Munich Opera Festival (2) - Of One Blood, 28 June 2026

 

Nationaltheater

Production images: Monika Rittershaus

Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England – Johanni von Oostrum
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots – Vera-Lotte Boecker
Female Consorts I-IV – Seonwoo Lee, Mirjam Mesak, Lotte Betts-Dean, Meg Brilleslyper
Female Consort V, Jane Kennedy – Freya Apfellstaedt
Male Consort I, Lord Darnley – Michael Butler
Male Consort II – Joel Williams
Male Consort III, Rizzio – Andrew Hamilton
Male Consort IV, Scottish Lord I – Armand Rabot
Male Consort V, Scottish Lord II, Executioner – Pawel Horodyski
Solo harpsichord – Mahan Esfahani

Director – Claus Guth
Set designs – Etienne Pluss
Costumes – Ursula Kudrna
Sound design – Bob Scott, Sven Eckhoff
Lighting – Michael Bauer
Choreography – Sommer Ulrickson

Dramaturgy – Yvonne Gebauer, Lukas Leipfinger
Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus director: Christoph Hell)
Bavarian State Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

I remember, as a schoolboy, reading in a newspaper about ‘The Hecklers’, a pair of composers with highly reactionary aesthetics, who objected so strongly to Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain that they protested against its revival at Covent Garden. I would hear Gawain at a subsequent revival, as a student, and be swept off my feet. But at the time, I recall being puzzled by the idea that one would protest against something being performed simply because one did not like it, or even because one thought it not very good. I did not know much about the repertoire of opera houses at the time, but the idea that they were overloaded with new, or even modernist, work was patently absurd. I was equally puzzled, at the end of this performance of Brett Dean’s new opera Of One Blood, to hear loud booing from certain quarters of Munich’s Nationaltheater, when the composer, librettist Heather Betts, and (I think) director Claus Guth came onstage. It was not a premiere, so their appearance was slightly unexpected, if welcome. Could people who had contentedly, so it seemed, sat through two acts of a new opera have felt so strongly about its music – it could, I suppose, have been its libretto, or even its staging – that they felt they must bellow farmyard noises in an attempt to drown out applause? If they had not liked the opera, or had considerable criticisms of it, fair enough, but what was it that had led them to such a display? It was neither a mindlessly reactionary nor a vigorously avant-garde work; it was well crafted, well performed, and well directed. Would not refraining from applause – as, I am sure, many of us have done on occasion – have been enough? I am afraid reflection has left me none the wiser, but the experience was unsettling and has continued to be, not least from concern for those at the sharp end of that strange, bullying response.

 

The phrase ‘of one blood’ refers to a phrase Mary (Stuart), Queen of Scots used in a letter to her cousin and antagonist – historical and, here, dramatic – Elizabeth I, here ‘Elizabeth Tudor’: ‘We be both of one blood, of one country, and in one Island’. In their communications and other sixteenth-century sources lie the seeds of Betts’s libretto, assembled and constructed after the manner of many a dramatic confrontation between the two. Betts is a visual artist: an interesting case for a librettist in terms of scene-setting, for instance the opening and close of the work in contemporary or perhaps, in Guth’s staging, a future Westminster Abbey, in whose Henry VII/Lady Chapel the two queens lie at opposite ends, at the command of their mutual successor, James VI and I, who also commissioned their tombs. That struck her when visiting, as it might anyone, but its visual element seems to have been especially important to the librettist dramaturgically, focusing the action and the way it plays out, thereby also influencing the staging, as well as providing elements of a solution for the perennial problem of what to do in a drama concerning the entwined lives of two central figures who never met. Contriving an occasion on which they did is a common solution; it is good to welcome an alternative to the fold, in an intriguingly clinical white setting, albeit beneath a hint of English Perpendicular Gothic (which tilted at one point, perhaps as a reflection of changing fortunes and/or danger). 

And so, we see the two queens act separately in the beginning, later appearing partly at the same time in their own halves of the stage, with ‘consort’ retinues – I was puzzled before realising the word was intended musically rather than maritally – so as to react one another’s words and deeds, coming tantalisingly close, yet never quite meeting. Tellingly, their union in duet, as opposed to ‘written’ dialogue, takes place when both are offstage. There are oddities to the libretto, or at least features I did not understand: the archaic ‘-eth’ third-person singular is employed, yet we hear ‘will’ rather than ‘wilt’ with thou. It all serves its purpose well enough, though—and perhaps such inconsistencies, if inconsistencies they be, are simply reflections of a language that has always been in change. Titles were used not simply to convey but, at certain points, to add to the libretto, including indication of place, such as Richmond Palace, Holyrood, or of course Fotheringhay Castle.

Collaboration between husband and wife librettist (their daughter one of Mary’s excellent consort) seems to have been fruitfully close. What comes ‘first’, whether chronologically or aesthetically, is ever a fraught question in any such relationship, but there were no obvious signs of tension and many of complement. Likewise between them and Guth, the extraction of both tombs for cleaning and their return at the end an interesting element of the aforementioned framing rather than contrast or contradiction. A low opening pedal – electronic rather than acoustic, I think – sounds, Rheingold-like yet -unlike, the musical beginning, subsequent scraping noises, like a dental implement writ large, partaking of the drama and ushering in the Bayerische Staatsorchester, here on excellent form under Vladimir Jurowski’s wise, invigorating direction. Two worlds, then, collided and coincided in more ways than one: multidimensional yet bilateral dramatic conflict, one might say. This was further layered in the Elizabethan scenes with harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani onstage. Few if any harpsichordists have done more for new music than Esfahani; here his role once again bridged divides between old and new, his instrument inciting orchestral and electronic material, and on at least one occasion – if my ears did not deceive me – prefigured in the ‘purely’ electronic material of the very opening. The dramatic possibilities of such time travel were manifold—perhaps all the better for being left to us not necessarily to resolve but to ponder, and thus to engage as active dramatic participants.

Similarities with Berg – first a chord close to Wozzeck, then broader harmonic fields – suggested themselves to my ears at the opening of the second act, but I am not sure this was so much influence as my ears making sense of a new harmonic world with music I knew. More fundamentally, the expertise and artistry with which both acts, of roughly equal length, were planned and realised was striking, still more so in the second (perhaps a matter of my having become more at home with the work). In that, the role of the equally excellent chorus was apparent: first liturgical, in Westminster Abbey, but changing its role, like the Greek chorus so as both to comment and participate, in acclamation, rebellion, and more. 

In what was perhaps an inevitable nod to or at least coincidence with Donizetti, coloratura featured in both queens’ lines, but there was far more to them than that, especially as brought so vividly and sympathetically to life by Johanni von Oostrum and Vera-Lotte Boecker. Amongst the rest of a very fine cast, I might put in a word for Michael Butler’s feckless Darnley and Pawel Horodyski’s Executioner, but this was emphatically an ensemble performance as well as one of warring queens. Designs and choreography were stylish and suggestive throughout. Maybe our hecklers disliked the black coals of ruin that occupied much of the second-act stage, before being swept away by restoration workers in the present/future. I am grasping at straws, though. Who knows? Ultimately, who cares?

Applause from the premiere: Geoffroy Schied

 

The Cunning Little Vixen, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 28 February 2026

Vixen – Vera-Lotte Böecker
Forester – Svatopluk Sem
Fox – Magdalena Kožená
Forester’s Wife, Owl – Natalia Skrycka
Schoolmaster, Mosquito – Florian Hoffmann
Priest, Badger – David Oštrek
Harašta – Carles Pachon
Dachsund, Woodpecker – Sandra Laagus
Rooster – Anna Samuil
Innkeeper’s Wife, Hen – Adriane Queiroz
Jay – Sonja Herranen
Innkeeper – Junho Hwang

Frog – Milla Aulibauer
Cricket – Paula Bredt
Grasshopper – Alexander Meieer
Young Vixen – Naz Yilmaz
Frantík – Otto Glass
Pepík – Alia Engel
First fox cub – Paloma Couloumy

Director – Ted Huffman
Assistant director – Sonoko Kamimura
Set designs – Nadja Sofie Eller
Costumes – Astrid Klein
Lighting – Bertrand Couderc
Choreography – Pim Veulings
Dramaturgy – Detlef Giese, Elisabeth Kühne

Children’s Choir of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (director: Vinzenz Weissenburger)
Staatsopernchor Berlin (director: Dani Juris)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Sir Simon Rattle (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Believe it or not, this was the first ever performance at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden of The Cunning Little Vixen, more than a century after its world premiere in Brno. It is not that it has never been performed in Berlin before, of course not. Walter Felsenstein’s 1956 (German-language) Komische Oper production was a landmark in the reception of the work and, more broadly, of Janáček outside the Czech lands. In 1965, Felsenstein’s production was made into a magical film for East German television, conducted by no less than Václav Neumann. Yet the house a few hundred metres away left the opera alone and indeed showed little interest in most of Janáček’s operas, even as they were revived elsewhere, in Europe or beyond. Simon Rattle’s passion for the composer, combined with his now long-term collaboration with the Staatsoper and Daniel Barenboim’s trust in Rattle, has now resulted in a number of Janáček house premieres, of which this must surely be the most surprising. Rattle conducted the opera for the first time almost fifty years ago, at Glyndebourne, in 1977. He has also conducted it with the Royal Opera and the LSO, as well as with the Berlin Philharmonic. So here we had an inviting blend of novelty and experience, mirrored onstage by the combination of adult professionals and child performers (acrobats as well as singers).

How did that work in practice? Rattle certainly conducted it with the knowledge, sympathy, and understanding that would entail. Pacing was such that one did not notice it; it proceeded naturally and, in general, at the rate of a sung play, as Janáček tends to require. The composer’s language had been fully internalised and put to good musicodramatic use, even if the Staatskapelle Berlin – understandably – did not always sound quite so much at home in this music as other opera orchestras (or indeed the LSO, which has taken to it like ducks to water). It was a golden, Straussian Janáček we heard: nothing wrong with that and indeed one might sometimes say the same about the most ‘authentic’ Janáček of all, from Czech orchestras. There is in their Janáček, though, something I did not quite hear in this case: not only ‘tradition’, that slippery, movable, even questionable feast; but also an instinctive feel of how the orchestral music speaks, sings, propels, and even bites, in its own extraordinary language. Playing was on its own terms, though, excellent throughout; I should not exaggerate a relatively minor reservation. 

As has been the case for his Janáček performances in both London and Berlin, Rattle had assembled and/or attracted a fine cast too. Vera-Lotte Böecker’s Vixen was characterful, animated, and sympathetic without being remotely cutesy. This world of Nature should never be sentimentalised. Magdalena Kožená offered a proper, more masculine complement with her Fox; the two matched one another at times as if in a Mozart instrumental serenade. Svatopluk Sem was a distinguished, humane Forester, his final hymn to Nature and its life cycles properly moving. (By now, the Staatskapelle too seemed more fully inside Janáček’s idiom.) Natalia Skrycka, Anna Samuil, David Oštrek, and Carles Pachon particularly stood out to me in their respective roles. Samuil’s Rooster proved a delightful, scene-stealing Rooster. But this was casting in depth too. No one disappointed, right down to the smaller animal roles very well taken by members of the Staatsoper’s International Opera Studio and also of its Children’s Choir. Choral singing in general was of a high standard throughout. 

Unfortunately, Ted Huffman’s production proved a disappointment. It had its moments, a highpoint being the imaginative presentation of the vixen’s running amok in the chicken coup, feathers flying across the stage as hens’ costumes were punctured. At that point, following a slow and disjointed start in stage terms, all seemed to be coming together nicely. It was, alas, difficult to discern much of a line in what followed, ideas briefly floated only to vanish without trace or recur arbitrarily, as in characters’ typing of letters towards Terynka during interludes, which added little other than confusion. All took place ultimately in a white box, Nadja Sofie Eller’s designs offering neither natural wonder nor obvious deracinated contrast. For some reason, great play was made of dressing the chorus in highly individualised human outfits: well designed as such by Astrid Klein, but it was unclear to what end. Lighting seemed to be little more than simple on and off; perhaps a point was being made, but again I am not sure what. There was scope for the children to display their skills, undoubtedly welcome; yet integration into the plot, be it of opera or production, proved elusive.

Insofar as there was an overall idea, it seemed to be to blur the boundaries between animals and humans: fair enough, but the blurring seemed, well, blurred in focus and ultimately arbitrary. This was a different attempt at realism from Felsenstein’s, from that of Peter Sellars too (for Rattle and the BPO in 2017). If preferable to the latter, which was often frankly bizarre, it could surely have learned something from the former, even at this distance, not least in terms of overall coherence and indeed of a sense of what the work, or the production for that matter, might be about. Elsewhere, the accomplishment of that one scene with the chickens threw into relief what came across as a lack of basic, general direction elsewhere. Some scenes more resembled an early stage of rehearsal than a finished staging. 

This is necessarily impressionistic, but I could not help noticing that younger and more international elements, visiting or resident, appeared distinctly less enthusiastic than the older, local core of the audience. If I were to hazard a potential explanation, I might note that it could hardly have been a matter of theatrical style and values. The production had nothing obviously in common with critical German theatre—unless that were why some approved, which I should not discount entirely. But I do not think it was only that; there seemed to be a genuine excitement at encountering the work, notwithstanding those Rattle performances at the Philharmonie in 2017. Those of us who have seen it in multiple stagings may be, according to taste, more critical or more jaded. Yet it is no bad thing to be reminded of the joy of encountering a Janáček opera for the first time; of that there appeared to be much in evidence.

Daphne, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 20 January 2024

Peneios – René Pape
Gaea – Anna Kissjudit
Daphne – Vera-Lotte Boecker
Leukippos – Johan Krogius
Apollo – David Butt Philip
Four Shepherds – Arttu Kataja, Florian Hoffmann, Adam Kutuy, Friedrich Hamel
Two Maids – Evelin Novak, Natalia Skrycka

Director, set design, costumes, lighting – Romeo Castellucci
Revival director – José Dario Innella
Choreography – Evelin Facchini
Assistant director – Maxi Menja Lehmann
Set design assistance – Lisa Behensky, Alessio Valmori
Costume assistance – Clara Rosina Straßer, Theresa Wilson
Lighting assistance – Marco Giusti

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Gerhard Polifka)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Thomas Guggeis (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Daphne (Vera-Lotte Boecker)

Seen first last year, Romeo Castellucci’s production of Daphne receives its first revival. In one sense, it could hardly be more timely, snow falling outside in wintry landscapes across Berlin and beyond, as it does onstage. Yet that immediately presents a greater untimeliness to the mise-en-scène, for a modern snowscape seems perversely distant from the Thessalian pastoral of Joseph Gregor’s libretto (and Strauss’s imagination). It is beautiful, of course, and with Castellucci, matters aesthetic have a tendency to take on a life, approaching the painterly, of their own. I have heard it said several times that Castellucci has no concept of the dramatic; I think that goes too far in this case, for this is no ‘mere’ installation and a story certainly is told. But the alterity to his aesthetic imagination, to which audiences, perhaps particularly opera audiences, respond very differently, is undeniably present—to my mind, more fruitfully than in, say, his Munich Tannhäuser or even his Salzburg Salome. It may or may not be the story some want to be told – ultimately, I think it remains the same story, albeit from an angle unexpected until one becomes accustomed to its shift – but we certainly have narrative and development as well as setting. 

That setting is one of widespread estrangement from Nature: not, I think, in an especially environmentalist sense, though that need not be excluded, but more existential. In light of that, the conception of the nymph Daphne, according to a programme interview, as ‘a being who withdraws from all social relationships in search of intensive, I should say, (skin-)contact with Nature … a contemporary creature who breaks with her surroundings’, seems central; so is her spiritual, as opposed to political, need to do so. And so, even in the deep snow, it is there she wishes to be. Whilst others, not unreasonably layer their clothing, she sheds much of hers. It is for us a radical break with all we value, social, erotic, and so on—and therein captures the dramatic essence of the work more clearly than one might suspect. The unexpected slant makes clear what that essence and her character are not. 

When Apollo does eventually bring sun to this world it registers powerfully, within its frame. He, after all, is far from entirely at home with himself, having uncomfortably, even shamefully, adopted the methods of Dionysus to ensnare the nymph. But acting in accordance with Nature brings the three key figures, Daphne, Apollo, and Leukippos briefly together, to an extent that would otherwise have been impossible; initial estrangement arguably assists that. I honestly cannot say I understood why the cover of the first edition of The Waste Land descended. It came across a bit too much as ‘referencing’ rather than drama, though I suppose quotation is inherent to the poem, and the act had an aesthetic as well as intellectual presence of its own. I am assuming, I think correctly, that there is greater significance to the invocation of Eliot than simply the scene of a winter waste land. But to return to the snow, one thing one can do with and in it is a favourite act of Castellucci’s: burial. (Another is the blood-like pouring and smearing of red paint over the dying Leukippos, tar-black reserved for Daphne.) Daphne’s transformation takes place both below – soon, we can no longer see her – and above, as the tree present throughout has a sort of apotheosis. There is something magical here, in the simplicity and wonder: ever tied or at least related to Strauss’s inspired orchestral and, eventually, vocalised concluding transformation (very much the composer’s own idea, rejecting Gregor’s idea of a choral finale).

 

Whilst we naturally – rightly – accord Daphne’s vocalise a key role here, it is actually quite short; for the most part this transformation is orchestral, and Strauss called it an ‘extended orchestral piece’. Here and elsewhere, Thomas Guggeis led the Staatskapelle Berlin with true distinction. From the opening Harmoniemusik throughout the score, the conductor traced an ever-transforming path, perhaps warmer than what we saw on stage, yet rarely heated and never remotely over-heated. This was a reading of subtle mastery, upset at most a couple of times by something intrusive from without—though that is arguably Strauss’s own responsibility. The Goethian metamorphosis that surely underpins Strauss’s method here as strongly and as generatively as in Metamorphosen was painted, indeed lived, as if this were a work far more frequently performed than it is; that is, conductor and orchestra showed deep knowledge and understanding, without loss to a proper sense of discovery and magic. For the orchestral players were at least equal participants in this achievement; I cannot imagine any orchestra, be it in Vienna, Dresden, or elsewhere, sounding more at home and proving a more rewarding guide. 

The cast likewise made an outstanding contribution. In the title role, Vera-Lotte Boecker’s silver glistened, gleamed and blended with her orchestral colleagues, though it could certainly grow into something fuller-voiced, thrillingly so, when called upon. Boecker entered enthusiastically, moreover, into the staging, grasping Castellucci’s at-times-somewhat abstract enigmas and personifying them, enabling one to believe. Like her fellow performers, she played the Straussian role of Music as well as singing or playing its lower-case cousin. To have had not one but two excellent Straussian tenor performances is quite something. Johan Krogius and David Butt Phillip both shone as Leukippos and Apollo respectively: the former offering a properly rounded portrayal, beautifully sung, Daphne’s likeable companion revealing tragic dignity in death; the latter’s rather different journey traced sympathetically and with due mystery. The deep voices of René Pape as Peneios and Anna Kissjudit as Gaea contributed much to the ensemble. Kissjudit may be described as a mezzo, but her chalumeau-like tones revealed, as in her Erda, the ability to sing a true contralto line too. Pape’s tone was similarly luxurious and similarly attentive to words. Shepherds, maids, and chorus were all excellent too. If Castellucci sometimes held the drama at arm’s length, though mirroring and responding it to throughout, that distance and conception of distance arguably enabled the riches of the evening’s orchestral and vocal performances to penetrate audience consciousness the more readily.