Arabella, Vienna State Opera, 22 April 2025

Images © Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn
Zdenka (Sabine Deveilhe), Arabella (Camilla Nylund)

Count Waldner – Wolfgang Bankl
Adelaide – Margaret Plummer
Arabella – Camilla Nylund
Zdenka – Sabine Deveilhe
Mandryka – Michael Volle
Matteo – Michael Laurenz
Count Elemer – Norbert Ernst
Count Dominik – Martin Hässler
Count Lamoral – Clemens Unterreiner
Fiakermilli – Ilia Staple
Fortune Teller – Juliette Mars
Welko – Michael Wilder
Djura – Jin Hun Lee
Jankel – Thomas Köber
Room Waiter – Wolfram Igor Derntl
Gamblers – Oleg Savran, Aljandro Pizarro-Enríquez, Jens Musger

Director – Sven-Eric Bechtolf
Set designs – Rolf Glittenberg
Costumes – Marianne Glittenberg

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus director: Martin Schebesta)

Vienna State Opera Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Matteo (Michael Laurenz)

Arabella is a difficult work to bring off. It requires performances and a staging of such quality that it can only really work at a certain level of house or festival. With Mozart, there is of course similarly nowhere to hide, yet his operas can work very well – often better – with young performers in smaller houses. This, if not more difficult, is at least differently difficult, perhaps akin to Mozart heard not only via Wagner but also via the golden age of Viennese operetta, less musically than verbally and dramatically—and with the particular sophistication not only of Strauss but of Hofmannsthal to reckon with too. All of that is whisked together in a confection that must retain its lightness of touch, not at the expense of depth yet so as to reveal it, and with the unavoidable knowledge and difficulty that Hofmannsthal’s work was incomplete, incompletable here, if only because Strauss, that most demanding of dramaturges (as director Sven-Erik Bechtolf observes in an interesting programme interview), would not, from respect for his deceased colleague, permit otherwise. It is not, thank God, a ‘vehicle’ in the sense of a work of few intrinsic merits, which gets trotted out to appease the vanity of a certain star singer and her – almost always her – fans. It can sometimes feel, even be treated, as though it were, though—not least since it seems to be a work in which there is little for the director to ‘say’ other than to let it play. Letting that happen is no easy thing, of course, but it rarely seems to call for, or indeed benefit from, overt interventionism or deconstruction. Tobias Kratzer, in what is probably the most illuminating staging I have seen, for Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, did permit himself a telling, timely twist, but his is probably the exception that proves the rule. 

Bechtolf has only one major intervention, one so commonplace now that it barely registers as such, save when one reflects why it might have been done and what it might have accomplished. That is, he and his designers Rolf and Marianne Glittenberg update the action to the time of composition, around 1930. I may have been sceptical about this beforehand—and to an extent still am: not because I object in principle, but rather because the work’s particular literary and dramaturgical fragility seems to militate against it, not entirely unlike updating, say, Nestroy, a Hofmannsthal play, or, for that matter, Sheridan. There are losses, I think, for such a comedy of manners. Seeing it as a companion piece, say, to Dostoevsky’s – or even Prokofiev’s – Gambler would doubtless offer illumination. What one gains, though, is first not being lost in nostalgia for a ‘beautiful nineteenth century’. Whatever nostalgia one might feel – do we not all? – for the time of updating, finely accomplished, it is already necessarily tempered by consciousness of that updating, of complication and even disjuncture. We all enjoy looking at ‘Weimar culture’, broadly understood, anyway, do we not? That permits some light-worn allusions to a gender fluidity crucial to the opera, as well as to opera more generally, without making them the point. Goodness knows, we need humanity in that respect right now, and perhaps they tell more clearly or at least differently than was ‘originally’ the intention, whether of Strauss, Hofmannsthal, or Bechtolf. 

Fiakermilli (Ilia Staple) and friends

Second and perhaps more important, one senses, inevitably with a hindsight that can seem written in, a foreboding, a fear of the future that distinguishes it from, say, operetta or indeed Der Rosenkavalier. Whether one entirely buys the argument or not does not really matter. It forms the basis for a largely convincing home, doing what Bechtolf sets out to do: perform rather than deconstruct the work, drawing out characters in whom he evidently believes. If it occasionally feels a touch tired around the edges, a little too reliant on the performers to bring it to life, then that is only to be expected of a production first seen in 2006. It is indeed the lot of any repertory system, one that has permitted this to be the fifty-sixth performance of this staging to date, as indeed has the staging itself. (Imagine that for Arabella in an Anglophone house!) Not every night can or should be a premiere. That provokes its own confrontation with memory, nostalgia even. The world was far from perfect then, yet compared to 2025, one can be forgiven a slightly fond backward glance, all the more to remind one of the present. Q.E.D., one might say. 

It never gets in the way of ‘the music’ either; indeed, it seems to permit it largely to speak as anyone with genuine interest in the work would probably wish. Christian Thielemann has lived with it some time, as of course has the Vienna State Opera. I was about to say that it showed, and it arguably did, but not in the sense of Mahlerian Schlamperei, of routine, but rather in a similar respect that freed rather than constricted. Rarely if ever with Thielemann does one sense resting on laurels. Occasionally, if more in Wagner than in Strauss, I have wondered whether he might actually have benefited from making less of an attempt to do things differently, though the urge to rethink and recreate can only be lauded. Here, however, there was approach neither to Scylla nor to Charybdis. The legendary golden warmth of the Vienna strings was to be enjoyed, not narcissistically but for its musicodramatic import, yet there was also a heightened sense, perhaps especially from the woodwind, that this was a work ‘of its time’, partaking in its own way of a neoclassicism that after all Strauss had presaged in Ariadne auf Naxos, arguably in Rosenkavlier too. Line was beyond reproach, again not in a marmoreal sense, but as part of a living performance that engaged with the past without being consumed by it. Meistersinger-ish counterpoint in lighter, Viennese hue created and played with memory before our ears. 

Arabella, Mandryka (Michael Volle)

Much the same should be said of a fine cast. Camilla Nylund offered every virtue, musically and dramatically, in a performance of the title role rooted in a a complexity not always present in even the most finely sung performances. That is not to say it was a reassessment as such, but rather one, as with the performances around her, that acknowledged the instability of Arabella’s upbringing, rendering the ultimate, rich beauty of her response all the more moving. If Michael Volle has given a mediocre performance, I have not been present; it was certainly not to be witnessed on this occasion. Mandryka’s pride, even vanity, as well as his more admirable qualities were the hallmark of what was again an uncommonly rounded portrayal. Sabine Deveilhe presented a Zdenka both likeable and troubled, completed by and also completing (at least for now) Michael Laurenz’s excellent Matteo, sung in a ringing tenor unfazed by Strauss’s demands. Wolfgang Bankl and Margaret Plummer conveyed, in tandem with the production, a couple who want the best, not only for themselves, yet seem incapable of acting to achieve that—at least without external guidance. Hofmannsthal’s text was used to the full here, as it was by all. Ilia Staple’s Fiakermilli was faultless vocally and as cabaret. The smaller parts were all vividly characterised, Juliette Mars’s Fortune Teller included. She did, after all, foretell what came to pass, a lightly fatalistic point made by her reappearance at the close, descending the staircase which Arabella and Mandryka had just ascended. Once more, Q.E.D.

King Arthur, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 8 November 2019

Images: Ruth und Martin Walz (from 2017 premiere)

Anett Fritsch, Robin Johannsen (sopranos)

Benno Schachtner (countertenor)

Reinoud Van Mechelen, Stephan Rügamer (tenors)

Neal Davies, Arttu Kataja (bass)

Arthur – Michael Rotschopf

Merlin – Jörg Gudzuhn

Oswald – Max Urlacher

Osmond – Paul Herwig

Emmeline – Meike Droste

Grimbald – Tom Radisch

Conon – Roland Renner

Aurelius – Steffen Schortie Scheumann

Mathilda – Sigrid Maria Schnückel

Little Arthur – Béla Jim Ottopal

Sven-Erich Bechtolf (director)

Julian Crouch (director, set designs)

Kevin Pollard (costumes)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Gail Skrela (choreography)

Joshua Higgason (video)

Ein Skills Ensemble

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Martin Wright)

Akademie für Alte Musk Berlin

René Jacobs (conductor)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reopening of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden - Szenen aus Goethes Faust, 3 October 2017

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Franziska Krug/Isa Foltin/ GETTY IMAGES FOR STAATSOPER UNTER DEN LINDEN

Faust, Doctor Marianus – Roman Trekel

Gretchen, Una Poentitentium – Elsa Dreisig

Mephistopheles, Böser Geist, Pater Profundus – René Pape

Marthe, Sorge, Mater Gloriosa – Katharina Kammerloher

Not, Magna Peccatrix – Evelin Novak

Mangel, Mulier Samaritana – Adriane Queiroz

Schuld, Maria Aegyptiaca – Natalia Skrycka

Ariel, Pater Ecstaticus – Stephan Rügamer

Pater Seraphicus – Gyula Orendt

Soloists – Narine Yeghiyan, Florian Hoffmann, Jan Martiník

Faust, Herold – André Jung

Mephistopheles, Lieschen – Sven-Eric Bechtolf

Gretchen, Astrolog, Engel, Türmer – Meike Droste

Zueignung – Anna Tomowa-Sintow

Jürgen Flimm (director)

Markus Lüpertz (set designs)

Ursula Kudrna (costumes)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Gail Skrela (choreography)

Detlef Giese (dramaturgy)

Chorus (chorus master: Martin Wright) and Children’s Chorus (chorus master: Vinzens Weissenburger) of the Staatsoper Unter Den Linden

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

And so, at long last, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden has reopened its doors to the public, its resident company’s long exile – seven years – in Charlottenburg’s Schillertheater over. It will close again at the end of the week, to re-reopen, as it were, in December, some final work to do, but let us not worry too much about that right now; as Daniel Barenboim said, in a speech at the reception following the performance, the Opera has avoided the fate of Berlin’s new airport. Fasolt and Fafner have more or less completed their work, and the gods have more or less entered Valhalla without, it would seem, sealing their fate. We can but hope.

Franziska Krug/Isa Foltin/ GETTY IMAGES FOR STAATSOPER UNTER DEN LINDEN

There was no rainbow bridge, but there was certainly a red carpet – and considerable security too. A host of dignitaries was present: gods, for better or worse, of this world. And hearing some of them speak beforehand, it was difficult, at least for this all-too-temporary exile from the United (sic) Kingdom, that Germany does not have it so bad after all. It made me proud, indeed, to have found sanctuary, if only for a Augenblick (‘moment’), in a country that prides itself upon its status as a Kulturnation. There may be many problems associated with that; there are problems, after all, with anything and everything – this side of Heaven, death, communism, or whatever flavour of realised eschatology one may favour. (Please, please do not say ‘Brexit’.) Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus stands as one of many warnings to us on that; so too does the Bebelplatz, site of perhaps the most notorious, even infamous, book burnings in history, immediately behind the Lindenoper. Germany, however, is the country of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (‘coming to terms with the past’) par excellence; it is never a completed work – Wotan, kindly take note – and yet, compared to anywhere else on earth, or at least in Europe, I can think of, there remains a sense, to quote Angela Merkel, of ‘Wir schaffen das’ (‘we can do it’).

Franziska Krug/Isa Foltin/ GETTY IMAGES FOR STAATSOPER UNTER DEN LINDEN

Merkel was one of those in attendance, although she did not speak. The President, Franz-Walter Steinmeier did, however. And in this country, this city, he could speak meaningfully of the crucial, life-giving importance of art. It is not just a hope, not just a slogan, not just an idea, but a reality – and a ‘reality’ in something approaching the complex notion offered thereof by Hegel, whose Humboldt University bust lies only a few hundred yards away. It is not even a personal matter; it would, of course, be impossible for the British Head of State, let alone her Prime Minister, plausibly to utter such words, and it is impossible to imagine either trying. However, even if one were to find a more personally and politically sympathetic figure to the arts, such as the current Leader of the Opposition, they would sadly, tragically, remain almost absurdly remote from reality, however conceived. I wished then, to return to that idea – I almost wish to capitalise it, but shall refrain – of the Augenblick; or, in the subtitle of this opening performance of Schumann’s Szenen aus Goethes Faust, ‘Zum Augenblicke sagen: Verweile doch!’ (‘Say to the moment: tarry a while!’)

Alas, it was, with the best will in the world – and I should like to think mine was well intended – difficult to say the same about much of what took place on stage. And whilst I do not wish to rain on anyone’s parade, critical honesty entails here a considerable degree of throwing one’s hands up in the air and asking ‘why?’ Rarely if ever have I seen so many people leave the theatre and not return after the interval; that was doubtless partly a matter of ‘celebrity’ guests, and so on, but perhaps a few more would have stayed had this staging of Schumann and Goethe not proved so utterly misconceived and often, sad to say, tedious. Barenboim rightly paid tribute to Jürgen Flimm’s Intendancy, prolonged so as to continue to care for the company during its prolonged exile, for Flimm unquestionably helped enable its return to Unter den Linden. As an opera director, however, Flimm’s record has proved at best mixed here in Berlin. To take but a couple of examples, his Orfeo ed Euridice had a good few things to recommend it, his Nozze di Figaro, shall we say, rather fewer. There is, I think, little point moaning about what might have been, had the company returned to its home earlier; yes, of course it would have opened with another production, but so what? Still less would there be any justification in complaining about the lack of another anticipated premiere, thwarted by its composer’s serious illness. Nor need one rule out in principle staging a work that was never intended to be staged, although it is perhaps a little quixotic in reality, however construed, to reopen an opera house with a work that is not only not an opera but which seems in its very essence to resist most, even all, operatic tendencies.

Production images: Hermann und Clärchen Baus

It might have worked; alas, it did not. What we saw – and heard – was an awkward padding of Schumann’s ‘scenes’ with small pieces of Goethe; except it was not really padding, more two different things going on, with little relationship to one another, not even in any sense approaching the dialectical, let alone in a more conventionally ‘smooth’ sense of drama. I suspect that anyone unfamiliar with Goethe would have wondered – and not in an especially productive way – what was going on. Anyone unfamiliar with Schumann would, I fear, have wondered what the point of this exquisite, heartrending, yet exquisitely and heartrendingly fragile tribute to Goethe’s work was, so diminished did it seem in this context, however well performed (and in many, if not all, respects it certainly was).

Goethe follows his fond imperative, ‘Zum Augenblicke sagen: Verweile doch’, with the exclamation, ‘du bist so schön!’ (You are so beautiful!) Apart from the music – and I am afraid it really felt as if it were quite ‘apart from’ – what then was schön? The work of set designer (and celebrated painter, sculptor, poet, etc.) Markus Lüpertz could certainly lay claim to have been so; I should happily have seen it in its own right. Alas, Flimm seemed not to know what to do with them. Instead, we had an unclear relationship between actors and singers, drama and music, any number of potential dialectical opposites, without either reconciliation (let us say Hegel) or radical negative failure to reconcile (let us say Adorno). Spoken and sung characters sometimes looked the same, sometimes did not, sometimes appeared in stylised ‘period’ (for Goethe) costume, sometimes not, or less so. Words were help up on placards. Indicators of metatheatricality were to be seen: seats from the theatre moved onstage, so that members of the chorus could watch and ‘interact’; music stands appeared, from which presumably some effort was being made to suggest characters learning music from the spirit of drama; the chorus suddenly appeared to sing from within the audience; and so on, and so on. There was an irritating prevalence of silly dancing, quite unconcerned with whatever music was being heard or not. Was there something of autobiography, or at least a summation of a (semi-Faustian) career in the theatre? Perhaps, but frankly, I am on the verge of making it up as I go along. That would seem very much to be in the spirit of what I saw: essentially an expensive version of a university student’s staging, enthused with some big ideas from other plays or productions.

Enough of that! The orchestra often sounded wonderful, recognisably the same band as we hear on Barenboim’s (outstanding) recordings of the Schumann symphonies with them. There were occasional fluffs here and there, and it would be idle to say that Barenboim’s direction was always quite so commanding as on those performances in which he had clearly ‘lived’ with the music for longer. He nevertheless conveyed a strong sense of the music, with ideas very much of his own about how it should go, not least a furiously driven Overture. (I am not sure that I necessarily liked it that way, but it had conviction and, I think, its own justification.) Passages that have much in common with the symphonies seemed – or perhaps this was my imagination – subtly underlined, as if to suggest a commonality of purpose that yet did not disrupt Schumann’s musical forms. (We had Flimm for that.) Choral singing was likewise excellent – what a wonderful Children’s Chorus the company can boast too! – although, towards the close, there were a few passages in which chorus and pit were not entirely in sync. The acoustical work to the theatre certainly seems to have paid off, the sound warmer than ever. (I was up in the Second Circle, so probably in a good position to speak of a lack of ‘distance’ acoustically.)

If Roman Trekel’s performance, thoughtful and intelligent though it may have been, remained rather dry of tone, then René Pape’s rich bass, more sonorous than ever, pretty much stole the vocal show. Anyone would have been persuaded by this Mephistopheles, although Sven-Erik Bechtolf’s spoken version seemed quite at odds: not interestingly opposed, just inconsistent. It was splendidly acted, I think, but belonging somewhere else entirely, whereas André Jung’s shouty Faust (again, perhaps this was Flimm’s intention) slightly baffled in itself too. Quite what Anna Tomowa-Sintow was doing delivering a reading at the beginning is anyone’s guess; I was very happy, for the first and presumably last time, to see her on stage, but was that enough? Perhaps it worked as a metaphor for the project as a whole. To return to the singers, Elsa Dreisig offered a clear, often radiant soprano, with intriguing hints perhaps of a bell-like Tales of Hoffmann Olympia. I think Flimm may have been presenting Gretchen as an all too evident construction by Faust and Mephistopheles, a commentary worth pursuing on ‘Das Ewig-Weibliche’ (the eternal feminine), but that sense at the close was fleeting and seemingly unprepared. That was certainly not Dreisig’s fault, though. Katharina Kammerloher also stood out amongst a cast that was, rightly, drawn entirely from the Staatsoper’s own company.

Franziska Krug/Isa Foltin/ GETTY IMAGES FOR STAATSOPER UNTER DEN LINDEN

This, then, was a surprising Prelude to what we might think of as the ‘real’ reopening. Or rather, to return to more complex conceptions of ‘reality’, the house and company will continue to reopen, to develop; the task will never be completed, for it never can be, even when the builders leave. Much will have been learned, and once the present co-intendant Matthias Schulz has taken over the full reins of the company in the spring, we should begin to gain a stronger impression of the drama ahead. His first fully programmed season will be 2018-19. Wolfgang Rihm’s Saul, the work to which I alluded above, will, it is hoped, still be heard in a later season. The house will re-reopen with a new Hänsel und Gretel and a new Coronation of Poppea. A tour of the splendid new rehearsal facilities augurs well. There is, then, everything to play – and everything to hope – for. We can aim for Wagner’s ‘artwork of the future’, or aim to ‘fail better’, as Beckett would have had it; the two are far from mutually exclusive. One of the very oldest orchestras in the world, arguably the very oldest, founded as it was in 1570, was sounding at least as good as ever. Opera is not solely a musical art, but it remains a musical art nevertheless. The house should and doubtless will build on that – in as many senses as possible, and then some. For crucially important though buildings may be, the real business of building, the real business of Bildung too, is not principally about them at all.

(An edited version of this review appeared first in VAN magazine.)

Salzburg Festival (2) - Così fan tutte, 6 August 2016

Felsenreitschule

 

Images Ruth Walz/Salzburger Festspiele
Alessio Arduini (Guglielmo), Julia Kleiter (Fiordiligi), Michael Volle (Don Alfonso),
Dorabella (Angela Brower), Ferrando (Mauro Peter)

Fiordiligi – Julia Kleiter

Dorabella – Angela Brower
Despina – Martina Janková
Ferrando – Mauro Peter
Guglielmo – Alessio Arduini
Don Alfonso – Michael Volle

Sven-Eric Bechtolf (director, set designs)

Mark Bouman (costumes)
Friedrich Rom (lighting)

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

Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra
Ottavio Dantone (conductor)

 

I saw Sven-Eric Bechtolf’s production of Così fan tutte three years ago in the Haus für Mozart. It seemed initially to have been heavily revised for its new venue in the Felsenreitschule, until I realised that it was indeed a new production. Quite why, I am not sure, for his first Così seems to have been the most successful part of his Da Ponte trilogy for Salzburg. (The Don Giovanni was, in a fiercely contested field, one of the worst I have ever seen. I could not face seeing the Figaro after that, but nothing I have heard about it has had me regret that decision.)

Bechtolf here retains the eighteenth-century setting: ‘beautiful’ frocks and all, for those who care about such things. There are hints at good ideas, but rarely, if ever, are they seriously followed through. For instance, we see something we might associate with the subtitle’s school for lovers (‘La scuola degli amanti’) at the opening, although it seems to have more of a medical bent than one might expect. No harm done: there is, after all, a strong current of Mesmerism and other strange ‘natural philosophy’ to the plot. However, apart from occasionally seeing frock-coated members of that school hanging around the stage, that is more or less it. Likewise, the nod to the work’s artificiality in having painted backdrops, such as a ‘beautiful’ Bay of Naples, mounted and dismantled during the action; again, however, we really need more than that. Making use of the extraordinary Felsenreitschule setting is of course a good thing, but it needs to be more than simply having characters run around above the stage for the sake of it. Otherwise, we have a thoroughly ‘traditional’, even regressive, staging, interrupted in utterly philistine fashion by deeds of slapstick, which have no place whatsoever in Mozart – however much they might delight certain cretinous members of the audience. (They laughed, moreover, at the most peculiar times. Do they not realise this is the most agonising, heart-rending of all Mozart’s operas? Do they react similarly to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony or the St Matthew Passion? One can only assume they do not listen to the music at all.) I could go on at greater length about the production but see little point: half-baked to a – well, to whatever soggy point things that are half-baked are half-baked to…

 

Musically, things were much better. I had worried that Ottavio Dantone might bring a self-consciously ‘authenticist’ reading to the work, but there was little of that. His tempi were varied, judicious, and flexible: always sounding as if they were reached in cooperation with the singers. And the Mozarteum Orchestra was able to sound like itself, warm of string tone, with woodwind both fruity and aristocratic, with no absurd prohibitions on vibrato or other such mannerisms. The sweet sado-masochism of Mozart’s score was able to tell in all its cruel glory.

 

Guglielmo, Don Alfonso, Dorabella, Fiordiligi, Despina (Martina Janková), Ferrando

It was an excellent cast too. Despite a few intonational issues in ‘Come scoglio’ notwithstanding, Julia Kleiter gave a commanding performance as Fiordiligi. She was certainly alert to the cruel parody in Mozart’s mock-seria writing; if only her director had been. Angela Brower made for an excellent Dorabella, very much her own, freer character: silkier, perhaps, when compared with Kleiter’s fine Egyptian cotton. If I have heard a sweeter-, more seductively-toned Ferrando than Mauro Peter I have forgotten – which seems unlikely. Alessio Arduini’s Guglielmo was proud, assertive, flawed: just as he should be, whether vocally or in stage manner (Bechtolf’s absurd interpolated dances notwithstanding). Martina Janková, the sole survivor, from 2013, again impressed as Despina, hers a thoroughly musical rendition, rendering no quarter for caricature. Michael Volle’s Don Alfonso was simply outstanding: what presence vocally he has, and how it is matched with command of the stage! There was much, then, musically to delight, enabling this truly extraordinary opera’s message of existential despair to register as it should.

Cardillac, Vienna State Opera, 22 June 2015

Cardillac (Tomasz Konieczny)
Images: Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn

Cardillac – Tomasz Konieczny
Daughter – Angela Denoke
Officer – Herbert Lippert
Gold Dealer – Wolfgang Bankl
Cavalier – Matthias Klink
Lady – Olga Bezsmertna
Police Officer – Alexandru Moisiuc

Sven-Eric Bechtolf (director)

Rolf Glittenberg (set designs)
Marianne Glittenberg (costumes)
Jürgen Hoffmann (lighting)

 

Is there at present any more unfashionable composer than Hindemith? Tippett perhaps runs him close, but I can think of no one else. Little has changed in that respect since I lamented this situation upon the Paris Opéra’s 2008 revival of Cardillac by André Engel. It is all the more welcome, then, that Vienna should not only stage but keep in its repertoire this wonderful opera, here given, as seems generally now to be the case, in its original, three-act form rather than Hindemith’s 1952 four-act revision for Zurich. (We miss, then, the performance within a performance of numbers from Lully’s Phaëton and the greater, post-Mathis der Maler sympathy accorded to Cardillac as artist.)

Daughter (Angela Denoke) and
Officer (Herbert Lippert)

Sven-Eric Bechtolf’s staging is probably the best I have seen from him. I opened my Paris review – bear in mind this was still the Gérard Mortier era of blessed memory – by saying, ‘Perhaps only Paris could turn in so stylish a production of the terminally unfashionable Hindemith.’ Bechtolf does not do so badly either, his stylisation fitting and lightly questioning the work too. The crowd scenes in particular benefit from carefully clockwork choreography, as if responding to the large timepiece (surely a more general nod to ETA Hoffmann, author of the original short story, Das Fräulein von Scuderi), and the black-and-white, top-hatted designs. The crowd both acts as a mob and retains, perhaps intensifies, its weirdness: not inappropriate for a Neue Sachlichkeit treatment of a German Romantic story. Sexual congress is again both plausible and stylishly removed from the merely representational. The realm of the master goldsmith himself offers powerful visual contrast – gold as much the order of the day here as in a later Schoenbergian orgy – and yet retains quirky, choreographed connection, as the action passes between different worlds. The work of Rolf and Marianne Gilttenberg as designers is very well fitted as frame and incitement to the exaggerated and musically-conceived, or at the very least musically-consistent, movement that ensues.  

For Hindemith’s motoric, extremely anti-Romantic conceptions of Bach – think of the Kammermusik transformed into opera – rightly came to the forefront here of our musico-dramatic attention. There were times, especially during the first act – all three acts were given, wisely, without an interval – when I missed the final degree of dry precision from the orchestral playing, but in general, Michael Boder’s conducting impressed, especially his handling – and the orchestra’s execution – of climaxes. Moreover, a relative relaxation of anti-Romanticism arguably held its own rewards, in preparing the way for the Officer’s compassion and, perhaps, whetting the appetite for a hearing of that later Zurich version. The Vienna State Opera Chorus’s contribution was excellent throughout, a credit to its chorus master, Thomas Lang.

Lady (Olga Bezsmertna)

 

 

Tomasz Konieczny offered a properly complex portrayal of Cardillac, permitting us to be torn between horror at his murderous narcissism, unable to permit his masterpiece to be owned by another, and his strange, increasing dignity as a craftsman. Vocal and stage presence were communicated as one. Angela Denoke, also Cardillac’s daughter in that Paris revival, gave quite the best performance I have heard from her in some time: lyrical and ever-meaningful verbally. As ever, she acted the role with passion and commitment. Herbert Lippert’s Officer struggled a little too often with Hindemith’s demands, but shared that sense of dramatic commitment. Olga Bezsmertna’s Lady showed true star quality. A member of the Vienna ensemble, she had me wishing her role offered more for her to sing. Wolfgang Bankl, Matthias Klink, and Alexandru Moisiuc all convinced in their roles. More Hindemith, then, please – in Vienna, but elsewhere too.

 

 

 

Salzburg Festival (5) - Don Giovanni, 15 August 2014

Images: © Salzburger Festspiele / Michael Pöhn

 

 

Haus für Mozart

Donna Anna – Lenneke Ruiten

Donna Elvira – Anett Fritsch
Zerlina – Valentina Nafornita
Don Giovanni – Ildebrando d’Arcangelo
Leporello – Luca Pisaroni
Commendatore – Tomasz Konieczny
Don Ottavio – Andrew Staples
Masetto – Alessio Arduini

Sven-Eric Bechtolf (director)

Rolf Glittenberg (set designs)
Marianne Glittenberg (costumes)
Friedrich Rorn (lighting)
Ronny Dietrich (dramaturgy)

Philharmonia Chorus Vienna (chorus master: Walter Zeh)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Christoph Eschenbach (conductor)

Why, o why, is it apparently so difficult for directors to come up with a vaguely coherent staging of Don Giovanni? Why, moreover, do so many of them seem so uninterested in, even contemptuous of, the work? It is an opera of such overflowing richness that one would have expected directors to be spoilt for choice when it came to options for staging. Instead, we find ourselves almost always faced with an incoherent mess.

Such is certainly what was served up by Sven-Erich Bechtolf. Bechtholf’s production is probably not quite so bad as London’s twin nadirs of Francesca Zambello and Rufus Norris, but it is difficult to say anything much more positive than that. This year’s Salzburg Festival’s Great War theme – are we not all fed up with such commemorations already? – seems to receive a nod in the updating, but to what end beyond that I cannot say. Similarly the bizarre hotel setting, which makes a nonsense of so much in the work. The closest attention to Da Ponte, let alone to Mozart, seems to be in retaining some vestige of class distinction in presenting Zerlina and Masetto as hotel staff. Beyond that, the opera seems of little interest to Bechtolf. Of religion, let alone of sin, there is nothing – unless one counts the occasional and, in context, quite nonsensical reapparances of the Commendatore as a porcine devil. People dart in and out of hotel rooms and occasionally strip to their underwear in the reception area. Whether comedy be intended is unclear; it certainly is not achieved. Still less is anything approaching tragedy. As for the ending, in which Don Giovanni is still there, chasing after another maid, what is supposed to have happened? Nothing, apparently – which actually is not so very far off the mark. An existentialist conception of Don Giovanni, if that be what this is, is fine in principle, if somewhat partial; but, like any other conception, it needs pursuing coherently. It really is not worth saying any more. Bechtolf’s Così fan tutte, whilst far from perfect, was much better than this; we await next year’s Figaro with trepidation.  

 

Musically, matters were much better. If Christoph Eschenbach did not rise to the heights of Daniel Barenboim in Berlin – by far the best conducted performance of this work I have ever heard – then he nevertheless rose above the rank incompetence and/or sheer perversity we are generally fated to hear. (I really cannot be bothered to compile a list; it would rival Leporello’s in length, if not in excitement.) There was not a single instance in which tempi were objectionable. They were generally well related to one another. And crucially, Eschenbach knew how to draw a fine sound from the Mozart orchestra non pareil, the Vienna Philharmonic, which in turn deigned to play as it can and should. There was not the Furtwänglerian intensity that Barenboim brought to the drama, but there was plenty of light and shade and, that rare thing, an impression that it was being permitted to speak more or less for itself.  Interventionist continuo playing may not be to everyone’s taste, but it did little harm, and indeed livened up a good number of the more hapless moments of stage direction.

 

Don Giovanni (Ildebrando d'Arcangelo)

 

Ildebrando d’Arcangelo made for a brilliant Don Giovanni, insofar as he was permitted to do so. (Why, at one point, did he suddenly have to dress up in the guise of a 1970s gameshow host? At any rate, the Jimmy Savile hint, doubtless coincidental, was not pursued.) Characteristically dark and flexible of tone, d’Arcangelo’s was a smouldering portrayal, which captured to an unusual degree his character’s quicksilver changes of mood and circumstance. Luca Pisaroni’s Leporello was an excellent sidekick, possessing agency in his own right, yet subordinate (again, insofar as Bechtolf’s direction permitted, etc., etc.). Both showed great facility with words, music, and their alchemy. Lenneke Ruiten and Anett Fritsch had their moments as Donna Anna and Donna Elvira, though intonational difficulties were not entirely absent. Andrew Staples sounded a little out of sorts as Don Ottavio; perhaps it was simply an off-night. In any case, despite some less than mellifluous sounds, his dramatic intelligence shone through. Valentina Nafornita and Alessio Arduini made for a characterful, indeed sexy, couple as Zerlina and Masetto. Only Tomasz Konieczny’s surprising unsteady Commendatore really disappointed. The cast, then, mostly did what it could, as did Eschenbach and the orchestra; the fault lay squarely with Bechtolf.