Strauss - Arabella (Wiener Staatsoper, 2014 - Webcast)

Richard Strauss - Arabella

Weiner Staatsoper, 2014

Ulf Schirmer, Sven-Eric Bechtolf, Anne Schwanewilms, Genia Kühmeier,

Tomasz Konieczny, Herbert Lippert, Wolfgang Bankl, Carole Wilson, Norbert Ernst, Gabriel Bermúdez, Ulrike Helzel, Clemens Unterreiner, Daniela Fally

Wiener Staatsoper Live Streaming - 18 December 2014

Arabella is a bit of a 'Zdenko' of an opera. It's posing as something that it isn't, a female opera dressed in men's clothes, and it's a little bit self conscious about it. It's a second bite at the Der Rosenkavalier cherry by Strauss and Hofmannsthal that somehow misses the point. Attempting to get back to the original sentiments and intentions that inspired their most enduring collaboration, focussing on the romance of period Vienna with its waltzes and operettas, attempting to remove much of the clever self-referentiality and longeurs of Der Rosenkavalier, something however gets lost in the process. It's as if the self-consciousness of the latter has somehow cancelled out the cleverness of the original idea. What you are left in Arabella is simply a beautiful opera, but not much else.

As composed by Strauss, with his wonderful facility for lush orchestration and his incredible writing for the female soprano voice, it is however also too easy to get carried away with the view that the creators might indeed have 'improved' on Der Rosenkavalier in some key respects. Without doing disservice to the undoubted qualities of Arabella as a lovely opera, Ulf Schirmer and Sven-Eric Bechtolf's production for the Vienna State Opera does however refuse to let Zdenka's deceit as to her true nature extend to a view of the opera itself. As Arabella puts it, so perfectly and without any falsity in the final line of the opera, 'nimm mich wie ich bin', "take me as I am". The Vienna production takes Arabella as it truly is, without all the usual adornments.

Key to this interpretation is the casting of Anne Schwanewhilms as Arabella and Tomasz Konieczny as Mandryka. Schwanewilms is an accomplished Straussian soprano, but she presents a very different side of the typical Strauss leading lady from the familiar lush silken romanticism and perfection you would find in Emily Magee, Rene Fleming or Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Her voice is not to everyone's taste, the tightness of her high notes and the less than smooth leap it sometimes takes to reach them nowadays is not ideal, but it's not idealised either. There's a more human quality to the emotional life of Arabella here than I'm familiar with. By the end of the performance, instead of being in awe at the beauty and brilliance of Strauss as a composer, in this production you really feel Arabella's pain and the meaning of those final words. Schwanewilms shows that there is a real heart behind Arabella as an opera, and all too often that's easy to miss.

Likewise, I tend to associate Mandryka with the warm, measured tones of a Michael Volle, and he is a marvellous interpreter of this role. Again however, his kind of interpretation can tend to add a little more sugar to the already honeyed tones of Strauss's orchestration. There's nothing wrong with that - I enjoy sinking blissfully into such performances - but it can be instructive to hear some other voices in the same role, and with Tomasz Konieczny giving a little more of a harder edge to the rough-mannered bear-wrestling wild man from the provinces, it does test how far Arabella can work as a dramatic opera in its own right. Perhaps it will reveal that the work is not quite perfect, but to me the little revelations and the laid-bare openness is better than smothering it with fake sentiment.

As Hugo von Hofmannsthal died during the preparations for the work, the libretto complete but - knowing Strauss and Hofmannsthal's working relationship - likely to be subject to further revisions, it's impossible to know how Arabella might have developed. As it stands, it's not as polished or as sophisticated a libretto as you might like, for all the surface beauty of the musical score. On the other hand, it could be that the operetta-like simplicity of the plot was precisely the intention and just the effect that the creators were striving towards. There's little intrigue to speak of until fairly late in the proceedings, what there is then is far from convincing in its developments and resolution, but it's not without some truth in its sentiments and it does touch on joy as well as the pain and heartbreak that comes in relationships. By the end, any kind of idealisation over the past, about love, is put aside in those final beautiful forgiving sentiments of the work.

Whether it perfectly captures everything that the creators intended is open to speculation, but in other respects Arabella is certainly moving in other direction that Strauss would explore, with more of the theatrical spoken-sung style that Strauss was heading towards in Intermezzo, as well as exploring more of the moments of beauty, wonder and joy that can be found in the nature of the domestic drama. Ulf Schirmer seems to be bearing this in mind with the conducting of Arabella and in this respect he's at one with the production and the singing. Director Sven-Eric Bechtolf and the Glittenberg's set and costume designs typically avoid the significant period of the work and update Arabella to around the time of composition, placing it in an Art Deco hotel and a jazz bar. It retains an air of sophistication then without the luxurious extravagance of the romanticised 1860s Vienna.

Aside from the qualities that Schwanewilms and Konieczny bring to the work, the singing elsewhere is similarly strong and complementary. Wolfgang Bankl and Carole Wilson make a good Count and Countess, Wilson rich lyrical voice in particular bringing new qualities out of Adelaide. Herbert Lippert's Matteo is bright and quite heldentenor-ish, while Daniela Fally makes quite an impression as Die Fiakermilli ought to, even doing the splits while singing. And what about Zdenko/Zdenka herself? As the motor behind the plot developments, twists and revelations, Zdenka is a vital character in the opera, and it couldn't be better cast than with Genia Kühmeier. For all the conflict between surface impressions and the harsh reality, there is a warm heart that beats in Arabella, and as the driving force that re-engages the characters with their better sentiments, Genia Kühmeier's Zdenka fulfils that role, as well as giving the production the warm heart it needs.

This performance of Arabella was streamed for live broadcast via the Wiener Staatsoper's Live at Home streaming service. There's an impressive line-up to be viewed over the next month, with DIE FLEDERMAUS on 31st Dec, DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE on 4th Jan, David McVicar's production of TRISTAN UND ISOLDE on 18th Jan and SALOME on 23rd Jan.

Links: Wiener Staatsoper Live Streaming programme; Staatsoper Live at Home video

Strauss - Arabella

Richard Strauss - Arabella

Opéra National de Paris, 2012

Philippe Jordan, Marco Arturo Marelli, Kurt Rydl, Doris Soffel, Renée Fleming, Genia Kühmeier, Michael Volle, Joseph Kaiser, Eric Huchet, Edwin Crossley-Mercer, Thomas Dear, Iride Martinez, Irene Friedli 

Opéra Bastille, Paris, 10 July 2012

You might detect a small note of annoyance in the tone of Hugo von Hofmannstahl’s letter of the 22nd December 1927 to Richard Strauss at one review of Der Rosenkavalier which criticised the failure to make the best use of the opera’s strongest character, the Marschallin. It’s tempting to think that, in this letter to Strauss discussing the composition of Arabella, Hoffmanstahl was indeed suggesting revisiting the 18th century world of old Vienna and addressing that criticism as well as improving the overall dramatic structure that was a little wayward in the earlier work. In many ways Arabella is indeed a more “perfect” version of Der Rosenkavalier, but it’s a work nonetheless that few would consider better than the earlier work, magnificent even with all its glorious imperfections. Given a sympathetic production, with the right kind of cast to draw out and linger over its elegance - such as the one assembled here for the Paris Opera - one would however have to seriously consider whether the latter isn’t worthy of comparison to its earlier incarnation.

Returning to the 18th century Viennese operetta setting, Arabella does indeed demonstrate the hand of a more experienced team capable of improving many of the elements that were slightly awkward and much too self-consciously clever in Der Rosenkavalier. The romantic Mozartian intrigue with identity problems and its cross-dressing farce fits better within the tone of the later work, the introduction of waltzes placed more naturalistically within the setting of a balls at a grand hotel. Everything runs smoothly along the narrative line laid out for the drama, with a musical continuity that effortlessly glides one right through the three acts. There’s always the danger of the music being a little too smooth with Strauss in this register, but there is an awareness of the darker side of the Vienna of Maria Theresia beneath the surface glamour.

This is one further significant difference between the conception of the two works. Der Rosenkavalier was composed in 1911 before the Great War, Arabella after it in 1933, and although both seem to wallow in a nostalgia for an idealised past, there are hints in the latter work - with its specific 1866 setting just after the war with Prussia - of a more meaningful reflection on the state of the post-war Austria of Hofmannshahl and Strauss’ time. There’s nothing too dark, just the hint that the world reflected in the monetary ruin and fall from grace of former military officer Count Waldner, is unable to sustain the illusion of living in the past much longer. What is wonderful about the work is how it manages to keep this within the spirit of what is essentially a comic melodrama, where one daughter Arabella will have to be married to a rich man, while the other daughter, Zdenka, must dress and act as a man, since the family cannot afford a marriage for two daughters, and Arabella is the better prospect.

Arabella moreover, despite the apparent light tone of the work, is indeed a more fully rounded human person that the Marschallin - who was more of a concept to embody the passing of time in the more philosophically-leaning Der Rosenkavalier, although fully and poetically developed in that respect - was never allowed to be. Arabella still has all the lush romanticism that Strauss and Hofmannstahl want to capture in this lost Viennese world for a time that, after the Great War, was ever more in need of it. Without denying that times can be difficult, that sacrifices need to be made, the opera offers up the hope that fairytales can happen, that goodness, fidelity and happiness have the chance to exist. With that kind of concept, Arabella can be played as too lushly romantic, too formally classical and over-elaborate in a manner that smothers the delicate balance that the music and the drama treads. Not so in this production at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, one of the final works of the current 2011-12 season.

The staging by Marco Arturo Marelli didn’t appear obviously special, but it worked wonderfully with the intended tone of the work. The whole purpose of Arabella is to create this world of 18th century Vienna in all its glamour - idealised though it may be - so there’s not a lot of point in changing the period or the setting. Marelli’s sets looked like the typical Opéra Bastille production, bright, with coloured lighting, filling the stage and making full use of the height of the stage, yet the luxury, smoothness and cleanness of the designs suited the tone of this particular work. The set was wonderfully designed also to match the flowing nature of the work, slipping elegantly from one scene to the next, although the actual stage direction for the characters within this was a little bit walk-on/walk-off. The cleverest touch was the fall of a blue silken curtain at the end of Act I, which managed to romantically set up the first wordless encounter between Arabella and Mandryka, to be taken up from the same position at the start of Act II.

With Philippe Jordan at the helm, there were some truly astonishing sounds coming out of the orchestra pit from the remarkable Orchestra of the Paris Opera. It seemed directed with a Wagnerian punch and heft that ought to be out of place with this light comic drama, yet it only served to underline the dramatic and romantic tone to its fullest extent. It was the intelligence of the wonderful singing performances however that really carried through the full beauty of the work and the complex depths that are suggested in Hofmannstahl’s libretto and Strauss’ music. Renée Fleming’s silken tones graced Strauss’ music with warmth, glamour and sensitivity, although her performance was certainly enhanced by Jordan’s direction and in her well-matched interaction with the other singers. Alongside Michael Volle, the pairing of Arabella and Mandryka felt every bit as perfect as it should, bringing the full romantic content out of the work, but Kurt Rydl as Waldner and Genia Kühmeier as Zdenka also impressed on every level, contributing to the overall richness of the piece and showing what it can be capable of in the hands of a strong team. It’s a long time since I’ve seen a spontaneous standing ovation for a production as a whole at the Paris Opera, but it was well-merited here.