Tuuli Takala / Reviews

Es war eine demonstrative Huldigung. Ein Zeichen des Publikums pro Thielemann. Solch eine Applaus-Eruption ist auch in Bayreuth eine Ausnahme. Noch immer ist die Zukunft von Christian Thielemann bei den Bayreuther Festspielen unklar. Thielemann entdeckt die neue Freiheit und ging heuer erstmals seit 2013 bei den Salzburger Festspielen "fremd". Mit der konzertanten "Parsifal"-Aufführung, seinem einzigen Auftritt auf dem Grünen Hügel in diesem Jahr, setzte er aber ein klares Ausrufezeichen.

This was the first opera performance by Semperoper Dresden after several months of lockdown and Josef E. Köpplinger’s new Die Zauberflöte was also the last one before their doors shut last November. Mozart’s Singspiele is presented as a coming-of-age story and we see a young Tamino in denim jacket and trainers on a darken stage at the start during the overture: when the curtains close at the end of the opera he is there with a ‘flute’ and the medallion we have seen presented to Pamina. So everything else – including the Masonic ritual – is from the boy’s overactive imagination and emphasises the fairy tale aspects of Zauberflöte. Both Tamino and Pamina are in their own ways rebellious teenagers with Tamino seeming rather naïve to begin with and easily manipulated by the Queen of the Night. Despite the path to true love being a rocky one – quite apposite because of the imaginative landscape videography from Walter Vogelweider we frequently see – literally love blossoms for them as roses grow and it seems absolutely right that when Sarastro seeks to nominate Tamino as his successor – as Hans Sachs recognises Walther von Stolzing is the future in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger – he goes off hand-in-hand to an indeterminate future with Pamina as they reject the male-dominated society. Die Zauberflöte was the culmination of Mozart’s increasing involvement with Emanuel Schikaneder’s theatrical troupe which since 1789 had been the resident company at Vienna’s Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden. Mozart was a close friend of a singer-composer in the troupe, Benedikt Schack (who eventually was the first Tamino), and they often worked collaboratively. In 1790, Mozart was involved in Schikaneder’s opera Der Stein der Weisen (The Philosopher’s Stone) and just like Zauberflöte it was also a fairy tale opera, and almost its precursor since it employed much the same cast in similar roles. Zauberflöte – as Mozart intended – features Masons because both Schikaneder and the composer were lodge brothers. The opera shows the triumph of reason over despotism and is influenced by Enlightenment philosophy and can be regarded as an allegory propounding enlightened absolutism. The Queen of the Night is the dangerous form of liberalism, whilst her antagonist Sarastro is the reasonable sovereign who rules with paternalistic wisdom and free-thinking insight. Unfortunately, the libretto also contains a racial stereotype in the form of Monostatos (who is a Moor and black and makes unwelcome advances to Pamina) and some equally dreadful misogyny with all women regarded as subservient to men. (Although Mozart provides full choruses in both acts that include female voices, it must be remembered the solemn choruses are for men alone.) Köpplinger – of Munich’s Gärtnerplatztheater – downplays the racial and misogynistic elements in his essentially child-friendly Zauberflöte; Monostatos is just a black-hearted villain with a cyberpunk look to him and the pink-haired(!) Pamina – in her colourful anime cosplay outfit – proves to be quite feisty. Köpplinger’s version is only a few minutes over two hours so much of Mozart’s original has been lost. It was created by adhering to coronavirus safety measures, involving social distancing and a few masks, and unfortunately this is something we will have to get used to for the foreseeable future in theatres and opera houses. There is so much eclectic imagery right from the start. There are some shenanigans with blue and yellow – the most popular colour in this Zauberflöte – ropes culminating in a tug-of-war between figures entirely in black (who will reappear from time to time), and there has been a sun and a moon followed by an eclipse. At the back we see a blueish barren landscape in which a solitary garish yellow tree is shown growing. When chased across the stage the ropes suggest snakes and it is now the grown-up Tamino who will face off against a long yellowish serpent. The Three Ladies in multi-coloured wigs and carrying rifles vanquish it before sprinkling a prostrate Tamino with something (fairy dust?). The feathered Papageno flies in on a fantastical mechanical bird that will eventually – to Tamino’s astonishment – lay an egg. Papageno (in stripey shirt, yellow again!) faints after his boastful heroics and the leaves on the three fall to leave just a single one. As Tamino looks at Pamina’s portrait there is a shilouette of her on the screen at the back. Though the Queen of the Night has a glittery skull cap and no horns she still reminded me of Maleficient from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. The Three Boys have extravagant white wigs and are colour-coded in red, green and blue and enter with a wheel, wing and some balloons and will be later seen with other memories of childhoods long ago. Sarastro’s temple is signified by strips of neon lighting and the lowering words Vernunft Natur Weisheit (Reason Nature Wisdom) with the emphasis on Natur and the priesthood will be seen to be more formally suited and booted with (initially white) cloaks. There is the suggestion of a castle tower whilst in the second act there is the illuminated outline of a cage and the priests will enter with white globes. As Act I draws to a close Tamino gets a flute which lights up and there are comical animals straight from the stage musical The Lion King. A red feather is shown gaining in importance (for some reason) though this may have something to do with the legend of the Firebird and at the conclusion of the act the young Tamino will be seen sitting on the prompt box and eating an apple. And so it continues through Act II to huge Armed Men each manipulated by three puppeteers; for the ordeals of fire and water the tree burns and crumbles and then we see a tsunami; Papageno and Papagena’s eight large, coloured eggs raise a laugh; and there is a sunrise for the final scene. Sarastro sings ‘The rays of the sun chase night away; the hypocrite’s surreptitious power is utterly destroyed!’ yet offers the Queen of the Night a reconciliatory hand and although she ignores it, she is still on stage with everyone at the end. Christoph Gedschold sounded as if he favoured fairly brisk tempi, and since any longueurs had been excised his account had freshness, great verve and lucid textures, and he encouraged focused playing from the Staatskapelle Dresden. Sebastian Wartig was an engaging, charismatic Papageno with plenty of wit and presence and a clear vibrant baritone. Obviously, his character’s more comic moments really needed an audience. Evelin Novak brought wilfulness and strength to Pamina and revealed a bright, expressive voice and her ‘Ach ich fühl’s’ – believing her love for Tamino was unreciprocated – was earnest, passionate and anguished. Her mother, the Queen of the Night, was sung by Nikola Hillebrand who looked suitably dramatic though sounded less so. The high notes in ‘O zittre nicht’ were not given their full value though she was somewhat more persuasive in the Queen’s Act II aria, ‘Der Hölle Rache’, where those same stratospheric notes sounded better supported, even though it was still rather shrill. Julia Muzychenko was an absolutely delightful Papagena and her ‘Pa… pa… pa…’ duet with Wartig’s Papageno was irresistible and full of charm. Aaron Pegram’s whipcracking Monostatos was deceitful, threatening and firmly sung. The Three Ladies were a cohesive and amusing ensemble though the three boy sopranos of the Dresden Kreuzchor were a little underpowered and this was entirely understandable in the circumstances. All the minor roles were solidly cast – most notable was Alexandros Stavrakakis’s deep bass as the Speaker – though they only got limited opportunities. René Pape brought a wealth of experience to his paternalistic Sarastro, he was imposing, stentorian, and with the remarkable low-register heft this character demands, especially for ‘O Isis und Osiris’. Klaus Florian Vogt made a rare mid-career return to Tamino with this performance and concentrated on wide-eyed innocence. As he scampered off with Pamina at the end I am not sure whether Köpplinger believes Tamino has learnt anything – apart from about falling in love – with all he has gone through. ‘Das Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön’ showed Vogt’s pure choirboy-ish tenor with its bleached tone to best effect and flowed beautifully and expressively. Vogt sang throughout with Mozartian grace, but his homogeneous tenor occasionally sounded a touch dry and a little too bland.

Busoni, great composer that he was, revered Mozart as greatly as any composer – well, any composer other than Bach, of course. Although Busoni came to Mozart through the nineteenth-century, broadly speaking ‘Romantic’ tradition(s), and although he lauded, in the preface to his own edition, Liszt’s Réminiscences de don Juan for possessing ‘an almost symbolic significance as the highest point of pianism’ (quoted by Charles Rosen), he seems not necessarily to have appreciated the darker side to Mozart as strongly as some of those who came after – above all, Wilhelm Furtwängler, whose recorded performances remain as astounding, as symphonic, as daemonic, as ever. It is a truism, perhaps a cliché, that we all make our own Mozart. Up to a point, that is of course the case, yet that does not make every viewpoint, every experiment, equally worthwhile. Our age, by and large, has not done very well, albeit with noble exceptions. Whereas Dresden did Busoni himself fine service indeed, the previous evening, in his Doktor Faust, this (musically) misconceived Don Giovanni did not, alas, mark anything like its finest hour – mostly on account of the conductor. It has become one of the many clichés to be read in reviews of Don Giovanni performances to call it a director’s graveyard. (Bizarrely, the same seems to have become true of recent stagings of Le nozze di Figaro, a work until recently seemingly imperishable. Così fan tutte rarely does well, either.) Perhaps, but there are certainly exceptions. Most recent of those for me was Stephan Kimmig’s brilliant production for Munich, which I saw last summer. Insofar as one could tell, the fault here did not lie with Andreas Kriegenburg’s production either. It starts promisingly, in a swish fashion or modelling agency, a world of expensive, ruthless vacuity enthroned. (What could be more contemptible than mere ‘fashion’? There are lessons, largely unheeded, for performance there too.) ‘2064 donne’, we read on a wall poster. Such is clearly an environment in which Don Giovanni, aided by Leporello, can have his pick of the depressingly interchangeable ‘girls’. Harald Thor’s set designs and Tanja Hofmann’s costumes work well, adding to what one can discern of the concept. The problem is that it all becomes rather lost. I suspect that tighter revival direction would have made everything much clearer. I do not necessarily mean this as a criticism of the person to whom this was entrusted: there may not have been enough time, enough resources, and so on. As it is, for an alarming amount of the time, the singers seem to have to make their own drama from the designs, and that is more or less it. They generally did pretty well at that, but there is a limit to what can be expected of them, and, modern(ish) look aside, it all comes a little too close to a repertory night in Vienna. That said, there was much to enjoy in a number of the vocal performances. Christoph Pohl’s Giovanni was a serious assumption, whose depth crept up upon us. Equal attention was paid to words and line, as with Evan Hughes’s quicksilver Leporello. The occasional intonational slip aside, Maria Bengtsson’s Donna Anna proved very well focused. A pleasingly ‘big’ sound could be made, although likewise the voice could offer laudable intimacy. Coloratura offered few problems to her; nor did it to Danielle de Niese as Donna Elvira. Likeable artist though she may be, however, an intrinsic thinness to her voice shone through in ‘In quali eccessi, o Numi … Mi tradì’. Might she have been better off as Zerlina? I wondered whether Anke Vondung, who sometimes lacked sparkle in that role, in an admittedly dependable performance, might have better suited to the mezzo part. Martin-Jan Nijhof’s Masetto was likewise dependable enough; perhaps with stronger direction, more might have been made of both peasant characters. Edgaras Montvidas, however, offered a beautifully sung, thoughtfully assertive Don Ottavio. One longed to hear more from him, if not from Michael Eder’s weak Commendatore (strange, given how strongly cast that role tends to be). With the Staatskapelle Dresden on fine form, strings and woodwind equally beguiling, the stage should have been set for a very good evening. And yet… For all the chatter, most of it uninformed, we hear concerning so-called Regietheater, an opera worth its salt – many, indeed a bewildering proportion of those in the benighted repertory, are not – will fail if it is not also a piece of Dirigententheater. What Omer Meir Welber did to Don Giovanni genuinely shocked me, although it angered and, worst of all, bored me still more. I say this not because I am hostile a priori to performances that play with the work concept. Far from it, even in Mozart: one of the most enlightening performances I have seen of a ‘version’ of Don Giovanni was heavily cut and reversed the genders of all but the (anti-)hero himself. To mess about, glibly, crassly with the score to no apparent end other than to massage the ego of the conductor is, however, something upon which it is difficult to look with anything other than horror. The Overture should have alerted me, but conductors sometimes do strange things there, taking it as ‘their’ moment. Regrettable though the new alla breve orthodoxy for the opening may be – there are good reasons to follow the practice, but mere fashion is not one of them – one can live with it. A Rossini-like breakneck speed to what followed was more disturbing. The sudden appearance, and disappearance after a few bars, of a harpsichord bewildered. Not half as much, though, as did the turn at the end towards what has long been known, somewhat problematically, as its ‘concert ending’, which may – or may not – have been written for Vienna. One can only wish that it had not, for it remains unconvincing in the extreme, whatever view one takes of where the ‘alternative conclusion’ should start. (If one wants a concert ending, one is better off with the serviceable, if uninspired, solution offered in most recordings – and concert performances.) There was worse to come, though, much worse. Exhibitionistic continuo playing is another curse of our age, it seems, but I have never heard anything quite on this level, before. Quite why we had harpsichord and what sounded like (I presume it was a trick of the acoustic, but who knows?) some sort of amplified early-ish, but not that early piano, I have no idea. There did not seem to be any obvious, or even elusive, point being made, and the lion’s share was reserved for the latter. Not being able to see the pit, it took me a while to realise that it was Welber playing whatever that strange-sounding instrument may have been. Whereas some more interventionist accounts seem to offer a commentary on the action – one can argue about whether that is what a continuo player ought to be doing, but that is another matter – this seemed to be simply a case of ‘look at me’, or rather ‘listen to me’. One tires quickly of formulaic figures, but they would have been preferable to the lounge pianist meandering we heard here, replete with all manner of very strange harmonies, endless sequences of Scotch snaps, keyboard crashes and clashes, changes of metre, and so on and so on. (It was the sort of thing that certain undergraduates find hilarious after a few bottles of wine, whilst everyone else looks on, baffled and not a little irritated.) One recitative, at least, seemed to end in entirely the wrong key, rendering its non-transition to the ensuing aria both painful and inexplicable. A mismatch of tuning between the instrument and orchestra did not help, either. That, however, was almost as nothing, compared with Welber’s tampering – again, to no discernible end – with the orchestral score. This was not some Mahlerian retouching, nor indeed was it something more artistically adventurous. It sounded utterly arbitrary, and involved the apparent deletion – to begin with, I thought it must be a matter of strange balance, but then realised better, or worse – of certain lines, leaving either nothing, or an opportunity for one of the continuo instruments to play instead. The orchestral introduction to one second-act aria – I cannot remember which: perhaps a blessing… – was removed entirely, the music played instead by the harpsichord. In another number, during the first act, the other continuo instrument loudly banged out the orchestral line an octave higher, doing its best to obliterate the orchestra. Another orchestral ending was close to drowned out by crashing, clashing keyboard chords. Unmotivated tempo variations – sometimes quite at odds with what was being sung onstage – only compounded the mess. When Welber settled down, he seemed perfectly capable of delivering a reasonable enough performance; the problem was that he rarely did. The unholy conflation we generally endure of Prague and Vienna versions is perfectly understandable as a sop to singers, and their fans, although it remains dramatically quite unjustifiable. One might make a case, if one were so minded, for Vienna, if only out of difference, but frankly, it would be misguided at best. Nevertheless, that was pretty much what we heard here – with the important proviso, rarely heard, that there is much we simply do not know about Mozart’s Vienna performances, and we should almost certainly do better to speak about them in the plural. It was mildly interesting to hear the duet for Zerlina and Leporello: the first time, I think, that I have done so in the theatre. It is unworthy of Mozart, though, especially unworthy of the Mozart of Don Giovanni; it might perhaps be rescued by imaginative staging – the libretto surely cries out for something truly sado-masochistic – but such was not the case here. Given the ‘liberties’ taken elsewhere, it was difficult not to feel sorry for Montvidas, losing Ottavio’s second-act aria. In context, though, anything that would hasten the end was no bad thing. Except, of course, the end did not come. The increasingly fashionable practice – it should be stressed that we do not know that Mozart did this, and/or how often he did so, in Vienna, and people should stop claiming that we do – of omitting the scena ultima was practised here, and so the work, such as it remained, simply stopped rather than closed. The proto-Brechtian alienation effect of the ‘moral’ was thus entirely lost, as in Claus Guth’s over-praised production (Salzburg, La Scala, Berlin), in which the uncomprehending director arrogantly accused Mozart of having bowed to convention. Let me put it this way: if you want to do what Mahler did, you really need to be of Mahler’s stature. I shall close with words from Julian Rushton’s review, in Eighteenth-Century Music, of Ian Woodfield’s book on the Vienna Don Giovanni: ‘Some versions of Don Giovanni acted in the composer’s and librettist’s lifetimes were outside their control (most obviously the singspiel versions), and knowledge of these richly informs reception history. Probably undertaken with no intention to slight the original, they document what seemed theatrically presentable in an irrecoverable time and place; this does not afford them status as a template for later interpretations. The modern theatre is not the eighteenth-century theatre; layers of meaning have accumulated that require access to a text we can ascribe to definite, even if multiple, authorship. … Woodfield … points to the irony of performances today going ‘authentic’ just as ‘the academy’ is beginning to take a more flexible view of such texts. We are indebted to him for presenting the ingredients that make up the early forms of Don Giovanni but we should not regard it as intrinsically wrong to adopt a version of nearly identifiable authorship rather than remixing the Don Giovanni soup for every modern production; we can safely leave that to the stage director.’ That seems about right – or does it? Is it a little too prescriptive? In theory, perhaps; in practice, when one suffers – well, you know the rest… At any rate, let us not disdain a thoughtfulness, a respect for Mozart and Da Ponte, that goes beyond a juvenile ‘look at or ‘listen to’ me. Two great Mozart conductors, duly honoured in the Semperoper foyers, would surely have nodded wise assent. Colin Davis and Karl Böhm, however, realised that it was ‘not all about them’.

The cast is entirely new, and it’s led by a British tenor who is now deservedly moving centre-stage in London after a long apprenticeship in Germany. Benjamin Hulett’s sound is simply glorious – rich, rounded, warm, and expressive – and he incarnates Prince Tamino as though born to play the part.