Upiór w operze

In 1979, in the preface to Słownik mitów i tradycji kultury (Dictionary of Myths and Traditions of Culture), Władysław Kopaliński sounded the alarm that “the conditions of modern life (…) drive us increasingly away from our cultural heritage”. He went on to explain that “this process of the breaking of cultural ties” upsets not only identity, but also the ability to participate in the collective social consciousness. The great polymath and indefatigable lexicographer died in 2007, at the age of nearly one hundred. He was always a pessimist, but even he did not suspect that the process in question would speed up so insanely in recent decades, at the threshold of the biggest crisis of Western culture in living memory. Shying away from suffering and longing for an irretrievably lost world of habits generate an ever stronger hunger for ignorance, trigger aggression, discourage thinking.

This makes me even more impressed by the initiatives of opera companies which in the general flood of mediocrity go for works that force one to make a deeper intellectual effort, to go beyond one’s comfort zone, to reflect more insightfully on the failing mechanism of cultural inheritance. The world had to face a similar crisis – in many respects – at the turn of the twentieth century, for example. The slow agony of Romantic thinking and the painful birth of modernism produced some masterpieces that right now, at a time of growing conflicts, of the atrophy of ethics, faith and hope, we need not only to bring back from obscurity, but also to subject them to contemporary judgement, looking for their essence and, at the same time, avoiding the temptation to distort it for our own purposes.

Such works include Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, of which I have written several times that it is a metaphor for emerging from mourning, a metaphor particularly emphatic in the context of its premiere, which took place two years after the end of the Great War. That the protagonist of both Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte and the libretto of the opera, which Korngold and his father based on the play Le mirage, adapted for the stage by Rodenbach himself, is not a human being but Bruges – a “Venice of the North”, kingdom of medieval bankers and clothmakers, city of Memling and Van Eyck – which began to die already in the early sixteenth century, when the canals became silted up, driving the merchants and craftsmen to Antwerp, less than one hundred kilometres away. Bruges-la-Morte is regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces of symbolism. Without it there would be no Death in Venice by Mann, perhaps no Ulysses by Joyce, and according to some no Emigrants by Sebald either. The dead Bruges is also a woman, who in Rodenbach’s novella will drive a widower into madness and persuade him to kill. In Korngold’s opera she will open the gateway to another world to him, will initiate a katabasis from which – like Orpheus – the protagonist will return alone, though ready to work through his bitter loss and go into the uncertain future.

It is no coincidence that Die tote Stadt is sometimes compared with Die Frau ohne Schatten. Yet usually these comparisons are unjust, referring to the alleged “imitative” nature of young Korngold’s opera with regard to the oeuvre of Richard Strauss, over thirty years his senior. However, the most important thread these two difficult and for years neglected works share is hope – in Strauss’ case for the mourning of all the children unborn because of the war, in Korngold’s case for the mourning of all the unnecessary adult victims of the war. In both cases that hope is filtered through mourning for a lost world. Bruges in Die tote Stadt became a symbol of  Vienna, degraded and deprived of its former glory. In 1915, five years before the double premiere of Korngold’s opera – in Hamburg and Cologne – Bruges-la-Morte  was adapted for film by Yevgeni Bauer, who transferred it to the reality of a degraded, starving Moscow affected by a refugee crisis. Rodenbach’s masterpiece resonated throughout the war-ravaged Europe. But only in Korngold’s piece did it find a reinterpretation that gave audiences some hope for the future.

Die tote Stadt. Rachel Nicholls (Marietta). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Longborough Festival Opera initially planned to present Die tote Stadt in a semi-staged version. Fortunately, the initial concept grew and stormed onto the tiny stage of the Gloucestershire theatre in the form of a staging that was well thought out and visually stunning. The director Carmen Jakobi – in collaboration with the set designer Nat Gibson, Elaine Brown, who was responsible for stage movement, and the reliable lighting director Ben Ormerod – created an illusion of Bruges set in the turn-of-the-century Viennese imaginarium. Bridges over the canals, stairs and gates of the tenement houses were supported by a “scaffolding” made of dozens of empty frames in a reference to the geometry of Gustav Klimt’s golden squares and rectangles. The clear division of the stage into the overwhelming memorial room of the deceased wife, the cramped bedroom of the widower and the space in the middle, where the boundaries between the real world, dreams and nightmares were blurred, helped the creative team to highlight the Freudian aspects of the story. The vivid interactions between the characters brought to mind Art Nouveau allegories or the drastic expressionism of Egon Schiele’s paintings. The narrative came alive in the bright colours of Marietta and her company, only to fade a moment later in the brownish greens, gloomy blues and black of the memories of the dead Maria, just like in Klimt’s famous painting Death and Life, in which a dark, starved Grim Reaper watches an exuberant apotheosis of the human family – full of life and pushing aside into infinity the prospect of the end of the earthly wandering.

As usual, Jakobi focused on working with the singer-actors, building the characters from dozens of simple and thus even more telling gestures. Paul consolidates his obsession by repeating the same, absurdly unnecessary rituals: he organises the gallery of Maria’s portraits according to a strictly defined pattern, always lights candles in the same order in front of a relic of his beloved’s hair, and even in his own nightmares behaves like an automaton. Marietta is imperceptibly transformed from an innocent child-woman into a predatory, seductive Lilith: the spectators are no longer certain whether the supposed lookalike of the protagonist’s deceased wife is a flesh-and-blood being or merely a projection of all Paul’s fears and delusions. The church processions come as if straight from Robert le diable, where Marietta is dancing the risen abbess, but in the end turn out to be a procession of demons from the hell of Paul’s loneliness. The finale is beautifully equivocal: the widower recovers from his apathy, but we don’t know which path he will now take. Jakobi swiftly builds up tension in the silent scene of Paul’s farewell to the faithful Brigitta, only to defuse it just as quickly. There are no easy solutions here. After all, the world has collapsed. But there is hope that it can be put together anew.

Die tote Stadt. Peter Auty (Paul) and Rachel Nicholls. Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The huge orchestra with its particularly elaborate percussion section had to be reduced to the size of the LFO pit. It’s good that the production team decided to use for the purpose the “Covid” version presented in late 2020 at La Monnaie. Due to the pandemic-period requirement of presenting the opera without an interval, certain cuts were made, but I must emphasise the mastery of the arrangement produced by Leonard Eröd, who limited the ensemble to less than sixty instrumentalists and yet managed to preserve the unique sound colour of the score, highlighting not only the rather obvious influences of Puccini, Strauss and Wagner, but also Korngold’s original, quite modernist ideas of expanding the harmony to the limits of the tonal system. All these elements were consistently extracted from the musicians by Justin Brown, who conducted the performance with a confident, expressive gesture to which the orchestra reacted at times with too big a sound, which certainly did not helped the singers. Still rarely presented, Die tote Stadt creates the biggest problems for the performers of the two leading roles. Contrary to what some say, the fault lies not with Korngold, but with inevitable changes in the audiences’ expectations and singing aesthetics. There are no more and probably will never again be artists who one hundred years ago were equally at home singing the protagonists of Strauss’ and Puccini’s operas, and those of Lehár’s and Suppé’s operettas. Hence the constant problems with casting the role of Maria/Marietta and Paul, which require precisely such a stylistic juggling act as well as the ability to pace oneself over the whole period. Emerging from this mostly unscathed was the excellent Rachel Nicholls, who, incidentally, joined the cast quite late and quickly mastered previously unknown material. But even in her case excessive expression led to a few shouted top notes and too wide vibrato in the middle register. Peter Auty, a singer with a strong, handsome, dark tenor was impressive in the dramatic fragments of the role of Paul, but disappointed – several times – in the quasi-operetta song “Glück, das mir verblieb”, attacking the high notes in full chest voice. Nevertheless, both artists created memorable portrayals, largely thanks to their acting skills, and I’m almost certain that with time they will be able to present true tours de force in Die tote Stadt. Among the rest of the cast particularly worthy of note were the young New Zealand baritone Benson Wilson as Frank/Fritz (especially because of the lyricism and beauty of phrasing in Pierrot’s serenade) and Stephanie Windsor-Lewis as Brigitta/Lucienne, a singer endowed with a mezzo-soprano that is assured intonation-wise and excellently placed.

This time I decided to extend my trip to the summer festival in Cotswolds by one day and end it at the Royal Festival Hall, London, with a performance of Parsifal, in Opera North’s last concert on the tour following four semi-staged performances at Leeds’ Grand Theatre. I could not let that opportunity pass: for obvious reasons nothing came out of the venture last year and it’s difficult to predict whether the excellent northern English opera company will decide to repeat it in the coming seasons. In any case, this was the first time the company tackled Wagner’s last masterpiece, which in a country of music lovers passionate about the composer’s oeuvre and usually knowledgeable about it should provide some food for thought. I myself approach Parsifal with a mixture of admiration and reverent fear. I was brought up on Knapperstbusch’s famous 1962 recording and since then I cannot stop thinking that every performance of this most complete embodiment of Wagner’s idea of Gesamtkunstwerk is an act of foolhardy bravery.

Especially given that Parsifal continues to closely guard its secret, which defies the common summary that it is a story of suffering, compassion and redemption. It ultimately convinced Nietzsche that Wagner was not a Dionysian artist after all, and forced the philosopher to finally disassociate himself from the music and aesthetics of the composer he had once worshipped. It first gave the teenage Reger a nervous breakdown and then influenced his decision to devote himself to a career in music. Last century it became the subject of numerous debates over Wagner’s racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny. One thing is certain: in musical terms Parsifal is an absolutely complete work, a recapitulation of all the most important threads in Wagner’s oeuvre, an ocean of sound from which it would be terrible to spill even a single drop. Besides, as Gurnemanz’s says, “zum Raum wird hier die Zeit”. Whatever it is, a mystery or “only” an opera, time becomes space here.

Parsifal. Brindley Sherratt (Gurnemanz). Photo: Mark Allan

I had never been to the Royal Festival Hall before and I have to admit that after the first few bars I was afraid whether a concert performance would succeed in its confrontation with the dry and very selective acoustics of the hall. Fortunately, my fears proved unfounded: Richard Farnes led Parsifal rather briskly (at least in comparison with the canonical interpretations), but with a wide breath and mostly appropriate dramatic pulse, which fell to pieces only in Act III, paradoxically slowing down the narrative. What matters is that the conductor drew up the tensions already in Act 1, effectively capturing the audience’s attention (the magnificent bells at the opening of the unveiling of the Grail, with a real Glockenklavier and a set of suspended metal plates). The vivid, clear sound of the orchestra usually did not overwhelm the singers, placed conveniently at the front of the stage.

Among them, the undisputed revelation of the evening was Brindley Sherratt, a warm and fatherly Gurnemanz, yet full of solemnity and dignity, aware of the content and emotion contained in every phrase – delivered with a velvety bass, beautiful in tone, flowing freely in all registers. Sherratt’s wise, mature approach to the role is on a par with Günther Groissböck’s lyrical Bayreuth interpretation from three years ago, and even supersedes it in technical terms. That Bayreuth cast also included Derek Welton, whose Klingsor did not seem distinctive enough for me at the time. Unfortunately, that impression persisted in London as well, which is a pity, because Welton’s is a large and handsome voice, though not very ringing in the lower register, a problem of most of today’s bass-baritones. Robert Hayward was in a class of his own as Amfortas. He is experienced enough as an artist to turn some of his shortcomings to the advantage of his interpretation. I have to admit I have a problem with judging Toby Spence’s performance in the title role. I really appreciate the singer: for his excellent technique, sensitivity and musicality. However, I still remember the times when Siegfried Jerusalem was viewed as a too “light” Parsifal. There was a reason: Spence’s delicate tenor, too, struggled at times to be heard over the dense orchestral texture. More importantly, the expressive weight of some fragments of the role was beyond him; this included “Amfortas! Die Wunde!”, where a sudden feeling of compassion borders on nearly erotic ecstasy. Spence put into the role everything he could – that in spite or everything he turned out to be a Parsifal convincing in his boyishness was thanks his above-average intelligence. A separate word of praise should go to the excellent bass Stephen Richardson: his Titurel was imperious and truly spine-chilling.

Parsifal. Toby Spence (Parsifal) and Brindley Sherratt. Photo: Mark Allan

I’ve left Kundry till the end, perhaps because Farnes made her redemption the centre of the narrative. Katarina Karnéus’ beautiful mezzo-soprano has lost a lot of its former glory, but it is still secured intonation-wise and indefatigably passionate, thanks to which it gradually became increasingly expressive. What the singer is really capable of was revealed only in Act 2. My heart almost broke after her desperate “Ich sah Ihn – Ihn – und lachte” and I have to admit that it’s been a long time since I heard a Kundry so close to seducing the pure simpleton.

I have grumbled a bit, but the finale nearly knocked us off our seats. The applause was long and well deserved. There are still places where it is possible to participate in the collective social consciousness – and this during performances of works that are difficult, force us to reflect and demand intellectual effort from both the artists and the audience. Hard times are coming. There is faith that we will not run out of hope.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

I was going to see Calixto Bieito’s legendary production in Oslo over two years ago, but my plans were thwarted by the COVID outbreak. When the pandemic subsided and the operatic life returned to a fragile normal, I tried again. My friends could not understand why I ignored fresh revivals of the Spanish iconoclast’s Carmen at other, much “trendier” opera houses, for example the Viennese Staatsoper or Paris Opera. I had my reason: although in 2018 I returned from The Queen of Spades at Operahuset with very mixed feelings – for which the fault lay primarily with the director and the otherwise superb conductor, who failed to figure out the stylistic idiom of Tchaikovsky’s late oeuvre – what prevailed in the end was the delight in the white nights and dazzling architecture of the Norwegian opera house, but, above all, the palpable, even in the adverse circumstances, enthusiasm of the artists, who approached each task with a sincerity and enthusiasm worthy of the best craftsmen.

This is rather important in this case, for Bieito’s production is almost a quarter of a century old and in most opera houses has lost the charm of its original freshness. Few people remember that at the 1999 festival in the Catalan town of Perelada it caused a true storm. The director was accused of vulgarity, of celebrating brutal sex and violence – as if everyone had forgotten that Bizet himself deliberately did not put the tragic story in inverted commas, did not clearly define the character of the protagonists, that departed from the established pattern to go astray into the dangers of realism and so outraged the Parisians with all this that they paid no attention to the mastery of the music. It is worth noting that the international operatic career of Bieito, the son of a humble railway worker, an admirer of Iberian zarzuelas and at that time newly appointed artistic director of Bilbao’s Teatro Arriaga, began precisely with Carmen. Those who know only this one among Bieito’s productions have no idea of his later creative development, which began barely a year later with the scandalising staging of Verdi’s Ballo in maschera and the opening scene featuring men with their pants down and relieving themselves on toilets with transparent walls. Those who have seen only Bieito’s most recent productions have no idea that his famous Carmen is, in fact, a model example of Regietheater from the end of last century – a production that is not so much provocative, but one that provokes the audience into thinking, trying to reach the audience’s sensibility without losing nothing of what the authors of the work wanted to say.

Carmen, Den Norske Opera, 2015. Photo: Erik Berg

A spectre of machismo hovers over Bieito’s concept. The stage – like in Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser’s production premiered two years earlier, in 1997 – literally reeks of sweat, unfulfilled male lust, female loneliness, omnipresent lasciviousness and need for ordinary human closeness. Bieito can even be forgiven for copying the corrida scene in Act 4 from the two Frenchmen – though his result is inferior. He shifts the narrative both in time and in space. The action in his Carmen takes place in post-Francoist Spain, perhaps somewhere in its overseas exclaves like Ceuta or Melilla. Everything else is like in Bizet’s work: animal desires, moral mess, all-encompassing slackness. Apart from a few characteristic props – a flagpole in Act 1, very uncool Mercedes W123 signifying the tackiness of the smuggling trade, crates of alcohol and cartons of cigarettes, electronic equipment and household goods marked with distorted but still recognisable logos of international companies – the stage is virtually empty. Bieito is very precise in presenting the relationships between the characters. Carmen is a quintessence of alluring strangeness, Don José – a dull, brutal soldier, Escamillo – a primitive male who knows how to turn his popularity in the bullring to his advantage.

The theme of bullfighting runs constantly through the production – from the pantomime in the overture, featuring Lilas Pastia, who pretends to be a prestidigitator, playing with a red handkerchief from underneath which, instead of the expected magic ball, he will show his finger in a vulgar gesture, to the symbolic presence of the “Osborne bull”, which appears in a beautiful, discreetly erotic scene at the beginning of Act 3. The advertisement for the Veterano brandy, produced by the Andalusian company Osborne and introduced into the Spanish landscape in 1957 in the form of distinctive wooden boards – which some tried to eradicate from the public space five years before the premiere of Bieito’s Carmen – also plays an important role in the introduction to Act 4. When the board with the bull collapses with a bang onto the stage, its shattered remains take part a moment later in a parody of a corrida.

Carmen, Den Norske Opera, 2017. Photo: Erik Berg

Significantly, most directors today would not dare to use the solutions that constitute the strength of Bieito’s concept. There would not be a little girl lasciviously dancing flamenco. There would be no such vivid images of sex. There would be no brutal scenes of violence requiring true film acting skills from the singers.

This is why I went to see that Carmen in Oslo, the capital of a country which knows how to distinguish stage illusion from reality. And yet I froze, when the smugglers threw Zuniga like a sack of potatoes against the body of a dilapidated Mercedes-Benz. That is why I watched the love scenes with such admiration. That is why I could not help laughing when drunken girls literally rolled out of a car outside Lilas Pastia’s tavern. This was the kind of theatre I needed and I did not even expect that following a sudden cast change I would also get a cast as starry as those in Paris or Vienna.

Carmen, Den Norske Opera, 2022. Photo: Erik Berg

Don José was sung that one evening by Charles Castronovo, known to Polish opera lovers from the Wrocław Tales of Hoffmann, a performance for which he paid with a serious case of COVID. I hasten to report that the American tenor is back in top form, impressing not only with his golden, almost baritonal voice, but also with beautiful phrasing and well though-out character concept. Ingeborg Gillebo, a singer with a soft mezzo-soprano, secure intonation-wise and perfectly suited to the title role, did not pace herself well and ran out of steam in the final duet with her former lover, played out on an empty stage. Marita Sølberg was an excellent Micaëla. She not only has a technically well-assured soprano, but can also act brilliantly. It was wonderful to hear the soubrette-like Frøy Hovland Holtbakk (Frasquita), as if taken straight out of the old Opéra-Comique, with the irresistibly funny and vocally compelling Christina Jønsi as Mercedes. There were also two revelatory performances: the phenomenal Dmitry Cheblykov as Escamillo, a young but already fully formed, slightly “grainy” baritone, impeccable both in terms of voice production and diction; and the velvety-voiced Jacob Abel Tjeldberg, making his debut as Zuniga.

In addition to the repeated praise for the chorus and the orchestra, I must express my highest admiration for Ariane Matiakh, a French conductor who fell in love with Bizet’s music at home and then got an opportunity to share that love with opera houses in Europe. It is good that she accepted Bieito’s concept and skilfully combined it with Bizet’s score: into a bitter reflection on the twilight of male gods and an uncertain hope for the dawn of female deities.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

As time goes by I get less and less surprised why I was such a passionate reader of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. I had an elder brother, who was wise, clever and knew how to handle anything, reinforcing my belief that I was stupid and couldn’t understand or learn anything. In a way he was right: I still haven’t mastered the art of not biting off more than I can chew, so when Longborough Festival Opera, after two years of pandemic-related restrictions, decided to enter the new season at full steam, I immediately set off for the Cotswolds hills. You keep coming back to your spiritual homeland despite adversities, and there were quite a few of them, given that I decided to see a performance of Siegfried precisely during the celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II’ Platinum Jubilee, which coincided with a half-term break at British schools. But simpletons from fairy tales and passionate music critics get everything right in the end. I managed to get hold of the last plane ticket, miraculously book a room in my favourite B&B and found myself again, like always, to a town from an eighteenth-century couplet, “where men are fools and women are bold, and many a wicked tale is told” – a few kilometres from a village which was once jokingly said to be aspiring to be the English Bayreuth, and which is now increasingly being hailed as a place headed by the most eminent, albeit invariably modest, Richard Wagner specialist in the world.

The plan was for LFO’s new staging of the Ring, conducted by Anthony Negus and directed by Amy Lane, to have its great finale next year. The pandemic has postponed it for at least a year, not to mention the fact that last year’s Die Walküre was presented with much reduced forces, in a semi-staged version, without overseas visitors, held back by the long quarantine in force in Britain at the time. I wrote about Das Rheingold six months before the outbreak of the pandemic and about Die Walküre – on the basis of a streamed performance generously made available by the management of Longborough Festival Opera. I went to see Siegried with hope, but, at the same time, with my head full of doubts: I make no secret of the fact that I still consider the third part of Wagner’s tetralogy to be its weakest link, inferior in both dramatic compactness and coherence of musical vision to the other three parts of the Ring: the brilliant reinterpretation of satyr drama in Das Rheingold, the movingly human tragedy of Die Walküre and the sumptuous grand opéra-like concept of the final Götterdämmerung. What seems to be the most problematic element of Siegfried is the eponymous protagonist, a herald of a new model of humanity, a hero from nowhere, a naive simpleton, a stupid “younger one”, who seems to embody the idea of freedom above all in his blessed incomprehension of the mechanisms governing the modern world. Wagner – at least on the surface – made a mistake in constructing this character, putting to the fore his naive, primal “fearlessness”, which, in the hands of most conductors interpreting Siegfried, leads to the highlighting of the already blatant disproportion between Siegmund’s son, raised in the forest, and Wotan’s cursed daughter Brünnhilde – poignantly “human”, compassionate and capable of true love.

Paul Carey Jones (Wanderer) and Adrian Dwyer (Mime). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Yet, as I have already mentioned, these are just appearances, resulting from the now common tendency to elevate the character of Siegfried and to seek in him a model for Walther and Parsifal – characters who acquire charisma and refinement in the course of the narrative in order to triumph in the finale as heralds of a new order. When it comes to Siegfried, the matter is much more complicated and, at the same time, tragic. This herald of inevitable change will never mature, will never – or perhaps will, shortly before his death in Götterdämmerung – become sufficiently self-aware to change anything in this world. In order to present Siegfried’s story persuasively, without trying to cover up his inherent traits – thoughtlessness, ingratitude and obtuse cruelty – one has to believe this fairy tale. Like a modern child or a nineteenth-century reader of Brothers Grimm’s tales, thinking in terms completely different from those used today, absorbed by the story of Kaspar Hauser, which reverberated throughout Europe, a mystery of his day and, at the same time, an embodiment of longing for Rousseau’s utopia of the natural man.

Negus does believe in that fairy tale, of which more in a moment. The matter is not as straightforward with Amy Lane, who – after an ambivalent reception of her Rheingold – seems to be plunging deeper and deeper into “homemade” theatre, as if not quite trusting that the audience at a Gloucestershire countryside opera house would be capable to follow, without detailed explanations, a bold metaphor. At Longborough the singers move within a confined space, which is governed by rules quite different from those of the large, state-of-the-art stages of Cardiff or London. The unnecessary accumulation of props (set designs by Rhiannon Newman Brown) works against the narrative in this case, not only distracting from what is essential in the score, but also – unintentionally – focusing the audience’s gaze on coarse details that would go unnoticed on a larger stage. Paradoxically, the further into the work, the purer the staging got, the clearer the projections (bringing to mind vague but probably correct associations with the Ossianic landscapes from Gottfried Keller’s 1845 Green Henry, an autobiographical novel of a failed painter who had problems with distinguishing between reality and his own ideas), and the darker the finale, which only in the last scene shone with the illusory light of fulfilled love.

Bradley Daley (Siegfried). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The stage movement, however, followed in every detail the dazzling musical vision of Negus, who – as I have said – not only believes in this fairy tale about a boy who went out into the world to learn to be afraid, but also, as is his custom, turns it into a whole where no tacking can be heard between the individual scenes, where the orchestra does not accompany, but takes turns in picking up the singing of the soloists or in tossing them a melody, on the basis of which they develop their own story, where everything pulsates like a living organism, talks in its own voice, demands the listener’s attention to the tiniest, often overlooked details in the texture. Negus’ interpretations have this uncanny quality of being able both to appeal to the novice Wagnerians and to persuade the seasoned pundits to explore the details of past performances – and leave them convinced that LFO’s music director is perhaps the only living conductor who manages to get to the heart of Wagner’s intentions, despite the recent attempts to present his music with period instruments and historical performance practices.

This is evidenced by the very choice of the soloists, headed by the Australian tenor Bradley Daley in the title role. Daley has a voice that is not very noble in its timbre, not very nuanced, but in this it is in some primaeval, even seductive way refreshing and reliable. His singing is clearly marked by childlike freedom, unbridled determination of a feral orphan from the forest who finds fear not where he expected it, and before he does, he discovers a completely different emotion neglected by most conductors – sympathy for Fafner, a “collateral” victim, as it were, of his true aspirations. The role of the giant turned dragon was quite finely played by Simon Wilding, who had become known as Fafner already in Das Rheingold. Among the remaining members of the cast from three years ago, the one that made the biggest impression on me was Adrian Dwyer (Mime), an artist endowed with a bright and, at the same time, meaty tenor, technically well-assured, never falling into a caricature of this altogether tragic figure. Though perhaps he was not as expressive as some previous performers of the role, above all the late lamented Erwin Wohlfahrt, known from, for example, Karl Böhm’s legendary interpretation at the 1967 Bayreuth Festival. Mark Stone as Alberich was slightly less impressive than before – although it has to be said that in Siegfried his role is less prominent than in Das Rheingold, which is reflected not only in the dramaturgy of this part of the tetralogy, but also in the score itself. As Erda, Mae Heydorn capitalised on her past success – however, she is more of a mezzo-soprano than contralto, which could be heard at times in her not very dense lower register. A magnificent Wanderer came from Paul Carey Jones, whose musicality and sensibility I had admired already in Die Walküre, yet it was only now that I could fully appreciate the assets of his velvety bass-baritone. Separate praise is due to the young Colombian singer Julieth Lozano in the part of Woodbird, at last sung with a sensuous soprano sparkling with colours, at last portrayed as an erotic “arouser” of Siegfried – certainly in accordance with the intention of the composer, who entrusted the role in Bayreuth to Marie Haupt, a pupil of Pauline Viardot and performer of Venus in Tannhäuser on numerous occasions. Lee Bisset (Brünnhilde), who was phenomenal in her acting, struggled at times to control the wide vibrato in her dense, gorgeous and truly dramatic soprano – I hope that the problem will pass, because I’m really looking forward to hearing her in the final part of the Longborough Ring.

Lee Bisset (Brünnhilde) and Bradley Daley. Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

I have to complement the already-mentioned assets of Negus’ interpretation with a description of two revelations. First of all, a breathtaking “Verfluchtes Licht!” episode from Act I featuring Mime – a wild feast of lights and flames, just as emphatic as in Karajan’s famous 1969 recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, but much more vivid and three-dimensional: the first episode in this performance that made me believe in the fairy tale and immerse myself completely in Wagner’s mythical reality. The other revelation, perhaps even more overwhelming, was Siegfried’s famous song of the melting and reforging of Nothung (“Nothung! Nothung! Neidliches Schwert!”), for the first time in decades performed in accordance with the composer’s original instructions (“Kräftig, doch nicht zu schnell”, “Schwer und kräftig, nicht zu schnell”). Nothung’s rebirth was finally given proper weight – thanks to wise collaboration between the singer and the knowledgeable conductor. I need not even mention the ecstatic finale of Act III, in which Brünnhilde bids farewell to the old order of things and throws herself into the arms of her long-awaited lover. Negus has already proved many times that he is able to control tension until the very last bar, which reverberates, fades away and rouses the audience to a frenetic ovation.

I will repeat the words of the simpleton from Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale: I finally know what fear is. Most importantly, however, in Longborough I also got to know what love and compassion is.

Translated by: Anna Kijak