Korngold saved in Munich miracle

It was only under pressure from several of my Opera in Depth Zoom students that I didn't spend a whole term on Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, covering it in a mere seven lectures and saving three for Korngold's Die tote Stadt (which, as The Dead City, opens at ENO this coming Saturday*). Ultimately, I'm glad I did, because it introduced me to one of the most moving and real productions of any opera I've seen, Simon Stone's for the Bavarian State Opera with dream casting in Jonas Kaufmann as Paul (never better) and Marlis Petersen as Marietta/Marie, and simply phenomenal conducting by Kirill Petrenko.

Everything's been topsy-turvy in my acquaintance with this peculiar opera. I should have seen it in Vienna, but the baritone was ill, so they replaced it with L'elisir d'amore (and we went instead to see a somewhat crapulous Otto Schenk in an all-male production of Wilde's Bunbury, oder wie wichtig ist est Ernst zu sein - novelty value, but poor, we left at the interval). I myself was ill during the Royal Opera run. I'd only half-listened to the Leinsdorf recording, and before the classes read Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte in a translation by Mike Mitchell, approaching the opera from the wrong end, as it turned out.

Decadent, melancholy Bruges is the protagonist in the book, twinned in the Dedalus edition with Rodenbach's essay The Death Throes of Towns, with which it shares so many phrases and images. 'How moving she is in this centuries-old consumption, in which the town stricken with death spits out one by one her stones - as if from her lungs - and especially moving on this autumnal November morning, beneath a sky whose pallor is in perfect accord with her own!' It chimes - bells playing a crucial role, incidentally - with the main character of the novel, Hugues, who 'needed a dead town to correspond to his dead wife...He needed infinite silence and an existence that was so monotonous it almost failed to give him a sense of belief'. (Portrait of Rodenbach below with Bruges in the background by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer).

Into this buried-barely alive-existence comes Jane, a dancer in the local production of Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable, who seems to bear a direct resemblance to the unnamed wife. The novel isn't in the first person, but nearly everything is seen from the obsessive widower's perspective, and the living woman's character resides only in her responses. I came eventually to see that Korngold and his critic father, disguised librettists of the opera, don't really care much for characterising Bruges - which the composer may or may not have visited as a teenager - or finding water music. But the operatic take on the renamed Jane, Marietta to Marie the dead wife, is marvellous and modern: a feminist figure of immense vitality, embodying the spirit of life as dance (Petersen seen as Marietta below in Stone's production with her fellow players in an intermezzo that starts out like the one in Ariadne auf Naxos but eventually turns sinister).

Stone capitalises on this, as he outlines in a booklet interview. He says he wants to avoid the 'old fashioned and conservative interpretation' of Marietta as wilfully tormenting Paul (which seems to be the case in the novel, where the character is called Hugues). Instead, Stone declares,

Marietta is a self-confident, happy, affectionate, freedom-loving, adventurous, open-minded woman. And it's exactly this woman whom Paul needed to come into his life and drag him out of his coccoon of sorrow, a dead person whom he had completely under his control. He packed her life into boxes and catalogued it. The desire for control is an instinct that all men carry within themselves and which lead to tension in relationships. Paul is an extreme example of this. So, Marietta is the most challenging of polar opposites to Paul that you could imagine.

We believe in Paul's obsession and Marietta's vitality almost from the start in this production. And we witness Marietta's despair in trying to bring Paul back to life and love that she feels for him - that he, clearly, reciprocates, if only he could break away from his control of the dead wife. 

Is this only a partial vision? In relation to the original story, yes; in terms of Korngold's wish to have his cake and eat it, the solution seems to me totally engaging and moving. The first two acts, after all, end with dancing vibrancy, while at the end of the third the Korngolds, having dispensed with the actual ending of Rodenbach's bleak novel, waken Paul from his nightmare and suggest a brighter future, though Stone points out in the interview that it will be a tough one. I now understand why there's less melancholy in this opera than I originally wanted - Korngold, after all, seems to have been very exuberant in his early 20s - although a Bruges-like dankness hangs around Paul's dialogue with the vision of Marie, which Stone, and Petersen's stunning transformation, make all too plausible.

Quite apart from the utterly involving theatrical experience, we witness two singers tackling roles of superhuman difficulty - the tenor especially needs massive stamina to sing so often in the middle to upper reaches of his voice - without drawing attention to the fact. As one of my students pointed out, she'd only seen productions before this where the strain is in the tenor's voice, while here that never happens with Kaufmann, so all the tension can go into the acting. And Petersen has no hard edges to her voice, so we get none of the usual dramatic-soprano hysteria and just total, lovable energy (her Marietta pictured below at the start of Pierrot's Song in Act 2, so well sung by baritone Andrzej Filończyk, who incarnates both Paul's friend Frank and the troupe player Fritz).

Leinsdorf's recording made me feel that the score is too splashy, with way too much celesta, piano and harp, too many voice-smothering outbursts; there's none of that from the amazing Petrenko, who makes it sound like a masterpiece. Perhaps it is; I wonder what the ENO production will tell us. But one thing's for sure - these DVDs should be an essential part of anyone's opera collection.

More on the Rosenkavalier experience anon (what guests we had: Felicity Lott and John Tomlinson together for the final session, and in separate Zooms, Richard Jones and his movement directer/choreographer Sarah Fahie, Peter Rose, Paula Murrihy and Fergus Sheil while they were rehearsing for the superlative Irish National Opera production). What it does seem pertinent to mention in connection with Die tote Stadt is my first acquaintance with the great Irish writer Sebastian Barry in his most recent novel, Old God's Time. So seductive is the prose in the early chapters that you might be lulled - I was - into thinking this is a poetic reflection on the past by a retired detective in his Dalkey retreat. What's to tell about the past? In fact this turns out to be another high drama about lacerating grief - without giving too much away, it turns out that Tom Kettle is a veritable job in his past afflictions - bound in with a surprising element of thriller. 

I'll say no more; read it, and meanwhile I'll get hold of other Barrys once I've worked my way through Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star - more essential set-in-Bruges reading to follow Rodenbach (Hollinghust provides a fine introduction to the English translation of Bruges-la-Morte. 

Next term's Opera in Depth choices, by the way, are Handel's Serse - inspired by the peerlessly cast English Concert performance last yeat in St Martin-in-the-Fields, due for release very soon - and (because I'll spend three rather than the usual five classes on that), a Poulenc survey over seven Mondays: one class apiece on La voix humaine and Les mamelles de Tirésias, triumphs of Glyndebourne's 2022 season, and then five on Dialogues Des Carmélites, due this year. Leave a message with your email (I won't publish it but I'll get back to you)  if you're interested in joining us - which, thanks to Zoom, you can do from anywhere in the world, and claim videos of any classes you can't make live.

*26/3 Review now up on theartsdesk. Yes, Stone's production spoiled me - though Miskimmon's was far from bad.

The grail

Here's one I prepared earlier, now let out of its cage. Look no further if you haven't listened to my Building a Library on Parsifal, just broadcast, and you're postponing revelation until you catch it on iPlayer for the week, or whatever this clip facility now up and running might be (17/!2: my producer tells me it should be 'up there until the end of days', or of the BBC, whichever comes first. There's also a podcast, which you can download here). I'll even stick in a further grail image, 'the one', ho hum, in Valencia Cathedral, to delay a glimpse of the winning cover.

The choice, for the first time in my 20-odd years of doing the programme, was totally obvious. So many folk have said to me over the past few months, 'of course you'll go for Knappertsbusch '62'. I thought I would when I listened again to Hans Hotter as Gurnemanz in Act One. But it became ever clearer to me as I listened to the three 'Kna' Bayreuth Parsifals currently doing the rounds - also including his first, from 1951, and his last of 1964, not long before his death - that I didn't want this kind of hard-hitting so often.

Kna's style does make for magnificent pinnacles - Hotter's 'O wunden-wundervoller heilige Speer' ('62) and George London's 'Erbarmen' in Act 1 ('51), Jon Vickers' 'Amfortas! Die Wunde!' in Act 2 ('64) - but what I've always sought since Haitink showed me the light at Covent Garden, conducting Bill Bryden's mostly intelligent production, is a naturalness that doesn't need to reiterate the spirituality and grandeur. As Mark Wigglesworth remarked when he came to talk to my Opera in Focus class the other week, Parsifal gives and gives while Tristan simply takes and leaves you exhausted. A great conductor needs to guide and give space where necessary, of course, but not to impose his (I await a 'her') will.

Which the great Rafael Kubelik never does. A few clever folk knew of this 1980 studio recording's existence but I certainly didn't before I came to listen and nor did my Parsifal-crazy producer Clive Portbury. He agrees that it's incomparably the best of what we have.

Runners-up I don't need to mention again here, but I do urge you to see the DVD of Hans Hollman's Zurich production. It would qualify alone as the only document of Haitink's conducting, but it's also the most quietly moving staging I've seen, trusting to the singers' stillness in the outer acts and - most important of all - respecting the transcendence of the grail ritual for all the suffering that surrounds it. The vital antidote, in short, to Stephen Langridge's Royal Opera horror. The students all thought so when I screeened Act Three in an extra class on Monday, and many wiped away the tears that simply hadn't flowed at Covent Garden.

I have a feeling that might happen when the Met production with Jonas Kaufmann comes out on DVD in February; from the images I've seen it appears much more in the right region than the one we're enduring in London. In the meantime, snap this up while you can; Gatti's conducting won't surpass Haitink's, and probably won't come anywhere near.

Alas, there are no clips on YouTube so I'll move sideways to seasonal seriousness. On the same Tuesday when my preparation schedule had been eaten up by the flying visit to 'do a telly', I took the BBC Symphony Orchestra class through two very different responses to the Flight into Egypt story, tied in with the chance to hear the two works in question tonight and tomorrow afternoon. Berlioz's painfully beautiful, intimate L'Enfance du Christ located the narrative close to the centre in the hands of the tenor 'Evangelist'. We had Anthony Rolfe-Johnson returning to life so scrupulously for John Eliot Gardiner, but all I could find on YouTube was Alain Vanzo not at his considerable best for Jean Martinon. So let's make do with that.

Like Britten's best poetry compilations, John Adams's El Niño would be admirable just as a sequence of magical words tellingly juxtaposed, without even  taking into account the extraordinary music which of course layers it still further. I look forward to experiencing it tonight without Peter Sellars' stage 'realisation', so enervating when the 2000 Paris original came to London. Adams for his supernatural epilogue turns to the charming and naive Gospel According to Pseudo-Matthew for a rest beneath a rather unusual palm tree, and juxtaposes it with the last of the stunning Mexican poems by Rosario Castellanos, a revelation to me.

As the soundclip doesn't offer a translation of the Castellanos poem, I take the liberty of reproducing it here:

Lady of the winds,
heron of the plains,
when you sway
your waist sings.

Gesture of prayer
or prelude of wings,
you are the cup into which the skies
pour one by one.

From the dark land of men
I've come kneeling to behold you,
Tall, naked, alone.
A poem.

So the text resounds and melts into a single repeated word in the mouths of  children - 'poesía'.

15/12 What a weekend it's been. My Arts Desk reviews are now up of El Niño here and of L'Enfance du Christ here. Don't whatever you do miss the Radio 3 broadcast of the ineffably moving Berlioz performance on the iPlayer here for the next week.

A diva for Europe

It's Europe Day today, and with senses still reeling from Saturday's Don Carlo at the Royal Opera, I propose that as a German Greek, already legendary soprano Anja Harteros (photographed here by Catherine Ashmore for the Royal Opera) should sing a great hymn of reconciliation - probably by that other, self-styled German Greek by temperament rather than by blood Richard Strauss. We'll have four for the price of one to conclude.

This woman is phenomenal. Everything I wrote about her Covent Garden debut in 2008 still holds good: the spinto strength, the Desdemona-perfect floating of Verdi's more ethereal high lines, the grace and focus of the acting. I expressed my anguish then that she wasn't signed up on the spot for the role of Elisabetta di Valois in Verdi's most comprehensive operatic masterpiece. Until last week, we had to endure the very fitful, unsteady technique of Marina Poplavskaya in the role (alas, the first run of Hytner's production, which grows on me, was the one to be filmed*). At last, five years later, Harteros's Elisabetta joined Kaufmann's infante for what turned out to be one night only

as well as the top-notch Philip of Ferruccio Furlanetto and Marius Kwiecien's legato-miraculous Posa (actually looking at the nationalities of the principals - German, German-Greek, French, Polish, Italian, British - aligns well with today). That most attractive baritone seemed happy to put a Brokeback spin on the buddy relationship, and why not? Let's have a solo shot of Kwiecien too, since we can.

I'll add no more to what I wrote, trying to keep superlatives to a minimum, on The Arts Desk except to echo a commenter on the Royal Opera website who declared that the penultimate scene of Kaufmann's Carlo and Harteros's Elisabetta sitting on the monument of Carlo V rather like weary children, cautiously joining hands and almost whispering their final hopes of meeting in a better world, would remain with him forever.

Unfortunately the phenomenon is not to be repeated this run; after that precious evening came the announcement that Harteros had acute tonsillitis and would not be fulfilling her remaining two scheduled performances. She is not, alas, part of the Royal Opera's plans for the next five years.

I've already put the YouTube excerpts from Act V in the much less interesting Bavarian State Opera production up on The Arts Desk, but - this time skipping the aria, which is less perfect than it was on Saturday night - there's no harm in enshrining that great final duet here.

At the risk of repeating myself, I have to note that 'Ma lassù ci vedremo in un mondo migliore' usually makes me weep - even with Poplavskaya and Villazon - because when Mattila and Alagna sang it in the Bondy production, I was there in the company of my dear friend Trude Winik. She used her National Socialist Compensation Fund money from the Austrian government - a long overdue gesture to the loss of her family in Treblinka - to buy two boxes at the opera for her closest friends (the rest of the money went to Save the Children). It was her last outing; she died at the age of 87 some time afterwards.

I'm off this evening to a Hibernian-inspired potpourri celebrating the Irish Presidency of the EU, from Flotow and Wallace to Grainger's Molly on the Shore and Wagner's Liebestod, that last utterance of a wilde Irische magd. The classy visitors are the singers from the European Opera Centre and the European Union Youth Orchestra conducted by Laurent Pillot.

Which makes this a good place to point out that most of  the pleas to sign petitions I get from Avaaz and Greenpeace are to support European laws which the UK government constantly seeks to block - the latest being the move to veto pesticides which are held responsible for the dramatic decline of bee populations. The following is part of what James Sadri of Greenpeace wrote in his victory letter of 'the world's first continent-wide ban on these chemicals'. Text in bold is his doing.

'Someone who has nothing to be proud of is the UK environment minister Owen Paterson, who not only voted against the ban, but lobbied on behalf of chemical giants Syngenta and Bayer to try and stop it going through. Paterson in a private letter even promised Syngenta that his "efforts would intensify" in the run-up to the vote.

'Well, Mr Paterson, you lost. The bees won.

'We know the current UK government has a disastrous track record on protecting our world - from climate change to bees. That's why so much of our work on this campaign has focused on mainland Europe, where we managed to shift big countries like Germany who yesterday gave the ban their critical backing.'

Let's hope it holds good beyond the two-year moratorium. In the meantime, remember Teresa May wants us to be the only country other than BELARUS not to be part of the European Convention on Human Rights (I don't know what's happened to this, but I do know that the Queen's Speech yesterday included May's other proposal to restrict NHS access to migrants. Cameron's much-vaunted bill for same-sex marriage was nowhere to be found, a special pity since it would have been fun to hear the words fall from the old queen's lips).

Remember also that George Osborne stood alone against 26 other EU finance ministers who voted to cap bankers' bonuses. Remember the neo-Nazis and defecting BNP supporters behind the smug grinning face of Nigel Farage, who seems to charm the journos into thinking he's a Good Bloke (though they might recall this. UKIP probably think it shows statesmanship; I find it abusive and bullying).

Just remember. These are difficult, dangerous times, and it's all too easy to scapegoat the EU for sundry woes (actually, why not just try the bankers?) But I would recommend all protest voters - probably not readers of this blog - to look at the small print of what they might be getting instead.

But enough. Let's have that German Greek hymn of harmony from Harteros and Strauss. I was going to leave it at 'Frühling' from the Four Last Songs,  in consonance with this especially beautiful late spring/early summer we're having, and thought the final sunset might not be appropriate for Europe. Unfortunately the first song's not embeddable by itself, so be compelled by Harteros with Jansons conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and stay the course.

*which rules out a DVD this time round. But why not a CD set? Pappano has the clout with EMI, though it would be costly to take it into the studio. But by then Christine Rice might be well enough to have a shot at Eboli, as originally intended. I think, against the odds, she could actually be rather good.

Dog and diva

In this week of bizarrely contrasted operatic first nights, it should be the other way round, of course, but it doesn't sound so good. The diva is Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur, purportedly a star vehicle for Angela Gheorghiu. Yet what we saw last night was a good company show, with plenty of quiet perceptiveness about the 18th century gulf between actors and aristocracy in David McVicar's production, beautifully designed by Charles Edwards. It certainly didn't make me regret taking the decision to spend four weeks on the opera with my City Lit students.

There's Gheorghiu's actress above in the Royal Opera photo by Catherine Ashmore, being attended to by Alessandro Corbelli's sympathetic theatre manager among others while Michaela Schuster's bitch princess looks on. You can read what I made of it in my Arts Desk review.


And what about Kaufmann? Well, I had the same reservations last night as I do about his new so-called verismo disc - that the top is infallibly secure, with its authentic Italianate sob, but the middle is a bit dark, baritonal and slightly in the throat, not quite the sunshine and roses I was hoping for in this rep. But as I wrote, it will be terrific for Lohengrin, Florestan and Siegmund. And eventually, let's hope, for Tristan and Siegfried. The boy has the looks, the musicality and probably the strength.


A rather different attention is being paid up top to poor old stray Sharik in the De Nederlandse Opera/Complicite premiere of A Dog's Heart earlier this year (both photos by Monika Rittershaus). I got to know Raskatov's score preparing an article for the ENO programme, and what an elaborate piece of clockwork it is: a bit like Prokofiev's collage technique, with no idea resting for more than a few pages, but quite a few repeats. Whether it'll hang together as good music theatre remains to be seen - and I will see tomorrow, since it's the first night at the Coli. Before that, I'm joining a conversation in the Apple Store on Covent Garden Piazza, chaired by Christopher Cook with the brothers McBurney and sundry performers as the other guests. It's free, so do come along at 6pm on Saturday.