I wanted to see Stefan Herheim’s new Glyndebourne staging of Pelléas et Mélisande in part out of perverse curiosity. What would happen when opera’s most hyperactive extrovert directs opera’s least flamboyant, er, opera? I was on my way to the Nineteenth-Century Music Conference in Huddersfield so I went to Glyndebourne first. Also I remembered I have a blog so I decided to write about it here.
And unfortunately I think Debussy might be Herheim’s kryptonite.
Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades is an opera that swerves between the apparently conventional and the obviously unsettling. As Dostoevskian antihero Herman crashes through 1790s St. Petersburg in search of the three cards that will always win, we can never quite tell what’s real and what’s the product of his feverish, anachronistic mind. And that’s before Stefan Herheim got around to directing it.
But now Herheim has, and on the way to Berlin for some work I went to Amsterdam to see it.
If you’re one of those people who fill comment sections with impassioned arguments about different editions of Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, has Stefan Herheim ever got something for you. (If you aren’t, you’ll find plenty to like too.) This production, which premiered on Thursday night at the Bregenz Festival, is not an attempt to create a definitive, authentic edition of one of the most convoluted operas in the repertoire. It’s about what’s at stake in such a search for authenticity–about subject and object, what it means to control and/or love someone, and whether we ever can escape our own heads.
And rarely has the search for the true self looked so much like a twisted Busby Berkeley musical!
This year Stefan Herheim’s revelatory Bayreuth production of Parsifal was taped and broadcast on TV. You can now watch it online. Don’t miss this one.
Herheim takes the story of Parsifal as the story of Wagner and Bayreuth
themselves, a journey from isolation to disaster to the possibility of
redemption. It’s challenging but will make you see the piece and hear
the music in many new ways. I saw this production live last year, with a slightly different cast and, from what I hear, slightly different production (I am watching this video tonight, so I can’t yet say how different). Here is what I wrote about it then. I also recommend Wagneroperas.net’s short introduction, which has links to many more reviews.
To be a ridiculous elitist, I expect the video is a poor substitute for the live experience. Camera direction is a problem with filmed Herheim–there’s always a lot going on and the camera strictly controls what you see, including some things and excluding others and governing when you move from one part of the stage to another. (I think Rusalka in particular was far more exciting live.) But this production is also about the journey you took to get to Bayreuth, and why you made that not uncomplicated trip.
That’s not meant to discourage you from watching this, indeed it would have been a travesty had this production not been filmed. (This is the last year it will be seen in Bayreuth before being replaced.)
The videos are on YouTube; I recommend downloading them because who knows how long they will stick around.
Act 1
Act 2
Act 3
Postscript: I warn you against listening to Parsifal and Bohème in close proximity. At some point you will hear, in your head only, Rodolfo crying out “Mimì!” followed by the Heilesbuße-Motiv (the descending arpeggio), and it will be really weird.
“Oh no! The art has escaped again!” So yelps a diminutive curator by the name of Lillas Pastia when he goes downstairs to check on the storage room in his museum. He sees the remnants of “Les triangles des sistres tintaient,” but we just saw all of it: a panopoly of characters from paintings, opera, and literature–many of them femme fatales–who have broken free from their authors to perform a rousing song and dance number. There’s Salome with the head (she premiered in Graz, natch), Mona Lisa, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth I, a Degas dancer, Marianne with her tricoleur, and, er, Jesus.
So what does this have to do with Carmen? Rather a lot, actually. This production (first seen in 2006 and now in its first revival) probably helped Stefan Herheim earn the reputation for being incomprehensible, but if you can keep up there’s a fascinating dissection of the nature of artistic representation, gender roles and a lot more. Plus it’s a ton of fun. Rarely has the explication of Nietzsche employed so much glitter.
Bizet, Carmen. Oper Graz, 6/27/12. Production by Stefan Herheim (revival) with new dialogue by Stefan Herheim and Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach. Conducted by Johannes Fritzsch with Kirstin Chavez (Carmen), Jean-Pierre Furlan (Don Jose), David McShane (Escamillo), Gal James (Micaela).
As usual, I will add more photos to this post when I’m working on internet that doesn’t have a clock on it. In the meantime you can see a gallery here.
The basic conceit of this production is simple. The setting is an art museum, where Don Jose is a security guard and Carmen is a cleaning lady. The action is a series of fantasies inspired by and happening in the paintings surrounding them. The big idea–that we are shaped by the artistic representations that our culture values (or, in this museum, even enshrines), and those who produce those images wield inordinate power–is familiar from many Regietheater stagings, but the twist from a self-reflexive theater setting to a museum of paintings allows all sorts of fresh tricks and twists. (Laurent Pelly also used a museum setting in his more recent Paris Giulio Cesare, which I haven’t seen.)
Much of the staging is quite witty. The opening chorus is sung by an ordinary crowd of museumgoers admiring the funny people in the paintings; the children’s chorus is a school group on a field trip. Don Jose’s regiment tumbles out of a canvas depicting them. The men describing the cigarette women emerging from their factory are a troupe of artists armed with palettes and giant berets, and the women appear with a cloud of steam (it’s an ironic cloud of steam, but as I recall in Francesca Zambello’s ROH production the ladies enter here with a non-ironic cloud, alas). Yet while the cloud produces gypsies, the artists are all painting images of the ultimate Virgin, Mary.
Carmen isn’t just Don Jose’s fantasy, she is enjoying her own fantasy of freedom as well, having a good time with her Habanera and taking control of Don Jose by painting the flower onto his uniform. (He finally smashes a Mary painting to great shock from all surrounding.) Micaela is a prim modern girl, not from a painting, but the fight between the two groups of women plays out between an army of Micaela doubles and an army of Carmens. The women definitely have it harder than the men when it comes to living with these images–and among the women only Carmen manages to wield a paintbrush herself.
Herheim has given himself the liberty to rewrite all of the spoken text to fit this scenario, though many familiar parts remain. The second act, taking place in the museum’s basement, shows the representations free from their creators. Escamillo similarly emerges from a painting. The act is most spectacularly interrupted by some chatter from Carmen and Micaela’s opera queen drag doubles, who alternately seem like a pair of Parterre commenters enjoying exceptional sympathy with the opera’s characters, arguing about the outcome of the plot and anticipating the tenor aria as well as a burlesque dialogue version of Der Fall Wagner. They are, in fact, Dancairo and Remendado, who need the fun ladies Frasquita, Mercedes, and Carmen. The act ends with all the representations holding their own canvuses proclaiming their liberty–with Marianne waving her flag in the middle, of course.
The third and fourth acts (I’ve always thought it was four, though the program lists the third as having two scenes) loses a bit of steam, though there are some spectacular moments. The characters retreat into a pastoral landscape painting (we also see a mise en abyme of endless frames within frames), but all does not go well. Fortune in the form of cards rain down from above, and Escamillo and Don Jose appear as doubles (a must in any Herheim production). Micaela, a refugee from reality, is rather out of place and is casually shot by Escamillo (my distinguished operagoing companion thought this was hilarious, but I’ve always liked Micaela and felt bad for her). The last act presents us with Don Jose attempting to paint his own portrait of Carmen to get her back (through some kind of cheesy projections, he seems to found abstract art at this point), and the crowd of observers appear in an amphitheater setting mirroring us, the audience, observing (an old but nonetheless effective Regie trick dating back to Hans Neuenfels’s Aida if not earlier to Wieland Wagner). The security guard and the cleaning lady aren’t the only ones influenced by representation, we are too, as we watch Carmen. In a final, mind-bending trick, Escamillo has painted Carmen as she really is, as a cleaning lady. Don’t ask what this means, this is a Gerheheimnis to me right now, but it’s fascinating in a lot of different ways.
It’s one of those productions that you would ideally see twice to get all the detail, but it’s thrilling and exhilarating to see it all go by even if you don’t get all of it. It’s busy, and relating the conventional plot as such isn’t high on the agenda, but what’s there is mostly fabulous. As distinguished operagoing companion noted, it seemed to draw primarily from two sources: Susan McClary and Nietzsche. If you ask me, that’s a combination not be discounted. Unlike some other operas that are Regie bait (Lohengrin, anyone?), Carmen is rarely subject to directorial creativity greater than changing the time period, so this fresh insight is especially welcome here.
The Oper Graz has done a great job of reviving this production, Christiane Lutz’s direction is sharp and detailed. Kristin Chavez’s Carmen and Jean-Pierre Furlan return from the first run while the rest of the cast is, I believe, new. Both Chavez and Furlan are excellent actors but probably sounded fresher in the 2006 run. Chavez’s spicy mezzo was unevenly projected much of the time, but when she smoothed it out showed a warm, sensual sound. Occasional scoops and slides made me wonder if her inspiration was a chanson singer, but it mostly worked. Furlan’s sinewy tenor has, sometimes, brutal force, but it’s a rough sound and not too flexible. His French was, at least, excellent. Not so David McShane’s as Escamillo, which sounded too high for him. Gal James as Micaela was the best singer in the cast, though her silvery soprano sounds more Straussian than Bizetian. Supporting roles were solid. Unfortunately the Grazer Philharmonisches Orchester remains a weakness of this house and is lacking in precision, particularly in the strings. Johannes Fritzsch’s conducting kept things together at reasonable tempos.
This production is a treat and it’s a shame it’s so obscure. You want to stage a good Carmen, New York City Opera?
In this dark and dazzling performance, Lulu wears many guises. She is the star attraction of a circus, drawing a succession of honest citizens into her deadly orbit. But she succeeds only as much as she is a projection for what they want, even if they can’t publicly admit it.
Lulu is an opera that demands superhuman efforts, and the Dresden Semperoper has, unusually, found that in cast, orchestra, and production with an embarrassment of riches, from Gisela Stille’s Lulu to Cornelius Meister’s conducting to and Stefan Herheim’s fascinatingly strange production.
Berg, Lulu. Semperoper Dresden, 6/19/2012. New production directed by Stefan Herheim, set by Heike Scheele, costumes by Gesine Völlm, lights by Stefan Herheim and Fabio Antoci. Conducted by Cornelius Meister with Gisela Stille (Lulu), Christa Mayer (Gräfin Geschwitz), Nils Harald Sodal (Der Maler/Ein Neger), Markus Marquandt (Dr. Schön/Jack the Ripper), Jürgen Müeller (Alwa), Ketil Hugaas (Schigolch), Almas Svilpa (Ein Tierbaendiger/Ein Athlet)
I’m not going to summarize this staging at length because
James Jorden already has in impressive detail. (He saw it in Copenhagen but
there seem to be only a few changes.) A lot has been written on this production already but everyone seems to see something different in it–dense cryptic spectacles are like that–so I’m happy to add my bit about what it, uh, “means.”
Lulu is a circus
from the very start: the opera opens with the Animal Tamer inviting us into his
show. Generally that is the end of that and we proceed into the Painter’s
workshop in proper quasi-realistic operatic manner. But Herheim organizes the
opera as an opposition or even dialectic between the circus (grotesques, a
surreal atmosphere, ghosts, the id) and the bourgeois world of operatic
performance (propriety, a miniature version of the opera house’s stage, Lulu’s
lovers before they become ensnared, the actual composition of Lulu, we the audience, the superego).
Lulu herself is the passage between these two realms, and as acted by Gisela
Stille, somewhat inside and outside the action at once, always aware but rarely
autonomous.
Running through the whole production is a, wait for it,
metatheatrical deconstruction thing. (Never saw that coming.) Lulu performs at
times—her dance, her modeling–on a miniature stage replicating that of the
Semper Oper (which apparently was the old Copenhagen opera house when the opera
was performed there), and panels replicating the auditorium interior dot the set. Another tiny model of the theater hangs out stage left. Most significantly Alwa is revealed as the composer of Lulu, starting to scribble at the “one could write an interesting
opera about this” line and continuing to write occasionally for some time.
Sometimes the characters read from music he hands them, prominently Lulu’s “ist
das noch der Diwan” line. She’s only doing what Alwa is telling her, only
behaving as the dark side of his own desires.
The musicians playing these solos appear onstage, and they
are all doubles for Lulu. I took this as a commentary on Lulu’s incompletedness. The act began with a little pantomime where
Alwa and the actual conductor argue about who gets to start, but it becomes
clear that Alwa and the establishment in general are no longer in charge (just
as Berg is not in control of the score), their standing and control falling
faster than Jungfrau Railways stock. The solos show Lulu herself is trying to
take over and playing the tune.
Like every utterance of “Frau Blücher!” in Young Frankenstein makes a distant horse neigh, the pastoral piping of recorders in Stefan Herheim’s Serse has the power to summon animals, in this case a small and jolly herd of dancing sheep. Elsewhere we get slightly creaky stage machinery, big shiny costumes, and some jokes that can only be described as corny (or, um, German). It’s good fun, and for what you expect out of this director and this opera house, mild-mannered madness indeed.
Handel, Serse. Komische Oper Berlin, 6/15/2012. German translation by Eberhard Schmidt adapted by Stefan Herheim. New production directed by Stefan Herheim, sets by Heike Scheele, costumes by Gesine Vollm, lights by Franck Even. Conducted by Konrad Junghaenel with Stella Doufexis (Serse/Xerxes), Karolina Gumos (Arsamenes), Brigitte Geller (Romilda), Julia Giebel (Atalanta), Dimitry Ivanshchenko (Ariodates), Hagen Matzeit (Elviro).
That this production is the last performance I will be writing about in this European year is more or less accidental–I saw Die Frau ohne Schatten afterward but was obliged to file quickly on that one–but it is fitting, because I’m not sure if anything could top this.
Wagner, Parsifal. Bayreuther Festspiele, 7/28/2011. Production by Stefan Herheim (revival), conducted by Daniele Gatti with Simon O’Neill (Parsifal), Susan Maclean (Kundry), Kwangchul Youn (Gurnemanz), Detlef Roth (Amfortas), Thomas Jesatko (Klingsor)
The current Parsifal in Bayreuth, directed by Stefan Herheim and conducted by Daniele Gatti, premiered in 2008 and has since become the festival’s most acclaimed production (and one of its tougher tickets). Parsifal in Bayrueth has a special meaning like few other musical works–the theater and the opera were designed for each other and for decades this theater was the only place the Bühnenweihfestspiel could be seen. Herheim’s production is geared towards Bayreuth, too. Along with telling the story of Parsifal, Herheim traces the history of the opera’s reception and its place in Bayreuth in particular, including the issues that confront the festival today (this is a festival that considers its legacy sufficiently important that a brief production history is printed not in the program book but the paper casting pamphlet). Additionally, the production’s complexity enables the many Bayreuth regulars to see something new each year.
It’s a beautiful production of many striking and haunting images and seamless stagecraft. As in other Herheim productions, we shift cinematically through time and space (so to speak). There is no ready key to the profusion of images and narrative; their well of associations and interconnections, keyed more to the music than the libretto, multiplies and gradually comes into focus. And everything moves with the music in a natural, truly Gesamtkunstwerk way. It’s difficult to summarize or describe, because described literally the production would sound chaotic and scattered. And it is. It’s in your head where everything comes together. Not instantly, either–I felt quite confused up to Act 3, but then everything that came before somehow began to make sense, and in the next few days it was still changing shape. I guess I’m saying that summarizing what happened onstage in my usual fashion is very different from describing my experience.
But the thematic material itself does demand description, because it’s fascinating and brilliant. There are several plot threads. Simultaneously, we watch the story of Parsifal, sometimes seen quite literally, along with the reception history of Parsifal the work in the context of the Bayreuth Festival (from its premiere to sometime in the 1950s), and the path of German history itself from Bavaria’s entrance into the unified Germany through both world wars. All go through interconnected journeys of discovery, seduction, maturation and an ambiguous kind of redemption (or more accurately Erlösung). Parsifal and Parisfal grow through history.
The main set replicates the backyard of Wagner’s Bayreuth house Wahnfried. The prompter’s box is transformed into Wagner and Cosima’s grave, the center of the stage is taken up by a (functional) fountain, the house is in the back. Here is the set (the bed, site of birth, death, sleep and seduction, is where the fountain will appear) and below a picture I took myself of the house:
In the staged Vorspiel, we see Parsifal’s mother Herzeleide in a bed in the center of the stage. This red-haired woman resembles the militant figure of Germania in the painting hanging above the fireplace (where the mirror is in the picture above), Friedrich-August von Kaulbach’s “Deutschland–1914.”:
This gives you an idea of the kind of cultural references that go through this whole production. The women are all variations on the Germania figure, with Herzeleide and Kundry (considering their relationships to Parsifal, rather disturbingly) morphing into each other. In the prelude, Parsifal builds a small wall on Wagner’s grave. This is the theme that will dominate Act 1: repression and shelter. Parsifal is sheltered by Herzeleide, Parsifal is sheltered in Bayreuth by Cosima. There is even an allusion to the work’s anti-Semitic elements when Kundry in the form of a maid threatens to steal Herzeleide’s baby. (That’s in the transformation scene, in which we see Parsifal born. I’m sorry. I warned you that this summary would probably not make any sense. And I feel kind of dishonest writing this because it’s only the tip of the iceberg.)
At the end of Act 1, the boy Parsifal wakes in his bed and his guardian Gurnemanz and asks if he understands (at this point I would have agreed with him: no). Was this all a dream? The dreamlike quality is further emphasized by the giant black wings worn by most of the characters (but not the Christ-like Amfortas, who also carries echos of Wagner’s insane patron Ludwig II). They also prefigure the swan and (German) eagle that will dominate the work. The adult Parsifal shoots the boy Parsifal with his bow (a [Bavarian] swan crest simultaneously falls from the proscenium), ending his childhood and beginning his journey into the world. The Grail temple is a replica of the one from the opera’s premiere (see photo at top of this post), the dead boy Parsifal, symbol of sheltered, traumatized innocence, momentarily plays the part of the Grail. The knights are a collection of ordinary people, both men and women.
In Act 2, Germany and Parsifal have gone out into the world, and started a jolly tragic war. The scene is a World War 1 hospital (one also thinks of The Magic Mountain or of Freud), and Klingsor is a cabaret transvestite, an outcast of a decidedly fin-de-siècle/Weimar sort. The flower maidens are both nurses to comfort the dying war victims and a succession of showgirls. Parsifal is seduced by them and finally by a Marlene Dietrich-like tuxedo’ed Kundry, who envelops him in her wings. Then comes the biggest coup de théâtre of the production. Amid a crowd of suitcase-carrying refugees, Parsifal realizes he must purify the world and heal Amfortas, and enormous swastika flags unfurl and the hospital/castle collapses around him in a giant crash. A boy (the young Parsifal again?) appears in a brown uniform, surrounded by SS officers and bearing Amortas’s spear (the Nazi’s Wunderwaffe?). Parsifal points the spear at Wagner’s grave.
Act 3 opens with my favorite theater-in-theater effect, showing a miniature version of the Festspielhaus proscenium behind the main one (above). But this is a wonderful use of this device, because this is a deconstructive staging, and the history of Parsifal is bound up with the history of this theater itself. Wahnfried has now collapsed, the Wagner regime, German nation and Grail order are in ruins. Parsifal arrives in a heavy medieval outfit like a refugee from a traditional production, but is transformed into a red-haired Germania figure identical to Kundry. The staging, which up to this point had been tremendously busy, suddenly is almost drained of all activity. The work has stopped signifying anything outside itself; we seem to be inside a giant Wieland Wagner tribute scene. With the return of the spear, the Wahnfried fountain begins to bubble, an attempt to wash away the past. Parsifal, Kundry, and Gurnemanz sing This is finished off with another tribute: the Wirtschaftswunder in the form of a procession of workers in front of the stage (a reference to Götz Friedrich’s 1972 Bayreuth Tannhäuser).
As we move to the last scene, in a nod towards Syberberg’s Parsifal film, Titurel’s motive prompts a giant projection of Wagner’s death mask. He is still haunting the festival, but it, like the boy Parsifal in the prelude, is soon blocked by a wall. And we see a 1951 proclamation from then-Festspiel leaders Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner, requesting that audience members refrain from political discussion in the Festspielhaus. But politics, obviously, remain. In the last scene, we are in the West German Bonn Bundestag. The wings are gone by now, but the giant mirror reflects the West German eagle in the floor. Amfortas speaks at a podium where the Grail once stood. But Parsifal’s arrival is ambiguous. The giant reflected eagle, first turning red, is washed of its blood by the appearance of the grail, as water from the fountain washes over it and is seen in the reflection. But, the mirror finally shows the audience and, rather shockingly, the normally concealed conductor and orchestra. The magic veil of the temple of Bayreuth has been lifted. This isn’t a mythic, holy object, it’s something we create and participate in, and also have the power to renew. Or is it just something that we’ve made, our own neuroses?
Musically, the highlight was as expected the Klang of the orchestra, beautifully played and clear and balanced, and never overpowering the singers despite being by any measure pretty loud. Daniele Gatti took slow tempos judging by numbers (around 4 hours 10 minutes, I think Metzmacher in Vienna back in April was around 3:45), but it never felt slow. This was in part because there was so much going on onstage, but the pacing was excellent and variety in color and phrasing fantastic.
The cast was, for the most part, good. Simon O’Neill (above) as Parsifal was the weakest link. He has a fine upper range, with powerful and clear high notes, but his lower range has an unfortunate tinny and nasal tinge, and his singing was neither very musical nor idiomatic in its treatment of the text. His acting did not detract from the production but nor did it help–yes, Parsifal is largely a passive character, so this was OK, but it was not ideal. Susan Maclean’s Kundry was not beautifully sung either, but this is Kundry we’re talking about. It isn’t bel canto, it’s more important that she have scary intensity and shriek well, and for that Maclean was great, with spontaneous and clear singing and hair-raising moments of Crazy. Her Marlene Dietrich impression is really very good, so it seemed a shame she almost seemed to adopt a Dietrich tinge to her voice at that point as well.
While O’Neill and Maclean were new this year, the rest of the main cast remained from the premiere. Kwangchul Youn was a resonant and warm-toned Gurnemanz, but lacked something in gravitas and personality. Detlef Roth has a small voice for Amfortas, but in the favorable Bayreuth acoustic could still be heard, and offered a wonderful singer-actor type integrated performance with extremely physical acting. Thomas Jesatko was a Klingsor also more memorable for acting than singing, but likewise excellent. The chorus, flower maidens, and acting of the supernumeraries (particularly the unnamed Act 1 boy) were all great.
| PREVIOUSLY REVIEWED Herheim’s Yevgeny Onegin in Amsterdam Katharina Wagner’s Meistersinger in Bayreuth Nikolaus Lehnhoff’sParsifal in London Christine Mielitz’sParsifal in Vienna |
Despite the above being mostly about Herheim’s vision, this is a great production because it is such a Gesamtkunstwerk, a model not of artistic megalomania but of collaboration. And how wonderful to see everyone working together to create something so intellectually challenging, beautiful, and unique!
Per-Erik Skramstad at Wagneropera.net has a good essay about this production with a compilation of reviews from the premiere year.
The best way to get a taste of this production without going to Bayreuth is in these videos, first a longish story from German TV and then two short intros from dramaturg Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach. They’re only in German, sorry:
Photos copyright Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther Festspiele (some from previous years)
Stefan Herheim’s production of Rusalka, just finishing its run at the Semperoper Dresden, was one of the best performances I’ve seen in I don’t know how long. It begins not with the score but gently falling rain. We’re on a European street, with several houses, the entrance to a subway stop, a tree, a lamppost, a church, some closed-up shops, and a bar.
Ordinary people pass by, a homeless woman lingers by the subway, a girl carrying a violin case asks for directions, the wind massacres an umbrella, a woman looks out her balcony. But while we vaguely wonder what this has to do with Rusalka (well, there’s water, and the bar is called the “Lunatic”), we begin to notice something else: the events are repeating themselves. A woman slips in a puddle again, violin girl asks for directions again, the woman goes out onto her balcony again.
It’s simultaneously enchanting and estranging. The details are meticulously crafted, but you aren’t drifting off, you’re thinking. Where’s Dvořák, where’s the pond, and didn’t I just see this same thing happen a second ago? And that’s just the first five minutes. You’re about to get a fascinating psychological thriller.
Dvořák, Rusalka. Semperoper Dresden, 5/28/2011. Production by Stefan Herheim, set design by Heike Scheele, costumes by Gesine Völlm, lichees by Reinhard Traub and Herheim. Conducted by Tomáš Netopil with Gal James (Rusalka), Zoltán Nyári (Prince), Gustáv Belácek (Water Gnome), Lisa Livingston (Foreign Princess), Tichina Vaughan (Ježibaba).
The opening sequence is the dull outer life of the Water Gnome, here the central character. With the music, we enter his fantasy world. Wandering around in his pajamas, sometimes he observes the course of his own frustrating life in flashback, sometimes he is in the present, sometimes we can’t really tell what is real and what isn’t. It is all precisely attuned to the momentum of the music, following its course more than it does one of logic. The moments succeed each other in an almost revue-like associative avalanche.
In the real world, Rusalka is a silver-dressed (moon-colored) streetwalker who attempts to seduce the Water Gnome. She, in changing guises, is his Eternal Feminine, the spirit of a nonexistent ideal, an escapist fantasy he prefers to the reality of the woman on the balcony–his wife. The fairy-tale atmosphere is not an escape but a dangerous quantity of sublimation.
Rather than return to her, he ducks into the bar, where he sees his younger self teased by three girls (the nymphs). But there’s always a darker, rawer shadow haunting these memories, as indicated by the bouncing mannequins of the sex shop under his apartment who dance to the nymph’s ritornello (the bar’s stools also go up and down, and the lights flash, quite a show). Indeed, each time he attempts to reach his idealized fantasy it collapses or is unmasked as grotesque, unfulfilled lust, most explicitly indicated by the misshapen, underdressed mob of the chorus that surrounds him at times. You can dream, but it doesn’t make you innocent.
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| Dresden (Tichina Vaughan as Jezibaba) |
Sometimes the happenings are kind of familiar: Rusalka, sitting on top of one of the cylindrical poster-mounting things European cities have, even spectacularly gets a mermaid’s tail floating in water. She sings her Song to the Moon to illuminated satellite dishes and begs the Water Gnome to free her. (Ježibaba is the homeless woman, and she gets Rusalka ingress to the Waterman’s apartment, where she and Ježibaba and the wife hang out. What this meant was a little mysterious to me* but I love some sisterly affection. The nature of Rusalka’s transformation was not on the clear side of things. I’ll get to that.)
The prostitute Rusalka makes the Water Gnome remember an old girlfriend he left for his eventual wife (or an idea of a woman and and not a real person at all?), and the sex shop becomes a bridal store (there are his apparent two versions of women right there, ha!). As Rusalka becomes a young woman in a wedding dress, a younger version of the Water Gnome appears and it is the Prince. (By now we’re in the late 60’s or early 70’s, and first we get a hippie cowboy as the Hunter singing the deer song in what I couldn’t help but wonder if was a Mulholland Drive reference. You know Herheim must love David Lynch.)
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| Graz (Gal James and Gustáv Belácek, with Lisa Livingston in the back) |
In Act 2, we see Rusalka and the Foreign Princess (who has been the Water Gnome’s wife all along) as identically-dressed doubles. The ideal of Rusalka is rapidly replaced by the reality of the Foreign Princess. Then the Prince and the Foreign Princess go to the opera, sitting in one of the proscenium boxes and, judging by their programs, seeing Rusalka, the fantasy. At the upstage end of the stage’s street, a mirror has been lingering all evening, reminding us that we are watching ourselves, now it expands to show the entire house as we watch the spectacular show of the Water Gnome’s sea-themed carnival. The Foreign Princess then tries to drag her husband out of this world. But by now Rusalka has descended in a glittery dress on an illuminated moon, the sea creatures have marauded through the auditorium, Herheim has fired a confetti canon over the Parkett, and the Water Gnome’s problem is our own: we don’t want to leave this spectacle either.
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| Graz (James and Belácek) |
In Act 3, we see the tragic effects of the Water Gnome’s inability to confront the real world. Still haunted by the hooker with a heart of gold but stuck watching TV at home (apparently they got a new one since they spectacularly threw a TV off their balcony to much shattering and fire in Act 1), he murders his wife. Rusalka is sadly left to identify her, and he is arrested. He only returns to smash the watery cylinder that enclosed Rusalka, trying to leave the fantasies that ultimately deceived him.
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| The ballet in Act 2 (Dresden) |
The most striking thing about the production is how through all the complexity it just works, with amazingly detailed acting, the stagecraft of Heike Scheele’s set (the shops on the street transforming, the nymphs floating Rhinemaiden-like) in a way that is dazzling but never gratuitously showy because it works in such close concert with the score. Sometimes, however, it is all a bit much to watch.** It also works with Herheim’s story, which admittedly has little to do with the customary Rusalka at most points. The biggest loss is the story of Rusalka herself, who doesn’t get much in the way of an independent existence or sympathy as a character. But Herheim’s idea–that the Rusalka of the opera is not a woman but a fantasy–is brilliantly realized.***
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| Lisa Livingston (Graz) |
At this May performance the excellent cast was mixed between that of the opera’s December premiere in Dresden and artists from an earlier incarnation in Graz. The majority were from Graz, so I’ve mostly used Graz’s pictures here (sorry, there are some multiple Princes and Ježibabas, but I ID’d the locations for copyright, the top photo is Dresden). Gal James was pure vocal loveliness as Rusalka, with a natural, sweet and even lyric sound and powerful acting between her multiple incarnations. Vocally, she may be my favorite Rusalka yet. Zoltán Nyári has a less heroic voice than you usually hear as the Prince, but his passionate delivery and energy made up for a certain lack of heft. Gustáv Belácek as the Water Gnome was a fascinating protagonist through the production’s heavy demands, and sung with warm sound and ease. Tichina Vaughan was an excellent, somewhat steely but loud Ježibaba, also acted with wonderful comic timing. Lisa Livingston, substituting for Stephanie Friede as the Foreign Princess, suffered from a lot of vibrato but was loud and a strong actress. Tomáš Netopil conducted the excellent orchestra in a beautifully shaped lyrical performance and had quick reflexes with some singers who showed rhythmic creativity.
This production will be back in Dresden in late August, and if you have any chance to see it, GO! The mystifying and frustrating dearth of Stefan Herheim productions on DVD continues (the Onegin in Amsterdam in June will be filmed), but if you’re in Europe this one’s worth a trip. Besides, if you’re watching a video, no confetti will land on your head.
Don’t make me choose between this Rusalka and Martin Kusej’s devastating, very different Bayerische Staatsoper production, they are both fantastic.
*das Geherheimnis (n.): part of a production you don’t understand.
**herheimlich (adj.): when there’s so much stuff going on onstage you have no clue in which direction to look and maybe miss something important.
***Herheimlich maneuver (n.): Extreme method for vigorous expulsion of deeply held preconceptions, for better or worse. Caution: Excessive use of Herheimlich maneuver can result in cases of fatal incomprehensibility. (contributed by @Mirto_P on Twitter.)
Here is a video, but it honestly doesn’t convey the feeling of the production at all. Thanks to Opera Cake for the upload.
Graz photos copyright by Karl and Monika Forster
Dresden photos copyright Mathias Creuzinger
The Marschallin of Stefan Herheim’s virtuosic Staatsoper Stuttgart Rosenkavalier is a sad woman with a lot on her mind. In her unconscious, she struggles between restraint and abandon, the ugliness of reality and the lush comfort of backwards-looking art. Backwards-looking art? Yes, this is a deconstructive production. But while Herheim doesn’t let Strauss off the hook for his sentimentality and conservatism, he also creates something with genuine beauty in the big moments and wit in the small ones. If it sounds overstuffed, well, it is, but so is the opera.
