermann. That it ends with a third and final death, all three ultimate protagonists departed, seems fitting in a sense that goes beyond Romantic death wish. Perhaps it is here, then, that the fantastic twist properly resumes, bidding us continue to question what we have seen and heard.

La cambiale di matrimonio, Royal Academy of Music, 16 May 2023

Susie Sainsbury Theatre

Tobias Mill – Charles Cunliffe
Fanny – Luiza Willert
Edward Millfort – George Curnow
Joseph Slook – Johannes Moore
Norton – Duncan Stenhouse
Clarina – Chloe Harris

Sam Brown (director)
Joshua Gadsby (lighting)
Teresa Poças (costumes)

Royal Academy Sinfonia

Johann Stuckenbruck (conductor)

Images: Craig Fuller

Rossini’s second opera and his first to be staged, the one-act La cambiale di matrimonio has been given a sparky, polished revival by Royal Academy Opera in the UK premiere of Eleonora di Cintio’s new critical edition. (The world premiere took place last November at the Royal Opera House in Muscat.) A fine team of young performers, ably directed by Sam Brown, made a good case for the piece without (wisely, I think) trying to turn it into something that it is not. Carl Dahlhaus’s far from pejorative claim that there was ‘nothing to understand’ about Rossini’s music, as opposed to Beethoven’s, has come in for a great deal of criticism: much of it seemingly failing to understand the admittedly over-binary opposition Dahlhaus drew. Whatever the truth of that, this farsa comica, to a libretto by Gaetano Rossi, is not the sort of thing one goes to for hidden depths or really for interpretation at all. It is less a case, in that irritating contemporary formulation, of ‘it is what it is’ than, as Dahlhaus pointed out, of being a ‘recipe for a performance’. That is what it received here—and a very good one too. 

Bright designs and zany, sharply executed antics tend to work well in Rossini’s comedies. Here, an initial preponderance of yellow, later joined by other primary colours, set the scene or rather continued it from a similarly perky account of the overture, a vivid curtain-raiser in the hands of Johann Stuckenbruck and the Royal Academy Sinfonia. Indeed, orchestra and singers, conductor and director were splendidly in sync throughout, lightly suggesting that Wagner’s should never be considered the only aesthetic. (For what it is worth, Wagner’s portrayal of Rossini as a purveyor of ‘absolute music’, whilst undoubtedly pejorative in some ways was also admiring, both consciously and unconsciously. It is perhaps better considered as pointing to a fork in the aesthetic road not entirely unlike Dahlhaus’s.) Enough, anyway, of Teutonic musings. The attempt of an English merchant, Tobias Mill, to sell his daughter Fanny to a Canadian businessman Joseph Slook was clearly mapped, with keen eyes and ears for a musical as well as dramaturgical structure and trajectory already prophetic of later Rossini. In a comedy of manners as well as action, English snobbery is mocked, whilst stereotypical portrayals of the foreigner (Canadian rather than ‘American’, as the cast’s spoken cries persisted in reminding the libretto as well as us) are subverted, Slook so appalled by Mill’s actions that he helps unite Fanny and her lover, the bookmaker Edward Millfort and names Millfort his heir. Slook may look brash and act strangely (initially) but his sympathetic character as well as young love win out over old and frankly mercenary ways. The music does not quite all ‘sound the same’, though one can hear why some might say so. The point is surely more that it enables and propels the action in words and gesture; this is not a Gesamtkunstwerk, but nor is it trying to be. 

Charles Cunliffe’s Mill used words (and music) skilfully to create his own predicament. Commanding stage presence did not detract from vulnerability and wounded pride as the story progressed. Luiza Willert’s Fanny was quite outstanding, alert to the tricks of the trade Rossini had already picked up (arguably in some cases created) and how to use them. This is clearly repertoire for which she has a gift. So too does George Curnow, often perplexed (in a good way) yet ultimately victorious as Edward Millfort. Johannes Moore’s Slook truly held the stage, again through a fine blend of words, music, and acting. His journey from larger-than-life foreigner to kindly benefactor was keenly observed and portrayed throughout. Chloe Harris and Duncan Stenhouse similarly both impressed as Clarina, Fanny’s maid, and Norton, Mill’s clerk. Their contribution to ensembles as well as their solo moments underlined that, for all the coloratura, this is an ensemble piece. And that, precisely, is what we saw and heard.

Jakob Lenz, English National Opera, 19 April 2012

(sung in English)

Jakob Lenz (Andrew Shore), Pastor Oberlin
(Jonathan Best)

Lenz – Andrew Shore

Pastor Oberlin – Jonathan Best

Kaufmann – Richard Roberts

Friederike Brion – Suzy Cooper

Voices – Rebecca van den Berg, Alexa Mason, Sigridur Osk, Louise Collett, Jimmy Holliday, Barnaby Rea

Children – Eleanor Grant, Harry Foster, Lille Forrester

Sam Brown (director)
Annemarie Woods (designs)
Guy Hoare (lighting)
Anjali Mehra (choreography)

Members of the Orchestra of the English National Opera
Alexander Ingram (conductor)


This co-production between ENO and Hampstead Theatre, supported by ENO’s Contemporary Opera Group and the English National Opera Trust, marked a welcome second British staging, the first for a generation, for Wolfgang Rihm’s chamber opera, Jakob Lenz. It is, sadly, a reminder of quite how parochial much of this country’s musical, especially operatic, life has become, though ENO is certainly doing its bit at the moment, with Detlev Glanert’s Caligula due to be staged at the Coliseum next month. There remains, of course, a persistently pressing need for several more runs of La traviata and La bohème. Enough of that, however; let us give thanks for a company willing to demonstrate some degree of commitment to the work of contemporary composers who do not happen to be British. (And for a reminder of a truly enlightened Intendant, uninterested in nationalistic considerations, click here, forwarding to 2:10 if necessary, though it is well worth listening to what comes before, once the sound adjusts.)

Rihm is, of course, a major figure in contemporary opera, though I have only seen one work of his staged previously, Das Gehege in Munich. Jakob Lenz, his second opera, was first staged in Hamburg in 1979, following quickly upon a Mannheim staging for his first opera, Faust und Yorick, in 1977. Set to a libretto by Michael Fröhling, based of course upon Büchner’s novella, it treats with the troubled poet’s visit to the Vosges in 1778. Arriving at the house of Pastor Oberlin, Lenz suffers hallucinations relating to Friederike Brion, whom Goethe has abandoned but who is still in love with him. (Friederike is here played on stage, but she has no lines.) Christoph Kaufmann, friend of Lenz and a poet himself, tries unsuccessfully to persuade Lenz to return to his family. Lenz discovers the body of a dead Friederike, not Brion, but a girl from a neighbouring village, though he thinks them one and the same; he tries – and fails – to resurrect her. As his condition deteriorates, Oberlin and Kaufmann abandon him.

Lenz, Oberlin, and Kaufmann (Richard Roberts)

There is certainly a great deal of expressionist Angst to be heard in the score, itself constructed in rondo-like fashion, thirteen scenes interspersed with interludes over the course of roughly an hour-and-a-quarter. Wozzeck is perhaps too obvious a presence, whether in subject matter or design; it cannot be said that the comparison does many favours to Rihm. For whilst there is a great deal of virtuosity to his writing for eleven orchestral players (three cellos, two oboes, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, percussion, and harpsichord), and a number of effects work well on their own terms, not least Lenz’s ‘Voices’, it remains difficult, as I have often found in Rihm’s work, to discern much of an individual compositional voice. Other influences surely include Henze and, increasingly apparent, Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (perhaps more apparent on account of the performance taking place in English). I even wondered whether there was a good dose of Britten thrown in for good measure, though that may have been coincidence rather than influence. Parody, though less extreme than that of Maxwell Davies, is apparent in the treatment of chorales for the church congregation. It is all theatrically effective in its way, not something to be taken for granted, but insofar as I was moved, it was more on account of the strength of the performances rather than the work itself. Moreover, there is less of a descent into madness than one might have expected; the poet’s state is parlous all along, without very much in the way of development.

Lenz and Friederike (Suzy Cooper)

If I say, then, that I am unsure why the work is a chamber opera rather than a music theatre piece, I do not mean that as a criticism of the staging it here received, more as a comment upon Jakob Lenz itself. Sam Brown’s production is perhaps surprisingly ‘traditional’, set when and where the libretto prescribes, ably designed by Annemarie Woods. Sub-Friedrich images, a church, and above all the water in which Lenz tries to drown himself – obvious shades of Alberich and the Rhine for Andrew Shore – heighten the Gothic effect. There is certainly something creepy about prettified children, parishioners, and their bonnets. Brown in the programme says that ‘Büchner is so specific to certain weeks in 1778 that it seemed perverse to try and change it.’ Perhaps, though we are not dealing directly with Büchner. Even so, I could not help but think that a little more abstraction might have added to a sense of contemporary interest; it is not clear to me that the opera is in any sense ‘about’ the eighteenth century, nor indeed ‘about’ Alsace. That may all, however, just be a matter of my taste, rather than anything fundamental.

Shore’s Lenz was a powerful portrayal, occasional spread at the top of the range more than compensated for by dramatic truth. He held the stage throughout, and rightly received warm applause. Jonathan Best ably evoked a concerned if ultimately impotent Oberlin, whilst Richard Roberts, if a little hamstrung by the bizarrely caricatured foppery of Kaufmann, impressed vocally too. The Voices – two sopranos, two mezzos, two basses – haunted and disoriented, though the children’s intonation was at times problematical. Alexander Ingram led an incisive account, with Members of the ENO Orchestra on splendid form. The Hampstead Theatre acoustic is perhaps not ideal, but then one can say that of many venues.