I’d do anything for love (and I would, in fact, do that) (Dido & Aeneas/Bluebeard, Oper Frankfurt)

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