Author: Dorota Kozińska

Had Ismail Pasha managed his court more wisely, perhaps he would not have squandered the power of his country. The grandson of Muhammad Ali, the first khedive of Egypt, continued with panache the work begun by his grandfather: he built thousands of schools, created a dense network of telegraphic and railway connections, modernized the port of Alexandria, and saw to the development of the fine arts, theatre and opera. In 1879, before the sultan of the Ottoman Empire removed him from office on the initiative of the British government, he stated that ‘my country is no longer in Africa; we have become part of Europe.’ Twenty years later, the illustrated edition of the Orgelbrand Encyclopedia mercilessly summed up his extravagance and ambition as follows: ‘in order to salvage at least his own personal fortune, he stopped paying interest on his debts; however, under pressure from European powers acting in defense of his creditors, he yielded to their demands. […] His unsuccessful attempt to conquer Abyssinia (1876) also contributed to the destruction of the appeal that he had possessed once upon a time in Europe because of his supposed civilizational aims.’

We have, above all, advocates of post-colonial theory to thank for the stubborn myth that the operatic œuvre was a luxury good in Egypt, imported on credit with an eye to a small clientele basically not interested in it. In reality, opera began to enter cultural circulation there back at the end of the 18^th century, via travelling troupes making the rounds between Naples, Alexandria and Cairo. The presentations, originally organized with an eye to the Europeans living in the overseas country, gained increasing interest among the local population. The Egyptians demanded the building of new theatres, formed their own ensembles, made adaptations in the spirit of the Arabic tradition. Former muezzin Salamah Hijazi shone in musical adaptations of plays by Shakespeare, Corneille and Racine; European operas were presented in both versions up until the 1920s.

Rafael Rojas (Radamès) and Alexandra Zabala (Aida). Photo: Clive Barda

So it is no wonder that Ismail Pasha decided to inaugurate the operations of the Royal Opera House in Cairo – founded in honour of the Suez Canal opening – with a new work by Verdi, or more precisely, a festive hymn for the occasion. The composer rejected the proposal of the khedive, who in light of this contented himself with a staging of Rigoletto. He had no intention, however, of giving up: shortly thereafter, he placed before Verdi the script of Aida, penned by famous French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette. This time, the bait caught. In November 1870, the score was basically ready, but the première was delayed on account of an unfortunate turn in the Franco-Prussian war – the costumes and scenery were stuck in besieged Paris. The first showing of Aida finally took place on Christmas Eve 1871 and was received enthusiastically by the audience – importantly, on the night of the première comprised above all of diplomats, dignitaries and critics, which had the effect of reinforcing the legend of opera’s elite character in Egypt.

Meanwhile, Aida almost immediately gained enormous popularity. Perhaps because, in comparison with Verdi’s earlier experiments, it is a work almost Classical in form, composed to a conventional and exceptionally clear libretto that revolves around the drama of duty – understandable to audiences on both sides of the Mediterranean. Aida’s greatest asset, however, is its music: an ideal marriage of the Italian tradition with French grand opéra, a captivating combination of opulent scenes of war and triumph with almost Impressionist sound painting in the more intimate moments of the narrative. Some complain that Aida lacks dramatic nerve: I adore swimming in the ‘heavenly’ long passages of this score, which is marked by the subtle lyricism of its cantilenas and the sensual softness of its quasi-Oriental orchestral textures.

For this reason, I set out without deliberation for another encounter with the musicians of Opera North, who last season – under the same baton of Sir Richard Armstrong – put on a show of the highest artistry in Strauss’ Salome. This time, my choice fell upon a semi-staged performance of Aida at Sage Gateshead, one of the most functional and acoustically best music centers in the world. The edifice designed by Norman Foster is a masterpiece of so-called organic architecture – it brings to mind a giant cocoon towering over the bank of the River Tyne. Inside it are three separate buildings divided by walls made of a soundproof concrete blend. The entire steel construction is hidden under an asymmetrical, aerodynamic copula made of glass. The main concert hall seating 1650 alludes loosely to the form and proportions of the Wiener Musikverein, to which fact it owes its phenomenal acoustics – warm and selective, despite a quite lengthy reverberation.

Eric Greene (Amonasro), Alexandra Zabala, Rafael Rojas and Alessandra Volpe (Amneris). Photo: Clive Barda

In such conditions and with such a superb ensemble, they successfully approximated the ideal. It had been a long time since I had heard an Aida led by such a sensitive hand, with such respect for the composer’s instructions, with such care taken to diversify the subtle instrumental shades, especially in the strings. The Opera North chorus displayed a similar sensitivity to intonation and to the timbre of each individual note and sonority. In Act I, I was slightly disappointed with Rafael Rojas, an otherwise experienced and very technically proficient tenor. Fortunately, he quickly pulled himself together and erased my so-so impression of Radamès’ romance ‘Celeste Aida’ devoid of brilliance and passion. His beloved found an ideal performer in the person of Alexandra Zabala – a singer blessed with a supremely lyrical and, at the same time, resonant soprano, perfectly balanced throughout the range of Aida’s part. Her sweet, tender pianissimo high C from the aria ‘O patria mia’ will remain in my memory for a long time. A splendid counterweight for the delicate Aida lost in a cruel world was created by Alessandra Volpe in the role of Amneris. Her dense, sensual voice, beautifully open at the top, is placed somewhere between a mezzo-soprano and a dramatic soprano – this singer, who will be performing next season as, among others, Santuzza in Bari and Carmen in Oslo, is worthy of further attention. A highly suggestive Ramfis was created by Petri Lindroos, an ominous, ice-cold bass (superb Judgement scene in Act IV). It was an excellent idea to cast Eric Greene in the role of Amonasro – the American singer has at his disposal a deep, dark-timbred baritone that he wields with uncommon musicality and feel for style.

The semi-staging, prepared by Annabel Arden (director), Joanna Parker (designer and video director), Dick Straker (video designer) and Richard Moore (lighting designer), though quite naturally minimalist, was even so striking at times with its excess of details distracting attention from the musical narrative. The production team decided to transport Aida into the realities of a contemporary conflict, supplementing the acting tasks with projections displayed at the back of the stage that alluded unambiguously to the current war in Syria. A pity, for the singers placed in front of the orchestra were moving in a metaphorical space, very intelligently arranged using a few multi-functional props (a doorframe with no door, designating the fluid border between the worlds of the Egyptians and the ‘foreigners’; a table which, in the final act, becomes the tomb of Aida and Radamès). The singers’ superb acting and excellently-prepared stage movement permitted one to turn a blind eye to the lack of originality in the costumes, which in ‘new’ opera theatre more and more often take the form of universal signs and symbols (if a ruler, then in a suit; if a fighter, then in a field uniform; if a high-born woman, then in high heels and peignoir). Despite this, I have the impression that staged concert performances should be more ‘static’, or at any rate based on different means of expression than in the case of a fully-staged rendition. Especially if my gloomy prediction that semi-staged productions will become the daily bread of opera comes to pass.

Alessandra Volpe. Photo: Clive Barda

However, experiencing Aida in a perspective so intimate, devoid of all extravagance, did make me aware of something about which I had never thought before. With whom did the first Egyptian viewers of Verdi’s opera identify? With the victorious army of the Pharaohs, or with the conquered Ethiopians? This a dilemma for post-colonial theorists, considerably more intriguing than lengthy discussion of whether Aida was an imperial spectacle for alienated strangers from Europe in Cairo, or yet another masterpiece of a form for which the Egyptians had acquired a taste back during the reign of the Mamluks.

Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski

Zakhor is no ordinary memory. It is an imperative to remember, a duty of every Jew, repeated in daily prayers – an absolute imperative, preceding knowledge, preceding comprehension. If we tried to explain it, using some mundane example, zakhor would be the cry of “Stop! Don’t touch it!” to a child marching confidently towards a bucket of boiling water. Remember before you comprehend. One day you will understand why you cannot put your hand into boiling water. In such an approach memory becomes an internalised norm imposed from outside. As years go by and new experiences are acquired, it will turn into an autonomous norm, lived through, understood and observed voluntarily. Since the destruction of the Second Temple and beginning of the diaspora zakhor has constituted the Jewish identity: treating history as a myth that helps to give sense to the present. History relived again and again is a guarantee of existence. If you forget, if you do not instil it in your sons – you will lose the way to the land which the Lord “swore to your ancestors”.

In this sense Weinberg’s The Passenger is an opera about memory. It is not about an all-consuming memory of the wrongs suffered, as Zofia Posmysz feared, interpreting Marta’s final monologue – featuring a fragment from a poem by Paul Éluard – as being against the Christian duty to forgive. Contrary to the doubts expressed by some Jewish communities after the American premiere of the work, The Passenger is indeed an opera about the Holocaust, although there are virtually no Jews in the libretto. They are not there, because Weinberg wrote the opera in circumstances precluding any direct references to the tragedy of the Shoah.

Photo: Yossi Zwecker

As early as in 1944, at a time of the Red Army’s impressive victories over the Third Reich, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee lost its raison d’être, having been established two years previously by the NKVD – mainly to win support of the Jewish diaspora for the USSR’s fight against Nazi Germany. Shortly after the war the Committee’s activities began to be denounced as “nationalistic” and “Zionistic”.  January 1948 was marked by the death of the composer’s father-in-law: the chairman of the Committee, Solomon Mikhoels, an eminent actor and director, artistic director of the Moscow Jewish Theatre, who shortly after the founding of the Committee set out, on Stalin’s initiative, on a long overseas journey, during which he managed to persuade American Jews to allocate funds for the purchase of one thousand planes, five hundred tanks as well as food and other necessary provisions for the Soviet Army. The bodies of Michoels and the theatre critic Vladimir Golubov-Potapov were found by factory workers on their way to their morning shift. According to the investigators’ report, commissioned by Ivan Serov, future head of the KGB, the death “resulted from [the victims’] having been run over by a heavy goods vehicle. The deceased had all their ribs broken and pulmonary tissue torn, Michoels – broken spine, Golubov-Potapov – hip bone. (…) No data suggesting that Michoels and Golubov-Potapov had died as a result of a cause other than a hit-and-run accident were found in the course of the investigation”.

By the death of Stalin hundreds of intellectuals and artists of Jewish origin had been “liquidated” as a result of massive repressions. After the dictator’s death even his fierce opponent Nikita Khrushchev did not include his murderous provocations in violations of the “Leninist principles of the revolutionary rule of law”. The Passenger was written in the shadow of a new wave of Soviet anti-Semitism which was a response to Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. A young radio engineer, Boris Kochubievsky, who sent a letter to Brezhnev declaring that he wanted to settle in the Jewish state, thus fulfilling the dream of hundreds of generations preceding him, was summoned to a KGB office and without any hearing was locked in psychiatric hospital. There began a smear campaign against real and alleged “Zionists”, with its repercussions affecting nearly all Jews in the USSR.

At that time Weinberg was locked in a painful battle with manifestations of memory and oblivion. In 1966 he left Moscow for the first time since the war – joining a delegation of Soviet composers going to the Warsaw Autumn Festival. His former colleagues from the conservatoire pretended they did not recognise him. He himself did not recognise Warsaw from his youthful memories. He did not want to return again. He came back from Poland with the melody of a recently discovered song to Mary, Angelus ad Virginem missus, echoed in the figure of the prisoner Bronka. In his opera only she has an unequivocally “Polish” sonic identity. In Act II Marta – the eponymous passenger from cabin 45 – uses the musical language of a Bessarabian shtetl, from which Weinberg’s future parents escaped. Debased, Tadeusz plays the chaconne from Bach’s Partita in D minor before an SS man, not only in an act of artistic defiance, but also as a tribute to the thousands of murdered Jewish violinists.

Photo: Yossi Zwecker

What many contemporary critics see as trivialisation of Zofia Posnysz’s message was, in fact, an attempt to outmanoeuvre Soviet censorship by Weinberg and his librettist Alexander Medvedev. It failed. In 1968 the opera was removed from the repertoire of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, having been accused of “abstract humanism”, which in the Soviet newspeak meant that the spectators could see The Passenger as a veiled manifesto of Zionism or an allegory of the Gulag. Weinberg did not live to see the premiere: he died in 1996, ten years before a concert performance of his beloved composition. Its subsequent fate has been mentioned many times, especially in the context of David Pountney’s Warsaw production, which reached Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera in October 2010, less than three months after the stage premiere in Bregenz. I wrote at the time that in Poland, which still could not shake off the memory of the Holocaust, it was difficult to accept a naturalistic, although at times “aestheticising” vision of Auschwitz. That we would prefer to transform this tragedy into a symbol or, even better, to remain silent about it.

Yet Poles treat the Shoah in historiographic terms, as a tragedy that has not been worked through, but fortunately is a thing of the past. The Jews experience the Holocaust as if it happened yesterday; they cultivate its memory in order to continue to live and to survive. They do not want any allegories. They want an experience. That is why I was so looking forward to the Israeli premiere of The Passenger, which took place – after years of efforts and thanks to considerable help from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute – at the New Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv, in Pountney’s now legendary staging. I had heard that during the preparations for the premiere the musicians, especially the singers, reacted very emotionally, entered into their roles with abandon, became their characters. The result exceeded all my expectations. The orchestra – conducted by Steven Mercurio, who had conducted The Passenger several times in the United States, for example at the Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit – did have its weak moments, but there were miracles happening on stage. This was undoubtedly largely due to the three protagonists (Adrienn Miksch as Marta, Daved Karanas as Liza and David Danholt as Walter), who had triumphed in earlier productions of Weinberg’s opera. Yet the old troupers had managed to share their experience with their Israeli colleagues so effectively that already in the middle of the first act I could no longer sense who had been singing their roles for years and who was making their debut in roles which often required them facing the memory of the tragedy of their own ancestors. Applauded thunderously in the middle of Act II, Alla Vasilevitsky (Katia) is a recent graduate of the Meitar Opera Studio, a programme for young artists affiliated with the local opera company. Zlata Khershberg was harrowing Bronka. After the final performance the artist hopped on a plane and flew to Warsaw to take part in the Stanisław Moniuszko competition. The audience gave the premiere cast a standing ovation. There were tears. There were questions. There were long conversations after leaving the theatre.

Photo: Yossi Zwecker

In recent years I have heard a lot of Weinberg’s music and seen a lot of productions of The Passenger. Not once did it cross my mind that Pountney’s staging – greeted with mixed feelings in Poland nearly a decade ago – would grow so much, would get new meanings, would turn out to be a vehicle of history tangled up in the present. One day after the Israeli premiere, a few hours before Yom HaShoah – the Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins at sunset and since 1951 has been celebrated on the 27th day of the month of Nisan – I took advantage of the courtesy of the company’s management and sneaked onto the empty stage with sets ready for subsequent performances in the run. I walked along the theatrical railway tracks leading to the Gate of Death. I stopped to look at the remains of Tadeusz’s broken violin. I remembered. I did not take it in yet. Perhaps one day I will understand.

Translated by: Anna Kijak
Original article available at: https://www.tygodnikpowszechny.pl/pasazerka-z-bydlecych-wagonow-158779

It is hard to do greater harm to the ‘new mythology’ of Wagner than to dress it in the costume of social criticism – to interpret Der Ring des Nibelungen through the prism of satire on the bourgeoisie, nationalist ideology or the slogans of militant Communism. Wagner created his total work ‘from the most abysmal depths of the spirit’, as a treatise on human nature – a treatise cut to fit the era of a modernity stripped of mystery and facing the complete loss of myth-creating potential. This was understood perfectly by Wieland Wagner, who cleansed the Ring of meanings imposed upon the tetralogy by the Nazi propaganda machine, and followed in the footsteps of Edward Gordon Craig, who appealed in his vision of theatre to a longing for imagination and things not of this world. The great reformer of Bayreuther Festspiele restored the status of a symbol to the Wagnerian dramas, staging them in a nearly empty, geometricized space painted with light. He gained a legion of imitators and epigones, but few have managed to approach the mastery with which he weeded out superfluous details for the sake of a clear message.

Perhaps the most capable advocate of a ‘pure’ concept for the production of Wagner’s tetralogy was Austrian stage designer Günther Schneider-Siemssen, from the beginning of the 1960s onward one of Herbert von Karajan’s closest co-workers and the creator of nearly 30 designs for productions stage-directed personally by the charismatic conductor. In March 1967, their production of Die Walküre opened the first Osterfest in Salzburg. The so-called Karajan Ring, realized in its entirety by 1970, has become a legend of opera theatre. In the 1980s, it made its way to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, this time directed by Otto Schenk. Schneider-Siemssen’s symbolic stage design – constructed around spiral spatial forms and complemented by video projections novel for their time and by spectacular lighting design – brought to mind the mythic cosmos: a place suspended between the world of the gods and that of people, between existence and non-existence. In 2017, in honour of the Osterfest’s 50^th birthday, the Salzburg Die Walküre saw a ‘remastered’ reconstruction by Dresden-born stage designer Jens Kilian – who, like Schneider-Siemssen, took his first steps in a film set design studio – and Bulgarian-German stage director Vera Nemirova, a student of Ruth Berghaus and her former assistant Peter Konwitschny.

Peter Wedd (Siegmund). Photo: Barbara Aumüller

The two of them already had the experience of a Ring realized for Oper Frankfurt (2010–12) under their belts. The main driving force of this production is, again, the stage design concept – inspired by the earlier visions of Wieland Wagner and Schneider-Siemssen, but sufficiently original and masterful in its simplicity to gain an independent position in the history of productions of this masterpiece. An indispensable element of all four parts of the Frankfurt tetralogy is the ‘stage sculpture’ invented by Kilian and superbly lit by Olaf Winter – a set of independently moving concentric circles, awakening ambiguous associations: with the titular ring forged from Rhine gold, with the rings of Saturn and other heavenly bodies, with the implacable symmetry of nature. In such a setting – fortunately for Wagner’s work – the stage director will not indulge in any craziness, especially in Die Walküre, the most intimate and ‘human’ part of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

James Rutherford (Wotan) and Christiane Libor (Brünnhilde). Photo: Barbara Aumüller

Nemirova therefore had to stifle the temptation to fill the stage with the clutter characteristic of Regieoper, and follow the stage designer’s vision. In Kilian’s Die Walküre, every now and then the rings arrange themselves in the suggestive shape of a tree stump: that of the ash tree Yggdrasil, the axis of the universe, the meeting point of all worlds from Nordic mythology. Hunding’s home is located under the roots; the sword plunged into the tree stump is stuck beneath the ceiling, and its hilt protrudes outside this gloomy world. All of the quarrels, disagreements and misunderstandings among the deities play out on the construction’s several levels. The rings set in motion intensify the feeling of uncertainty and danger. Not much more is needed in order to shape the narrative according to the composer’s intentions. All that was left for Nemirova to do was to sketch out the relationships between the characters, in which she was also helped by Ingeborg Bernerth’s costumes, suspended outside time and making use of discreet symbolism. A bit of director’s theatre – but economical, tasteful and, despite everything, in line with the score – wafted in only at the beginning of Act III, in the episode of the ride of the Valkyries, which was accompanied by a contemporary scene of a military funeral playing out on the lowest level of Kilian’s ‘machine’. Leaving aside its minor, basically superfluous allusions to the theatre of Konwitschny and Decker, Nemirova’s concept turned out to be one of the clearest with which I have dealt in the past quarter century. It is worth adding that the stage director and stage designer tied their Die Walküre together with a beautiful narrative bracket: from the prologue with Siegmund, lost in a blizzard among the irregularly orbiting rings, to the finale with a ring of real fire, lowered from the stage rafters over Brünnhilde, who has been put to sleep by Wotan.

James Rutherford, Peter Wedd and Taras Shtonda (Hunding). Photo: Barbara Aumüller

Also conducive to a coherent and logical staging were the performers. In this year’s revival, Amber Wagner – a Sieglinde endowed with a dark, overtone-rich soprano – received an ideal partner in the person of Peter Wedd, who sang Siegmund a year ago in Karlsruhe. His dense, balanced tenor, making masterful use of chiaroscuro technique, formed an ideal complement to Wagner’s voice, bringing to mind associations with the legendary Resnik/Vinay pairing in Die Walküre under the baton of Clemens Krauss. Taras Shtonda, debuting in the role of Hunding, created the character of a scoundrel of the darkest type – a gruff, husky bass, perhaps a bit too weakly-supported in the lower register. The other soloists – chief among them, the velvet-voiced James Rutherford (Wotan) and Christiane Libor (Brünnhilde), phenomenal in both character and voice – reprised their successes from previous years. Sebastian Weigle led the orchestra at relatively slow tempi (especially in Act I), but taking extraordinary care with the pulse and texture – his perspective in many ways resembled Karajan’s ‘lyric cosmos’, equally free of pathos and other unauthorized stylistic accretions as the pure stage visions of Kilian and Schneider-Siemssen.

Absorbing the Frankfurt Die Walküre with all of my senses, I always return in my mind to the economical and laser-precise prose of W. G. Sebald, the author of the brilliant – and suggestively named – The Rings of Saturn. A good story cannot bear haste or mess. A good myth – especially one for new, terrible times – must be clear as crystal.

Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski