Haus für Mozart
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| Images: © SF/Thomas Aurin |
Primadonna, Ariadne – Christina Nilsson
Tenor, Bacchus – Eric Cutler
Zerbinetta – Ziyi Dai
Major-domo – Johannes Silberschneider
Music Master – Christoph Pohl
Dancing Master – Jonas Hacker
Harlequin – Leon Košavić
Scaramuccio – Michael Porter
Truffaldino – Lukas Enoch Lemcke
Brighella – Theodor Browne
Naiad – Jasmin Delfs
Driad – Ana Mittermüller
Echo – Marlene Metzger
Wigmaker – Blaž Stajnko
Lackey – Fabian-Jakob Balkhausen
Officer – Fabio Dorizzi
Dancers – Ashley Elexandra Wright, Yume Takojima, Anton Ruslanovych, Samuel Young-Wright
Actors – Leo Albertini, Maximilian Montag, Martin Preiner, Paridam Schneider, Christian Walker
Lighting – Franck Evin
Choreography – Ashley Alexandra Wright
Video – Alexander Pannier
Dramaturgy – Till Briegleb
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
A musically outstanding Ariadne auf
Naxos, as well played as any I have heard, was here alas let down by a
frankly idiotic staging, directed by the recently fashionable ‘interdisciplinary
artist’ Ersan Mondtag. Let me resume the good musical news, which was very good
indeed. I am not sure I had heard Manfred Honeck conduct an opera before,
although in addition to serving as Music Director in Stuttgart for several
years, he will have played in many as a violinist in the Vienna Philharmonic,
here led by his brother Rainer. Doubtless it did no harm to be ‘one of them’, for
the musicians clearly trusted and responded to him as they would to few others,
combining a sense of chamber music writ large with unassuming yet
unquestionable musical flexibility and direction. Harmony and counterpoint combined
in near-Mozartian balance in an orchestra of soloists. Rarely if ever have I
heard so much of the score, inner string parts in particular: not simply for
its own sake, but musically and thereby dramatically enriching the drama. Tristan
in particular could be heard informing various passages of the Opera proper:
not only in the obvious, intertextual ways, but in those string textures, their
direction, and their potentiality. This may not have been a brazenly
modernistic Strauss, but then this is a particular work with its own brand of
neoclassicism avant la lettre: one rooted in, yet in no sense
hidebound by, tradition, and with frames of historical reference in almost any
direction one might care to take, not least what we call the French Baroque
(though ‘Classicism’ arguably makes greater sense). I can pay Honeck’s
direction no greater compliment than to say I should love to hear him in a Mozart
or Wagner opera, or indeed more Strauss. And if he can encourage this orchestra
to play like that, he should definitely conduct more opera in Salzburg and
Vienna.
With this of all operas, we need to keep several operatic balls in the air at the same time, and show ourselves to be doing so. Whatever nonsense they were called to by the director, the singers shone vocally bright indeed. Christina Nilsson, served particularly ill by Mondtag’s designs, nevertheless offered a thoughtful, radiant performance as Ariadne. At one point, I found myself wondering wishing the late Jessye Norman had been cast, in order to put the production where it deserved, but otherwise I was more than happy with her successor. Ziyi Da was a delight from beginning to end as Zerbinetta, her coloratura responding perfectly to the needs of a drama both necessarily italicised and natural. If I have heard a better Music Master than Christoph Pohl, I have forgotten him, which seems unlikely. A warmly Wagnerian baritone, with just the right amount of ironic distance, sounded just what Hofmannsthal and Strauss had ordered. If it is difficult to wax too lyrical about a Bacchus, that reflects the thanklessness of the role; Eric Cutler did all that was asked for him and more. Jonas Hacker’S Dancing Master, Leon Košavić’s Harlequin, the euphonious trio of Jasmin Delfs, Ana Mittermüller, and Marlene Metzger: these and others all attested to casting from depth, repaid in intelligence, good humour, and tonal warmth. A host of dancers and actors did well what presumably had been asked of them too.
I have left to the end Kate Lindsey’s Composer, not because she proved an exception, but because her character, alas, leads us directly to Mondtag’s staging. If, to begin with, I found her singing a touch on the harsh side, it blossomed into one of the most moving accounts of Strauss’s paean to music I have heard. It is one of those unmistakeable moments when the master of musical masks lets his slip, or at least has us think it does, and had me in tears. (The Vienna Philharmonic was at least an equal partner here of course.) But the reason, I suspect, I had taken longer to warm to her performance was that she had been landed with having to play the Composer not as a successor to Cherubino, but rather as a strangely dressed, ‘uptight’ middle-aged woman with a twitch. In offering what she did, Lindsey probably did precisely what had been asked for, prior to casting caution to the winds. That was not the worst of it, by any means. In what came across, rightly or wrongly, as crass misogyny, this woman was enabled, during the Opera, to ‘loosen up’ with the aid of a spliff or two, Zerbinetta removing the Composer’s top so that she could wander haplessly around the stage in her bra, prior to tentatively joining in one of the most tedious all-in orgies you will ever have the misfortune to observe.
The attempt, as New Labour might have had it, to sex up Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s dodgy dossier was often embarrassing, but always dull and increasingly so. Where the Prologue’s setting, on a spaceship flown to Mars, with a variety of peculiarly dressed people, had merely irritated but had not especially got in the way, the Opera suggested a supreme lack of interest on the part of the production team in anything remotely connected with the work, let alone its musical and verbal text. Characters from the Prologue wandered around to no particular end, as if in search of a bus that alas was never coming. Curiously joyless sex, with a bias towards revelation of the male form, carried on throughout. For some reason or none, Zerbinetta and her troupe either – according to taste – took the controls of the spaceship or engaged in a television quiz show.
Finally, Bacchus arrived as a golden spaceman, to leave with Ariadne, only to have the Major-Domo press a button and explode their ship. If the argument were, as seemed suggested in the dramaturge’s programme note, that this was offering a contemporary critique of artistic patronage, it failed completely in its aim, let alone in presenting any idea, Strauss’s, Hofmannsthal’s, or anyone else’s, of transformation. But if that were being offered, perhaps some consideration might have been given to which version of the opera would be presented. Only a little better thought out than the production, this note gave the impression of not even having appreciated this was an issue, referring baldly to the ‘premiere’ in Vienna in 1916. Sebastian Bolz’s accompanying essay was, by contrast, excellent: a model introduction to the work.
As the celebrated Turkish proverb has it, when a clown moves into a palace, he does not become the sultan; the palace becomes a circus. I suspect the production team would claim their work was ‘about’ this relationship rather than simple evidence of it. There is, of course, nothing intrinsically wrong with a circus or the idea of one, though it is hardly to be equated to the commedia dell’arte. It is not, though, suited to everything—especially when it never leaves the shallows of a mere ‘look’. Achim Freyer’s (almost) one-size-all approach could become wearing, but there was no doubting his craft, his pursuit of an idea, his ability to conjure up a new world within the confines of his aesthetic, and the theatrical magic he could, at his best, create. His Magic Flute, which I saw for the first time here in Salzburg in 1999, was a case in point: perhaps still the most memorable and magical I have seen. If you have never seen so much as a still from a low-budget 70s sci-fi series and would happily see it irrelevantly created on stage, seasoned with a torrent of aimless dry-humping observed by an occasional refugee from the land of Teletubbies, Zirkus Mondtag will descend next summer on Bayreuth for Parsifal.
