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In June 1869, Cosima bore Siegfried – the third child of her non-marital relationship with Wagner – and sent a letter to her husband, yet again imploring him to grant her a divorce. Hans von Bülow finally gave in: ‘You have decided to devote the treasure of your heart and mind to a higher being. I have no intention of condemning you for same.’ What ensued was probably the happiest period in the longtime lovers’ lives. The divorce proceedings were completed in July 1870; one month later, Cosima and Richard were married. Shortly thereafter, the composer decided to give his wife a surprise: he sat down to write the piece that awakened her from her sleep at the Tribschen villa near Lucerne on the morning of 25 December, the day after Cosima’s birthday. Musicians from the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich – thirteen of them – gathered on the staircase and played a symphonic poem with the monstrously long title of Tribschener Idyll mit Fidi-Vogelgesang und Orange-Sonnenaufgang, als Symphonischer Geburtstagsgruss. Seiner Cosima dargebracht von Ihrem Richard, known today as the Siegfried Idyll. Initially, Wagner had no intention of publishing it; however, financial pressures induced him to do so at the Schott music publishers, expanding the ensemble to 35 instruments.

The Siegfried Idyll has entered the standard concert repertoire as Wagner’s only original work for chamber orchestra. Later arrangements – prepared by, among others, conductor Felix Mottl and composer Hans Werner Henze – have normally limited themselves to shorter instrumental fragments of his operas, or to orchestral takes on the Wesendonck Lieder, which were originally scored for voice and piano. When rumours reached my ears concerning an initiative of the Scottish ensemble Mahler Players, which – after the warm reception of their Mahler in Miniature series comprised of, among other items, a chamber version of Das Lied von der Erde – had decided to take on Wagner, at first I thought they were totally out of their minds; then I listened to a few of their previous recordings online, at which point, without further ado, I set forth on a mad journey to Inverness: to a concert in which conductor and ensemble founder Tomas Leakey juxtaposed Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht with Act I of Wagner’s Die Walküre.

Tomas Leakey. Photo: Mahler Players

Schoenberg’s early work, initially written for string sextet, is most often heard today in the composer’s 1943 revised version for string orchestra. In the rendition of Mahler Players, it would thus not have been anything noteworthy if Leakey had not connected Schoenberg’s inspiration from a poem by Richard Dehmel (describing the journey of two lovers through a dark forest, during which the woman reveals to her beloved that she is pregnant with someone else’s child) with the equally dark narrative of Die Walküre (where Siegmund, freshly arrived from the backwoods, enters into an incestuous relationship with his twin sister Sieglinde, with whom he begets Siegfried, a hero unblemished by evil who will change the fate of the gods). The conductor treated the audience to a few introductory words before the concert and, in the second portion, transitioned smoothly from a sensual and tender interpretation of Verklärte Nacht to the stormy beginning of Wagner’s drama – in a masterful arrangement by Matthew King and Peter Longworth, who in some mysterious way managed not to degrade the expressive power of this substantial score, despite a reduction by nearly three quarters of the original ensemble. Even more noteworthy, the soloists (Peter Wedd in the role of Siegmund; Claire Rutter as Sieglinde; and actor/singer/performance artist Iestyn Edwards, normally associated with a totally different repertoire, in the role of Hunding), did not convey the impression of being inhibited by the more intimate take on Die Walküre – they sang with full voices, totally involved in their characters, and not even for a moment giving the audience any reason to suppose that they are taking part in some weird and not-entirely-justified endeavour.

After the concert at the Inverness cathedral. From left to right: Tomas Leakey, Peter Wedd (Siegmund), Iestyn Edwards (Hunding) and Claire Rutter (Sieglinde). Photo: Mahler Players

Actually, they were more than convinced of what they were doing. Since the beginning of the ensemble’s existence – it was founded in 2013 – Tomas Leakey and his instrumentalists have been continuing a wonderful tradition of musical work at the grass roots. They have been introducing the inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands, one of Europe’s most sparsely-populated regions, to the world of classical music with no concessions, immediately taking on masterpieces of the highest order, engaging soloists who score successes at the best opera houses, independently preparing themselves for the work painstakingly, thoroughly and with fantastic artistic results. And in return, they have received a generous reward: the Neogothic cathedral in Inverness was packed to the gills; the performance was received with shouts of rapture and lengthy standing ovations. The artists encountered an equally warm reception the previous day at St. Giles’ Church in Elgin, and the day after at the Macphail Centre in Ullapool – a fishing port numbering slightly over 1000 inhabitants that also hosts, among other cultural events, an annual three-day book festival. In past seasons, the Mahler Players have ventured into even less accessible corners of northern Scotland – with music by their namesake, with a chamber version of Dvořák’s New World Symphony, with orchestral excerpts from Parsifal. In the coming years they are planning, among other events, concerts with Act III of Siegfried, Act II of Tristan und Isolde, and a symphony based on themes from Wagner’s late sketches, commissioned from Matthew King. They have no great difficulty finding partners and sponsors for their projects; after six years of activity, there is no doubt that their initiatives will encounter the enthusiasm of an audience hungry for new experiences.

I dedicate this short report to some organizers of our musical life, who stubbornly hold to the thesis that the only way to popularize this artistic field is to organize operetta galas, tenor tournaments and super-productions with large outdoor screens and stadium amplification. For connoisseurs, on the other hand, they offer summer festivals featuring foreign artists who – for a generous fee – will agree to return from a prestigious concert tour via a roundabout route through Poland.

Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski

This is yet another June that I am spending with Wagner’s music: more and more intensively from year to year, since the first Tristan in Longborough (put on for the 150^th anniversary of the world première), because I have been deliberately following the singers who have been making their entrée into the world of the master of Bayreuth under the watchful care of Anthony Negus. This time, as a prelude to the new staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen under his baton, I decided to head to Konzert Theater Bern for a Tristan featuring Lee Bisset, a phenomenal Isolde in the 2017 revival of the Longborough Festival Opera’s production, as well as Swedish tenor Daniel Frank, whom I was not able to see in the last year’s Götterdämmerung in Karlsruhe – which I regretted enormously at the time, for he had sounded very promising in recordings. The Bern opera house, furthermore, has a beautiful Wagnerian tradition: the Neo-Baroque building designed by René von Wurstemberger was inaugurated in 1903 with a presentation of Tannhäuser; and the Swiss première of Tristan took place in March 1889 at the Hôtel de Musique, the theatre’s previous headquarters which were demolished at the beginning of the 20^th century.

I traveled to Switzerland full of the highest hopes: the stage-directing concept was the responsibility of Ludger Engels, a thoroughly-educated German musician who took a turn in the direction of theatre at the instigation of distinguished conductor and Bach-Collegium Stuttgart founder Helmuth Rilling. Since the mid-1990s, Engels has directed over 30 opera productions, including a Minimalist, relatively well-received staging of Tristan und Isolde for Theater Aachen (2012). If I had read the reviews of that production more carefully, a red light would have gone on in my head. For even critics immune to the extravagances of German Regieoper pointed out the lack of any relationships between the title characters, accusing the director of treating Tristan too literally as an idea drama. In Bern, Engels went all the way and transfigured Wagner’s masterpiece into a multileveled theatre-in-a-theatre, referring to the work of Berlin performance artist Jonathan Meese. Perhaps readers remember that in 2014, Meese was supposed to prepare a new staging of Parsifal in Bayreuth. The Festival management finally dissolved their contract with him, officially citing the endeavour’s excessively high cost. Behind the scenes, it was whispered that the problem was rather the artist’s predilection for the Nazi ‘Heil Hitler’ gesture, for the use of which – in his performance art work entitled Größenwahn in der Kunstwelt, presented at the documenta exhibition – Meese faced charges at the Regional Court in Kassel. He won the case and did not abandon his controversial practices. Frankly, his artistic performances border on chutzpah: a certain critic even christened him the a Borat of contemporary art.

Tristan und Isolde at the Konzert Theater Bern. Daniel Frank (Tristan) and Robin Adams (Kurwenal). Photo: Christian Kleiner

This did not, however, prevent Engels from characterizing Tristan as Jonathan Meese, supplying him with three Isoldes (one singing, supposedly a metaphor of Mathilde Wesendonck; and two silent: Wagner’s first wife Minna, that is, his past love; and his future companion Cosima, whom he for unknown reasons posed as a cross between Lady Gaga and Klaus Nomi); and trashing the stage with oodles of props which, to the initiated, brought to mind the art of the German scandalmonger, but reminded probably no one of Wagner’s drama (stage design: Volker Thiele; costumes: Heide Kastler; lights: Bernhard Bieri). And as if that weren’t enough, he played out each of the three acts in a completely different stylistic language, without drawing them together through any kind of narrative link, and then made the singer playing the roles of the Shepherd and the Young Sailor (Andries Cloete) ‘stage direct’ the whole thing. I shall not undertake any thorough exegesis of Engels’ concept – I shall only report that in the final accounting, no one died (but neither did anyone connect with anyone); and in the final scene, the director did not fail to remind us of Meese’s declaration that ‘Kunst ist totalste Freiheit’. Judging from the uproarious laughter in Act III when Kurwenal asks Tristan, ‘Bist du nun tot? Lebst du noch?’, the audience noticed certain divergences between the libretto and the stage director’s vision.

Unfortunately, the onstage mess affected the quality of the singing. Lee Bisset came out considerably beneath her abilities – while the acting was superb, she sang in a tired voice with excessive vibrato and insecure intonation. Daniel Frank – blessed with a tenor of beautiful timbre and a high degree of musicality – began to lose power already in the middle of Act II, and was not able to build the tension in Tristan’s long death scene. The velvety-voiced Claude Eichenberger (Brangäne), though awkward from an acting standpoint, made a fine impression. Robin Adams shaped the character of Kurwenal solidly, but at times he clearly lost control over the volume of his powerful baritone. The unexpected hero of the evening turned out to be the Berner Symphonieorchester – playing with slightly reduced forces under the baton of their director Kevin John Edusei at quite slow tempi and with a clear, ‘Modernist’ sound. This was a Wagner decidedly closer to the aesthetics of Boulez than – let us say – Thielemann, splendidly adapted to the acoustics of the hall and sufficiently intriguing to draw attention away from the indubitable weaknesses of Ludger Engels’ staging.

I traveled to England with the steadfast conviction that things could only get better. Confident about the musical side of the first part of the Ring in Longborough, I was a bit nervous about the staging concept of Amy Lane – a talented stage director, though not yet very experienced (to date, she has honed her craft above all as an assistant; she has also worked on revivals of, among other items, Kaspar Holten’s take on King Roger for the Sydney Opera House). My fears turned out to be unfounded, though it would be difficult to call the new vision of Das Rheingold innovative. Lane alluded loosely to the legendary Ring staging of Patrice Chéreau – an image of Europe in Industrial Revolution times, a soulless world controlled by lust for profit, eaten away by the cancer of corruption and exploitation. Chéreau ‘bourgeois’ Ring had been, however, extraordinarily clear from a visual standpoint, while Lane did not resist the temptation to complement the economical stage design (Rhiannon Newman Brown) with ubiquitous and sometimes overly literal projections. Some of Tim Baxter’s ideas, however, spoke to the imagination – above all, the Modernist vision of Valhalla, looming in the distance like the silhouette of an unfinished factory.

Das Rheingold at the LFO. Darren Jeffery (Wotan). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

On the other hand, Amy Lane guided the singers in a masterful manner, subtly highlighting the character traits of the protagonists and network of interdependencies in which they are entangled. Her tragic take on Alberich shed new light on the inevitable fall of Wotan – he stumbled into the embrace of evil gradually, motivated at first by humiliation, then by anger and cruelty, finally by overwhelming despair. The death of Fasolt was predictable already at the moment when, nestled in the giant’s embrace, Freia for a split-second returned his caress – thereby giving evidence of the feelings arising between the two of them, which could foil the plans of the gold-hungry Fafner. Loge turned out to be a quintessentially Mephistophelian character: a connoisseur of the nature of gods, dwarves and giants, but at the same time, an enemy of all inhabitants of the mythical world; an ironic mocker who, beneath the mask of a smile, concealed deep contempt for the representatives of all creation. The perverse demigod, who plays a key role in the narrative of Das Rheingold, would have been even more convincing had Lane brought him closer to Goethe’s prototype, instead of giving him traits of the devil from late Romantic takes on Gounod’s opera. It would also have been worthwhile to polish up the differences of proportion between the characters: a Mime who clearly towers over other protagonists disturbs the credibility of the narrative. Some of the fault for this lies with the costume designer (Emma Ryott) – fortunately, much time remains until the closing of the Ring, so there will be opportunity yet to correct minor flaws in the staging.

It is difficult to determine who among the cast deserved the most applause – the surprising, indeed Expressionist Alberich of Mark Stone, blessed with a perfectly-placed and richly-shaded baritone; or the terrifying Loge of Marc Le Brocq, with each phrase chiseled like a laser engraving on marble, luminous and intonationally secure. Darren Jeffery built a surprisingly ‘human’ character of Wotan – with a voice full of melancholy, sometimes trembling in pain, bringing to mind associations with the most subtle performances of the German Lied repertoire. His soft bass-baritone found an ideal counterweight in the sonorous and rounded soprano of Madeleine Shaw (Fricka), which superbly conveyed the quandaries of the father of the gods’ partner entangled in ‘male’ intrigue. Blessed with a sensuous, almost girlish soprano, Marie Arnet portrayed a very convincing Freia; Adrian Dwyer, who has a clear and piercing tenor at his disposal, sang out Mime’s torment in a shocking manner. Out of the two giants, the more memorable for me was the moving Fasolt (Pauls Putnins). It is a bit regretful that the otherwise quite good Froh (Elliot Goldie) ran out of power just before the finale: in the ecstatic phrase ‘Zur Burg führt die Brücke’, the voice of the god of rain should truly shine with the colours of the rainbow. Among the Rhine Maidens, I found material for a future Erda – the dense, overtone-rich contralto of Katie Stevenson (Flosshilde). Meanwhile, the role of the earth-mother goddess was portrayed with bravado by Mae Heydorn – with a voice sufficiently ominous and full of authority to freeze the blood in the veins not only of Wotan.

Loge (Marc Le Brocq), Madeleine Shaw (Fricka) and Elliot Goldie (Froh). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Every word onstage came out clearly, ideally articulated, linked one with the other into a deeply thought-out and even more deeply-experienced statement. This time, the orchestra under the baton of the dependable Anthony Negus receded, as it were, into the shadows. In reality, it melded with the singers into one essence, a living, pulsating organism in which the motifs intermingled, circulated like lymph beneath the skin, reached to the deepest levels of the musical fabric. The famous prelude began with a hollow E-flat in the double basses, derived from the viscera of ancient existence; it woke up the horns, then the rest of the instruments and, finally, the whole world. Throughout Das Rheingold, Negus dosed the tension gradually, saving up reserves for the finale. Perhaps this is why I was so impressed by Erda’s prophecy and the metamorphosis of the ‘genesis’ motif, which resounds with tragic sorrow and shifts to a minor tonality, only to draw back like a dead wave after the words ‘Alles was ist, endet’, heralding the inevitable return to the status before the beginning.

Everything that will happen over the next few years at Longborough has been hereby reported. All we have to do now is wait for the remaining parts of the Ring and the great summation in 2023.

Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski

Resuscitation often ends in the patient being seriously battered and bruised. The sternum breaks, the ribs crack, blood pours into the pleura – a scary list, but no one doubts that inept resuscitation is better than no resuscitation. If it had not been for a musical passion of a lecturer from the University of Göttingen, perhaps Handel’s operas would not have emerged from obscurity. Oskar Hagen, an art historian and amateur musician, became interested in the oeuvre of the Halle master during a long illness. Naturally, he shared his fascination with his wife, the singer Thyra Leisner, and a friend who was a cellist. Everything began with home concerts, fashionable in university circles at the time. Encouraged by their success, Hagen decided to organise something on a larger scale. He produced an edition of Rodelinda and organised the first modern performance of the opera – on 26 June 1920, with a cast featuring university students and lecturers accompanied by musicians of the Akademische Orchestervereinigung conducted by him. These were the beginnings of Händel-Festspiele Göttingen, a cradle of Handel revival, which reached the British Isles only in the 1950s.

There would have been no revival, however, if Hagen hand not adapted Handel’s operatic legacy to the sensitivity of the listeners, brought up for generations on Wagner’s works. He cut the scores of his idol into pieces, rearranged them for a large orchestra, “embellished” the recitatives with instrumental interludes, removed repetitions from da capo arias, transposed the parts written for castratos an octave down and entrusted them to low male voices. This does not change the fact, however, that before the outbreak of the Second World War nineteen Handel operas were revived by German theatres, with no fewer than nine being presented in Göttingen (among them Radamisto, Ottone and Giulio Cesare). In 1943–1953 – with an interval of two years caused by a conflict with the Nazi authorities – music directorship of Händel-Festspiele Göttingen was in the hands of the conductor Fritz Lehmann, an ardent advocate of early music and founder of Berliner Mottetenchor. Since 1981 the Festival has been ruled by British apostles of historical performance: respectively, John Eliot Gardiner, Nicholas McGegan, and since 2011 – Laurence Cummings together with the Managing Director Tobias Wolff.

Fllur Wyn (Esilena) and Erica Eloff (Rodrigo). Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

This season I had an opportunity to come to Göttingen for a longer visit, and I decided to use it and visit the Händel-Festspiele. Unfortunately, I missed a concert performance, apparently excellent, of the oratorio Saul, featuring soloists, NDR Chorus and FestspielOchester conducted by Cummings. I arrived in Göttingen three days later, in time for the auditions of the Festival competition, featuring just five ensembles from Germany, Holland and Switzerland. They were all excellent, which makes it all the more difficult to bridle at the verdict of the jury, which included the Baroque violinist Anne Röhrig, the flautist Maurice Steger and the countertenor Kai Wessel. My sympathies were with the Dutch ensemble Dialogo Antico, not only because of its excellent programme (vocal-instrumental works by Handel, Stradella, Alessandro Scarlatti, Bononcini and Arvo Pärt), but also because of the mature and focused interpretations by the countertenor Toshiharu Nakajima. But the winner was Ensemble Caladrius from Germany, with its charismatic flautist Sophia Schambeck, who displayed undoubted virtuosity in a much more accessible repertoire. It is a pity, though, that all three prizes – Main Prize, Bärenreiter Urtext Prize and the Audience Prize – went to one ensemble. The other finalists deserved at least some kind of consolation prize.

The remaining Festival events were focused on the annual opera premiere at the Deutsches Theater, a Neo-Renaissance building from 1890, which in the mid-twentieth century was eventually transformed into a Sprechtheaterhaus. Since then the building has been resounding with music only once a year, during the Händel-Festspiele. This year it was the turn of Rodrigo, Handel’s first Italian opera, loosely based on the story of Roderic, the last Visigothic king, defeated by the Arabs at the Battle of Jerez de la Frontera. Loosely, because the main theme of the work, the initial title of which was Vincer se stesso è la maggior vittoria, is an inner transformation of the protagonist, who after yet another marital infidelity matures and returns to his beloved although infertile wife Esilena. In between we have everything a Baroque opera should have – desire for revenge, unexpected exchange of partners and several dead bodies. Huge support for the intelligent and occasionally very witty direction by Walter Sutcliffe – who turned Rodrigo into a contemporary warlord battling some shady characters somewhere on the frontier of Western civilisation – was provided by Dorota Karolczak’s sets, perfectly laid out and vividly conveying the labyrinth of nooks and crannies of a dilapidated palace. Interestingly, the sets had been made in the workshops of Poznań’s Teatr Wielki, which should quickly start collaborating with Karolczak directly – as this will be beneficial to the company’s own productions. A separate round of applause is also due to the team of MaskenWerkstatt Schweiz, who so suggestively made up Erica Eloff singing the title role that some audience members could swear they were watching a countertenor.

Almira’s Songbook – Seconda Prat!ca, Queen’s Minstrels. Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

Eloff, who was excellent in portraying her character, was not quite up to the requirements of the role, however – splendid in lyrical fragments, she was disappointing in arias requiring truly masculine bravura and vocal glamour typical of the art of the castratos. Anna Dennis (Florinda) in turn, a singer with a powerful, dark soprano, sometimes made up for technical shortcomings with a large volume. It was a big mistake to cast Evanco as a countertenor. Russell Harcourt fought bravely but unsuccessfully – this is not surprising, because it is a typical en travesti role, written for an agile female soprano with easy top notes. Among the other cast members worthy of note were, especially, Fflur Wyn, a technically phenomenal Esilena, captivating with her golden-hued voice, and Jorge Navarro Colorado (Giuliano), excellent as an actor and singing with a secure and clear tenor. However, the unquestionable hero of the evening – as well as several other Festival events – was the FestspielOrchester conducted by Laurence Cummings. This was yet another piece evidence showing how much can be done by skill, knowledge and passion combined with complete trust in the Kapellmeister. The Göttingen Festival Orchestra features members of Les Arts Florissants, Concerto Köln, Complesso Barocco and other premier league ensembles. Cummings gained his experience as the boss of the London Handel Orchestra and co-founder of the London Handel Players. Their music-making brims with pure joy and authentic, mature love for the legacy of the Festival’s patron.

All these qualities shone even more brightly during a gala concert at St. James’ Church, featuring the French countertenor Christophe Dumaux, whose career has been evolving along quite unexpected lines. Most artists singing falsetto on operatic stages are stars of a few seasons, singers with lovely but harmonically not very rich voices, quickly paling beside fuller, well-handled female voices. Yet Dumaux has been maturing like good wine. He skilfully passes from register to register, sounding like a proper haute-contre at the bottom and shining like a dramatic soprano at the top. He makes a brilliant use of messa di voce, embellishes his arias stylishly and tastefully, and phenomenally builds tension in da capo arias. I will remember his “Ah, stigie larve” as an unrivalled model of the Handelian mad scene; his “Pompe vane di morte” finally convinced me of the greatness of Rodelinda. Dumaux said goodbye to the audience with just one encore: “Cor ingrato” from Rinaldo. I had not returned from a concert so hungry for more for quite some time.

Franziska Fleischanderl (salterio). Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

The remaining Festival events did not carry as much weight for me, which does not mean that they were disappointing. The flautist Dorothea Oberlinger’s recital with Cummings on the harpsichord should serve as an example of how to compile a virtuoso programme of Baroque music with less sophisticated listeners in mind. The performance by the Seconda Prat!ca ensemble, which decided to present a musical portrait of Almira, the protagonist of Handel’s first opera, captivated the listeners with the sensual beauty of Iberian vocal music. The soloists and Coro e Orchestra Ghisleri conducted by Giulio Prandi made up for technical shortcomings with so much enthusiasm that we greeted their performance of Handel’s Dixit Dominus with thunderous applause without any hesitation. Nor did we hesitate before getting up before dawn to get to a concert at 5am and hear how Franziska Fleischanderl welcomes the sun with the delicate sound of the salterio and stories of her extraordinary instrument.

Next year Händel-Festspiele Göttingen will celebrate its centenary. History will come full circle – the organisers are planning a new staging of Rodelinda, from which everything began. It will be interesting to see whether one day they will come up with the idea of reconstructing it in the form devised by Oskar Hagen. Who broke Handel’s ribs, left him badly bruised, but resurrected his oeuvre for good. For the benefit of the whole world.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alessandra Volpe. Photo: Clive Barda

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

Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski

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

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

Photo: Yossi Zwecker

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

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

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

Photo: Yossi Zwecker

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

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

Photo: Yossi Zwecker

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

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

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

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

Peter Wedd (Siegmund). Photo: Barbara Aumüller

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski

Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov has been more fortunate, all things considered. With a libretto based on Pushkin’s “Shakespearean” Romantic tragedy (which so pleased the author that in a letter to his friend Pyotr Vyazemsky he admitted that he had read it aloud to himself, clapped his hands and exclaimed, “What a Pushkin! What a son of a bitch!”) and referring to a generally less complicated episode from Russia’s history, it conquered the world’s stages over one hundred years ago and has stayed on them ever since despite numerous interferences by successive adaptors. Khovanshchina, composed at the same time as The Fair at Sorochyntsi, saw the light of day five years after the composer’s death – in a version by Rimsky-Korsakov, who, in fact, turned the whole score upside down. The opera reached Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1913 with a new orchestration by Ravel and Stravinsky, or rather in a hybrid version, because Feodor Chaliapin, who sang Dosifey, insisted that “his” fragments be kept in Rimsky-Korsakov’s arrangement. Shostakovich’s version, most often presented today, had its premiere in 1960, at Leningrad’s Kirov State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, which in 1992 returned to its original name and now operates as the Mariinsky Theatre. It was not until 1985 that Khovanshchina, with the libretto in Russian, found its way to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, where it has been produced several times since. Four years later the Shostakovich version (with Stravinsky’s finale) was recorded by Claudio Abbado with the forces of  Wiener Staatsoper.

Ekaterina Semenchuk (Marfa) and Evgeny Akimov (Golitsin). Photo: Marco Brescia & Rudy Amisano

This makes the high number of productions of Khovanshchina at Milan’s La Scala all the more surprising. They began with the Italian premiere in 1926, followed by six more productions of the Rimsky-Korsakov version, two more – in 1981 and 1998 – of the Shostakovich version and the latest one, directed by Mario Martone and conducted by Valery Gergiev (the Shostakovich version but without Kuzka’s joyful song removed by Rimsky-Korsakov). It seems that Mussorgsky’s unfinished masterpiece is redeemed primarily by the music – in his original libretto the composer condenses events of several months, making the narrative understandable only to those familiar with the complicated history of the feud between the streltsy and the boyars. The action of the opera begins after the famous May Moscow uprising of the streltsy following the sudden death of Tsar Feodor in 1682. In the aftermath of the rebellion Ivan and Peter, two brothers of the deceased from two different marriages, were proclaimed tsars, with their elder sister, Sophia Alekseyevna Romanova, being made regent. Sophia, in fact, ruled the country for the following seven years, taking advantage of Ivan’s mental infirmity and Peter’s young age. In September the haughty and cruel Prince Ivan Khovansky – made commander of the streltsy for his services in putting down the rebellion – turned against Sophia and, hoping to gain the throne, demanded a revocation of Nikon’s reforms, which undermined the order of the Old Believers supporting him. The inconvenient Khovansky was pronounced a rebel and sentenced to death in absentia on 27 September – on the very same day he was captured with his son Andrey thanks to an intrigue of Feodor Shaklovity, a former scrivener raised by Sophia to the rank of a member of the Boyar Duma and, after the execution of the Khovanskys, appointed head of the Streltsy Department. Subsequent fate of the protagonists of Khovanshchina went along rather unexpected lines: in 1689, after Peter had deposed Sophia, the regent’s favourite, Vasily Golitsyn, an Occidentalist and “best educated man of his day”, was deprived of his functions and estate, and then exiled to Arkhangelsk. Shaklovity – after cruel tortures – was executed on 11 October. Power was seized by Peter the Great. Sophia was sent to the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow, where she spent the rest of her life in complete isolation – even the nuns had access to the former regent only for one day a year.

Khovanshchina is a dark opera, exposing the grimmest characteristic of the history of Russia – its dependence on an obtuse mob susceptible to all kinds of manipulation. It is a fresco about the collapse of an order of the world in which individuals, no matter how outstanding, are treated as pawns of no importance on the chessboard of history. Mario Martone, an Italian film director and screenwriter, gave it the status of a global catastrophe and as such illustrated it with images borrowed from post-apocalyptic cinema. His Milan staging – prepared in collaboration with the set designer Margherita Palli, costume designer Ursula Patzak and the brilliant lighting designer Pasquale Mari – features clear and visually beautiful references to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Scott’s Blade Runner, Hillcoat’s The Road and von Trier’s Melancholia. From the very beginning the protagonists of the drama move in a space marked by a sense of doom. A black or grey sky hangs over everything; there is no Red Square, no streltsy quarters, no secluded monastery of the Old Believers in a pine forest. We have to decipher the relationships between the characters from codes closely linked to the present – which may cause some problems for viewers not familiar with the context of the work. However, the overall concept is fairly coherent and features several memorable images. For example, the Scrivener’s dillapidated motorbike loaded with lots of attributes of his trade – typewriters, old computers and outdated laptops – from which an illiterate mob tries to extract some information but has no idea how to use them. Or the magnificent ending to Act Four – beginning with Ivan Khovansky hunting birds and closing with the murder of the prince wearing a snow-white shirt and killed with his own gun to the sounds of village girls singing about a white swan. Or the finale, when the Old Believers are engulfed by the fire or a huge apocalyptic star which, “burning as it were a lamp, it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood”.  Khovanshchina at La Scala ends with the breaking of the Seventh Seal, coming of the last days when God separates good from evil and sends death onto earth. Martone’s idea fits in well with the paradoxically hopeful finale of Shostakovich, who in his version returns to the opera’s opening theme of dawn on the Moskva River: star the Wormwood – or, perhaps, planet Melancholia from Lars von Trier’s film – heralds a “beautiful end of the world”, Good News about liberation from captivity.  The question is whether it fits in just as well with the overwhelmingly pessimistic vision of the composer.

Evgeny Akimov and Mikhail Petrenko (Ivan Khovansky). Photo: Marco Brescia & Rudy Amisano

Martone’s vision has its gaps and blunders, which, however, recede into the background when confronted with an awe-inspiring musical concept of the whole. Khovanshchina requires exceptional skill when choosing the cast: a singer to tackle the mighty part of Marfa with its Italian origins, three radically different low male voices and singers responsible for the three just as contrasted main tenor roles. The character of Andrey Khovansky’s abandoned fiancée was brilliantly portrayed by Ekaterina Semenchuk – a singer with a dark, meaty mezzo-soprano with a perfect command of dynamics (wonderfully ethereal pianos in the final scene when Andrey is led to the stake). Mikhail Petrenko represents an increasingly rare breed of singers who rivet attention from the very first stage appearance: despite very brief moments of insecure intonation and too wide vibrato, his Ivan Khovansky fully reflected the arrogance, stupidity and animal cruelty of the tragic boyar. Alexey Markov’s noble and, at the same time, ominous-sounding, slightly smoky baritone was perfect for Shaklovity’s demonic character. The beautifully rounded, soft and velvety bass of Stanislav Trofimov (Dosifey) brought to mind Feodor Chaliapin, who sang the role at the premiere of Khovanshchina at Saint Petersburg’s Kononov Hall.  Among the tenor voices the one I was impressed by the most was Maxim Paster (Scrivener) – a fine character singer, sensitive to every word and its place in a phrase. I wished for a bit more expressiveness in the role of Golitsin (Evgeny Akimov), especially in comparison with the passionate singing of Sergey Skorokhodov (Andrey), perfectly even across the registers. I was a little bit dissatisfied with the other female voices: Evgenia Muraveva’s soprano (Emma), slightly constricted at the top, and Irina Vashchenko’s instrument (Susanna), not very attractive in colour and intonationally insecure.

Setting for Act V. Photo: Marco Brescia & Rudy Amisano

As should be expected, the main hero of the evening was the chorus – perfectly prepared linguistically by Alla Samokhotova, and delivering the text with perfect diction and phenomenal sense of phrasing. The bloodcurdling finale of Act III (the streltsy in a dialogue with old Khovansky) made me all the more frustrated that Mussorgsky did not manage to write the “small piece in the auto-da-fé scene” – I think that the hymn based on a traditional Old Believers’ melody, a hymn that was never written, would have sent us into raptures in this rendition. The orchestra under Gergiev sounded too aggressive at times; I also missed a thoughtful gradation of tension – in Act V, when everything should have screamed in pain and whispered in anguish, the narrative seemed to have got stuck and did not get its colours back until the last several dozen bars of the opera.  Yet this does not change the fact that such a finely honed and simply thrilling Khovanshchina would be hard to find even in Russia. Not to mention Poland, where Mussorgsky’s masterpiece was staged only once, exactly fifty years ago at Teatr Wielki in Poznań.

However, it would be unfair to put the blame for this on the directors of opera companies in Poland – a country whose motto has for decades been “we’ll get by somehow”. Khovanshchina is an opera about great impossibility, about history leading to nowhere. About waters that became wormwood, about people who died of the waters and will never be revived. Perhaps this is why Mussorgsky never finished it.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Sir John Denis Forman, Scottish television producer, admirer of Mozart’s piano concertos and author of The Good Opera Guide, summed up La forza del destino as “the one where a marquis is killed by an exploding pistol and his daughter in monk’s costume finds her lover has murdered her brother just outside the front door of her cave”. He was basically spot on, although he omitted Acts II and III as well as the first scene of Act IV, and missed at least one corpse in the finale. Verdi always preferred pure emotions to psychological motivation of his protagonists and in the case of La forza del destino he stressed emphatically that it was an “opera of ideas”. One of these ideas is the titular destiny, which eventually triumphs over all love and dispatches all protagonists to meet their Maker. Stylistically, La forza del destino is an even greater hotchpotch than the earlier Un ballo in maschera. There is a tribute to the Rossinian opera buffa in the baritone part of Fra Melitone; there is the spirit of the Parisian opéra comique embodied by the Gypsy Preziosilla; there are crowd scenes worthy of Meyerbeer; there is a stanzaic ballad of an aristocrat posing as a student; finally, there is a classic “Italian” triangle in which the baritone stands in the way of love between the soprano and the tenor. I need not add that the dramaturgical panache of La forza del destino and its mosaic-like score pose considerable challenges to the performers. In order for the audience to make head or tail of all this and become moved by it to boot, we need a judicious conductor, an excellent cast and a director with extraordinary imagination.

Franz-Josef Selig (Padre Guardiano; left, with red cloak), and Michelle Bradley (Donna Leonora). Photo: Monika Rittershaus

The Frankfurt Opera has entrusted its latest production of La forza del destino to Tobias Kratzer, winner of Der Faust theatre prize for – to put it mildly – an iconoclastic staging of Götterdämmerung in Karlsruhe. The great hope of the German Regieoper is also to direct Tannhäuser for the opening of the upcoming Bayreuth Festival after last year’s debut of Yuval Sharon (Lohengrin), whose staging of Die Walküre, part of the Karlsruhe Ring, demonstrated, in my opinion, much greater skill and better sense of the theatrical magic.  Yet critics mollycoddle Kratzer, who did indeed present La forza del destino as an opera of ideas, but he focused on his on his own idée fixe rather than on conveying the composer’s intentions. The action of Francesco Maria Piave’s libretto, based on Ángel de Saavedra’s play Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (with inserts from Schiller’s Wallenstein) is stretched over time and space. Kratzer jumped at the chance and transferred the whole thing from Spain to the United States, stretching it over time from the American Civil War to the present, and replacing Verdi’s fatalism with destiny determined by American imperialism and racially motivated violence. In both instances he was way off the mark: war in La forza del destino serves as a dramaturgical embellishment, while the Marquis di Calatrava opposes the relationship between Leonora and Don Alvaro not because of the colour of the latter’s skin but because of his social status. According to the caste system of 18th-century Spain, Don Alvaro was a step or two below a “pure” español from the Old Continent. No question of mésalliance: perhaps only a slightly worse match for the Marquis’ beloved daughter, all the more so that the young man was not highly thought of in Seville.

Tanja Ariane Baumgartner (Preziosilla). Photo: Monika Rittershaus

Nevertheless, I decided to take it easy – there are few directors these days with time and willingness to delve into the complicated contexts of the opera. In any case, the beginning was promising: a scene in the Marquis’ room with a film running in the background – a stylised Gone with the Wind with a reversal of roles at that: a black Don Alvaro trying to persuade a white Donna Leonora to flee with him, while on stage we had a white Alvaro and a black Leonora. It looked as if we were in for some interesting playing with stereotypes – provided the Kratzer would be precise and consistent in his directing. He was not. Successive acts and scenes made up an overview of important events from the last 150 years of the history of the United States: sloppily thrown together, full of quotes from Kratzer’s (and other’s) earlier productions, crammed with superfluous details. And, above all, marked by the imagination of a film buff who stylises situations to make them look as if they came from The Birth of a Nation (the scene in the monastery turned into a secret Ku Klux Klan “temple”) or Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter (Act III set in – surprise, surprise – the reality of the Vietnam War) or Spike Lee’s films (the finale featuring a shooting at a motel). When it comes to the purely theatrical matter, Kratzer cannot really cope – wooden singers wander aimlessly around the stage, the humour of the character of Melitone is totally lost, and the numerous disguises and qui pro quos are completely unconvincing, occasionally even grotesque, as in Act II, when no one recognises a woman in a voluptuous Donna Leonora wearing a light-blue dress. On the other hand, there was no end to journalistic tricks – in the form of shocking photographs, quotes from speeches and allusions to front-page headlines. However, I have to do justice to the set and costume designer (Reiner Stellmeier), who provided all this chaos with a clean, lucid theatrical space arranged with modest means.

Craig Colclough (Fra Melitone) and Franz-Josef Selig (Padre Guardiano). Photo: Monika Rittershaus

Musically, the performance was much better, although Jader Bignamini’s conducting could hardly be called inspired. The version presented in Frankfurt was the original, Petersburg one, with a short introduction in lieu of an overture, a different order of some scenes and an ultra-romantic finale in which Alvaro dies as well – the otherwise precise orchestral playing and polished choruses lacked exuberant energy and panache, which under true masters of the Verdian style make it possible to avoid longueurs in the narrative. The unquestionable star of the evening was Michelle Bradley (Donna Leonora) – a very young soprano with a surprisingly dark and meaty voice, wonderfully even across the registers and with beautifully coloured bottom notes. She still lacks freedom at the top – which was most acutely felt in the “angelic” prayer “Pace, pace mio Dio!” from the final scene of the opera – and the ability to differentiate moods in this big role. But in a few years Bradley may well become one of the best Leonoras in the world. By comparison, Hovhannes Ayvazyan making his debut as Don Alvaro was just decent – a handsome voice and more or less secure intonation are not quite enough to create a convincing portrayal of an outsider torn by emotions. Of the two male protagonists much more impressive was Christopher Maltman (Don Carlo) – an experienced singer but, again, making his debut in the role, a possessor of a baritone voice that may not be very Verdian but is beautifully rounded, resonant and rich in harmonics. The velvety-voiced Franz-Josef Selig was in a class of his own in the double role of Marquis di Calatrava and Padre Guardiano. I am full of admiration for Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, who bravely overcame all the pitfalls of the role of Preziosilla – dazzling but fiendishly difficult, because it is written high and is full of uncomfortable shifts between the registers. I was disappointed by Craig Colclough, vocally insipid and not at all funny as Fra Melitone – I suspect, however, that the director is largely to blame for this state of affairs.

All in all, a musical job well done, which Tobias Kratzer’s disorderly concept, which went against the libretto and the score, did not manage to thwart. It will be interesting to see when this kind of theatre – in some respects conservative, as it meets specific expectations of the audience – will go out of date. At some point in Act III, a memorable quote was projected upstage: “Somehow this madness must cease”. I’ve always said that Martin Luther King was a very wise man.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

There is no joking around with Die Zauberflöte. At least in Germany, where every self-respecting opera house has this masterpiece in its repertoire. To date, Berliners have been able to choose among August Everding’s canonic staging with scenery alluding to Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s designs from 1816 (Staatsoper), Barrie Kosky’s madcap version in the silent film convention (Komische Oper), and Günter Krämer’s elegant and clear concept playing at the Deutsche Oper since 1991. The youngest audiences begin their education with Die Zauberflöte. Adult opera lovers treat it as one of the nation’s sanctities. Theatre directors use it to open the most important seasons. Student Benno Ohnesorg, a participant in a demonstration against the Shah of Iran’s visit, died taking a bullet from the police on 2 July 1967 in front of the Deutsche Oper building in Berlin – where Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, unaware of the tragedy in progress outside, was enjoying a performance of Die Zauberflöte.

Musicologists and theatre connoisseurs have been trying for years to solve the mystery of Mozart’s last opera – with its libretto so incoherent that at moments it barely holds together, but nonetheless captivating in the panache of its compositional genius. To make the matter even stranger, the score of Die Zauberflöte is also anything but homogeneous. The work includes everything: tragedy and buffo of the most diverse varieties, stanzaic songs and a Lutheran chorale, showpiece arias, grand choruses and masterfully-constructed ensembles. Despite its evident affinities with folk theatre and the Zauberoper convention fashionable in Vienna at the time, it is dogged by rumors that it is really a Masonic parable with a hidden message. Researchers point in vain to other sources of inspiration: chivalrous romances, Abbé Terrasson’s fantasy novel Sethos, Christoph Martin Wieland’s educational fairy tales from the Dschinnistan series. In the opinion of defenders of Mozart’s honour, the image of the composer laughing his head off at productions of the Freieshaustheater in suburban Vienna and, together with Schikaneder, writing a comedy for the enjoyment of the rabble somehow does not befit the dignity due to a masterpiece of this stature.

As a child, I was led astray. It happened at a certain artists’ house where we often went in the off-season, for my father had a laid-back attitude toward his children’s compulsory education. For lack of children my age, I filled up my time independently and made friends with the lady who ran the local library. There were only two kinds of books there: academic publications in the field of art history, and crime novels. The librarian – figuring that the former were too difficult for me – enthusiastically introduced me to the world of Sherlock Holmes stories, American noir fiction and Agatha Christie mysteries. Thanks to such an early initiation, I still have a weakness for thrillers and crime novels. This is why I have observed with growing interest the collaboration of Scottish composer Stuart McRae with Glasgow-resident writer Louise Welsh, who debuted in 2002 with a dark novel entitled The Cutting Room and quickly gained renown as a master of the psychological thriller. To date, the tandem has realized three suspense operas: the barely 15-minute Remembrance Day (2009); the one-act Ghost Patrol (2012), nominated for the Olivier prize; and an opera in four scenes entitled The Devil Inside (2016), based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp – unanimously considered one of the biggest events of the season at the Scottish Opera.

Paul Whelan (Captain Ross). Photo: James Glossop

We did not have to wait long for the next fruit of their collaboration. This time, McRae and Welsh decided to create a real opera: over two hours in length, comprised of three acts, with eight soloists and a quite sizeable orchestra. The main source of inspiration for Anthropocene – which had its world première a week ago in Glasgow – was the feature-length Danish documentary Expedition to the End of the World, directed by Daniel Dencik. The film, which is breathtaking in its imagery, tells the story of an unusual expedition to the fjords of northern Greenland. Aboard the traditional three-masted schooner were not only scientists, but also artists. Dencik recorded their conversations, which at a certain moment morphed into an amazing debate on human nature and the place of humanity in the natural environment. Welsh was fascinated, above all, by the motif of the ship as an enclosed micro-world, a peculiar miniature of societal life and the rules that govern it. The romantic sailboat was replaced by an ultra-modern research unit named ‘King’s Anthropocene’, on which a married couple of academics (Professor Prentice and her husband Charles) in quest of ice samples for research sailed in the company of the endeavour’s narcissistic sponsor Harry King; his spoiled daughter Daisy, an amateur travel photographer; a journalist and sensation-hunter named Miles; the ship’s engineer, Vasco; and Captain Ross, the ship’s commanding officer. The plot’s point of departure is a sudden break in the weather at the end of the Arctic summer. Three people who have disembarked onto the ice sheet to take samples are delayed in returning to the ship, which is consequently immobilized in the frozen fjord. The stragglers finally reach the ship and come back on board, dragging with them a huge block of ice with a human body frozen inside. At night, in a blaze of northern lights, Daisy detects some kind of motion above the surface of the ice block. Vasco crushes the block to pieces. From inside, a young woman wrapped in white breaks out in convulsions. Indubitably alive.

In the further course of the narrative, there appear Biblical threads, allusions to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Inuit mythology and several Shakespeare plays, chief among them The Tempest. The sharply-drawn characters – disoriented by the presence of the mysterious being, condemned to a long wait for rescue, or perhaps even death amid the ice – helped the creators to build tension and bring the matter to a cruel, simultaneously pessimistic finale. Before we discover that the girl – called simply Ice – is in fact a beloved daughter sacrificed by her parents to deliver their fellow countrymen from bondage to the frost, a tangle of tragic events will take place aboard the ship. The researchers will understand too late that, in freeing Ice, they have brought her sacrifice to nothing. For ‘King’s Anthropocene’ to return home, blood must again be shed. Except that Ice was once sacrificed in a feeling of love. At the heart of the new ritual will lie hatred. The ice will melt, Ice will escape from the dangerous ‘tribe’ of conquerors, and those who remain alive will await deliverance not with hope, but with fear.

Jennifer France (Ice). Photo: James Glossop

This sounds like the synopsis of a thriller script rather than an opera libretto. And the entire endeavour could have ended in catastrophe, were it not for the phenomenal collaboration of all of the artists involved. Stuart McRae is an experienced, word-sensitive composer of stage music, and an unparalleled master of orchestral colour. Each of the protagonists of Anthropocene was provided with a different vocal language: the tenor part of Harry King (the superb Mark Le Brocq) at times resembles a vivid Baroque aria; the mistrustful Captain Ross (the somewhat bland-sounding Paul Whelan) speaks in the short sentences of a character taken, as it were, straight from the ‘marine’ operas of Britten; the velvet-voiced Vasco (Anthony Gregory) in the flirtation scene with Daisy (the convincing Sarah Champion) falls into a pastiche of Elizabethan song. Ice (the phenomenal, crystal-clear and cool-timbred soprano Jennifer France) alternates between spinning out unearthly vocalises in the top register – flowing, as it were, from another dimension – and emitting short, breathy phonemes that ring with the torment of a being restored to life against her will. The warm and passionate soprano of Jeni Bern (Prentice) forms a clear contrast with the commanding baritone of Stephen Gadd in the role of her husband Charles. The character of the arrogant journalist Miles – the accidental killer of Vasco, in the finale sacrificed by Prentice – was taken on with bravado by Benedict Nelson, to whom McRae entrusted a role thick with conflicting emotions. Compared to the Scottish composer’s earlier works, the music of Anthropocene conveys the impression of being a bit more conservative, but nonetheless consistent in terms of dramaturgy: ideally balanced between modality and tonality; in the northern lights scene, brilliant in the lightness of the shimmering orchestral texture; in the final storm, crushing with its mass of ambiguous sonorities moving towards the culmination. The most beautiful fragment of the opera, however, turned out to be Ice and Prentice’s duet from the penultimate scene of Act I: a true theatrum doloris, as it were from a 21^st-century Pergolesi, full of painful tensions between dissonance and consonance, built on a background of ostinato figures in the strings and harp.

Jeni Bern (Professor Prentice). Photo: James Glossop

Unfortunately, the staging did not always keep pace with the text (which was flawlessly declaimed by the singers) or with the music as a whole, which was under the care of the dependable, as usual, Stuart Stradford. Stage director and lighting designer Matthew Richardson, who has been working with the McRae/Welsh tandem since the première of Ghost Patrol, followed an otherwise justified path to convey the boundlessness of the Arctic with large sweeps of white; in so doing, however, he lost the mystery of this inhospitable land. Polar white sparkles in a thousand shades – in Richardson’s concept, however, it brought to mind rather associations with the sterility of hospital interiors, which he did not manage to overcome even with an image of the northern lights. The individual costumes and elements of the stage design (Samal Blak) – legible in the symbolic layer and sometimes very expressive as a theatrical symbol (the ghastly dummy of a skinned seal hung up head downward; the signs marking communication routes on board the ship, in Act II replaced by streaks of blood) – are not arranged coherently in space. So it is with all the greater admiration that I found the dramatic tension of the narrative could be felt and heard even with my eyes closed – thanks to the ideal combination of word with sound, and the masterful construction of the score.

Several melodies and phrases from the libretto – especially in the role of Ice – are running through my head to this day. That ‘Father’s knife [which] screamed against the whetstone’. The final words of the departing Ice, which sound like a curse (‘You are not my tribe’). Is the Anthropocene – the time of humanity’s reign – really supposed to turn out as the final, shortest era in the history of life on Earth? It might end up that way if we do not ponder in a timely manner the pitiful fate of Doctor Frankenstein and his contemporary imitators.

Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski