Musikfest Berlin (2) – RSB/Jurowski: Die Frau ohne Schatten, 1 September 2019

Philharmonie

Images: © Monika Karczmarczyk

Emperor – Torsten Kerl

Empress – Anne Schwanewilms

Nurse – Ildikó Komlósi

Spirit-Messenger – Yasushi Hirano

Barak – Thomas Johannes Mayer

Dyer’s Wife – Ricarda Merbeth

Apparition of Youth – Michael Pflumm
Voice of the Falcon – Nadezhda Gulitskaya

Voice from Above – Karolina Gumos
Guardian of the Temple Threshold – Andrey Nemzer

The One-Eyed – Tom Erik Lie

The One-Armed – Jens Larsen

The Hunchback – Christoph Späth

Night-Watchmen – Christian Oldenburg, Philipp Alexander Behr, Artyom Wasnetkov

Maids, Unborn, Children’s Voices – Sophie Klußmann, Verena Usemann, Jennifer Gleinig, Alice Lackner, Vizma Zvaigzne

Children’s Choir of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (chorus director: Vinzenz Weissenburger)

Berlin Radio Chorus (chorus director: Benjamin Goodson)

Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra

Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

Concert performances of opera are strange things. So too, of course, are stagings of opera, albeit often in different ways; Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal knew that better than most, on which see (and hear) Ariadne auf Naxos. Yet a concert performance will likely ever remain ‘ein sonderbar Ding’, as the Marschallin might have put it. Important also is the way one comes, either individually or as an audience, to such a performance. Does one view – a fraught verb, here, but I shall stick with it – it as closer to an audio recording, in which one follows the libretto, even the score, and perhaps goes so far as to stage it in one’s head? Does one take the more overtly reactionary view of expressing relief that the work is not being messed about by a stage director who may be clueless or may just have ideas other than one’s own? Or does one view the situation in more positive terms, as an opportunity to concentrate on the opera’s musical qualities, not so much undistracted, as heard in superior performing conditions? Symphony orchestras may have the opportunity to fill in harmful gaps in their repertoires: does it make sense for an orchestra to play Beethoven and Mahler, without ever touching more than a Wagner overture or prelude, or to play Strauss tone poems without reference to Strauss’s operas? It may be a matter of cost, too, and the only way some works will gain a hearing at all, especially in countries less blessed operatically than those of the German-speaking world.

Those and other positions are, of course, far from mutually exclusive. Moreover, one’s aesthetic stance may well be called into question: generally a very good thing. Much, for instance, as I know and feel the Ring should be staged; much as I long for a production that begins to do it justice (alas, only one to date in my live theatrical experience); I also know that two of the most powerful Wagnerian experiences of my life have been ‘concert stagings’ and concert performances of the Ring, both in the distinctly unpromising terrain of the Royal Albert Hall. Ultimately, a performance is what it is: a unique event, with affinities to others, yet never quite to be reduced to them. Why such ruminations, then? Partly to try to understand my reaction; I have not, Parsifal-like, come from nowhere. But also, I hope, to try to help readers who may have been more involved than I found myself by this Frau ohne Schatten to understand.

Ultimately, I wonder whether this is an opera that lends itself especially well to concert performance. One may well, with equal justice, wonder from its stage directions whether it lends itself well to staged performance. But most of us by now have, thank God, moved on from any conception of slavish adherence to such directions. Directors as different as Robert Wilson, Claus Guth, and Krzysztof Warlikowski have all brought imaginative and communicative standpoints to bear on the work. There have, of course, been less successful stagings, a nadir surely being Christof Loy’s ‘I cannot be bothered to stage the work at all’ production for Salzburg, but that will always be the case. This is a musical drama, in many ways a complex musical drama and for many a problematic one too. That need not in itself entail staging, but I felt too little dramatic thrust as a whole on this occasion: not so much from the singers, most of whom tried to inject a degree or two of such dynamism, as from Vladimir Jurowski.

As with much other opera I have heard from him, in and out of the opera house, Jurowski’s conducting seemed not only oddly formalist but, within that framework, sectional sometimes to the point of dramatic inertia. It was not so much a lack of longer line, a common problem among lesser conductors, but what came across as a definite aesthetic stance, only undermined by whipping up of highly conventional ‘excitement’ – getting louder, faster – at the ends of many sections: the close of the second act a case in point. I am not sure one can have it both ways; or rather one can, but should one? More conversational passages, moreover, seemed strangely underplayed, as if they were acres of undistinguished recitativo secco (an exaggeration, I know, but never mind), for which tightness of orchestral control might be relinquished not for flexibility as for nonchalance and even slight fuzziness (if nothing on the scale of Zubin Mehta’s recent unhappy way with the work, also in Berlin). There were passages of great interest, to be sure, although more timbral than harmonic. Jurowski seemed happiest when able to apply unusually hard-edged, even brittle, tone to the work, as if to undermine its sumptuousness. Strauss as ’20s Hindemith has a certain fascination: except such a conducting stance seemed sooner rather than latter forgotten, whatever the excellence of playing, whether in solo or ensemble, by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. Such excellence was not quite, however, accompanied by the familiarity that an opera house orchestra would have brought to the score, for how could it be? Likewise, the singing of the Berlin Radio Chorus, very fine in its way, did not and could not speak of the immersion a stage run could. Interestingly, the Staatsoper children’s choir suggested stronger memories of the stage (in that Guth production, as conducted by Mehta).

Ildikó Komlósi as the Nurse

What of the solo singing? In London, Jurowski has made some very odd choices with singers. That was perhaps less the case here, although amongst the principals, it was only really Ildikó Komlósi’s Nurse whose musico-dramatic star shone as brightly as any on stage. The role is a gift, of course, Strauss and Hofmannsthal at their collaborative best, but Komlósi grabbed the gift and made it her own as a singing actress who can, unquestionably, sing. Ricarda Merbeth also gave a good account her role in a sincere, musical, verbally attentive performance as the Dyer’s Wife. If Thomas Johannes Mayer’s Barak sometimes would have benefited from greater heft, he nonetheless brought similar verbal acuity to his performance. Torsten Kerl and Anne Schwanewilms were more awkwardly cast, Kerl’s Emperor often sounding distinctly elderly, sometimes overwhelmed by an orchestra Jurowski did a great deal to keep down. Schwanewilms had some wonderful moments; there was no doubting the dedication of her performance. There were other moments, however, in which the role now sounded sadly beyond her. ‘Supporting’ roles were generally very well taken, though Nadezhda Gulitskaya’s Falcon will not have appealed to all vocal tastes. I have not heard a countertenor sing the Guardian of the Temple Threshold before, but Andrey Nemzer certainly made his presence felt in an intriguingly florid account.

Much to ponder, then, and the audience reacted with enthusiasm less alloyed. This seems to be the beginning of a Strauss opera series for the orchestra, akin to that of Wagner’s ‘canonical’ dramas under Marek Janowski. There was certainly enough of merit here to warrant keeping an eye – and ear – open for future instalments.

(This performance will be broadcast on 7 September 2019, 18.05 CEST, across Europe, including UKW, Kabel, and Digitalradio in Berlin.)

Rienzi, Deutsche Oper, 18 April 2019

Deutsche Oper

RIENZI, DER LETZE DER TRIBUNEN von Richard Wagner, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Premiere am 24. Januar 2010, copyright: Bettina Stöß

Rienzi – Torsten Kerl

Irene – Elisabeth Teige

Steffano Colonna – Andrew Harris

Adriano – Annika Schlicht

Paolo Orsini – Dong-Hwan Lee

Cardinal Orvieto – Derek Welton

Baroncelli – Clemens Bieber

Cecco del Vecchio – Stephen Bronk

Rienzi double – Gernot Frischling

Philipp Stölzl (director, set designs)

Mara Kurotschka (assistant director)

Ulrike Siegrist (set designs)

Kathi Maurer, Ursula Kudrna (costumes)

Lorenzo Nencini (revival director)

fettFilm (video)

Chorus and Extra Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus director: Jeremy Bines)

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Evan Rogister (conductor)

At last, an opportunity for me to see Rienzi, the only Wagner opera I had yet to see in the theatre. A long-held ambition fulfilled, then? Yes, just about. Alas, that was about it, though. There were two major, frankly insurmountable problems: first, the miserable conducting of Evan Rogister; second, the butchered version employed, so extreme as to render what we heard musically and dramatically nonsensical. Rarely in the theatre and never in the Deutsche Oper have I heard such a sustained display of incompetence in the pit as Rogister’s. The number of times the Overture came close – or more than close – to falling apart did not bode well. Singers, solo and chorus, often proved alarmingly out of sync with the orchestra; there was, moreover, no sign of the conductor so much as noticing, let alone putting things right. Occasionally, the music came into focus; it was bound to eventually, I suppose, though never for long. Interpretation? Forget it. It was hardly surprising that, for long stretches, this great Wagner orchestra seemed to have given up. Was this in fact Covent Garden’s dread Daniel Oren working under a pseudonym? A dark thought indeed. One to avoid with equal vigour, I fear.

However, even a Daniel Barenboim – if only he would consider one day conducting Wagner’s Cinderella – would have struggled with the version of the score handed to him. The composer struggled with its unintentional length, of course. His witness in Mein Leben is instructive and entertaining. Quite what it would mean to present a ‘complete’ Rienzi is unclear; the closest we may come is the version conducted by Edward Downes for a BBC radio recording, and even that falls short according to some understandings. Whilst there is something to be said for glorying in its length, for rendering its problems a virtue, that is unlikely to be an option any time soon. Cuts are, in principle, not the end of the world – and may, for many, prove the opera’s redemption. This, however, was something else, not only in the savagery of its cuts but in there seemingly arbitrary nature, as if someone had attempted to present a ‘children’s version’, but had not really tried, and had succeeded only in cutting it down to whatever the specified size had been. The number and nature of non sequiturs, musical just as much as dramatic, straightforwardly defied comprehension.

Of the work’s roots in Meyerbeerian grand opéra, there was well-nigh nothing remaining in structure, and merely the odd procession (usually truncated) as meaningless evidential detail. It is difficult to imagine someone making anything of the nobles’ role, let alone identity, nor indeed of anyone else’s. Of the seeds of what was to come, often overlooked, the little that remained ironically resembled, apparently more by accident than design, Wagner’s notorious demolition of Meyerbeer in Opera and Drama: an ‘outrageously coloured, historico-romantic, devilish-religious, sanctimonious-lascivious, risqué-sacred, saucy-mysterious, sentimental-swindling, dramatic farrago’, albeit hacked away at a bargain-basement cut-price quite at odds with anything might could have imparted meaning to the experience. Poetic justice? Perhaps, but to what end?

That the work’s promise – more than promise, as any of us who knows it will attest – nonetheless shone through is testimony not only to intrinsic merit, but also to some fine singing and, to a lesser extent, to Philipp Stölzl’s 2010 production. The latter is doubtless one-sided. In other circumstances, I might have been more inclined to complain about its too-ready association of Rienzi with fascism and, in the case of the Overture, with Hitler himself. The vision, in more than one sense, is at least memorable there: a Rienzi body-double looking out over the Alps from Berchtesgaden, listening to the music, conducting along, and resolving to rule the world. Use of video – great credit should go here to fettFILM – is unnervingly effective, permitting Rienzi as silent film speaker to address the masses, to turn them, even as we see and hear something else. A fascist design aesthetic in dress, colour, and architecture heightens the unsubtle line; at least, though, it is a line. In any case, is subtlety really what we are looking for in Rienzi? The chorus in particular might nonetheless have been better directed. Stölzl’s trademark tableaux vivants are one thing; they work more meaningfully in his Deutsche Oper Parsifal, I think, even though that came later. Too often, though, one had the impression poor chorus members were merely being left to fend for themselves.

In the title role, Torsten Kerl had his moments, although too often he proved vocally stretched. There could be no faulting his enthusiasm, though, nor his skills as a film propagandist. (His Overture body double, Gernot Frischling, deserves credit too.) Annika Schlicht, however, in the Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient role of Adriano, proved the star of the show: clear as a bell, bright and subtle as a speaking clarinet, and very much a breeches mezzo on stage. (Schröder-Devrient seems to have struggled to learn the part: there were clearly no such difficulties here.) I hope to hear – and see – more from her. Insofar as the cuts permitted, Elisabeth Teige also impressed as Irene, as did those assuming what were now less smaller than miniscule roles. Rienzi, though, deserved so much better. On the positive side, I stand all the more determined to see a production and to hear a performance – preferably in tandem – that in some sense do justice to this singular work. And if someone would kindly return the manuscript from Russia, that would be nice too.

Siegfried, Opéra national de Paris, 30 March 2011

Opéra Bastille

Siegfried – Torsten Kerl
Mime – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke
The Wanderer – Juha Uusitalo
Alberich – Peter Sidhom
Fafner – Stephen Milling
Erda – Qiu Lin Zhang
Woodbird – Elena Tsallagova
Brünnhilde – Katarina Dalayman

Günter Krämer (director)
Jürgen Backmann (set designs)
Falk Bauer (costumes)
Diego Leetz (lighting)
Otto Pichler (choreography)

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Philippe Jordan (conductor)

Mime (Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke) and Siegfried (Torsten Kerl)
 (Image: Elisa Haberer)



What to do for a Siegfried, or indeed for a Siegfried? Our age stands, not without reason, suspicious of charismatic heroes. Nietzsche would doubtless have pointed to our décadence and likened our descent to that from Homerian epic and the dramas of Æschylus and Sophocles, to the dramas of Euripides he so despised. After Freud, we tend to prefer the neo-Euripidean psychology of anti-heroes – not that psychology is absent in Wagner; after Hitler, we tend to prefer the venal sham of so-called representative democracy to those who would overthrow it, out of fear, a quality quite unknown to Siegfried, that we might arrive at something even worse. Either way, we remain ensnared by what Adorno and Horkheimer so tellingly termed the dialectic of enlightenment, which they traced as far back even as Homer’s Odysseus. Yet Siegfried remains. We struggle to find anyone who can sing the role, let alone to believe in him, at least in the drama that bears his name, the betrayals and tragedy of Götterdämmerung perhaps speaking more easily to us. Siegfried remains too, the ‘scherzo’ of the Ring, an aptly Beethovenian description – Wagner rarely sounds more Beethovenian than at the end of the first act – yet a challenge to an age that rarely seems able to deal with Beethoven, at least the symphonic Beethoven, either. We can only marvel at Furtwängler, quite unable, it would seem, to match him, rarely even to approach him. Yet it is not so straightforward even as that, for the tale of the boy without fear becomes intertwined with that of Wotan’s final renunciation. Of the four Ring dramas, Siegfried makes least sense by itself; it can only be understood as the third part of the cycle. Performers and directors need not only to balance the two, but to bring them into fruitful conflict.

If it would be an exaggeration to say that Günter Krämer straightforwardly sets his Siegfried in the 1960s, there are certainly elements of that era to the setting, which makes chronological sense in terms of the Speer-like designs for Valhalla at its height in Die Walküre. Mime appears to live in a relatively swish, if undeniably bad-taste, apartment. The plant growing there looks as though it might explain a good deal, including the bear’s exit through a lift: were both Siegfried and Mime hallucinating? The time-setting makes a good fit with Wagner’s conception too, given that hopes for revolution were still in the air: a Junge Siegfried twinned with les événements is far from absurd, especially in Paris, though it is a moot point whether Peter Wapnewski’s ‘rebel without a consciousness’ (Richard Wagner in seinen Helden (Munich, 1978), p.169) should have lost it through smoking marijuana rather than never having possessed it in the first place. Designs for this act are garish, verging upon psychedelic.

However, a crucial aspect of Mime’s portrayal edges us into the 1970s. Perhaps it would be hoping too much for subtlety in this respect, since it might therefore have gone unnoticed, but Mime appears, through Krämer’s direction, Falk Bauer’s costumes, and Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s acting on stage, to be an outrageously caricatured homosexual, hand gestures, dancing and all, with definite tendencies towards transvestism at least. (Is that yet another dig at Wagner and his pink silk, I wonder?) Given that (s)he appears as something of a cross between John Inman and Mollie Sugden, I could not help but wonder whether Krämer were a devotee of Are You Being Served? Indeed I half expected Miss Johannes Brahms to enter stage left à la Baba the Turk. The concept takes us away from endless debates, whatever one thinks about them, concerning anti-Semitism, and retains the character’s outsider status, and actually seems to be permissible on stage, in a way that a ‘Jewish’ caricature of Mime, were one so inclined, would not be. It also opens up a new angle upon the echt-heterosexual Siegfried’s instinctive aversion towards a parent who claims to be both mother and father, though is actually neither, and who certainly has no offspring of his own. Whilst preparing to forge, Siegfried – immediately, one assumes, bien dans sa peau – mockingly mimics Mime’s gestures; clearly the outcast’s place is in the kitchen. Whether we consider it all a bit of fun, veering dangerously close to homophobia, or even, implausibly, making a serious point concerning gay adoption, is probably more a matter of taste, or at least sensitivity, than anything else. It occurred to me that someone with post-modernist inclination towards hyphens and parentheses might have entitled the first act ‘Mime: (A) His/her-(s)tory’; it is certainly one way to address the paucity of women in the drama. Perhaps a thesis has been launched. At any rate, a possible way of representing Siegfried’s upbringing somewhat overshadows, indeed becomes, the plot.

The Wanderer arrives as a tramp: fair enough. In an interesting touch, he sheds his vagrant’s clothes to become a more recognisable chief of the gods as his wager, whose brutality is often glossed over, with Mime progresses. Brutality, in terms of the aftermath of war, is certainly present in Neidhöhle too. The staging of the second act Prelude is especially interesting. Nude soldiers – although, thanks to Diego Leetz’s thickly atmospheric green lighting, it is quite some time before one knows whether they are nude – carry the Nibelung hoard in dragon formation. (One sees what one hears in the music: an all too rare occurrence in stage direction.) The hoard is composed of crates, which, one eventually makes out, have ‘Rheingold’ inscribed upon them. At the end of the Prelude, the soldiers open the crates, to reveal the weaponry with which the hoard will be defended. Rentier capital – Fafner’s Proudhonian ‘What I lie on, I own’ – constitutes power as lethal as Donner’s hammer or indeed the machine guns we see. Fafner, when he actually appears, is carried aloft, replete with crown: there is something tellingly phantasmagorical to this portrayal, almost Wizard of Oz-like. And that, of course, is at least part of the key to the Tarnhelm’s magic.

If that hits home with considerable dramatic punch, other elements of the production, especially later on, convince less. The Woodbird’s representation on stage as another wartime refugee will not please everyone, and it is a decidedly peculiar conception of an unsullied Voice of Nature. Whatever one thinks of that, it seems needlessly confused to have her played by an actress, whilst Elena Tsallagova sings the role – on this occasion, not without uncertainly – offstage. The office environment of the Wotan-Erda scene does no particular harm, but makes no particular point either: it seems somewhat clichéd. However, there is tightening of tension thereafter. The confrontation between Wotan and Siegfried for once genuinely seems a real struggle. Wagner’s emphasis might have changed from his original conception, but this is still the moment when the sword of revolution shatters the spear of state. For all our – and in many respects, the production’s – reluctance to deal with revolutionary heroism, this deed of an Hegelian world-historical hero registers with surprising force. The backdrop to the final scene both confuses and illuminates. By returning us to the Walküre and Rheingold Speer set, some form of continuity is registered, likewise the changing fortunes of ‘GERMANIA’, now down to only its first three letters. One has to accept that this is just a backdrop rather than Valhalla itself, for the sake of any sense of place.

What possesses genuine dramatic power is the idea of having Valhalla’s heroes, old-fashioned in (almost) genuine Teutonic helmets and so forth, on stage above what ought to be Brünnhilde’s rock, ready and yet unable to defend or perhaps even to attain her, unlike Siegfried, the apparent harbinger of a new age – or should that be a New Age? Wotan, or rather, as I discovered at the curtain call, his body double, staggers up the steps, yet has to be assisted by his heroes, and even then it remains a struggle. So the balance or dialectic between the two principal plot strands, if not perfect, is reinstated. Moreover, the spatial separation between Brünnhilde and her old life is rendered glaringly apparent: she is now ‘purely human’, or, as we shall doubtless discover, ‘human, all too human’. Balanced against that signal achievement, I did not find much sense of annihilation, whether political or metaphysical, at the end. Perhaps the words are held to accomplish that by themselves, and perhaps they should, though my experience is that, somewhat bafflingly, audiences often seem oblivious to what precisely Siegfried and Brünnhilde have actually been singing.

In the pit, Philippe Jordan seemed to have the ‘scherzo’ element well in hand. Masculine drive, delineating the trajectory of Siegfried’s behaviour, was counterbalanced by a welcome ‘French’ – perhaps ‘feminine’ – range of colour in the orchestra. Adorno would surely have applauded the sense of phantasmagoria, which yet did not seem, as sometimes it did during the Berlin Philharmonic’s Aix-en-Provence performances, to be present merely for its own sake. For the most part, the orchestra was on fine form, the ‘Forest Murmurs’ magical indeed. Moreover, I do not think I have heard more impressively resounding kettledrums in this work than here: not a trivial point in recounting the tale of Fafner. It seemed, however, that the early third-act slackening of tension onstage was mirrored in the pit too. The structure of this act is especially difficult to hold together: I have heard far worse, but there were moments of meandering.

Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s vocal performance was as impressive as his stage portrayal: the first act really was Mime’s story. His wheedling second-act deceptions were just as impressive, likewise the ‘evil stock-jobbers’ satire’ (Hans Mayer, ‘The “Ring” as a bourgeois parable. Wieland Wagner’s new conception and its realisation in Bayreuth,’ in Programmhefte der Bayreuther Festspiele, booklet for Götterdämmerung, 1966, p.33) confrontation with Peter Sidhom’s verbally attentive Alberich. Juha Uusitalo handled well the changing demands of role and production: both Wanderer and the emerging-returning Wotan were finely characterised and well delivered. Stephen Milling’s Fafner, however, threatened to overshadow all and sundry; his was an excellent performance in every way. The deep beauty of Qiu Lin Zhang’s voice and the dignity of her stage presence made for a notable Erda, though there were moments of less than perfect intonation. It is a cruel thing to leave Brünnhilde’s entry so late and then to expect her to do what she must. Katarina Dalayman’s delivery was not perfect but nevertheless offered moments of scintillation that augur well for Götterdämmerung. What of the hero himself? Torsten Kerl emerged with considerable credit. His resources, quite understandably, were sapped somewhat during the third act, but he recovered for a powerful final duet. Kerl was surprisingly vigorous throughout: his vocal reserves would appear to have grown considerably. What, then, to do for a Siegfried or a Siegfried? One could do much worse than start here.

Der fliegende Holländer, Royal Opera, 23 February 2009

Royal Opera House

The Dutchman – Bryn Terfel
Senta – Anja Kampe
Daland – Hans-Peter König
Erik – Torsten Kerl
Mary – Claire Shearer
Steersman – John Tessier

Tim Albery (director)
Michael Levine (designs)
Constance Hoffmann (costumes)
David Finn (lighting)

Chorus of the Royal Opera House (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Marc Albrecht (conductor)

The Flying Dutchman seems as ill-fated at Covent Garden as its eponymous hero is in Wagner’s drama. I do not remember anything much about Ian Judge’s production, last seen in 2000, but I do remember some of the worst Wagner conducting I have ever had the misfortune to encounter, courtesy of the incomprehensibly esteemed – at least in some quarters – Simone Young. Marc Albrecht, whose work I had greatly admired last year in Munich for The Bassarids, was not so bad as that; at least he did not sound as though he was learning the score en route. On the evidence of this performance, however, he is no Wagnerian, which is distinctly odd, given that the very qualities standing him in such good stead in Henze’s opera should have done so here too. That is why I wonder whether Albrecht’s decidedly stop-start, non-‘music-drama’ approach was deliberate: a revisionist attempt to direct us to (a handful of) the opera’s sources rather than to explore what it became. The Wagnerian melos – I do not believe it in any way illegitimate to employ terms Wagner had yet to coin – was nowhere to be heard. Instead of a guiding symphonic thread, there was merely a collection of numbers strung together, connected by carelessly-constructed – in performance, that is – orchestral passages. A backward-looking approach might have worked in theory, I suppose, at least for those more charmed by the hangovers from Italian opera than inspired by the extraordinary dramatic journey on which Wagner here truly commences. Even then, quite why one would wish thus to reduce the work’s stature would remain a matter for the psychoanalyst. In reality, however, all that was accomplished was to make a taut, concise score drag interminably. The gains that ought to have accrued from the rightful decision to perform the work without an interval – in this case, I do not think the alternative is even worth considering – were squandered by a performance that married drawn out, lifeless slow passages with caricatured Solti-like, or Solti-lite, excitability. There were also serious lapses of coordination between stage and pit, especially when Solti-lite came to the fore. Given the wrongheadedness of the conducting, it was perhaps surprising to note that the orchestra itself was on rather good form. A few slips notwithstanding, there was a commendable richness of string tone, complemented by some splendid contributions from the brass. Orchestral execution in the Overture was of a high standard, yet it appeared to go on forever; without the requisite implacability of line, it veered dangerously close to an operatic pot pourri. Sadly, this set the tone for the rest of the performance.

There were a few other straws at which to clutch. The choral singing was excellent, for which great credit must go to Renato Balsadonna’s preparations. Anja Kampe, barring the occasional overly-operatic exaggeration, shone as Senta, at least insofar as the production allowed her to do so. Hers was a powerfully musical and dramatic portrayal, within the constraints with which she had to work, signalling a vast improvement upon her Act II Isolde under Vladimir Jurowski last December. If Kampe sings as well as this at Glyndebourne in the summer, Jurowski’s Tristan might turn out to be something quite special. Torsten Kerl was not a bad Erik, but there was nothing unforgettable about his performance, quite unlike Klaus Florian Vogt in Vienna last year. Kerl was musical but somewhat anonymous: perhaps fair enough for the role, but Vogt showed what can be done with it. It is difficult to imagine Kerl as the Glyndebourne Tristan he is slated to become. John Tessier made a good job of the small role of the Steersman.

Otherwise, the cast was disappointing. Bryn Terfel doubtless suffered from the bizarre lack of interest shown by the production in its central character; indeed, one sensed an understandable bewilderment concerning the nature of his role. One could hear without straining every word of the text he delivered, which makes a welcome change from many interpreters. Nevertheless, his was a performance that poorly repaid the Royal Opera’s forgiveness in having him back, following his crying off the Ring. When he sang, there were passages not entirely lacking in his former vocal beauty. Much of the text, however, was either despatched in an irritating ‘ghostly’ whisper or simply barked. No one seemed to have told him that Italianate musical values were to be the order of the day, since his phrasing was as choppy as the North Sea. Hans-Peter König made something of Daland’s venality but a richer tone would have been appreciated. Poor Clare Shearer, made up like Nora Batty, made little other impression as Mary.

This brings me to Tim Albery’s production, perhaps the greatest disappointment of all. Its sole virtue was seen during the Overture, with a surprisingly effective suggestion of wind and rain upon a makeshift stage curtain. As mentioned above, the figure of the Dutchman seemed to hold no interest for Albery. Wagner’s myth was brought down to the level of dreary realism, which appeared to aim at social commentary, yet spectacularly – or, better, wimperingly – misfired. This was Wagner as deflated EastEnders. So far as I could discern, the production seemed more interested in portraying a slice of life in a community randomly relocated to a time and place irredeemably unfashionable: was this 1970s Grimsby? I say ‘irredeemably,’ since redemption, or even its denial, did not seem to figure at all. Senta merely seemed silly – and most probably a little mad, though not too much. This was no study in hysteria; it was just a bit gloomy. For some reason – or rather, as it seemed, for none at all – she brought on to the stage a toy ship during the Dutchman’s monologue. It would remain there in subsequent scenes, serving most confusingly as a substitute for the picture to which Senta sings her Ballad. The nondescript costumes of the sailors and the tarty yet unrevealing garb of their girls seemed somehow to suggest a Carry on Sailing meets Play for Today, and yet it signally failed to amuse, let alone to proffer any insights. The attire of the Dutchman’s crew appeared to suggest the nineteenth century. Again clutching ever more desperately at straws, I wondered whether some kind of opposition was being posited between (relatively) modern times and the period of composition. If so, nothing was made of it.

Harry Kupfer unforgettably portrayed the Dutchman as Senta’s dream. This was not even interesting enough to be a nightmare.