Henze - Der Prinz Von Homburg (Stuttgart, 2018)

Hans Werner Henze - Der Prinz Von Homburg

Staatsoper Stuttgart, 2018

Cornelius Meister, Stephan Kimmig, Štefan Margita, Helene Schneiderman, Vera-Lotte Böcker, Robin Adams, Moritz Kallenberg, Michael Ebbecke, Friedemann Röhlig, Johannes Kammler, Ming Jie Lei, Pawel Konik, Michael Nagl, Catriona Smith, Anna Werle, Stine Marie Fischer

Naxos/BelAir - Blu ray

The central theme of Heinrich von Kleist's drama Der Prinz von Homburg is very much tied into late 18th and early 19th century Romantic obsessions with the questions of mortality and heroic sacrifice, where the sentiments of love are often conflated with an attraction to death. Such ideas caused an outbreak of lovers' suicides following the publication of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, and indeed Kleist himself would die in a double suicide pact at the age of 34, even before publication of this last play. Der Prinz von Homburg however has a much more complex exploration of an individual mindset setting itself against the prevailing order, providing Hans Werner Henze with fascinating material for an opera that could explore and criticise the conservative nature of post-war Germany in 1960.

"No dream can bring fame and love", the Great Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia sternly observes early in Ingeborg Bachmann's libretto for Henze's opera, but the Prince of Homburg is one who dares to dream. Or perhaps not so much dares as much as suffers from a condition, somnambulism, where he is unable to easily distinguish dreams from reality. He is prepared however to believe that his dreams are real or can at least indicate a way to change reality and the reality he faces is a troubling one.

Waking from one of his dreams, the Prince discovers that he holds a glove in his hands belonging to Natalie, Princess of Orange. He sees this as a sign of love, an omen, something to strive to make real. His obsession with his dream of Natalie however leads him to be distracted during the discussions of the High Command on tactics for the Battle of Fehrbellin. Still caught up in a semi-dreamlike state, unaware of the orders not to engage with the enemy, he leads his troops into the fray. Despite his heroic actions leading to a tremendous victory however, the Prince is arrested for acting against orders and condemned to death.

As with Kleist's Romantic drama, sentiments of love are conflated with death, the Prince going into battle with only thoughts of Natalie as his prize, seeing victory only through the prism of her love. Even though his actions win the day, the Prince is guilty of following his own heart, acting outside of accepted rules of military command. He neither accepts his death sentence nor his later reprieve however, but chooses to live or die - or exist in some idealistic dream-state between them - according to his own terms. It's the ultimate expression of freedom, an idea that is reworked towards other ends in Henze and Bachmann's libretto, the word 'Freiheit' given extra prominence in this 2018 Stuttgart production directed by Stephan Kimmig.

In his notes included in the DVD booklet, the director identifies where Henze's own personal circumstances fit an identification with the Prince of Homburg. Reportedly conscripted into the military by his Nazi supporting father during the war, finding the experience of following orders, rules and protocols deeply troubling, Henze could relate to the wider implications of Kleist's play. An extraordinary, intriguing and deeply fascinating psychological exploration of an individual mindset that refuses to abide by strict or authoritarian rules of social conformity that bear no relation to their personal situation, it's a work that deserves to be allowed to exist in a context outside of the ideal of war heroism or indeed a Romantic notion of love and death being connected.

Kimmig's production for Stuttgart is consequently non-representational, seeking rather to find a more abstract or symbolic truthful presentation of the underlying psychology, conditions and situations. That means that it makes sense on some level, even if it is not that easy to decode. The set is dressed to look like an abattoir or an old-fashioned gymnasium (or death camp) shower without any water taps. Here the soldiers and even the Elector do ballet barre exercises wearing tracksuit bottoms and white vests. The soldiers smear blood on in readiness for battle and, rather than mount horses on the orders of the Commander who brandishes a samurai sword, they line up at a long white table.

Although the setting is unfamiliar, it's an attempt to highlight the actions and the underlying complex psychology through other means. Nathalie's glove, for example, is a boxing glove, and there seems to be a struggle of sorts between the Prince of Homburg and the Princess of Orange over their love - whether she might be forced into a more favourable alliance arranged for her - and over the battleground of their love being caught in a state between love and death. There's an interesting and effective use of an identical life-size projection of the Prince on the curtain that suggests a shadow self, a dream self.

Seeking above all to make the drama work on a level that serves the purposes of Henze's adaptation, it's a highly suggestive means to create an unsettling or nightmarish vision rather than a reality. Or, it might even be seen as intermediate conflation of the two since this is indeed the level Prince's dream-like detachment works on, the proximity of certain death by execution pushing the mind even further into a heightened state comparable to the raptures of impossible love.

It has to be said that Henze captures the sense of heightened states in the music brilliantly and without any glorification, either of the notion of heroism or indeed Romantic idealism. Mentions of the Fatherland and glory provoke ominous thunderous chords and loud percussion in a musical performance of great lyrical and dramatic intensity that is superbly managed under the conductor, Cornelius Meister. It's dramatically attuned to hold a suspended tension and fear, with occasional wandering off into the disturbed and dreamlike paths of the Prince's "black world of shadows".

Henze's musical interpretation of Heinrich von Kleist's tense, haunting and enigmatic drama is utterly fascinating and gripping. Whether the direction of the drama and its obscure imagery is to one's taste or not, it does succeed nonetheless in fully conveying all the power and suggestion of the work. So too do the hugely impressive and uniformly excellent cast, with outstanding performances notably from Vera-Lotte Böcker as Natalie and Robin Adams as the Prince.

The 2018 Stuttgart production of Der Prinz von Homburg is presented in High Definition on a fine Blu-ray release from Naxos/BelAir. The image is clear and well-defined, the musical performance powerful and dynamic in its lossless PCM stereo soundtrack (there is no additional DTS surround track on this release). The BD is dual-layer BD50 and all region A/B/C compatible. Subtitles are in German, English, Japanese and Korean.There are no extra features, but a synopsis and tracklisting are provided along with a comprehensive exploration of Henze's intentions in the booklet essay by the director Stephan Kimmig.

Links: Staatsoper Stuttgart

Janáček - From the House of the Dead (Brussels, 2018)

Leoš Janáček - From the House of the Dead

La Monnaie-De Munt, Brussels, 2018

Michael Boder, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Willard White, Pascal Charbonneau, Štefan Margita, Nicky Spence, Ivan Ludlow, Alexander Vassiliev, Graham Clark, Ladislav Elgr, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, Aleš Jenis, Pavlo Hunka, Florian Hoffmann, Natascha Petrinsky, John Graham-Hall, Peter Hoare, Alexander Kravets, Alejandro Fonte, Maxime Melnik

La Monnaie Streaming - November 2018

Krzysztof Warlikowski's production of Janáček's From the House of the Dead received mixed reviews when it opened at the Royal Opera House early last year. Seen again as a co-production with La Monnaie in Brussels - who would be much more familiar with the director's working methods - it's clear that Warlikowski does try to impose too much onto Janáček's final opera, but even though it has enough going on in its own terms, it's not as if the opera can't take it. As with the Royal Opera House production, if it serves just to get this magnificent work performed - it's not only Warlikowski's debut there but From the House of the Dead that had never before been performed at Covent Garden - then it's job done, and despite the usual reservations and sometimes valid complaints about the director's methods, it's largely a job well done.

As far as trying to do too much, well Warlikowski could probably have done without the theoretical philosophising of Michel Foucault distracting from the strong musical opening scored by Janáček that takes you into a world of masculine power-play and violence that has a heightened malevolence within the confines of a prison. It matters little whether that is a work camp in Siberia, as it is in Dostoevsky's original work - one written about from hard-earned experience as a political prisoner - or in what looks more like an American prison yard. It's a work about observations on the nature of life in the prison camp, the kind of people from all walks of life who end up there and what confinement does to them.

While the philosophical elements add little to the essential meaning of the work, they do at least present an observational view on the nature of justice and imprisonment. Far more successful are the real-life observations in the filmed interviews that give the production a more genuine human touch that is far from theoretical. Projected onto the steel curtain that drops between acts, a prisoner talks about his detachment from the world around him and how it leads to a greater awareness of the presence of death. It adds to the deeper exploration in Janáček's opera of sentiments that are brought out rather than submerged or destroyed by the pervasive violence, anger, hatred, bitterness and regret around them. Women are almost never out of their thoughts or stories - love and family - but even though it is twisted and distorted in this all-male environment, it's a spark that still ignites passions.

That spark needs to be there in a production and From the House of the Dead doesn't have much in the way of action to dramatise. Warlikowski finds other fine ways of expressing those inner underlying sentiments and the complex way they manifest themselves in words and actions, stories acted out with cartoon violence and life in the prison environment with much more realistic brutality. He also avoids what would now appear to be hackneyed imagery in the references to birds, and in particular an injured eagle that is looked after by the inmates and released at the same time as the political prisoner Gorjančikov. Warlikowski finds a more modern and original form of expressing it using two black dancers (dancers often serving a similar function in the director's productions). Cross-dressing and play-acting out the drama in Act II is given perhaps too much emphasis with too much going on that is distracting (another frequent feature in Warlikowski's productions), but it's an attempt find a modern way to relate to those deeper masculine concerns expressed in the work.

From the House of the Dead then is not a conventional work and it doesn't have a central figure much less a hero, as that would go against the intentions of what the work is about. Gorjančikov's narrator becomes an observer, collecting not just stories but also recording the impact these significant incidents have had on the inmates. It's about how hope and the spark of human kindness is never extinguished, even in such a place, even after all they've been through. Each of the characters relate their stories, their fears and complexes, their humanity submerged by the proximity and behaviour of other male characters, of having to get on and live with them, of having to survive not being shafted by them in one way or another, and Warlikowski does this by focussing on the relationships, on little acts of kindness between them, even after acts of appalling violence.

Janáček was always a progressive 20th century musical innovator, a unique voice who had developed a few tricks in his time and never rested on a single simple means of expression but was constantly seeking to innovate. His use of adapting the rhythms of the spoken voice to determine flow and rhythm are expanded further here for the specific challenges of adapting From the House of the Dead. The rhythmic pulse could be seen as representing the monotony and repetition of daily existence, but Janáček - particularly in this new critical edition of the score, a score that Janáček was unable to oversee though to completion - shows subtle shifts under Michael Boder's direction. Never simply repetitive, it's constantly developing and changing, showing how people can adapt to their surroundings and change it by degrees.

Within the score and the world it depicts, human actions, words and behaviours are not negligible and can cause unpredictable shifts as hope turns to despair, the progressive rhythm broken by outbursts of violence, then repaired and finding its rhythm again. It's an incredibly rich work, Janáček also employing harder sounds and unconventional instruments including chains, not as a dramatic element, but as part of the fabric of the world the work operates within. Ultimately however personal interpretation is vital to bring the work to life and it's that investment that is brought to it by an outstanding cast of singers who are given plenty to get their teeth into. Pavlo Hunka in particular makes Šiškov's Act III story heartbreaking and Nicky Spence is a menacing figure in a number of character roles that exhibit a surprising but necessary emotional range for this work. That's all to fit perfectly not with Janáček's score, but with the thoughtful interpretation of this remarkable work by Boder and Warlikowski.

Links: La Monnaie-De Munt