Heusinger - Die Zeitreisemaschine (Detmold, 2022)

Detlef Heusinger - Die Zeitreisemaschine

Landestheater Detmold, 2022

Lutz Rademacher, Detlef Heusinger, Anton Grass, Louise Heckel, Emily Dorn, Theodore Browne, Stefan Stoll, Irina Meierding 

Edition Gravis - DVD 

A joint commission between the Landestheater Detmold and the Bregenz Festival, Die Zeitreisemaschine ('The Time Travel Machine') by Detlef Heusinger is subtitled 'A Family Opera', and it lives up to that title not just by being an opera for the family, but also one that in some respects is about family. In any family there are generational differences and one area where those differences are more starkly brought into focus is through musical tastes. Who hasn't looked back nostalgically to the old days in the firm belief that quality of music and music performances were much better than they are today?

The grandfather in Heusinger's new opera is adamant about that point, and he makes it clear to his grandson Felix right from the outset of Die Zeitreisemaschine. And you know what? It just so happens that Felix and his sister Frida have just come across a time machine, so why not put this theory to the test and go back and see if things were really much better in the good old days.

The children end up in 1840's Paris in the apartment of Gioachino Rossini, who has retired prematurely from composing opera and now spends his days in bed. Unwell, eating a lot, Rossini is no longer interested in the hard work of being a composer in his present day, and is unwilling even to leave his room to travel to see a new production of Guillaume Tell. Unsurprisingly, even Rossini looks back on the good old days when life was more simple. Those modern trains are too frightening - it was much better and safer when they used horses and carriages.

Of course, whether things are better now or were better in the past can't be proved empirically, but since we are dealing with the subject in the context of an opera, one would expect that it might be a little easier to judge whether music was better in the past than it is in the present. Putting aside the children's preference for Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, we at least we have the advantage of being able to directly compare Heusinger compositional skills with Rossini, but I'm not even sure that this proves anything. Some I'm sure might find the comparison easier to determine, but all we can say for sure is that axiomatically Rossini was of his time and Heusinger is of his time.

What we can say, and one advantage we have in the present, is that we have the past to look back on. Rossini undoubtedly would have considered the music of Mozart being better than anything composed in the present day, and few would argue with that. So in a way we do possess a time-travel machine. Rossini would also have been influenced by his past, so really, it's all about how well we build on what has come before. As the current director of the SWR Experimental Studio, Detlef Heusinger has the whole history of music (up to now) at his fingertips and shows in Die Zeitreisemaschine that he can work creatively with the knowledge and musical tools at his disposal.

Conducted by Lutz Rademacher, Heusinger's chamber-sized orchestra for this opera is therefore able to mix traditional instruments more modern instruments and techniques, using an electric guitar, electronic keyboards and even a theremin. The wholly accessible musical arrangements of the opera itself play with the range of options available, using recitative, aria and choral arrangements to blend into a rich texture that is of its time and uses it to reflect the nature of the subject matter.

Would Rossini have taken advantage of a theremin and electric guitar if there were at his disposal? Clearly he didn't need to, and we can still hear that Guillaume Tell is no worse off for these instruments not being available to him. Can we say that having to much choice and too much history of music at our disposal places us in the present day at an advantage, or is it a disadvantage? Heusinger just has to be more selective in the choices he makes, but the challenge to progress music forward and not backward is the same that Rossini would have faced with the legacy of Mozart.

It's an interesting choice to use Rossini as a way of reflecting and contrasting common attitudes to the past versus the present. Undoubtedly Rossini must surely have felt the same as any composer faced with the legacy of the illustrious musical history that came before him. Rossini's reasons for retiring early remain a mystery, but he must surely have had doubts about his own legacy as a composer. There would have been no guarantee at the time that Rossini's work would outlive him and indeed, while La Cenerentola, Il barbiere di Siviglia and Guillaume Tell are still popular 200 years later, the majority of his works remained in obscurity and some were even lost for many of those years. There's still no guarantee that even those works will not become victim of changing fashions, and certainly they will mean little to young fans of Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga.

Such is the nature of time and inevitably some of these ideas come up directly in the opera. The contrasts and commonalities that the opera explores are brought out in the stage direction, which is undertaken in this Detmold production by the composer himself. In the sharing of roles - the grandfather becoming Rossini and the children's parents becoming Figaro and Isabella - the point is clearly made that as long as we keep looking backwards, we won't change the future. The idea of the opera is not really any more complicated than that, and in fact is very simple in terms of plot development and the playing out of the scenes. It perhaps doesn't always keep one engaged through the scenes with Rossini being berated by his soprano wife and manservant or in the children's recitative passages, but the musical expression is wonderful and contributes to suggesting much more in its wide variety of colours and textures.

There are good performances and strong singing from the dual-role principal singers; Emily Dorn as Rossini's wife Isabella frequently lapsing into Mozart like soprano coloratura, Theodore Browne playing the tenor Figaro/father and Stefan Stoll as grandfather/Rossini are both excellent, as is Irina Meierding playing a variety of minor roles. The children only have spoken roles. Heusinger's stage direction is basic but effective, the set well decorated to present the limited drama. A revolving platform shows the present as if through a TV screen and the Rossini period as if through a proscenium arch. Video imagery is used for the transitions between past and present. It works hand-in-hand with the musical score and the Landestheater Detmold itself, extending out into the theatre boxes for music and chorus, presenting a wider immersive theatrical experience that is enhanced on DVD.

The DVD image is standard definition PAL, not always perfectly sharp or focussed when viewed on a HD screen, but the filming captures the colour and design of Heusinger's production well. The sound quality is excellent with Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo and 5.1 mixes allowing the voices, detail of the score and the clarity of the varied instruments and SWR Experimentalstudio's live electronics to be enjoyed. Although the DVD is region-free, there are unfortunately no subtitles provided in any language. A DVD-ROM feature contains only a digital copy in 1080i which actually looks much clearer on a smaller screen than the DVD on a HD TV. There is a booklet enclosed in German only, with a tracklist, cast biographies, a synopsis, an essay on the opera and an interview with the composer.

Links: Landestheater Detmold, Edition Gravis

Saint-Saëns - Samson et Dalila

Camille Saint-Saëns - Samson et Dalila

Badisches Staatstheater, Karlsruhe, 2010

Jochem Hochstenbach, José Cura, Julia Gertseva, Stefan Stoll, Lukas Schmid, Ulrich Schneider, Andreas Heideker, Sebastian Haake, Alexander de Paula |Arthaus Musik

The question of whether Samson et Dalila might not be better suited to the setting of an oratorio than an opera has been a problematic issue ever since Saint-Saëns started work on it back in 1867, ten years before its first performance. With its biblical subject and choral emphasis, the original intention of the composer himself was that it should be an oratorio, but he was persuaded by the librettist Ferdinand Lemaire to turn it into an opera. The reality is that the completed work lies somewhere between opera and oratorio, omitting a great deal of the dramatic episodes that occur in the story of Samson and Delilah, while even some of the most famous and well-known scenes occur off-stage. In an attempt to make the function better as a drama, Argentinian tenor and stage director José Cura injects some contemporary references into his 2010 production of the work for Badisches Staatsoper, but while the quality of the work and its performance here are pretty much beyond reproach, the question of the work’s nature and its suitability for the stage remains unresolved as far as this production is concerned.

Designed and directed by Cura himself, it’s not a terribly imaginative production. The concessions towards modern relevance and contemporary allusion are half-hearted and heavy-handed, not really going much further than relating the enslavement of the Hebrew people and conflict in the Middle East to the corporate ambitions of oil companies in the region by setting a few oil-rigs on the stage. It’s a static set design that remains unchanged throughout Act I and Act III, the lighting permanently dark chiaroscuro, the only variation being the rather clichéd imagery of silhouetting the rigs against a burning red sunset in the first act and against the midnight blue of night in the third. It’s also uncommitted with regard to the contemporary setting, since although Samson and the Hebrews and even the soldiers wear modern or casual clothes, Delilah and her priestesses wear traditional white tunics, and Act II goes to some length, despite the sparseness of the decoration, to wrap Samson in the curtain backdrop in order to ensure that it retains the look and feel of traditional biblical imagery.

There’s little consistency to the concept and it’s so lacking any insightful observations about contemporary issues in the region that you wonder what the purpose is in (half-)updating it at all. If it’s an attempt to create a workable dramatic context for the work, it doesn’t really succeed, since the actual stage direction within these limiting sets remains fairly static, and even the ‘Danse des prêtresses de Dagon‘ consists of nothing more than a traditional processional march (although the beautiful young women seem fond of kissing and fondling each other elsewhere). Musically however, and in terms of the singing - with José Cura reprising a signature role and Julia Gertseva providing the necessary persuasive glamour as Delilah - there’s more than enough dramatic expression to make up for the lack of stagecraft and it’s here that the true qualities of the work, regardless of the uncertainties in its categorisation, are revealed. Cura, I find is a little too stentorian, sacrificing clarity of French diction for sonority in an old-fashioned way, but it’s a committed performance that, certainly in the third act, draws out and enhances the deepening sense of the visceral brutality of the drama and dark betrayal that it there to some extent in the score. The fine performance of Gertseva however, particularly in her duet with Cura, singing a powerful ‘Mon coeur s’ouvre a sa voix‘, ensures that there are no weaknesses in the other vital aspects of this magnificent work.

The actual filming of the production itself however also raises some questions. The sleeve and booklet notes on the DVD (Cura even writing the liner notes) go to pains to convince us that this performance was recorded LIVE, but it’s clearly filmed without an audience present and, since some of the lip-syncing doesn’t match, it’s possibly edited together from a couple of different performances or has even been overdubbed. Certainly in the case of José Cura, his lip-movements and performance don’t reflect the delivery at the start of the first act, and he sings most of the third act from beneath a hood, so the full dramatic performance isn’t always there in the way that it might be before a live audience. Also, curiously, some of the other singing is done off-stage to the extent that you aren’t always sure whose voice you are hearing. In the case of the old Hebrew, for example, an actor (Walter Schreyeck) plays the role but the actual singing of the role is performed off-stage by another person (Ulrich Schneider). Again however, although there are close-ups and some different angles used, there doesn’t seem to be any actual trade-off in making this filmed performance any more visually interesting. Other than a brief flashback montage at the start of Act III though, there’s nothing too clever or distracting attempted either.

These curiosities in the staging and filming are however minor considerations and don’t take away from the fact that overall this is a terrific performance of Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila. The orchestra of the Badisches Staatstheater, conducted by Jochem Hochstenbach, give a strong account of the lyricism and the dark power of the work and they are assisted considerably in achieving the necessary impact by principals and by the outstanding work of the chorus. On the DVD release, there is a certain amount of reverb on the singing that takes away from the clarity a little, but the recording of the chorus and orchestration is fine, exhibiting lovely detail and tone. There’s good presence in the 5.1 surround mix, and the PCM stereo option is also excellent. The widescreen image quality is reasonably clear, considering the sharp contrasts on the darkened stage. The DVD is region-free, NTSC, dual-layer. Subtitles are English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Korean. There are no extra features, but the booklet contains notes by Cura and a full synopsis.