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‘I will be a friend to you, and you shall take care of my linen’ – those words, uttered by Mr B. to the beautiful and innocent maid at the beginning of Samuel Richardson’s famous work have been igniting readers’ imagination for almost three hundred years. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded was published in 1740. Richardson, writing his debut epistolary novel, considered today to be the first mature novel in English literature, also proved to be the precursor of eighteenth-century ‘conduct books’ – guides to the intricacies of binding social norms. Yet the exceptional nature of Pamela lies not just in the masterful penmanship, but also in the bravura play of contrasts: virtue clashes with lasciviousness, ideal with reality, piety with primitive instinct. Richardson’s book became the first bestseller, in the present-day sense of the word, read with flushed cheeks by maids and gentlefolk alike, in equal measure praised from the pulpit and accused of veiled pornography. Not without reason, judging from the excerpt quoted above. A few dozen pages later, Pamela, hearing suspicious noises coming from Mrs. Jervis’ closet, first undresses before opening the door, through which falls her employer, dressed in nothing but a silk dressing gown. Yet she maintains her chastity until the day of her marriage to Mr B., which for some was proof of her remarkable attributes and for others of her exceptional manipulative skills in seeking the desired goal, namely, social advancement through marriage to a partner of incomparably higher status.

The popularity of Pamela surpassed all conception. The novel sold in hundreds of copies across the whole of Europe, and in 1742 it reached America, where it was published by Benjamin Franklin, one of the future founding fathers of the United States. It inspired artists and launched a fashion for the outfits described in the novel and their attendant ‘gadgets’. It was the object of numerous imitations and adaptations, including the comedy La Pamela, o sia La virtù premiata, from 1750, in which Carlo Goldoni transferred the action to Venice and turned the titular heroine into the unrecognised daughter of a Scottish aristocrat. Later, under the pseudonym Polisseno Fegejo, he turned his play into the libretto La Cecchina, o sia la buona figliuola, in which the maid becomes the gardener Cecchina, the lost offspring of a colonel with the Prussian cuirassiers. Among the composers to turn to Goldoni’s libretto were Egidio Duni and Salvatore Perillo, but their operas met with a rather cool reception in Italy.

The text only found a composer of commensurate talent in the person of Niccolò Piccinni, a Bari-born thirty-two-year-old subject of the Kingdom of Naples. La Cecchina, staged in 1760 at the Teatro delle Dame in Rome, was Piccinni’s fifteenth opera and proved a turning point in his career. First it opened to him the doors of all the major theatres in Italy, and then it set off to conquer Europe. In 1765 it came to Warsaw, where, just twenty years later, it enjoyed spectacular success in Wojciech Bogusławski’s Polish adaptation (Czekina, albo cnotliwa panienka). During the 1770s it apparently reached Beijing, staged at the imperial court by a company of Italian Jesuits.

Francesca Aspromonte (Cecchina). Photo: Clarissa Lapolla

A hundred years later, Verdi, who was already setting about Falstaff, called La Cecchina ‘the first true comic opera’, without which the masterworks of Mozart and Rossini would never have been written. Yet among most present-day music lovers, Piccinni’s name fails to trigger any musical associations. If anything, historical circumstances are evoked, linked to his journey to Paris in 1776, when the composer was drawn into one of the first episodes in the ‘war’ of the Gluckists and Piccinnists – a conflict between advocates of reformed French opera and supporters of Italian opera. The Parisians, who loved a good quarrel, paying no heed to the mutual respect between the two composers, who had no wish to compete with one another, triggered an aesthetic war lasting several years, which occasionally spilled over into fisticuffs. They clashed wherever the opportunity arose: on the streets, in cafes, in private homes, theatres and schools. The dispute rumbled on even after Gluck returned to Vienna in 1780. During its final phase, it assumed the quite grotesque form of a war between the Piccinnists and devotees of Antonio Sacchini, newly arrived from Italy, who with time went from being another representative of the Neapolitan school into a moderate imitator of Gluck.

And then it all fell quiet. La Cecchina disappeared from stages shortly after Piccinni’s death in 1800 – along with more than a hundred other operas of his. Over the next two centuries, it was staged sporadically, mostly in Italy. In 1928 a production was put on in Bari, to mark the bicentenary of the composer’s birth. And it returned to the composer’s home town almost a hundred years later, in January 2026, as part of the preparations for the next jubilee.

I could not pass up such a chance. I travelled to the Apulian capital not just on account of the work, but also for the carefully selected soloists and the conductor, Stefano Montanari, who has been music director of the Teatro Petruzzelli for almost three years. I was curious to see how this collector’s piece would fare in the hands of the Italian actor, screenwriter and film director Daniele Luchetti, familiar to Polish film buffs thanks partly to the drama Lacci, shown at the opening of the Venice Film Festival in 2020.

Paola Gardina (Paoluccia), Krystian Adam (Marquis della Conchiglia), Francesca Aspromonte, Christian Senn (Mengotto), and Michela Antenucci (Sandrina). Photo: Clarissa Lapolla

Well, it fared quite splendidly. Luchetti forged an irresistibly funny spectacle which at the same time takes up an intelligent dialogue with both the convention of the epoch and the output of the most outstanding specialists in the staging of pre-Romantic operas, to mention but Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and his assistant Jean-Louis Martinoty. At first glance, he remained faithful to all of the stage directions contained in the libretto. In reality, he wittily ‘translated’ them for the sensibilities of a contemporary audience, adding anachronistic props to the settings or arranging them in a way that triggered utterly unexpected associations. The band of servants tasked with tending to the physical fitness of the Chevalier Armidoro resembles a company of circus strongmen lifted straight out of Fellini’s La Strada; the Marquis della Conchiglia sets off in pursuit of Cecchina on a comical scooter adorned with rococo tassels; the bravura finale of Act I, amidst bedsheets strung up across the stage, reminds one of the Neapolitan lineage of Piccinni’s opera; every so often, elements from the most famous productions of Britten’s Death in Venice burst into the Venetian landscape of Goldoni’s adaptation. Yet in spite of all these ‘diversions’, Luchetti’s production remains a moving tribute to eighteenth-century theatre: with a subtle play of lights and shadows, intricately painted vedute and proscenium borders (stage design by Alessandro Camera, beautifully illuminated by Marco Filibeck) and remarkably beautiful costumes (Massimo Cantini Parrini) of captivating lightness and finesse and a palette of colours worthy of the greatest Italian masters of the Italian Settecento.

Equally convincing was the musical side of the show, prepared by Montanari with genuine expertise in mature buffo style and a characteristic blend of comical and sentimental elements with the totally ‘serious’, the latter bringing deeper reflection on human nature. There are soubrettes in this opera, as well as the figure of the soldier Tagliaferro, derived from the commedia dell’arte tradition. There are lovers wracked by doubt and also a typical mezzo carattere, in the person of the Marquis, in love with the titular heroine. It is also worth mentioning that the Roman premiere of La Cecchina was performed solely by men – in connection with the still binding edict issued by Pope Sixtus that banned women from performing in theatres in the Papal States. In subsequent performances given during Piccinni’s lifetime, the singers appeared in a great variety of configurations, from mixed casts, in which the soprano and mezzo-soprano parts were sung by castrati arm-in-arm with women, to ‘natural’ casts with a single travesti role (Armidoro).

That only enhances my admiration for the choice of soloists for the Bari show – in a cast consisting entirely of artists experienced in such repertoire and fully aware of the historical context of the first performances of La Cecchina. The titular figure of the buona figliuola was successfully embodied by Francesca Aspromonte, endowed with a warm, soft soprano, highly expressive, though a little dull in the middle range. Taking nothing away from the young Italian singer’s abilities, I must admit that the show was stolen from her by the phenomenal Ana Maria Labin in the part of Lucinda, boasting a soprano voice with an exquisite, silvery timbre, perfectly set and balanced across the registers, which, despite its charming delicacy, carries remarkably well (including in the ethereal pianos of the aria ‘So che fedel m’adora’ from Act III). Contrasting marvellously with the parts of the two female protagonists was the energetic and fruity-sounding soprano of Francesca Benitez in the trousered role of Armidoro. Michela Antenucci and Paola Gardina formed a bravura pair of the malicious maids Sandrina and Paoluccia, investing their parts with so much vis comica that at times I was doubled up with laughter.

Act III, Finale. Photo: Clarissa Lapolla

Just as much joy was conveyed by Krystian Adam in the tenor role of the Marquis della Conciglia, demanding candid lyricism and vocal buffoonery in alternation. In both aspects, he came across splendidly, thanks not just to the beauty of his voice and his exquisite technique, but also to the well-judged ideas of Luchetti, who led this protagonist all the way from being a sweet scallywag, through a gallant disorientated by his nascent feelings, to a man ready for true love. In the casting of the two baritone parts – the poor Mengotto, wooing Cecchina in vain, and the hilarious cuirassier Tagliaferro, who brings news of her real family origins – the contrast between the two characters was judiciously brought out. The mature beauty of Pietro Spagnoli’s voice was ideally suited to the character of the battle-hardened Tagliaferro, while the less seasoned, though equally suggestive, baritone of Christian Senn excellently conveyed the quandary of the miserable Mengotto.

Montanari led the whole performance – with an ensemble of musicians from the local orchestra – with verve, a flair for the idiom and a hint of delicious insouciance. All the more worthy of underlining is that he conducted from the instrument on which he also accompanied the soloists in the elaborate secco recitatives. I feel it my duty as a reviewer to note that it was an eighteenth-century Italian fortepiano (or a copy thereof), ideally suited to the circumstances – an instrument to which it would have been worth devoting at least a few words in the programme book, which was otherwise impeccably prepared.

There are still two years to go until the tercentenary of Piccinni’s birth. The Bari theatre has given us a wonderful foretaste of the approaching jubilee of its native son. It is high time we took an interest in his unjustly forgotten work and perhaps reassessed it against the background of the output of the epoch. Verdi did so a long time ago and, as usual, he was right.

Translated by: John Comber

Ellen T. Harris, author of a recently reissued monograph of Dido and Aeneas and co-author of one of the critical editions of Purcell’s opera, once lamented on the pages of The New York Times that the more we learn about this work, the less we know about it. And it’s hard to disagree: the information reiterated for years in textbooks and opera guides according to which Purcell composed Dido for the purposes of an elite school for girls run by Josias Priest in Chelsea has been refuted, but no prospects have opened up for any new findings. Thematic and structural similarities between Dido and John Blow’s three-act opera with prologue Venus and Adonis point to direct inspiration from the work by Purcell’s teacher. We know for sure that Blow wrote that opera to a commission from King Charles II. There is much to suggest that Venus and Adonis was premiered in the year 1683, possibly in one of the chambers of the White Tower at Windsor Castle, which the king ordered to be turned into a theatre shortly before this date. We also know that in 1684 Blow’s opera was staged again at Priest’s school. Could it be that Dido was also written with Charles’s court in mind, before subsequently appearing on the stage of the school in Chelsea? If so, then the premiere must have occurred before the king’s death in 1685. It has also not been ruled out that Charles II’s premature death could have thwarted the plans of Purcell, who – nolens volens – left the work on a shelf and only staged it later, at the boarding school for girls in Chelsea. Or perhaps he composed Dido for James II? If so, we still don’t know whether he managed to stage it at the court of the last Catholic king of England.

One puzzle follows another. Some scholars draw attention to the expression ‘turning times’ in the spoken epilogue from the first edition of the libretto, which they claim refers to the Glorious Revolution, during the last months of 1688, when the English parliament dethroned James II and thereby definitively brought an end to the Stuart dynasty. We are familiar with Purcell’s opera from three much later copies, none of which gives a cohesive picture of the original shape of the score. The oldest among them was dated roughly to the mid-eighteenth century – until, that is, the recent discovery that the paper used by the copyist only entered production in 1777. The manuscript is lacking not just the prologue, but also several dances and – most importantly – the ending of Act II. Dido has come down to us in the form in which it was used in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy Measure for Measure written in 1699 by Charles Gildon and staged the following year at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre under the title Beauty the Best Advocate.

Markéta Cukrová (Dido), and Ekaterina Krovateva (on the left) as Belinda. Photo: Serghei Gherciu

Purcell’s masterpiece – or rather what remains of it – was plucked from oblivion in 1895, on the bicentenary of the composer’s death. Since the middle of the last century, Dido has enjoyed unwaning popularity: it has been performed on early and modern instruments, paired with other works to keep the audience in the theatre for more than an hour, and supplemented in various ways, largely with music by Purcell himself.

The creative minds behind the new production of Dido and Aeneas at the National Theatre in Prague, on the stage of the Stavovské divadlo, took the rather peculiar decision to make several cuts to the already depleted score (removing the ‘Echo Dance’, the beginning of the scene in the grove and the ‘Witches Dance’), give the parts of the Spirit and the Sailor to the Witches, and bolster the first act, quite substantially, with extracts from The Indian Queen, Purcell’s last, unfinished, semi-opera. The sung commentaries of the allegories of Fame and Envy on the doings of the rivals for the heart of the Incan princess Orazia, and also the invocation of the Aztec conjuror Ismeron to the God of Dreams, together with the later response from the deity, were added to the Prague production in the character of a court masque, watched by Dido and Aeneas a moment after the Trojan prince makes an ardent declaration of love to the queen of Carthage.

In terms of dramaturgy, all of these ideas failed. The lengthy insertion from The Indian Queen, although musically interesting, seriously disturbed the proportions and the continuity to the narrative in the first two acts of the opera – particularly since, after the masque, Dido sang Orazia’s love song to Montezuma, at odds with the work as a whole in terms of both content and poetical language. That is what happens when those responsible for a production – in this case director Alice Nellis and dramaturge Ondřej Hučín – focus entirely on their own interpretation of a work while disrespecting the conventions of the original. Nellis decided to turn Dido into the tale of a woman scared of falling in love, who allows herself to become possessed by her inner demons and urges the man to leave, descending into ever deeper lethargy and depression. Such a take leaves no room for a drama of duty: it is not the Spirit with the face of Mercury that bids Aeneas sail off to Italy, only the negative thoughts swirling around in Dido’s head, appearing on the stage in the guise of the Witches. Truth be told, there is no Aeneas here, or his companions. The queen’s tragedy would have been played out even without their participation. The brief amorous episode only hastened her death.

Aco Bišćević as the Fame of The Indian Queen. Photo: Serghei Gherciu

Nellis’s conception certainly did not facilitate the task of the soloists, among whom only Markéta Cukrová, in the titular role, was able to display her truly impressive experience in the domain of Baroque singing. Unfortunately, her once luminous mezzo-soprano has lost not just its sparkle, but also precise intonation; problems have also arisen with her control of vibrato. Yet she gave an interpretation that was quite immaculate in terms of style, so perhaps that evening she was simply off-colour. I was disappointed by Lukáš Bařák in the role of Aeneas, a singer endowed with a fine, but rather inflexible baritone voice, gravitating towards the bass, wholly unsuited to this baritenore part. Ekaterina Krovateva came across quite well, and her robust coloratura soprano would match the emotional figure of Belinda even better if the singer were better able to master its expansive volume. A very good impression was made by the two soprano Witches, Lenka Pavlovič and Marie Šimůnková, and I cannot fault Magdaléna Hebousse in the part of the Second Woman. I find it more difficult to accept the performance by the Slovenian tenor Aco Bišćević in the dual role of the Sorceress and the allegory of Fame – in both cases smacking of caricature, which inclines one to suspect that this singer has problems with his vocal technique. The other performers of the ‘masque’ in Act I – bass Tomáš Šelc (Envy, Ismeron) and the aforementioned Krovateva as the God of Dreams – performed far better, not for a moment transgressing the bounds of good taste.

Separate doubts were aroused by the overall musical concept of the show, and more precisely by the decision to piece together an instrumental ensemble from members of the local orchestra and musicians from Collegium 1704. The practice of combining early and modern instruments is nothing new in performances of Baroque operas, but this time the sound proved too much of a ‘hybrid’, with the conductor perhaps partly to blame. Michael Hofstetter directed the music in an accomplished and assured manner, but at times the tempi were too brisk and there was a lack of attention to detail. All the greater, therefore, is the praise merited by Collegium Vocale 1704, in a twelve-strong line-up from which at least half the solo parts in Dido and Aeneas could easily have been filled.

Dance scene choreographed by Klára Lidova. Photo: Serghei Gherciu

So was it a catastrophe? Not in the least. In defiance of the muddied thinking behind the production and despite the flaws in the musical rendition, we were presented with a beautiful piece of theatre. It was both modern and at the same time intelligently played with the spatial deception of a scenery à l’italienne, the magnificence of Baroque machinery and flies, and the illusion captured in semi-transparent fabrics. Everything that was lost in the flimsy dramaturgy was found in the skilfully lit sets by Matěj Cibulka, the discreet designs by Michal Mocňák, the suggestive costumes by Kateřina Štefkova and the spectacular choreography by Klára Lidova, performed by dancers and acrobats. What a wonderful show it would be if all of the creators and performers allowed themselves to be swept away by the magic of theatre: ‘Aurora now had left her saffron bed, and beams of early light the heavens o’erspread’. Just like in the fourth book of The Aeneid, in which Virgil depicted not just the death, but also the love of Dido.

Translated by: John Comber

It sometimes happens that a future opera critic becomes acquainted with a work from a wholly unexpected angle. That is precisely what occurred with me – a sickly child who killed time spent at home by listening to records from her parents’ collection. No one selected this music for me. My attention was drawn to the 7 inch vinyl with orchestral excerpts from Aida primarily by the intriguing cover and no less intriguing description, in a completely incomprehensible language. Many years passed before I realised that recorded on that disc was a 1959 performance by the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Miklós Erdélyi, who was then associated with the Hungarian State Opera. Thus my acquaintance with Verdi’s Aida began with the overture and three ballet extracts from the second act – in a surprisingly subtle interpretation, shimmering with the softness of the quasi-oriental orchestral textures.

Soon after, I encountered my first Aida at the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw. Again in unusual circumstances – from the wings. Jan Marcin Szancer’s huge sets could not be housed in any of the store rooms, so they were kept in the side-stages. The statue of the pharaoh, several storeys high, was passed by participants in all the Warsaw productions, from Bizet’s Carmen to Wagner’s Tannhäuser. The children of the chorus were dumbstruck with awe. The soloists, meanwhile, experienced growing irritation at the fact that the stage designers were producing creations which, instead of helping the singers, only hindered them in their struggles with the unfriendly acoustics of what was one of the biggest theatres in the world.

Since the time of that production, which was premiered exactly sixty years ago, the Warsaw Opera has tackled Aida just twice. Each time without success. Progressive elements tore their hair out, while the conservative Józef Kański summed up Marek Grzesiński’s 1986 production with the quip ‘And what? And nothing!’ and furnished Robert Lagana Manoli’s concept, from nineteen years later, with the telling title ‘The trumpets sounded beautiful…’

As the years passed, I too became discouraged about Aida, particularly since the greatest titans of music theatre had sought a key to interpreting this masterwork – compared to Verdi’s earlier experiments, an opera almost classical in form, composed to a conventional and exceptionally clear libretto based on a drama of duty – in vain. Some fruitlessly tried to settle scores with nineteenth-century colonialism, some set the narrative in the realities of contemporary conflicts, while others removed Aida from all context, producing incohesive spectacles in motley costumes.

Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Hence I decided to reignite my old love for Verdi’s Egyptian opera at the Janáčkovo divadlo, which for several seasons now has been for me a haven of good theatre: pared back, clean of form, employing metaphorical signs, allusions and mental shortcuts. And at the same time meeting the expectations of the local audience – as a tool for building a community and a space for reflection and dialogue. And only now has it dawned on me that the vision of operatic theatre realised in the building on Rooseveltova Street is so close to my heart because it is a modernist vision, perfectly at one with the atmosphere of Brno.

I think we still don’t really appreciate the modernistic potential of the Moravian capital – a city whose history was entangled for almost half a century with the fortunes of Bohuslav Fuchs, an urban planner, designer and architecture theorist who raised several generations of Czech architects. His legendary buildings – including the Avion Hotel, squeezed into a narrow, eight-metre-wide plot between two houses on Česka Street – proved to be the perfect example of a modernist game with resistant matter and space. Fuchs brought to Brno a host of visionaries from Czechoslovakia and designers from abroad, among them Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who created the plans for the functionalist Villa Tugendhat. It was thanks to Fuchs that Brno became one of the most important centres for modernism in Europe; also because, unlike other cities, it did not have to rise from the ruins after the war. It etched its name in the history books not just as a herald, but also as a continuator of the ‘new tradition’: unsullied, unbroken, distinctly reflected in architectural thought, design, literature, everyday life and, last but not least, opera.

The new production of Aida, premiered in September last year, is not perhaps an outstanding spectacle, but it was certainly conceived in such a way as to hold its place in the repertoire of the Janáčkovo divadlo for many seasons. Marek Cpil, a graduate of the JAMU in Brno, associated for a while with the Divadlo Na zábradlí in Prague, designed sets which – in my opinion – would have been greeted just as favourably in Moravia a hundred years ago as they were received at the end of the first quarter-century of the new millennium: minimalistic, highly geometricised, in a palette of gold, red, black and blue, referring to the Egypt from the common preconceptions of audiences and perfectly highlighted by the lighting designer Přemysl Janda. Aptly corresponding to Cpil’s vision were the costumes designed by Linda Boráros, distinctly emphasising the contrast between the colourful presence of the Nubians and the hieratical convention in the way the Egyptians are depicted, reflecting the ancient power structures and social divisions (taken to the brink of caricature in the costume of the Pharaoh, the only truly monumental element of the staging – in the form of a towering construction, rolled onto the stage, sparkling with golden scales, out of which emerges only the head of the singer). Director Magdalena Švecová coupled that scenery with quite static action, inspired by symbolic gestures, poses and patterns of robes from Egyptian painting. More energy was breathed into the production by choreographer Marek Svobodnik, who enlivened the temple frescos and bas-reliefs in the ballet scenes with the participation of dancers from the NdB2 junior ballet company.

Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

I caught the last December performances, in which the titular role of Aida – as in the premiere – was incarnated by a former resident of the Janáčkovo divadlo, the Hungarian Csilla Boross. As usual, her voice took a long time to warm up: her supple, rich soprano, at first not open enough in the top part of the scale, only showed its full quality in Act III, in a remarkably subtle rendering of the aria ‘O patria mia’, the warm lyricism of which was ideally counterbalanced later by the final duet of the protagonists. This time, the role of Radames was taken by Eduard Martyniuk, a Ukrainian tenor endowed with a voice of exceptional beauty, backed by fine bel canto technique – unfortunately, too light for this part, and consequently more and more forced as the narrative unfolded. Happily, I could at least relish his gentle cantilena, led in ‘old-fashioned’ style, in ‘Celeste Aida’.

Anastasia Martyniuk fared much better as Amneris. Her rich mezzo-soprano, a riot of colours, is ideally suited to this part: beautifully open at the top, balanced across the registers, thanks to her intelligence and musicality, convincingly split between anger and despair, which the young Ukrainian underscored with very good acting. Paling in comparison was the Slovakian baritone Aleš Jenis (Amonasro), blessed with a voice of interesting timbre, but not particularly sonorous and essentially devoid of expression. The role of the Pharaoh was successfully filled by Jan Šťáva, one of the pillars of the Brno theatre, boasting a typically ‘Czech’ bass with a wonderful bottom range and beautifully nurtured middle. The remaining parts were well within the capabilities of Daniela Straková (High Priestess), Jan Hnyk (Ramfis) and Petr Levíček (Messenger). The choruses – children’s and mixed – also came across quite well, under the direction of Martin Buchta, though at times they lacked energy and fullness of sound.

Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Quite phenomenal, meanwhile, was the sound of the orchestra, under the baton of Jakub Klecker, who once again demonstrated how much a choirmaster’s experience can bring to the role of an opera conductor. He directed throughout with a sensitive hand, meticulously differentiating the shades of the instruments (especially the strings), taking care to ensure a lyrical quality to the cantilenas, beautiful harmonic details and the specific exoticism of Verdi’s score. He forged an interpretation that was surprisingly intimate, far from the monumentalism and pathos that have effectively turned many a music lover away from Aida.

In Brno, even the trumpets sounded beautiful. And contrary to the review of my former master, there is not a hint of irony in that assertion. For the needs of this production, the Janáčkovo divadlo brought in a set of ‘trombe egiziane’, designed by Verdi specially to perform the triumphal march in the second act. The trumpets were displayed to the audience before the premiere, on the square in front of the theatre. They will certainly serve for many a year. I anticipate that the new Brno Aida – modest, imperfect, quite simply human – will not depart the scene any time soon. It is through such shows that children acquire a love of opera. To such shows they return when they’re old. That is how a theatre community is built.

Translated by: John Comber

Around the same time that Peter Sellars was working on his staging of the Matthew Passion at the Berlin Philharmonic – that is, in early 2010 – Romeo Castellucci, l’enfant terrible of Italian theatre, created one of the most provocative works of his entire career. The production Sul concetto di volto nel figlio di Dio, featuring a fragment of Antonello da Messina’s painting dominating the stage, an image of the Saviour of the World silently watching the agony of the ailing Father, went out into the world after its premiere at the Romaeuropa Festival labelled as the director’s profession of faith. It was admired in Rome, and provoked violent riots in Paris and Avignon. Less than six years later, when Sellars was already coming up with the first sketches for La clemenza di Tito at the Salzburger Festspiele, Castellucci decided on Matthäus-Passion for the opening of the Musikfest Hamburg. Had he been able to implement his original concept, this might have resulted in a production straight from the spirit of Sul concetto di volto. There were some technical obstacles, however: the production was planned in the vast Deichtorhallen, a former market hall without theatrical facilities that has been transformed into a museum of contemporary art. The idea of illustrating Bach’s work with a series of live images reminiscent of Italian Renaissance paintings was, therefore, replaced by Castellucci with a series of installations and performances bringing to mind loose, often disturbing associations with the passion of Jesus and forcing the spectators to engage in difficult reflections on the meaning of human suffering.

In 2016 the staging was received favourably, but without much enthusiasm. Castellucci all too soon came up against the legend of Sellars’ production, prompting comparisons all the more so given that Simon Rattle, who conducted the Berlin Passion, and Kent Nagano, who conducted the work in Hamburg – both well known to German audiences – represented radically different musical worlds. Sellar’s pared-down and yet emotionally charged concept was a perfect match for Rattle’s temperament and thus proved to be more accessible. Castellucci’s abstract theatre, using symbol and metaphor, worked perfectly with Nagano’s clear, slightly distanced interpretative style, requiring much more attention and concentration from the listener.

For nearly a decade the Hamburg Passion – although, in retrospect, it proved to be a landmark work in the Italian director’s oeuvre – was preserved only in the memories of audiences present at the three performances at Deichtorhallen and in a video recording that does not convey its many nuances. Over two years after the failed attempt to revive it in Rome, it finally arrived at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence with the same conductor and the same Evangelist (Ian Bostridge) – for two of the three scheduled performances, as the premiere coincided with a strike of the local trade unions.

Photo: Michele Monasta

Fortunately, I made it to the second and last performance to find out once against that Castellucci was, indeed, a provocateur, but by no means a scandalist. If he is, it is, as he himself repeatedly emphasised, in the New Testament sense of the word σκάνδαλον, the Greek equivalent of michshol, or “stumbling block” from the Book of Leviticus, an obstacle “you shall not put before the blind”. In the New Testament it is above all a “stone of offence”, a metaphor for going astray, inciting evil. Castellucci throws this stumbling block at our feet as if before the blind, transforms it into a silent cry to the deaf. He throws us off balance with a succession of seemingly inappropriate, iconoclastic associations the meaning of which either eludes us or reaches us when we least expect it.

The director leads the audience down the wrong path already at the very beginning of the performance, when white-clad Nagano steps onto the snow-white stage and washes his hands in a bowl brought in by two actors dressed in white. This is not a gesture of Pilate; this is a gesture of purity of heart, made by a priest who will soon descend into the orchestra pit to begin a ritual involving musicians in white costumes. Blinding white is a feature in many of Castellucci’s stagings, but in the Passion it is omnipresent and ambiguous: as a symbol of holiness and truth, but also of emptiness, loneliness and mourning. The director will stage nineteen memorable episodes in this white setting, in which every object, every substance, every tree, every person, and even their absence, will be treated conscientiously and with extraordinary tenderness by the athletes, police officers, doctors, lab technicians, cleaners and “ordinary” Florentines participating in the performance, and silently telling their own and other people’s stories. In the Judas’ betrayal episode they will use the real skull of a thief caught red-handed and killed by a shot to the head. They will take the last supper of a recently deceased patient out of a fridge, they will put sheets stained by the umbilical cord blood of a real newborn in a washing machine. In the Crucifixion scene a group of volunteers – children, young and old people – will attempt to hold the position of Jesus nailed to the cross by clinging with their hands to a suspended bar. No one will last more than a minute. The director will turn water into blood and vice versa, by alternately colouring and neutralising a solution of phenolphthalein in transparent tubes.

All these actions are meticulously described by Castellucci in a separate booklet accompanying the programme book. We stumble over them as if stumbling over stones even without his explanations. All aspects of the last days of Christ acquire a completely different dimension when linked to the ordinary experience of the beginning and end, pain and comfort, hope and despair. I will remember that “my” newborn baby (the director linked a different baby to each performance) is a girl called Anna, who has just turned one month. I will not forget that the fir tree cut down before my performance and stripped of its branches before my eyes was thirty-nine years old. I will remember the story of the illness of the Florentine goldsmith Maurizio, who came on stage on prostheses and left it on stumps of legs that would not have had to be amputated, if it had not been for the chaos in the pandemic-stricken hospitals.

Photo: Michele Monasta

Some episodes proved less, some even more vivid. Many factors influence the degree to which they are perceived as consistent with doctrine and with Bach’s text, factors ranging from personal sensitivity to the experiences of a particular community. The Italians read these codes as intended by the director, as was evidenced not only by the thunderous ovation after the performance, but also – and perhaps above all – by the reaction at the beginning of that mystery play, when no one burst into applause after Nagano’s entrance, recognising that theatre was already happening. However, in comparison with the Hamburg performances, the distance between the musicians and performers on stage has grown. At Deichtorhallen all the action took place in the space between the audience and the performers: yes, it could throw the musicians off balance at times, but at the same time it encouraged them to empathise.

Another thing was that the soloists and members of the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino ensembles, safely hidden in the cocoon of the orchestra pit, focused entirely on their tasks. With a truly youthful passion, which is not surprising because, as Castellucci meticulously points out, the orchestra features a violinist who has just turned twenty-one and the oldest singer in the chorus is in his sixties. This is exactly how Bach should sound when performed by artists normally associated with opera: light, airy, with no attempts to ape Baroque articulation on modern instruments, but with respect for Bach’s musical rhetoric – which is especially true of the chorus members, prepared by Lorenzo Fratini and Sara Matteucci, who impressed with their excellent diction, understanding of the text and full commitment to their collective characters.

Particularly worthy of praise among the soloists were Edwin Crossley-Mercer as Jesus – captivating with his phrasing and the melancholic tone of his beautiful bass, perhaps a little too “smoky” in the middle; the excellent Anna El-Khashem, with her crystal-clear, subtle soprano voice and excellent breath control; the ever reliable Krystian Adam, who possesses a rare ability among tenors to combine a stylish interpretation with a great deal of emotion; and Iurii Iushkevich, singing with a surprisingly colourful, calm, almost girlish-sounding countertenor. Decent though not particularly spectacular performances came from the soprano Suji Kwon, and basses Thomas Tatzi and Gonzalo Godoy Sepúlveda. Ian Bostridge was, unfortunately, disappointing as the Evangelist: his interpretation was too expressive, at times even hysterical already in Hamburg. A decade later the technical shortcomings became apparent: Bostridge was not the only one to struggle in this performance with the 442 Hz pitch, awkward for the “early musickers”, but he was the only one to be defeated in this struggle, shifting between registers with visible effort and losing control of his larynx on several occasions. All the more praise for the highly efficient and singer-friendly continuo group (the organist Cristiano Gaudio, the theorbo player Elisa La Marca and the gambist Mario Filippini).

Photo: Michele Monasta

I was not disappointed by Kent Nagano, a conductor for whom I have had a weak spot for years: for his versatility, for his eminently intellectual and, at the same time, very human approach to the musical matter, for his attention to textural detail and for his innate aversion to flamboyance. In today’s world of extremes Nagano represents the commendable attitude of a tireless seeker of the golden mean – an artist with whom not only a musician, but also an ordinary listener can simply feel safe.

Which is important in the case of a work that grips our imagination so powerfully. Castellucci put a stone before me. Nagano got me on the right path. I think that both got to the crux of Bach’s message. This is exactly what the Matthew Passion is all about.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

It is not a new staging, but in many respect it is memorable. Don Giovanni, directed by John Fulljames, with sets by Dick Bird, costumes by Annemarie Woods and lighting by Fabiana Piccioli, was to be the Greek National Opera’s first new production at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre in the 2020/21 season – announced with great hype, along with a revival of Madama Butterfly and the ballet premiere of Don Quixote, already in August 2020, when everything seemed to suggest that Greece had overcome the pandemic. Fate had other plans. The pandemic struck again, the restrictions were reinstated, but the company was not about to give up. The production, which was scheduled to open in December, was premiered without an audience, was filmed by means of eight cameras, and state-of-the-art video and audio broadcasting technology, and soon proved to be one of the hits of the GNO TV streaming service, which was launched at that difficult time. What contributed to the success of the venture was not only the excellent cast, led by Tassis Christoyannis in the title role, but also the professional editing with lots of close-ups, quick cuts and beautifully framed shots. When the production finally hit the stage – first in Athens, then in Gothenburg and Copenhagen – it was received much more coldly by the critics.

Primarily because it is not very innovative. Many artists before Fulljames, including Sven-Erich Bechtolf and Keith Warner, had come with the idea of setting the action of Don Giovanni in a hotel – a clever idea, it has to be said, as the “democratised” space of contemporary hotel chains helps to resolve the dilemma of the sharp social divisions outlined in the work. However, it reduces the eponymous character to the one-dimensional role of a sexual predator, someone like Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein – types found in many new stagings of operas, not just those of Mozart. It strips Don Giovanni of the aura of mystery, the “unsolvable enigma” that even some of the greatest theatre directors were afraid to tackle. On the other hand, Fulljames plays with this convention quite skilfully, with a good dose of uniquely British humour. He introduces into the staging a dozen or so extras, brilliantly directed by the choreographer Maxina Braham. They are members of the hotel staff who, with grotesque indifference, ignore the excesses of the guests, remove the traces of lewd orgies and meticulously restore the rooms to sterile order. Fulljames winks at the audience, showing them, instead of the statue of the Commendatore, his frozen corpse in a cold store full of butchered carcasses of pigs (another borrowing, this time from Warlikowski). In the sadomasochistic party scene he plays with drag, dressing Don Ottavio, Donna Anna and Donna Elvira in identical ball gowns.

Photo: Martynas Aleksa

He is less successful in characterising the various protagonists, especially Donna Elvira, who resembles a stalker possessed by unrequited love rather than a proud, betrayed woman. The duel scene in Act I resembles a chaotic skirmish in which Don Giovanni kills the Commendatore by accident. Equally unconvincing is the changing of clothes with Leporello, in which the main role is played by a particularly hideous red wig. Fulljames’ staging, however, undeniably has rhythm and pace, as well as some really strong points, primarily an overwhelming sense of the fleeting nature of all of Don Giovanni’s vile deeds: even their victims do not have time to realise what has actually happened: the door slams shut in front of them, the lift disappears, the light comes on in another room, the staff quickly change the sheets, wipe the table and fluff the cushions.

I came to Vilnius, wondering how this production would fare in the extraordinary building of the Lithuanian National Opera, itself an “unsolvable enigma” of Soviet architecture. The design competition for the building, launched in 1960, was won by Elena Nijolė Bučiūtė, a very young Lithuanian architect, who presented a model of the theatre that anticipated the ideas of many German post-war modernists. Fourteen years passed between the design and the construction, many of Bučiūtė’s novel ideas were lost, but some were kept – they included the bright foyer space, the spectacular decor details of red brick, yellow glass and brass, and the magnificent auditorium with nearly a thousand seats, still the largest stage in Lithuania. The largest, yet still giving a sense of intimacy in experiencing the work – not least thanks to the very good acoustics, in which the singers do not have to try to outshout the orchestra and the conductor can easily balance the sound between the stage and the pit.

Photo: Martynas Aleksa

Fulljames’ Don Giovanni was premiered here in March. I managed to see one of the performances after the autumn revival, conducted by Vilmantas Kaliūnas, a Lithuanian oboist who has been working in Germany for more than thirty years and who has recently taken up conducting as well. And the result is not bad: he conducted the whole thing at reasonable, singer-friendly tempi, the orchestra’s sound, a little thin at first, gradually gained depth, the musicians reacted attentively to his instructions, generally playing with a clean, nicely rounded sound.

The cast was dominated by Lithuanians, led by Modestas Sedlevičius in the title role, a singer with a not very large but exceptionally handsome baritone, beautifully balanced across the registers and phrasing in an old-fashioned, truly Lieder-like style. Leporello was sung by the experienced Tadas Girininkas, whose a bass has an expansive but well-controlled volume, is sonorous, if sometimes a little dull in the middle. Liudas Norvaišas did well in the short role of the Commendatore, while the young baritone Mindaugas Tomas Miškinis fared slightly worse, not quite managing to control his emotions as Masetto, which is by no means an easy role. The only foreigner among the soloists, the Polish tenor Krystian Adam, as usual infused his character with a lot of passion, a feat that is all the more noteworthy given that few singers know how to create a memorable Don Ottavio. Adam managed to do just that: with a voice that is lyrical, but at the same manly in its sound, beautifully developed in the lower register and open at the top, supported by excellent diction and a feel for the idiom. Of the ladies, the one I found the most convincing was Ona Kolobovaitė as Donna Anna. Despite her young age, she is a very mature singer with a wonderfully soft and supple soprano as well as extraordinary acting skills. I was less taken by Gabrielė Bukinė, whose voice is denser, almost like a mezzo-soprano, at times too heavy for the role of Donna Elvira and, above all, rather hysterical, for which – unfortunately – the misguided directorial concept was largely responsible. Lina Dambrauskaitė was more impressive, with her graceful and light soprano, combined with a great sense of comedy, perfect for the role of Zerlina.

Photo: Martynas Aleksa

I don’t know if I would like to see this staging again. I know that in the Lithuanian National Opera building, radiating light and warmth from within, it revealed all its strengths and made it possible to turn a critical eye away from its undeniable flaws. It did not solve the enigma of Don Giovanni. But it certainly did not discourage further efforts to unravel it.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

My return to the Cam riverside to take part in the Autumn Series of the Cambridge Music Festival took place in special circumstances: shortly after the title of Doctor of the Church was conferred on the most eminent leader of Anglo-Catholicism, John Henry Newman, beatified fifteen years ago by Benedict XVI and canonised by Francis nine years later. The catalogue of Catholic saints is quite long. Yet among the Doctors of the Church – beginning in 1298, when Boniface VIII authenticated the list presented nearly six hundred years earlier by Venerable Bede, who included in it Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, Jerome of Stridon and Pope Gregory the Great – there are just 38 individuals. Bede, an Anglo-Saxon Benedictine monk, who once had “a wife in the lustful passion of desire” and then had intercourse with her in the name of true love of Christ, was proclaimed Doctor of the Church only in 1899, nearly a decade after Newman’s death. John Henry, an alumnus of Oxford’s Trinity College, converted to Catholicism in his forties: after a period of intense activity in the so-called Oxford Movement, representatives of which – advocates of a radical reform of Anglicanism – called for a return to the early Christian idea of a “primitive church”.

In many respects Newman was a tragic figure. The Catholics distrusted him, the Anglicans treated him as a renegade. His rich written legacy, which is still regarded as one of the pinnacles of Victorian literature, was discovered for Poles by Stanisław Brzozowski, author of Legenda Młodej Polski (Legend of Young Poland). In 1937 Zofia Bastgenówna asked in her excellent essay “The mystery of Newman”: “What do we, Poles, know about this outstanding personality of the previous century, who so perfectly and originally illustrates the era of the so-called modernism and brings together the peculiarly English features of Catholicism in an individually profound experience of an internal transformation?”. She observed at the same time that “with the exception of theologians and historians of literature, no Englishman is any longer familiar with this great figure whose fame associated with the Oxford Movement was accepted more than a century ago once and for all, without objection, and has never been considered in its essence since”.

The Dream of Gerontius, Newman’s 1865 poem or, rather, poetic drama, is in its essence a large-scale depiction of Purgatory. In 1900 it was used as the basis for a work that Elgar, for good reason, did not allow to be referred to as “oratorio”. The composer used this tale of dilemmas of the soul – leaving the body and setting out into the unknown – as an answer to the questions about death, meaning of suffering, existence of God and of the beyond, questions that troubled Victorian England. The Anglican clergy did not like the references to saints and the Virgin Mary, while musicians were not enamoured of the references to Wagner’s oeuvre, especially Parsifal. And yet Elgar’s score was equally strongly influenced by the style of Dvořák (who, incidentally, himself toyed with the idea of writing a work to Newman’s poem) as well as nineteenth-century French composers, not to mention the fact that The Dream of Gerontius proved to be, on the whole, such a distinct and innovative work that its premiere at the Birmingham Music Festival came close to becoming a disaster. The chorus failed to cope with its part and the tenor Edward Lloyd, experienced in the oratorio repertoire, paced himself badly and barely made it through to the end of the concert.

Stuart Jackson. Photo: Gerard Collett

Fortunately, history did justice to the work while the composer was still alive. However, the time of its greatest popularity, is now behind it – also in Britain, where it once occupied as prominent a place in the repertoires of choral societies as Handel’s Messiah. Performances outside the composer’s homeland are a rarity and rarely meet the expectations of the admirers of Elgar’s work, yours truly included. This is why out of the six concerts in the autumn instalment of the Cambridge Music Festival I chose without a second thought The Dream of Gerontius at King’s College Chapel, featuring soloists, the BBC Concert Orchestra, the BBC Singers and the King’s College Choir conducted by Daniel Hyde, the current Director of Music at King’s College. The whole thing seemed all the more interesting to me because in the sumptuous yet intimate interior of the Gothic chapel, the piece was to be heard in a version by Iain Farrington, pianist, organist and composer, author of dozens of arrangements of symphonies, operas and oratorios – including works by Mahler, Brahms, Sibelius and Wagner – for smaller ensembles.

Farrington has orchestrated The Dream of Gerontius for an ensemble of about thirty musicians, almost three times smaller than the large late Romantic orchestra envisaged by Elgar. And yet he has managed to preserve the colour palette and richness of texture of the original, giving the soloists much more room to shine and balancing the proportions between orchestra and chorus, the Achilles’ heel of most contemporary conductors, who unwittingly fall into the trap of monumentalism that is inappropriate in this work. Hyde conducted the whole thing in rather brisk tempi, highlighting perhaps the most significant peculiarity of this score – the already mentioned affinity with Wagner’s Parsifal, in which the music flows in an almost uninterrupted stream, with melodies and leitmotifs emerging from one into another. Singificantly, after a brief interval between the first and the second part the conductor managed to completely change the mood of the story – from a timid prayer full of suffering to an ecstatic, Dantean journey into Purgatory, culminating in the harrowing “Take me away” and finding release in the long farewell song of the Angel and the chorus.

The most experienced among the soloists was James Platt, a typical English bass, with an ease of articulation and an extraordinary expressive voice, which, however, had too much vibrato at times, a trait that was particularly evident in the first part, in the essentially baritone role of the Priest. The eponymous Gerontius definitely benefitted from Farrington’s chamber version: Stuart Jackson’s handsome tenor is agile and technically impeccable, but its volume is not large, which in this version the singer more than made up for with an intelligent Lieder-like phrasing and ability to differentiate the emotions contained in the prosody. The best among the three was Claire Barnett-Jones as the Angel. Hers is a pure, excellently placed and well controlled mezzo-soprano, which, if necessary, would certainly cut through a much larger orchestra. I must emphasise, however, that despite the soloists’ efforts and the disciplined playing of the orchestra, the real protagonists of the performance were the choirs: attentive, expressive, diverse not only with regard to the nature of the characters they portrayed, but also in terms of timbre and voice production. The apt and heterogeneous juxtaposition of female and boy sopranos, altos and countertenors, tenors and basses – sounding different in the BBC Singers ensemble and different in the King’s Chapel choir – further emphasised the drama of the composition, which, according to musicologists, bears more hallmarks of an opera rather than of any variety of oratorio.

Daniel Hyde. Photo: Leon Hargreaves

Six days before the concert Leo XIV, proclaiming Newman Doctor of the Church, named him Doctor Amicitiae, Doctor of Friendship. Newman was inveterately celibate and introverted by nature, but he engaged in friendships with his whole being, seeing them as the most effective way of communicating the message of faith to loved ones. This may have been the reason why the interpretation of The Dream of Gerontius at King’s College Chapel appealed so powerfully to my agnostic imagination. Since that evening I have been coming back again and again to the story of Newman’s relationship with another convert, Ambrose St John, believed to be the prototype of the Angel from the poem. The two men lived together for over thirty years. After his friend’s death Newman experienced such a strong sense of loss that he compared it to mourning a deceased spouse. He asked to be buried with St John in one grave.

In 2008, when the grave was opened to move Newman’s remains elsewhere in view of his expected canonisation, it turned out that the body had completely decomposed. It had simply vanished. As if the Angel had really plunged it into the penal waters. I think, however, that even without knowing this story I would have remembered the Cambridge performance as the most tender depiction of Gerontius’ journey through death I have encountered to date.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

It is still a difficult time for the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, at which renovation started in November 2022 and which will not open its doors until next season at the earliest. It has been a strange time for Oksana Lyniv, who appeared for the first time at the conductor’s podium of one of Italy’s most beautiful theatres in March 2021. Four months later, as the first woman in the history of the Bayreuther Festspiele, she conducted a new staging of Der fliegende Holländer at the Green Hill, before taking over as music director of the Bologna company the following January. During her three-year tenure she was able to prepare just one “real” premiere in Bologna’s Sala Bibiena. The following productions, not only those under her baton, wander from hall to hall in Emilia-Romania’s capital.

It was not without reason that the theatre closed in 2022 with a production of Wagner’s Lohengrin. This was where the Italian premiere of the opera took place in 1871. Over the following three decades Teatro Comunale presented all of Wagner’s most important works and became the first company in the world to receive official permission from the Bayreuth Festival to stage Parsifal, on 1 January 1914, under the baton of Rodolfo Ferrari, with the phenomenal Giuseppe Borgatti in the title role and Helena Rakowska – the wife of Tullio Serafin – in the role of Kundry. Bologna became the most important centre for Wagnerian performances in Italy. It was this tradition that Lyniv, the first female conductor at the helm of an Italian opera company, not just in Bologna, decided to revive.

She has carried out her reform with kid gloves, seemingly without neglecting the repertoire beloved by the local audiences. However, she has handed this repertoire over to other conductors, focusing herself on music opening up other horizons – on Wagner’s operas, on the late Romantic idiom of Mahler and Strauss, on Puccini’s last works. I encountered the Bologna Holländer under her baton in 2023, still having vivid memories of the Bayreuth performance. My impression at that time was that Lyniv was still struggling with the local orchestra, which stubbornly played in the Verdian style, in a manner unsuited to any of Wagner’s scores. That is why I initially was reluctant to face the concert performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen, presented in Bologna in stages since June last year. I gave in only when it came to Siegfried, which in the end I did not manage to see. It was, therefore, with even greater determination that I went to see and hear Götterdämmerung – especially after my recent, very positive experience with the entire Ring cycle conducted by Simone Young, another “debutante”, that is, the first woman to conduct the entire tetralogy in Bayreuth.

All concerts in the cycle – just eight in total, two for each part of the Ring – were held at the Teatro Manzoni, an elegant building in a style reminiscent of Liberty, a uniquely Italian variety of Art Nouveau. Although the edifice, opened in 1933, is located at the very heart of Bologna, it stands away from the main thoroughfares, amidst buildings cramped into the old town backstreets. Before the war it housed one of the most modern culture venues in Italy, with a vast orchestra pit and a very spacious auditorium. It became a venue for concerts, opera and theatre performances, as well as film screenings for thousands of people. After the war the building functioned as a cinema, undergoing extensive renovation in the early twenty-first century. The old theatre was replaced with a state-of-the art concert hall with an auditorium of just over 1200 seats.

Oksana Lyniv. Photo: Anrea Ranzi

I will not delve into the reasons for not staging the Ring in its full stage form – as was the case with Der fliegende Holländer presented over two years ago in the much larger EuropAuditorium, which has the necessary machinery at its disposal. Let me point out, however, that the full Wagner orchestra took up the entire space of the Auditorium Manzoni stage – the chorus had to be placed in the balcony (to an excellent dramatic effect, but more on that in a moment). Instead of a beautifully produced and exemplarily edited programme book that I praised so much in my review of Holländer, we got a ten-page booklet into which, apart from notes on the performers and a partly out-of-date cast, only an essay by Alberto Mattioli could be squeezed.

It is a pity that one of Lyniv’s most ambitious ideas was given such modest treatment – especially as this was both her debut in the Ring and the return of the tetralogy after more than a quarter of a century of absence from the Bologna music scene. The return was certainly successful; so much so that I began to regret my earlier prejudices. The orchestra had finally become accustomed to the idiom of this music, playing attentively and with commitment, grasping every suggestion from Lyniv, who this time not only broke down the score into its constituent parts, precisely extracting from it all the details of texture and emphasising the sophisticated interplay of leitmotifs, but also took care of the continuity and coherence of the narrative. The story moved forward unstoppably and in such a broad wave that I can forgive the winds some false notes and intonation slip-ups – surprising in that they appeared rarely, but in an accumulation that resulted in a veritable cacophony, perhaps most severe in the prelude to Act Three. Perhaps there were not enough rehearsals, or perhaps there was a lack of practice in using authentic Wagnerian instruments, including three steerhorns, or cow horns. On the other hand, the chorus, prepared by Gea Garratti Ansini, did a phenomenal job – this is true especially of the male voices in the stunning intensity of the Gibichungs’ response (from the balcony) to Hagen’s chilling Call in Act Two.

When it comes to the soloists, there was a merry-go-round in the casting of the two most important roles. Siegfried changed twice, finally entrusted to Tilmann Unger a few days before the concert. Wagner lovers became familiar with the German tenor’s name during one of last year’s Bayreuth performances of Parsifal, when Andreas Schager fell ill and his replacement Klaus Florian Vogt missed his plane, as a result of which Unger took on the title role in Act One. I advise you to pay attention to this singer: the only thing he still lacks for the role of Siegfried is a bit more volume and, thus, freedom at the upper end of the range. His voice is very handsome, with the right baritone tinge at the bottom, ringing and clear as befits a Heldentenor. His text delivery is excellent; he intelligently builds his characters and skilfully plays with the mood, as he demonstrated especially in the beautifully constructed monologue “Mime hiess ein mürrischer Zwerg” in Act Three. A perfect Siegfried for modestly-sized stages, and young enough to be able to still develop and “grow into” theatres with more difficult acoustics.

Brünnhilde was to have been played by Eva Vesin, but she was in the end replaced by Sonja Šarić, with whom Lyniv had worked since the beginning of her tenure in Bologna. I noticed the Serbian soprano’s extraordinary musicality already in Holländer, in which she sang Senta. This time she captivated me with her unique timbre – soft, velvety, a little nasal, so different from the bright, often wobbly sopranos that, for reasons I cannot fathom, have taken the lead in the Wagnerian repertoire today. In Šarić’s interpretation Brünnhilde evolved in perfect harmony with the score: from a girl in love to a mature woman who had lost everything and only then appreciated the power of love. I once sensed a similar note in the voice of my first Brünnhilde – the phenomenal, unjustly forgotten Berit Lindholm. Similar technical ease and interpretative wisdom are easier to find today in archive recordings than on the stages of renowned opera houses.

Albert Pesendorfer (Hagen). Photo: Andrea Ranzi

The Bologna Götterdämmerung had one more protagonist – the magnificent Hagen of Albert Pesendorfer, whose bass is powerful, intense and terrifyingly dark, which the singer enhanced even more with his carefully thought-out portrayal of the character and excellent acting. Of Hagen’s two unfortunate siblings I found Gutrune the more memorable by far – in Charlotte Shipley’s lyrical portrayal she was fragile, arousing compassion, and, in her reaction to Siegfried’s death, even shocking in the truth of her emotions. The otherwise lovely baritone Anton Keremidtchiev was disappointing as Gunther, singing the role almost mechanically, with his eyes fixed on the score, without any connection to the text. Just as disappointing was Atala Schöck in the role of Waltraute, sung in a voice that was tired, had too much vibrato and lacked sparkle. On the other hand, fine performances came from Claudio Otelli as Alberich as well as brilliantly marched Norns (Tamta Tarielashvili, Eleonora Filipponi, Brit-Tone Müllertz) and Rhinemaidens (Julia Tkachenko, Marina Ogii, Eglė Wyss).

If the previous parts of the Ring were as convincing as Götterdämmerung, Oksana Lyniv’s mission in Bologna can be regarded as accomplished. Teatro Comunale has returned to the Wagnerian tradition inaugurated so beautifully with Lohengrin conducted by Angelo Mariani. Lyniv has not parted company with Bologna for good – she will work closely with the local opera house at least until the Sala Bibiena reopens. I am becoming more and more taken by women conducting Wagner’s music. Lyniv is like fire. Young is like aether. Time for female incarnations of other Platonic elements in this repertoire.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

I still cannot get over the fact that Mozart’s Idomeneo is so rarely seen on our stages. We owe the only post-war stagings to the Warsaw Chamber Opera and the Polish Royal Opera. Despite the undoubted merits of each of these productions and the tremendous efforts of the musicians associated with the historically informed performance movement at various stages of its development in Poland, they all passed like a meteor, delighting the eyes and ears of a handful of spectators. For obvious reasons, given the microscopic sizes of the two theatres. It could be argued that Idomeneo was Mozart’s first mature opera, followed by masterpieces more worthy of permanent presence in the repertoire of large houses. Yet there is no denying that Idomeneo is a masterpiece in its own right, a work that is superbly constructed in terms of drama and requires extraordinary skill from most soloists, especially the singer in the title role, to whom the composer entrusted the most difficult tenor part in his entire oeuvre. It is so difficult that post-war attempts to present it in its original form (a task singers were still tackling valiantly at the beginning of the previous century) were not made until the 1980s. However, we should be in the vanguard of this trend, if only because the basis of all critical editions of Idomeneo are the autographs of the first two of the opera’s three acts kept in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków.

So much for the introduction and explanation of my travels in search of an ideal Idomeneo in other European opera houses. I wrote extensively about the complicated fate of the myth, its presence in opera and about Mozart’s work itself last year, after the premiere at the Staatstheater Mainz, under the baton of Hermann Bäumer, who soon after that became Music Director of the Prague State Opera. My review of that production was very favourable, mainly because of its musical qualities, not to be underestimated in an ambitious company, though one that operates on the fringes of operatic life in Germany. In Prague things looked even more interesting in many respects: the conductor was to be Konrad Junghänel, a living legend of period instrument performance and frequent collaborator of the director, Calixto Bieito, known as a ‘Quentin Tarantino of the opera stage’, a provocateur who accuses his colleagues of creating productions so empty and bland as if the twentieth century had never happened.

Evan LeRoy Johnson (Idomeneo) and Rebecka Wallroth (Idamante). Photo: Serghei Gherciu

I don’t usually take artists’ iconoclastic statements seriously, but I have to admit that I have a weakness for Bieito, for his open, ‘proletarian’ approach to music, for his fascination with the craftsmanship of Brook and Bergman, for his uncommon – at least in the past – sense of operatic dramaturgy. However, his most recent productions reveal increasingly serious symptoms of a creative crisis. This also applies to this year’s staging of Das Rheingold at the Paris Opera, which caused such consternation among the critics that some of them explained the disaster by citing internal conflicts and problems within the company. The reviewers could not believe their eyes. Bieito always knew how to tell stories, didn’t he? Apparently, he has lost this ability, because the Prague Idomeneo is even worse in this respect. Bieito’s minimalist (which is not an objection) staging, completely devoid of tension (which is a very serious objection indeed), takes place in Ana-Sophie Kirsch’s sets, banally organising space, dominated in the first two acts by moving panels of translucent plastic, and virtually absent in the last act. Paula Klein’s costumes – hard to say whether in line with the director’s concept or lack thereof – look as if taken straight from the catalogue of her previous designs for Bieito, not necessarily having any connection with the message of Idomeneo. The fact that some of the scenes are illustrated with projections from Eisenstein’s Strike and Battleship Potemkin, and Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front only reinforced my belief that Bieito was rehashing his earlier work. A few solutions do echo his old imagination (for example, the dropping of dozens of water canisters, symbolising a sea monster, from a net suspended over the stage), but most of them seem downright grotesque (horror evoked by the spotlight of head torches, as if in a scout patrol; the incomprehensible scene in which Elettra plots her revenge by hugging Idomeneo’s shoes, only to end up smearing herself with shoe polish; the smashing of a tacky statue of Neptune as a sign of the protagonist’s defiance of the deity). Most importantly, Bieito made no effort to present any relationships between the characters – the tentatively built tension between Idomeneo and Idamante seems to originate in the music itself, not in the director’s concept.

Evan LeRoy Johnson. Photo: Serghei Gherciu

Against the backdrop of this completely lifeless staging the efforts of the performers were all the more admirable, especially as Junghänel, himself appearing at the Státní opera for the first time, had a cast made up entirely of singers making their role debuts. This may have been the reason behind the quite substantial cuts in the score: out went not only most of the recitatives, but also some scenes as well as the figure of the king’s confidant Arbace – indeed, the least interesting character in the work. Although the conductor did not manage to fully master the treacherous acoustics of the venue, which disrupted the sound balance in the orchestra – to the detriment of the strings, unfortunately – he conducted the whole with style, clearly highlighting motifs and maintaining the pulse without forcing the tempo, greatly helping the soloists as a result. The best among them, in my opinion, was Evan LeRoy Johnson in the title role, a singer with an almost perfect tenor for the part – resonant, broad, with just the right baritone tinge in the lower register; agile, though perhaps not yet at ease in the breakneck coloraturas of the aria “Fuor del mar” in Act Two, rewarded with a well-deserved ovation. In order to completely win over the Czech audience to his interpretation of the character of Idomeneo, the artist still needs to grow a bit more into the role and gain some confidence. The local music lovers have quite a different idea of what a “Mozartian” tenor should sound like – rightly so to a certain extent, but not in this case. There are neither predecessors nor successors of this figure in the composer’s oeuvre. It is a blind alley in the evolution of his style, perhaps because the first performer of Idomeneo, Anton Raaff, considered by Christian Schubart to be the greatest male voice of all time, was nearing seventy at the time and, to put it mildly, failed to meet the young composer’s expectations.

The same goes for Vincenzo Prato, who sang Idamante at the premiere. Mozart was generally prejudiced against castrati, but ‘il nostro molto amato castrato Dal Prato’, as he wrote wryly in a letter to his father, was considered by him to be not only a poor singer but also a complete idiot. The composer soon transposed the part for the tenor voice and this was the version that was later performed for years. The return to the soprano voice has been a matter of recent decades, and it is still not always possible to find singers suitably contrasted in timbre and temperament for the three roles of Idamante, Ilia and Elettra, intended for this Fach. This was also the case in Prague, although Rebecka Wallroth, who has a handsome and well-placed voice, though too lyrical for the role of Idomeneo’s son, still fared the best of the three. Ekaterina Krovateva’s dense, meaty soprano was definitely not suited to the character of the innocent Ilia, while Petra Alvarez Šimková as the demonic Elettra made up for her technical shortcomings with an interpretation bordering on the grotesque and the hysterical, especially in the bravura aria “D’Oreste, d’Aiace”. Very decent performances came from Josef Moravec in the tenor role of the High Priest and Zdeněk Plech as the Voice of the Oracle. I was a bit disappointed by the chorus, singing decently though without much expression, which is a serious shortcoming when it comes to performing this highly nuanced part, one of the finest in Mozart’s entire oeuvre.

Rebecka Wallroth and Ekaterina Krovateva (Ilia). Photo: Serghei Gherciu

Despite my reservations, I must stress, however, that the main culprit for the performance’s shortcomings was the director, who left the singers to their own devices, gave them no direction, made it difficult to explore the meaning of the work and build convincing, full-blooded characters. What also may have prevented the Prague Idomeneo from becoming successful was the unexpected death of Reinhard Traub, who collaborated with Bieito on the lighting design. Traub died during the preparations for the production. Too early and at the height of his creative powers, as I had been able to see many times at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. It was he who provided brilliant lighting designs for Lohengrin and Tannhäuser in productions directed by Sharon and Kratzer respectively. He was among those who made Schwarz’s Ring watchable at all. He highlighted good stagings and brought out everything worth saving from the bad ones. On the State Opera stage, bathed in blues, pallid greens, depressing shades of ochre and grey – usually unrelated to the narrative – I failed to discern his masterful hand. The production lacked not only the spirit of the story, but also the spirit of light. All that was left was the music and the performers, who gave their best. And all credit to them for that.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

While wandering around Venice, Goethe arrived at a conclusion that surprised even him, namely, that the artist’s eye is formed by the colours of the reality he has experienced since childhood. In Goethe’s opinion, the Venetians perceive everything in brighter colours than the residents of northern Europe, who are consigned to dust and mud, and incapable of such a joyful vision of the world.

Similar reflections occurred to me as I spent a few days at this year’s Bayreuth Baroque festival, of which the leading figure was Francesco Cavalli, a composer born in 1602 and inseparably linked to the beginnings of the Venetian school of opera, as the most highly esteemed and most influential composer of works written with the city’s public opera theatres in mind. Although he entered the world in Crema, Lombardy, and was first taught by his father, Giovanni Battista Caletti, his beautiful soprano voice captured the attention of the Venetian aristocrat Federico Cavalli, who undertook to educate him and bestowed his own surname on the boy. The 14-year-old Francesco became a singer in the choir of St Mark’s Basilica and may have been trained with Monteverdi, who was kapellmeister there at the time. That is not known for sure, but what is certain is that in 1638, now a grown man, he began working with the newly opened Teatro San Cassiano and a year later wrote for the theatre Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo – his first ‘opera scenica’, and at the same time the oldest extant Venetian opera.

From that moment on, he composed at least 40 operas. It is quite astonishing to note how many have come down to us: contemporary scholars confirm his authorship of 27 operatic scores. Even more remarkably, his works began circulating around theatres in other Italian cities already in the mid-seventeenth century. All of them are marked by a smooth-flowing narrative, specific cantabilità, or 'singability’ of passionate recitatives intertwined with emotional arias, and a rare dramatic flair. Major–minor tonality is still crystallising in this music, which contains plenty of dissonances and large intervallic leaps. Yet one also notes the cohesion between the music and the diverse range of characters, which break up the gravity of situations with elements of comedy and grotesque, like in Shakespeare’s plays. Tragic heroes rub shoulders on the stage with types from commedia dell’arte, lofty myths clash with the vox populi, and the woes and ecstasies of lovers with Venetian street opinion.

Pompeo Magno. Sophie Junker (Giulia) and Valer Sabadus (Servilio). Photo: Clemens Manser

For the festival’s premiere, Max Emanuel Cenčić chose a late opera by Cavalli – the heroic drama Pompeo Magno (1666), the last part of the so-called ‘republican’ trilogy, also comprising the operas Scipione affricano and Muzio Scevola. All three were written after the composer’s return from France, where he spent more than two years, invited to the court of Louis XIV by Cardinal Mazarini. After the fiasco of the imposing five-act tragedy L’Ercole amante, written for the inauguration of the Salle des Machines in Paris in 1662, Cavalli solemnly vowed never to write another opera in his life. That vow was short lived. The Venetian premiere of Scipione took place in 1664, at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo, while the other two works were staged in consecutive years at the Teatro di San Salvador. The libretti for the entire trilogy were written by Nicolò Minato, an incredibly productive poet who was fascinated by historical subjects. That does not alter the fact that he treated the sources for the biography of Pompey – especially Plutarch’s Parallel Lives – with a veritably Venetian insouciance. Perhaps the only thing that tallies with the Greek historian’s account is the commander’s triumphant entrance into Rome following the victorious third war against Mithridates. The rest is a tangle of amorous intrigue as implausible as it is passionate, with occasionally sarcastic satire on the political reality of La Serenissima at the time. A satire that is tragic, but as per usual peopled by a host of comical figures, enhanced by Cavalli’s traumatic experiences from Paris, which nevertheless triggered his Italian imagination, with plenty of virtuosic arias, considerably more elaborate than in the works from the beginnings of his Venetian career.

After several excellent premieres in recent years, Cenčić has finally found the perfect blend. He has directed a show in which he neither encloses the work in a cage of soulless reconstruction nor forces it to meet the expectations of a modern audience. He has produced a staging in the colours of a reality remembered from childhood – in the renewed spirit of theatre propounded by Jean-Louis Martinoty, who opened our eyes to the mechanism of Baroque opera back in the 70s. It is not entirely true that one of the last operas by Cavalli has only been revived in our times at the Margravial Opera House. At the beginning of the 70s, in a version far-removed from the original, Raymond Leppard presented it at Glyndebourne. In 1975 the BBC broadcast Pompeo Magno from London, in a performance conducted by Denis Stevens, with Paul Esswood in the titular role and Nigel Rogers as Mithridates. But it is only with Cenčić that we receive this masterwork in a form that gives viewers the illusion of travelling back in time to the true sources of the phenomenon of Venetian opera, into a world seen joyfully, though not without a hint of invigorating bitterness.

A huge contribution to this production’s success was also made by Cenčić’s collaborators: Helmut Stürmer, who created sets referring to the architecture of the Palace of the Doges (openwork windows, a bas relief of a winged lion, a geometrical pattern in rose marble against a backdrop of bright limestone), which were alternately covered and uncovered, as required, to expand or restrict the narrative field; Corina Gramosteanu, who created the wonderful costumes, inspired by the works of Venetian painters, from Bernardo Strozzi through to Giandomenico Tiepolo; the large team responsible for the wigs, masks and make-up; and the lightning director Léo Petrequin, endowed with a rare imagination, who bathed the whole scene in illumination worthy of the Venetian colourists.

Cenčić the stage director breathed life into it all. Cenčić the singer forged, with his warm, velvety countertenor, a deeply human titular hero, now amusing, now ambiguous, now genuinely moving. It is impossible today to identify all the performers of the world premiere of Pompeo in 1666; it is not known how many women were in the cast, how many castrati, how many boys or how many men. All told, eight countertenors took part in the shows at Bayreuth, including the phenomenal Nicolò Balducci in the part of Sesto, Pompeo’s son: an artist for whom I already predict a marvellous career in heroic roles written with soprano castratos in mind. It is with pleasure that I noted the festival debut of Alois Mühlbacher in the dual role of Amore and Farnace; although he took a while to get going, it was worth the wait for his supple and surprisingly boyish soprano countertenor to reach its full sound. Valer Sabadus in the part of Servilio rather paled in comparison. Kacper Szelążek – unrecognisable in the grotesque costume of Arpalia – displayed not just excellent vocal technique, but also fabulous acting skills. A special mention in this procession of countertenors is due to 70-year-old Dominique Visse, in the role of the lascivious (though not always up to the task) Delfo. This legendary singer formed a hugely comical pair with Marcel Beekman, a Dutch haute-contre at least a head taller, who gave a bravura performance as the libidinous old Gypsy Atrea.

Pompeo Magno. The final scene. Photo: Clemens Manser

It is hard to decide which of the female voices made the biggest impression on me: the fiery soprano Mariana Flores in the part of Issicratea, brimming with emotion and at times frightfully distinctive, or her extreme opposite – the exquisite, splendidly rounded voice of Sophie Junker, whose only flaw was that she had decidedly too little to sing in the part of Giulia. Valerio Contaldo, blessed with a lyric tenor voice with a beautiful golden timbre, full and sonorous also at the bottom of the range, proved an excellent Mithridates. In the secondary roles, excellent singing was displayed by Victor Sicard (Cesare), Nicholas Stott (Claudio) and Jorge Navarro Colorado (Crasso), as well as the wonderfully attuned quartet of Prencipi (Pierre Lenoir, who also sang Genius, as well as Angelo Kidoniefs, Yannis Flilias and Christos Christodolou). The singers’ displays of prowess were accompanied by scenes phenomenally polished by Cenčić, with the participation of nine actors of short stature, as if plucked straight out of genre frescoes by Tiepolo.

The musical hero of the evening was unquestionably Leonardo García-Alarcón, who directed his Cappella Mediterranea from the harpsichord with an incredible sense of drama, taking care over the occasionally surprising details of harmony and the clarity of the melodic lines. Alarcón not only achieved an excellent understanding with the singers, but also elicited from the sparkling score all the possible emotions, expressive contrasts and inexhaustible reserves of humour. It is worth noting that the ensemble played in an exceptionally large line-up for a Venetian opera: besides strings and an extensive continuo group, it also included percussion and wind instruments, including cornetts and trombones, used quite ingeniously in the comical episodes.

It rarely happens that I leave the theatre with a sense of the utmost fulfilment, and that is precisely what occurred that evening, when the final applause died down in the Margravial Opera House. Hence I shall treat the three solo recitals I heard over those few days as charming divertissements, highly anticipated encounters with favourites of the festival audience that were rewarded with tumultuous applause. I attended the concert ‘Teatro dei Sensi’ – at the Ordenskirche St Georgen, bathed in candlelight – on the eve of  the performance of Pompeo Magno I saw and heard, but already a few days after the premiere. Hence the lack of surprise at the applause given to Mariana Flores, who with Cappella Mediterranea in an eight-strong line-up and under the baton of García-Alarcón presented arias from another dozen or so Cavalli’s operas. I personally was a trifle disappointed; Flores is a typical theatrical animal and feels most at home when interacting with other characters. Here she was lacking context: despite the discreet directing of her performance, she gave the impression of being rather constrained, and her voice sounded at times too harsh, as if lacking sufficient support, which also caused problems with intonation.

Suzanne Jerosme. Photo: Clamens Manser

Suzanne Jerosme came across much better. Blessed with a colourful, sensuous and precisely articulated soprano voice, Jerosme displayed an excellent feel for the prosody. In the recital ‘Il Generoso Cor’, at the Schlosskirche, together with three musicians from the orchestra Il Gusto Barocco – the ensemble’s leader and harpsichordist Jörg Halubek, cellist Johannes Kofler and lutenist Josías Rodrígues Gándara – she presented a programme comprising excerpts from oratorios by Camilla de Rossi and Maria Margherita Grimani, active at the Viennese court around the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The music by these two Italian women was programmed with works by their male contemporaries, especially Alessandro Scarlatti, whose style exerted the strongest influence on their aesthetic sensibilities.

That same day, on the stage of the Margravial Opera House, in sets prepared for the farewell show of Pompeo Magno, Swiss-French mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti performed with the accompaniment of the Orchestre de l’Opéra Royal de Versailles and violinist Andrés Gabetta. That was a true concert of stars, with a striking array of Baroque hits (Purcell, Porta, Vivaldi, Porpora and Locatelli), performed in equally striking fashion, though not always stylishly. But I won’t turn up my nose at it: the audience was delighted, and this year’s festival certainly merited the spectacular closing gala.

I cannot wait for what will come next. In many respects, Max Emanuel Cenčić reminds one of a Baroque impresario: he has been artistic director of the festival since its inception, directs the productions, in which he also performs, and to cap it all is a first-rate host of the accompanying events. This year, he created Venice for us at Bayreuth. I felt almost like Goethe: I came away with a wonderful, vivid, unique image of that city.

Translated by: John Comber

And so everything is clear. Last season I reviewed the first two instalments of Bayreuth’s Der Ring des Nibelungen – directed by Valentin Schwarz – and this year, as promised, I took the opportunity to complete the work. It was a final farewell to the young Austrian’s controversial staging. For the 150th anniversary of the premiere of the tetralogy in 2026, the Bayreuther Festspiele has announced another experiment: Der Ring in Bewegung, or The Ring in Motion, prepared by a veritable army of creatives who will feed artificial intelligence with “memories” of past productions at the Green Hill and will allow it to “direct” new productions on their basis, productions that will be a little different each time: with sets designed by Wolf Gutjahr and with singers dressed in costumes by Pia Maria Mackert. No one even tries to guess what this will look like. I suppose the creative team are preparing for plenty of surprises. Many regulars, however, rejoice at the return of Christian Thielemann to the conductor’s podium, as well as some significant changes in the cast.

In the four years since its premiere Schwarz’s concept has undergone several modifications – those from the last season were apparently the most significant. Unfortunately, I cannot judge them objectively, because I have only seen each part of the Ring once. But even if some ideas have been honed and various scenes are now more coherent, the director’s childish tendency to take up striking narrative threads and abruptly abandon them has led him completely astray. To paraphrase Chekhov’s famous compositional principle, none of the dozens of dramatic guns from the prologue were fired in Götterdämmerung, and what was fired in the finale turned out to be blanks. The mass of superfluous symbols and the total absence of symbols that were relevant confounded not only the audience, but also the performers bustling around the stage. A year ago I wondered what or who the Rhinegold was. I came  to the conclusion, consistent with the opinions of other members of the audience, that it was the awful brat kidnapped from the Rhinemaidens from the poolside in the first part of the Ring. And I was right or I was not, because the little Hagen cast by Schwarz in the role – and from the point of view of narrative logic he should not have appeared in Das Rheingold at all – ultimately fails as an instrument of the annihilation and rebirth of the world. Unless we were to conclude that the now quite grown-up Hagen has unexpectedly become a “treasure” of Brunhilde, who in the finale loses interest in the dead Siegfried and passionately bites into his murderer’s lips. This, however, would suggest that the universe has fallen into a spiral of violence and nothing will ever be fixed again. Yet into the ruins of Walhalla – in this case a drab puddle and barely creeping fires – enters a rejuvenated incarnation of a heavily pregnant Erda and the twins she carries (in the director’s version the quarrelling Alberich and Wotan are twin brothers) will be seen in a moment in a stage projection. This time embracing and smiling from ear to ear.

Schwarz manipulates human and inanimate props without rhyme or reason. The mysterious pyramid could be anything – Loge’s  fire, a funeral pyre or the seat of the gods. However, I would not be surprised if it turned out to be nothing more than a bedside lamp in the director’s disjointed concept. The puzzling Rubik’s cube from the previous instalments has a purely ornamental function in Siegfried, dangling around the neck of the now-grown-up Hagen. Nothung is revealed only in the third part of the tetralogy, pulled by Siegfried from Mime’s crutch and clearly not in need of forging. Perhaps that is why the protagonist does his blacksmithing job way upstage, hidden from the audience’s view, with sparks flying from quite another direction.

Siegfried. Victoria Randem (Waldvogel), Klaus Florian Vogt (Siegfried), Ya-Chung Huang (Mime), and Branko Buchberger as Young Hagen. Photo: Enrico Nawrath

The absurdities of this staging pile up at such a rate that describing them in detail would make my review burst. Schwarz disregards not only Wagner’s text. He does not tell a different story either. He behaves like a fresh directing graduate who has watched many television series about sadistic children from dysfunctional wealthy families and decided to make a lavish theatrical production about this. After the reasonably promising Rheingold he gradually loses his inspiration. In addition to a dramaturgy that is bursting at the seams, there are also schoolboy errors – like in the scene from Act Two of Götterdämmerung, when Gunther looks inside a plastic bag handed to him by Hagen and gets a shock. He looks into it many more times and gets the same shock every time. In addition, the bag contains Grane’s head, although it is very much a human head, for Grane is not Brunhilde’s steed in Schwarz’s concept, but a faithful companion and guardian of the fallen Valkyrie. The idea would be interesting, if it were played out well and the audience were spared associations with The Godfather, made worse by the headless carcass of a horse brought on stage (another of Chekhov’s guns that fires blanks).

Out of this chaos there sometimes emerge harrowing and memorable episodes – in Siegfried it is the death of the helpless, infirm Fafner, in Götterdämmerung it is the chilling scene of the alleged Gunther raping Brunhilde. The vacuity of the directorial concept is sometimes made up for by the beauty of Andrea Cozzi’s set design. This is not enough to make the audience engage with the dramas and dilemmas of the repulsive characters created by Schwarz. There is nowhere to start to compare his Ring to the legendary staging by Chéreau, an iconoclast who deconstructed a myth deconstructed earlier by another iconoclast, Wagner himself. Deconstruction is a method of interpretation, and this skill was clearly what Schwarz was missing.

This is all the more regrettable as the young Austrian was expected to make a Ring “fit for our times”; yet what came out of it was a misguided product for zoomers, who mostly prefer to watch Netflix, and if they ever get interested in Wagner, it will certainly not be thanks to such an approach. The cognitive dissonance deepened last season, when Schwarz’s staging clashed with Simone Young’s subtle musical interpretation sparkling with colour. In this year’s Siegfried and Götterdämmerung there was at times a lack of understanding between the singers and the conductor. Young does not push the tempo and likes to use a broad, pulsating phrase that several of the soloists clearly found difficult.

Klaus Florian Vogt as Siegfried fared the worst in this respect. He is an indefatigable singer with a tenor of surprisingly high volume, but nevertheless dull colour-wise and harmonically poor. Young’s concept mercilessly exposed all the shortcomings of his performance, including a persistent mannerism of singing evenly from bar to bar, without a trace of rubato, which often resulted in asynchrony with the orchestra and breathing wherever he felt like it. The much more musical but clearly tired Catherine Foster as Brünnhilde came up against similar problems. Tomasz Konieczny as the Wanderer, a part that is too high for him, made up for his shortcomings with excellent acting, having been cast by Schwarz in his favourite role of a shady character. I was pleasantly surprised by Ólafur Sigurdarson as Alberich: last year he really sounded like Wotan’s twin brother, and since then his baritone has acquired a noble depth and a beautiful golden tone. However, the most beautiful voice and the most cultured singing came from Mika Kares as Hagen – evil incarnate and, at the same time, irresistible thanks to a wonderfully soft phrasing produced by a bass as luscious as it was seductive in its sound.

Götterdämmerung. Klaus Florian Vogt. Photo: Enrico Nawrath

Also on the bright side were the phenomenal Mime of Ya-Chung Huang, one of the best character tenors of recent years; the moving, tragic Fafner as portrayed by Tobias Kehrer; and Christa Mayer, convincing in the role of Waltraute. Less stellar performances came ffrom Victoria Randem, whose soprano is far too heavy for Waldvogel; Michael Kupfer-Radecky (Gunther), who was a bit hysterical and struggling with the unbalanced timbre of his bass-baritone; and Gabriela Scherer (Gutrune), whose soprano already has too much vibrato, although she is excellent as acting-wise. On the other hand, I was very impressed by the Norns (Noa Beinart, Alexandra Ionis and Dorothea Herbert) and, especially, the Rhinemaidens (Katharina Konradi, Natalia Skrycka and Marie Henriette Reinhold), all of whom were perfectly in tune and well-matched sound-wise. The undoubted discovery of this year’s season for me was Anna Kissjudit, an Erda from the guts of the Earth, compelling thanks to both the beauty of her dark, dense contralto and her incredible musicianship.

All in all, I am not surprised by the joy of German music lovers at the fact that Der Ring des Nibelungen will return to Bayreuth next year in an entirely different, though hard to predict, version. Of the countless Rings I have encountered in my career as a reviewer Schwarz’s is the only one I found boring, which, in a way, can be considered a success for the director, for he has achieved the almost impossible. It was with all the more trepidation that I waited for the new production of Die Meistersinger, especially after my excellent experience with Kosky’s previous staging. To make matters worse, Georg Zeppenfeld – praised by critics after the premiere for his portrayal of Hans Sachs – fell ill, and the casting merry-go-round began.

Rarely does a series of unfortunate circumstances lead to such a happy resolution as in the case of the performance for which I was accredited. That evening Zeppenfeld was replaced by Michael Volle, who may be the best Sachs of the last decade. David’s role was taken over at the last minute by Ya-Chung Huang. Most importantly, however, in this one performance, Axel Kober, a natural-born Wagnerian whose inspired interpretation of Die Meistersinger I had the opportunity to hear a few months earlier in Copenhagen, was at the conductor’s desk.

This was great news for me, as I have never appreciated the bizarre ideas of Daniele Gatti, who is responsible for the musical side of the production – artificially contrasted tempi, unjustified rubato and preference given to melody over harmonic structures, which usually results in an imbalance of tonal proportions. Kober tidied things up already in the overture, which was clear from the evident but quickly controlled “parting of ways” with the orchestra. And from then on it went swimmingly.

Under such an tender and singer-friendly baton all members of the cast were able to show their best. Volle was in a class of his own, although, given the circumstances, he probably built the character of the Nuremberg cobbler a bit as he himself saw fit – as a man who knows how to put the interest of the community before his own well-being, as a great artist who can appreciate young talent and accept the inevitable aesthetic change. His velvety, yet mature and warm baritone corresponded perfectly with Wagner’s portrayal of Sachs: a man still young at heart and in spirit, facing the inevitable old age not without bitterness. In addition, we can hear in Volle’s singing many years of experience in the Straussian repertoire: his interpretation of the role is deep enough to make the audience aware how many of Sachs’ dilemmas are – paradoxically – to be found in the dilemmas of the Marschallin from Rosenkavalier.

Michael Spyres can notch up another successful debut at the Green Hill, this time in the role of Walther, in which he not only seduced me with his impeccable vocal technique, but also confirmed my belief that he is not a baritenor, but a real tenor, with a huge range, juicy at the bottom, luminous at the top, and in the middle – uncommonly resonant and very “conversational”, which he is able to underline with his phenomenal diction. “Baritenor” sounds great, but if I were one of the specialists taking care of singer’s image, I would rather emphasise that his art has marked a revival of an almost extinct type of voice, a voice that would certainly have been appreciated by most opera composers of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Spyres skilfully paced himself in this treacherous, only seemingly easy and graceful role. Compared to last year’s debut in Die Walküre, he may have been a bit less at ease, but the bar was also set higher. What happens next, we will see. Spyres’ voice grows increasingly manly every year and betrays not the slightest sign of fatigue. For the time being the American singer has formed a dream couple with Eva of Christina Nilsson – after admiring her Freya last year, I can confirm that the young Swedish singer’s voice is not only gorgeous, but also well-trained; and she plays with it with the joy of a teenage girl in love with a boy as radiant as she is. Unfortunately, for various reasons we will neither hear either of these two at next year’s festival, nor will we see a revival of Die Meistersinger in 2026.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Scene from the Act Three. Photo: Enrico Nawrath

This makes it all the more important to appreciate the efforts of all the soloists involved, as their voices – beautiful and fresh regardless of age – finally did not bring to mind associations with the Museum of Distinguished Wagnerian Artists, but with lively, audience-engaging theatre and storytelling unfolding on stage. Michael Nagy was excellent as a hilarious, though not grotesque Beckmesser. Christa Mayer, released from playing very important heroines of the Ring, built an exceedingly nice and completely unpretentious character of Magdalena. Ya-Chung Huang brilliantly coped with having to suddenly replace his colleague as David.  With his cavernous bass Jongmin Park properly conveyed the authority and seriousness of Veit Pogner. In fact, each of the Nuremberg guild masters got his five minutes in this production and used them to the full.

It was not without reason that I began with a description of a performance that unexpectedly benefited from the staging. Unexpectedly, because before the season opened, many know-alls would not have given a brass farthing for the concept presented by Matthias Davids, an experienced director but almost exclusively in the musical repertoire. Meanwhile, the creative team – for the first time in decades – consciously steered clear of any attempt to highlight the supposed subtexts of Wagner’s masterpiece and presented it as a madcap comedy. Andrew D. Edwards proposed a different set design for each act; however, he placed the “imagined Nuremberg” somewhere between the reality of the free city of the Empire and its vision embodied in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The action is undoubtedly set in the present day, but the creative team, including the costume designer Susanne Hubrich, constantly play with references to the region’s history – not least because they want to make a clear distinction between the “guardians of tradition” and the rebels who want to overcome their diktat.

To put it in the shortest terms, the tournament featuring Walther and Beckmesser turns out to be part of a folk festival, a kind of German equivalent of the village fête. The organisers dress in pseudo-historical costumes, while enjoying coffee from the coffee machine, pickled cucumbers and a “meat hedgehog” made from raw pork. The brawl in the finale of Act Two takes the form of a neighbourhood fight that will be forgotten by everyone in the morning. In Act Three no one will be surprised by the straw bale decorations, the giant inflatable cow or the presence of the winners of regional beauty contests.

In the end, Eva will escape from this hole of a town with Walther, having swapped her traditional attire for plain jeans with a colourful blouse. We can be outraged and consider such an interpretation to be an oversimplification of Wagner’s message. We can also assume that Davids and his collaborators have left the work open, resisting anachronistic attempts to accuse the composer of the sins committed by the calculating “heirs” to his oeuvre.

Either way, time has come to depoliticise Wagner’s legacy. It is worth cultivating this trend for as long as possible, although we have to be aware of the risk that someone else might treat it like Schwarz – to the detriment of both the composer and the mindlessly lured young audience. It is time to think whether the first words of Walter’s tournament song are “Morgenlich leuchtend” or “Morgen ich leuchte”, and what this really means.

Translated by: Anna Kijak