Upiór w operze

During the summer holidays, when operatic life in Poland almost comes to a standstill, being limited to concert performances and one-off open-air performances, critics and music lovers are left with no choice but to pack up their suitcases and seek their fortunes elsewhere. Summer festivals in France, Germany, Austria and the United Kingdom not only take place in real theatres, but also tempt fans with interesting repertoire, presenting operas that are completely unknown in Poland or, for various reasons, are neglected. I began my holiday tour this year in England as usual. After Avner Dorman’s Wahnfried  I returned to Longborough for Pelléas et Mélisande, which had its Polish premiere at Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera (in a production that was, in fact, transferred from the Aix-en-Provence Festival), 116 years after the Paris premiere, and disappeared from the stage after five performances. From there I moved on to Grange Park Opera for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, unlikely to be staged in Poland again.

Monty Jacobs, a now forgotten German critic of English descent, wrote in 1904 of Maeterlinck’s symbolist play that “Mélisande’s love tragedy sparkles with the fullness of saturated colours and delicate transitional tones of a picture that is utter perfection”. The same can be said today of Debussy’s masterpiece, one caveat being that the composer constructed his musical image from the delicate transitional tones between light and darkness. His Pelléas et Mélisande is the first opera in history with a libretto that is not an adaptation, but the text of a play, abridged with the playwright’s permission (with what is perhaps the only but memorable original addition by the composer – Mélisande’s song “Mes longs cheveux” at the beginning of Act Three). Fidelity to the prosody and complicated meanings of the original is one of the main factors that determine the atmosphere of the score, which, according to Ernest Ansermet, exemplifies a perfect symbiosis of musical content with poetic substance. At the same time Pelléas can be called an anti-opera, as it were, a work that eludes both the convention of the form and itself. It takes place always and everywhere or never and nowhere. It evokes an overwhelming aura of fear and mystery locked in unexpected dissonances, modalisms and whole-tone scales without a tonal centre. It undulates slowly and tails off like dead water after a storm. Anyone who tries to fathom its essence will hear “ne me touchez pas” – heard in nearly every bar, not just in the famous first words of the terrified Mélisande.

Pelléas et Mélisande at LFO. Karim Sulayman (Pelléas) and Kateryna Kasper (Mélisande). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

That is why stage directors should not “touch” Pelléas et Mélisande. The land of Allemonde is governed by symbols and archetypes. Most attempts to set the work in a specific, recognisable reality fail. Fortunately, Jenny Ogilvie, the director of the Longborough production, respects the work’s programmatic anti-realism and has offered a production that is as ambiguous as it is engaging for the audience – clearly drawing on Adolphe Appia’s symbolist theatre, with clean, architectural space modified primarily by light and shadow. The stage is almost empty and from the very first images overwhelmingly dark. There is no spring, no castle or tower, no precipice flooded with water – or they are there, suggested, however, by silver foil, geometric, three-dimensional sets by Max Johns and by Peter Small’s varied lighting.

Neither is there Mélisande’s long hair, which somewhat perplexed me – until the beginning of Act Three, when the protagonist, instead of combing the locks tumbling down from the tower walls, rocked on a swing: in thick darkness illuminated by ethereal light, wearing a snow-white gown with vertical ruffles (costumes by Anisha Fields) sufficiently emphasising the “rusalka-like” aspect of her personality. This was enough to charm not only Pelléas, but the entire audience as well. And yet, despite the compelling beauty of this and other scenes, not all ideas of the lighting director proved equally convincing: at times Small used this tool too aggressively, overshadowing – excuse the pun – Ogilvie’s excellent work with the actor-singers.  A significant error, but one that does not ruin the beauty and wisdom of the production, consistently carried through to the finale, in which Mélisande’s deathbed, resembling a flower-filled glass coffin, disappears into the darkness along with Arkel hugging the newborn baby, and the only character that remains on stage is Golaud, the most tragic figure of the drama, a man who has lost everything because of a desperate belief that the “truth” will guarantee him the love of the mysterious foundling from the forest.

A beautiful production, one of the most beautiful ones I have seen at this theatre: not least because it confirmed Ansermet’s opinion concerning the symbiosis of poetry and music in this work. Anthony Negus, whom I know best for his dazzling interpretations of Wagner’s oeuvre, has managed to finally shatter the myth of Pelléas as an anti-Wagnerian opera. In his work Debussy is involved in a fierce dispute with the Bayreuth Master, though he does not question his method – rather, he tries to direct it onto a different track, cleanse it of the remnants of the Romantic aesthetics and distil it into a form more suitable for the new times. He plays with silence, rarely goes beyond mezzo forte, avoids tutti like the plague, treats leitmotifs differently, and still cannot resist using the Tristan chord as a symbol of – not just functional – ambiguity (on Mélisande’s words “je suis bien heureuse, mais je suis triste” in Act Four). What this opera has even more of than Tristan is Parsifal, a work which Debussy held in high regard and the echoes of which can still be heard the morbid sound aura of Arkel’s castle. Having at his disposal an orchestra as sensitive as ever to his every gesture, Negus brought out all these details with the meticulousness of a natural-born Wagnerite, without losing the essence of Debussy’s distinctive style or other sources of inspiration used by the composer, who similarly “deconstructed” in Pelléas the oeuvres of Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.

Nia Coleman (Yniold) and Brett Polegato (Golaud). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Most importantly, however, Negus conducted the character of Golaud precisely as intended by Debussy – who with each successive performance encouraged the first performer of the role, Hector Dufranne, to emphasise even more forcefully the intense sadness and loneliness of the jealous prince, to highlight even more strongly his regret for what he had not done and had not said. Golaud as interpreted by Brett Polegato, a singer of great sensitivity endowed with a baritone that is almost painfully beautiful, would have pleased Debussy in every way. Especially in the scene with Yniold (superbly portrayed by Nia Coleman singing with a truly “boyish” soprano), which, under Negus’ baton, turned into a real musical thriller, one of the best dramaturgically constructed depictions of psychological violence I have ever encountered in opera. What turned out to be a great casting decision was entrusting the role of Mélisande to the Ukrainian-German soprano Kateryna Kasper, who has a voice of extraordinary expressive power and a surprisingly dark timbre, marked by a peculiarly “Eastern” melancholy, which makes her an ideal performer of this mysterious creature. Vocally, she was not matched by Karim Sulayman, a very musical singer who knows how to handle the French phrase stylishly, but whose tenor is decidedly too light and insufficiently developed at the bottom to cope with the demands of the role of Pelléas. Julian Close, the memorable Hunding and sinister Hagen from last year’s Ring, this time built a touchingly fragile character of the old Arkel. The ever-reliable Catherine Carby was excellent as Geneviève, while the Latvian-British bass-baritone Pauls Putnins was faultless in the brief roles of Doctor and Shepherd.

After the magnificent performance in Longborough, I was even more looking forward to Mazeppa at Grange Park Opera, wondering how David Pountney would resolve the dilemma of staging Tchaikovsky’s opera during the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. The libretto of Mazeppa is based on the poem Poltava, written by Pushkin a few years after the fall of the Decembrists’ uprising, when the poet had already become fully convinced of Tsar Nicholas I’s historical mission. Pushkin’s Mazeppa is neither an indomitable, though selfish, youth from Byron’s poem, not a Romantic hero from Słowacki’s later drama; instead, he is a traitor of Russia, anathematised by the Orthodox Church, a conspirator against Peter I, a heartless, cruel man and victim of senile passions. The historical hetman was no innocent – like Kochubey and most commanders and politicians from that turbulent era. Mazeppa indeed tried to marry Kochubey’s young daughter, but Kochubey thwarted his plans and sent Mariya (or Matriona) to a monastery. A few years later Kochubey indeed was condemned to death by Mazeppa – after a failed attempt to turn the latter in to the tsar. It is a fact that the defeat of the Swedish army and the Hetmanate at Poltava put an end to Mazeppa’s many years of diplomatic efforts to unite the Ukrainian lands – but this is not what Poltava and the opera based on it are all about.

Mazeppa at GPO. Rachel Nicholls (Mariya) and David Stout (Mazeppa). Photo: Marc Brenner

Today Mazeppa is Ukraine’s national hero and a symbol of the country’s steadfast resistance to Russia. The hetman’s portrait can be found on banknotes; his name was given to the flagship of the Ukrainian navy, the godmother of which was the wife of President Zelensky. We can assume with a high degree of certainty that as long as Ukraine remains independent, this particular work by Tchaikovsky will not find its way onto the stages of opera houses there – for the same reasons Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar has not been and probably will never be staged in Poland.

I suspect that most Brits associated Mazeppa with Byron’s poem and did not expect to see a scoundrel on stage. In any case, the spectators at the Grange Park Opera performance were clearly perplexed. Judging by the conversations overheard during the interval, until the end they expected a spectacular internal transformation of the protagonist. And they did not get it, because Pountney not only moved the narrative to some vague, though close to us, present, but he also highlighted all the propagandistic features of the work. As early as in Act One his Mazeppa enters the stage in the first act in full gear of the Hells Angels, a motorcycle club regarded as a criminal organisation, not only in the United States. He is accompanied by acolytes as if taken straight from the notorious Solntsevskaya Brotherhood. The director had the lovers’ escape enacted in an almost grotesque convention, punctuated by scenes of quick sex on the saddle of a Harley. Mazeppa’s words in his conversation with Kochubey in Act One (“the thing is that Mariya must marry me”) were interpreted by him in accordance with the moral attitude of his generation – the result being that in Act Two we saw a very pregnant teenage Mariya. Orlik’s torturing of Kochubey brought to mind Lubyanka in Stalin’s times rather than any of the atrocities from today’s Russian-Ukrainian front. The battle from Act Three was fought between some unknown armies; it was taken out of context, populated with characters who, as in most productions of this kind, waved banners, robbed the coffins of the fallen, danced in gas masks and generally threw their weight around in some ghastly theatre of war – though it was unclear whose war. However, I went numb when, in the torture scene, the word “Mzp” appeared on the wall with a red letter “Z” in the middle and I heard people sitting next to me whisper whether it was a reference to Zelensky. I don’t have to explain this to my Polish readers, but I would love to remind the audience of the English Mazeppa that this ghastly sign is the symbol of the Russian invasion forces in Ukraine.

Aleksander Poliński, who reviewed the Warsaw premiere of Mazeppa in 1912, when that part of Poland was still under Russian rule, wrote that “Tchaikovsky must have been in a bloodthirsty mood when writing Mazeppa. For in this whole, somewhat lengthy opera God’s sun shines through in only a few scenes. In the vast majority of the scenes storms of various passions roar, axes of executioners swish, shackles of political prisoners rattle, moans of the tortured and wails of those in excruciating pain are bloodcurdling”. Pountney must have been in a similarly bloodthirsty mood when he created the concept for his Mazeppa (and tried to win over to the idea the set designer Francis O’Connor, the choreographer Lynne Hockney and the lighting director Tim Mitchell). Since the first days of the war I have been calling for long-dead composers not to be held responsible for the nightmare happening beyond our eastern border. This time, however, I did understand the frustration of my Ukrainian friends. And I still hope that Pountney has not sided with the invaders. I constantly delude myself that he has simply failed to understand anything about this war.

Act Two. Kochubey (Luciano Batinić), Orlik (Andreas Jankowitsch), and dancers. Photo: Marc Brenner

Fortunately, I was not disappointed by the protagonists of the drama: the phenomenal David Stout, who with his beautiful baritone brought out far more nuance in the role of Mazeppa than Tchaikovsky himself envisioned for this one-dimensional character; and the magnificent Rachel Nicholls, who, paradoxically, showed her full potential only in Mariya’s harrowing final lullaby. The tenor John Findon, making his Grange Park debut, was rather good in the thankless part of Andrei, who is in love with Mariya. The Croatian bass Luciano Batinić was a reliable Kochubey, though his was perhaps not a very expressive portrayal in comparison with the protagonists. Sara Fulgoni was a little disappointing in the mezzo-soprano role of Lyubov, Mariya’s mother – more convincing as an actress than a singer. Other roles were more or less successfully interpreted by Andreas Jankowitsch (Orlik), Sam Utley (Iskra) and Benjie del Rosario (Drunken Cossack). The whole thing, accompanied by the English National Opera orchestra and the GPO chorus, was conducted conscientiously, though without flair, by Mark Shanahan, who left enough space for the singers, but not delved into the nuances of this at times surprisingly sophisticated score.

And so – to refer again to Poliński’s words – whatever was good in Mazeppa somehow got out. What will remain with me, however, is Pelléas et Mélisande under Negus, who fully consciously brought out everything that is good in this score.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

History has beautifully come full circle, almost on the centenary of the premiere of King Roger, when most reviewers rightly interpreted Szymanowski’s opera as a metaphor for the changes taking place in Europe’s social consciousness at the time. In June 1926, after a performance at Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki, Henryk Opieński wrote about the victory of “the Dionysian concept of life over a king in the fetters of Byzantine religious rigour, his wife, his entourage and, finally, his entire people”. The audience received the composer’s new work surprisingly well, although it featured neither a clearly defined amorous intrigue, nor a murder leading to a plot twist, nor a final conclusion – none of the elements associated with opera, even in the minds of modernist spectators. The listeners were seduced primarily by the music: at the time Szymanowski was experimenting with pentatonics, dissonances and blurring of the transparency of “European” harmonic verticals. There was as much Orient in the score as there was antiquity drowned in a modernist dream. As much a Greek – or essentially Nietzschean – dispute between the Apollonian and Dionysian elements, as a struggle with one’s own longing, sensuality and sexual orientation.

The few opponents accused King Roger of either having a worthless libretto or going astray into Wagnerian epigonism. Ironically, Szymanowski’s work is, indeed, a “post-Wagnerian” opera, although it is by no means epigonic – the composer at time gets into a lively argument with the author of Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde, an argument ending with a mysterious hymn to the sun, an antithesis of “Liebestod”, as it were, in which the protagonist undergoes transfiguration not through death, but through worship of the life force, self-awareness, darkness-destroying power. Such a manifesto was needed at the time and was interpreted correctly in Europe, as is evidenced by, for example, the glowing reviews in the German press after a performance directed by Alexander Schum at the Stadttheater Duisburg in 1928, which made history primarily because of a demonstration by the nationalist Stahlhelm paramilitary militia. The real triumph, however, came with the premiere of King Roger at the Národní Divadlo in Prague, in 1932, in a staging by Josef Munclingr.

Crowd scene. In the foreground Vit Nosek (Edrisi) and Jiří Brückler (Roger). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Raised by his uncle František, a musician at the Municipal Theatre in Lviv, after the untimely death of both parents, Munclingr went on to study at the local conservatoire and at the philosophical faculty of the University of Lviv. He made his debut as an opera singer in 1911 at the age of just twenty-three, signing the bass role of Colline in La Bohème. One year later he was already singing in Prague. Before the outbreak of the Great War he became a soloist with the Stadttheater in Poznań. From there he moved to Warsaw, where he first got engaged by Teatr Wielki and then in 1919 he briefly joined the company of Teatr Stołeczny, also as a stage director. Szymanowski referred to him as “half-Czech, half-Pole”. Although in 1921 Munclingr returned to the land of his ancestors for good, he never severed his ties with his adopted homeland. At Prague’s Národní Divadlo he not only staged King Roger, but also prepared the stage premiere of Harnasie. After the Second World War he appeared in the episodic role of Kuśmirak in Aleksander Ford’s film Border Street. In addition, he appeared several times at the Poznań and Wrocław Opera Houses. He also translated Wyspiański’s tragedy Judges into Czech. Yet he went down in history of primarily the Czechoslovak opera scene: as the performer of Dikój and, at the same time, stage director of the famous Bratislava premiere of Janáček’s Katya Kabanova; as an outstanding stage director and theatre theorist; as a man who contributed to the heyday of Prague’s Národní Divadlo during Otakar Ostrčil’s musical directorship; as a true expressionist successfully pulling the domestic scene out of the greyness of bourgeois realism. He caused ferment in Brno as well: in 1951 he became an associate professor at the local Academy of Performing Arts, helping to establish the country’s first opera directing department.

Vladimír John, a recent graduate of the Brno Academy, made his debut on the Moravian stage precisely with King Roger. And he was undoubtedly successful in that: lasting less than an hour and a half (with a few cuts in the score), played without an interval, the production turned out to be both a tribute to the tradition of modernist theatre and an attempt, modern in its spirit, to place the narrative of the opera beyond time and space. The attempt corresponds – paradoxically – with the intentions of Iwaszkiewicz and Szymanowski, who intended their work to be a clash of myth and archetypes with a crisis of the familiar world order, a parable, as it were, about the struggle of reason, emotion and subconsciousness, in which Sicily was only a pretext, an island from the composer’s memories and phantasmagorias. It is difficult to say whether the Shepherd is a phantom from Roger’s “bloodied dreams”, a newly discovered aspect of the ruler’s personality – as the director suggests – or genuinely a stranger, an unknown god in human form, an incarnation of Dionysus, an emanation of Shiva, all in one?

John’s vision is presented in Martin Chocholoušek’s sparse set, the essential elements of which remain unchanged, which does suggest that the conflict unfolds in the realm of spirit rather than matter. Perfectly lit by Martin Chloup, in Act One it creates an vivid illusion of the Cappella Palatina, bathed in dispersed rays of dusk; in Act Two it evokes the atmosphere of the Orient in a space filled with surreal shapes bringing to mind a parade of lingams, symbolic representations of the god Shiva; in Act Three it is striking in its contrast of darkness and blinding brightness of the interior of a mirror pyramid, where Roger completes his pilgrimage into himself and sets off into the mysterious dawn.

Veronika Rovná (Roxana), Jiří Brückler and Vit Nosek. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Chocholoušek’s beautiful set design concept, irresistibly bringing to mind Munclingr’s legendary stagings, was not quite matched by Barbora Rašková’s costumes, which seemed to be coming from too many aesthetic orders: most convincing in the opening scenes with the chorus dressed in Bauhaus-inspired geometric attires, least convincing in the motley human-animal retinue of the Shepherd. What was also excessive was the choreography of Jan Kodet and Michal Heriban, who unnecessarily entrusted the singers with some of the dance tasks. These are, however, minor caveats: Vladimír John’s impressive debut, the first staging of King Roger in years in which the director has not superimposed additional layers of meaning on an already convoluted libretto, is another proof of the vitality of Czech opera theatre – one of the few in Europe that has not got into a rut and, miraculously, has not gone deaf to the music.

And this time, too, there was something to listen to. It’s been a long time since I saw such a coherent and thus thrilling take on Szymanowski’s masterpiece as the one that came from the baton of Robert Kružík, the new music director of Janáčkovo divadlo as of next season. Kružík is a genuine opera conductor: he skilfully weighs the proportions between the stage and the orchestra pit, does not overwhelm with the power of sound, and gives room to both soloists and the well-prepared, masterfully dynamic choruses. Instead of stratifying the seemingly incoherent sound planes of King Roger, he turned them into a glittering, colourful fresco, juxtaposing the hieratic chanting of the clergy with the sensual softness of the Shepherd’s aria, the ecstasy of Roger with the oneiric nature of Roxana’s song, the sweeping, tangled chords of Dionysian frenzy with the equivocal, “dark” clarity of the protagonist’s final sacrifice.

Jiří Brückler and Vit Nosek. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Nor were there weaknesses in the solo cast either. Jiří Brückler, who has a baritone that is mature and expressive, yet velvety and lyrical in timbre, created a highly convincing portrayal of the internally torn ruler. Veronika Rovná, with her bright, colourful soprano and exceptionally smooth, musical phrasing, came to full form in the second act – if it had not been for the slightly too harsh top notes, her Roxana would have ranked among the top interpretations in the old, “pre-war” style, which for some reason has been abandoned by most Polish singers. The light tenor of Vit Nosek (Edrisi) consistently gained strength of expression over the course of the narrative. Jana Hrochová and David Szendiuch were excellent in the episodic roles of the Deaconess and the Archbishop.

Yet I did not expect I would be so electrifyingly impressed by Petr Nekoranec as the Shepherd – judging from Szymanowski’s correspondence, a role written with an almost impossible voice in mind: androgynous, ambiguous like Dionysus, amorphous like Shiva. And such a voice has indeed been found. Some peculiarities of Nekoranec’s technique – a distinctive vibrato and a tendency to sing high notes in a mixed voice, nowadays generally frowned upon in the tenor repertoire – fit this part like a glove, especially when combined with his disturbingly sensual phrasing. This may have been the sound of Vladimír Tomš, the Czech Shepherd from the 1932 Prague production. Perhaps it was under Tomš’s influence that the composer finally came to appreciate King Roger – writing with sadness after the Prague premiere that “I probably won’t be able write anything like this again”. It’s so good that someone can still sing it.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

It’s been almost ten years and I still feel that one of the most inspiring projects I have encountered in my career as a critic was Wagner’s Ring in Karlsruhe – produced on the initiative of Peter Spuhler, the then director of the Badisches Staatstheater, by four directors, one for each part of the cycle, and complemented by a new opera, Wahnfried, commissioned especially for the occasion from the Israeli-American composer Avner Dorman. I wrote at the time that the theatre in Hermann-Levi-Platz – named after a descendant of a famous rabbinical family, Kapellmeister of the Karslruhe court opera and a great admirer of Wagner, who after many twists and turns entrusted him with the premiere of his Parsifal – would pave the theatrical way to Bayreuth for the four directors. And indeed: of the four “young and talented”, three have already reached the Green Hill, with Yuval Sharon’s Lohengrin enjoying an unprecedented return to the Festspielhaus stage this season.

There could hardly be better confirmation of the need to separate the work from its creator than the legacy of Spuhler’s directorship in Karlsruhe. His tenure – exceptionally successful in artistic terms – had a premature and turbulent ending following violent protests against his authoritarian managerial methods. Nevertheless, the four-director Ring made history and great reviews followed the premiere Wahnfried – its smallest detail honed by all the members of the creative team and artists involved, from the composer and authors of the Anglo-German libretto, Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz; the conductor Justin Brown and the carefully selected cast, who included several soloists from the Ring he conducted; to the production team headed by Keith Warner.

The title of Dorman’s opera refers to the villa in Bayreuth in which Wagner spent the last years of his life and which he named Wahnfried – much to the delight of the town’s residents, who associated the word “Wahn” mainly with madness and delusion. Yet what the composer had in mind was the Schopenhauerian creative frenzy as well as refuge providing a respite from it. He probably did not anticipate that Haus Wahnfried would be transformed into a ghastly mausoleum, the seat of a degenerate cult of his person and oeuvre, a cult created by his grieving widow Cosima and her increasingly bizarre acolytes, including Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a man uprooted from his own culture, advocate of Arthur de Gobineau’s racist thought and ardent promoter of the völkisch ideology, which many believe had a fundamental impact on the development of the Nazi doctrine.

Mark Le Brocq (Houston Stewart Chamberlain). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Chamberlain is the protagonist of Dorman’s opera – in line with the intentions of the co-producers of the venture, which came at a time of historical reckoning for the Bayreuth clan, begun a few years before the bicentennial of the composer’s birth. Wahnfried was intended as something of a divertissement between the successive presentations of the Ring in Karlsruhe: a creative impression on the “dangerous liaisons” of the Wagner family, parallel to many educational initiatives at the time, like the famous “Verstummte Stimmen” exhibition, a part of which is still available on the Green Hill, and the documentary Wagner & Me, featuring the British actor, writer and Wagnerite Stephen Fry.

Wahnfried turned out to be an impression made all the more interesting by the fact that it was filtered through the experiences and sensibilities of a forty-year-old artist raised in Israel, where Wagner’s music still remains a taboo that cannot be broken even by prominent Jewish artists. This may be the reason why Dorman did not fall into the trap of Wagnerian pastiche, writing his first opera in the spirit of postmodern eclecticism – with numerous references to forms and genres of the past, a work seemingly comprising two acts, but in fact composed of a dozen separate episodes, juxtaposed to create an almost cinematic contrast of musical planes. Dorman is a very skilful polystylist. He builds the sound climate of his work – based on expressive melodic structures, and ostinato rhythms as if straight from Shostakovich – from references to jazz, salon waltzes, military marches, Weimar cabaret, individual leitmotifs from Wagner’s operas, klezmer music, and snippets of Protestant chorales. The solo parts oscillate between a declamatory style and poignant lyricism (Siegfried Wagner’s magnificent monologue at the beginning of Act Two), merging perfectly in the group scenes with the sound of the chorus and the colourful orchestral layer.

The music of Wahnfried – sophisticated yet accessible – has something irresistibly “American” about it. To many critics it brings to mind John Adams; to me it is associated more with John Corigliano and the fusion of styles typical of his oeuvre: not devoid of the grotesque and black humour, manoeuvring between realism and the world of delusion, effectively shattering convention, like in the now somewhat forgotten opera The Ghosts of Versailles. However, Dorman and his librettists too often resort to stereotypes: Chamberlain became an ardent Wagnerite as early as in the 1870s; his first visit to Wahnfried did not come until 1888, five years after the death of his beloved composer; only then did he join the Bayreuther Kreis, in which the seeds of völkisch nationalism and a new, racist strand of anti-Semitism had already been sown by Baron Hans von Wolzogen, whom Wagner himself had invited to edit the Bayreuther Blätter monthly, a decision he soon came to regret bitterly. The story of Isolde, the first fruit of Cosima and Richard’s love, who was denied her share of Wagner’s legacy, is much more tragic and multifaceted: Cosima herself lived with the stigma of being Liszt’s illegitimate child; matters were further “complicated” by her then husband Hans von Bülow, who acknowledged his paternity of Isolde. Isolde’s rejection by her mother was also influenced by the conventions of the day, which stigmatised marriages supported by the wife – and this was the case of Isolde, who married the penniless conductor Fritz Beidler. Chamberlain himself made advances to Isolde: his subsequent marriage to Eva von Bülow, Wagner’s second daughter, was the result of cold calculation. Cosima learned of Isolde’s untimely death by chance ten years after the fact – less than a year before her own death. Most importantly, however, both Cosima and Houston Stewart Chamberlain died before Hitler came to power, and the main culprit behind the dictator’s later association with Bayreuth was the naive and not very intelligent Winifred, whose actions deserve a separate opera.

Mark Le Brocq and Oskar McCarthy (Wagner-Dämon). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The narrative oversimplifications and lack of psychological depth in Wahnfried were counterbalanced in Karlsruhe by singers who brought to mind the complex characters of the Ring. Wagner’s spectre haunting Chamberlain was played by the singer portraying the equally ambiguous character of Alberich. Hermann Levi, a man torn between his love for the composer and having to put up with his anti-Semitic taunts, was portrayed by the singer playing Wotan in the Karslruhe staging.

Polly Graham, the director of the Longborough production, followed a different path: she engaged in a dialogue with Keith Warner’s concept of the premiere, alternately arguing with it and refining the British director’s ideas. She deliberately juxtaposed Chamberlain’s grotesque figure with reality – Mark Le Brocq is much closer to the historical character than Matthias Wohlbrecht, who sang the role in Karlsruhe. Graham has preserved the vaudeville-cabaret feel of some of the episodes by casting the accomplished dancer and circus artist Tamzen Moulding as Acrobat. Wagner-Dämon – in Warner’s concept bringing to mind Jack Napier from Burton’s Batman – has been transformed into a green jester, a joker pulled from the deck in successive deals of history’s cards. The Master’s Disciple (Hitler) – made to look by the director of the premiere as the dictator from Chaplin’s film – is brought on stage as a Great War veteran, wearing a uniform decorated with a clown’s pompoms. Together with the set designer Max Johns and costume designer Anisha Fields, Graham has convincingly conveyed the ghastly atmosphere of the Bayreuth clan – manipulators controlled by Cosima, who distorted the composer’s ideas, controversial in any case from today’s point of view.

Musically, the Longborough Wahnfried was on a par with the Karlsruhe production. Special credit should go to Le Brocq for his phenomenal portrayal of Chamberlain, going far beyond the original framework of a character role. It is impossible to forget the chilling interpretation of Cosima by the seasoned Wagnerian Susan Bullock, who, approaching the end of her career, managed to turn her inevitable weaknesses into assets worthy of the world’s best stages; the superb technique of Alexandra Lowe, a singer blessed with a soprano of great beauty, expressive and secure intonation-wise, which was evident in the dual roles of Isolde and Winifred; and the touching portrayal of Siegfried Wagner by Andrew Watts, who sang the role in Karlsruhe – although his countertenor has since become dull and lost some of its harmonics, it has definitely gained in strength of expression. Excellent performances also came from the soprano Meeta Raval (as Anna and Eva, Chamberlain’s wives); Adrian Dwyer, a memorable Mime from the Ring conducted by Negus, this time in the sinister role of the Master’s Disciple; the baritone Edmund Danon, making his LFO debut (as the living and dead Hermann Levi); and Oskar McCarthy, coming from a slightly different order, in the baritone part of Wagner-Dämon. McCarthy, a versatile singer, actor and performer, more than made up for some shortcomings in his vocal technique with his theatrical craftsmanship. Another singer deserving a favourable mention is the Cuban-French bass-baritone Antoin Herrera-López Kessel as Kaiser Wilhelm II and the anarchist Bakunin. I was not disappointed either by the chorus, larger than usual for this company, augmented by members of the Longborough Community Chorus. The whole thing was conducted by Justin Brown, repeating his Karlsruhe success and once again showing the LFO regulars that he is not only an effective conductor, but primarily a very sensitive musician.

Adrian Dwyer (Master’s Disciple). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The British premiere of Wahnfried, which was met with favourable reception from both the critics and the audience, despite the work’s shortcomings, proved to be an important and necessary venture. All the more important given that it was undertaken by LFO, a company established out of pure and disinterested love for Wagner, demonstrating again and again that it cares for his legacy more wisely than his Bayreuth heirs, who often go astray. That is why I am surprised by some voices claiming that staging Dorman’s opera in the “English Bayreuth” was a reckless act, an initiative fraught with the risk of undermining the achievements of the rural opera company from Gloucestershire. That is why I was alarmed by the essay included in the programme, the author of which, Michael Spitzer – perhaps with the best of intentions – engaged in manipulation in the other direction. The world is once again plunging into the hell of hypocrisy; ideologies that were supposed to be gone forever after Hitler’s defeat are on the rise again. So it is better not to repeat the long-discredited legend about the porcelain monkeys of Moses Mendelssohn, grandfather of the composer Felix – a humiliating purchase the philosopher had to make to be granted permission to marry. Spitzer repeats the hackneyed cliché that the figurines in Mendelssohn’s collection are an example of the so-called Judenporzellan, items purchased by Jews under duress in exchange for the right to start a family and have legitimate offspring. True, Frederick the Great did promulgate this disgraceful decree – one of many intended to boost sales of products from his Berlin manufactory – but not until 1769, when Moses had long been married. Not only that – six years earlier the same Frederick had granted Moses the Schutzjude status, protecting the scholar from the persecution that indeed affected his poorer and less privileged brethren, that is, practically most of the Jewish community in Prussia. However hideous the figures in the Mendelssohn collection may seem today, in Moses’ times they were regarded as a symbol of luxury and affluence. Therefore, Felix could have not treated the heirlooms inherited from his grandfather as a “racist memento mori”. The whole story is an anachronistic construct rejected by researchers almost half a century ago.

This does not mean that there was no anti-Semitism in Germany in Wagner’s days. This does not mean that Wagner was not an anti-Semite. Finally, this does not mean that Chamberlain did not pour racist poison into this leaven – with disastrous consequences, as we increasingly tend to forget. History must not be manipulated to introduce audiences to Dorman’s work. It is necessary to seek the truth and truth does not lie in the middle at all. “The truth lies where it lies”, as Władysław Bartoszewski, a member of the Żegota presidium and a Righteous Among the Nations, used to say. He was a man who understood perfectly the meaning of the phrase “to do more harm than good”.

Translated by: Anna Kijak