From Undine to Rusalka: truth in fairytales

How Dvořák must have loved his sad water-spirit (Sally Matthews depicted in the latest revival of Melly Still's unforgettable Glyndebourne production above by Tristram Kenton): there isn't a bar that palls in his Rusalka, and I was very reluctant to let the opera go in the fourth and last Opera in Depth class on it last Monday afternoon. Curious that so fantastical a tale, differently treated in many variants, should have brought forth such deep responses from so many of the masters who touched it, otherwise Hans Christian Andersen in The Little Mermaid, Mendelssohn in his Overture The Fair Melusine and, least known these days, Henri de la Motte, Baron Fouqué, in the seminal tale, Undine, of 1811 (illustrated below in a later edition by Arthur Rackham).

No wonder Goethe loved it so much. Undine is no wan angel; when we first meet her she's capricious and wilful (not bad traits for a heroine by today's standards), only later transformed by love for her Prince Huldbrand. What's remarkable, though, is the author's human understanding of the love triangle which develops in the royal realm.

The fascination of Dvořák and Kvapil's second act is how the sudden appearance of the Foreign Princess to challenge the mute-among-mortals seems hallucinatory to the Prince: she even has some of Rusalka's music, like a kind of Black Swan, representing the sexual desire lacking in the protagonist (Robert Carsen's superb Paris production makes her and witch Jezibaba into aspects of Rusalka). In Fouqué, the unhappiness develops over time; at first Princess Bertalda becomes Rusalka's confidante for real once the prince has ridden back through the forest with his love back to his domain (painting below by Daniel Maclise, 1843).

The situation is complicated by the fact that she turns out to be the mortal child snatched away by the water spirits from the fisherman and his wife who have since brought up Rusalka as their own. At the beginning of Chapter XIII ('How they lived at Castle Ringstetten') we get this:

The writer of this story, both because it moves his own heart, and because he wishes it to move that of others, begs you, dear reader, to pardon him, if he now briefly passes over a considerable space of time, only cursorily mentioning the events that marked it. He knows well that he might portray skilfully, step by step, how Huldbrand's heart began to turn from Undine to Bertalda; how Berthalda more and more responded with ardent affection to the young knight, and how they both looked upon the poor wife as a mysterious being rather to be feared than pitied; how Undine wept, and how her tears stung the knight's heart with remorse, without awakening his former love, so that though he at times was kind and endearing to her, a cold shudder would soon draw him from her, and he would turn to his fellow mortal, Bertalda. All this the reader knows might be fully detailed, and perhaps ought to have been so; but such a task would have been too painful, for similar things have been known to him by sad experience, and he shrinks from their shadow even in remembrance. You know probably a like feeling, dear reader, for such is the lot of mortal man. Happy are you if you have received rather than inflicted the pain, for in such things it is more blessed to receive than to give.

How this affected the author precisely is not known, though I hazard a guess from the fact that he was was twice married (I've found nothing about the first wife). But how truthful, and - in the uncredited translation I have - how much more telling than the discreetly erotic drawings that accompany it.

I note that Fouqué provided the libretto for Hoffmann's opera on the subject; what a shame that the music is so much more pedestrian than either the novella or Hoffmann's literary tales.

In the end I used nothing from the Hoffmann opera to illustrate the classes, though there was plenty from Mendelssohn, Weber, Tchaikovsky (the four surviving numbers from his Undine, including the love duet which became the Act 2 Pas d'action with violin and cello solos replacing soprano and tenor in Swan Lake), Sullivan (yes, the magic/spooky music of Iolanthe is worth taking seriously) and Dvořák's other operas (chiefly The Devil and Kate and Armida, chronologically either side of Rusalka).

As for the opera itself, we had mostly what we needed in two CD sets and two films. On disc, there's the Supraphon Rusalka from Neumann with the unsurpassably luminous Gabriela Beňačková, whose Song to the Moon is peerless, or at least first equal with Lucia Popp's - this is actually from a desert island arias disc -

and Mackerras's, also with the Czech Philharmonic. starring Fleming and Heppner, never better. The last duet is overwhelming in what for me is maybe the greatest, Liebestod-ish end of any opera. This excerpt comes in a tad too late for my liking, but you get the idea.

The DVDs are of Carsen's production mentioned above, again with Fleming, and the late, lamented Sergey Larin as the Prince, and another going way back to Pountney's Victorian nursery fantasia for English National Opera, which is still heartbreaking in the final scene (Eilene Hannan and John Treleaven). So much so that one student had to run out of the room at the end so that we didn't hear her sobs. I had that the first time I saw the film, though I don't remember the live performance having quite the same effect. Alas, Eilene Hannan died in 2014 at the age of 67 - best remembered as an intense presence on stage in everything she did.

Meanwhile, for next season, academic year, call it what you will, I've decided that we'll devote the autumn term to three, rather than two, operas, one a stage work: Handel's Agrippina, Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and Weill's Der Silbersee. The spring term will see the third instalment of our four-year Ring journey with Siegfried, while the summer bring Strauss's Elektra and one more TBC. All tending to the Germanic, I know, but that's what the London rep is offering in 2019-20. Let me know in a message here if you're interested, complete with e-mail; I won't publish it, but I'll be sure to reply.

Why you must see The Passenger

It's an Auschwitz opera, but it could hardly be more responsible or unsensational in its approach. Zofia Posmysz, the Polish woman on whose novella it's based, was indeed interned in the camp and years later heard what she thought was the voice of her former tormentor in a group of German tourists on the Place de la Concorde (it wasn't, but she based her flashback technique on a 'what if?'). Mieczyslaw Weinberg, the composer, otherwise known as Moisey Vainberg, followed in his father's footsteps as a musician in Warsaw's Yiddish theatre, fled to the Soviet Union while his parents and sister were sent to the camps, and was imprisoned in the last year of Stalin's reign for 'bourgeois Jewish nationalism' (his father-in-law had been Solomon Mikhoels, whose fate he was spared only by Stalin's death).

So both had a right to such an opera. That wouldn't in itself make The Passenger great, and in the relatively cold light of twice viewing the Bregenz premiere on DVD - the first time to review for the BBC Music Magazine, the second time with a score to write a programme note - I still can't say with certainty that it is, at least by the conventional canons of operatic masterpiece status. Too much, perhaps, lives under the shadow of Weinberg's inspirational father-figure mentor Shostakovich (I argue in the programme, or rather speculate, since there's so little hard evidence, on the presence of a third voice who would certainly have been presented on a regular basis to Weinberg by Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten).


Yet what struck me especially on a second hearing was how restrained much of the musical invention is. It doesn't thrust itself on you with any false pathos; it only really breaks its leash in the impassioned love music between the imprisoned Sofia-figure, Marta, and the lover she's reunited with, Tadeusz. It places its dissonant climaxes very carefully; it makes use of a life-and-death tension between cheap music and Bach (a departure from the source). Its dramaturgical arches see the banality of evil ultimately wiped clean, or at least dwarfed into insignificance, by the voice that will never forget.


Above all it demands total integrity from its cast. Michelle Breedt, picture above right in the third of the Karl Forster photos from the Bregenz premiere, will surely be as magnificent at ENO - the eight-performance run starts tonight - as she was at Bregenz. Giselle Allen sings the other woman, originally sung by Elena Kelessidi (on the left). There are superb roles for a whole ensemble of women, whose barracks scenes remind me of the integrated acting in Sovremennik's vintage staging of Yevgenia Ginzburg's Into the Whirlwind. And David Pountney, knowing better than to exploit his recent trademark crazy crowd scenes, directs with restraint on Johan Engels's perfect set.

I'm facing tonight's UK premiere with just a little knot inside, but I know it's going to be quality work. I'm sure, too, that the opera itself will justify the five two-hour classes we're going to spend on it in my Opera in Focus course at the City Lit, starting this afternoon. Lucky that I have a full house of students willing to follow me into such arcane repertoire...


On a connected note, I spoke on the phone yesterday to Thomas Sanderling about the death, just before his 99th birthday which would have been today, of his remarkable conductor father Kurt. I needed to check some facts in my Guardian obituary, and though I gave him the option of not being disturbed, he rang me to talk about his father's last days and to read through the piece (which made me very, very nervous - needlessly, as it turned out).

Both Sanderlings have been intimately connected with Weinberg's work; the composer dedicated his Second Symphony to Sanderling Vater. Now Thomas is embarking on what he feels passionately sure IS an operatic masterpiece, Weinberg's treatment - with the same librettist, Alexander Medvedev - of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. He's going to play through scenes from the piano score to convince me. So the wonderful continuity of the musical world goes on...

Stop press, 20/9: The Passenger was, as predicted, done by ENO at the very highest level. Fret though I may about what might be the authentic voice of Weinberg, there were huge strengths throughout and, yes, the epilogue was quietly affecting. Review here on The Arts Desk. And I got to shake the venerable hand of elegant Zofia Posmysz...

Portrait of the artist as opportunist

OK, so that's me messing round on the Leeds Grand Theatre stage, as snapped by my Radio 3 interlocutor, the ineffable Christopher Cook. But I'm talking about Chartkov, lonely protagonist of Nikolay Gogol's The Portrait as translated into music by Mieczyslaw Weinberg (aka Moysey Vainberg) in 1980. The opera, clearly, is no straightforward rendering of the short story, in which the portrait of a Satanic old moneylender is absolutely key throughout. That supernatural aspect wasn't much liked by critic Belinsky, whose more prosaic understanding of a central message about artistic compromise is shared by David Pountney in the Opera North production (the four production photos below by Bill Cooper).

In other words, he sees it more or less exclusively about what happens when a painter sells out, only to discover too late what dedication to real art is all about. Which is fine, up to a point. I like Pountney's central conceit, brilliantly supported by the sets and costumes of Dan Potra, that we start in a rainbow-oiled artist's studio in Petersburg c.1830


only to move forward to what society painters would have had to do in the Socialist-Realist world of the 1930s


and on to Warhol in New York.


That's fine. But, as has become Pountney's wont in more recent extravaganzas, the message is muddied. What are we supposed to make of the cracked-mirror 'portrait', the fact that the old moneylender with the evil eyes never appears, let alone steps out of his frame, to balance the vision of the artist's psyche muse, a leggy girl in bedshirt and high-heeled red shoes? Plus there are some declining old voices in the ensemble: Helen Field's is unbearable to listen to after a while, and I don't think it was just Peter Savidge's temporary indisposition which made his crucial, Death in Veniceish hymn to the true artist in Act Two so unpleasant to listen to (it's a tough sing, and we got a much better stand-in on Thursday, who sadly won't be heard on the broadcast).

Nevertheless it's tenor Paul Nilon's evening, and while this time he didn't have a character as interesting as Michel in Martinu's Julietta to get his teeth into, he did as good a job as he could to stop us wishing that the great Langridge had got hold of the role twenty or so years earlier.


So what of the music? A second hearing, not least because Rossan Gergov got far more impassioned and well-phrased playing out of the Opera North Orchestra than on the previous performance we'd heard, suggested pseudo-profundity in the last act when I'd been led to hope there might be real depths here. But Weinberg still finds inspired touches: the Lamplighter's ever more haunting ballads, in a simple vein that this composer could do so well, the muted violin solo for the evanescent Muse and the symphonic sweep from the A major eulogy in praise of the dedicated artist to Chartkov's panicky peripetaia. It never comes close to the operatic riches I heard once again in Saturday's Met screening of Adams's Nixon in China, so evidently a masterpiece even back in 1988 when I first heard it. But it's stageworthy and interesting. And the more I hear of Weinberg's music, the more I come to respect this composer who lived so much in Shostakovich's shadow after arriving in the Soviet Union from Poland.


Some of this I managed to say in our boxed conversation as we looked out on the splendours of the beautifully-restored Grand Theatre (above) before and during the show: we'll see what transpires when the Radio 3 broadcast is aired in May. I must say that I had a jolly time as always with CC - seen here framed -


as well as with producer Sam Phillips - who indulged me in a second visit to Hansa's Gujarati vegetarian restaurant, where I did indeed get to meet the great lady as I'd hoped - and the rest of the team. And, yes, I love Leeds now; though it seems unfortunate that Opera North couldn't have done more to fill the many empty seats in the Grand with young folk (I saw none on either visit). This is just the sort of piece that could have fired up many a school project.