Posts in English

The motto of this year’s Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik is “Was feiern wir?” – and not without reason, as there is something to celebrate and someone to honour in 2026. The festival is celebrating fifty years of uninterrupted existence: it took place even during the pandemic, which prevented the organisation of Festival Oude Muziek in Utrecht, Avignon Festival and Bayreuther Festspiele, among others. Soon, it will be able to celebrate even more jubilees – of the Ambraser Schlosskonzerte, which were launched in 1963 and continue to take place during the Festwochen; of the Early Music Summer Academy, inaugurated in 1972, the predecessor of several educational projects run today; and of the Cesti-Wettbewerb, which has been accompanying the festival for sixteen years. This year Eva-Maria Sens and Ottavio Dantone managed to invite two previous artistic directors, René Jacobs and Alessandro De Marchi, to take part in the festival. In addition, they paid tribute to Alan Curtis, who initiated the tradition of staging forgotten Baroque operas in Innsbruck. Although the tenth anniversary of the death of the American harpsichordist, musicologist and conductor came during the previous Festwochen, this year’s commemoration may have been even more fitting given the staging of Cesti’s legendary opera Il pomo d’oro: after all, it was Curtis who presented two other reconstructed works of this extraordinary composer, the melodrama Il Tito and the dramma musicale La Semirami.

This is why I decided to include in my operatic visit to Innsbruck the “Tribute to Alan” event at the Spanish Hall of the Ambras Castle. It featured the mezzo-soprano Anna Bonitatibus as well as ten Accademia Bizantina musicians led from the harpsichord by Dantone. Bonitatibus was one of Curtis’ favourite singers. He heard her for the first time in 2001, at the Handel Festival in Halle, where she was portraying Irene in a Tamerlano production conducted by Trevor Pinnock. He immediately started working with her and that collaboration soon turned into close friendship. Bonitatibus mentioned “Carissimo Alan” among the people who had the biggest impact on her career. She worked with him until his death and their collaboration included an unfinished project of recording all of Handel’s operas. It was largely thanks to Curtis that she became involved with the Innsbrucker Festwochen, where she continues to conduct masterclasses and serves on the jury of the Cesti Competition.

The artists constructed their programme in such a way as to capture the listeners’ attention and, at the same time, pay tribute to Curtis in pieces marked by an emotional intensity and unbridled energy similar to that he himself brought to his own ventures. The concert at Schloss Ambras was thus brief but delicious. Bonitatibus’ voice may no longer be as fresh as it used to be, yet it still delights with its warm tone, characteristic rapid vibrato and complete control over phrasing, thanks to which her interpretations have gained even more intensity and expressiveness (especially in her phenomenal performance of Ulysses’ aria “No, quella beltà non amo” from Handel’s Deidamia and Anastasio’s endearingly lyrical “Sento in seno” from Vivaldi’s Il Giustino). The evening, which also featured two concerti grossi by Handel and Geminiani respectively (a standout performance among the instrumentalists came from Alessandro Tampieri, a violinist who combines incredible technical discipline with lightness and freedom of improvisation), was by no means a “musical monument” in honour of the great artist: rather, it brought to mind a well worked-through period of mourning for a departed friend, when one can finally allow oneself to return to joyful memories.

Anna Bonitatibus, Ottavio Dantone, and members of Accademia Bizantina. Photo: Amir Kaufmann

It is a pity that Curtis did not live to see the staging of Il pomo d’oro, rightly announced as the biggest event of this year’s Festwochen (also in the literal sense: according to accounts from the period, this monstrous festa teatrale lasted over ten hours). It was also announced – not quite so rightly – that it would be the first performance of the work since its premiere in 1668. The manuscript of Cesti’s five-act opera to Francesco Sbarra’s libretto has not survived in its entirety: Acts Three and Five disappeared from the score at some point. This was the form in which Il pomo d’oro was published in 1897 by Guido Adler, in the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich series he edited. Interest in the work was revived in 1982, when the American musicologist Carl B. Schmidt found fragments of the lost acts (including nearly twenty arias) in the library of the House of Este in Modena. However, a year before that a group enthusiasts staged Il pomo d’oro as part of an initiative so peculiar that it is worth mentioning it at least. A so-called chamber version of the surviving three acts with the prologue was directed by the twenty-four-year-old Eberhardt Harnoncourt, son of Nikolaus, in collaboration with the instrument maker and gambist Walter Waidosch. The premiere, featuring fifty amateurs, was held in the small town of Aidenbach near Passau. Eight years later in Vienna a “complete” version – that is, with the fragments discovered in Modena – was presented in a concert performance on period instruments conducted by Gerhard Kramer, a judge by profession and, at heart, a passionate Baroque opera lover. The cast, on the other hand, was made up of professionals, headed by Kurt Equiluz as Paride. The work impressed Martin Haselböck, the founder of the Orchester Wiener Akademie, so much that he decided to stage it. He even managed to put together a creative team, but the project did not go ahead due to logistical reasons.

Interestingly, the Boosey & Hawkes catalogue features a critical edition of the score of Il pomo d’oro – including the Modena fragments and a reconstruction of the rest of the music on the basis of other works by Cesti – by Alan Curtis himself. However, the edition is not available and it is not known if and when it will be published at all. Even more interestingly, Dantone became aware of the gaps in the score already when planning the staging for the festival anniversary season – which he openly admitted in a conversation with Paolo Scarnecchia for the Total Baroque magazine. He, therefore, decided to take the bull by the horns and create his own reconstruction, complementing a new critical edition he had prepared together with Bernardo Ticci. A very good decision, for in this version we cannot hear any “tacking”, although it lasts “only” just under eight hours. Conclusion? Either the witnesses’ accounts are inaccurate or the reconstruction could be expanded to include fragments composed in the style of Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, who composed music to numerous ballet scenes.

But it is just not quite clear whether it would be worth it, because staging this monumental celebration in honour of the House of Habsburg – albeit one loosely drawing on the myth of the Judgement of Paris, the prime cause of the Trojan War – is just as complex today as it was in the seventeenth century. Pietro Antonio Cesti apparently composed Il pomo d’oro for the wedding of Emperor Leopold I and Margaret Theresa of Spain, planned for mid-1666 in Vienna. Yet, first, the wedding was delayed, as was later the construction of the huge Theater auf der Cortina, and then the young empress had to recover after the death of her firstborn son. In the end the premiere took place to mark her seventeenth birthday, on 12 and 14 July 1668 – it was divided into two parts owing to the size of the work. The staging featured over one thousand performers, not to mention horses, elephants and lions. The architect Lodovico Burnacini – who also designed the theatre – prepared no fewer than twenty-three sets for the performance. The show had just about everything: shipwrecks, Venus descending from the night sky in a ball of fire, burning ruins surrounded by the waters of the Styx and vanishing into the monstrous jaws of the monster of Hades. In other words, a veritable theatre of miracles, which apparently overshadowed even Paris’ Salle des Machines.

Il pomo d’oro. Alberto Allegrezza (Filaura), and dancers. Photo: Birgit Gufler

Fabio Ceresa, the director of the Innsbruck production, had much more modest resources at his disposal, but his theatrical imagination was just as rich and was, moreover, supported by his impressive knowledge of Baroque opera. First of all, he appreciated the surprisingly coherent narrative of Il pomo d’oro, which stemmed not only from the libretto, but, above all, from the musical structure of the work. As a result, he was able to create two clear main storylines, that is the ruthless rivalry of the Olympian gods and the romantic vicissitudes of the mortals unfolding in its shadow – combining the fairy-tale splendour of the former’s world with the conventional, stylised modernity of the latter’s (Giuseppe Palelli’s marvellous costumes and Nikolaus Webern’s sophisticated yet functional set design, precisely lit by George Tellos). He brilliantly highlighted two characters drawn from the comedy convention: the nurse Filaura, an en travesti role, and Momo, or Momus, the god of mockery, a former adviser to the inhabitants of Olympus, cast down to earth as punishment (in Cesti’s opera, Momo also serves as a commentator on the events, breaking down the symbolic barrier between the stage and the audience). Ceresa peppers some scenes – including the Prologue, featuring the allegories of the lands of the Holy Roman Empire, and the episode depicting the council at the residence of Eolo, the lord of the winds, at the beginning of Act III – with allusions to current political and social events, sometimes rather bluntly, yet never crossing the line of good taste.

Above all, however, he knows how to leave the modern audience speechless and full of childlike wonder – and this is a no mean feat in this era of ubiquitous projections and opera’s increasingly common forays into artificial intelligence and augmented reality. Ceresa resorts to tried and tested theatrical tricks, which we fall for like children, because we have long forgotten that it can be done that way. Who would have thought that a curtain with a simple image of a skyscraper suddenly pulled down from its batten would create such a poignant impression of a city falling into ruin? Who did not burst out laughing when Giunone showered Momo with a deluge of tacky gold tinsel? Who did not stare, mouth agape, at the black abyss of the stage, where the Milky Way, made up of light points on invisible poles, was dancing?

Mauro Borgione (Paride) and Federico D.E. Sacchi (Nettuno). Photo: Birgit Gufler

Dantone showed similar imagination, entrusting the over forty roles to twenty singers, sharing the stage with the NovoCanto vocal ensemble and two dance groups, Street Motion Studio and Compagna Fattoria Vittadini. The Innsbruck Il pomo d’oro cast would in any case be sufficient for at least three productions of works representing various types of Italian Baroque opera. Because that is precisely what this work is like, unique within Cesti’s oeuvre – contrary to appearances – making liberal use of all the styles and conventions of its day. There are surprisingly melodious recitatives, characteristic of the Venetian School; there are more or less elaborate arias, ariosos and laments; there are true arie di furore, ensembles of various kinds, group scenes composed in the traditional Roman style or with elements of the polychoral and concertante techniques. The mood changes constantly: pastoral fragments alternate with scenes straight from hell; passionate lovers’ duets are juxtaposed with comic episodes; outbursts of divine wrath are separated by a short distance from manifestations of triumph and glory.

The cast included artists with voices of various colours, very diverse temperaments and even more diverse stage experience. All did more than well, but I hope I will be forgiven for mentioning only those whose craftsmanship made the biggest impression on me. Let me start with the phenomenal Giunone of Sophie Rennert, a mezzo-soprano that attracted my attention a few years ago, but it is only now that I have heard her in a role seemingly tailor-made for her. She played with it in a manner bordering on nonchalance, displaying a whole range of demeanours and emotions – from the imperiousness of a goddess of the heavens to unholy fits of rage, worthy of Sophia Loren in Matrimonio all’italiana. I was captivated by two red-blooded, passionate altos – Margherita Maria Sala, especially in the role of Alceste, and the young Mathilde Ortscheidt, winner of the Cesti Competition three years ago, convincing in the role of the nymph Ennone abandoned by Paride. Both of Ennone’s partners came trumps: Mauro Borgione singing Paride, a role nominally written for a tenor, but, in fact, from the point of view of today’s Fach classification, just as indefinable as the roles of Orpheus and Ulysses from Monteverdi’s operas, requiring a flexible voice with a broad range and clearly baritonal colour; and Rémy Brès-Feuillet, who has a dark, velvety alto countertenor, perfect for the role of the melancholic shepherd Aurindo. However, in many scenes in which he appeared the show was stolen by the brilliant Alberto Allegrezza, a versatile singer actor in the bravura role of Filaura, Ennone’s nurse. Rocco Cavalluzzi increasingly won me over with each act, in the big role of Momo, written for a high bass; another excellent performance came from Federico D.E. Sacchi, just as experienced in this repertoire, in the bass roles of Nettuno and Cecrope. I should also mention fine performance of two young singers freshly discovered by Dantone: the tenor Žiga Čopi as Marte and the bass Balázs Bán as Bacco.

Despite the fact that Dantone had at his disposal a much smaller number of musicians than the Viennese orchestra in 1668 – which was made up of five ensembles playing, it would seem, every instrument used in opera at the time – he nevertheless managed to bring out everything that matters in this score. Also thanks to a large and very nimble continuo section, constantly engaging in a lively dialogue with the soloists and the chorus.

There is just one thing that keeps me awake at night: the finale, where, in the original version, Giove presents the golden apple to the young empress, while Fabio Ceresa chose to bestow the fruits of the Hesperides’ garden on all the performers – replacing the obsequious message of Il pomo d’oro with a contemporary allegory of the unity of the European Union. The golden-haired infanta from Velázquez’s Las Meninas gave birth to three more children, only one of whom reached adulthood, and had two miscarriages. She died at the age of twenty-one, during her seventh pregnancy. Perhaps it is better not to tempt fate?

Translated by: Anna Kijak

I won’t deny that my attitude towards Hansel and Gretel is exceedingly personal. The last Warsaw staging of the opera – by two legends of Polish puppet theatre, the director Jan Wilkowski and the set designer Adam Kilian – was premiered at Teatr Wielki in 1979. It was the last Warsaw premiere for myself and a bunch of my girlfriends, because at the ripe old age of fifteen we had to say good-bye to the children’s choir. We were still quite childish, but accustomed enough to Wagner’s music – thanks to, among other things, our participation in dozens of performances of Tannhäuser, and recent guest appearances by another company presenting the Tetralogy – to be able to spot in Engelbert Humperdinck’s shimmering score not only popular German folk songs, but also verbatim quotes from the Ring and a tangle of leitmotifs organising the narrative like in the works of the Bayreuth master. Nor were we surprised at all that the musical direction of Hansel and Gretel was in the hands of the company’s boss and eminent Wagnerian Antoni Wicherek.

We were, therefore, all the more disappointed that the premiere received only a handful of reviews, most of which were scathing. The attacks were targeted mainly at Humperdinck, called by one critic a “Wagner for the poor in spirit”, and his “long outdated music”. The conductor and man behind the whole project was criticised as well: for setting in motion the huge machine of “Poland’s pre-eminent musical stage” just to show “two brans” throw a witch into the fire. Since then no one has dared to stage Hansel and Gretel in Warsaw, although elsewhere the opera is hugely popular and in some countries it is a regular feature of the Christmas season. However, it has to be said that music lovers are yet to treat it completely seriously; a tentative proposal, made a few years ago, to present the work – composed, after all, by an assistant to Wagner and teacher of his son Siegfried – at the Bayreuther Festspiele came up against fierce resistance by the guardians of tradition.

Fortunately, it did not take long for the step to be taken by the “English Bayreuth”, that is Longborough Festival Opera. There were serious arguments in favour of the decision: Humperdinck’s opera was admired by the greatest musicians of the period, including Richard Strauss, who conducted the premiere in Weimar on 23 December 1893. More triumphs came with the subsequent stagings in Munich and Karlsruhe, under the batons of, respectively, Hermann Levi and Felix Mottl, two great Wagnerian conductors. They were in no doubt that the composer had produced a brilliant synthesis of a children’s fairy tale with the loftiness of the Wagnerian myth, of references to German folklore with mastery of orchestral technique learned from Wagner.

Darren Jeffery (Father). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The whole thing started innocently enough: from an adaptation by Adelheid Wette, Humperdinck’s younger sister, who in 1889 had the idea of putting on a Christmas puppet show of Hänsel und Gretel for her daughters. Her brother was supposed only to write music to four songs accompanying the play. The home show was such a hit with the guests that the siblings expanded it into a substantial singspiel with piano. Two years later Humperdinck completed a true three-act opera, Hänsel und Gretel, to a libretto by Adelheid, who in her version omitted the most drastic scenes from the fairy tale, adding instead several good-natured characters helping the protagonists on their way to a happy ending.

Yet whatever was sugar-coated in the libretto retained its original horror and mystery in the score. After all, the roots of the Brothers Grimm’s famous fairy tale go back to the great famine, the first of the disasters that struck fourteenth-century Europe. A series of harsh winters was followed by cold springs and rainy summers. The earth refused to dry, to warm up or, even less so, to bear fruit. People started to eat dogs and draught animals. They would grind the remains of seed grain to make flour. They would hunt frogs, boil tree bark, pick out larvae from rotten tree trunks. Desperate, they would get rid of weaker children, abandoning them to their fate and wild animals in the wilderness, as far from their homes as possible, to prevent them from finding their way back. Just like in the fairy tale about siblings abandoned at the behest of their stepmother, but with the consent of their father, a woodcutter, who had been persuaded that otherwise he would have to make coffins for all four of them.

Lucy Bailey, the director of LFO’s Hansel and Gretel, decided to restore at least some of that frustration and darkness to Humperdinck’s opera. Before coming to England I feared that she might not be able to restrain herself, that in the end she would not resist the cruelty of the original. The name Bailey, one of the most important figures of modern British theatre, immediately made me think of her famous Titus Andronicus, presented at Shakespeare’s Globe exactly twenty years ago – in a staging so harrowing that spectators would faint at every performance. It was only when I arrived in Longborough that I realised that Bailey’s career began with a fascination with opera, that she learned her trade not only in drama theatres, but also in Glyndebourne and that she made her debut at Wexford already in the 1980s.

This is most likely why she did not cross any boundary in Hansel and Gretel. She saw, both in the libretto and in the score, that what remained of the original literary work was mainly a story about becoming mature enough to accept responsibility and learning from one’s mistakes, yet a story still marked by the anxieties of the period – lest children’s rebellion against parental authority turn permanently into hatred. In the Longborough production the role of the Witch is performed by the same singer as that of the Mother – a practice often followed in performances of Hansel and Gretel, mainly for practical reasons. However, Bailey followed the Grimm brothers, who in every edition of the fairy tale would suggest more and more emphatically that by killing the Witch the children, in fact, killed their evil stepmother. Yet in the fairy tale the story unfolds over a longer time-frame. In Humperdinck’s softened version the twins are found by their parents after an all-night search of the forest. This did not prevent Bailey from transferring the matricide motif to the sphere of children’s fantasy, which must have been fuelled by fear and hunger.

Joanna Harries (Hansel) and Rosalind Dobson (Gretel). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The director skilfully builds an atmosphere of horrifying poverty from the very beginning. The first two acts take place in a monochromatic space (the sets are by Anisha Fields, who designed the costumes for last year’s excellent staging of Pelléas et Mélisande at LFO, with the whole being lit – brilliantly, as usual – by Ben Ormerod). Act One is dominated by the dirty white of the broom-maker’s cottage interior, with the floor soiled with soot and walls scrawled over with charcoal by the children. In Act Two crooked drawings of puny leafless trees replace a forest – in a space very similar to that of the previous act, though depicted in negative; this time the dominant element is black, against which greyish-white branches loom. Colours, with intense red dominating, appear only in Act Three, the action of which takes places in the Witch’s house.

Bailey builds an atmosphere of horror from what is unseen, lurking at the back of the stage or underneath it. The Witch looks like the Mother, but in rich garments: a red dress as if straight from the set of the film Cruella, just as red stilettos and a white wig of the evil queen from illustrations of Victorian books for children. There is no gingerbread house, no oven in which the old hag will be burned; the entire third act resembles a hallucination in which images as if straight from Alice in Wonderland are mixed with fragments of the children’s memories. Hansel and Gretel wake up under a huge duvet irresistibly bringing to mind a red-and-white chequered tablecloth used for special occasions; the imprisoned Hansel, only whose head is peeking out above the stage, is fattened by the Witch with thick rice pap, which the twins would have eaten the previous day, if the jug of milk had not got broken. When all is finally over, the red will disappear, but no other colour will replace it: the gingerbread children, freed from the spell, the saved siblings and their parents – still as poor as before but happy – will sing the joyous finale in the darkness of the gloomy forest and will probably return to their soot-stained huts. They will, however, be wiser, having learned that it is better to stick together in these terrible times.

Lee Bisset (Mother), Rosalind Dobson, Joanna Harries, Darren Jeffery and the Longborough Youth Chorus. Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Karen Kamensek brought out many hidden treasures from this score, conducting the fifty or so strong festival orchestra with verve, a spark of humour and, whenever necessary, appropriate solemnity. She firmly yet sensitively highlighted all “Wagnerisms” of the work – all the more effectively given that less than two weeks before the LFO ensemble played the final chords of Tristan under Anthony Negus. Kamensek was also excellent in leading the singers, most of whom are at the beginning of their careers, which also applies to the two main protagonists, perfectly matched in terms of both character and voice (Rosalind Dobson’s beautiful lyric soprano in the role of Gretel and only slightly heavier, though suitably “twin-like”, soprano of Joanna Harries singing Hansel). Emerging artists also did well in smaller roles (Laura Fleur as the Sandman, and Kelli-Ann Masterson, also brilliant as an actress, in the role of Dew Fairy). After her local Wagnerian triumphs, especially as Isolde and Brünnhilde, Lee Bisset took on the dual mezzo-soprano role of Mother/Witch, stealing the show primarily as a phenomenal actress, as her handsome voice is already showing clear signs of fatigue. Darren Jeffery proved to be a magnificent Father. He is an exceptionally refined artist with a soft and warm bass-baritone, perfectly even across all registers. David Eaton, too, deserves praise for preparing the Longborough Youth Chorus, made up largely of children from the local community.

There was just one thing that surprised me – that there were very few children in the audience, despite the fact that the opera was performed in English, in a very skilful and accessible translation by David Pountney. Did the parents thought that the fairy tale was too cruel? Or were they ashamed of their own emotions, for this is, after all, a story of not just hunger but also a sense of security that has been undermined – a nightmare that is all too relevant in today’s world?

Translated by: Anna Kijak

I feel strange. For the first time since 2014 I have failed to get to Longborough to attend a performance conducted by Anthony Negus – this time in another revival of Carmen Jakobi’s phenomenal Tristan und Isolde. I will come to LFO this season, but it will be for a completely different production. I can’t help it, this is just how my professional commitments have turned out. But I am looking forward all the more eagerly to next year’s Meistersinger at the home of one of the greatest – and, at the same time, the most elusive – Wagnerian conductors of our time. At the same time I am happy that within a short period of time I was able to listen to, see and judge the work of two young musicians who in recent years have had the opportunity to benefit from Negus’ experience and through him – more or less consciously – join the guardians of a tradition which is still underappreciated on the Continent and which the Sorcerer of Longborough took over directly from his master, Sir Reginald Goodall.

It seemed at one point that Goodall – assistant to Albert Coates and Malcolm Sargent – reached his peak in the mid-1940s, when he went down in the history of British music as Britten’s unexpected guiding angel, first preparing the premiere of his Peter Grimes at Sadler’s Wells and then sharing the baton with Ernest Ansermet during the first performances of The Rape of Lucretia at Glyndebourne. He soon joined the Covent Garden company, where he was entrusted with several touring performances of Die Walküre. Despite excellent reviews, he was unable to spread his wings in the Wagnerian repertoire. In the early 1960s he was outshone by Georg Solti, the Royal Opera’s new music director. And yet Goodall continued to work in his “Valhalla” in the theatre’s attic – neither a dressing room, nor a broom closet – honing interpretations with singers of the stature of Donald McIntyre and Gwyneth Jones. He was biding his time until 1968, when Sadler’s Wells Opera asked him to prepare Die Meistersinger for the company’s centenary. The production became legendary, as did the Ring started in 1970 by the same team and the fruits of his later Wagnerian collaboration with the ROH and WNO.

The production remained a legend also because Goodall’s unique approach to Wagner’s music – stemming from his in-depth study of the score, extraordinary sensitivity to colour and phrasing details, and above all from the time devoted by the conductor to rehearsing with the musicians – was something only witnesses of these events could appreciate. The recordings of the performances conducted by Goodall got lost in the archives for a long time. When they finally resurfaced, in an era of ridiculously perfect studio recordings, few people were able to appreciate Goodall’s interpretative “endless crescendo” as well as his art of piling up tensions for hours, which could be captured only during a live performance.

John Tomlinson (Gurnemanz) in rehearsal for Inverness Parsifal. Photo: Mahler Players

Negus is not the only continuator of this almost extinct tradition (in this context it is impossible not to mention Sir Mark Elder, another of Goodall’s assistants at the time), but he is certainly the closest to its core idea of shaping the narrative over a broad timescale. This was spotted years ago by Tomas Leakey, the Inverness-born founder of the ambitious chamber orchestra Mahler Players, which after a few seasons of presenting works of its patron arranged for small ensembles decided to take the bull by the horns and introduce the Highlands residents to the oeuvre of Wagner. I have been following their ventures for over seven years, from the moment when Matthew King and Peter Longworth prepared for them an arrangement of Act One of Die Walküre for thirty instruments. Since then Leakey has been regularly consulting his ideas with Negus. In recent seasons he shared the baton with him in concert performances of Act Three of Siegfried and Act Three of Parsifal. Using a method only he himself knows, he enlisted for these projects not only well-known Longborough soloists, but also artists like Sir John Tomlinson, a Bayreuth legend of nearly twenty seasons.

However, when he decided to present the complete Parsifal in Inverness, I could not believe it. Not because I doubted the passion and professionalism of his musicians. But I feared he was too optimistic about the endurance of the audience, who would be forced to listen to this four-hour work inside the local cathedral, in a performance that, despite some elements of stage movement, would still be a concert. How wrong I was. Wagner’s mystery captivated the audience members from the very first bars of the prelude – unfolding unhurriedly but inexorably, as spoke Goodall and then Negus after him – holding them on the edge of their chairs until the powerful climax in the finale of Act Three. This was largely due to the orchestration, arranged for forty musicians – nearly three times fewer than Wagner envisaged – by King himself, who somehow managed to preserve the unique colour and richness of the sound of the ensemble, despite the proportional superiority of the wind instruments over the string section of merely twenty. A lot of the credit for this success goes to Leakey, who shaped the narrative with a tender hand and a feeling for the challenging acoustics of the Gothic Revival cathedral. To complain about isolated clinkers and lapses in intonation would be unbecoming for a reviewer brought up on the legendary, beautifully imperfect Bayreuth recording under Knappertsbusch. Most importantly, the Inverness performance featured no cases of miscasting, even though there were singers with vastly differing levels of experience – and in some cases, with no experience whatsoever – in the Wagnerian repertoire.

Each of them managed to create a convincing portrayal, beginning with the phenomenal Tomlinson as Gurnemanz, a character into which he put all the wisdom of his experience and beauty of his voice that time has treated exceptionally kindly – one might even get the impression that it has decided not to touch it at all. Tomlinson’s is a bass voice in the truest sense of the word, still magnificent in the middle register and skilfully handled at the extreme ends of the range, in perfect harmony with the libretto, articulated precisely, emphatically and without the tendency, so common today, to descend into caricature. The revelation of the Scottish Parsifal was Almerija Delic, a Bosnian singer with an excellent track record in German theatres, who impressed me with her exceptional stage presence as well as a rich, highly expressive dramatic mezzo-soprano, simply perfect for the role of Kundry. The eponymous “pure fool” found an brilliant interpreter in Julian Hubbard, a youthful singer in all respects, both physical and vocal. It has been a long time since I heard a Parsifal with such a resonant and luminous tenor voice, and spot-on intonation. I was a bit concerned about Amfortas, portrayed by Thomas Weinhappel, a decidedly lyric baritone who had only recently begun to venture into heavier repertoire. Fortunately, my fears proved unfounded: his velvety-voiced, anguished Amfortas was genuinely moving, especially in his interaction with Gurnemanz, well-thought-out by both singers. An excellent performance in the role of Klingsor came from the German bass Renatus Mészár, a memorable Wotan from the Karlsruhe Ring and soloist in the just as memorable recording of Bruno Maderna’s rediscovered Requiem, conducted by Frank Beermann. Titurel was successfully portrayed by Sion Goronwy, whose bass is rounded, pitch-black and authoritative in its sound. The Flowermaidens (Catriona Clark, Jessica Leary and Laura Margaret Smith – the last two artists also singing Squires) were excellent, as was Barbara Scott (Voice from Above). I should add that all the ladies, the two other Squires (Petro Wychrij and Aidan Thomas Phillips) as well as Grail Knights (Matthew Kimble and Jim MacPherson) not only excelled in their solo roles, but also formed part of the twenty-five-strong chorus. I also have to stress that Wychrij noted in his bio that he was a Royal Mail employee, while the Second Knight, MacPherson, turned out to be a historian and lecturer at the local university.

Chorus at the Inverness cathedral. Photo: Mahler Players

The Inverness Parsifal captivated me also with its imaginative use of the cathedral space as well as acting – equally well thought-out and executed. Every move, every grimace, every non-existent and yet palpably present prop made up a story that was more vivid that most stagings by today’s directors. I suspect that the scene in which Parsifal, proud of having shot the swan, is gradually losing his composure, and, above all, the image of the aged Gurnemanz supporting the anguished Amfortas on his way to the revealing the Grail will come back to me every time I encounter Wagner’s masterpiece in the future.

Shortly after that I found myself at a Grange Park Opera’s performance of Das Rheingold conducted by Harry Sever, a rising star among British conductors and assistant to Anthony Negus during the work on the Longborough Ring, which began even before the pandemic and ended two years ago with the entire tetralogy being staged over the course of one season. Wasfi Kani decided to present the monumental cycle at her “theatre in the woods” in Surrey, on terms similar to those at LFO, that is with a cast of British singers, presenting one part of the cycle per season, until the completion of the work in 2030, preferably under Negus’ baton. In the end it was agreed that Negus would join the venture only in 2028; the responsibility for the preparation of the first two parts of the Ring was assumed by Sever, who, in addition to serving as the master’s apprentice, also had an opportunity to try his hand at being a LFO conductor, taking charge of several performances of Die Walküre and Siegfried.

I will start with the staging of Das Rheingold, my biggest cause for concern, as GPO’s new production was to be directed by Charlie Edwards, the very same who three years earlier had staged Tristan here – in a setting resembling a huge garage sale of furniture and museum artefacts from the Neuschweinstein Castle, the Wesendoncks’ villa and the Bayreuth Festival archive. This time the stage space was much cleaner and more consistent with the logic of the work, also in terms of colours (the blue of the Rhine, the dazzling white of the gods’ residence, the black of the Nibelheim). Collaborating, like before, with the costume designer Gabrielle Dalton and the lighting director Tim Mitchell, Edwards has set the action in the nineteenth-century reality – not precisely defined but nevertheless bringing to mind the second stage of the industrial revolution in Britain. Hence the “Dickensian” costumes by Gabrielle Dalton; hence Valhalla’s resemblance not so much to Greek temples but to Victorian imitations of classical Palladian architecture; hence the dual form of the eponymous gold – of electricity, driving mass production, and of arrivistes’ wealth derived from it. There are also psychoanalytical tropes, like the abused Freia’s dependence on Fasolt.

Das Rheingold. David Stout (Alberich), James Rutherford (Wotan), and Mark Le Brocq (Loge). Photo: Marc Brenner

All this is actually quite interesting to watch, despite the fact that Tim Mitchell once again bathes some scenes in harsh, stark light, closer in its aesthetics to expressionism than to Victorian sumptuousness. I had the impression, however, that Edwards had replaced his mania for amassing props with collecting ideas stolen from other Ring directors. In addition to obvious references to Chereau’s legendary Ring celebrating the tetralogy’s centenary, we also have veiled allusions to the Ring production directed by Castorf – who turned gold into oil – and even some tropes from Schwarz’s failed staging, like the compulsive tinkering with the fuse box, which nevertheless worked better in the storm scene from Act One of the Bayreuth Walküre.

The cast of the GPO Rheingold featured several singers I knew not only from British theatres, including James Rutherford with his beautifully nuanced take on the tortured figure of Wotan. I heard him in the role for the first time in the Frankfurt Walküre conducted by Weigle and I am very much looking forward to his performance next season. The lord of the gods found a perfect partner in Christine Rice, whose wisdom, stage experience and magnificent technique enabled her to create a Fricka worthy of the best opera houses in Europe. Rachel Nicholls takes a long time to warm up – long enough not to be able this time to shine vocally as Freia, which does not change the fact that acting-wise she round rings round her colleagues, as usual. It is quite possible that I would have appreciated Sara Fulgoni’s craft in the role of Erda, if the director had not had her appear – as if it were an amateur theatre – between the rows of seats in the auditorium, as a result of which the bloodcurdling prophecy of this Nordic Gaia completely lost its momentum. I may have been impressed by Mark Le Brocq’s Loge more than I was in Longborough: not only in vocal, but also in acting terms, as a vision – as unsettling as it is close to my own sensibilities – of a failed intellectual whom nobody wants to listen to. Of the two giants Matthew Rose definitely stood out as Fasolt.  Other members of the cast – perhaps with the exception of Adrian Thompson and his over-the-top Mime – did a more than decent job. However, I did not expect that the artist that would become king of this Rheingold would be David Stout – an Alberich incarnate I would say, if I did not know this singer earlier and could not say with absolute certainty that with a voice of such beauty, with such intelligence and such awareness of the context he is ready not only for this role and not only in the Wagnerian repertoire.

Mark Le Brocq, David Stout, James Rutherford, and Thomas Isherwood (Donner). Photo: Marc Brenner

On the other hand, I truly do not know what to say about the orchestral sound in this production. Wasfi Kani extended a helping hand to the English National Opera company, which is irrevocably bidding farewell to London and is trying to come to terms with its exile to Greater Manchester. Kani’s initiative is laudable, but I would like to know who was responsible for the line-up of the ensemble performing Das Rheingold, which, out of necessity, was reduced to fewer than seventy instrumentalists. Was it a coincidence or someone’s conscious decision that although in the GPO orchestra pit there were ten more musicians than in Longborough, the string section was much smaller, which in this particular work went against the composer’s intention? Is it down to Harry Sever, extraordinarily musical and sensitive to the beauty of sound as he is, that nothing came of the prelude, that the “music of the beginning”, so celebrated by Thomas Mann, failed to flow already in the very first bars, failed to build up in a torrent of successive passages, failed to recede like a dead wave before Woglinde’s first phrase? Would it not be better to follow Tomas Leakey’s and Matthew King’s example, not only reducing the size of the orchestra, but also trying to bring its sound and proportions closer to what the composer intended?

I would rather not jump to any conclusions today. I will wait for Sever to begin to tell his own tale himself. After all, it is not that everybody should read Wagner through Goodall’s interpretation. It is about finally breaking free from the diktat of the anachronistic, monumentally “Teutonic” approaches to the Bayreuth master and returning to the very essence. This is being done not only by Negus the sorcerer and his apprentices. Attempts are also being made by heirs to other traditions, like, for example, Altinoglu and Nagano. Let the Wagnerian aoidoi finally sing their hearts out – for in these masterpieces what matters is not just the details of the texture. The essence is a myth, an eternal tale, a narrative that will be able to liberate us from the nightmare of the everyday or at least will make us realise that we cannot escape it.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

The work of William Kentridge has not had much luck when it comes to Polish audiences. It eludes our attention like a fleeting image seen from the window of a speeding train and is quickly forgotten. In 2009, when Krystyna Meissner finally managed to bring Kentridge’s production Woyzeck on the Highveld to Wrocław’s Dialog Festival, it went virtually unnoticed. When Kentridge came to Kraków to receive the ASIFA Prize 2014 for outstanding achievements in animated film, it once again became necessary to remind people of his life and artistic accomplishments. Opera lovers preferred to watch Lulu and The Magic Flute in other stagings. The film screenings of Il Ritorno d’Ulisse from La Monnaie at Kraków’s Cricoteka attracted mainly fans of Kantor curious about Kentridge’s play with his theatre of death. Last year’s presentaiton of the installation I am not me, the horse is not mine at Białystok’s Galeria Arsenał did not even get a separate vernissage.

One might say, therefore, that the situation with the reception of the South African artist in Poland is even worse than with the proverbial sea serpent: not only has no one seen him, but hardly anyone has even heard of him. This is quite unlike in the UK, where the new production of L’Orfeo at Glyndebourne attracted interest for two reasons: because of Kentridge’s involvement in the project and the astonishing fact that Monteverdi’s masterpiece – the premiere of which in 1607 is regarded as the symbolic birth of opera – had never before featured in the programme of the legendary Sussex festival. Another thing is that reactions following the first performance on 14 June ranged from rapture to complete rejection of Kentridge’s concept. Intrigued, I decided to break my iron rule and, before heading off to the fourth of the thirteen performances, read – even if only perfunctorily – the director’s pre-premiere comments.

Krystian Adam (Orfeo), Roseline Wilkens and Francesca Aspromonte (La Musica, Euridice). © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

And then something strange happened. Kentridge’s declaration – not surprising really – that the starting point for his work on the staging was Rilke’s poetry, his Sonnets to Orpheus and, above all, the extraordinary poem Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes, brought back memories of my youthful fascination with another, relatively little known piece from the collection Neue Gedichte. As a result, instead of analysing the source of Kentridge’s inspiration, I went back to Der Junggeselle, a poem in which chairs stand haughtily along the wall, night sneaks into the furniture and the mirror releases a drape behind which the eponymous bachelor sees his own death. Then I went on to read Sibyl, then other pieces and only quite some time later did I return to the first of the Sonnets to Orpheus, where a “tree climbed” at the beginning.

This is precisely how Kentridge works: his method is that of loose, rapid associations, sudden shifts, loops, which initially can overwhelm and seem chaotic, and yet they do consistently lead the audience to the heart of the matter. This L’Orfeo has basically everything we know from the artist’s earlier installations and productions. There are moving collages and Dadaist constructions featuring Kentridge’s signature motif of the megaphone. There are stop motion animations, projections by Janus Fouché on Sabine Theunissen’s sparse sets. There are subtle plays of shadows, there is unsettling “black” light (directed by Urs Schönebaum), there are stunning costumes designed by Greta Goiris, inspired partly by the aesthetics of Bauhaus theatre. There are also references to Kentridge’s works from recent years, including dynamic, evolving images of trees painted in ink on paper, charcoal drawings and monotypes on pages from old books.

This extraordinary multiplicity of visual stimuli is a symbol of our desire for the world to give us everything we expect from it, a metaphor for our refusal to accept suffering and dying. In order to understand that death is an inextricable part of human existence, Orfeo has to come to terms with the loss of Euridice. In order to remain an artist, he needs to learn how to transform the visible into the invisible. Following in Rilke’s footsteps, from that moment on Kentridge gradually cleanses the stage of excessive images. Euridice becomes a separate being, a patch of light in the blackness of memories.

Krystian Adam. © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

In Kentridge’s vision – the coherence of which we realise only in the finale of Act V – Orfeo is the figure of the poet. La Musica, present on stage not only in the Prologue, in which she announces the story of Orfeo’s love for Euridice, but also throughout the performance, is the figure of the artist, perhaps also the poet’s alter ego, and is thus a generalised allegory of art. She stands bent over a table in a studio that is strikingly similar to Kentridge’s own studio, and, with total abandon, “creates” all the projections and animations appearing in the background. For a brief moment she will lend her voice to Euridice portrayed by a sensual dancer – presumably the prematurely deceased Wera Knoop, a friend of Rilke’s daughter, to whose memory the poet dedicated his Sonnets to Orpheus. The Nymphs, Shepherds as well as the singer in the dual role of the Messaggera and La Speranza are a group of artists who are the couple’s friends. The gods occupy separate positions on ladders raised above the stage. The infernal spirits, which accompany Orfeo in his trip across the Styx, bring to mind the grotesque figures from the print series Dada Picnic, one of Kentridge’s most expressive works.

The rest is conveyed by the artist through movement drawn directly from physical theatre techniques and performative methods, giving the performers considerable freedom in their choice of the means of expression. An important role in Kentridge’s concept is played by props, including “Sibyl’s leaves” on sticks, symbolising the fleeting nature of human prophecies, and, above all, asymmetric cardboard “fans”, used highly evocatively as screens separating Orfeo from Euridice in the scene in which he tries to lead his beloved out of the underworld.

Kentridge’s vision is by no means easy to take in and interpret, which, in my opinion, is one of its strengths, although I do understand that it may have proved too much for part of the audience. However, in no way did it interfere with the musical side of the production. I have heard dozens of performances of L’Orfeo in my life, but I don’t think I have ever encountered an orchestra conducted with such lightness, playing with such ease and a sense of phrasing, supported by such a stylish and confidently executed continuo. Celebrating its fortieth anniversary, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is a self-governing ensemble that has been associated with Glyndebourne since its beginning. It plays under the direction of its concertmasters, who take turns in the role, or chooses conductors individually. Jonathan Cohen, the current head of Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, led the OAE not for the first time and rightly so.

Francesca Aspromonte. © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

Krystian Adam, whom I have been following in the role of Orfeo for nearly a decade (that is, since his sensational debut in 2017, during John Eliot Gardiner’s concert tour featuring Monteverdi’s three operas), is undoubtedly one of the world’s leading performers of the role today. His voice has since developed a suitable baritonal quality in the lower register, while his interpretation has matured and gained in expressiveness. He had always known how to move a heart of stone with the powerful monologue “Possente spirto” from Act III, regarded as one of the finest examples of early Baroque performance practice. This time he dazzled me with the brief “ohimè”, a heart-rending cry of despair mixed with disbelief at the news of Euridice’s death. The news was brought by a phenomenal Messaggera portrayed by Xenia Puskarz Thomas, a mezzo-soprano with a power of expression worthy of a Shakespearean heroin. I do not share the admiration for the vocal artistry of Francesca Aspromonte, who sang the roles of La Musica and Euridice in a lovely soprano voice, albeit one that had too much vibrato and was uncertain in terms of intonation; however, I fully appreciate her brilliant acting. Among the other soloists one that deserves special mention is Hugo Herman-Wilson for his performance as the Second Shepherd; I would also like to express my highest praise for the outstanding Glyndebourne Chorus.

And I am grateful to Kentridge for the idea of introducing a silent, dancing Euridice into the story. Roseline Wilkens – grace and fire, passion enclosed in a body far removed from the European notions of the canon of dance beauty – proved in the finale to be so imbued with the great death, so convincing in her new girlishness, that I felt a twinge of sadness that Rilke could not see this.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

High up on the list of my guilty pleasures is reading comments on online fora. During this year’s visit to Göttingen I came across a surprising opinion of a tourist whose impression was that the city was beautiful but there were too many young people in it. I thought to myself – irrespective of my personal impressions, quite different from the disgruntled globetrotter’s opinion – that it would be hard to find a better description of the atmosphere in one of Germany’s most important centres of scholarship, the home to over forty Nobel Prize winners as well as the university known in Latin as Giorgia Augusta, whose students included the Brothers Grimm, Heinrich Heine and Hugo Steinhaus. Indeed, there are plenty of young people here. The student population alone is equal to that of an average town in Poland – approximately one-fourth of the total number of residents of the Göttingen District’s capital.

Apart from the fact that it is easier to be run over by a bicycle than a car here, Göttingen is quiet, joyful and fairly safe. This may be the reason why the atmosphere at the Händel-Festspiele Göttingen, the world’s oldest Handel festival, which celebrated its centenary in 2020, is decidedly more casual than most of the European festivals of early music. Tradition demands it: after all, the Festspiele is the brainchild of music-making amateurs, lecturers and students at the local university, who had enough audacity a few years after its launch to entice Gunnar Graarud, a star of the Berlin stages at the time, to come to Göttingen and sing in their first staging of Xerxes. After all, one of the first directors of the Deutsches Theater, the venue of festival opera performances today, was a sought-after film actor who starred in two thrillers directed by Hitchcock and died on the set of a musical comedy written by Billy Wilder, a comedy so full of plot twists and secrets uncovered by the protagonists that it would have sent many a Baroque librettist into a fit of envy.

It’s been seven years since I found myself at this wonderful event for the first time – quite by chance really, as I was in Göttingen for entirely different reasons. I was lucky to witness the last few years of Laurence Cummings’ musical tenure and now I watch with admiration how George Petrou, who has taken over the reins from Cummings, continues the festival’s established programming line, enthusiastically attracting an increasingly younger audience – also thanks to special concerts for children as well as family-friendly versions of operatic productions. The motto of this year’s Händel-Festspiele was VERLOCKUNG or “enticement”. It was hard not to succumb to it, even if only for three Festspiele days, which I had chosen carefully, complementing a performance of Handel’s Deidamia with concerts in Göttingen and at the Welfenschloss in nearby Münden, where the Weser River originates from the confluence of the Werra and the Fulda.

Unfortunately, due to the cancellation of some services, I was unable to attend a performance by the flautist Erik Bosgraaf and the Italian ensemble filoBarocco playing “Polish-Moravian” music by Telemann, who in 1705 took up the post of Kapellmeister to Count Erdmann II Promnitz, Lord of Żary, which enabled him to travel even farther, including to places like Pszczyna and Kraków. Fortunately, I was able to get to the evening performance of Handel’s Messiah at the Stadthalle, to which I had been particularly looking forward, because it featured several soloists I knew and admired, but mainly because of the FestspielOrchester Göttingen, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary and has confirmed its versatility in recent seasons, easily adapting to Petrou’s spirited interpretations and his preferred expressive, pungent and juicy sound aesthetics.

George Petrou. Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

Yet this time it was the sound that was lacking, primarily because of the acoustics of the Stadthalle concert hall, ruined effectively – and probably irreversibly – during the thorough renovation of the modernist edifice. As it often happens these days, sight has won over hearing. The design by the German studio soll sasse architekten was showered with awards. No one thought that reconstructing the Grosser Saal on a larger scale and using different materials would have such a significant impact on its acoustic properties. I hope that with time the festival oratorio concerts will return to previous venues – in the case of Messiah the problem was further compounded by the fact that the NDR Vokalensemble was placed at the back of the stage, behind the orchestra, in a nineteenth-century style. As a result, the choral fragments, so important in this masterpiece, were heard as if through a mist, the text did not reach the audience – instead of being an equal participant in the narrative, the ensemble was relegated to the role of insignificant accompaniment. The orchestra, too, got off to a difficult start, from the very beginning sounding uneven when it came to intonation and, at times, also rhythm. I also wondered about the criteria for selecting the soloists, who were without exception talented artists with experience in this repertoire, though not necessarily a good fit for the vision of George Petrou, who, presumably, wished to remain faithful to the composer’s intentions.

The best among the four soloist was the tenor Ru Charlesworth, a former prize-winner at the Cesti-Wettbewerb in Innsbruck, a passionate singer with a still youthful sound, and, most importantly, peerless teller of the story of the Messiah’s life and death as well as the anticipated salvation of the souls (a phenomenal “Ev’ry valley shall be exalted” from the Isaiah’s prophecy scene). In this respect he was superior to the Canadian baritone Drew Santini, whose voice is far less expressive and marked by a small but persistent vibrato, not always consistent with his interpretation. The mismatching problem was especially evident in the case of the two ladies: Ana Maria Labin, whose soprano is light and resonant, shimmering like quicksilver; and Lena Sutor-Wernich, whose powerful, deep alto has a tenor-like quality in the lower register. Handel wrote the alto part in Messiah especially for Susannah Maria Cibber, an excellent actress and amateur singer, whom the composer appreciated above all for her “sweet voice” and extraordinary power of interpretation. Yet Sutor-Wernich’s alto brings to mind Wagner’s Erda or Gea from Strauss’ Daphne, both when it comes to the sound and style of expression, which was particularly evident in the duets.

The above reservations stem solely from the fact that Petrou has got me used to performances pulsating with energy and, at the same time, thought-out in every detail. Fortunately, two days later he more than made up for any doubts relating to the Messiah performance. Before this happened, however, I had listened to some other festival concerts, each of which deserves a separate mention, despite their different statures and experience of the artists.

I will start with one of “out-of-town” events, at the Welfenschloss in Münden, which attracts a slightly different audience: made up of the locals as well as music lovers, who, thanks to a guided tour organised by the festival, can combine an encounter with music at the residence of the Princes of Brunswick-Göttingen with a walk around this small town, famous of its beautiful half-timbered houses. The programme of this year’s concert, entitled “Ein feste Burg”, a title borrowed from Martin Luther’s hymn, featured works by composers active in Lübeck during the Thirty Years’ War, which passed the city by, but marked the end of its former glory. Among the performers were participants in masterclasses devoted to the music of Hanseatic cities – as part of the Europäisches Hanse-Ensemble project, launched in 2019. The ensemble, led by Manfred Cordes – for many years a professor and former rector of the Hochschule für Künste Bremen – performs each season with a different line-up, supported by artists experienced in this repertoire (like the gambist Hille Perl and the soprano Ulrike Hofbauer, who joined it this year). I was amazed by the stylistic variety of this repertoire, from chorale cantatas, Venetian-style motets, to dances and other small instrumental pieces, in which the local north German traditions are combined harmoniously with Italian, French and English inspirations. I was delighted by the solo cantata Ach Herr, lass deine lieben Engelein by Franz Tunder – Buxtehude’s father-in-law and his predecessor as organist at St. Mary’s Church in Lübeck – with the same text by Martin Schalling the Younger that Bach used in the final chorale of his St. John Passion. I was moved by the listeners who recognised in many compositions melodies known to them from church services, but “performed so much more nicely”.

Rachel Brown and Laurence Cummings. Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

I expected a lot from Laurence Cummings’ return to the festival, to which he devoted ten years of his life. However, I did not expect that during the concert at the University Hall, where the harpsichordist appeared alongside the legendary flautist Rachel Brown, everything would go in line with the title “To Melt a Stony Heart”. This was not another musical tale by the charismatic artist, who – much to the audience’s delight – can transform any Baroque opera into a masterful one-man show, combining the roles of a compère, a singer and an accompanist. This was a true treatise on the nature of music, worthy of Orpheus himself – a two virtuosos’ tale of how to charm the listeners, how to captivate them not only with the content, but also with the form, built on a strong structural framework featuring appropriate ornamentation, skilfully repeated rhythmic figures and clear articulation. How to build up the tension in order for the audience not to melt like wax too soon, to keep their attention with a lively dialogue between the performers, with focused singing from the keyboard and a poetic passage woven into the narrative. Brown and Cummings led us through the oeuvres of Baroque Orpheuses – from Couperin, Campra, Lully and Vivaldi, to Handel and Gluck. And it was indeed as if shadows wept, as if the heart of the lord of the underground himself melted. I still hear the magnificent sarabande “Le Départ” from Hotteterre’s Flute Suite in E minor. I will remember for a long time the aria “Cara sposa”, ending the first part of the concert, in which Cummings sang from harpsichord Rinaldo’s despair after the loss of the abducted Almirena. The two artists were the source of one of my most beautiful experiences in recent years, not just in Göttingen.

And the very next day I was in for an experience that was just as intense: the festival’s closing performance of Deidamia, Handel’s last Italian opera, which proved to be undoubtedly one of the best productions of George Petrou’s tenure. His boundless energy at the conductor’s desk and his unique sense of humour, to which he gives free rein in each of his projects, found the perfect outlet in this work. Deidamia was written to a libretto by Paolo Antonio Rolli, who presented the mythical story in a slightly different and more playful manner than Metastasio in his Achille in Sciro. The story of Achilles, son of Thetis, who decided to save her son from certain death at the walls of Troy by hiding him, disguised as a girl, on the island of Skyros, where he fell happily in love with Deidamia, one of the daughters of the island’s king, Lycomedes, was enriched by Rolli with a number of subplots. Before Ulisse, arriving on Skyros in search of Achille – whom everybody except Deidamia believes to be a fair maiden named Pyrrha – manages to reveal his true identity and persuade Achille to go to war with him, he himself will begin to flirt with Achille’s beloved. In turn, Fenice, Ulisse’s companion, makes advances towards Pyrrha. Unsurprisingly, this will give rise to numerous misunderstandings and scenes of jealousy. In the end Fenice will settle for Nerea, Deidamia’s confidant, Ulisse will fulfil the mission entrusted to him and everything will end with the mandatory lieto fine, that is the marriage of the king’s daughter to Achille, who is preparing to set off for Troy.

Deidamia. Bruno de Sá (Achille) and Sophie Junker (Deidiamia). Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

Rolli’s mad libretto, full of plot twists, enabled Handel to weave a number of comic elements into this melodramma. Unfortunately, the cunning plan of making the Londoners interested again in Italian opera – going out of fashion at the time – failed. Deidamia was performed at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre only three times and went silent for more than two hundred years. Despite tentative attempts to revive it in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it proved impossible to bring it back to the repertoire. Until October 2025 that is, when a production directed by Petrou, with splendid sets by Giorgina Germanou, was presented for the first time at the Wexford Festival – with the same conductor and the same cast. We commented on a recording of that event with Marcin Majchrowski on the Polish Radio Two. Dazzled by the performance, we complained about the crisis of Handel’s invention, still not predicting any success for the opera.

It was only in Göttingen that I realised that the critics’ enthusiasm at the time had been entirely justified. What carries this Deidamia forward and up is an extraordinary synergy between the musical and the theatrical side of the production, giving the artists not only freedom, but also authentic joy of spinning this convoluted tale. The undisputed star among the cast is Sophie Junker in the title role. She captivates the audience not only with her acting talent and her beautifully rounded, soft soprano, but also with her phenomenal technique and mastery of the rules of stylistic ornamentation (which she  demonstrated already in the showpiece aria “Nasconde l’usignol” in Act I). Despite an indisposition, manifested in slight intonation problems, Sarah Gildford gave a fine performance as Nerea with her fresh, warm and irresistibly sensual soprano. The two future heroes of the Trojan War – Achille and Ulisse – were portrayed by Bruno de Sá and Nicolò Balducci, respectively. These two outstanding artists have recently caused quite a stir in the world of historically informed performance. Both have voices Handel did not even dream of in Italian opera: de Sá – a genuine male soprano with an extensive range, Balducci – a very handsome soprano countertenor, which, as it turned out, sounds excellent also in a slightly lower tessitura. In the original cast of Deidamia the part of Achille was entrusted to the teenager Mary Edwards, another singing actress, who played characters of the opposite gender also later on in her career. The role of Ulisse was written by Handel for a mezzo-soprano castrato. I would, therefore, venture to say that de Sá’s and Balducci’s involvement in this tragicomedy of errors and mistaken identities fully meets the criteria of the historical convention. The baritone Rory Musgrave did well in the role of Fenice, written for a high bass, while the velvety-voiced Petros Magoulas was outstanding in the bass role of the equable king Licomede. And everybody had great fun, including the orchestra of the Festspiele Göttingen, playing under Petrou’s baton in the typical Handelian pitch of 422.5 Hz.

Deidamia. Nicolò Balducci (Ulisse) and Rory Musgrave (Fenice). Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

There would not have been so much fun, if it had not been for the staging – as handsome as it was mischievous. Petrou has the action take place on two temporal planes. The adventures of the mythical heroes unfold in parallel with a thoroughly modern themed trip to the island of Skyros (the tourists are played by members of the university choir, who are present on stage far beyond the requirements of their musical duties). The comic tension has its source in the fact that the representatives of the two worlds do not realise their co-existence and even if they do notice that something strange is intruding into reality, they are unable to interpret it. Nerea finds a suitcase on the beach, starts rummaging through it, and, disconcerted, pulls out a bra and a box of tampons. Something is knocking over the Sunday painter’s easel, though there is not a breath of wind. Licomede muses over peaceful old age amidst the depths of the sea, where an ancient treasure hunter is diving. Achille aims his bow at a cardboard doe at a shooting gallery. And yet everyone in this crowd grapples with their own dilemmas; they suffer and love in the same manner, and are overcome by bouts of equally painful jealousy. The group of holidaymakers even includes a suspiciously tall and sinewy lady who in the end will turn out to be a man.

I might have missed all these little details had I not been translating a book by a classical philologist who first allowed his elderly father to attend a student seminar on the Odyssey, and then took him on a themed cruise following in the footsteps of Homer’s hero. Petrou’s idea for Deidamia may not be as intricate as my author’s prose, but it does come down to a similar conclusion: in many respects the heroes of Troy were no different from today’s holidaymakers. Present-day tourists, too, can be killed one day: in another Trojan War, worthy of our times.

The organisers of the Händel-Festspiele Göttingen deserve credit for leading us into temptation for the works of bygone eras to make us think and to genuinely care about them.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Czech music lovers are just as unlucky when it comes to Dialogues des Carmélites as Poles. As I have recently pointed out, when reviewing the premiere or, in fact, reconstruction of Robert Carsen’s Amsterdam production at Teatro Regio di Torino, the first and so far the only Polish staging of Poulenc’s opera took place in 2000 at Łódź’s Teatr Wielki. Dialogues had to wait seventy years for its Prague premiere. It finally happened this year in May, at the Prague Spring, an event marked by several other round anniversaries.

Dialogues des Carmélites finds its hard to get onto the operatic stages in the former Eastern Bloc, even after the political transformation. The work’s long absence in Czechia is all the more understandable given that shortly after the war the country introduced one of the most restrictive models of fighting the Catholic religion in this part of Europe – in line with the instructions given by Zhdanov, who held up the Soviet experiences in the battle against the Orthodox Church as a model for the USSR’s satellite countries. The repressive measures also affected monasteries. The night of 13–14 April 1950 saw the launch of the so-called Operation K, preceded by show trials of a dozen or so monks, some of whom received life sentences. Over 200 male congregations were dissolved, a few thousand members of monastic communities were interned, monasteries were left to their fate or deliberately vandalised, property was confiscated or plundered. August was marked by the launch of Operation Ř (from the Czech word řeholnice, meaning a nun), carried out in stages and more selectively, targeting mainly “non-useful sisters”, which for the communist authorities meant those involved in education and care of the sick. The victims of that persecution included Magdalena Anna Schwarzová, a Carmelite postulant, who was accused of high treason a few years later, sentenced to eleven years in prison and deprived of her public rights. In the 1980s, following another wave of repression, she was forced to renounce her citizenship before leaving for Kraków, Poland, where she spent the rest of her life as a cloistered nun.

Photo: Petr Neubert

No wonder, therefore, that Barbora Horáková Joly, the director of Dialogues at Prague’s State Opera, saw this inglorious chapter in the history of Czechoslovakia as a parallel with the fate of the wretched Compiègne sisters, guillotined in July 1794. The bad thing is that she treated it too literally, forgetting that Poulenc’s opera was not a reconstruction of historical events, but an adaptation of Gertrude von Le Fort’s mystical novella drawing on these events, an adaptation featuring new elements added by Georges Bernanos and the composer himself. Horákova Joly’s entire concept is dominated by violence, conflict and humiliation, which blur the attitudes and motivations of the various characters.  There is no existential fear, nor any inner transformation. For some unknown reason Marquis de la Force abuses his own son mentally and physically; the Old Prioress dies smeared with her own faeces, with her hair messed up, as if she were in a neglected care home and not in Mother Marie’s tender care; Chevalier de la Force arrives at the convent to say good-bye to Blanche covered in blood and barely able to stand – and yet he is supposed to pay her a visit as a potential guardian in her escape, convinced that he would be able to keep his sister safe in the turmoil of the revolution.

Photo: Petr Neubert

The list of absurdities is endless – which is a pity, because the production is presented in sparse and functional sets designed by Ines Nadler, well-lit by Sascha Zauner, complemented by Annemarie Bulla’s costumes that would have been quite sufficient as an allusion to post-war repressions: without the director’s excessive and ill-conceived ideas, without projections (by Sergio Verde) and fragments of documentaries overused to the point of tedium, not to mention Blanche’s child lookalike, as superfluous as in most opera productions à la mode. It is a pity, because had Horáková Joly reined in her vivid imagination and focused on the only clever, though perhaps not too original, idea of “assigning” to the sixteen nuns sixteen mobile metal structures, lowered from the flies and placed at various angles – which first get covered by the greenery of the vegetables and flowers cultivated by the sisters only to turn in the end into the condemned women’s graves – the rest would have told itself, in a simple reference to this clear metaphor. Like the final execution scene, in which the nuns stand on their own graves in beams of spotlight going out suddenly one by one after each strike of the guillotine.

This rather unsuccessful staging did not quite hold its own musically either. The weakest link was the orchestra, clearly not ready to tackle Poulenc’s shimmering, rhythmically relentless and, at the same time, inhumanly precise score. In Act I everything, including intonation, was off. Then things began to improve somehow – under the experienced baton of Hermann Bäumer, the new music director of Státní opera, whom I came to know during his excellent directorship in Mainz. This may have happened, because at some point the conductor abandoned any further attempt to bring out the sharp contrasts and wealth of harmonies in favour of sounds that were hard, harsh and powerful, but at least impressive. On the other hand, a fine performance came from the chorus, directed by Adolf Melichar, which has little to do in this opera, so I appreciate its commitment and clear articulation all the more.

Photo: Petr Neubert

In an exceptionally uneven cast the soloist that stood out was above all Jana Sibera, who has a soft, girlish, beautifully rounded soprano, perfect for the role of Blanche. I was also very impressed by Mother Marie sung by the Norwegian mezzo-soprano Tone Kummervold, whose dense, technically impeccable voice I had admired a few years earlier in Schulhoff’s Flammen. The sharp, strained high notes of Tamara Morozova (Madame Lidoine) were not very pleasant on the ear and neither were serious intonation problems of Ekaterina Krovateva (Constance). Markéta Cukrova was completely miscast as the Old Prioress, a character she was unable to bring to life either with her acting or with her singing: as she ages, her mezzo-soprano is getting increasingly harmonically deficient and increasingly unstable owing to insufficient support. Daniel Matoušek has a lovely tenor, but it is definitely too light for the role of Chevalier de la Force; Paul Gay as Marquis de la Force was rather bland; Michael Skalický did his best as the Chaplain, although the role was too complex and big for his experience and skills.

Perhaps I should have gone to see some of the following performances. Perhaps the production will grow with time. I left the premiere, feeling that the Prague Dialogues des Carmélites did not do justice to either the “Compiègne Sixteen” or the thousands of Czech and Slovak nuns expelled from their convents, interned in camps, harassed by the security services, deprived of the remains of their human dignity.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Krystian Lada does not like to separate the audience from the symbolic performance space. All his productions begin with the curtain raised – long before the first sounds of the opera are heard. Before the Mainz staging of Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves a dozen or so women slowly make their way onto the dark grass of the rocky hills of the Isle of Skye; they are unassuming, modestly dressed, young and old, beautiful and ugly. They are soon joined by a group of men in costumes bringing to mind not only the traditional dress of the Free Church of Scotland elders and the workwear of the Hebrides fishermen, but also the glistening blackness of oil from the drilling platforms scattered across the North Sea. The women introduce themselves and say a few words about their origin and religion. Not all of them are allowed by the men to finish. One by one, they are all pushed off the stage. Just one of them manages to say her name, Bess. This is enough for the men. The community dresses the girl in a wedding gown and has her “try on” various symbols of virginal martyrdom.

The gesture, which at first appears to contradict the doctrine of the Presbyterians – who reject the veneration of saints, their relics and images – is, in fact, an apt reflection of the worldview of the Danish artist Lars von Trier, the director of the 1996 film, which became the basis of Mazzoli’s opera, composed to a libretto by Royce Vavrek. Breaking the Waves, the winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, was released just over a year after the announcement of the famous Dogme 95 manifesto and is still regarded as the seminal work of the movement. It was precisely at that time that von Trier, raised in a family of atheists, decided to convert to Catholicism, although he later abandoned the idea and chose agnosticism. He never hid his fascination with the oeuvre of his compatriot Carl Theodor Dreyer, primarily his Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), as well as the 1943 Day of Wrath and the post-war The Word. With time the iconoclast Dreyer came to be hailed as a master of religious cinema and Lars von Trier found his successor in himself. In Breaking the Waves he mused over dilemmas similar to those explored by Dreyer. From Joan of Arc he took Bess’ martyrdom; from Day of Wrath – the ambiguous bell motif; from The Word – the theme of his protagonist’s madness or mental disability.  However, he did not manage to shake off his reputation as someone who liked to cause scandal, partly because, even in his later films, he continued to point to patriarchal religion as a source of harm and suffering, exposing its inherent mechanism of the community using sexuality to exercise control over the individual.

Mazzoli’s three-act stage work was written twenty years after the film’s premiere, having been commissioned by Opera Philadelphia. Vavrek had the idea even before that, but the composer refused to be persuaded to adapt Breaking the Waves until she discovered the immanent “operatic nature” of von Trier’s work. His tale of Bess has the obsession and sacrifice of Wagner’s Senta, the vastness of the sea from Britten’s Billy Budd and Peter Grimes, and the hell paved with good intentions, like in Janáček’s Jenufa. The libretto of the opera follows the original text quite closely, a decision followed also in theatrical terms by the authors of most previous productions, maintaining a classic, linear narrative structure.

Julietta Aleksanyan (Bess) and Brett Carter (Jan). Photo: Andreas Etter

Krystian Lada has opted for a different approach: against the backdrop of an almost unchanging sets (designed by Annette Murschetz), masterfully organising the space, he stages a morality play about presumed guilt and ambiguous redemption, bringing to mind the tradition of medieval Passion plays. On the rocky grassland mentioned earlier there grow white lilies, usually not to be found in this environment. Jan, a Norwegian oil rig worker, will use them to make a wedding bouquet for Bess. They are both dressed in white: the groom in a suit, the bride in a gown with an enormous train, which she will hardly take off until the very end of the performance (costumes by Adrian Bärwinkel). There is no nard, no saffron or calamus here, but we cannot help but feel that this patch of land is supposed to satisfy all the needs of the community, both physical and spiritual. That is why it is an area that is closely watched – from the platforms surrounding it behind which a different world stretches: a world of boundless seas, distant oil rigs and rights rejected by the community.

In this enclosed garden Bess will lose her virginity; this is where she will say goodbye to Jan setting off for an oil rig, this is where she will have sex with him via phone, still in the same white dress, stained with the blood of their wedding night. When the news of Jan’s tragic accident arrives, the dark grass will be replaced with the steel grey floor of a hospital ward, reminiscent more of a mortuary than of an intensive care unit. Half-naked and bloodied, Jan, with his loins covered by a white cloth, brings to mind the tortured Christ just as strongly as he evokes the suffering Amfortas. Paralysed and unable to have sex, he slowly loses his will to live. When he finally manages to persuade his wife to have sex with other men, this will begin the Bess’ painful transformation into a holy harlot. New bloodstains appear on the dress. Bess “will finish the job”, giving herself to sailors from a red ship the presence of which we can only guess at from the flood of vermillion light at the back of the stage (as always, excellent lighting design by Aleksander Prowaliński, this time in collaboration with Frederik Wollek).

Julietta Aleksanyan. Photo: Andreas Etter

The rape scene takes place behind a semi-transparent curtain, with streams of terrifying filth pouring down on it. Blood mixed with oil? Faeces? Or perhaps disembowelled entrails? After the gruesome climax the narrative slowly comes to a close. Bess dies in the arms of women, Jan regains the use of his legs and returns to the stage in his wedding attire – splattered with dirt and blood like the white train of the dress, which now covers the woman’s coffin. Soon a purifying rain will fall from the flies. In the depths of the invisible sea we will hear the sound of non-existent bells, the sound Jan longed for on his wedding day.

Lada has served the operatic version of Breaking the Waves well. He has distanced it from the cinematic original and introduced it to the world of theatrical symbolism – much to the benefit of the audience and without detracting from the music, which has earned Mazzoli a reputation as one of the brightest stars in the firmament of twenty-first-century American opera. Critics often label her oeuvre as post-minimalist: indeed, Mazzoli organises most scenes around a vivid, repetitive pattern, not necessarily rhythmic – however, the main asset of her music is its harmonic language, which vaguely brings to mind Schönberg’s fluid tonality and polytonality. Mazzoli beautifully tints chords with dissonances, recasts instruments, and breaks up the colour of the orchestra with the sound of electric guitar and synthesiser. In addition, she has an extraordinary feel of the human voice, as is evidenced by the truly Brittenesque choruses and the poignant and, at the same time, surprisingly melodious part of Bess.

Brett Carter. Photo: Andreas Etter

A part with which Julietta Aleksanyan coped splendidly. She is a soprano with a very handsome voice, uncommon sense of phrasing, and admirable ability to build such a complex and tragic character. The fragile Bess was perfectly partnered by the imposing Jan of Brett Carter, who has a healthy, flexible baritone with a bright, almost tenor-like timbre. I was really taken by Karina Repova as Dodo, Bess’ sister-in-law: her velvety mezzo-soprano possesses both soothing tenderness and strength essential to the role – they were well contrasted with the merciless severity of the Mother (sung by Nancy Weißbach, a reliable dramatic soprano). Among the male cast the Ukrainian bass-baritone Daniel Semsichko as the Councilman stood out as well, but I was disappointed by Yoonki Baek as Dr. Richardson, whose tenor was quite frail and whose intonation was uncertain. Other roles were competently performed by the baritone Tim-Lukas Reuter (Terry) as well as the bass Doğuş Güney and the tenor Frederik Bak as the two rapists. A fine performance also came from the male chorus directed by Sebastian Hernandez Laverny – rough, at times brutal in its sound, particularly convincing in fragments styled as Presbyterian hymns and psalms. The whole, featuring the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Mainz, was conducted by Dirk Kaftan – with remarkable verve and attention to every detail of this highly complex score.

However, the Mainz staging of Breaking the Waves ended differently from the earlier productions of the opera. A dozen or so “Mainzer Frauen”, the women from the prologue, came back on stage with Bess in order to sing a simple song, “My body is a map”, composed by Mazzoli to a paraphrase of the text of the main protagonist’s aria from the beginning of Act III. Perhaps it was a nod to librettists from the past, who were able to end every opera with a well-put-together lieto fine? If so, it was  untimely. Every single day over one hundred raped women die, with their bodies proving to be a map to nowhere.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

This visit – at the invitation of the North Rhine-Westphalia’s Culture Secretariat, with an eight-strong group of international observers, including my former editor colleague Monika Pasiecznik – was for me like Odysseus’ return to his beloved Ithaca. For thirteen years I have been working almost exclusively as an opera critic. I sometimes forget how much of my professional career was devoted to contemporary music, for example, when I reported on the successive editions of Berlin’s MaerzMusik, a festival I accompanied throughout Matthias Osterwold’s tenure, eagerly following its ups and downs. Year after year I would immerse myself deeply for a week and a half in the latest works, sometimes for over ten hours a day – until the festival began to eat its own tail. After that I would come to Berlin only sporadically and none of the subsequent MaerzMusik curators managed to win me over to their concept. That is why I accepted without hesitation an invitation to two concurrent festivals: the ORBIT biennial of new music theatre, taking place for the third time in Cologne, and the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, celebrating its ninetieth anniversary.

I would venture to say that the programmes of both events – ORBIT, still experimenting and groping its way, and the venerable festival in Witten, which, incidentally, has expanded the formula of its title to include orchestral works and music theatre presentations – if combined into one and spread over time, would produce a festival surprisingly similar to the “MaerzMusiks” from Osterworld’s best years. But these happened nearly two decades ago. If I were younger, this would sound like an complaint. But I am older and I really need something like this: an intense festival of contemporary music that would satisfy both elderly avant-gardist and concert hall regulars, and an audience that still has no idea what to do about it. Listeners and spectators who want to explore such music in the contexts of time, space and other abstract notions. Who prefer to treat new music as a fact of which we know nothing yet, and to set this fact against the harsh reality and the social behaviours associated with it. To listen in darkness, on the go, lying down and while eating. To experience music in the urban space or, on the contrary, to retreat with it into ever changing and less obvious interiors.

What a dream. Meanwhile, Cologne is almost a hundred kilometres away from Witten, and we, as privileged critics, managed to cover almost the entire programmes of both festivals solely thanks to the efforts of the NRW KULTURsekretariat, which enabled us to attend rehearsals and meet the authors of still unfinished projects. Our advantage over the “ordinary” audience was that we knew the aesthetics of many composers from previous encounters. Interestingly, these were not always consistent with our present impressions. “Of all my memories, the saddest are the happiest ones,” confessed Jean Genet, to whom I will return, in The Miracle of the Rose. Well, sometimes it is the other way round: the music of Chaya Czernowin, the focus of this year’s Wittener Tage, which two decades ago I found to be dreadful, albeit technically competent, waffle, this time had me completely engaged. Am I finally mature enough to understand that the various threads of sound in her work alternately intertwine and unravel, run backwards and across the narrative, sometimes disappearing into the fabric only to emerge from it again unnoticed? Or perhaps I was confined in the cocoon of the past and was not keeping up with the voice of the younger generations?

Let us begin at the beginning. Before the ORBIT Festival opened officially, we went to the Ensemble Musikfabrik studio to observe the general rehearsal of Mutants in Music: III. Dreamteam + Playlist of Deaf Dreams, a performance featuring musicians and dancers from the Cologne-based Ensemble uBu. It looked promising: the opening “symphony” of involuntary muscle twitches while falling asleep, enacted by the performers on beds laid out on the studio floor to the rhythm of sounds reminiscent of a children’s music box, failed, however, to develop into a coherent narrative about the art of dreaming together. The drama got stuck until it was carried away by the music, building up gradually from overlapping fragments of a playlist compiled by the deaf artist Matthias Ranner – sung, articulated through instruments, vibrating on low-frequency waves. Only then did I feel like dreaming together with uBu: when Schumann’s Mondnacht emerged from a cloud of clangs, shouts and hums, when Schubert’s Notturno in E flat major began to murmur like a lullaby and when pop-culture texts began to mix gracefully with fragments of avant-garde classics.

Gefängnis ohne Mauern, Schiff ohne Meer. Photo: Sophia Hegewald

The hidden structure of dreams – or rather nightmares – was explored many times by Jean Genet, for example, in his provocative Miracle of the Rose, a semi-autobiographical, non-linear narrative in which the writer loosely drew on his own experiences at the Mettray reformatory for juvenile offenders and his subsequent imprisonment at Fontevrault. The sudden leaps in time and the disorienting blurring of fantasy and reality, characteristic of Genet’s prose, have fascinated numerous composers, resulting in works like Bengtson’s opera The Maids and Eötvös’ Le Balcon, and, before that, Hans Werner Henze’s instrumental “imaginary theatre”, based on motifs from Le Miracle de la Rose. Philipp C. Meyer, a student of Isabel Mundry and Stefano Gervasoni, among others, has decided to use the same material in Gefängnis ohne Mauern, Schiff ohne Meer, a piece of music theatre for one actor (Max Kurth) and seven musicians from Ensemble Garage. Although the set designer Jan Patrick Brandt did indeed create a convincing vision of a supposedly “open” prison (a semi-transparent lightbox at the back of the Roter Saal at the COMEDIA Theater, which both shields the actor entering it and exposes him to public view; illuminated spheres in which the narrator’s distorted face is reflected), and director Miriam Götz intensified the atmosphere of oppression by scattering the musicians across the stage and making their performance seem like intrusive, obsessively repeated actions – the whole thing turned into a drawn-out monodrama with sparingly used background music. True, it was very interesting at times (I was particularly struck by the modulated train whistle, the dreamlike clamour of birds and the crunch of glass being gnawed at by one of the fellow prisoners), but it fell silent at key moments in the narrative, above all in the scene when the mystical rose was discovered at the bottom of the heart of Harcamone, the “holy murderer”. It is a shame, because Meyer is undoubtedly a talented composer and deserved to work with a dramaturge who would have radically shortened the spoken text and woven it more effectively into the musical fabric of the piece.

By contrast, the final performance of Sombre. In the Shadows of Our Time was excellent. It was a moving tribute to Kaija Saariaho, who passed away less than two years ago, made by her husband, the composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière, her son, the director Alexi Barrière, and the composer and sculptor Cécile Marti. The musical material of the production was made up of four chamber pieces by Saariaho (Caliban’s Dream to fragments of Shakespeare’s The Tempest; NoaNoa to a text from Paul Gauguin’s journal; Ciel étoilé; and Sombre to excerpts from Ezra Pound’s Cantos). Marti “replied” to the first two with a composition entitled ‘ŌVIRI to a text by Aleksi Barrière, while Jean-Baptiste Barrière followed Ciel étoilé with Un Tempo di Lampi Senza Tuono to the poem Attesa by Primo Levi. The whole, surprisingly uniform stylistically, was a convincing tale of the fatal consequences of idolatry: in private and artistic, as well as political life. Once again, I was reminded of Maerzmusik and a conversation from twenty-one years ago, after the staged concert Italia Anno Zero, when we fulminated that if we were shown a film featuring Mussolini one more time, we would not be answerable for our actions. In the world we are living in now projections of photographs from concentration camps and filmed speeches by the Duce – interspersed with images of the heavenly beaches of the Hiva ‘Oa island – again make an electrifying impression. Another thing is that this time we were dealing with a very well-produced, if slightly conservative, theatre, which suited the small stage at the Alte Feuerwache perfectly, and, above all, was superbly performed by four instrumentalists (Eija Kankaanranta on the kantele, the flutist Camilla Hoitenga, the double bassist Aleksander Gabryś, the percussionist Fritz Hauser) and the outstanding bass-baritone Robert Koller. The Swiss singer, adding rainstick to the sound layer of the piece, also demonstrated exceptional acting talent. Every one of his portrayals – from Gauguin to Pound – was equally convincing; every word was rich in meaning, every gesture essential. Right up to the final tearing of the projection screen, behind which stood a sculpture by Marti: a primeval stone idol that could represent anything from the painter’s fourteen-year-old mistress, the leader of the Italian fascists, to today’s objects of idolatrous worship.

Sombre. In the Shadows of Our Time. Photo: Sophia Hegewald

I wish we had been able to see Samu Gryllus Host_Opera – based on a documentary novel about the abduction of a dozen or so girls in the Hungarian town of Balassagyarmat, carried out by the sons of local apparatchicks and hushed up by the communist authorities. I am glad that the encounter with the Cologne-based experimentalist Rochus Aust and his Deutsches Stromorchester gave us the chance to explore the still-deserted spaces of the port mill in the revitalised Deutz district, wearing helmets and protective clothing, just like the future audience of the cosmic performance Die Dualen/Grand Jury. We missed out on a few other ORBIT events, including a Symposium and a Speaker’s Corner featuring representatives from the independent arts scene. The Cologne festival is brimming with youthful energy, at times discovering something new, on other occasions reinventing the wheel. One day it will probably become established and thus less interesting.

The Wittener Musiktage are certainly well-established, which in the context of the previous sentence may again sound like a complaint, but the matter is more complicated. ORBIT is still searching, the Witten festival has already found what it was looking for: at least that is how its regulars see it, enamoured as they are with the great avant-garde of the third quarter of the twentieth century and greeting every hint of tonality with a consternation not unlike that which Wagner’s Tristan caused Clara Schumann. The tentative attempts to persuade the audience to embrace a slightly different kind of music, made during the brief tenure of Patrick Hahn, the festival’s former curator, fell on deaf ears – the oeuvre of Cassandra Miller, the face of last year’s Musiktage, who specialises in musical recycling, got a frosty reception. The helm was taken over from Hahn by Anselm Cybinski – together with the majority of the programme already planned for 2026 and focused on the oeuvre of Chaya Czernowin. We will have to wait and see what happens next.

I feel that, given my experiences to date, I am sitting on the barricade dividing the experimentalists and the advocates of the museum avant-garde. I have been quite happy to see the festival’s programme being expanded to include music that is decidedly “non-chamber” music. I was excited to discover the aptness of this year’s motto of the event: Gegenwart. Unentrinnbar (“The Present. Inescapable”). The present played a trick on us. It made us put greater emphasis on the context when assessing the works presented – often at the expense of a detailed analysis of the artists’ compositional technique.

Forty-eight hours of music in three days. That is why I will focus on delights, surprises and disappointments. Above all, on a radical change in my attitude towards Czernowin’s oeuvre, in which I finally began to recognise pain, unresolved trauma and opposition to the actions of tyrants. Surprisingly, her oeuvre sounds the least convincing when it engages directly in contemporary discourse (the underdeveloped NO! A Lament for the Innocent, featuring Sofia Jernberg’s strangely detached amplified soprano part, at a concert by the WDR Orchestra conducted by Yalda Zamani). I definitely find myself more in tune with Czernowin’s sensibility when she uses delicate musical means to evoke the scent of biblical hyssop, that ambiguous plant used by the Israelites in the Passover ritual to ask God to spare them, while slaying the firstborn of Egypt (a phenomenal performance of Ezov by Quatuor Diotima). I was equally struck by the performance of the Cologne-based band hand werk in a music theatre production, Red-Headed Man, based on the modernist poetry of Daniil Kharms: those who realised that a poem about a red-haired man who had no hair no eyes, no ears, no lips, no nose, who had absolutely nothing at all – and, therefore, it was better not to mention him – was a terrifying metaphor for Stalinist terror, turned a blind eye to Chernowin’s unsuccessful directorial debut in staging her own work, which was saved by the spectacular musical and acting performance of the cellist Niklas Seidl.

Red-Headed Man. Photo: Claus Langer

Another highlight from the Wittener Tage for me was Mártón Illés’ Four Sketches from the opening concert, in which vibrant live electronics merged seamlessly with an equally vibrant performance by Klangforum Wien, conducted by Elena Schwarz, clattering, chirping and shouting against a backdrop of fragmented czardases and Romani rhythms, bringing to mind a torn map of neural connections in the human brain. I was moved by Dmitri Kourliandski’s Partially Restored Landscapes, performed by the Diotima Quartet, and described by the composer as a musical deconstruction of encoded radio signals, but which I perceived as an inability to articulate and express the simplest human emotions, a manifestation of a desperate longing for the irretrievably lost land of childhood. I still cannot quite make sense of the concert by Basel Sinfonietta conducted by Titus Engel, during which the audience gave a warm reception to the technically accomplished, seductively Orientalising piece Untamed River by the Iranian composer Amen Feizabadi (with the superb Noa Frenkel in the solo part), and booed the naive Seven Valleys of Love by his compatriot Golfam Khayam, a clumsy composition, but one that remains touchingly faithful to the aesthetics of the classical Persian dastgāh system.

Noa Frenkel. Photo: Claus Langer

I will not hide my admiration for Øyvind Torvund’s Two Pieces for Orchestra and Electronics, performed by the WDR Orchestra under Zamani. Torvund has always thrown listeners off the scent, branched off down different paths and drawn the audience into an intriguing discussion about the blurred boundary between nature and civilisation – this time he put shreds of inspiration from the music of Wagner, Bruckner and Sibelius into the muzzle of wolves howling in the wilderness and other strange creatures.

There are many things I have not written about and I do not regret it. This trip has transported me back to a beautiful past, when I would immerse myself in the music of the day for weeks and would pick out only what was essential. This trip has thrown me into the inescapable present. I am happy to be able to experience it not only in the existential dimension, but also in the aesthetic dimension, filtered through the sensibility and unbridled imagination of contemporary composers.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Who are you, world, that you terrify me so? – asked Gertrud von Le Fort, the author of the novella The Song at the Scaffold, from which everything began. The German writer was a woman full of existential angst, which is said to be an essential prerequisite for true faith. She lived in this anxiety for a long time, ninety-five years, until her death on All Saints’ Day in 1971. She was a Catholic, but born in a Protestant family whose members – as her father, a Prussian army officer used to say – participated in history wherever they could. Her paternal ancestors came from the Duchy of Savoy-Piedmont and bore the surname Liforti. They were Waldensians, members of one of Christianity’s oldest pre-Reformation movements. In the mid-sixteenth century they converted to Calvinism and fled to Switzerland. There they adopted the surname Le Fort, associated etymologically, like its Italian variety, with strength and courage. In the period directly preceding the action of the novella one of the Le Forts co-organised Louis XVI’s failed attempt to escape to Varennes and two others died at the hands of the revolutionaries.

Gertrud von Le Fort wrote The Song at the Scaffold in the form of a letter from an eyewitness to the events, an exiled French aristocrat. The narrative focused on a fictitious figure of a young Carmelite nun, Blanche de la Force, another mutation of the author’s own surname. However, the story described by von Le Fort did indeed happen. The Compiègne convent was closed by the revolutionary authorities in 1792; for the following two years the nuns lived as “laypersons” in several adjacent houses. In 1794 Fouquier-Tinville, the first public accuser of the Revolutionary Tribunal, delivered an indictment against the Carmelites, arguing that despite official prohibitions they had managed to create a monastic community of sorts. In June the women were transported to the infamous “vestibule of the guillotine”, that is the Conciergerie prison at the former royal palace on the Île de la Cité in Paris, and were subsequently sentenced to death. The Carmelites were executed on 17 July, barely ten days before the end of the Reign of Terror. On their way to the execution site they sang the Salve Regina. After the execution truly deathly silence fell among the crowd. But the last nun to be beheaded was not Blanche de la Force but Madame Lidoine, the prioress, whose dowry to enter the convent had been paid years earlier by Marie Antoinette no less.

The literary Blanche is von Le Fort’s alter ego, a character reflecting her own grief over the values squandered by the Great War, her own fear of the consequences of the October Revolution and the rise of a radical mood in Germany. “Fear is a great emotion,” wrote Gertrud von Le Fort in The Song at the Scaffold, “The nation should know fear. (…) The terrible events I am going to write of have really taken place and may be repeated at any moment”. The short novella, showing not only the horror of history, but also the possibility of inner transformation of people participating in it, caused quite a stir among the intellectual and artistic elites of the day. Interest in von Le Fort’s work continued also after the Second World War. In 1948 the French Dominican Léopold Bruckberger persuaded Georges Bernanos to adapt the novella for a film script. However, he was not pleased with the adaptation. Bernanos died a year later, and his manuscript – markedly different from the original in several respects – was unearthed by his publisher and published as Dialogues des Carmélites, the title having been changed at von Le Fort’s request. Bernanos’ work began a new life on theatrical stages, first in a German translation (as Die begnadete Angst, “Blessed anxiety”) and then, after the 1952 Paris premiere, in the French original.

Photo: Mattia Gaido

Following Bruckberger’s suggestion, Bernanos enriched the portrayal of Blanche with elements borrowed from the biography of Constance, Blanche’s younger “soulmate”. It was Constance who had a brother who, amidst the turmoil of the Revolution, tried to rescue her from the convent – and thus the narrative of the Dialogues gained the character of Chevalier de la Force. In addition, Bernanos put a stronger emphasis on the horrific agony of the old prioress, Madame de Croissy, most likely motivated by his own fear of looming death. The drama became more human than Gertrud von Le Fort’s novella, suffused with mysticism – this may have been the reason why it immediately became hugely successful.

It also struck a chord with Poulenc, deeply anxious at the time about the fate of his partner, Lucien Roubert, who was dying of cancer. However, it was Margarete Wallman, an Austrian dancer, choreographer and director, who finally persuaded the composer to adapt Bernanos’ play for an opera – through her husband, head of the Ricordi publishing house. Poulenc transformed the play into a libretto almost without any interference in its content and form. He worked two years on the music, creating a score that did not go beyond tonality, was full of references to modal scales in its harmony, and limited in its use of chromaticism.  His Dialogues is a magnificent continuation of the French tradition, including Pelléas and Mélisande – with Debussy’s characteristic, unobvious treatment of leitmotifs – as well as the vocal fluency of Massenet’s operas, not to mention other sources of inspiration, from Monteverdi’s recitative and expressive style to the dramatic intensity of the work’s climactic scenes worthy of Mussorgsky.

In Poland Dialogues des Carmélites did not attract much attention until the beginnings of the political transformation. However, the brief popularity of Bernanos’ play ended already in the mid-1990s and Poulenc’s opera was staged only once, over a quarter of a century ago, at Teatr Wielki in Łódź. Yet there are avowed fans of the masterpiece in Poland, usually agreeing that in purely theatrical terms no one has presented it in a more compelling way that Robert Carsen, author of the legendary 1997 production for De Nederlandse Opera. Carsen’s staging has been seen in nearly twenty opera houses across the world. I only managed to catch up with it in Turin – and with good reason, for after nearly three decades of its stage travels it had come full and significant circle. The Dialogues at the Teatro Regio di Torino was prepared by the same conductor who had been in charge of the Amsterdam performances: Yves Abel, a Canadian of French origin, who has been devoted to the popularisation of the musical tradition of his ancestors all his life.

Photo: Mattia Gaido

I have seen plenty of stagings revived without the involvement of the original directors, by assistants unaware of the context and disregarding the timeless significance of gestures that had ceased to be meaningful to them. Nothing of the sort happened in Turin, where Carsen’s original concept was meticulously reconstructed by the experienced director Christophe Gayral, and lighting – which is key to this staging – by Carsen himself, in collaboration with Cor van der Brink, who had gained his experience by working on productions by true giants of opera theatre, like Robert Wilson and Pierre Audi. Carsen’s vision unfolds on a nearly empty stage, on which every solitary prop – a bench, an armchair, a bed, a grave – plays a significant role (sets by Michael Levine, costumes by Frank Baer). Carsen cleverly plays with colour: for example, in Act One, when Blanche wears a white robe, with Marquis de la Force wearing red and his son parading in a blue costume. However, this is not an anachronistic reference to the allegedly revolutionary symbolism of the French flag, but more to the colours associated with the ancien régime: the white of the clergy, the heraldic red of the aristocracy and the blue of the rising bourgeoisie. The duet of Blanche and her brother takes place on both sides of a symbolic cloister wall, represented on stage by a row of nuns with their backs turned to the audience. The wall proves to be an illusion – at some point the protagonists start to pass through this porous partition and every word they utter only serves to emphasise the power of their transgression. The famous final execution scene – phenomenally highlighted by Philippe Girodeau’s evocative choreography – eschews literalness. There is no blood and no guillotine: the sisters announce their death one by one with a sequence of symbolic gestures and then fall prostrated on the stage, with their arms outstretched – but with their faces turned upwards, as a sign of faith, hope and trust in the unknown.

Blanche was portrayed by Ekaterina Bakanova, who has a rounded, ringing and expressive soprano – which was evident especially in the episodes of extreme dilemma and terror, when the artist would sometimes sacrifice the beauty of sound in favour of an almost tangible expression. A perfect counterbalance to the emotional Blanche was provided by Francesca Pia Vitale as Constance, sung with a radiant voice full of girlish ardour. I was less impressed by Sally Matthews as Madame Lidoine – her beautiful, mature soprano is still very sonorous, but has too much vibrato, which, unfortunately, affects the delivery of the text. In this respect Matthews was clearly inferior to the rest of the female cast, including Antoinette Dennefeld, a moving and intensely human Mother Marie, and, above all, Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo, a phenomenal Madame de Croissy. The alto part of the old prioress, like the part of the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, is usually entrusted to eminent singers who are also excellent actors, but who have their best years way behind them. Brunet-Grupposo went against this trend, demonstrating that a sense of theatre and impeccable vocal technique could support interpretation regardless of age. The intensity of her portrayal overshadowed Bakanova already in the first dialogue, in which she explained the order’s rule in sentences sharper than the blade of the guillotine. In the death scene, when her entire world of values had collapsed like a house of cards, she rose to the level of Shakespearean tragedy. Faced with such acting and such musicality, a critic remains helpless with admiration: even occasional lapses in intonation seem to be a conscious tool of communication with the listeners.

The men have very little to do in this opera. All the more credit should, therefore, go the baritone Jean-François Lapointe, an undisputed master of the French repertoire, who, in his brief role as Marquis de la Force, dazzled the audience not only with his spot-on sense of style, but also with his superb diction and outstanding stage presence. Valentin Thill as Chevalier de la Force was more than decent, although his handsome lyric tenor loses some of its power of expression because of awkward transitions between registers. I cannot fail to mention Krystian Adam, who sang the Chaplain in impeccable French, with a warm and beautifully open voice, at the same time creating a nuanced portrayal of a man torn between fear and duty.

Photo: Daniele Ratti

Yves Abel conducted the Turin Dialogues in a highly stylish manner, in wisely measured tempi, skilfully balancing the proportions between the shimmering, colourful orchestral layer, and the wealth and weight of the words uttered on stage. It should be said at this point that the conductor had to cope with the untypical acoustics of Teatro Regio di Torino, where the orchestra’s selective and resonant sound can get out of hand and overwhelm the singers. Nothing of the sort happened. The conductor was in control of everything, including the chorus, superbly prepared by Gea Garatti Ansini, whose members also joined the soloists in the final scene, complementing the musical image of the tragedy of the sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne.

And once again we experienced the power of a nearly thirty-year-old staging and the power of artists believing in Poulenc’s masterpiece. For evil truly has no power other than the helplessness of good – to refer to Gertrud von Le Fort’s words again.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

I never cease to be amazed by the Czechs, and the grace as well as ease with which they bring back to life underrated operas from their national repertoire. True, it can be argued that Czech composers’ masterpieces have long been present on the world’s stages and that audiences craving for something new – not only in their homeland – will welcome any dusted-off piece with open arms. Yet this argument is false: first, not all of these operas deserved to be banished from theatrical stages, second – even if they are inferior to the more distinguished achievements of their authors, the Czechs usually know how to hide their flaws and highlight their strong points. This is primarily due to the fact that they have never broken with their operatic tradition; they know how to make it fit it into the framework of modern theatre, to look at it with detachment and, when necessary, to approach it somewhat tongue in cheek.

This has recently been the case of The Devil’s Wall, Smetana’s last completed opera and, at the same time, one of the four he wrote to Eliška Krásnohorská’s libretti, including the romantic opera Viola, based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and abandoned after several hundred bars. Krásnohorská, a writer, translator, editor of Ženské listy and activist in the women’s emancipation movement, was much younger than the composer. They met in 1864, before Eliška turned seventeen. Their true friendship began unusually – with an article in which Krásnohorská, whilst making no secret of her admiration for Smetana’s musical talents, pointed out his errors in the prosody of the Czech language, using The Bartered Bride as an example. Instead of taking offence, Smetana took her comments to heart. Krásnohorská was the composer’s muse, collaborator and unfulfilled love in the final decade of his short life, when he was battling increasing deafness, soon compounded by vertigo, hallucinations and sudden rage outbursts – according to Smetana, these were symptoms of madness that brought him to the brink of suicide several times. In spite or perhaps because of that, their first joint operas (The Kiss and The Secret) were bitter-sweet, lyrical comedies in which it is often hard to tell the difference between irony and melancholy, fiction and autobiographical themes.

However, work on The Devil’s Wall dragged on for longer than expected, also because of disputes over the nature of the work itself. From the very beginning Krásnohorská suggested something along the lines of a romantic opera, combining a historical theme with the legend of a devil trying to prevent the construction of the Monastery of Vyšší Brod, founded by Vok of Rožmberk as an expression of his gratitude to the Virgin May for saving him from the waters of the Vltava. Smetana wanted a lighter approach to the subject, to which Krásnohorská agreed, but their subsequent collaboration was a struggle. In the end Smetana removed more or less one-third of the original text from Krásnohorská’s libretto and did the whole his own way. He may have wanted to laugh and be moved a bit before he died.

Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

The premiere in October 1882, at the now defunct Nové České Divadlo in Prague, was received with moderate enthusiasm. The wooden building, used as the summer base of the Temporary Theatre, had neither the technical facilities nor sufficiently talented creative team to properly stage an opera about devils, dreams full of phantoms, a thunderstorm and reversal of the Vltava course (suffice it to say that sheep were played by suitably trimmed poodles). Rarach, a role written for Karel Čech, was in the end sung by a different singer, shattering the illusion of a striking resemblance between the hell’s emissary and the hermit Beneš. Despite favourable opinions about the music, The Devil’s Wall was removed from the repertoire after just six performances. Bad luck continued to plague the the work: a performance in Prague on 28 June 1914 was interrupted by news of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Smetana’s last opera did not make it beyond Czech theatres and still remains one of the composer’s least frequently staged works. Worse still, after a while it came to labelled a a work of declining years showing symptoms of the gradual disintegration of the composer’s creative powers.

The Devil’s Wall has not been seen in Brno for nearly half a century. Now the opera has returned in a staging that is so impressive with the richness of theatrical imagination and, at the same time, so irresistibly funny that I do not quite know whom to praise first. Let me, therefore, start unusually with Dragan Stojčevski, who, at the request of the director Jiří Heřman, designed the sets drawing solely on the architecture of the buildings and the interiors of the Vyšší Brod monastery, but making them an equal protagonist of the narrative. Although there is no Rožmberk Castle, nor a shepherd’s hut, nor a cliff on the bank of the Vltava, nor even the eponymous devil’s wall, that is a river dam – everything is there, in the sets organising the entire stage space, constantly moved, turned away, attracting the eye to strange nooks and crannies. Jarek, tormented by temptation, has a dream of an orgy involving smoking weed in the monastery library; Katuška is making out with her lover in the cloister garden; the Vltava River swells just outside the window of St. Anne’s Chapel.

Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

The more our sense of the absurd grew, the easier it was to turn the narrative into a convincing whole – thanks to the brilliant direction of Heřman, who approached The Devil’s Wall with a panache worthy of the Salle le Peletier in Meyerbeer’s era. And with a sense of humour similar to that which must have characterised the authors of special effects of the French grand opéras. Heřman masterfully exploits the “alienness” of a detail or prop – the medieval setting (Zuzana Štefunková Rusínová’s superb costumes) is disrupted by a young monk in trainers; wheelbarrows from a DIY store roll onto the stage several times, and the peasant women push quite modern, neatly compressed bales of straw with their rakes. In addition, the director plays a hilarious game with symbols. The abundance of fish caught in the orchestra pit and swimming in the banked up Vltava, and, finally, the carp wagging its tail in a Gothic sculpture’s arms serve as a subtle (?) reminder that Vyšší Brod is a Cistercian abbey. The Rožmberks’ heraldic rose appears in a variety of contexts – for example, in Vok Vítkovic’s ceremonious entrée in full armour (I will not describe the scene, for if anyone is intending to go to Brno, I will spoil all the fun for them).

Some of Heřman’s ideas are so mad that I sometimes had the impression that I was watching the film Arabela, alternating with The Red Inn. However, wherever lyricism, horror or seriousness is needed, the spectator will find it. What deserves a special mention is the director’s collaboration with the choreographer Marek Svobodník, who has provided Rarach with a retinue of skeletons in black-and-white costumes, moving with the eerie grace of danse macabre figures (in scenes where Rarach is not parading in Beneš’s habit, but appears as a skeletal devil, the singer animates a hermit’s puppet in front of him). Add to this the superb crowd scenes, Dominik Žižek’s evocative projections and the lighting design overseen by Heřman himself, and we have a production that will captivate everyone – from a child taken to the opera by their parents for the first time, to a discerning music lover who has hitherto not believed in the power of Smetana’s work.

Photo: Matek Olbrzymek

For after what we heard in Brno, no one will believe that the opera is a work of declining years. Under Robert Kružík’s confident yet delicate hand the performance revealed not only obvious allusions to Wagner and Liszt, but also unexpectedly sophisticated and novel harmonic and colour structures bringing to mind Dvořák’s and Mahler’s late works. This was due to the disciplined and attentive orchestra, not to mention the phenomenal chorus of the Brno Opera, which I cannot praise highly enough in every performance. In the solo cast I saw a month after the premiere I was impressed the most by Pavel Švingr in the role of Rarach. He is a singer blessed with a powerful bass voice, yet one that is both exceptionally handsome and musical. Singing Beneš, David Szendiuch, with his considerably less distinctive voice, paled somewhat in comparison. On the other hand, an excellent performance came from Roman Hoza – a moving and human Vok Vítkovic, sung with a soft baritone with excellent breath control and beautiful middle range. The ever reliable Peter Berger was outstanding in the tenor role of the knight Jarek – no doubt aided by the soprano Lenka Máčiková, who gave a superb acting portrayal of Katuška with a mercurial voice. Romana Kružíkova lacked a similar stage presence; hers is a soprano light and girlish enough for the role of Hedvika, Vok’s beloved, but she still needs to work on her interpretation on the character. Záviš was convincingly portrayed by Václava Krejčí Housková, whose assured, steely mezzo-soprano is perfect for this trouser role. Finally, a round of applause should go to the tenor Petr Levíček in the character role of Michálek, the castle steward and Katuška’s father, a part that seems to have been taken straight from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

Next year The Devil’s Wall will be presented at Prague’s National Theatre in a production by Ondřej Havelka, the first director that made me cry with laughter at the opera. A quarter of a century has passed since then and Havelka now has some stiff competition. If the Prague production turns out to be just as successful, Smetana will die of laughter in the beyond.

Translated by: Anna Kijak