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I was going to see Calixto Bieito’s legendary production in Oslo over two years ago, but my plans were thwarted by the COVID outbreak. When the pandemic subsided and the operatic life returned to a fragile normal, I tried again. My friends could not understand why I ignored fresh revivals of the Spanish iconoclast’s Carmen at other, much “trendier” opera houses, for example the Viennese Staatsoper or Paris Opera. I had my reason: although in 2018 I returned from The Queen of Spades at Operahuset with very mixed feelings – for which the fault lay primarily with the director and the otherwise superb conductor, who failed to figure out the stylistic idiom of Tchaikovsky’s late oeuvre – what prevailed in the end was the delight in the white nights and dazzling architecture of the Norwegian opera house, but, above all, the palpable, even in the adverse circumstances, enthusiasm of the artists, who approached each task with a sincerity and enthusiasm worthy of the best craftsmen.

This is rather important in this case, for Bieito’s production is almost a quarter of a century old and in most opera houses has lost the charm of its original freshness. Few people remember that at the 1999 festival in the Catalan town of Perelada it caused a true storm. The director was accused of vulgarity, of celebrating brutal sex and violence – as if everyone had forgotten that Bizet himself deliberately did not put the tragic story in inverted commas, did not clearly define the character of the protagonists, that departed from the established pattern to go astray into the dangers of realism and so outraged the Parisians with all this that they paid no attention to the mastery of the music. It is worth noting that the international operatic career of Bieito, the son of a humble railway worker, an admirer of Iberian zarzuelas and at that time newly appointed artistic director of Bilbao’s Teatro Arriaga, began precisely with Carmen. Those who know only this one among Bieito’s productions have no idea of his later creative development, which began barely a year later with the scandalising staging of Verdi’s Ballo in maschera and the opening scene featuring men with their pants down and relieving themselves on toilets with transparent walls. Those who have seen only Bieito’s most recent productions have no idea that his famous Carmen is, in fact, a model example of Regietheater from the end of last century – a production that is not so much provocative, but one that provokes the audience into thinking, trying to reach the audience’s sensibility without losing nothing of what the authors of the work wanted to say.

Carmen, Den Norske Opera, 2015. Photo: Erik Berg

A spectre of machismo hovers over Bieito’s concept. The stage – like in Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser’s production premiered two years earlier, in 1997 – literally reeks of sweat, unfulfilled male lust, female loneliness, omnipresent lasciviousness and need for ordinary human closeness. Bieito can even be forgiven for copying the corrida scene in Act 4 from the two Frenchmen – though his result is inferior. He shifts the narrative both in time and in space. The action in his Carmen takes place in post-Francoist Spain, perhaps somewhere in its overseas exclaves like Ceuta or Melilla. Everything else is like in Bizet’s work: animal desires, moral mess, all-encompassing slackness. Apart from a few characteristic props – a flagpole in Act 1, very uncool Mercedes W123 signifying the tackiness of the smuggling trade, crates of alcohol and cartons of cigarettes, electronic equipment and household goods marked with distorted but still recognisable logos of international companies – the stage is virtually empty. Bieito is very precise in presenting the relationships between the characters. Carmen is a quintessence of alluring strangeness, Don José – a dull, brutal soldier, Escamillo – a primitive male who knows how to turn his popularity in the bullring to his advantage.

The theme of bullfighting runs constantly through the production – from the pantomime in the overture, featuring Lilas Pastia, who pretends to be a prestidigitator, playing with a red handkerchief from underneath which, instead of the expected magic ball, he will show his finger in a vulgar gesture, to the symbolic presence of the “Osborne bull”, which appears in a beautiful, discreetly erotic scene at the beginning of Act 3. The advertisement for the Veterano brandy, produced by the Andalusian company Osborne and introduced into the Spanish landscape in 1957 in the form of distinctive wooden boards – which some tried to eradicate from the public space five years before the premiere of Bieito’s Carmen – also plays an important role in the introduction to Act 4. When the board with the bull collapses with a bang onto the stage, its shattered remains take part a moment later in a parody of a corrida.

Carmen, Den Norske Opera, 2017. Photo: Erik Berg

Significantly, most directors today would not dare to use the solutions that constitute the strength of Bieito’s concept. There would not be a little girl lasciviously dancing flamenco. There would be no such vivid images of sex. There would be no brutal scenes of violence requiring true film acting skills from the singers.

This is why I went to see that Carmen in Oslo, the capital of a country which knows how to distinguish stage illusion from reality. And yet I froze, when the smugglers threw Zuniga like a sack of potatoes against the body of a dilapidated Mercedes-Benz. That is why I watched the love scenes with such admiration. That is why I could not help laughing when drunken girls literally rolled out of a car outside Lilas Pastia’s tavern. This was the kind of theatre I needed and I did not even expect that following a sudden cast change I would also get a cast as starry as those in Paris or Vienna.

Carmen, Den Norske Opera, 2022. Photo: Erik Berg

Don José was sung that one evening by Charles Castronovo, known to Polish opera lovers from the Wrocław Tales of Hoffmann, a performance for which he paid with a serious case of COVID. I hasten to report that the American tenor is back in top form, impressing not only with his golden, almost baritonal voice, but also with beautiful phrasing and well though-out character concept. Ingeborg Gillebo, a singer with a soft mezzo-soprano, secure intonation-wise and perfectly suited to the title role, did not pace herself well and ran out of steam in the final duet with her former lover, played out on an empty stage. Marita Sølberg was an excellent Micaëla. She not only has a technically well-assured soprano, but can also act brilliantly. It was wonderful to hear the soubrette-like Frøy Hovland Holtbakk (Frasquita), as if taken straight out of the old Opéra-Comique, with the irresistibly funny and vocally compelling Christina Jønsi as Mercedes. There were also two revelatory performances: the phenomenal Dmitry Cheblykov as Escamillo, a young but already fully formed, slightly “grainy” baritone, impeccable both in terms of voice production and diction; and the velvety-voiced Jacob Abel Tjeldberg, making his debut as Zuniga.

In addition to the repeated praise for the chorus and the orchestra, I must express my highest admiration for Ariane Matiakh, a French conductor who fell in love with Bizet’s music at home and then got an opportunity to share that love with opera houses in Europe. It is good that she accepted Bieito’s concept and skilfully combined it with Bizet’s score: into a bitter reflection on the twilight of male gods and an uncertain hope for the dawn of female deities.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

As time goes by I get less and less surprised why I was such a passionate reader of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. I had an elder brother, who was wise, clever and knew how to handle anything, reinforcing my belief that I was stupid and couldn’t understand or learn anything. In a way he was right: I still haven’t mastered the art of not biting off more than I can chew, so when Longborough Festival Opera, after two years of pandemic-related restrictions, decided to enter the new season at full steam, I immediately set off for the Cotswolds hills. You keep coming back to your spiritual homeland despite adversities, and there were quite a few of them, given that I decided to see a performance of Siegfried precisely during the celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II’ Platinum Jubilee, which coincided with a half-term break at British schools. But simpletons from fairy tales and passionate music critics get everything right in the end. I managed to get hold of the last plane ticket, miraculously book a room in my favourite B&B and found myself again, like always, to a town from an eighteenth-century couplet, “where men are fools and women are bold, and many a wicked tale is told” – a few kilometres from a village which was once jokingly said to be aspiring to be the English Bayreuth, and which is now increasingly being hailed as a place headed by the most eminent, albeit invariably modest, Richard Wagner specialist in the world.

The plan was for LFO’s new staging of the Ring, conducted by Anthony Negus and directed by Amy Lane, to have its great finale next year. The pandemic has postponed it for at least a year, not to mention the fact that last year’s Die Walküre was presented with much reduced forces, in a semi-staged version, without overseas visitors, held back by the long quarantine in force in Britain at the time. I wrote about Das Rheingold six months before the outbreak of the pandemic and about Die Walküre – on the basis of a streamed performance generously made available by the management of Longborough Festival Opera. I went to see Siegried with hope, but, at the same time, with my head full of doubts: I make no secret of the fact that I still consider the third part of Wagner’s tetralogy to be its weakest link, inferior in both dramatic compactness and coherence of musical vision to the other three parts of the Ring: the brilliant reinterpretation of satyr drama in Das Rheingold, the movingly human tragedy of Die Walküre and the sumptuous grand opéra-like concept of the final Götterdämmerung. What seems to be the most problematic element of Siegfried is the eponymous protagonist, a herald of a new model of humanity, a hero from nowhere, a naive simpleton, a stupid “younger one”, who seems to embody the idea of freedom above all in his blessed incomprehension of the mechanisms governing the modern world. Wagner – at least on the surface – made a mistake in constructing this character, putting to the fore his naive, primal “fearlessness”, which, in the hands of most conductors interpreting Siegfried, leads to the highlighting of the already blatant disproportion between Siegmund’s son, raised in the forest, and Wotan’s cursed daughter Brünnhilde – poignantly “human”, compassionate and capable of true love.

Paul Carey Jones (Wanderer) and Adrian Dwyer (Mime). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Yet, as I have already mentioned, these are just appearances, resulting from the now common tendency to elevate the character of Siegfried and to seek in him a model for Walther and Parsifal – characters who acquire charisma and refinement in the course of the narrative in order to triumph in the finale as heralds of a new order. When it comes to Siegfried, the matter is much more complicated and, at the same time, tragic. This herald of inevitable change will never mature, will never – or perhaps will, shortly before his death in Götterdämmerung – become sufficiently self-aware to change anything in this world. In order to present Siegfried’s story persuasively, without trying to cover up his inherent traits – thoughtlessness, ingratitude and obtuse cruelty – one has to believe this fairy tale. Like a modern child or a nineteenth-century reader of Brothers Grimm’s tales, thinking in terms completely different from those used today, absorbed by the story of Kaspar Hauser, which reverberated throughout Europe, a mystery of his day and, at the same time, an embodiment of longing for Rousseau’s utopia of the natural man.

Negus does believe in that fairy tale, of which more in a moment. The matter is not as straightforward with Amy Lane, who – after an ambivalent reception of her Rheingold – seems to be plunging deeper and deeper into “homemade” theatre, as if not quite trusting that the audience at a Gloucestershire countryside opera house would be capable to follow, without detailed explanations, a bold metaphor. At Longborough the singers move within a confined space, which is governed by rules quite different from those of the large, state-of-the-art stages of Cardiff or London. The unnecessary accumulation of props (set designs by Rhiannon Newman Brown) works against the narrative in this case, not only distracting from what is essential in the score, but also – unintentionally – focusing the audience’s gaze on coarse details that would go unnoticed on a larger stage. Paradoxically, the further into the work, the purer the staging got, the clearer the projections (bringing to mind vague but probably correct associations with the Ossianic landscapes from Gottfried Keller’s 1845 Green Henry, an autobiographical novel of a failed painter who had problems with distinguishing between reality and his own ideas), and the darker the finale, which only in the last scene shone with the illusory light of fulfilled love.

Bradley Daley (Siegfried). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The stage movement, however, followed in every detail the dazzling musical vision of Negus, who – as I have said – not only believes in this fairy tale about a boy who went out into the world to learn to be afraid, but also, as is his custom, turns it into a whole where no tacking can be heard between the individual scenes, where the orchestra does not accompany, but takes turns in picking up the singing of the soloists or in tossing them a melody, on the basis of which they develop their own story, where everything pulsates like a living organism, talks in its own voice, demands the listener’s attention to the tiniest, often overlooked details in the texture. Negus’ interpretations have this uncanny quality of being able both to appeal to the novice Wagnerians and to persuade the seasoned pundits to explore the details of past performances – and leave them convinced that LFO’s music director is perhaps the only living conductor who manages to get to the heart of Wagner’s intentions, despite the recent attempts to present his music with period instruments and historical performance practices.

This is evidenced by the very choice of the soloists, headed by the Australian tenor Bradley Daley in the title role. Daley has a voice that is not very noble in its timbre, not very nuanced, but in this it is in some primaeval, even seductive way refreshing and reliable. His singing is clearly marked by childlike freedom, unbridled determination of a feral orphan from the forest who finds fear not where he expected it, and before he does, he discovers a completely different emotion neglected by most conductors – sympathy for Fafner, a “collateral” victim, as it were, of his true aspirations. The role of the giant turned dragon was quite finely played by Simon Wilding, who had become known as Fafner already in Das Rheingold. Among the remaining members of the cast from three years ago, the one that made the biggest impression on me was Adrian Dwyer (Mime), an artist endowed with a bright and, at the same time, meaty tenor, technically well-assured, never falling into a caricature of this altogether tragic figure. Though perhaps he was not as expressive as some previous performers of the role, above all the late lamented Erwin Wohlfahrt, known from, for example, Karl Böhm’s legendary interpretation at the 1967 Bayreuth Festival. Mark Stone as Alberich was slightly less impressive than before – although it has to be said that in Siegfried his role is less prominent than in Das Rheingold, which is reflected not only in the dramaturgy of this part of the tetralogy, but also in the score itself. As Erda, Mae Heydorn capitalised on her past success – however, she is more of a mezzo-soprano than contralto, which could be heard at times in her not very dense lower register. A magnificent Wanderer came from Paul Carey Jones, whose musicality and sensibility I had admired already in Die Walküre, yet it was only now that I could fully appreciate the assets of his velvety bass-baritone. Separate praise is due to the young Colombian singer Julieth Lozano in the part of Woodbird, at last sung with a sensuous soprano sparkling with colours, at last portrayed as an erotic “arouser” of Siegfried – certainly in accordance with the intention of the composer, who entrusted the role in Bayreuth to Marie Haupt, a pupil of Pauline Viardot and performer of Venus in Tannhäuser on numerous occasions. Lee Bisset (Brünnhilde), who was phenomenal in her acting, struggled at times to control the wide vibrato in her dense, gorgeous and truly dramatic soprano – I hope that the problem will pass, because I’m really looking forward to hearing her in the final part of the Longborough Ring.

Lee Bisset (Brünnhilde) and Bradley Daley. Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

I have to complement the already-mentioned assets of Negus’ interpretation with a description of two revelations. First of all, a breathtaking “Verfluchtes Licht!” episode from Act I featuring Mime – a wild feast of lights and flames, just as emphatic as in Karajan’s famous 1969 recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, but much more vivid and three-dimensional: the first episode in this performance that made me believe in the fairy tale and immerse myself completely in Wagner’s mythical reality. The other revelation, perhaps even more overwhelming, was Siegfried’s famous song of the melting and reforging of Nothung (“Nothung! Nothung! Neidliches Schwert!”), for the first time in decades performed in accordance with the composer’s original instructions (“Kräftig, doch nicht zu schnell”, “Schwer und kräftig, nicht zu schnell”). Nothung’s rebirth was finally given proper weight – thanks to wise collaboration between the singer and the knowledgeable conductor. I need not even mention the ecstatic finale of Act III, in which Brünnhilde bids farewell to the old order of things and throws herself into the arms of her long-awaited lover. Negus has already proved many times that he is able to control tension until the very last bar, which reverberates, fades away and rouses the audience to a frenetic ovation.

I will repeat the words of the simpleton from Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale: I finally know what fear is. Most importantly, however, in Longborough I also got to know what love and compassion is.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

The occasional tourists who stray off the main route and reach Monieux in the Provençal department of Vaucluse are not likely to spend more than a few hours there. Having seen the vestiges of old fortifications and guard tower, having visited the Romanesque church of Saint-Pierre, and ventured into some picturesque backstreets – they will proceed on their way, possibly carrying off a pouch of lavender, a piece of sheep’s cheese, or a jar of honey from a local apiary in their rucksacks. There is plenty more to see in the area, from the Nesque River gorges to the soaring limestone peak of Mont Ventoux, towering above the entire delta of the Rhône. A writer, however, will look at Monieux with a different eye, especially once he has taken the fateful decision to settle there. Stefan Hertmans (for he is meant here), also known in Poland for, among others, his daring novel War and Turpentine, resolved to settle into the local community, to develop an intimate relation with the landscape, get a feel for the flavours of sun-scorched rosemary and thyme, and hearken to the voices of the past. Local legends and neighbours’ tales inspired him to explore by himself. With time, this became his creative obsession. Hertmans began to see ghosts in the waking state. He gave them names and realised the meanings of their journey. Rummaging through sources and supported by his own imagination, he reconstructed the complicated life story of a woman who had reportedly lived in that commune a thousand years before. This led to the publication, three years after War and Turpentine, of his next book, De bekeerlinge (2016), which soon came out in English as The Convert.

The book is neither a fictionalized documentary nor a historical novel. Hertmans’ narrative unfolds on several planes – temporal, spatial, and emotional. It takes us back to a time when, after a long period of relatively peaceful co-existence between Jews and Christians, something began to go wrong. It was the time of the first separate settlements, originally built on the initiative of both communities; the time of the early expulsions, and of massacres of the Jewish population in the years of the first and only successful crusade. The author remains in the present, recounting – in the convention of a meta-story – his own effort to come to grips with the town’s past and his countless attempts to solve its mystery. These two layers are bound by the surprisingly durable mortar of sensations and sensory experience. Descriptions of unimaginable suffering appear side by side with poetic images of beauty, while life smoothly passes into death, and vice versa. The world has not changed in the last thousand years; this is bad news. A pretext will always be found to crush the Other like a bug and to deprive him or her of their humanity. The world has not changed in the last thousand years; this is good news. Burnt down and gutted, it keeps arising from the ashes, and invariably it smells of thyme and honey, restoring, be it for a brief moment, the lost hope for a better tomorrow.

Details no longer count in this story. Hertmans makes no effort to conceal that he based his tale of the eponymous convert on flimsy evidence. Most researchers reject Norman Golb’s thesis that the toponym MNYW (appearing in one of the documents found in the Cairo Genizah, the storeroom in which worn-out or no longer used text from the Ben Ezra Synagogue were “buried”) refers to Monieux, in its medieval spelling as Moniou. There is much to indicate that this one of the ghastliest massacres of the Jews during the First Crusade took place in a completely different location, most likely in Spain. We have no way to relate these Cairo manuscripts to the story of an anonymous convert who married Rabbi David Todros of Narbonne against her parents’ will and later, for the sake of her love, lost her husband, children, and mind. As a writer, Hertmans has done what no historian would dare to do: He bestowed an individual identity on the hapless collective victim. He called her Vigdis Adelaïs, a Christian descendant of the Norman Vikings, who was reciprocally in love with a yeshiva student at Rouen and embraced his faith, which proved to be her undoing. The names that Hertmans gave her are telling ones: Vigdis – a Norse ‘war goddess’; Hamutal – interpreted in The Convert as ‘the heat of dew’, though the Biblical associations of this Hebrew name are rather different and more patriarchal; and the Egyptian Galana, which only refers to the alien blurry blue of her eyes. He bestowed on her the fate of other women, either born Jewish or converted to Judaism – torn alive to bits and pieces, murdered in their own homes, or begging to be spared the sight of their children being slaughtered by their husbands; eventually losing their faith in God and hope in humankind.

De bekeerlinge. Lore Binon and Vincenzo Neri. Photo: Annemie Augustijns

The Flemish composer Wim Henderickx immediately sensed the operatic potential of this tale. We are told that it took him just a few days for Vigdis’ tragic story to take shape in his mind. The painstaking task of adapting the novel into a libretto was taken up by Krystian Lada. The pandemic proved to act as an unwanted and humility-inspiring ally to this project. Henderickx’s nearly three-hour-long work evolved under the strict lockdown conditions and was premiered in the first half of May at Antwerp’s Vlaamse Opera.

Though Lada had already tried his hand at libretto writing, this is apparently his first attempt at a work of such dimensions, which moreover called for a precise translation of the author’s intentions into the language of musical theatre. There are virtually no dialogues in Hertmans’ book. Its radically subjective narration had to be rarefied, stripped of the author’s commentaries, and transformed into a sequence of intimate monologues separated by snatches of prayers, rituals, and heartrendingly sad lullabies. The universal lot of Vigdis/Hamutal has been enclosed in the words of a moving ballad that returns like a refrain, bringing relief at the moments of greatest suffering. This was clad by Henderickx in a suitably timeless melody of his own (“Once upon a dream / there was a princess unseen / there was a Love unspoken / But God stood in between”). In contemporary operatic libretti, it is very rare for the audience to leave the theatre with a motif that remains so profoundly memorable to both the ear and the heart, one that smoothly carries the narration forward, releases and spins the tale in accordance with the author’s wish, defining the beginning and the end of the whole story.

Lada’s libretto, whose ragged and fragmentary character paradoxically enhances its grip on the imagination, has received a wholly appropriate musical setting from Wim Henderickx, a composer who, despite his training at the IRCAM in Paris and the Darmstadt Summer Courses, has boldly followed his own path, primarily inspired by the Hindu raga and the distinctive rhythmic patterns of traditional African music. It is indeed a rare phenomenon for a Western composer so skilfully to incorporate instruments from other musical cultures into the texture of a large orchestra (efficiently conducted here by Koen Kessels). These instruments are the Arabian oud, the Middle-Eastern zither called qanun, and, most prominently, the double-reed duduk, sobbing in the voice of all the victims of the great Armenian genocide under the Ottoman empire.

De bekeerlinge. Lore Binon (centre). Photo: Annemie Augustijns

Hendericxs is equally skilful at managing the orchestra as he is at the use of human voices, both in the solo and choral parts. Casting the Belgian soprano Lore Binon in the role of Vigdis was an excellent idea. Her pure, fleshy, and richly expressive voice, well tested not only in Baroque music but also in art song repertoire and in the works of Schönberg and Mahler – proved an exceptionally accomplished vehicle to convey the ‘otherness’ of this tragic figure lost in the melting pot of cultures. Vincenzo Neri was her worthy partner in his fourfold role as David, Shipowner, merchant Embriachi, and Commander. His soft, beautifully rounded baritone is coupled with an excellent stage presence. The very young velvet-voiced South African baritone Luvuyo Mbundu truly shone as Rabbi Obadiah. The fine acting and great vocal ability of Spanish tenor Daniel Arnaldos likewise deserves a kind mention, particularly in the part of Pope Urban II. There were virtually no weak points in the cast, except for the otherwise outstanding Sephardic singer Françoise Atlan, for whom the burden of four hard, fully operatic parts that the Convert composer entrusted her with proved a bit too much. The choirs deserve separate praise, especially the members of the amateur community ensemble Stadskoor Madam Fortuna.

De bekeerlinge. Lore Binon with her doll double. Photo: Annemie Augustijns

Wim Henderickx’s De bekeerlinge is a work accessible to the ear, but also extremely skilfully composed, demonstrating a great sense of orchestral colour and fine balance between the stage and the pit. As for the few long-drawn-out bits, the director Hans Op de Beeck turns out to be the one to blame. He is an eminent visual artist, but a rather less competent director, especially in the opera. The idea of limiting nearly all the stage design to splendidly painted horizons moved by means of hand-operated machinery visible on the stage would have been much more successful had he not ordered that each of the eleven scenes be preceded by a compulsive and fundamentally redundant change of scenery. The other stage events, apart from the shocking episode of raping Vigdis’ doll double, seemed superfluous and not very well thought out.

At a meeting before the premiere Stefan Hertmans spoke with approval about the reduction of the novel’s material. He also appreciated the idea of having the Jewish Kaddish heard in the final scene, after the tormented Vigdis’ death in the ruins of the Moniou synagogue. Frequently wrongly identified with a prayer for the dead, the Kaddish is, after all, a prayer for life, the most important part of collective devotion in Judaism, and a hymn of praise for God present in the energy of all the departed ones. This world will come back to life: in the fragrances of Rouen, the flavour of Provençal lavender, and the golden brilliance of Egyptian oases. Only why so much suffering, and so little love? Why such an ocean of contempt? And what is the point of converting if there is no one up there to listen?

Translated by: Tomasz Zymer

As Javier Marías once said, Madrid seems to be in a hurry to say everything. My visits to the Spanish capital have always been very brief. This time I spent nearly a week there, in the company of friends who know the city inside out – and yet Madrid kept nudging me, showed me unknown backstreets, had me lost in the crowd at El Rastro, gorge on snails in a thick broth of Spanish ham and chorizo, and absorb the fragrance of the roses in full bloom in the Retiro park. Obviously, Madrid would not have been itself, if it had not remained me even before my departure to take a look at the April repertoire of Teatro Real. In the end I chose two performances – less and more obvious – not expecting, however, that both would turn out to be a source of surprises and give me plenty of food for thought.

The Catalan ensemble Agrupación Señor Serrano, which combines in its productions elements of performance, dance, video art and interactive stage actions, has appeared many times in Poland, for example at Konfrontacje Teatralne in Lublin or Kontrapunkt Festival in Szczecin. The Teatro de La Abadía, where its latest venture, Extinción, was premiered, was talked about in Poland in 2010, in connection with the premiere of Beckett’s Endgame directed by Krystian Lupa (with music by Paweł Szymański) – a production in which Hamm was played by no less a figure than José Luis Gómez, for me a memorable Luis from Saura’s Blindfolded Eyes, while younger viewers may remember his performance in Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In. It was Gómez, who in 1995 established this theatrical laboratory, as it were – in the chapel and assembly hall of a former boarding school for girls, a complex constructed in the 1940s in the late art déco style – and still tirelessly keeps an eye on all its initiatives.

Extinción. Marcel Borràs. Photo: Teatro de La Abadía

The Señor Serrano group has for years been exploring the theme of increasing destruction of the natural environment, combined with a tragedy for humanity, inevitable in the face of this catastrophe. This time, however, the group decided to couple this vision with the music of a Catalan Benedictine monk, Joan Cererols, performed live by members of the Teatro Real chorus and instrumentalists of the Nereydas ensemble conducted by Javier Ulises Illán. The artists chose two masses by Cererols, popularised in the Iberian world by the memorable recordings of La Capella Reial de Catalunya conducted by Jordi Savall: Missa de Batalla, commemorating the victory of the Spanish army and regaining of control over Naples in 1648, after the independent Neapolitan Republic episode, which lasted less than a year; and the slightly later Missa pro defunctis, dedicated to the victims of a plague epidemic, which decimated the population of Barcelona in the 1650s.

As usual, Àlex Serrano and Pau Palacios – the director and dramaturg of Extinción – abandoned a coherent linear narrative in favour of free-flowing digressions. From the conquistador Francisco de Orellan’s expedition to find the legendary land of El Dorado to the illegal – on account of a civil war – exploitation of the Congolese deposits of coltan, this modern “gold”, needed to produce smartphones, among other things. From reflections of philosophers and physicians on the seat of the human soul to dilemmas associated with artificial intelligence. Everything intertwines and intermingles as if in a dream: a hand immersed in the black soil of the Amazon forest fishes out a mobile phone, a hand immersed in the body of a dead human releases liquid gold from his guts. Destructive fanaticism goes hand in hand with an orgy of consumerism. All these images, generated on site with the help of three performers – Carlota Grau, Marcel Borràs and Serrano himself – transformed and projected on a screen placed upstage, reminded me vaguely of Rodrigo García’s scandalising Golgota Picnic . Unlike most of my Polish colleagues I saw that production live. I was not outraged, but was left with a feeling that somebody was reinventing the wheel. I had a similar impression when watching Extinción – at times vivid, but more often getting bogged down in a chaos of confused associations, unnecessarily revealing the “behind the scenes” at the expense of the magic of the theatre. I felt that magic only in the finale, in the perverse scene of the redemption of humanity by the sacrifice of its consumeristic madness. The convulsive dance to the sounds of the Agnus Dei from Missa de Batalla (phenomenal Carlota Grau) took place in a shower of fresh popcorn pouring from hot “thuribles” hanging above the stage. Memories of Golgota Picnic were revived again: the buttery aroma of García’s buns symbolising excessive feeding of the multitude blended for me with the buttery aroma of popcorn – the incense in the twenty-first-century temple of universal excess. The metaphor may not be revelatory, but it is finally clear.

Extinción. Carlota Grau in the final scene. Photo: Teatro de La Abadía

Unfortunately, apart from this one exception theatrical actions did not go hand in hand with the narrative of Cererols’ mass. This is partly the fault of the overall concept, pushing the musicians to the background with regard to the performing artists and, above all, the performance itself. While the instrumentalists from the Nereydas ensemble were impeccable, although their subtle, stylish playing often got lost way upstage, the Teatro Real chorus members lacked either the will or the skill to get to grips with the unique idiom of the Catalan composer. Intonation was poor, there were no dynamic nuances, and the insecure and often unbeautiful singing smothered both the intricacies of the polychoral texture of Missa de Batalla and the rough asceticism of Missa pro defunctis, in which Cererols consciously alludes to the late Renaissance rhetoric of Tomás Luis de Victoria’s works.

Thus I treated Extincion  as an interesting, though not fully successful performative experiment, pinning more hopes on the creative team and performers of The Marriage of Figaro on Teatro Real’s main stage. Initially, this was supposed to be the premiere of a new directorial vision of Lotte de Beer in a co-production with the Aix-en-Provence Festival, but as early as last December a decision was made to replace de Beer’s controversial and, to put it mildly, not very successful staging with a revival of Claus Guth’s notorious 2006 production. Guth’s Salzburg staging once generated extreme controversy and was treated by many critics as an attempt on Mozart’s masterpiece. Refreshed years later, it leads to the conclusion that an attempt on a sacred interpretative tradition was made at the time not so much by the director, but the conductor, Nikolaus Harnoncourt. It was Harnoncourt who, with Guth’s considerable help, extracted from the score of The Marriage of Figaro unexpected tones of grotesque and tragedy, supported by expressive acting on the part of the singers and clear, ascetic sets designed by Christian Schmidt.

The Marriage of Figaro. André Schouen (Count Almaviva), and Uli Kirsch (Angel). Photo: Javier del Real

In the Madrid production the focus again shifted a little and the whole, especially when compared with Guth’s later stagings in Vienna and Frankfurt, seemed almost like a classical approach, largely in keeping with the authors’ intentions. Only now did I appreciate the aptness of the mirror-like division of the stage space into the “downstairs” part; the “upstairs”, inaccessible to the lowly mortals, where only those closest to the count and countess were allowed; and the ambiguous mezzanine, a place of actions going beyond the convention, actions the nature of which we can only guess. Once again I was stunned with admiration at the precision of the Countess and Count’s silent quarrel to the accompaniment of the wedding march in Act 3. I was much more sympathetic this time to the introduction of the additional character of Angel (Uli Kirsch), who in Guth’s concept is not only a defeated Cupid but also an alter ego of the naïve, hormonally tormented Cherubino.

The production does have its weaknesses, but their number is small enough not to disrupt the flow of the narrative and to provoke the audience not only to reflect, but also to burst out laughing. I find Ivor Bolton’s approach to the whole more acceptable in some respects than Harnoncourt’s dark interpretation. Bolton conducts The Marriage of Figaro with an assured hand, avoids too sharp contrasts in tempi, but strongly emphasises expression instead, bringing out from the texture plenty of underappreciated details (like the splendidly accented grace notes in the bassoons and oboes in the wedding march). He is also helpful to the singers, who were truly excellent in the first cast I heard – led by Julie Fuchs (Susanna), dazzling in her acting and extraordinarily musical, a singer with an agile soprano with a beautiful silvery timbre. Marie José Moreno (Countess) was not much inferior to her in terms of the beauty of her voice, and even surpassed her with the power of expression and maturity of interpretation in the melancholic aria “Dove sono”. It’s been a long time since there were two baritones so cleverly juxtaposed in the leading male roles: one robust, impetuous, and tinged with a distinctive plebeian note (Vito Priante as Figaro), and the other noble, velvety, irresistibly seductive in his singing (André Schouen as the Count). Although Rachael Wilson’s light, silky, well-assured mezzo-soprano sounded too feminine for the trouser role of Cherubino, the singer masked this shortcoming with brilliant acting. Particularly memorable performances in the supporting roles came from Monica Baccelli, an expressive singer with an extraordinary sense of comedy, as Marcellina and Christophe Mortagne, an excellent French character tenor, as Basilio.

The Marriage of Figaro, Act 3. Photo: Javier del Real

It’s a strange feeling, travelling across the operatic world these days. Every sound, every gesture and every image is absorbed, analysed and contemplated: just in case the current journey should turn out to be the last. And then all this is described. With passion but also out of a sense of duty, because – to refer to Marías again – the world depends on its storytellers. Also the enchanted world of opera.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

The Finnish National Opera has been really lucky. After several good years under the baton of Patrick Fournillier, an able and reliable conductor, who took up the post of Artistic Director of Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera in the 2020/21 season, it placed its orchestra in the hands of a musical visionary, and one who was present on site at that. Hannu Lintu has been collaborating with the Helsinki Opera for years, or in any case since he took charge, in 2013, of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, now based in the new Helsingin musiikkitalo building, located halfway between the legendary Finlandia-talo designed by Alvar Aalto and the Kiasma contemporary art museum, built some twenty years later. He took up the baton as Chief Conductor of the Suomen Kansallisooppera – a few hundred metres’ walk from all the institutions mentioned above, in a park along the picturesque Töölö Bay – in January in this year, shortly after the very well received revival of The Flying Dutchman, with which he made his debut at Paris’ Opéra Bastille.

It was precisely Lintu that was the main reason behind my trip to Helsinki – to see Billy Budd directed by Annilese Miskimmon, a Norwegian-Polish-Finnish co-production premiered  in Oslo in 2019. The Finnish conductor attracted my attention already with his recording of Witold Lutosławski’s Venetian Games and complete symphonies for the Ondine label with his previous orchestra. Lintu’s interpretations – from Sibelius, Rautavaara and Saariaho to his phenomenal readings of Beethoven’s, Wagner’s and Mahler’s scores – are at once disciplined and full of emotions vibrating somewhere deep inside, marked by extraordinary attention to detail and, at the same time, an ability to extract from that detail surprisingly relevant content. The other reason – in some respects just as important to me – was Peter Wedd’s debut in the role of Captain Vere, especially as in recent years I had encountered two outstanding, though radically different incarnations of this tragic character: by Alan Oke and Toby Spence. What I did not expect, however, was that through Lintu I would be gripped by a completely different scene than usual, that the conductor would use Wedd’s greatest assets to sum up, as it were, his unusual and revelatory interpretation of Britten’s masterpiece.

Billy Budd: Scene from Act 1. Photo: Tuomo Manninen

But more about this in a moment. I will start with the staging, which turned out to be as visually attractive (set designs by Annemarie Woods) and as underdeveloped in terms of directing as it had been in Oslo and Warsaw. Miskimmon chose to further emphasise the impression of the impossibility of escaping from a ship “lost on the infinite sea” by transporting Billy Budd to 1940, to a submarine involved in an operation to destroy French vessels after France’s surrender to the Third Reich. The decision proved dramatically ineffective and at times downright absurd in its effects. I still do not understand, for example, how the “cursed mist” would any way affect the accuracy of a torpedo attack. All the nautical commands with which E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier packed the libretto, and to which Britten provided a worthy musical equivalent in the score were out of place on board a submarine. Details such as the idea of having Billy hanged somewhere outside the surfaced watercraft – in the heat of naval warfare – are not even worth mentioning. Busy as she was updating the plot, Miskimmon did not have enough energy left to direct the characters. The story is somewhat of an allegory and will not tell itself – the director needs to skilfully draw the sinister, erotically charged triangle in which Captain Vere, the seemingly implacable guardian of the war order, occupies an unclear position between Claggart, inhuman in his corruption, and Budd, inhuman in his perfection, the obverse and the reverse of the same coin. A coherent tragedy, swelling like a festering ulcer, has been transformed by Miskimmon into a series of loosely connected and paradoxically static – despite the frequent running around on stage – episodes.

Jussi Merikanto (Mr. Redburn), and Juha Pikkarainen (Bosun). Photo: Tuomo Manninen

Yet musically the Finnish Billy Budd exceeded my wildest expectations. The great collective hero of the evening was the chorus, brilliantly prepared by Marge Mehilane and Marc Ozbiča. It delivered the text perfectly and at the same time responded alertly to Linto, who skilfully emphasised the relentless drive of the chorus’ music, its sometimes painful harmonic roughness and surprising richness of sound hues. A thunderous and fully deserved applause greeted Ville Rusanen in the title role – a singer endowed with a not very beautiful, but movingly “human” baritone voice, and building his character with the perceptiveness of a veritable dramatic actor. His Billy was stronger in heart than fear, stronger in instinct than the will to survive, stronger in spirit than death – a true holy fool, the only one in this predicament of war who knew how to accept the inevitable. I was a bit disappointed with Timo Olavi Riihonen, partly because of the director, who had no sensible idea how to deal with the character of Claggart. The reasons were partly objective: Riihonen’s beautiful, rounded bass had nothing demonic about it; at times it sounded good-natured even. There were practically no weak links in the supporting roles, though it is worth singling out the performance of Jussi Merikanto (Mr. Redburn), a singer with a resonant, handsome and technically well-assured baritone, who made his character credible not only through excellent acting, but above all through musical means.

Ville Rusanen (Billy Budd). Photo: Heikki Tuuli

It is time to explain the revelation announced at the beginning. Lintu, a conductor sensitive to detail and capable of reading between the lines of the score, brought out in his interpretation something that many other masters of the baton miss. It was not until the epilogue that I understood why his Billy Budd was “dirtier”, more cruel, at times even merciless in the orchestral layer, why there was so little obvious beauty in it. Peter Wedd is certainly not a classic Britten tenor; he has clearly not yet fully “grown into” the part of Captain Vere, his performance not yet sufficiently nuanced dynamically, too heavy-handed in the upper register. However, as is his wont, Wedd saved his best for the final monologue – a divine cantilena, ethereal piani, a forte in which the despair of the whole world could be heard. The structure of the work suggests that towards the end Vere tries to give himself an answer to the question that troubled him in the opening monologue. Hannu Lintu makes it very clear that he will not find this answer. In his interpretation the Captain only seemingly achieves peace of mind, in vain seeking support in the orchestra, which constantly deceives him, fails to provide him with a harmonic basis, and every now and then drowns out his thoughts with sounds of war (the relentless beats of the timpani and the bass drum are still ringing in my ears). In the last phrase, the line “centuries ago, when I, Edward Fairfax Vere, commanded the Indomitable”, the Captain gives up in this unequal struggle. The orchestra dies out, Vere’s voice tails off, everything breaks up into nothingness.

I have never heard such a harrowing ending of Billy Budd. And it’s been a long time since I saw such a moved audience. That eerie, disintegrated phrase carried a warning that was clear to all. May it never come true.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

When about two weeks ago I was flying to Berlin via a roundabout route, black clouds of war were already gathering over Europe. That day, however, my attention was completely focused on the storm Eunice and on the fear that it might thwart my reviewing plans. I got to Berlin safely and before going to the first performance I had a discussion with my Berlin friends, during which we made various predictions – all of them wrong, as it later turned out – about the course of events beyond Poland’s eastern border. Unease was growing, but for the time being I was looking forward to two Wagner performances at the Deutsche Oper, performances of productions which had been in the company’s repertoire for quite some time, but which, strangely enough, I had not had the opportunity to see before.

Both originated at a unique moment in the company’s history. Tannhäuser, directed by Kirsten Harms, was premiered in 2008, more or less half way through her management of the company – two years after the famous scandal with the suspension of Hans Neuenfels’ staging of Idomeneo, following signals from the police and the Home Office that the epilogue added by Neuenfels and featuring the severed heads of Poseidon, Buddha, Christ and Mohammed could provoke serious unrest in the city. As a result of this unprecedented act of censorship the theatre came under severe criticism, which soon, however, abated following a change of the fateful decision and Harms’ numerous subsequent achievements as a manager and artist. During her tenure the Deutsche Oper saw both the attendance and its income rise, with the company’s repertoire expanding to include a number of musical rarities and works of composers who had been silenced by history. After Harms’ departure the company experienced an interregnum of more than a year, the final phase of which was marked by the premiere of Lohengrin in April 2012, shortly before Dietmar Schwarz took over as General Manager. The production was directed by Kasper Holten, the newly appointed Director of Opera at the Royal Opera House in London.

Tannhäuser, Act 2. Photo: Bettina Stöß

In the first few seasons of its stage existence it was Harms’ Tannhäuser that received much more favourable reviews. Holten’s Lohengrin had to face comparisons with the legend of Götz Friedrich’s 1990 concept – so beloved by the Berlin audience – and lost the first round. However, time proved kinder to Lohengrin, a production not without some faults, but nevertheless coherent and drawing attention to unsettling aspects of the story – perhaps unjustly neglected by the earlier directors.

The minimalistic and fairly conventional Tannhäuser offends primarily by its lack of any axis keeping the narrative together. The only trope that seems to lead anywhere – in line with the composer’s intention, it has to be said – is the combination of the figure of Venus and Elisabeth into one, also one singer. Yet in Harms’ interpretation nothing comes out of this. The conflict is not resolved, the scales do not turn the favour of either side of the female nature; even in the finale it remains unclear whose image Tannhäuser has in mind as he is dying and whether he is dying in the first place – perhaps he is just waking up from nightmares tormenting both the protagonist and the audience in equal measure. The whole poetry of theatre disappears after the first scene, in which an armour-clad supernumerary plunges slowly into the abyss of Venus’ grotto. After that there are only images, some spectacular (sets, lighting and costumes by Bernd Damovsky), but, to put it mildly, loosely linked to the action, the libretto and the score. Why is the pilgrims’ chorus in Act I roasting in hell, surrounded by a pack of demons straight from Gustave Doré’s illustrations to Milton’s Paradise Lost? Why in Act III do all the pilgrims end up in a field hospital, as if the pilgrimage to Rome has been clearly harmful to them? Why does the song contest in Act II look like a cross between Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky and animated miniatures from the Codex Manesse? I am not judging the ideas in themselves – the could have certainly been enacted on stage brilliantly, if only the director had had any sense of humour and distance from the matter of the work. I also have the impression that the technical team were not convinced by Harms’ concept either. They did not make sure that the horse dummies pulled on wheels would not drown out the music in the hunting scene, nor did they intervene when one of the dozens of inflatable knights suspended from the flies began to swing jauntily from right to left and back again.

Tannhäuser, Act 3. Photo: Bettina Stöß

The minimalism of Holten’s Lohengrin from the very beginning was intended to serve a purpose; it emphasises all the more the spectacular nature of key scenes in the drama, including the appearance of the Swan Knight and his subsequent marriage to Elsa. This is a grim, dark production about war – not about Henry the Fowler’s expedition against the Hungarians, but about war as such, always the same, suggested by Steffen Aarfing’s costumes and sets, which refer equally to the fairy-tale Middle Ages and to the Dano-Prussian War of 1864 as well as earlier conflicts in northern Europe. It is also a production about wartime manipulation, a desperate search for a leader whom the oppressed people welcome with open arms: even if he comes from nowhere, even if he sets absurd conditions and treats everyone instrumentally, including Elsa of Brabant, who is waiting for a mysterious saviour. Instead of providing easy answers to the questions in this crime story with Gottfried in the background, Holten piles up even more mysteries. He leaves us uncertain as to whose victim Elsa’s brother was and whether he indeed was transformed into a swan. Lohengrin himself is a usurper swan, parading with wings attached to his back, a false archangel saviour, who in the Die Gralserzählung frantically turns the pages, as if until the last moment he could not decide with which version of the events to beguile his naive followers. The production features several memorable images: the “police-style” outline of a corpse, which from the very first scenes suggests that Gottfried will never return, the marital bed, which turns out to be a funeral catafalque, the sheet, unstained by traces of the wedding night, which in Act III will cover Telramund’s corpse. Again, no one will die in the finale, but shortly before the curtain comes down the chorus will stop Lohengrin, not letting him leave for an imaginary Monsalvat. We do not know what will happen next – except for a clear suggestion that the war machine has been operating in the same manner from times immemorial.

Lohengrin, Act 1. Photo: Bettina Stöß

Ironically, in musical terms the two productions stood in contrast with the stage concept. The moving Lohengrin, heavy-handed by the conductor Donald Runnicles, devoid of energy and with climaxes coming in the least expected moments in the score, was disappointing vocally as well. David Butt Philip, clearly indisposed that day, may have tackled the eponymous role too early. It is not enough to have a strong, handsome tenor with baritone hues to convey the multi-layered nature of the character and, above all, wisely pace yourself over the three treacherous acts of the opera. Jennifer Davis (Else), a singer with an otherwise pretty soprano, was flat almost throughout the entire evening; Ain Anger’s bass is too common and not very rich for the role of Henry; Iréne Theorin (Ortrud) too often had to make up for the deficiencies of her tired voice with overacting. The only bright point in the cast was Jordan Shanahan as Telramund – his full, healthy baritone was very much up to the demands of this truly tragic role: a man prepared to resort to any meanness to defend the time-honoured ancestral rules.

On the other hand the theatrically bland, at time grotesque Tannhäuser captivated the audience with the music – colourful, passionate and lively under the baton of a young Australian, Nicholas Carter. Stephen Gould may not be a singer who enchants with the power of his expression, but he has mastered the title role right down to the tiniest details and can still sing it thoughtfully with a technically-assured voice, just as the composer intended. Camilla Nylund, an artist with a luminous and excellently placed soprano, brilliantly sung the double role of Venus and Elisabeth. Markus Brück, an heir of the good old German school of baritone singing, proved to be one of the best Wolframs I had heard in recent years. Another singer deserving appreciation is Ante Jerkunica, whose warm, slightly “grainy” bass infused the role of Landgrave Hermann with plenty of tenderness and lyricism.

Lohengrin, Act 2. Photo: Markus Lieberenz

And yet it is Lohengrin that became embedded in my memory after this short, wind- and rain-lashed visit to Berlin. I came back to Poland to enjoy some sun. Three days later a war started: a war like the one in the vision presented by Holten, who in some prophetic inspiration revealed its less obvious mechanisms in the Berlin production. But even he may not have predicted that on the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine Lohengrin would return to Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre after an absence of one hundred years. With a less ambiguous message than in Holten’s vision, I’m afraid. Over there they still trust knights who come from nowhere.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Setting out on my journey back from Basel to Warsaw, I stopped in a little square in front of the hotel, lured by the sight of a glass-fronted cabinet with needless books. I expected to find there some easy read for the long journey with a change in Frankfurt; instead, much to my surprise I took off the shelf an edition of Sławomir Mrożek’s Ucieczka na południe (Escape to the South) – slightly yellowed, but otherwise untouched by time. Fate writes the best libretti for my operatic journeys. A severe winter approaches and I’m coming back from an escape to the south, to a city only five degrees of latitude farther north, where I will again try to find something that would free me from “a feeling of emptiness”. It would be interesting to see whether in six months, when I set off as usual on a tour of niche festivals, I’ll come across an abandoned copy of Mrożek’s Maleńkie lato (Little Summer).

What makes all this even more bizarre is the fact that I went to Basel – a city on the Rhine, between Switzerland, Germany and France – to see Il ritono d’Ulisse in patria. A production adapted and directed by Krystian Lada, delayed like Odysseus’ return – the March premiere was wiped out by the previous wave of the pandemic. An original vision of a supposedly flawed opera, Monteverdi’s “ugly duckling”, which hatches laboriously out of a great confusion of styles and only in the course of the narrative does it begin to reveal clearly contrasted emotions and moods, and, above all, wonderful portrayals of the two main characters. I had been dying of curiosity since spring, because Lada decided to remove the figure of Ulisse from the original structure, admitting openly that he intended to draw the audience into a performance, a “participatory project” based on Monteverdi’s work, presented deliberately not on the vast state of the Opera House, but in the adjacent Schauspielhaus. Lada replaced the eponymous King of Ithaca with a collective protagonist, a figure of alienness, an archetype filtered through the experience of reading Joyce, Hauptmann and Kazantzakis, reflected in the mirror of contemporary problems of refugees and migrants. He brought on stage eight “men of Basel”, strangers blending in with the local community. The musical portrait of Ulisse was replaced with their silence, snatches of utterances, body languages, electronics discreetly linking the various episodes.

Katarina Bradić (Penelope). Photo: Judith Schlosser

What makes Lada different from most young opera directors today is the fact that, having taken a work apart, he is able to put it together again – sometimes into a surprising whole, but without losing or spoiling anything along the way. It seems to me that in the pre-premiere talks he put too much emphasis on the idea of staging a “Ulisse without Ulisse”. The biggest asset of his concept is his masterful highlighting of a narrative element that has been there in Il Ritorno from the very beginning and is often missed by both directors and performers. The incredible convergence of dramaturgical patterns in Monteverdi’s operas and Shakespeare’s late plays has been pointed out by John Eliot Gardiner, among others. It is incredible, because it is highly unlikely that Monteverdi ever encountered Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Yet the works of the two men mirror each other, as if by some kind of cultural convergence: the tension in them stems from the contrast of quickly alternating tragic and ironic scenes triggering tears of laughter and sincere emotion. Lada condensed the opera’s three acts into an uninterrupted action, roughly two hours long, directed like an operatic Tempest or Winter’s Tale, fast flowing, coherent and engaging. And although his adaptation went very far – which he did not hide from the very beginning – he did not do any harm to Monteverdi, and at times even helped the myth by giving it a more human form. The poignant finale, in which Penelope cries “Or si, ti riconosco” at the sight of each of the eight strangers, makes me think of an alternative version of the myth, relegated to oblivion for millennia, in which the queen, consumed by longing and broken by loneliness, gives herself to all the suitors one by one.

The Basel production is full of other tropes and perfectly enacted episodes, which show that Lada understands the mechanism of the operatic form, that he knows how myth works, and that he is able to relate all this to the present – without falling into literality and banality. Having a limited number of singers at his disposal, he gives each of them several roles – not always in accordance with the traditional performance practice, following above all the logic of a focused narrative. Thus Penelope is also Human Frailty, the gods are transformed into suitors, the allegories of Time, Fortune and Love act as links between the earth and Olympus. The director offers us an Epicurean interpretation of the myth of the great journey and even greater longing. The beautiful, imperious, self-absorbed gods decide to play humans and fail in their confrontation with humanity: mortal, flawed and yet stubbornly seeking happiness that comes even if only from the absence of suffering. The most moving character is Eumete, naive four-eyes in overalls, ready to help all the Odysseuses of this world. His opposite is Iro – burning with hatred and aiming a knapsack sprayer at the strangers as if they were bedbugs. The central figure in the narrative is Penelope, an indomitable woman, faithful not only to her lost husband, but also to herself. Her love for Ulisse gives her strength and teaches her compassion. It helps her satisfy her own body, refuse love to the usurpers and give it to those who really needed it.

Katarina Bradić, Théo Imart (Giunone/Anfinomo/L’Amore), Alex Rosen (Nettuno/Antinoo/Il Tempo) and Rolf Romei (Giove/Pisandro/La Fortuna). Photo: Judith Schlosser

Drawing a preliminary sketch of characters on an open stage, before the first sounds of the music are heard is slowly beginning to become a distinctive feature of Lada’s productions. Radiant, elaborately coiffed gods, covering up deficiencies of their looks with grotesque jockstraps and corsets (excellent costumes by Bente Rolandsdotter), silently circulate among props, aiming from a bow at a man-shaped target signed with the name of Ulisse. In between their archery displays, they step onto the proscenium and gesticulate vigorously. Only after a while does the audience, snuggling down in their seats, realise that the deities control the traffic in the auditorium. Then with equal relish they “pull” the instrumentalists into the orchestra pit and give the signal for the story to begin.

The constant twists and turns of the narrative are accompanied by seamless changes of scenery (Didzis Jaunzems), consisting of a few simple ladders, boxes, scaffoldings and platforms, precisely controlled by the technical staff, the extras and the singers. The minimalistic nature of the sets focuses the audience’s attention all the more effectively on the psychology of the protagonists and the multifaceted story, which reaches its dramatic climax in the scene of the suitors’ trial. Penelope stands in the dust of the earth like a true shaman, covered by a dirty, decaying cloak of her lost husband, raising a bow made of deer antlers above her head. Disguised as humans, the deities lose their power before they so much as touch Odysseus’ weapon. They bow before a mortal woman, the most faithful of the faithful, the strongest of the strong, the most tender of the tender. They leave humiliated, retreating before the nameless wanderers who, by the end, will mingle with the audience, reveal their identities and complicated stories, and find their home in Ithaca. The myth comes full circle and, at the same time, clashes with reality. After an absence of twenty years Ulysses returns in a completely different form.

“Men of Basel”. Photo: Judith Schlosser

Basel is one of the bastions of the historical performance movement, so there is nothing surprising about the technical proficiency and sense of Monteverdian style of the members of the I Musici de la Cetra ensemble, prepared by Johannes Keller and Joan Boronat Sanz. However, I did not expect that this modest, experimental production would provide me with so many vocal thrills. The expected star of the evening was Katarina Bradić as Penelope, whom I had heard four years earlier in the same role in Brussels under René Jacobs’ baton. Not only has Bradić’s contralto grown in brilliance and density in all registers since then, but Lada also uses the singer’s acting potential to the full – my heart went up to my throat already in the opening lament “L’aspettato non giunge”. The real revelation, however, was Ronan Caillet as Eumete: the French tenor, a pupil of Christoph Prégardien, impresses with his extraordinary musicality, handsome voice with a slightly baritonal tinge, and excellent acting skills. It is impossible to ignore the talent of Théo Imart, a young male soprano who played Giunone, Anfinomo and L’Amore – another living proof that the time of “disembodied” countertenors is fortunately coming to an end, with their place being taken by singers with flexible, colourful and expressive voices. Equally promising is the presence of Jamez McCorkie in the cast. Not so long ago the Basel Telemaco sang baritone roles: he has recently changed his Fach to tenor, retaining a brassy brilliance in the lower register and a quasi-soul articulation, remarkably consistent with his “black” voice. Among the other soloists, special mention should be made of Rolf Romei (Giove/Pisandro/La Fortuna) – a Basel Opera veteran, and expressive spinto tenor normally associated with quite a different repertoire; and the actor Martin Hug, who created a brilliant and vocally surprisingly competent portrayal of the pathetic Iro.

This is the kind of theatre – insightful, economical, daring – I naively dreamt of when the Polish opera world was entering the dark night of the pandemic. Perhaps I will see it one day. With this hope I returned north, to a country, where “sometimes it was so boring that the local dignitaries, having carefully drawn the curtains, would put on fake paper noses in front of their mirrors just to amuse themselves a little”.

Translated by: Anna Kijak