Hans Werner Henze - Das verratene Meer
Wiener Staatsoper, 2020
Simone Young, Jossi Wieler, Sergio Morabito, Vera-Lotte Böcker, Josh Lovell, Bo Skovhus, Erik Van Heyningen, Kangmin Justin Kim, Stefan Astakhov, Martin Häßler, Jörg Schneider
Wiener Staatsoper Live - 14 December 2020
Yukio Mishima's novella The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea seems like an unusual work to be adapted to opera, but it's a layered work of unusual psychological complexities that must have been of interest to Hans Werner Henze. Mishima was certainly interested in exploring unusual and taboo behaviours in characters seeking to break out from social restrictions and find an inner sense of order, purpose and meaning. In order to achieve that there is a need for dedication to purity, never showing weakness, seeking to find the spiritual in the physical. That conflict can develop into disillusionment or perhaps even something darker and more dangerous.
Short but densely layered, Henze finds a way in his musical treatment of his 1989 opera Das verratene Meer (The Sea Betrayed) to illustrate and probe those lusts, passions and urges and then attempt to align them with a sense of order that topples over into disorder. There are signs of repression of urges and taboo behaviour in the household of Fusako Kuroda, a widow in the Japanese port of Yokohama, the owner of a clothes shop, who still has sexual urges and seeks out company of sailors. Her 13 year old son Noboru has incestuous thoughts about his mother and spies on her when she undresses at night.
Mrs Kuroda is invited by Ryuji Tsukazaki, the second mate on the freighter Rakuyo Maru which has just come into port, to look around the ship, bringing Noboru with her. Ryuji describes himself as a man of the sea, someone who has a close relationship with the sea that is different from those who live on the land. The sea offered him a sense of excitement exploration and adventures, the sense of something else out there, but it hasn't lived up to its promise. He finds one port very much the same as the other, yet is still drawn towards the sea. When Fusako invites him over to get to know him better however, he sees the possibility of settling down there.
Noboru isn't sure what to make of this new man in his mother's life. He sees a man conflicted and spies on Ryuji and his mother making love. Lacking a father and fascinated by the sea and adventure he idolises the sailor, wants to ensure that he finds his purpose, a sense of fulfillment, something that proves that there is meaning and order on the world. His friends however are less impressed. Influenced by them Noboru comes to lose faith in the sailor, seeing his infatuation with his mother as a weakness, one that steers him away from his much more important 'pure' relationship with sea.
In some ways the psychology of the work is basic archetypes, a little bit Freudian, but there is definitely an ambiguity to the resulting shock outcome that Mishima and Henze perhaps have different outlooks on. For Mishima its an allegory for the Japanese nation's fall from glory whereas for Hans Werner Henze - without changing a single thing about the work - Das verratene Meer can be seen as something different. Not unlike his version of Der Prinz von Homburg, it undercuts the idealisation of a heroic death, and like Homburg,Henze is undoubtedly drawing on the same personal response to his own country, his father, his experience of the military and his homosexuality.
Henze's music is by no means purely illustrative accompaniment then but seeks to conjoin the drama with the inner forces and the nature of the world. Order is imposed by man and is not only contrary to nature - as the killing of a cat can be said to demonstrate - but it can lead to harmful and dangerous consequences. Inevitably it's tense, driven, dark music that inhabits the same sound world as Benjamin Britten's dark explorations of human conflict and lusts as The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice, although coming a different musical tradition, that of Alban Berg with a little of the harsh dissonance of Aribert Reimann.
Henze uses a full range of orchestra resources at his disposal to achieve this, with full orchestral blasts as well as reduced instrumentation, punctuated with various percussion sounds. As with the Stuttgart Der Prinz Von Homburg, there is terrific cast and orchestra here to do justice to the force of Henze's unsettling score, and a sympathetic conductor in Simone Young. The final cymbal claps of the execution of the sailor by the teenage boys coming across not just like killing blows, but like the crashing of waves from the vengeful sea.
Superbly directed by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito for maximum impact of the unsettling qualities of the work, the production sets the opera in the surroundings of a port of bare concrete. That and the presence of railings that signify the presence of the sea through, remain throughout the fourteen scenes that overlap and draw together the mental as well as physical locations of a bunker, a bedroom and the door of the shop. Brutalist ugliness and poetic reverie are in this way combined in the set design as they are in the music. Most impressive - as she was also in the cast for the 2018 Stuttgart Der Prinz von Homburg - is Vera-Lotte Böcker singing the challenging vocal range of Fusako, but there are excellent performances also from Josh Lovell as Noboru and Bo Skovhus as Ryuji.
