Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Deutsche Oper Berlin

29.6.22

In the era of the hyperobject you almost have to salute a production that retains the visual signifiers of Regieoper while narrowing the opera’s scope of meaning instead of widening it, particularly when the work concerned is by the most totalizing composer of them all, Richard Wagner. You almost have to hand it to them. But only almost. Jossi Wieler, Anna Vierbrock, and Sergio Morabito’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is sometimes clever, reasonably entertaining, has a decent take on the ending, and never sets its goals particularly high. The other Wagner director at the DO gives the impression of arriving at rehearsal to announce that “today we are going to see how the forging song would look as staged as Part 2 of Das Kapital.” But rather than read the musical world of Die Meistersinger as an allegory for [whatever], Wieler/Vierbrock/Morabito pop into their Wagner rehearsal and announce that “it’s about singing, actually.”

Their production is set in a modern conservatory run by Veit Pogner, going through a generational shift. The Mastersingers are the teachers, followed around by a group of students. Even Beckmesser, an uptight dork, has his clique. The students react with horror when Pogner announces his plan for Eva, but mostly seem on board with the local method. Hans Sachs is the resident hippie and (I think?) therapist or Alexander Technique instructor or something like that and Walther is the preternaturally gifted student who shows up not having ever had a lesson but somehow is better than everyone else (music students all know that person and we hate them). The prize songs are staged as recognizable music school events, including auditions, masterclasses, and a midnight concert gone wrong (that’s the end of Act 2). The finale seems to be a graduation.

The suggestion that the mastersingers’ pedantic yet still attractive culture is the world of modern classical music itself is an intriguing one. One of the strongest statements on this is made at the very beginning, when the church chorus in the opening is positioned in the boxes around the theater, making it very clear that the characters’ world is ours. Likewise, the set’s mixture of nineteenth-century wood paneling and modern institution suggests a conflict between tradition and change. It is also modeled on a specific Third Reich-era building at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich, adding another element to the traditions that may be being preserved. But while these are all good ideas, they tend to be suggested rather than developed, making things more lightweight that a description would imply.

One thing about Meistersinger is that its text and score are extremely specific, choreographing a lot of action around shoemaking, other gestures, and spaces. Removing the craft element means a loss of that tight relationship between music, text, and action. There are ways to replace it, but this production is too laid-back to have done much. However, having Hans Sachs hand out, of all shoes, Crocs is very funny. The procession at the beginning of the final scene is staged as a nightmare but I wasn’t sure what it was doing.

Despite being undercooked and sometimes conventional, this production moves along quite well and is generally engaging to watch. (I recognize that as someone who works at a music school I may be targeted by a production that is essentially about faculty meeting drama.) It is made very obvious that Eva and Sachs are having an affair, aligning her with the progressive faction of the conservatory and against her father. Since the stakes seemed to have been lowered, I spent a lot of the performance wondering how they were going to stage Hans Sachs’s speech at the ending (the ultimate “this isn’t actually about music” moment), but it actually works out well enough: Eva and Walther nope out of the entire situation, leaving the stage, walking into the auditorium, then out into the lobby while Hans Sachs gradually gains support among the students and then all the chorus, acclaimed not as a dictator but as a populist demagogue.

Musically, this wasn’t an outstanding Meistersinger but it wasn’t bad. John Fiore’s conducting was very smooth and transparent, drawing out the melodic lines and counterpoint rather than the weighty effects and contrasts. Klaus Florian Vogt’s Walther is a very well-known quantity but he was in great voice, sounding a bit darker than he did last time I heard him but maintaining his incredible clarity. He did suffer an error that I’m amazed most Walthers don’t make every time, singing the wrong verse of the Prize Song text at one point (it feels like there are 15 different ones!). It was definitely Wagnerese, the notes were right, but the words weren’t the ones on the supertitles; he looked briefly discombobulated and then figured it out, making this act of composing a little closer to authentic than usual. Another one for the drastic/gnostic files, musicologists.

As Hans Sachs, Johan Reuter wasn’t very vocally imposing and sounded tired by the end, but he’s a smart, interesting interpreter and made a real character. Heidi Stober sounded nice but underpowered as Eva. Ya-Chung Huang was a very tastefully sung, hyperactively directed David. In a typical Berlin arrangement, Philipp Jekal acted Beckmesser and Tom Erik Lie from the Komische Oper sang; Jekal seemed over the top but it can be hard to judge under these circumstances. Lie was very accurate and solid also considering the circumstances.

Based on the cameras I saw all over the auditorium, this production will eventually be on TV or DVD.

Full credits here

Der Freischütz

De Nationale Opera, Amsterdam, 21.6.22

Director Kirill Serebrennikov’s Der Freischütz, which I saw in Amsterdam but is now streaming free on OperaVision, is a rehearsal room production, that is, the setting is a place where a bunch of artists are rehearsing Der Freischütz. OK, I thought, it’s late pandemic (one hopes) and we’re partying like it’s 2010, when this gambit was ubiquitous. It’s an interesting choice for Serebrennikov, who directed an entire Nabucco in Hamburg while under house arrest in Russia and has since relocated to Germany. Opera about opera often has a kind of tunnel vision, cutting off the world outside in favor of self-contemplation. But, like any rehearsal room production, this production is only as good as its theatrical invention. This one isn’t entirely consistent and sort of runs out of steam at the end, but on the whole I found it charming.

The spoken dialogue of Freischütz lends itself more easily to directorial intervention than sung-through opera—the words don’t have the same privileged status as the score, particularly in something like Freischütz, an opera now primarily valued for its overture and a few creepy set pieces, not its grand plan. (See also Dmitri Tchneriakov’s Carmen, which I wrote about here, though that’s more of a grand plan situation.) There’s a lot more room for directors to create new text, not just stage existing text, and that is what Serebrennikov does.

Above all, he wrote a new demonic narrator/MC known as “The Red One,” played entirely in English by actor Odin Lund Brion (who apparently also plays Tchaikovsky in Serebrennikov’s new film Tchaikovsky’s Wife, which sounds like a trip). He directly addresses the audience and the characters, interpolates some songs from Tom Waits’s The Black Rider (inspired by Der Freischütz) in a raspy Brecht voice, and generally talks a lot. He’s good company, but this is a production that is best at its most effervescent, and the amount of added text drags.

The rehearsal room plot is more a series of skits and characters than a full-fledged plot and mostly transpose the opera’s musical numbers into new anecdotes. A bass who has clawed his way out of the chorus (Kaspar, Günther Groissböck bringing the abs-based humor we would expect), a soprano worried that she is getting older (Agathe, Johanni van Oostrum), a tenor worried that his wife would prefer to be married to a baritone (Max, Benjamin Bruns, sounding good). The material is not particularly fresh and embraces theater clichés, but perhaps against my better judgement I still enjoyed the well-controlled tone and craft in the execution. It’s an opera production with jokes about the Barihunks blog! There’s an Antichrist joke! There’s a highly choreographed Hunter’s Chorus! There’s a pretty good marimba cell-phone ring joke! As an opera person who has been separated from opera for a while, I felt it was speaking my language.

But I have this feeling that on some level I shouldn’t have liked this because it is, in its own way, narcissistic. It reinscribes a certain dated myth of opera even as it deflates it. Serebrennikov employs a number of distancing devices, including live video, a poster of a forest in lieu of a forest, the narrator, and the picture that ominously falls off the wall is a portrait of Weber. During the overture, The Red One unfurls a slide show telling us the entire story of the opera, a story the subsequent performance doesn’t really bother with. During Agathe’s numbers it seems to make its inevitable bid for transcendence: she sings “Und ob die Wolke sie verhüllen” in a traditional gown, totally straight.

But is that what happens? Before singing, Agathe goes on a rant about fearing her voice is in decline, that she is being supplanted by younger singers. Johanni van Oostrum’s rendition of the aria was lovely, but I still found myself scrutinizing it rather than being transported: does her voice have a certain opacity? Doesn’t this performance seem a bit tense and clenched? Moreover, while the concept honestly has no idea what to do with happy-go-lucky Ännchen (and admits as much), Ying Fang stole the performance vocally, sailing through the score with such lightness, precision, ease, and joy that everyone else seemed to be trying too damn hard. So, uh, maybe Agathe is uncomfortably right? I’m not sure if that is what Serebrennikov intended to happen, but I found the ambiguity the most intellectually interesting element of the performance.

The devil—not just The Red One, but the libretto’s Samiel—does duly arrive, though, and in one of Serbrennikov’s cuter ideas it’s in the form of conductor Patrick Hahn’s voice. (I had the suspicion they wanted him to do it from the podium, which would have been much better theatrically, but he was recorded, probably a performance necessity.) If The Red One is the devil on one shoulder—leading us off track, messing with the story, indulging our more clichéd impulses—the conductor is the devil on the other—imposing a hierarchal order and Werktreue. Musically, though, one major asset of the National Opera in Amsterdam is that the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is a very deluxe pit band and things sounded extremely good.

Is it even possible to stage a by-the-book Freischütz anymore? Most productions don’t. Tcherniakov in Munich was interesting and very different from this one, Konwitschny is infamous (though I like it, lol). There’s one outlying case: Christian Thielemann and Axel Köhler did a traditional production in Dresden because of course they did, so that’s on DVD if you want it. But Der Freischütz’s place in the repertoire is odd: brought out every now and again, vaguely considered important, taught in almost every history course, an overture I’ve played roughly a gazillion times (and would play that many more times, I’m a clarinetist), but usually more of a curiosity than a classic.

One thing Serebrennikov doesn’t do (and Tcherniakov didn’t either) is centrally engage with the German folkloric elements, one of the key touchstones when you are teaching this piece in MUS 362, Music History II. The Hunter’s Chorus is more “Wie die Weiber” than “Men in Tights.” His Freischütz rather exists in a world of international opera, one speaking English rather than German. And for this reason it is ultimately still a nostalgic piece. Barihunks.blogspot.com hasn’t been updated since 2020. The rehearsal room gambit itself feels a little quaint. This production, though, assures us that the world of opera still exists and has meaning. What is that meaning? I’m not sure about that part.

Photos by Bart Grietens

La forza del destino

Oper Frankfurt, 6.19.22

When director Tobias Kratzer says that Verdi’s La forza del destino is an opera that is centrally about racism, I don’t disagree with him. It’s an opera about a lot of things—the force of history, war, how tenors and baritones never recognize each other. But when you remember that its animating force is not just the firearms accident at the start of the opera but the Calatrava family’s deep animus toward Peruvian Alvaro, it makes Carlos’s misguided obsession with vengeance seem like not only a melodramatic device but an all-too-familiar racist vendetta against miscegenation (something amply backed up by Carlos’s and Melitone’s language against Alvaro in the second half of the opera). This does seem like an opera for our times—after all, one of the main characters decides to get away from it all and hide in a cave for a few acts—as does its suggestion that what we call destiny is actually how people act.

That being said, Kratzer’s attempt to stage Forza as a story of race in America, which I think under some circumstances could have really worked, goes off the rails for reasons both theatrical and ethical. As far as I can tell this production hasn’t been scrutinized in print/internet by any actual Americans, but the opera world is international and here I am, an American.

Kratzer maps the story onto decades of American history, starting in an antebellum South and progressing through the Vietnam War to the modern era. He thus immediately recalls Stefan Herheim’s landmark Bayreuth Parsifal, which used a similar idea. Herheim, however, benefitted from a tight connection between work, time, and place. Kratzer’s production is more nebulous. He also isn’t a maximalist like Herheim, which means that it’s easier to scrutinize each decision he makes because there aren’t as many of them.

One challenge is that I think that this revival may have been poorly rehearsed, because the Personenregie was vague or absent. The cast was all new from the 2019 premiere and they may not be quite on the same page; some of it may have worked better in the original production. (I do not include the musical preparation in this and the conducting by Pier Giorgio Morandi and the orchestra were both excellent.) Also, he uses the 1862 St. Petersburg version of the score, which becomes most relevant at the very end.

Kratzer embraces the score’s eclecticism and uses a large variety of theatrical tools and languages. The antebellum Act 1 contains a video (video by Manuel Braun) in which actors silently mime the plot while the singers in front of them, equipped with identical furniture, more or less double their blocking and sing. There is a whole literature about this kind of mediatization but I can’t refer to it because the relevant Oxford Handbook wouldn’t fit in my suitcase, but I think that Kratzer is mostly doing this because the video features Black baritone/actor Thesele Kemane as Alvaro. Alvaro is implied to be a slave in Leonora’s family’s household.

This is one of the central problems of the production and I think that Kratzer should have stopped and gone back to the drawing board right here. If you want to racialize a traditionally deracialized piece (arguably the production history of Forza has historically whitened it), this is not the way to do it. I understand how opera casting works and Kratzer probably had zero say in who his Alvaro was going to be, but you are still left with a production that uses a Black man’s image on film and not his voice, having him ventriloquized by someone else (in this case Korean tenor Alfred Kim). It’s less obviously problematic than blackface but it’s still not good. If you want your production to be about Black people in America, hire some Black people who sing opera, who still face widespread discrimination and weren’t hired to sing in this revival.

I think the all-white production team is also an issue here. Just to start, the production uses images of racist violence (specifically lynching) in a way that wouldn’t be considered acceptable in the US. It’s not the US, but it might be a more effective work if it allowed meaningful connection and creative agency for communities that it is claiming as its subject. Instead they are found around the edges, silent or dead (the film, though made first, literally casts the silent actors as the backdrop to the singers—the other most prominent people are Laura Tashina as Leonora and Dela Dabulamanzi as Curra, the obligatory Black maid character). They aren’t credited on the Oper Frankfurt’s website and don’t get bios in the program.

The America represented in the production is exaggerated and clichéd, which is intentional (that’s the tone of the genre acts) but some of the images seem muddled in a way that’s odd. The hotel is an Old West saloon with a Confederate flag and soldiers in blue and grey mixing (even though it’s still mid-war because they also shoot up a Lincoln icon) and everyone wearing giant caricature heads like they wandered in from the Katharina Wagner Meistersinger. This is a hard act to make work and this one seems stiff and inexpressive, as well as not quite the West or the South or any recognizable genre of image. It’s too out of focus to work as satire, both in its reference to real cultures and as a piece of theater (this is effectively the Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri of Regietheater).

We then move to an austere religious space and one of the other hitches of the concept, which is that American Protestantism is really different from Catholicism, particularly due to its lack of monastic life (a central aspect of the opera’s plot). This version of Christianity, despite the “Jesus Saves” banner, looks very foreign to an American evangelical or Baptist culture. At the end of Act 2, when Leonora joins the monks’ community, the priesthood dons hoods and carries out a KKK ceremony, ending with a burning cross, and I think that the production team could have stood to read a bit more about what a burning cross actually signified, because it’s not this. The point is that Leonora is being integrated into a white supremacist culture but, I mean, she was already in one well before the white hoods.

The third act is set in Vietnam and is the most successful part of the production. The reluctant soldiers and war mania map onto a setting that is obviously drawn from Apocalypse Now (there is a projection of helicopters but no interpolated Wagner). The long passage of time somehow makes it seem more plausible that no one recognizes each other. Every Regie production feels obliged to do something sexy with Preziosilla in this act (one of the least clothed of operatic characters other than Salome) and here she appears as a Playboy bunny with two sidekicks, and they shoot Vietnamese people during the Rataplan. It’s gruesome and rather more effective than the previous acts because there isn’t so much artifice between the idea and its representation.

The final act is set at a food bank run by the monks in their modern incarnation, their room overseen by statues of Barack and Michelle Obama (this is where Carlos condemns Alvaro as “sangue il tinge di mulatto”). At the end, Kratzer returns to the film doubling for Leonora’s hermitage, here a hotel room. Using the St. Petersburg version of the finale, in which offstage monks intone a Misere, Alvaro dies when he is shot by the police (who are the Padre Guardiano and Carlos), who then immediately frame him. It’s again, not exactly a bad idea, but the use of the film makes it a dodge, actor Alvaro returns only to die, and the interpolation of doctored MSNBC footage of Black Lives Matter protests feels disingenuous, to be extremely generous (to be less generous: catastrophic).

It’s a lot and most of it doesn’t work, but that may have been partly due to the vague and mostly uncoordinated performances by the cast (I don’t really want to see this production again, but I am curious as to what a stronger cast would bring to it). The biggest asset to the production was Pier Giorgio Morandi’s swift, nuanced conducting and the exciting performance by the orchestra. As Leonora and Alvaro, both Izabela Matula and Alfred Kim boasted powerful, stable middle registers, a must for Verdi, but shared the same issue of singing the entire opera at a blunt, unrefined f to ff volume, which became tiresome very quickly, and neither created much of a character. Zeljko Lucic sang with much more nuance but set new records for amount of Baritone Claw and conventional hand gestures, seeming utterly at sea in as a character given great importance by this concept. Bianca Andrew did a fine, zesty job as Preziosilla and deserves a better production to be in. Einspringer bass Don Lee had the unenviable job of subbing in as Calatrava Senior and the Padre Guardiano at short notice but sounded solid.

An example of a production with a similar mission that was, by most accounts, more successful on these counts is Heartbeat Opera’s Fidelio, which I read about but didn’t see. It suggests a very different way this sort of retelling. But that’s not, for better, or for worse, German repertory opera.

Full credits here

Dido and Aeneas/Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Oper Frankfurt, June 18, 2022

I’m seeing some opera this summer related to a project I’m doing about “problem operas” and I thought I would write about some of the performances here. This first one wasn’t planned to be part of my research project—I was in Frankfurt for something else—but I wasn’t going to skip such an interesting-looking prospect, and I’m glad I saw it.

On its face this is double bill is odd, above all due to the drastically disjointed musical style. But Barrie Kosky’s production, a cult favorite here in Frankfurt (it premiered in 2013), makes a case for both operas as the stories of doomed relationships, and ultimately this production is more than the sum of its already formidable parts.

Kosky’s Dido has the studied restrictions of a theater school exercise, or a Dogme 95 director who decided on a totally different set of rules: an extremely shallow stage is bisected by a bench that runs nearly its entire width, a chorus that is directed to be “expressive” and a production whose pastel colors give few hints as to a specific setting or time period. The result has the flatness and frequent stylized poses of a photograph, and indeed this is a production that looks great in images, but it is well-chosen to concentrate the strong contrasts of Purcell’s story.

The side characters in Dido are rendered with exaggerated stylization, including the head-wagging witches and party-all-day chorus. Dido, in contrast, was performed by Cecelia Hall with vivid indecision and musical precision, it is a big performance but one that never becomes bathetic. The loss here, arguably, was Aeneas, despite Sebastian Geyer’s best efforts he comes across as just some guy, but that’s partly Purcell’s fault (I also thought he was vocally a little miscast; his voice sounds quite dark for this piece). The orchestra adopted a mostly convincing HIP-light approach, including recorders and period winds but modern instruments performed in period style; this was more of a fleet and light historical performance than a monumental Romantic one.

In contrast, Kosky’s Bluebeard is very three dimensional, the bench replaced by a raked turntable (I was occasionally distracted by thinking about how difficult it would be to stage manage this kind of situation—the answer being “very,” though it doesn’t turn that often). Kosky remains a minimalist but in a different way: the staging never tries to literally represent doors, torture chambers, or any of the other things revealed in the castle. He doesn’t need to, because they’re in the orchestra already, and a visual analogue would probably never measure up to Bartók’s music.

The result is highly abstract, the drama a story of Judith and Bluebeard gradually destroying each other. Bluebeard didn’t kill anyone, but he and his previous wives appear as doubles of himself and Judith, alluding to their pasts and futures. There are visual flourishes alluding to the text, including vines, smoke, and water, all of which emerge from Bluebeard and his three doubles’ sleeves.

The bare stage means that all the focus is on the cast, and Claudia Mahnke and Nicholas Brownlee, but both were able to find a physicality reflecting the music’s intensity and seemed completely absorbed. I thought Mahnke was a bit more specific than Brownlee, but she’s been singing this production for a while (and he sounded great, based on list of upcoming engagements the opera world is going to be hearing a lot of him in the next few years).  Conductor Benjamin Reiners had perhaps the hardest job of the evening, leading two such radically different works, but the Bartók was impressively well-balanced, and more focused on the singers than the highly symphonic focus you often hear in this work.

This is the kind of performance that it’s easy to say “avoids traditional operatic schtick,” and it does, as well as staging with two repertoire classics that nonetheless exist on the margins of the traditionalist canon (meaning it doesn’t have any of the big nineteenth-century features like love triangles, betrayals, cabalettas, etc.). I hesitate to frame it that way because it’s hard to do in a way that isn’t Verdi and Puccini-bashing, which I have no interest in doing, and what is opera without some schtick sometimes? But it is nonetheless refreshing to see such an inventive double bill staged with unique flair, and the kind of approach that would benefit any over-familiar work. A feel-bad classic.

Full credits for production here

Photos from Oper Frankfurt site, no photographer credited

I wrote about opera and modern life in Saturday’s New York Times:

Beneath the artifice, the virtuosic singing and the foreign languages, opera’s stories are deeply familiar: tales of love, loss and duty that anyone could identify with. But lately, there’s another way that opera has been recognizable to many in its audiences: its dissatisfaction with the state of the world.

During a recent operagoing trip to Europe, I was struck not by the extent to which productions were placed in the present — contemporary settings are routine there to an extent they are not in the United States — but by the degree to which they were critical of the universes they portrayed. They were, above all, savage and skeptical, and therefore felt very much of our moment.

You can read the whole thing here.

The above also constitutes my review of Lohengrin in Zürich. To add a few more review-y things: it’s hard to judge in the Opernhaus Zürich, which is approximately the size of a two-car garage, but Rachel Willis-Sørensen sounds like a genuine jugendlich-dramatischer Sopran, which is always exciting. She’s only in her early thirties and it will be exciting to see where her voice goes. Anna Smirnova was a big and blowsy Ortrud whose dramatic highlight was a point at which she kicked a bunch of bouquets off tables like an aggressively untrained soccer player. Finally, this a performance found Fabio Luisi doing Peak Luisi (delicate, exquisite) and I found the production involving and admirable if not very thrilling.

Hopefully I will soon be able to very belatedly complete my review of Die Frau ohne Schatten in Munich (which currently is a draft and a lot of notes), mostly because the conducting was extremely good.