How to Keep On Living, Offred?

The Polish edition of The Handmaid’s Tale, translated by Zofia Uhrynowska-Hanasz, appeared in 1992, seven years after its original publication in Canada. Published by PIW as part of the Klub Interesującej Książki (Interesting Book Club) – a project intentionally less prestigious than the famous ‘black series’ of contemporary world literature – it gained a small band of enthusiasts, but generally failed to make any great ripples, like the earlier translations of three other Margaret Atwood novels. No interest was aroused in Poland by Volker Schlöndorff’s 1990 film adaptation either – possibly because it was not well received by the critics and was not released in Polish cinemas. Poland only enacted a new family planning law – considerably more restrictive than the law on the conditions for terminating pregnancy that had been in force since the mid-fifties – in 1993.

Atwood and her terrifying dystopia became a hot topic in 2016, when the first Black Protests swept Poland, after Ordo Iuris and the Pro Life Foundation announced that it was to set before parliament a citizen’s bill proposing a complete ban on abortion and the introduction of severe punishments for ‘prenatal murder’. In 2020, after the notorious verdict (questioned in legal circles) issued by the Constitutional Tribunal, we woke up on the threshold of the Republic of Gilead, with an abortion law stricter than in Iran or Pakistan, and the tightest in Europe, not counting the ultra-Catholic Malta, where abortion is absolutely forbidden. Legal abortion, theoretically possible in cases where the woman’s life is threatened or in situations where the pregnancy is the result of a proscribed act, in practice became a fiction.

In Poland, Atwood’s novel found favour, and female readers in particular were amazed that the Canadian writer had managed to foresee a future that in 1985 had seemed unimaginable. Yet The Handmaid’s Tale was actually reflecting, in a crooked mirror, the fears of women across the Atlantic. It was first published around the same time as Ronald Reagan introduced the so-called Mexico City Policy, which blocked the financing of all organisations concerned with reproductive health. The principle of a ‘global gag’ became a push-me-pull-you of American politicians: by turns abolished by the Democrats and restored by the Republicans, it reemerged, in a monstrous form, in 2017, under Donald Trump. The spectre of Gilead, temporarily dispelled in the United States by Biden, still hovers over Poland, a country where the cult of Reagan, fighting ‘for our freedom and yours’, is surprisingly persistent, and even the current governing coalition is riven by disputes over abortion – and that after the eight-year nightmare inflicted on many Poles, not just women, by the right-wing populists.

Avery Amereau (Serena Joy) and Kate Lindsey (Offred). Photo: Zoe Martin

That probably explains why I perceive Atwood’s book and all its adaptations as if through a pane of glass. That tale no longer shocks me. I see it rather as a reflection of a partially realised scenario, a possibly belated warning against a deluge of fundamentalist oppression around the world. That also applies to the opera by Danish composer Poul Ruders that was written in 1998 and premiered two years later at Det Kongelige Teater in Copenhagen, with a libretto by Paul Bentley translated into Danish. The English National Opera has been associated with this work almost from the start. The Copenhagen production, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, with sets by Peter McKintosh, reached the London stage in 2003, where it was first performed in English. The Handmaid’s Tale, after several productions in the United States and Australia, returned to the ENO in 2022, in a staging by director Annelise Miskimmon, the theatre’s artistic director, and her regular scenographic collaborator Annemarie Woods. In February 2024, the production was revived under the baton of the same Portuguese conductor, Joana Carneiro, and with the participation of several singers from the original cast.

Bentley and Ruders, choosing between the main heroine’s expansive inner monologue and a sort of hybrid in which Offred’s emotions, reflections and recollections clash with the fairly linear narration of events in Gilead, opted for the latter solution, remaining essentially faithful to Atwood’s text, but at the expense of the drama: almost to the end of the first act, the tale is rather static and heads laboriously towards the climactic scene of Janice’s labour (the child turns out to be disabled and is slain), while in the second act it hurtles along blindly, diverting the audience’s attention away from the next climax, in the scene of the public execution. The flaws in Bentley’s libretto are largely compensated for by Ruders’s highly expressive, at times even ruthless, music, which meanders between atonal and tonal, drawing liberally on a wide range of conventions: from Mozart, through Richard Strauss, Berg and Stravinsky, to the classics of American minimalism. Ruders also introduces elements of pastiche and grotesque into his score, although, unlike his beloved Penderecki, he does not use them as material for further compositional actions, employing them rather as quotations, musical symbols, motifs appearing out of nowhere, which vanish a moment later into a dense orchestral texture (recurring references to John Newton’s hymn ‘Amazing Grace’, the promise of the chorale ‘Ich bin’s ich sollte büssen’ from the first movement of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, dispersed into nothingness). Ruders’s imagination and excellent technique come to the fore especially in the remarkably colourful orchestral part. Things did not turn out so well with the solo parts: the only character whom the composer really allows to speak with a full voice is Offred. The other protagonists communicate in broken sentences, snatches of arioso, often exceeding the compass of any voice whatsoever, with the result that a not entirely comprehensible emotional barrier is created between the stage and the audience (I most regretted the character of Nick, who plays an extremely important, even crucial, role in Atwood’s narrative, but is overlooked by the production team).

Kate Lindsey. Photo: Zoe Martin

Miskimmon, herself brought up in a country of fanatism and religious prejudice, did not follow the lead of several of her earlier productions and resisted the temptation to transfer A Handmaid’s Tale to the realia of her native Ireland. Together with Woods, she created a pure, clear theatrical space, in which she placed characters and props triggering unequivocal associations with Atwood’s book and with the vision of the team behind the highly publicised series from 2017, anchored in the collective imagination. The handmaids wear dresses similar to the costumes of Amish women – in various shades of red, the intensity of which appears to suggest their ‘reproductive usefulness’ in Gilead (Offred has the ‘reddist’ dress). The wives of the dignitaries, including Serena Joy, are dressed in blue, the regime’s functionaries in dun uniforms, and the privileged men parade around in black. The transitions between scenes are smooth, mostly thanks to the brilliant lighting (Paule Constable) and quick changes of props behind a red curtain that also serves as a screen for Offred’s black-and-white recollections (projected by Akhila Krishnan). Miskimmon retained several forceful gestures from the original, including the ritual of inseminating a handmaid in the arms of the lawful wife of the ‘reproductor’, while others are softened (to marvellous effect), replacing the corpses hanging on the wall with photographs of the condemned, while transferring the actual execution to the domain of theatrical symbol (one can infer the function of the rope that disappears somewhere between the wings and the flies solely from the precise directing of this image). At several points, she succeeded in relieving the mood of ubiquitous menace with a touch of black humour (the handmaids use prayer machines, modelled on one-arm bandits). The sole mistake in the staging – a major error, alas – is turning the spoken male role of Professor Pieixoto into a performance by an actress (the excellent Juliet Stevenson). After all, it is precisely Pieixoto who binds the narrative together with a tragic clasp, admitting at an academic conference in 2195 that as a man he does not have the right research tools to verify the handmaid’s tale – thereby indirectly testifying that women were erased from the history of the Republic of Gilead.

The main collective hero of the evening proved to be the orchestra – in magnificent form, sensitively reacting to the precise instructions from Joana Carneiro, who kept perfect command over proceedings. I was less taken by the chorus, which was lacking cohesion, which for me is extremely important in this work, where the objectified women ought to speak in the uniform voice of a nameless crowd. In the thankless supporting roles, most impressive was Avery Amereau (Serena Joy), whose dark, velvety mezzo-soprano, with a beautifully cultured, truly alto bottom register, aptly conveyed the sadness of the infertile wife – profound and despairing, like the biblical Rachel. Nadine Benjamin was convincing with her sonorous soprano and abundance of energy, ideal for the role of the rebellious Moira; the same goes for Scottish soprano Eleanor Dennis, who brought a great deal of freshness to the part of Ofglen, Offred’s friend. A class unto herself was Susan Bickley in the mezzo-soprano role of the main heroine’s mother. Rachel Nicholls gave a bravura performance of the soulless Aunt Lydia, to whom Ruders gave a part that is downright repulsive in vocal terms: full of screamed commands and broken, barking syllables in the top register. The male singers came across worse, including the booming bass James Creswell, who decidedly lacked subtlety in his interpretation of the emotionally unstable Commander Fred.

Kate Lindsey and Eleanor Dennis (Ofglen). Photo: Zoe Martin

Yet everything was offset by the titular handmaid, defined with the derogatory, possessive nickname Offred, meaning ‘of Fred’. Her lost life, existential fear and continually crushed hope were marvellously rendered by the American mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, possessing a voice of great beauty, led to masterful effect and with great facility, particularly in the top scale, where the ethereal piano seems to reach us at times from another world, at times from the depths of an agonising yearning for happiness irrecoverably lost. I am not at all surprised that in the second act she was given a duet with herself (her younger incarnation is usually entrusted to another soloist): still ringing in my ears are her last words, ‘how can I keep on living?’, sung in unison, before a split on the last note into a piercing semitone interval. I think the opera would benefit from Ruders ‘slimming down’ the narrative and instead allowing Offred to enter into a closer relationship with one of the musically better drawn characters.

This revival almost came to nought. Until the eleventh hour, it was threatened by a strike of the ENO musicians, protesting against planned redundancies in the orchestra. The crisis has been averted for the time being, but a decision to force the ensemble to move to Manchester seems inevitable. Dark clouds are also gathering over the Welsh National Opera. I just hope that a hundred years from now no Professor Pieixoto will exclaim at another symposium that he has too little evidence to verify anonymous reports of the former splendour of operatic theatre in Great Britain.

Translated by: John Comber

Like Milk and Blood

Over a decade ago, when Romeo Castellucci’s production of The Four Seasons Restaurant arrived in Poland, Jacek Kopciński bridled at a comment in the Malta Festival programme book: an example of embarrassing vacuousness, “the claptrap, which is so tolerated today and which overgrows theatre programmes, brochures and leaflets, spreads to television and, of course, to the Internet (…), from where it finds its way into reviews and then into master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, subsequently quoted in programmes – and the whole process comes full circle”. Like Kopciński, I am not in the habit of reading previews before a performance, and like him, I often rub my eyes in astonishment, when I read them after seeing the performance in question. However, when confronting the oeuvre of Castellucci, about whom I again agree with Kopciński that he is a director of eschatological premonitions as much well-known as he is misunderstood, I’m afraid of falling into the trap of clichés. The Italian artist’s theatre – unreal, derived from the logic and aesthetics of dreams – features so many symbols and cultural references that a review of each of his productions can become a doctoral dissertation. And be way off the mark, because Castellucci’s stagings are like time bombs. Their various elements keep coming back to the spectator like recovered dreams. They make up false memories, thanks to which the spectator experiences revelation, as it were – for a sequence of several oneiric scenes is able to generate in his or her brain an image which was not there, but which will prove to be the key to interpreting the whole.

I firmly take the view that theatre is not a keyhole and is not to be used to peek at reality: that is why I appreciate Castellucci’s productions so much, and why in describing them I try to resist the temptation to split hairs and pedantically pick out the accumulating signs. I went to see Die Walküre – the second part of Wagner’s tetralogy staged by him – at La Monnaie primarily because of my personal fondness for the work: perfectly constructed in terms of drama and thus enabling the spectator to gain a deep insight into the motivations and feelings of the characters. I was also intrigued by the director’s declaration that he would treat each part of the Brussels Ring not only as an integral part of the cycle, but also as a separate work, governed by its own theatrical logic.

Thus the generally luminous, white and gold Rheingold was followed by a predominantly dark Walküre, speaking, like Castellucci’s other productions, the unique language of his theatre, oriented more towards the image than the word. At times this image was on the verge of visibility, creating an illusion of empty space that the spectators were to fill with their energy and emotions, to sort out the blackness, give meaning to it. Castellucci’s Die Walküre becomes more and more minimalist, conceptual from act to act. In this respect it brings to mind rather obvious associations with Wieland Wagner’s stagings, though it creates a broader framework for the world of myth, placing it – like Pasolini did in his Medea – in the context of the aesthetic experience of various cultures and periods. Hence the references to Christian and Buddhist iconography, hence the allusions to Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, hence  the reference – in my opinion the most significant of all – to Friedrich Hölderlin and his Death of Empedocles.

Nadja Stefanoff (Sieglinde) and Peter Wedd (Siegmund). Photo: Monika Rittershaus

I might have missed the association, if it had not been for the poignant finale, in which Brunhilde disappeared under a blindingly white screen, after which the screen was lifted, revealing a pair of shoes she had left behind. Brunhilde’s rock turns out to be Etna, into whose depths Empedocles threw himself. Castellucci’s entire production is steeped in the thought of Empedocles, the forefather of the philosophy of love, the author of the concept whereby the main forces of order are Love and Strife, and our world comes into being only when the latter, dark force invades the perfect world. Siegmund’s wolf skin, Hunding’s black dog, Fricka’s white doves and Valkyries’ dark horses (it’s been a long time since Castellucci brought such a number of live animals to the stage) are not only the director’s repeated sign of a return to the origins of theatre, but also a reference to Empedocles’ belief in metempsychosis. Empedoclean elements include even the colours of the staging, which, with few exceptions, is dominated by the four elemental colours: black, white, red and various shades of ὠχρός, the colour of the earth.

I admit that Castellucci’s visions are not always consistent with the music, and sometimes make life difficult for the singers (this is especially true of the mesh screen in Acts One and Two, the equivalent of a PVC film curtain, making it difficult for audiences of the artist’s earlier stagings to follow the action). Several images, however, will remain in my memory for a long time: a horse’s eye in a giant circle watching Sieglinde and Siegmund in Act One like an omniscient animal deity; the death of Siegmund, engulfed by a quivering mass of earth, or perhaps lava flowing out from beneath it; the beginning of Act Three, in which nine barely visible horses carry the naked corpses of the fallen warriors onto the stage, and then the Valkyries pile them up, laying them down in rows, throwing one of the corpses into the lap of one of them, who receives him with helpless apathy worthy of Michelangelo’s Vatican sculpture.

Ingela Brimberg (Brunhilde). Photo: Monika Rittershaus

A veritable storm of meanings was carried by the image of the Völsung siblings’ vow of incestuous love. The scene gradually becomes empty. The lovers are left amidst the snowy whiteness, also dressed in white; Siegmund (yes, earlier than in the score) draws a sword from Sieglinde’s womb and opens a wound in her body: a symbol of misfortune, suffering, but in medieval Christian iconography also of the vulva from which a child will be born. This is soon followed by is a veritable orgy of fertility and transgression. The lovers lubricate themselves with blood flowing out of the wound – symbolising the female element of the foetus – and then douse each other with milk, a symbol of the male “white blood”, or sperm, from which the baby’s bones will grow. There is no ash tree on stage. Siegmund puts the Nothung, a decidedly phallic element in this context, into an empty white refrigerator – as if with a subconscious intention of preserving the fruit of the love night. The whole scene can also be interpreted in terms of sacrifice of milk and blood. Or the Old Testament prohibition of combining one substance with another, that is, in the subtext – the prohibition of incest. The abundance of flowers accompanying this initiation also brings to mind some ancient chthonic ritual. It’s been a long time since I saw such a bold yet stunningly beautiful erotic scene in the theatre.

The musical reins of the production were in the hands of Alain Altinoglu – a conductor as far as possible from trying to interpret Wagner in the bombastic Bayreuth style of the 1930s – so it’s not surprising that his choice of cast was different from what many critics expected. The result was generally good, although there were a few disappointments, especially for me, with all my years of watching the Wagnerian “shadow cabinet” in less prominent European theatres. I really liked the fragile, subtle Sieglinde portrayed by the German soprano Nadja Stefanoff, whose voice is relatively small but luminous and natural, with a warm, slightly “old-fashioned” sound and great power of expression. Unfortunately, she did not find her equal in Peter Wedd (Siegmund), an extremely musical singer, whose free-flowing phrasing is reminiscent of the vocal art of his compatriot Walter Widdop. However, Wedd’s handsome, dark tenor shows clear signs of fatigue. Theatre directors clearly missed the moment when Wedd had the makings of one of the more interesting jugendliche Heldentenors of his generation. Now his voice has become dull, lost its harmonics, descended deep into the larynx, which has also resulted in production errors – a great pity, especially given that when I heard his debut in the role in Karlsruhe in 2016, his sonorous, bronze “Wälse! Wälse!” carried over the orchestra with a real squillo. Living proof of the usefulness of taking good care of your vocal instrument was provided on the other hand by Marie-Nicole Lemieux, a singer normally associated with quite a different repertoire, who effortlessly adapted her sonorous, warm and extremely rich-sounding contralto to the by no means easy part of Fricka. I wasn’t entirely convinced by Ingela Brimberg as Brunhilde – hers is a soprano that is powerful, but rather harsh and, in my opinion, with too much vibrato, for which she fortunately managed to make up with great musicality and phenomenal acting. I will be interested in following the career of Gábor Bretz, a Wotan who is still too “youthful”, but is already showing the makings of an excellent lyrical interpreter of the role, as he demonstrated especially in the final farewell scene with Brunhilde. I was a bit disappointed by Ante Jerkunica, whose otherwise beautiful bass is too light for the role of Hunding. A perfectly harmonised (if sometimes a tad too shrill) team of the Valkyries was created by Karen Vermeiren, Tineke van Ingelgem, Polly Leech, Lotte Verstaen, Katie Lowe, Marié-Andrée Bouchard-Lesieur, Iris van Wijnen and Christel Loetzsch.

Gabor Bretz (Wotan). Photo: Monika Rittershaus

The biggest revelation of the evening, however, was Altinoglu, conducting the whole thing with a precision worthy of André Cluytens and attention to narrative cohesion that Charles Munch himself would have been proud of. It was the first time I heard live a truly “French” Wagner, which in this interpretation betrayed non-obvious affinities with Berlioz’s oeuvre, for example. Altinoglu keeps the pulse in check, does not overwhelm with the mass of sound, contrasts the tempos clearly, but always in accordance with the musical logic, and, above all, impresses with his extraordinary attention to detail and ability to bring out surprising sound effects from the texture, especially in the woodwind (phenomenal clarinets and oboes). We could use a few more equally sensitive conductors to finally make a breakthrough in the performance of Wagner’s music, still played with admirable persistence in a quite ahistorical manner.

Some predict that Castellucci’s Brussels stagings will make up the first Ring worthy of our century. They are quite likely right. We live in a civilisation of images, but, fortunately, we are still able to make a distinction between artistry and chutzpah. Castellucci himself once said that good theatre has power. Can create. It testifies to the existence of another, parallel world.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Mourning Does Not Become Elektra

Soon – if I don’t run out of steam – we will celebrate together the tenth anniversary of this website, and with this small jubilee various other anniversaries, both sad and happy. However, let me once again put my nose out of our backyard and point out that various eras are coming to an end across the operatic world: entire generations of musicians associated with a particular performance practice are passing away, the splendour of companies that were supposed to last forever is fading, great projects initiated years ago are coming to a close. What is also coming to an end is Antonio Pappano’s musical reign at the Royal Opera House. The conductor, in the prime of his life and at the height of his creative powers, is leaving the legendary Bow Street building after twenty-two years to take the helm of the London Symphony Orchestra in September. In January Pappano bid a symbolic farewell to the ROH audience, choosing for his final premiere a work by the same composer and prepared with the same director with whom he triumphed in 2002, when he opened his first London season as Covent Garden’s Music Director. From Ariadne auf Naxos to Elektra. From a magnificent, colourful staging of an opera the creators of which deliberately juxtaposed the world of Greek myth with Wagner’s ideal of boundless love, to a dark study of revenge derived from Sophocles’ tragedy. A brilliant closure of the collaboration with the German freelancer Christof Loy, with whom Pappano has come a long way – from the youngest-ever boss of the ROH to the acclaimed architect of the London company’s undisputed greatness.

This time I went to London in a semi-official capacity, making it a social occasion as well, and after the performance I was able to share my impressions about the musical and theatrical side of the farewell event as much as I wanted. I knew Ariadne – revived at the ROH four times, last time in 2015 – only from video recordings, but I always thought it was an outstanding production. I was surprised, like Pappano, that for so many years he had not decided to have his “own” Elektra, even though during his reign Strauss’ one-act opera had appeared on the London stage several times under different conductors and in staging by other directors. I expected from the very beginning that the production would attract extraordinary attention of both critics and music lovers. I decided to come to see the third of the six scheduled performances – after the general slackening and decline of form that usually accompanies the so-called second premiere, at a point when the singers are beginning to identify with their characters and the conductor is coming to a full understanding with the ensemble he is leading.

Nina Stemme (Elektra) and Sara Jakubiak (Chrysothemis). Photo: Tristram Kenton

However, I could not have predicted that Nina Stemme would withdraw already after the first performance to be replaced by the Lithuanian soprano Aušrinė Stundytė (in the end, the Swedish artist returned to the stage for the last two performances). The London audience, discouraged by the scathing reviews of Stemme’s performance at the premiere, was beside itself with joy. I was reserved, having seen Stundytė’s portrayal of Renata in Prokofiev’s Fiery Angel in Warsaw. It was nearly six years ago, the singer was just over forty, but already at that time her voice was tired, had too much vibrato and unattractive colour. Unfortunately, my fears were confirmed by the London Elektra, although I suspect that Stundytė’s intelligence and uncommon musicianship won the hearts of some English music lovers, who were charmed by her fragility and unexpectedly gentle take on the eponymous heroine of Strauss’ opera.

The problem is that this is probably not what Pappano and, especially, Loy had in mind. Loy this time created an unambiguously dirty staging, set in the static space of an unspecified bourgeois residence in Vienna during the Strauss-Hofmannsthal era. In this concept, Elektra – with her heart seething alternately with love, hatred and desire for revenge – does not wander around the palace in rags. Dressed in a modest black-and-white maid’s uniform, she coexists with the rest of the palace staff in the home of Klytaemnestra and her lover. She sneaks out into the coal-smeared courtyard with the Oversser and five Maids, for whom the ultimate freedom is to be able to crouch, even for a moment, on the steps of the staircase leading to the rear of the queen’s residence. We can only guess what happens inside the palace: the world lost by Elektra after Agamemnon’s death hides even deeper, behind one of the doors in the faintly yellowish-lit corridor. This space – positioned by the set designer Johannes Leiacker on a low mezzanine floor of the building surrounding the courtyard and perfectly lit by Olaf Winter – creates a striking impression of inaccessibility. Behind the high windows something is still going on, but in dead silence. The space of human relationships is suggested primarily by the costumes, especially of the three female protagonists: Elektra, relegated to the role of a servant; Chrysothemis, locked in a schoolgirl’s dream of normality (wearing a girlish, pale pink dress that looks as if it has aged with its owner); and Klytaemnestra, guilty of her two daughter’s misfortune  (wearing sapphire silks and a white fur stole, the sumptuousness of which cannot hide the passage of years or the inner ugliness of the character).

Karita Mattila (Klytaemnestra) and Nina Stemme. Photo: Tristram Kenton

Such a staging – minimalist, far from being literal, operating primarily with symbols – has no room for a fragile Elektra and Stemme probably did not portrayed her as such. It is difficult for me to objectively assess Loy’s concept, because I suspect that the weakening of dramatic tension may have been caused by the sudden cast change, rather than any shortcomings on the director’s part. With Stundytė in the title role, Elektra came across as more delicate and in some ways less determined than Chrysothemis. The scene in which she recognised Orestes was indeed touching, but it didn’t touch the hearstrings the way it should have; even the eerie waltz in the finale, when Elektra can no longer hear anything but the music coming from within her, seemed strangely cautious and shaky.

Of course, I can’t put all the responsibility on Stundytė, who was brought to London at the last minute and had to add Loy’s instructions to her experience of recent productions by Warlikowski and Tcherniakov. There is this snag though – the Lithuanian soprano should not have taken on the role of Elektra in the first place. In no way does her voice resemble that of a “twenty-year-old Brünnhilde” demanded for the part: instead, she is a mature Tosca who has strayed into an unsuitable repertoire, being cast in Strauss and Wagner operas thanks to her musicality combined with fine stage presence and good acting skills. Stundytė’s soprano has a limited colour palette and lacks not only volume, but also the necessary intensity, traits that put Inge Borkh – whose voice was relatively small, but had exceptional dramatic potential – among the greatest Elektras of all time. Much better than Stundytė was Karita Mattila, a singer with great charisma, with which she skilfully masks the limitations of her inevitably aging soprano: although in the mezzo-soprano part of Klytaemnestra she had trouble projecting her voice in the upper and lower registers, she nevertheless managed to maintain her characteristic consistency and smoothness of sound across the scale. The thankless role of Aegisth was well sung by Charles Workman, whom I appreciate not only for the beauty of his voice, but also for his complete freedom and lightness of phrasing. Łukasz Goliński made a very successful ROH debut as Orestes. His is a resonant and deep baritone, golden in tone and wonderfully developed in the lower register. If he can be faulted for anything, it would a few intonational lapses, which can be put down to the earnestness of his interpretation. At least decent performances came from the rest of the numerous cast, led by the five Maidens (Noa Beinart, Veena Akama-Makia, Gabrielė Kupšytė, Ella Taylor and Valentina Puskás) and Lee Bisset in the small role of the Overseer.

Nina Stemme. Photo: Tristram Kenton

I left Chrysothemis for last, because it’s been a long time since I had to deal with a singer who would take control the entire stage from her first entrance on the word “Elektra!”. Sara Jakubiak was superior to Stundytė in every respect: her commitment to the character she created, the beauty of her voice, her phenomenal vocal technique and her extraordinary freedom in carrying out the tasks assigned to her by the director. I only hope – judging from the American singer’s career so far – that Jakubiak will not listen to the remarks of some reviewers who, having recovered from the initial shock, would like to cast her in the title role. God forbid: hers is a dark, powerful, but still lyrical soprano, crystal clear, floating over the orchestra like a voice from another world, impeccable in terms of production, the only one in the entire cast thanks to which the audience was able to marvel at the elegance of phrasing combined with a clear, deeply thought-out delivery of Hofmannsthal’s text. Had it not been for Jakubiak, I would sum up the vocal side of the London performance as generally decent, but unmemorable with few exceptions. Her portrayal of Chrysotemis was a memorable experience, somewhat unfairly overshadowing the other qualities of this altogether successful staging.

Pappano conducted the whole in line with Strauss’ own original instruction: “as if it were Mendelssohn”. He resisted the temptation to go for an extremely modernist reading of the score in terms of a persistent dramatic crescendo, an overwhelming cacophony of sounds, which many conductors further emphasise with a deliberately “dirty” sound of the various orchestral groups. Instead of the contrast between black and white, we got myriads of shades of love and hate, revenge and chaos, doubt and hope – and with them unexpected layers of lyricism, so often disregarded by contemporary conductors and so longingly remembered by admirers of Georg Solti’s legendary interpretation with Birgit Nilsson in the title role.

We didn’t get a new Nilsson, but no one dared doubt that Pappano was saying goodbye to the ROH in a style worthy of his greatest predecessors. Another circle is coming to a close. And I will soon share with you my impressions from La Monnaie, to whose glory Pappano contributed greatly before taking over the reins at the Royal Opera House; and from the English National Opera, which will soon disappear from London’s musical map. Let’s hope that this year I will witness the birth of new delights more often than bury irretrievably lost hopes.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Hwaet! Listen!

The artists who today can honestly be described as ambassadors of Polish culture in the world include several individuals whose careers I have followed from the very beginning. Agnieszka Budzinska-Bennett occupies a unique position among them: primarily because she has triumphantly followed the same path I began to tread tentatively in the early 1990s. The beginnings of a female medieval music ensemble which I co-led with Aldona Czechak for nearly a decade were as crazy as the whole era. I have said that it was beautiful but difficult. Experience gained at masterclasses in the West – where we were able to go with money scrimped and saved, borrowed or scrounged from institutions and foundations – were more often the subject of derision rather than genuine interest in Polish musical circles. I still find it hard to believe that we nevertheless notched up several important successes: first of all, abandon the „imitative” model of historically informed performance, common in Poland at the time, in favour of an engaged model requiring source research, work on manuscripts, comparative studies of vocal traditions and development of conscious improvisation skills. However, it so happened that I took up music criticism at more or less the same time. The conflict of interest grew. I gradually moved away from performance. Or maybe I simply lacked the determination, diligence, charisma and talent – all the qualities that have taken Agnieszka to the top and made her one of the leading specialists in this narrow and difficult field. By European, if not global standards.

I remember when she contacted me for the first time, while she was still a musicology student at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She had already participated in several prestigious courses, including those with the British sopranos Evelyn Tubb and Emma Kirkby, for years associated with The Consort of Musicke. At the time I was involved in a research programme focused on the oeuvre of Hildegard von Bingen, initiated by Barbara Thornton and supported by Benjamin Bagby of the legendary ensemble Sequentia. I spent nearly two years shuttling between Poland, Belgium and Germany, gathering knowledge and experience, which we confronted every few months during intensive sessions at Barbara and Benjamin’s home in Cologne. Agnieszka – in love with the Middle Ages since childhood, engrossed in recordings by pioneers of period performance since high school, and confronting her life’s passions with the musicological knowledge at the university – inquired about everything in minute detail. Her passion, determination and a sense of self-worth as steadfast as it was justified made an electrifying impression on me. This exotic-looking, bright, energetic girl was a force of nature. I thought to myself that if she managed to take part in the courses taught by Sequentia’s co-founders, she would benefit a hundredfold more from them than I ever would. She managed to do that twice. And my intuition did not fail me.

Years later we started calling each other “sister”. This is because the beginnings of our foray into early music were surprisingly similar. From the beginning Agnieszka was fascinated by cooperation, teamwork. Although she conscientiously went through all levels of musical education in her hometown of Szczecin and received a diploma in piano at the end of her high school education, she never became friends with the three-legged black giant. She felt lonely at the keyboard: she was fascinated by the world of medieval dragons and heroes, courtly love and sophisticated poetry, over which she had been poring with dictionaries since childhood, absorbing the magic of foreign-sounding words and the melody of forgotten languages. She read Scandinavian sagas and Nibelungenlied, and then confronted them with Wagner’s Tetralogy. She devoured Beowulf as if it were the best crime novel. To this day she still has a weakness for fantasy literature and quirky television series, including Ragnarok, a Norwegian tale with more than one moral, the authors of which have brilliantly reinterpreted Norse myths to attract modern teenage viewers uncertain of their own identity. We recently shared our impressions of several episodes on Messenger, laughing uproariously and making sure no one was looking over our shoulders.

I spent years honing my reviews, essays and columns, while Agnieszka devoted herself wholeheartedly to musical archaeology and increasingly successful attempts to bring this world to life in performance practice. After the last semester of Poznań musicology, in 1997, she began her studies in Switzerland, at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, one of the most important centres of medieval music studies and the bastion of period performance. SCB students included Gustav Leonhardt and Jordi Savall; Sequentia, the fruit of Thornton and Bagby’s joint graduation concert, was also born within SCB’s walls; singing was taught there by the charismatic countertenor Richard Levitt, a member of the legendary Studio der frühen Musik, and a favourite teacher of Agnieszka, Andreas Scholl and… Sting, who used his advice when preparing an album of Dowland songs. It was there, in Heidrun Rosenzweig’s class, that Agnieszka mastered the basics of playing the medieval harp. It was there that in 1997 she founded the all-female ensemble Peregrina – or Wanderer – the name of which refers not only to a “pilgrimage” of musical ideas across medieval Europe, but also to the biographies of the ensemble’s members, who had come to Switzerland from the United States, United Kingdom and Finland in search of the musical Holy Grail.

Agnieszka Budzińska-Bennett. Photo: Laelia Milleri

Along the way, in passing, as it were, Agnieszka learned six languages, including Latin, indispensable in her work. She completed a programme in Scandinavian studies, and a post-graduate course in musicology at the University of Basel. While working as an assistant at the Microfilm Archive of the Institute of Musicology there, she met her future husband Lucas Bennett, and thus happily married the worlds of medieval and contemporary music (Lucas, a theorist and musicologist, specialises in twentieth- and twenty-first-century works; his father, the composer Gerald Bennett, a longtime collaborator of Pierre Boulez, whom he helped found the famous IRCAM in Paris, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on computer and electroacoustic music). Agnieszka sealed her impressive education with an honours degree in vocal ensemble conducting from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and a doctorate, defended in Poznań, on subtilitas, that is what can and cannot be heard in motets of the ars antiqua period. That was in 2010.

Peregrina already had two albums to its credit at the time: Mel et lac with twelfth-century Marian hymns and Filia praeclara with chants of the Poor Clares from Stary Sącz, for which I nominated Agnieszka for the first time for the Polityka weekly’s Passport Award. The nomination went unnoticed. The following year I mustered a small lobby, thanks to which Agnieszka made it to the top three “for her passion as a researcher who prepares concert and recording programmes through painstaking musicological, philological and historical work. For the excellent Crux album of Parisian Easter music from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century”. The Passport eluded her again. In 2012, with a persistence worthy of Cato the Elder, I urged the award jury members to open their ears to the artist’s new achievements, submitting her nomination “for another excellent album, Veiled Desires, an anthology that recounts the life, spirituality and sexuality of medieval nuns by means of music of that era. For her ability to embed artistic activity in a broader social and historical discourse. For the reliability of her source research, which is an essential part of the work of musicians performing early music”. Made it to the final again, passport denied again. Agnieszka hugged me backstage and asked me politely but firmly not to nominate her again.

I complied. However, I missed no opportunity to preach about Saint Agnieszka of Basel and her solid craftsmanship, which needs no passports. I appreciated the fact that in 2016 she was entrusted with the artistic supervision of a huge project of recording all the Melodies for the Polish Psalter by Mikołaj Gomółka with the Polish Radio Choir, but I still thought there was not enough response in Poland to what was closest to the hearts of both of us: medieval music. Music that is free of splendour, only seemingly easy, but in fact requiring maximum precision and concentration from the performers – in some ways similar to the Japanese Zen gardens, which encompass the entire universe, where gravel is raked into waves for hours, and a few stones are placed within a tiny space in such a way that it is impossible to take them all in at once.

Not everyone likes monochromatic landscapes of sand, moss and rock chips. Nor does everyone feel safe in them. So Agnieszka decided to rake, arrange and water her beloved music all the more calmly to give the listeners space and help them extract as much meaning from it as possible. She herself once recalled a mesmerising performance by Benjamin Bagby, who improvised an extensive passage from the Old English epic poem Beowulf, accompanying himself on a six-stringed lyre. His monologue went on for more than an hour, only some intelligible words could be extracted from the text, and yet, according to Agnieszka, everyone guessed at which point the monster “moved the third claw of its left hind paw”.

Agnieszka with Ensemble Dragma. Photo: Alejandro Lozano

With time similar things began to happen at her concerts. It is as if each one begins, as in Beowulf, with the famous cry of “Hwaet!”, which is usually translated as “Listen!”. In fact, it literally means “wait” and so the listeners obediently wait. Until a meaning emerges, until an image is outlined before their eyes, until hundreds of sounds, inconspicuous as couch grass flowers, form a symbolic pattern. The more inquisitive among the listeners will later start looking for contexts. The less inquisitive – or those simply tired of the chaos of the modern world – will be content with the sheer beauty of the composition.

Agnieszka is fully aware that it is impossible to impose on the audience one correct model of listening. Medievalist-musicians sometimes spend months preparing a short piece. They have to decipher it on several levels: read and understand the text, accurately interpret the notation, place the composition in a social, historical or liturgical context, combine it with the appropriate instrumentation if necessary. If doubts arise, they have to resolve them in the archives or ask colleagues for help. Once everything is ready, they have to check, if it can be played or sung at all. If not, they have to go back to the beginning and start all over again. They go to a lot of trouble and the listener may still turn a deaf ear to such an inconspicuous trifle. It thus takes a skill to arrange a programme, which in the case of medieval music is much more susceptible to the vagaries of acoustics, interior architecture and the general nature of the space.

This is why when I set off to attend the Swiss concerts under the “Kras 52” project, carried out by Agnieszka in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, I asked the organisers to let me listen to the same programme twice: in the late-Gothic Calvinist church in Biel in the Canton of Bern and the following day in the fifteenth-century Haus zum Hohen Dolder in Basel, the former seat of a medieval society from the monastery village of St. Alban, whose duties included overseeing local vineyards, settling border disputes and fire protection of the monastery’s estates.

A manuscript marked by the mysterious signature Kras 52 was once kept in Warsaw’s Krasiński Library in Okólnik Street. It ended up there in 1857, as part of the legacy of Konstanty Swidziński, a bibliophile, art collector and patron who before his death had amassed a collection larger than that of the Ossoliński Library at the time. More than half of the collection – including the building – went up in smoke in October 1944, in a fire set by the occupiers after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising. The manuscript was miraculously found three years after the war in the Bavarian State Library in Munich, where Karol Estreicher recognised it by its light-coloured leather binding and ornate inscription “Manuscript from the fifteenth century”. In addition to the sermons of Jacobus de Voragine, Gesta Romanorum collection and a treatise on the expulsion of demons, it contains more than forty works in black mensural notation with music by composers of the late ars nova period and early Franco-Flemish polyphony, as well as seven of the nine surviving compositions by Mikołaj of Radom, and other musical relics associated with Kraków and the court of Władysław Jagiełło.

Photo: Alejandro Lozano

The first part of the project, entitled Regina Gloriosa, is based on a Marian repertoire – a fascinating testimony to the interpenetration of Italian, Avignonian and local influences, as well as the earliest Polish, still tentative experiments with Western polyphony. Agnieszka, this time with Ensemble Dragma – made up of her regular collaborators – presented one of the most subtle and sophisticated programmes of recent years. Divided into four parts (Marian Mass, music for Christmas and Epiphany, music for the Presentation of the Lord, and Marian prayers separated by the Magnificat), and performed with only five musicians, it not only revealed the light texture of these works, translucent like parchment, but also, with its thoughtful arrangement and a few wisely chosen additions from other sources, effectively sustained the attention of the entire audience. Without flamboyance, but with the tried-and-tested method of delicate contrasts – Agnieszka’s sensual soprano with Tessa Roos’ angelic, focused voice, intriguing dialogues between the harp and Marc Lewon’s lute, conversations carried out in such an expressive whisper of the instruments that whenever Jane Achtman and Elizabeth Rumsey’s vielles and Lewon’s gittern joined in, the medieval ensemble gave the impression of total completeness.

The same music – which rose like a pillar of light towards the vault of the Calvinist church – heard in the tiny hall of the Haus zum Hohen Dolder with its squeaky boards spoke directly to the listeners, sometimes from a distance of less than a metre. And once again I was able to experience the quality of these performances, just as I experience the mastery of opera singing in modest five-hundred-seat theatre. In such conditions musicians stand before the audience exposed as they were at birth. Ecce homo. Ecce mulier. Any deficiency in the technique would have resounded in this chamber with the power of the trumpets of Jericho.

When it was all over, when – like in the good old days – we cleaned the room together and washed the dishes, Agnieszka’s family invited me to dinner at a restaurant the name of which I will not reveal. Look for yourself where to eat the real braised brawn and ossobuco in Basel. Because what I also have in common with Agnieszka, her husband Lucas, her beloved father-in-law Gerald and his partner Pam is that we like to eat well and sip good wine to go with the feast. We also love to cook, finding in this a delight similar to browsing through ancient archives. Next time we will make ourselves some Spanish salsify with red lentils or spicy chicken with pumpkin. Perhaps I will be able to rival Agnieszka in this particular art.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

On Goodness and Arts

Niespełna dwa tygodnie temu, a ściślej 22 grudnia, minęła 300. rocznica urodzin Karla Friedricha Abla. Z tej okazji, a także na dobry początek roku 2024 – roku wielkich nadziei, których nie pozwolimy nikomu popsuć – anonsuję płytę, o której walorach mogę śmiało Państwa zapewnić, i w której mam swój skromny udział w postaci eseju do książeczki: C. F. Abel / The Drexel Manuscript / Krzysztof Firlus (viola da gamba) / DUX 2027. Poniżej link do strony wytwórni. Miłej lektury, jeszcze milszego słuchania i jeszcze raz Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku.

Less than a fortnight ago, more precisely on 22 December, was the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Friedrich Abel. On this occasion, and to mark the beginning of 2024 – the year of great hopes that we will not allow anyone to spoil – I am announcing a CD, the value of which I fully vouch for, and in which I have my modest contribution in the form of an essay in the booklet: C. F. Abel / The Drexel Manuscript / Krzysztof Firlus (viola da gamba) / DUX 2027. Below is a link to the label’s website. Enjoy reading, enjoy listening even more, and once again, Happy New Year.

https://www.dux.pl/abel-the-drexel-manuscript-firlus.html
More at: www.krzysztoffirlus.com

Gods did not like philanthropists. In the tragedy Prometheus Bound Aeschylus used the term philánthrōpos—the one who loves humanity—in the second scene of the exodos, when incensed Zeus, through his messenger Hermes, tries to convince the ‘fire thief’ to get rid of this love, which he considered a mockery of his divine honour. In vain, and it is hardly surprising. After all, Prometheus was the father of humans: he made them from clay mixed with tears and gave them the form of gods; although he created defective beings, of mean stature, weaker than titans, barely able to stand on their frail legs, whose bones cracked under the slightest weight, he still loved them. He smuggled them fire in a stalk of fennel, taught them to forge metal, farm, cook meals, read, write, and live in harmony with the forces of nature. Zeus was afraid of these creatures and therefore ordered to chain their creator to the rocks of the Caucasus.

Over time, the word philánthrōpos also appeared in Aristophanes’ comedies, Plato’s dialogues, and Xenophon’s speeches. The term was associated with a feature proper of true rebels—heroes fighting against gods and adversities for the good of their people; a feature attributed to rulers who care for the good of their subjects, characteristic of truly free people, concerned for the existence of every human being, including slaves deprived of legal and political personality.

Perhaps that is why the first modern philanthropists—among them William Wilberforce, member of the British Parliament from three different constituencies at the turn of the 19th century—were also zealously involved in the abolitionist movement. Back then, charity became a determinant of civic attitude, a virtue of moral people—well-mannered and free from vice. Some fought with weapons, while others carried the torch of enlightenment. Charity was no longer the sole domain of soft-hearted people. It was identified with a virtue that should be sought by all those aspiring to the elite opposing barbarity of culture. It also became a fashion; a remedy of wealthy burghers against the inefficiency of state administration; an alternative way to be remembered by descendants.

Even then not everyone was eager to go to war. Otherwise, it would be like in Stefan Żeromski’s novel entitled Ashes: ‘everyone would like to go across the Pilica River as quickly as possible, no one would like to work’. Francis Martin Drexel, born in 1792 in the Austrian town of Dornbirn near Bregenz, in Vorarlberg, historical land bordering Switzerland, definitely did not want to associate his future with the military. He was the eldest son of a wealthy merchant who skilfully took advantage of the privileges of Vorarlberg under the Habsburg rule. The lands of Vorarlberg had constituted a separate district since the 17th century, subject to the administration of goods in Tirol, and were under the administration of Western Austria only thirty years (from the middle of the 18th century). When little Francis was eleven, his father sent him to Italy so that the firstborn could at least learn the basics of Italian and French. The boy proved to be extremely talented—in two years he mastered as many as five foreign languages; in 1805, he returned to his hometown to learn a decent profession. He became an apprentice of a painter in a nearby village.

In the same year that Napoleon forced Vorarlberg and Tirol to join the Kingdom of Bavaria, Francis begged his father to help him avoid conscription. His father agreed to his request. The young man crossed the Rhine to get to Switzerland and holed himself up there for the next five years, making a living off of painting signs, renovating houses, and making custom portraits. In 1812, he secretly returned to Tirol. Before both countries were reunited with Austria, after the Vienna Congress, he had managed to get to Bern in Switzerland and enrolled in further painting lessons.

Three years after Napoleon’s abdication, in 1817, Francis went to the port of Amsterdam, bought a ticket for eighty dollars, and boarded the John of Baltimore. Two months later, he disembarked in Philadelphia. He quickly found a job as a drawing instructor at a girls’ school and made good money as a portraitist. After a family scandal involving his brother-in-law, however, he had to seek his fortune elsewhere. For several years, he travelled South America, where his painting talent was appreciated so highly that he triumphantly returned to Philadelphia and set up his own banking house. Drexel & Co. soon grew to become one of the most powerful banks in the United States of America.

The founder of the banking empire shared his wealth as Prometheus shared fire. Three times a week, he would welcome every pauper who knocked on his door. Together with his wife Emma, he distributed food, shoes, clothes, medicine, and money to those in need; the couple soon hired an assistant who visited the applicants at home, interviewed them, and, on this basis, issued them with special certificates entitling them to receive an allowance directly from the Drexels. Francis and Emma donated a substantial sum of $30,000 a year to charity at the time, paying rent for hundreds of families and financing the manufacture of clothing for the poor in one of Philadelphia’s monasteries.

Francis Martin Drexel died in a train crash in 1863. He had six children, including three sons who followed in his footsteps, tied their careers to the family bank, and continued their father’s philanthropic activities. Two of them, the eldest Francis Anthony and the youngest Joseph William, also inherited their father’s passion for art. Joseph turned out to be extremely musical too. He mastered several instruments, especially the violin. After moving to New York, not only did he support financially local musical institutions, but he also actively engaged in their activities (including as director of the Metropolitan Opera and chairperson of the New York Philharmonic Society). During his numerous trips around the world, he amassed a huge collection of instruments, and in 1858 he bought a collection of scores and books on music from the German immigrant Henry F. Albrecht, which gave a start to his own collection, twenty years later enlarged by invaluable manuscripts from collections of European connoisseurs.

Photo: Grzegorz Mart

The so-called Drexel Collection—donated by Joseph William in 1888, just before his death, to the Lenox Library, which together with the Astor collection gave rise to the existing New York Public Library—contains over six thousand priceless prints and musical manuscripts. It includes, among others, several unique sources for the history of the output of 17th-century English composers and a manuscript marked with the Drexel 5871 reference number, containing, in addition to seventeen sonatas by Arcangelo Corelli and an anonymous Presto in C major, twenty-nine pieces for viola da gamba by a German virtuoso of the instrument, Carl Friedrich Abel.

Abel, like Drexel, came from a family in which not only the profession, but also certain values were passed from generation to generation. His grandfather, Clamor Heinrich, an outstanding organist and violone master, was, among others, a court musician in Köthen, an instrumentalist of the Duke’s band in Hanover, and, finally, an Obermusicus in Bremen. His father, Christian Ferdinand, gained a reputation as one of the most excellent string musicians of his era. He managed to avoid serving in the Swedish army during the occupation of northern Germany by getting married. After moving to Köthen, he became friends with Johann Sebastian Bach, the successor of Kappelmeister Augustin Reinhard Stricker, who employed him in the court orchestra as a violinist and a viola da gamba player. Bach was godfather to his daughter Sophie-Charlotte and then took care of his son’s musical education at the Leipzig Thomasschule. In 1743, young Carl Friedrich Abel—on the recommendation of Bach—got a place in the court orchestra in Dresden. Fifteen years later, he left for London and soon became a court musician of Sophia Charlotte, German princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, newly crowned Queen of Great Britain. Shortly thereafter, he was joined by Johann Christian, the eleventh son of Johann Sebastian. The musicians’ cordial friendship resulted in the launch of Bach-Abel Concerts in 1764—the first subscription concerts in England, organised initially by retired Venetian singer Teresa Cornelys in her residence at Soho Square and then, until the death of Johann Christian in 1782, in the prestigious Hanover Square Rooms.

Abel outlived his friend, but he died younger, at the age of sixty-four—apparently because he enjoyed the pleasures of worldly life too much. He was a genuine life and soul of the party and revolved around the greatest artists of the era—among them Thomas Gainsborough, an excellent portraitist and landscape painter and a talented amateur violinist, probably the first owner of the manuscript of Abel’s works for viola da gamba, which, over time, fell into the hands of Joseph William Drexel.

Abel’s music is as pleasant to the ear as it is complicated to perform. In his music, the composer took full advantage of the possibilities of an instrument that was gradually going out of fashion while maintaining a reliable sense of form—both in free-form preludes and in more formal dances and rondos. He skilfully played with silence, intensifying in these short pieces the impression of a non-existent dialogue between several musical narrators. The richness of contrasts, concerning both dynamics and articulation, sometimes brings to mind Mozart’s early symphonies, but on the other hand, it takes the listener back into the past, into the world of unexpected sound solutions from the works of Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe or Marin Marais.

Carl Friedrich Abel fell into oblivion for more than two centuries like many other composers, adored while alive and cast into the shadows shortly after their death. Had it not been for Drexel’s passion for collecting and a quite unexpected discovery of manuscripts in the Lower Silesian Maltzan palace in Milicz, Abel would have probably remained as enigmatic as one wealthy merchant from Vorarlberg, the father of Francis Martin, who decided to protect his offspring from the cruelty of war, thus inadvertently contributing not only to the development of banking and philanthropy, but also to the consolidation of artistic passion in his descendants.

***

Photo: Grzegorz Mart

Krzysztof Firlus plays a bass viola da gamba from the studio of Igor Przybyła—a copy of a seven-string instrument from 1693, by Michel Colichon, one of the most eminent Parisian luthiers of the late 17th century. Colichon’s gambas referred to the English model in terms of their structure—they had a slightly smaller body than their German counterparts but had a balanced sound despite shorter strings, and thus weaker tension. The top plate of the 2009 copy was made of spruce, while the back, ribs, and neck—of maple.

Carl Friedrich Abel used various instruments—in the portrait by the aforementioned Thomas Gainsborough, he plays a similar seven-string viol, although probably of German origin. However, it is also known that one of his favourite instruments was a six-string viol from the workshop of the Königsberg luthier Joachim Tielke (currently kept in the collection of the London Victoria & Albert Museum). This does not change the fact that none of the compositions preserved in the Drexel 5871 manuscript requires the use of a seventh string—which would confirm the thesis of most researchers that the aforementioned pieces were composed with a six-string viol in mind. Firlus’ choice is a kind of compromise between a still unattainable copy of the Tielke instrument and a reproduction of the French Colichon instrument, which allows to reflect all the nuances of these compositions.

Translated by: Żaneta Pniewska

It’s Easy to Lose Your Head in Brno

When it became clear that the number of premieres of this year’s season at Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera would come down to a total of three – a certain co-production that we will see four years after its opening in Salzburg lambasted by the critics; yet another staging of one of the most popular operas in the repertoire; and a world premiere of a work that I don’t quite see returning to any stage – I again became jealous of the Czechs. Czech opera companies offer a true embarrassment of riches, there are plenty of rarities in their repertoires and the interest of international critics is huge. This is hardly surprising: the Czechs don’t need to fill their casts with foreign stars of dubious quality, nor do they lack great directors or competent conductors. Besides, they don’t go to the opera once in a blue moon, but on a regular basis and they are really knowledgeable about it.

What has certainly contributed to this state of affairs is the bourgeois egalitarianism of our southern neighbours, who, unlike Poles with their sabre-wielding longings, have opera in their blood. Yet when I went to the Janáček Theatre in Brno for day-to-day performances of Strauss’ Salome and Dvorák’s comic opera Jakobín, completely unknown in Poland, I did not expect that in both cases I would be confronted with a theatre that was open and modern, and, at the same, time stemming from a tradition dating back at least to the beginning of the previous century.

Suffice it to say that David Radok, director of the Brno Salome, is the son of Alfréd, a legend of twentieth-century Czech theatre, co-creator – with Miloš Forman, among others – of the famous Laterna Magika, and a member of the D34 theatre company founded by Emil František Burian. Emil František, in turn, was the son of Emil Burian, one of the first performers of the role of the eponymous Jacobin in Dvorák’s opera. Emil’s younger brother Karel Burian sang the role of Herodes at the premiere of Salome at the Semperoper. When I began to investigate what the young Lucie Kaňková, Terinka in the Brno Jakobín, meant when she claimed to come from a family of respected Prague musicians, I discovered that on her father’s side she was a great-great-granddaughter of Jan Nepomuk Kaňka, Beethoven’s composer and lawyer friend, and on her mother’s side – a great-granddaughter of the violinist Jindřich Feld, whose students included Rafael Kubelik. I postponed further research, so as not to be influenced by anything. What if the apples did fall far from the tree this time?

Salome. Linda Ballová in the title role, and Jaroslav Březina (Herodes). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Born in 1954, David Radok emigrated with his family from Czechoslovakia after the defeat of the Prague Spring. He learned his craft in Gothenburg, primarily at the Folkteater, where his father Alfréd found refuge. He made his debut as a director at the local opera house with a staging of Menotti’s The Medium. In fact, he has continued his collaboration with Scandinavian companies to this day: he is the man behind the Peter Grimes production, dusted off after nearly thirty years and very well received in Copenhagen, which in May saved the honour of the Operaen, when a co-production with Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera fell through for reasons that are yet to be explained. He has dozens of productions to his credit, primarily of Baroque and modernist operas. His stagings are clean, but dark, precise and marked by a uniquely Czech brand of black humour. This was also the case of Salome, although the action, set on an almost empty stage enclosed on three sides by a brick structure reminiscent of the interior of the ruined Basilica of Maxentius in Rome (set design by Dragan Stojčevski), unfolded rather sluggishly at first. I suspect that the director may have intended to build tension in this powerful one-act opera by means of the Hitchcock method, but the earthquake started only with the confrontation between Salome and Jochanaan. When the prophet emerged, dripping with water, from the trapdoor – with a black sack over his head, hauled out of the palace cistern in chains – the audience shuddered with horror for the first time. Radok’s concept proved coherent: Herodes’ palace was a universal metaphor for totalitarian violence and decay of all values. Hence the bizarre hotchpotch of costumes (designed by Zuzana Ježkova), ranging from operetta-style liveries, uniforms and suits, silk gowns and déshabillés, to the slightly over-the-top idea of having The Page of Herodias wear a Muslim niqab; hence the repulsive austerity of the sets and the terrifying indifferentism of the protagonists. There are only monsters roaming around the stage. Had the footmen not rushed to wipe the blood on the floor, Narraboth’s suicide would have gone unnoticed. Orgies and scheming take place somewhere in the background, almost imperceptibly, behind the semi-translucent glass of the palace’s living room. Paradoxically, the character that turns out to be the most human in the drama is the weak, demoralised Herodes – shouting that he will not allow the saviour of the world to raise the dead, because that would be horrible; frozen in humiliation when Salome, in the finale of the Dance of the Seven Veils, pushes his face into her crotch; vomiting with fear and disgust, when his stepdaughter gets her way and has the servants bring Jochanaan’s severed head on a silver platter. My perception of the Brno production may have been influenced by the current events in Poland – but I have to admit that the downfall of the grotesque tetrarch made a much bigger impression on me than the dilemmas and frustrations of the utterly spoiled Salome.

It is more likely, however, I was a bit disappointed by the performer of the title role, the Slovakian Linda Ballová – an excellent and extremely convincing actress as a psychopathic Lolita Salome, but possessing a soprano that I cannot, for the life of me, associate with a “sixteen-year-old princess with the voice of an Isolde” as Strauss himself suggested. Ballová’s voice, relatively small, artificially darkened and characterised by a persistent, uncontrolled vibrato, pales in comparison with the luminous, truly girlish sopranos of Destinn and Cebotari, and above all the phenomenal Olive Fremstad, who sang Salome in the American premiere of the work at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907. Despite the powerful orchestration, those singers easily cut through the dense tutti: Ballová continuously struggled with the matter, at times departing from the musical text, and even the famous low G flat on the last word of her monologue was lost in the flood of instrumental chords.

Salome. Linda Ballová. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

However, the other members of the cast did a great job, led by the phenomenal – also acting-wise – Jaroslav Březina in the role of Herodes. Warm words of praise should go to Vit Nosek, who sang Narraboth with a rounded and ardent tenor, although he was not fully able to cope with the tasks entrusted to him by the director. The vengeful Heriodias was successfully portrayed by the experienced Eva Urbanová, a singer endowed with a powerful and superbly controlled soprano; Jochanaan was convincingly sung by the German baritone Birger Radde, a technically superb, extremely musical singer with a voice that is exceptionally noble, beautiful and rich. Marko Ivanovic led the whole thing with an assured hand, but at times paying too much attention to polishing individual details – at the expense of the agitated, kaleidoscopic narrative of this remarkable score.

After such intense impressions of the previous evening, the meeting with Jakobín obviously took place in a completely different atmosphere. The fruit of Dvorák’s second collaboration with the librettist Marie Červinkova-Riegrova – after the mediocre success of the 1882 production of Dimitrij – proved to be the first real triumph in the composer’s operatic career. The story of Bohuš, son of Count Vilém – who returns to his homeland incognito, together with his wife Julie, only to discover that his father is still convinced that his first-born has allied himself in France with the Jacobins and married a woman of ill repute in Paris – runs parallel to the love story of Terinka, daughter of the choirmaster Benda, and Jiří, gamekeeper at the count’s estates, jealous of burgrave Filip, who is courting his fiancée. Dramaturgically, the thing struggles a bit, musically it dazzles, both with the lyricism of the vocal parts and the sumptuous orchestration as well as references to, on the one hand, Czech folklore and on the other – Italian comic opera and the opéra à sauvetage, a genre popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the example of which was also Beethoven’s Fidelio.

Jakobín. Pavla Vykopalová (Julie), Jan Šťáva (Filip), and Roman Hoza (Bohuš). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

This convoluted story was tackled by Martin Glaser, a director a generation younger than Radok, but nevertheless faithful to the Czech tradition of engaged theatre, imbued with the spirit of satire and, at the same time, with the poetic magic of old school plays, which, in the words of Jan Komenský, were to entertain in a way that would make “our games a preparation for serious matters”. In his delightfully colourful Jakobín we can find not only inspirations from eighteenth-century Hanakian opera, but also less obvious, perhaps not entirely conscious references to the oeuvres of other directors from this part of Europe (I’m thinking of, for example, the undulating wooden platforms known from Nekrošius’ productions, with which Glaser builds the landscape of an imaginary town just as evocatively as he creates the interior of the count’s palace). How I miss such stagings: beautiful, clean and clear, human in the most literal sense of the word, provoking laughter and emotion, perfectly coupled with the composer’s idea.

This makes it all the more gratifying that the main contributor to the success of Jakobín was the Janáček Theatre team. The singers permanently affiliated with the Brno company were completed by just two artists: Lucie Kaňková, a singer blessed with a luminous, colourful soprano beautifully opened at the top, and Aleš Briscein as Jiří, an indefatigable and reliable tenor, who brings to mind Klaus Florian Vogt – the difference being, however, that, unlike the German star, he has a truly beautiful voice and uses it with admirable musicality. A lovely pair of the main protagonists came from Pavla Vykopalová (Julie), whose soft soprano had already delighted me in The Greek Passion, and the extraordinarily versatile baritone Roman Hoza (Bohuš), who had clearly worked diligently during his master classes with Christa Ludwig. The indisposed Petr Levíček heroically faced adversity and won over the audience with his bravura portrayal of the choirmaster Benda. The two priests from the production of Martinů’s opera I had seen – David Szendiuch and Jan Šťáva – showed themselves at their best as Count Vilém and the grotesque burgrave Filip. The role of the disreputable Adolf, who tries to seize Bohuš’s inheritance, was entrusted to Tadeáš Hoza, Roman’s younger brother, who possesses a baritone equally well placed, albeit a bit brighter and open more widely in the upper register. Jakub Klecker conducted, making good use of his extensive choral and choirmaster experience in this singing score.

Jakobín. David Szendiuch (Count Vilém). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Given the lack of operatic excitement in Poland, I will have to visit Brno more often. If I were to die in an isolation hospital, like field chaplain Matyáš from The Good Soldier Švejk, no one would be pulling their hair out in despair after me. My record is clean: even if I borrowed one thousand eight hundred crowns from someone, I gave it back long ago.

Translated by Anna Kijak

Lili of Einar’s Body

One day a woman locked in Einar Wegener’s body decided to tear down her prison. Had she chosen to act on the decision, the deed would have been referred to as suicide. She even set a date for herself: 1 May 1930. She had tried everything, but the doctors, instead of helping her, tried to forcibly treat Einar. They diagnosed him with either neurosis or schizophrenia, recommended a lobotomy and treated him with X-rays. Einar, exhausted by the treatment, was in anguish and so was Lili living inside him. When the anguish – described today as gender dysphoria – reached its peak, hope sprang up suddenly. The difficult case was taken up by the famous German gynaecologist Kurt Warnekros, a pioneer of gender-affirming surgery. No one before him had taken the risk of “completely transforming” a man into a woman. No one before had trusted him so desperately. The first surgery took place in February 1930. After the second Einar ceased to exist and the woman freed from him was issued a passport in the name of Lili Ilse Elvenes. We do not know whether she ever used the surname Elbe: perhaps this was a later invention of journalists seeking to commemorate the river flowing through Dresden, where Dr. Warnekros’ clinic was located.

A few months after the fourth procedure – groundbreaking from the medical point of view – the patient’s body rejected the transplanted uterus. And yet Lili welcomed death with calm and gratitude for the brief period spent in the body she had always dreamed of. She died on 13 September 1931, at the age of just under 49. Before her death she said that Einar had wanted to die for a long time: so that Lili could awake to life. This harrowing story, told by herself and compiled by a friend who hid under the pseudonym Niels Hoyer, was published as a book shortly after her death. The Danish original Fra Mand til Kvinde (Man into Woman) was immediately translated into German, an edition followed by two independent translations into English. Lili’s tragic fate,  discussed before the war mainly in terms of a moral sensation, kept returning from time to time in other contexts: in the middle of the last century on the wave of discussions about new methods of surgical gender reassignment, in the early twenty-first century – after the publication of David Ebershoff’s acclaimed novel The Danish Girl, subsequently filmed by Tom Hooper. The critics received Ebershoff’s debut with mixed feelings: although the author created a vivid story about the power of love, the essence of marriage and gender models, he let his imagination run wild, obscuring the already vague story of Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener, who may have married Einar precisely because someone else lived in his body.

Photo: Edyta Dufaj

Both were talented and both very young when they fell in love with each other. They met at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts, having arrived there from provincial towns and conservative communities in the south of the country: Einar was the son of a spice merchant, Gerda – of a Lutheran pastor. He won acclaim as an author of atmospheric, impressionistic landscapes, while she dedicated herself primarily to illustration and portrait art combining Art Nouveau and Art Deco and characterised by ambiguous, decadent eroticism. It was apparently Gerda who awakened Lili in Einar – by prompting him to replace Anna Larssen, a popular actress at Copenhagen’s Folketeatret, during one of Gerda’s portrait sessions. Innocent dress-ups became a ritual. Dressed in female attire, Einar began to go out with Gerda for walks, to attend exhibition previews and social gatherings, with Gerda introducing him as her husband’s cousin from Jutland. Lili was given her own set of clothes, settled in the marital bedroom, but was afraid to come out in the stifling atmosphere of Puritan Denmark. The couple’s move to France proved of little help: Gerda flourished as an artist, but Lili felt increasingly bad in Einar’s hated body. Deliverance came with Dr. Warnekros’ offer. Lili emerged from the shadows as a mature woman and lived her entire new life over the course of fourteen months. The marriage was annulled. Lili became infatuated with a French art dealer, Gerda married an Italian pilot. Everything fell apart after Lili’s death. Gerda’s marriage turned out to be a mistake. The artist spent the last years of her life in poverty, forgotten, drinking herself into a stupor and supporting herself by selling hand-painted greeting cards. She died shortly after the outbreak of the war, at the age of just 54. She may have always loved the woman in her husband.

If Tobias Picker – author of six operas based on famous literary works, most of which were commissioned by major American theatre companies – had wanted to cash in on the success of Ebershoff’s novel, I probably would not have gone to the premiere of his Lili Elbe at the Theater St. Gallen. However, from the very beginning this project promised to be extraordinary. Just before the outbreak of the pandemic, Picker – then artistic director of Tulsa Opera in Oklahoma – cast the transgender Lucia Lucas in the role of Don Giovanni. The baritone-singing Lucas began the transition process in 2013, went through a hell, purgatory and heaven similar to that of Lili Elbe, and seemed to Picker the perfect performer for the opera he decided to compose especially for her. The libretto was written by his husband Aryeh Lev Stollman, a neuroradiologist at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, using primarily the book Fra Mand til Kvinde; the dramaturgical side of the whole thing was handled by Lucas herself and direction – by Krystian Lada, who “discovered” Lucas for himself back in 2019, during the Brussels premiere of Unknown, I live with you.

Photo: Edyta Dufaj

Picker has created an opera of the kind that European composers are often unwilling or simply unable to write: real two-act opera with a linear plot that arouses strong emotions in both connoisseurs and people who come to the theatre for well-told stories. Above all, in Lili Elbe he has given a tremendous opportunity to shine to the singers, led by Lucia Lucas, who spins this treatise on recovered identity with the passion and understanding of a person who can really empathise with her character’s plight. In musical terms Picker does not so much juggle with convention as harnesses it in the service of the narrative: in the theatre within theatre scene, when Einar and Gerda watch a “modernist” performance of Orpheus and Eurydice, he draws on the treasury of Webern’s and Schönberg’s oeuvres; he conveys the atmosphere of the frenzied 1920s by means of references to Weill and Parisian cabarets; he interweaves the whole with threads drawn from the music of Korngold, Copland and Puccini; he dresses the moving finale in a robe of sound with clear allusions to Wagner’s Tristan and the love transfiguration of Isolde.

Krystian Lada presents the story within a space with few props (stage design cooperation by Łukasz Misztal), suggestively lit by Aleksander Prowaliński, as usual building tension with precise acting and expressive stage movement (choreography by Frank Fannar Pedersen). There are clear examples of his directorial “signatures”, like the half allegorical, half fairy-tale pantomime in the prologue: with bachelors and maidens pair up in the open, like princes with their Cinderellas, the maidens find the right shoes, one is left without a partner, little Einar runs off stage with one foot in a boy’s shoe and the other in a shiny pump. Another element that has become an integral part of Lada’s staging are theatrical emanations of the characters’ identities – when Lili awakens in Einar, she manifests herself under many guises: an Androgyne, a pregnant woman, a woman with a beard, and other vague visions of femininity, evocatively conveyed by dancers from the Tanzkompanie St. Gallen. Again, there is a great understanding between the director and the costume designer (Bente Rolandsdotter), who managed not only to emphasise the stark contrast between the grey everyday life in Denmark and the colourful world of bohemia, but also to contrast Gerda’s joyful colour imagination with a melancholic, subdued palette of shades suggesting the sadness of Lili locked inside Einar. A beautiful idea was the final cleansing of the protagonist from the dirt of her previous existence: in a ceremony that brought to mind associations with baptism as well as ritual washing of the body by the deceased’s loved ones.

Photo: Edyta Dufaj

The musical side of the production was overseen by Modestas Pitrenas, who led the soloists, the chorus and the Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen with an assured hand, if a bit too heavy at times. I think, however, that with each successive performance the balance between the stage and the orchestra pit will continue to improve. Among the very large cast special mention should go to Sylvia d’Eramo, as Gerda, singing with a beautifully rounded soprano; the singing- and acting-wise superb mezzo-soprano Mack Wolz in the triple role of Anna Larssen, Wegener’s Mother and the Young Woman; the touchingly lyrical Brian Michael Moore in the tenor role of Lili’s beloved, Claude LeJeune; and, above all, the technically superb Théo Imart, endowed with an extraordinarily handsome soprano countertenor, and singing three extremely varied roles of the Danish Countess, Dagmar and Matron. However, I cannot help it, but what will stay in my memory above all is Lucia Lucas’ harrowing portrayal. Leaving aside her innate musicianship, mastery of nuanced dynamics and articulation, attention to rhythm and melody of phrasing – there is something irresistibly feminine about Lucas’ voice, more sonorous at the bottom of the scale and more widely open at the top than in the case of many performers of the role of Wotan. I have no idea where this comes from: certainly not from the timbre; if anything, then from the intensity and ardour of emotion, not normally associated with “male” singing. This sparkling baritone is clearly comfortable in its new body.

Yet after a long applause I became overwhelmed with sadness: that in Poland we are not yet mature enough to tell difficult stories using the language of opera. And even if we are mature enough, we do not know how to tell them with such sincerity and simplicity. It is either shouting or pathos, or allusion wrapped in black humour. And yet we need moderation so much.

Translated by:
Anna Kijak

Hell, Purgatory, Paradise

It is hard to believe that Bayreuth – the capital and second largest city of the Regierungsbezirk of Upper Franconia – is still almost exclusively associated with the Wagner Festival. Few people know that it was the birthplace of Christiane Eberhardine, the uncrowned queen of Poland – wife of Augustus II the Strong and mother of Augustus III – for whose funeral ceremony Bach composed the famous Trauer-Ode BWV 198. Tourists marvel at the gems of German Rococo in Dresden and Potsdam, having no idea of how many treasures of architecture of this style can be found in Bayreuth itself and on the outskirts of the city. Judaica devotees often fail to note that the Great Synagogue, which has been in operation since 1760, emerged almost unscathed from Kristallnacht: only because its building was adjacent to the Margravial Opera House. Few music lovers remember that this magnificent theatre, a UNESCO heritage site since 2012, hosted a baroque music festival already in the first decade of this century. The decision to revive the event, as Bayreuth Baroque, was not made until 2019, after a major renovation of the building.

Not only the Bayreuther Festspiele on the Green Hill, but also the new festival, under the artistic direction of Max Emanuel Cenčić, almost fell victim to the 2020 pandemic. Fortunately, the organisers managed to “squeeze” into the short break between the waves of the pandemic and hold Bayreuth Baroque under a strict sanitary regime, with no programme cuts. I went to Bayreuth at the time literally for just one evening, for a concert performance of Vinci’s Gismondo by the soloists and {oh!} Orkiestra led by Martyna Pastuszka.

In the years that followed Bayreuth Baroque managed to consolidate its reputation and attract new audiences to the city, which, much to the despair of its councillors, became deserted every time after the Wagner Festival ended. For various reasons I was unable to make it to the second and third instalments of the event, received increasingly well also by critics. This year I decided not to give up and to go to see performances of both staged operas included in the programme; sandwiched between them was a recital by a singer who has been all the rage recently among lovers of stylish performance of Baroque music.

Rolando Villazón as Orfeo. Photo: Clemens Manser

The performance of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, in a production directed by Thanos Papakonstantinou, left me confused, to say the least. The production is by no means new: this theatrical experiment, featuring live-electronics and material arranged and composed by Panos Iliopoulos, was premiered in 2017 at Athens’ Megaron. It was quite favourably received by Greek critics and ignored by most foreign reviewers – not without reason, as it was one of the many events accompanying the “true” celebrations of the 450th anniversary of the composer’s birth. The creative team honestly admitted at the time that it would be an Orfeo “with a twist”, a staging appealing to the sensibilities of audiences other than the supporters of historical performance truth. Indeed, there were plenty of surprises: from the addition to the Baroque instruments (Latinitas Nostra ensemble led from the harpsichord by Markellos Chryssicos) of, among others, the saw, bass guitar and theremin, the rather intrusive identification of Orpheus with the figure of Christ, to bizarre casting decisions. To make the matters worse, most of Iliopoulos’ ideas were not only in poor taste, but also contradicted the musical and dramatic logic of the original.

This is, in fact, also true of the staging, which, although quite pleasing to the eye (set design by Niki Psyhogoiu, lighting by Christina Thanasoula), puts spectators familiar with the work and the reception of Orphic literature in Monteverdi’s time to a severe test. Especially given that ideas like wedding dances with ribbons being wrapped around a cross (and a Latin cross at that) neither are revealing, nor reflect too well on the cultural competence of the creative team. Nor am I convinced by the concept of turning the entire opera into a thriller, announced already in the prologue, in which the famous toccata is replaced with a melody from an ominously jamming music box. Monteverdi resorts to a masterful dramatic trick, conducting the narrative of Act I in an atmosphere of growing joy and ecstasy – so convincing that the listeners forget what comes next; that the news of Eurydice’s death is as unexpected for them as it is for Orpheus. This adaptation oozes horror from the very beginning and everything is heading towards the final pandemonium, that is the version – abandoned by the composer – with a frenzy of maenads tearing apart the Thracian singer. I should add that this version was lost, so Iliopoulos went the whole hog and added something that had no connection to Monteverdi’s La favola d’Orfeo whatsoever.

Another thing is that he managed to spoil the original as well. His insertions and arrangements disrupted the chord base in the basso continuo to such an extent that the singers had trouble intoning their lines correctly. Chryssicos compounded this, further confusing the artists with his bizarre choice of tempi and disregard for the internal symbolism of key passages in the work (for example, in “Possente spirto”, a poignant clash of emotion and convention, which in this interpretation was more like the soundtrack to a B horror film). The soloists sang generally correctly but unstylishly, with an excessively wide vibrato, leaving out most of Monteverdi’s characteristic ornamental figures. The notable exception was Marios Sarantidis, who with his lovely, brilliantly controlled bass impressed already in the ensembles – unfortunately, as Charon he was effectively drowned out by the electronics. Different dilemmas were posed for me by Rolando Villazón’s participation in the venture. After his vocal crisis, his voice returned in a completely different form: smoky, gravelly, less wide in terms of range, which, however, the artist knows how to mask and even turn to his own advantage with his excellent technique and expressive interpretation. This time he did not succeed. In Act I his Orpheus was literally fighting to survive. After that things improved somewhat, although I could not shake the feeling that Villazón strayed into this experiment from a completely different story and got no support from anyone: neither the conductor, the director, nor the author of this bizarre adaptation.

After the performance all hell broke loose. Half of the audience booed like mad, drowned out by the other half with frenetic applause and shouts of enthusiasm. I hanged on in silence, feverishly gathering my thoughts and anxiously preparing for the following evening.

Bruno de Sá and the ensemble Nuovo Barocco. Photo: bayreuth.media

My fear proved unfounded. The recital by the Brazilian male soprano Bruno de Sá at the Baroque Ordenskirche St. Georgen, founded by Margrave George William for the courtly order of knighthood Ordre de la Sincerité, impressed not only with the quality of the performance and the deeply thought-out arrangement of the programme, but also with its unique atmosphere – it took place in an interior bathed in natural candlelight, in close contact with the musicians positioned in the middle of the Greek cross on the plan of which the church was built.

I needed such a purgatory after the hellish torments of the previous day. Let me start by praising the excellent Nuovo Barocco ensemble, founded by the Hungarian oboist Bettina Simon and the Greek violinist Dimitris Karakantas. Until recently, fans of historical performance could choose between the cold perfection of Northern European Baroque ensembles and the fiery, often sloppy element of the Southerners. Nuovo Barocco is part of a whole new trend of playing that is energetic and passionate, at the same time characterised by a dazzling, almost romantic beauty of sound, evident both in the accompaniments to the arias and in the instrumental pieces (phenomenally highlighted “sentimental” texture of Francesco Durante’s Concerto No. 2 in G minor ).

The musicians presented a programme made up of works by composers of the Neapolitan school: in the first part, Bruno de Sá sang arias intended for soprano castrati in female roles (Cunegunda from Gismondo and the eponymous heroine of Vinci’s Didone abbandonata, Sabina from Pergolesi’s Adriano in Siria and Ismena from Giuseppe Sellitto’s opera Siface); in the second – arias of male protagonists (Curiazio from Cimarosa’s Gli Orazi e I Curiazi, Volusio from Hasse’s opera Cajo Fabricio, Arminio from Porpora’s Germanico in Germania, and the aria “Son qual nave”, written by Riccardo Broschi for his brother Farinelli for the pasticcio opera Artaserse).

After the great revival of the countertenor voice, the time has come for the much more exclusive voice of male soprano, that is, the singing of men who, for various reasons, did not undergo mutation in adolescence. Of the three brightest stars in this rarefied vocal fach (I am also thinking of Samuel Mariño and Dennis Orellana), de Sá is unquestionably the most musical and technically the best. He is proficient in coloratura, can maintain a balance of tone in the transitions between registers, his phrasing is smooth and done with a great sense of style. In addition, his range is very wide – but it turned out not to be wide enough to meet all the challenges of the recital’s closing aria from Artaserse. The reason is simple: Farinelli moved with ease within a range of three and a half octaves and his breathing capabilities were remarkable even for a castrato.

And this raises the question of the usefulness of male sopranos in historical performance. Countertenors are unable to match the art of the castrati of the past either, but their voices are denser and more expressive. Bruno de Sá’s soprano, on the other hand, sounds like a lovely, incredibly well-trained voice of an adolescent girl, which necessarily limits the singer in his choice of female roles and almost disqualifies him as a performer of male roles in Baroque opera. It is unlikely that the problem will disappear in the future, when the pioneers –de Sá among them – will begin to give way to increasingly technically proficient male sopranos. This is because the problem is not in the technique, but in the physiology. In my opinion we should already start thinking about a suitable niche for male sopranos, whose instrument is fascinating, but much more delicate than that of most countertenors. I was reaffirmed in this belief by the encores of the singer, who was clearly tired at this point: from a not very convincing interpretation of “Tu del Ciel ministro eletto” from Handel’s Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, to “Ombra mai fu” from Bononcini’s Xerse, where even the dazzling timbre of his voice failed to mask the problem of tone stability.

Flavio, re de’ Longobardi. Julia Lezhneva (Emilia) and Max Emanuel Cenčić (Guido). Photo: Falk von Traubenberg

Yet overall the recital left a very good impression and I did not expect that the final performance of my trip, of Flavio, re de’ Longobardi, the fourth of Handel’s operas for the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, would take me straight to paradise. I can confidently say that I had not seen such a visually beautiful yet clever staging of a Baroque work for at least a decade. The creative team decided to stage the whole thing in the style of a courtly tragicomedy, highlighting the peculiar heterogeneity of this dramma per musica, which at times really verges on a parody of opera seria. Helmut Stürmer’s superbly designed sets, making up a new space again and again, provided a background for scenes reminiscent of Corneille’s and Molière’s theatre, Hogarth’s prints and Gainsborough’s paintings – possibly also filtered through Kubrick’s film adaptation of Barry Lyndon. However, the efforts of the set designer, costume designer (Corina Grămoşteanu) and lighting designer (Romain De Lagarde) would have been in vain, if it had not been for the direction of Max Cenčić, who, following the example of the greatest masters of opera theatre, derived this convoluted story not only from the libretto, but also from the score, phenomenally arranged the crowd scenes, and, at the same time, took care of every gesture, glance and change of facial expression of the singers as well as the several silent actors who were used in the action. Cenčić brilliantly weaves comedy and love with elements of the grotesque, sometimes on the verge of overdoing it, as in the episode when offspring is being conceived by Flavio, who fulfils his royal duty in front of a cheering court. However, Cenčić does not overdo it in the end – indeed, he forces laughter back down our throats when the debased queen emerges from her bed and, in the silence of the interrupted musical narrative, finds comfort in the tenderness of the court dwarf, who leads his mistress backstage, glaring at those present with contempt (excellent Mick Morris Mehnert).

There were many more such episodes in this performance, and the spectators had to swallow tears of emotion as often as they had to suppress violent fits of giggles. In several fragments the creative team invoked the convention of pasticcio, incorporating into the opera other works by Handel, instrumental compositions by Telemann, an aria from Lotti’s Theophane and Michel Lambert’s air de court “Vos mépris chaque jour” – that last piece performed by a lady-in-waiting singing delightfully out of tune (the actress Filippa Kaye). How on earth Cenčić managed to unleash such reserves of acting talent from all the cast members, I truly have no idea. All the more credit to him for that, as he assembled a dream cast. He himself took up the mantle of Senesino and sang the heroic role of Guido, in which he impressed not only with the luscious sound of his increasingly beautiful countertenor, but also with his extremely stylish ornamentation in da capo arias. The audience was completely bowled over by Julia Lezhneva in the role of Emilia, engaged to Guido: her round soprano was enriched with deeper, truly “feminine” tones and her improvisational skills were at their peak – I don’t know what purists would say, but in the third segment of the aria “Mà chi punir desio” she created a showpiece ornament from an excerpt from Nino Rota’s soundtrack to the film Romeo and Juliet. In the second pair of lovers Yuriy Mynenko (Vitige) was particularly worthy of note with his superbly placed soprano countertenor beautifully open at the top. He found a fine partner in Monika Jägerová (Teodata), a singer endowed with a contralto of extraordinary beauty, which in the last act, however, began to betray signs of fatigue. The eponymous Flavio was sung by the young French countertenor Rémy Brè-Feuillet, making up for minor technical shortcomings with an uncommon sense of comedy. The character roles of Ugone and Lotario were brilliantly performed by Fabio Trümpy and Sreten Manojlović – the former a bit better vocally, the latter incomparably better as an actor. The excellent as usual Concerto Köln orchestra was led from the harpsichord by Benjamin Bayl: precisely, with a flawless sense of the form of the work and the capabilities of the soloists involved in its performance.

When the applause finally died down, I really felt like an exile from the garden of delights. From now on, I will tirelessly seek to return. I have a vague feeling that this paradise can be regained. Because where I lost it, I now know for certain.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Equal, Like in Oslo

One day during a recent stay in Oslo, I decided to return to my hotel by tram. After a while I got the impression that the tram turned the wrong way. No one reacted. However, the calmness of the passengers ceased to infect me, when the tram came to a halt between stops. The driver announced that he had forgotten to move the points, but would rectify his mistake immediately. The tram began to reverse, with the passengers still on board and still not commenting on the incident. It moved back to the junction and rolled in the right direction. A few streets down it had to return to the depot. Everyone got off without a word and continued on foot.

The situation made me think about a book by Thorbjørn Egner I read as a child. More specifically, about the fragment in which the three eponymous robbers of Cardamom are released from jail: “‘Why don’t you take a ride on the tram?’ ‘Yes, thank you,’ they replied (…). ‘It’ll be nice to take a ride now’. (…) The conductor rang the bell and the tram began to move”. This is a summary, as it were, of Kardemommeloven, or the law of Cardamon Town: you must not tease anyone, you must be nice and polite, apart from that everything is allowed. The Norwegians are held up as a model of civil society. Mutual respect, observance of legal norms and cooperation with state agencies are not seen as a sign of weakness in this country. Just as reticence in showing feelings is not a sign of boorishness, but stems from a reluctance to do unto another what is disagreeable to you. Norwegians value their peace and, therefore, do not disturb others.

How effective a strategy this is has been demonstrated by the last century of the country’s history. In 1905, after the dissolution of the personal union with Sweden, Norway began to rebuild its identity and patiently develop a velferdsstat – a welfare state. Today it boasts one of the highest levels of per capita income in the world and ranks second in the global Human Development Index. Citizens pay their high taxes conscientiously, benefiting in exchange from state-funded education, social welfare and health care. Norway is an extremely egalitarian country, where the principle of equality applies irrespective of gender, religion, social background and ability. Egalitarianism is also advocated by members of the royal family, led by King Harald V, who ascended the throne in 1991, inheriting from his ancestors the motto “Alt for Norge”: everything for Norway. The king’s 2016 speech contained some memorable words: that Norway is first and foremost about people; girls who love girls, boys who love boys, and boys and girls in love with each other who believe in God, in Everything or in Nothing. Kai Østensen – a Christian LGBT activist – summed up the speech with the words “I love the king. Amen”.

Liv Redpath at Oscarshall. Photo: Per Ole Hagen

The king is also loved by his wife, Queen Sonja: it is possible that their complicated love story has also contributed to his worldview. Sonja was a “commoner”, the daughter of a small businessman, a graduate of a tailoring programme at a vocational school, a boarding school in Lausanne and the University of Oslo, where she obtained her bachelor’s degree. For a  long time the young couple kept their relationship a secret. Finally, Harald told his father that if he stood in the way of his happiness with Sonja, he would not marry anyone else. The argument proved irrefutable: the crown prince was the only male heir to the Norwegian throne. The wedding ceremony took place in 1968 at Oslo Cathedral. King Olaf V led his bride down the aisle to the sounds of Purcell’s Trumpet Tune And Air, and the newlyweds left the church to the accompaniment of Bach’s Prelude in E flat major BWV 552/1.

A lavish musical setting of the ceremony was a tradition in the Norwegian royal family, which is related to the ruling houses of Denmark, Sweden and United Kingdom. The future king studied at Oxford, but that period brought him primarily a love of water sports. His wife, on the other hand, an avid music lover and patron of young artists, turned out to be a true ambassador of music in Norway. An initiative that has become firmly established in the international music community is the Queen Sonja Competition, launched in 1988. This year – at the invitation of the organisers and the Ophelias Culture PR agency – I had the pleasure of watching the events of the final few days of the competition.

They began with a private concert at Oscarshall, a neo-Gothic maison de plaisance built on the Bygdøy peninsula above the Frognerkilen fjord. The palace, the decor of which is the work of Norwegian craftsmen and artists, was opened to the public as early as in 1881. Converted into a museum during the reign of the current royal couple, it proved an ideal venue for an intimate recital of songs and chamber works by Grieg, Debussy and Walton, featuring the soprano Liv Redpath and the pianist Sveinung Bjelland. The young American, who won the Lied Prize at the previous competition, is already making a career on both sides of the Atlantic. Deservedly so: her colourful, sensual voice and wise interpretations whetted everyone’s appetite for the auditions of this year’s finalists.

The auditions took place at the Norwegian National Opera, one of the first architectural wonders of the twenty-first century. The building blends perfectly into the urban fabric, also attracting tourists, who begin exploring it on the very shore of Oslofjorden, before climbing to the top of the building on the slanted roof, from which they can admire the panorama of the capital to their hearts’ content.

QSSC final concert: Vladyslav Tlushch, baritone, Ukraine. Photo: Per Ole Hagen

The Norwegian government launched a competition for the Opera House building in 1999. The submissions were evaluated by a professional jury and more than seventy thousand residents of Oslo. The winner was a design by the international Snøhetta group. Construction work began in 2003 and was completed four years later – not only ahead of schedule, but also at a much lower cost than planned, despite the fact that the finest materials were used in the construction.

White granite and marble create an impression of a glacier flowing into the waters of the bay. Above the stage rises an aluminium tower covered with a pattern reminiscent of Norwegian weaving techniques. The entrance is through a gap in the façade – directly into the foyer, with panels of glass supported by steel columns and a wooden “core” that surrounds the stage and the auditorium. The oak slats used for the interior were treated with ammonia, giving them the appearance of seasoned wood. The plafond chandelier casts light diffused through six thousand hand-cut crystals. Several hundred computer models were tested in the design of the acoustics, a process resulting in a perfect two-second reverberation.

At the Opera House we had a meeting with the executive director of the competition, Lars Hallvard Flaeten, who made us aware of the surprising conflict between the Norwegian mentality and the very idea of musical competition. What Norwegians regarded as a mad idea came from the conductor Mariss Jansons, who arrived in Oslo in 1979. If he had not elevated the local Philharmonic Orchestra to a European level during his tenure, even the crown princess would not have been persuaded. However, her competition was to be governed by different rules: uniting rather than dividing, opening a window to the world for Norwegian artists, and opening the eyes of the world to the Norwegian music scene. It started as a piano competition. In 1995 it changed its profile and has been held as the Queen Sonja Singing Competition every two years ever since. Today anyone can apply for entry. The participants’ contest is accompanied by master classes and stage interpretation workshops. The main goal, Flaeten argues, is not to win, but to gain the experience needed in the increasingly versatile world of modern opera.

This year the Norwegian egalitarianism came up against war. The organisers decided not to admit participants from Russia and Belarus – a difficult decision because of the singers’ protests and because of concerns about the quality of the competition, in which representatives of the two nations had ranked among the finalists and winners for years. Yet works by Russian composers were allowed in the repertoire: on the last day Tchaikovsky’s music was heard as many as three times. Doubts arise as to whether the jury acted in accordance with the Kardemommeloven, since in the finals it is the jury that selects the participants’ repertoire, and among those admitted to the final was a Ukrainian national.

QSSC final concert: Jasmin White, contralto, USA. Photo: Per Ole Hagen

However, the atmosphere of the concert – featuring the local orchestra under the baton of James Gaffigan, and Lise Davidsen, who as a host was as brilliant as she had been in Wagner’s roles on the world’s best stages – was joyful and unpretentious. The contest was close, although the podium – apart from the winner, Jasmin White from the United States, a singer endowed with a beautiful contralto voice and an endearing personality – lacked individuality to match the challenges of twenty-first-century opera. We will certainly hear more about White in the future: their final performance was not without some lapses, nevertheless the way White concealed them with purely musical means (especially in Juno’s aria from Handel’s Semele) testifies to the singer’s uncommon intelligence and stage presence. The second prize winner, Armenian baritone Aksel Daveyan, has a lovely, well-controlled voice of the kind that is quickly forgotten – perhaps because his interpretations did not give the impression that they were supported by any in-depth reflection. I found the third prize winner, German countertenor Nils Wanderer, more memorable, mainly because of his poignant performance of “Stille amare” from Handel’s Tolomeo – though I suspect the singer’s voice is not agile enough to win the listeners’ hearts with his overall take on roles in the Baroque repertoire. I wish the Ukrainian baritone Vladyslav Tlushch had made it to the podium. He was rather pale in the aria from Bellini’s I Puritani, but impressed me greatly with his perfect sense of the French style in the chanson bacchique from Thomas’ Hamlet . However, I have no right to question the jury’s verdict on the basis of one stage of the competition, especially as singing is no longer the only indicator of an artist’s potential on contemporary stages.

Let us assume, therefore, that in Oslo all were primi inter pares. I guess we need such a conclusion, not only in the ruthless world of the operatic business.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Link to the source text:
https://www.tygodnikpowszechny.pl/kult-rownosci-po-norwesku-184599

The Art of Eternal Love

I remember a conversation with a University of Göttingen professor who in 2019 spoke of the imminent death of the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, an event that, in his view, was anachronistic, cultivated nineteenth-century rituals of art reception and, despite its attempts to woo younger audiences, completely ruled out any in-depth reflection on the composer’s work. His predictions nearly came true just a year later, when the Festspielhaus slammed its doors shut – for the first time in its post-war history. The festival rose back in convulsions from the devastations of the pandemic. In 2021 the organisers had to cancel the new production of Ring and resign themselves to presenting all performances with the house half full. Last season Katharina Wagner still had to take into account the risk of cancelling performances involving a large chorus and a large cast of soloists. In order to prevent any downtime, she commissioned Roland Schwab to prepare a “spare” staging of Tristan and Isolde to fill gaps in the repertoire, if it became necessary.

Making his Bayreuth debut, Schwab accepted the offer without a second thought, despite the fact that he had to deliver the commission in record time. The offer came in December 2021: given the unique scheduling of the preparations for the Green Hill premieres, the director presented a preliminary version of his concept just a month later. He took into account in it the “Covid” distance between the singers. The relatively sparse sets were designed by Piero Vinciguerra, the costumes by Gabrielle Ruprecht, while the lighting was directed by Nicol Rungsberg. In many respects the new production of Tristan appealed to the sensibility and sense of aesthetics of older, more experienced Wagnerites. The oval space above the stage, matched by an analogous shape on the stage floor, brought to mind not only Wieland Wagner’s legendary stagings, but also Vera Nemirova’s Frankfurt Ring. Restrained stage gesture, limited props, and lights emphasising the stark contrast of black and white completed the impression of asceticism of the whole.

Catherine Foster (Isolde) and Christa Mayer (Brangäne). Photo: Enrico Nawrath

After Valentin Schwarz’s mercilessly booed Ring, the new Tristan was received like an answer to everyone’s prayers. The staging had only two performances – despite constant cast changes, the festival programme went on as originally planned. This year Tristan returned to the Festspielhaus and was again very well received, although Schwab’s concept is not flawless. And yet – compared with the avalanche of trashy ugliness sweeping across most European stages – it fulfils the promise made by the director even before the premiere: that this would be a show in which the spectators would not want to find themselves, but, on the contrary, lose themselves.

From the beginning Schwab tries to convince us that Tristan is essentially a story with a happy ending, a tale of the power of true love all the way to the grave and beyond. To highlight this trope, he resorts to some questionable solutions, however. One them is an allusion to Wagner’s alleged Buddhist inspirations – in the form of a neon sign in the  Devanāgarī script, which accompanies us throughout the performance with the Sanskrit word śāśvata, which means more than “eternal” (because it also means primordial, recurring, continuous, lasting forever), and is essentially at odds with the Buddhist message rejecting the errors of both nihilism and eternalism. The word śāśvata refers precisely to the eternalist belief in the real existence of phenomena as they appear to manifest themselves. Thus, it fits neither the Buddhist worldview nor the message of Wagner’s opera. Doubts are also raised by the fact that the story of Tristan and Isolde has been linked to the late ancient myth of Philemon and Baucis, first told in the eighth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. After all, the story of two Phrygian villagers who were the only people to take under their roof Zeus and Hermes – disguised as poor wanderers – and as a reward for their generosity were transformed posthumously into two trees with intertwined branches, is about love that is fulfilled and lasting. Nor am I convinced by Schwab’s argument that the fate of Tristan and Isolde was similarly summarised by the thirteenth-century German writer Ulrich von Türheim in his completed version of Gottfried von Strassburg’s poem. Let me say once again that Wagner’s Tristan is neither an autobiographical work, nor an operatic adaptation of a medieval romance.

Catherine Foster and Clay Hilley (Tristan). Photo: Enrico Nawrath

This does not change the fact that Schwab’s production reaches the realm of the metaphysical and transcendent in many respects. First of all, this is because of the clear separation of the oval on the stage floor from the rest of the theatrical space. That place, which at the beginning of Act I brings to mind vague associations with a swimming pool aboard a luxurious cruise ship, can be accessed only by the protagonists and only from the moment of their amorous confession. However, something strange happens earlier, when the water turns red at the sound of Isolde’s story about the death of the brave Morold. The oval shape gradually draws both protagonists in, like a dizzying whirl of passion. Yet it does not allow them to become united, either in Act II, when their great duet, begun on a surface in which the light of stars is reflected, ends in a desperate struggle of contrasts between the dazzling World of Day and the fathomless, ink-black World of Night; or in the finale of Act III, when the oval freezes into a silvery-grey, motionless pond. A strong idea – though interpreted by some spectators as an allusion to the practices of totalitarian systems – was to have Tristan mortally wounded by strands of white light descending from the flies. This execution, as it were, resembling death in the electric chair, was preceded by tortures inflicted on the lovers by the jealous Melot, who shone a spotlight in their eyes – a moving symbol of the world from which they both wanted to escape into the night.

In the face of so much magnificence, it is not hard to forgive the director for having the transformed Isolde/Baucis begin her final monologue from behind a thicket of green leaves; it is also possible to turn a blind eye to the idea of bringing on stage three pairs of the lovers’ alter egos embodying the youthful, mature and old ages of their love. Especially given that Markus Poschner dressed the whole thing in a surprisingly subtle musical garment sparkling with flashes of bright orchestral colours (excellent woodwind!) against the dark sounds of instruments in the lower register, constructing the narrative with the method of persistent gradation of tensions. If anything can be said against him, it’s the occasional unstable proportions between the stage and the covered orchestra pit, which was especially problematic for Tristan in Act II. The American tenor Clay Hilley, who stepped in for Stephen Gould at the last moment, has a voice that is slightly smaller and less developed at the top; in addition, he does not always know how to cover minor technical deficiencies with expressive text delivery. However, it must be said that his phrasing is sensitive and elegant enough for him to possibly join the ranks of the best “lyrical” Tristans in the world in a few seasons. Catherine Foster, endowed with a harsh, but assured and perfectly placed soprano, confirmed her class as Isolde: it is a pity that she ran out of steam for the final “Mild und leise wie er lächelt”, for which she paid with too wide a vibrato and several intonation lapses. Christa Mayer did well as Brangäne, although her singing lacked the softness characteristic of the best performers of the role. I found Ólafur Sigurdarson (Melot), who possesses a rather gravelly baritone, more convincing as an actor. Jorge Rodríguez-Norton (Shepherd), Raimund Nolte (Steersman) and Siyabonga Maqungo (Young Sailor) handled their respective episodic roles efficiently.

Clay Hilley and Catherine Foster. Photo: Enrico Nawrath

However, complete understanding of the text, both literary and musical, was demonstrated only by Markus Eiche (a surprisingly fragile Kurwenal, with a baritone voice that is bright and melancholy in tone), and above all by Georg Zeppenfeld in the role of King Marke. His extraordinarily handsome bass, phenomenal diction and unfailing sense of the stage were as usual appreciated by the audience, who rewarded their favourite with a roar of applause.

And so Tristan, as presented by Roland Schwab, again served to wipe away the tears of music lovers disappointed with the new Ring, which reportedly somehow failed to settle. I was about to say that makeshift solutions sometimes proved to be the most durable, but not this time – the staging has been removed from the repertoire for good; next season it will be replaced by a new production by the Icelandic director Þorleifur Örn Arnarsson, with an almost completely different cast conducted by Semyon Bychkov. This was not the end of the festival surprises, especially for fans of good singing. The rumours of the Bayreuther Festspiele’s death turned out to be greatly exaggerated.

Translated by: Anna Kijak