Reimann - Lear (Munich, 2021)

Aribert Reimann - Lear

Bayerische Staatsoper, 2021

Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christoph Marthaler, Christian Gerhaher, Angela Denoke, Ausrine Stundyte, Hanna-Elisabeth Müller, Georg Nigl, Andrew Watts, Matthias Klink, Edwin Crossley-Mercer, Ivan Ludlow, Jamez McCorkle, Brenden Gunnell, Graham Valentine, Dean Power, Marc Bodnar

Bayerische Staatsoper TV - 30 May 2021

There aren't many late 20th century operas that have made such an impact as Aribert Reimann's Lear, a modern opera that has had around 30 productions since its creation in the 1978. And impact is an appropriate and apposite word to describe this extraordinary and still most challenging of operas, a work that is nothing less than an assault on the senses. Some might find that true of most modern opera, but when it comes to adapting this darkest and most violent of Shakespeare's plays - one that Verdi has ambitions to write but never achieved - it's an opera should shake you to the core. Reimann's Lear is indeed - in the best possible meaning of the term - an assault on the senses.

What is also extraordinary about the opera is how much it remains close to the original in text, tone and theme, a challenging work with a diverse cast of characters each with their own motives, character and personality. It retains as much as possible of the two almost distinct story-lines, Lear and his daughters on one hand Gloucester and his sons on the other, each one informing and enhancing the themes of the other. It's all there in the opera, right down to all the notable lines straight out of the play and, in this concentrated form, you'd be hard pressed to think of anything significant that has been cut.

What is even more extraordinary is how Reimann's music enhances the dramatic intensity of the original. In the play, much depends on a director's or actor's interpretation on how the characters come to life, how they interact, what they generate between them. Reimann is wholly the director here and scores those personalities even more intensely into the vocal lines. Few characters are more formidable in drama than Regan and Goneril, and in Reimann's version they are even more stridently terrifying creations, made all the more so by the layering of vocal lines in a way that cannot be done in the theatre, doubling the voices and thereby concentrating and intensifying the drama.

Given all that, Shakespeare and Reimann combined on a work as dark, dramatic and powerful as Lear, is it any wonder that director Christoph Marthaler decides that it needs no further dramatic intervention from him. Although that does seem to be a guiding principle for this director, preferring to offer a contrasting new element on top of the work rather than seek to provide mere dramatic illustration, he's not wrong with adopting that approach in this work. Whether what he brings to it has any merit or indeed interest is a matter of taste and interpretation, but you would hope at least that it doesn't get in the way of the inherent force of the work.

Some might think however that he does fail to adequately present the work on the stage, but at the very least one thing you could count on with Marthaler is that it would not be like any other production and be completely unpredictable, if not even barely comprehensible. He doesn't disappoint on that front. If you can reduce the concept down to a brief description, Anna Viebrock’s stage set is based on the Museum of Natural History in Basel, and Lear is a collector of insects who likes to preserve the past, viewing his own subjects and family as if they were exhibits pinned to a board.

Hence at the start of the Bayerische Staatsoper's 2021 production - with a live audience back after the most recent Covid-19 lockdown - we see a museum guide or scientist showing a small group of visitors the exhibits of the Lear family all mounted in glass display cases in a room of the museum. Other eccentric ways of complementing the drama follow, but hardly bear up to any real scrutiny or commentary. In the first half, Goneril and Regan's dismissal of Lear and his retinue is done by opening boxes of perfume and spraying it in their direction, while in the second half the cast are largely confined within transport cases and cupboards.

If Marthaler doesn't directly engage with the opera however, Reimann's score is certainly capable of presenting the subject on its own terms. It's the sound of a world descending into disorder and madness. Not just one old man's personal decline but all the beliefs, certainties and securities that we have held - even the order of tonality - being cast aside and utterly destroyed in halftones, quartertones and a barrage of thunderous percussion. It's literally the end of the world as we know it; the destruction of hope, of faith in humanity, the sound of despair and regret at the realisation of the reality, the truth about the nature of people revealed, the horror that people can inflict on one another and the depths to which they will stoop out of greed and self interest. It's the nature of the modern world laid bare.

Sadly there is little evidence of that in Marthaler's production, which actually seems to go out of its way to lessen the impact. Fair enough, you might not need to see the gory detail of Gloucester's bloody eye sockets, but putting to glass spheres onto Georg Nigl's eyes does not provoke the essential visceral response that the situation - and Reimann's scoring of it - uses to demonstrate the horrors that man (and woman) are capable of inflicting on one another. There might not be a whole lot Marthaler has to say about Lear, and there may indeed not be a whole lot more that anyone can add that isn't already there to its fullest in Shakespeare and Reimann, but interpretation is of course still an essential part of any opera performance and I was particularly looking forward to hearing the fine cast assembled for this production.

The singing at least tries its best to deliver the magnificent dark poetry of the text and the music that maximises its impact. Christian Gerhaher as Lear and Hanna-Elisabeth Müller as Cordelia are both excellent, doing their best to overcome the largely neutral inexpressive stage direction. Gerhaher manages to be typically lyrical while still describing the horror of his experience, but is still somewhat held back by the direction. Rather more successful since they have great roles to sing no matter what, Ausrine Stundyte is typically impressive as Regan and Angela Denoke suitably dramatic as Goneril, her unsteady and erratic pitch actually suiting Reimann's slides into horrific dissonance. Matthias Klink is outstanding as Edgar/Poor Tom.

Links: Bayerische Staatsoper TV

Gluck - Orphée et Eurydice (Zurich, 2021)

Christoph Willibald Gluck - Orphée et Eurydice

Opera Zürich, 2021

Stefano Montanari, Christoph Marthaler, Nadezhda Karyazina, Chiara Skerath, Alice Duport-Percier, Sebastian Zuber, Graham F. Valentine, Bérengère Bodin, Marc Bodnar, Liliana Benini, Raphael Clamer, Bernhard Landau

Live Stream - 14th February 2021

There are some operas that seem to exist on another level, tapping into something indefinable and spiritual - Wagner's Tristan und Isolde or Parsifal, Stockhausen's Licht, Glass's Satyagraha, Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande - and many composers strive to reach that state through the power of music. Some of the best productions I have seen also strive to achieve that level of abstraction, not being held strictly to the exigencies of dramatic narrative, but finding a way in visual terms to tap into the same miraculous source that the music comes from.

One work that should certainly attain a level of transcendence beyond mortal matters is Gluck's Orfeo, or indeed in the French arrangement by Berlioz as Orphée et Eurydice. I presume that is also what director Christoph Marthaler is trying to do with his Zurich production, because it's hard otherwise to relate it to much that happens conventionally in any telling of the myth of Orpheus. Whether he actually achieves it is less certain, and indeed what he actually achieves is hard to define, but at the very least Marthaler attempts to bring an individual vision to a great opera.

There are essentially only three singers in Gluck's opera as well as a chorus, but it's more than enough to express everything that Gluck wanted to achieve in his stripped-back reformist version of opera. Really it couldn't be improved, although admittedly Berlioz's version, combining the best parts of Gluck's own Italian and French versions, is wonderful. What it doesn't need then is any additional figures or obscuring narrative imposed unless it can in some way support rather than distract from the beauty of the score and the intent of the original opera.

Christoph Marthaler puts several strange figures on the Zurich stage; a man like a caretaker or mortuary attendant (he has that mortuary pallor) shares a space in some indeterminate and likely otherworldly plane of existence with a number of other figures, one of whom - dressed in an ill-fitting bright woolen yellow tank top - we soon discover is Orpheus. The man, after scolding a loudspeaker that a young schoolgirl invisible to him has brought onto the stage for being mysterious, then paces though the rooms passing a funeral urn to shady figures who walk from room to room, into the lift and back again, each exchanging the urn and keeping it out of the reach of Orpheus. Meanwhile another figure makes jerky dance movements as if having a seizure.

What on earth (or heaven, or hell) this has to do with Gluck's opera is anyone's guess, but since the opening scene is Orpheus's lament for the death of Eurydice, we must presume (and it does fit in a way) that we are seeing an expression of the mind-state of Orpheus in a condition of deep bereavement, himself trapped in death's waiting room. I did say anyone's guess and that's mine. A beatific smile/stupid grin appears on the faces of these actors and dancers when one of the figures/abstractions turns out to be Amore/Love, offering Orpheus a way out of the prison of his disturbed state of mind. He has a few more horrors (interruptions, interventions and strange situations with eccentric characters) to face up to first.

I recall that Marthaler did something similar with his 2009 Bayreuth Tristan und Isolde, setting each of the acts on three levels of a descending room (or figures ascending?) as a way of putting them into an emotional space rather than a physical one. It's frankly a bit bonkers and you can hardly say that it's respectful of the work, but respect is overrated and works shouldn't be sacrosanct, not even Orphée et Eurydice. Whether it just throws random ideas out - lost arias, a recital of T.S. Elliott's 'The Hollow Men', pizzas all around - or whether it finds something new to express through the music and the meaning is up to the individual to interpret. Personally, I thought it entertainingly idiosyncratic and intriguingly unresolved, but far from the most spiritual or enlightening of productions.

Whatever you think about Marthaler's contribution, it's still Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice, which means it's still a work of exquisite beauty and delicacy. With its subject of grief, bereavement and the search for peace of mind and for the belief that love can win though times of social distancing and isolation, it's also a work that can have meaning at any time and make a personal connection, not least in these Covid-19 times. Marthaler of course doesn't directly reference the current pandemic, but there's no need to either: the very fact that this production of the opera is even able to take place at all is testament to the power of music and art to soothe and heal the soul in difficult times.

Zurich evidently have to make adjustments in order to put on a live opera performance in February 2021. There are some compromises that have to be made, the orchestra in a separate location, the chorus in another, with even the audience watching it distantly all around the world from a screen, so some disconnect is to be expected. Personally, I didn't find the music as beautiful, soothing and touching as it should be under Stefano Montanari, feeling somewhat disconnected from the stage performance. Whether that's down to the direction, the conducting or the difficulties of performance under current circumstances and blending the elements together is hard to determine, but like the recent Pelléas et Mélisande in Geneva, it feels like there is some vital element missing.

Although the recording and mixing of the live performance in an empty theatre makes it sound a little echoing, it's always a delight nonetheless to hear this work and see its themes explored and challenged. Although it seems like there are more people involved, there are indeed only three singers who carry the whole tormented character of the work and they do so well. Mezzo-soprano Nadezhda Karyazina is a rich lyrical Orpheus, but whether the unusual production played a part in it, I didn't get any sense of real feeling here. Chiara Skerath is not quite so strong vocally, but carried the haunted agnonised aspect of Eurydice better. Musically, I just didn't get the feeling from this that you ought to, and much as I enjoyed Marthaler's eccentric approach, the production didn't really work for me either.

Links: Opernhaus Zurich

Offenbach - Les Contes d'Hoffmann (Teatro Real, Madrid 2014 - Webcast)

Jacques Offenbach - Les Contes d'Hoffmann

Teatro Real, Madrid, 2014

Sylvain Cambreling, Christoph Marthaler, Vito Priante, Christoph Homberger, Anne Sofie von Otter, Eric Cutler, Ana Durlovski, Measha Brueggergosman, Altea Garrido, Lani Poulson, Jean-Philippe Lafont, Gerardo Lopez, Tomeu Bibiloni, Isaac Galán

ARTE Concert - 21 May 2014

Les Contes d'Hoffmann is an 'opéra fantastique', but there's not much that's fantastical about Christoph Marthaler's version of Offenbach's most ambitious work in this production at the Teatro Real in Madrid. He certainly lets his imagination run riot with the concept, filling the stage with all sorts of antics and goings-on, but nothing really comes together or even seems to relate at all to what the work is about.

I must confess however that I've never been convinced that The Tales of Hoffmann has anything much worth making a fuss about anyway. I love Offenbach's comic operas, the brilliance of the wit, the daring of the satire and the entertaining, dazzling melodies, but the composer's only fully-fledged opera leaves me cold. I can appreciate Offenbach's musical sophistication here and how it's put to the service of the drama, even if it doesn't make a great impression, but I find the plots of Hoffmann's tales convoluted and tedious with little that reveals or provides insight into any genuine human values.

Which is a bit of a problem when the plot that has been drawn from assorted stories of E. T. Hoffmann are all supposed to examine the three great loves of his protagonist's life and the tragedy of their circumstances. As such, I have no objection to a director looking elsewhere for new areas of interest in Les Contes d'Hoffmann, or indeed playing up the fantastical nature of the work. Christoph Marthaler's production - one of the last legacies of the adventurous final term of the late Gérard Mortier at the Teatro Real - unfortunately only takes the work further away from whatever human experience might be found in it, and rather than find magic in it only adds greater confusion to an already convoluted storyline.

Worse than that, Marthaler's direction actually makes a slight but entertaining work feel long and very dull indeed. If you take the time to think about the production, there is actually an underlying theme in the setting, the whole opera with its diverse stories all taking place in a modern centre for the arts. That seems like a good place to unify the theatrical, the dramatic, the artistic and the creative imagination, but instead the stage is rather cluttered with art students sketching a series of nude models who pose and recline, while other characters wander around, fall about and randomly take up positions on the stage, many of them manipulated for some unknown reason by a remote control.

There's an awful lot going on but none of it makes any sense or relates to any familiar view of the work, none of it is interesting or entertaining to watch, and - what must be the bottom line - little of it really serves to enhance the work. If the production fails there's no question where the fault lies then, since the performers really do make the best of what they've been given to work with here. Ann Sophie von Otter, for example, is asked to interpret Hoffmann's Muse and Nicklausse as one and the same - a kind of drunken sprite who dances merrily around as Hoffmann's guide and protector. Von Otter enters fully into the spirit of the role, but the strength of her voice has declined a little in recent years. The singing and interpretation are characteristically warm, delicate and beautiful, but there's no longer any force behind it and she does occasionally become lost in the blend of voices and music.

Eric Cutler also does well within the confines of a character without any real personality who isn't given much to work with by the director either. His singing is clear, flowing and lyrical, but with very little feeling behind it - a problem, as I say, I would associate partly with the nature of the work itself. Vito Priante has one of the richest roles in Les Contes d'Hoffmann, playing the combined roles of Lindorf, Coppelius, Dr Miracle and Dappertutto, but he also fails to make any real impact, playing them all as the same character (which they essentially are) with no costume changes, but he doesn't have the necessary presence or enough character in the voice for the part.

The best thing about Les Contes d'Hoffmann, and certainly the best thing about this production, is the sparkle that the Olympia, Antonia and Giulietta characters bring to the work. More commonly performed by one singer in all the roles - and consequently one of the most challenging soprano roles in all opera - the casting here proved that there's much to be gained from using different voices for the very different demands of each of the parts. Soprano Ana Durlovski impressively sings Olympia as a sad, timid figure rather than a showpiece diva and it's all the better for it, finding the tragic nature of the character in one who, ironically, isn't even human. Equipped with a deeper soprano voice, Measha Brueggergosman took on the roles of Antonia and Giulietta - two sides of the same coin? - and filled them with fire and personality. Her voice didn't always hold firm, but she was particularly impressive in Antonia's duet with Eric Cutler's Hoffmann.

That fire was particularly welcome when there was so much tedium elsewhere. Despite the busyness of Act I, this was mostly a static production with little in the way of effects, little in the way of creative imagination and certainly little that could be described as fantastical. There's a surprising amount of standing around singing and there's not a great deal of life in Sylvain Cambreling's conducting either. Cambreling has a long track record with this work, but in the context of this production the interpretation of the score just felt lifeless and uninspired. This was not a performance, or indeed a production to win over anyone unconvinced about the merits of Offenbach's great unfinished project.

Links: ARTE Concert

Wagner - Tristan und Isolde

Richard Wagner - Tristan und Isolde

Bayreuthe Festspiele 2009

Christoph Marthaler, Peter Schneider, Iréne Theorin, Robert Dean Smith, Michelle Breedt, Jukka Rasilainen, Robert Holl, Ralf Lukas

Opus Arte

It’s well known that Richard Wagner broke off the composition of his masterwork The Ring of the Nielbeung after the completion of the first two parts of the tetralogy (and up to the second act of Siegfried) in order to write his two other magnificent late music-dramas, Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg. There are various political and commercial reasons for this break, but there remains a clear connection between the themes of these two works and those of the Ring that suggests to me that Wagner needed another outlet for the powerful themes that couldn’t fit within the tetralogy – as huge and encompassing a life-work as it is.

Die Meistersinger seems to want to consider another aspect of the nature of German art and culture and the creation of something new from a revered tradition that is part of what the Ring is about, but approached in a very different manner with a comic tone that can’t be found elsewhere in Wagner’s work. Tristan und Isolde seems to me to be very much connected with the love between Siegmund and Sieglinde in Die Walküre, a deeper exploration of the nature of love that is so powerful and so beyond our control that it surpasses any rational attempt to contain it, master it or even describe it, not least when it is a love that defies traditional moral constraints, something no doubt inspired by Wagner’s relationship with his mistress Mathilde Wesendonck.

Difficult to describe maybe, but in Tristan und Isolde Wagner makes one of his most persuasive accounts of those mystical feelings and powerful drives, not least through some of the most sublime music ever composed – almost equal to his final masterpiece Parsifal – that weaves contrasting leitmotifs together into a near frenzy of emotional outpourings and conflicting desires. In the same way that Parsifal would dwell at great length at the question of pain and suffering as a redemptive purifying force, Tristan und Isolde contains little real action and little dramatic intrigue in its four-hour-plus running time, leaving plenty of room for the opera to wallow in the sentiments it is concerned with.

Explored in depth they most certainly are, but even so, the structure of the opera would seem to work against a conventional expression of romantic sentiments, contriving rather to keep the two lovers apart or on guard for most of the opera. In Act 1, Tristan strives to keep his distance from the Irish princess that he has promised as a bride for King Marke, transporting her from Ireland to Cornwall, refusing requests from Isolde for a meeting, even accepting when they do meet what he suspects is a poison meant for both of them. Isolde is furious that she has feelings for the young man who, despite his disguise, she recognised and as the one who had killed her former betrothed, Lord Morold, yet still nursed him back to health. To make reparation she plots to give Tristan a poison and herself, for her weakness, but her maid Brangäne switches the draught for a love potion. Act 2 consists only of a furtive encounter between the two secretive lovers that is eventually discovered by the King, while Act 3 sees their separation and re-encounter only in death.

In spite of, or perhaps precisely because of the unconventional nature of the love story, Tristan und Isolde is all the more powerful in its means of expression. The tension that exists in Act 1 is violently broken down by the imbibing of a potion – as a rather melodramatic device one can take this literally or not, but the intent is the same – that removes all constraints, pretences and reveals their true feelings for each other. It’s in Act 2 that the expression of those feelings is given voice – through the words, through the singing and through the music. The expression of that forbidden love is principally characterised by contrasts – in distance and nearness, in hatred and love, in darkness and light, in life and death, but principally through the day and night. Theirs is a love where, through its origin where they expected death in a potion but instead found the birth of love, everything is reversed and meaning turned upside down. Through their furtive encounters when the King is absent, signalled to Tristan by the extinguishing of Isolde’s bedroom light, theirs is also a love that is “consecrated to the night”, existing in a terrible but unquenchable yearning and state of tension that is only fully realised and consummated in the death that comes in Act 3.

With its expression of love as an endless eternal state thriving on contradictions, Tristan und Isolde is reminiscent in this way of Parsifal in its elevation of suffering to a mythical, mystic state, and Wagner’s musical expression of this state is simply astounding and also somewhat punishing (for the performers as well as the audience, the opera at the time of its composition being rejected by Dresden after fifty-four rehearsals as being impossible to play). It maintains an incredible state of mounting tension, constantly revisiting and revising leitmotifs, playing them off each other, only bringing them to a form of release in the climax of the ‘Liebestod‘. It’s a moment of utter musical genius that one can feel more intensely than almost any other dramatic operatic scene has ever achieved.

In terms of dramatic representation, there’s not really much you can do with Tristan und Isolde, which conversely means that an imaginative director can do just about anything with it. Bayreuth doesn’t really seem interested in staging traditional productions of Wagner’s operas, but in an opera like Tristan und Isolde, that shouldn’t matter in the slightest. It’s not a historical opera tied to a specific period, it’s a mythological opera about the mysterious forces of love. Christoph Marthaler’s 2005 production for the Bayreuth Festival, recorded here in a 2009 performance, finds a good balance between making the drama and the interaction between the characters intriguing to consider, while still being faithful to the opera’s themes.

From the costumes and the décor of the ships interior in Act 1, it looks like it is randomly set in the 1930s, but not over-realistically so – the sets there to create a specific environment that ends up working quite well, rising into three tiers for each of the three acts, maintaining a fluidity and consistency in the piece. The main visual theme however – considering its significance in the second act – is that of lights, from the neon ring “stars” in the sky in Act 1, to the light switches of Act 2, and the pulsing rings of Act 3 that could represent love or life, or the two combined in death. Obviously, this is highly conceptual in a manner that those who like a more concrete, literal stagy representation dislike, but it suits the nature of the opera, and certainly suits the nature of Wagner’s conceptual themes, without distracting from them or imposing a false reading. The performers fit well into the stage directions laid out for them – looking a little incongruous and a little uncomfortable at times with the eccentric mannerisms, but mostly finding a perfect accommodation between the words, the emotions and dramatic interaction with each other.

Iréne Theorin is fairly magnetic throughout as Isolde, capturing her haughtiness and conflicted feelings for Tristan in Act 1 with a degree of precision, and finding a similar level of emotion in the contradictory impulses of the ‘Liebestod‘ in Act 3. Through much of Act 2 she appears to be in a love-potion-induced trance, acting without volition, almost in a state of madness, which may not be how one would expect Isolde to be played, but her childish, playful eagerness to switch off the lights does capture a perfect sense of complete abandon to her condition to the disregard of any rational sensibility. Her singing is strong, only occasionally faltering, but a fine representation of her character nonetheless. It may take a while to warm to Robert Dean Smith as Tristan, but any doubts should be dispelled by his handling of the incredibly demanding final act soliloquy that he delivers magnificently with such impassioned yearning that you almost fear that he, like Tristan, is going to push himself over the edge. Michelle Breedt is a fine Brangäne, her singing strong, her acting in character throughout, and Jukka Rasilanen as Kurwenal delivers a touching performance, particularly in his sympathy for and fidelity to his master in the final act. If there are any minor irritations with interpretation and staging in the first two acts, all should be redeemed by Act 3, and that is certainly delivered here under the baton of Peter Schneider.

The Opus Arte Blu-ray looks good for the most part in terms of the 16:9 video transfer. There are some problems with the quality of the audio, but they are mainly down to the recording, positioning of the actors and the acoustics of the live performance on the Bayreuth stage. The minimal staging, the positioning of the performers and the surrounding walls give a somewhat echoing quality to the singing in places. In Act II’s “Isolde! Geliebte! Tristan! Geliebter!” for example, with Theorin and Dean Smith backed up against the walls, the singing fails to rise above the orchestration. The orchestra isn’t ideally clear either and doesn’t make a great deal of use of the surrounds, tending to be mainly focussed towards a centre stage. Extras include an optional conductor camera visible in a small box at the bottom of the screen (a pointless feature when Bayreuth productions otherwise do their utmost to keep the orchestra and conductor invisible in line with the composer’s intentions), as well as an illustrated synopsis and a 25 minute making of that looks behind the scenes at the staging of the production at Bayreuth.