Salzburg Festival (7) - Médée, 19 August 2019

Grosses Festspielhaus

  

Images: Salzburger Festspiele / Thomas Aurin
Médée (Elena Stikhina)

Médée – Elena Stikhina

Jason – Pavel Černoch

Créon – Vitalij Kowaljow

Dircé – Rosa Feola

Néris – Alisa Kolosova

Two handmaidens of Dircé – Tamara Bounazou, Marie-Andrée Bouchard-Lesieur

Médée’s voicemail – Amira Casar

Simon Stone (director)

Bob Cousins (set designs)

Mel Page (costumes)

Nick Schlieper (lighting)

Stefan Gregory (sound design)

Christian Arseni (dramaturgy)

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Ernst Raffelsberger)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Thomas Hengelbrock (conductor)

What a sad waste of an evidently considerable budget. A rare opportunity, my first, to see an important opera staged; a fine cast, both in vocal and acting terms; equally fine orchestral playing and far from negligible conductor; all undone, alas, by one of the most uncomprehending, unmusical, wasteful, inept stagings of an opera I have had the misfortune to see in quite some time. To render the story of Medea, in any of its versions, so mind-numbingly banal would have been achievement in itself; to rob that rendition of any internal, let alone other, coherence, would have been one of equal magnitude; to exhibit such a deaf ear to Cherubini’s score for Médée, whilst arrogantly, ignorantly disdaining the claims of its genre…

Marie-Andrée Bouchard-Lesieur (Second Handmaiden), Dircé (Rosa Feola), Tamara Bounazou (First Handmaiden)

Underlying director, Simon Stone’s premise, if we may call it that, is the patronising claim that, to be ‘relatable’, Médée must be brought down to size. That would appear to entail robbing her of all particularity, of anything that makes her remarkable, debasing her character into at least two more-or-less-incompatible clichés: not at all misogynistic, then. We start, ominously in all the wrong ways, with a film accompanying – actually, intentionally or otherwise, distracting from – the Overture. Médée and Jason are shown in this film to be a couple of unsympathetic, narcissistic rich people, with typically pretty accessory-children. (At least I think that was the claim.) Living somewhere in the Alpine region outside Salzburg - various film scenes take place round and about the festival city, though nothing, so far as I could tell, onstage itself – they enjoy a sickening ‘family’ breakfast and go to a concert. (If only I were making this up.) Jason cannot make it, so Médée and the children go without him, only to realise that they have forgotten something – if only I had – and turn back. Médée finds Jason in bed with Dircé, and they conclude a ‘high-net-worth divorce’. Just what Cherubini is suggesting in the score – and, for most of us, far less relatable than Euripides, Cherubini, or anyone in between.

Médée, Jason (Pavel Černoch), children

And so it ineptly staggers on. The next time we see her, the formerly well-to-do Austrian (or at least Austrian-domiciled) Médée has been expelled to Georgia. Her settlement had run out, we learn via voicemail (!) She communicates via an Internet café with Créon and Jason: more, it seems, to incorporate two expensive sets onstage at the same time than out of any dramatic imperative. For some reason, she does not use Skype, although refers to it, moving away from the computer terminal to a payphone at the café. Créon and Jason, meanwhile, are at a lapdancing club, replete with acts more tiresome than erotic. The ‘girls’ seem also to be at the same venue, a rare and puzzling concession to cost, though they have some male strippers on hand.

Immigration control looms large, though hardly relevant. Yes, all of us to the left of ‘conservative’ directors such as Alvis Hermanis – he might even have made a better job of directing this – revile what is being done in our name to migrants. But to attempt to disarm criticism by portraying Médée in this way is at best bizarre. There are other ways to dispense with magic, if you wish. Créon, who seems to be some sort of interior minister, appears at the airport – we learn, for some reason or seemingly none, again via voicemail, that Médée has flown in via Istanbul – personally to prevent Médée from entering. Quite why she had not been forbidden entry beforehand, having assaulted at least one immigration officer, is unclear in what purports to be a realistic, contemporary setting. Both participants conduct their struggle live on television, which is streamed to an expensive international hotel in which the wedding guests and wedding couple, somewhat bafflingly, are all staying. An economics programme, with stock exchange updates, provides light relief. Again, I wish I were making this up.

Stone dispenses with the dialogue. Fair enough, I suppose, though really I cannot see the need. (A common tendency may be seen in many tedious butcherings of Fidelio.) Instead, we hear absurdly ‘dramatic’ – ‘operatic’, almost in the pejorative sense – of the aforementioned voicemail messages from Médée to Jason, which often make nonsense of the acts seen onstage, let alone the acts we might have seen. References to Skype and so forth – the programme she seems unable actually to use – are both edifying and instructive. The creators of Gossip Girl would have done a much better job – in every conceivable respect.

As for the third act’s dread deeds of vengeance, Stone manages to make a nonsense both of what the work is telling us and of his replacement, let alone the score. An equivalent to the poisoned robe and other gifts is set up, in expensive-looking shopping bags, but instead Médée decides to drug a waiter, dress up as him, and poison Dircé’s champagne. Even that does not seem to be the agent of her death, though, for then Médée, presumably because Stone thought the banal drama he had created needed a touch of melodrama, stabs Dircé and Créon, blood spilled all over. We revert to film, for riveting footage of Médée leaving the building, finding a car, and driving along a motorway, until we reach our modern-day temple: a motorway service station. There, after a lengthy period of time in which all the high state security surrounding her could simply have incapacitated her and saved the children, not then dead but just seated in the car, she kills them and herself with exhaust fumes. The chorus could be seen waiting in the wings from where I was seated, apparently before it should. Even the lighting was not coordinated. And quite how Médée was supposed to have heard an offstage Jason, I have no idea. Any old police drama would have accomplished this with greater efficacy. At any rate: The End.

Poor Cherubini, then. Admired by Brahms and Wagner – a dual endorsement that is far from the easiest to have pulled off – not to mention minor luminaries such as Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and even the elderly Haydn, Médée is too often underrated, neglected, or just ignored. Its legacy to later opéra comique is clear, but so too is what that genre failed to take up, and may well have benefited from doing so; perhaps one might even say the same for much grand opéra. However much Berlioz may, amusingly, have fumed against Cherubini, he clearly learned a great deal, just as Cherubini, still more so, had from Gluck. (It is surely no coincidence that Riccardo Muti has shown himself such an unfashionable enthusiast for both.) The construction of scenes is often fascinating: a veritable missing chapter in so many accounts, more assumed than actual, of nineteenth-century musical history.

Créon (Vitalij Kowaljow)

Thomas Hengelbrock seemed more at home with that than with how the scenes might actually fit together, deplorably pausing to encourage, rather than at least to discourage, applause between them. But at least he brought that medium-term formal understanding to the table, along with a far from negligible ear for detail, in which the excellent players of the Vienna Philharmonic, on something approaching top form, truly shone. The chorus likewise sang with unfailing commitment: everything in Gluckian and other musical terms the production was not. Elena Stikhina gave a memorable, even moving, insofar as she was permitted, performance in the treacherous title role. Her coloratura proved searingly dramatic, a reinstatement Gluck himself would surely have understood and appreciated; her range of vocal colours was equally impressive. Dircé, in Stone’s world just another ‘real woman’, albeit less spirited, was fortunate to encounter such fine singing from Rosa Feola, who did whatever she could in these most trying circumstances. If Pavel Černoch sometimes sounded strained at the top of his vocal range, he proved tireless in communicating his difficult mix of allure and cowardice: unfailingly well-acted. Jason is just the thankless role you would expect it to be. Vitalij Kowaljow’s stentorian Créon and Alisa Kolosova’s rich-toned Néris likewise deserved better.

For Stone could not have shown less of an ear for music if he had tried. Perhaps he did. At any rate, his alternative irrelevancies distracted in the very worst way, even from themselves. By all means, comment on, question, even, if you are really sure about it, hold to account the work, of which the score is a crucial part. A production need not be its obedient servant. But to work so uncomprehendingly against it, by default rather than design: that was never likely to end well.

Bayreuth Festival (1) - Tannhäuser, 1 August 2011



(As usual, click on pictures to enlarge)

Festspielhaus, Bayreuth

Tannhäuser – Lars Cleveman

Elisabeth – Camilla Nylund

Venus – Stephanie Friede
Wolfram von Eschenbach – Michael Nagy
Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia – Günther Groissböck
Biterolf – Thomas Jesatko
Walther von der Vogelweide – Lothar Odinus
Heinrich der Schreiber – Arnold Bezuyen
Reinmar von Zweter – Martin Snell
Shepherd Boy – Katja Stuber

Sebastian Baumgarten (director)
Joep van Lieshour (set designs)
Nina von Mechow (costumes)
Franck Evin (lighting)
Christopher Kondek (video)
Carl Hegemann (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Thomas Hengelbrock (conductor)

Whilst I had not made every effort to avoid all contact with reviews, I had tended to pass them by, especially since this was a new production and I wanted to come to it as free of preconceptions as I could. Yet, though I had picked up little detail, I had sensed a widespread, perhaps even universal, negativity concerning Sebastian Baumgarten’s staging of Tannhäuser. That had spurred me on, at least to a certain extent, to search for what might be valuable in it, to attempt to discover what grounds there might be for a dissenting opinion. Unfortunately, that was to prove a devil’s advocacy too far.

Often one finds a good idea that might have been better presented, or a questionable idea that has nevertheless been thought through and consistently brought to the stage. Here, it took a long time to work out what on earth the idea might be, but a moment’s consideration to appreciate that it was not necessarily the best Konzept for Tannhäuser, and not much longer to realise that it was confusingly presented amongst a host of irrelevances, which seem designed merely to provoke rather than to enlighten. For it is the setting that dominates everything else, a chemical factory as designed by Joep van Lieshour. Or at least that is what I could garner from looking at it, with pipes, gas, an alcohol machine with daily rations, and stage business from employees which begins before the performance and continues throughout the intervals (along, during the first interval at least, with some people on film who appear to have no connection with anything or anyone else). It appears, from reading the programme, that Lieshour’s ‘obsessive Installation’ is the principal character (‘Hauptrolle’) in the production – so much for Tannhäuser and Elisabeth – and this installation’s business is recycling of human excrement into food and alcohol, the latter so as to pacify and therefore to prevent rebellion. (As the late Anna Russell used to say, ‘I’m not making this up, you know!’…) That might all have been an interesting idea in itself, but even with a casuistry that goes beyond the Jesuitical, it is difficult to relate it to Tannhäuser.

If one goes beyond the set – though it is difficult to do so, given its overwhelming presence – one finds perhaps an alternative Konzept, which may have something more to say about the work. The problem is more that its presentation is so unclear that puzzlement is a far more likely outcome. It seems that Baumgarten wishes to dissolve the polarity between the Wartburg and the Venusberg: a dissolution in which, after all, Wagner himself would engage in subsequent works. One really has to struggle, though, to work that out. If the ‘obsessive Installation’ is the Wartburg, the Venusberg emerges sometimes from within, or rather from underneath. Why its denizens resemble apes, though, I have no idea. Are they an extremely primitive life form, or the product of a chemical experiment? The odd thing is that so alienated has one become, it has become difficult even to care what the answer to such puzzles might be. Venus trying to break into the Wartburg during the song contest is a nice tough, akin to an unwanted guest at a wedding. But why, o why, does the production conclude with her having a baby? Had it been one of the other bestial brothel workers – Venus, by contrast, seems thoroughly human – one might have understood, but it is a strange plot twist for a madam, whom one might suspect to have gone beyond the age of child-bearing age. Perhaps that is the miracle for which all have sought? Or is it that she, unlike the others, is honest and therefore fruitful? One can only speculate. Moreover, there was no evidence of the director having engaged with the score at all: that Wagner wrote music dramas, or at least in this case Romantic operas, seemed to be of no interest to him.

I mentioned further irrelevances, so ought to list a few. People sit on stage: I had assumed they would turn out to be the Wartburg guests, but no, they merely sit on stage. Were they supposed to represent the rest of us in the audience? Or were they merely a product of a desire to sell more tickets? Who knows? The Shepherd Boy – not a boy – seems merely to be a drunken compère: I was put in mind of an especially irritating additional game-show character in a yellow jump suit from the 2006 Salzburg production of La finta semplice, but doubt that that would have been the dubious ‘inspiration’. Sub-Brechtian slogans appear on screens, or on placards, from time to time; sometimes they are literally meaningless. We seem to be meant to draw something from an apparent polarity between art (Kunst) and work (Arbeit), though quite what, in the context of the production, I do not know. A Virgin figure is sometimes shown on the screen, with especial emphasis on her foregrounded feet, whose toes wiggle. Sore feet from a pilgrimage?

Perhaps most perplexing of all is the question of who any of the people on stage really are. Since little attempt seems to be made to integrate the ‘obsessive Installation’ into the story, one ends up trying to assign them roles within the factory. Is Hermann the boss and Elisabeth therefore the boss’s daughter? Why then does she spend all of her time wandering listlessly around the factory? Most heiresses might have an alternative residence. Tasteless is perhaps the kindest description one can offer of having her make her exit by voluntarily entering a gas chamber: I do not know what else to say about that. And then, the final slogan, which at least presents Wagner’s words (to Cosima, 23 January 1883), namely that he still owed the world a Tannhäuser. I hope that Baumgarten did not mean that we now beheld the culmination of Wagner’s frustrated desire; I hope more strongly still that Baumgarten did not mean that he still owed the world a Tannhäuser and that we shall witness another attempt.

Musically, things were better, though rarely at a level for which one might justly have hoped (certainly inferior, taken as a whole, to the recent Covent Garden production, reviewed here). I apologise for devoting so much more attention to the staging, but that reflects the apparent priorities at work. Thomas Hengelbrock presented what at times proved to be an interestingly revisionist account of the score (essentially Dresden, but from Wagner’s 1845 lithographic copy). There were certain differences from what one usually hears, not least in terms of the first act music following the disappearance of the Venusberg, but without having the scores to hand, I cannot comment in detail. Perhaps more importantly, and as one might expect from someone with an ‘early music’ background, Hengelbrock stressed Wagner’s early Romantic inheritance rather than what the work was to become. (Personally, I always find myself regretting the omission of the music for Paris, but I appreciate that there are arguments for Dresden too.) Mendelssohn and Schumann seemed guiding spirits, especially during the Overture, though the latter’s presence was not always beneficial, Hengelbrock imparting a somewhat four-square quality to some of the phrasing. (In Schumann’s symphonies, and indeed many of his other works, the trick is to conceal that quality, not to bring it out.) There were other occasions on which he brought out Italianate qualities, not least in what became almost a stereotypical ‘love duet’ between Tannhäuser and Venus. There were colouristic benefits, however, especially with regard to the melting Harmoniemusik, for which the players must naturally be credited.

Lars Cleveman was an adequate Tannhäuser but hardly an interesting one. His tone appears to have become noticeably more baritonal than it was. Camilla Nylund had her moments as Elisabeth, but there were passages when she proved more than a little intonationally challenged, quite painfully during the second act. It was a pity that Stephanie Friede’s Venus became somewhat squally later on, since she displayed an intriguingly rich timbre during the first scene; perhaps her vocal portrayal will gather confidence over time. Two performances, however, were excellent. Günther Groissböck displayed the most recognisably ‘Wagnerian’ voice, and sang handsomely indeed as the Landgrave. And if Michael Nagy could not efface my memories of Christian Gerhaher at the aforementioned Covent Garden performances, no one in my experience ever has, whether live or on record. Nagy’s Wolfram was attentive to all aspects of the text, and impressively acted too: I do not recall Wolfram’s jealousy registering quite so clearly, or movingly. Especial mention must be accorded to the superlative Festival Chorus, excellently trained by Eberhard Friedrich, clarity and weight effortlessly combined.

Picture of the Konzept (Bayreuth Festival)

Finally, a few words concerning the programme booklets. I am sorry to say that the English translations read as if they had been produced by an extremely primitive version of the Google translation service. The only answer – fine for those of us who could, but doubtless irritating for those who could not – was to read the original German. But why, then, translate in the first place? I do not wish to harp on about the matter unduly, but to show that I am not being unreasonable, here is a sample, taken from a brief interview with Hengelbrock:

Right from the overture, things begin to mix up completely. But take the entrance aria of Elizabeth [sic] as an example. She does not appear as a chaste virgin, but when the ‘lift up bosom’, you can hear this in the surges of the strings. The stormy woodwind tripoles [triplets?] find themselves in jubilant aplomb in the Italian Symphony performed by Mendelssohn.