Doktor Faust, Semperoper Dresden, 19 March 2017

Semperoper

Images: Jochen Quast
Faust (Lester Lynch) in front of an image of Helen of Troy

Doktor Faust – Lester Lynch

Wagner – Michael Eder
Mephistopheles, Night Watchman – Mark Le Brocq
Duke of Parma, Megäros – Michael König
Duchess of Parma – Manuela Uhl
Master of Ceremonies, Gravis – Magnus Piontek
Soldier (Girl’s Brother), Natural Scientist – Sebastian Wartig
Lieutenant, Beelzebuth – Jürgen Müller
Students from Krakow – Eric Stokloßa, Bernhard Hansky, Allen Boxer
Theologian, Levis – Tilmann Rönnebeck
Asmodus, Jurist – Stephan Klemm
Students from Wittenberg – Gerald Hupach, Khanyiso Gwenxane, Alexandros Stavrakakis, Aaron Pegram, Benjamin Glaubitz
Tenor Solo – Aaron Pegram
Shy Person – Friedrich Darge
Women’s Voices – Roxana Incontrera, Angela Liebold, Ewa Zeuner
Dancers – Juliane Bauer, Marianne Heubaum, Nicole Meier, Björn Helget, Dennis Dietrich, Dominik Strobl
 

Keith Warner (director)

Anja Kühnhold (assistant director)
Tilo Steffens (set designs)
Manuel Kolip (video)
Julia Müer (costumes)
John Bishop (lighting)
Karl Alfred Schreiner (choreography)

Juliane Schunke (dramaturgy)

Sächsischer Staatsopernchor Dresden (chorus master: Jörn Hinnerk Andresen)

Säschsische Staatskapelle Dresden

Tomáš Netopil (conductor)

 

Wagner (Michael Eder) and Faust

One of the greatest twentieth-century operas, scandalously neglected, by a great twentieth-century composer at least as scandalously neglected as any other. We knew that already, of course, or many of us did, but no one could have been in any doubt after this excellent Dresden performance. Whatever minor cavils I might have – mostly concerning the edition used – they will not seriously detract from that. Doktor Faust received its premiere here at the Semperoper in 1925; this premiere of a new production by Keith Warner, conducted by Tomáš Netopil, proved a worthy successor.

 

Warner is a serious, thoughtful director: just the thing, one would have thought, for Busoni in general and Doktor Faust in particular, and so it turns out to be. Busoni insisted on a distinction – did not almost all interesting composers of his time? – between his own musical drama, its epic quality perhaps looking forward to that of Brecht and Weill (Busoni’s pupil), and Wagnerian music drama, which he considered incapable of greater intensification. That is clear enough, although on certain occasions, I found myself intrigued by aspects of the performance that brought Busoni closer to Wagner than one might have expected. In his Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music, Busoni had declared that ‘the greater part of modern theatre music suffers from the mistake of seeking to repeat the scenes passing on the stage’. Its ‘proper mission’, rather, was to interpret ‘the soul-states of the persons represented’, which might actually stand in opposition to the action. Warner respects the particular qualities of Busoni’s work, not least that distinction between the role of words and music (much, perhaps ironically, as many directors would now also do with Wagner) and, quite rightly, has staging interpret them and mediate between thereby. The assembled company thereby offers a rebuke to Schoenberg’s frankly silly (wilful?) misunderstanding, quite some time later, of what Busoni had said:

 

I remember how Busoni was the first to claim that music in opera must not express what is expressed by the action. The opera is principally the product of four factors: the text, the music, the stage, and the singer. If one of these constituents is allowed to disregard what the others do, why should they not also enjoy the same privilege? For instance, the singer? Could not Monastasos ask Sarastro to dance a ‘pas de deux’ with Pamina? Or could not Lohengrin immediately after his arrival sell the swan to a butcher and start auctioning his gondola?

 

Not that such reading against the grain would necessarily be a bad thing, if done intelligently; far from it. However, it is not in play here.

Faust, the Duchess of Parma (Manuela Uhl), and the chorus

 

What is in play is a staging that successfully navigates the interplay between such opposing and/or complementary features of Busoni’s work, to which we might add (again, not unlike Wagner, if with different means) tragedy and comedy, temporal and eternal, continuing and formally delineated, and not least, the ideal and the ‘merely existing’. As lain out in the (here unspoken) Prologue, the opera’s distinctly non-Goethian origins – like Wagner, Goethe is a figure from whom one might well decide to keep one’s distance here – in earlier puppet theatre remind us that there is more than one route to selling one’s soul and indeed to enlightenment. We have been led to think for ourselves, though, before the formal beginning of the performance, when we see a group of students (dancers, as we later discover, offering intelligently choreographed commentary and dramatic incitement) perusing their books, what they are reading or thinking (presumably) projected onto the curtain. And so, when the curtain rises during the ‘Symphonia’, we see hints at earlier historical attempts at solving the eternal riddles of existence, parading ancient philosophers and Christ (I think) amongst them, the twin roots of our (and Faust’s) Western tradition. He, not unreasonably, seems very much weighed down by it all at his desk, the bargain he strikes in some sense a response to a depression that is perhaps both personal and collective.

Mephistopheles (Mark Le Brocq), Faust, and the chorus

 

The fateful journey through which Mephistopheles takes our hero has elements again both of history and eternity. Indeed, even before the appearance of the final spirit, Faust has opened the book, Clavis astartis magica, to find a modern laptop. What might just seem a time-travelling gimmick, however, has a real dramatic point, increasingly so as the evening progresses. We place our faith in new methods of communication, new route to enlightenment, but do we thereby lose our diminish our critical faculties? Of course Faust would choose the sixth spirit, the one who travels as quickly as the thoughts of man (wonderfully double-edged!), just as we sit here writing and reading online. But what trickery is there in the Mephistophelian magic that enables the brutal murder of the girl’s (Gretchen’s) brother, the glittering seduction of the Duchess of Parma, and most glaringly here, the apparition of Helen of Troy? The action has taken us forward, through the age of Einstein to that of Warhol (amongst others featured). In the Wittenberg tavern, transposed to a transatlantic flower-power joint, Mephistopheles provides Faust with the requisite hallucinatory drug to smoke. The apparition then is real, in the quotidian sense, but is it real in the Hegelian, philosophical sense? Perhaps, then, as with Wagner again, the scene is very well set for the (relative, at least) victory of Schopenhauer in the final scene, Busoni at least as explicit here as his great predecessor in the crucial importance of the philosophy of the Will. Too much metaphysics, or not enough? The production is open enough to have us wonder.

Mephistopheles

 

I wondered, though, in that vein, whether we might have been better off with Philipp Jarnach’s edition, as premiered in Dresden all those years earlier, rather than the more recent version by Antony Beaumont. Beaumont’s version, incorporating material not used by Jarnach, is undoubtedly fascinating and closer to Busoni’s intentions. There remains, however, a nagging doubt, and I say this without wishing to posit a philistine distinction between ‘scholar’ and ‘composer’, that Jarnach’s punchier solution actually, in its relative infidelity (or, if you prefer, insufficiency), offers the better theatre. We should lose a good deal of the explicitly Schopenhauerian conclusion, yet the admittedly melodramatic final bars do their work so brilliantly that I missed them greatly. ‘Sollte diese Mann verunglückt sein?’ when spoken, offers an ending that is both teasingly ironic and recognisably tragic. Whether one wants that is, I suppose, largely a matter of taste. I had never heard the Beaumont ending in the theatre, and do not begrudge it. Might there, perhaps, though, be in the future some possibility of combining the best features of both? This is not, after all, Don Giovanni (about which more soon, also from Dresden).

 

The arguments are finely balanced, I accept. Ultimately, it was far more important that Netopil and the Staatskapelle Dresden offered so expert an account of the score. The orchestra’s strengths were just as strongly in evidence as if they had been playing a repertoire work by Wagner or Strauss: perhaps a little darker of hue than they would have been in the latter, again suggesting a greater, despite-himself, kinship between Wagner and Busoni than many of us might have expected, but also harking back to the great (despite the cuts) recording by Rafael Kubelík with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. (Kent Nagano in Lyons offers an account textually preferable and, on that account absolutely necessary, yet by dramatic comparison, a little more bloodless.) There was heft and there was light; there was mahogany and there was gold; and so on and so forth. Everything was well-paced, with excellent momentum. If there were a few occasions on which I thought the demonic sardonicism might have been played up a little more (notably the Flea Song), emphasising the closed nature of the form as well as its integration, then that stands at least on the verge of nitpicking.

The end

 

Lester Lynch gave a fine portrayal of the title role, which went from strength to strength. It is by any standards a big part, and there were a few moments before the interval (during the Parma scene) when he sounded a little tired, if only relatively speaking, but as his anguish, weighed down by his conscience (personal and collective, as mentioned earlier?) came to the fore, there was no faulting the intelligent and ultimately deeply moving quality of his response. Mark Le Brocq’s Mephistopheles was very much in the mould of Kim Begley (for Nagano), a Loge on steroids, with a weird, unearthly tendency to camp that chilled rather than merely amused. I was a little surprised at some of the strange German heard from Manuela Uhl as the Duchess of Parma, but hers is a thankless role, and she generally did what she could with it. Aside from Michael Eder’s somewhat underpowered Wagner (no, not that Wagner), the rest of the cast was thoroughly impressive, not least collaboratively, proving much more than the sum of its parts. So too was the chorus, not just vocally, although it was little short of outstanding in that respect, but in stage business too. Warner, Netopil, and the assembled company presented us, then, with a true company achievement: just what opera should be. Whatever Schoenberg might have said…

 

Katya Kabanova, Opéra national de Paris, 1 April 2011

Palais Garnier

Katerina Kabanova – Angela Denoke
Marfa Kabanicha – Jane Henschel
Varvara – Andrea Hill
Boris Grigoryevich – Jorma Silvasti
Vanya Kudrjas – Ales Briscein
Tikhon Ivanich Kabanov – Donald Kaasch
Saviol Dikoy – Vincent Le Texier
Kuligin – Michał Partyka
Glacha – Virginia Leva-Poncet
Feklucha – Sylvia Delaunay
Woman – Marie-Cécile Chevassus
Man – Ulrich Voss

Christoph Marthaler (director)
Joachim Rathke (co-director)
Anna Viebrock (sets, costumes)
Olaf Winter (lighting)
Thomas Stache (choreography)
Stefanie Carp (dramaturgy)

Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus master: Patrick Marie Aubert)
Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Tomáš Netopil (conductor)


For the third and last of my operatic nights in Paris, I remained with the Opéra national de Paris, but moved across town from the Bastille to the Palais Garnier, famously ‘in the style of Napoleon III’. Christoph Marthaler’s production of Katya Kabanova was on the menu. The Paris Opera had not staged Katya until as recently as 1988, in Götz Friedrich’s production, though the Belgrade Opera (!) had presented it in 1959 at the Théâtre des Nations, and the Opéra-Comique had offered a French-language version in 1968. Marthaler’s production was first staged at the Salzburg Festival in 1998, and came to the Palais Garnier in 2004, moving from one Gérard Mortier stronghold to another; it is encouraging to note that Nicolas Joel has not turned his back on every aspect of Mortier’s rule. It is also worth noting that it took Mortier to bring The Cunning Little Vixen to the Paris Opera: I saw the first, rather wonderful production only three years ago! The longtime neglect of Janáček, whether in France, Britain, or elsewhere, is truly baffling, yet it persists, giving all the more reason to be thankful for this Katya.

Images: Christian Leiber

I am not sure why Marthaler’s production has been performed at the Garnier rather than the Bastille; Friedrich’s, apparently, moved to the latter on revivals. Whether this were the intention or no, the contrast between the Garnier’s preposterously lovable extravagance – music almost seems beside the point – and the mise-en-scène was stark indeed. I can hear some readers groaning at the mere mention of a drab Eastern European apartment block, here powerfully evoked by Anna Viebrock’s set designs, but the test is whether the setting works. For the most part, I think, it does. The original Ostrovsky play, The Storm, and the opera are both set in a mid-nineteenth-century Russian provincial town, but the ‘provincial’ is more to the point than the ‘mid-nineteenth-century’, and even that could, I imagine, readily be translated into the suburban. The closed moral world of the apartment block’s inhabitants and their hypocrisy are searingly portrayed, choral hymn singing emanating and visible from one of the flats above. Indeed, one of the great virtues of this production is a chance to observe some of the goings-on elsewhere, whether from the ‘virtuous’, the potentially sympathetic (the violin soloist, not in the orchestra, but practising at his window), or the drunk (comedian, Ulrich Voss, whose shouting and staggering at the beginning of the third act will not have been to all tastes). Their uniform turning away as Katya’s torment moves her toward suicide is simple, powerful, and terrifying. There is, perhaps loss in that we never reach the Volga, yet claustrophobia is heightened by Katya drowning herself in the block’s courtyard fountain. I also found it a little confusing that characters exited through what appeared to be a wardrobe (this is hardly Narnia!), but not to worry.

Tomáš Netopil led the orchestra with considerable verve, although tension was not always maintained as it might be. The sheer orchestral delight and dramatic fervour of a conductor such as Sir Charles Mackerras is not his – yet. Angela Denoke was suffering from some ailment, according to an announcement made prior to the performance. I should never have been able to tell, for hers was a powerful portrayal indeed. Katya’s goodness shone through, yet never in an unbelievable way; one also knew that this was a woman, and a woman with needs. I believed in every word and every note she sang. Andrea Hill and Ales Briscein make for a winning couple as Varvara and Kudrjas, bright of tone and manner, though Varvara’s dancing threatens to irritate after a while, however much it may be intended dramatically to distinguish her from the stifling ‘morality’ of her environment. Not every performance was so impressive, though. Donald Kaasch passed muster as Tikhon, but sometimes sounded vocally as opposed to dramatically weak. (It did not help, moreover, that he looked more like the Kabanicha’s husband than her son.) Jorma Silvasti’s Boris lacked necessary allure: one needs to have some sense of what might attract Katya to him.

However, as so often, the Kabanicha threatened to steal the show, yet creditably did not quite do so. What a truly appalling character she is! We do not, it is true, know what has made her like that; whether it was something akin to what Katya herself suffers must remain speculation, though one cannot help but wonder. Be that as it may, her viciousness seems almost unparalleled in all opera. Jane Henschel quite made the character her own, no mere caricature, all the more malicious for presenting a properly sung portrayal. Interestingly, she will be singing Mrs Sedley at Covent Garden later this season: the more vicious the society... Her outdoor exhibitionism with Vincent Le Texier’s nasty Dikoy points up the hypocrisy nicely; she knows exactly what she was doing when she waves at the neighbours. Once they have withdrawn to her apartment, a quick spurt from the water fountain suggests that all is over as quickly as one might expect. The selfishness of the character is almost ritually enhanced by periodic retreats into her bedroom, where she will turn on the television or listen to the radio, eat some chocolates, lie down on the bed, and play with a squeaky toy. Production and performance work in tandem.

I was in two minds as to the delivery via loudspeakers of the choral singing at the end being. The effect was alienating, but I am not quite sure that gain outweighed loss. More importantly, however, I was profoundly moved by the performance as whole, once again marvelling at what a masterpiece this is. Marthaler will soon be directing more Janáček, in the guise of The Makropulos Case at this year’s Salzburg Festival, a production to which I look forward greatly. For those interested, his production is available (with Denoke and Henschel) on DVD; I have not seen the performance.