{"id":4275,"date":"2019-10-03T16:17:43","date_gmt":"2019-10-03T14:17:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/atorod.pl\/?p=4275"},"modified":"2019-10-03T22:41:24","modified_gmt":"2019-10-03T20:41:24","slug":"by-the-lake-which-wasnt-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/?p=4275","title":{"rendered":"By the Lake Which Wasn\u2019t There"},"content":{"rendered":"

Magic was present in the theatre on the banks of the Wien River from the very beginning. Emanuel Schikaneder\u2019s troupe moved to a new building on the other bank of the river \u2013 almost exactly opposite the Freihaustheater \u2013 ten years after the premiere of The Magic Flute.<\/em> The opening of the Empire-style building, erected in 1801 after a design by Franz J\u00e4ger, was celebrated with an allegory Thespis Traum <\/em>by Schikaneder and Franz Teyber\u2019s heroic opera Alexander.<\/em> Schikaneder\u2019s dream theatre boasted the biggest and best equipped stage in the entire Habsburg realm. The high-spending impresario spared no expense, putting his wild ideas into practice, as a result of which he had to get rid of the Theater an der Wien less than three years later. However, he did retain the position of its artistic director for a while. The premiere of Leonora<\/em>, the original version of Beethoven\u2019s Fidelio<\/em>, took place in 1805, when Schikaneder was already in deep financial trouble. He died impoverished and lonely seven years later. The theatre changed hands many times, with successive owners carrying out alterations and presenting all kinds of works \u2013 from operas and operettas, through ballets and pantomimes, to plays. Yet Schikaneder\u2019s mad ghost hovered over the building for decades, watching over the premiere of Schiller\u2019s The <\/em>Maid of Orleans<\/em> \u2013 featuring eighty horses and four hundred human performers \u2013 and the golden age of Viennese operetta marked by the triumphs of Johann Strauss\u2019 Die Fledermaus <\/em>and The Gypsy Baron.<\/em> After WWII the Theater an der Wien served for a while as a venue for performances of the damaged Staatsoper; in the 1960s \u2013 having miraculously avoided a conversion into a municipal car park \u2013 it switched to musicals, occasionally making its stage available for Wiener Festwochen events. In 2006, after an extensive renovation, it reopened its doors as an opera house.<\/p>\n

Today this historicising-modernist jewel, hidden in the Linke Wienzeile frontage almost as effectively as the Wien River hidden under the Naschmarkt, presents nearly thirty works per season \u2013 this season its repertoire includes thirteen new productions and two world premieres (Egmont<\/em> by Christian Jost and Genia<\/em> by Tscho Theissing).\u00a0 In December the Viennese theatre will present Halka<\/em> directed by Mariusz Treli\u0144ski and featuring the Arnold Schoenberg Chor and ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien conducted by \u0141ukasz Borowicz. I glanced at the cast of Rusalka<\/em>, opening the new season, and decided to visit Vienna already in September \u2013 to see the interior, hear the acoustics and enjoy a potentially excellent performance of one of my beloved operas. And, if fate would have it, to feast my eyes and ears on an inspired staging of Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u2019s masterpiece.<\/p>\n

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Maria Bengtsson (Rusalka) and Ladislav Elgr (Prince). Photo: Herwig Prammer<\/p>\n

Fate wouldn\u2019t have it. The German Am\u00e9lie Niermeyer took on opera directing in 2007, at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in D\u00fcsseldorf, where she staged Wozzeck<\/em>, La clemenza di Tito <\/em>and Rigoletto<\/em>, among others. Since then she has shown many times that she likes to ride roughshod over the queen of musical forms, picking out individual threads and twisting them to fit her own, often one-dimensional concept. In her recent staging of Otello<\/em> at the Bayerische Staatsoper she managed to reduce the opera to an analysis of marital problems between Desdemona and the eponymous hero, leaving aside the rest of the complicated narrative, which, incidentally, in Verdi and Boito\u2019s version differs substantially from the Shakespeare\u2019s original. When working on Otello<\/em>, Niermeyer was accompanied by the set designer Christian Schmidt, a regular theatrical partner of Claus Guth. She invited Schmidt to Vienna as well, relying completely on the German artist\u2019s talent \u2013 like many other contemporary directors guided by a wholly mistaken premise that what the audiences look for at the opera are, above all, visual thrills.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Schmidt limited himself to shamelessly recycling his earlier ideas from Guth\u2019s productions. He arranged the entire space \u2013 bringing to mind neither a forest lake, nor the Prince\u2019s castle, nor any other fairy tale reality \u2013 using the tried and tested model from the Salzburger Festspiele Cos\u00ec fan tutte<\/em>, complementing the quarter-turn staircase and white wall panels with elements from the Paris Rigoletto<\/em> (a club-style cubicle behind a curtain, a roller door covering the interior of the sets). The rustling rushes were borrowed from the La Scala Lohengrin<\/em> and the Glyndebourne La clemenza di Tito.<\/em> The huge crystal chandelier, the presence of which was to mark a passage from the world of forest spirits to the world of humans, was brought straight from the Salzburg Fidelio<\/em>; literally \u2013 I bet any sum it was the same stage prop. The shallow pool in lieu of a lake \u2013 in which for some reason the wedding guests in Act II splash around as well \u2013 was tested for the first time in the Dresden staging of Salome<\/em> directed by Peter Mussbach.<\/p>\n

In this universal Kunstkammer<\/em> of postmodernist theatre Niermeyer presented just one narrative thread, justifying all inconsistencies with an equally universal interpretative device \u2013 that everything was going on in the protagonist\u2019s mind. Her Rusalka is quite a modern girl who is terribly scared of her own femininity and falls victim to complex manipulation on the part of the other protagonists forcing her to become a sexual object. The transformation of a demonic creature into a woman consists in her deflowering by Je\u017eibaba. Vodnik turns out to be a bastard who loses power over his own daughter and, frustrated, pushes her into the arms of another man, fully aware of the suffering that will result from his impulsive decision. In the finale Rusalka must forgive not only the Prince, but also her father, who will realise too late the consequences of his patriarchal attitude. Gone is the whole symbolism of Kvapil\u2019s story, but what is missing above all is a reversal of the fairy tale order of things: a bloodcurdling story of a nymph who lets herself be fatally beguiled by a man.<\/p>\n

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G\u00fcnther Groissb\u00f6ck (Vodnik) and Maria Bengtsson. Photo: Herwig Prammer<\/p>\n

Fortunately, wonderful musical thrills were there. The acoustics of the Theater ad der Wien provide singers with an opportunity to subtly play with voice colour, dynamics and expression, which was fully taken advantage of by Maria Bengtsson as Rusalka \u2013 she sang in a crystal clear and beautifully sounding soprano, successfully avoiding the temptation of forcing the volume at the expense of the logic and flow of phrasing. She found an excellent partner in G\u00fcnther Groissb\u00f6ck as Vodnik \u2013 the artist combines a phenomenal technique and extraordinary beauty of a supple, velvety bass with exceptional sensitivity and intelligence in constructing his character (the stunning monologue \u201cCel\u00fd sv\u011bt ned\u00e1 ti, ned\u00e1\u201d in Act II and the triple \u201cB\u011bda!\u201d in the finale: the first sung neutrally, the second in a faltering voice, the third in a helpless fury). Ladislav Elgr (the Prince) was disappointing. He has a lovely tenor with a clear spinto \u201csteel\u201d in it, but he does not know how to handle it: all the missed top notes and sudden changes of colour in the registers result from a complete lack of breath control, which may soon lead to serious vocal problems. On the other hand the three Wood Sprites (Ilona Revolskaya, Mirella Hagen and Tatiana Kuryatnikova) were phenomenal, dazzling in the ensembles not only with their perfect harmony but also beauty of their voices. Casting the rather spiritless Kate Aldrich as the Foreign Princess and Natascha Petrinsky \u2013 with her ugly, worn out mezzo-soprano \u2013 as Je\u017eibaba destroyed the symmetry between the two characters, indented as two sides of the same sinister force.<\/p>\n

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G\u00fcnther Groissb\u00f6ck. Photo: Herwig Prammer<\/p>\n

The Arnold Schoenberg Chor emerged as a collective hero of the evening, using the limited possibilities to shine provided by the score to the full, impressive in its excellent diction, perfect voice production and masterful use of dynamics. The orchestra had its moments of weakness, especially in the brass, but it made up for them with its ability to differentiate the texture \u2013 this was largely thanks to David Afkham, a young German conductor, who led the performance, using quite slow tempi, but without losing the pulse for a moment and bringing out unexpected \u201cmodernist\u201d touches, which usually disappear in too heavily played chords.<\/p>\n

Grumblers whinge that the allegedly conservative music of Rusalka<\/em> cannot compare to Kvapil\u2019s inventive libretto full of hidden meanings as it is. Yet Niermayer\u2019s derivative, dramaturgically botched production was saved primarily by its musical layer. It was only in the finale that I felt the atmosphere of real theatre: when Rusalka had left and the devastated Vodnik remained alone on stage, rocking a memory of his daughter in his empty arms.<\/p>\n

Translated by: Anna Kijak<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Magic was present in the theatre on the banks of the Wien River from the very beginning. Emanuel Schikaneder\u2019s troupe moved to a new building on the other bank of the river \u2013 almost exactly opposite the Freihaustheater \u2013 ten years after the premiere of The Magic Flute. The opening of the Empire-style building, erected … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-mangusta","4":"post-4275","6":"format-standard","7":"category-posts-in-english","8":"category-wedrowki-operowe"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4275"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4283,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4275\/revisions\/4283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}