There Will Be Wälsungs (Castorf Ring, 2)

After an animated Das Rheingold, Frank Castorf’s Bayreuth Die Walküre is a rather flat affair. There are rumblings of a larger plan, but as expected they’re more like suggestions of themes than anything systematic. For one thing, the narrative isn’t linear. We’ve gone from an indeterminate trashy American motel in Rheingold back to the 1880s. The 1880s in–you guessed it!–Baku, Azerbaijan. (Sorry if you did not, in fact, guess it. Perhaps it is helpful to remember that Castorf is from East Berlin.) There’s an oil drilling boom and once again people/gods/dwarfs/singers are destroying everything. The Wälsungs Siegmund and Sieglinde, however, don’t have any real place in this ecosystem, and this turns out to be a problem. Musically, though, this was a very strong installment, making the cleft between sound and stage ever wider.

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Nuremberg’s Got Talent

If the Met’s performance Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg of last Saturday were one of its own characters, it would be Veit Pogner. Pogner, Eva’s father, is aging, jovial, traditional, filthy rich (he is, after all, a goldsmith), not a great thinker, and maybe hasn’t quite thought through all of the implications of his grand plans. This was a solid Meistersinger, and it was a pleasure to have Wagner back at the Met after too long an absence. Most of it was good and a few things were more than good. Except for Michael Volle’s fascinating Hans Sachs, it was not daring and it was not exciting, but some meat and potatoes Wagner like we haven’t gotten in a while.

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Ariadne auf Naxos at the Theater an der Wien: Art isn’t easy

The bar has been raised for the richest man in Vienna: one must now have a space shuttle.  The rich (though not unseen) patron of Harry Kupfer’s new Theater an der Wien production of Ariadne auf Naxos holds his party in his private hangar.  He is not a man of taste or of restraint, and none of his guests have much interest in anything Ariadne is selling.  And Kupfer doesn’t seem to have a lot of faith in the transcendent power of art in modern times, either. This production had cool visuals, an amazingly sung Bacchus from Johan Botha, and an excellently staged Prologue, but for me it never really took off.  Maybe I’m just not cynical enough.

Strauss-Hofmannsthal, Ariadne auf Naxos.  Theater an der Wien, 14/10/10.  New production by Harry Kupfer, sets by Hans Schavernoch, costumes by Yan Tax lights by Hans Toelstede.  ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien conducted by Bertrand de Billy with Anne Schwanewilms (Ariadne), Mari Eriksmoen (Zerbinetta), Heidi Brunner (Komponist), Johan Botha (Bacchus), Nikolay Borchev (Harlekin), Jochen Schmeckenbecher (Musiklehrer)

This production sure is colorful.  Literally.  The female party guests get bright red and the commedia dell’arte characters look like they’ve been assaulted by someone wielding a confetti gun.  And the Glitter Fairy threw up on them, too.  The set isn’t large but its industrial look isn’t quite minimal or monochromatic either, and sometimes we have video projections too.  It looks awesome, but it’s very, very busy.  The tasteless desert island set is a small roped-off square in the middle of the hangar space, filled with broken-off statue bits of wings, I assume representing Ariadne’s condition but also the opera seria’s antiquated, museum-like place in a world of space shuttles and clutter.

The Prologue is really excellent.  It’s bustling without being too crowded or unfocused, it moves quickly all over the stage and establishes all the characters very quickly, including a Tenor with an affection for Zerbinetta.  Everything is modern, more or less, though the party guests do sport tall Baroque wigs.  The Composer’s black and white suit stands out among all the color, in the opera Ariadne and Bacchus will also wear black and white.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what this symbolizes.

The Opera features a lot of milling-about by the supernumerary party guests, who are considerably more interested in Zerbinetta than Ariadne.  Occasionally TVs showing stock reports appear.  Ariadne languishes on her broken wings almost unnoticed, her isolation becoming the abandoned state of high art in modern culture.  Bacchus, wearing a tux and waving a hanky, is the commodified form of culture for the masses, giving us effortless tenorial thrills and similarly uninterested in Ariadne–he ends up with Zerbinetta.  Ariadne, confusingly, ends up with Harlekin, joining the modern world at last.  I guess?

You can’t deny that Kupfer has a point of view, but I’m too much of an idealist, and I like Strauss’s music too much, to go along with it.  In this production, high culture doesn’t seem to be something worth saving.  While I can understand putting Ariadne in the background as an interpretive decision, it and the confusing finale undermine too much of the music without making a good point in return.  The party guests don’t give Ariadne a chance, but Kupfer doesn’t give her one either.  It’s easy to show superficial rich people ignoring culture, but what’s the point?  The guests appreciate Zerbinetta and company, of course, but the troupe’s antics are too sweet and harmless to have any kind of satiric bite in this context.

Musically, this was yet another production to show that the Theater an der Wien can for the most part stand up to the Staatsoper in quality–often by hiring many of the same people.  The ORF orchestra conducted by Bertrand de Billy got off to an uneven start but filled the theater in the Opera without ever being too loud (this theater is perfect for this opera in size, I believe Strauss actually pointed this out himself at one point).  Ensembles were excellent.  Anne Schwanewilms brought understated simplicity and sensitive lyric singing to Ariadne, but she, perhaps due to this production, lacked presence and her tone often turned harsh and metallic (though her volume was fine). 

Mari Eriksmoen was plucked out of obscurity to replace post-partum Diana Damrau as Zerbinetta.  She gave a competent account of the role with confidence, stamina, good diction, and good intonation, but the voice itself is small and colorless, and she didn’t even try the trill on the high D.  She does have great stage presence, though, and her modern, no-nonsense Zerbinetta never lapsed into cutesy.  I suspect the enormous applause at the end had something to do with the general Viennese fondness for women who are young and skinny, though.

Johan Botha was unquestionably the musical highlight of the evening with an effortlessly sung Bacchus with his usual clear, light but incredibly powerful tone.  He sounds like he could sing this in his sleep, and I can’t imagine anyone sounding better  in this role today.  He was a good sport embodying the multitude of tenor clichés handed to him by Kupfer–yes, including that hanky–but still, the guy can’t really act.  Interesting work-around, I suppose.

Heidi Brunner had a few excellent moments as the Komponist, singing some lovely rich high notes, but also some rough patches between registers and sloppy phrasing.  Jochem Schmeckenbecher was again (I saw him at the Met in February) a good if blustery Musiklehrer and Nikolay Borchev made a positive if fleeting impression as Harlekin.  The Nymphs et al. were all perfectly adequate.

I do like Zerbinetta’s yellow and green striped tights, though.  If you tell me where I can get some of those I would wear the heck out of them in all sorts of inappropriate contexts.  Proof that I really did choose the right blog name here, I guess.

I think I’m alone in not liking this one too much.  If you would like to read a more ecstatic review you can start with the two major Viennese newspapers, Der Standard and Die Presse.  There are three more performances, on October 17, 20, and 22.  It is not sold out and the standing room line was remarkably low key.

Photos copyright Werner Kmetitsch/Theater an der Wien
Next: Mass in B minor at the Musikverein with Harnoncourt tonight.

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Tannhäuser: Crazy in love

This looks familiar, I’m not sure why.

Dich, teure Halle, grüss’ ich wieder!  After four years with no Wiener Staatsoper in my life, I returned last night, and if this Tannhäuser is any kind of omen I’m glad I did, because it was awesome.  Welser-Möst is doing great things with the orchestra, there’s some fantastic singing, and well, if the virgin-whore complex is getting you down (it certainly gets old for me), Claus Guth has a production for you.

Wagner, Tannhäuser (Dresden version).  Wiener Staatsoper, 8.9.2010.  Conducted by Franz Welser-Möst with Johan Botha (Tanhäuser), Anja Kampe (Elisabeth), Matthias Goerne (Wolfram von Eschenbach), Michaela Schuster (Venus), Ain Anger (Hermann).  Production by Claus Guth.

Guth sets the opera in fin-de-siècle Vienna in the early days of Freud and Schnitzler.  Venus is a figment of Tannhäuser’s imagination, his attempt to live with emotional truth and unearth his unconscious mind rather than the live with social hypocrisy of his comrades (who keep their sex lives more neatly compartmentalized).  Unfortunately, this obsession results in ostracism and (socially induced?) mental illness.  The self-harming pilgrims are, post-pardon, confined to a psych ward, Tannhäuser’s voyage to Rome seems to be in the mind only, and Elisabeth kills herself with an overdose of Tannhäuser’s pills.

We open to see… not the usual orgy but another curtain, exactly like the one that just parted (no ballet, it’s the Dresden version).  For a second I thought I had stepped into a Robert Carsen production by mistake.  But no, it is the stage on which Tannhäuser imagines a double of himself cavorting with Venus, a fantasy he finally leaves.  But even afterwards, the oddly stopping and starting action, rooms that fall apart, and surreal moments suggest that large sections of what we see are through Tannhäuser’s unstable eyes.

I liked this production a lot.  It’s arguably an indirect interpretation, avoiding much of what Wagner would have thought the opera is about (the artist-opera aspects are solely metaphoric), but Guth wants to show that Wagner’s good woman/bad woman and redemption thing aren’t unearthly matters at all, they are just means of social control (we’re still in pre-Tristan land, remember).  Virtue and Christianity are all social constructions, ones which Tannhäuser attempts to defy at his peril.  In Act 3, this gets a little on the convoluted side–I was not always sure where Tannhäuser’s social outcast status stops and his apparent actual madness starts–but it mostly works.  The program claims this is the Dresden version, but Venus does come back at the end so I think it’s a Paris-Dresden combo.

The production speaks largely through images and tableux rather than acting.  Much of the blocking is stylized and static.  Maybe this is because it’s an underrehearsed revival, maybe it’s because many of the singers don’t seem to be able to act, but it seems like it’s a part of the production.  (According to a woman I spoke with during intermission, the June premiere of this production was a lot more detailed on the Personenregie end.)  The sets are gorgeous, the prologue and pilgrims wandering through a mostly-empty stage (the shepherd is a junior-sized Tannhäuser double), the more concrete places all reproductions of actual places in Vienna. 

Tannhäuser reenters the world via the seedy, faux-exotic Hotel Oriental (which still exists), where his comrades relieve their unconsciouses by discreetly renting by the hour, unlike Tannhäuser’s more prolonged and indiscreet escapades.  The hall of song is nothing other than part of the Staatsoper itself (the room with the composer’s busts that faces the balcony looking out over the Ring).  Setting the opera in the opera house itself is kind of an overused trick but it never stops working.  This room is a Baroque imitation and social space, here representing a stiff and self-conscious society with the outdated custom of the song contest.   Finally, Act 3 takes place in Otto Wagner’s asylum in Steinhof, this era’s attempt to deal more rationally with its outcasts.  The costumes are all realistic fin-de-siècle, and it looks very good as well as being functional and unfussy.

The Staatsoper’s orchestra was in excellent form.  Franz Welser-Möst’s conducting was grand, losing a bit of impetuosity but making up for it with nobility.  Tempos were moderately quick but never rushed (though the violins came to grief on one or two of those many long downward runs).  Ensembles were mostly clear and balanced. At the loudest moments the orchestra occasionally overpowered the soloists, but for Wagner this was very singer-friendly conducting.  The chorus sounded super.

Johan Botha sang Tannhäuser with astonishing ease, beauty, and tireless power.  After what usually passes for Heldentenor singing to hear something like this is balm for the ears.  But with that amazing ease seemed to come a lack of dramatic involvement, musical shaping, and variations of color for most of the score.  You felt he might as well be reading the phone book, and while him reading the phone book would be pretty and loud it would not be interesting.  His singing is impressive, but rarely affecting.  And the man cannot act his way out of a paper bag (it must be said, a very large paper bag).  So an incredible and memorable performance in some ways, but lacking in others.

At the end, Tannhäuser finally sees Venus in the guise of Elisabeth.

Anja Kampe as Elisabeth was new to me, and I thought she was fantastic.  She’s got a big, silvery, bright voice that seems destined for bigger and less lyrical roles than this one, but did a good job with the delicate parts of the score as well as raising the roof with the loud ones.  She was also the best actor in the production, making the cardboard Saint Elisabeth close to a real and confused young woman.  (If the ticket gods of Bavaria are generous, I should be seeing her as Leonore in Fidelio in Munich later this season, and I really hope I will.)

Michaela Schuster sounded shrill as Venus, but put everything into it and vamped convincingly.  Matthias Goerne sang Wolfram von Eschenbach with velvety tone (excluding some weak top notes) and great musicality, but was quite stiff onstage.  His Evening Star song was lovely, but, staged as a contemplation of suicide, rarely has someone pointing a gun at their own head been so dull.  The action’s all vocal here.

A great start to the season, I hope this is representative.  Forza del Destino and possibly also Semele next week.

Bows (sorry, hopefully my in-house photography will improve soon, the one with flash was even worse):

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