Gioachino Rossini - Semiramide
Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich - 2017
Michele Mariotti, David Alden, Joyce DiDonato, Alex Esposito, Daniela Barcellona, Lawrence Brownlee, Elsa Benoit, Galeano Salas, Igor Tsarkov, Simone Alberghini
Staatsoper TV Live - 26 February 2017
It seems to me that the Bavarian State Opera have been much more successful in striking a balance between fidelity to the original intentions of an opera and a more modernised approach to presentation, where in the past they might have been a bit more radical and hit-and-miss. The production of Rossini's lengthy opera seria Semiramide with its setting in antiquity was however always going to be a good testing ground to see if the high standard set so far this season could be maintained. Happily, David Alden's production is perfectly pitched, and with an outstanding cast of Rossinian singers, this was an impressive account of a challenging work.
Challenging certainly as far as singing is concerned (with Joyce DiDonato playing the Assyrian Queen, you would feel that this critical element at least is well catered for), but challenging also in as far as striking a balance between the political machinations of Ancient Assyria and the traditional overheated romantic complications that are tied up in it. The director can't just indiscriminately impose a nice balanced viewpoint either - as directors might have done at this Munich opera house in the past - but needs to take into consideration the nature of Rossini's musical treatment, which does tend to exert a strong force and intent of its own.
So what does Rossini set out to achieve in Semiramide? Well, it's an opera seria written in 1823, the composer's last work in Italy before he moved to Paris, taking his work to a new level that would effectively influence the structure and tone of Italian opera for rest of the century. Semiramide can then be seen as the last of an older style of opera not that far removed from those of the 18th century, a style of opera fast growing out of fashion even then. It's as if Gluck's opera reforms had never happened, and as far as Italian opera is concerned the new rules never really applied, as the Rossini style would provide a direction for the opera seria form to morph into the even more extravagant style of bel canto.
What can already be seen in Semiramide however is Rossini's own method of expanding the set subjects of the older form into something involving far more dramatic expression. Instead of arias we have more confrontational duets, and the chorus is not there to comment on the situation but becomes the voice of the people involved and implicated in the dramatic events. Rossini's musical underscoring only intensifies the emotional charge and conductor Michele Mariotti brings all those familiar techniques out wonderfully with the Bayerisches Staatsorchester. The racing rhythms are already in place, the melodies, the pizzicato plucked strings building into marching rhythms that speeding up into winding wild spins and crashing crescendos. It's not as sophisticated as Rossini's later work for Paris, but it's still highly effective.
The drama in Semiramide however remains a challenge, even with such music to probe the underlying dramatic tensions and conflict. Like most opera seria, the subject is not so much a political power struggle as a romantic melodrama with family complications. To sum the long opera up in a few lines, the Queen Semiramide is expected to hand power over to her consort Assur, the general who helped her murder her husband, the ruler King Nino. Semiramide however stuns everyone by announcing that she will marry the war hero Arsace, not realising that Arsace is actually her missing son, Ninia, nor - in true opera seria tradition - caring about the romantic complications this might cause for others. The turn of events force King Nino's ghost to rise from the grave to demand vengeance from Arsace who, when he discovers his true identity, knows who is the villain he must kill.
With a ghost scene, a mad scene (Assur furious to the point of derangement at Semiramide's rejection), religious intoning and dramatic revelations accompanied by peals of thunder, Rossini certainly ups the stakes of the opera seria, pointing the way towards not only bel canto but grand opera. David Alden's production captures perfectly this sense of something old given a new twist. Paul Steinberg's sets of elegant rooms with adjustable walls and large family portraits, convey a sense of shifting arrangements within a rich, corrupt family. That's the dominant tone, but there is room for the grand gestures that come out in Rossini's music, with a large statue of King Nino towering over several scenes in a display of power, and pictures moving and coming to life during the more melodramatic revelation scenes.
With the emphasis on home and family, what comes across more effectively in Semiramide is the underlying sense of love being a more important factor than power. Those who aspire to power without knowing true love end up the worse for their ambitions, eaten up with frustrations, their families torn apart by their desire for revenge. It's family as society as well then, and the chorus likewise have a large part to play in the drama as the citizens witnessing the upheaval that is taking place within the royal family. As far as Semiramide is concerned, it does soften how she is portrayed since there is love there for Arsace, which even though it is misplaced is transformed in an almost redemptive fashion when she becomes aware of his true identity.
Like any good director then, Alden's job is to be true to the story and the personalities as Rossini might have intended, respecting the work for the time it was written, but still making it appealing to a modern audience. Alden acknowledges the history and the location with a few nods in the costumes, but sets it more within what he describes as a combination of North Korea and modern Middle East. There's no need for historical reconstruction here; it's an opera. What matters more is that everything is geared towards drawing out the themes by whatever means necessary and giving the appropriate space for the music and the singers to elaborate upon those distinctive elements that Rossini specifically brings to the opera medium.
Which brings us to Joyce DiDonato. Now there's a singer who is more than capable of doing justice to Rossini's terrific writing for the voice for the role of Semiramide, Queen of Assyria. And it's not just her singing ability and the quality of the voice, which should already be very well-known. What is just as important is that there is 'presence' there too, the essential star quality that is necessary to carry a role like this and do justice to the vocal challenges and to the complexity that it reveals within the character. She assumes the role of the Queen brilliantly, looking every inch the diva, carrying the extravagances of the drama with complete authority and conviction. Without this kind of interpretation the opera would be a much lesser work in performance. Fortunately, it really doesn't get much better than this.
It's an excellent cast all round however, many of them experienced Rossinians. Alex Esposito sings comfortably within the bass role of Assur, but he still has a tendency to overplay the eye-rolling villain. It feels more like he is performing than really inhabiting the role. Assur admittedly isn't as nuanced a character as Semiramide and does go full-blown crazy, but Rossini's music makes this plain enough without additional emphasis being required. Daniela Barcellona is superb as Arsace, another challenging role that really needs a contralto voice and it's the kind of trouser role that Barcellona specialises in. Rossini generously gives lovely pieces to all the leads, which gives Lawrence Brownlee the opportunity to shine as Idreno. Elsa Benoit also makes a good impression staggering around as a confused Azema, but even Galeano Salas's Mitrane and Simone Alberghini's Oroe have their moments and take them well. The chorus work too is just tremendous, and the Bayerische Staatsoper just continue to go from strength to strength.
Links: Bayerische Staatsoper, Staatsoper.TV
Gaetano Donizetti - La Favorite
Bayerische Staatsoper, 2016
Karel Mark Chichon, Amélie Niermeyer, Elīna Garanča, Matthew Polenzani, Mariusz Kwiecień, Mika Kares, Joshua Owen Mills, Elsa Benoit
Staatsoper.TV Live - 6th November 2016
On the surface, La Favorite has a melodramatic plot of contrivance, misfortune and happenstance that results in the inevitable tragic ending for the leading lady. It's one that is typical of bel canto opera and Donizetti (Lucia di Lammermoor, Linda di Chamounix, Anna Bolena). La Favorite in fact seems even more over the top than usual, with religion, court intrigue and war heroism all crashing together in a spectacular fashion within the remit of a tragic love triangle. Behind it all however there is the touching and tragic personal story of a woman crushed by huge forces beyond her control, and the Bayerische Staatsoper's 2016 production focuses in on this human element of Donizetti's rich work to brilliant effect.
There is certainly a risk of that human element being lost within the vast scale of the plot and the immense stature of the personalities involved. The human element is principally within the figure of Léonor de Guzman, a woman who is secretly the mistress, the 'favourite', of King Alfonse XI of Castille. Their illicit union however doesn't escape the notice of the Pope, who issues a Papal decree denouncing the king's intention to divorce the Queen and risk placing the nation under threat. The king sees a way out of the problem, agreeing to a marriage between Léonor and Fernand, a captain in his army who has distinguished himself in the nation's wars, but the king has another agenda, having just discovered that Fernand is already Léonor's lover.
Even the history of Léonor's affair with Fernand is shrouded in romantic intrigue and secrecy; Fernand leaving the monastery of St James where he is a novice monk to follow a mysterious woman he is in love with, Léonor necessarily keeping their meetings hidden from the King. Behind all the huge religious, political and royal intrigues however is a woman who is the victim of all these forces; the mistreated and abused mistress of the king, a fallen woman reviled by the Catholic Church, scorned by the royal court who laugh at her "sordid affair", and eventually abandoned by her lover over his deep sense of "honour". These grand forces might take a literal representation in the libretto, but Donizetti's score has a way of showing how they affect women in the abstract.
Donizetti's music is often underrated and indeed in some works it is rather rudimentary in its rhythms and dramatic effects. Composed for the Paris stage, and presented in that original French version here in Munich, the work is considerably more sophisticated than Donizetti is often given credit for. On the grand scale, the collision of such vast forces looks towards Verdi's Don Carlos, but on the intimate and more personal level, Fernand's rejection of the fallen woman Léonor at the altar is equal in force of sentiment and dramatic impact to Alfredo's repudiation of Violetta in La Traviata. Perhaps even more so, since the royal court also round on Léonor in a mass chorus that proclaims "His revenge is noble indeed", in response to Fernand's act.
The key to not letting such highly charged scenes and lofty personalities overwhelm the human tragedy of Léonor's fate is, evidently, restraint. Donizetti's score suggests bombast, but it invites intimacy and a more nuanced approach. The extravagant bel canto histrionics are not there in La Favorite, nor is there is any mad scene to show off the agility and range of the soprano. Léonor is scored for a mezzo soprano, and the timbre is darker, the role more dramatic, but still lyrical and still extremely challenging. Elīna Garanča is restrained in her gestures, almost holding back too much, but a deeper response to the turns of events is there to be brought out and it can be fully felt in her singing delivery. It's an impressively and yet unshowy performance.
Highlighting Léonor's fate as the core of the opera's greatness is the main element that points to another success for the Bayerische Staatsoper following on from their live broadcast of an impressive Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg last month. It seems like many of the previous directorial excesses of the opera house have been scaled back without losing any of the freshness, modernity and inventiveness of their productions. Amélie Niermeyer's direction pays attention to the tone of the opera, to the narrative drama and to the subtext. There's an attention to detail in the characterisation that avoids the broad brushstrokes that the overly-orchestrated plot would seem to invite.
The attention to detail and to the human side of the work is not just reflected in Léonor, but there is effort made to humanise the other characters too. Most notably - even if its "humanising" on a rather more base level - the director uses the interval music between Act I and II to show us another side to King Alfonse. Sitting beside Léonor while a light display suggests they are watching a lurid TV drama, many facets of Alfonse the man are shown, his arrogance and machismo, his boyish playfulness, his sleazy possessiveness of Léonor, pawing over her, but also his romantic fervour. It's a terrific use of Donizetti's music to develop character without distorting it. It has to be said that Mariusz Kwiecień is quite brilliant in running through this range in a fantastic dumbshow display, and his singing and performance in the more conventional kingly role is equally assured and impressive.
Matthew Polenzani is doing great work on the Munich stage, and he's well cast here as a dramatic lyrical Verdi tenor instead of a more romantic bel canto singer like Juan Diego Flórez or Yijie Shi (who sang the role in Toulouse). His voice is not a big one, but it's expressive and he can do much with a role like Fernand. That said, Fernand is not a figure who comes out of the work with a clear or nuanced position, swayed between love and God, working himself up from monk to warrior, with little opportunity for any real human character to be expressed, but Polenzani does what he can with the arias and is always engaging in voice and in performance.
La Favorite shows what opera at its best can do, elevating the human experience to an epic scale, and reducing epic scale down into relatable human experience. The Munich production sees a woman's life within the context of the unforgiving forces of religion and masculine power, judged by their standards and unable to exert any control over her own life and love. Donizetti's music is masterfully up to the task and the Bayerisches Staatsorchester, directed with force, vigour and sensitivity by Karel Mark Chichon show just how sophisticated Donizetti's writing can be and just how much of an impact his operas can make. This is another outstanding production in what is so far an impressive broadcast season at the Bavarian State Opera House in Munich.
The next live broadcast from Munich is Shostakovich's LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK on 4th December 2016 at 7pm (C.E.T.), conducted by Kirill Petrenko and directed by Harry Kupfer.
Links: Bayerische Staatsoper, Staatsoper.TV
Richard Strauss - Die schweigsame Frau
Bayerische Staatsoper, 2014
Pedro Halffter, Barrie Kosky, Franz Hawlata, Okka von der Damerau, Nikolay Borchev, Daniel Behle, Brenda Rae, Elsa Benoit, Tara Erraught, Christian Rieger, Christoph Stephinger, Tareq Nazmi
Staatsoper.TV - 5 October 2014
There are a few subjects or themes that appear regularly in the operas of Richard Strauss, and sometimes even within his other tone poems and orchestral works. One of them is family life, as seen in his Symphonia Domestica and in the closely autobiographical opera, Intermezzo. Another recurrent theme in Strauss' work is around opera itself and the nature of being a composer. This self-referential subject is most evident in Ein Heldenleben, Feuersnot, Aridane auf Naxos and Capriccio, but there are also self-referential elements in the music and treatments of Der Rosenkavalier and Der Liebe der Danae.
All of these familiar themes are there to one extent or another (depending how much emphasis a director wants to give them) in Die schweigsame Frau ('The Silent Woman'). Considering that Strauss was married - albeit happily - to a woman who by all reports was very difficult to live with, the idea of being married to a silent woman was perhaps one that Strauss found amusing to contemplate. It certainly makes a fine subject for an entertaining but relatively light comic opera, but the musical treatment by Strauss is typically sensitive and beautifully orchestrated in a way that draws out other qualities and characteristics from the subject. These are brought out wonderfully in the Bayerische Staatsoper's production directed by Barrie Kosky and conducted by Pedro Halffter.
The first thing a director has to recognise about Die schweigsame Frau is that in addition to the family matters that dominate the subject, the work is also very much an opera about opera. Set in England, the subject of Die schweigsame Frau resembles Verdi's Falstaff in it being about an old and somewhat past-it knight, Sir Morosus, who is encouraged by one of his servants, the barber Master Cutbeard, to get himself a wife. Morosus however can't bear to have women about him and despises their chatter. In his 46 years as a sailor travelling around the world, the only silent woman in his experience is one who is "in the churchyard and under a stone cross". His housekeeper is torment enough, but a wife in the house would have him in a coffin within three weeks.
When his son Henry returns from the dead however, bringing with him a loud wife and a noisy opera company that he has joined, Morosus considers that it would be better to marry in order to disinherit his son and the raucous company he keeps, but who would marry an old man like himself? Somewhere between The Barber of Seville and Don Pasquale (it's worth noting that alongside Falstaff, the three comic operas referenced here are perhaps the three finest comic operas ever written, barring Mozart's work, but that too is referenced elsewhere), Sir Morosus' barber hatches a plot to trick the old man into a sham marriage, rescuing the inheritance for Henry, and perhaps winning the old man over to a realistic acceptance of the idea of married life.
Well, realistically that's not going to happen, and the authors recognise this. Instead, what Strauss manages to do - the music being particularly instrumental in how successfully this is achieved - is reform Morosus' view of the world and the audience's view of Morosus. Over the course of Die schweigsame Frau, he becomes wonderfully human. Even though he is being set-up, with three members of the opera troupe being offered as potential brides in a sham marriage, Morosus is nonetheless moved that a beautiful woman would even consider marrying an old man like himself. Timidia, who is Henry's wife Aminta playing a role, is herself moved somewhat by how the old man is stirred into love and begins to understand that happiness isn't necessary something elusive.
The fact that the emotions are stirred by something "fake" isn't an issue. The role-playing is just another example in the Strauss canon, of how the "artificial" construction of art, music and opera can inspire genuine feelings and suggest possibilities that one might not otherwise be open to in "real-life". To do that successfully, of course, the opera and the music must itself be good, and with Strauss, that's something that is never in any doubt. Act II culminates in the most beautiful sextet that is typically Straussian in the soaring beauty of its orchestration, but worthy of Mozart (who is the model for this kind of scene evidently, and a model that Rossini often emulated) in how it draws together sentiments of nobility, sadness and humanity, even within a comic situation.
Despite its qualities, Die schweigsame Frau wasn't a success when it was first performed and it has rarely been revived over the years. Much of the opera's troubled history stems from the fact that it was banned by the Nazis in 1936 after only three performances. This was less to do with any controversy surrounding the subject of the work than the fact that Strauss worked with a Jewish writer, Stefan Zweig, on the libretto. Even after the war, there was little appetite for this Strauss comedy, or indeed for much the lush orchestration and frivolous subjects that seemed increasingly out of touch with developments in 20th century music, and Die schweigsame Frau is consequently one of those latter works by the composer that is rarely performed and has subsequently fallen into obscurity.
In the year of Strauss's 150th anniversary however, Munich's Bayerische Staatsoper's new production of Die schweigsame Frau gives this neglected work a welcome revival and they've done rather well by it. For much of the first two acts, and much of the third also, the set consists of nothing more than a raised platform on the stage, with a bed the only real prop. Barrie Kosky however lets the characters and the music fill out everything that is essential in the work. Or rather, the conductor Pedro Halffter ensures that the full impact of Strauss's orchestration serves the comic drama and the underlying human sentiments, while Kosky draws out the typically Strauss themes and references, most notably in how the Henry's opera troupe are all dressed as famous opera characters.
It might have been better to dress Tara Erraught as Mariandel here rather than Violetta, since her character plays the same type of plain-speaking, forward country-girl when introduced as one of Morosus' potential wives, but I can think of at least one good reason not to go in that direction (fun and appropriately opera self-referential as it might have been), but there's no reason to over-complicate the work with too much cleverness - the work is strong enough to work on its own terms. Act III opens up the stage a little more when Timidia starts transforming the house and start spending the money which drops down like rain as the platform opens up. It's a simple and effective direction that gets the essentials across.
The production is also very well served by the cast. Like most Strauss operas, the principal soprano role is exceedingly challenging, and Aminta/Timidia is no exception. Brenda Rae has to hold some very high notes indeed, and she does so impressively, her performance in the dual role moreover wonderfully engaging. The lower end of the bass tessitura for Sir Morosus is no less challenging, and in many respects, the role can be just as rewarding as Baron Ochs von Lerchenau. Perhaps that's just because Franz Hawlata sang it so well here and, just as importantly, recognised and brought out the different human facets of his character. As mentioned above, Tara Erraught's soaring mezzo-soprano made a noticeable impact, but there were equally strong performances and singing from Nikolay Borchev as the barber and Daniel Behle as Henry.
This was a wonderful start to the new season of live steamed broadcasts at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich. In an anniversary year where we've been treated to plenty of Der Rosenkavaliers, Ariadnes and even an unusual amount of Die Frau ohne Schatten productions, this is an ambitious and pleasantly successful venture into lesser explored but eminently worthy Richard Strauss territory.
Links: Staatsoper.TV
