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This story could be described as a classic example of tragedies that often occurred in marriages arranged by royal families, when people who were complete strangers to each other and incompatible in every respect were united – with the sole aim of serving the political or economic interests of the powers involved in the practice. The problem is that these two particular teenagers did genuinely fall in love and their love bore such bitter fruit that we can still shed tears over their unhappiness even today.

María Teresa Rafaela of Spain was the daughter of King Philip V of Spain and his second wife Elisabeth Farnese. One year before her birth, in 1725, King Louis XV of France broke his engagement to Philip’s eldest daughter, the seven-year-old Mariana Victoria, and married the Polish princess Maria Leszczyńska. In order to normalise the relations between the Spanish and the French branch of the House of Bourbon at least to some extent, in the early 1740s a plan was formulated for a marriage between María Teresa and Louis Ferdinand, Louis XV’s fourth child and eldest son, and the long-awaited heir to the French throne. A proxy wedding was held in late December 1744 in Madrid and then the infanta set off on a long journey to France. She reached Versailles on 21 February 1745. Two days later she met her husband, who at that time was not yet sixteen.

Unfortunately, the unanimous conclusion after the wedding night was that the marriage had not been consummated. The teenage dauphin had failed to rise to the challenge. His reserved and shy wife became the object of scorn and derision of the court. Something unexpected happened, however. Instead of wallowing in shame and humiliation, the young couple began to get to know each other better. They did not leave each other’s side even for a moment. It was not until September 1745 that María lost her virginity with Louis. A few months later she became pregnant. The child was born after the date set by physicians and the mother died three days later, two weeks after the death of Philip V. She was only twenty years old. The dauphin fell into such despair that his father reportedly had to drag him forcibly from his late wife’s bed. One year later Louis Ferdinand was forced to marry again – this time Maria Josepha of Saxony, the daughter of Augustus III, Prince-Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. Louis’ firstborn daughter passed away at the age of only two years. The marriage to Maria Josepha produced thirteen children. Five were stillborn. Three died in early childhood. Three sons ascended the throne of France – one of them, Louis XVI, was executed by guillotine. At the age of thirty-six Louis Ferdinand died of tuberculosis. He never became king. He was survived by his father and even maternal grandfather. Before his death the dauphin ordered that his heart be buried in the tomb of his first wife.

Katya Klein (María Teresa Rafaela of Spain). Photo: Javier del Real

Louis Ferdinand’s father-in-law, Philip V, was an ardent lover of music and beautiful voices. In 1734 Elisabeth Farnese brought the famous castrato Farinelli to the Madrid court – as a criado familiar, or servant of the royal family, Farinelli would soothe the monarch’s severe melancholy with his singing. It was at the same time that Francesco Corselli – a Piacenza-born son of a French dancer named Courcelle, a name subsequently Italianised – was active in Madrid as a singer, violinist, harpsichordist and teacher of the royal children. In 1738 he was appointed Kapellmeister of the Capilla Real. Shortly before the “remote” wedding of Infanta María Teresa he was commissioned to write an opera celebrating the event. He used for the purpose a libretto by Pietro Metastasio, Achille in Sciro, which had already been set to music by Antonio Caldara, in 1736. Metastasio was by no means the first to turn this mythological theme into an opera: as early as in 1641 the story of the hero in female robes was tackled by Francesco Sacrati – in La finta pazza composed to a libretto by Carlo Strozzi and staged at the Teatro Novissimo in Venice.

Corselli’s Achille was premiered at the Coliseo del Buen Retiro under Farinelli’s musical direction, and with Santiago Bonavía’s sets and stage machinery. The work was much less lucky than Rameau’s comic ballet Platée, staged to mark the same occasion, shortly after the “real” wedding of Louis and María Teresa at the Great Royal Stables of Versailles. Achille was forgotten for nearly 280 years, until Ivor Bolton, Teatro Real’s Music Director, decided to resurrect it in Madrid. His plans were thwarted by the pandemic – Achille in Sciro directed by Mariame Clément, with sets by Julia Hansen, lighting by Ulrik Gad and choreography by Mathieu Guilhaumon, was cancelled shortly before the lockdown. The premiere took place nearly three years later, though not without mishaps: Franco Fagioli eventually withdrew from the role of Achilles and was replaced by the Spanish countertenor Gabriel Díaz, who fell ill after the second performance. The third show was cancelled and the following ones hung in the balance – the performance I got to see took place in an atmosphere of extreme tension due to the long-planned OperaVision broadcast.

According to the well-known version of the myth, Achilles’ mother Thetis decided to protect her only son from death by the walls of Troy at all costs by hiding him disguised as a girl on the island of Skyros, ruled by King Lycomedes. Her ruse was seen through by Ulysses, who, resorting to a different stratagem, persuaded Achilles to follow the voice of his own nature, and to choose battlefield fame over a long life of idleness that would condemn him to oblivion among future generations. Metastasio wove into this narrative love between Achilles and Deidamia, Lycomedes’ daughter. Deidamia’s love is steadfast like a rock. It is Achilles who hesitates, torn between passion and duty, not realising that it is possible to combine both.

Francesca Aspromonte (Deidamia) and Gabriel Díaz (Achilles). Photo: Javier del Real

Mariame Clément decided to bring into the action of the opera the infanta herself (the phenomenal Katya Klein in the pantomime role of María Teresa), a shy and confused teenager, in whose eyes the story of Deidamia and Achilles is transformed from a royal entertainment into an instructive school of feelings. The whole thing takes place in a conventional “Baroque” setting, with archetypal costumes, in a half-serious, half-comic convention that would have been even more impressive had the producers not got stuck halfway between reconstruction and an attempt to appeal to the sensibility of a contemporary audience. There was not enough fairy-tale wonder, bright colours, exaggeration, contrasts and breathtaking illusion in this concept. On the other hand – there was too much running about, slapstick acting as well as empty gestures repeated again and again. Yet I must admit that I was deeply moved by the director’s idea – perfectly conveyed by Klein – to make the infanta identify with Achilles rather than with Deidamia, with an insecure boy who, like her, has no idea what awaits him in a foreign country, far from the hated but nevertheless familiar world; who wants to love and be loved, but deep down senses that love must give way to an inexorable raison d’état.

I am writing this from the perspective of a foreign critic, fully aware of the fact that the allusions included in the production touched the rawest nerves with the local audience. I also take into account the universal need for theatrical “truth”, which prompted the creative team to cast most roles in this multi-layered game of appearances in line with today’s historical performance convention. Yet – paradoxically – Corselli entrusted the roles of Achilles and Ulysses to women. The only role in the opera sung by a castrato was the character role of Nearco, performed by a tenor in the Madrid production.

I will not protest against this “old-new” convention, especially as most of the singers performed their tasks flawlessly. Particularly noteworthy was the freedom in their delivery of the recitatives, knowledge of style and sense of expression in the showpiece da capo arias, and – last but not least – deep respect for the text of the libretto, delivered without exception with clarity, with due attention to the prosody and logic of phrasing. Given the fiendish difficulty of the title role, in comparison with the rest of the cast Gabriel Díaz – a singer endowed with a voice that is not very glamorous, but nevertheless confident and finely controlled, especially in the lyrical sections – made an unexpectedly good expression. His Achilles found a worthy partner in Francesca Aspromonte (Deidamia), although at times the singer had to make up for some technical shortcomings in her coloratura with excessive expressiveness. Tim Mead was a bit disappointing as Ulysses with his typically English, i.e. not very resonant, countertenor. The young Spanish soprano Sabina Puértolas excelled as the rejected suitor Teagenes. Much more impressive of the two character tenor figures was Krystian Adam (Arcade), a singer with a free, beautifully open voice and excellent sense of Baroque improvisation. Juan Sancho, otherwise convincing as Nearco, often made up for minor shortcomings with some bravura acting. Of the entire cast the only disappointment came from Mirco Palazzi, who sang Lycomedes with a bass too feeble and harmonically too poor for the role of the authoritative, awe-inspiring ruler of Skyros. The Teatro Real chorus, led by Andrés Máspero, was splendid as usual.

Sabina Puértolas (Teagenes). Photo: Javier del Real

However, the true hero of the evening was Ivor Bolton, who with an impressive sense of style realised the basso continuo on the harpsichord with the other musicians of the Monteverdi Continuo Ensemble, and conducted an expanded Orquesta Barroca de Sevilla from the instrument. Despite occasional false notes in brass and minor intonational lapses, he managed to maintain the nerve and pulse of Corselli’s hybrid, essentially Italian, at times seductively French musical narrative, and in the second and third acts highlight the extraordinary dialogues of the violin, mandolin and trumpet with the soloists’ vocal displays. What is also commendable is his meticulous approach to working with the singers. Bolton’s interpretations are very vivid and bear a characteristic, recognisable mark of his intriguing artistic personality. This is a rarity in today’s increasingly uniform world of historically informed performance.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

When I was a teenager, I loved Tadeusz Różewicz’s now rather forgotten play The Laocoon Group – not least because I was lucky enough to see a production at Warsaw’s Teatr Współczesny directed by Zygmunt Hübner and featuring an unequalled cast led by Zofia Mrozowska, Wiesław Michnikowski and Henryk Borowski. It was a frightfully funny performance, from which I will always remember the pretentious tirade of the Father, a representative of the so-called working intelligentsia, who, having returned from Italy, tells his family about the famous sculpture from the Vatican Museums, weaving quotations from Virgil, among other things, into his story. The problem is that he only saw a plaster copy of it, as the original had just been removed for restoration.

I had a vivid recollection of the scene from The Laocoon Group, when I received a message confirming my accreditation for a performance of Der fliegende Holländer at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna. It wasn’t until I read that I was to pick up my ticket at the entrance to the EuropAuditorium in Piazza Costituzione that I remembered that as of January the famous Sala Bibiena, and with it the entire theatre building, would be undergoing renovation for four years – roughly the length of the reconstruction work after the great fire of 1931, which ended with the rebuilding of the auditorium in its current horseshoe shape. Tough luck: I had to get over the fact I would not be seeing the most famous “Wagnerian” stage in Italy. Not only the venue of the Italian premiere of Der fliegende Holländer and of the first performance of Lohengrin – which Verdi followed from a box with the score on his lap – but also the first theatre in the world to receive official permission from the Bayreuth Festival to stage Parsifal, on 1 January 1914, under the baton of Rodolfo Ferrari, with the phenomenal Giuseppe Borgatti in the title role and the Polish singer Helena Rakowska – the wife of Tullio Serafin – in the role of Kundry. An opera house headed by such music directors as Sergiu Celibidache and Riccardo Chailly in the past, and since last January by Oksana Lyniv – not just the first female conductor here, but also the first ever woman to be in charge of an opera company in Italy. One year before that Lyniv broke another taboo by conducting Der fliegende Holländer at the opening of the Wagner feast in Bayreuth, after 145 years of uninterrupted male reign at the helm of the local orchestra.

Scene from the Act 1. Photo: Andrea Ranzi

In August 2022 I had mixed feelings after a revival of the Bayreuth Holländer under her baton. I decided to verify my opinion in Bologna, choosing for the purpose a performance with the second cast in order not to be influenced by my impressions of the singers I had heard the previous season not just in Bayreuth, but also at Grange Park Opera in England. The first pleasant surprise came, when I dealt with the company’s very efficient press office. The second – when I picked up the superbly edited programme book for the production, with exhaustive documentation of past productions of Wagner’s opera at the Teatro Comunale and an extensive discography of the work, dating back to 1936. The third – after my first look inside the EuropAuditorium, a 1,700-seat theatre with a fairly deep orchestra pit and a fully equipped stage tower, located in the 1975 functionalist Palazzo di Congressi (its main designer was Melchiorre Bega, the architect behind the famous “golden high-rise” of the Axel Springer concern in Berlin). It may not be a dream venue for presenting Wagner’s works, but it does boast excellent, very selective acoustics, making it possible to honestly assess not only the soloists’ abilities, but also the overall interpretative concept for the piece.

However, I will start with the staging, as it seemed to be absent in Bologna, which is all the more surprising given that both the director Paul Curran and the set designer Robert Innes Hopkins are experienced opera people who have worked for years – successfully – on several continents. In addition, both are highly skilled at Personregie and creating a theatrical world in a relatively small space. Yet this time neither of them took into account the fact that the EuropAuditorium stage is shallow, but relatively wide, and, most importantly, that it does not provide intimate contact with the audience, seated in a vast and flat auditorium. The vision presented by Curran and Hopkins (in collaboration with the lighting director Daniele Naldi and the projection designer Driscoll Otto) gave the impression of being not so much minimalist as economical and, most significantly, imitative of the Florence staging of Der fliegende Holländer done four years earlier by Curran with a different set designer (Saverio Santoliquido). Images – almost identical to those in Florence – of the rolling sea and the ghostly attributes of the Dutchman’s ship were displayed in Bologna against a backdrop of three overlapping panels, in a space less well lit and less appealing to the audience’s imagination. In the second act, set – unconvincingly – in a contemporary industrial sewing room, projections partially replaced the fixed decoration from Santoliquido’s vision, and were supplemented by Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (serving as a portrait of the legendary Dutchman) superimposed on the waves. Like four years ago the costumes were from an unspecified period. Several theatrical effects – including the pulling ashore of Daland’s invisible ship – were copied from the previous staging. There was no chemistry between the characters whatsoever. In the finale the Dutchman sneaked out through a gap in the middle screen, while Senta climbed to the top of the side panel and disappeared in the wings. This failed compromise between tradition and modernity was more reminiscent of a staged concert or amateur theatre performance, although, admittedly, it did not particularly bother the singers.

Sonja Šarić (Senta) and Anton Keremidtchiev (The Dutchman). Photo: Andrea Ranzi

They were, however, especially in the Act 1, hampered by the orchestra playing with a truly Verdian temperament and generally in a style more suitable for I vespri siciliani or Un ballo in maschera rather than any of Wagner’s scores. As an ardent admirer and researcher of archives – including regional archives – I listened to this performance with genuine emotion, relishing the virtuoso displays of the violin concertmaster, the tearful solos of the oboe and the repeated attacks of the brass. It would have been truly fascinating, if Lyniv had been able to give the whole at least a semblance of a consistent romantic narrative. Yet all doubts I had raised about her interpretation in Bayreuth were more than confirmed in Bologna. Lyniv is a genuine modernist, dissecting the piece into its constituent parts, extracting sometimes unexpected details from the texture – but she is unable to put them back together into a convincing story. Her conducting is sweeping, has real verve, but it works only in the most dazzling passages. Wherever the narrative requires lyricism and ability to read forgotten aesthetic codes – it loses its pulse, gets bogged down in meanderings of boredom and feigned emotion. Lyniv’s interpretations bring to mind monochromatic photographs in which it is impossible to see the forest from behind black and white trees. There is inhuman sharpness and surgical precision in them. There are no colours, chiaroscuro effects or logical dynamic and agogic contrasts.

That is why Anton Keremidtchiev, who is endowed with a small but very handsome baritone, shone as the Dutchman only in Act 3 – his chilling monologue “Die Frist ist um” was drowned in a sea of perfectly articulated but meaningless orchestral sounds. That is why Senta, portrayed by the very young and very musical Sonja Šarić, gave up after several attempts to make her famous ballad sway and sang it politely, evenly, to the beat imposed by the conductor. Goran Jurić must have looked up to Peter Rose from the first cast during rehearsals. Rose knows how to highlight the similarities between Daland and the equally ambiguous character of Rocco from Beethoven’s Fidelio, but Jurić lacked intonational and technical prowess in the role. I find it difficult to judge Alexander Schulz, who took on the role of Erik just days before the opening night; however, I did not expect a tenor singing with such a strong foreign accent and in a manner associated with verismo rather than Wagner’s youthful oeuvre. Despite her young age the Russian mezzo-soprano Marina Ogii has a voice that is too dilapidated even for the role of Mary. Paolo Antognetti gave a very decent performance as the Steersman: I’m referring here more to the sonorous, bronzy tone of his voice rather than to his interpretation of his character. The unquestionable hero of the performance was the Teatro Comunale chorus, prepared by its new master, Gea Garatti Ansini, and singing with perfectly produced, rich and beautifully rounded sound.

Anton Keremidtchiev, Alexander Schulz (Erik) and Sonja Šarić. Photo: Andrea Ranzi

Summing up my field research on Der fliegende Holländer as interpreted by Oksana Lyniv, I will return to the discussion of the two Gentlemen with the Customs Officers in Różewicz’s play: after an exchange of remarks about Kierkegaard, one of the Customs Officers, when asked about what is new in the country, waves his hand and says: “Disintegration, alienation, frustration, everything as it used to be”. I never thought I would have to go all the way to Bologna to find that out.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

People of Westphalia joke that tourists do not have to buy a new map of Münster: they can get by with a copy of one of the sixteenth-century copperplates with a panorama of the city. The layout of the streets has not changed for hundreds of years, even after the Second World War, when more than ninety per cent of Münster’s Old Town lay in ruins following Allied air raids and the subsequent artillery attack. Münster is one of the few German cities which did not implement a modernist reconstruction plan – with a network of car-friendly thoroughfares and with isolated historic buildings emerging from a sea of modern edifices. There were disputes, but eventually the idea of raising the city from the ruins almost intact won: whether out of respect for the city’s turbulent history or because of the ambiguous attitude of Bishop Klemens von Galen, who thundered from the pulpit just as loudly against Nazi crimes against the civilian population as he did against the carpet bombings of German cities towards the end of the war.

One of the few concessions to modernist architectural thought is the building of the Theater Münster, just a several minutes’ walk from two of the city’s most famous religious buildings: the monumental, late-Romanesque St. Paul’s Cathedral, known in Poland primarily as the venue of the premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki’s St. Luke Passion, and the gloomy Gothic St. Lambert’s Church, on the tower of which it is still possible to find the frightening iron cages where the remains of the murdered leaders of the theocratic Anabaptist commune were displayed in 1535. The building, designed by four young German architects on the initiative of Hermann Wedekind, the then director of the municipal theatre, caused a sensation across Europe. Opened in 1956, it was the first modern theatre in post-war Germany. It combined bold spatial solutions – primarily a paraboloid stage tower and a perfectly designed three-tier auditorium ensuring intimate contact with the performers even for spectators from the farthest rows – with respect for the city’s cultural traditions. The new structure encompassed not only the remains of the old theatre and music school, but also the trees that survived the wartime conflagration and were included in the plan of the inner courtyard.

Rachel Nicholls (Elektra). Photo: Martina Pipprich

With time the furore died down, but solid craftsmanship has remained, since 2017 under the leadership of Golo Berg, who took over the musical directorship of the company from the Italian conductor Fabrizio Ventura. In January last year Katharina Kost-Tolmein, a pianist and a graduate in musicology and philosophy from the University of Heidelberg, was appointed general director and opened her first season at the Theater Münster with a production of Ernst Křenek’s Leben des Orest, having previously been at the helm of Theater Lübeck for seven years. Nearly one year later she decided to return to the motif of destructive revenge among the Atrides by staging Strauss’ Elektra – the first fruit of the composer’s collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his most daring excursion into radical musical modernism.

Kost-Tolmein declares herself to be an advocate of theatre that is “modern and open to experimentation”. I had an opportunity to see what this meant in practice five years ago in Lübeck, where I travelled to see a performance of The Flying Dutchman featuring a very decent cast and brilliantly conducted by Anthony Negus, but in a staging by Aniara Amos that was inept to the point of ridiculousness. I suspected that I might experience something similar in Münster and I was not wrong. Although Elektra, as presented by Paul-Georg Dittrich, was not as visually off-putting as the Lübeck Dutchman (perhaps thanks to Dittrich’s collaboration with the experienced Christoph Ernst, who was responsible for the set, costume and lighting design), it did expose all the sins of the German Regieoper, revealing few of its virtues in exchange. Elektra may be Richard Strauss’ most coherent stage work. It virtually begs to be directed, especially bearing in mind the powerful influence on the dramaturgy of Elektra, as well as the earlier Salome, of the ideas of Max Reinhardt, who categorically opposed the interference of politics in the sphere of art. Yet Dittrich turned Stauss’ one-act opera into a veritable orgy of political theatre, combining without any rhyme or reason elements of agitprop and old-fashioned Zeittheater with unbearably simplified social criticism of the Castorfian and Polleschian kind.

Margarita Vilsone (Chrysothemis), Rachel Nicholls, and Hasti Molavian, Maria Christina Tsiakourma and Katharina Sahmland as Maids. Photo: Martina Pipprich

Thus an operatic study of revenge was transformed into grand reckoning with the German past and present – with the protagonists portraying increasingly new and increasingly bizarre characters. The frantic journey from the decline of the Hohenzollern dynasty, through the Third Reich and the turbulent 1960s, to the Tatort Münster crime series, the activities of the NSU terrorist militia and cheap journalistic allusions to the Merkel and Schröder governments, was accompanied by an almost constant movement of the revolving stage. The performers rushed to and fro, led by Elektra, who first swapped her costume of a predatory Lolita for an SS uniform, and later dressed up as Romy Schneider portraying Elisabeth of Bavaria in the film Sissi. A detailed description of this pandemonium is beyond my patience and the framework of this review. Suffice it to say that an alphabetical guide to the director’s tropes took up two pages of small print in the programme booklet. Only the Maids, dressed by Ernst in surprisingly realistic exoskeletons of the female oriental cockroaches (Blatta orientalis), retained a relatively unified identity.

I always admire artists who in such harmful working conditions simply do their job and do it well. I came to Münster primarily because of Rachel Nicholls, whose career I have been following closely since her decision to gradually move towards dramatic soprano roles. Someone once said that Salome needed an adolescent Isolde and Elektra – a Brunhilde that is not much older. Nicholls has both Isolde and Brunhilde in her repertoire, and in both roles she comes close to the aesthetics that not only Wagner, but also Strauss would have preferred. Her voice is relatively bright and sounds really youthful, does not need to be forced in the excellent acoustics of the Theater Münster, and given the singer’s extraordinary intelligence, tremendous musicality and acting skills it becomes a perfect vehicle for the madness tormenting Elektra. Nicholls’ interpretation is definitely closer to Rose Pauly’s portrayal from the late 1930s than to the legendary interpretations of Inge Borkh and Birgit Nilsson – which should, in fact, be regarded as a complement. Her Elektra is both fragile and terrifying, and, most importantly, develops as a character, from the powerful monologue “Allein! Weh, ganz allein” to the eerie “Ob ich die Musik nicht höre? Sie kommt doch aus mir” in the finale of the opera. She found a worthy partner in the Chrysothemis of Margarita Vilsone, a singer with a resonant, rich and very warm soprano. Helena Köhne was an outstanding Clytemnestra, with a contralto appropriate for the role, beautifully developed and superbly controlled, but the artist was decidedly less committed as an actress, which is entirely understandable given that the director turned her into an Angela Merkel. Singing in an otherwise handsome baritone, Johan Hyunbong Choi (Orestes) failed to build a convincing character, which Aaron Cawley, surprisingly, managed to accomplish in the brief part of Aegisthus. It is worth paying attention to this singer, who found himself in Dittrich’s staging in place of the indisposed Garrie Davislim: the young Irishman has the makings of an interesting Heldentenor with a golden, baritone tone. Worthy of note among the rest of the cast were Maria Christina Tsiakourma, Hasti Molavian, Wioletta Hebrowska, Katharina Sahmland and Robyn Allegra Parton, who made up a perfectly integrated, though sonically diverse, ensemble of five Maids. The whole was masterfully controlled by Golo Berg, who skilfully emphasised both the novelty of the work (Elektra’s demonic death “waltz”!) and the often surprising lyricism of the score.

Margarita Vilsone and Rachel Nicholls. Helena Köhne (Clytemnestra) in the middle background. Photo: Martina Pipprich

I left the theatre delighted with the quality of the performance, but unable to shake off the thought of how much more beautiful and terrifying it would have been, if it had been without the swastikas, burning Hindenburgs and ubiquitous cockroaches. I hope that no fan of theatre that is “modern and open to experimentation” will commission Dittrich to transfer Kafka’s Metamorphosis to the stage.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Even if Offenbach had not seen Jules Barbier and Michel Carré’s Les contes fantastiques d’Hoffmann on stage – which is unlikely, as Parisians flocked to the Théâtre de l’Odéon after the successful premiere of the play in 1851 – he certainly must have heard about it. The idea for a loose adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s three short stories (The Sandman; Councillor Krespel; and A New Year’s Eve Adventure) came from both authors. Barbier’s brilliant intuition told him to introduce Hoffmann himself into the narrative and make him the main protagonist of this kaleidoscopic tale of love and other demons. More than a decade later the play was adapted into a libretto for an opera which was to have been composed by Héctor Salomon. It was not until a few years after the Franco-Prussian War that Offenbach showed some serious interest in the text, when he had to rebuild his Parisian career basically from scratch. The libretto was entrusted to Barbier alone – Carré had died prematurely in 1872. Had it not been for some unlucky coincidences, it is possible that Offenbach would have immediately got down to work and presented his “true” opera in the 1877/78 season, as originally planned.

Yet it was only in that season that he began composing in earnest. A successful trip to the United States had brought him considerable financial benefits, thanks to which he was finally able to pay off his debts and return to abandoned scores. Unfortunately, the gout he had contracted during the years of prosperity was increasingly robbing him of his strength. As he was writing The Tales of Hoffmann, Offenbach knew he was dying. He would wake up at night so tormented by his illness that even the slightest touch of the sheets gave him unbearable pain. During the day he sought solace in conversations with his dog – a creature presumably ugly and dwarfish in stature, since he named him after Kleinzach, the dwarf from the song in the opera’s prologue. Apparently he confessed to the dog that he would have given everything to live to see the premiere of his work. He fell four months short. The Tales of Hoffmann, with an orchestration and recitatives by Ernest Guiraud, cut and reassembled by Léon Carvalho, the then director of the Opéra-Comique, found its way onto the stage in February 1881 and was an instant triumph. Today it is Offenbach’s most frequently produced work and, at the same time, a work that still remains open, virtually impossible to reconstruct in line with the composer’s intention despite the musicological discoveries of past decades.

In recent seasons The Tales has been performed usually in the version edited jointly by Michael Kaye and Jean-Christophe Keck, the most dramaturgically coherent to date. And it is in this version that the opera had its most recent premiere at the Göteborgsoperan, in a staging co-produced with the Saarländisches Staatstheater Saarbrücken, conducted by Sébastien Rouland and directed by Krystian Lada. The set was designed by Marian Nketiah, a graduate of the Faculty of Architecture, Technische Universität Berlin; the costumes by Bente Rolandsdotter, whose designs I have already praised in my review of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Basel; and the lighting design, extremely important in this production, was done by Aleksandr Prowaliński, a member of the Polish director’s team during the production of Daniel Catán’s opera Florencia en el Amazonas at the Theater St. Gallen.

Fanny Wranne (supernumerary) and Andrew Foster-Williams (Coppelius). Photo: Lennart Sjöberg

While entrusting the four main female roles in The Tales to one singer (as Offenbach intended) is becoming the prevailing practice at most opera houses, the idea of casting three singers in the role of Hoffmann has so far occurred probably only to Barrie Kosky in his 2015 Berlin production. However, Kosky created his production with different means and for a completely different purpose than Krystian Lada, who decided on a similar manoeuvre in Gothenburg. In Lada’s production the main protagonist is a middle-aged Hoffmann – a poet, writer, artist experiencing a violent crisis after parting with the woman of his life. Locked within the four walls of his miserably deserted flat, he drinks himself into a stupor, despairs and struggles with a series of hallucinatory images in which he – and his beloved Stella – appear as characters from the past, protagonists of quite recent events and prefigurations of individuals they may become in the future. In this half Faustian, half Freudian journey into the depths of his own psyche Hoffmann is accompanied by numerous secondary and two major figures: of true love, requiring sacrifice, but leading to true freedom – represented by the Muse identified with Niklaus (also in keeping with the composer’s intention to some extent) – and by four incarnations of the Mephistophelean force: “part of the Darkness which brought forth the Light”. In such an interpretation The Tales of Hoffmann is not just a description of three stages from a man’s life, but also a story of maturation: a fantastic tale of an increasingly wise prince who slowly realises how much harm he did to princesses, who harmed him as well. A man who has to face his own ego, to confront four demons that “constantly contradict” and put him to the test, to understand that sometimes you have to stop existing in order to become human again – not just a poet.

In the Swedish production Hoffmann observes himself from the outside, argues with himself, impersonates himself from the past and himself imagined at the end of his life. That is why, although the “middle” Hoffmann is at the forefront in the production, the protagonist often speaks in the voices of the other two incarnations and sometimes even sings along with them. In addition, he identifies with the mocked Kleinzach (hence the idea of having his ballad accompanied by a harrowing pantomime with the young Hoffman being bullied by his peers) and sees a facet of his personality in the characters he has hitherto blamed for his misfortune (an excellent idea to cast the role of Spalanzani with the same singer who sings the old Hoffmann).

Kerstin Avemo (Stella). Photo: Lennart Sjöberg

Such an interpretation, uncannily in keeping with the intentions of the opera’s creators, requires huge precision and consistency from all members of the creative team. This was successfully accomplished in Gothenburg, which is all the more admirable given that The Tales of Hoffmann is problematic for virtually everyone involved in producing this masterpiece, and given that in the case of Krystian Lada was the first project on such a scale since his memorable Nabucco at the Wrocław Opera. Lada used a very wide range of theatrical means, including projections of pre-recorded films and rather intensive use of the revolving stage. Admittedly, in the Prologue I felt rather overwhelmed by this profusion: fortunately, wandering through the maze of archetypes and symbols was made easier by Bente Rolandsdotter and her “talking” costumes, seemingly surreal, but in fact helping me to understand who was who in a world of brightly painted sensitive souls on the one hand, and grotesque brutes squeezed into bondage harnesses on the other. The Olympia Act – instead of being presented in Paris – “stopped” in the bourgeois Nuremberg, among sets phenomenally arranged by Nketiah and taken as if straight from Die Meistersinger. The Antonia Act, originally intended to take place in Munich, unfolded in an extremely intimate space shaped by light and gesture, bringing to mind any place in Europe where people are harmed behind the closed doors of wealthy houses. The Giulietta Act pulsated with the sparkle of the diamond from Dapertutto’s aria and the relentless rhythm of games at a Venetian casino. Nothing was modern here and nothing was from the period. Hoffman was drinking himself to death in a dressing gown that looked like a pathetic memory of the flowery shirt from his youth. The terrified and very much alive Olympia – looking as if taken straight from a folk painting of the Madonna – brought to mind the words of Kleist, who claimed that perfect grace could be an attribute of either a mechanical puppet or God himself. The stunningly voluptuous curves of the Muse evoked the archetype of the eternal feminine – in a reference not only to Jung, but also to Słowacki and his childhood dream determining our entire adult life. The concept of Lindorf/Coppelius/Miracle/Dapertutto’s fluid identity fitted aptly with the idea of multiplicity of evil present in us.

There are a few Polish tropes in this production, including Olympia shown as a victim of a violent, religiously obsessed society that tries to force the woman into the role of a submissive, mindless doll. There are several études devised as a tribute to Offenbach, who wanted the audience to burst out laughing in relief, unable to bear the excess of emotions contained in the work. There are several memorable scenes: the departure of Olympia, the symbolic death of Antonia, the moment in which the old Hoffmann realises that, having killed Schlemil, he in fact has killed himself.

Kerstin Avemo (Giulietta), Tomas Lind (old Hoffmann), and Eskil Fridfors (supernumerary). Photo: Lennart Sjöberg

Lada’s concept found excellent performers in the singers, especially in Kerstin Avemo, a phenomenal actress with a soprano that is not large but very agile, with Avemo skilfully balancing it within the styles which Offenbach made the subject of his provocative play with convention. Among the production’s three Hoffmanns Joachim Bäckström had the most work to do. His is a typical jugendlicher Heldentenor, beautiful in colour, although still insufficiently nuanced for this difficult role. The American lyric tenor Brian Michael Moore did well as the young Hoffmann, but I have to say that of the three incarnations of the protagonist I was impressed the most by Tomas Lind – a Hoffmann who was as convincing vocally as he was as a character, and who maked an impression on the heart and the ear as the most believable personification of an artist going through an age crisis, and, at the same time, an example of the enduring beauty of a well-managed and wisely nurtured voice. During the 9 December performance the undisposed Katarina Karnéus (Muse/Niklaus) found a worthy replacement in Ann-Kristin Jones singing from the wings. The quadruple role of Lindorf/Coppelius/Miracle/Dapertutto was entrusted to Andrew Foster-Williams, who confirmed his class not only as an excellent performer of roles written for a uniquely “French” bass voice, but also as a fine actor with an exceptional sense of humour. The artist deserving special mention among those singing the character roles was Daniel Ralphsson (Andrès/Cochenille/Frantz/Pitichinaccio), especially for his hilarious interpretation of “Jour et nuit je mets en quarte”, proof of the musical deafness of the servant Frantz, portrayed in this production as a seemingly ordinary technician, hanging around on stage from the beginning of the performance.

The entire performance was conducted with extraordinary verve and a sense of style by Sébastien Rouland, an artist known also to Polish music lovers, a pupil of Marc Minkowski and conductor of Offenbach’s La vie parisienne in a version prepared under his direction at the Opéra National de Lyon and released on DVD by Virgin Classics. “What emerges from this mirror,” to quote the ending of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s A New Year’s Eve Adventure? Well, the point that from the beginning a co-production should be treated as a coherent artistic vision, followed under the baton of a knowledgeable conductor, with singers aware of their duties, and with a director who knows how to read a score. Yet in Poland this does not seem to work somehow. I am waiting for the end of the story of the lost reflection – which will finally be transformed into a new beginning thanks to a devoted creative team.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

This was once the place where the madness of Shakespeare’s Macbeth started. Today Inverness is regarded as one of the happiest cities in Scotland. It is located in beautiful surroundings, like the legendary castle of the Thane of Cawdor, and has cheerful residents – people proud of their community, passionate about the local nature, happy with city’s the social and cultural offerings. Two and a half years ago I had an opportunity to see the enthusiasm with which they welcomed another venture of the Mahler Players chamber orchestra under its founder Tomas Leakey – a concert featuring Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht in an authorial version for string orchestra, and the first act of Wagner’s Die Walküre arranged by Matthew King and Peter Longworth for an ensemble of just twenty-something musicians. Six months later Leakey presented two symphonies by Sibelius with a similar line-up. During the lockdown he recorded the first album with his ensemble – of the symphony Richard Wagner in Venice commissioned from King and based on the composer’s late, fragmentary drafts. That debut CD caused quite a stir on the UK record market and received excellent reviews, including one by myself. After the restrictions were lifted Leakey found time to regale his fellow Highlanders with chamber versions of symphonic works by Beethoven and Mahler, before returning to his “Wagner Project”: more experienced thanks to a Bayreuth scholarship funded in 2020 by the Wagner Society of Scotland.

When he wrote to me that this time he had prepared, together with King and Longworth, the second act of Tristan, and assured me that Inverness was just as beautiful in December as it was in June – with just the day being shorter – I immediately accepted the invitation. On the day of the concert I took a long walk in the morning along the shore of the Moray Firth to watch waves as heavy and leaden as those on which Tristan, mad with longing, watched out for Isolde’s ship. I returned through Merkinch, a neighbourhood in which the poor once lived and which struggled with the nightmare of the last great famine in Scotland, as Wagner was writing his Tristan. In the evening I turned up at the Gothic Revival Cathedral of St. Andrew, consecrated less than a decade after the premiere of the opera. I thought I knew what to expect, especially given that the cast included the performers of the title roles from the 2017 revival of Tristan at Longborough – an experience after which I nearly died of an excess of emotion – as well as the legendary singer Sir John Tomlinson, one of the best Wotans in Bayreuth’s post-war history and King Marke in the 1993 production conducted by Barenboim. Now Tomlinson was to take on the role again, almost thirty years after his Tristan debut on the Green Hill.

Tristan at the Inverness cathedral. On the right Sir John Tomlinson (King Marke). Photo: Mahler Players

Leakey planned the concert without an interval, preceding the second act with the Prelude to the opera, and closing the whole with the Introduction to act three and the final “Liebestod”. My first surprise came from the sonic richness of the arrangement, written for a slightly larger ensemble than in Die Walküre, but still consisting of only thirty-six musicians. King and Longworth did not follow the path chosen by Matthias Wegele in last year’s “pocket” Tristan from Vienna: Wegele preferred to dispense with several key instruments, including the harp, and to build the texture from scratch as it were – with intriguing results, although in some ways closer to the aesthetics of modernism. The authors of the arrangement for the Mahler Players decided to remain faithful to the score and to reduce it in such a way that the listeners would have the impression of hearing the work played by the full cast. This is by no means easy, which makes King and Longworth’s stylish and balanced version – with only occasional imbalances to the detriment of the strings – all the more admirable. On the other hand I’m not sure whether such imbalance can be avoided in any reduction of Tristan, if Wagner himself stressed the importance of the numbers and sound quality of the quintet in the score.

The Inverness performance was a typical concert, with soloists singing from their music stands. And this brought another surprise for me: Peter Wedd, the Tristan incarnate, an artist who had twice brought the LFO audience to its knees, not only with the beauty of his voice, but also with his extraordinary musicality and phenomenal acting, this time did not even try to at least make eye contact with Lee Bisset. He sang as if inwards, with great concentration and with some vague sadness, without the youthful ardour he had in Longborough. I had the impression that Wedd was saying goodbye to his protagonist, slipping, as it were, into his death; that he was not so much asking Isolde to follow him into the darkness of the Night, as plunging into it himself – resigned, broken, unwilling to die. I find this contrary to the letter of Wagner’s text, although I must admit that the performance itself was captivating. Wedd’s dark tenor continues to gain in vividness, especially in the lower register, and his high notes sound strong and confident, although they sometimes seem a little dim. By contrast, Bisset’s singing, despite some technical shortcomings (minor intonation problems at the beginning of the act) seemed all the more human, warmer, more effective as a vehicle for what are, after all, diverse emotions. However, I got the impression that they were both polishing each phrase with such abandon that they lost the text of the libretto along the way. I put this down to the capricious acoustics of the church.

But then Tomlinson stood up from his chair and sang “Tatest du’s wirklich?”. Suddenly every word – perfectly articulated – struck painfully like a dagger. I had not encountered such a harrowing portrayal of King Marke since Matti Salminen’s Budapest performance. I wrote at the time that Salminen gave an unsurpassed model of profound interpretation marked by the wisdom of age. Now I have two models, completely different and equally unsurpassed. The Finnish bass’ Marke was full of bitterness and resignation. Tomlinson was alternately seething with rage and writhing with humiliation. His piercing “warum mir diese Schmach?” sounded like a roar of a wounded animal. I wish every Shakespearean actor had such an ability to control the degree of tragedy as this singer, who is no longer young and has a voice that has lost its former lustre, but who uses it masterfully, with an incredible feel of all its strengths and weaknesses. My respect for Tomas Leakey increased exponentially. It takes an extremely modest and sensitive person to persuade such an artist to participate in such an unusual venture.

Tomas Leakey. Photo: Mahler Players

A separate round of applause should also go to two young singers, especially the velvety-voiced Laura Margaret Smith, whose Brangäne was touching if somewhat shy – this was fully understandable as Smith replaced the much more experienced Alwyn Mellor in the part at the last minute. Frederick Jones had little to sing as Melot, but he did so with conviction and a nicely placed, handsome tenor.

Given the difficulty of the undertaking, the orchestra performed admirably well – under the careful but demanding hand of Leakey, who opted for rather uncomfortable, firm and unhurried tempos in a couple of crucial passages. If he was testing the capabilities of his musicians, they came out of the test victorious. They played wisely and sensitively, were not explicit and preserved the work’s inherent mystery. They managed to sum up Tristan in a form in which it was interpreted by Karol Berger, who wrote that “if the effect of Wagner’s opera is consolatory, it is not because of what it says about the human lot, but because it says something important about it at all”.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

It took me eight years to come full circle and return to the beginnings to my freelancing career. In 2014, instead of celebrating the 160th anniversary of my favourite composer at home by the loudspeakers, I decided to go to a performance of The Cunning Little Vixen in a production that originated in Prague and was brought to Brno for the Janáček Brno festival – the motto of which was “Happy Birthday Leoš!”. After more than two decades on the editorial board of Ruch Muzyczny I made my debut as a freelancer with a review of Ondřej Havelka’s production. Janáček’s oeuvre has always been at the top of my priorities as a reviewer. As it happened, however, I made it to the Brno biennial for the second time only now: partly because I was always at a loss as to what to choose from the festival’s rich offerings. I nearly gave up again, because this year the organisers exceeded themselves: the programme of the nineteen-day event included no fewer than thirty-six musical events, among them five opera performances, headed by the hosts’ production of From the House of the Dead combined with the Glagolitic Mass, directed by Jiří Heřman and conducted by Jakub Hrůša, the newly appointed successor to Antonio Pappano at London’s Royal Opera House; as well as non-operatic performances of the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera, conducted by its boss Tomáš Hanus, and of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande with Tomáš Netopil. I decided to content myself with the last four days of the festival, not wanting to miss a rare opportunity to hear Erwin Schulhoff’s only opera Plameny in its entirety. For the next two years I will wonder how to see the most of the 2024 biennial, which will last over three weeks.

Janáček Brno is a fairly new venture, launched in 2008 with an overview of all stage works of its patron. With time music by other composers was added to Janáček’s oeuvre, making it possible to show his legacy in a broader context of the period. However, the main programme axis is still opera of the modernist era – which is what adds uniqueness to the event, appreciated by, for example, the jury of the International Opera Awards, who in 2018 presented Janáček Brno with an award for the best festival. I have written many times about how the Czechs love their national repertoire and know how to popularise it all over the world. When I was in Brno I saw once again that they also know how to appreciate the mastery of foreign performers, but – unlike my compatriots – do not feel that their own music requires persistent promotion by great stars from the West.

Věc Makropulos. Nicky Spence (Gregor) and Ángeles Blancas Gulín (Emilia Marty). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

This is hardly surprising given that Czech conductors – well-versed in the idiom of Central and Eastern European music – head some of the best orchestras in the world. I had an opportunity to admire Tomáš Hanus shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic: in a brilliant interpretation of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride at the Bayerische Staatsoper, and soon after that at the helm of WNO in a stylish and disciplined approach to Prokofiev’s War and Peace. On the day of my arrival in Brno, which happened to coincide with the Czech Struggle for Freedom and Democracy Day, Hanus led the Welsh orchestra in a programme consisting of Britten’s Four Sea Interludes, Dvořák’s Biblical Songs, Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde and Janáček’s Sinfonietta, which was highly appropriate in the circumstances. I had the impression that Hanus felt the least “at home” in Wagner’s music – played too smoothly, without an inner pulse and appropriate gradation of tension. On the other hand he was able to beautifully highlight the exuberant contrasts and shimmering nature of the textures in Britten’s Interludes and at the same time surprisingly emphatically stress the composer’s Mussorgsky inspirations (for example, in the swaying Allegro spiritoso). He provided a wonderful example of collaboration with the singer in Dvořák’s songs – Adam Plachetka’s velvety bass-baritone is often lost in the sumptuous acoustics of grand opera houses; in Hanus’ subtle interpretation the soloist impressed not only with the beauty of his voice and soft phrasing, but also with wisely delivered text, taken from the 16th-century Kralice Bible. But all this was nothing in comparison with the thrilling performance of the Sinfonietta, in which the fanfare – as Janáček would have it – was played by thirteen musicians of the Czech Armed Forces’ brass band. Unlike most symphony orchestra players, they did it without a single slip-up, which clearly suggests that Janáček knew what he was doing. The concert received a tumultuous and fully deserved standing ovation, which may have contributed to WNO’s even greater success in the performance of Věc Makropulos the following day.

To this day I shudder at the memory of the only staging of this masterpiece in Poland, presented exactly ten years ago at Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera, when the spectators – lured by a misleading promise of a science-fiction comedy, accustomed to the image of a cheerful Czech over a pint of beer, and unfamiliar with both Janáček’s oeuvre and Karel Čapek’s bitter dystopia – began to leave the auditorium in droves already halfway through the performance. What must have also contributed to this was the inept playing of the orchestra under Gerd Schaller, who not only failed to control the various instrumental groups, but also to explain to the musicians what the score was about. Hanus didn’t have the slightest problem with this, probably also because he had been poring over the score for months together with Jonáš Hájek and Annette Thein, preparing a new edition for the Prague branch of the Bärenreiter publishing house. In addition, in their interpretation of Janáček’s operas British musicians equal and sometimes even surpass Czech performers. Among the members of the international cast of WNO’s Věc Makropulos the most pleasant surprise came from the Spanish soprano Ángeles Blancas Gulín in the role of Emilia Marty – a singer endowed with a small but very charming and exceedingly expressive voice, appropriately “old-fashioned” for this difficult part, and supported by excellent acting and a great feel for the character. When it comes to the rest of the cast, the most noteworthy performances came from Nicky Spence as Gregor, David Stout as Baron Prus and the ever-reliable Mark Le Brocq as Vítek, whose monologue explaining the intricacies of the libretto – during the interval between the first and second acts – won far more approval from the Czech audience than from the blasé spectators at the Cardiff premiere. Yet who knows, perhaps my most vivid memory of the production – in a pared-down, but very stylish staging by Olivia Fuchs (director), Nicola Turner (set and costume designer), Robbie Butler (lighting designer) and Sam Sharpless (video projections) – will be Alan Oke’s brilliant performance in the episodic role of Count Hauk-Šendorf. In any case, it has to be said that the creative team hit the nail on the head when it came to Čapek’s and Janáček’s message – this is one of the masterpieces of the modernist grotesque, which in the finale should force guffaws back down our throats and transform them into helpless sobs. The creators of the Welsh production fully succeeded in this.

Plameny. Tone Kummervold (La Morte) and Denys Pivnitskyi (Don Juan). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Not quite so in the case of the creative team of the eagerly awaited Flammen, brought from the National Theatre in Prague and presented in its original Czech version as Plameny. Schulhoff’s only opera was unlucky, as was its composer: after the failure of the Brno premiere, nothing  came out of Erich Kleiber’s plans for a Berlin staging, due to the Nazi campaign against modern art. Schulhoff, cursed as a representative of Entartete Kunst, and hated as a Jew and a communist, after the Nazis seized Czechoslovakia he applied for Soviet citizenship, which did not protect him from deportation to the Bavarian fortress of Wülzburg, where he died of tuberculosis in 1942. He came up with the idea for an opera loosely based on the myth of Don Juan in 1923 and discussed his vision with Max Brod, a friend and biographer of Kafka, and translator of Janáček’s librettos into German. Brod advised him to collaborate with the Czech scriptwriter Karl Josef Beneš, who together with Schulhoff created an oneiric, surreal tale of a seducer in love with Death – the only woman he is unable to seduce and who ultimately seals his fate. The dissolute Don Juan will not end up in hell: the punishment for his transgressions will be the curse of eternal life, with no hope of fulfilment.

Schulhoff got down to work on the score in 1929 and slugged away at it for three years. The premiere in January 1932, at the Divadlo na Veveří, the former seat of the National Theatre in Brno, was a complete fiasco. The audience rejected not only the unique structure of the work – which combined elements of opera, pantomime and symphonic poem – but also its exuberant eclecticism, vacillating between impressionism, brutal expressionism and relatively orderly neoclassicism. Plameny begins like Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, only to end in gentle sounds of the glockenspiel and the celesta, which initially bring to mind the operas of Richards Strauss and then – of his not always inspired numerous imitators. In the middle it is possible to find literally everything – from almost line-for-line quotations from Berg’s Wozzeck to New Orleans jazz inspirations and an archaising pastiche in the style of Szymanowski. Schulhoff treats the human voice in Plameny in a strictly instrumental manner: perhaps the only truly “operatic” fragment in the work is La Morte’s solo in the finale of the tenth scene: with a moving glissando of the mezzo-soprano at the end of the phrase “salvation is so far away again”.

I have to do justice to Jiří Rožeň, who managed to keep the sometimes unruly musicians of the Prague orchestra in check throughout the opera. Among the soloists the singer who deserved the biggest applause was the Norwegian Tone Kummervold, underestimated by the audience, who in the thankless role of La Morte showed the full range of now nearly obsolete vocal techniques. A very decent performance came from the female chorus of Shadows, but the performers of the main roles were disappointing, which is especially true of Denys Pivnitskyi as Don Juan, a singer who is not very musical, though gifted with a healthy and strong tenor. Slightly more satisfying was the soprano Victoria Korosunova in the multiplied role of the seducer’s previous mistresses. However, I can hardly blame the singers, as the chaos on stage was primarily caused by Calixto Bieito, a director who after a few phenomenal productions in the early days of his career lost his inspiration completely and has been frittering away his talent ever since. I would advise those of my colleagues who compare Bieito’s concepts to Luis Buñuel’s to go and watch some of the latter’s films again and refresh their memories of their youth. All in all, Plameny turned out to be a beautiful catastrophe giving us hope that Schulhoff’s forgotten work would eventually return to the stage for good – hopefully in a better thought-out staging.

Jan Jirasky. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

However, Brno did not live by opera alone. During these four days, I also managed to form an opinion (a very favourable one) on the Brno Children’s Choir under the direction of Valeria Mat’ašová and the mixed Kühn Choir, which fared slightly worse under the direction of Jakub Pikla; admire the stylish playing – reminiscent of Rudolf Firkušný’s artistry – of Jan Jirasky, a professor at the Brno Academy of Music and an outstanding specialist on Janáček piano music; and contemplate the condition of contemporary piano playing after a recital by Linda Lee, winner of this year’s Janáček Competition. Lee is technically phenomenal, but completely unaware of the meaning of the music, which pours from her fingers like perfectly round and clearly artificial pearls.

Still, I will go back to Brno, the city where Janáček spent over forty years, created his biggest masterpieces and to this day has not let himself be forgotten.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

I didn’t expect that after nearly two years of pandemic scarcity I would be travelling to the United Kingdom as often as I have done recently. In the past six months alone, despite concerns over the war and the growing post-Brexit chaos, I have visited two of London’s most important concert halls and three English opera houses, one of them twice. The occasion for my November trip was another festival of Polish sacred music, Joy & Devotion (which I wanted to hear in its entirety after the excellent impressions of last year’s inaugural concert), and the world premiere of Agata Zubel’s Piano Concerto No. 2 – two events co-organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and included in London’s still extremely rich musical offerings within just one week.

London greeted me in its usual way: with torrential rain, deafening noise and plenty of surprises in the hotel, which the following day – after I changed rooms – I linked to the presence of Sir John Barbirolli’s ghost roaming around. Had I realised earlier that the conductor had been born in that very house, in a flat above a bakery that closed down years ago, the ghost might have left me in peace already on the first night. He was more gracious later, although he continued his pranks until the end, breaking my radiator and from time to time, without any warning, turning on the shower in my tiny bathroom. Such things sometimes happen in England, and this is one of the reasons I love this country, where a newcomer is reminded at every turn that he or she is treading on the footsteps of the past. For example, on the way to St Martin-in-the-Fields, through a labyrinth of West End theatres, where the senior Mr Barbirolli, one-time violinist at La Scala, played, as did his son John, before he put aside his cello and took up the baton.

It is hard to find a place in this part of the capital without a thriving cultural life. All the more reason for me to admire the persistence and consistency of Paweł Łukaszewski, who not only managed to organise his festival for the second time – in one of Europe’s most famous churches – but is already making bold plans for next season. Once again he managed to persuade three English ensembles to work with him, each ensemble with a very different character and different mission, but all well known to the local audiences, and to the musicians who collaborate with them and often even were brought up within their ranks. I have already written extensively in Tygodnik Powszechny about The Gesualdo Six, an ensemble led by Owain Park, which opened last year’s festival. The leaders of the other two choirs fully deserve to be called icons of British musical life. Stephen Layton is one of the few choirmasters who are just as successful as conductors of orchestral ensembles (until 2016 he led the City of London Sinfonia, which he took over two years after the death of Richard Hickox). In 1986 he founded the chamber choir Polyphony with one concert in mind. The choir has been active ever since, recording more than a dozen albums, some of them for the Hyperion label, and establishing itself as one of the world’s leading ensembles specialising in Bach and Handel. Two years its “senior”, the Rodolfus Choir came into being thanks to the initiative of Ralph Allwood, former Director of Music at Eton College and a keen populariser of choral music among people of all ages and levels of musical ability. The choir is made up of young and very young singers, most of them participants in the famous Choral Courses, organised by Allwood for more than forty years – courses that for many became the springboard for future careers, not just in choral music.

Stephen Layton. Photo: Marcin Urban/IAM

The festival’s size and structure of its programme have remained unchanged: three concerts of Polish choral and organ music (the only departure from this pattern being the participation of the cello in a work by Roxanna Panufnik, but more on that in a moment), primarily works by contemporary composers, including those of the younger generation, works sometimes presented alongside the legacy of earlier periods. This time, however, there were no revelations on a par with Krzysztof Borek’s Missa Mater Matris, and the debutants were somewhat disappointing – among them Marek Raczyński, whose Missa brevis was heralded as the festival’s greatest sensation. Yet the members of The Gesualdo Six interspersed its individual segments with music by other composers, perhaps in the hope of concealing the formal shortcomings of the work, which lost its momentum already after a very interesting and original Kyrie, inspired – perhaps subconsciously – by the tradition of the Eastern Churches. In comparison with last year the performance of the phenomenal sextet (joined in several pieces by Fiona Fraser, Rachel Ambrose Evans and Will Prior) was not entirely satisfying. Despite their customary perfect intonation, wonderfully blended voices and overall culture of sound, their performance lacked the enthusiasm that so inspired the singers at the inauguration of the previous festival. The “Joy & Devotion” could only be felt in Górecki’s Veni, o mater terrae and O mater semper alma, which began the concert, and which are, after all, nothing more than extracts from the unfinished cycle Z pieśni kościelnych (Church Songs) based on the church songbook compiled by Father Jan Siedlecki – with a Latin text by Edward Tambling, published only after the composer’s death. Górecki’s harmonisations are simple and, at the same time sincere and decidedly “his own” – which cannot be said of Teofil Klonowski’s nineteenth-century setting of Gaude Mater Polonia, sung gloomily at the end of the evening. For us it is one of the most important historic pieces of Poland’s musical culture; for the English, well-versed in the history of plain-chant – another version of the popular Eucharistic hymn O salutaris hostia in an anachronic and rather graceless setting for four voices. I think that Owain Park’s ensemble needs to be intrigued by something again, be given pieces of the highest quality, be made proud that they are revealing to the local audience early music other than the relatively well-known works by Pękiel and Gorczycki.

Members of Rodolfus Choir during a rehearsal. Photo: Marcin Urban/IAM

Much more delight was provided by the excellent Polyphony choir, which opened the festival with a programme consisting exclusively of new music. This was the first time I heard the ensemble live and I fully agree that Layton has raised it to the highest world-class level. The singers’ clear voice production, beautiful, luminous timbre (especially in the even-voiced sopranos), and above all, their perfect sense of musical timing and drama, enabled them to emphasise all the more the strengths of works written in the aesthetics already familiar to the British (e.g. Paweł Łukaszewski’s Missa Sancti Papae), draw attention to the intriguing aspects of the style of the young composers (Ziółkowski’s subtle Ave Maris Stella, intriguing in terms of its colour) and cover the shortcomings of the weaker items on the programme (I will not mention the names, but just note that Polish choral music sometimes verges dangerously on kitsch). It was a display of sheer professionalism, just as the concert of the Rodolfus Choir three days later was an exemplary demonstration of the effects of working with a virtually amateur ensemble largely made up of teenage singers. Ralph Allwood chose their repertoire cleverly, selecting primarily texturally simpler gems of early music. Neither minor rhythmic stumbles nor occasional intonation slip-ups were offensive in their performance; instead, the audience was gripped by the joy of music-making and full commitment to the works presented. The experienced choirmasters instils in his choristers the most essential elements of their craft, as we saw during the performance of Roxanna Panufnik’s composition, which was interrupted by sudden applause. All Shall Be Well, a dialogue rich in complex harmonies and sudden dynamic shifts between the choir and the cello (Leo Popplewell), in which Panufnik juxtaposes the text and melody of Bogurodzica with the words of the English mystic Juliana of Norwich, requires maximum concentration, especially from such young performers. The choristers resumed the interrupted climax confidently and with a smile on their lips. This small incident encapsulated the essence of the festival slogan, also captured in the playing of the excellent organist Rupert Jeffcoat, who amazes not only with his technical virtuosity, but also with his sophisticated ornamentation and imaginative, often unusual registration of the instrument.

Edward Gardner, Tomoko Mukaiyama and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Photo: LPO

The walk across the Thames, to the Royal Festival Hall, proved not only to be a trip into entirely different aesthetics, but also an unexpected journey deep into musical time. Agata Zubel’s Piano Concerto No. 2 – a concerto with a single soloists but with two pianos, including one microtonally tuned – was written for Tomoko Mukaiyama, a Japanese-Dutch pianist, visual artist and performer. Both the author of the programme note and later commentators stressed the performative aspect of the piece – of little significance in my opinion in comparison with the intricate form, the polyphony of sparkling colours typical of Zubel and the subtle references to Lutosławski – in terms of working with rhythm and sophisticated transitions from chaos to order and back again. Particularly striking in the Concerto is the middle movement: a delicate, instrumental “song” in which faithful observers of the composer’s work will easily find grains of an almost human voice thrown into the spectral orchestral fabric. Zubel has been extraordinary lucky when it comes to performers. It would be hard to imagine more sensitive interpreters of this work than the London Philharmonic Orchestra with Edward Gardner, one of the world’s most distinguished specialists on Lutosławski’s legacy, who in the following items on the programme showed the inspirations of the Concerto in ever deeper retrospect. First, he unveiled the astonishingly classical beauty of Lutosławski’s Symphony No. 4, which Andrzej Chłopecki once called the swan song of modernism, then he delighted the audience with a lyrical take on The Rite of Spring – two pieces without which Zubel’s Piano Concerto No. 2 would never have been written or would have sounded quite different.

So there are reasons for us to be proud, but we must not drown this pride in national complexes. I’m looking forward to future Joy & Devotion festivals. I wish Agata Zubel a speedy return to London concert halls. I expect that Polish music will be heard more and more in the British Isles. In the meantime let us explore, answer questions, reveal contexts and prepare programme booklets for future seasons. British music lovers are genuinely interested in music, and not only their own.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Apparently Ingmar Bergman learned about his first success in the film industry, which was soon to set his career on a whole new track, while reading a newspaper in his own toilet. Although the Palme d’Or at the ninth Cannes Festival went to the documentary Le Monde du silence, directed by Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle, Bergman’s 1955 comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende) was also among the winners of six official prizes with the Prix de l’humour poétique, awarded in this particular category only once in the entire history of the festival. Bergman must have felt deeply embarrassed by this accolade and not only because the good news found him on the toilet. He had been directing films for nearly ten years. His oeuvre at that point included films – like Sawdust and Tinsel and Summer with Monika – which with time became part of the canon of Swedish cinema, and which their creator himself valued very highly. He may have been a little bit coy in his statements to the press, in which he emphasised that he took up comedy for financial reasons, without much conviction, as he had always been regarded in his family as a surly, touchy and humourless child. In any case, he left the Cannes screening halfway through, indignant that the audience – instead of laughing uproariously – only occasionally rewarded his Smiles of a Summer Night with a perfunctory round of applause.

He did not appreciate the sense of humour of the French, who immediately were taken by the Shakespearean farse about a superannuated lawyer Fredrik Egerman and the entire amorous constellation of characters complicating his life: his young wife Anne, “unconsummated” for two years; Henrik, his son from his first marriage, who is struggling with his desire for his nubile stepmother; the actress Desiree, with whom Fredrik once had an affair and who reappeared in his life with a child bearing his name and at an age unequivocally pointing to the date of his conception; her puppet lover, Count Malcolm, and the countess, who desperately flirts with Fredrik in order to draw on the inexhaustible pool of male jealousy and get her husband back. The intrigues of the upper classes are counterpointed by the coarse and painfully direct love of the servant Petra and the coachman Frid. Things take an unexpected turn, when Desiree, in love with Fredrik and seasoned in love battles, persuades her mother, Madame Armfeldt, to organise a party with all of the above at her country estate – at a very unusual time, in the middle of the joyous Swedish Midsommar celebrations …

If Bergman lacked a sense of humour, this would be like saying that Conrad, the protagonist of Erich Kästner’s novel The 35th of May, lacked imagination. In addition, Bergman drew on the best possible source, namely Shakespeare. The inspirations drawn from A Midsummer Night’s Dream are not only obvious but also filtered through the director’s unique sensibility and his extraordinary feel for erotic human relations. Smiles of a Summer Night even features a Puck – in the form of Desiree’s impish offspring – and the double role of Titania and Oberon is played by the mean, grumpy and yet irresistibly moving Madame Armfeldt. The audience in Cannes – instead of collapsing with laughter – froze in front of the screen in silent awe. After its festival success Bergman’s work was ranked among the ten most important films of the year by Cahiers du Cinéma and was nominated for the BAFTA award. Masterfully directed and brilliantly acted, the scene of the mutual unmasking of Desiree’s two lovers – the lawyer in a saggy nightcap and the count in a ridiculous hussar uniform – has gone down in the history of cinema. Fanclubs of the film were set up all over the world and there were several imitations, including Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy.

Agatha Meehan (Fredrika Armfeldt). Photo: Sharron Wallace

However, very few people in Poland realise that Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night was given a second life primarily thanks to Stephen Sondheim’s musical A Little Night Music (the title of which refers not only to the amorous rituals of a “midsummer’s night”, but also to Mozart’s famous serenade, with its references to music accompanying outdoor flirtations in darkness lit by candles and torches). This may be because the musical as a form is still regarded in Poland as a guilty pleasure for less sophisticated audiences, the last resort for musicians and producers who have failed on the “real” operatic stage, a modern equivalent of a trashy operetta. Sondheim’s oeuvre reaches Poland by a roundabout route, paradoxically through film: older audiences were delighted by his songs in Richard Lester’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), younger ones – by Tim Burton’s brilliant film adaptation of Sweeney Todd (2007). Yet A Little Night Music has an international reputation of one of the American composer’s most sophisticated masterpieces: musically, it requires truly operatic skills from the performers; dramatically – craftsmanship normally associated with outstanding performances in plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen and Strindberg.

British opera companies try to include “lighter” operas and musicals in their repertoires every season. This is particularly true of Opera North, which has an exceptionally versatile orchestra and a team of soloists cast in roles allowing them to shine and show off all their current vocal and acting skills. That is why no one is surprised by the presence in this year’s production of A Little Night Music at Leeds’ Playhouse (in a co-production with the local Quarry Theatre) of Dame Josephine Barstow (Madame Armfeldt) – an eighty-two-year-old soprano who used to score triumphs in Bayreuth, London, Munich and Vienna in roles like the Marschallin in Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s opera and Sieglinde in Wagner’s Die Walküre – or of the excellent Dutch baritone Quirijn De Lang (Fredrik), a singer at the peak of his vocal powers, cast equally readily in oratorio parts, roles in classical Mozart operas as well as parts from the canon of modernist and contemporary repertoire. Shining performances among the rest of the cast – apart from the expressive Sandra Piques Eddy presenting a superbly acted Desiree – come not only from major performers of minor roles, but also from singers just taking their first steps on stage, still undecided as to whether they will devote themselves wholeheartedly to a career in London’s West End, or go for interpretations in the spirit of reconstructing old performance practices, or perhaps – as their voices and skills develop – take up challenges in a heavier operatic repertoire.

Dame Josephine Barstow (Madame Armfeldt). Photo: Sharron Wallace

The most admirable thing is that they all treat the spoken and the sung word with equal affection and competence. With an equally “poetic” sense of humour they portray their ambiguous characters, building bridges between radically different conventions, singing styles and acting techniques in an admirably offhand manner demanded by Sondheim’s genius (Madame Armfeldt’s phenomenal “Liaisons”, irresistibly bringing to mind both the reminiscences of the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, and Przybora and Wasowski’s frivolous song “Biżuteria” (Jewellery) performed by Barbara Krafftówna). Hidden behind a semi-transparent curtain, the orchestra under Oliver Rundell accompanies the soloists as alertly as a bird – in the original Broadway line-up with a discreet brass accompaniment, with the piano and celesta, without a large rhythm section that effortlessly “carries” most standard musical productions.

James Brining’s direction in Madeleine Boyd’s sets and costumes is certainly no match for Bergman’s original in either panache or splendour of imagination. It is, nevertheless, effective in organising the varied planes of this convoluted tale: by moving the narrative to a time a little closer to us, presumably the inter-war era, it makes it more digestible for British audiences, obsessed as they are with the period. The staging requires no additional explanation: thanks to the singers’ impeccable diction and superb voice production, it goes straight to the hearts of the Yorkshire theatre regulars, who come here not only for musicals and Christmas adaptations of The Lion, the Witch and the Old Wardrobe, but also – and perhaps above all – for plays like Tony Harrison’s The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus and offerings from the youngest luminaries of British drama.

Quirijn de Lang (Fredrik Egerman). Photo: Sharron Wallace

It would be hard for me to try to convince my readers of the intrinsic value of A Little Night Music, written in collaboration between the great – though still not appreciated everywhere – composer and the eminent British screenwriter and librettist Hugh Wheeler, known to fans of classic detective novels for the books he published under the pseudonym Patrick Quentin, in fact a partnership of authors with several writers, primarily Richard Wilson Webb. And yet I will try: a good whodunnit can tell us more about the people and the world around us than pretentious “high” literature written in line with the dictates of fashions making it possible to become well-known on the international publishing market. Well-performed, A Little Night Music still says more about the human need for truth and love than a thoughtlessly sung operatic masterpiece.

Translated by: Anna Kijak
Original text available at: https://teatr-pismo.pl/19180-milosc-w-swej-prostej-i-niesmialej-mowie/

There was a time when Mozart’s oeuvre was put above the music of the good old Haydn. There was also a time when Haydn’s Creation was valued more highly than his Seasons, although in any case both oratorios were considered masterpieces in comparison with Il ritorno di Tobia, composed more or less a quarter of a century earlier. According to Charles Rosen, in neither of the two works did Haydn achieve the level of his quartets and great symphonies, and after completing The Seasons he even experienced an artist’s block, too old and too weak to hold on to even a fraction of the ideas rushing into his head. It is as if the master, who was not yet seventy, reached a point when he had ceased to refer to anything except his own experience and own impotence.

Rumour also had it that Gottfried van Swieten, author of the libretti to both The Creation and The Seasons, in vain tried to persuade Haydn to close the cycle with a third oratorio, The Last Judgement. Yet a letter by Georg August Griesinger – Haydn’s diplomat friend – to Empress Maria Theresa suggests something quite different: that the initiative came from the composer, who asked Christoph Martin Wieland, called the German Voltaire, for a libretto. Wieland refused. Thus it would be hard to lay the blame for the fiasco on the artist’s block afflicting Haydn – after all, he went on to write two magnificent masses, Schöpfungsmesse  and Harmoniemesse, and fell silent for good five years before he died.

However, there is no denying that it took him two years to write The Seasons and that at times the work was hard going. What undoubtedly contributed to this were the composer’s health problems as well as the libretto by van Swieten, who this time clearly bit off more than he could chew. He took as his basis James Thomson’s extremely popular poem The Seasons, although a lot suggests that he first went for Barthold Heinrich Brockes’ German translation and on its basis produced the text of the oratorio, spicing it up with numerous additions from other sources and with his own imagination. What emerged as a result was a rather misshapen work, in which the charm of the original was lost, while van Swieten’s deficient skills were revealed to the full. If that had not been enough, van Swieten, despite his poor command of the language, undertook, like in the case of The Creation, to translate the libretto into English, which produced an even more inferior result than before. Suffice it to say that until recently British artists used to perform The Seasons in German, because the “English” original would have listeners break into uncontrollable laughter. There were several more or less fortunate attempts to make van Swieten’s libretto palatable until Paul McCreesh came up with his own, exceptionally graceful translation, which may stay in concert repertoires for good.

Academy of Ancient Music, Laurence Cummings. Photo: Mark Allan

Laurence Cummings used the translation – to the benefit of the work and much to the delight of the audience gathered at London’s Barbican Hall – during the inauguration of the second season of the Academy of Ancient Music under his leadership, in a dramatised performance of the oratorio with stage movement by Martin Parr presented against the background of pleasant but in fact unnecessary projections by Nina Dunn Studio. I reviewed last year’s Creation, inaccessible to observers from outside the United Kingdom because of the covid restrictions in place at the time, on the basis of a broadcast. This time I decided not to miss an opportunity to hear the AAM in The Seasons live, especially given that I had had intense previous contact with McCreesh’s translation, translating it into Polish for a CD booklet for Signum Records.

Haydn was undoubtedly right, when he demanded that his oratorios be performed in languages understood to local audiences. That is why the premiere of Die Jahreszeiten was very warmly received at the Palais Schwarzenberg in Vienna, while The Seasons with the original version of the libretto was not performed even once in the composer’s lifetime. This is a work carried by text: only in symbiosis with the word does it reveal its true nature. Only then does it pave the way for the listener to understand the refined harmonic and textural devices, justify numerous self-quotations, make it possible to appreciate the novelty of solutions soon after used in the oeuvres of Beethoven, Weber, Schubert and even Wagner. Only on this condition does it reveal the tribute to the prematurely deceased Mozart hidden between the lines: when a theme from the Requiem appears in the triple fugue from Spring, when Sarastro’s wisdom resounds in Simon’s singing, when we can hear the voices of Papageno and Papagena in the love duet between Hanne and Lukas from Autumn, when in Winter a quotation from the second movement of the Great Symphony KV 550 appears with the words about the passing summer of human life.

Rachel Nicholls nad Benjamin Hulett. Photo: Mark Allan

For nearly half a century the sound of the Academy of Ancient Music evolved under the influence of two distinctive musicians with extremely different personalities: Christopher Hogwood and Richard Egarr. Laurence Cummings has added another important element to the identity of his ensembles: an irrepressible joy of music making, an enthusiasm that makes it possible to become engrossed in the rhetorical intricacies of the score. The AAM chorus not only impresses with its excellent voice production and impeccable diction; it savours its singing and imbues it a powerful emotional charge. Each instrument in the orchestra speaks with its own conscious voice – when necessary blended and balanced with the sound of the rest of the ensemble, at other times unceremoniously highlighted, surprisingly bright, saturated in the extreme, balancing on the edge of ugliness. There is dazzling brightness and deep darkness, the heat of the sun and the cold of the ice in this playing – everything needed to convey the changeability of the seasons and the inexorable cycle of earthly existence.

Of the three soloists I was the most pleasantly surprised by Rachel Nicholls, who replaced the indisposed Sophie Bevan at the last minute. I must confess contritely that I had my doubts whether the soprano, who has been scoring triumphs in the Straussian and Wagnerian repertoire for several years, would be able to find her way back into the long-abandoned idiom of pre-Romantic music. I am critic of little faith: Nicholls is perfectly capable of embedding her supple, radiant voice in a very different style of singing, phrasing in line with all the classical rules, flashing lightly through long passages and embellishments. Similar brilliance came from Benjamin Hulett’s tenor, silvery and bright, impressing both with confident intonation and wide, open breathing, allowing the melodic line to be free and expressive. The ardour of the two young lovers found a perfect counterbalance in the dignified singing of Jonathan Lemalu, marked by the wisdom of mature age. With his warm and velvet soft bass-baritone Lemalu was able to paint each affect with a slightly different hue, to outline each reflection with a line of different thickness.

Rachel Nicholls, Jonathan Lemalu and Benjamin Hulett. Photo: Mark Allan

In May 1809 the Napoleonic army set off against Vienna. The city surrendered after a brief and uneven fight. The ailing Haydn collapsed at the piano one day and never got up from his bed. He died on 31 May, shortly after midnight. His last words are circulated in several versions. After listening to The Seasons at the Barbican, I am willing to believe that shortly before he died he said: “Cheer up, children, I am all right”.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Do you remember Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri? Or, more precisely, the music Mildred Mayes is listening to in the car at the very beginning of the film? Most movie buffs were led to believe that they were dealing with a contemporary arrangement of a traditional Irish melody, while in fact Renée Fleming sings Lady Harriet’s aria “Letzte Rose” from Friedrich von Flotow’s opera Martha, though with Thomas Moore’s original text, taken from the 1813 collection Irish Melodies. The composer indeed referred to a popular song of the day, but transformed it in his own way and made it the basis not only of the aria, but also of the love theme that runs through the piece. Martha, staged in 1847 in Vienna, turned out to be Flotow’s second and last operatic success. Known to music lovers today for several immortal hits, it completely overshadowed his previous work: the opera Alessandro Stradella, the triumph of which at the Hamburg Opera subsequently led to a contract to stage Martha at Vienna’s Theater am Kärntnertor.

Flotow was neither the first nor the last among 19th-century composers who decided to make one of the most influential yet most mysterious composers of the Italian Baroque the protagonist of their operas. However, they were not interested in his music, but in his sensational biography, described in, for example, Histoire de la musique et de ses effets, the first compendium of the history of music in French literature, written by Pierre Bourdelot, a libertine, freethinker and physician to Louis XIII, later supplemented by his nephew Pierre Bonnet-Bourdelot and published only after the death of both by another heir of the family in 1715. The ambiguities of Stradella’s biography – which gradually expanded to include tales of his difficult character, propensity for scheming and gambling, and promiscuity, which ultimately brought upon him the revenge of his cuckolded rivals and death at the hands of assassins – became ideal fodder for Romantic librettists. However, instead of perpetrating a black legend of him, like the one surrounding the tragic figure of Caravaggio, the librettists came up with more and more complicated cloak-and-dagger stories, with the amorous Stradella successfully throwing a spanner in the works of torturers and guardians of female virtue, stories with an obligatory happy ending. This Stradella-mania even affected the teenage César Franck, who in 1841 – four years after the failure of Louis Niedermeyer’s five-act grand opéra at the Salle Le Peletier in Paris – composed his own Stradella, but stopped at the voices with piano stage and left the work unfinished.

Interest in Stradella waned at the turn of the 20th century, only to be revived in recent decades, thanks in part to new research which has finally made it possible to look at his life and work in a broader historical and aesthetic context. We know now that he was not born in 1639 in Nepi, but four years later in Bologna, though the most formative period of his life was his childhood and youth spent in Rome, where he received his musical education. We know that his innate independence combined with immense talent and extraordinary ambition got him into trouble more than once, and it is difficult to say whether his tragic death at the hands of Genoese thugs – when he was not yet forty – had more to do with his propensity for reckless love affairs or his inability to navigate the labyrinth of political and moral intrigues of the day. Stradella left behind a huge and immensely valuable body of work, rivalling the legacy of Purcell and Biber in originality, and going far beyond the stylistic framework of the period in innovation and imagination. He was a precursor of the concerto grosso. In experimenting with a more tuneful, rhythmically freer variety of counterpoint, full of dissonant tensions, he was more than ten years ahead of Corelli. He came up with the idea of the da capo aria before he had time to give it a proper form.

There is something spectral in Stradella’s oeuvre. It is possible to hear in it things that are not physically there yet, that were only geminating in the composer’s visionary imagination. This is probably why it is so admired by Salvatore Sciarrino, a contemporary master of musical understatements, thinned out consonances, of silence louder than sounds. In 2017 Sciarrino wrote an opera, Ti vedo, ti sento, mi perdo (I see you, I hear you, I lose myself), whose protagonist is Stradella – or rather his absence. The action takes place in 1682, in one of the Roman palazzi, where rehearsals take place before a performance of Stradella’s cantata. Everybody is waiting for a new aria promised by the composer, but instead they get the news of his sudden death. The truth about the composer, who became a legend during his lifetime, must from now on be sought in in-depth reflection on his music.

Andrea De Carlo. Photo: Famiano Crispi & Vincenzo Scudieri

The man at the forefront of this reflection is Andrea De Carlo, one of the world’s most eminent specialists in the legacy of Alessandro Stradella, an artist well known also to Polish music lovers from his collaboration with Rinaldo Alessandrini’s Concerto Italiano ensemble, not to mention the student production of Stradella’s comic opera Il Trespolo tutore (2018), which featured Polish musicians and was recorded on DVD. De Carlo began his career as a jazz double bass player, later joined in the orchestra of the Teatro Massimo di Palermo and eventually – after studying with the gambist Paolo Pandolfo – devoted himself almost entirely to the practice and theory of historical performance. In 2005 he founded his own ensemble, Mare Nostrum, which has evolved from a homogeneous viol consort into an extremely versatile and dynamic early music ensemble. Following their first, critically acclaimed concerts and recordings of German and French Baroque music, De Carlo and his musicians began to focus increasingly on the works of 17th-century composers associated with Rome. This naturally led to “The Stradella Project” – initiated as part of the Baroque Festival in Viterbo, headed by De Carlo – which has already resulted in eight excellent albums of monographic recordings for the French label Arcana. Young talent and future collaborators of De Carlo are forged in the “Stradella Young Project”, an education and research initiative launched in 2011, whose apprentices regularly participate in De Carlo’s projects.

This year I had the pleasure of accepting an invitation from the event organisers and the Munich-based agency Ophelias Culture to attend the first days of Festival Barocco Alessandro Stradella. And thus I was able not only enjoy the music, but also to relish the beauty of the historic region of Tuscia, the cradle of Etruscan civilisation, a land stretching among the hills between the Tiber and the Apennine range, in a territory that overlaps not only with today’s province of Viterbo in the northernmost part of Lazio, but also with the whole area of Tuscany and a large swathe of Umbria. Viterbo, one of the best-preserved medieval cities in central Italy – with its imposing Cathedral of Saint Lawrence, supposedly built on the ruins of an Etruscan temple of Heracles, and the mighty Palazzo dei Papi, where from November 1268 to September 1271 the cardinals were held on bread and water during the longest conclave in the history of the Church, before the election of Pope Gregory X – was preparing for the Macchina di Santa Rosa procession.

The march with the relics of St. Rose, a Franciscan tertiary expelled from the city by the Cathars, takes place year after year on the night of 3 September, along a route of more than a kilometre from Porta Romana to the steep climb to the church of Viterbo’s patron saint. One hundred men from the Sodality of the Porters (Facchini di Santa Rosa) carry a nearly 30-metre high tower, weighing five tons, through the streets, literally in the dark, following only the directions of the capofacchini, who march at the four corners of the enormous machine. In the days leading up to the procession residents are busy building stands in the traditional stopping places of the porters, and members of the Sodality proudly display its banners in the windows of their homes, in shop windows, restaurants and craftsmen’s workshops. Admission to the porters community is considered an exceptional honour in the local community – not least because, as part of the test, each candidate must lift a 150-kg box on his shoulders and carry it at least a hundred metres.

In these circumstances it is not surprising that the first concerts of the Festival took place outside the province’s capital. Yet it would be hard to imagine a better venue for the inauguration, with an opera by Stradella, than the Mannerist Villa Farnese, a gem of the late Italian Renaissance, towering over the town of Caprarola, which clings to the volcanic Cimini Hills. The young Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, only thirty-something at the time, acquired the estate at the very beginning of the 16th century. Educated by Pomponius Laetus to love classical proportions, he decided to erect a defensive palace above the settlement and commissioned the best architects active in Rome at the time to prepare the designs. The architects included Baldassare Peruzzi, who drew out the shape of the future fortress on a pentagonal plan. The construction of the foundations was completed only a few years before the cardinal was elected pope, who went down in history as Paul III. The work on the fortress was understandably put on hold. Nearly thirty years later it was resumed by the pope’s namesake and grandson, Alessandro Farnese: a cardinal, diplomat and generous patron of artists, who replaced the idea of completing the palazzo di fortezza with the idea of erecting a grand country villa on its foundations. The arduous mission of incorporating the body of the palace into the pentagon of the fortifications was undertaken by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, one of the most eminent architects of the second half of the 16th century, not only in Italy.

The result was a building of uncommon beauty, in the form of a pentagonal prism, but with a regular four-storey façade and a circular arcaded courtyard inside. Each storey of the villa served a different purpose and was furnished accordingly. Visitors are dazzled by the Sala dei Fasti Farnesiani on the piano nobile level. It is richly decorated with frescoes by the Zuccari brothers depicting the greatest achievements of the Farnese family. Taddeo Zuccari and his assistants are also the authors of the allegorical paintings in the Jupiter Room, accessible from the courtyard, which served as a sort of reception room for guests and a vestibule to the summer apartments. To enter it, visitors must first take their eyes off the illusion of foliage rustling in the wind, birds’ wings flapping and glimpses of sunlight on the azure of the frescoes on the arcade vaults.

Moro per amore, Villa Farnese, Caprarola. Eleonora Filipponi (Lindora) and Danilo Pastore (Floridoro/Feraspe). Photo: Famiano Crispi & Vincenzo Scudieri

This was the venue of the Festival’s inaugural performance – of Moro per amore, Stradella’s last opera, completed in 1681, a few months before his death. A similar villa, castello or palazzo may have been the venue for the first rehearsals before the work was staged at some theatre in Rome or Genoa. Similar frescoes may have witnessed cardinals, princes and their mistresses taking pleasure in making music, especially as the libretto was written by another well-educated aristocrat with a passion for the arts: Flavio Orsini, who sometimes wrote under the anagrammatic pseudonym of Filosinavoro.

The seven soloists and the nine-member Mare Nostrum ensemble, conducted by Andrea De Carlo, entered this space richer in knowledge and experience which the pioneers of historical performance could only envy. De Carlo’s musicians are fully aware of the fact that today no one will get all the allusions, references and puns in the allegedly absurd libretto, but they nevertheless should try to get as many of them as possible and then help the audience get them. Since the trap is set already in the ambiguous title of the piece (no one really dies of love here, but it takes a Moor to make a certain beautiful queen finally fall in love), every pun that is caught needs to be supported by an appropriate gesture, passion in the music, a meaningful glance. The artists need to attract attention to the passage that, for some reason, Stradella himself highlighted: by strengthening the articulation in the singing, bashing body of the instrument. They need not to wring their hands over the sense of humour of the Orsinis, the Farneses or suchlike, but to laugh at what made people laugh at the time (for example, the aging, contralto nanny and the soprano castrato proposing to her in the finale). The Mare Nostrum musicians know how to enthral the listeners and teach them something at the same time – and this is an increasingly rare skill, even among people involved in education on a daily basis.

View from Torre Monaldesca, Civitella d’Agliano. Photo: Dorota Kozińska

This year Festival Barocco Alessandro Stradella takes place until the end of September. It does not rely on Stradella alone. Over the next two days I went on two sentimental journeys to the repertoire from which my experience of historical performance had begun: the instrumental dances of the Ars Nova era (the excellent lutenist player Peppe Frana, partnered brilliantly by the flutist Alessandro de Carolis and the percussionist Antonino Anastasia); and the music wandering between Iberia and the New World since the first wave of the conquistador conquests (participants in the Stradella Young Project). The first concert took place in the rooms of Torre Monaldesca in Civitella d’Agliano: a tower from the top of which the local Guelphs used to look out for their enemies, the Ghibellins. The second concert was an open-air event in Borgo Fantasma, one of hundreds of “ghost towns” scattered around Tuscia, destroyed by landslides, earthquakes and other natural disasters.

I will have to go back there one day. For the austere beauty of the stone towns, for the effusion of colours in the frescoes in the cardinals’ villas, for the music of Stradella – brought back from oblivion by people who go forward full of love and don’t look back.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Link to the source:
https://www.tygodnikpowszechny.pl/takie-festiwale-to-ja-rozumiem-178593