Oper Frankfurt, 2021
Titus Engel, Tobias Kratzer, Alfred Reiter,.Susan Bullock, Michael Porter, Liviu Holender, Samuel Levine, Michael McCown, Monika Buczkowska, Barbara Zechmeister, Božidar Smiljanić, Danylo Matviienko, Gabriel Rollinson
Naxos, Blu-ray
Personally I've always thought of Carl Nielsen as a very serious composer; an interesting composer we could perhaps consider as working in the neo-classical style, but whose Danish heritage and ventures into modernism gives him a distinct character and musical approach of his own. His symphonies are only recently being more widely performed, but his two operas are less well known in the rest of Europe. Composed in 1906, Maskarade however is apparently seen as almost a national opera in his home country and, more surprisingly, it's a comedy. Comedy doesn't always succeed in translation and there are few successful comedies in opera (it tends to be more of a mainstay of operetta), which might explain why the work is not better known outside Denmark. So while there is little doubt about Nielsen's (growing) reputation as a composer, the pertinent question around this Frankfurt production in a German translation of Maskarade is whether it is actually funny or not.
What is tricky about the comedy of Maskerade is that its source is a drama by the 18th century Norwegian playwright, Ludvig Holberg. That’s not necessarily an issue as Shakespeare’s comedies and Restoration comedies all have fairly broad universal characteristics that are still funny today. What keeps revivals of those works successful and what always remains amusing are the characters and situations, often involving the nobility being undermined by their own pomposity or by the cleverness of their servants. In opera, the comedies based on the works of Beaumarchais still resonate in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia and Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, but the same revolutionary sentiment thrives even earlier in works like Pergolesi's La serva padrona. Unquestionably, however, the comedy in opera is most successful in the works of Mozart and Da Ponte, in Le nozze di Figaro, in Così fan tutte and even in Don Giovanni. Mozart and Da Ponte draw such beautiful characters that you are completely at their mercy.
Nielsen's Maskarade draws from the same heritage and while it's not Mozart and Da Ponte - for which there is no match anywhere in opera - it still manages to combine a good blend of music and character and find its own national character. It takes a while to develop its comic credentials across the three acts, but there are other ways to build up the anticipation of a riotous comedy and it doesn't have to be subtle either. Here in Maskarade, the comedy of the first two acts relies on much repetition of the word 'maskarade' as something anticipatory. The opera opens with Leander and his manservant Henrik waking up with a hangover from the previous night's drinking and dancing at a masquerade, and looking forward to another the same evening. Leander's mother Magdelone has heard about these youthful extravagances and wants to join in the fun and dancing. The masquerade craze on the other hand is met with vociferous disapproval from Leander's stern, joyless, conservative father Jeronimus as "a devilish place" of "horny mayhem", ruining the fabric of society, responsible for the growing spread of "whores, drinking, gambling and murder".
Boy, after a build up like that you can't wait to see one of those masquerades staged now. Evidently it doesn't entirely live up to that reputation in Act III, but Jeronimus isn't entirely wrong, since it was at the last masquerade that Leander met and fell in love with a young woman even though he is engaged and about to be imminently married to another: Leonora, the daughter of Mr Leonard. Squeezing this confession out of Henrik, Jeronimus is furious and concerned about breaking the promise of the marriage to his friend’s daughter. Only Mr Leonard turns up to announce that his wayward daughter has also refused the marriage having met a young man at the masquerade. That confounded 'maskerade'! There'll be no more of those! But of course there will, and it comes as no surprise that the mysterious masked woman Leander has fallen in love with and the mysterious masked man Leonora has thrown over her marriage for are not exactly unrelated.
All the requisite elements are there for a typically broad comedy that is guaranteed to entertain, but is there any deeper meaning to the work? Nielsen's treatment certainly characterise and emphasises well the opposing viewpoints and disagreements. Henrik makes the argument for the masquerade as a brief moment of joy and colour in a dull, cold world of hunger, hardship and misery, accompanied by swirls of musical colour in Nielsen’s orchestration, while the beautifully scored dances themselves are likewise persuasive. Is that hedonistic justification the extent of the moral position of the opera? Adopting a mask of being who you want to be, it's not that different to Mozart’s take on Beaumarchais, valuing freedom and egalitarian principles, or indeed Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s view in Der Rosenkavalier that the youth need to make their own choices (and mistakes) and not be constrained by the old ways. Despite a number of classical allusions that suggest there is more to the character of the masquerade than "horny mayhem" I'm not sure it's any more nuanced than that, but it is certainly entertaining.
Director Tobias Kratzer doesn't try to overburden the work with clever distractions, focussing on developing character and colour, keeping the set design simple and modern with little meta-theatrical visual amusements. It's an appropriate and measured response to a work of neo-classicism that you could consider a dress-up masquerade in itself. It's no Mozart and Da Ponte, it's no Strauss and Hofmannsthal (closer to the other Strauss, Johann’s Der Fledermaus) but there's a recognition of the qualities of the theatrical experience and setting it in a way that is appropriate to the character of the music score. There is of course plenty of opportunity for additional amusing visual touches by reworking the masking as cosplay, as it is now called, or as fancy dress as it used to be called.
The Fach for voices seems to me to be very much in the Mozart range; light and lyrical even the bass-baritone roles, fitting for a comedy and for this opera’s style and lightness of touch. The singers all perform well, all with substantially principal roles, but nothing that is too exacting. For the 2021 Frankfurt production, the Danish libretto is given a German translation which fits closely with the original Danish to make it more immediate for a German audience. That intent is lost when it is taken out of the theatre for an international DVD/BD release, but it still works just as effectively as it should thanks to an amusing, saucy and suggestive English subtitle translation.
Titus Engel is more commonly seen conducting experimental and avant-garde opera, but proves to be a good conductor to find the little quirks in Nielsen's score. It's an elegant and sophisticated score in its folk and its dance compositions but it has to be said that there is no 'Dance of the Seven Veils' here and the music doesn’t quite live up to the scandalous reputation that has been built up for the masquerade.
The Naxos Blu-ray of Carl Nielsen's Maskarade from Oper Frankfurt in 2021 looks very good indeed on a BD50 disc. It has lossless LPCM stereo and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtracks with clear vocals and the orchestration has a good dynamic sweep, if not the precise detail in the mixing that you can get in other HD releases. As you would expect, the BD is all-region. The only extra feature is the booklet which contains an interview with the conductor Titus Engel in English and German.
External links: Oper Frankfurt, Naxos
