Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Deutsche Oper, 3 December 2023

Hans Sachs – Johan Reuter
Veit Pogner – Albert Pesendorfer
Kunz Vogelgesang – Gideon Poppe
Konrad Nachtigall – Marek Reichert
Sixtus Beckmesser – Philipp Jekal
Fritz Kothner – Thomas Lehman
Balthasar Zorn – Jörg Schörner
Ulrich Eißlinger – Patrick Vogel
Augustin Moser – Paul Kaufmann
Hermann Ortel – Stephen Bronk
Hans Schwarz – Tobias Kehrer
Hans Foltz – Byung Gil Kim
Walther von Stolzing – Magnus Vigilius
David – Ya-Chung Huang
Eva – Elena Tsallagova
Magdalena – Kathrin Göring
Night Watchman – Tobias Kehrer
Apprentices – Agata Kornaga, Freya Müller, Kangyoon Shine Lee, Yehui Jeong, Oleksandra Diachenko, Natalie Jurk, Jongwoo Hong, Thoma Jaron-Wutz, Leon Juurlink, Kyoungloul Kim, Sotiris Charalampous, Simon Grindberg

Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock, Sergio Morabito (directors)
Torsten Köpf (co-set designer)
Charlotte Pistorius (co-costume designer)
Olaf Freese (lighting)

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

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin

Ulf Schirmer (conductor)

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, premiere am 12.6.2022 in der Deutschen Oper Berlin, copyright: Thomas Aurin. (Some roles were taken by different singers.)

In the depths of the coronavirus Great Silence, I mused that its horror would be over, musically speaking, when I had once again heard live three works: Gurrelieder, a large scale work by Richard Strauss, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Why not, say, Les Troyens, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony or Moses und Aron, I am unsure, though the difficulty of hearing Moses anywhere at any time presents its own challenge. It was not so much about individual as representative works, though, so as to be indicative of some sort of resumption of ‘normal’ musical life, rather than tailoring performances to pandemic circumstances. Strauss’s Alpine Symphony I heard surprisingly early on, though I am tempted to say I should still wait for a Frau ohne Schatten (all being well, next year); Gurrelieder came a little over a year ago. Alas, neither was a very good performance, though I felt relief and gratitude nevertheless. Now, at last, came Die Meistersinger, my first opportunity to see the Deutsche Oper’s current production, new last year, from Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock, and Sergio Morabito. 

There are good ideas, here: often, if not always, well achieved. That the most overt and complex instance of cultural nationalism in Wagner’s dramatic œuvre should, in the wake of subsequent German history, be a site of controversy, even of discomfort, should not itself be controversial. It is the least of the debts we must continually settle in the wake of Friedrich Meinecke’s ‘German catastrophe’. That this might yet be controversial in ultra-reactionary circles need not detain us. No, of course, Meister does not mean Herr, and anyone claiming Hans Sachs’s call to honour your German masters is concerned with political domination should be taken no more seriously than the Nazis on this; nonetheless, rightly or wrongly – for me, it would be some of the former, and considerably more of the latter – Die Meistersinger has, like so much else, been tarnished by the ‘catastrophe’ and we cannot simply pretend it has not happened. And so, to frame the action with the wood-panelling of a music school that more than hints at a certain conservatoire on Munich’s Arcisstraße, reminds us, for the most part beneficially, of our historical and cultural duty.

 

The Hochschule für Musik and Theater – if that be what it is – is as prestigious a school of advanced musical instruction as can be found. The building in which it now stands was built between 1933 and 1937 as the Führerbau; if you walk past today, you will see a plaque acknowledging the Munich Agreement, signed there in 1938. What you will not see inside are the Stolpersteine laid down earlier this century; the city of Munich removed them as an alleged fire hazard. The interior may also be familiar – again, I suspect far from coincidentally – to those who have watched Edgar Reitz’s Heimat 2. This is where Hermann and others received their musical instruction and gave many of their performances. Encircling 1968, the hopes it engendered and its bitter aftermath, Reitz’s films inhabit a similar world to that shown here, fashions suggesting (to me) the later 60s or early 70s. Hans Sachs is, of course, in some ways a harbinger of les évènements, though with a healthy does of Schopenhauerian reflection and interpretation that might have given them greater staying power. The hand of historical discomfort is present, then, though it is really up to us, for most of the performance, how much we feel that.

There are shades of Katharina Wagner’s Bayreuth Meistersinger. Not only is this set in a music school and hers an art school; there is some throwing around of shoes, if not so much as at Bayreuth. In this case, that seems, somewhat awkwardly, to be consequent to a realisation that the new setting does not readily permit Sachs to be a cobbler too, yet something at some point must be done with shoes. There are a few other cases where what we see sits awkwardly with what we hear, without proving a productive contradiction. It seems strange, for instance, to have Walther and Eva copulate in two corners of the hall during the chorale, only for him immediately after to apologise, seemingly without irony, ‘Fraulein! Verzeiht der Sitte Bruch!’ Sachs running off with Eva a little while afterwards, having creepily approached her from behind, is at best a bit silly, more Carry On Nuremberg than anything else. The point of gender imbalance and, frankly, violence inherent in the work is better made elsewhere, with female students/apprentices having to resist or endure Magisterial advances, often in full view. Alas, we know only too well now the wrong sort of ‘permissive’ culture that has been nurtured and protected in conservatoire education.

 

The position of the apprentices and chorus deserves further attention. Since there is no town of Nuremberg here – a different sort of Meistersinger ohne Nürnberg from that of Wieland Wagner – some other solution for the latter needs to be presented. At the close, this, reasonably enough, is the audience for what appear to be final recitals of sharply contrasting quality from Beckmesser and Walther. Earlier on, in place of the guilds, we have what seems to be David’s nightmare, in which the clock (a little too crassly) goes back to 19:33, whose horror is inadequately characterised by ghostly dancing. Likewise, the orgy (free love?) in which the apprentices indulge at the beginning of the second act, though to begin with intriguingly balletic, goes on a bit so as to become frankly tedious. No wonder they slope off in dribs and drabs. Perhaps that is the point, though I am not sure I believe that. More disturbingly, Sachs’s final peroration oscillates between one-sided condemnation and further silliness. His transformation into threatening, at least proto- (or post-)fascist mob leader receives little or no adequate preparation, unless that is why the ceiling lights having been moving around for the entire scene. (It suggests sea-sickness, but I do not think we have moved to the Titanic.) A recurrence of still greater ill-matched dancing may suggest the crowd having fallen under his sway, a warning, but it seems more suggestive of an inability to conclude. This, for me, would benefit from rethinking, as would some loose ends elsewhere.

 

For the nationalist underpinning and final turn are only one aspect of a multivalent work, whose humanity – yes, one can hear it, and should be unashamed of saying so – ultimately exceeds however one wishes to characterise the above. The idea that a father should seek to award his daughter as a prize in a song contest, even if she may refuse, is of course monstrous, even when we allow for historical difference. But the point, ultimately, is that he does not, and that is Wagner’s doing. We can dispute many issues of gender here; with which nineteenth-century artwork can we not? Yet the pain Sachs and, to an extent, Eva must suffer, and the joy of requited love between Eva and Walther are real and of dramatic consequence. Both, whatever my misgivings concerning surrounding details, are present here. I am not sure the unmistakable sexual element of the former relationship is especially helpful, since its dramatic import is blurred by warnings of abuse elsewhere, but the chemistry between Magnus Vigilius’s Walther and Elena Tsallagova’s Eva is stronger, more all-enveloping, and in its way victorious. That the two elope and do not take part in the concluding minutes, whatever it might mean, seems to me important. Beckmesser does not return either: a relief, for it has surely become too much of a cliché and would have been out of place here. 

Vigilius and Tsallagova both gave strong performances throughout. The former, new to me, is shaping up to be a fine Heldentenor indeed. Golden yet far from unvarying of tone, he also displayed verbal sensitivity and stage presence in equal measure. Tsallagova, whom I cannot recall hearing in Wagner before, proved similarly spirited and adaptable. If there were, understandably, times when Johan Reuter tired a little as Sachs, he soon recovered, and offered a properly complex reading of the character, both for work and production. Philipp Jekal trod the difficult lines of Beckmesserian performance, neither too absurd, nor too dignified, with aplomb: another reading with acute attention to the alchemy of words, music, and gesture. Albert Pesendorfer rarely, if ever, disappoints, and certainly did not here in a big-hearted (bartering the bride notwithstanding) Pogner of great presence. Ya-Chung Huang’s David made much of the uncomfortable bullying and bashfulness his character suffered in this reading, offering fine musical virtues too. Kathrin Göring’s Magdalena was well sung and characterised, as were all of the smaller roles, this group of Masters no mere collective but rather replete with individual voices and temperaments.

After an underwhelming, oddly balanced Overture, thin and dragging, the orchestra under Ulf Schirmer soon got into its swing, all the more impressive in the second and third acts. Without wishing to make any obvious points, Schirmer directed the players (and, more generally, the singers on stage) with inobtrusive understanding and wisdom. If there were inevitably, in a performance of this length, occasional cases of stage and pit falling apart – one unfortunately so in the Quintet – they were soon remedied. Far more noteworthy were a lack of awkward corners and an abundance of musical continuity, very much in the spirit of the work. The chorus was excellent throughout.

A qualified welcome, then, to the first revival of this Meistersinger. Its predecessor was, I think, the last of Götz Friedrich’s Wagner productions to be replaced here in Charlottenburg. I saw it in 2010 and recognise both loss and gain in its replacement. As the work reminds us, though, nothing is for ever and certainly not in art. There was enough here, not least in fine sung performances, to remind me of my love for Die Meistersinger – I shall admit to having shed the odd tear, in the Quintet and in both the Trial Song and Prize Song – and quite how much I have missed it. Work, production, and performances invited us to reflect that we never simply return; nor can or should we ever shed our past. The myth of a Year Zero is as unwelcome as it is chimerical.

Tristan und Isolde, Oper Leipzig, 5 October 2019

Leipzig Opera House

Tristan (Daniel Kirch) and Isolde (Meagan Miller)
Images: Tom Schulze

Tristan – Daniel Kirch

Isolde – Meagan Miller

King Marke – Sebastian Pilgrim

Kurwenal – Jukka Rasilainen

Melot – Matthias Stier

Brangäne – Barbara Kozelj

Shepherd – Martin Petzold

Steersman – Franz Xaver Schlecht

Young Sailor – Alvaro Zambrano

Enrico Lübbe (director)

Torsten Buß (co-director)

Étienne Pluss (set designs)

Linda Redlin (costumes)

fettFilm (video)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Nele Winter (dramaturgy)

Leipzig Opera Chorus (chorus director: Thomas Eitler-de Lint)

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

Ulf Schirmer (conductor)

Sailors and Kurwenal (Jukka Rasilainen)

Leipzig’s relationship with its greatest son has never been easy, nor should it have been. Wagner, in all his glorious and inglorious contradictions, is too complicated, problematical, and interesting to be reduced to mere hero-worship; or, as Theodor Adorno put it, ‘progress and reaction in Wagner’s music cannot be separated as sheep from goats’. There has been – arguably, still is – enough of that in Bayreuth, anyway. Many Wagner productions of what we may broadly think of as the Regietheater era have acknowledged that: Rings from Joachim Herz to Frank Castorf and beyond, Parsifal and Meistersinger stagings too. Of the music dramas, however, Tristan has seemed more resistant to problematisation, deconstructive or otherwise. Rare examples with some degree of success have included Peter Konwitschny’s old Munich production and, more fully, Dmitri Tcherniakov’s 2018 staging for Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the latter loudly denounced by most, yet for me fruitful in its alienation. Ultimately, Tristan’s problems seem different: more a matter of balance between drama as conventionally understood and that metaphysical drama of the Schopenhauerian Will and representation which Wagner, for one, certainly came to see as the work’s true core. Or is it, perhaps, that one needs to look and indeed to listen more closely, more subtly, for the fissures of a modernity that no one has ever seriously been able to deny this most singular of works?

Isolde and Tristan

The question remains open, I think. In the meantime – we shall likely ever remain in that meantime – Oper Leipzig has steadily been renewing its Wagner roster. This new Tristan production arises from a welcome Leipzig collaboration with the Intendant at the city’s Schauspiel, Enrico Lübbe, and his deputy, Torsten Buss. Fundamental to the staging is a ship(wreck): the location, in a relatively straightforward realistic sense, of the first act, yet also a focus for memories, dreams, psychological states and philosophical ideas brought into being. Each act has the same basic setting, yet is seen from a different standpoint, in a different state of repair, on a different scale, so as to enable the quasi-symphonic emergence of unity in diversity, ultimately cyclical, as perhaps befits a nineteenth-century work, in a final, post-Liebestod return by Tristan and Isolde to a pristine ship, never previously seen – and perhaps never having existed – in that state. In its second-act ruins, we appreciate not only our construction of connections, but crucially, our capacity for imagination.

Brangäne (Barbara Kozelj) and Isolde

So too does Tristan, who, during Isolde’s initial confrontation with him, soon regresses to the role of a child, even an unborn one, lying in foetal fashion, as if to recapture the essence of a relationship he never consciously experienced first time around, his mother having died during childbirth. Is it his imagination, then, that creates the multiplying Isolde figures during the love duet? What do they signify? There is an aimlessness, an unsatisfactory nature to them, which may hint at dashing of romantic hopes long since foretold, psychoanalytically. There is something, moreover, of the delirium we encounter more fully in the third act, to the way people, settings, thoughts, and even narratives drift in and out of consciousness. Can one, should one, begin to piece them together? Temptation is unavoidable; the production seems to encourage it. A nagging doubt nonetheless remains, like the contemporary, or at least Adornian, nagging doubt concerning Wagnerian totality. It is Tristan und Isolde, of course, not Tristan oder Isolde; the celebrated second-act discussion of ‘diese süße Wörtlein: “und”’ is often understood to offer a conceptual key to the work. And yet, Tristan will tear off his bandages, will he not? In what sense are the two ever truly united? Is the union we witness at the close of this production noumenal, phenomenal, or a sham?

Tristan and Isolde

Oppositions will always play a crucial part in Tristan, above all that between night and day; it would be strange if that did not in some sense feature in a staging. It certainly does here, for instance when the stage turns almost, yet not quite, black – part of the ship may still just be perceived – after drinking of the potion and, again, during the love duet. Night, even then, is a creation: of Tristan and Isolde; of the ship, as foundation and locus of the drama; of Wagner; of the performer; of the audience; and so forth. That we wish the dimly perceptible set to disappear entirely is symptomatic: Romantic illusion and delusion are ours, as well as the characters', as well as Wagner’s. Perhaps, then, we did need to watch and listen more subtly. One might think of this as a collaboration between different forms of light: lighting and video, as well as those entrusted with it (Olaf Freese and Torge Møller of fettFilm); Freese in the programme booklet refers to a ‘Zusammenspiel [interplay] von Licht und Video’. Film, just as much as set design, creates and disintegrates the ship - at least until the close. Likewise, we might say, there are collaboration and, more dramatically, interplay between realism and abstraction; between the individual psychological of chamber theatre – often chamber music, too – and metaphysical symbolism; and, of particular importance to this production, between sea-voyage and its fateful, fatal culmination, symbolised by the image of a ship, perhaps as shipwreck, as its own graveyard, somewhere between stagnant and dead. It should move, yet it does not; rather our gaze moves, or is moved for us by the design team, and more broadly, the production. Our souls, similarly, are moved, or should be, by Wagner’s great Greek Chorus of the orchestra.


Visual and, more specifically, design values are strongly to the fore, yet not for their own sake, as mere backdrop, but as a portal to the dramatic and conceptual. One may think this a Seelenlandschaft (‘landscape of the soul’), as Lübbe describes it, not least when the excellent English horn player, Gundel Jannemann-Fischer, wanders across the stage, a different figure from the Shepherd: a relationship that may perhaps be understood in terms of Schopenhauerian aesthetics and implicit critique or at least (typically Wagnerian) extension thereof. The alte Weise is far more than something the Shepherd plays, yet Wagner would have considered that all the more justification for concealment of the player. Granting the instrument personification, albeit in gentle, non-provocative fashion, both heightens the importance of music and also lightly nods to a twentieth-century world of music theatre, even of post-Holocaust antagonism to idealist totality. Whatever the truth of that – one soon finds one is tied in knots – it is surely the case that even such a quasi-Schopenhauerian relationship may only be accomplished by parallel or, ideally, Hegelian-dialectical communication and understanding of, if not its negation, then at least its inversion; that is, by nurturing also a sense of soul in landscape, in Nature. It was a Romantic reading, ultimately, that I gleaned, as befits an ultimately Romantic work.

Isolde and Brangäne

Much to ponder, then, which is far from always the case in a Tristan staging. Unfortunately, musical fortunes proved patchier, above all from Wagner’s aforementioned tragic Chorus, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and its conductor, Ulf Schirmer. The orchestra has a wealth of Wagnerian experience to call upon; this was no vintage night, however, with some strikingly careless and non-committal playing and only intermittent presence of its distinctive, ‘old German’ tone. Schirmer’s direction certainly did not help, especially in the first act, whose form had yet to be mastered. The opening Prelude seemed to go on forever: not on account of tempo as such, but of a lack of unifying ‘unendliche Melodie’, vertically and horizontally. A striking lack of chemistry between orchestra and conductor may have betokened an off-night; it was nevertheless concerning, given that Schirmer is no visiting conductor, but the opera’s General Music Director and Intendant. As is often the case, ‘traditional’ cuts did their distorting work; neither sole nor even principal responsibility, however, lay with them. Ingolf Barchmann’s bass clarinet deserves a mention for its roving, malevolent, harmonically destabilising contributions.

King Marke (Sebastian Pilgrim) and
Melot (Matthias Stier)

There was more to enjoy vocally, though here the picture was also mixed. Most singers improved as the evening went on, Daniel Kirch’s Tristan fully coming into its own in a highly impressive third act. Too much in the way of first-act barking gave way, ironically, to a more lyrical style. Given that many tenors struggle to make their way through the work in one piece, perhaps this was a matter of first-night nerves and issues of pacing; dramatic instinct and technical ability were certainly present. Meagan Miller’s lyrical, touchingly human Isolde occasionally sounded overwhelmed, yet for the most part offered – and contributed - much. Barbara Koselj’s Brangäne offered the most consistently impressive vocal performance, as unfailingly intelligent as her subtly expressive gesture. Jukka Rasilainen struggled as Kurwenal in the first act, bluff and dry of tone, but recovered markedly in the third. Sebastian Pilgrim made a fine impression as King Marke, sonorous of tone and, again, unquestionably human. Smaller parts were all well sung and acted, Alvaro Zambrano’s Young Sailor in particular catching the ear. (He also, unusually, appeared briefly on stage.) Had there been more consistent collaboration with this chamber-drama sphere from ‘metaphysical’ orchestra and conductor – the opposition is, of course, not precise – the wholeness of the evening’s experience would undoubtedly have been furthered. Yet even in that (relative) lack, one was led to think about the desirability or otherwise of totalising intoxication. Nietzsche’s opus metaphysicum, its score only to be read when wearing gloves, may not always have been fully realised; in a deeper, yes metaphysical, sense, it remained untamed as ever.

To celebrate 1500 blog posts: Deutsche Oper Strauss-Wochen (5) - Der Rosenkavalier, 10 April 2016



Der Rosenkavalier © 2008, Bettina Stöß
(Images are indicative of the production, not of the present cast.)

Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Die Feldmarschallin, Fürstin Werdenberg – Michaela Kaune

Der Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau – Albert Pesendorfer
Octavian – Daniela Sindram
Herr von Faninal – Michael Kupfer-Radecky
Sophie – Siobhan Stagg
Jungfer Marianne Leitmetzerin – Fionnuala McCarthy
Valzacchi – Patrick Vogel
Annina – Stephanie Lauricella
Police Officer – Seth Carico
The Marschallin’s Major-domo – Peter Maus
Faninal’s Major-domo – Jörg Schorner
Singer – Matthew Newlin
Flautist – Djordje Papke
Servant – Thomas Lehman
Milliner – Alexandra Hutton
Landlord, Vendor of Pets – Matthew Peña
Three noble orphans – Sabine Dicekcmann, Gabriele Goebbels, Christa Werron
Their mother – Satu Louhi
Hairdresser – Younes Laraki
His assistant – Sandra Meyer
Marschallin’s Lackeys – Haico Apal, Ulrich George, Tadeusz Milewski, Rüdiger Scheibl
Mohammed – Jason Boateng
Almonier – Frank Sufalko
Leopold – Olli Rantaseppä
Doctor – Carsten Meyer
Pair of Dancers – Silke Sense, Christopher Matt
Four Waiters – Ralph Eschrig, Mike Fischer, Heine Boßmeyer, Imma Nagne Jun
Children – Children’s Choir and Children Extras
Leopold – Dirk Wolter
Lackeys – Ingolf Stollberg, Andreas Keinze, Jun-Seok Bang, Matthias Beutlich
Waiters – Rafael Harnisch, Torsten Schäpan Norbert Klesse, Thomas Müller
Three noble orphans – Jennifer Porto, Emily Dorn, Christel Loetzsch

Götz Friedrich (director)

Gottfried Pilz, Isabel Ines Glathar (designs)
Duane Schuler (lighting)
Gerlinde Pelkowski (Spielleitung)

 

What a splendid way to finish, with Götz Friedrich’s Rosenkavalier. Few opera productions have a productively long life; I do not mean that as an insult, for by their very nature, successful stagings tend to respond to the concerns of their time, which will not necessarily be ours. There are exceptions, of course; have you ever met someone who has tired of the Chéreau Ring? (Perhaps there remain, somewhere on a reserve, a few choice creatures who still angrily reject it, ‘in the name of all that is winged in helmets’, but let us leave them to their webpages.) Friedrich’s 1993 production, doubtless in conjunction with (very) successful revival direction, still has a great deal to offer. Unlike, say, Otto Schenk’s ideas-free, drama-free, totally-missing-the-point-of-the-opera bad-taste-Rococo-fest, Friedrich’s staging, surely the inspiration for almost all interesting productions thereafter, might have been imagined yesterday, or even tomorrow; comparison with Chéreau is far from exaggerated. Its seventy-fifth performance had me think more than a little; it also had me cry more than a little. It can therefore be said to have done its work very well indeed.

Anachronism is the opera’s thing, or rather it is part of the opera’s most profound concern: the passing of time. Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding. (Or ‘sonderbares’?) It is too in Friedrich’s staging: it is about playing roles, wearing masks, navigating the æsthetic and historical disjunctures with tragic wit and comedic fate. That is done out of love, out of necessity; as a game, as a way of life; as a Viennese, both rooted and cosmopolitan, of ‘then’ and of ‘now’. The point is, of course, that the Vienna of Der Rosenkavalier never existed; it is not ‘really’ the ‘Jesuit Baroque’ of Maria Theresa, to which Hofmannsthal referred in a letter to Strauss (24 April 1909). Yet if there is both truth and untruth – more a matter of dialectical drama than of dishonesty – in Hofmannsthal’s claim, there is likewise both truth and untruth in another Hofmannsthal letter (to Harry Graf Kessler, 20 May 1909) that the Marschallin is not intended in a ‘voltairianisch’ way. Again, there is reference to the ‘Austrian Jesuit Baroque’, but there is something that both encompasses and transcends, or perhaps transgresses, the Austrian, even the Viennese, setting. There was never really a Vienna of Voltaire in the first place; the Austrian Enlightenment was richer – and poorer – than that. Joseph II, whilst co-Regent, pointedly passed by Voltaire’s château rather than visit him. But the artwork has a cosmopolitanism to it too that should not be ignored; the Marschallin’s French may not be intended in that way, at least not entirely, but she is not so far from the salons of Paris – or of Capriccio. There is something of the historico-æsthetic need to recreate in all of that, as there is in what we see.

For the production opens not in the ‘Jesuit Baroque’, not really; nor even in the Vienna of 1911, not really. It seems, and semblance is surely the important thing here, a way in rather than an endpoint, to have more of the 1920s of it, albeit an ‘interwar period’ as we now know it, looking back: fondly, nostalgically, maybe even a little desperately. That is not just Friedrich’s doing, of course; his production, aided enormously by the excellent designs of Gottfried Pilz, Isabel Ines Glathar and by Duane Schuler’s clever lighting, has lived on too, now in the Spielleitung of Gerlinde Pelkowski. The work’s over-ripeness – a part, but only a part of it – has been historically anticipated, almost as if it were aware of Walter Benjamin, which in a sense, of course, it is. It and its after-history are certainly aware of the Marschallin’s hopeless desire to stop the clocks; the poignancy is, if anything, added to, by the extension of the ‘too late’ quality, but also by the Marschallin and Octavian dressing up, recreating, with some of the greatest eroticism I have seen in this work, that never-was dix-huitième we know and love. (Not the Rococo: are you listening, friends of Otto Schenk? Listen to Hofmannsthal… Listen to Strauss: even Johann, via Richard!) The Personenregie unfolds with deceptive, unsparing realism and non-realism; we feel on the one hand it is real, and on the other, that it is artifice. Such is the work; such is the production; such is musical performance. We cannot stop the clocks, although everyone of us would help the Marschallin do so.

 

Perhaps the greatest victory against the ‘Against Modern Opera Productions’ tendency, though, is the beginning of the second act. It looks magnificent, on a first glance; it does on a second, too, although not in the way they think it does.  Some of them actually applauded, presumably thinking they were in Schenkstadt. But they were not; the joke was on them. They do it with mirrors, as the Marschallin would have told them, if only they listened, or cared. Faninal’s Palais actually resembles a smart hotel; it is all a little too functional. It even resembles the smartness of the Salzburg Festival, a Straussian, Hofmannsthalian, strenuously ‘Austrian’ invention itself. We love it; our lives are enriched by it. But it is an invention; an imposter, even, claiming Mozart, in no meaningful sense whatsoever an ‘Austrian’, just as it claims his Salzburg, his Vienna.

 

The third act is perhaps the greatest triumph of all. The pretension – and I use the word deliberately – of a created Beisl is revealed for what it is: again, this is true criticism. The exaggerations of this ‘old Vienna’, presumably ‘suburban’ in the old sense – think, perhaps of Mozart’s Theater auf der Wieden, or of any other example that takes your fancy – are revealed and, just perhaps, explained. If it is an old Viennese ‘farce’, then it is also old Viennese Fasching; Faschingsschwank aus Wien, as Schumann might have had it. The commedia dell’arte hints (the lovers’ dressing up) of the first act find their destiny here, the Pantomime ‘real’ and the events ‘proper’ theatre; or is it vice versa? The splitting of the stage and the interaction between the two ‘halves’ show us that it is not either-or, but also that a sense of either-or is necessary to appreciation of the delights of the metatheatrical constructions, both Werktreu and otherwise. Valzacchi’s photography is spot on. He draws us into his world, makes us voyeurs, foreigners, consumers, anachronisms, participants. The scandal sheets, the situation, the carnival would be nothing without us. And none of this detracts from our being moved at the end; quite the contrary, it enhances, it necessitates that.

 

And how we were moved at the end – and not just then. The three women – well, two women and a ‘man’ – complemented and contrasted with each other splendidly. Michaela Kaune’s dignity was unanswerable; it grew, as time went on. She became more beautiful in every way, the more her fate and her mastery of the situation were sealed. Daniela Sindram’s Octavian, stuck in the middle, was unsparingly portrayed: quite right, there should be no sentimentalism here. The character’s youth might seem attractive, but it is not, neither for him, nor for us. Siobhan Stagg’s spirited Sophie was just the thing: horrifyingly little-girlish at the start – the schoolgirl dress was also just the thing – and developing, little by little, not too far but far enough. Albert Pesendorfer’s Ochs was not merely boorish; there was an element of charm, as there should be, at least at times. His pretensions to being a Kavalier were satirised, but not too much, as much in performance as in the silly reddishness of his wig. It was intriguing to encounter a Faninal with real charm too, as well as undeniable arriviste qualities. In Michael Kupfer-Radecky’s portrayal, we were treated to vocal as well as stage suavity, no mere caricature; he knew how to turn it on too. The Italians were uncommonly fine in vocal terms, and more complex character than one generally sees; Patrick Vogel’s quicksilver Valzacchi was complimented by Stephanie Lauricella’s glamorous Annina. Nothing else, I am sure, would have done in this ’20s-ish world.

 

So it went on, everyone playing his or her part, and the quality of the ensemble playing the greatest part of all. Except, perhaps, for the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, whose praises I have sung in every one of these reviews, and which I shall sing again here. ‘In its blood’ is perhaps an unfortunate, if not entirely inappropriately unfortunate, metaphor here, but it really, doubtless unsurprisingly, seems to speak Strauss like few other orchestras. Ulf Schirmer, in one of the finest performances I have heard from him – self-effacing, not faceless – was first among equals; one had the sense that the orchestra’s waltzing coaxed him, just as he coaxed it. Moments of stillness were such that a pin could have been heard to drop; moments of commotion were so finely balanced that this might have been a second Meistersinger. There was direction, but there was time to linger. Rubato might not stop the clock, but it might increase our desire to do so. Strauss’s Wagnerism – leitmotif here unusually apparent, without overbalance – and his worship of Mozart were as carefully held in check, as productively drawn into conflict and, perhaps, even reconciliation, as they were on stage. As I said, I thought – and I cried.

 

 

 

Parsifal, Oper Leipzig, 18 April 2014

Leipzig Opera House

Parsifal – Daniel Kirch

Gurnemanz – Jan Hendrik Rootering
Klingsor – Jürgen Kurth
Kundry – Kathrin Göring
Amfortas – Mathias Hausmann
Titurel – Mitcho Borovinov
Knights of the Grail – Keith Boldt, Mitcho Borovinov
Esqures – Viktorija Kaminskaite, Jean Broekhuizen, Sebastian Fuchsberger, Tommaso Randazzo
Flowermaidens – Menna Davies, Paula Rummel, Jean Broekhuizen, Viktorija Kaminskaite, Eva Schuster, Sandra Janke
Voice from Above – Sandra Janke

Roland Aeschlimann (director, designs)

Susanne Raschig (costumes)
Lucinda Childs (movement)
Lukas Kaltenbäck (lighting)

Children’s Choir, Women of the Youth Choir, Chorus, and Additional Chorus of the Leipzig Opera (chorus master: Alessandro Zuppardo)

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Ulf Schirmer (conductor)

 

I have praised Roland Aeschlimann’s Leipzig (and Geneva) staging of Parsifal before. Its relative abstraction allows space for the audience to think, without tending towards the vacuous. It also proves durable, a significant virtue in what is a repertory piece for Oper Leipzig; this is now the third time I have seen it, and whilst there may by now be some of the attendant disadvantages of repertory staging, it continues to do its job very well. Since I have written on the production twice already (in 2009 and 2011), I shall not do so at length this time; there are no significant changes, and the interested reader may follow the links provided, which also have images from the staging. Lukas Kaltenbäck’s lighting continues both to prove atmospheric in itself and to enable the crucial demarcating role of colour in terms both of location and dramatic transformation. (For more on that, see the 2011 review.)

Last time around, I wrote that I remained ‘intrigued and equally uncertain about Aeschlimann’s Grail. Amfortas uncovers something mysterious – no problem there – and holds up a sheet which, by a trick of lighting presents what continues to remind me of a Turin Shroud-vision of Christ. I still wonder whether, even at this stage, we need something a little more substantial – in more than one sense – to offer sustenance for Monsalvat’s community.’ This time, I had fewer qualms, if any, concerning an alleged need for something ‘more substantial’. For, not only, as I wrote before, is there ‘something else, again mysterious, … revealed, which clearly replenishes the community,’ its abstraction and open-endedness enabling for the audience; there is actually – or at least there was on this occasion – something a little troubling, rather than empty, about whatever it is that is going on, without that degenerating into the all-too-easy charge that Monsalvat is … (fill in the gap for your favourite outlandish anti-Wagner accusation). It is quite right, as it were, that all is not right; this is a community in need of ‘redemption’. But nor do we have absurd anti-Wagnerian fantasies foisted upon us. Many of those inclined that way will doubtless take the opportunity to confirm themselves in their hostility, but the space permitted by the production may give some at least a pause for thought.

 

Ulf Schirmer led a decent performance, without raising the roof; the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra was itself on predictably fine form. Schirmer’s conducting sometimes towards the sectional, Wagner’s ‘most subtle art’ of transition not faring so well – or rather, faring better on stage. By the same token, however, there were no particular problems; and again, the performance offered space for reflection. Choral singing was generally excellent, though there were a few moments of disconnection with the pit. A good cast had only one disappointment. Normally, Gurnemanz is the most reliable of beasts; here, Jan Hendrik Rootering was often highly uncertain of pitch in the first act, though better in the third, and dry of tone rather than moving in his narrations. Daniel Kirch impressed as Parsifal; just because there are still more difficult Wagner roles, we should not be lulled into taking a good performance of Parsifal for granted. Kirch marshalled his resources well, lasted the course, and communicated the text – by which, I mean words and music – with intelligence. Much the same could be said of Kathrin Göring’s Kundry. Göring sounded as if she was more of a lyric soprano, but that did not preclude drama, especially in the second act. Jürgen Kurth, whom I have heard before here as Klingsor, continued to do good work, and the smaller roles were taken well too.

 

For a Parsifal on Good Friday, then, this offered much on which to reflect, not least having heard the St Matthew Passion at the Thomaskirche the night before. There is nothing wrong with annual rituals such as these and much right with them; indeed, the Christian calendar remains very much part of who we are. Parsifal’s warning against ritualism endured, however – not the least achievement of this production.

From Bayreuth to Leipzig: Wagner returning home for his 200th anniversary

(a paper originally given at the OBERTO conference: Staging Operatic Anniversaries, at Oxford Brookes University, 10 September 2013)

 

Many in Wagner’s generation and in more than one generation before him found themselves preoccupied with the question, ‘What is German?’ A celebrated epigram by Schiller had begun by asking: ‘Germany? Where is it? I don’t know how to find it.’  Wagner himself essayed the question more than once, whether as a particular focus or as one amongst several. Much Wagner scholarship has, however, suffered from insufficient appreciation of that question’s nineteenth-century context and specifically of Wagner’s Saxon inheritance. His upbringing in Leipzig and Dresden, in the ‘third Germany’ that was neither Prussia nor Austria, profoundly informed his understanding of things ‘German’.

 

Transformed by Napoleon from an electorate into a useful allied kingdom in 1806, Saxony had the misfortune to emerge from the 1813 – that is the year of Wagner’s birth – Battle of Leipzig on the losing side. Most Saxon troops defected to the allied forces; King Frederick Augustus I was imprisoned; the state itself seemed imperilled, Saxony proving the great loser from the German states at the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna. Though Prussia failed to absorb her entirely, the rump of the Wettin kingdom held but three-quarters of the territory of the new Prussian province of Saxony. As Germans, looking askance at recent French cultural and political domination, increasingly wished for some form of national unification, questions arose: in what form and under whose aegis? Would there be popular unification founded upon a national movement, as desired by many of the 1848-9 revolutionaries, Kapellmeister Wagner in Dresden included, or a traditional power-political aggrandizement by one or both of the two great German powers? And where would that leave other German states, members of the so-called 'third Germany,' such as Saxony and Bavaria?

 

When Wagner, then, came to advise Ludwig II, he was informed by earlier experience. Wagner remained hostile to many of the other German princes, whose lamentable rule he held responsible for Germany’s sorry historical state, yet suspicion of Prussia, a ‘barracks state’ for many other Germans, always formed a crucial part of his outlook. The contrast, however exaggerated, between Prussian militarism and other states’ – Bavarian, Saxon, etc. – cultural achievement was a mainstay of discourse within those states. ‘Nationalism’ involved many competing strands.

 

Moreover, though one does not necessarily associate Wagner later in life with Saxony – indeed, amnesty permitted him to return to the other German states before his own – we find him in Leipzig, publicly and otherwise, more often than we might suspect. He conducted in 1862 at the old Gewandhaus the first performance of the Prelude to Act One of Die Meistersinger. Nietzsche wrote to his friend, Erwin Rohde, of attempts to effect a first encounter: Wagner was staying with relatives in Leipzig, unbeknown to the press. When they met, Nietzsche was enchanted by Wagner’s reading from his biography, Mein Leben, a scene from his Leipzig student days and observed, not for the last time, Wagner’s fondness for the local dialect.

 

In an essay from the mid-1860s, unpublished until 1878, the very question’ What is German’, ‘Was ist deutsch?’ is asked in its title. Just as, in Die Meistersinger, Hans Sachs proclaims that holy German art will endure, no matter what political calamity might befall the Holy Roman Empire, so Wagner now chooses the forlornly French-periwigged Bach as epitome of the German spirit, his music triumphing despite both his wretched, unrecognized existence as choirmaster and organist, and Germany’s catastrophic political fortunes. (Lutheran-Bachian chorales loom large in the Meistersinger score, likewise neo-Bachian counterpoint. Indeed, unreal anachronism, like that of the German nation itself. is built in to the work, since it provides Wagner’s reinvention of eighteenth-, not sixteenth-century counterpoint.)

 

Subsequent generations have often striven to dissolve Wagner’s ambiguities. National Socialism provides perhaps the most flagrant example, though it is far from alone. When Thomas Mann challenged hardening nationalist orthodoxy by presenting a more interesting, complex Wagner in a 1933 address, ‘Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner’, he was rebuked in an indignant ‘Protest by the Richard Wagner City Munich,”’which spoke on behalf of a ‘national restoration of Germany … [having] taken on definite form.’ Though signatories, including Richard Strauss, Hans Knappertsbusch, and Hans Pfitzner, were not all National Socialists, they were complicit in at best a simplification of Wagner’s person and ideas. Such elision of Wagner with Nazi goals has continued to haunt Wagner scholarship and reception into the twenty-first century. The Bavarian anti-Reich Wagner of ‘What is German?”, let alone the Saxon universalist, would surely have objected.

 

And so, when, after the Second World War, the Wagner city of Munich and Wagner adoptive temple of Bayreuth seemed to many hopelessly compromised, one might have expected Leipzig to step forward as an alternative. Matters were of course complicated by the political division of Germany into East and West. Both were suspicious in their different ways, but the East Germans were – perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not – often reluctant to enlist a fellow socialist into their roll call. Maybe Wagner was too hot to handle, too wilful; maybe some even heeded Marx’s unfair dismissal, when answering, at the time of the opening Bayreuth Festival in 1876, the persistent question, ‘What do you think of Wagner?’: highly characteristic of the ‘New German-Prussian empire-musicians’. That is, he was of Bismarck’s party, when little could have been further from the truth.

 

Herz's Gotterdammerung (1976)

On the one hand, the Leipzig Opera, reborn in a new house in the Augustusplatz, opened in 1960 with a performance of Die Meistersinger. (It would also mark the fiftieth anniversary of its reopening with a new production of the same work.) And in the 1950s, there were more Wagner performances in the East than in the West. On the other hand, Beethoven, for instance, especially the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony, seemed a safer German ‘humanist’ master – and then there were of course the ‘other’ Leipzig composers: Bach, Mendelssohn, even Schumann, despite the fact that none of them was born in the city.  Moreover, if the opera house opened with Joachim Herz’s Meistersinger, it waited until 1973 for Herz’s Ring – though its role, predating Patrice Chéreau’s 1976 production, in making Wagner’s myth very much of the nineteenth century and its political, social, and economic conditions should never be underestimated. (Sadly, it often is.) Until recently, however. a visitor to the city’s streets would see little of Wagnerian interest, whereas it would be difficult to miss Bach and Mendelssohn. The birth house was pulled down in 1886, and other places in which his family lived – they were rarely in one place for long – met the same fate either then or during Allied bombing in 1943-4.

Interestingly, however, that has been changing, not least in preparation for the bicentenary. A new statue, the competition won by sculptor Stephan Balkenhof, has been erected, funds notably coming from private subscription rather than from the state or municipality. Balkenhof was faced with the specified task of integrating an unrealised conception from a century earlier, by Max Klinger, the end result thus incorporating an aspect of Leipzig’s ambivalent Wagner reception as well as a clear, downsizing attempt, very much of our time, to render Wagner the young man just that, rather than a towering nineteenth-century Romantic genius.  Musically, Leipzig has distinguished itself by staging Wagner’s three ‘early’ operas. Earlier this year, I saw Die Feen, which Bayreuth, in its co-production of those three works, somewhat mystifyingly elected to perform only in concert, thus ceding something of its position as Wagnerstadt. It was one of the two most significant Wagner stagings I have so far seen this year, the other coming from the Mozartstadt of Salzburg, in Stefan Herheim’s new production of Die Meistersinger, a rare Wagner outing for the summer festival: the first time that particular work had been seen there since the 1930s, and itself, along with Herheim’s Parsifal and Lohengrin a truly outstanding attempt to grapple with Wagner’s place in German history.




A scene from Herheim's Meistersinger: © Salzburger Festspiele / Forster

 

 

Die Feen, never performed in Wagner’s lifetime, was intended for the Leipzig opera, though much of it was written in Würzburg – the Wagnerian contest between Bavaria and Saxony thus receiving a miniature dramatisation of its own, further complicated by Würzburg’s Franconian status as a very recent acquisition by Munich. It would eventually be staged in Munich in 1888, five years after the composer’s death, a production that received numerous repeat performances; thereafter, stagings and concert performances alike have proved at best sporadic. The first Leipzig performance took place in 1938, as part of the city’s celebrations for Wagner’s 125th birthday.

 

It is a splendid work, at times perhaps ‘immature’, yet far superior to a number of works, even oeuvres, that bafflingly continue to hold the operatic stage. For the Wagnerite, and indeed for those with any interest in musical history, there is considerable additional pleasure to be derived from the parlour game of identifying both the many influences upon the work and the ways in which it offers a true starting point for Wagner’s subsequent explorations. According to Wagner, writing in Mein Leben:

While I had written [the incomplete, preceding work] Die Hochzeit without operatic embellishments and treated the material in the darkest vein, this time I festooned the subject with the most manifold variety: beside the principal pair of lovers I depicted a more ordinary couple and even introduced a coarse and comical third pair, which belonged to the operatic convention of servants and ladies’ maids. As to the poetic diction and the verses themselves, I was almost intentionally careless about them. I was not nourishing my former hopes of making a name as a poet; I had really become a ‘musician’ and a ‘composer’ and wanted simply to write a decent libretto, for I now realized nobody else could do this for me, inasmuch as an opera book is something unique unto itself and cannot be easily brought off by poets and literati.

 

And so of course, it would continue, Wagner furnishing all of his own musico-dramatic texts, even if in this instance he reworks – perhaps too modest a verb – Carlo Gozzi. One may trace a multitude of other continuities or presentiments, not least the idea of the forbidden question, albeit the other way round from Lohengrin, at least in terms of gender: Ada, the half-fairy, half-mortal, has agreed to marry Arindal, the King of Tramond, with the condition that he never ask her who she is. Die Feen, however, is no tragedy; for, after inevitably having asked the question, having therefore seen Ada disappear, and having followed her to the underworld, where, Orpheus-like (surely a tribute to Wagner’s beloved Gluck?), he restores her to life with voice and lyre, Arindal gains immortality and joins Ada in the land of the fairies. The trials Arindal must undergo both recall The Magic Flute and presage Die Frau ohne Schatten. That is not, of course, to say that Die Feen itself is a crucial link between Mozart and Strauss – though Wagner certainly is, and Strauss actually served as assistant conductor for that Munich premiere – but rather to remind ourselves that so many of the ideas on which dramatists draw are part of common currency, especially when dealing with ‘what is German’, not least the resolutely unsentimental fairytale..

 

I could happily continue with respect to the ‘dramatic’ content, yet ought at least briefly to say something in similar vein, if equally selective, about the music. For instance, there is a second-act figure that naggingly anticipates Tristan, and the choral writing certainly at times looks forward to Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. Looking back, Weber, Marschner, and only slightly less, Beethoven and Mendelssohn loom large in the general music language, this being a more unalloyed ‘German’ opera than either of its two immediate successors, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi, though the Italian and French influences upon those works have often been exaggerated. In any case, the broader point is that, for Wagner at this time, standing firmly in a dominant tradition of eighteenth-century German aesthetics, perhaps the key to understanding ‘German art’ was its power of synthesis, overcoming merely ‘national’ styles to progress, in his later Zurich ‘reform’ language, toward the universal.

 

Copyright: Kirsten Nijhof. Christiane Libor (Ada), Arnold Bezuyen (Arindal)

In this staging by director Renard Doucet, metatheatricality is worn lightly, humorously, yet tellingly. Following a Saturday evening modern German family meal, the father tunes in to a live broadcast of Die Feen from the Leipzig Opera. (A nice touch is his turning up the volume for the Overture as the conductor does similarly in the pit.) The rest of the family departs, leaving him in peace to listen. Music becomes the key to the work as a whole; it enlists his emotions, transforms his understanding. In something of a modern fairytale, his living room becomes the performance space, not entirely unlike the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann. What might seem a counterpart to all-too-comfortable Biedermeier home life soon has its tensions exposed – Wagner perhaps issuing the challenge from which his home city had sometimes recoiled, whether in the 1830s, the GDR, or even more recently. Yet ambivalence remains; has Wagner disrupted proceedings, or has he himself been disrupted? Although the paterfamilias – at best a weak example of the type – welcomes back his wife at the end of the broadcast, and leaves Ada to the fairies, a beret-clad Wagner included, will he tire of his quotidian existence and hanker again after the immortality of that other world, that to which, as Arindal, he had exceptionally been admitted?

 

Ulf Schirmer’s conducting of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra proved well-judged. Early Romantic influences were apparent, but so, as in the staging, were hints – and sometimes rather more than hints – of what was to come. A phrase here or there might be ever so slightly underlined, or so I fancied, to alert one to a similarity with a phrase in Lohengrin, and indeed beyond. More importantly, the straining even at this stage towards through-composition was readily apparent, without entirely undermining the ‘number’ structure of this Romantic opera. The dark, typically old ‘German’ sonorities of the Gewandhaus Orchestra – so different, for instance, from the more homogenised, ‘international’ Berlin Philharmonic, of Karajan’s vintage, let alone Rattle’s – helped ‘place’ it within a recognisable tradition.

 

In performing this work – and performing it in such a fashion, both on stage and in the pit –  Leipzig took one step further towards reconciliation with its greatest son. This may not have been the intention, but perhaps we should also take this opportunity at least partly to shift our attention from Wagner’s later life, as focused upon places such as Munich and Bayreuth, to his earlier years, not least so that we might construct a richer, more complex picture of what it meant – and means – for Wagner and his music to be German.