American Lulu, The Opera Group, 14 September 2013

Young Vic Theatre

Lulu – Angel Blue

Clarence – Robert Winslade Anderson
Dr Bloom – Donald Maxwell
Jimmy – Jonathan Stoughton
Eleanor – Jacqui Dankworth
Photographer, Young Man – Paul Curievici
Athlete – Simon Wilding
Professor, Banker, Police Commissioner – Paul Reeves

John Fulljames (director)

Magda Willi (designs)
Guy Hoare (lighting)
Finn Ross (video)
Carolyn Downing (sound)

London Sinfonietta

Gerry Cornelius (conductor)

Images: Bregenzer Festspiele/Anja Köhler and Bregenzer Festspiele/Karl Forster
In the foreground: Jacqui Dankworth (Eleanor) and Angel Blue (Lulu); Simon Wilding (athlete) in background

 

I was a little taken aback by the reaction I received upon mentioning that I was looking forward to seeing American Lulu. One friend, perfectly reasonably, said that he had not taken to it when he had seen it in Berlin; I wish I had had the chance to press him more on why. However, he did suggest that the staging – presumably at the Komische Oper premiere – may have been a considerable part of the problem. Others, though, seemed to recoil at the very idea. Who did Olga Neuwirth think she was, adapting Berg’s opera into her own? For once, I almost felt myself the voice of reason, then stopped short when I recalled that to have been the title of an especially nasty right-wing newspaper column. At any rate, I had no a priori objection to what sounded as though it were simply the continuation of practices that dated back as long as any conception of the musical work, and indeed beyond. I have always preferred the Second Viennese School arrangements of Johann Strauss to the ‘originals’; Mozart’s Handel reworkings, whether in terms of arrangement or more thoroughgoing recomposition have long fascinated me; and as for Bach, whether his rewriting of other music, sometimes his own, sometimes that of others, or the multitude of rewritings, in whatever form, offered by composers from Mozart to George Benjamin... They vary wildly in quality, of course, and that seemed to me the only point; the question was not whether Neuwirth had any ‘right’ to adapt Berg’s opera, but whether it worked.

 

I think it did, or at least much of it did. I cede to no one in my love for Lulu – save, perhaps to one of Neuwirth’s teachers, Luigi Nono, who described  it as one of the two greatest operas of the twentieth century, the other being Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand. I know Berg’s score – and Friedrich Cerha’s completion – pretty well, and found myself not annoyed, but fascinated by the interplay between Berg and Neuwirth. In a work that lasts about half the time of the original, Neuwirth adapts, including reorchestration, the first two acts, and writes her own third act, both text and music. (English translations, concerning which, I found some more convincing than others, were provided by Richard Stokes and Catherine Kerkhoff-Saxon in the first two acts, and Kerkhoff-Saxon alone in the third.) One might miss the gorgeous post-Romantic labyrinthine depth of Berg, but to hear his music refracted as it was, pointed in a different direction by a new(-ish) story held its own interest – just as, say, Berio’s work on composers as different as Boccherini, Purcell, and Schubert has. (If only he had lived to complete his realisation of L’incoronazione di Poppea...) And so, with Berg’s – admittedly, selectively employed – jazz-influenced scoring in mind, Neuwirth’s reorchestration and composition alike make their move to New Orleans via a wind-dominated ensemble, Berg’s voluptuous strings put in their place and perhaps now heard through Brecht-Weill. (No one, I hasten to add, is saying that Berg is ‘improved upon’; that is not the point.) I was less sure about the introduction of more popular music ‘proper’, especially Eleanor’s blues music, into the score; its inclusion, presumably intentionally so, seemed oddly uncritical, as if, in a curious inversion or at least evasion of Adorno, Berg’s opera requires subjection to criticism but that of an allegedly purer popular culture does not. And yet, as I shall come to describe, there is a dialectical twist that would at least partially assist in that regard. The new version of the film music – what a relief it was actually to see a film, practically the only moment in present-day staging of opera where film seems to be eschewed – is brought to us, like the ‘jazz band’ music  via a recording of a Wonder Morton organ: evocative, contemporaneous, and yet also, rightly for a new work, somewhat oblique in its relationship to the ‘original’.

 

The third act of Lulu, which Neuwirth, wrongly to my mind yet perhaps nevertheless fruitfully, regards as ‘unsatisfactory’ – ‘after great trials and tribulations, two women are simply slaughtered by a serial killer; and that is that’ – becomes instead ‘an unresolved murder case’, but more to the point here, offers her own music, clearly flowing from that of Berg, still more from that of Berg-Neuwirth, and yet which quite properly takes on a life of its own: a twenty-first-century reimagination of post-expresssionist music. There are vocal leaps; there is vocal seduction; there is a hard-edged, yet sinuous quality, in line with Berg’s own. I should need to hear it again to say much more; yet, to answer the earlier question, for the most part, and bearing in mind my cavil concerning the blues music in particular, I think it worked.

 

I deliberately started with the music but ought to say something briefly about the new setting.  Instead of the Prologue, we start at the end, in 1970s New York, when Clarence (Schigolch) asks Lulu why, when she is now so wealthy, she is no more satisfied, prompting her to look back at her life, beginning in 1950s New Orleans. A photographer with whom she is living is soon supplanted by Dr Bloom, purchaser of the pictures; Lulu dances in Bloom’s club, music written for her by his son, Jimmy. (I do not need in laboured fashion to point out who is who with respect to Berg; it is perfectly clear, though some of Berg’s intricate parallelism falls by the wayside as Neuwirth’s drama takes on a different trajectory.) Initially I found the substitution of Eleanor, a singer, for Geschwitz, something of a disappointment. The ‘otherness’ – if I am honest, banality – of her music, however well sung by Jacqui Dankworth, seemed too obvious, too lacking in integrative or indeed disintegrative power. However, and I hope this was not merely a product of my fevered imagination, there is criticism, if not so much of her music, then of the hippyish psycho-babble in which her reproaches – she is by the third act a successful singer, though still hurt by Lulu’s prior rejection – are couched. She too, it seems, is capable of exploitative behaviour. As indeed are we all, and some of it, like Neuwirth’s, may even be construed positively. We should not fall for bogus notions of the ‘jargon of authenticity’. Meanwhile, all the while, the drama is punctuated by reminders of the Civil Rights Movement: words from Dr King, and sounds, in Eleanor’s final song, of ‘We shall overcome’.  It is certainly not subtle, and it is perhaps all too easy to say ‘that is the point,’ but its contribution was nevertheless greater than to make us appreciate more fully the balancing-act between existential and social – far too often tilted in favour of the former – in Berg’s opera. (Should we consider American Lulu in reference to Berg’s work, or as a work in itself? That depends, of course, on who ‘we’ are. Either we know the original or we do not, but a question that permits neither of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as a ‘straight’ answer is a good question for Neuwirth to be asking audiences, steeped in the self-righteous delusions of Werktreue.)

 

This was a co-production by The Opera Group, the Young Vic, Scottish Opera, and the Bregenz Festival, in association with the London Sinfonietta. The latter was on excellent form throughout, splendidly guided, insofar as one could tell from an initial hearing, by Gerry Cornelius. I was certainly as gripped by the orchestral performance as by the puzzles and challenges of Neuwirth’s work itself. John Fulljames makes a great deal from relatively little on the small stage of the Young Vic. Video was used sparingly but to great effect, Finn Ross’s work employing characters from the stage greatly appreciated, as mentioned above. The uncomfortable voyeurism of having Lulu change on stage, taking her clothes from a wardrobe and almost defying us not to watch, has one’s mind working, as it should, in different directions: self-interrogation, heightened by the (Brechtian?) presence onstage behind a see-through curtain of the orchestra. Construction of reality, perception of what may or may not be epic, is not simply our own task, but it is so at least in part, as in Lulu’s mind.

 

Angel Blue offered a charismatic assumption of the title role. It is of course far shorter than Berg’s, but has different challenges, the slipping between speech, parlando, and glorious, if all-too-brief (deliberately so?), passages in which the voice may truly soar a case of ongoing reinvention. Her stage presence, just as in ENO’s recent Bohème, was scintillating. In this opera, more than Berg’s, the other cast members are lesser beings, but there was much to enjoy from their various contributions. Paul Curievici, for instance, furthered the strong impression he recently made in The Importance of Being Earnest, and Donald Maxwell continued to hold the stage even at what must be approaching the twilight of his career.

 

Emma Woodvine, credited as ‘dialect coach’ seemed to have done a good job. I still wonder about the practice, though, of having assumed accents, be they from the South or elsewhere. It seems curiously selective; for instance, when we have a performance of Carmen, whether in French or in translation, we do not usually hear the dialogue – or, for that matter, the vocal lines – delivered in the tones of Seville. Better, I think, to let actors, including singing actors, act than to have them turn impressionists. (That runs both ways, of course; those complaining, as sometimes they do, about American or other accents in English dialogue should probably find better things to do with their time.) No matter; it is a minor point, indeed more of a question. And a great strength of this evening was the questioning that it provoked.

Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, English National Opera, 24 March 2011

Young Vic Theatre

(sung in English, as The Return of Ulysses)

Penelope (Pamela Helen Stephen)
Images: Johan Persson

L’Humana Fragilità, Pisandro – Iestyn Morris
Il Tempo, Antinoo – Francisco Javier Borda
La Fortuna, Minerva – Ruby Hughes
Amore, Melanto – Katherine Manley
Penelope – Pamela Helen Stephen
Ericlea – Diana Montague
Eurimaco – Thomas Walker
Ulisse – Tom Randle
Minerva – Ruby Hughes
Eumete – Nigel Robson
Iro – Brian Galliford
Telemaco – Thomas Hobbs



Benedict Andrews (director)
Börkur Jónsson (set designs)
Alice Babidge (costumes)
Jon Clark (lighting)
Sean Bacon (video)

Members of the Orchestra of the English National Opera
Jonathan Cohen (conductor)

Minerva (Ruby Hughes) and Ulisse (Tom Randle)

ENO has hit form again, offering my best operatic experience since Elektra last summer in Salzburg. And with Monteverdi: I should hardly have expected it, not least since my prejudices lie very much against contemporary performance practice and translation of his libretti from Italian. The intimate, verging upon claustrophobic, space of the Young Vic was doubtless crucial: a proper rather than merely fashionable experience of theatre ‘in the round’, which could never have worked in the Coliseum.

Though in a literal sense it would be quite true to say that I had travelled over the course of two evenings from musical drama of the present day (Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s new opera, Kommilitonen!) towards the early days of opera, the statement might be found misleading, for this was a thoroughly modern Monteverdi we encountered. Kommilitonen! proved enjoyable but also a little dated. Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, as one of the two surviving late operas by Monteverdi, already stands quite distinct from his first, L’Orfeo, let alone from slightly earlier works by other composers. The dramatic orbit of Ulisse and L’incoronazione di Poppea almost inevitably puts one in mind of Monteverdi’s contemporary, Shakespeare; both dramatists remain strikingly modern, not least when contrasted with many of their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century successors. Purcell notwithstanding, one must look to Gluck and then to Mozart to find a musical dramatist fully worthy of the honour of heir, if unwittingly so, to Monteverdi. Yet, if Poppea still shocks to the core, its devastating psychological realism placed in the service of a truly amoral, (quasi-)historical tale, its Homeric predecessor has struggled somewhat to escape its shadows. ENO’s decision to devote its now-annual excursion to the Young Vic to Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, or The Return of Ulysses (to his Homeland), was therefore welcome indeed – and must surely have convinced any doubters that this is a work fully worthy to be ranked with its more celebrated sibling. As ever, there remained the problem of translation into English, but this translation, Christopher Cowell’s, was much better than most of those recently foisted upon us: it respected Giacomo Bodoaro’s libretto after Homer, for which many thanks.

Three suitors (L-R: Iestyn Hughes, Samuel Boden, Francisco
Javier Borda), Penelope, and Minerva

The Prologue makes it quite clear that this is a contemporary drama. Human Frailty is abused, Abu Ghraib style, by Time, Fortune, and Cupid, the evidence gloatingly captured on camera. I was reminded of Barrie Kosky’s Iphigénie en Tauride for Berlin’s Komische Oper; perhaps the resemblance is not entirely coincidental, for director, Benedict Andrews, also Australian, divides his time between Sydney and Berlin, and works at the Schaubühne Theatre. During this abuse, we see Penelope’s parallel agonies on screen, Sean Bacon’s excellent video footage permitting us still-closer-up attention to detail, often but not always that of Penelope. As the Prologue comes to an end, Ithaca’s palace comes into our view – and will never leave it. A stylish, modern apartment (or hotel room?), encased by glass that is smeared by a series of depredations, it is Penelope’s prison: the ever-visible space for the ‘life’ of a ruler’s wife. Börkur Jónsson’s set designs are first-rate, drawing us in and yet repelling us at the same time. Maids fuss and conspire – whom can she trust? – whilst sharply-suited dressed political suitors roam. The tie pins give them away, though: we know that none would be able to string the bow of Ulysses. These cowards, brutal if ultimately ineffectual, pleasure themselves with no thought of Penelope as a woman. In what seemed to me a rare miscalculation, she appears to respond briefly to them physically as they offered their gifts. Perhaps her acts are intended as a trap, but they jar with her constancy and do not seem to lead anywhere.

Suitors, Ulisse, Iro (Brian Galliford), and Melanto
(Katherine Manley)

Some scenes are missing, of course: one cannot help wondering what the sea-music for nereids and sirens was like, likewise the ballet of the Moors. To augment the ravages of time, the director introduced large cuts, the remaining score running – according to the programme, though I did not check – for two-and-a-quarter hours, three acts compressed into two parts. Neptune, Jupiter, and Juno disappear completely. As so often, we seem uncomfortable allotting the gods their role. Minerva remains, though, adopting Penelope’s form and availing herself of the suitors, she perhaps seems more the trickster than Ulysses; is she a goddess at all? Apart from the musico-dramatic loss in itself, there are dramatic consequences, for we miss out on Neptune’s crucial emphasis upon ‘ritorno’ (‘return’). Andrews’s emphasis, however, seems quite different: this is less the story of Ulysses’s return, or rather still less than is often the case, and more Penelope’s tale. However, it works: there is no claim that this was a definitive Ulisse, but it was a powerful musico-dramatic experience.

Moreover, at the end, the balance shifts once again. Reminding us of the images of war that have permeated the drama throughout, not least on the apartment television screen (war in the Mediterranean? surely not…), we suffer Ulysses’s pain upon return: the lack of a role, the rejection, and of course, the bloody revenge he inflicts upon those who have defiled his home, captured on film, just like the initial abuse of the Prologue. After that, his extended shower scene attempts to cleanse, but the only hope, and it may prove vain, lies with Penelope; whatever the beauties of the final duet, the future is uncertain. Cuts may have reshaped the drama but ultimately they did not distort it.

Eurimaco (Thomas Walker), Iro, Penelope, and
Antinoo

Jonathan Cohen led members of the ENO Orchestra with great dramatic flair. I might hanker after Raymond Leppard, or, better still, Hans Werner Henze’s extraordinary Mediterranean realisation, but this was not hair-shirt Monteverdi, puritanism that would be quite at odds with his Renaissance/Early Baroque world - as a celebrated former Ulisse noted in an interview he gave me not so long ago. The musicians may have been relatively few in number, but a large band was not necessary in the Young Vic; again, the Coliseum would have been another matter. The continuo group was varied. Rebecca Miles’s recorder added variety to the one-to-a-part strings during certain ritornelli, whilst the introduction of Daniel Jamison’s bassoon brought just a hint of Henze’s earthy pagan reimagining.








Penelope and Ulisse (final scene)

If ever a role were made for Dame Janet Baker, it was that of Penelope, though it is hard to imagine Pamela Helen Stephen’s great predecessor in this particular production. It is to Stephen’s credit that she very much made the role her own; I only mention Baker since she would have been an inevitable reference point for many. What Stephen lacked in refulgence and sheer nobility of tone, she made up in dignity – and misery – of stage presence. We felt her pain in anything but the modern, debased, sentimental way. Tom Randle is such an intelligent musical actor that it would be easy to take him for granted, but one hardly could on this occasion. The complexities, some of them dark indeed, of Ulysses’s character were searingly portrayed, without the slightest hint of melodrama. Thomas Hobbs made an interesting Telemachus, vulnerable – including memories of the accursed Helen – and scarred by his experience, not least that of ‘rescue’ by Ruby Hughes’s ambiguous Minerva, another fine portrayal. Katherine Manley and Thomas Walker played dangerous, erotic – and utterly convincing – games as Penelope’s maid, Melanto, and her lover, Eurymachus; their lust, for power and for pretty much everything else, was an ongoing reminder of the real (godlike?) forces at play. My only regret concerning Diana Montague’s Ericlea was that she did not have more to sing: what a pleasure it was to hear Montague again, and to share in so faithful – in every sense – a performance. It was an equal pleasure to welcome back long-standing Monteverdian Nigel Robson, who provided a moving portrayal of the honest shepherd, Eumaeus. Brain Galliford’s childish, yet nevertheless sinister, parasite, Irus offered splendid contrast, though the strange scene of his demise, in which Monteverdi’s speech-rhythms seem (at least) to presage Mussorgsky and Janáček, offered pathos too. A ghastly trio of suitors completed the cast, Francisco Javier Borda, Iestyn Morris, and Samuel Boden, all throwing themselves wholeheartedly into Andrews’s – and Monteverdi’s – vision. I was especially taken by the finely shaped tenor of Boden and the icy clarity of Morris’s counter-tenor.

This, then, strikes me as essential theatre for anyone who can still acquire a ticket. Three cheers to all concerned!

Elegy for Young Lovers, English National Opera, 24 April 2010

Young Vic

Hilda Mack – Jennifer Rhys-Davies
Elisabeth Zimmer – Kate Valentine
Carolina von Kirchstetten – Lucy Schaufer
Toni Reischmann – Robert Murray
Gregor Mittenhofer – Steven Page
Dr Wilhelm Reischmann – William Robert Allenby
Josef Mauer – Stephen Kennedy
Servants at Der Schwarze Adler – Joyce Henderson, Stephen O’Toole, Sam Taylor, Emma Vickery

Fiona Shaw (director)
Tom Pye (designer)
Peter Mumford (lighting)
Lynette Wallworth (video)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Stefan Blunier (conductor)

Three cheers to ENO for staging Henze! It is more than time that one of our major companies did, nine years having passed since the Royal Opera’s superb Boulevard Solitude. (If only that might be revived, though there are of course more pressing concerns, such as hearing x and y in multiple revivals of La Traviata…) This Elegy for Young Lovers is on a smaller scale, but so is the work itself – and smaller is not necessarily lesser. Performances are generally good, and Fiona Shaw’s direction in the intimate space of the Young Vic impresses.

Elegy for Young Lovers is one of those works concerned with the figure of the artist: a subject that not unnaturally tends to delight a good number of artists. The writer, Gregor Mittenhofer exploits all those around him for the sake of artistic inspiration – which seems in his case to be more transcription of events than sublimation into something greater. Poor Hilda Mack, who lost her husband forty years ago, is of value only on account of her visions, which he greedily plagiarises. When Elisabeth forsakes him for his godson, Toni, he gives his blessing, but then, when the Alpine guide calls to warn of a blizzard, claims that he knows of no one out on the mountain, having sent them to gather flowers for him. The point is less revenge than that they can serve as the ‘inspiration’ for his new poem, Elegy for Young Lovers. It is with a public reading in Vienna – here on video – that the opera ends.

Shaw’s setting is essentially when and where it should be: the Austrian Alps in the early twentieth century. She directs the cast well, doubtless drawing upon her own theatrical experience, and even manages to get the singers’ spoken dialogue to sound as if it is delivered by actors: no mean achievement, as veterans of The Magic Flute or Fidelio will tell you. All, quite rightly, is ultimately focused upon Mittenhofer’s ego, but delineation of other characters is not neglected. A true coup de théâtre, for which Tom Pye’s design work should also be credited, comes at the end of the second act, when the ice clock, which has been chiming the hours, is smashed by Mittenhofer in his impotent rage, wishing the lovers dead but surely also an expression of his artistic inadequacy. What makes this especially memorable, is the reappearance of Hilda, who now realises how she has been exploited. She picks up a little ice for her drink, undercutting the melodrama – that is, Mittenhofer’s egocentric melodrama.

Stefan Blunier, whom I recently heard give a fine account of The Love for Three Oranges in Berlin, was equally impressive here – not in the pit, but above the stage. The balance between drive and tenderness was well chosen, and the mélange of styles – Berg and Stravinsky, not for the first time, loom especially large – was given its due, without ever sounding incoherent. Solo instrumentalists from the chamber orchestra were without exception excellent; it would be invidious to single out anyone in particular.

Steven Page commands the stage as Mittenhofer. Vocally, there are a few less than perfect moments, but the portrayal of the role is all: monstrous, self-satisfied, ultimately hollow. Lucy Schaufer brought out both the pride and the sadness in the Gräfin von Kirchstetten: an aristocrat and, more important, a woman who abases herself for the dubious cause of the artist. (In a telling moment, Mittenhofer acknowledges the other characters’ inadequacies, though not directly his own; the dramatic truth is that he is right, at least with respect to them. They are human, all too human, too.) I was not sure why her accent veered towards the transatlantic though. Kate Valentine and Robert Murray were likeable as the young lovers, and their final scene, in which they imagine their old age and the course of their married life, was genuinely moving. It is difficult, however, to consider Murray a success as a romantic, or Romantic, lead; character roles should be more his thing. Jennifer Rhys-Davies’s turns – in more than one sense – as Hilda Mack were appropriately show-stealing. Her increasing lucidity proved both convincing and unnerving. Is she more unhinged than the ‘artist’? It appears not. I found the aggressive Irishness of Stephen Kennedy’s mountain guide (a spoken role) rather out of place, but this was a blemish upon the production rather than a fundamental flaw.

It is interesting to note that Auden and Kallman dubbed the work – their equivalent to Arabella, dedicating it to Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Arabella is far from my favourite Strauss opera; indeed, I have never been able to make much of it at all, despite some wonderful moments. Moreover, apart from the hotel setting, it is not especially clear, at least to me, why they should think of Arabella. But one can see at least why the librettists might have been thinking of Strauss and Hofmannsthal, with their fondness for reflection on art and artists. Could Henze, though? He has often struck me as a Strauss-like figure, despite – or perhaps, on some level, because of? – his antagonism, which goes far beyond comments he might sometimes have made concerning, say, Wagner, Schoenberg, or Webern (though never, so far as I am aware, Stravinsky). ‘Beethoven regarded his whole enterprise as a contribution to human progress. As with Marxism, his goal is not God but Man, whereas there are other artists who have never given a thought to the moral function of their work; for instance Richard Strauss, who is for me – perhaps I’m going too far – something like a court composer to Kaiser Wilhelm II.’ Does the writer of these words, Henze himself, protest a little too much? And which artist is closer to Mittenhofer? A sadness for composer and librettists must be that they are constantly in danger of exploiting human experiences for the sake of something called art. Perhaps the imperative therefore ought to be that the art produced is good, for, as Adrian Mourby writes in a programme note concerning the Yeatsian inspiration for Auden: ‘It was Yeats’s failures as an artist that concerned Auden most. It was from these that he wished to distance himself. Mittenhoffer is not just a monster. He is probably not much of a writer.’ This production helps vindicate Henze and his librettists from at least that charge.