Wędrówki operowe/Operatic Journeys

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

During the summer holidays, when operatic life in Poland almost comes to a standstill, being limited to concert performances and one-off open-air performances, critics and music lovers are left with no choice but to pack up their suitcases and seek their fortunes elsewhere. Summer festivals in France, Germany, Austria and the United Kingdom not only take place in real theatres, but also tempt fans with interesting repertoire, presenting operas that are completely unknown in Poland or, for various reasons, are neglected. I began my holiday tour this year in England as usual. After Avner Dorman’s Wahnfried  I returned to Longborough for Pelléas et Mélisande, which had its Polish premiere at Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera (in a production that was, in fact, transferred from the Aix-en-Provence Festival), 116 years after the Paris premiere, and disappeared from the stage after five performances. From there I moved on to Grange Park Opera for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, unlikely to be staged in Poland again.

Monty Jacobs, a now forgotten German critic of English descent, wrote in 1904 of Maeterlinck’s symbolist play that “Mélisande’s love tragedy sparkles with the fullness of saturated colours and delicate transitional tones of a picture that is utter perfection”. The same can be said today of Debussy’s masterpiece, one caveat being that the composer constructed his musical image from the delicate transitional tones between light and darkness. His Pelléas et Mélisande is the first opera in history with a libretto that is not an adaptation, but the text of a play, abridged with the playwright’s permission (with what is perhaps the only but memorable original addition by the composer – Mélisande’s song “Mes longs cheveux” at the beginning of Act Three). Fidelity to the prosody and complicated meanings of the original is one of the main factors that determine the atmosphere of the score, which, according to Ernest Ansermet, exemplifies a perfect symbiosis of musical content with poetic substance. At the same time Pelléas can be called an anti-opera, as it were, a work that eludes both the convention of the form and itself. It takes place always and everywhere or never and nowhere. It evokes an overwhelming aura of fear and mystery locked in unexpected dissonances, modalisms and whole-tone scales without a tonal centre. It undulates slowly and tails off like dead water after a storm. Anyone who tries to fathom its essence will hear “ne me touchez pas” – heard in nearly every bar, not just in the famous first words of the terrified Mélisande.

Pelléas et Mélisande at LFO. Karim Sulayman (Pelléas) and Kateryna Kasper (Mélisande). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

That is why stage directors should not “touch” Pelléas et Mélisande. The land of Allemonde is governed by symbols and archetypes. Most attempts to set the work in a specific, recognisable reality fail. Fortunately, Jenny Ogilvie, the director of the Longborough production, respects the work’s programmatic anti-realism and has offered a production that is as ambiguous as it is engaging for the audience – clearly drawing on Adolphe Appia’s symbolist theatre, with clean, architectural space modified primarily by light and shadow. The stage is almost empty and from the very first images overwhelmingly dark. There is no spring, no castle or tower, no precipice flooded with water – or they are there, suggested, however, by silver foil, geometric, three-dimensional sets by Max Johns and by Peter Small’s varied lighting.

Neither is there Mélisande’s long hair, which somewhat perplexed me – until the beginning of Act Three, when the protagonist, instead of combing the locks tumbling down from the tower walls, rocked on a swing: in thick darkness illuminated by ethereal light, wearing a snow-white gown with vertical ruffles (costumes by Anisha Fields) sufficiently emphasising the “rusalka-like” aspect of her personality. This was enough to charm not only Pelléas, but the entire audience as well. And yet, despite the compelling beauty of this and other scenes, not all ideas of the lighting director proved equally convincing: at times Small used this tool too aggressively, overshadowing – excuse the pun – Ogilvie’s excellent work with the actor-singers.  A significant error, but one that does not ruin the beauty and wisdom of the production, consistently carried through to the finale, in which Mélisande’s deathbed, resembling a flower-filled glass coffin, disappears into the darkness along with Arkel hugging the newborn baby, and the only character that remains on stage is Golaud, the most tragic figure of the drama, a man who has lost everything because of a desperate belief that the “truth” will guarantee him the love of the mysterious foundling from the forest.

A beautiful production, one of the most beautiful ones I have seen at this theatre: not least because it confirmed Ansermet’s opinion concerning the symbiosis of poetry and music in this work. Anthony Negus, whom I know best for his dazzling interpretations of Wagner’s oeuvre, has managed to finally shatter the myth of Pelléas as an anti-Wagnerian opera. In his work Debussy is involved in a fierce dispute with the Bayreuth Master, though he does not question his method – rather, he tries to direct it onto a different track, cleanse it of the remnants of the Romantic aesthetics and distil it into a form more suitable for the new times. He plays with silence, rarely goes beyond mezzo forte, avoids tutti like the plague, treats leitmotifs differently, and still cannot resist using the Tristan chord as a symbol of – not just functional – ambiguity (on Mélisande’s words “je suis bien heureuse, mais je suis triste” in Act Four). What this opera has even more of than Tristan is Parsifal, a work which Debussy held in high regard and the echoes of which can still be heard the morbid sound aura of Arkel’s castle. Having at his disposal an orchestra as sensitive as ever to his every gesture, Negus brought out all these details with the meticulousness of a natural-born Wagnerite, without losing the essence of Debussy’s distinctive style or other sources of inspiration used by the composer, who similarly “deconstructed” in Pelléas the oeuvres of Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.

Nia Coleman (Yniold) and Brett Polegato (Golaud). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Most importantly, however, Negus conducted the character of Golaud precisely as intended by Debussy – who with each successive performance encouraged the first performer of the role, Hector Dufranne, to emphasise even more forcefully the intense sadness and loneliness of the jealous prince, to highlight even more strongly his regret for what he had not done and had not said. Golaud as interpreted by Brett Polegato, a singer of great sensitivity endowed with a baritone that is almost painfully beautiful, would have pleased Debussy in every way. Especially in the scene with Yniold (superbly portrayed by Nia Coleman singing with a truly “boyish” soprano), which, under Negus’ baton, turned into a real musical thriller, one of the best dramaturgically constructed depictions of psychological violence I have ever encountered in opera. What turned out to be a great casting decision was entrusting the role of Mélisande to the Ukrainian-German soprano Kateryna Kasper, who has a voice of extraordinary expressive power and a surprisingly dark timbre, marked by a peculiarly “Eastern” melancholy, which makes her an ideal performer of this mysterious creature. Vocally, she was not matched by Karim Sulayman, a very musical singer who knows how to handle the French phrase stylishly, but whose tenor is decidedly too light and insufficiently developed at the bottom to cope with the demands of the role of Pelléas. Julian Close, the memorable Hunding and sinister Hagen from last year’s Ring, this time built a touchingly fragile character of the old Arkel. The ever-reliable Catherine Carby was excellent as Geneviève, while the Latvian-British bass-baritone Pauls Putnins was faultless in the brief roles of Doctor and Shepherd.

After the magnificent performance in Longborough, I was even more looking forward to Mazeppa at Grange Park Opera, wondering how David Pountney would resolve the dilemma of staging Tchaikovsky’s opera during the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. The libretto of Mazeppa is based on the poem Poltava, written by Pushkin a few years after the fall of the Decembrists’ uprising, when the poet had already become fully convinced of Tsar Nicholas I’s historical mission. Pushkin’s Mazeppa is neither an indomitable, though selfish, youth from Byron’s poem, not a Romantic hero from Słowacki’s later drama; instead, he is a traitor of Russia, anathematised by the Orthodox Church, a conspirator against Peter I, a heartless, cruel man and victim of senile passions. The historical hetman was no innocent – like Kochubey and most commanders and politicians from that turbulent era. Mazeppa indeed tried to marry Kochubey’s young daughter, but Kochubey thwarted his plans and sent Mariya (or Matriona) to a monastery. A few years later Kochubey indeed was condemned to death by Mazeppa – after a failed attempt to turn the latter in to the tsar. It is a fact that the defeat of the Swedish army and the Hetmanate at Poltava put an end to Mazeppa’s many years of diplomatic efforts to unite the Ukrainian lands – but this is not what Poltava and the opera based on it are all about.

Mazeppa at GPO. Rachel Nicholls (Mariya) and David Stout (Mazeppa). Photo: Marc Brenner

Today Mazeppa is Ukraine’s national hero and a symbol of the country’s steadfast resistance to Russia. The hetman’s portrait can be found on banknotes; his name was given to the flagship of the Ukrainian navy, the godmother of which was the wife of President Zelensky. We can assume with a high degree of certainty that as long as Ukraine remains independent, this particular work by Tchaikovsky will not find its way onto the stages of opera houses there – for the same reasons Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar has not been and probably will never be staged in Poland.

I suspect that most Brits associated Mazeppa with Byron’s poem and did not expect to see a scoundrel on stage. In any case, the spectators at the Grange Park Opera performance were clearly perplexed. Judging by the conversations overheard during the interval, until the end they expected a spectacular internal transformation of the protagonist. And they did not get it, because Pountney not only moved the narrative to some vague, though close to us, present, but he also highlighted all the propagandistic features of the work. As early as in Act One his Mazeppa enters the stage in the first act in full gear of the Hells Angels, a motorcycle club regarded as a criminal organisation, not only in the United States. He is accompanied by acolytes as if taken straight from the notorious Solntsevskaya Brotherhood. The director had the lovers’ escape enacted in an almost grotesque convention, punctuated by scenes of quick sex on the saddle of a Harley. Mazeppa’s words in his conversation with Kochubey in Act One (“the thing is that Mariya must marry me”) were interpreted by him in accordance with the moral attitude of his generation – the result being that in Act Two we saw a very pregnant teenage Mariya. Orlik’s torturing of Kochubey brought to mind Lubyanka in Stalin’s times rather than any of the atrocities from today’s Russian-Ukrainian front. The battle from Act Three was fought between some unknown armies; it was taken out of context, populated with characters who, as in most productions of this kind, waved banners, robbed the coffins of the fallen, danced in gas masks and generally threw their weight around in some ghastly theatre of war – though it was unclear whose war. However, I went numb when, in the torture scene, the word “Mzp” appeared on the wall with a red letter “Z” in the middle and I heard people sitting next to me whisper whether it was a reference to Zelensky. I don’t have to explain this to my Polish readers, but I would love to remind the audience of the English Mazeppa that this ghastly sign is the symbol of the Russian invasion forces in Ukraine.

Aleksander Poliński, who reviewed the Warsaw premiere of Mazeppa in 1912, when that part of Poland was still under Russian rule, wrote that “Tchaikovsky must have been in a bloodthirsty mood when writing Mazeppa. For in this whole, somewhat lengthy opera God’s sun shines through in only a few scenes. In the vast majority of the scenes storms of various passions roar, axes of executioners swish, shackles of political prisoners rattle, moans of the tortured and wails of those in excruciating pain are bloodcurdling”. Pountney must have been in a similarly bloodthirsty mood when he created the concept for his Mazeppa (and tried to win over to the idea the set designer Francis O’Connor, the choreographer Lynne Hockney and the lighting director Tim Mitchell). Since the first days of the war I have been calling for long-dead composers not to be held responsible for the nightmare happening beyond our eastern border. This time, however, I did understand the frustration of my Ukrainian friends. And I still hope that Pountney has not sided with the invaders. I constantly delude myself that he has simply failed to understand anything about this war.

Act Two. Kochubey (Luciano Batinić), Orlik (Andreas Jankowitsch), and dancers. Photo: Marc Brenner

Fortunately, I was not disappointed by the protagonists of the drama: the phenomenal David Stout, who with his beautiful baritone brought out far more nuance in the role of Mazeppa than Tchaikovsky himself envisioned for this one-dimensional character; and the magnificent Rachel Nicholls, who, paradoxically, showed her full potential only in Mariya’s harrowing final lullaby. The tenor John Findon, making his Grange Park debut, was rather good in the thankless part of Andrei, who is in love with Mariya. The Croatian bass Luciano Batinić was a reliable Kochubey, though his was perhaps not a very expressive portrayal in comparison with the protagonists. Sara Fulgoni was a little disappointing in the mezzo-soprano role of Lyubov, Mariya’s mother – more convincing as an actress than a singer. Other roles were more or less successfully interpreted by Andreas Jankowitsch (Orlik), Sam Utley (Iskra) and Benjie del Rosario (Drunken Cossack). The whole thing, accompanied by the English National Opera orchestra and the GPO chorus, was conducted conscientiously, though without flair, by Mark Shanahan, who left enough space for the singers, but not delved into the nuances of this at times surprisingly sophisticated score.

And so – to refer again to Poliński’s words – whatever was good in Mazeppa somehow got out. What will remain with me, however, is Pelléas et Mélisande under Negus, who fully consciously brought out everything that is good in this score.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

History has beautifully come full circle, almost on the centenary of the premiere of King Roger, when most reviewers rightly interpreted Szymanowski’s opera as a metaphor for the changes taking place in Europe’s social consciousness at the time. In June 1926, after a performance at Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki, Henryk Opieński wrote about the victory of “the Dionysian concept of life over a king in the fetters of Byzantine religious rigour, his wife, his entourage and, finally, his entire people”. The audience received the composer’s new work surprisingly well, although it featured neither a clearly defined amorous intrigue, nor a murder leading to a plot twist, nor a final conclusion – none of the elements associated with opera, even in the minds of modernist spectators. The listeners were seduced primarily by the music: at the time Szymanowski was experimenting with pentatonics, dissonances and blurring of the transparency of “European” harmonic verticals. There was as much Orient in the score as there was antiquity drowned in a modernist dream. As much a Greek – or essentially Nietzschean – dispute between the Apollonian and Dionysian elements, as a struggle with one’s own longing, sensuality and sexual orientation.

The few opponents accused King Roger of either having a worthless libretto or going astray into Wagnerian epigonism. Ironically, Szymanowski’s work is, indeed, a “post-Wagnerian” opera, although it is by no means epigonic – the composer at time gets into a lively argument with the author of Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde, an argument ending with a mysterious hymn to the sun, an antithesis of “Liebestod”, as it were, in which the protagonist undergoes transfiguration not through death, but through worship of the life force, self-awareness, darkness-destroying power. Such a manifesto was needed at the time and was interpreted correctly in Europe, as is evidenced by, for example, the glowing reviews in the German press after a performance directed by Alexander Schum at the Stadttheater Duisburg in 1928, which made history primarily because of a demonstration by the nationalist Stahlhelm paramilitary militia. The real triumph, however, came with the premiere of King Roger at the Národní Divadlo in Prague, in 1932, in a staging by Josef Munclingr.

Crowd scene. In the foreground Vit Nosek (Edrisi) and Jiří Brückler (Roger). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Raised by his uncle František, a musician at the Municipal Theatre in Lviv, after the untimely death of both parents, Munclingr went on to study at the local conservatoire and at the philosophical faculty of the University of Lviv. He made his debut as an opera singer in 1911 at the age of just twenty-three, signing the bass role of Colline in La Bohème. One year later he was already singing in Prague. Before the outbreak of the Great War he became a soloist with the Stadttheater in Poznań. From there he moved to Warsaw, where he first got engaged by Teatr Wielki and then in 1919 he briefly joined the company of Teatr Stołeczny, also as a stage director. Szymanowski referred to him as “half-Czech, half-Pole”. Although in 1921 Munclingr returned to the land of his ancestors for good, he never severed his ties with his adopted homeland. At Prague’s Národní Divadlo he not only staged King Roger, but also prepared the stage premiere of Harnasie. After the Second World War he appeared in the episodic role of Kuśmirak in Aleksander Ford’s film Border Street. In addition, he appeared several times at the Poznań and Wrocław Opera Houses. He also translated Wyspiański’s tragedy Judges into Czech. Yet he went down in history of primarily the Czechoslovak opera scene: as the performer of Dikój and, at the same time, stage director of the famous Bratislava premiere of Janáček’s Katya Kabanova; as an outstanding stage director and theatre theorist; as a man who contributed to the heyday of Prague’s Národní Divadlo during Otakar Ostrčil’s musical directorship; as a true expressionist successfully pulling the domestic scene out of the greyness of bourgeois realism. He caused ferment in Brno as well: in 1951 he became an associate professor at the local Academy of Performing Arts, helping to establish the country’s first opera directing department.

Vladimír John, a recent graduate of the Brno Academy, made his debut on the Moravian stage precisely with King Roger. And he was undoubtedly successful in that: lasting less than an hour and a half (with a few cuts in the score), played without an interval, the production turned out to be both a tribute to the tradition of modernist theatre and an attempt, modern in its spirit, to place the narrative of the opera beyond time and space. The attempt corresponds – paradoxically – with the intentions of Iwaszkiewicz and Szymanowski, who intended their work to be a clash of myth and archetypes with a crisis of the familiar world order, a parable, as it were, about the struggle of reason, emotion and subconsciousness, in which Sicily was only a pretext, an island from the composer’s memories and phantasmagorias. It is difficult to say whether the Shepherd is a phantom from Roger’s “bloodied dreams”, a newly discovered aspect of the ruler’s personality – as the director suggests – or genuinely a stranger, an unknown god in human form, an incarnation of Dionysus, an emanation of Shiva, all in one?

John’s vision is presented in Martin Chocholoušek’s sparse set, the essential elements of which remain unchanged, which does suggest that the conflict unfolds in the realm of spirit rather than matter. Perfectly lit by Martin Chloup, in Act One it creates an vivid illusion of the Cappella Palatina, bathed in dispersed rays of dusk; in Act Two it evokes the atmosphere of the Orient in a space filled with surreal shapes bringing to mind a parade of lingams, symbolic representations of the god Shiva; in Act Three it is striking in its contrast of darkness and blinding brightness of the interior of a mirror pyramid, where Roger completes his pilgrimage into himself and sets off into the mysterious dawn.

Veronika Rovná (Roxana), Jiří Brückler and Vit Nosek. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Chocholoušek’s beautiful set design concept, irresistibly bringing to mind Munclingr’s legendary stagings, was not quite matched by Barbora Rašková’s costumes, which seemed to be coming from too many aesthetic orders: most convincing in the opening scenes with the chorus dressed in Bauhaus-inspired geometric attires, least convincing in the motley human-animal retinue of the Shepherd. What was also excessive was the choreography of Jan Kodet and Michal Heriban, who unnecessarily entrusted the singers with some of the dance tasks. These are, however, minor caveats: Vladimír John’s impressive debut, the first staging of King Roger in years in which the director has not superimposed additional layers of meaning on an already convoluted libretto, is another proof of the vitality of Czech opera theatre – one of the few in Europe that has not got into a rut and, miraculously, has not gone deaf to the music.

And this time, too, there was something to listen to. It’s been a long time since I saw such a coherent and thus thrilling take on Szymanowski’s masterpiece as the one that came from the baton of Robert Kružík, the new music director of Janáčkovo divadlo as of next season. Kružík is a genuine opera conductor: he skilfully weighs the proportions between the stage and the orchestra pit, does not overwhelm with the power of sound, and gives room to both soloists and the well-prepared, masterfully dynamic choruses. Instead of stratifying the seemingly incoherent sound planes of King Roger, he turned them into a glittering, colourful fresco, juxtaposing the hieratic chanting of the clergy with the sensual softness of the Shepherd’s aria, the ecstasy of Roger with the oneiric nature of Roxana’s song, the sweeping, tangled chords of Dionysian frenzy with the equivocal, “dark” clarity of the protagonist’s final sacrifice.

Jiří Brückler and Vit Nosek. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Nor were there weaknesses in the solo cast either. Jiří Brückler, who has a baritone that is mature and expressive, yet velvety and lyrical in timbre, created a highly convincing portrayal of the internally torn ruler. Veronika Rovná, with her bright, colourful soprano and exceptionally smooth, musical phrasing, came to full form in the second act – if it had not been for the slightly too harsh top notes, her Roxana would have ranked among the top interpretations in the old, “pre-war” style, which for some reason has been abandoned by most Polish singers. The light tenor of Vit Nosek (Edrisi) consistently gained strength of expression over the course of the narrative. Jana Hrochová and David Szendiuch were excellent in the episodic roles of the Deaconess and the Archbishop.

Yet I did not expect I would be so electrifyingly impressed by Petr Nekoranec as the Shepherd – judging from Szymanowski’s correspondence, a role written with an almost impossible voice in mind: androgynous, ambiguous like Dionysus, amorphous like Shiva. And such a voice has indeed been found. Some peculiarities of Nekoranec’s technique – a distinctive vibrato and a tendency to sing high notes in a mixed voice, nowadays generally frowned upon in the tenor repertoire – fit this part like a glove, especially when combined with his disturbingly sensual phrasing. This may have been the sound of Vladimír Tomš, the Czech Shepherd from the 1932 Prague production. Perhaps it was under Tomš’s influence that the composer finally came to appreciate King Roger – writing with sadness after the Prague premiere that “I probably won’t be able write anything like this again”. It’s so good that someone can still sing it.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

It’s been almost ten years and I still feel that one of the most inspiring projects I have encountered in my career as a critic was Wagner’s Ring in Karlsruhe – produced on the initiative of Peter Spuhler, the then director of the Badisches Staatstheater, by four directors, one for each part of the cycle, and complemented by a new opera, Wahnfried, commissioned especially for the occasion from the Israeli-American composer Avner Dorman. I wrote at the time that the theatre in Hermann-Levi-Platz – named after a descendant of a famous rabbinical family, Kapellmeister of the Karslruhe court opera and a great admirer of Wagner, who after many twists and turns entrusted him with the premiere of his Parsifal – would pave the theatrical way to Bayreuth for the four directors. And indeed: of the four “young and talented”, three have already reached the Green Hill, with Yuval Sharon’s Lohengrin enjoying an unprecedented return to the Festspielhaus stage this season.

There could hardly be better confirmation of the need to separate the work from its creator than the legacy of Spuhler’s directorship in Karlsruhe. His tenure – exceptionally successful in artistic terms – had a premature and turbulent ending following violent protests against his authoritarian managerial methods. Nevertheless, the four-director Ring made history and great reviews followed the premiere Wahnfried – its smallest detail honed by all the members of the creative team and artists involved, from the composer and authors of the Anglo-German libretto, Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz; the conductor Justin Brown and the carefully selected cast, who included several soloists from the Ring he conducted; to the production team headed by Keith Warner.

The title of Dorman’s opera refers to the villa in Bayreuth in which Wagner spent the last years of his life and which he named Wahnfried – much to the delight of the town’s residents, who associated the word “Wahn” mainly with madness and delusion. Yet what the composer had in mind was the Schopenhauerian creative frenzy as well as refuge providing a respite from it. He probably did not anticipate that Haus Wahnfried would be transformed into a ghastly mausoleum, the seat of a degenerate cult of his person and oeuvre, a cult created by his grieving widow Cosima and her increasingly bizarre acolytes, including Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a man uprooted from his own culture, advocate of Arthur de Gobineau’s racist thought and ardent promoter of the völkisch ideology, which many believe had a fundamental impact on the development of the Nazi doctrine.

Mark Le Brocq (Houston Stewart Chamberlain). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Chamberlain is the protagonist of Dorman’s opera – in line with the intentions of the co-producers of the venture, which came at a time of historical reckoning for the Bayreuth clan, begun a few years before the bicentennial of the composer’s birth. Wahnfried was intended as something of a divertissement between the successive presentations of the Ring in Karlsruhe: a creative impression on the “dangerous liaisons” of the Wagner family, parallel to many educational initiatives at the time, like the famous “Verstummte Stimmen” exhibition, a part of which is still available on the Green Hill, and the documentary Wagner & Me, featuring the British actor, writer and Wagnerite Stephen Fry.

Wahnfried turned out to be an impression made all the more interesting by the fact that it was filtered through the experiences and sensibilities of a forty-year-old artist raised in Israel, where Wagner’s music still remains a taboo that cannot be broken even by prominent Jewish artists. This may be the reason why Dorman did not fall into the trap of Wagnerian pastiche, writing his first opera in the spirit of postmodern eclecticism – with numerous references to forms and genres of the past, a work seemingly comprising two acts, but in fact composed of a dozen separate episodes, juxtaposed to create an almost cinematic contrast of musical planes. Dorman is a very skilful polystylist. He builds the sound climate of his work – based on expressive melodic structures, and ostinato rhythms as if straight from Shostakovich – from references to jazz, salon waltzes, military marches, Weimar cabaret, individual leitmotifs from Wagner’s operas, klezmer music, and snippets of Protestant chorales. The solo parts oscillate between a declamatory style and poignant lyricism (Siegfried Wagner’s magnificent monologue at the beginning of Act Two), merging perfectly in the group scenes with the sound of the chorus and the colourful orchestral layer.

The music of Wahnfried – sophisticated yet accessible – has something irresistibly “American” about it. To many critics it brings to mind John Adams; to me it is associated more with John Corigliano and the fusion of styles typical of his oeuvre: not devoid of the grotesque and black humour, manoeuvring between realism and the world of delusion, effectively shattering convention, like in the now somewhat forgotten opera The Ghosts of Versailles. However, Dorman and his librettists too often resort to stereotypes: Chamberlain became an ardent Wagnerite as early as in the 1870s; his first visit to Wahnfried did not come until 1888, five years after the death of his beloved composer; only then did he join the Bayreuther Kreis, in which the seeds of völkisch nationalism and a new, racist strand of anti-Semitism had already been sown by Baron Hans von Wolzogen, whom Wagner himself had invited to edit the Bayreuther Blätter monthly, a decision he soon came to regret bitterly. The story of Isolde, the first fruit of Cosima and Richard’s love, who was denied her share of Wagner’s legacy, is much more tragic and multifaceted: Cosima herself lived with the stigma of being Liszt’s illegitimate child; matters were further “complicated” by her then husband Hans von Bülow, who acknowledged his paternity of Isolde. Isolde’s rejection by her mother was also influenced by the conventions of the day, which stigmatised marriages supported by the wife – and this was the case of Isolde, who married the penniless conductor Fritz Beidler. Chamberlain himself made advances to Isolde: his subsequent marriage to Eva von Bülow, Wagner’s second daughter, was the result of cold calculation. Cosima learned of Isolde’s untimely death by chance ten years after the fact – less than a year before her own death. Most importantly, however, both Cosima and Houston Stewart Chamberlain died before Hitler came to power, and the main culprit behind the dictator’s later association with Bayreuth was the naive and not very intelligent Winifred, whose actions deserve a separate opera.

Mark Le Brocq and Oskar McCarthy (Wagner-Dämon). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The narrative oversimplifications and lack of psychological depth in Wahnfried were counterbalanced in Karlsruhe by singers who brought to mind the complex characters of the Ring. Wagner’s spectre haunting Chamberlain was played by the singer portraying the equally ambiguous character of Alberich. Hermann Levi, a man torn between his love for the composer and having to put up with his anti-Semitic taunts, was portrayed by the singer playing Wotan in the Karslruhe staging.

Polly Graham, the director of the Longborough production, followed a different path: she engaged in a dialogue with Keith Warner’s concept of the premiere, alternately arguing with it and refining the British director’s ideas. She deliberately juxtaposed Chamberlain’s grotesque figure with reality – Mark Le Brocq is much closer to the historical character than Matthias Wohlbrecht, who sang the role in Karlsruhe. Graham has preserved the vaudeville-cabaret feel of some of the episodes by casting the accomplished dancer and circus artist Tamzen Moulding as Acrobat. Wagner-Dämon – in Warner’s concept bringing to mind Jack Napier from Burton’s Batman – has been transformed into a green jester, a joker pulled from the deck in successive deals of history’s cards. The Master’s Disciple (Hitler) – made to look by the director of the premiere as the dictator from Chaplin’s film – is brought on stage as a Great War veteran, wearing a uniform decorated with a clown’s pompoms. Together with the set designer Max Johns and costume designer Anisha Fields, Graham has convincingly conveyed the ghastly atmosphere of the Bayreuth clan – manipulators controlled by Cosima, who distorted the composer’s ideas, controversial in any case from today’s point of view.

Musically, the Longborough Wahnfried was on a par with the Karlsruhe production. Special credit should go to Le Brocq for his phenomenal portrayal of Chamberlain, going far beyond the original framework of a character role. It is impossible to forget the chilling interpretation of Cosima by the seasoned Wagnerian Susan Bullock, who, approaching the end of her career, managed to turn her inevitable weaknesses into assets worthy of the world’s best stages; the superb technique of Alexandra Lowe, a singer blessed with a soprano of great beauty, expressive and secure intonation-wise, which was evident in the dual roles of Isolde and Winifred; and the touching portrayal of Siegfried Wagner by Andrew Watts, who sang the role in Karlsruhe – although his countertenor has since become dull and lost some of its harmonics, it has definitely gained in strength of expression. Excellent performances also came from the soprano Meeta Raval (as Anna and Eva, Chamberlain’s wives); Adrian Dwyer, a memorable Mime from the Ring conducted by Negus, this time in the sinister role of the Master’s Disciple; the baritone Edmund Danon, making his LFO debut (as the living and dead Hermann Levi); and Oskar McCarthy, coming from a slightly different order, in the baritone part of Wagner-Dämon. McCarthy, a versatile singer, actor and performer, more than made up for some shortcomings in his vocal technique with his theatrical craftsmanship. Another singer deserving a favourable mention is the Cuban-French bass-baritone Antoin Herrera-López Kessel as Kaiser Wilhelm II and the anarchist Bakunin. I was not disappointed either by the chorus, larger than usual for this company, augmented by members of the Longborough Community Chorus. The whole thing was conducted by Justin Brown, repeating his Karlsruhe success and once again showing the LFO regulars that he is not only an effective conductor, but primarily a very sensitive musician.

Adrian Dwyer (Master’s Disciple). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The British premiere of Wahnfried, which was met with favourable reception from both the critics and the audience, despite the work’s shortcomings, proved to be an important and necessary venture. All the more important given that it was undertaken by LFO, a company established out of pure and disinterested love for Wagner, demonstrating again and again that it cares for his legacy more wisely than his Bayreuth heirs, who often go astray. That is why I am surprised by some voices claiming that staging Dorman’s opera in the “English Bayreuth” was a reckless act, an initiative fraught with the risk of undermining the achievements of the rural opera company from Gloucestershire. That is why I was alarmed by the essay included in the programme, the author of which, Michael Spitzer – perhaps with the best of intentions – engaged in manipulation in the other direction. The world is once again plunging into the hell of hypocrisy; ideologies that were supposed to be gone forever after Hitler’s defeat are on the rise again. So it is better not to repeat the long-discredited legend about the porcelain monkeys of Moses Mendelssohn, grandfather of the composer Felix – a humiliating purchase the philosopher had to make to be granted permission to marry. Spitzer repeats the hackneyed cliché that the figurines in Mendelssohn’s collection are an example of the so-called Judenporzellan, items purchased by Jews under duress in exchange for the right to start a family and have legitimate offspring. True, Frederick the Great did promulgate this disgraceful decree – one of many intended to boost sales of products from his Berlin manufactory – but not until 1769, when Moses had long been married. Not only that – six years earlier the same Frederick had granted Moses the Schutzjude status, protecting the scholar from the persecution that indeed affected his poorer and less privileged brethren, that is, practically most of the Jewish community in Prussia. However hideous the figures in the Mendelssohn collection may seem today, in Moses’ times they were regarded as a symbol of luxury and affluence. Therefore, Felix could have not treated the heirlooms inherited from his grandfather as a “racist memento mori”. The whole story is an anachronistic construct rejected by researchers almost half a century ago.

This does not mean that there was no anti-Semitism in Germany in Wagner’s days. This does not mean that Wagner was not an anti-Semite. Finally, this does not mean that Chamberlain did not pour racist poison into this leaven – with disastrous consequences, as we increasingly tend to forget. History must not be manipulated to introduce audiences to Dorman’s work. It is necessary to seek the truth and truth does not lie in the middle at all. “The truth lies where it lies”, as Władysław Bartoszewski, a member of the Żegota presidium and a Righteous Among the Nations, used to say. He was a man who understood perfectly the meaning of the phrase “to do more harm than good”.

Translated by: Anna Kijak