Lohengrin, Vienna State Opera, 1 May 2025

Henry the Fowler – Günter Groissböck
Lohengrin – Klaus Florian Vogt
Elsa – Camilla Nylund
Telramund – Jordan Shanahan
Ortrud – Anja Kampe
Herald – Attila Mokus
Brabantian nobles – Wolfram Igor Derntl, Thomas Köber, Panajotis Pratsos, Jens Musger
Pages – Daliborka Lühn-Skibinski, María Isabel Segarra, Charlotte Jefferies, Viktoria McConnell

Directors – Jossi Wieler, Sergio Morabito
Designs – Anna Viebrock
Lighting – Sebastian Alphons
Assistant set designer – Torsten Köpf

Vienna State Opera Chorus

Extra Chorus, and Choir Academy (chorus director: Thomas Lang)

Vienna State Opera Orchestra and Stage Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Images: © Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn
Gottfried (member of the Wiener Opernschule), Elsa (Camilla Nylund)

Lohengrin has sometimes been described as Wagner’s ‘Italian opera’. I do not hear it that way myself, thinking rather that if such a thing were to exist, it would be with a pronounced Teutonic accent in the guise of Das Liebesverbot. For me, if one is to classify in this way at all, Lohengrin marks Wagner’s fond farewell to German Romantic opera. However, if I remember correctly, Christian Thielemann said during his time in Dresden he subscribes to the ‘Italian’ conception of the work, and for the first time, I found myself hearing it as a valid, indeed convincing reading (it not the only one). The lyricism, orchestral and vocal, of Thielemann’s reading – and there was no doubt here that this was Thielemann’s Wagner – swept along, even enveloped spectators and artists alike, not at the expense of harmony, timbre, and other musical parameters, but as arguably the guiding force in their interaction. Transitions were very much of a piece with the conception outlined in a fascinating programme note in which the conductor characterised Lohengrin as ‘Wagner’s first truly though-composed work’. 

It can be otherwise understood – arguably was by Wagner himself, in a letter to Schumann – but the point is that the conception compelled and convinced. The Vienna orchestra, which clearly adores playing with him, was not only a willing participant, but also, it would seem, an inspiration in this particular conception. I had the sense that, like a Wagner conductor of old – naming no names for now – this was his ‘Vienna’ Lohengrin, whilst his Berlin or Dresden version of the work might be quite different. Indeed, it marked quite a contrast with what I heard from him at Bayreuth in 2019, almost entirely for the better. Viennese strings glowed, woodwind spoke with a magic born in Mendelssohnian forest, yet turned somewhat phantasmagorical, and brass thrilled and threatened by turn or in tandem. This was no Bruckner orchestra-as-organ, insofar as the cap fits in that case, but there was as ever no denying the conductor’s virtuosity in leading it as an organist of sorts, less in bending it to his will as allowing wills to merge in coherent collaboration. And of course, the orchestra sounded as it never could emerging from a covered pit. 

Interestingly, it was not only Thielemann and the orchestra whom we had also seen and heard in the previous week’s Parsifal; it was the five most prominent soloists and the outstanding chorus too. Only a sharply characterised Herald from Attila Mokus had not been heard in connection with the swan-knight‘s Monsalvat father. This was quite a Wagner ensemble, by any standards, Bayreuth’s included, headed again by Klaus Florian Vogt. If Lohengrin were the role with which Vogt made his name, I felt if anything his Parsifal had proved a little stronger. This was still a tireless performance, though, with precisely the timbral quality that continues to divide opinion. Vogt can certainly act too, even when lumbered as here with a deeply unflattering wig. 

Henry the Fowler (Günther Groissböck),
Lohengrin (Klaus Florian Vogt)

Camilla Nylund’s Elsa was anything but a portrayal-by-numbers; she entered wholeheartedly into the stage concept at work here, on which more soon, initially rousing our suspicions and engaging our compassion in apparent contrition. Anja Kampe’s Ortrud was similarly complex and uniquely fiery, a portrayal very much her own, yet marking her a worthy successor indeed to the likes of Waltraud Meier (my first, at Covent Garden in 2003) and Petra Lang. Jordan Shanahan and Günther Groissböck brought both ambiguity and clarity to their roles as Telramund and King Henry. No praise could be too high for the contribution of an augmented Vienna State Opera Chorus, trained by Thomas Lang: harmonically grounded, agile on stage, and as gleaming of tone where required as the orchestra. Partners in crime, as it were—and with Thielemann too, his shading of the chorus at the close of the first act astonishingly variegated and quite unlike any performance I have heard before. 

For the somewhat odd conception, or part-conception of this new production from Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito was of a crime scene. Or, as designer Anna Viebrock described it in the programme: ‘We’re not telling a story of salvation, we’re making a thriller. This criminalistic perspective alone takes us way beyond the horizons of expectation.’ Since we pretty much witnessed Elsa disposing of her brother Gottfried during the Prelude to the first act, there was nothing much of a crime to be solved, and indeed everything turned out just as we might have expected. Leaving the ‘criminalistic perspective’ on one side and turning to the broader dramaturgical standpoint, there was a considerable amount to be gleaned from the ‘basic premise … [of] “Elsa did it”’. 

Ortrud (Anja Kampe)

Immediately distrusting her and Lohengrin, engaging more sympathetically perhaps with Telramund and Ortrud was an enriching experience not only dramatically but musically too, the flick of that switch having one hear not only them but at times the orchestra differently too. The broader portrayal of a time of political instability in which religion – less so, theology – appeared to take on a sinister German-Protestant hue and, needless to say, play a deeply sinister role was full of historical resonance, without being pinned down to specific reference. If the production concept seemed strongest in the first act, somewhat running out of steam by the third, the level of musical excellence was such that it was difficult to mind too much. Ultimately, here was a Lohengrin that demanded to be heard and was worth seeing too.

Parsifal, Vienna State Opera, 23 April 2025

Images:© Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn
Parsifal (Nikolay Sidorenko and Klaus Florian Vogt)

Amfortas – Jordan Shanahan
Gurnemanz – Günther Groissböck

Parsifal – Klaus Florian Vogt
Klingsor – Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Kundry – Anja Kampe
Titurel – Ivo Stanchev
Younger Parsifal – Nikolay Sidorenko
Squires – Anita Monserrat, Juliette Mars, Andrew Turner, Nathan Bryon
First Knight of the Grail – Devin Eatmon
Second Knight of the Grail – Alex Ilvakhin
Flowermaidens – Ileana Tonca, Mariia Zherebiateva, Anna Bondarenko, Celine Mun, Jenni Hietala, Isabel Signoret

Director, designs, costumes – Kirill Serebrennikov
Lighting – Franck Evin
Assistant director – Evgeny Kulagin
Assistant designer – Olga Pavluk
Assistant costume designer – Tatina Dolmatovskaya
Video and photography – Aleksey Fokin, Yurii Karih
Fight coordinator – Ran Arthur Braun
Dramaturgy – Sergio Morabito

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Thomas Lang)

Vienna State Opera Orchestra

Axel Kober (conductor)

 

Kirill Serebrennikov’s Vienna Parsifal, seen first in April 2021, receives a revival fully justifying the praise it garnered four years ago. Like Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Unter den Linden staging, it has a Russian quality to it, once again bringing to mind Dostoevsky (and Nietzsche’s confrontations with him and with Wagner), albeit in quite a different way. Here is not the world of the Old Believers but The House of the Dead: recalling, if only coincidentally, Frank Castorf’s move from the Ring not to Parsifal but to Janáček’s opera as a surprising, yet illuminating pendant. Well conducted by Axel Kober, in the best performance I have heard from him, with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and Chorus, and a fine cast, this knocked spots of Bayreuth’s two recent, sorry encounters with the work written for its theatre. On a first acquaintance at least, Serebrennikov’s production marks an important contribution to Parsifal’s production history post-Stefan Herheim, whose Bayreuth staging continues, like Patrice Chéreau’s Ring, to divide others into worlds of ‘before’ and ‘after’. 

Video homes in on a remote, forest monastery, or I thought so initially. It is actually a prison. If it would be silly to say they are the same thing, the two certainly have something in common, as prison does with all manner of institutions and greater societies, all the more so when we deny that it does. As an Anglican cleric might have it, ‘we are all, in a very real sense, prisoners,’ and of course we are. Serebrennikov, notoriously, was himself when his art contravened the diktats of Putin and Russian Orthodoxy’s fascism. The way such societies constitute themselves internally and in relation to their governors is anthropologically revealing; all manner of rules, customs, comradeship, and expectations build up in complex interaction, masking, abetting, and inciting violence, increasingly so when, like all institutions, they stray from their founding purpose. Prisoners are thrown out by guards for a beating from prisoners. Gurnemanz is an intermediary, a political even, certainly at times a financier, paying a guard to look the other way. His leadership capacity involves tattooing fellow prisoners: a rite of initiation and doubtless of hierarchy too. Ritual become ritualism, as in the writing on the wall, sometimes in blood: ‘Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor, harre sein’. Sometimes it takes an external intervention, a novice who does not know where he is, even who he is, to accomplish what is required—though that will be easier said than done. 

Gurnemanz (Günther Groissböck)

But that is to get slightly ahead of ourselves—not unreasonably, given the production does, presenting the first and second acts from the standpoint of an elder Parsifal, embodied in the singer (in this case, Klaus Florian Vogt), those acts’ stagework mostly – save for illuminating moments of interaction through memory – by the outstanding, highly physical acting of Nikolay Sidorenko. Violence is rife, and video enables us to home in further, observing and feeling the wounds, of which Amfortas’s is but the most egregious example, for ourselves. Like St Thomas, one might say—or like all manner of other instances, if one prefers. Kundry visits as a photographer, though one who seems also to know the rules, perhaps closer to guiding principles than others, though her photography, as becomes increasingly clear, is not only a matter of record but also of exploitation, glamourising what – and whom – should not be glamourised; such, however, is our society, and such is unquestionably the world of most of its journalism. Surveillance is part and parcel of that—and is of course an unmistakeable component of life in prison. The troubling death of another prisoner, relayed on video – though should we trust its (edited?) testimony? – equates, we think, to that of the swan. There is certainly a terrible beauty to the close-ups and a frank, border-line repellent insistence on our (homoerotic) gaze. There is ultimately no objectivity at the human level, least of all when we claim there is.

More broadly, narration may be necessary, whether via Kundry, Gurnemanz, or the elder Parsifal; yet it can, as we all know, be highly unreliable. That, as Herheim acknowledged, this has aesthetic and specifically musical implications, is clear both in Serebrennikov’s theory and practice. ‘It is Wagner's compositional and dramaturgical perspective of memory in Parsifal,’ he acknowledges, 

… from which I developed my scenic concept: An adult man of my age remembers the young man, almost still the lad he once was. For us, Wagner's music emerges from the inner movement of the protagonist and is set in the context of a scenic experimental arrangement. Parsifal is overtaken or overwhelmed by his memories, sometimes he gets lost in them. He discovers the repressed. The break in time between the first two acts and the third led me to tell the story of the mature Parsifal in a flashback, as it were, which takes us through the events of the first two acts until we arrive in the narrator's present in Act 3. In all three acts, there is what I understand to be a sacred or mystical encounter between Parsifal then and Parsifal now. It is important for me to emphasise that I have created a poetic space of memory in which - just as in our memories - there can be contradictions and in which different levels can overlap or replace each other as if in a cross-fade.

Passing of time, so fundamental to Wagner and more broadly to drama itself, is key to the unfolding of the first, most complex (here) act, as well as to its relation with the second and third. A more wholesome, more necessary ritual, that of breakfast, of breaking bread, enables its religious-theological counterpart, seemingly understood or at least capable of understanding in Wagner’s own Feuerbachian terms, to engage in that passing, to speed things up (in fruitful counterpoint, even dialectic, with the score. The latter days of Parsifal’s week of incarceration, demarcated by video, pass more quickly, then, than those at its beginning. 

Parsifal, Kundry (Anja Kampe)

At that act’s close, there is no ‘Voice from Above’; it is Kundry herself, returned to capture the moment visually, for which Parsifal has now learned to pose, flexing muscles so as to make his way in a world both old and new. Klingsor’s world, attached (even physically as well as conceptually) to that of the prison, is that of a glossy, fashion magazine: one with pretension, no doubt, that it tells a ‘story’ with its images—and indeed with the copious words seen on screen, of Kundry’s article to date. It is not finished, though, and he compels her to return to it, to continue her work with Parsifal. (And why not, one might ask; surely prison and its conditions require reporting on. Doubtless they do, but by whom, and to what end?) The Flowermaidens, part of this world and dressed accordingly, do their bit, but it is of course only Kundry who will succeed, her (Klingsor’s) exploitation of the released prisoner every bit as disconcerting, as inciting to voyeurism, as what we saw earlier on film. Stripped, ritually yet trivially, and not knowing where to turn, desperately trying to cover what is both his humiliation and his sexuality, Parsifal, now clad – captured, in more than one sense – in fresh underwear and the tightest of leather trousers, must fulfil his side of a bargain in which he does not know the stakes, indeed to which he can hardly be said to have consented in the first place. But is that not generally the case with bourgeois contracts? (Recall the runes of domination on Wotan’s spear, or the ’terms of employment’ in a hellish factory.) Parsifal, then, is reborn, in typically ‘religious fashion’, but it is sour, straightforwardly wrong. This is, after all, the ‘rose of Hell’, replete with serpent for Parsifal on film to model. The design of the black T-shirt he is eventually permitted to don doubles up as that for the headscarves of forced memories of Herzeleide. Such is the plan. In this struggle, part of which is the vain attempt of the older Parsifal to help his younger self, predestination must play its part, as always it must in narration if it is to be narration at all. 

Parsifal and Kundry

Both worlds, in any case intimately connected, come together in the third act, as they do in the work ‘itself’. In an intriguing twist, the ‘swan’ prisoner appears to come back to life, though again the question must be asked as to whether we should believe what we are told. We arguably have no choice, and that may be the problem. Rather as Christ might come down from the Cross in Gurnemanz’s narration, that is our current lot, shaped by memory and experience. In related fashion, we are reminded that performance, whatever ideological ritual-literalists may tell you, will always offer a dialectic between fidelity and infidelity. If not quite to the extent of the deeply faithful Herheim, there is also much, doubtless for many a surprising degree, that was faithful to stage direction. I cannot remember, for instance, the last time I saw an actual chalice raised on stage, yet here it i. Unless I was missing something – quite possible with so much going on, on different levels – Titurel is not seen onstage, though the recent tendency, contra Wagner, has been to render him visible.

Amfortas (Jordan Shanahan)

All this would be as naught without performers able to bring the vision to life and to contribute much of their own. Jonas Kaufmann sang the title role in 2021. It is difficult to think of an exponent – at least one who can sing it – more different vocally from Kaufmann than Vogt. Both, however, are excellent actors as well as singers, and Vogt’s compassionate retelling and participation, very much progenitor-to-Lohengrin, would surely have satisfied even his vocal detractors. Parsifal’s words – and notes – rang forth with admirable clarity and connection, their intermittent unworldliness not only a feature but a dramatically productive one. Anja Kampe’s Kundry, similarly engaged but in a very different way, was admirable too, adapting chameleon-like to changing circumstances whilst nonetheless remaining herself. Jordan Shanahan gave a rich-toned yet vulnerable, deeply human portrayal of Amfortas, ever founded in Wagner’s text. As Gurnemanz, Günther Groissböck was more active participant than often one sees and hears, but also perhaps more changed by the experience.

Kober’s musical direction likewise accentuated ‘fidelity’. It was not a reading to give rise to thoughts of ‘his’ Parsifal, as might, say, Thielemann’s or Rattle’s. There is room for both, and in reality there is a spectrum as in staging. At any rate, this gave the impression of releasing both the outstanding Vienna orchestra and Wagner’s score to do their dramatic work, alert to the latter’s melos and its demands in tandem with the staging, but also enabling them to arise. The depth of orchestral sound was a joy, though never a joy merely in itself; again, it always sounded dramatically founded. There were a few strange balances, in particular with respect to lower brass, though that may have been an oddity of the acoustic more than anything else. Choral singing was similarly outstanding throughout, a vital contributor to and participant in a drama that should – and here did – become more mysterious with every retelling.

In that, surely, Parsifal unites, whatever its heterodoxy, the human and the divine. As Janáček wrote above the score of his final drama, From the House of the Dead, ‘In every creature, a spark of God!’

Arabella, Vienna State Opera, 22 April 2025

Images © Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn
Zdenka (Sabine Deveilhe), Arabella (Camilla Nylund)

Count Waldner – Wolfgang Bankl
Adelaide – Margaret Plummer
Arabella – Camilla Nylund
Zdenka – Sabine Deveilhe
Mandryka – Michael Volle
Matteo – Michael Laurenz
Count Elemer – Norbert Ernst
Count Dominik – Martin Hässler
Count Lamoral – Clemens Unterreiner
Fiakermilli – Ilia Staple
Fortune Teller – Juliette Mars
Welko – Michael Wilder
Djura – Jin Hun Lee
Jankel – Thomas Köber
Room Waiter – Wolfram Igor Derntl
Gamblers – Oleg Savran, Aljandro Pizarro-Enríquez, Jens Musger

Director – Sven-Eric Bechtolf
Set designs – Rolf Glittenberg
Costumes – Marianne Glittenberg

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus director: Martin Schebesta)

Vienna State Opera Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Matteo (Michael Laurenz)

Arabella is a difficult work to bring off. It requires performances and a staging of such quality that it can only really work at a certain level of house or festival. With Mozart, there is of course similarly nowhere to hide, yet his operas can work very well – often better – with young performers in smaller houses. This, if not more difficult, is at least differently difficult, perhaps akin to Mozart heard not only via Wagner but also via the golden age of Viennese operetta, less musically than verbally and dramatically—and with the particular sophistication not only of Strauss but of Hofmannsthal to reckon with too. All of that is whisked together in a confection that must retain its lightness of touch, not at the expense of depth yet so as to reveal it, and with the unavoidable knowledge and difficulty that Hofmannsthal’s work was incomplete, incompletable here, if only because Strauss, that most demanding of dramaturges (as director Sven-Erik Bechtolf observes in an interesting programme interview), would not, from respect for his deceased colleague, permit otherwise. It is not, thank God, a ‘vehicle’ in the sense of a work of few intrinsic merits, which gets trotted out to appease the vanity of a certain star singer and her – almost always her – fans. It can sometimes feel, even be treated, as though it were, though—not least since it seems to be a work in which there is little for the director to ‘say’ other than to let it play. Letting that happen is no easy thing, of course, but it rarely seems to call for, or indeed benefit from, overt interventionism or deconstruction. Tobias Kratzer, in what is probably the most illuminating staging I have seen, for Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, did permit himself a telling, timely twist, but his is probably the exception that proves the rule. 

Bechtolf has only one major intervention, one so commonplace now that it barely registers as such, save when one reflects why it might have been done and what it might have accomplished. That is, he and his designers Rolf and Marianne Glittenberg update the action to the time of composition, around 1930. I may have been sceptical about this beforehand—and to an extent still am: not because I object in principle, but rather because the work’s particular literary and dramaturgical fragility seems to militate against it, not entirely unlike updating, say, Nestroy, a Hofmannsthal play, or, for that matter, Sheridan. There are losses, I think, for such a comedy of manners. Seeing it as a companion piece, say, to Dostoevsky’s – or even Prokofiev’s – Gambler would doubtless offer illumination. What one gains, though, is first not being lost in nostalgia for a ‘beautiful nineteenth century’. Whatever nostalgia one might feel – do we not all? – for the time of updating, finely accomplished, it is already necessarily tempered by consciousness of that updating, of complication and even disjuncture. We all enjoy looking at ‘Weimar culture’, broadly understood, anyway, do we not? That permits some light-worn allusions to a gender fluidity crucial to the opera, as well as to opera more generally, without making them the point. Goodness knows, we need humanity in that respect right now, and perhaps they tell more clearly or at least differently than was ‘originally’ the intention, whether of Strauss, Hofmannsthal, or Bechtolf. 

Fiakermilli (Ilia Staple) and friends

Second and perhaps more important, one senses, inevitably with a hindsight that can seem written in, a foreboding, a fear of the future that distinguishes it from, say, operetta or indeed Der Rosenkavalier. Whether one entirely buys the argument or not does not really matter. It forms the basis for a largely convincing home, doing what Bechtolf sets out to do: perform rather than deconstruct the work, drawing out characters in whom he evidently believes. If it occasionally feels a touch tired around the edges, a little too reliant on the performers to bring it to life, then that is only to be expected of a production first seen in 2006. It is indeed the lot of any repertory system, one that has permitted this to be the fifty-sixth performance of this staging to date, as indeed has the staging itself. (Imagine that for Arabella in an Anglophone house!) Not every night can or should be a premiere. That provokes its own confrontation with memory, nostalgia even. The world was far from perfect then, yet compared to 2025, one can be forgiven a slightly fond backward glance, all the more to remind one of the present. Q.E.D., one might say. 

It never gets in the way of ‘the music’ either; indeed, it seems to permit it largely to speak as anyone with genuine interest in the work would probably wish. Christian Thielemann has lived with it some time, as of course has the Vienna State Opera. I was about to say that it showed, and it arguably did, but not in the sense of Mahlerian Schlamperei, of routine, but rather in a similar respect that freed rather than constricted. Rarely if ever with Thielemann does one sense resting on laurels. Occasionally, if more in Wagner than in Strauss, I have wondered whether he might actually have benefited from making less of an attempt to do things differently, though the urge to rethink and recreate can only be lauded. Here, however, there was approach neither to Scylla nor to Charybdis. The legendary golden warmth of the Vienna strings was to be enjoyed, not narcissistically but for its musicodramatic import, yet there was also a heightened sense, perhaps especially from the woodwind, that this was a work ‘of its time’, partaking in its own way of a neoclassicism that after all Strauss had presaged in Ariadne auf Naxos, arguably in Rosenkavlier too. Line was beyond reproach, again not in a marmoreal sense, but as part of a living performance that engaged with the past without being consumed by it. Meistersinger-ish counterpoint in lighter, Viennese hue created and played with memory before our ears. 

Arabella, Mandryka (Michael Volle)

Much the same should be said of a fine cast. Camilla Nylund offered every virtue, musically and dramatically, in a performance of the title role rooted in a a complexity not always present in even the most finely sung performances. That is not to say it was a reassessment as such, but rather one, as with the performances around her, that acknowledged the instability of Arabella’s upbringing, rendering the ultimate, rich beauty of her response all the more moving. If Michael Volle has given a mediocre performance, I have not been present; it was certainly not to be witnessed on this occasion. Mandryka’s pride, even vanity, as well as his more admirable qualities were the hallmark of what was again an uncommonly rounded portrayal. Sabine Deveilhe presented a Zdenka both likeable and troubled, completed by and also completing (at least for now) Michael Laurenz’s excellent Matteo, sung in a ringing tenor unfazed by Strauss’s demands. Wolfgang Bankl and Margaret Plummer conveyed, in tandem with the production, a couple who want the best, not only for themselves, yet seem incapable of acting to achieve that—at least without external guidance. Hofmannsthal’s text was used to the full here, as it was by all. Ilia Staple’s Fiakermilli was faultless vocally and as cabaret. The smaller parts were all vividly characterised, Juliette Mars’s Fortune Teller included. She did, after all, foretell what came to pass, a lightly fatalistic point made by her reappearance at the close, descending the staircase which Arabella and Mandryka had just ascended. Once more, Q.E.D.

Salome, Vienna State Opera, 4 February 2023

Images: © Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn 

Herod – Gerhard Siegel
Herodias – Michaela Schüster
Salome – Malin Byström
Jochanaan – Wolfgang Koch
Narraboth – Daniel Jenz
Page – Patricia Nolz
Jews – Thomas Ebenstein, Andrea Giovannini, Carlos Osuna, Katleho Mokhoabane, Evgeny Solodovnikov
Nazarenes – Clemens Unterreiner, Attila Mokus
Soldiers – Ilja Kazakov, Stephano Park
Cappadocian – Alejandro Pizarro-Enríquez
Slave – Daniel Lökös
Executioner – Alexandre Cardoso da Silva
Cameraman – Benedikt Missmann
Little Salome – Margaryta Lazniuk
Little Salome (Dance/Video) – Anna Chesnova

Cyril Teste (director)

Céline Gautier (artistic collaboration)
Valérie Grall (designs)
Marie La Rocca (costumes)
Julien Boizard (lighting)
Mehdi Toutain-Lopez (video design)
Rémy Nguyen (video design (live camera))
Magdalena Chowaniec (choreography)

Sergio Morabito (dramaturgy)  

Vienna State Opera Orchestra

Philippe Jordan (conductor)

At last, a new Salome comes to Vienna, Boleslaw Barlog’s venerable (1972!) staging finally having been retired. Cyril Teste’s new production has much to recommend it, both in itself and as realised by cast and orchestra. At first sight, all is as one might expect from a contemporary staging. Herod’s court has a mix of modern(ish) civilian evening dress and military uniforms. Guests are seated at a long table and champagne flows. We see them not above, as in David McVicar’s long-running Covent Garden production, but behind. But we see greater detail through live video. Herod’s leering obsession with Salome is already apparent. A state banquet is the setting, but the tragedy for Teste is familial; in a programme interview, he sees parallels with Hamlet. I am not sure I see it that way, really. The aestheticism of both Wilde and Strauss seems, at least in Teste’s spoken outline, somewhat shortchanged. In practice, though – and this is surely more important – the production is open enough to allow one to approach it from one’s own standpoint and not feel disappointed, quite the contrary.

© Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn 

There is commendable attention to atmospheric detail, contributing considerably to a more detailed whole. Curtain movement chillingly – in more than one sense – conveys the sinister evening wind. More fundamentally, the detail of camerawork not only brings to life more that is going on, more than one can reasonably take in on a single viewing, but also enables Herod’s pornographic intent to reveal itself. For this Salome is not only a family tragedy; it is a tragedy of an abused girl/young woman. Salome’s dance is closely filmed, split between her and a memory of her still younger self. Initially parts of it seem odd, bizarrely awkward, as when she flexes her muscles, but one realises that is the point. Salome is both too knowing and not knowing enough; a part of her is shockingly, even heartbreakingly, innocent. And yet we must watch. Even the Tetrarch finds it impossible to watch some of it, head in hands toward the side of the stage, though that does not subtract from his glee at its close. He would probably prefer a private viewing. Aestheticism, then, comes here after all; we should always beware rulers who also think themselves artists.

I am (nearly) always surprised how most productions put entirely to one side Salome’s explicit reference to homosexuality; it is not even a subtext, but a text, Salome promising Narraboth a green flower if he will do her bidding. In my experience, only Hans Neuenfels’s brilliant Berlin staging has taken the opera at its word here (assuming we do not count David McVicar’s gratuitous nude executioner). The production certainly does not lack other sexual content, though, culminating in a gripping collision between Salome, the executioner, and the head of John the Baptist he has brought up from the cistern employed as a mask. Ultimately the executioner, at Herodias’s bidding, withdraws, but not before he too has had his piece of the girl. Moreover, the now common portrayal of Herodias’s page, sung by a female voice yet unquestionably a male role, as an androgynous woman poses, or at least suggests, further questions of gender, even as it takes us further from Wilde’s green carnation.

© Wiener Staatsoper / Ashley Taylor

This would count for relatively little, were it not for a host of outstanding performances onstage. Malin Byström fully inhabited the title role from beginning to end, in as fine a performance as one could hope to see and hear. Gerhard Siegel did not mistake grotesquerie of behaviour for a licence not to sing. His Herod was all the more plausible, as well as all the creepier and more sinister, for its vocal qualities. Michaela Schüster was surely destined for Herodias, her portrayal effortlessly iconic – for once, the much-abused word seems fitting – in its small observations as in its effortless hauteur. Ultimately, rule is hers, at least until eclipsed all too briefly by her daughter. Wolfgang Koch’s Jochanaan is a typically intelligent portrayal: necessarily direct in its prophecy, yet subtle in its interplay of words and music. The finest Narraboths always leave one wishing for more, that the officer’s tragedy might be averted. Daniel Jenz was no exception, his Narraboth sweetly sung, imploring and bewitched. Cast from seemingly endless depth, this Salome had everyone, however small the role, contribute to a greater whole. For me, the two Nazarenes, Clemens Unterreiner and Attila Mokus, especially caught the ear, but it may well have been others—and surely was for others in the audience.

© Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn 

The Vienna State Opera Orchestra was on excellent form too, full of rich, warm tone in which to luxuriate, yet ever precise and directed. It may not be quite the period instrument here, Salome having reached the house as late as thirteen years after its 1905 Dresden premiere; one might nonetheless have been forgiven for thinking so. That precision owed much, of course, to Philippe Jordan’s thoughtful conducting. If this were not a Salome on which he stamped an indelibly personal mark – one might think here of, say, Karajan’s Salome – that was surely not Jordan’s intention. In permitting the score, after the necessary cliché (and illusion), to speak for itself, he was less neutral than responsive to the particular requirements of the stage.

Don Giovanni, Vienna State Opera, 3 February 2023

Don Giovanni – Kyle Ketelsen
Commendatore – Ain Anger
Donna Anna – Hanna-Elisabeth Müller
Don Ottavio – Dmitry Korchak
Donna Elvira – Kate Lindsey
Leporello – Philippe Sly
Zerlina – Isabel Signoret
Masetto – Martin Häßler

Barrie Kosky (director)
Katrin Lea Tag (designs)
Franck Evin (lighting)
Theresa Gregor (costumes)
Sergio Morabito, Nikolaus Stenitzer (dramaturgy)

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus director: Thomas Lang)

Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera

Antonello Manacorda (conductor)

Images: © Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn
Donna Anna (Hanna-Elisabeth Müller) and the Commendatore (Ain Anger)

One of Barrie Kosky’s great virtues as a director is that he does not impose a one-size-fits-all approach, or aesthetic, to his work with opera. There will sometimes, of course, be visual similarities – doubtless in part his, in part his design team’s – but they are intermittent and rarely, if ever, determining factors for the conceptual framework. (An especially vexing misconception of the AMOP crowd is that designs ‘are’ the production. No wonder they fail to understand anything they see.) And that framework, like it or otherwise—I have regularly fallen into either camp—is usually pretty clear. 

What puzzled me most about this Don Giovanni was a relative lack of clarity—whether in my perception or intrinsic. I think I managed to piece a bit more together afterwards, but much of it seemed, at least to me, a little undercooked: not a characteristic I readily associate with the director. Is that perhaps a by-product of its first outing having been at the height of the pandemic, when restrictions may have inhibited certain types of action? Characters certainly seem to spend a good deal of time, though far from all of it, some distance apart on a large stage. It is a rocky, rather grim landscape, many miles (literally, I suspect, as well as conceptually) from early-modern Seville (or the Venice Da Ponte’s libretto often seems fundamentally to suggest). Nothing is hidden, or concealed, in a wasteland that is anything but labyrinthine. It sprouts flora in the final scene of the first act, as do the chorus (who, whatever I said earlier on, resemble strikingly the chorus in Kosky’s Komische Oper Monteverdi Orpheus). But then it is back to the grey, rocky landscape—and latterly, a pool of water. 

That literal flowering seems to suggest some sort of Bacchic ritual, it would seem, albeit curiously shortlived. Perhaps that is the point: what does Giovanni do when things are not flowering, when the wine is not flowing—which does not even seem to happen at his feast, nor indeed ‘Finch’ han del vino’? He waits, it seems: a curious undermining of the kinetic energy that makes up his dramatic – in music and words alike – persona. Again, I imagine that is the point. Indeed, after, though only after, the performance, I sensed that, especially later on, this had been for Don Giovanni and Leporello, perhaps for the others too, a performance of Waiting for the Commendatore. Or had it? The idea of a Beckettian Don Giovanni is intriguing, but not very much more seems to be done with it. 

Don Giovanni (Kyle Ketelsen) and Masetto (Martin Hässler)

The other principal theme, perhaps related, is a centring of Leporello, who seems (not unreasonably, I suppose, given a standpoint of psychological realism) quite traumatised by his experiences with Don Giovanni. Is there a sense of abuse there? One might argue that that is intrinsic to the master-slave dialectic, though I am not sure that is quite how Mozart and Da Ponte see it. I think so, but more strong, again especially towards the end, is a sense of an ersatz father-and-son relationship. Perhaps, according to standpoint, that is intrinsically abusive. One might, truthfully yet not necessarily revealingly, observe that all of Don Giovanni’s relationships, if one may call them that at all, qualify as such. I sensed, though, that Kosky is saying more than that, without being quite clear (in my mind) what that ‘more’ is. Donna Elvira seems to be behaving rather unusually too. 

Don Giovanni and Leporello
(Philippe Sly)

Another Kosky virtue is that he knows his music. As with any director, indeed any musician, one might disagree with his response, but it would be unfair to claim that he has not considered it. A case in point here would be the concatenation of dances Mozart presents as a society of orders stands on the libertine – perhaps even revolutionary – precipice. For once, not only do we have the different bands of musicians on stage; the characters dance the appropriate dance, lending visual realisation of an extraordinary moment whose import may not always be recognised by a twenty-first-century audience. Too often, directors impose trademark silly dancing for all-comers. (There is a bit of that too, but not here.) I could not help, though, but wish that Kosky had interpreted the music, or at least how I hear it, a little more. It is not that music need always be doubled on stage, any more than the libretto need, but in the absence of a stronger conceptual lead, it might have helped. Herbert Graf’s Salzburg Felsenreitschule ipproduction for Furtwängler continues to score here. 

I am wary, as anyone should be, of saying it would have been better to have done x than y. It seems more fruitful in general to concentrate on y, though consideration of x may have some heuristic use in sharpening critique of y. For me—surely also for Mozart and Da Ponte—Don Giovanni is unquestionably a religious, indeed a Catholic, work, profoundly concerned with sin and damnation. That does not mean it must be presented as such, but it suggests performance would do well at least to find a satisfactory alternative to doing so, rather than simply ignoring the issue. That may be why, assuming God rather than Nietzsche to be dead, Kosky steps, surprisingly tentatively, toward the Theatre of the Absurd and, perhaps, beyond it to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, though neither comes across so starkly as it might. But then, perhaps neither is supposed to; if something is a context, it is not necessarily for me to say that it should become something more than that. Is it, though, for an audience member to voice bemusement concerning what, if anything, the message might be? Surely it is; for if not, not only criticism but theatre itself must be dead. And, whatever Kosky’s message may be, whatever the strange intermittent lack of theatricality to a production that yet strains hard to be theatrical, I strongly doubt he would wish to propose that particular death. 

As it was, a strong cast of singers worked hard to bring theatrical as well as musical values to the stage. Kyle Ketelsen was an energetic, charismatic Don Giovanni, owning the stage when he needed to, yet not without a sense of the chameleon when musically as well as dramatically called for. Philippe Sly’s wounded yet spirited Leporello offered a tour de force in the service of Kosky’s strangely compelling conception. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller, an initial announcement notwithstanding, and Dmitry Korchak both shone as the unambiguously seria pair, Donna Anna and Don Ottavio. They understood how coloratura works dramatically—and made us feel that. Kosky’s Donna Anna is certainly no unwilling participant: a more controversial idea now than it might have been twenty or even ten years ago, but certainly not without warrant in the score, let alone Romantic tradition. Kate Lindsey’s ‘Mì tradi’ was worth the price of admission alone; not that the rest of this captivating artist’s performance was not similarly excellent. If I were unsure quite what Kosky was trying to suggest here, there was no doubting Lindsey’s dramatic and musical capabilities of doing so. Ain Anger’s Commendatore was intelligently sung, paying commendable attention to the words as well as to overall aura. Isabel Signoret and Martin Häβler’s spirited Zerlina and Masetto likewise made much, though never too much, of their words, marrying them with sweet satisfaction to melody and overall characterisation. 

Antonello Manacorda and the Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera (to all intents and purposes the Vienna Philharmonic) seemed neither at odds, nor completely of one mind. There was no discernible attempt made to stymie the Vienna sound, commendably full on occasion, and anything but puritanical. (Imagine: puritanism in this of all works!) Yet whilst generally choosing sensible tempi – I still cannot come on board with the fashionable alla breve for Overture and Stone Guest, however ‘correct’ it is held to be – Manacorda often seemed to remain somewhat on the surface: more, perhaps, of orchestra than score. He was supportive of the cast, though, and I cannot imagine anyone being seriously disappointed. I doubt use of the all-too-familiar conflation of Prague and Vienna versions was his doing. Whoever made that decision really should have known better, but no one ever does (well, hardly ever). The outcome, save in the most blistering, powerful of performances, is always dramatically unsatisfactory; this was no exception. Prague is, of course, the answer; it would be a good start were someone occasionally to ask the question.

Die Zauberflöte, Vienna State Opera, 10 December 2019

Sarastro – Ain Anger

Tamino – Andreas Schager

Speaker, Second Priest – Adrian Eröd

First Priest – Peter Jelosits

Queen of the Night – Aleksandra Jovanović

Pamina – Andrea Carroll

Three Ladies – Fiona Jopson, Ulrike Helzel, Zoryana Kushpler

Papagena – Ileana Tonca

Papageno – Rafael Fingerlos

Monostatos – Benedikt Kobel

First Armoured Man – Herbert Lippert

Second Armoured Man – Ryan Speedo Green

Three Boys – Members of the Vienna Boys’ Choir

Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier (directors)

Christian Fenouillat (set designs)

Agostino Cavalca (costumes)

Christophe Forey (lighting)

Beate Vollack (choreography)

 Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus director: Martin Schebesta)

Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera

James Conlon (conductor)

Something new, Olga Neuwirth’s Orlando, was followed by something old: that most Viennese of operas, Mozart’s Magic Flute. It was premiered in 1791, not at a court theatre—today’s State Opera today’s equivalent—but at the suburban Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden, which had opened in 1787 and had been under the management of Mozart’s librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, since 1789. Geographically, one should not make too much of that: the Wieden district is but a stone’s throw away, today’s Fourth District, incorporated in 1850. (It includes the Karlskirche, the Naschmarkt, and so on: landmarks many would think of as ‘central’. Gluck lived there, as later would Brahms.) Nor should one necessarily overemphasise the ‘popular’ element: its repertoire was mixed, but it included plenty of Goethe and Schiller. Use of the vernacular was hardly unprecedented either: Joseph II’s plan for a German National Theatre had given the world Die Entführung aus dem Serail, although that transformation of the Burgtheater came to an end shortly thereafter.

Nevertheless, the work’s roots in popular theatre should not, cannot be denied any more than the opportunity afforded by relative freedom of genre: a synthesis of everything from Hanswurst to Bach and, incipiently, onwards to Beethoven. The genre of Singspiel permits that, but it is the element of musical magic, the fully achieved status of Zauberoper that extends beyond historical definition, binding together and sublimating the material both then and now. Successful performance and production need in some sense to further or at least to reflect that. Sadly, such a goal—hardly unreasonable—seems increasingly beyond the realms of possibility. Indeed, Mozart in general often seems to prosper better now at smaller theatres, often in conservatoire productions, rather than at the great houses and festivals of the world that for long did him proud. I wish I could account this evening an exception. Alas—and it saddens me greatly to say this—it often proved tedious, anything but a Zauberoper.

On the face of it, James Conlon’s approach to the musical direction had much to be said for it. A reasonable sized orchestra—if hardly large, more’s the pity—combined with judicious tempi and disinclination to follow ‘period’ fads augured well. How rare it is nowadays to hear ‘Ach, ich fühl’s’ taken at something other than a breakneck tempo. Alas, there was barely a hint of magic, let alone of drama or enlightenment. The orchestra sounded cultivated enough, yet rarely committed, save for some truly euphonious—magical—wind playing. There were, moreover, quite a few false entries and disjunctures between pit and stage. Repertoire performances are or should be the lifeblood of a house such as Vienna: that does not mean, however little the time afforded for rehearsal, that they should descend to or below the level of the merely routine.

The cast fared better, though it was not a vintage evening on that score either. Andrea Carroll’s sincere Pamina was probably the highlight for me: clean of line and winningly instrumental of tone, whilst equally at home with words and their implication. Rafael Fingerlos’s Papageno also impressed, likewise as keenly communicative with words as with music and gesture. I was keen to hear Andreas Schager’s Tamino. It is not every day, indeed barely any day, that one gets to hear a Heldentenor in this role, let alone the world’s reigning Siegfried and Tristan. Alas, compared to, say, Siegfried Jerusalem—I think of Bernard Haitink’s recording—this was a one-dimensional performance, largely lacking in variegation and verbal nuance; it was better heard in solo passages rather than ensembles, during which it could sometimes veer disconcertingly astray. Ain Anger’s Sarastro was more consistent: intelligent and musical, if occasionally a little dry of tone. Aleksandra Jovanović’s Queen of the Night did not quite scale the heights—literally, in her first aria—but nor did she really disappoint. One could not have asked for more from the three outstanding Vienna Boys’ Choir soloists; their counterparts as Three Ladies also performed admirably.

As for Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s production, it is difficult to know what to say. It barely seemed to be a production at all. There was the germ of something metatheatrical: what seemed to be a setting of a rehearsal room, the implication of a stage in front corresponding with the actual Vienna proscenium. That, however, was it. Moreover, the placing of action, such as it was, made a nonsense even of that germ of an idea. Otherwise, there was a melange of largely unattractive costumes, with the singers largely left to fend for themselves. Oh, and a Monastatos in blackface: yes, blackface, in 2019. Whatever reservations someone might have held concerning Neuwirth’s Orlando, then, one realised all the more not only why it was necessary, but what laudable, magical effort had been expended on its advent. Something new, once again, would be welcome.

Olga Neuwirth: Orlando (world premiere), Vienna State Opera, 8 December 2019

Images: (c) Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn

Orlando – Kate Lindsey

Narrator – Anna Clementi

Guardian Angel – Eric Jurenas
Queen, Purity, Friend of Orlando’s Child – Constance Hauman
Modesty – Margaret Plummer
Sasha, Chastity – Agneta Eichenholz
Shelmerdine, Greene – Leigh Melrose
Dryden – Marcus Pelz
Addison – Carlos Osuna
Duke – Wolfgang Bankl
Pope – Christian Miedl
Orlando’s Child – Justin Vivian Bond
Putto – Emil Lang
Doctor 1 – Wolfram Igor Derntl
Doctor 2 – Hans Peter Kammerer
Doctor 3 – Ayk Martirossian
Orlando’s Girlfriend, Lead Singer – Katie La Folle
Lead Singer – Ewelina Jurga
Two Actresses – Selina Ströberle, Antoannetta Kostadinova
Tutor – Andreas Patton
Russian Sailor – Felix Erdmann
Boat’s Captain – Michael Stark
Children’s Father – Tvrtko Štajcer
Officiant – Massimo Rizzo
Fiancée – Katharina Billerhart
Servant – Florian Glatt
Cameraman – Robert Angst

Polly Graham (director)

Will Duke (video)
Roy Spahn (set designs)
COMME des GARÇONS (costumes, masks)
Julien D’Ys (hair creation)
Stephen Jones (masks)
Ulrich Schneider (lighting)
Markus Noisternig, Gilbert Nouno, Clément Cornuau, Olga Neuwirth (live electronics and sound design)
Julien Aléonard (sound direction)
Jenny Ogilvie (movement)
Helga Utz (dramaturgy)

Vienna State Opera Choral Academy

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus directors: Thomas Lang, Stefano Ragusini, Svetolomar Zlatkov)

Band (Lucas Niggli (percussion), Stephan Börst (bass guitar), Edmund Köhldorfer (electric guitar), Annemarie Herfurth (synthesister), Martina Stückler (alto saxophone))

Stage Orchestra and Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera

Matthias Pintscher (conductor)

The first ever opera composed by a woman to appear on the main stage of the Vienna State Opera, let alone the first such to be commissioned and premiered by that house, not only did Olga Neuwirth Orlando defy expectations; not only, indeed, was it dramatically concerned with defiance of expectations; it accomplished those tasks and/or performed those roles with gestures of defiance such as that house had never previously seen. It was concerned with writing, yet also with performance; with sex, yet also with gender; with Vienna, yet also with the wider world; with art, yet also with violence. This was an historic evening that was also concerned with history—and with its uncomfortable bedfellows, present and future.

Based on Virginia Woolf’s novel, yet, as is common with Neuwirth’s work, drawing upon and quoting a number of other related sources—some quotations came from Sally Potter’s film—score, Polly Graham’s staging, and libretto, written collaboratively by Catherine Filloux and Neuwirth, take us from the Elizabethan era to the present, dangling an uncertain future before us. Orlando, the boy who time travels and reawakens as woman sees his/her story taken further than Woolf’s 1928, through spin of a filmic top and absorbing musical transition, right up until now, yet also peers into the future through her non-binary child, played here by performer Mx Justin Vivian Bond, whose non-operatic voice is doubtless more startling to many in a theatre such as this than are ideas of gender fluidity. Or rather, the latter should come as little challenge whatsoever to an artform and audience accustomed to a Nerone, a Cherubino, or an Octavian, yet sadly may still do so for some in this particular context. Perhaps, be it consciously or unconsciously, because this is not an opera written by men; because, like Neuwirth’s widely misunderstood American Lulu, it is an opera that purposely seeks to avert, even to neuter, the male gaze. How dare she/they? That the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, a renowned interpreter of all three of those roles, should feature here at the centre of the opera and do so with such excellence, should and, certainly in my case, did give pause for thought.

Hand on heart, in the house, I was neither so intrigued or convinced by libretto and Polly Graham’s often surprisingly conventional staging as I was by score and most performances. That said, I have since found myself considering their collaborative interaction more than I should have suspected. There is probably a lesson in that too: certainly collaboration and respect of difference lay, unsurprisingly yet with undoubted moral force, in occasion and opera alike. The scenes looking to the future, for all their polemical intent, seemed to me dramatically to descend into little more than a litany of demands to build a better world; I was going to say no one could reasonably object to them, but many objections—not least the hostility experienced from sections of the audience—are far from reasonable. Aesthetic judgement would probably have recommended a cut of half an hour: perhaps even more, with greater time being afforded earlier scenes that seem somewhat rushed through. That was not necessarily, however, the sole form of judgement to be exercised here. Perhaps this audience did need to see and hear Orlando with her girlfriend, to hear her child sing freely, to be reminded of the threat Trump-and-Johnson fascism poses us all, and so forth. Olga Neuwirth is not Richard Strauss. This was not really an occasion for l’art pour l’art. Mr Greene’s refusal to publish Orlando’s work and his anger when she dared question his critical judgement spoke of and to many: not so much when the mask dropped as when it was donned in all its horror.

I set to thinking about how Neuwirth’s work fitted—and did not fit—into received canons of modernist politically committed work. (How could I not, such having been a particular research—and life—concern of my own?) Not entirely coincidentally, Hans Werner Henze and Luigi Nono came to mind. Electronic manipulation of voices, here clearly a telling comment on and dramatisation of other possibilities and hopes for transition, formed part of a greater determination to offer as large a vocal range as possible, whilst rightly affording particular attention to the female voice in its various guises. As Matthias Pintscher pointed out in a programme interview, not only did Neuwirth specify that Orlando should be sung by a mezzo, but ‘exactly what kind of mezzo-soprano she has in mind. And always the spectrum: the three ladies Purity, Chastity, Modesty, or the three doctors or the poets, and especially in the choruses: a children’s choir, and the division in the voices.’ That went for vibrato, or not, and all manner of degrees in between. Interest in incorporation of music from far beyond the Classical canon, whilst subjecting it to procedures and development we may still reasonably consider modernist is a political as well as an aesthetic statement. The desire to give voice to those without a voice is common, of course, to both Henze and Nono, yet not necessarily in this way. It is difficult to imagine either incorporating pop music in this way, though Henze arguably came a little closer in a work such as Natascha Ungeheuer—or perhaps better, in his idea of a work that in many ways turned out rather differently: ‘the finished product,’ as he put it, ‘was to have a touch of arte povera.’

Quotation, allusion, reference: these are rife, incorporated into Orlando’s development as a writer, again more successfully in the score than elsewhere. The play between expectation, between what was new and what one ‘knew’, between those and what one may have been artistically convinced one knew was part and parcel not only of the opera’s aesthetic worth, but surely also of its political message. Tudor church music, Purcell’s Sound the Trumpet (to different yet related words, and sung by a different vocal type), a wonderful recording of Arnold Rosé and his daughter playing the Bach Double Violin Concerto (names of Holocaust victims projected), chordal progressions from Wozzeck (I think…), square manipulations of material from The Rite of Spring: they formed the drama but also led one to think what is ‘quotation’ and how does it differ from ‘allusion’ and ‘reference’? Traditionally, pitch has proved paramount. Should it be now, in a different age, with different music, different requirements, different forms of transition? Again and again, one’s ears come back to the interludes, to possibilities for change, for transformation—and to their achievement. There is messiness, often deliberately so. That was surely part of the point, just as it can be with Henze and indeed with much art, musical and non-musical. Neuwirth’s recent film score for Die Stadt ohne Juden could not help but hang in the air, not least since the strong presence of film sometimes afforded a narrative, yet aesthetically destabilising, sense of film to proceedings.

I could continue saying what the opera is not. It is certainly not primarily concerned with character, as conventionally dramatically understood. Neither is Fidelio, for that matter, still less Al gran sole carico d’amore—or any Nono opera, for that matter. There is often something to be said for a via negativa, perhaps: ask Aquinas, or the Schoenberg of Moses und Aron, with its ‘unrepresentable [etc.] God’. Again, though, I am not sure that that is the point here. Comparison with Al gran sole, an opera concerned with women’s revolutionary experience, written by a composer of undoubted importance to Neuwirth, may well illuminate. Yet it still presents a male composer as model. Many, most, even all of us can only avoid that path fitfully for the moment. Awareness may take us a little further along a path less trodden; or, to quote the thirteenth-century inscription that once so inspired Nono, ‘Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar,’ (‘Travellers, there are no paths, only travelling itself’). Easy, doubtless, to say, with privilege, yet nevertheless often helpful to bear in mind.

That certain threatened, entitled, privileged elements in the audience took it upon themselves loudly, violently, fascistically to boo the composer—not, be it noted, anyone else from a participant list of Meyerbeerian proportions—doubtless contributed to the first-night ‘drama’ in the demotic sense. Yet it was difficult to resist—and why would one resist?—asking why they had done so. Presumably those old, white, cisgender, heterosexual men had known that they were not in for an Against Modern Opera Productions evening of Donizetti and Zeffirelli. They had attended, it would seem, in order to boo, in order to attack—a woman and others in roles these self-appointed protectors considered not to be fit for them. We knew on whose side they would have stood—on whose side they still stood—when it came to accusations of ‘degenerate’ (entartet) art. That Neuwirth, longstanding collaborator with that most heroic of Nestbeschmutzerinnen, Elfried Jelinek, once again refused to be oppressed by the hegemonic either/or, to be ‘yodelled out of existence’ as she put it in a celebrated 2000 intervention against Austria’s far-Right FPÖ, that she and others fought back, was the crucial thing here to those angered by the slightest disruption to their unmerited, alleged authority.

What better way to oppose stark primary colours of exclusivity than through music, that most ambiguous of media? Those who would ‘defend’ it—against what and on whose authority?—proved, as ever, to be those most violent in their defamation of it. ‘I will continue,’ in Orlando’s final words, ‘because: “Nobody has the right to obey!” My hopes are fading, but my rage remains. –’ Yes, but… Just as in Così fan tutte or Capriccio, Götterdämmerung or, yes, American Lulu, music, still more than language, provides the ‘buts’. For that, however, one must listen, and to listen through the struggle to appreciate that there is no more one way to listen than there is to write or to perform. If that is not ultimately a political message, I am not sure what is. ‘Nobody has the right to obey!’