Wędrówki operowe/Operatic Journeys

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

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

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

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

Oksana Lyniv. Photo: Anrea Ranzi

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

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

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

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

Albert Pesendorfer (Hagen). Photo: Andrea Ranzi

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

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

Translated by: Anna Kijak

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

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

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

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

Evan LeRoy Johnson. Photo: Serghei Gherciu

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

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

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

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

Translated by: Anna Kijak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pompeo Magno. The final scene. Photo: Clemens Manser

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

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

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

Suzanne Jerosme. Photo: Clamens Manser

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

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

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

Translated by: John Comber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Götterdämmerung. Klaus Florian Vogt. Photo: Enrico Nawrath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by: Anna Kijak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Žiga Čopi. Photo: Amir Kaufmann

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

Ensemble Explorations. Photo: Mona Wibmer

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

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

Translated by: John Comber