Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 5 July 2026

Images: Stephan Rabold

Bassa Selim – Bülent Ceylan
Konstanze – Adela Zaharia
Blonde – Serafina Starke
Belmonte – Siyabonga Maqungo
Pedrillo – Michael Laurenz
Osmin – David Steffens

New version and presentation – Bülent Ceylan, Andrea Moses, Michael Höppner
Director – Andrea Moses
Set designs – Raimund Bauer
Costumes – Anja Rabes
Lighting – Irene Selka
Video – Andrea Gabriel
Dramaturgy – Michael Höppner, Detlef Giese

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Gerhard Polifka)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Thomas Guggeis (conductor)

No one is perfect, although Mozart’s music often is. One of many differences between the Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s previous and current musical directors is the latter’s apparent lack of interest in the operas of Mozart. Christian Thielemann’s ongoing rejuvenation of the house’s record in Strauss’s dramatic works has already offered some compensation. Both he and Daniel Barenboim have of course long since proved themselves distinguished, if strikingly different, Wagnerians. It was, in his context, a heartening development to see the house offer a new production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail—not, I think, a work Barenboim ever conducted in full, although he was known to offer its overture in Busoni’s conclusion. (Barenboim’s advocacy of his fellow adoptive Berliner Busoni’s music is another aspect of the old regime yet to be reprised, but there is time.) That, however, was before reckoning with the new ‘version’ served up by director Andrea Moses, dramaturge Michael Höppner, and comedian Bülent Ceylan. In what proved to be an increasingly depressing evening, there were important redeeming features: the singers and, still more, the players of the Staatskapelle Berlin. The abiding memory, alas, will be of one of the most important musical works in German theatrical history having been treated with undisguised contempt by a director and dramaturge who seemed not even to have bothered to engage with it in the first place. 

Billing this as an encounter between comedy and opera immediately posed the question (or rather, sadly did not) of what the relationship between the two might hitherto have been. Have there not been a few such ‘encounters’, or rather more than that, before? It is always worth, though, trying to approach something on its own terms: not that those terms cannot be criticised, but one will better criticise if one has discovered what they might have been. In that, I am afraid I can at best prove only partially successful. Ceylan essentially set the parameters for the evening by introducing it as a comedy show, ‘Entführung Live’. The idea of him as host drifting in and out of the character of the Bassa Selim is not an uninteresting one. Something improvised might, moreover, have sat in fruitful conflict with the work and the more general aesthetic of Vienna’s Nationalsingspiel. If anything, though, the tyranny of a new script proved more of a problem, Ceylan initially speaking as if this were the premiere, only later referring to that in the past tense. Whilst, to an extent, the lack of projection may have been part of the joke, incomprehensibility (to some) of Turkish German and Mannheim dialect the point, I am not sure it can be let off quite so easily. Moreover, for an event that prided itself on speaking to an international audience, the lack of titles, if not for the comedy then at least for the ‘new’ dialogue, was odd. If non-German-speakers, or indeed those of us with some German who nonetheless may have struggled at times, would have known anything, it would surely be the musical texts—the only part of the ‘action’ with titles in English or German. Ceylan was at least respectful to the musical artists, at least until the third act, in which his activity involved a good deal of speaking over them. Melodrama, I suppose, one might call it, but the game show element of highlighting apparen members of the audience – presumably in reference, in one case, to that recent Coldplay concert – had nothing to do with Die Entführung, even in its newly ‘presented’ state.

That said, he did what he was engaged for, and largely did it well. Ire should be reserved for Moses and her dramaturge. For what the production itself was ultimately concerned with remained to me elusive: very little, so far as I could tell, beyond this ‘encounter’. ‘Love’, perhaps, yet without any real questioning of what that might be—or have been. Characterisation went out of the window; there was some very odd direction of Konstanze in ‘Martern aller Arten’, in which she suddenly seemed turned on by the whole farrago, only immediately to forget that. Also absent was much sense of place, beyond a slightly baffling setting of much of it on a ship. Worst of all, the set design at one point revealed an offensive caricature of a woman’s eyes peering out from behind a burqa, hardly ever seen in Turkey, then or now: Orientalism and, let us be honest, Islamophobia far worse than anything in the work, by twenty-first- let alone eighteenth-century standards. (In her incoherent Staatsoper Meistersinger, she arbitrarily incorporated ‘sinister’ Arab figures towards the close, so there seems to be something of a pattern, both undiscriminating and, well, something worse.) The final moral, according to T-shirts thrust upon actors and chorus, appeared to be that everyone loved Bassa Selim. Hmmm, maybe. And even if true: is that it? 

There were occasional suggestions that the perennial question ‘was its deutsch? / ‘what is German?’ – we have all been there – might be a theme, but it was so poorly sustained and, worse, haplessly addressed, that it would have been better left alone. If you start from the smug liberal standpoint that your values, more or less anti-historical, stand at such a level of perfection that they are all anyone has needed, currently needs, or will need, you are unlikely to advance politically and certain not to advance dramatically. To quote the unlamented Kamala Harris, ‘I’m speaking.’ Harris’s notorious refusal to acknowledge the right of protestors to be heard, let alone the justice of their cause, indeed points to the ‘elephant in the room’ chez Moses et al. in a city and country that proudly flies Israeli flags (antisemitically described by the present Federal Chancellor as ‘Judenfahne’) from public buildings. If you want a contemporary Orientalist theme, it is staring you in the face, but that would require a little courage. What we heard instead were less calls to Lessing’s gospel of tolerance, let alone modern diversity, than of self-congratulation that Berlin first and Germany second had advanced to their current stage of enlightenment. In reality, Moses offered no real concept beyond self-congratulation and enabling sections of the audience to congratulate themselves too, and strikingly little interest in, or even awareness of, the work. The craft of actual stage direction seemed more notable for absence than presence (unless, clutching at straws, the impression of non-direction were itself a misguided aesthetic choice). 

Enough—though enough did not come soon enough. There were, as I said, aspects of the evening’s ‘entertainment’ truly to praise. One would not hear superior Mozart orchestral playing anywhere in the world; one would almost certainly hear significantly worse. Woodwind solo playing, duetting, and more was exquisite beyond words. (Much here, for better or worse, was beyond words.) The Staatskapelle strings, though, were every bit as fine, eschewing any hint of what passes today, quite erroneously, for ‘period style’, whilst as alive and alert in the present as one could hope for: unquestionably far more so than anything in the production and its ‘presentation’. What cavils I had lay with sometimes fussy direction by Thomas Guggeis. Whilst there was much to admire in his contribution – if not his unwillingness or perhaps inability to put his foot down in cases of the most egregious directorial intervention – then he could sometimes hold the orchestra down a little too ‘prettily’. Moreover, his participation in the contemporary fad of fortepiano ‘commentary’ was, alas, all too predictable in nature. When it was anything more than tracing an orchestral line on the keyboard in front of him, it came to still less, one particularly embarrassing moment excerpts from Mozart elsewhere, albeit with ‘jazzy’ (certainly not jazz-like) syncopation. Still, when he conducted, he mostly conducted very well and, crucially, let the orchestra mostly speak for itself. 

The orchestra’s twin partner in virtue, the opera chorus, acquitted itself well too, whatever the trials presented to it onstage. So too did the cast, headed by a sweet-toned, tender Belmont in Siyabonga Maqungo and the almost instrumentally conceived Konstanze of Adela Zaharia (once past a few balance problems early on). Both made their coloratura dramatically expressive, insofar as Moses permitted, as well as musically glittering. So too did the outstanding Blonde of Serafina Starke, a member of the Staatsoper’s International Opera Studio, and her well-matched Pedrillo, Michael Laurenz, as alert to the many demands placed on him onstage as by the score. David Steffens’s Osmin was also first-class: surprisingly subtle, again insofar as permitted. 

There's the rub, alas. I suppose one might try to mount a defence rooted in the genre banished by Joseph II’s theatrical reforms, founded in the ideas of Mozart’s friend Joseph von Sonnenfels. Might we see this as a return to the world of Hanswurst and, especially, his improvisational theatre? Sonnenfels’s – by extension, Joseph’s – objections had related to impurity of language, that is it was not (literary) German enough; dramatic triviality; and extensive extemporisation, that is in terms we might now employ, that it did not present a dramatic ‘work’. Its improvisatory nature, shows often only attaining literary form in their musical items, also rendered it extremely difficult to censor. But no, my heart is not in it. Ultimately, in any particular instance, there are no rules. Do whatever you want; a canonical, if slightly precarious, work will survive. But make sure you know what it is you are dealing with and do it well; otherwise, still more than mocking the work, it will mock you. If only this Entführung were anything like as ‘live’ as it thought it was.

Die schweigsame Frau, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 22 July 2025

Images: Bernd Uhlig

Sir Morosius – Peter Rose
Housekeeper – Iris Vermillion
Barber Schneidebart – Samuel Hasselhorn
Henry Morosus – Siyabonga Maqungo
Aminta – Brenda Rae
Isotta – Serafina Starke
Carlotta – Rebecka Wallroth
Morbio – Dionysios Averginos
Vanuzzi – Manuel Winckhler
Farfallo – Friedrich Hamel

Director – Jan Philipp Gloger
Set designs – Ben Baur
Costumes – Justina Klimczyk
Lighting – Tobias Krauß
Video – Leonard Wölfl
Choreography – Florian Hurler

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin 

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Christian Thielemann’s first new production as music director at the Staatoper Unter den Linden was always going to be a special event. A declaration of intent, no doubt: of respect for the house’s traditions, whilst subtly extending them. For all his superlative strengths, Daniel Barenboim was not much of a Straussian, at least in the opera house—and I think that points to a more fundamental difference between Thielemann and his predecessor, perhaps to be explored more fully another time. In any case, one might say that that regard for canon and tradition, whilst understanding and indeed aiding its mutability was tailor-made for the art of both Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig. So indeed it proved to be. 

Thielemann has been pretty much universally acclaimed for his Strauss—and rightly so. His ability to ‘play’ the orchestra as if it were a keyboard instrument is remarkable, yet equally worthy of note – and of hearing on this occasion – was his Barenboim-like willingness to have the musicians engage in Kammermusik that could be shaped, if needed, into something larger but never greater. The Staatskapelle Berlin, always the jewel in this house’s crown, played not only with perfection but palpable commitment. It could be a Mozart serenade writ large via Wagnerian polyphony; it could be a telling arabesque duet with voice; it could be a sly piece of word painting; it could, just occasionally, be the full orchestra letting its presence felt, but also felt as necessary. Everything felt ‘natural’, however much art there might be in that; everything felt both rehearsed and spontaneous. Most important of all, the orchestra told us what mattered most—to Strauss and, one hopes, to us, at least during those magical hours spent in the theatre. Art is not to be equated to life; it is both less and more. Strauss knew that; so did Thielemann and the orchestra; so, I think, did we. 

For Strauss – Zweig too – is here, as ever, intimately and, yes, beautifully concerned with music and its history, with art more broadly and its history too. The canon is not an immutable thing He can do no other, which is part of the wonder of his aestheticism. The craft from both is astounding, especially when one does not notice it. Everywhere an allusion, everywhere an illusion—all the more so when one barely notices. Some of that is doubtless unconscious; one might say the same of performances and staging too. None of us works, thinks, makes art, or indeed makes society in a vacuum. Is/was Henry and Aminta’s sheltering in another room whilst Sir Morosus finds rest – low D-flat for contrabassoon, organ, and his ‘Dank!’ – an echo of Walther and Eva doing likewise at the close of their second act in Die Meistersinger? It looked and even sounded like it, but may also be a function of genre, of the unconscious, even of chance. We make our own connections, though we are led along the way. Actual quotation is less mistakeable, or is it? How many of us waver over Rossini-Monteverdi here? Presentiments too: how much of Sir Morosus is there in Capriccio’s La Roche, or vice versa? Is he Baron Ochs partly wiser, even transfigured, or is that to partake in the cardinal sin of sentimentality? Perhaps it is all, as the Marschallin would counsel, a farce, no more but also no less. Yet what knowing irony there is in that claim, as Straussians will know all too well. 

Let us leave that on one side for the moment to consider Jan Phillip Gloger’s production. Thielemann and Gloger have collaborated at Bayreuth and in Dresden, so again this might offer a harbinger of sorts. I had my doubts at points yet ultimately was won around by Gloger’s concept, not least since it developed so finely in collaboration with musicians onstage and in the pit—what opera is or should be, and be about. There is none of Ben Jonson’s London here, though predicaments that faces Londoners still more than Berliners – yes, I know the latter will protest, but they should try living here – come to the fore: initially, the housing crisis, but increasingly that of loneliness and how society treats the elderly in an age of generational conflict in which the latter may seem to hold too many of the cards. (They do not, of course, or not straightforwardly; it is a useful culture-war camouflage for capital. But enough of that for now.) As the opera begins, we see increasingly desperate ‘refreshing’ of a screen by someone attempting to find city accommodation – many of us have been there – followed by the stage revelation of a wealthy, single, older person living in an expansive apartment to himself, attended to by housekeeper and barber (here, more general ‘wellness’ consultant). Yet we are also confronted – I can see, even hear, the raised eyebrows – with statistics before the second and third acts, that is on the curtain during the intervals, that challenge our preconceptions, for instance how many older people who might wish to move to smaller accommodation might end up paying more in rent if they do so (and they might not be able to).

That, however, becomes ever more a context than concept. More fundamentally, the tale is one of conflict and reconciliation, furthered by understanding and willingness to accept the new. A trick, in many ways quite horrible, is played on Sir Morosus. The characters relish it in some ways, yet are also not without guilt, faithfully following Zweig and Strauss. One may or may not like the garish way in which Sir Morosus is married to his apparently ‘silent’ woman, Timida/Aminta, but it makes its dramatic point. Perhaps some of the metadramatic interventions are, like the statistics, a bit crass, but they do no real harm. Holding up a sign saying ‘Regietheater’ both alerts some, less receptive in the audience, to what might be happening not only onstage but to the stage that has been enacted onstage, and may even remind them that all this is not nearly so new as some would have them believe. No one, after all, was a greater practitioner of the cause they excoriate than Richard Wagner, whose Hans Sachs, one of Morosus’s many progenitors, reminds us: ‘Es klangt so alt und war doch so neu!’ 

Reconciliation is arguably more problematical in Die Meistersinger than here, the world of what is ‘deutsch und echt’ notable by its absence (which may, admittedly, prove to some still more problematic). For the time being, though, we can share in the old man’s joy in true acquaintance with, perhaps even growing love for his nephew and adoptive son and his wife, their troupe, and even a little of the music he once so detested. We can share in theirs for him too, heartwarmingly portrayed – for once, I mean no irony, and Strauss appears not to do so either – in the closing display of a Morosus Community, in which none need be silent and, just as important, none need be alone. One can be, of course, and Morosus is grateful for time on his own, for peace and quiet, for the music to have stopped, but as a free choice rather than faute de mieux. Solitude, as any Romantic will tell you, can be a good or bad thing; it depends very much on context and will. 

Stage performances were outstanding. As Sir Morosus, Peter Rose was everything would have hoped for, placing the character somewhere justly between Ochs and La Roche – I have been treated to the former, though not yet to the latter – but above all creating an individual human being of his own, whose ‘difficulty’ we increasingly understood and sympathised with, coming to know a somewhat different person than the one we had assumed he was. His way with Zweig’s German was second to none. Siyabonga Maqungo presented an ardent, lovelorn, equally human Henry, well matched to Brenda Rae’s Aminta. Rae played that role in a very different production (Barrie Kosky’s) the only other time I have seen the opera in the theatre. Here, her vocal glitter and precision were matched, indeed exceeded only by her humanity. The animating presence of Samuel Hasselhorn as the barber Schneidebart was a joy from start to finish, as finely conceived theatrically as it was musically. It was a similar, if more fleeting joy, to welcome Iris Vermillion back to the Berlin stage as Morosus’s housekeeper. There was the finest sense of company from all concerned, not least a chorus superbly trained by Dani Juris, which reciprocated the ensemble favour in appearing very much as a cast of individuals brought together. 

This proved, then, an excellent and deeply moving evening. Strauss and Zweig’s Schweigsame Frau sang in and for itself; but also for music; for opera; for Berlin; and, I like to think, for this exiled Berliner back in town for all of twenty-two hours, a good few of them, like those of Sir Morosus, spent asleep before returning to the city in which the opera ‘should’ be set and in which Jonson’s Volpone not only is set but was first performed. These three-and-a-half hours, though, proved more than worth the journey, a reminder less of the horrendous world around us – though that made its presence softly, touchingly felt – than of what, if we can make it a little horrendous, we might actually live for. That is, it reminded us what Strauss and his aestheticism are ultimately concerned with and why this work from the 1930s, derived from and transforming an English comedy of more than three centuries earlier, might yet matter to us in 2025.

‘Wie schön ist doch der Musik!’ And just perhaps, as Morosus continues, ‘aber wie schön ist, wenn sie vorbei ist!‘ The music was indeed beautiful, and there was unquestionably something poignant, even painful in the beauty of its fleetingness, of its passing. That it cannot be grasped is worth our grasping; in that way and in reflection both upon it and upon its passing, it will often remain with us all the longer. As ever, at least in a performance worth its salt, one does not want the Straussian epilogue to end, but it does and it must, and we are better for it. And with that, both my opera season and that of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden draw to a close. The latter’s next will open with Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Ring, conducted by Christian Thielemann.

Bayreuth Festival (3) - Tannhäuser, 4 August 2024

Festspielhaus

Images: Bayreuther Festspiele / Enrico Nawrath

Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia – Günther Groissböck
Tannhäuser – Klaus Florian Vogt
Wolfram von Eschenbach – Markus Eiche
Walther von der Vogelweide – Siyabonga Maqungo
Biterolf – Olafur Sigurdarson
Heinrich der Schreiber – Martin Koch
Reinmar von Zweter – Jens-Erik Aasbø
Elisabeth – Elisabeth Teige
Venus, Page – Irene Roberts
Young Shepherd – Flurina Stöckl
Le Gateau Chocolat – Le Gateau Chocolat
Oskar – Manni Laudenbach
Pages – Simone Lerch, Laura Margaret Smith, Annette Gutjahr

Director – Tobias Kratzer
Set designs – Rainer Sellaier
Lighting – Reinhard Traub
Video – Manuel Braun
Dramaturgy – Konrad Kuhn

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Nathalie Stutzmann (conductor)

Adieu or au revoir, I asked myself when leaving the Festspielhaus, but also from time to time during this performance of Tannhäuser. It will not, I hope, be adieu to the Bayreuth Festival. My years of attendance pale in comparison to those of many, but regular visits have become part of my musical, intellectual, and indeed social life, and I should be sorry to see that come to an end. But would it be to Tobias Kratzer’s production, and to the characters it has not only portrayed and explored but created, with lives, personalities, and possibilities of their own. The closest parallel that presented itself to me, perhaps ironically, was that of Frank Castorf’s Ring, which I also saw here three times, and to which by the end I had become quite attached. Even now, I sometimes wonder fancifully whatever became of Nadine Weissmann’s Erda, following Wotan’s brutal dismissal of her at (Al-)Exanderplatz. Somehow, ridiculous though this may sound, I should like to know that, a bit like Dallas’s Sue Ellen, she battled through. For Kratzer’s similarly classic – less controversially so – staging, time will tell. 2024 was scheduled to be its final outing, but there are plausible rumours that Le Gateau Chocolat and the gang will take the stage one more time two summers from now, when Bayreuth is due to give all works from The Flying Dutchman on, adding Rienzi for the first time in the Festspielhaus, for the Festival’s sesquicentenary.

Le Gateau Chocolat

As intelligent as it is entertaining (not necessarily a word one instantly associates with this opera), Kratzer’s metatheatrical, Ariadne-like Tannhäuser thus became all the more moving for me on this occasion, though I think that may also be attributed to a slight shift in tone. At its heart – it has a big heart – lies the opposition, faithful to Wagner’s own binaries and attempts to bridge them, between the world of the Wartburg and that of the Venusberg: the former as presented at Bayreuth, the latter a defiantly alternative, joyous troupe made up of Tannhäuser, his lover Venus, and two fellow artists, the fabulous Le Gateau Chocolat (as herself) and the enchanting Oskar (as in Günter Grass’s Oskar Matzerath, played by Manni Laudenbach with tin drum). They too make art; they too can be uncompromising; but differently, as in life, and in that they are quite unapologetic. The Overture – for better or worse, this is the Dresden Tannhäuser – shows through a mixture of film and staging our players on the road, running out of food and fuel, having to make an emergency stop at a service station to replenish supplies, only to be (almost) caught by a policeman. Venus, to the horror of the others, puts her foot down in a hit-and-run incident, occasioning Tannhäuser’s jump from the van and departure from the band. ‘Unapologetic’ has its limits. A lovely touch this year, was early on to have Oskar, lump in his throat, drink a shot in memory of Stephen Gould, the production’s first Tannhäuser.

Found by a passing cyclist (the Shepherd), Tannhäuser proceeds to rejoin his former singers on the Festspielhügel, the Festival audience making its way around their discussions, in order to be present at the performance. As the first act is drawing to a close, Venus, Le Gateau Chocolat, and Oskar make their way to the Green Hill to win Tannhäuser back. Much of the actual audience – all who wish – then make their way down to the pond at the foot of the actually existing hill, for the cabaret show they have devised, beautifully compered by Le Gateau Chocolat, who draws proceedings (her own rendition of ‘Dich teure Halle’ included) to a close with a call for Bayreuth to come out of the closet and display of the Progress Pride Plag, a poignant and necessary call for queer liberation in the age of JD Vance and JK Rowling. 

For the second act, we move inside the Festspielhaus/traditional Wartburg, video taking us backstage, both for preparations (with fine, detailed work both by the live film crew and members of the chorus) and for events for which the house is anything but prepared. In explicit homage to the Young German Wagner, members of the troupe invade the temple of bourgeois art, reminding us who Wagner really was and what he stood for with the banner unfurled from the storied balcony at the front of the house: quoting the composer’s torrential revolutionary catechism, Die Revolution, of 1849: ‘Frei im Wollen/Frei im Thun/Frei im Geniessen/R[ichard] W[agner]’. Freedom in desire, deed, and pleasure offers an obvious, glaring contrast with the professed values of the Minnesänger, as of course Wagner proceeds to show in the song contest, here crashed by our alternative artists, Venus pushing herself forward as an ersatz Page (a phrase behind in the first instance). Eventually, a security guard alerts Katharina Wagner, who calls the police to arrest Tannhäuser, notably leaving a dejected, broken troupe behind as the curtain falls. 

No one is a winner here, then, and certainly not Elisabeth, whom we meet again in a desolate landscape, the van burned out, tasting soup Oskar has made. What has happened in the meantime can largely be left to our own imagination, but it is clear that the troupe has broken up and Elisabeth has similarly lost almost everything. If, moreover, she has not lost her final gift (or curse), she will do so shortly to Wolfram, though only because he agrees to dress as Tannhäuser, clown wig and all. It was clearly not a good idea; it does not seem to have brought them any joy; but in the absence of anything better in art or life, they felt a compulsion to do so in the back of the van. Only Le Gateau Chocolat, we learn, has made it, advertising watches from a giant billboard above. When Tannhäuser returns, he tears to pieces his own score in despair, pages littering the stage until tales of the Papal miracle reach us. Life having in crisis supplanted art – this is not a Nietzschean aestheticism, nor was Wagner’s – we see on film at the close an alternative path, which may or may not offer consolation: Tannhäuser and Elisabeth, riding off in the van into the sunset. Perhaps another day, in another world. 

None of this would amount to much without committed performances from all concerned. All principal roles other than Venus were played by the same artists I heard last year. Ekaterina Gubanova will return for the final two performances, but here she was replaced with Irene Roberts, who uncannily resembled her (tribute not least to those working in costumes and make-up). Her performance was alive, arresting, and unsentimental: very much what was required. Klaus Florian Vogt’s Tannhäuser was beautifully sung, tirelessly acted: another intelligent portrayal. Some do not like his voice or think it appropriate; it is for them, as his gang might (perhaps more colourfully) tell us, to deal with it. Elisabeth Teige gave another excellent performance as her namesake, showing strength and subtlety in her tragedy. Markus Eiche’s often tenor-like Wolfram offered a fine study not only in verbal response but also in wounded pride. Günther Groissböck was on considerably better form as the Landgrave than as the previous night’s King Marke. Other noteworthy performances out included Siyabonga Maqungo’s sweet-toned Walther von der Vogelweide and Olafur Sigurdarson’s charismatic Biterolf.

Eberhard Friedrich drew out variegated performances from the Bayreuth Festival Chorus, words and meaning as intelligible as those of any soloist. And whilst I was unconvinced by some gear changes in Nathalie Stutzmann’s conducting – at the end of the first act in particular – and there remained a good few peculiar orchestral balances, possibly born of a desire to highlight Wagner’s debt to grand opéra, considerable progress had been made from last year. Ensemble was not perfect, but it was a good deal sight stronger than it had been in the first of the three productions I saw and heard this year. The sum of what, I think, we may in the best sense call this ‘show’ proved greater and deeper than its estimable parts. Here is to hopes for 2026.

Il barbiere di Siviglia, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 16 February 2024

Count Almaviva – Siyabonga Maqungo
Doctor Bartolo – Renato Girolami
Rosina – Marina Viotti
Don Basilio – Grigory Shkarupa
Berta – Adriane Queiroz
Figaro – Samuel Hasselhorn
Fiorillo – Dionysios Averginos
Ambrosio, Notary – Florian Eckhardt
Officer – Wolfgang Biebuyck

Director – Ruth Berghaus
Designs – Achim Freyer
Revival director – Katharina Lang

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Ido Arad (conductor)

Images (from 2010): Monika Rittershaus

I see that, in London, Jonathan Miller’s 1987 ENO production of The Barber of Seville is receiving another outing. It seems positively modern, though, at least when it comes to years and performances on the clock, when compared with Ruth Berghaus’s 1968 staging for the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, first seen a little less than midway between the declaration of the German Democratic Republic and the fall of the Berlin Wall and now past 350 outings. In one of these near-miracles impossible fully to explain, though, Berghaus’s production seems more of our time – I cannot quite bring myself to describe anything, anti-historically, as ‘timeless’ – than many a staging receiving its premiere. It is probably the oldest I have ever seen in the theatre, yet it does not seem like it. Doubtless it has changed over the years; the director who dared to make changes at the Berliner Ensemble, would hardly have wished it otherwise. Some gestures struck me as highly unlikely to have been hers. Still more than usually, then, to speak of ‘Berghaus’s production’ will be a short-hand for a collaborative, changing effort. By the same token, it is difficult to believe that, at its heart, this is not something true, through fidelity and infidelity alike, to her conception. Above all, it provided the foundation on which a delightful evening of Rossini’s comedy unfolded. 

At that heart, I think, is a crucial insight not only into the artificiality of theatre – though that is certainly present – but into the very particular artifice involved in that arch-formalist Rossini. In a passage extracted in the programme, Berghaus exclaims (my translation): ‘Reality! Theatre is not reality and does not mirror reality. Theatre asserts a lfe that is taken from reality. But it is not reality. One must accept theatre as an addition to reality. It is a stage that does not mean the world. … The theatre is an institution that makes it possible to come to terms with reality.’ That is what we see here, not only in outcome but in construction too. Returning, via Brecht yet only in part, to the commedia dell’arte, beautifully evoked by the young Achim Freyer – then in his mid-thirties, this year celebrating his ninetieth birthday – the production simply builds its sets before our eyes and ears. Curtains, a few props, and an eye for design are all that is needed for a ‘Seville’ that is neither a naturalistic presentation nor a provocative anti-Seville to arise as the necessary backdrop for singers to act, to make comedy.

Very well they did so too. Samuel Hasselhorn, as Figaro, emerged as first among equals, unfailingly musical, clean and meaningful in coloratura, and with the timing of a seasoned actor. Marina Viotti’s Rosina similarly excelled, with Sitabonga Maqungo a likeable if,  occasionally, a less theatrically tight Almaviva. Grigory Shkarupa constructed a splendidly real-yet-not-real Don Basilio. A sparkling performance from Adriane Queiroz left one wishing Berta had more to sing. What Renato Girolami sometimes lacked in vocal presence, he made up for in theatrical commitment as Doctor Bartolo. The Staatskapelle Berlin, keenly directed throughout by Ido Arad, did not put a foot wrong, evoking, somewhat to my surprise, a sound not so distant from that of Neville Marriner’s vintage Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Bright, precise, and likewise with pinpoint timing, here was another crucial dimension never to be reduced to anything else, yet likewise never approaching abstraction. The aesthetics, then, were as ‘right’ as the execution. 

‘The picture,’ Berghaus explained, ‘really only has to enable the singer to act. I am very dependent on good singers, and sometimes I am of the opinion that singers are greater comedians than actors.’ They sing and take their bows, then, neither to depict ‘reality’ nor simply to present a ‘plot’. The relationship is complex, yet it does not feel as though it is. There does not feel as though there is anything to be ‘interpreted’ at all, though that is surely to conceal much work. That, in any case, can be considered afterwards, or before. A world of enjoyment is created, yet one which permits something deeper to speak, to sing, to be felt. By never forgetting that it is theatre, its success continues.

Bayreuth Festival (3) - Tannhäuser, 16 August 2023

Festspielhaus

Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia - Günter Groissböck

Tannhäuser - Klaus Florian Vogt

Wolfram von Eschenbach - Markus Eiche

Walther von der Vogelweide - Siyabonga Maqungo

Biterolf - Olafur Sigurdarson

Heinrich der Schreiber - Jorge Rodriguez-Norton

Reinmar von Zweter - Jens-Erik Aasbø

Elisabeth - Elisabeth Teige

Venus - Ekaterina Gubanova

Young Shepherd - Julia Grüter

Le Gateau Chocolat - Le Gateau Chocolat

Oskar - Manni Laudenbach

Pages - Cornelia Heil, Ekaterina Gubanova, Laura Margaret Smith, Karolin Zeinert

Tobias Kratzer (director)

Rainer Sellmaier (designs)

Manuel Braun (video)

Reinhard Traub (lighting)

Konrad Kuhn (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus director: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Nathalie Stutzmann (conductor)

For my third and final Bayreuth performance this year, I revisited an old friend, Tobias Kratzer’s Tannhäuser. New when we met in 2019, it has weathered the pandemic storm and since assumed something close to classic status. Not that, like any of us during that or indeed any other four-year period, it has remained the same. Artists have come and gone, though some have remained: Markus Eiche’s Wolfram, Jorge Rodriguez-Nortonäs Heinrich der Schreiber, and from Kratzer’s new, Ariadne-like troupe, Manni Laudenbach’s Oskar and Le Gateau Chocolat. Memory can play tricks, so this may be a matter of my imagination, but I think Le Gateau Chocolat’s first-interval show had acquired a greater edge as storm clouds have gathered across the world in the battle to preserve, let alone extend, LGBTQ+ rights. (Let us Westerners never forget that, for much of the world, such rights remain a pipe dream.) Calling on Bayreuth to ‘come out of the closet’, explicitly telling the audience it had seen a queer show, and unfurling the rainbow flag (as would soon be done onstage, in the house, at the end of the second act) seemed, in the light of much that has happened, a more political act than ever, as necessary as the Festival’s ongoing exploration of past Jewish contributors.

To take a step back, we first meet he troupe - Tannhäuser, Venus, Le Gateau Chocolat, and Oskar - during the Overture, on Manuel Braun's wonderful video and briefly onstage. Anarchic, hurried, and chronically lacking in cash, they meet tragedy as Venus pushes down on the van’s accelerator to escape the latest, Burger King non-payment predicament and seemingly kills the policeman who had caught them. That affords the occasion for Tannhäuser deciding to leave the band and return to the Bayreuth Festival, pilgrims and all, where Tannhäuser is being played, yet stands in need of an injection of Wagner the Young German revolutionary, who stands behind them at least as much as he does behind his ‘official’ life beyond the grave. 

Venus & Co. will not take no for an answer, though, and pursue Tannhäuser, two worlds colliding above all in the Wartburg/Festspielhaus. Venus makes her way onstage as one of the pages, the discipline of an opera performance clearly not to her liking. Her invasion, joined by Le Gateau Chocolat and Oskar, occasions Tannhäuser’s crisis of artistic, sexual, and revolutionary confidence. The third act plays out much as one might have expected, albeit with a touching friendship between Elisabeth and Oskar, and a properly disturbing twist in which Elisabeth cedes to Wolfram but only so long as he is dressed as Tannhäuser. When he attempts to shed Tannhäuser’s clown wig, she adamantly replaces it. The action, though, has been prepared so as to heighten the emotional and intellectual weight of its drama. What may have seemed like an entertaining new story has proved a friend of long standing after all, a friend with whom our own journeys have shared much.

Klaus Florian Vogt, a newcomer to the title role here, did a typically committed, highly well-acted job. His voice remains controversial: put simply, people tend to like it (in a particular role) or not. Leaving that aside, and considering what he does with it, no one would have had reasonable, or even unreasonable, grounds to accord him anything but praise. And when one recalls the not-so-distant days when opera houses struggled to cast any Wagner tenor role, one realises that not everything has changed for the worst. Vogt’s Elisabeth, Elisabeth Teige, proved an unusually powerful presence in the role, her part, seemingly vocal and instrumental in quality, in second-act ensembles something close to awe-inspiring. Her compassion, moreover, was matched by her womanliness: this Elisabeth is avowedly no cipher. 

From the rest of a fine cast, Markus Eiche’s Wolfram and Siyabonga Maqungo’s Walther were impressively attendant to the demands of words, music, and stage, as was Günter Groissböck’s Landgrave, luxury casting indeed. Ekaterina Gubanova enthusiastically grasped the challenges and possibilities of Kratzer’s expanded conception of Venus, and added several more for good measure. Julia Grüter shone, strikingly so, as the Young Shepherd. And of course, Le Gateau Chocolat and Laudenbach shone in their roles, as did Eberhard Friedrich’s outstanding Bayreuth Festival Chorus (again!)

There is often a ‘but’, and here it comes. Nathalie Stutzmann’s conducting proved something of a work-in-progress. Balances were often eccentric, sometimes revealing interesting aspects of the score and (especially) its grand opéra origins, as well as affinities with Berlioz, but that eccentricity often proving puzzling rather than enlightening. There was little in the way of greater, ‘music drama’ line, which is fine up to a point if one wishes to highlight where the work, musically, has come from, but some greater sense of overall structure is surely desirable, whichever version of the work one uses. Here, for better or worse, it is Dresden. Perhaps most concerningly, there were occasions, especially during the second act, when ensemble veered dangerously close to collapse. There were, I think, good ideas here, maybe their execution will improve with greater experience in an admittedly difficult house. In any case, there was so much else to enjoy that no one seemed to notice, or care, which perhaps is as it should be. We tend to our communities, or should, as a whole, not as an aggregate of individuals.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 21 April 2019

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Images: Bernd Uhlig (from the first performances, in 2015)

Hans Sachs – Wolfgang Koch

Veit Pogner – Matti Salminen

Eva – Julia Kleiter

Walther von Stolzing – Burkhard Fritz

David – Siyabonga Maqungo

Magdalene – Katharina Kammerloher

Kunz Vogelgesang – Graham Clark

Konrad Nachtigall – Adam Kutny

Sixtus Beckmesser – Martin Gantner

Fritz Kothner – Jürgen Limm

Balthasar Zorn – Siegfried Jerusalem

Ulrich Eisslinger – Reiner Goldberg

Augustin Moser – Florian Hoffmann

Hermann Ortel – Arttu Kataja

Hans Schwarz – Franz Mazura

Hans Foltz – Olaf Bär

Night Watchman – Erik Rosenius

Andrea Moses (director)

Jan Pappelbaum (set designs)

Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

‘Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding,’ sings Strauss’s Marschallin: a truth that seems to grow truer with our – at least with my – every advancing year. More prosaically, and more specifically, we might also say that openings and re-openings, constructions and reconstructions, creations and recreations, unifications and reunifications are strange things: rarely what they seem, and rarely what the fashionable, the non-critical presume them to be. Such ideas lie at the heart of Die Meistersinger: at its heart, concerned with the ongoing creation and performance of a song, within a society that has both placed such endeavour at its heart and also done its utmost to thwart the same. Perhaps all societies, at least all bourgeois societies – what could be more bürgerlich than this early modernity created and recreated by the nineteenth century? – are like that. As Schiller and Marx, Wagner too, insisted, left to his own devices, man – woman too? – will create as an artist; as all three lamented, that ‘natural’ state of affairs rarely, if ever, pertains. At best, a higher, mediated state of unity might be achieved; but how?

Such thoughts came very much to mind watching, for the first time, Andrea Moses’ 2015 production of the work. Not because it really engages with them: alas, this is a sorry piece of theatre, considered as staging. Nonetheless, the work and its traditions enabled, at least in retrospect, some manner of critique. The gravest charge against the production is its tedium, the second its hapless incoherence. (The two are not unrelated.) It seems to suggest ideas, yet they never seem grounded, never connected; its amateurism, in the worst sense, suggests what the Masters might think of Walther before he sings a note (and many of them do once he has). For the action plays out mostly as if this were the most hidebound of traditionalist stagings, albeit without either that sixteenth-century (or even nineteenth-century) ‘original’ context or a new one to put in its place. The first act takes place in something resembling a concert hall – there are apprentice ushers, or something like that, in black tie – or perhaps a corporate event, Masters’ names displayed as if sponsors. Nothing, however, makes much sense, since there is no apparent effort to explain, to criticise, to create, to recreate, and so forth. Or is it a sportsground sponsors’ lounge, competition here being the thing? Perhaps, for the second act takes place in what seems to be the backstage of a stadium. For some reason – or none – the inhabitants of Nuremberg are now in punk garb. That seems implicitly to be the reason, though surely not the intention, for their descending into a riot, in which football flags are waved. Beckmesser has meanwhile, bafflingly, squeezed himself into sixteenth-century costume. Everyone else has otherwise wandered around aimlessly, save for Walther and Eva who wrap themselves in an ever-present German flag. An Orthodox Jew walks across stage during the turmoil, untouched by and seemingly oblivious to it. I have no idea either…

The first part of the third act moves to a library: fair enough in itself, as setting for Sachs’s world chronicle, although there is no sense of how it relates to anything that has gone before, still less of who these people might be and why they might act as they do. The Festwiese scene attempts, I think, to tie things together, but not only is it too late, the message it appears to project is glib and disturbing, as well as ultimately incoherent. For the production’s origins now come more clearly to the fore. It had originally been intended that this Meistersinger should reopen the renovated eighteenth-century house on Unter den Linden. Work having fallen behind – or new work having been necessitated – that was delayed until 2017, Daniel Barenboim and the outgoing Intendant, Jürgen Flimm, then presenting a staged version of Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s ‘Faust’. Both ‘reopenings’, anticipated and actual – even the latter was a little false, the theatre soon closing again until December – were scheduled for Germany’s new national day, the Tag der Deutschen Einheit, which explicitly celebrates the anniversary of reunification in 1990. The first performance, it seems, took place in two parts: the first two acts on the day itself, the third the following day (the equivalent to Wagner’s Johannistag morning-after to Polterabend, I suppose).

With that in mind, one can perhaps see the celebrations by the Spree, our Pegnitz substitute, as trying, Sachs-like, to bring peace, even unity, to the revelry and violence of the night before. Alas, it is all terribly confused. Is the ‘night before’ the troubled German, past and the ‘morning after’ the here and now? If so, that makes little sense in terms of the premiere chronology; it also makes no sense of the settings, all ‘present’, if little related. The backdrop of the absurdly ‘restored’ old Berliner Schloss – ironically, a mere Potemkin façade, – suggests, however, that we are intended to reflect in such a way. Those who might have preferred a restored GDR Palast der Republik or something new will have had very different thoughts, uneasy at this banal, Disneyfied celebration of capital’s victory over socialism. (I saw the ‘new-old’ façade for the first time fully risen, whilst walking to the performance: a dispiriting sight indeed.) Seemingly as an afterthought, a few Kaiserreich flags are flown and, captured by Sachs, cast into the river. Given that the palace was the Hohenzollerns’, ‘modern’ rejection of that flag seems disingenuous. Most bewildering, though, is the appearance of two Arab ‘sheikhs’ with bodyguard. Our Master ‘sponsors’, their logos again proudly displayed, act with great solicitude to them, explaining events – would that they had to us – and caring for their needs. Have they funded the ‘event’? And if so, what might that mean? They notably leave the stage before the close, excluded or excluding themselves from the final celebration, replete with German flag. A celebration of corporate, ‘moderate’ nationalism, then, from which financially enabling non-Germans must absent themselves? Try as I might, I cannot come up with an inoffensive explanation – even should that prove to be mere cluelessness.

Faced with such irritating nonsense, I found it difficult to concentrate on the musical performances in themselves, though much was clearly admirable. Barenboim’s command of the outstanding Staatskapelle Berlin continues greatly to impress, flexibility, clarity, delight in the score’s Mozartian, conversational qualities, and a thorough grounding in Wagner’s harmonic plan unquestionably apparent. His idea of presenting an array of old Masters – some may recall a similar concept at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival to mark Brian McMaster’s farewell – was engaging. It was a delightful thing indeed to encounter and re-encounter so many great names from the past, such as Siegfried Jerusalem, Graham Clark, and Olaf Bär, all the way to Franz Mazura, due to celebrate his ninety-fifth birthday the following day. Matti Salminen’s Pogner fell into that category too, occasional instability a price well-worth paying for sheer likeability. Wolfgang Koch gave a typically thoughtful, musicianly performance as Sachs, interacting nicely with Martin Gantner’s Beckmesser, Julia Kleiter’s sprightly, sometimes radiant Eva understandably torn. Burkhard Fritz’s Walther had his moments – though they were not always happy; he kept going, though, which is something. Siyabonga Maqungo’s David and Katharina Kammerloher’s Magdalene both impressed in lively, detailed assumptions, making as much as could reasonably be expected from a difficult situation.

If, ultimately, many of these performances seemed more observed than felt, that may well have been the fault of the production – and my inability to rise above it. There will be other creations and recreations, though, other attempts to construct and reconstruct the past, present, and future. This production’s predecessor from Harry Kupfer still lingers in the mind; let us hope the next in line will prove worthier.