Wagner - Tristan und Isolde (Aix-en-Provence, 2021)

Richard Wagner - Tristan und Isolde

Festival Aix-en-Provence, 2021

Simon Rattle, Simon Stone, Stuart Skelton, Nina Stemme, Jamie Barton, Josef Wagner, Franz-Josef Selig, Dominic Sedgwick, Linard Vrielink, Ivan Thirion

ARTE Concert - 8th July 2021

Director Simon Stone typically approaches Tristan und Isolde in his 2021 Aix-en-Provence Festival production with the intention of updating the opera to a more meaningful contemporary age. As wrong-headed as that might seem, since the drama - such as it is - and principal motivating force in Wagner's opera and music score takes place in a realm almost entirely outside of any physical time or place, Stone nonetheless has good form with his modern updates both in the world of opera and in the theatre. There's a complete reworking of the drama and the motivating forces behind it in this production, but Wagner's sublime music proves - as always - to be supremely capable of withstanding and supporting any number of extravagant directorial ideas and concepts. 

If you want to relocate Tristan und Isolde in the present day, minus magic love potions and the forced relocation of the Queen of Ireland by sea to a forced marriage with the King of Cornwall, you do nonetheless need to replace it with something suitable and meaningful. There's a natural division in the opera between the physical reality and an idealised dream-like exploration of powerful forces that extend beyond and transcend material human boundaries. Krzysztof Warlikowski also recently exploited that division in his 2021 Munich production and for the festival at Aix, Stone proposes viewing the heightened reality as a kind of love/vengeance fantasy on the part of the disturbed mind of a wife whose husband has been unfaithful to her.

Much of this is laid out in the Vorspiel and inevitably Wagner's music has a lot of weight to carry in order to establish this as any kind of viable idea to impose upon Tristan und Isolde. Witnessing her husband (Tristan) canoodling with a work colleague or friend at a dinner party in their fancy apartment, Isolde goes to bed in Act I dreaming of stormy sea with ideas of burning revenge and probably divorce raging in her dreams. Rather than drink from some arcane flask of magic potion, here at the conclusion of Act I it's a collection of prescription drugs and a cachet of cocaine in a cardboard shoe box that acts as a drug to heighten the personal turmoil of emotions going on between them.

As ever in this particular work, you need to carry this though to its conclusion to determine whether this domestic arrangement can be sustained, but it has to be said that Stone at least does establish it in spectacular fashion in Act I. You might be less inclined to go along with this idea as it is initially laid out where it not for the power of Wagner's music to scour the depths of human emotional response. It sustains the dramatic and conflicting tensions of love, hatred and desire that exists between Tristan and Isolde through to the release from any inhibiting factors to its expression at the end of the first act. There's still quite a bit to go though, and it's not easy to piece it all together into something coherent in Stone's production.

Act II abruptly takes us to an office where Isolde appears to be the manager, where the staff - in line with present circumstances - observe social distancing and mask wearing in the workplace. The day after the night before, the consequences still reverberating in Wagner's score, Tristan is shown the door with his suitcase. His reappearance in the office however leads - slightly confusingly - to a seamless flashback of the consuming love the two of them once had. To add to the complex layering of the situation and the resonances in Wagner's music, younger Tristans and Isoldes re-enact the beginning of their affair in parallel scenes during 'O sink hernieder'. It's revealed that the affair indeed started as an office romance when Isolde was already married and had a young child, the discovery of the affair breaking up her marriage.

It's not the traditional telling of the story of Tristan und Isolde by any means and it risks undermining the context and intended meaning of the drama, but it certainly touches on the underlying sentiments, if somewhat obliquely. More than that it in fact, with a vision of an elderly Isolde and Tristan in a wheelchair, it attempts to telescope the entirety of sentiments that contribute to a fully rounded and lived relationship, and encapsulate within it the depth of feeling that two people can have for one another. It's not just two people each with the own feelings but something greater that has grown between them, a love that is called Tristan AND Isolde, something that exceeds the boundaries of flesh and blood existence and can only reach its fulfilment in death. And damned if you don't feel that when it is laid out like this.

Laying it out, as simply as possible in all its complexity, is indeed the purpose of a director and Stone achieves that to a remarkable degree. It's no mean feat to match and fuse the sentiments expressed in the music and in the abstract dramatic expression of what love means, and translate that into something relatable. For the most part, Stone makes every moment feel meaningful and prevents anything from dragging - King Marke's monologue excepted, which eludes even Stone's ability, particularly as it's difficult to figure out what this Marke's relationship is with Isolde in the layered timeline. Obviously she's his wife at this point, but after Act I it's not that clear how it has come about. On the other hand, Isolde seeing Tristan wounded by Melot at the end of Act II and attempting to take her own life seems like a thoughtful pertinent touch.

Things perhaps become clearer in Act III, showing how the latter scene was in the main a flashback interlude at a point where Isolde had left Marke for Tristan. There is a murmur in the audience as Act III opens - defying even the wildest expectations of where this might be going - on a moving train running through the Paris underground Metro line. It sure as heck wasn't going to be the usual static scene on Kareol anyway. Closer to the immediate aftermath of the Christmas party, here Tristan and Isolde are on their way to a function - or perhaps an opera  - in formal dress. Or more likely since they are heading out of the city - stopping at each of the stations on the Porte des Lilas line - just back from one. At the conclusion - major spoiler alert - Isolde catches Tristan texting his mistress and Melot defends her honour by stabbing Tristan as the passengers get off at their station.

I don't really care what justification Stone has for this, and I'm not even sure it goes against my previous belief that Tristan und Isolde is stronger when it plays out in the abstract, letting the spirit of the work and the music flow without being tied to any realistic physical realm. A subway train is both as abstract and as real as any a place for Tristan to agonise through his last moments of life, in isolation amidst the oblivious and sometimes concerned glances of the other passengers. It has a suitable air of surrealism about it, being vaguely unsettling or disorientating, as the tube of the train, authentic from the upholstery of the seats down to the graffiti tags on the wall, shuttles alone relentlessly from station to station.

Everything that Act III needs to be however is there most critically in the performances of Stuart Skelton and Nina Stemme. While he cuts a less than heroic romantic figure than you would usually expect of a Tristan in Act I, and looks somewhat shamefaced like a naughty schoolboy at being caught out by Marke and Melot in Act II, the true depth of his feeling, his love psychosis, is felt in Skelton's powerful, deeply felt performance throughout. Freshly wounded again on the Paris Metro in Act III, what is essentially put across is a sense of deep loss and the pain of it.

Here Stone takes the liberty of reworking the Liebestod - a daring venture if nothing else for it being one of the most sublime moments ever written in all of opera, and one that really shouldn't be messed with. Replaying the devastating scene of Tristan being caught texting a lover, but this time without the stabbing, the consummation of their love in death might not be exactly the kind Wagner was aiming for, but it's immensely powerful nonetheless. Tristan has lost his Isolde and it feels like the end of the world. Utterly devastating, it manages to evoke the higher spiritual level of the work while simultaneously bringing it down to earth. You can't argue with the sincerity of intent nor the effectiveness with which that is achieved. Stemme and Skelton do their part to bring that about, but there are also tremendous performances from Jamie Barton as Brangäne, Josef Wagner as Kurwenal and Franz-Joseph Selig as Marke. Simon Rattle's conducting and the performance of the orchestra is also hard to fault.

Links: Festival Aix-en-Provence, ARTE Concert

Wagner - Tristan und Isolde (Brussels, 2019)

Richard Wagner - Tristan und Isolde (Brussels, 2019)

La Monnaie-De Munt, Brussels 2019

Alain Altinoglu, Ralf Pleger, Alexander Polzin, Bryan Register, Franz-Josef Selig, Ann Petersen, Andrew Foster-Williams, Nora Gubisch, Wiard Witholt, Ed Lyon

La Monnaie Streaming - May 2019

Say what you like about La Monnaie's strict policy on bold and sometimes bizarre modern productions, but they always look fantastic. And with Alain Altinoglu currently chief musical director, they sound fantastic too. That's good news for something like Tristan und Isolde, a work that operates on an abstract plane that inspires leaps of creativity without the necessity to adhere to any kind of real world naturalism. It certainly makes a leap in this production directed by film director Ralf Pleger with set designs by artist Alexander Polzin, who rise to the challenge that few other works can aspire to with a production that really does look and sound fantastic.

The exploration of the deep mysteries of love, death and human spirituality almost calls out for an art installation presentation and lately opera houses have been turning more and more to creators in the plastic arts (and even architects in some cases) to lend their hand to representations of the human and philosophical content of Wagner operas. Tristan und Isolde has seen interpretations from Bill Viola in Paris and Anish Kapoor at the ENO in London, and there's no doubt that a work that is one of the greatest achievements of the performing arts benefits from the imagination, creativity of this kind of cross-fertilisation with other art disciplines.

There's evidently no sign of anything like a ship then in Act I of La Monnaie's Tristan und Isolde. It least follows a similar abstract approach to Pierre Audi's 2016 production of the opera at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, with a cool green/blue colour scheme, the figures dressed in white ceremonial robes, the sky here decorated with huge icy stalactites that descend down to the stage between the figures and glow. There are a few other abstract props - Isolde appearing on the stage wearing a broken kite-like frame, but it's relatively simple in his adherence to mood, drawing the focus very firmly and effectively onto Isolde's icy fury at her captivity.

Ann Petersen carries the full drama of conflicted anger and mounting madness in that respect, the notion of death already present and associated with love in her recounting of Tristan's murder of her fiancé Morold and his supplanting himself fatally in that disturbed impressionable psyche at being held hostage in marriage to Marke. There's no need for love potions in this production to bring about the magical event of Tristan and Isolde's love, it's something that comes from within, implacably, following no logic or reason but a deep internal yearning and reaction to complex psychological disturbances, and it's enough that the music and singing carry the full weight of its conviction.

Act II is even more impressive in how it captures the complexity of those feelings that Tristan and Isolde feel for each other within a huge Alexander Polzin plaster sculpture that is surprisingly adaptable to the ebb and flow of moods and mounting desire. The sculpture takes the form of a thick mass of twisted truncated tree branches erupting out of the earth, with naked figures of dancers entwined within it. With shifts of light and use of shadows it conforms to the changing moods, primarily lust that ripples across the branches as the naked bodies weave and slide through it. Seen like this, you can't imagine Act II being done in any other way that expresses the sensations, emotions and spiritual content so perfectly.

Again, the apparent simplicity of the Act III backdrop reveals complex patterns of darkness, light and casting of shadows; black holes one minute, shafts of light the next or the suggestion of stars. The use of colour blending with the light offers infinite gradations of expression that aren't so much representational of Wagner's score as offering another dimension to its moods and sentiments. And yes, it is as abstract as that sounds, evoking a hallucinatory 'trip' according to director Ralf Pleger, where love is the drug, but should we not be looking for deeper commentary or interpretation in Tristan und Isolde?

Some directors like Dmitri Tcherniakov at Berlin in 2018 might be more interested in the dramaturgical and psychological than the spiritual and the ineffable, but that's not the case with Pleger and Polzin's vision of the work. The La Monnaie production is as enigmatic and open to personal interpretation as the work itself, operating on a level of pure sensation, caught up in the rapture of the world's greatest lovers; a love that is impossible to grasp without it completely overshadowing life, stretching beyond the boundaries of being, becoming an all-consuming self-contradictory destructive/transcendental force.

The musical and singing performances are supremely up to the greatness of the work and the stage production that has been developed for it. Ann Petersen perfectly meets the requirements of mood and character; urgent, anxious and soaringly rapturous, both human and aspiring to supra-human. Bryan Register is an impressive Tristan, unfaltering, likewise finding a perfect equilibrium between control and abandonment to the discovery of such depth of feeling and the transformative nature of that force. There are flawless performances too from Franz-Josef Selig's Marke, Andrew Foster-Williams's Kuwenal and Nora Gubisch's Brangäne.

Alain Altinoglu's conducting of the La Monnaie is also deeply impressive. I really don't think I've heard the work performed with such sensitivity and attention to detail of pace and mood, never letting the romantic surges overwhelm, but showing how they arise out of the internal and external drama, carrying the singers and the audience along, reminding you what a work of supreme beauty and genius Tristan und Isolde is. This is a spectacle and a performance befitting of one of the greatest artistic creations in any medium. Simply stunning.

Links: La Monnaie - MM Channel

Debussy - Pelléas et Mélisande (Vienna, 2017)

Claude Debussy - Pelléas et Mélisande

Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna - 2017

Alain Altinoglu, Marco Arturo Marelli, Adrian Eröd, Olga Bezsmertna, Simon Keenlyside, Franz-Josef Selig, Bernarda Fink, Maria Nazarova, Marcus Pelz

Wiener Staatsoper Live - 30 June 2017

Debussy's only completed opera Pelléas et Mélisande remains a one-of-a-kind opera that doesn't conform to the traditional format, and as such a production can't really be judged on the more familiar critical basis of interpretation and performance. Fidelity to the dramatic events is determined by the fact that Maurice Maeterlinck's play is incorporated wholly within the opera, but it's the mood determined by Claude Debussy's musical setting of it that is perhaps the most important consideration for a production to meet. Somehow, none of these unique requirements ever makes Pelléas et Mélisande any less intriguing a work, since even within the very specific requirements of the setting of the work, there is room for perhaps one or two little adjustments of emphasis and interpretation.

Within this work, a few minor adjustments can go a long way, and that's certainly the case with Marco Arturo Marelli's new production of Pelléas et Mélisande for the Vienna State Opera. Even more so than most productions of the work, the mood here is dominated almost entirely by the stage sets which emphasise the forbidding presence of the castle in Allemonde. We never seem to leave it, we never get a glimpse of anything natural outside the castle, not a hint of daylight, not even a garden with a fountain or an exterior Blind Man's Well. All of these, including Pelléas and Golaud's excursion to the caverns, all seem to take place within the walls of the castle in this production.

Bathed in monochrome shades of purple light, the emphasis on the location heightens the dark mood of the piece. The castle itself is a sinister Max Ernst-like rough-hewn tall grey block structure, decaying and slightly tilted, ready to tip into the stagnant waters that lie in its vaults. The atmosphere accordingly is dark and oppressive; the inhabitants all old, sick and dying or else subject to strange forces and accidents. We know this because Golaud and Arkel describe it as such, acknowledging how out of place Mélisande presence is there, but you really get an enhanced sense of it here.

In another adjustment of emphasis in this regard, the first scene of Marelli's production, just before he hears the sobs of a young woman, shows Golaud unable to go on not just because he is lost in the forest, but he about to shoot himself in the head with the gun placed under his jaw. Just to jump ahead of the chronology, since there is a kind of consistent rhythm (of music and language) and even a kind of circular symmetry to the opera, this is not just a throw-away image, but one which is returned to in the closing notes of the opera as Mélisande slips away and Golaud is left with his own demons once again and his gun.

Debussy certainly wasn't composing an opera for singers to demonstrate their prowess, but the casting of roles can evidently also adjust the emphasis and mood of Pelléas et Mélisande. If you put a singer, actor and performer like Simon Keenlyside into a role like Golaud, that character is going to feature strongly, and Golaud can often be the dominant figure in the work. Whether you take the castle as an outward expression of Golaud's moods, authority and dominance, or whether it's the castle that exerts its dark influence over his moods, the two are inextricably linked. Golaud wants to control and understand but is obdurate in his mindset, and it's his actions and the force of them that are the main cause of Mélisande's deep unhappiness which leads to the tragedy of what occurs between her and Pelléas.

Although they are more reserved in their expression, Pelléas and Mélisande are also subject to their own powerful forces and drives which are a reaction to their circumstances, and the Romantic desire to escape from them. Marelli extends that beyond the castle/Golaud darkness for both figures in a way that doesn't rely so much on the more traditional symbolism of the piece, although Pelléas's obsession with Mélisande's hair is still important here. We also see however the dying father of Pelléas in a silent role (who I've never really been aware of before), seemingly called Arzt. His role is never entirely clear or explored but it adds another element or layer of mystery on top of the drama. For Mélisande, her condition is associated with a boat.

You can't play around too much with the symbolism of Pelléas et Mélisande (and you don't really want to be explicitly interpreting it either), but the boat does manage to successfully become the dominant theme of the production. The upturned boat on a bench for repairs (decaying like everything else) is the tower from which Mélisande drapes her hair to Pelléas below. The boat is used as a ladder for Yniold to spy upon the couple, and it becomes the rock that Yniold cannot move. As such the boat comes to be a symbol of the essence of Mélisande, her desire, her freedom, an object that reflects her status as something that lies outside and apart from the rest of the citizens of the castle and Allemonde. It also becomes her 'bed' in Act V and eventually transports her into the sunset (still standing) at the conclusion.

The boat also of course ties Mélisande to another important symbol in the opera and that is the imagery of water. Here the freedom of boat and the water have a lot more resting on it, since Mélisande is already visibly pregnant at the start of Act IV. Water is present throughout on the stage and is given a darker context beyond the familiar symbolism of hidden depths holding unreachable objects. It's also a path of life, sometimes seen stagnating in the dark, at other times, offering the idea of movement and freedom - as in the beautiful sequence in Act 2 Scene 3, where Mélisande drifts into the scene guided by a semi-submerged Pelléas. Mélisande eventually leaves the castle in the boat, guided by the women servants, into a blazing red sunlight, leaving the dark creatures of Allemonde behind.

It's not all doom and gloom then, and you ought to be able to detect a hint of hope, if not quite optimism, in Debussy's concluding notes and perhaps even in Maeterlinck's words, as Arkel looks to Mélisande's child for the future in a place that - as it currently stands and has been repeatedly emphasised - is no place for children. Tapping into this moment of hope, or at least endurance, Marelli chooses to show Golaud's suicidal despair stayed by the hand of young Yniold, who also has a generally larger silent part to play elsewhere in this production and is characterised as such with expressive personality by Maria Nazarova.

The mood and tone are perfectly judged by Alain Altinoglu's conducting of the Vienna orchestra. The music is haunting and mesmerising as only this work can be, but Altinoglu's attention to the detail and flow demonstrate how Debussy's score really has a force of its own and is never mere accompaniment or mood music. Simon Keenlyside makes his presence fully felt as Golaud, Franz-Josef Selig is a luxury Arkel, his French enunciation beautifully clear and wonderfully phrased. Adrian Eröd plays Pelléas with enraptured romanticism and his voice is well pitched to sing it as such. If Mélisande remains somewhat distant and enigmatic, that's as it should be and Olga Bezsmertna's singing and performance conveys this perfectly.

Links: Wiener Staatsoper Live

Debussy - Pelléas et Mélisande (Aix-en-Provence, 2016)

Claude Debussy - Pelléas et Mélisande

Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, 2016

Esa-Pekka Salonen, Katie Mitchell, Stéphane Degout, Barbara Hannigan, Laurent Naouri, Franz Josef Selig, Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo, Chloé Briot, Thomas Dear

Opera Platform - 7th July 2016

It should come as no surprise that Katie Mitchell and Martin Crimp's vision for Pelléas et Mélisande is far removed from any setting in antiquity, but it is also substantially different from the rather more common abstract dream-world setting of most contemporary productions. The cross-over between dreams and reality nevertheless plays an important part in this production for the 2016 Aix-en-Provence festival.

There are no towers then, no fountain, no sea, no caverns or large rocks, few of the symbolist features that might appear to be critical to Maurice Maeterlinck's original drama. Adherence to these ethereal and symbolic elements does however tend to leave interpretation open-ended, and that is something that director Katie Mitchell and dramatist Martin Crimp seem to want to avoid. They have a very specific reading of Pelléas et Mélisande and, knowing Katie Mitchell's work, that is unsurprisingly a feminist reading, but it's also a convincing one that accounts for the nature and the quality of the piece: Mélisande is a woman in an unhappy marriage.

The opening scene seems to be critical to the establishment of this reading and the world it is going to take place in. Mélisande wanders into an empty bedroom in her wedding dress looking confused. In a scene that seems to encapsulate the past, the present and the future, Mélisande is lost and is "rescued" by Golaud (even though he is lost himself). Her first fearful words to him, when he appears, are pertinent - "Ne me touchez pas, ne me touchez pas!". Thereafter she becomes a victim of forces beyond her ability to control, her sense of identity lost in an unhappy marriage where she becomes nothing more than a pawn, a plaything with no choice or volition of her own.

This description of Mélisande's nature can be heard in the floating impressionistic music that Debussy fits so remarkably to Maeterlinck's play and it's emphasised here in the dreamlike quality of the first scene. The bedroom also doubles as a forest, the undergrowth creeping up the walls as past, present and future all come together, creating a mental prison where Mélisande is psychologically abused and broken down. The impression of being treated like a doll is emphasised during the musical interludes, where Mélisande is attended on by maids in an adjoining room who drop and lift her stiff lifeless body, dressing and undressing her for the next scene.

Lizzie Clachan's sets for Katie Mitchell's usual multi-level, multi-room stage designs are exquisite and well-suited to a work that floats imperceptibly and often without logic between scenes and locations. The mechanics of the scene changes are impressively realised, the box rooms magically slipping into place in an ever changing configuration that matches the mood of the setting even if it never conforms to the work's regular established locations of caverns and towers. The "Blind Man's Well", for example, where Mélisande drops her ring into the pool, is a disused room with a drained swimming pool where branches of trees have broken through its windows.

Such scenes - Mélisande blindly following Pélleas into the room - capture everything about the closed-off, decaying world of Allemonde as an expression of Mélisande's marriage and mental state. Symbolism is everything in Maeterlinck, and the symbolism adopted by Mitchell does everything it ought to do, and that is mainly to unsettle, or at least show an unsettled view of the world from Mélisande's perspective. This goes as far as Mélisande looking on at a double of herself with a distorted or psycho-realistic view of how Golaud treats her. "Je suis malade ici" doesn't just mean that she is wistfully melancholic, here her true state of mind is made apparent.

Which also means that the familiar connecting narrative thread of Pelléas et Mélisande becomes increasingly difficult to follow as the opera progresses. Like many of Mitchell's productions with multi-level parallel scenes (Written on Skin, Alcina, Lucia di Lammermoor), there is often more going on and made explicit than needs to be. This results in a lot of comings and goings, scene changes, action taking place in multiple windows at the same time and often with doubles in different timelines.

Martin Crimp's dramatic argument also becomes harder to fathom the longer it goes on, taking increasingly strange dreamlike twists further away from the familiar narrative. Not content with Mélisande being a helpless figure torn between the projected desires and fears of Pelléas and Golaud, Arkel too gets in on the action here in one disturbing scene, and even Yniold is ambiguously sexualised and abused. The stone that is too heavy for him/her to lift has a very definite meaning here beyond the more abstract symbolism it usually carries. It's all a bit Pinteresque.

Despite it all - and notwithstanding the suggestion of a cop-out implication that "it was all a dream" - Mélisande still remains enigmatic, her true desires unknown or ambiguous, which is really how it should be. It makes characterisation difficult, but Barbara Hannigan's fine singing and expression (or lack of expression where appropriate) makes that very interesting to consider. The singing elsewhere in this luxuriously cast production also accounts for it being haunting and full of hidden menace. Stéphane Degout is an experienced Pelléas (reportedly his last time singing the role) and Laurent Naouri a fine Golaud, but viewed from Mélisande's perspective it's hard to really grasp their true nature here. Esa-Pekka Salonen gives us a gorgeous reading of Debussy's wondrous score.

Links: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, Opera Platform

Boesmans - Wintermärchen (La Monnaie, 1999 - Webcast)

Philippe Boesmans - Wintermärchen

La Monnaie-De Munt, 1999

Antonio Pappano, Luc Bondy, Dale Duesing, Susan Chilcott, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Franz-Josef Selig, Cornelia Kallisch, Juha Kotilainen, Kris Dane, Johanne Saunier, Heinz Zednik

ARTE Concert

As one of Shakespeare's late romances and believed to have been only partly written by him, The Winter's Tale - like Cymbeline, The Tempest and Pericles - seems to be designed to draw together a number of familiar dramatic situations and incidents purely for the sake of dramatic entertainment. To broadly and somewhat crudely lump them together, each of them offer variations on banishment, wild storms at sea, lost siblings cast adrift on the tides of fortune, where they meet adventure in foreign lands, only recognising their true inheritance at the end as they are belatedly reconciled into the noble families whose fortunes have since taken dramatic turns.

A Winter's Tale in particular, although it's by no means alone in this, additionally makes use of several heightened otherworldly set-pieces (or miracles, if you like) that would seem to make it a natural for the lyric stage. With a central theme of a jealous father whose foolhardy actions lead to him become estranged from his daughter, it would seem moreover a natural work for Verdi to tackle as an opera (reminiscent as it is of Rigoletto and particularly Simon Boccanegra), but although a great admirer of the playwright and one of the greatest opera composers of Shakespeare (Otello, Macbeth and Falstaff all being truly great works), I'm not aware of Verdi ever expressing an interest in The Winter's Tale or even being familiar with this particular work.

It's a work nonetheless that would certainly have presented some challenges, even to the great composer that late Verdi was, if we are to judge from the imperfections of Simon Boccanegra. Dutch composer Philippe Boesmans, working with director Luc Bondy, finds a way to draw together some of the more incongruous dramatic elements of The Winter's Tale in their 1999 collaboration on its operatic adaptation, Wintermärchen. Despite the high melodrama, or more likely in some ways due to it, The Winter's Tale carries a strong emotional and psychological undercurrent to it, one that is so expertly and movingly handled at the conclusion that it invites one to overlook the dramatic contrivance elsewhere.

Like almost all adaptations of Shakespeare to the opera, cuts are inevitable and much of the poetry is lost from the original work, but Luc Bondy and Marie-Louise Bischofberger's libretto condenses the drama fairly well for Boesman's four-act opera. If the moral question explored in the work on the subject of jealousy is pushed somewhat to extremes - both in the original drama and the opera - the impact of such behaviour on others is just as important, and similarly pushed to extremes. Luc Bondy's staging of the work for La Monnaie consequently attempts to play the drama as naturalistically as is possible (barring the obvious otherworldly interventions), allowing the staging to take on some of the more melodramatic aspects.

Although the first two acts of the drama take place in Sicily then, the kingdom of King Leontes is depicted as a dark and snowy landscape for the winter's tale that is to take place. A huge wall of ice symbolises the sudden insane jealousy that drives Leontes to attempt to have his friend Polixenes poisoned in the belief that he has had an affair with the Queen and is somehow responsible for her pregnancy. As Leontes watches them from behind the wall, the block of ice becomes an enormous barrier that chills his heart, and separates him from the truth that everyone else around him can see. The close of this first half of the drama even successfully stages the trial of Hermione and brings in the judgement from Delphi as a direct message from Apollo, Boesman's post-Wagnerian orchestration capturing all the impact of the consequences that follow.

By way of contrast, both Bondy and Boesmans take a very different spin on the second half of the work that mainly takes place sixteen years later in Bohemia. Leontes' abandoned daughter has been raised by a shepherd and grown up with the name Perdita unaware of her heritage. Engaged to Prince of Bohemia, against the wishes of his father Polixenes, the mute Perdita and Florizel's romance takes place in what looks like a fenced-in basketball court in a New York backstreet alley, populated by 'bohemian" musicians, pickpockets and street dancers. Boesmans score changes considerably, with most of Act III performed in an avant-jazz style by the group Aka Moon. Florizel is not an opera singer either, but sings more like a pop musician. The language changes too, with English spoken in 'Bohemia' in contrast to the 'court language' German of the first two Acts in Sicily.

The drama and the overall tone however still adheres closely to Shakespeare's play, and in any case it's not really any less naturalistic or realistic than Shakespeare's controversial depiction of the exiles being washed up by a storm on the landlocked shores of Bohemia. The inconsistencies and the otherworldly interventions that overturn the tragic developments of The Winter's Tale for the warmer, happy ending of Leontes being reunited not only with Perdita but also with the dead Queen Hermione are likewise less important than the overall necessity of providing a satisfying conclusion that will warm the hearts of the audience. Boesmans and Bondy carry that off well, particularly in the handling of Hermione's statue coming to life. Holding to the consistency of Wintermärchen's characterisation, the Queen, frozen in time in the wall of ice, breaks through it, restored to life at the return of her daughter. 

If there's room to bring a measure of realism to the experiences of the characters in The Winter's Tale through the performances of a good cast, the scoring for the voices for Wintermärchen and the quality of the singing performances can likewise bring out the very real sentiments that lies behind all the drama. This recording of the 1999 performance of the work at La Monnaie, conducted by Antonio Pappano - revived on-line by ARTE in tribute to the recent death of Luc Bondy - benefits from exceptional singing and dramatic performances, particularly from Dale Duesing as Leontes and Susan Chilcott as Hermione. Hermoine's despair at the charges brought against her in Act II are particularly heartfelt in how the scene is scored and in how well it is performed, but Leontes likewise is a challenging role with a wide emotional range to get across. A young Franz-Josef Selig also makes a strong impression here as Camillo, with a particulrly lovely lament for his home at the opening of Act III.

Links: ARTE Concert, La Monnaie

Mozart - Die Zauberflote (Wiener Staatsoper, 2014 - Webcast)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Die Zauberflöte

Weiner Staatsoper, 2014

Adam Fischer, Moshe Leiser, Patrice Caurier, Benjamin Bruns, Markus Werba, Thomas Ebenstein, Franz-Josef Selig, Iride Martinez, Olga Bezsmertna, Jochen Schmeckenbecher, Benedikt Kobel, Regine Hangler, Ulrike Helzel, Carole Wilson, Annika Gerhards, Marian Talaba, Janusz Monarcha

Wiener Staatsoper Live at Home - 4 January 2015

There are many ways to play Die Zauberflöte and different types of emphasis you can place on each of the different aspects and rich themes of the work. It can be playful or esoteric, dark or light, grand, ritualistic and ceremonial, or an all-out comedy that delights in the absurd situations and characters. Ideally, of course, a production should incorporate all of the above, but it helps if it settles for a consistent tone or purpose. Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier's production for the Vienna State Opera does fit in a bit of everything, even if it is a little messy about it, but it's overall purpose is more difficult to determine.

In my experience, you can almost always get an idea of the tone of a production of Die Zauberflöte by looking at how the Three Ladies are dressed. (It's true, you can try this at home by looking at the production photos of any Die Zauberflöte). In this case it's a bit mix and match, an assortment of formal dress, ballroom glitter, gypsy chic and pantomime dame, with no uniformity even between the ladies themselves. The same applies to non-period specific dress the rest of the cast wear, with Tamino in Turkish pants and a hooded sweatshirt, Pamina in a prom dress, and Papageno at least looking traditionally bird-creature like. It's not that I'm trying (or likely) to get a job as a fashion writer, but by the end there does seem to be some significance to the use of costumes to the overall purpose that Leiser and Caurier have adopted here for the work.

The directors' view of Die Zauberflöte seems to be based on the notion of its childlike view of the world. There are mysterious forces at work that as a child we aren't entirely able to make sense of. The behaviours and deeper motivations at work between mother and father (Königen der Nacht and Sarastro) aren't easy to determine, there are dangers all around, rites of passage that have to be navigated and arduous tasks and seem to serve no useful purpose. At the end of the trials in this production however, Tamino and Pamina haven gained wisdom and knowledge and emerge dressed in smart business suits ready for the adult world outside. Papageno, of course, by refusing to accept the demands of  adulthood, doesn't change and retains his childhood innocence and ignorance.

That doesn't sound like it's entirely in the spirit of Mozart and Schikaneder's original intentions for this magical adventure. If Mozart was certainly aiming to show that knowledge and enlightenment is better than ignorance and superstition, it wasn't with the intention of moulding people into conformity as corporate drones in suits. I don't know for certain, but that might not entirely be the end of the story in this production. Leiser and Caurier, in their all encompassing view of the work, do seem to give due consideration and acknowledgement to one of the most important elements of the work, one reflected in the title itself. Die Zauberflöte celebrates music in all its forms, from popular melodies to grand ceremonial and sacred pieces, and through music we can perhaps still get back in touch with the mystic, with the magical, with childhood.

Or perhaps I'm being over-generous. There is a lack of consistency to the production and an absence of the sense of otherworldly wonder that you would associate with much of Die Zauberflöte. On the other hand, the familiar set-pieces are at least often given a different spin, do relate to the content and the themes and even raise a wry smile now and again. The serpent first appears as a shadow before its decapitated remains fall onto the stage; the Queen of the Night makes a suitably impressive entrance, as well as a good exit in Act II with chairs flying in her wake; Monostatos and his "Polizei" sprout tutus when they encounter Papageno and his magic bells; and there's even a fun collection of wild animals dancing to Tamino's magic flute. You'll even find glowing pyramids in profusion in Sarastro's kingdom, so the production isn't devoid of traditional symbols and imagery.

The real quality of Die Zauberflöte, and where the work really comes to life, is in the colour that Mozart injects into the music, and in the colour of the characters themselves. This is where the absurd story gains true meaning and magic - which, as I say, I think the director's acknowledge - but it's not entirely borne out by the rather rote and colourless musical and singing performances here in Vienna. Conducted by Adam Fischer, the music is beautifully played, but it's a full orchestration and not period instruments. It comes across then as rather homogeneous, lacking character and conviction for the variety of tones in this opera, never exciting, never stirring, driven or even as playful as it might be. The pace is also rather leaden, draining the energy out of pieces like Pamina and Pagageno's duet and almost dragging 'In diesen heiligen Hallen' to a grinding halt.

The performers try hard to find a way to work between the music and the stage direction, but - with the exception of Thomas Ebenstein's energetic Monostatos - they don't manage to bring any additional edge or colour to the production. The singing can hardly be faulted, Benjamin Bruns a capable Tamino, Olga Bezsmertna a lyrical Pamina and Markus Werba a bright Papageno, but the performances come across as somewhat rote, over-familiar and unengaging, with little real personality injected into the them. On the musical theme of the work, Tamino says that every note he plays on his magical flute "stems from the heart". Music from the heart is what you get from Mozart too, and that's where the magic in Die Zauberflöte lies, but there was little sense of it here.

This performance of Die Zauberflöte was streamed for live broadcast via the Wiener Staatsoper's Live at Home streaming service. The next broadcast is David McVicar's production of TRISTAN UND ISOLDE on 18th Jan, while Richard Strauss's SALOME can be seen on 23rd Jan.

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

Wagner - Der fliegende Holländer (Bayreuth 2013 - Blu-ray)

Richard Wagner - Der fliegende Holländer

Bayreuther Festspiele, 2013

Christian Thielemann, Jan Philipp Gloger, Franz-Josef Selig, Ricarda Merbeth, Tomislav Mužek, Christa Mayer, Benjamin Bruns, Samuel Youn

Opus Arte - Blu-ray

You never know quite what to expect from a new Bayreuth production other than the certainty that it won't be a "traditional" staging of a Wagner opera. Jan Philipp Gloger's concept for the 2012 production of Der Fliegende Holländer for example, is initially difficult to figure out, but there are a few things that stand in its favour that suggest that it at least holds true to the spirit and intention of the work. One is its adherence to the dramatic and mythological strengths of the work, the other is the quality of the performance itself, conducted by Christian Thielemann and sung well by a strong cast.

Taking it in terms of each of the three acts - although this performance uses the "joined-up" version of Der Fliegende Holländer without breaks or intermission - it's not immediately obvious what the setting or the intention is from the first act, and there's not much that appears consistent in the tone or the concept in the acts that follow either. Act I seems to suggest a futuristic setting, a data or information sea rather than a traditional water one. Dark walls are lined with connections, components and cables like a motherboard, lighting-up with the flashes of the storm, one that seems to derive directly from the ominous and unnoticed approach of the cyborg Dutchman's phantom ship.  

It may be dark and menacing, but the tone is inconsistent, the Steersman and Daland like a comedy double-act or at least showing some degree of levity in their actions and gestures. Conceptually, it doesn't seem to hold together, but arguably Wagner's technique doesn't hold together either in this earliest through-composed work which breaks into Donizetti melodies and Lortzing-influenced operetta duets. Act II seems similarly schizophrenic, the female chorus not a group of wives-a-weaving but workers in a factory packing fans into boxes. Among this group of sweetly singing industrious ladies, Senta comes across as a bit of an odd-ball - dark, gloomy and not a little deranged, crafting an abstract sculpture of the mythical Dutchman out of spare bits of wood, black tar and packing.

If you're a bit lost as to what is going on here you can at least enjoy the outstanding musical and singing performances, but things do start to fall into place in Act III (although it might help if you refer to the director's notes on the production in the accompanying booklet). Broadly speaking it's not that far removed from Martin Kušej's interpretation for the De Nederlandse in terms of how  the subject of Der Fliegende Holländer is viewed as a question of love versus commerce. The incompatibility and conflict between love and business is indeed a subject that plagued Wagner most of his life, so there's merit in this view, but whether it can be brought out meaningfully depends very much whether it also adheres to other important aspects of the composer's life and philosophy, particularly around this time.

According to Jan Philipp Gloger, the Dutchman's curse is to be ever in search of new markets and increasing his profits. Weary of the pace of modern life and cold practicality of business, he needs to find some peace and get back in touch with real human feelings. This is a credible reading of the work, but it needs to also take into consideration Wagner's belief in the romantic and ennobling power of myth, its importance enriching and expanding the horizons of the individual and its collective purpose as something that defines a nation and its people. Golger's production actually does this, converting Senta into a makeshift angel, her actions inspiring her co-workers to recognise her human sacrifice in a commemorative object d'art.

That sounds belittling of Wagner's mythology, but it actually brings it back to human terms without losing any of the grandeur of the work. That's all there in the music - to which careful and respectful attention is paid here - and in the singing performances. Christian Thielemann's conducting of the Bayreuth orchestra might perhaps be a little unadventurous, but it's perfectly attuned to the dramatic performance and the singing. Unshowy, it's sensitive to the intricacies of the score, muscular where required, light and lyrical in other places with a true romantic sweep and dramatic drive. It's wonderful to hear, but even more impressive in how it connects with all the points of the dramatic staging.

The efforts of director and conductor could still all fall apart if the production didn't also have sympathetic singing performances and, fortunately, the singing here is very strong in all the roles. Ricarda Merbeth in particular is outstanding as Senta. It's is a difficult role, not just for the singing requirements, but in how one chooses to define and balance Senta's dreamy, deranged and romantic nature. Merbeth not only meets all the technical requirements, she delivers it with ringing lyricism that captures the magical as well as the all too human nature of her character. She's at her best in the critical Act II scene with the Dutchman which has to make this unlikely couple seem credible and she and Samuel Youn do indeed 'click' and work together wonderfully.

You can't fault the casting in the other roles here either, with Franz-Josef Selig a solid Daland and Benjamin Bruns a bright, golden-voiced Steersman. The choral work - a vital element of Der Fliegende Holländer - is also outstanding, the male choruses purposeful and driven, the female chorus delicate and lyrical. The production design for this 2013 recording incidentally seems to have been reworked slightly from it 2012 presentation from what I can see from production photographs. Senta is dressed in black throughout here rather than red, the blood red imagery replaced elsewhere with black tar-like drips. The model sailing ship is gone in Senta's ballad, replaced with her obsessing over the abstract sculpture she has created.

On Blu-ray, the 2013 Bayreuther Festspiele production of Der Fliegende Holländer looks tremendous, even with all the dark backgrounds and high contrast lighting. The audio tracks are both strong, the DTS Master HD-Audio 5.1 giving a good surround ambience while the PCM track is more focussed and direct. Extras consist of short interviews with Benjamin Bruns, chorus master Eberhard Friedrich, director Jan Philipp Gloger and a slightly longer entertaining interview with Christian Thielemann being amiably(?) spiky and contrary, clearly knowing his own mind with respects to Wagner and this work. The disc is region-free, subtitles are in English, French, German and Korean.

Wagner - Tristan und Isolde (Opéra Bastille - Paris 2014)

Richard Wagner - Tristan und Isolde

Opéra National de Paris, 2014

Philippe Jordan, Peter Sellars, Bill Viola, Robert Dean Smith, Franz Josef Selig, Violeta Urmana, Jochen Schmeckenbecher, Janina Baechle, Raimund Nolte, Pavol Breslik, Piotr Kumon

Opéra Bastille, Paris - 8 April 2014

First produced in 2005, Peter Sellars and Bill Viola's controversial production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is characteristic of the approach that Gérard Mortier was keen to introduce during his tenure as director of the Opéra National de Paris. With the death of Mortier earlier this year, this scheduled première of the 2014 revival of Tristan und Isolde - marked with a minute's silence before the performance - turned out to be a powerful reminder of why Mortier was such an important a figure in the world of opera. His sense of adventure in his efforts to bring opera up to date and make it relevant to a new modern audience will be greatly missed.

Initially thought impossible to perform, Tristan und Isolde remains one of the most challenging works in the entire opera repertoire. Consequently, it demands a challenging response from any director and it should also still challenge an audience. Lacking much in the way of conventional drama, with long passages of obscure monologues and imagery influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Eastern mysticism, Tristan und Isolde is less of a traditional opera than a vast symphonic poem that stretches the limits of an orchestra and singers, as well as the endurance of the audience. Mortier recognised that when he looked beyond the opera world for talent in the art world capable of thinking beyond the confines of traditional opera staging, employing experimental theatre companies (La Fura dels Baus), arthouse film directors (Michael Haneke), and modern artists like video installation artist Bill Viola.

Pairing Viola with Peter Sellars - a more experienced opera director with a very definite tendency to produce experimental visions of familiar works - is one of the most inspired collaborations instigated by Mortier. Engaging a visual artist, a modern artist working in a very new medium, to respond to the extraordinary music and philosophy of Richard Wagner is likely to lead to a very creative and unique vision for the work. Whether they manage to delve into and illuminate those mysteries inherent in the work, or whether the video projections merely illustrate them and give them a visual form, Bill Viola's vision of Tristan und Isolde is nonetheless a distinctive and individualistic response to a monumental piece of music-drama.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, considering where his own areas of interest and those of Wagner coincide, Viola's imagery focuses very much on the contrasts and opposing imagery that is evoked by the two lovers throughout. Light and dark, fire and water, day and night, life and death - these divisions characterise the nature of the love of Tristan und Isolde (divisions that can only be resolved in the fusion of love and death), and they form the basis of Viola's slow-motion long-take video projections. It's a work of extremes, and those extremes are visualised in scenes featuring water in a number of forms (from seas and pools down to basins and jugs of water) and in scenes of fire (from blazing infernos down to rows of little flames on an array of candles).

The imagery is however is a little more complex than the use of extreme states would suggest. There are figures in nearly every scene, and the imagery must be seen to be relating to them. It makes sense that water would feature heavily in the sea passage of Act I where Isolde is being conveyed by Tristan to be the wife of King Marke of Cornwall, and it's duly represented in footage of raging seas and crashing waves. It's also a liquid, a magic potion that transforms or reveals the true nature of the feelings between the Irish Princess her captor. Viola's videos depict a surrogate Tristan and Isolde undergoing a kind of purification, stripped of their garments and inhibitions, plunged into basins, emerging out of pools, showered by attendants with jugs of water.

Act II, the secret encounter of Tristan und Isolde and their discovery by King Marke and Merlot, is by contrast land-based and Viola's approach is a little more abstract. The same two figures still feature prominently and interact with the imagery, but here they are exposed to the fire of passion. That might sound a little clichéd, but there's little that is obvious in the video installations which shows torches in woods, a slow dawning sunrise, the figure of the man approaching and wading through a blazing fire, the woman lighting small tea candles one by one. This is love as an exploration beyond the boundaries of the self, but still at this stage self-contained. Act III's resolution of course pushes those extremes even further and attempts to reconcile them through death or transcendence, and Viola's hypnotic imagery likewise supports the musical epiphany of Wagner's extraordinary music.

Arguably there's still something of a disconnect between the video and the stage, or at least an unfavourable imbalance. One would think that the singers on the stage should be the principal focus for the personification of the characters, but that's not physically possible of course. Expecting seasoned opera singers to be involved in such physical challenges as pacing through blazing fires, plunging in slow motion into and out of water is clearly out of the question, particularly when the singers have more than enough to deal with simply singing the roles. With the playing out of whatever drama there is taking place on screens, this does actually benefit the singers in that it leaves them free to focus on the expression required by these demanding roles.

That's not to say that the singers are necessarily detached from the dramatic playing. It's certainly very much simplified, the stage black, with nothing but a square low platform to lie upon occasionally. Neither Robert Dean Smith nor Violeta Urmana are great actors, but they don't need to be here; the music and the imagery should convey much of what they are singing. It doesn't stop them from trying though. They are opera singers after all and have experience singing these roles, so it's inevitable that they are going to bring some of their own experience to how the passions are expressed. Viola's imagery however at least takes some of the pressure off trying to push to those near-impossible extremes at the edges of human passion.

There's little evidence then of the input of Peter Sellars and perhaps less need for it in this production, but telling little details count. Marke and Merlot, for example, show up early on one or two occasions in Act II, witnessing the lovers in flagrante, but such is the swirl of passions, visualised on the screens and equally hypnotising the viewer, that Tristan and Isolde are entirely oblivious to the presence of anyone else. Just so we are aware that there is an outside world out there, Sellars also extends the drama occasionally out into the theatre, with choruses exploding from left, right and to the back of the amphitheatre, with the Young Seaman echoing off-stage or from one of the Bastille's theatre boxes. It's a surround-sound experience, enhanced all the more by an extraordinarily beautiful account of the work by the orchestra under Philippe Jordan. It has a sweepingly romantic force, pushing those extremes, yet mindful of the little details and of the need to bring them together.

I've seen Robert Dean Smith sing Tristan a few times now, and he just keeps getting better. He's not the most charismatic Tristan and he doesn't have much to offer in the way of acting, falling back on his own routine, but my admiration goes out to anyone who can sing Act III Tristan as well as Smith does here. Violeta Urmana is not always the most consistent singing Verdi and her high end can be a little strained, but it does seem Wagner might be more the forte for her formerly mezzo-soprano voice. There are still a few high notes that don't come out terribly pleasantly, but she sailed through the Liebestod and demonstrated some beautiful phrasing elsewhere. Overall we had good strong singers as Tristan and Isolde here.

We also had a superb King Marke in Franz-Josef Selig. His singing and phrasing were extraordinarily good, truly anguished in his betrayal by Tristan but dignified in his grief. Janina Baechle likewise was a solid and reliable Brangäne, attentive to the moods and the drama with a clear enunciation and expression. Jochen Schmeckenbecher buckled a little in one or two places but was nonetheless a strong and at times impressive Kurwenal. It was a surprise to see Pavol Breslik stand in as a last-minute replacement for the smaller parts of the Shepherd and Young Seaman, but he took this small step into the Wagnerian repertoire well, albeit mostly off-stage, with a forceful and lyrical delivery.

When you have as strong a cast as this, with a production based around Bill Viola's visuals, Peter Sellars' direction and Jordan's handling of the orchestra, it's a powerful reminder of how challenging and ground-breaking a work Tristan und Isolde still is. It's surprising however that, judging by the booing of Viola at the curtain call by a small minority of people, some supposedly intelligent Paris opera goers can't recognise a corresponding challenging, ground-breaking or at least sincere effort to respond to Wagner's intentions. Clearly, we're going to miss Gérard Mortier more than we thought.

Mozart - Die Zauberflöte (Opéra Bastille - Paris 2014)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Die Zauberflöte

Opéra National de Paris, 2014

Philippe Jordan, Robert Carsen, Pavol Breslik, Julia Kleiter, Daniel Schmutzhard, Franz-Josef Selig, Sabine Devieilhe, Eleonore Marguerre, Louise Callinan, Wiebke Lehmkuhl, Regula Mühlemann, François Piolino, Terje Stensvold, Eric Huchet, Wenwei Zhang

Opéra Bastille, Paris - 6 April 2014

The last production of Die Zauberflöte at the Paris Opéra was in 2005 and the themes of the opera were given a radical reworking by La Fura dels Baus. It wasn't a great success to my mind, taking far too many liberties with the meaning of the work in their concept, setting it as a war between opposing hemispheres of the brain. Consequently we had a giant inflatable brain divided in two on the stage, with singers bouncing around on it when they weren't suspended from cables. More controversially, the Catalan theatre company also removed all the recitative and spoken dialogue, replacing it with poems read by a male and a female actor seated on podiums at opposing sides of the auditorium. It got a mixed response and I don't recall it being revived at all after Gérard Mortier left the Paris Opéra.

Robert Carsen's new production - presented first at the Baden-Baden Easter Festival last year - is in many ways just as radical in how it portrays those opposing forces of light and dark, of male and female.  It might not entirely make any more sense of a work that already has its own inconsistencies and mysteries, but where Carsen's interpretation differs from that of La Fura dels Baus is that it at least settles on an aspect of the work that is entirely in line with the composer's worldview. Carsen's Die Zauberflöte is about the supremacy of love, of the inevitable triumph of light over dark, of the victory of enlightenment over obscurantism.

Focussing on this aspect, Carsen's production consequently avoids the ceremonial structure that more traditionally form the basis of presentations of the work - the masonic rituals, the mythic qualities of the battle between darkness and light. He also almost entirely glosses over the questions of misogyny in the work, contrasting what is actually said with a more enlightened view where male and female and the opposing forces of darkness and light actually work in harmony, in common accord, as two halves of a whole (with less of the bludgeoning imagery of La Fura dels Baus). Sarastro and the Queen of the Night actually walk hand-in-hand in this production, which is not something you would see anywhere else, or indeed think that it could really work.

Does such an approach indeed not go against the intentions of the work? Well, Die Zauberflöte is drawn from a number of sources, myths and legends, all of which undergo further upheaval at the hands of the librettist Emmanuel Schikenader in such a way that makes little rational sense or demonstrates any consistency. Mozart's hand and influence in the music is however on surer ground, more of a whole in its adherence to the composer's sense of order and benevolent, enlightened worldview. (The beauty of the music has a similar relationship with Da Ponte's libretto in Così Fan Tutte). The music of Die Zauberflöte is sweet and beautiful and Carsen's production responds very much to that.

That's not to say that Carsen ignores the darkness in the work. Far from it. The sense of death is greatly emphasised here in the imagery of open pits that suggest graves (even the orchestra pit is surrounded by a grass verge as if the orchestra too are in a mass grave), coffins are scattered around, and even Papagena first makes an appearance not as an old lady, but as a dead one, wearing the form of a skeleton and emerging out of a coffin. Carsen's way of integrating such imagery into the work, in the context of Mozart's music, is to see it as part of the cycle of life. This is borne out in the projections of woods that form the backdrop for the majority of the work, Johnny Maritneau's photographs depicting the same woodland scene in different seasons of the year.

The stage design is described in more detail in my review of the web streamed broadcast of the Baden-Baden production, but the full impact of the brilliance of the design, the levels that are revealed in the depths of the stage, are only really apparent when viewed live and as a whole. Carsen's production is far from how Die Zauberflöte usually looks, and it may lack the usual special effects and magic by settling for a more prosaic naturalistic approach, but it's no less impressive in its simplicity and beauty than, at the opposite extreme, the extravagant floating stage production at Bregenz in 2013. In fact, the full beauty and sweetness of Mozart's music (and nature) is only all the more apparent and Philippe Jordan delicately draws that beauty out of the Paris orchestra. This is music that could charm the birds out of the trees and in this production, it did.  

The singing was just as sweet. The only cast member here that was also in the Baden-Baden production was Pavol Breslik as Tamino. Hearing him sing live in the theatre, his lovely light tenor actually didn't appear to be strong enough for the role, not always rising above what is a relatively small orchestra. On the other hand, he stood in to sing the Shepherd and Young Seaman roles in Tristan und Isolde two nights later with tremendous force and precision, and I would never have considered him a Wagnerian singer. His voice is beautiful though and it has the perfect sweetness of timbre for this production. Daniel Schmutzhard was a solid Papageno, who never once struck a false note in either voice or performance. Franz-Josef Selig was a deeply impressive Sarastro, every word clear and resonant, with even those extremely low passages controlled and commanding.

It was the female roles who impressed the most however. Sabine Devieilhe's debut at the Opéra de Paris (having wowed Paris audiences with her Lakmé at the Opéra Comique) lived up to high expectations with a phenomenal Königen der Nacht. When Tamino ponders "Was that real or have I taken leave of my senses?" after her Act I aria, you really can sense how he might indeed be overawed. It was Julia Kleiter however who stole the show as Pamina, and it was most pleasing to see the audience respond so enthusiastically to her at the curtain call. Her voice was lush and fully rounded, perfectly controlled yet filled with emotion and feeling for Pamina's situation. This was a world class performance that perfectly complemented the sentiments drawn out by Jordan and Carsen's direction.

The Paris Opéra's new Die Zauberflöte doesn't perhaps explore the full richness of Mozart's masterpiece. It doesn't really play to the comic element, it doesn't have much time for its esoteric side, nor for the serious aspects of the work's majestic ritualistic side. This was a warm, uplifting Magic Flute that swept you along and it clearly held the audience enraptured with the beauty of its sentiments.