Nights at the Opera: 2014

However belatedly, I decided to round up a personal "best of" list for the last calendar year. It's always an enjoyable experience of revisiting... particularly poignant for me as I looked back on the last of my German opera-going (for now.) Due to my own relative restraint (not to say remissness) in attending, I've limited myself to a top three in my usual categories.

Standout performances:

Tanja Ariane Baumgartner. Selecting one of her performances was difficult, as she was one of the most reliably exciting singers in my Frankfurt season. But her Charlotte, in Werther, was not only richly sung, but intensely intelligent and intensely sensual; showing Charlotte as a lively, trammeled spirit, rather than a domestic saint, was much appreciated by me!

Anja Silja. She's still got it. She may have invented it. In Aribert Reimann's Gespenstersonate, she made parrot noises and commented on the human condition, and I was thrilled and terrified.

Nimm noch nicht Abschied: Daphne in Frankfurt

Apollo and Daphne. Photo © Oper Frankfurt/Barbara Aumüller

Last night, I got to see the first performance in this season's revival of Daphne in Frankfurt. The 2010 production by Claus Guth, who also supervised the revival, was of stunning beauty and poignancy, and a strong cast, led by the luminous Maria Bengtsson in the title role, gave moving performances. This was my first live Daphne, and one that helped me understand the opera as a coherent whole. Strauss's exquisite music is bound with an enigmatically layered libretto by Joseph Gregor, and haunted by the circumstances of its creation in 1937-38. Guth's production created an intimate narrative about Daphne's search for truth, and attempts to escape from violence, which managed (I thought) to suggest even the possibility of hope for society as well as the individual in the sublime conclusion. We see Daphne as an old woman (Corinna Schnabel) who visits the home of her youth, now in a state of abandonment and decay, and thus revisits the events of that youth (taking place around the time of the opera's creation.) The rooms of Peneios' and Gaea's household are the backdrop for the unfolding of a powerful drama which is as much allegory as myth, where Daphne attempts in solitude to avoid the violence of male society that Strauss and Gregor so frighteningly evoke. But she can get no closer to utopia than a world of paper birds and cut branches. One of the things which the production accomplishes with remarkable, redemptive success is showing that, while Apollo's and Leukippos' sexual aggression towards Daphne is reprehensible, deserving of the punishment which the god meets out to the youth and to himself, neither Apollo or Leukippos is always-already a rapist: the violence which Daphne so fears is a choice, not a disposition. This was a huge relief for me as audience member, and allows the scenes of emotional intimacy to be seen and heard as genuine, not coercive; Daphne's sense of betrayal by the god is genuine, not a belated realization of falsehood. The drama unfolds gradually, making its way despite all violence, despite all betrayal, to that transcendent finale.

Edgar: O gloria, o voluttà

Oper Frankfurt assembled a luxurious cast for two concert performances of Puccini's second opera this week. Not knowing when I'd get the chance to hear Edgar live again, I jumped at the chance to do so, especially since it also offered the opportunity to hear Angela Meade again, and Bryan Hymel for the first time. Mezzo Tanja Ariane Baumgartner joined them in making the most of the music, and making the principal characters both more plausible and more sympathetic than they are as written. What struck me first on listening to recordings of Edgar was the theatrical pacing and use of the orchestra colors. In Michele Girardi's chapter (in here)  covering the work, though, the focus was on the patent weaknesses of the libretto. According to Girardi, Fontana committed "gross linguistic and metrical sins," forcing the composer to "attempt the impossible in making up for for plot deficiencies with music." Although it's not Puccini's most bold or sophisticated music, I did find the libretto harder to ignore in performance than in recordings, and often hard to excuse. The opening scene offers a representative example: the woodwinds, growing in number, evoke waking birds, while a breeze rustles through the strings; chimes are succeeded by a clear bell… and then the chorus comes in and tells us that it is dawn, that the last star has disappeared, and that a faraway bell is ringing. (I couldn't help contrasting it mentally with the gorgeous naturalism of Bohème's Act III opening.) The plot of Edgar centers on the eponymous hero, nominally torn between the soprano who sings aubades about almond blossoms and the mezzo who was raised by traveling Moors (!) and sings about survival of the fittest and about torrid kisses. He seems more interested in Byronic introspection than in either of them, though, symbolically burning down his house when he takes up with the mezzo at the end of Act I, going off to join nationalist endeavors as an act of repentance and self-purification for taking up with the mezzo at the end of Act II, and staging his own funeral as an aesthetic and social experiment in Act III. There's a baritone who hovers around the edges of the drama, being in love with the mezzo and leading the soldiers, in both cases for reasons which are unclear. At the work's climax, the mezzo is tricked by the tenor and then excoriated by the hypocritical chorus, so she stabs the soprano in the back. In short, it's the kind of drama that begs for a concert performance (or for a really good critical production.) And Frankfurt's concert performance was of a very fine caliber indeed.

Le coeur se creuse: Werther in Frankfurt

Order vs. the artist: Werther, Act I
Photo © Oper Frankfurt/Wolfgang Runkel

Until last night, Werther belonged to the category of operas I'd never seen live, despite its being solidly established as part of the standard repertoire. I'm glad to have amended this under such favorable conditions: Frankfurt's current revival boasts not only an excellent cast, but a cool, intelligent production by Willy Decker that provides a welcome counterweight to the emotionalism of Massenet's score. Decker's visual language is straightforward and effective, dividing the nature where Werther absorbs experience and sensation from the Bailli's house by a sliding wall. The Bailli's reference to it as "his kingdom" appears as a hollow reference to a pretense of bourgeois order which he cannot uphold: the image of his dead wife has a stronger presence than any of the living in this repressed and depressive atmosphere. The emotions in the score are officially forbidden by the bourgeois society on stage: Massenet is writing in and for the time of Ibsen, not that of Goethe. The children's toy houses reappear as the village of Act II; Albert and Charlotte are separated as they are bound by the enormous dining table where they preside over all the parishioners. I particularly liked that Decker's production creates many silent, musically sensitive interactions among the characters which helped give a clear emotional through-line between the opera's episodes. Credit is due to the revival director, Alan Barnes, for making poignantly clear how each of the opera's characters is imprisoned. Even the Bailli is depressed rather than feckless; Schmitt and Johann function like Shakespearean mutes, personifying the unimaginative apathy which, as Goethe's protagonist observes, can be as dangerous as malice. It is they who bring the messages which interrupt Werther and Charlotte's attempts to break free of their prescribed social roles. Charlotte, for all the calm which Albert praises, has a lively intellectual life, and is aware, with painful intensity, of the emotional life which she is being denied. And for once we see a Werther whose Todessehnsucht is present (and credible) from the outset: he devotes himself to art and nature alike; but he is exhausted by the constant effort of maintaining his refusal to compromise.

Ich sehe klar: Enescu's Oedipe in Frankfurt

Oedipus and the Thebans Photo © Oper Frankfurt/Monika Rittershaus

On Friday, I went to Oper Frankfurt's run of Georg Enescu's rarely performed and richly textured Oedipe (synopsis here.) Hans Neuenfels' powerful new production created suspense and ambiguity in this most famous of stories about inevitability. (The fourth act, in which Enescu finds redemption for Sophocles' tragic protagonist, is omitted here.) The space in which the drama takes place is enclosed with layers of equation-covered blackboards which Oedipus tries to read like hieroglyphs. We see Oedipus first thus: as a grown man, an academic deciphering mysteries of systems and probabilities, an observer of the scene in Laios' palace. The cradle is an egg--symbol of life--which remains mysterious and unnamed. But the apparent order praised by the uniformly clad chorus is disrupted by prophecy, and Oedipus resolves to act: to enter the story, rather than observing it; a parallel impulse for the researcher as for the warrior who desires freedom from his fate. But this quest for autonomy is impeded not least by social impulses towards categorization: Shepherd, Priest, King. Costumes from different periods of history (notably in Jocasta's gowns) allude to this dangerous tendency. Even the Erinnye- like rockers who appear to resist control abet the bullying cruelty of Laios. One of the production's most chilling moments is when, as the plagued Thebans beg their king for aid, for an answer to their questions, for an end to their pain, Oedipus finds himself back in a lecture hall, equations crowding the walls, the Thebans crowded onto benches, and he himself powerless in a white coat by the gleaming metal gurney which is only temporarily without the burden of a corpse. But the production does not insist that freedom is illusory; the highly charged interactions between Oedipus and Merope raise the question of whether Tiresias' prophecy functions with the power of suggestion, or indeed is based on insight into character. Is it Oedipus' obsession with fate that drives him, rather than the fate itself? The opera's central question--how free are we?--hangs painfully suspended.