L’Heure espagnole and L’Enfant et les sortilèges, Royal College of Music, 7 December 2013

 

Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music

 

Concepcíon – Kezia Bienek

Gonzalve – Gyula Rab

Torquemada – Peter Aisher

Ramiro – Luke D Williams

Don Iñigo Gomez – Bradley Travis

 

L’Enfant – Rose Setten

Le Feu, Le Rossignol – Natasha Day

La Princesse – He Wu

L’Arithmétique, La Rainette – Craig Jackson

Maman, La Tasse Chinoise, La Libellule – Maria Ostroukhova

La Bergère, La Chouette – Elizabeth Holmes

La Chatte, L’Ecureuil – Katie Coventry

L’Horloge comtoise, le Chat – Nicholas Morton

Le Fauteuil – Jerome Knox

L’Arbre – Matthew Buswell

La Chauve-Souris, Une Pastourelle – Josephine Goddard

Un Pâtre – Amy Williamson

La Thêière – Daniel Farrimond

 

James Bonas (director)

Ruari Murchison (designs)

Wayne Dowdeswell (lighting)

 

Chorus

Royal College of Music Opera Orchestra

Michael Rosewell (conductor)

 

 

Gyula Rab (Gonzalve), Kezia Bienek (Concepcion)

A delightful end-of-term show from the Royal College of Music International Opera School. Ravel’s two operas were performed with charm, style, and not inconsiderable magic – and I am sure I should have said that even had I not sampled some of the Institut français wine beforehand (a definite recommendation, should you be looking for somewhere to drink in the bewilderingly tricky environs of South Kensington).

L'Enfant (Rose Setten), La Princesse (He Wu)



James Bonas’s stagings treat them as independent works, which of course they are; there is no discernible attempt to forge a link between them, but then nor is there any need to do so. With the help  of Ruari Murchison’s designs, we thus find ourselves for the first half where we should expect to do so: the shop of a Toledo clockmaker. The clocks that the muleteer, Ramiro, must carry up and down the stairs and the staircase itself are our guiding presence: plot device and environment working well together. Costumes hint at a Frenchman’s view of Spain, reminding us not only of the circumstances of this particular opera but also of the old quip, fair or otherwise, that the best Spanish music has been written by Frenchmen. The characters are sharply directed, enabling the young singers’ considerable acting and vocal abilities to shine to the full.

 

 

Concepcion and Ramiro (Luke D Williams)

 

 

Kezia Bienek offered a properly feminine Concepcíon, housewifely languor and determination to avail herself of what her visitors can – and cannot – provide alternating as the situation demanded. Peter Aisher deputised for an indisposed Nick Pritchard as her husband, Torquemada, though one would hardly have known; he seemed fully at ease with role and production alike. Gyula Rab’s Gonsalve provided humour – the very parody of a poet’s self-absorbed conceit – and vocal excellence, well partnered in those respects by his rival, Bradley Travis’s Don Iñigo Gomez. And last but certainly not least, Luke D Williams offered a fine assumption of the muleteer’s role, this Ramiro’s vocal and physical attraction perfectly clear, whilst he remained properly clueless about the games unfolding around him.    

 

The nocturnal setting for L’Enfant et les Sortilèges contrasted appealingly with the Spanish sun of its predecessor. There was something properly dream-like, even trippy, to the stage realisation of Colette’s and, above all, Ravel’s world. We were free to follow our own interpretations, Freudian or otherwise, and there was certainly implied menace to an opera that emerged as far from innocent; at the same time, the production does not seem to impose any particular view upon us. It evokes, maybe even provokes, but does not constrain.

 

 

 

 

The Royal College of Music Opera Orchestra under Michael Rosewell had proved excellent during its Spanish hour, and once more did so here, though perhaps there is still more opportunity for it to shine in L’Enfant. Despite its smallish size (strings 8.6.4.3.2), it never sounded undernourished; indeed, it sounded just right for the Britten Theatre. Ravel’s heady blends of wonder and precision, of Gallic suavity and infectious orientalism, sounded perfectly fitted to the child’s adventures on stage – though arguably I should have expressed that the other way round. Again, the cast offered a great deal to enjoy; I heard not a single weak link. Rose Setten captured admirably the truculence and receptivity required of the child, Maria Ostroukhova a splendid complement both in maternal and other roles. Without listing every assumption, I should especially like to single out He Wu’s Princess: again precise in musical terms, yet ambiguously inviting with respect to the drama. Is this a child’s awakening? ‘Probably yet not necessarily', remains the answer – as so often proves to be the case with Ravel.

 

 

London Sinfonietta/ Pomàrico - Haas, in vain, 6 December 2013

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Georg Friedrich Haas – in vain (London premiere)

London Sinfonietta

Emilio Pomàrico (conductor)

 

It has taken quite a while for Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain to receive a performance in the United Kingdom. The London Sinfonietta under Emilio Pomàrico – valiantly, brilliantly standing in for an indisposed André de Ridder – gave this country’s premiere in Huddersfield, before bringing the work to the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the final weekend of the Southbank Centre’s Rest is Noise festival. Audience numbers are far from everything. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing in front of a couple of enthusiasts, or indeed simply for its own sake in front of no one at all: for the glory of God, as any mediæval composer would have understood. Yet the claim that contemporary music is of limited interest, that what audiences want is a generic programme of overture-concerto-symphony – a perfectly reasonable formation if done for a good reason rather than out of laziness – was once again belied by a sell-out for a more than hour-long ensemble work by a sixty-year-old Austrian composer. This is not the churned-out pandering of minimalism, ‘holy’ or otherwise, but substantial, substantive, music, which both requires effort and rewards it. Such in any case was my first experience of a work whose renown has steadily grown over the past few years, not least thanks to the advocacy of figures such as Sir Simon Rattle and Alex Ross. An introduction by Rattle, given before a Berlin performance earlier this year, was reprinted in the programme. I am glad I only read it afterwards, since it enabled me to hear the performance without any preconceptions, not knowing at all what to expect, but I should recommend the enthusiasm and intelligence of Rattle’s words to anyone remotely curious.

 

One thing that struck me about a performance, whose length was not so very far off that of a Mahler symphony, was how compelling the experience was, in the sense that not only I, but seemingly 99% of the audience, had no difficulty whatsoever in concentrating throughout; the impression was of an audience gripped. In a situation such as this, one inevitably tends to make references to other works and composers, sometimes more revealingly than others: not only as a reference point, but also simply in an attempt to find verbal approximations. I do not mean, then, necessary to imply ‘influence’, let alone derivation, but simply to offer a few descriptive signposts of my own experience, itself derived only from hearing a performance rather than from having seen the score.  

 

Ligeti came to mind, not that the opening string scurryings sounded quite ‘like’ him, let alone the ‘harsher’ soundworld of, say, Xenakis, but as a starting-point, not only for my own orientation, but for appreciation of Haas’s sheer inventiveness, one could probably have done worse. (I saw afterwards that Rattle had also invoked Ligeti, so perhaps I was not being entirely fanciful.) There is theatre, of course, even if one did not know that Haas composed the work partly as an expression of dismay at the rise of the Freedom Party in Austria’s 1999 elections. (He grew up in Voralberg, later reflecting upon his experience: ‘However impressive the landscape might have been … life there in the 1950s and 1960s was largely cut off from the cultural developments in the world outside.’ This was no sentimental rural idyll, then, for him, but a disturbingly reactionary environment in need of response.) Periods of total darkness enable one to listen all the more closely: what extraordinary skill on the part of the musicians! And the dawning of light upon the stage more often than not proves – yes, in vain. Ceremonial contributes to that sense of theatre, brass perhaps recalling the great aequale of Austrian tradition: archaic almost, and yet very much of the present, just like the trombones in Don Giovanni or Beethoven’s Missa solemnis.

 

For it was the ghosts of German Romanticism that most haunted my experience of the work. Perhaps that is simply a matter of personal preoccupation, but it is not, I think, entirely so. Battle and curious confluence between ‘natural’ and modern, tempered tuning take place; again, Ligeti inevitably came to mind. (Is it that contest that makes the music 'microtonal', or is it the microtones that suggest to Haas the contest? Does it matter?) But the sense of trying to recreate a ‘natural’ world both necessary and yet, in some senses, out of our grasp, born of major triads, the arpeggios of, say, Das Rheingold, and the heart-rending horn echoes both of Wagner and of Der Freischütz, Schumann too, summons up the ‘in-vain-ness’ not only of musical works but the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. Those paintings may have been over-exposed in recent years, tarnished by base commercialism; so has Romanticism itself, many times over. The specific and the generic will nevertheless survive. Ghosts will adapt; indeed, we may doubt whether they are ghosts at all. There were indeed a good few times in which memories that great ‘farewell’ that is not really a farewell to Austro-German tradition, Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, insinuated themselves. I have heard many people express surprise that Helmut Lachenmann, that most avid, intrepid examiner and re-inventor of this tradition, should so admire Strauss’s work; that must reflect on their misunderstanding of Strauss. Lachenmann ‘gets’ Strauss; so, I suspect, does Haas.

 

The inexorable downward scalic passages of the closing ten minutes or so are as mesmerising as anything I have heard in ‘new music’ for quite some time. Tension mounting, doubtless at least as much through the Sinfonietta’s superlative performance as through the work itself, these apparently generative passages lead nowhere – but it is, of course, nowhere, nothing, something negative, in vain, that is being generated. Attempts to break free of what Rattle illuminatingly describes as ‘music … [getting] stuck on  … [an] extraordinary Escher staircase’ seem to involve both reversion, that is to scales themselves, and also neo-Lisztian innovation. My memory drew parallels with the introduction to Liszt’s B minor sonata, to the astonishing scales that most undervalued, most farsighted of nineteenth-century masters offers as material for more or less the entirety of that indisputable masterpiece. And the disconcerting, even frightening stop to which the music suddenly came: that, I thought, could only be Wozzeck. Rattle, I discovered, thought so too, adding Erwartung to the mix as well.

 

Performances, insofar as I could tell, were exemplary throughout. The London Sinfonietta are past masters at such challenges, yet we should celebrate that achievement rather than take it for granted. Pomàrico, making his London debut, clearly needs to visit these shores again soon. So does Haas. The concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 Hear and Now, on Saturday 18 January 2014.

 

Gubisch/BBC SO/Pons - Schreker, Busoni, Ravel, and Schoenberg, 4 December 2013

Barbican Hall

Schreker – Vorspiel zu einen Drama

Busoni – Berceuse élégiaque, op.42
Ravel – Shéhérazade
Pavane pour une infante défunte
Schoenberg – Chamber Symphony no.1, version for full orchestra, op.9b

Nora Gubisch (soprano)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Josep Pons (conductor)

 

A refreshing programme of early(-ish)-twentieth-century orchestral music from the BBC SO and Catalan conductor, Josep Pons, which, if it did not always possess the last word in refinement, certainly benefited from Pons’s palpable enthusiasm for this repertoire. Indeed, the opening Schreker Vorspiel zu einem Drama – not, as the Barbican website had it, the Overture to Die Gezeichneten, from which this longer concert work derives – can rarely, if ever, have been heard with such liveliness, even bumptiousness. The performance itself made a refreshing change from the over-ripe decadence to which we have become accustomed in such music. Not that there was no hint of such a tendency, but the last thing the music needs is exaggeration in that quarter. Amidst a sea, no an ocean, of coughing and even – I kid you not – widespread eating and drinking, Pons projected a strong sense of line, the BBC SO responding with apparent glee to Schreker’s orchestral phantasmagoria. There was plenty of bite too, rhythmic command being especially impressive. And if there were perhaps times when Pons’s infectious enthusiasm threatened to run away with itself, the performance was one of warmth: just the ticket for a cold December night.

 

Busoni’s Berceuse élégiaque followed. If Schreker is a minor master of whom it would be no bad thing to hear a little more, then Busoni is a scandalously neglected figure, his Doktor Faust one of the great twentieth-century operas, and his other three operatic scores all fully worthy of repertory status. Given his pre-eminence as pianist, Busoni’s orchestral music is often still more overlooked than his operas. (Not that his piano music is performed nearly so often as it should be.) Schreker’s large orchestra contrasted strongly with Busoni’s refined instrumentation, likewise the former’s superior proto-Hollywood harmonies with the latter’s radical ambiguity. Is this the major or minor mode? We may well be asking the wrong question – but not in a Schoenbergian sense (though at times, the orchestration sounds not so different from a Schoenberg ensemble, ‘influence’ being most likely to fall at least as strongly in the opposite direction). There was a properly nauseous and ominous sense of the rocking berceuse to this performance, though there were times when it sounded a little effortful. In general, however, there was admirably clean, classical elegance to be heard, coupled with a dark, troubling undertow. Late Liszt, unsurprisingly, came to mind more than once as prelude to Busoni’s dissolution of ‘form into feeling’, a wondrous tribute to his mother upon her death.

 

Ravel, that towering master of orchestration, was to be heard immediately before and after the interval. Nora Gubisch joined the orchestra for a wonderful account of Shéhérazade, her tone both lustrous and clear: in many ways ideal for the composer. Pons assured a variegated account, matched by his soloists, transitions in ‘Asie’ especially well handled. There was true dramatic urgency where required. The ecstasy upon the word ‘Chinie’, followed by a plethora of orchestral chinoiserie, was just as impressive as the exultant climax upon ‘haine’ and resultant orchestral afterglow. ‘La Flute enchantée,’ with an excellent flute solo from Michael Cox, was expectant than ‘langoroureux,’ the balance between mystery and clarity well judged. ‘L’Indifférent’ emerged with all its sexual ambiguity. What a wonderful hush was to be heard upon the injunction, ‘Entre!’ The Pavane pour une infante défunte was treated to an unsentimental account, which Pons kept moving without rushing. Dance rhythm was apparent, even generative, throughout.

I wish I could feel greater enthusiasm about Schoenberg’s 1935 version for full orchestra of his First Chamber Symphony. Whilst understanding his reasons for providing this alternative, it seems – and continued to seem – inferior in every respect to the original, like a considerably more extreme case of Verklärte Nacht. Timbres and edges are smoothed and blunted; solo moments come as welcome relief, reminding one of just what one is missing. That said, there were in this performance occasions when a stronger still kinship to Mahler and Brahms came through, partly as result of the larger forces. Pons’s tempo shifts were considerable but not unconvincing, save for a sagging of tension during the slow movement. Still, this is Schoenberg, and it is no bad thing to remind ourselves from time to time of a weaker, yet indubitably ‘authentic’, version of what remains a strong candidate for the title of most joyous twentieth-century musical masterpiece.

 

Parsifal, Royal Opera, 2 December 2013

Royal Opera House

Gurnemanz – René Pape

First Grail Knight – David Butt Philip
Second Grail Knight – Charbel Mattar
First Esquire – Dušica Bijelič
Second Esquire – Rachel Kelly
Third Esquire – Sipho Fubesi
Fourth Esquire – Luis Gomes
Kundry/Voice from Above – Angela Denoke
Amfortas – Gerald Finley
Parsifal – Simon O’Neill
Titurel – Robert Lloyd
Klingsor – Sir Willard White
Flowermaidens – Celine Byrne, Kiandra Howarth, Anna Patalong, Anna Devin, Ana James, Justina Gringyte

Stephen Langridge (director)

Alison Chitty (designs)
Paul Pyant (lighting)
Dan O’Neill (movement)
Thomas Bergmann, Willem Brasche (video designs)
Royal Opera Chorus and Extra Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Sir Antonio Pappano (conductor)

Yet again, I am afraid, the Royal Opera House seems to have come up with a Wagner production for those who are not very interested in Wagner. Thunderous applause issued forth for Sir Antonio Pappano, when the best that one could say about his conducting was that it was a bit better than the appalling mess he had latterly made of, say, Götterdämmerung and Die Meistersinger. I am told, though I have yet to look at them, that newspaper critics have praised him to the skies; I wish I could say that that surprised me. There will be some writers who have a genuine alternative view on this matter, though I admit that in this case I find it difficult to understand how, but many of our opera critics seem not to know their Knappertsbusch from their Kempe, still less their Karajan from their Boulez. Members of the audience are perfectly entitled, of course, to attend a performance with as little or as much knowledge as they please, but the whole business of criticism is on very dodgy ground indeed when one doubts whether some opera writers can even read a score – let alone bother to do so.

I can only assume that in some sense, unless the first night performance were entirely different from the second, audience members and critics had confused some fine orchestral playing with the conductor’s sense of line, or rather lack thereof. There were even early signs, I admit, when it seemed as though Pappano might at last have learned to conduct Wagner. (Surely such an apprenticeship should have been served long before deigning to try one’s hand at Covent Garden, but anyway…) The First Act Prelude sounded both beautiful, sometimes luminously so, and possessed of a decent sense of direction, even if it were far from unclear that Wagner’s transcendental meaning(s) had been grasped. Yet soon we were back in the bad old arena of stopping and starting, underlining a motif and failing to grasp how it might be part of the composer’s fabled ‘art of transition’, let alone fit into a complex, dynamic, quasi-symphonic web. Has Pappano ever so much as read, let alone understood, Wagner’s words in Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama?

To be an artwork as music, the new form of dramatic music must possess the unity of the symphonic movement; this it attains by spreading itself over the whole drama, in the most intimate cohesion therewith … This unity centres upon a web of basic themes, which contrast, complete, re-shape, divorce, and intertwine with one another as in a symphonic movement; yet here, the requirements of the dramatic action dictate the laws of separation and combination.

Somehow I doubt it – and that is even before one considers the complex role played by Wagner’s poem in all of this. As I said, there were passages in which, on a basic level, continuity was maintained, and there was some very fine orchestral playing too considered in isolation, but nothing in Wagner should be considered in isolation. That is the problem – and of course the ultimate opportunity. This was Wagner conducting devoid of any understanding of what makes Wagner Wagner – and we can be pluralist in that, of course. Yet such pluralism does not, or certainly should not, extend to having Wagner reduced to a slightly Teutonic Verdi. One can only weep when thinking that the last time Parsifal was staged at Covent Garden, it was conducted with unassuming greatness by Bernard Haitink. Sadly it seems that Haitink is destined never to return; in which case, might we not have someone else, if only occasionally, to do Wagner’s works a modicum of justice? Barenboim? Thielemann? Gatti? What might pass muster in a provincial house ought not to have any place on a world stage, a house once presided over by Haitink, by Sir Colin Davis.

Let us move on, without enthusiasm, to the production. ‘Stephen Langridge’s production emphasises the timeless and universal nature of the Parsifal story,’ claimed the cast list’s ‘quick guide to Parsifal’. I am not at all sure what that is supposed to mean, the drama of Parsifal lying in an epic theological struggle between time and eternity. But even if we could somehow accept that claim – very odd or unspeakably trite; most likely, both – it was not at all clear how Langridge’s production does anything of the sort. It certainly seems  to retreat from the mythological, from the questioning, to a weird unspecific specificity, which gave incoherent answers where answers were the last thing that was required. We appear to be in a world, not unlike that of Simon McBurney’s dreadful ENO Magic Flute, over which a quasi-Scientologist cult rules; yet that potential menace is undermined by a weird obsession with hospital care. I had thought a friend who attended the first night was being facetious when he asked whether the production had been intending a comment on British sanctification of the NHS; now I am not so sure. Much of the action takes place in something resembling the strange ‘Sex Box’ of Channel 4’s recent risible television programme. (I wonder indeed whether it were the worst television programme I have ever seen: four ‘couples’ have sex in a box in front of a studio audience, though unseen by that audience, after which they briskly emerge – they are not allotted much time – to answer, or rather not really to answer, questions put to them by Mariella Frostrup and some alleged experts. Parody seemed to be absent but who knows?) The box has a bed, on which scenes from Gurnemanz’s narration – Kundry’s decidedly unerotic ‘seduction’ of Amfortas, Klingsor’s self-castration – are depicted, since we are clearly unable to listen to Gurnemanz for ourselves and imagine, still less to play with past and present, with different modes of perception and understanding, as Wagner would have us try. Amfortas’s hospital ‘care’ also takes place there.

For some reason, the Grail is replaced by a little boy, whose side is pierced, echoing Amfortas’s own wounding, and presumably as some sort of Christ-like reference. Indeed, when we reencounter this ‘Grail’ in the third act, the boy has grown into a nubile young man, still in his underpants, still ready to be pierced, though that does not happen and instead he simply retreats inside his box. The way Titurel and some of the knights touch the boy’s wound suggests paedophilia, but that does not seem to be carried through, so maybe it is just another unfortunate misjudgement. Parsifal has arrived dressed like a vagrant, with more than a touch of the Jimmy Savile about him, so again: who knows? Frankly, who cares? There is, moreover, no castle to be destroyed, no sign of the Cross, etc. Instead, presumably as an Œdipal allusion, Parsifal is blinded, though just when an interesting idea might have manifested itself, its effect is blunted by the banal restitution of Parsifal’s sight at the end. Needless to say, the NHS works its wonders, Amfortas and Kundry walking off  together

Alas, Parsifal, as sung by Simon O’Neill, sometimes even sounded a little like Jimmy Savile too. There were better moments, especially during the third act, but too much was crude, undifferentiated, and most of all vocally unpleasant, redolent, as is this singer’s wont, of a misapplied pneumatic drill. His acting was little better, though seemingly by default, since there was little difference form the first two acts, he did a passable imitation of a blind man in the third. Why can the Royal Opera not at last engage Jonas Kaufmann in German repertoire, rather than waste him on largely trivial Italianate works? Or what about Christopher Ventris, or Stuart Skelton? The rest of the cast – and here were the only real candidates for redemption – were much better. Top of the class was René Pape’s Gurnemanz: authoritative, suave,  and so securely founded in Wagner’s alchemic combination of words and music that one could forgive a great deal – just so long as he was on stage. Likewise Gerald Finley’s wonderful Amfortas, for whom dramatic commitment was of course a greater task. This was the first time I had heard Finley in Wagner; I certainly hope that it will not be the last. Angela Denoke's Kundry was again a committed assumption; many of the notes she reached, but a good few she did not. Why she appeared in the third act as she had in the second, rather than as the creature seen in the first, I cannot imagine. Unfortunately, Willard White as Klingsor and Robert Lloyd as Titurel both suggested that they would be well advised to retire from vocal performance. The male chorus improved significantly in the third act, having lacked focus in the first. Whether it were a matter of the female chorus’s placing offstage or something else, its words were entirely inaudible. I hope that having Kundry sing the part of the Voice from Above was a matter of cost-cutting rather than a ‘dramatic’ decision; in the latter respect, it made no sense at all.

Only last year, I saw Stefan Herheim’s Bayreuth Parsifal for the last time. It did not receive its finest musical performance, Daniele Gatti having been replaced by Philippe Jordan, who was little better – if at all – than Pappano. Moreover, the cast had been better in previous years too. Yet the dramatic integrity, the intellectual commitment, above all the sheer musicality of Herheim’s staging once again won out. Here I struggled and failed to find a single case of the director engaging with Wagner’s score. Haitink managed, more or less single-handedly, to salvage something from the meaningless triviality of the previous, at least equally dreadful production. But it needs someone of that stature; we seem fated endlessly to be denied such redemption.

Götterdämmerung, De Nederlandse Opera, 30 November 2013

Het Muziektheater, Amsterdam

Siegfried – Stephen Gould

Gunther – Alejandro Marco-Buhrmester
Alberich – Werner van Mechelen
Hagen – Kurt Rydl
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Gutrune, Third Norn – Astrid Weber
Waltraute – Michaela Schuster
First Norn – Nicole Piccolimini
Second Norn, Wellgunde – Barbara Senator
Woglinde – Machteld Baumans
Flosshilde – Bettina Ranch

Pierre Audi (director)

George Tsypin (set designs)
Eiko Ishioka, Robby Duiveman (costumes)
Wolfgang Göbbel (lighting)
Cor van den Brink (choreography)
Maarten van der Put (video)
Klaus Bertisch (dramaturgy)

Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra

Netherlands Opera Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)
Hartmut Haenchen (conductor)

 

I shall try to make this relatively short, partly on account of time pressures, but also because I still have to watch the DVD set of this Amsterdam Ring from Hartmut Haenchen and Pierre Audi, and shall therefore be able to say more once I have seen the whole ‘cycle’. (I know the word is misleading in many ways, but it is now so ingrained that its use is sometimes well-nigh inevitable.) That said, a live experience can be very different from a filmed one; indeed, for me at least, the former is nearly always preferable. There is in any case a different cast for this run. Moreover, fellow speakers at the Internationaal Wagner Congres, which took me to Amsterdam in the first place, advised that Audi’s production, in particular George Tsypin’s brilliant set designs, did not really transfer very well to video. I shall see…

 

In many respects, it is Tsypin’s ring-like space – presumably developed in concert with Audi – that dominates proceedings: not in any sense limiting, but as a good production will do, enabling. (Stephen Langridge’s Parsifal, to which I shall come shortly, did quite the opposite: a rude, yet alas not-at-all surprising awakening, upon my return to London.) The ring is, cleverly, not circular but never meets, permitting a lengthy walkway up to the theatrical heights. Not only does that facilitate comings and goings, observations and retreats; it reminds us that Wagner’s Hegelian view of history – Schopenhauer notwithstanding – does not deal in the purely ‘cyclical’. In Götterdämmerung perhaps of all works, that is crucial. The audience is drawn in; indeed people watch – like the Immolation Scene ‘watchers’ themselves – from the extremities of the set. Equally innovative and provocative is the placing of the orchestra within the ‘ring’. It is, of course, quite a different conception from that of Wagner’s invisible orchestra at Bayreuth, which, bizarrely, no one seeks to follow.  Yet, in a sense, it has equally distinguished roots in Wagnerian æsthetics. Wagner’s conception of the orchestra as his Greek chorus does not rely upon an invisibility that was never the case in Athens; indeed, the complexity of the chorus’s engagement with drama is part of the point. We are reminded, moreover, of Patrice Chéreau’s stated Bayreuth wish, explicitly echoing Wagner, that ‘that the orchestra pit be, like Delphi’s smoking pit, a crevice uttering oracles — the Funeral March and the concluding redemption motif. The redemption motif is a message delivered to the entire world, but like all pythonesses, the orchestra is unclear, and there are several ways in which one might interpret its message. … Should one not hear it with mistrust and anxiety?’

 

Audi does not propose an overarching Konzept, at least not insofar as I could discern from this viewing of a single drama. Yet in no sense does his production seem vacuous. This is not Lepage (surely the very nadir: no criticism could be too harsh), Schenk, Braunschweig, or Cassiers. There is, may Wotan be thanked, no aping of a bad nineteenth-century naturalism, as Thomas Mann would have put it and whose utterly failure Wagner himself appreciated. Yet there is a sense both of myth – at some times vaguely eastern, the veils for Gutrune and Brünnhilde reminding one of Wagner’s (proto-)Schopenhauerian flirtations – and of its interaction with history: the very stuff of the Ring. Boundaries are fluid yet the presentation is far from formless. Thus the Gibichungs can sport stylised nineteenth-century fashion at one point, for instance Gutrune’s wedding dress, and Gunther’s hunting green with top hat, both admirably fitted to the attractive figures of Astrid Weber and Alejandro Marco-Buhrmester. At the same time there is a sense of the mists of myth and pre-history descending, the imaginative presentation of Brünnhilde’s final sinking into red oblivion a case in point: superficially similar, in its use of choreography and sheets, to that in the Berlin production of Guy Cassiers, yet so much more theatrical – and meaningful. Elegance is never exchanged for Loge’s anarchistic fire. And there is real fire too – somewhat mystifyingly at the end of the second act, but more meaningfully at the end of the third.  The Tarnhelm is used intelligently at the close of the first act, so that we see both mysterious visitors and their role in Brünnhilde’s fate. Too often - for instance, in Keith Warner's London staging - directors mess this up completely; not here.

 

Hartmut Haenchen’s direction had its moments. It was certainly preferable to the truly abysmal efforts of Antonio Pappano last year at Covent Garden. (I am beginning to think that legislation might be necessary to wrest Wagner from Pappano’s near-monopoly. A good musical director would recognise his strengths and more importantly his weaknesses, and distribute repertoire accordingly.) There was little of that stopping and starting, that driving hard and that grinding to a halt; yet, by the same token, there was some scrappy orchestral playing – the brass nearly inaudible at the end of the first act, when their steel should viscerally reflect the brutality of Brünnhilde’s rape – and Wagner’s melos was sometimes obscured.

 

Stephen Gould’s Siegfried was serviceable: more than one can often say, but it was neither an especially meaningful nor mellifluous performance. Catherine Foster displayed considerable dramatic commitment and, when her tone was properly focused, a fine command of Wagnerian line; intonation, however, was sometimes a problem.  Kurt Rydl, a wonderful Hagen in his time, showed that, whilst he can still act the part with the best of them, he should alas probably have retired a while ago, his voice often threadbare and lacking focus.  Weber, though her voice could sometimes prove attractive, had a tendency towards blowsiness. Marco-Buhrmester, though, was deeply impressive, his vocal delivery of text and music alike as elegant as his stage presence. Michaela Schuster’s Waltraute was the other star performance; as with Marco-Buhrmester, every word was made to tell, yet without exaggeration. Hers was a performance that drew one in as the production suggested. I only noticed afterwards that Eberhard Friedrich had trained the chorus; that made perfect sense, since its excellence put me in mind of Bayreuth at its best. More anon when I have watched the DVDs…

'Redemption to the Redeemer!'



Bayreuth, 1882 premiere:
Amalie Materna (Kundry), Emil Scaria (Gurnemanz),
Hermann Winkelmann (Parsifal)

Questions concerning Wagner and religion are some of the most complex in an altogether complex life and œuvre. Did Wagner believe in God? Was he a Christian? Did his views and practice develop? How do his works reflect, further, develop them? To answer such questions often hangs more upon definition of terms, a task both necessary and hopeless, than gleaning of real insight. Wagner’s attitudes changed, yet rarely in linear fashion. The apparently atheist follower of materialist Young Hegelian philosophy endured; so did the admirer of Jesus as social revolutionary. Yet a mysticism of Catholic if hardly orthodox variety also asserted itself. ‘Our conversation leads us to the mystic Meister Eckhart,’ reads Cosima’s 1873 diary. ‘R. begins to read a sermon by him, which fascinates us to the highest degree. Everything turned inward, the soul silent, so that in it God may speak the highest word!’ In 1881, Parsifal essentially composed yet not fully scored, Cosima writes of her husband looking ‘forward to the better times in which such men as Shakespeare, now prophets in the wilderness, will be brought in to form, as it were, part of a divine service. Thus the world once was – first a ceremonial act spoken, then to Holy Communion.’ Questions multiply; answers seem more remote than ever.


Is Parsifal, then, a religious artwork, or is it a work ‘about’ religion? Unsurprisingly, the answer turns out to be: both. More profoundly, however, the very material of Wagner’s drama may be understood to lie in exploring the relationship between the two tendencies. Specific concern with Christianity is far from incidental, in that it enables exploration of both cyclical (Schopenhauerian) and teleological (Hegelian) conceptions of time – otherwise understood, the archetypal ‘Greek’ and ‘Jewish’ strands of the Christian faith. Parsifal, like Christianity, is neither merely cyclical nor straightforwardly linear; it is certainly far from the ‘timeless’ work that reactionary commentators have claimed. Instead, we watch, listen to, and participate in a struggle between time and eternity.


An abiding conflict, dramatic and intellectual, already starkly dramatised in the Ring, is taken further in Parsifal. We might characterise it as taking place between Hegel and his school on one hand and Schopenhauer on the other, or, to put it another way, between history and anti-history. For Hegel, history represented the progress of the ‘Idea’ or ‘World Spirit’, sometimes referred to as ‘God’, which might embody itself, often anything but consciously, in a ‘world-historical’ figure such as Napoleon – or Siegfried. Where Hegel divined purpose, Schopenhauer discerned no sense in history whatsoever, merely the inchoate striving of the irrational, resolutely non-developmental Will. Recall Hans Sachs’s Meistersinger ‘Wahn’ (illusion) monologue: ‘Wahn, Wahn, everywhere Wahn! Wherever I search, in city- and world-chronicles.’ True reality lies not in the external, phenomenal world, but in the noumenal realm of the Will itself, music being the only art with a direct relationship to that realm. Musical drama thus became for the Schopenhauerian Wagner the metaphysical vehicle for granting real existence to the categories of the understanding, for penetrating, beyond the ‘surface’ words of his poem, to the essence of his myth.


In that spirit, Wagner observed, in the wake of its 1882 performances, that Parsifal owed much to ‘flight from the world,’ for:

 Who could look all his life long with an open mind and a free heart, at this world of murder and theft, organised and legalised through lying, deception, and hypocrisy, without having to turn away, shuddering in disgust? Whence then would one avert one’s gaze? All too often into the vale of death. To him, however, who is otherwise called and singled out by destiny, there appears  the truest reflection of the world itself, as the foretold exhortation of redemption, despatched by its [the world’s] innermost soul.

 

Yet, though couched in the language of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, there remains here a revolutionary socialist’s anger at a bourgeois world of lies, deception, and hypocrisy. Moreover, revulsion is crucially tempered by a redemptive prophecy as redolent of Christianity as of Schopenhauer. Indeed, in 1879, Wagner described Parsifal as ‘this most Christian of works’. He had come to believe that charismatic, revolutionary heroes – Siegmund, Siegfried, Tristan, Walther – could never satisfy the hopes invested in them; that was not, however, to say that charismatic heroes as such were to be abjured. Whatever his dark, Schopenhauerian thoughts regarding withdrawal from society, Wagner continued, after the apparent failure of revolution in 1848-9, to engage with the external, political, historical world. Just as Sachs would, following his lament, suppress his depression, turning his attention once again to Nuremberg and to manipulation of Wahn, Wagner maintained, indeed developed, his Hegelian conception of music drama, in the tradition of Attic tragedy, as abidingly political – and religious: a reflection, an incitement, an exploration, by and of society.


What, after the close of Parsifal, will become of Monsalvat, the Grail castle and community, under Parsifal’s new leadership remains unclear, yet the drama is that of its rescue or salvation, not of annihilating destruction. (That has already been accomplished – but in Klingsor’s realm.) Parsifal discovers what he needs through his own historical experience and the transformative influence this exerts; yet he does not control that historical experience. Despite Nietzsche’s venom, Parsifal stands in this respect at least close to the portrayal of Jesus in The Anti-Christ (which itself stands in some respects close to Wagner’s own incomplete prose drama, Jesus of Nazareth): 

One might … name Jesus a ‘free spirit’ – what is established is nothing to him: the word killeth, whatever is established killeth. The concept, the experience of ‘life’, as he alone knows it, for him opposes every kind of word, formula, law, belief, dogma. … his ‘wisdom’ is precisely the pure ignorance [reine Torheit, a referenee to Parsifal] of all such things. Culture is something he has never heard of…

 

Parsifal was, then, to be a different kind of hero from his Wagnerian predecessors. In the drama that bears his name, we deal with a complex, endlessly fascinating interaction between Mitleid (Schopenhauer’s empathetic compassion, literally ‘sorrow with’), grace (Christianity), and the cunning of historical reason (Hegel). Christian grace, in all its ambiguity, mediates between compassion and history. Amfortas, for instance, is unable to do anything to rectify his plight; he must simply wait. He has acted, with disastrous results, as Klingsor impotently continues to act. When Klingsor’s spear is stopped in its tracks by the sign of the Cross, the spear is transformed into an agent of healing. Yet although Parsifal makes the sign, agency comes from beyond.  For both Schopenhauer and Wagner, Mitleid was closely connected, though not exclusively, with Christianity – and what could be more Christian than the sign of the Cross?



Parsifal, it should be stressed, is not Christ. Wagner criticised Hans von Wolzogen, for having, in an essay the composer otherwise admired, called Parsifal a reflection of the Redeemer: “I didn’t give the Redeemer a thought when I wrote it.”’ We should probably take that claim with a large pinch of salt, whilst noting the anxiety to avoid identification. The Hegelian words with which he opened his contemporaneous essay, Religion and Art, may help explain that anxiety:
 

One could say that when religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for art to grant salvation to the kernel of religion, by having us believe that mythical symbols, which the former [that is, religion] would have us believe in their real sense, may be comprehended through their symbolical value, in order to discern therein, via an ideal presentation, the concealed profound truth. 

And yet, it seems that what actually accomplishes Parsifal’s personal transformation is something beyond Hegel and Schopenhauer. Wagner himself called it grace; there are several, far-from incidental references in his poem to Gnade, a term he had not employed in explicitly theological terms in an opera since Lohengrin. In the Prelude to Act III, we hear again the conflict between dynamic passing of time and blind, purposeless circularity; the former has become arduous, yet it has still not been overcome. Grace, however, if it does not supplant, at least enables realisation both of self and community. When, in the Third Act, Parsifal returns to Monsalvat in search of the Grail, his search is successful either through chance or through the intervention of something higher, if something higher exists – and it appears that it does. It is that and that alone which enables Parsifal finally to carry out his deed, to heal Amfortas’s wound, thereby putting Amfortas out of his eternal agony and, crucially rejuvenating his equally sickened community. How ‘symbolic’ such a force may be is open to question, but then a good part of Wagner’s dramatic genius is itself to raise questions rather than to answer them.



Alois Pennarini as Parsifal and Hannah Mara as Kundry, in the staging by Henry W Savage’s theatre company at the New York Theatre, 1904. (Harper's Weekly Magazine, 12 November 1904)


 

Almost despite himself – on account, we might say, of the Will’s striving towards salvation – Wagner finds himself drawn toward Christianity, or at least toward elements of Christian teaching. He resembles Wotan and Kundry, as described in a conversation recounted by Cosima : ‘R. sees a resemblance between Wotan and Kundry: both long for salvation and both rebel against it, Kundry in the scene with P., Wotan with Siegfried.’ Yet both, whether through the urgings of the Will or through the mediating agency of grace, go beyond their respective rebellions and are saved. Their sins forgiven, Brünnhilde delivers benediction to Wotan, and Parsifal’s example converts Kundry. ‘I do not believe in God,’ Wagner told Cosima on another occasion, ‘but in godliness, which is revealed in a Jesus without sin.’ Though heterodox, Wagner’s profession is nevertheless inconceivable without Christ, without Christianity. Such an idea helps explain Wagner’s desire, when telling Ludwig II of the ‘purity of content and subject-matter of my Parsifal,’ to restrict performances to Bayreuth, to protect the work from ‘a common operatic career’. He would ‘not entirely blame our Church authorities if they were to raise an entirely legitimate protest against representations of the most sacred mysteries upon the selfsame boards in which, yesterday and tomorrow, frivolity sprawls in luxuriant ease’.  

Wagner never, however, claims that Parsifal is itself a sacred rite, but rather that it presents such a rite, namely Holy Communion, on stage. The rite, however, is staged at a time of profound crisis for the community of Monsalvat. Amfortas, not only king but high priest, has succumbed to the blandishments of Kundry and therefore been caught off guard by Klingsor, wounded, apparently irreparably, by his own spear, captured by Klingsor and yet the only weapon that can heal the wound. Without the spear, moreover, the Grail, which the increasingly frail Amfortas can hardly bear to uncover, stands in danger of capture by the community’s adversaries. Crisis is underlined, deepened, by the agony Amfortas feels – as, through Mitleied, do Parsifal, and we – in continued revelation, on stage, in the poem, and in the orchestra alike, of his open wound. Parsifal’s Second Act cry of recognition, ‘Amfortas! – the wound!’, is preceded by Kundry’s kiss, its Tristan-chord making the connection with what Nietzsche dubbed Tristan’s ‘voluptuousness of hell’. This is not an incitement to chastity, but an indictment of insufficient or perverted conceptions of love, whether in the trivial delights of the Flowermaidens’ pleasure garden or the terrible self-castration of Klingsor, intended to elevate him to mastery over physical desire yet rendering him all the more its abject slave. Parsifal recoils in terror. ‘His demeanour,’ read Wagner’s stage directions, ‘expresses a terrible change; he presses his hands forcefully against his heart, as if to overcome a rending pain.’ That pain resounds in screaming orchestral sequences, harmonically and melodically, of more-or-less unresolved diminished seventh chords, their dissonance enhanced by added notes.

 

Just as Wagner’s mixture chords both loosen the bonds of tonality and bind the chords on their own terms more closely together – thereby anticipating Schoenberg and the final crisis, agonising and emancipating, of tonality itself – so does the agony of the wound intensify and symbolise the crisis of Monsalvat and ritual. Yet their crisis offers a necessary starting-point for their third-act redemption, on stage and as an audience rite too. The pure fool and we may then be enlightened through fellow-suffering: ‘durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor’. Words and music are repeated in ritualistic fashion; however, they also, owing to development of the drama, develop in their meaning. Only after the mysterious workings of grace have furthered Parsifal’s Mitleid does he gain the understanding necessary to save Monsalvat and its rite, so as to fulfil the ‘durch Mitleid’ prophecy. We might play with the celebrated opening of St John’s similarly predestinarian Gospel: In the beginning were Will’s sorrow and Heart’s sorrow (Parsifal’s mother, Herzeleide), and the sorrow (Leid) was with (mit) the Will, and the sorrow was Will; Parsifal was the representation of that Will and of that Mitleid.


Recalling Wagner’s own words from Religion and Art, has musical drama vouchsafed salvation to religion itself? Might the relationship even have worked both ways? That possibility may help us understand Wagner’s unwieldy designation, Bühnenweihfestspiel (‘stage-festival-consecration-play’). It also suggests one possible interpretation of Parsifal’s notoriously enigmatic concluding words: ‘Redemption to the Redeemer!’


(originally published as a programme essay for the Royal Opera's 2013 production of 'Parsifal')

Jansen/COE/Haitink - Brahms, 29 November 2013

Grote Zaal, Concertgebouw

Violin Concerto in D major, op.77

Symphony no.2 in D major, op.73

Janine Jansen (violin)

Chamber Orchestra of Europe

Bernard Haitink (conductor)

 

Two of Brahms’s greatest works in very fine performances in the Concertgebouw: a perfect choice for one of the hall’s 125^th anniversary ‘jubilee concerts’. Without being oppressively nationalistic – the Chamber Orchestra of Europe is, after all, by its very nature anything but – it could reasonably be seen as a matter of Dutch pride too: hall, conductor, and soloist representing the very best of the Netherlands’ cultural life.

 

Bernard Haitink, Janine Jansen, and the COE certainly made for a fine team in the Violin Concerto. There was little loss in what might have been thought the ‘restriction’ of chamber-size Brahms. For one thing, the orchestra throughout played with great fullness of sound and no preposterous scaling down, let alone elimination, of vibrato. That is, the size of orchestra – Meiningen or otherwise – was not the point; this was simply a manifestation of great musicianship. A translucency one would associate with the orchestra’s founder, Claudio Abbado, remained, but there were few occasions when anyone would reasonably have protested at a lack of body. The hushed moments, for instance, following Jansen’s exemplary account of the first movement cadenza, truly drew one in to listen with great intent, but that was not at the cost of due vehemence – minor mode passages in particular – elsewhere. Haitink’s command of the music’s ebb and flow, above all its harmonic rhythm, was enough to make a Schenkerian out of the most hardened Schoenbergian. Not that there was no sense of developing variation, either here or in the two following movements, but the work emerged as a ‘classic’ in a newly-minted yet time-honoured sense rather than a harbinger of what the twentieth century would bring. Jansen’s intonation was well-nigh perfect throughout, her tone perfectly centred, and her dynamic palette impressively varied without there being a sense of undue exaggeration. So much did her performance seem to emerge out of the capabilities of her instrument – and of course her artistry – that this seemed to be a concerto ‘for’ rather than ‘against’ the violin. The slow movement was songful, glorious in its evocation of Mozartian Harmoniemusik; it was not only the principal oboe who deserved special mention; so did the entire section, a veritable collection of serenaders. Jansen’s interaction with them was as first among equals rather than star soloist, expertly guided with a light yet firm touch by Haitink. The finale emerged with an utterly convincing balance between ‘Hungarian’ virtuosity – never for its own sake – and ‘German’ Urlinie. I could not find fault with a single aspect of this performance; nor should I wish to try.

 

The Second Symphony received almost as fine a performance, my sole reservation concerning the finale. Once again the COE’s playing was beyond praise, even though here there were times when one might have wished for a larger band. (Not so many of them, though, I have to admit.) All-too-easy summations of this as the ‘sunniest’ of Brahms’s works sounded as irrelevant as they are. Deeper undercurrents, again founded in Haitink’s harmonic understanding, were given their due: again permitted to emerge with an art that concealed art, apparently ‘natural’, rather than underlined. Indeed, the weight of the first movement registered to an extent such as one rarely hears, the exposition repeat fundamental to the musical conception rather than a formalistic nod. There are arguments either way, of course; the question is what works in any particular case. The special character of the inner movements was keenly observed. Once again, Brahms’s Viennese predecessors came to mind, and more importantly to the heart’s perception. Mozart and Schubert, rather than the first movement’s Beethoven, were very much present: benevolent, inspiring ghosts. The finale, however, I could not quite come to terms with. It was fast, indeed faster than I can ever recall hearing. Crotchets per minute are neither here nor there, but Haitink, as in some of his recent Beethoven, seemed intent on driving too hard. I can understand the desire to rid Brahms of ‘autumnal’ clichés, just as much as those of ‘summer’, but this music does not lose its true excitement if it is given time to breathe. There was much to admire, and the playing of the COE continued to impress greatly, but it did not – to me at least – seem a reading quite in the spirit of what had gone before.