Wędrówki operowe/Operatic Journeys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by: Anna Kijak

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

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

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

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

George Petrou. Photo: Alciro Theodoro da Silva

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by: Anna Kijak

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

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

Photo: Petr Neubert

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

Photo: Petr Neubert

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

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

Photo: Petr Neubert

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

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

Translated by: Anna Kijak

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julietta Aleksanyan. Photo: Andreas Etter

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

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

Brett Carter. Photo: Andreas Etter

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

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

Translated by: Anna Kijak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red-Headed Man. Photo: Claus Langer

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

Noa Frenkel. Photo: Claus Langer

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

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

Translated by: Anna Kijak