Upiór w operze

I generally tend to avoid quoting overused bons mots, but in the case of Bayreuth Baroque I really cannot think of anything other than Hitchcock’s famous recipe for a good film. Max Emanuel Cenčić’s festival began four years ago with a veritable earthquake and tension has been steadily rising ever since. Cenčić is both the artistic director of the festival, and the director and performer of one of the leading roles in the stagings of forgotten Baroque operas prepared year after year, which on the surface seems like a perfect recipe for disaster. Yet the opposite is, in fact, true: Cenčić’s ambitious and visionary concepts are proving to be not only the highlights of the festival programme, but also the starting point for subsequent festival ventures featuring the stars of past performances, as well as an arena for new experiments in historically informed performance.

I dread to think what will happen next. After last year’s premiere of Handel’s Flavio I expected a temporary loss of form. I told myself that it was not possible to treat the audience every season to a production that would be so musically excellent and theatrically thoughtful. Especially given that all of Cenčić’s productions to date – in addition to their many other assets – have been marked by a light, almost burlesque sense of humour, which I hastily concluded was the most important feature of his directing. This year Cenčić reminded us of Ifigenia in Aulide, one of Nicola Porpora’s least known operas – despite its conventional lieto fine, a deadly serious thing, exposing humanity’s deepest moral dilemmas, explored at length by authors from Euripides, Racine, Schiller and Hauptmann, to Yorgos Lanthimos with his harrowing film The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

Ifigenia in Aulide. Photo: Clemens Manser

Ifigenia comes from the middle period of the composer’s career, when a group of aristocrats hostile to Handel, led by Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, invited Porpora to London to throw down the gauntlet to the revived Royal Academy of Music. The Opera of the Nobility was inaugurated in December 1733 with the premiere of Porpora’s Arianna in Nasso at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, a month before the premiere of Handel’s Arianna in Creta, which was being prepared at the Haymarket theatre. After two not very successful seasons, the Opera of the Nobility moved to the King’s Theatre in Covent Garden and began regularly using underhand tactics against the rival company. The rivalry brought both sides to the brink of bankruptcy, but Handel won in the end. The Opera of the Nobility went out of business in 1737, having been ruined in large by demands of ever-higher salaries from the singers, including the contralto Francesca Bertolli, the castrati Senesino and Farinelli, and the bass Antonio Montagnana. Discouraged, Porpora left England, tried in vain to obtain a position at the imperial court in Vienna and eventually returned to Naples, where he rebuilt his reputation for a time with a new, revised version of Semiramide riconosciuta.

If you don’t count Festa d’Imeneo, his last London opera – or, in fact, a serenata – the 1735 Ifigenia received the frostiest reception from King’s Theatre regulars. Its run ended after only five performances, overshadowed by the much more popular Polifemo. The main culprit for the failure was probably Porpora’s regular collaborator, the librettist Paolo Antonio Rolli, who made the decision – misguided, as it turned out – to stick faithfully to the myth in Euripides’ version and focused too much on the relationships between the characters at the expense of effective dramaturgy. Yet musically, it is an extraordinary work, challenging the established stereotype of Porpora’s “old-fashioned” style. Despite its rather conventional structure – with plenty of virtuoso da capo arias alternating with secco recitatives – Ifigenia delights with its lyricism and beauty of melodic lines, variety of colour effects, as well as the composer’s method of constructing harmonic structures, already heralding classicism.

Aware that Rolli’s “Euripidean” libretto may, paradoxically, better appeal to the sensibilities of modern audiences, Max Emanuel Cenčić this time departed from the aesthetics of theatrical pastiche, creating a production that is clear, and, at the same time, marked by deep symbolism and a plethora of references to the myth’s “imagined” reality, which has changed over the centuries. I have already praised the set designer Giorgina Germanou’s talent for shaping space and mood with the help of simple, brilliantly lit decorations and expressive costumes (also by her this time) in connection with the pasticcio Sarrasine at this year’s Göttingen Handel Festival. The lighting director Romain de Lagarde bathed the sets in evocative shades of red, symbolising bloody sacrifice; idyllic blues; white, suggesting Iphigenia’s innocence; and the fathomless black of Diana/Artemis, in Greek mythology the goddess of hunting, but also of the moon and death. The nakedness of Agamemnon’s soldiers, bringing to my mind scenes from classical red-figure vases, and the war colours of the Myrmidons, Achilles’ cruel and uncouth companions, are contrasted with the ominous purple of the seer Calchas’ robes, the heroes’ costumes suspended outside time and the Baroque splendour of the Atreides’ clothing. However, what turned out to be Cenčić’s most interesting idea was the division of the role of Iphigenia between a young, silent actress (Marina Diakoumakou) and black-clad Diana sporting deer antlers on her head, who accompanies Iphigenia like a shadow – this highlighted the passivity of the eponymous heroine in the face of divine will and, at the same time, provided the tragedy with an expressive narrative frame: from the anger of Diana demanding a human sacrifice for the death of the deer, through her growing decision to save the unfortunate girl, to the inevitably emerging bond between the goddess and her future priestess on Taurida.

Ifigenia in Aulide. Jasmin Delfs (Iphigenia/Diana). Photo: Falk von Traubenberg.

The sophisticated staging made the extraordinary qualities of the musical interpretation all the more powerful. Who knows, this may have been the first time in my life that I witnessed a contemporary performance of a Baroque opera that verged on absolute perfection. I will not grumble that the role of Ulysses, intended for a female soprano, was entrusted to a man (Nicolò Balducci), while Farinelli’s successor in the role of Achilles was a singer with a voice less resonant than that of the famous castrato from Apulia (Maayan Licht). Both soloists demonstrated that a well-trained soprano countertenor can be a true heroic voice, comfortable across all registers, agile in coloraturas, secure intonation-wise in huge intervallic leaps, and fluent in the style of Neapolitan bel canto. In the role of Agamemnon Cenčić once again faced the legend of Senesino and once again emerged victorious from the ordeal, both as a technically sensational singer and a superb actor. A convincing character of Clytemnestra was created by Marie-Ellen Nesi, a singer with an unusually expressive dark mezzo-soprano. Riccardo Novaro’s resonant and supple baritone was flawless in the role of Calchas. However, the most impressive performance may have come from the young Jasmin Delfs in the dual role of Iphigenia and Diana – because of not only her beautiful, luminous soprano, but also her extraordinary ease and lightness of singing.

Aroma di Roma, a candlelight concert at Ordenskirche St. Georgen. Photo: Clemens Manser

All these wonders would not have happened without Christophe Rousset, leading the soloists and the orchestra of Les Talents Lyriques from the harpsichord with an uncommon sense of the idiom and the richness of the colours contained in the score, with an assured and decisive hand, usually at rather sharp tempi, but with such discipline that nothing was lost from the calibre of this music. The following day the French harpsichordist performed with a dozen or so of the ensemble musicians at a candlelight concert at Ordenskirche St. Georgen, accompanying the excellent Sandrine Piau in a programme comprising two secular cantatas on “Roman” themes, Montéclair’s La morte di Lucretia and Handel’s Agrippina condotta a morire, and Domenico Scarlatti’s cantata Tinte a note di sangue, a letter written in blood to an unfaithful lover, interspersed with instrumental pieces by Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti. I was very moved by the evening: a display of the most tender collaboration between the musicians and the legendary singer, who more than made up for the now dull sound of her beautiful soprano with phenomenal technique and incredible maturity of interpretation.

Lucile Richardot. Photo: Clemens Manser

It is a pity that there was no such wisdom in Lucile Richardot’s concert the day before at the Schlosskirche with an attractive programme consisting of arias of the “Baroque sorceresses” – Medea, Armida and Circe – with the very capable Jean-Luc Ho at the harpsichord. Her extraordinary, almost tenor-like contralto is still deeply radiant. Her interpretations are getting increasingly mannered – to the detriment of both her voice and the music. It is possible, however, that I am too harsh on Richardot, still unable to recover from the delight of two evenings that transported me to a completely different dimension of historically informed performance.

This year I went to Bayreuth Baroque for a very brief visit – to experience an earthquake and a series of aftershocks. In future seasons I expect tsunamis, landslides and musical fires. Cenčić has already managed to surpass Hitchcock in the art of tension building.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Veterans of the Polish period instrument performance wax emotional about Innsbruck. In the turbulent 1990s, when they came to the Tyrolean capital – full of hope and poor as church mice – to study with the greatest masters, they would sometimes slip in without a ticket to concerts at the Hofburg, the Spanish Hall of the Ambras Castle or St. James’ Cathedral. Since then dozens of early music festivals have sprouted up across Europe. The dreamers of those days no longer have a sense of being excluded. The time of legends and pioneers is no more: the oeuvre of past eras has escaped its niche and entered the mainstream. The odds have evened out, but, on the other hand, the public’s expectations have changed. In order be able to face up to the growing competition, artists must reassure the listeners that the existing formula is working or must reinvent themselves.

The godparents of the Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik were two enthusiasts: the bassoonist Otto Ulf, a teacher at the local secondary school, and the poet and translator Lilly von Sauter, who in 1962 became the curator of Archduke Ferdinand II’s impressive collection at the Ambras Castle. The following year the two organised the first castle concert – on the 600th anniversary of the handover of Tyrol to the Habsburgs. The idea caught on.  Since then the Ambraser Schlosskonzerte have attracted a growing number of music lovers and curious tourists. In 1972 the Summer Academy of Early Music was launched thanks to Ulf’s efforts. The first “real” festival, under the artistic direction of its founder, was held in 1976. It was Ulf who shaped the Festwochen’s profile, which was unusual for the time and which elevated the event to the rank one of the most important festivals in Europe. Since the 1977 staging of Handel’s Acis and Galatea the programmes of successive Festwochen have featured stagings and semi-staged performances of old, often forgotten operas and oratorios. We can safely venture to say that Innsbruck is the cradle of the modern revival of Baroque opera.

The most fruitful years of the festival were those during the directorship of Ulf and his successor Howard Arman. The Festwochen became a breeding ground for new talent, a stepping stone in the great careers of future masters of historically informed performance, a model for the founders of new festivals and an encouragement to include early music in the programmes of other prestigious events. Something started to go wrong during the reign of René Jacobs, who treated Innsbruck somewhat dispassionately, as a sideline to his international activity, which was developing more dynamically outside Austria. The crisis worsened during the tenure of Alessandro De Marchi, an alumnus of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and one-time assistant to Jacobs, who failed to revive the festival’s tried-and-tested but a bit outdated formula. De Marchi undoubtedly deserves praise for inaugurating the Cesti-Wettbewerb, a competition in honour of the Italian composer Pietro Antonio Cesti, who served for some time as the Kapellmeister at the court of Archduke Ferdinand Charles in Innsbruck. Prizewinners from previous years, including Emöke Baráth, Rupert Charlesworth, Sreten Manojlović and the Polish mezzo-soprano Natalia Kawałek, are developing beautifully, building careers not only in the Baroque repertoire. However, sceptics grumbled that De Marchi was making misguided programming choices and put his own ambitions above the patience of listeners, who were treated to hours-long performances of not always interesting rarities. The critics also raised concerns about De Marchi’s striking but increasingly mannered interpretations.

Graupner’s Dido. Jone Martínez as Menalippe and Andreas Wolf (Hiarbas). Photo: Birgit Gufler

One thing is certain: the festival began to lose the interest of audiences and foreign critics. It was time for reforms. The change of the guard in 2023, after the last season programmed by De Marchi, brought with it a change in the structure of the entire Festwochen management. Markus Lutz, the previous Managing Director, became Executive Commercial Director; Eva-Maria Sens was appointed Artistic Director; while the harpsichordist, conductor and researcher Ottavio Dantone, well-known to Polish audiences as well, was made the new Musical Director.

The motto of this year’s Festwochen was “Where do we come from? Where are we going?” I have already answered the first question above. If, as I suspect, the organisers were referring to the title of Gauguin’s famous painting, the motto was missing the question “Who are we?” Which is not entirely clear in the case of Eva-Maria Sens, a graduate in history and German studies, who has been collaborating with the festival since 2015, previously in the much less prominent position of head of artistic administration, and has no particularly impressive track record. For the moment her vision is not much different from the declarations of most newly appointed directors, trying to lure the audience with an open dialogue between the past and the present. It will be possible to answer the question “Where are we going?” in a few years, although it is already worrying that the festival’s musical directors will serve no more than three to five seasons. In my opinion this is too short a time to give the festival an identity and leave a clear mark of artistic individuality on it. It’s a pity, because Dantone and his Accademia Bizantina, the festival’s resident orchestra, represent the commendable trend of communicating with listeners in a purely musical language, without unnecessary fireworks, with a deep sense that the content and the emotions of compositions written centuries ago will prove intelligible also to a modern, well-prepared audience. Yet it takes time and determination to develop a new audience. Let’s hope both Dantone and his successors will not lack either.

In evaluating the entire festival, the programme of which, spread over more than five weeks, included stagings of three operas, the Cesti Competition, over twenty concerts and as many fringe events, I have to rely on the opinions of the local critics for obvious reasons. I arrived Innsbruck for the last few days of the Festwochen, consciously – albeit regretfully – forgoing Giacomelli’s Cesare in Egitto under Dantone and a concert performance of Handel’s Arianna in Creta featuring the winners of last year’s competition. I chose Christoph Graupner’s Dido, Königin von Carthago, conducted by Andrea Marcon – the operatic debut of the twenty-four-year-old composer, who not long before that got a job as a harpsichordist at Hamburg’s Oper am Gänsemarkt. The building in the square where, contrary to its name, poultry was never traded, with the name most likely referring to the estate of the landowner Ambrosius Gosen, was the first public opera house in Germany, opening in 1678, just over forty years after the inauguration of Venice’s Teatro San Cassiano. It was a stage where no castrati were hired, but where audiences nevertheless expected the same thing as in Venice: elaborate arias full of intricate embellishments and complicated librettos with lots of subplots.

Graupner wrote Dido after the departure of his younger colleague Handel, a violinist and harpsichordist at the Hamburg theatre, who before traveling to Italy had managed to present the well-received Almira and the now-lost Nero at the Gänsemarkt. Of the scores of Handel’s later “Hamburg” operas, Florindo and Daphne, only fragments have survived and they are insufficient to warrant a reliable reconstruction. The operas of Johann Mattheson – the same to whom Händel refused to give way at the harpsichord for a performance of Die unglückselige Cleopatra and was very nearly killed by the enraged composer, an event that turned out to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship between the two men – are yet to see their renaissance. The first performance in our time of Mattheson’s Boris Goudenow, which premiered in Hamburg in 1710, three years after Graupner’s operatic debut, did not take place until 2005. Of the three composers, whose oeuvres from that period perfectly reflect the “programme line” of Oper am Gänsemarkt during the house’s first heyday under the direction of Reinhard Keiser, one, Mattheson, was Hamburg-born, while the other two received their first musical training in two Saxon cities: Halle (Handel) and Leipzig (Graupner). Despite the undoubted stylistic differences, their works from the period represent German opera of the transitional phase between the mature and late Baroque, that is, according to Piotr Kamiński, “an intoxicating mixture of Venetian opera, French choreography, German heartiness and universal bad taste”.

Robin Johanssen (Dido), Jacob Lawrence (Aeneas), and Jorge Franco (Achates). Photo: Birgit Gufler

The occasional stagings of Almira aside, this eclectic genre is still a terra incognita for most Baroque opera lovers. Dido – like Almira, which does not resemble any of Handel’s later operas – surprises with its huge size, mixing of German arias and recitatives with Italian arias, typical of Hamburg opera, a range of improbable subplots and an extraordinary sensuality of sound. It also reveals the composer’s Leipzig training, especially his mastery of the art of counterpoint and fugue. The orchestration is dense and dark, combinations of instruments  not obvious, changes of mood abrupt, play of modes and keys deeply thought out and linked to the character of the protagonists (most of the title role is in minor keys). Worthy of note are the elaborate ensembles and choruses, in part inspired by French composers, and in part even featuring literal references to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas – which would confirm musicologists’ most recent theories that the father of English opera’s oeuvre had a much bigger influence on the music of continental composers than previously thought. Graupner also made several significant corrections to Heinrich Hinsch’s libretto, demonstrating an unerring sense of drama – corrections sometimes as subtle as changing the order of the chorus’ words at the beginning of Act III from “Dido lebe” (long live Dido) to “Lebe, Dido” to make the link to the following ominous duet between Aeneas and Achates, “Lebe, Dido, lebe wohl” (Farewell, Dido, farewell), all the stronger.

It’s a pity that Marcon took the accusations against De Marchi too much to his heart and opted for rather serious cuts to the score. Many arias were removed from the opera, as was the entire role of Iras, Dido’s confidante in love with Achates, with secco recitatives being drastically trimmed as well, sometimes to the detriment of the musical dramaturgy. Perhaps, however, the audience at the Tiroler Landestheater indeed was not ready yet to sit through the complete work that would have taken at least four and a half hours to perform without the cuts. In the truncated version it did hold the audience’s attention, a lot of credit for which is due to the Italian production team: the dancer and choreographer Deda Cristina Colonna who was in charge of directing (in 2017, shortly after Stefan Sutkowski’s death, her production of Lully’s Armida, presented in Innsbruck two years earlier, was brought to the Warsaw Chamber Opera), and the set designer Domenico Franchi. A sensible compromise between the sumptuousness of the historicising costumes and props, and the minimalism of the geometric, sliding decorations – magnificently lit by Cesare Agoni, who bathed the stage in vivid, saturated shades of blue, red, black, white and, above all, gold – provided space for the singers and ample room for manoeuvre for the director, who patched up the gaps in the libretto with elaborate acting gestures alluding to both Baroque dance and modern forms of dance and pantomime.

The biggest hero of the evening was, however, Andrea Marcon, leading the soloists, NovoCanto vocal ensemble and La Cetra orchestra with an energy that proved infectious to all the performers, but at the same time with precision and without falling into irritating mannerisms. He beautifully spun tuneful, expressive melodic lines, intricately weaving them into the dense, shimmering texture, only to occasionally pull out a single thread from it. He placed the accents brilliantly, played with timbre skilfully and, above all, perfectly balanced the proportions between the stage and the orchestra pit, which, given the rather uneven vocal cast, was not an easy task.

I was a little disappointed by the eponymous Dido portrayed by Robin Johanssen, a singer endowed with a sensual and fresh soprano with a charmingly silvery timbre, which to my ear is more appropriate for the classical repertoire, however. Her singing, smooth, even across the registers and confident in the coloraturas, lacked primarily specifically Baroque ornamentation. In addition, Johanssen took a long time to warm up and achieved her full expression only in Act III (especially in the harrowing aria “Komm doch, komm, gewünschter Teil”, in which she was accompanied with uncommon sensitivity by Eva Saladin, the ensemble’s concert mistress). Alicia Amo, cast in two roles – Anna, Dido’s sister, and the goddess Venus – has a soprano that is bright and rather harsh in tone, marked by a persistent, uncontrolled vibrato, which the singer tried to cover with expressive delivery of the musical text, not always succeeding. I was definitely more impressed by the velvety-voiced, very technically proficient Jone Martínez in the soprano roles of Juno and the Egyptian princess Menalippe, whose love for the Numidian prince Hiarbas, head over heels in love with Dido, would find fulfilment only after the death of the Carthaginian queen. The weakest links in the male cast were the tenors: Jacob Lawrence (Aeneas), handsome-voiced but unconvincing as a character, and the clearly still inexperienced Jorge Franco as Achates. On the other hand excellent performances came from the unfortunate suitors: Andreas Wolf, who impressed with his sonorous, well-placed bass-baritone and stylish ornamentation in the role of Hiarbas; and José Antonio López, whose noble, mature baritone was perfect for the role of Juba, Prince of Tyras infatuated with Anna.

Musica hispanica. Los Elementos, Alberto Miguélez Rouco. Photo: Mona Wibmer

I stayed in Innsbruck for two more days. The following day, at the Jesuit church, I was able to enjoy rarely heard music by two eighteenth-century composers, José de Nebra and Francesco Corselli, fragments of which – arranged in a vocal-instrumental mass typical of Madrid’s Capilla Real at the time – were performed passionately and unpretentiously by the Los Elementos ensemble conducted by the Spanish countertenor and harpsichordist Alberto Miguélez Rouco. The day after that, as part of the new “Ottavio Plus” series, Dantone and Alessandro Tampieri, concert master and soloist of the Accademia Bizantina, gave a concert at the Spanish Hall, presenting a sophisticated programme featuring works for solo harpsichord and harpsichord in dialogue with violin, viola and viola d’amore: from the “proto-Baroque” Frescobaldi, through Attilio Ariosti, Domenico Scarlatti and Johann Sebastian Bach, to the heralds of Classicism, Johann Gottlieb Graun and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

Ottavio Plus. Ottavio Dantone and Alessandro Tampieri. Photo: Mona Wibmer

The venues were packed, but pilgrimages of music lovers from abroad are yet to materialise. There are new faces among the performers, the repertoire is already a bit different, the festival is slowly changing course and setting off into the unknown. “All remains different”, the new directors announced, alluding to the hit song by the German actor and singer Herbert Grönemeyer. I hope they will keep their word. The refrain of Grönemeyer’s song begins with the words “there’s so much to lose, you can only win”.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Well, I have been taught once again to never say never. I didn’t make it to the premiere of Valentin Schwarz’s production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, as I still had other some Bayreuth stagings from previous years to catch up on. Last year I gave the new tetralogy a miss as well – discouraged by the generally scathing reviews of the director’s vision, the uneven, in a few cases even ill-judged cast and the return to the podium of the young, undoubtedly talented, but not very experienced Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen, who in 2021 deprived me of any vestiges of pleasure in experiencing my beloved Die Walküre. This season I ran out of arguments – after Cornelius Meister and then after Inkinen, the baton was taken over by Simone Young, to whose debut on the Green Hill we had been looking forward for years. The other sensational announcement was that Michael Spyres would sing Siegmund, an announcement all the more sensational given that this was a double debut – the American tenor had never sung the role on stage before. Professional curiosity prevailed, although I must confess remorsefully that I got myself accredited only for Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. After what I saw and heard, I do not rule out that next year I might take one last opportunity to get to know the whole thing – if only to verify some of the interpretive tropes I spotted when analysing the first two parts of the Ring.

Schwarz arrived in Bayreuth with a hard-earned reputation of an iconoclast and a rebel. He announced that he intended to direct the Ring as if it were a four-part saga on Netflix – a story about the problems and dilemmas of a modern family, adapted to the sensibilities of today’s audiences, with all the resulting dramatic consequences of this decision. Fully aware that Wagner had drawn on dozens of sources to create his own mythology, Schwarz felt himself a myth-maker as well and, as he put it, “with consistent disrespect” for the libretto, made fundamental changes in it: not in the textual but in the interpretive layer. He made the conflict between the two twin brothers, Alberich and Wotan, the dramatic axis of the whole. He replaced the Rhine gold physically present in the Ring with a multiple symbol of power. He turned Sieglinde – pregnant even before the arrival of Siegmund – into a victim of Wotan’s rape, completely turning the relationship between the protagonists of Die Walküre upside down. As Schwarz resorted to comparisons with cinematic attempts to demythologise established myths, let me point out that in Netflix’s nearly thirty-year history no one has made an adaptation so far removed from the original that the viewer – in order to understand anything about it – has to use the director’s extensive commentary. Such commentary was not necessary even in the case of the mad Norwegian series Ragnarok, whose creators took a merciless approach not only to Norse mythology, but also to Der Ring des Nibelungen – and yet the narrative remained clear, above all for the production’s main target audience, that is pimply teenagers who didn’t always have a clue why a certain nursing home resident in the fictional town of Edda wore a black eye patch and was called Wotan Wagner.

Das Rheingold. Tomasz Konieczny (Wotan), Ólafur Sigurdarson (Alberich), and John Daszak (Loge). Photo: Enrico Nawrath

Thus, from a conceptual point of view Schwarz’s Ring is a complete disaster, but visually a perversely attractive disaster, mainly due to Andrea Cozzi’s excellent set design, Andy Besuch’s fine costumes, Nicola Hungsberg’s efficient lighting direction, prepared this year on the basis of Reinhard Traub’s original concept, and – last but not least – the extraordinary qualities of the Festspielhaus stage, the depth of which enhances every detail and brightens every colour. However, Schwarz doesn’t know how to use this brilliantly arranged space, which evokes only superficial associations with a movie set. The narrative unfolds in too many places at once, becomes distracting owing to the impossibility of using close-ups and long camera zoom-ins and, as a result, gets bogged down in the tangled, disjointed side plots.

And yet it is possible to discern in all this a desperate attempt to lure the audience with the promise of a mystery. There is no gold, no ring, no Nothung in this staging, but there are symbols that are yet to be fully explained – perhaps their meaning will be unveiled in the subsequent parts of the cycle. Could it be that gold is the ghastly, cruel boy in a yellow shirt, whom Alberich kidnaps from the custody of the Rhinemaidens? Or perhaps it’s just an illusion, perhaps the real metaphor for the primordial order of nature is the two children in Die Walküre sprinkled with golden glitter – embodied visions of the original state of innocence of Sieglinde and Siegmund? What does the pyramid, shown in various forms, mean? Could it be that in all its manifestations – from a polyhedral variation of Rubik’s cube that Wotan gives the infernal boy to play with, to the luminous space that Brünnhilde heads for in the finale of Die Walküre – it is an ambiguous symbol of power and violence, the ring, Tarnhelm and Wotan’s spear in one?

We don’t get an answer to these questions and I doubt – I may be wrong, though – that we will get it at the end of the Ring. Schwarz has some decent directorial skills, and from time to time he enlivens this incoherent tale of a toxic family with finely played episodes and charming acting scenes that, instead of developing into a coherent narrative, burst like soap bubbles. Like the brilliant, if a bit over-the-top, scene in which Erda impetuously hurls a tray full of champagne glasses against the floor before “Weiche, Wotan, weiche”. Like the beginning of Act I of Die Walküre, in which Hunding, amidst the flashes of a thunderstorm, struggles with a panel of blown electrical fuses. Like the well-captured essence of Siegmund’s disappointment, when, hearing that he will not be reunited with Sieglinde in Valhalla, he abandons his suitcase packed for the journey to the palace of the fallen. Yet most of Schwarz’s ideas come from nowhere and lead nowhere, and this includes the spectacular Non-Ride of the Valkyries: shrouded in bandages and recuperating in a plastic surgery clinic.

Das Rheingold. Tobias Kehrer (Fafner), Jens-Erik Aasbø (Fasolt), Nicholas Brownlee (Donner), Christina Nilsson (Freia), and Mirko Roschkowski (Froh). Photo: Enrico Nawrath

I wonder to what extent this pandemonium of post-dramatic theatre influenced casting choices and style of performance of the various vocal parts. In Das Rheingold, in line with Schwarz’s concept, we got the twins Alberich and Wotan in the form of two repulsive shady-looking characters, whose singing – far from any canons of beauty and subtlety – carried only a powerful charge of contempt, frustration and hatred (Ólafur Sigurdarson and Tomasz Konieczny, respectively). An emotionless and prematurely aged Fricka found a convincing performer in Christa Mayer, who possesses an already tired mezzo-soprano with an excessive vibrato. Freia, terrified and almost in catatonia, was heard in Christina Nilsson’s lovely but at times seemingly frozen voice. Ya-Chung Huang’s technically assured tenor had to cope with an extremely one-dimensional, even caricatural vision of Mime. The same applies to John Daszak, whose interpretation of Loge came as if straight from English vaudeville – which is not surprising, given that Schwarz imagined him as Wotan’s family lawyer. Okka von der Damerau as Erda successfully made up for her technical shortcomings with her expressiveness. Of the two giant brothers the one I found more memorable was Fafner, sung by Tobias Kehrer with a fairly small and at times unstable, but very charming bass. Mirko Roschkowski (Froh) paled in comparison with the excellent Nicholas Brownlee as Donner (I looked up the cast of Das Rheingold to be presented at the Bayerische Staatsoper in the autumn and discovered with satisfaction that I wasn’t the only person to hear more of a Wotan in him). I found softness and lyricism only in the singing of the Rhinemaidens – this makes me all the happier to note a fine performance by the Polish mezzo-soprano Natalia Skrycka as Wellgunde. In the second instalment of the Ring characters familiar from the prologue were joined by Wotan’s traditionally screaming daughters, in comparison with whom Catherine Foster did surprisingly well in the role of Brünnhilde, sung musically, with great commitment and at times an indispensable sense of humour, although the English singer, who has an undoubtedly handsome soprano, as usual did not avoid problems with intonation and excessive vibrato.

Die Walküre. Michael Spyres (Siegmund) and Vida Miknevičiūtė (Sieglinde). Photo: Enrico Nawrath

Only the first act of Die Walküre fulfilled my dream of the truth of the most humane of Wagner’s musical dramas – thanks to two phenomenal Bayreuth debutants: Vida Miknevičiūtė, who conveyed all the anxiety, ecstasy and anguish of Sieglinde with a soprano that was quite sharp, but at the same time agile, spontaneous, sparkling with colour, impeccable in terms of both intonation and articulation; and Michael Spyres, who took Bayreuth by storm and immediately presented himself as one of the best Siegmunds in the festival’s post-war history. I admire the extraordinary intelligence of this singer, who perfectly senses the moment when a change of repertoire should be made without damaging the voice and, at the same time, in full harmony with the aesthetics and performance tradition of the newly mastered roles. His German still leaves a bit to be desired (this also applies to the production of certain vowels, which continue to bring to mind associations with the French grand opera), but in terms of vividness of his voice, his uniquely baritonal sound, beautifully open top and rounded notes at the bottom of the range, and above all the sensitive, truly song-like phrasing – I think Spyres would have delighted Wagner himself. The singing of this Sieglinde and this Siegmund could move a rock: it certainly moved the ever-dependable Georg Zeppenfeld, who complemented the artistry of the two singers with an astonishingly sensitive portrayal of the unloved, frustrated Hunding.

Die Walküre. Tomasz Konieczny (Wotan). Photo: Enrico Nawrath

It was worth coming to Bayreuth for this one act, for this hour of wonderful music making under Simone Young’s tender baton. The Australian conductor tried to brighten the score of the whole Ring, to extract hitherto neglected details from its texture, to emphasise the tragedy of gods, people and in-between beings with an almost impressionistic play of lights and shadows. She fully achieved this goal in the orchestral layer. When it came to singing, she often had to fight against recalcitrant matter, especially in Das Rheingold, when the soloists sometimes managed to drown out, shout down and stomp down the subtly and wisely playing orchestra. How much of this was Schwarz’s fault, how much was contributed by the booming singing manner, so beloved on the Green Hill, how much was contributed by the conductor herself, defending her vision against all odds – I might find out next year. I already know that the festival should let go of neither Miknevičiūtė, Young nor Spyres. Wagner’s masterpieces deserve the return of sensitive interpreters.

Translated by: Anna Kijak