Handel - Xerxes (Duisburg, 2019)

George Frideric Handel - Xerxes

Deutsche Oper am Rhein, 2019

Konrad Junghänel, Stefan Herheim, Valer Sabadus, Terry Wey, Katarina Bradic, Torben Jürgens, Heidi Elisabeth Meier, Anke Krabbe, Hagen Matzeit

OperaVision - January 2019

What is impressive about many of Stefan Herheim's productions is his ability to get deep underneath the driving forces of the works in question, whether it's by transporting the work into a modern context and completely deconstructing it (La Bohème, Rusalka), setting it in the wider context of the time and history surrounding its creation (Eugene Onegin), or even using the creator of the work and its creation to illuminate and provide another way of looking at the works (Parsifal, The Queen of Spades). Ironic distancing has to be maintained however with a respect for the fundamental concerns of the work and sometimes you get the impression on rare occasions that either Herheim's approach is completely ironical or he just doesn't have anything particularly deep or meaningful to say about the work.

Keeping opera seria entertaining and relevant to a modern audience while respecting the musical conventions and intentions of the work is a challenge for any director, and Handel's Xerxes/Serse is not the most dramatic or involving of treatments on a subject that has been covered many times in baroque opera. Sometimes however all you need is a single idea or context to set the work within, and Herheim's idea is a simple one that comes from a reversal of the work's English title; Xerxes becomes Sex Rex, the first century Persian king is actually something of a sex maniac.

That's actually an original and refreshing way of looking at the traditional role of the powerful ruler's involvement in a situation that is common in opera seria. Disrupting the romantic lives of everyone around him when he decides to choose a partner for himself, often it's seen in terms of a ruler being self-absorbed and oblivious to the concerns of others, asserting his will in an abuse of power. Nowadays that kind of behaviour from someone in a position of power and authority is seen differently as a sex pest or sexual predator, but Herheim doesn't attempt to put it in a modern context in the style for example of the 2017 Karlsruhe Semele.

Herheim in fact doesn't appear to choose to delve any more deeply than the simple reversal of the title however in this production of Xerxes, and rather than modernise the production or seek to put it in the context of a framework, he seems instead to just let it play out looking like a period production from 1738 when the opera was composed. Or is it a parody of an old opera seria production? This is where Herheim likes to blur the lines, but he gives little away to indicate any kind of irony or detachment, other than perhaps the fact that the behaviours of the characters are more recognisably human than the rather stiff formalism of roles and characters that you might expect from this.

But what might you reasonably expect from Xerxes? When the opera was first performed it wasn't terribly popular because it broke several of the strict rules of opera seria. For a start, Handel reduced the formality of da capo repetition in arias, reducing most of them down to one-part arias, which doesn't give the singers quite as much leeway for ornamentation. He also introduced an element of buffo comedy into the work, and mixing buffo and seria is a serious misdemeanour that in earlier times in France was known to result in a war, or at least a war of words in the Querelle des Bouffons.

Handel, I imagine, wasn't trying to start any wars, but simply reacting to the practical demands of the storyline, which to be frank was surely a rather tired situation even by Handel's time, and introduce a little more musical colour to the palette. Which he undoubtedly does, but perhaps not to the extent that the work can be staged 'straight' to a modern audience. I've no doubt that Stefan Herheim has thoroughly researched this, but as far as I can see, all he has managed to come up with as a way of tapping into the spirit of the work and presenting it to a modern audience is to exaggerate the other elements or bring them up to the level of Xerxes the Sex Rex.

Elviro as the comic fool for example, is played up to an almost slapstick level where he can hardly move for stumbling or bumping into people. Herheim even has him arguing with the prompter and the conductor in the pit, and Xerxes in annoyance breaks a musician's flute. Atalanta is extra-flirtatious and scheming, Romilda extra-prim and virtuous resulting in Atalanta's plots to remove her rival by attacking her in one scene with a knife, a snake, a gun, a cannon which puts a hole in the back of the scenery through to the backstage, then uses a crossbow and eventually succeeds only in bringing down a doll of Eros. With some dancing sheep thrown in, Herheim himself describes it all as a “baroque Muppet Show”.

There's no doubt that this enlivens the work to some degree, and it's quite clever in a nudge and a wink kind of way that recognises we are all actors playing roles on the stage of life, but there's not a lot more to it than that. There perhaps doesn't need to be for this opera, particularly when the production values are as high as we've come to expect from a Herheim production. If it's not a parody of an 18th century opera, it has all of the old-world spectacle of the stage design, props and costumes. It looks good, it sounds good, it's a bit of fun, and that ought to be enough, but it doesn't really do much to lessen the predictability and conventionality of the drama from feeling very tiring over the three hours it takes to get to a conclusion.

Perhaps that's down to the work itself which, hearing it for the first time, doesn't seem to rate among the most memorable of Handel's works. There's moments to enjoy of course in the musical performance under the direction of Konrad Junghänel who keeps it flowing along quite well. With recitative in German and the principal arias in Italian, the singing performances are good, counter-tenor Valer Sabadus in the castrato role of Xerxes tries hard to inject life and humour into the proceedings, Katarina Bradic as his cross-dressing jilted fiancée Amastre brings a lively verve to her performance. There's much to enjoy also in the complications between Atalanta, Romilda, Arsamene and Elviro, but the singing doesn't always have the necessary fullness and, despite all the efforts and prettiness of the production, it does come across as a disappointingly limp affair.

Links: Deutsche Oper am Rhein, OperaVision, YouTube

Bianchi - Thanks to my Eyes

Oscar Bianchi - Thanks to my Eyes

Festival Aix-en-Provence, 2011

Franck Ollu, Joël Pommerat, Hagen Matzeit, Brian Bannatyne-Scott, Keren Motseri, Fflur Wyn, Anne Rotger, Antonie Rigot

Bel Air Media, La Monnaie Internet streaming

Writing his first opera, commissioned by the Aix-en-Provence Festival and premiered there in 2011, Swiss-Italian composer Oscar Bianchi took a French drama by Joël Pommerat (‘Grâce à mes yeux’) as the source of Thanks to my Eyes, but took the unusual step of asking the author to adapt the work into the English language for the libretto. The reason for the change of language, according to the composer, working very much in the modern musical idiom, was purely technical and related to the more discordant sounds and textures evoked by the work that suited English singing better than the more musical-sounding French. I can think of another reason not explicitly stated by the composer why you would be cautious about setting a French-language drama to music, and that’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

Even then, while there might be the occasional reminder of the more spooky elements of Britten’s Turn of the Screw in the chamber instruments, it still proves impossible to escape the huge influence of Debussy’s only opera and its extraordinary ability to fuse music to Maeterlinck’s already existing play, while keeping the original almost entirely intact. Bianchi’s approach to creating a musical ambience for Pommerat’s drama works - and works reasonably well to often striking effect, it has to be said - in a similar way. Cutting the original work back extensively to fit an opera work that is only about one hour and ten minutes long, the short scenes in Thanks to my Eyes have a similar feeling of incompleteness, interruption and open abstraction that is there in Debussy and Maeterlinck’s symbolist work. The similarities however exist more than just on the surface approach of connecting the music to the drama.

While the story and themes are quite different to Pelléas et Mélisande, there are similarities in the theatrical representation of the drama. A young man, Aymar, timid and solitary, is dominated by his famous father, a great comedian who, in the first scene, is shown handing one of the suits he uses in his act to his son, clearly expecting him to follow in his footsteps. His dominance of Aymar however also extends to control over finding a suitable woman for the young man, suggesting and trying to influence Aymar into choosing a woman like his own mother, much as he chose his wife based on his own mother. Aymar however is torn between two women, a Young Blond Woman and a mysterious cloaked Young Woman in the Night who keeps her face covered, who he secretly meets on a mountain top away from the eyes of his family. He knows however that he must break off this relationship, but is too timid to even be able to take that step.

Reducing the drama down to key scenes, although maintaining a linear, serial flow, even if some of the scenes are rather abstract in nature, does have the impact of bringing any undercurrents and symbolism directly to the surface. Like Debussy however, even though he is working in a much different musical language, the intention of Bianchi is to convey a sense of deeper meaning and suggestion beyond actual language and physical expression. While on the one hand then the figures all fit into regular types - domineering father, passive mother, child seeking to find his own sense of self and expression apart from them - there are other intriguing elements that are indeed evoked by the drama scenes, lighting and the use of the atmospheric chamber music. It may not be the most memorable or melodic music, but its intent is to integrate more fully into the whole theatrical process as a Gesamkunstwerk, as does the expression through the singing.

The singing on this recording at the opera’s world premiere run in Aix-en-Provence, is of an exceptionally high standard, and when I say exceptionally high, I’m not just referring to the unusual use of a countertenor voice for Aymar, sung by Hagen Matzeit. This is an appropriate choice for the figure, emphasising his difference from his (not unexpected) bass-baritone father, Brian Bannatyne-Scott. The singing and sometimes wayward phrasing weave in complex ways, and work well off each other in this context. Interestingly, while the two women are sopranos (both singing the roles wonderfully, Fflur Wyn in particular having to reach some extraordinary high notes), the mother has a speaking-role only, and speaks in French, as do the others when speaking to her. The dramatic reasons for this are remain unexplained - it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that their mother might be a native French speaker - but it does introduce another intriguing dramatic and vocal element that contributes to the overall complexity of the meaning contained within the overall soundscape.

The tone of the music and singing and the effect it creates is matched by the staging, directed by the original author and librettist, Joël Pommerat. Locations are generic - outdoors, indoors, on a mountain top, at a edge of a cliff - uniformly grey in the darkness (barring a sunrise and some atmospheric lighting effects here and there), sparse and solitary, clearly evoking an emotional landscape more than a literal one. On the whole, regardless of what you judge to be the qualities of the often obscure motivations and actions in the drama or whether you find the style of music pleasant or not, the work does indeed transport you into another world entirely and hold you in its thrall for over an hour.

Broadcast via the Internet streaming service of La Monnaie-De Munt, (available on-line until 5th May 2012) this recording unusually isn’t of the current production running in Brussels, but a recording made at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2011. I’m not sure how this would have been presented on the stage, but the television recording allows the disparate scenes to flow and change without any breaks in the music, using frequent intertitles (in French) along the lines of “A few moments later, in the same place” or “That night, on the mountain top” to effect the rapid switches in time and location. Yes, Thanks to my Eyes is a rather strange, experimental piece of avant-garde music-theatre whose meaning may be difficult to fathom, with music and singing that may be challenging to the ears, but it does succeed in creating an alternative means of expression that comes across effectively on the screen and I’m sure even more so in a theatre.