Bayreuth Festival (4) - Lohengrin, 31 July 2014

 

 

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

King Henry the Fowler – Wilhelm Schwinghammer

Lohengrin – Klaus Florian Vogt

Elsa – Edith Haller

Friedrich von Telramund – Thomas Johannes Mayer

Ortrud – Petra Lang

King’s Herald – Samuel Youn

Brabantian Nobles – Stefan Heibach, Willem van der Heyden, Rainer Zaun, Christian Tschelebiew                                       

Hans Neuenfels (director)

Reinhard von der Thannen (designs)

Franck Evin (lighting)

Björn Verloh (video)

Henry Arnold (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra

Andris Nelsons (conductor)

 

 

What a relief amidst the debris of the Castorf Ring! Hans Neuenfels’s Lohengrin is now widely acclaimed as a classic staging: not, of course, the only way to do it, for there is no single way, but a consistent, brilliantly-executed production, whose run has now been extended for another year. (Sebastian Baumgartner’s Tannhäuser is, by contrast, saying farewell a year earlier than originally envisaged; I cannot imagine why…) Having given accounts of the staging in 2011 and 2012, I do not have a great amount to add to description of what happens, but shall add a few remarks concerning particular aspects that struck me. There was perhaps a sense – born of a first-night performance? – of slight comparative slackness, especially in the first act, but that is really to quibble excessively; certainly the third act was at least as gripping as before, partly because Andris Nelsons’s focus had greatly improved by that stage too. (Again, that is comparative; it was in no way bad beforehand.)

 

 

 

The concept at the heart of the production is a mysterious experiment. (Are not all experiments in a sense mysterious, whatever the claims to the contrary?) During the first act Prelude – though not immediately: Neuenfels permits the music to speak first – Lohengrin seems to be trying to gain entrance to wherever it is that the action is taking place. That initial failure signals that whoever is running the show, it is not Lohengrin; indeed, judged by his record over the evening – and this is Wagner’s doing as much as it is Neuenfels’s – he is a singularly unsuccessful hero, very much in line with most of Wagner’s heroes, Parsifal and Walther excepted. Nor is anyone else we see in charge, least of all the flawed, Fisher-King-like Henry the Fowler, his stooping reminiscent of many an Amfortas. The rats are certainly not free agents, though there are instances of what might just be such free agency, just as there are with Ortud and Telramund, arguably at least as much so as with Lohengrin and Elsa. They are moments, though, and the inevitable victory comes, be it on the part of Fate or a higher earthly power.  It is, of course, to speculate concerning who – if anyone – is running the experiment, but we seem invited to do so, if only to realise the futility of the attempt. Much like late capitalism and its scientific handmaidens more generally, one might say. At any rate, the tragedy is clear, as is our voyeuristic status as observers. A leader at the end has been born or created, but his embryonic status tells the true story, or at least part of it. ‘Reality’ will prevail, which is to say a mystified claim upon scientism’s part will prevail. ‘Objectivity’ is deconstructed, as of course it has been many times before, but when will the powers that be listen?

 

 

Nelsons’s leadership grew in stature as the evening progressed. I suspect that it will do so still further as the festival continues. Flexibility and line were rarely in competition, but generally revealed to be two sides of the same coin, just as they should be. If there were a few moments when the score did seem to meander a little, even when the orchestra sounded slightly subdued, they were readily forgotten in a blaze of orchestral glory for the third act. Daniel Barenboim, amongst present conductors, may find greater metaphysical depth, broader terms of reference, in the score, but few others will. Eberhard Friedrich’s chorus gave a superlative performance: one could have taken verbal as well as musical dictation. And that, let us remember, was at the same time as having to perform highly intricate individual stage manoeuvres, often whilst dressed in rat costumes. There remains no greater opera chorus on earth.

 

Klaus Florian Vogt likewise retains his standing – at least for many of us – as the world’s premier ranking Lohengrin. The nay-sayers will not be convinced; they do not care for his tenor, light but extraordinarily powerful, and they are perfectly within their rights not to do so. The unearthly quality of his voice seems just right to me, its purity as chilling as it is alluring. Again, it is not, of course, the only way, but it is a uniquely compelling way. He looks and acts the part too. Edith Haller replaced Annette Dasch. She had a few uncertain moments, not least concerning intonation in the first act, but her performance grew in conviction, peaking like that of many others in the final act. Thomas Johannes Mayer offered an outstanding Telramund, his perfect marriage of poem and musical line having one wish he were singing Wotan. (But then he might be wasted in the Castorf Ring.) Petra Lang was likewise a truly world-class Ortrud; I can only think of Waltraud Meier in the same breath. Her stage malevolence and vocal magnificence were truly as one. Wilhelm Schwinghammer’s subtle portrayal of King Henry made him a far more interesting character than one often hears: partly Neuenfels’s doing, no doubt, but also the consequence of a thoughtful approach to musical dramatisation on stage, in which weakness and power (both relative) found themselves in fruitful contradiction. Samuel Youn had one notable slip with tuning, but otherwise made for a characterful Herald. Above all, the characters increasingly worked together – and with the chorus and orchestra. A wonderful, much-needed tonic, however disturbing!

Bayreuth Festival (1) - Das Rheingold, 27 July 2014

 

 

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Wotan – Wolfgang Koch

Donner – Markus Eiche
Froh – Lothar Odinius
Loge – Norbert Einst
Fricka – Claudia Mahnke
Freia – Elisabeth Strid
Erda – Nathalie Weissmann
Alberich – Oleg Bryjak
Mime – Burkhard Ulrich
Fasolt – Wilhelm Schwinghammer
Fafner – Sorin Coliban
Woglinde – Mirella Hagen
Wellgunde – Julia Rutigliano
Flosshilde – Okka von der Damerau

Frank Castorf (director)

Aleksander Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)
Rainer Casper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Jens Crull (video)
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Kirill Petrenko (conductor)
 

So this is it: Frank Castorf’s notorious Ring. There are various caveats: what I see may well not be the same as what audiences saw last year; this is only Das Rheingold, with the rest to come. However, whilst there is a good deal about which to be frustrated, not least the lengthy passages in which Castorf appears to lose interest, or at least I lost interest in him, and whilst it would e difficult to acclaim his attentiveness to, or even his interest in, Wagner’s music, this proved of considerably greater stage interest than some other recent staged Rings. Guy Cassiers’s production for Berlin (and La Scala) may have been blessed with a superior cast and a far superior conductor, but its lack of any ideas whatsoever made it an inferior production when considered only as such. Stephen Wadsworth’s Seattle Ring was similarly inert in stage terms. Ironically, Daniel Barenboim’s Proms performances have proved not only the most satisfactory of recent years, but perhaps of my entire Ring-going experience, with the possible exception – again, ironically – of previous minimally-staged performances at the Royal Albert Hall from the Royal Opera under Bernard Haitink.

 

Anyway, back to Castorf. This Rheingold has ideas of considerable promised and moments of real dramatic power. The Texan setting of the ‘Golden Motel’ on Route 66 is undeniably not one for those who want their Vorabend to develop in an elevated setting; just as undeniable is the loss, common to many stagings, of anything that might make clan Wotan something akin to gods in the first place. Ernst Bloch may have said that these were gods without being gods, but that is far from the whole of Wagner’s story. Listen to the score – as Castorf seemingly never does – and you will hear noble inspiration in Wotan’s dream of Valhalla. Wagner’s Feuerbachian understanding of religious inversion, which underpins not only Wotan’s sacerdotal fortress but also, by ‘true socialist’ extension, Alberich’s conversion of gold into capital and his construction of Nibelheim, is disregarded, again as so often, in favour of something cruder, more one-sided, far less interesting.

 

If we can take the debased setting, however, and perhaps even wearily concede its validity in our appalling late-capitalist plight, we shall find, alongside the irritations and provocations, more to engage us.  The use of film, far too often a trendy addition which adds little or nothing to an opera staging, here stands at the very heart of the dramatic representation. A screen at the top of the motel relays events elsewhere, some of which we can see on stage very well already, some of which we can see with difficulty, some of which we should otherwise not be able to see at all. They may be in the ground-floor bar, run by an initially hapless but perhaps ultimately successful, extra, who comes in for abuse from Alberich, Wotan, and others, but has us wondering whether he will prove a survivor in the longer run. They may be in the sleazy motel room above, in which we first see Wotan dream of power, in bed with Fricka and then with Freia. (The latter seems to me perfectly justifiable; after all, is not the very point of the gods’ relationship with the alleged goddess of ‘love’ that they use and abuse her for the promised immortality of her apples. For apples here, we should probably read stereotypical ‘female assets’ from American trash culture.) The faded quality of the film, its distorted colours in particular, have us wondering – or at least they did me – whether what we are seeing is ‘real’ at all. Katie Mitchell-style filming might be taking place, sometimes overtly with a cameraman, sometimes covertly as befits our surveillance culture, but discrepancies seem to creep in, whether by design or by our own unreliable narration. The world of webcams and ‘reality television’ is never far away: discomfortingly, we participate whilst we disdain. Perhaps this is after all a neo-Feuerbachian inversion for our time. The dialectics are certainly unremittingly negative, as befits a post-Adornian world. And indeed the moment of greatest dramatic power for me was the truly shocking covering of Freia with gold bars, the motel bed stripped to its frame as, clad in trashy, eye-catching PVC, she found herself submerged by the stolen hoard. In many respects, it was the most literally-minded scene of all, and perhaps drew some of its power from (more or less) trusting Wagner for once, but filming and voyeurism made it sickening beyond any depiction I can recall previously having seen.

 

 

 

What truly frustrates, then, is that Castorf fails to live up elsewhere to that promise. I could not help but have the sense that he would have been better off presenting a Ring, cut as he would do so with other theatre, somewhere other than the Bayreuth Festival, which could hardly have been expected to acceded to his requests for reworking the text. (Nor do I think it should have done, which perhaps marks me down as being of the reactionary camp, but so be it.) The third scene in particular drags – and certainly not on account of Kirill Petrenko’s tempi, which were uniformly, excessively fast. Here I sensed Castorf’s impatience with Wagner’s narrative. It is an odd thing not to find Alberich and Nibelheim of dramatic interest; too often, though, they seem awkwardly tacked on to the rest of the drama. There are smaller irritations too, for instance, irrelevant, noisy interruptions, such  as Alberich kicking a beach ball around during the Rhinemaidens’ hymn to the gold. (Their antics around the motel paddling pool, filmed for ‘cultural consumption’ otherwise work well on the whole.) The appearance of a rainbow flag for the entry to Valhalla obfuscates. Presumably a ‘joke’ alluding to Froh’s rainbow, it adds nothing since it is not developed. Is that what the gods’ going up in the world – or in Heaven – really amounts to: the motel turning gay-friendly? In the absence of any other allusions to homosexuality, it just seems silly. What appears to be the drug-induced stupor of the bar guests, seemingly aroused by whatever Donner’s summoning of thunder translates into here, is more suggestive, whether intentionally or otherwise. Political and religious power does not only stupefy, but stupefy it nevertheless does.

 

Rarely does there seem to be any synergy between what we see on stage and what we hear in the pit. Petrenko was – to my ears, bafflingly – acclaimed louder than anyone else by the Bayreuth audience. His account was not bad; it was certainly preferable to the aimless incoherence we in London have had to suffer time and time again from Antonio Pappano. Line and, above all, drive were maintained almost ruthlessly. But it was a musical account almost as one-dimensional, though not in the same way, as Castorf’s stage direction. Indeed, I am not sure I have heard a less variegated Wagner performance. Furtwängler – or Barenboim – this certainly was not. At times, it sounded more akin to Toscanini conducting Mendelssohn. Fashionable obsessive concern with Wagner’s early-Romantic roots hardened into something very much of our time, a refusal or even inability to yield; Wagner was held captive by something approaching turbo-charged automation. The orchestra itself sounded more than usually ‘covered’ by the covered pit. Was Petrenko struggling as much with the acoustic as with anything else?

 

There was a fine trio of Rhinemaidens, which augured well, though such augury was not entirely to be trusted. Wolfgang Koch’s Wotan grew in stature as the evening went on. Whether by design, I was not entirely sure, and there were some early moments that were straightforwardly rough, but there was enough here to hold promise for later on – especially if Castorf allows the god to be more than a mere gangster. Oleg Bryjak’s Alberich had his moments, but had a tendency to rely upon caricature that shaded into crudity; when he permitted himself – or was permitted – to concentrate upon singing, there was a voice to be reckoned with. Though Mime’s role in Das Rheingold is not so great, Burkhard Ulrich nevertheless managed to outshine his ‘superiors’ in an attentive portrayal (at least in verbal and musical terms!) As Fasolt and Fafner, Wilhelm Schwinghammer and Soran Coliban increasingly impressed too. It was a nice touch to have a Fasolt who was actually for once a credible prospect of attraction for Freia, whether or no she felt the same way. The brothers proved increasingly differentiated in character through verbal and musical means at least as much as through staging. Claudia Mahnke’s Fricka was initially shrill, unalluring in the wrong way, but improved considerably. Elisabeth Strid’s Freia, whatever one thought of Castorf’s stage portrayal, offered something that went far beyond the merely tawdry. Nadine Weissmann’s Erda – her fur-coated, Dallas-style appearance presumably indicating a ‘classiness’ as elevated as Castorf is willing to countenance – proved welcome in vocal contrast, though Petrenko’s hurrying did her no favours. Markus Eiche’s Donner and Lothar Odinius’s Froh followed the general pattern of really coming into their vocal own in the final scene. Norbert Einst’s Loge likewise followed suit, though again, I think that was as much a matter of the production as anything else. It is difficult, however, to believe that, taken as a whole, this is the level of singing upon which Bayreuth should be able to call; a standard at least approaching Barenboim’s Proms Ring should surely be the norm here. On, then, to Die Walküre: with trepidation but also with interest…

Bayreuth Festival (3) - Lohengrin, 13 August 2012

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

King Henry the Fowler – Wilhelm Schwinghammer

Lohengrin – Klaus Florian Vogt
Elsa – Annette Dasch
Friedrich von Telramund – Thomas Johannes Mayer
Ortrud – Susan Maclean
King’s Herald – Samuel Youn
Brabantian Nobles – Stefan Heibach, Willem van der Heyden, Rainer Zaun, Christian Tschelebiew

Hans Neuenfels (director)

Reinhard von der Thannen (designs)
Franck Evin (lighting)
Björn Verloh (video)
Henry Arnold (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)

Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Andris Nelsons (conductor)

I found much to admire last year in Hans Neuenfels’s production of Lohengrin, though equally voiced a few reservations. This time around, perhaps having overcome my initial surprise at the now-celebrated infestation of rats, I found little to quibble about at all. Indeed, the production seemed elevated almost to the level of a companionable yet still provocative classic. Direction appeared still tighter, and I did not feel there were many, if any, instances of working against Wagner’s score; indeed, subtle distinctions of movement, which I am not convinced were necessarily there last year, suggested commendable consonance. Where there was simply too much confusion in the previous evening’s Flying Dutchman, there could be little doubt that we were seeing what we were meant to see. At the heart of Neuenfels’s production, or at least my understanding of it, remains the experiment, into which Lohengrin first, unsuccessfully, tries to break, towards the end of the First Act Prelude. He eventually gains access, yet that initial failure is noteworthy: whoever is in control, it is not Lohengrin. Nor is it King Henry, who is dragged off-stage by the mysterious attendants – redolent perhaps of those enigmatic ‘authorities’ to whom Don Ottavio refers in Don Giovanni. Indeed, the king is clearly a flawed, even wounded, perhaps Amfortas-like character: an intriguing and utterly convincing conception. Interestingly, two instances of characters throwing off the shackles of supervision are Ortrud and Lohengrin, arguably when both are at the height of their powers during the second act. So no authority is absolute, perhaps, though whatever this is – Fate? The near-omnipotent surveillance of late capitalism? The illusion of the Gesamtkunstwerk? – manages to reassert itself, before bringing forth the fragile infant figure of Gottfried from within an egg. (Incidentally, I cannot now imagine why I found that problematical last year, so it is time to recant.)  One of the most telling aspects of the staging is the impatience, at moments shading from frustration into anger, that Lohengrin experiences with respect to Elsa. Neither of these characters is a saint.

Andris Nelsons’s conducting had progressed by leaps and bounds; it certainly proved more coherent than either Philippe Jordan’s account of Parsifal or, perhaps more surprisingly, Christian Thielemann’s sometimes brilliant yet sometimes flawed conducting of The Flying Dutchman. The orchestral sound was aptly golden, more redolent of Vienna than anywhere further north. Ebb and flow were splendidly judged throughout, with none of the mannerisms that intruded from time to time in 2011. At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, Eberhard Friedrich’s chorus was magnificent: absolutely crucial in this work, of course; the chorus members’ acting as part of the pliable, threatening mass was equally exemplary.

Klaus Florian Vogt would seem to have been born to play Lohengrin. The unheimlich quality of his voice meshes perfectly both with role and production. What a relief it is not to have to endure a strained or downright unpleasant tenor in this repertoire, even if I thought there were just a few occasions this year when he might have been guilty of coasting towards slight blandness. That said, there were many instances not only of unearthly beauty but of fine dynamic shading and phrasing. Moreover, Vogt looks the part, which one can hardly say of Johan Botha, the most recent Lohengrin at Covent Garden. Annette Dasch may not have been the most memorable of Elsas, but she offered an attentive, varied assumption, far more secure than Astrid Weber, whom I heard as a late replacement for Dasch last year. Thomas Johannes Mayer was an excellent Telramund, both forthright and sensitive. If Susan Maclean paled somewhat in comparison with Petra Lang’s Ortrud in 2011, Maclean’s tone lacking refulgence, she nevertheless did as much to compensate with stage presence as she could. (The final scene seemed overdone, though that may well have been a matter of direction: here, Ortrud seemed less drunk with power than merely drunk.) Samuel Youn was on better form as the Herald than he had been as the Dutchman the night before, though intonational problems reared their head again. The splendidly named Wilhelm Schwinghammer was an excellent King Henry; it is a fine achievement to sing strongly and yet convincingly play the role of a weak man, as opposed to acting weakly.

This production is now available on DVD, filmed last year. Though I have not actually seen the DVD, my experiences this year and in 2011 render me reasonably certain that I can, indeed should, offer a firm recommendation.