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