eno – Likely Impossibilities

The ENO’s Parsifal: Knights of the living dead

Regietheater is by definition non-canonical but Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s well-travelled 1999 staging of Parsifal is one of the few productions that can be said to have achieved iconic status. Last Sunday I caught its current revival at the English National Opera. It’s still worth seeing. The cast is almost universally fantastic, and the orchestra and conducting are good too. There was only one hitch, and that was that it is in English. (Maybe this wouldn’t be a big deal for you, but it turns out that I hate Wagner in English, or at least I can’t stand this translation.)

Wagner, Parsifal, English National Opera, 2/27/2011. Production by Nikolaus Lehnhoff, conducted by Mark Wigglesworth with Stuart Skelton (Parsifal), John Tomlinson (Gurnemanz), Jane Dutton (Kundry), Iain Patterson (Amfortas), Tom Fox (Klingsor). English translation by Richard Stokes.

As well as in London, this production has been seen in Baden-Baden, San Francisco, Barcelona, and Chicago, supposedly making it the most-seen Parsifal production ever. This is supposedly its last appearance in London. It is also on DVD (from Baden-Baden). This was my first time seeing it and I can understand its popularity. While it looks a little dated today, it mixes a clear basic idea with a collection of more elusive (and allusive) images that illuminate this challenging work without oversimplifying it. It’s good, and I can handle some ambiguity in Parsifal, but yeah, it beats me as to what Lehnhoff is saying some of the time.

The setting is your basic post-apocalyptic wasteland, of the indoors sort. The knights of the Grail are already encased in their own cement tomb, a decaying order (whose first appearance alludes to the terracotta army of ancient China. The Grail is a beam of blinding light, an empty signifier of a religious cult of devotion without purpose. Parsifal enters through a meteor hole in the fortress; he and Kundry, the only outsiders in the first act, are both wild creatures dressed in reddish brown, contrasting with the grayish white robes of the knights. Amfortas is almost a mummy already, and we actually see Titurel this time around, looking like a zombie.

Act 2 is basically the same set, which is a problem. Klingsor, looking like a Japanese warrior, hovers in the sensitive area of a giant pelvic x-ray (castration, we get it, OK). Kundry gets a succession of ruffly and colorful costumes whose shedding may suggest a butterfly, but whose first shell was obviously a giant vagina (perhaps this interpretation is a sign of Anna Nicole’s lingering influence on my mind). The staging of the seduction is a little on the routine side, and the buttoned-up flower maidens are more like nuns behaving badly than seductresses (albeit with, um, balls on their heads).

Act 3 is the most enigmatic. The knights have disintegrated into a disorderly mess, all now dressed in rags, and the curved train tracks and mass grave suggest a famous image of Auschwitz. But I’m not sure exactly what Lehnhoff is getting at here. The lack of a scenic transformation with the Karfreitagszauber and Parsifal’s departure from the group at the very end of the opera don’t quite add up. Amfortas dies, Kundry leaves with Parsifal and a few of the knights, and the rest seem to hail Gurnemanz as their leader and start worshipping the spear instead. This group doesn’t seem to be saved at all, but Parsifal’s retreat confuses me.

This is an addition to my growing collection of Christian God-free Wagner productions (see also this one and this one), but a non-Christian Parsifal is rather a larger challenge than a Tannhäuser or Lohengrin. As someone with limited interest in religion in general I thought it worked surprisingly well. However, this does add complexity to the reading of the libretto, and I’m afraid that this was already dealt a severe blow by the English singing text. The dense network of allusions and rhythms of Parsifal are impossible to translate. Beyond this, this translation simply suffers from many problems of tone, sounding too often like low doggerel (and I believe it contains many more rhymes than the German). For example, and I may be paraphrasing in word order:

Du siehst, mein Sohn,
zum Raum wird hier die Zeit.

You see here, my son
Time and space are one

It’s close to literal, but still presents problems of meaning–the Verwandlung from time to space is made into an equivalence–as well as adding a rhyme where one is really not called for. I can’t say I find “A single weapon serves” a satisfactory translation of “Nur eine Waffe taugt,” either. The emphasis is right, but “taugen” is so much more noble than the utilitarian “serve.” (It also creates a connection with Kundry’s “Dienen, dienen,” translated here as “to serve, to serve,” which is something different.) The obvious solution is to forget about it and do it in German, if you ask me. The enunciation of words was done with a conscious correctness that was not always musical, but I could always understand it. Unfortunately.

I’m sorry that the translation interfered with my enjoyment of the music so much, and hope this isn’t true for everyone else. Because the musical performance was really good! The orchestra sounded thoroughly excellent and well-rehearsed if a smidgen less than world-class in sound. Mark Wigglesworth proved an able conductor with beautiful balance and coloring, though I sometimes missed the larger sweep of the score. It didn’t do anything so crass as drag or rush but it didn’t quite hover in timelessness either.

Stuart Skelton is a fantastic Parsifal, with a large, forceful, yet still beautiful and clear Heldentenor. I missed a certain fragility at first, but it is lovely to hear a role like this sung with such security and passion the whole way through, and acted with both naïveté and dignity. John Tomlinson’s august Gurnemanz got the largest share of the applause, and his wisdom and authority pays great dividends despite some severe wobbles in Act 3. Iain Paterson threw himself into Amfortas’s tortures with mostly touching and occasionally awkward results, and sang with nobility and Textdeutlichkeit. (OK, screw it, I’m going to throw in as much German here as possible to make up for the lack of it onstage.) Jane Dutton was the biggest disappointment as Kundry, with blowsy, scharf tone. Tom Fox sounded at times recht ausgesungen. Chorus and small roles all solid.

More than worth seeing. Especially if you have a greater tolerance for Wagner auf Englisch than I.

Photos copyright Richard Hubert Smith.

It’s a dog’s life

December 6, 2010 2 Comments

My unearned London vacation continued last Thursday with A Dog’s Heart at the English National Opera. It sounded intriguing: production with theater company Complicite, source material from Bulgakov. But the composer, Alexander Raskatov, was an unknown quantity to me. Turns out this was bad, because while this opera some things going for it, the score isn’t one of them, alas.

Alexander Raskatov, A Dog’s Heart. English National Opera, 2/12/2010. Production directed by Simon McBurney, conducted by Garry Walker with Steven Page (Professor Filipp Filippovich Preobrazhensky), Peter Hoare (Sharikov), Elena Vassilieva (Shaik’s unpleasant voice/Darya), Andrew Watts (Shark’s pleasant voice), Leigh Melrose (Bormenthal), Nancy Allen Lundy (Zina), Blund Summit Theatre (dog puppetry)

A Dog’s Heart was composed by Raskatov to a libretto by Cesare Mazzoni after the Bulgakov novella of the same title. The source material is wonderful for an opera, a tale of a mad doctor/professor who in an unwise decision transforms a good-natured stray dog into an exceptionally intemperate man via the transplant of some, uh, vital organs. Hijinks, as they say, ensue. The setting is 1920’s Russia, and the absurdism, Soviet twists (telltale obsession with real estate, committees, informants, etc.) and series of short, episodic scenes, as well as some elements of the musical style, are strongly reminiscent of Shostakovich’s The Nose. Like that work, the libretto is a “sung play” setting of the Dargomyzhsky sort, consisting of massive amounts of dialogue without many ensembles and only a few extended solo sections. (Think Les parapluies de Cherbourg, Russian style.) The similarities to The Nose loom large enough to maybe say that A Dog’s Heart is derivative.

Raskatov is best-known for his completion of Schnittke’s Symphony No. 9, and his own mixture of styles recalls Schnittke as well. Unfortunately, I could never grasp a unique voice under the collage of Soviet anthems, jazz, and Russian folk music. The music is maddeningly disjunct, hardly ever lyrical, and changes texture and mood so quickly that I felt I never had a grip on it, nor could I figure out the way the music related to the dramatic situations. Most of it is not tonal, though Raskatov has an odd tendency to turn straightforwardly tonal at the most dramatic climaxes. Things settle down a bit in Act 2 with a Shostakovich-ish passacaglia, but I still have no idea what Raskatov is about musically. If there is a characteristic sound to this opera it is, alas, the combination of a flexatone and a farting trombone. That makes it sound much more entertaining than it is, the music rarely picks up on the wit of the text.

I suspect the poor text setting was a major impediment. The original libretto was in Russian (though the premiere was at De Nederlandse Opera), and while Martin Pickard’s English translation is satisfyingly immediate and vulgar, the emphasis and rhythm of the text enjoy only a tenuous connection with that of the music. The text proceeds slowly, and the surtitles were much appreciated because it is not easy to understand. Few characters acquire a unique musical profile, and some of the music associated with one is recapitulated by another with no clear dramatic intent. The most distinctive voice is the obligatory screechy New Opera coloratura soprano, here a maid who is given a particularly punishingly stratospheric part (Nancy Allen Lundy sang with flair). She’s got a character, but someone write a new opera that doesn’t involve a lady hanging around solely above the staff, please!

The inventive and very precisely choreographed production, directed by Complicite director Simon McBurney is the best thing going here. The set combines projections of Soviet scenery on a backdrop (and sometimes also on a front scrim) with an otherwise mostly-bare stage. Sharik, pre-transformation, is represented by an endearing puppet dog from Blind Summit Theatre (you may remember them as Trouble in the Met’s Butterfly–that production originated at ENO). His “pleasant voice” is sung by a countertenor, Andrew Watts, his “unpleasant voice” by a mezzo, Elena Vassileva, barking and squealing through a megaphone. The two sound quite similar in timbre; the main difference is the megaphone and musical style rather than the voices themselves. As a foul-mouthed balalaika-playing man with a taste for vodka, Sharik becomes Sharikov and is sung by tenor Peter Hoare, who makes an outrageous, overpoweringly energetic character who shakes up the slow proceedings considerably.

Unfortunately the production is content to be merely absurd, and while I don’t mind that it keeps the symbolism open-ended, I wish it had done something more with the piece’s politics. Its view of the Soviet society of the Professor’s apartment committee and Sharikov’s employment is underdeveloped and vague, and prevents things from really acquiring consequence and gravity. The chorus mostly lingers stage left in a straight line, and the production never really creates a society beyond the setting of the professor’s apartment. Despite the tightness of the staging and some strong scenes–an intriguing beginning mixing the two voices of the dog, a parade of strange patients at the Professor’s office, and most of the scenes involving Sharikov the man–the evening tended to drag. Singing was good and the orchestra dealt handily with the asymmetry of Raskatov’s score and its strange sounds. It’s not like I could have heard if things had gotten off but it all sounded very confident. But without music I can enjoy, I’m afraid I can’t call this one a success with me.

Possibly the most amusing thing I heard all evening was this dialogue in the ladies’ room before the show:
“Tom was so disappointing. Jen said to expect a stunner.”
“The best I can say is that he has very good skin.”

Trailer: