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Following last year’s delight at Christoph Graupner’s Hamburg opera Dido, Königin von Carthago, my return to the Innsbrucker Festwochen der alten Musik seemed a foregone conclusion. This time, however, I plumped for the first of the festival’s three operatic premieres, and at the same time one of the two Ifigenias this year – the one at Aulis, composed by Antonio Caldara, after which, in the last days of August, festival-goers will be hearing Tommaso Traetta’s Ifigenia in Tauride, written almost half a century later. Again the choice was difficult, yet despite everything I had the sense that a good compromise had been reached. I made up for what I had missed last season and finally heard Accademia Bizantina in action in situ – the resident orchestra conducted by Ottavio Dantone, who in 2024 became music director of the Festwochen; knowing that I had to choose, I reluctantly gave up Traetta’s opera performed by Les Talents Lyriques with Christophe Rousset – to gain more interesting material for comparison with the triumph of their performance of Porpora’s Ifigenia in Aulide at the last Bayreuth Baroque festival.

This year’s Festwochen in Innsbruck, which are still on-going, carry the ambiguous subtitle ‘Wer hält die Fäden in der Hand?’, which conceals not just the suggestion of various strings being pulled in a diverse vision of the festival’s programme, but also an allusion to the production concept for Caldara’s work, which was prepared by the Catalonian puppet company PerPoc, under the direction of Anna Fernández and Santi Arnal, in their latest collaboration with the Russian illustrator and scenographer Alexandra Semenova, who has lived in Madrid for several years. Yet the initiative of reviving the forgotten Ifigenia in Aulide – more than three hundred years since its Viennese premiere – intrigued me, above all, on account of the libretto by Apostolo Zeno, the most important pre-Metastasio literary reformer of Italian opera seria, and the reverence with which Dantone approached the work’s musical material, deciding to stage it without any major cuts, in a version lasting almost four hours, with just a single intermission.

This is one of the earlier operatic takes on the myth (preceded by the Hamburg Die wunderbar errettete Iphigenia by Reinhard Keiser, from 1699, among others), and at the same time a work that contributed significantly to the later successes of these two Venetians at the court of Charles VI Habsburg: Zeno, making his debut in Vienna, and Caldara, who two years earlier had become court Vize-Kapellmeister, a post he would retain until his death, in 1736. It is not entirely true, however, that Zeno – when seeking a suitable lieto fine for a grand stage show to mark the emperor’s name-day in November 1718 – rejected Euripides’ original version and also a later version in which Iphigenia’s sacrifice was replaced by the sacrifice of a deer, after which he turned to Pausanias’ ‘third version’, where the heroine’s life is saved by the death of another Iphigenia, demasked at the last minute as the true object of the offering made to the gods.

Ifigenia in Aulis. Carlo Vistoli (Achille), Shakèd Bar (Clitennestra), and Marie Lys (Ifigenia). Photo: Birgit Gufler

Zeno, of course, wanted to bring more amorous tension into the action, relinquishing Artemis’ intervention in favour of friction between two rivals – Ifigenia and Elisena – in their fight for Achille’s attentions. Yet he referred not to Pausanias, but to the tragedy by Racine, who moulded the variant related by Pausanias in his own image, creating an unprecedented version of the myth of the hero’s chosen one being saved by the noble suicide of another woman in love with him (in Racine’s play, her name is Eriphile). Pausanias does not suggest the existence of a second Iphigenia; he quotes a little-known myth from Argos, in which the only true Iphigenia was not a descendant of the Atreides, but a child born of Theseus’ rape of Helen, who gave her son to Clytemnestra to be raised.

Racine’s variant was taken up perhaps only by Zeno, a great enthusiast of the French tragedians, a poet who aspired to renewing the art of opera in the neoclassical spirit of the Accademia degli Arcadi. Caldara’s music, with its impressive clarity of texture, excellent contrapuntal work and hugely powerful expression, proved a splendid vehicle for the librettist’s intentions. Nevertheless, present-day reception of the Viennese Ifigenia in Aulide is hindered not just by its length, but also by its abundance of elaborate secco recitatives that add to the action, intertwined with a host of relatively short da capo arias that clearly head in the direction of Classical form.

All the greater is one’s admiration for the musicians who shouldered this complicated narrative and succeeded in maintaining the audience’s attention, despite the embarrassingly maladroit staging. At first, I thought that Semenova, PerPoc and choreographer Cesc Gelabert were attempting a humorous dialogue with Baroque theatrical conventions, but it soon came to light that they were treating their task with deadly seriousness. Given that this show was played in the Grosse Komödiensaal at the Hofburg in Vienna before the court of Charles VI, in spectacular chiaroscuro sets by Francesco Galli Bibiena that astonished viewers with the depth of their perspective, Semenova’s stage design created at times a grotesque impression. One-dimensional, static, overloaded with a host of ineptly replicated ‘Greek’ ornaments, floral and animal symbols, it failed to correspond to the action of the opera and took space away from the soloists. As if that were not enough, into this chaos, the stage team introduced dancers waving standards and cardboard panels, as well as animators of life-size puppets, which – for some unknown reason – doubled solely the female characters in the drama. And those puppets did not discharge any clear dramaturgical function; they were often passed by the puppeteers into the hands of the female singers, who, instead of concentrating on performing their parts, had to devote themselves also to animating their puppet counterparts.

Amid this accumulation of unnecessary props and tawdry costumes (the ladies in pseudo-ancient flowing robes, the puppets in outfits like something out of a folk pageant, the gentlemen in shorts and sandals, motley garments resembling the sheepskin cloaks worn by Balkan shepherds, and Corinthian helmets adorned with Baroque plumes, inexplicably set vertically on top of their heads), one would seek in vain for any psychological truth or relations between the characters. And yet that is what the libretto demands from the start, in order to understand Zeno’s unusual concept, borrowed from Racine, and assess for oneself whether Elisena is merely an obstacle on Ifigenia’s path to romantic fulfilment or perhaps a tragic figure; in order to grasp that the lieto fine in which one person gives up their life for another brings a portent of another catastrophe, namely, the death of Achille, who will never be united with his miraculously saved beloved.

Filippo Mineccia (Teucro) and Martin Vanberg (Agamemnone). Photo: Birgit Gufler

These quandaries and dilemmas had to be considered solely on the basis of Caldara’s music – happily performed by forces worthy of the stars of the imperial court who at the premiere in 1718 helped the composer to take off his career in Vienna. The legacy of Maria Landini, the first performer of the part of Ifigenia, was taken up by Marie Lys, winner of the Cesti Competition in 2018 – a soprano blessed with a remarkably clear, distinctive voice, grounded on excellent technique, as she immediately demonstrated in the aria ‘La Vittoria segue, o Carlo’, moved to the beginning of the opera and sung in front of the curtain (this aria was originally something of a musical tribute to Emperor Charles VI, at the end of the grand spectacle). Lys coped even with a brief drop in form during Act II, effectively bolstering the interpretation of her character with excellent acting. The bright, crystal-clear and highly mobile soprano of Neima Fischer – a winner of the Cesti Competition from two years ago – enabled her to trace a convincing profile of Elisena, at times stubborn and naive, at times arousing genuine sympathy for her unrequited love for Achille. The mezzo-soprano role of Clitennestra was splendidly performed by Shakèd Bar, a singer with a live-wire voice, marvellous stage presence and phenomenal vocal technique, whose teachers included Sonia Prina.

Among the performers of the male roles, the greatest responsibility fell upon Carlo Vistoli, making his debut at the Innsbruck festival. Vistoli, nota bene also a pupil of Prina, is already a very experienced singer, including in Caldara’s music, as he fully displayed in the fiendishly difficult part of Achille, realised with a technically impeccable, strong countertenor voice, beautifully rounded and perfectly developed in the upper reaches of the scale. In some respects, however, he had the show stolen from him by Laurence Kilsby – in the much shorter, but bravura role of Ulisse. This young English tenor boasts not just an exquisite voice, excellently set and sparkling with an array of colours, but also the rare skill of ‘speaking in song’, which immediately arrests the audience’s attention. Excellent performances were given in the less prominent roles of Teucro, in love with Elisena, and Arcade, Agamemnone’s confidant, by two other finalists and prize-winners of the Cesti Competition: respectively Filippo Mineccia (countertenor) and Giacomo Nanni (baritone). Only Agamemnone was a tad disappointing in the interpretation of Martin Vanberg, endowed with a beautiful and well-directed tenor voice, who failed to fully identify with the character he was creating.

Dantone conducted with great sensitivity and imagination, not for a moment losing the pulse in a work that displays a relative lack of variety in terms of musical construction. The Accademia Bizantina, after a few minor slips in the prologue, immediately pulled itself together and played cleanly until the end, with incredible energy and a respect for the nuances of the score. A separate mention is due to the excellent continuo group in the countless secco recitatives.

Žiga Čopi. Photo: Amir Kaufmann

I would not hazard the assertion that the misguided staging has buried the chances of successfully reviving Caldara’s forgotten opera. Yet a sense of dissatisfaction remained, enhanced the next day by the excellent impression made by the Sunday morning rehearsal of the Accademia Bizantina before the Scarlatti! concert at the Haus der Musik. In Dantone’s hands, in fragments of works by Alessandro Scarlatti – especially in the buffa scene from his Neapolitan opera L’Emireno – there was more theatre than in the whole stage concept of Ifigenia. It is worth emphasising all the more that Dantone is highly adept at working with young singers. And those singers learn very quickly, including the Slovenian Žiga Čopi, distinguished by a great vis comica and a soft, beautifully-hued tenor, which may soon develop into the truest haute-contre or Italian tenore contraltino.

Ensemble Explorations. Photo: Mona Wibmer

I gained further evidence that music in itself is theatre that very same evening, at a concert in the Spanish Hall of Ambras Castle, where the Belgian cellist Roel Dieltiens – together with the members of Ensemble Explorations, reactivated following the pandemic – presented selected works from Bach’s The Art of Fugue. In a different order than usual. In the most disparate forces, from two to six instruments, but chosen from a wider range (violin, viola, cello, piccolo cello, recorders, oboe, oboe da caccia, positive organ, double bass, violone). And in an intellectual focus that conveyed all the more powerfully the complexity of human emotions. Those who had considered Die Kunst der Fuge to be a purely speculative work left the concert disappointed. Others, myself included, were reinforced in the conviction that interpretation does not preclude faithfulness to the composer, as long as it does not turn into an obsessive search for oneself in works created by someone else – as Edward Said once aptly put it.

From those two Sunday lessons in Innsbruck, I learned something else of value: that good music always holds its own against bad theatre. We will hear Caldara’s Ifigenia again one day. And there will be more Ifigenias. There is still so much to be discovered.

Translated by: John Comber

During the summer holidays, when operatic life in Poland almost comes to a standstill, being limited to concert performances and one-off open-air performances, critics and music lovers are left with no choice but to pack up their suitcases and seek their fortunes elsewhere. Summer festivals in France, Germany, Austria and the United Kingdom not only take place in real theatres, but also tempt fans with interesting repertoire, presenting operas that are completely unknown in Poland or, for various reasons, are neglected. I began my holiday tour this year in England as usual. After Avner Dorman’s Wahnfried  I returned to Longborough for Pelléas et Mélisande, which had its Polish premiere at Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera (in a production that was, in fact, transferred from the Aix-en-Provence Festival), 116 years after the Paris premiere, and disappeared from the stage after five performances. From there I moved on to Grange Park Opera for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, unlikely to be staged in Poland again.

Monty Jacobs, a now forgotten German critic of English descent, wrote in 1904 of Maeterlinck’s symbolist play that “Mélisande’s love tragedy sparkles with the fullness of saturated colours and delicate transitional tones of a picture that is utter perfection”. The same can be said today of Debussy’s masterpiece, one caveat being that the composer constructed his musical image from the delicate transitional tones between light and darkness. His Pelléas et Mélisande is the first opera in history with a libretto that is not an adaptation, but the text of a play, abridged with the playwright’s permission (with what is perhaps the only but memorable original addition by the composer – Mélisande’s song “Mes longs cheveux” at the beginning of Act Three). Fidelity to the prosody and complicated meanings of the original is one of the main factors that determine the atmosphere of the score, which, according to Ernest Ansermet, exemplifies a perfect symbiosis of musical content with poetic substance. At the same time Pelléas can be called an anti-opera, as it were, a work that eludes both the convention of the form and itself. It takes place always and everywhere or never and nowhere. It evokes an overwhelming aura of fear and mystery locked in unexpected dissonances, modalisms and whole-tone scales without a tonal centre. It undulates slowly and tails off like dead water after a storm. Anyone who tries to fathom its essence will hear “ne me touchez pas” – heard in nearly every bar, not just in the famous first words of the terrified Mélisande.

Pelléas et Mélisande at LFO. Karim Sulayman (Pelléas) and Kateryna Kasper (Mélisande). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

That is why stage directors should not “touch” Pelléas et Mélisande. The land of Allemonde is governed by symbols and archetypes. Most attempts to set the work in a specific, recognisable reality fail. Fortunately, Jenny Ogilvie, the director of the Longborough production, respects the work’s programmatic anti-realism and has offered a production that is as ambiguous as it is engaging for the audience – clearly drawing on Adolphe Appia’s symbolist theatre, with clean, architectural space modified primarily by light and shadow. The stage is almost empty and from the very first images overwhelmingly dark. There is no spring, no castle or tower, no precipice flooded with water – or they are there, suggested, however, by silver foil, geometric, three-dimensional sets by Max Johns and by Peter Small’s varied lighting.

Neither is there Mélisande’s long hair, which somewhat perplexed me – until the beginning of Act Three, when the protagonist, instead of combing the locks tumbling down from the tower walls, rocked on a swing: in thick darkness illuminated by ethereal light, wearing a snow-white gown with vertical ruffles (costumes by Anisha Fields) sufficiently emphasising the “rusalka-like” aspect of her personality. This was enough to charm not only Pelléas, but the entire audience as well. And yet, despite the compelling beauty of this and other scenes, not all ideas of the lighting director proved equally convincing: at times Small used this tool too aggressively, overshadowing – excuse the pun – Ogilvie’s excellent work with the actor-singers.  A significant error, but one that does not ruin the beauty and wisdom of the production, consistently carried through to the finale, in which Mélisande’s deathbed, resembling a flower-filled glass coffin, disappears into the darkness along with Arkel hugging the newborn baby, and the only character that remains on stage is Golaud, the most tragic figure of the drama, a man who has lost everything because of a desperate belief that the “truth” will guarantee him the love of the mysterious foundling from the forest.

A beautiful production, one of the most beautiful ones I have seen at this theatre: not least because it confirmed Ansermet’s opinion concerning the symbiosis of poetry and music in this work. Anthony Negus, whom I know best for his dazzling interpretations of Wagner’s oeuvre, has managed to finally shatter the myth of Pelléas as an anti-Wagnerian opera. In his work Debussy is involved in a fierce dispute with the Bayreuth Master, though he does not question his method – rather, he tries to direct it onto a different track, cleanse it of the remnants of the Romantic aesthetics and distil it into a form more suitable for the new times. He plays with silence, rarely goes beyond mezzo forte, avoids tutti like the plague, treats leitmotifs differently, and still cannot resist using the Tristan chord as a symbol of – not just functional – ambiguity (on Mélisande’s words “je suis bien heureuse, mais je suis triste” in Act Four). What this opera has even more of than Tristan is Parsifal, a work which Debussy held in high regard and the echoes of which can still be heard the morbid sound aura of Arkel’s castle. Having at his disposal an orchestra as sensitive as ever to his every gesture, Negus brought out all these details with the meticulousness of a natural-born Wagnerite, without losing the essence of Debussy’s distinctive style or other sources of inspiration used by the composer, who similarly “deconstructed” in Pelléas the oeuvres of Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.

Nia Coleman (Yniold) and Brett Polegato (Golaud). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Most importantly, however, Negus conducted the character of Golaud precisely as intended by Debussy – who with each successive performance encouraged the first performer of the role, Hector Dufranne, to emphasise even more forcefully the intense sadness and loneliness of the jealous prince, to highlight even more strongly his regret for what he had not done and had not said. Golaud as interpreted by Brett Polegato, a singer of great sensitivity endowed with a baritone that is almost painfully beautiful, would have pleased Debussy in every way. Especially in the scene with Yniold (superbly portrayed by Nia Coleman singing with a truly “boyish” soprano), which, under Negus’ baton, turned into a real musical thriller, one of the best dramaturgically constructed depictions of psychological violence I have ever encountered in opera. What turned out to be a great casting decision was entrusting the role of Mélisande to the Ukrainian-German soprano Kateryna Kasper, who has a voice of extraordinary expressive power and a surprisingly dark timbre, marked by a peculiarly “Eastern” melancholy, which makes her an ideal performer of this mysterious creature. Vocally, she was not matched by Karim Sulayman, a very musical singer who knows how to handle the French phrase stylishly, but whose tenor is decidedly too light and insufficiently developed at the bottom to cope with the demands of the role of Pelléas. Julian Close, the memorable Hunding and sinister Hagen from last year’s Ring, this time built a touchingly fragile character of the old Arkel. The ever-reliable Catherine Carby was excellent as Geneviève, while the Latvian-British bass-baritone Pauls Putnins was faultless in the brief roles of Doctor and Shepherd.

After the magnificent performance in Longborough, I was even more looking forward to Mazeppa at Grange Park Opera, wondering how David Pountney would resolve the dilemma of staging Tchaikovsky’s opera during the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. The libretto of Mazeppa is based on the poem Poltava, written by Pushkin a few years after the fall of the Decembrists’ uprising, when the poet had already become fully convinced of Tsar Nicholas I’s historical mission. Pushkin’s Mazeppa is neither an indomitable, though selfish, youth from Byron’s poem, not a Romantic hero from Słowacki’s later drama; instead, he is a traitor of Russia, anathematised by the Orthodox Church, a conspirator against Peter I, a heartless, cruel man and victim of senile passions. The historical hetman was no innocent – like Kochubey and most commanders and politicians from that turbulent era. Mazeppa indeed tried to marry Kochubey’s young daughter, but Kochubey thwarted his plans and sent Mariya (or Matriona) to a monastery. A few years later Kochubey indeed was condemned to death by Mazeppa – after a failed attempt to turn the latter in to the tsar. It is a fact that the defeat of the Swedish army and the Hetmanate at Poltava put an end to Mazeppa’s many years of diplomatic efforts to unite the Ukrainian lands – but this is not what Poltava and the opera based on it are all about.

Mazeppa at GPO. Rachel Nicholls (Mariya) and David Stout (Mazeppa). Photo: Marc Brenner

Today Mazeppa is Ukraine’s national hero and a symbol of the country’s steadfast resistance to Russia. The hetman’s portrait can be found on banknotes; his name was given to the flagship of the Ukrainian navy, the godmother of which was the wife of President Zelensky. We can assume with a high degree of certainty that as long as Ukraine remains independent, this particular work by Tchaikovsky will not find its way onto the stages of opera houses there – for the same reasons Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar has not been and probably will never be staged in Poland.

I suspect that most Brits associated Mazeppa with Byron’s poem and did not expect to see a scoundrel on stage. In any case, the spectators at the Grange Park Opera performance were clearly perplexed. Judging by the conversations overheard during the interval, until the end they expected a spectacular internal transformation of the protagonist. And they did not get it, because Pountney not only moved the narrative to some vague, though close to us, present, but he also highlighted all the propagandistic features of the work. As early as in Act One his Mazeppa enters the stage in the first act in full gear of the Hells Angels, a motorcycle club regarded as a criminal organisation, not only in the United States. He is accompanied by acolytes as if taken straight from the notorious Solntsevskaya Brotherhood. The director had the lovers’ escape enacted in an almost grotesque convention, punctuated by scenes of quick sex on the saddle of a Harley. Mazeppa’s words in his conversation with Kochubey in Act One (“the thing is that Mariya must marry me”) were interpreted by him in accordance with the moral attitude of his generation – the result being that in Act Two we saw a very pregnant teenage Mariya. Orlik’s torturing of Kochubey brought to mind Lubyanka in Stalin’s times rather than any of the atrocities from today’s Russian-Ukrainian front. The battle from Act Three was fought between some unknown armies; it was taken out of context, populated with characters who, as in most productions of this kind, waved banners, robbed the coffins of the fallen, danced in gas masks and generally threw their weight around in some ghastly theatre of war – though it was unclear whose war. However, I went numb when, in the torture scene, the word “Mzp” appeared on the wall with a red letter “Z” in the middle and I heard people sitting next to me whisper whether it was a reference to Zelensky. I don’t have to explain this to my Polish readers, but I would love to remind the audience of the English Mazeppa that this ghastly sign is the symbol of the Russian invasion forces in Ukraine.

Aleksander Poliński, who reviewed the Warsaw premiere of Mazeppa in 1912, when that part of Poland was still under Russian rule, wrote that “Tchaikovsky must have been in a bloodthirsty mood when writing Mazeppa. For in this whole, somewhat lengthy opera God’s sun shines through in only a few scenes. In the vast majority of the scenes storms of various passions roar, axes of executioners swish, shackles of political prisoners rattle, moans of the tortured and wails of those in excruciating pain are bloodcurdling”. Pountney must have been in a similarly bloodthirsty mood when he created the concept for his Mazeppa (and tried to win over to the idea the set designer Francis O’Connor, the choreographer Lynne Hockney and the lighting director Tim Mitchell). Since the first days of the war I have been calling for long-dead composers not to be held responsible for the nightmare happening beyond our eastern border. This time, however, I did understand the frustration of my Ukrainian friends. And I still hope that Pountney has not sided with the invaders. I constantly delude myself that he has simply failed to understand anything about this war.

Act Two. Kochubey (Luciano Batinić), Orlik (Andreas Jankowitsch), and dancers. Photo: Marc Brenner

Fortunately, I was not disappointed by the protagonists of the drama: the phenomenal David Stout, who with his beautiful baritone brought out far more nuance in the role of Mazeppa than Tchaikovsky himself envisioned for this one-dimensional character; and the magnificent Rachel Nicholls, who, paradoxically, showed her full potential only in Mariya’s harrowing final lullaby. The tenor John Findon, making his Grange Park debut, was rather good in the thankless part of Andrei, who is in love with Mariya. The Croatian bass Luciano Batinić was a reliable Kochubey, though his was perhaps not a very expressive portrayal in comparison with the protagonists. Sara Fulgoni was a little disappointing in the mezzo-soprano role of Lyubov, Mariya’s mother – more convincing as an actress than a singer. Other roles were more or less successfully interpreted by Andreas Jankowitsch (Orlik), Sam Utley (Iskra) and Benjie del Rosario (Drunken Cossack). The whole thing, accompanied by the English National Opera orchestra and the GPO chorus, was conducted conscientiously, though without flair, by Mark Shanahan, who left enough space for the singers, but not delved into the nuances of this at times surprisingly sophisticated score.

And so – to refer again to Poliński’s words – whatever was good in Mazeppa somehow got out. What will remain with me, however, is Pelléas et Mélisande under Negus, who fully consciously brought out everything that is good in this score.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

History has beautifully come full circle, almost on the centenary of the premiere of King Roger, when most reviewers rightly interpreted Szymanowski’s opera as a metaphor for the changes taking place in Europe’s social consciousness at the time. In June 1926, after a performance at Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki, Henryk Opieński wrote about the victory of “the Dionysian concept of life over a king in the fetters of Byzantine religious rigour, his wife, his entourage and, finally, his entire people”. The audience received the composer’s new work surprisingly well, although it featured neither a clearly defined amorous intrigue, nor a murder leading to a plot twist, nor a final conclusion – none of the elements associated with opera, even in the minds of modernist spectators. The listeners were seduced primarily by the music: at the time Szymanowski was experimenting with pentatonics, dissonances and blurring of the transparency of “European” harmonic verticals. There was as much Orient in the score as there was antiquity drowned in a modernist dream. As much a Greek – or essentially Nietzschean – dispute between the Apollonian and Dionysian elements, as a struggle with one’s own longing, sensuality and sexual orientation.

The few opponents accused King Roger of either having a worthless libretto or going astray into Wagnerian epigonism. Ironically, Szymanowski’s work is, indeed, a “post-Wagnerian” opera, although it is by no means epigonic – the composer at time gets into a lively argument with the author of Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde, an argument ending with a mysterious hymn to the sun, an antithesis of “Liebestod”, as it were, in which the protagonist undergoes transfiguration not through death, but through worship of the life force, self-awareness, darkness-destroying power. Such a manifesto was needed at the time and was interpreted correctly in Europe, as is evidenced by, for example, the glowing reviews in the German press after a performance directed by Alexander Schum at the Stadttheater Duisburg in 1928, which made history primarily because of a demonstration by the nationalist Stahlhelm paramilitary militia. The real triumph, however, came with the premiere of King Roger at the Národní Divadlo in Prague, in 1932, in a staging by Josef Munclingr.

Crowd scene. In the foreground Vit Nosek (Edrisi) and Jiří Brückler (Roger). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Raised by his uncle František, a musician at the Municipal Theatre in Lviv, after the untimely death of both parents, Munclingr went on to study at the local conservatoire and at the philosophical faculty of the University of Lviv. He made his debut as an opera singer in 1911 at the age of just twenty-three, signing the bass role of Colline in La Bohème. One year later he was already singing in Prague. Before the outbreak of the Great War he became a soloist with the Stadttheater in Poznań. From there he moved to Warsaw, where he first got engaged by Teatr Wielki and then in 1919 he briefly joined the company of Teatr Stołeczny, also as a stage director. Szymanowski referred to him as “half-Czech, half-Pole”. Although in 1921 Munclingr returned to the land of his ancestors for good, he never severed his ties with his adopted homeland. At Prague’s Národní Divadlo he not only staged King Roger, but also prepared the stage premiere of Harnasie. After the Second World War he appeared in the episodic role of Kuśmirak in Aleksander Ford’s film Border Street. In addition, he appeared several times at the Poznań and Wrocław Opera Houses. He also translated Wyspiański’s tragedy Judges into Czech. Yet he went down in history of primarily the Czechoslovak opera scene: as the performer of Dikój and, at the same time, stage director of the famous Bratislava premiere of Janáček’s Katya Kabanova; as an outstanding stage director and theatre theorist; as a man who contributed to the heyday of Prague’s Národní Divadlo during Otakar Ostrčil’s musical directorship; as a true expressionist successfully pulling the domestic scene out of the greyness of bourgeois realism. He caused ferment in Brno as well: in 1951 he became an associate professor at the local Academy of Performing Arts, helping to establish the country’s first opera directing department.

Vladimír John, a recent graduate of the Brno Academy, made his debut on the Moravian stage precisely with King Roger. And he was undoubtedly successful in that: lasting less than an hour and a half (with a few cuts in the score), played without an interval, the production turned out to be both a tribute to the tradition of modernist theatre and an attempt, modern in its spirit, to place the narrative of the opera beyond time and space. The attempt corresponds – paradoxically – with the intentions of Iwaszkiewicz and Szymanowski, who intended their work to be a clash of myth and archetypes with a crisis of the familiar world order, a parable, as it were, about the struggle of reason, emotion and subconsciousness, in which Sicily was only a pretext, an island from the composer’s memories and phantasmagorias. It is difficult to say whether the Shepherd is a phantom from Roger’s “bloodied dreams”, a newly discovered aspect of the ruler’s personality – as the director suggests – or genuinely a stranger, an unknown god in human form, an incarnation of Dionysus, an emanation of Shiva, all in one?

John’s vision is presented in Martin Chocholoušek’s sparse set, the essential elements of which remain unchanged, which does suggest that the conflict unfolds in the realm of spirit rather than matter. Perfectly lit by Martin Chloup, in Act One it creates an vivid illusion of the Cappella Palatina, bathed in dispersed rays of dusk; in Act Two it evokes the atmosphere of the Orient in a space filled with surreal shapes bringing to mind a parade of lingams, symbolic representations of the god Shiva; in Act Three it is striking in its contrast of darkness and blinding brightness of the interior of a mirror pyramid, where Roger completes his pilgrimage into himself and sets off into the mysterious dawn.

Veronika Rovná (Roxana), Jiří Brückler and Vit Nosek. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Chocholoušek’s beautiful set design concept, irresistibly bringing to mind Munclingr’s legendary stagings, was not quite matched by Barbora Rašková’s costumes, which seemed to be coming from too many aesthetic orders: most convincing in the opening scenes with the chorus dressed in Bauhaus-inspired geometric attires, least convincing in the motley human-animal retinue of the Shepherd. What was also excessive was the choreography of Jan Kodet and Michal Heriban, who unnecessarily entrusted the singers with some of the dance tasks. These are, however, minor caveats: Vladimír John’s impressive debut, the first staging of King Roger in years in which the director has not superimposed additional layers of meaning on an already convoluted libretto, is another proof of the vitality of Czech opera theatre – one of the few in Europe that has not got into a rut and, miraculously, has not gone deaf to the music.

And this time, too, there was something to listen to. It’s been a long time since I saw such a coherent and thus thrilling take on Szymanowski’s masterpiece as the one that came from the baton of Robert Kružík, the new music director of Janáčkovo divadlo as of next season. Kružík is a genuine opera conductor: he skilfully weighs the proportions between the stage and the orchestra pit, does not overwhelm with the power of sound, and gives room to both soloists and the well-prepared, masterfully dynamic choruses. Instead of stratifying the seemingly incoherent sound planes of King Roger, he turned them into a glittering, colourful fresco, juxtaposing the hieratic chanting of the clergy with the sensual softness of the Shepherd’s aria, the ecstasy of Roger with the oneiric nature of Roxana’s song, the sweeping, tangled chords of Dionysian frenzy with the equivocal, “dark” clarity of the protagonist’s final sacrifice.

Jiří Brückler and Vit Nosek. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Nor were there weaknesses in the solo cast either. Jiří Brückler, who has a baritone that is mature and expressive, yet velvety and lyrical in timbre, created a highly convincing portrayal of the internally torn ruler. Veronika Rovná, with her bright, colourful soprano and exceptionally smooth, musical phrasing, came to full form in the second act – if it had not been for the slightly too harsh top notes, her Roxana would have ranked among the top interpretations in the old, “pre-war” style, which for some reason has been abandoned by most Polish singers. The light tenor of Vit Nosek (Edrisi) consistently gained strength of expression over the course of the narrative. Jana Hrochová and David Szendiuch were excellent in the episodic roles of the Deaconess and the Archbishop.

Yet I did not expect I would be so electrifyingly impressed by Petr Nekoranec as the Shepherd – judging from Szymanowski’s correspondence, a role written with an almost impossible voice in mind: androgynous, ambiguous like Dionysus, amorphous like Shiva. And such a voice has indeed been found. Some peculiarities of Nekoranec’s technique – a distinctive vibrato and a tendency to sing high notes in a mixed voice, nowadays generally frowned upon in the tenor repertoire – fit this part like a glove, especially when combined with his disturbingly sensual phrasing. This may have been the sound of Vladimír Tomš, the Czech Shepherd from the 1932 Prague production. Perhaps it was under Tomš’s influence that the composer finally came to appreciate King Roger – writing with sadness after the Prague premiere that “I probably won’t be able write anything like this again”. It’s so good that someone can still sing it.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

It’s been almost ten years and I still feel that one of the most inspiring projects I have encountered in my career as a critic was Wagner’s Ring in Karlsruhe – produced on the initiative of Peter Spuhler, the then director of the Badisches Staatstheater, by four directors, one for each part of the cycle, and complemented by a new opera, Wahnfried, commissioned especially for the occasion from the Israeli-American composer Avner Dorman. I wrote at the time that the theatre in Hermann-Levi-Platz – named after a descendant of a famous rabbinical family, Kapellmeister of the Karslruhe court opera and a great admirer of Wagner, who after many twists and turns entrusted him with the premiere of his Parsifal – would pave the theatrical way to Bayreuth for the four directors. And indeed: of the four “young and talented”, three have already reached the Green Hill, with Yuval Sharon’s Lohengrin enjoying an unprecedented return to the Festspielhaus stage this season.

There could hardly be better confirmation of the need to separate the work from its creator than the legacy of Spuhler’s directorship in Karlsruhe. His tenure – exceptionally successful in artistic terms – had a premature and turbulent ending following violent protests against his authoritarian managerial methods. Nevertheless, the four-director Ring made history and great reviews followed the premiere Wahnfried – its smallest detail honed by all the members of the creative team and artists involved, from the composer and authors of the Anglo-German libretto, Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz; the conductor Justin Brown and the carefully selected cast, who included several soloists from the Ring he conducted; to the production team headed by Keith Warner.

The title of Dorman’s opera refers to the villa in Bayreuth in which Wagner spent the last years of his life and which he named Wahnfried – much to the delight of the town’s residents, who associated the word “Wahn” mainly with madness and delusion. Yet what the composer had in mind was the Schopenhauerian creative frenzy as well as refuge providing a respite from it. He probably did not anticipate that Haus Wahnfried would be transformed into a ghastly mausoleum, the seat of a degenerate cult of his person and oeuvre, a cult created by his grieving widow Cosima and her increasingly bizarre acolytes, including Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a man uprooted from his own culture, advocate of Arthur de Gobineau’s racist thought and ardent promoter of the völkisch ideology, which many believe had a fundamental impact on the development of the Nazi doctrine.

Mark Le Brocq (Houston Stewart Chamberlain). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Chamberlain is the protagonist of Dorman’s opera – in line with the intentions of the co-producers of the venture, which came at a time of historical reckoning for the Bayreuth clan, begun a few years before the bicentennial of the composer’s birth. Wahnfried was intended as something of a divertissement between the successive presentations of the Ring in Karlsruhe: a creative impression on the “dangerous liaisons” of the Wagner family, parallel to many educational initiatives at the time, like the famous “Verstummte Stimmen” exhibition, a part of which is still available on the Green Hill, and the documentary Wagner & Me, featuring the British actor, writer and Wagnerite Stephen Fry.

Wahnfried turned out to be an impression made all the more interesting by the fact that it was filtered through the experiences and sensibilities of a forty-year-old artist raised in Israel, where Wagner’s music still remains a taboo that cannot be broken even by prominent Jewish artists. This may be the reason why Dorman did not fall into the trap of Wagnerian pastiche, writing his first opera in the spirit of postmodern eclecticism – with numerous references to forms and genres of the past, a work seemingly comprising two acts, but in fact composed of a dozen separate episodes, juxtaposed to create an almost cinematic contrast of musical planes. Dorman is a very skilful polystylist. He builds the sound climate of his work – based on expressive melodic structures, and ostinato rhythms as if straight from Shostakovich – from references to jazz, salon waltzes, military marches, Weimar cabaret, individual leitmotifs from Wagner’s operas, klezmer music, and snippets of Protestant chorales. The solo parts oscillate between a declamatory style and poignant lyricism (Siegfried Wagner’s magnificent monologue at the beginning of Act Two), merging perfectly in the group scenes with the sound of the chorus and the colourful orchestral layer.

The music of Wahnfried – sophisticated yet accessible – has something irresistibly “American” about it. To many critics it brings to mind John Adams; to me it is associated more with John Corigliano and the fusion of styles typical of his oeuvre: not devoid of the grotesque and black humour, manoeuvring between realism and the world of delusion, effectively shattering convention, like in the now somewhat forgotten opera The Ghosts of Versailles. However, Dorman and his librettists too often resort to stereotypes: Chamberlain became an ardent Wagnerite as early as in the 1870s; his first visit to Wahnfried did not come until 1888, five years after the death of his beloved composer; only then did he join the Bayreuther Kreis, in which the seeds of völkisch nationalism and a new, racist strand of anti-Semitism had already been sown by Baron Hans von Wolzogen, whom Wagner himself had invited to edit the Bayreuther Blätter monthly, a decision he soon came to regret bitterly. The story of Isolde, the first fruit of Cosima and Richard’s love, who was denied her share of Wagner’s legacy, is much more tragic and multifaceted: Cosima herself lived with the stigma of being Liszt’s illegitimate child; matters were further “complicated” by her then husband Hans von Bülow, who acknowledged his paternity of Isolde. Isolde’s rejection by her mother was also influenced by the conventions of the day, which stigmatised marriages supported by the wife – and this was the case of Isolde, who married the penniless conductor Fritz Beidler. Chamberlain himself made advances to Isolde: his subsequent marriage to Eva von Bülow, Wagner’s second daughter, was the result of cold calculation. Cosima learned of Isolde’s untimely death by chance ten years after the fact – less than a year before her own death. Most importantly, however, both Cosima and Houston Stewart Chamberlain died before Hitler came to power, and the main culprit behind the dictator’s later association with Bayreuth was the naive and not very intelligent Winifred, whose actions deserve a separate opera.

Mark Le Brocq and Oskar McCarthy (Wagner-Dämon). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The narrative oversimplifications and lack of psychological depth in Wahnfried were counterbalanced in Karlsruhe by singers who brought to mind the complex characters of the Ring. Wagner’s spectre haunting Chamberlain was played by the singer portraying the equally ambiguous character of Alberich. Hermann Levi, a man torn between his love for the composer and having to put up with his anti-Semitic taunts, was portrayed by the singer playing Wotan in the Karslruhe staging.

Polly Graham, the director of the Longborough production, followed a different path: she engaged in a dialogue with Keith Warner’s concept of the premiere, alternately arguing with it and refining the British director’s ideas. She deliberately juxtaposed Chamberlain’s grotesque figure with reality – Mark Le Brocq is much closer to the historical character than Matthias Wohlbrecht, who sang the role in Karlsruhe. Graham has preserved the vaudeville-cabaret feel of some of the episodes by casting the accomplished dancer and circus artist Tamzen Moulding as Acrobat. Wagner-Dämon – in Warner’s concept bringing to mind Jack Napier from Burton’s Batman – has been transformed into a green jester, a joker pulled from the deck in successive deals of history’s cards. The Master’s Disciple (Hitler) – made to look by the director of the premiere as the dictator from Chaplin’s film – is brought on stage as a Great War veteran, wearing a uniform decorated with a clown’s pompoms. Together with the set designer Max Johns and costume designer Anisha Fields, Graham has convincingly conveyed the ghastly atmosphere of the Bayreuth clan – manipulators controlled by Cosima, who distorted the composer’s ideas, controversial in any case from today’s point of view.

Musically, the Longborough Wahnfried was on a par with the Karlsruhe production. Special credit should go to Le Brocq for his phenomenal portrayal of Chamberlain, going far beyond the original framework of a character role. It is impossible to forget the chilling interpretation of Cosima by the seasoned Wagnerian Susan Bullock, who, approaching the end of her career, managed to turn her inevitable weaknesses into assets worthy of the world’s best stages; the superb technique of Alexandra Lowe, a singer blessed with a soprano of great beauty, expressive and secure intonation-wise, which was evident in the dual roles of Isolde and Winifred; and the touching portrayal of Siegfried Wagner by Andrew Watts, who sang the role in Karlsruhe – although his countertenor has since become dull and lost some of its harmonics, it has definitely gained in strength of expression. Excellent performances also came from the soprano Meeta Raval (as Anna and Eva, Chamberlain’s wives); Adrian Dwyer, a memorable Mime from the Ring conducted by Negus, this time in the sinister role of the Master’s Disciple; the baritone Edmund Danon, making his LFO debut (as the living and dead Hermann Levi); and Oskar McCarthy, coming from a slightly different order, in the baritone part of Wagner-Dämon. McCarthy, a versatile singer, actor and performer, more than made up for some shortcomings in his vocal technique with his theatrical craftsmanship. Another singer deserving a favourable mention is the Cuban-French bass-baritone Antoin Herrera-López Kessel as Kaiser Wilhelm II and the anarchist Bakunin. I was not disappointed either by the chorus, larger than usual for this company, augmented by members of the Longborough Community Chorus. The whole thing was conducted by Justin Brown, repeating his Karlsruhe success and once again showing the LFO regulars that he is not only an effective conductor, but primarily a very sensitive musician.

Adrian Dwyer (Master’s Disciple). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The British premiere of Wahnfried, which was met with favourable reception from both the critics and the audience, despite the work’s shortcomings, proved to be an important and necessary venture. All the more important given that it was undertaken by LFO, a company established out of pure and disinterested love for Wagner, demonstrating again and again that it cares for his legacy more wisely than his Bayreuth heirs, who often go astray. That is why I am surprised by some voices claiming that staging Dorman’s opera in the “English Bayreuth” was a reckless act, an initiative fraught with the risk of undermining the achievements of the rural opera company from Gloucestershire. That is why I was alarmed by the essay included in the programme, the author of which, Michael Spitzer – perhaps with the best of intentions – engaged in manipulation in the other direction. The world is once again plunging into the hell of hypocrisy; ideologies that were supposed to be gone forever after Hitler’s defeat are on the rise again. So it is better not to repeat the long-discredited legend about the porcelain monkeys of Moses Mendelssohn, grandfather of the composer Felix – a humiliating purchase the philosopher had to make to be granted permission to marry. Spitzer repeats the hackneyed cliché that the figurines in Mendelssohn’s collection are an example of the so-called Judenporzellan, items purchased by Jews under duress in exchange for the right to start a family and have legitimate offspring. True, Frederick the Great did promulgate this disgraceful decree – one of many intended to boost sales of products from his Berlin manufactory – but not until 1769, when Moses had long been married. Not only that – six years earlier the same Frederick had granted Moses the Schutzjude status, protecting the scholar from the persecution that indeed affected his poorer and less privileged brethren, that is, practically most of the Jewish community in Prussia. However hideous the figures in the Mendelssohn collection may seem today, in Moses’ times they were regarded as a symbol of luxury and affluence. Therefore, Felix could have not treated the heirlooms inherited from his grandfather as a “racist memento mori”. The whole story is an anachronistic construct rejected by researchers almost half a century ago.

This does not mean that there was no anti-Semitism in Germany in Wagner’s days. This does not mean that Wagner was not an anti-Semite. Finally, this does not mean that Chamberlain did not pour racist poison into this leaven – with disastrous consequences, as we increasingly tend to forget. History must not be manipulated to introduce audiences to Dorman’s work. It is necessary to seek the truth and truth does not lie in the middle at all. “The truth lies where it lies”, as Władysław Bartoszewski, a member of the Żegota presidium and a Righteous Among the Nations, used to say. He was a man who understood perfectly the meaning of the phrase “to do more harm than good”.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

The motto of this year’s Händel-Festspiele Göttingen was “Lorbeeren” or laurels. For thousands of years laurel wreaths have adorned the temples of not only victorious commanders, but also poets, scholars and artists. Laurel is an attribute of Apollo, the god of beauty, life and light. Yet the price of splendour and glory is often suffering: Apollo is also the god of truth and violent death. The dark side of many a triumph was pointed out by George Petrou, the festival’s artistic director, who referred to an aphorism by Otto Julius Bierbaum, a German poet, journalist and author of children’s books. “Lorbeer ist ein gutes Kraut für die Saucenköche”: laurel is a herb good for sauciers. Yet when worn on the head, it can sting.

That is why the Festpspiele poster features a green laurel branch with a black chain spiralling under it. That is why Petrou’s choice of the festival opera this time was Tamerlano, one of Handel’s darkest and most remarkable stage works – a masterpiece that was underrated at first, then long forgotten and resurrected only on the bicentennial of its premiere, in 1924, at Karlsruhe’s Hoftheater. In Göttingen Tamerlano was first heard on period instruments exactly forty years ago, in the middle of John Eliot Gardiner’s tenure.

The opera was apparently written in less than three weeks, between Giulio Cesare and Rodelinda, for the Royal Academy of Music’s sixth season at the Haymarket theatre. In some respects it can be viewed as an attempt to jump on the bandwagon of Orientalism, fashionable in Britain at the time, as well as a nod to the Academy’s wealthiest benefactors, who were associated with the East India Company – soon to become the main driving force of British imperial power. On the other hand, however, Tamerlano seems to be a sentimental journey to the Italy of the composer’s youth. This may explain the self-quotations from Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno and La Resurrezione present in the score, and, above all, the idea of entrusting the key role of Bajazet to a tenor voice – first used by Alessandro Scarlatti in Il gran Tamerlano of 1706, and then in several versions of Francesco Gasparini’s opera.

George Petrou. Photo: FreddieF

In 1724, when Handel’s opera was premiered, Londoners were already accustomed to the November tradition of staging Nicholas Rowe’s tragedy Tamerlane on William of Orange’s birthday and the anniversary of the bloodless revolution that began the following day, shortly after the Dutch prince’s arrival in England in 1688. In Rowe’s play the eponymous Tamerlane, that is the Mongol ruler Timur the Lame, turned out to be an allegory of William himself, an enlightened philosopher king. The villain was Bayezid, the Ottoman sultan captured by Timur after the Battle of Ankara and a personification of King Louis XIV of France, hated by William. This may have been the reason why the audience felt confused by the story being presented in Handel’s opera from a slightly different perspective, with Haym’s libretto drawing on both Scarlatti’s opera and Gasparini’s Tamerlano, whose librettist, Agostino Piovene, in turn relied on Jacques Pradon’s French tragedy. Handel backed this tale of a clash between two barbarian titans with his own musical genius, creating a work astonishing in the psychological depth of its characters – ambiguous, often repulsive, arousing sympathy streaked with grotesque and horror.

The indefatigable Rosetta Cucci – who has been associated with Wexford Festival Opera for years, since 2020 as and the festival’s artistic director, and is also active as an accompanist and stage director – explained in the description of her staging concept for Tamerlano that she intended to move away from historical truth and create a universal drama. A puzzling statement given that all modern directors of Baroque operas do so, not to mention the fact that there was never any historical truth in Tamerlano. Instead, we have the truth of emotions and superbly drawn relationships between the six protagonists in the score, highlighted by an almost classical unity of time and place – the action takes place just after the battle lost by Bajazet, in the palace taken over by his vanquisher in Bursa, then the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Cucci has set the story in a claustrophobic space painted with black and bright white light (set design by Tiziano Santi, costumes by Claudia Pernigotti, lighting by Ernst Schiessl), suspended between a dream, allegory and vision of a quite modern dictatorship. I have seen dozens of similar takes on pre-Romantic opera in my life, most of them over a quarter of a century ago at the old Warsaw Chamber Opera. They were, however, mostly clearer and more closely related to the music – and music, in the case of the drama’s two main protagonists, gives the director more than enough clues as to what to do with them on stage.

Yet Cucci, contrary to the score, sees Tamerlano as a bloodthirsty monster devoid of any human qualities and has turned Bajazet into an archetypal victim. She has made up for the bucolic element missing in the opera by having Asteria wear an idyllic costume and Andronico change at one point his prince’s military uniform for a white robe. She has added to the cast seven mime actors, entrusting them with the role of pricks of Tamerlano’s conscience or perhaps his urges and fantasies, shamefully pushed deep into the subconscious. She has also introduced additional plots (including that of Leone’s rejected courtship of Irene) and a whole host of unnecessary props that, instead of clarifying the complicated narrative, make it even more confusing.

This affected especially the character of Tamerlano, constructed with dedication – in line with the director’s intentions – by Lawrence Zazzo, a fine actor and an even better singer, whose colourful, typically masculine countertenor has already lost some precision and volume, but still retains great power of expression. The key character of Bajazet was rescued – paradoxically – by Juan Sancho’s fiery stage temperament, fully revealed in the aria “Empio, per farti guerra” and the protagonist’s death scene – jagged, swinging between despair, hallucination and calm in the face of the looming end. Yet this magnificent role, which Handel wrote for Francesco Borosini, who had earlier triumphed in Bajazet, another version of Gasparini’s Tamerlano, requires a slightly different type of voice. Borosini had a very extensive range and moved confidently even in the bass tessitura. Sancho had to make up for the lack of volume at the bottom with some excellent acting.

Tamerlano. Juan Sancho as Bajazet. Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

Towering above the rest of the cast in vocal terms was Yuriy Mynenko as Andronico. His countertenor, now fully developed, round at the top and smoothly moving to sonorous, natural tenor notes at the lower end of the range, predisposes him to most of the roles written for Senesino, who had similar assets. Slightly less impressive was Louise Kemény, whose soprano is soft and rich in colours, but no longer fresh enough for the role of Asteria. Dara Savinova was better as Irene, a role she sang with a dark and velvety mezzo-soprano, exceptionally secure intonation-wise. I am not at all surprised that Petrou, following the example of several of his predecessors, reinstated Leone’s aria “Nell’ mondo e nell’ abisso” removed by Handel – even if only for the sake of Sreten Manojlovic and his warm basso cantante, marked by a hint of melancholy, the beauty and technical excellence of which fully justify the slight deviation from the composer’s intentions.

Thus, the unconvincing staging failed to undermine the success of the Göttingen Tamerlano, to which also contributed the FestspielOrchester, led by Petrou with his usual passion, with an unerring sense of the pulse and rhythm of the music, without unnecessarily “smoothing” it at the edges. I suspect that Petrou was just as passionate in conducting the other staple of the festival programme, a Handel oratorio.

I could not make it to this year’s Solomon, but I rushed straight from the train to a gala concert at the Stadthalle, featuring the same orchestra and Ann Hallenberg, the legendary Swedish mezzo-soprano, a pupil of Kerstin Meyer, remembered for her recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 under John Barbirolli. Hallenberg won acclaim mainly in pre-Romantic repertoire, and although she performs less frequently these days, her mature voice has retained all the qualities of her youth: golden colour, excellent breath control and stylish, flowing phrasing. To give the singer some breathers and to highlight her strengths all the more effectively, Petrou put together a programme alternating between Handel’s arias, and Vivaldi’s concertos and sonatas. It was a true greatest hits concert, during which I enjoyed “Venti, turbini, prestate” from Rinaldo as much as the soloists’ excellent collaboration with the conductor and the entire ensemble (special credit should go to the concertmistress Elizabeth Blumenstock and the bassoonist Alexadros Oikonomou).

Galakonzert. Ann Hallenberg, George Petrou and FestspielOrchester Göttingen. Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

There were also, as usual, lectures and symposia, there were events for children, there was a competition for young performers of Baroque music, there was morning music from the tower at St. James’ (played by the carillonist Martin Begemann) and a host of other events, including afternoon recitals in Göttingen churches. I will especially remember the performance by Stefan Kordes, organist at the St. Jacobi parish, who, playing on an instrument from the local workshop of Paul Ott, presented not only works by Bach, Messiaen and Elgar, but also fascinating transcriptions of Wagner’s “O, du mein holder Abendstern” and Ride of the Valkyries by Edwin Lemare, one of the most popular and influential organists of the turn of the twentieth century.

George Petrou attracts new regulars to the Händel Festspiele, using by all possible means. This year he decided to give them a Göttingen version of the Last Night of The Proms, featuring the Jacobikantorei and the Göttinger Symphonieorchester conducted by its head Nicholas Milton. Everything was as it should be: Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance at the beginning, Hubert Parry’s Jerusalem and Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs at the end, and in between Handel, of course, Londonderry Air as well as many other musical delights. The encores were crowned with the fiery Brazilian rumba Tico-Tico no fubá.

I honestly admit: I sang Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free with everyone else. I clapped to the rhythm of Hornpipe – encouraged by Milton, who conducted the whole thing with a sense of humour and energy worthy of Leonard Bernstein. Difficult times have come. The world is breaking in our hands. To refer once again to Otto Bierbaum’s words: “Humor ist, wenn man trotzdem lacht”. There is nothing else to do but laugh in spite of the difficulties.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

This may have been this season’s most anticipated premiere in the world. Tickets for all performances of Die Walküre, the last production conducted by Antonio Pappano, departing in glory after twenty-two seasons at the helm of the Royal Opera House, sold out in a matter of hours already in January. The lucky ticket holders did not give up the trip to London even when it was announced that Lise Davidsen had withdrawn from the role of Sieglinde. The first tickets began to be returned to the box office only several months later.

I had other plans, especially since I hoped for a complete Ring before the end of Pappano’s tenure. However, it proved impossible for the venture – directed by Barrie Kosky, with sets by Rufus Didwiszus (exquisitely lit by Alessandro Carletti) and costumes by Victoria Behr – to be completed as originally planned, primarily for financial reasons. I changed my mind encouraged by friends – having been given a ticket, and lured by their hospitality as well as the prospect of a heated exchange of opinions in the long interval between Acts Two and Three, I packed my suitcase and set off for London.

I did not see Das Rheingold, which had mixed reviews, but my intuition suggested that my fellow critics were not yet able to see the forest among the trees. After reading the first reviews of Die Walküre I thought my intuition had been correct: the forest had begun to take shape. Yet little did I know that my expectations concerning the staging (which were more than met) and the feeling that the cast change would be a change for the better (the choice of Davidsen’s replacement turned out to be excellent on all counts) would clash so strongly with my disappointment with Pappano’s musical concept.

Stanislas de Barbeyrac (Siegmund) and Natalya Romaniw (Sieglinde). Photo: Monika Rittershaus

Let me start with the staging concept, which after Das Rheingold provoked a wave of comments that Kosky allegedly intended to reduce the message of the entire Ring to a warning against the looming climate disaster. Much of this is the fault of Kosky, who did not resist the temptation to provide extensive explanations, the most memorable among which was that he used the recent bushfires, some of the most tragic in Australia’s history, as the starting point for his vision. The audience believed him, and in the first part of the tetralogy focused primarily on the lack of any reference to water, on the charred trunk of the mighty World Ash Tree and the almost constant presence of Erda – a figure of the tormented Mother Earth – as interpreted by the aged actress Rose Knox-Peebles, who remains on stage even during the warning “Weiche, Wotan, weiche” uttered offstage.

It is possible that Kosky, like most directors working on the Ring in stages, listens carefully to the audience’s voice and revises the original concept under their influence. Yet as I was watching Die Walküre, I could not help thinking that he had had something more in mind from the beginning. That his tetralogy would not be a journalistic story about the dangers of the modern world, but – as in Chéreau’s case – an attempt at a contemporary redefinition of the myth redefined earlier by Wagner himself. Das Rheingold is always problematic: it is essentially a highly condensed introduction to the drama proper, which begins in Die Walküre. That the story told in it is the most human of the entire Ring is something I have written about many times before. Kosky, however, has shifted the emphasis: he points out that all the shocking aspects of this narrative – the the Völsungs’ incestuous love, Brünnhilde’s almost equally incestuous fascination with her half-brother Siegmund, and the cruel filicide committed by Wotan (through Hunding) in the name of a specifically understood raison d’état – stem from the necessity of the myth, in which Wagner focused, as if in a lens, all the evils of his own era. Such things happen when the world is on fire. History once again has come full circle. That is why Kosky has turned his Walküre into a story of a very contemporary war – a liminal situation which cannot be understood by anyone who has not experienced it. A situation that unleashes the worst instincts in both the perpetrators and the victims.

The discreet yet relentless presence of Erda – this time interpreted by the equally aged actress Illona Linthwaite – though seemingly at odds with the composer’s intentions, in fact helps today’s audience delve into the deep humanism of Die Walküre. The mysterious creature, formed by Wagner from several deities from Norse sagas and tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, does not fall back in Kosky’s version into sleep after uttering the prophecy from Das Rheingold. It continues in lethargy, omniscient and, therefore, powerless. What hides underneath Erda’s frail body, bared for most of the performance, we can only guess from the anguish visible on her face. She is not only Mother Earth and Brünnhilde’s mother. She is a compassionate mother of all that lives in this world and takes the lives of others in the name of its own survival. It is from her numb hands that Siegmund takes the flowers that herald the Völsungs’ spring. It is from her bosom, joined with the mighty ash tree, that Siegmund plucks the sword promised to him by his father. It is Erda who, with a desperate gesture, makes Siegmund get used to death, pushing the half-charred corpse of a warrior into his arms. She will be the one to watch over Brünnhilde punished by Wotan.

Soloman Howard (Hunding). Photo: Monika Rittershaus

Erda looks helplessly at the war, the image of which, as seen by Kosky and Didwiszus, brings to mind harrowing associations with Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine. Not only because the terrified Siegmund, looking like a hunted animal, bursts onto the stage in a blue T-shirt and yellow hoodie. This somewhat too obvious gesture recedes into the background in the face of phenomenal directorial work revealing the true aftermath of all armed conflicts. Symptoms of post-traumatic stress are visible not only in Sieglinde and Siegmund, but also in Hunding, who serves on the other side of the barricade, and who masks his trauma with unimaginable contempt and aggression. The apparent calm of the gods controlling this war hides a fear of losing power. Pushing carts with piles of decomposing corpses – as if they were not carting them off the battlefield, but exhuming them from a mass grave – the Valkyries behave like raging Maenads: or women who have completely gone out of their minds under the influence of wartime atrocities.

Kosky skilfully waves his way between literalism and symbolism. The ash tree mutilated by Wotan is as ubiquitous on stage as Erda. It can be recognised in the material of the furnishings from Hunding’s hut. When Siegmund pulls the sword from the wall of his future assassin’s house, we realise that we have before us only a fragment of a tree trunk that cannot be seen in its entirety. It is in its cavernous recesses that Sieglinde hides from the shame of her incestuous night with her twin brother. Wotan uses a spear carved from an ash branch to hold Siegmund and help Hunding complete the most gruesome act of carnage I have ever seen on stage. It is the ash tree that accepts Brünnhilde into its scorched interior and is set on fire by the father of the gods.

What will also be etched into the audience’s memory are the sounds of animal fear, the poignant images of loneliness, power and violence, evident in the characters’ eyes and in the barely suggested but telling changes in their facial expressions – as in Act Three, in Brünnhilde’s dialogue with Wotan, who for a moment loses his composure and cannot hide his dismay at his daughter seeing right through him. It is certainly possible to argue with Kosky’s stage concept. Yet it impossible to ignore the mastery of his directorial craft, impressive even in terms of theatre, let alone in the context of working with singers.

And the singers chosen by Pappano made up a dreamlike cast, additionally balanced by the presence of Natalya Romaniw, who replaced Lise Davidsen, making her debut as Sieglinde. I had the good fortune to hear Romaniw live for the first time nine years ago, even before British critics discovered her as the Foreign Princess in the Glasgow production Rusalka. Already at that time I was awed by her powerful, yet clear and round soprano, which has since gained an even more beautiful, compellingly lyrical sound. Combined with the artist’s exceptional intelligence and sensitivity, it predestines her to this particular role in Wagner’s oeuvre, which Davidsen, in my opinion, already “outgrew” a few years ago. Nor can I imagine Davidsen as Siegmund’s twin sister, both character- and voice-wise, for Stanislas de Barbeyrac, included in the cast from the beginning, possesses the truest lirico spinto tenor, with a beautiful golden tone and all the makings of a fine dramatic voice, albeit in the old style. Though it has to be said that both protagonists were unable to spread their wings in Act One, strangely stifled in Pappano’s interpretation (I will return to this later). In Act Two they revealed their full potential, and in Act Three Sieglinde’s phrase “O hehrstes Wunder!” shot up to the ceiling of the theatre with such luminous power that it took everyone’s breath away. Soloman Howard was an outstanding Hunding with his terrifyingly dark bass, which is perfect for the role and the expressive power of which was further enhanced by Kosky’s concept. The role of Fricka was handled superbly by Marina Prudenskaya. Hers is a mezzo-soprano that is rather harsh, but authoritative and objective enough in tone to raise the dispute with the equally cold and repulsive Wotan to a level above that of a simple marital quarrel. Wotan, portrayed by Christopher Maltman, impressed me much more than I had expected. The English singer’s flexible baritone, beautifully balanced in all registers, colourful and exquisite articulation-wise, enabled him to create a character that was as repulsive as it was irresistible – pure evil, consciously enhanced by musical means, without resorting to the recently overused character singing that verges on caricature. A highly convincing Brünnhilde – girlish, full of energy and technically superb – came from the Swedish soprano Elisabet Strid. In this production even the eight Valkyries got a truly regal cast – led by Lee Bisset, the memorable Isolde from Longborough, as Gerhilde, Maida Hundeling as Helmwige and the excellent Rhonda Browne as Schwertleite.

Elisabet Strid (Brünnhilde) and Christopher Maltman (Wotan). Photo: Monika Rittershaus

The problem was that Pappano conducted Die Walküre – it is hard to say whether out of a need to distinguish himself from other conductors, or out of a temptation to “align” Wagner’s work with parallel currents in Italian music – like a number opera, like a sketch for the Milan version of Don Carlos or for Otello, premiered at La Scala three years later. This failed to work already in Act One, at the level of microform, when the sweeping Wagnerian tale got bogged down in unexpected halts in the narrative, stifling the singers’ verve and pushing to the background the climaxes carrying this remarkable story forward. Hope returned in the phenomenally conducted introduction to Act Two, but was extinguished definitively in Act Three, after a sluggish and not very precise Ride of the Valkyries. Most importantly, however, key elements of the work were lost in Pappano’s approach: the ecstatic finale of Act One did not resonate, the intricate interplay of recurring motifs was lost in many places, and after the final call “Loge, hör! Lausche hieher!” the fires barely flickered, instead of bursting into a feast of flames in the orchestra.

It is a pity, because this masterpiece was wisely staged and wonderfully sung. It is a pity that such an outstanding conductor did not bid farewell to his audience with an opera closer to his heart. Finally, it is a pity that no one pointed out to him that he had made a wrong decision.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Some say that Kirill Serebrennikov is a Meyerhold for our times. He is certainly the most recognisable dissident among Russian artists: after spending nearly two years under house arrest for allegedly embezzling public funds, after a truly Kafkaesque trial that ended with a fine, a three-year suspended prison sentence and a ban on leaving the country, and, finally, after losing his position as artistic director of the Gogol Centre, which he has turned into one of the world’s most vibrant centres of independent theatre in less than a decade.

Serebrennikov left for Berlin in March 2022, following a decision to overturn his sentence issued a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He openly condemned the war started by his country already in May, when Tchaikovsky’s Wife was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. In Russia some of his productions were immediately removed from the repertoire, while others had his name erased from them. Still, he has had more luck than Meyerhold, who was accused of collaborating with Japanese and British intelligence, tortured for months and executed in 1940. Both Meyerhold and Serebrennikov became involved in complicated deals with the government, althought it would be hard to call either of them an opportunist, at least in today’s sense of the word. And yet such attempts are made, also in Poland, where the process of erasing Russian culture has gone the farthest of all European countries (for reasons that are quite understandable). Attempts to explain the dramatic choices and complexities of the career pursued by Serebrennikov – a gay man who does not hide his orientation, the son of a Russian Jew and a Ukrainian woman of Moldovan descent, born in Rostov-on-Don, where in 1942, in the Snake Ravine near the city, the largest murder of Jews in the USSR’s wartime history was carried out – are viewed in some circles as a faux pas similar to trying to defend the princess from Rousseau’s Confessions for her dismissive attitude toward the hungry peasants.

Yet a comparison between Serebrennikov and Meyerhold is valid in many respects. The legendary reformer of Soviet theatre was also an extravagant rebel; he, too, shocked audiences, shattered conventions, drew on the most diverse styles of theatrical production. He demanded absolute commitment and incredible physical fitness from his actors. Meyerhold’s stagings aroused either admiration or fierce opposition: they left no one indifferent. The same is true of Serebrennikov, who some believe to be a brilliant visionary, while others regard him as an outrageously overrated director who continues to capitalise on his relatively recent persecution by the Putin regime.

Hubert Zapiór (Don Giovanni). Photo: Frol Podlesnyi

What I find seductive in his theatre is the pure acting element as well as an ability – long forgotten in Poland or perhaps never highly regarded – to soften pathos with the grotesque, to relieve tension by means of irony and black humour. True, Serebrennikov’s stagings are generally overloaded with ideas, sometimes not very coherent, full of incomprehensible allusions and tropes leading nowhere. But even if they annoy, it is impossible to take your eyes off them and then to get rid of the reflections whirling in your head.

That is why I went to Berlin for the premiere of the last part of the so-called Da Ponte Trilogy, produced by Serebrennikov with the Komische Oper for over two years. I decided to miss the first two parts, because I had had enough of both Così fan tutte and The Marriage of Figaro for the moment. However, the story of the punished rake promised to be provocative even when compared with the director’s previous ventures. First of all, Serebrennikov announced the whole thing as Don Giovanni / Requiem, which smacked of Teodor Currentzis’ earlier Mozart experiments. Secondly, he decided to imbue the narrative of the opera with references to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Thirdly – to replace Donna Elvira with a male victim of Don Giovanni’s conquests, Don Elviro, portrayed by the Brazillian sopranist Bruno de Sá.

It promised to be at least a beautiful catastrophe, but what did come out of it was a production thrilling with its pace, teeming alternately with horror and wit, interrupted again and again at the premiere by applause and bursts of laughter from the audience. Yes, it is another excessive production, drawing liberally on both Serebrennikov’s previous stagings (including, not surprisingly, that of Pushkin’s Little Tragedies, staged at the Gogol Centre when the director was already under house arrest) and “all the means used in other plays”, as in Meyerhold’s case. Once again, it is a production that leaves us with more questions than answers, unknown perhaps even to Serebrennikov himself. It contains the most recognisable elements of the Russian artist’s theatre – from dreams and ravings, the sometimes unobvious multiplication of characters, to disjointed narrative.

And yet it is watchable – probably because Serebrennikov, despite seemingly turning everything inside out, still highlights the most essential aspect of the title character’s story. It is not a story about promiscuity or obsession, it is a story about the mechanisms of power and its links to sex. Thus, the homoerotic subtext of the introduction of Don Elviro recedes into the background: the age, gender and orientation of the “victims” do not matter at all to Don Giovanni, just as they did not matter to Casanova, the greatest lover of all time. Yet Serebrennikov completes this spectacle of power with a surprising conclusion: that the descent into the hell of agony can give even a villain a chance and influence the fate of the world. Hence the reference to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Jungian archetypes. Hence the idea to explain everything from the end and start the action already to the sounds of the overture, with a daring scene of Don Giovanni’s supposed resurrection at his own funeral.

Photo: Frol Podlesnyi

This is an arch-Russian scene, played out on several planes, with sets simpler than in Meyerhold’s productions, based on boxes of raw pinewood that perfectly organise the space (arranged in diverse configurations, they will stay with us until the end of the performance). A group of grotesque mourners bid farewell to the protagonist as if he were a Soviet dignitary. To kiss the deceased, they have to lean over the edge of the open coffin, sometimes climbing the steps to do so, then perform a suitable show of despair in front of the rest of the congregation. Meanwhile, in an adjacent box black-clad bodyguards (excellent choreography and stage movement by Evgeny Kulagin) are desperately struggling with the Commendatore’s corpse, trying to pack it into a black body bag. In the midst of this pandemonium Don Giovanni begins to show signs of life and, to the evident frustration of the mourning-faking participants in the funeral, is immediately transported to the hospital.

The rest of the production is made up of a series of snapshots of the real agony of the protagonist, who goes through the successive states of the Buddhist bardo – from life, through dream-like ravings, moments of tranquillity, the painful process of dying and, finally, to a state of readiness to be reborn. Don Giovanni will be guided on this journey by the Commendatore – in the dual form of the spirit of the murdered man (the actor Norbert Stöß) and one of his past or future incarnations (the singer Tijl Faveyts, made to look like a Buddhist emperor, as if taken straight from Robert Wilson’s theatrical visions). He will be accompanied by Leporello, who soon turns out to be himself, or, more precisely, the doubting aspect of his dissociated self (which Serebrennikov, somewhat in the style of early Castorf, emphasises by means of two neon props with the words “SI” and “NO”); the pregnant nurse Zerlina and her wimpish partner Masetto, a work colleague (the only reasonably real characters from Don Giovanni’s ravings); and phantoms of the past – the demonic Donna Anna, torn between her hatred of the assassin and her own father, the helpless Don Ottavio, the genuinely heartbroken Don Elviro, and his mute friend Donna Barbara (the actress Varvara Shmykova), who at some point will also become the object of the Great Rake’s designs. Everything culminates in perhaps the most spectacular “hellscension” scene I have ever seen in the theatre – in a convention reminiscent of both the great ball at Satan’s from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (with Don Giovanni having a bit of Woland or Wotan in him) and naive plebeian theatre created by the simplest of means.

And then silence will fall for a while, followed, instead of the final sextet, by the first notes of the Requiem. An aging Don Giovanni, portrayed by the phenomenal dancer Fernando Suels Mendoza, will embark on the final leg of the journey and reach its end – and, at the same time, a new beginning – gradually regaining his balance and climbing up a vertical wall of pinewood.

There was too much of everything. There were questionable ideas – such as adding Ilya Shagalov’s projections that contributed little to the plot, or interrupting the musical narrative with excerpts from the Book of the Dead recited by Stöß. There were superfluous, though irresistibly funny, elements, including those in the feast scene, when Donna Anna, Don Elviro and Don Ottavio sneaked into the palace in ceremonial Masonic attire. There were moments that dragged on and too many symbols in the fragments of the Requiem crowning the whole. There were gestures that were too journalistic – when a banner appeared on stage stating that the aria “Il mio tesoro” would not be performed due to the cuts in Berlin’s culture budget. In fact, it was not performed because the creative team opted for the so-called Viennese version of the opera – with all the consequences of that decision, including the inclusion of Leporello and Zerlina’s duet “Per queste tue manine” in Act II.

Tommaso Barea (Leporello) and Bruno de Sá (Don Elviro). Photo: Frol Podlesnyi

It certainly was not a Don Giovanni for beginners, but neither were we dealing with a fashionable but inept Regietheater, in which the production team members treat music only as an excuse to pursue their own vision, detached from the work. Musically, it was a performance of surprisingly high quality – also taking into account the difficult acoustics of the Schiller Theater, where the Komische Oper company has moved while its home is being renovated. James Gaffigan conducted the whole in tempi that were very brisk, but corresponded to the concept formulated by Serebrennikov, a director with great sensitivity to the nuances of the score, which he demonstrated in, for example, the perfectly acted out recitatives. The most publicised soloist of the evening, Bruno de Sá, handled the part entrusted to him stylistically and technically better than many women singing Donna Elvira today: only at times did his beautiful soprano fail to sufficiently cut through the sound of the orchestra. I have more reservations about Adela Zaharia (Donna Anna), who has a powerful soprano with a decidedly dramatic tone, but one that is too wide for the part and too often overwhelming the singer’s stage partners. Penny Sofroniadou, who sang Zerlina, was much better when it came to controlling the surprisingly large volume of her voice. Among the male cast I was a little disappointed with Tijl Faveyts, whose bass was not expressive enough for the role of the Commendatore. Philipp Meierhöfer, on the other hand, was very convincing, also in terms of acting, in the role of Masetto. Augustín Gómez, who has a fairly small, but agile and handsome tenor, presented a rather stereotypical figure of a weak and passive Don Ottavio – I continue to dream of a staging in which the director would put enough emphasis on the second of the essential aspects of Mozart’s masterpiece: faithfulness against all odds. In the solo parts of the Requiem the voices of Sofroniadou, Gómez and Faveyts were joined by the alto of Virginie Verrez, thick but with a bit too much vibrato.

Perhaps the greatest asset of the production was the superbly matched duo of Don Giovanni and Leporello – Hubert Zapiór and Tommaso Barea, respectively, singers bursting with youthful energy, bravely tackling their excessive, at times acrobatic acting tasks. Most importantly, singers with a similar type of voice, a very masculine, deep and yet colourful baritone, in Zapiór’s case lightened up by a distinctive “grain”. Mozart and Da Ponte would have been over the moon: if the whole thing had been for real, only this minor detail would have made it possible to distinguish the master from the servant in the general confusion of the identity-swapping episode.

This was the closure of the Berlin Da Ponte Trilogy, which, in fact, is not a trilogy. At the Komische Oper it was brought together not only by the librettist and the director’s controversial, fiercely debated vision, but also by the vocal talent – backed by excellent acting skills – of Hubert Zapiór, the performer of the main roles in all three productions. He is a young and very promising artist. If we want to enjoy his performances in Poland, it is time to look around for a musical stage director, a suitable theatre and a conductor sensitive to singing.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

One does not live on Wagner alone. But a lack of any coherent policy of familiarising the Polish audiences with his oeuvre is harder to stomach. Probably no European country – including Italy, which has a rather peculiar Wagnerian tradition – stages and presents his works as infrequently as we do. True, The Flying Dutchman or Tannhäuser will occasionally make an appearance on stage. Or there will be a few performances of Parsifal here and there. After a hiatus of nearly half a century since the premiere of the abridged version in Poznań, Warsaw will tackle Tristan: I’m not sure why, for the 2016 Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera production was a disaster in every way.

We had only one production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg after the war, at Poznań’s Teatr Wielki, a production that was all right at best. Der Ring des Nibelungen was staged in Poland twice after 1945: in the late 1980s in Warsaw and twenty years ago in Wrocław. The three conductors responsible for the musical side of these ventures – Gabriel Chmura in the case of Die Meistersinger, and Robert Satanowski and Ewa Michnik, who prepared the Warsaw and Wrocław Rings, respectively – deserve praise for their persistence in pursuing ambitious dreams, especially in such unfavourable conditions. Yet these were in many ways too ambitious dreams.

Meanwhile, the 150th anniversary of the premiere of the entire Ring at the Bayreuth Festival is approaching and the entire music world has been preparing for it for a long time. In Poland the anniversary will go unnoticed, in contrast to the celebrations currently being prepared beyond our Western border (which is rather obvious), but also in the Czech Republic, where Wagnerians will be able to encounter the Tetralogy at least twice, including in a new staging by Sláva Daubnerová, planned for the three stages of Prague’s National Theatre. Incidentally, the sets for this show – produced in stages, beginning with the premiere of Das Rheingold in February 2026 – will be designed by Boris Kudlička, the new director of Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera as of next season, and the costumes by Dorota Karolczak, a Bydgoszcz-born artist who for years has been working almost exclusively abroad (I wrote about her excellent designs for the Rodrigo production at the Göttingen Handel Festival six years ago).

Thus, lovers of Wagner’s oeuvre have no choice but to travel all over Europe in search of gems that will never be experienced in Poland by at least another generation of music lovers. Yet I went to Copenhagen for Die Meistersinger full of apprehension – after the musically disappointing and very unevenly cast premiere of Laurent Pelly’s staging at Teatro Real, co-produced with Den Kongelige Opera and Národní divadlo in Brno. I knew the Madrid production only from a broadcast. Visually, I liked it a lot, but I was completely unconvinced by Pablo Heras Casado’s interpretation: shallow, at times downright boring and entirely devoid of expression.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Copenhagen. Johan Reuter (Hans Sachs). Photo: Miklos Szabo

In this case, however, the man behind the conductor’s desk was Axel Kober, a seasoned Wagnerian, who roused the Copenhagen Opera’s well-prepared orchestra from the very first bars of the overture, conducted lightly, in lively but not rushed tempi, with just the right dose of necessary pathos, though without an ounce of the grotesque. I was stunned with delight when I heard the chorus’ singing: meaty, dynamically nuanced, impeccable in its intonation, with perfectly delivered and evidently thought-out text. And then it got even better – Kober’s mastery was evident not only in the way he revealed the characters of the various protagonists, but also in his wise highlighting of the score’s contrasts: between farce and tragedy, monologues alternating between tenderness and hatred, a texture beautifully rarefied in love duets and dense as a silkworm weave in the stunning travesty of Bach polyphony in the finale of Act II.

Die Meistersinger is a masterpiece of “mature style”, an opera full of contradictions and interpretive pitfalls, which both the conductor and the creative team managed to avoid. Laurent Pelly directed the whole in very sparse and beautifully symbolic sets designed by Caroline Ginet, with costumes designed by himself and Jean-Jacques Delmotte. The action takes place in a unified space defined by several monumental platforms and vertical panels that alternately create an illusion of St. Catherine’s Church, the night sky above the tangled streets of Nuremberg and the expansive meadows on the River Pegnitz in Franconian Switzerland. The rest is told by the few props: a gilded frame in which the obsolescent Meistersingers crowd around as if in an old-fashioned portrait; or a canvas with a colourful mountain landscape painting that ominously fades and falls in the finale, like a harbinger of an impending disaster. There are more similar harbingers in this staging. Pelly moved the narrative to the turn of the twentieth century, the time before the First World War, but wove into it signals of later evils. The cardboard houses from which the set designer built the medieval Nuremberg, and which the crowd reduces to ashes at the end of Act II, appear in Act III as a pile of rubbish, pressed deep into the idyllic scenery. When Beckmesser sneaks into Sachs’ workshop, he unexpectedly freezes at the sight of a bundle of shoes hanging from the ceiling, which bring to some spectators’ minds irresistible associations with the ghastly display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.

All this, however, reaches the audience as if through a fog, barely suggested by a subtle change of light, defused by bursts of laughter in brilliantly enacted farcical scenes. What attracts attention from the very beginning is the intricate portrayal of Beckmesser, who is transformed from a frustrated scoundrel into a wretched victim – of the crowd’s taunts, David’s aggression, Sachs’ ruthlessness. The credit for this goes not only to the director, but also to the conductor and the highly intelligent singer (Tom Erik Lie), who with his serenade in Act II makes the audience laugh uncontrollably, but when he sings “Morgen ich leuchte” at the tournament, the laughter gets stuck in our throats, and later, when, as the composer intended, he rushes stealthily into the crowd, we feel the bitter taste of shame in our mouths.

Only now have I realised that I start my assessment of the cast from Beckmesser, but I think this was the first time I saw a living, imperfect human being on stage, rather than a grotesque figure of an aging suitor. Another broken character is Sachs, whose final speech begins to resound with chilling tones – all the more emphatically as Johan Reuter’s magnificent, golden-hued bass-baritone seems to be singing about something else entirely. The Danish artist created one of the most memorable portrayals I had ever seen: with a voice that is not large, but masterfully controlled, with an incredible sense of the words and the content they carry. At this point I should start a litany of praises for all the singers, perfectly cast in their roles. May I be forgiven for mentioning only the magnificent portrayal of Eva by the luminous lyric soprano Jessica Muirhead; the uncommonly convincing, also with the beauty of his ardent youthful tenor, Jacob Skov Andersen (David); the mezzo-soprano Hanne Fischer, touching with the warmth of her voice, in the role of Magdalena; and Jens-Erik Aasbø, unobvious, more fragile and lost than impressive with the power of authority, in the bass part of Veit Pogner. Slightly less impressive was Magnus Vigilius, whose Jugendlicherheldentenor is healthy and beautiful in timbre, but not very flexible – although I still believe that the Danish singer is among the top ten performers of the role of Walther in the world.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Finale. Photo: Miklos Szabo

Aware that I needed to stock up on my Wagner experiences, the following day I set off for Prague to see Siegfried, that is another preview of next year’s tour with the entire Ring des Nibelungen on period instruments, conducted by Kent Nagano. I have already written about this for Tygodnik Powszechny, although without going into details that are relevant to the current report. Firstly, the presentation of the individual parts of the Tetralogy begins in the Czech capital, which is not without reason the only Central European city on the itinerary of the Dresdner Festspielorchester and Concerto Köln, and to which the Ring found its way less than a decade after its premiere in 1876. Secondly, the “Ring historisch informiert” project is not just about reconstructing the historic line-up of the orchestra. It is a massive, long-term undertaking, featuring musicologists, theatre historians, linguists and anthropologists. Its aim is to recreate not only the original sound of the Tetralogy, but also its cultural context: the text delivery practice of the day, the way dramaturgy was shaped and the concept of musical time, in keeping with the spirit of the era.

As we can easily guess, from the very beginning the project had as many enthusiasts as fierce opponents – especially among admirers of stentorian, supposedly Wagnerian voices. Admittedly, listening to recordings of the previous instalments of the “historical” Ring, I, too, had doubts, especially about the Walküre cast, in my opinion too “characteristic”, not matching the level of expectations of the composer, who sought his dream protagonists among the most skilful performers of roles from the operas of Rossini, Donizetti and Meyerbeer. However, I have been a devotee of Kent Nagano’s conducting since the beginning of my career as a music critic. He was the one who won me over to Bruckner’s symphonic music – with interpretations that lightened the convoluted texture of these works and freed them from the dictates of the musical “barbarism” so beloved by other conductors. He was the one who amazed me with the versatility of his talent, thanks to which he interprets the scores of Beethoven and Brahms as insightfully as those of Messiaen and contemporary composers.

I was, therefore, not surprised that the main protagonist of the Prague concert performance of Siegfried at the State Opera was the orchestra – by no means homogeneous despite its expanded line-up, highlighting the sonic peculiarities of individual groups, sometimes even individual instruments. From the dense orchestral mass there began to emerge not only leitmotifs, but also less obvious elements of Wagner’s musical rhetoric: broad phrasing, discreet glissandi, strongly accented portamenti. In the quintet the violas, speaking in an almost human voice, finally came to the fore; the winds resounded with the rustle of leaves and the croaking of forest creatures, the percussion – with the whistles and murmurs of the relentless elements. The whole thing acquired quite a different colour – due to a lower pitch, different design and construction of the instruments, and, as a result, details of articulation.

Siegfried in Prague. Christian Elsner (Mime) and Thomas Blondelle (Siegfried). Photo: Václav Hodina

Audiences are slowly becoming accustomed to period instrument performances of nineteenth-century instrumental music; however, attempts to reconstruct the vocal practices of the day still provoke resistance, also in the context of the operatic form. This concerns particularly the so-called Wagnerian singing, which, for all intents and purposes, is an anachronistic construct, developed decades after the composer’s death, partly through a misinterpretation of his original intentions. Wagner wanted a specific timbre and expression, bringing to mind the sound of a natural spoken voice – combined with a technique that today is associated almost exclusively with Italian and French Romantic opera. Above all, the composer required his singers to be able to “tell a story” with music, to build a role in line with the principles observed by theatre actors of the day.

This is where the participants in the Dresdner Musikfestspiele project started and this is what Nagano himself mentioned, emphasising how difficult it was to find singers talented enough, yet willing to give up their desire for showmanship and devote many months to interpreting the text, mastering and integrating old acting techniques with vocal practice. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the project features lesser-known artists, often taking their first steps in performing Wagner’s works. This is the first ever such a large-scale experiment. The musicians, including the conductor, are learning also from their mistakes. I have the impression that in Siegfried they have finally come close to their desired goal. This is evidenced by, for example, the fact that the title role was entrusted to Thomas Blondelle, who has a voice that is not very large, but well placed and attractive in timbre – which, combined with a thoughtful interpretation of his character, enabled him to play Siegfried in line with the letter of both the libretto and the score: as a precocious, yet naïve and at times cruel teenager who is desperately struggling with a crisis of adolescence.

Siegfried. Christian Elsner, Thomas Blondelle, and the boy soprano from the Tölzer Knabenchor (Woodbird). Photo: Václav Hodina

In Act III Blondelle found an excellent partner in Åsa Jäger, a youthful Brunhilde whose sparkling soprano has a powerful but generally skilfully controlled volume. The Nibelung brothers – Christian Elsner as Mime and Daniel Schmutzhard as Alberich – fully trusted the score and did not try to emphasise the moral ugliness of their characters by means typical of character singing. In this way, in spite of the still cultivated performance practice, they created ambiguous characters, marked by a clear tragic note. It was an excellent idea – and in keeping with the conventions of the period – to place Fafner way upstage and give him with a metal tube, as a result of which the dragon’s voice sounded all the more cavernous and ominous (Hanno Müller-Brachmann came out onto the proscenium only for the giant’s last, dying phrases, sung in his natural voice, as if to mark the loss of his magical power). It is a pity that the excellent boy soprano from the Tölzer Knabenchor (Woodbird) was not mentioned by name. I was slightly disappointed only by Gerhild Romberger (Erda), whose mezzo-soprano lacked the richness of tone and contralto depth necessary for the part, but who made up for this somewhat with her excellent acting.

The most magnificent performance of the evening, however, came from Derek Welton. Since the last time I heard him in the role of the Wanderer, his voice has acquired nobility and authority, but what served him well above all was the lowering of the orchestra’s pitch to the original version. The Australian singer is more comfortable in the lower range of his robust and juicy bass-baritone, which used to be associated with a rarefied timbre on the upper notes of this rather high part. This time, under Nagano’s watchful baton, Welton achieved perfection – I had not encountered such a musical interpretation of the Wanderer, well thought-out, derived directly from the text and backed by an impeccable vocal technique, for a long time.

I expect a similar experience, perhaps even more intense, next season – not only in Prague and Copenhagen, but wherever Wagner’s oeuvre continues to be the subject of admiration, inquiry and endless polemics. Fortunately, I like travelling.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

The only play by Edmond Rostand still put on by Polish theatre companies is Cyrano de Bergerac. Occasionally Les Romanesques will stray onto one of the provincial stages. Few people remember his L’Aiglon (Eaglet), not performed in Poland for more than ninety years, although this powerful six-act historical fresco, written especially for Sarah Bernhardt, who played the eponymous character of Napoleon’s hapless son at the Paris premiere in 1900, arrived in Warsaw before the Great War and was enthusiastically received. The staggering career of the play, which Cornelia Otis Skinner compared in her biography of Bernhardt to a new victory at Wagram, was one of the greatest cultural phenomena in the theatrical life of the first half of the twentieth century. It earned Rostand a place in the Académie française when he was just thirty-three. In its first season in Paris L’Aiglon ran for at least 230 performances. Immediately translated into other languages, the play was all the rage around the world, from New York to Sofia. In 1924 audiences at Bydgoszcz’s Municipal Theatre forced the company to present additional performances – the poster proclaimed on 15 July that L’Aiglon would be presented “definitely for the last time, by general request”.

Rostand quite seriously considered the possibility of transferring his dramatic works onto the operatic stage. When he died prematurely in 1918, during the Spanish flu epidemic, the idea was picked up by his heirs. Apparently, of all Rostand’s theatrical legacy, only Chantecler was not turned into a musical work. The best librettos based on his plays came from the pen of Henri Cain, co-author of the successes of most of Parisian belle époque composers, including Massenet. Cain also adapted L’Aiglon. However, it took an opera to his libretto a long time to hatch – the proposal to write it was rejected at first by both Jacques Ibert and Arthur Honegger, who had been friends since their time at the Paris Conservatoire. It was not until 1936 that they changed their minds, when they were both approached by Raoul Gunsbourg, director of the Monte Carlo Opera. They saw in L’Aiglon the potential to be a work for new, difficult times. They decided to join forces and create an opera for the masses, a musical manifesto of opposition to the brownshirting of Europe, in line with the cultural policy of the newly formed Popular Front.

Gabriel Rollinson (Fürst von Metternich). Photo: Andreas Etter

Work on the piece lasted from mid-1936 to January the following year. The two composers decided to divide the responsibilities and efficiently implemented their concept, without paying much attention to either the librettist or the theatre’s director. Drawing on the tradition of the French grand opéra, they used a five-act structure, combining the material from the first two parts of Rostand’s play in the first act of the opera. They also reduced the number of characters – by about half, which still means that there are twenty more or less elaborate solo parts in the opera. Yet the work is relatively short, lasting just under two hours, and thanks to its skilful combination of the conventions of opera and operetta, historical fresco and dance divertissements, it does not drag on even for less sophisticated listeners, especially given that the score contains echoes of popular songs and marches, Viennese waltzes, dark sarabandes as well as clever references to the legacy of composers of past eras, including Haydn, Meyerbeer and Verdi. The lyrical framework of the whole – the outer acts – was written by Ibert, the middle acts, carrying a greater dramatic load, are the work of Honegger. Nevertheless, Act Three features a ballet composed by Ibert and the dense orchestration of some passages in Act One betrays the hand of his colleague. This only testifies to excellent collaboration between the two on this hybrid piece, which at times irresistibly brings to mind associations with film music – which is not surprising, given that both Ibert and Honegger had considerable experience in the field (the latter even “Napoleonic” experience, as the composer of the soundtrack to the silent film masterpiece directed by Abel Gance).

The friends showed infallible intuition: the premiere on 11 March 1937 – featuring Fanny Heldy as the Eaglet, Vanni Marcoux as the old soldier Flambeau and the American baritone Arthur Endrèze, highly regarded in France, as the demonic Chancellor Metternich – was a staggering success. A year later L’Aiglon triumphed at Brussels’ La Monnaie. After the war the opera returned to the stages of several French theatres; the 1952 staging at the Paris Opera, conducted by Cluytens, became legendary thanks to the soprano Géori Boué’s phenomenal interpretation of the eponymous character. The twilight did not come until the 1960s, with a general crisis in the popularity of the French repertoire. The revival of L’Aiglon began towards the end of last century – with moderate success. Had it not been for the award-winning live recording from La Maison Symphonique de Montréal conducted by Kent Nagano and published by Decca in 2016, the fruit of Ibert and Honegger’s collaboration might have remained forever in the archives, of no interest to anyone except opera historians.

Alexandra Samoulidou (L’Aiglon). Photo: Andreas Etter

This season L’Aiglon came to the Staatstheater Mainz, which stands on a square built on Bonaparte’s orders at a time when Mainz was the capital of the French department of Mont-Tonnerre. After an excellent experience with the local production of Idomeneo, I returned to the city on the Rhine, motivated more by curiosity than belief in the value of the forgotten adaptation of Rostand. I was very pleasantly surprised – even if L’Aiglon is not a masterpiece, it is definitely nicer to see a wise and thoughtful staging of an opera that is excellently cast, expertly conducted and performed with genuine engagement, than with yet another striking directorial vision of a work from the standard international repertoire, which in Poland rarely goes hand in hand with adequate preparation of the artists involved.

This time, too, the musical side of the production was in the hands of Hermann Bäumer, who will soon take over as artistic director of the State Opera in Prague. Luisa Kautz, born in 1987, a graduate of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, directed the staging, preparing it in collaboration with the set designer Valentin Mattka, the costume designer Tanja Liebermann, the projection designer Judith Selenko and the lighting director Frederik Wollk. In part of her concept Kautz consciously drew on the 1900 theatrical original: she had the Eaglet dressed in a snow-white uniform modelled on Jacques Doucet’s design for Sarah Bernhardt and the scene of his death resemble the finale of the famous Parisian production, in which Napoleon II was dying on a bed standing next to the elaborate cradle of the would-be successor to the French Emperor. This, however, was where the similarities ended. The Mainz production of L’Aiglon – the story of the Duke of Reichstadt, deprived of his father’s name, title and inheritance by the Holy Alliance, brought up at the Schönbrunn Castle as if in a golden cage, followed by the secret police of Metternich, who resolved to deny him accession to any throne in Europe at all costs – is a story of a gradual disintegration of the personality of Bonaparte’s only legitimate offspring, of the anguish of a man-child who tries unsuccessfully to break free from the custody of the Austrian chancellor and then sinks into the abyss of a terminal illness.

The harbingers of his ghastly phantasmagorias appear already Act One, when a precisely drawn diagram of a battle emerges from beneath a kitschy painting of mountains and the spectres of Napoleon’s soldiers descend from the walls. The horror intensifies in Act Two, played out in the almost empty space of a chamber hung with portraits of ancestors. This is when Metternich – in a brilliant scene reminiscent of the confrontation between Baron Scarpia and Tosca – utterly humiliates the Eaglet, showing unabashed contempt for his father, and then reproaches him for his weakness and ascribes to him all the Habsburg vices inherited from his mother. The ballet from Act Three becomes a pretext for the young man’s grotesque journey into the depths of his lost childhood, played out on a tiny stage – visible perhaps only through the eyes of his imagination – to the rhythm of the courtiers’ prancing at a masked ball. In Act Four the Eaglet’s escape is intertwined with a frenzied vision of the Battle of Wagram, experienced again following the death of the faithful Flambeau – in a setting reminiscent of an abandoned warehouse of memorabilia from Bonaparte’s glory days. In the finale the battle cloak of black eagle feathers gives way to a white bedspread lined with chick down that covers the body of the dying prince. “Meine Geburt und mein Tod sind meine ganze Geschichte” – my whole story comes down to birth and death. Luisa Kautz closes the tale of Napoleon’s son with an expressive theatrical gesture, against a background of the Eaglet’s fragmented memories and deathbed delusions.

The fifth act, finale. Photo: Andreas Etter

The title role was convincingly played by the young Greek soprano Alexandra Samoulidou, whose voice is sensual, dark in tone, perhaps too “feminine” at times – but on the other hand consistent with the more than century-old tradition of interpreting Rostand’s protagonist, standing halfway between boyish naiveté and never-fulfilled masculinity. An outstanding portrayal of Flambeau came from the American bass-baritone Derrick Ballard, whose performance was in line with the nineteenth-century buffo caricato convention, usually associated with the roles of braggart soldiers, but in this particular case marked by a strong note of tragedy. Another singer who caught my attention among the huge cast of L’Aiglon was Gabriel Rollinson. His Metternich was all the more sinister, as he poured venom into the Eaglet’s ear in free-flowing, beautifully constructed phrases produced by a baritone voice with a heartbreakingly beautiful sound, so rare these days: melancholic, smoky, resembling the voice of a young Andrzej Hiolski. In fact, each of the soloists in this production deserved separate praise, as did the members of the company’s chorus and the instrumentalists of the local Philharmonischer Staatsorchester, playing vigilantly under Bäumer with a luscious sound and enthusiasm rarely encountered in Polish ensembles, but testifying clearly to the musicians’ excellent rapport with the conductor.

“Droves of people watched,” Zygmunt Krasiński wrote, remembering the Eaglet’s funeral. All that remains to be said is that nearly two hundred years after those events the audience followed the tragic fate of Napoleon II on the Mainz stage in just as large numbers, though perhaps more attentively. The staging of the rediscovered opera by Ibert and Honegger will be presented “definitely for the last time” on 25 May. It is worth going to Mainz to see it, as the world is again turning brown.

Translated by: Anna Kijak