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.

Priez pour paix

Having noticed this piece from January 2011 rising up the most-viewed list, I make no apologies for republishing it now. Not only does it embed the exquisitely simple Poulenc song which is one possible response to the weekend's events - though I hasten to add I don't think of 'prayer' in narrow Christian terms - but it also reminds me to go back and watch one of the greatest films possibly ever. Unless you seek total escapism, it's the right thing to see at the moment, though you'll weep. My review DVD is still in the hands of our Meknes host at the Riadh Laboul, so I'd better get another copy.

I make no apologies for juxtaposing the peaceful song-title - bearing in mind Poulenc's inward setting of Charles d'Orleans's invocation under threat of war - and the violence implicit in Caravaggio's painting. Both the juxtaposition and the image play key parts in Xavier Beauvois's near-flawless film Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux): Luc (the infallibly sympathetic Michael Lonsdale) leans against the wounded body in a poster of the picture on the wall of his Algerian monastery and we begin to understand what 'love of Christ' might actually mean.

In fact all the best aspects of faith are to be found in the exquisitely chosen dialogues and quotations of the film's awe-inspiring script, with the Koran playing almost as large a role as the Bible. I'm hoping to obtain a copy of the text as it's a collection of wisdom in itself. In the meantime, read Dom Christan de Cherge's testament, written in Algiers on 1 December 1993, produced at his monastery of Our Lady of Atlas in Tibhirine on New Year's Day 1994 and opened on Pentecost Sunday 1996 shortly after the murders of Christian and his fellow Trappists (is it possible to talk about this film without foreknowledge of its end? I don't think so, though clearly an audience which didn't know the outcome would find it even more suspenseful). This is the voice not of a missionary - the director had said he would have found it hard to make a film about that - but of someone who dearly loved Algeria and his Muslim brothers.


Of Gods and Men works simply on so many levels: as a meditation on sound and silence - the popcorn crunching next to me soon stopped, and the Curzon Mayfair was still for the rest of the screening - in which music plays a minimal but essential role, Tchaikovsky as much as religious chant, and we understand what's not verbalised (as when, for instance, Lambert Wilson's Christian touches the trunk of a huge, ancient tree); as an unsentimental embodiment of what it might really mean to live and work in a community which may worship differently; and above all, ultimately, as a palpitation-inducing speculation on whether fear or faith will have the last word (the final procession which melts into the snow leaves the question open).

Unusually, I don't want to say much more, or to sully the film with any clips: just go see for yourselves. If only it could be screened in Iraq and Egypt in their current times of trouble, too*: not, of course, as anything as crass as a Christian tract, but just for its simple reflections on the 'all men are/should be brothers' line. It's enough, as Golaud says in Pelleas et Melisande, to make stones weep. But not in a bad way.

Anyway here's Poulenc's 'Priez pour paix', the first of four songs delivered here by Charles Panzéra with his wife at the piano (I wanted the Ann Murray recording, but it's not on YouTube; now - 17/11/2015 - Felicity Lott is there with Pascal Rogé, but for some reason not embeddable). The simple poem is by Charles d'Orleans (1394-1465)



And how could I not reproduce the most moving final scene in all opera, the nuns to the guillotine in Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites? This is perhaps director Robert Carsen's finest achievement, seen in the Scala production conducted (magnificently) by Riccardo Muti and with Dagmar Schellenberger giving a stunning performance as Blanche. When I encountered Carsen at a BBC Music Mag awards gathering, I asked him what working on it had signified. He replied with tears in his eyes that his mother had just died and it meant the world to her. A pity we don't get the brutal Prokofiev-style march before the Salve Regina here, the equivalent to the simultaneous noise of hovering helicopter and chant in one of the film's most powerful sequences.



The Carmelites, of course, have high-profile martyrdom thrust upon them; one of the points in Of Gods and Men is that the brotherhood wants to live as long as it can simply to do good to its flock as - in the words of one village lady - the branch on which they sit, and does not seek death. But the way in which the men individually come to terms with what it means to stay or to leave is another remarkable aspect of this cinematic masterpiece.

*17/11/2015 Hard, isn't it, to think of a time when Syria wasn't ripping itself apart (that started in March 2011, two months after I wrote this post)? Or that any of us wandered free and happy through the souks of Damascus and Aleppo, or the ruins of Palmyra and Qalaat Samaan, meeting kindness at every turn.

Wie himmlische, nicht irdische

Sophie's wonder at the other-worldly Persian attar in Octavian's silver rose was mine on a very special occasion three days ago. I couldn't put up my most burning emotion about it then, but now that I've reviewed the first Royal Opera concert performance of Richard Strauss's Capriccio over on The Arts Desk, I think it may be safely released into the e-ther. It still wouldn't be fair or honourable to write about the unique final-rehearsal experience in any kind of detail or critical nuance. But I hope I'm allowed, as the sole and hence very honoured guest of a distinguished cast member, to shout to the world the final impression of a performance under circumstances I'll remember to my dying day.

I may have - who hasn't? - blown hot and cold about the Renée Fleming phenomenon. Remember how the previous joint holder along with Margaret Price of the Beautiful Voice award, Kiri te Kanawa, could be engaged or on auto-pilot? Fleming's split is to be either naturalness itself, with soaring Straussian soprano instrument to command, or a little arch and vocally curdled. For the gift of Capriccio, though, may all her small sins be forgiven. 

The final rehearsal in question took place to myself and about 15 others luxuriously dotted around the Royal Opera stalls. Most singers were casually dressed, which was absolutely fine; Renée, however, gave us not only a dress and wrap to die for - my programme now tells me it was a 'Vivienne Westwood metallic floorlength Couture corset gown in sequins, with a silver and gold rose jacquard coat' (pictured above and below on Friday night by Catherine Ashmore) - but also absolutely no stinting on the performance at any point. Nor did anyone else hold back, for that matter, but the prima donna really is the one in the spotlight for the last 20 minutes.

That's a great diva as well as a dedicated professional and a canny businesswoman for you. And it meant that the final scene - to hell with whether we care about Countess Madeleine's sticky dilemma, the wonder of music solves every problem - soared and transported us as I've never heard it before in the opera house, which includes fabulous performances by Felicity Lott, Kiri and a singer I've always thought hugely underrated, the charming Margaret Marshall.

For more on the other singers, go over to the TAD review (I might add that newcomers Andrew Staples as composer Flamand and Tanja Ariane Baumgartner as classy actress Clairon had added immeasurably to their new acquaintance with their roles by the first public performance). But just imagine it: the great Strauss experience as if presented in the Countess's salon for the select few. Did I feel like one of the luckiest people on the planet for hours after. Still do.

We've spent four sessions on the last Strauss stage masterpiece, a love-letter to a life in the operatic theatre, in the City Lit Opera in Focus class. The dilemma here was with whom to end - Renée in Robert Carsen's gorgeous if sharp-edged Palais Garnier production (illustrated up top and in its latest DVD format), or Kiri in Chicago. Early comparisons had quickly revealed that Carsen's vision was wittier and lighter in every respect than Stephen Lawless's on a too-big stage, and we stayed with it for most of the DVD sequences. It moves, moreover, from playfulness to great emotional weight towards the events of the late afternoon in the pre-revolutionary (for which read here occupied Paris) salon, so that tears were to be shed for Franz Hawlata's magnificently acted impresario La Roche long before the transcendent final glory.

Not all the students liked the opera's reference-studded debate, but the ones who didn't were predictably won over by the end. For the conversation-piece centre, despite Hotter and Gedda clamouring for attention on the old Sawallisch recording, I kept returning again and again to Karl Böhm with Schreier as composer and Prey as poet,  Janowitz and Fischer-Dieskau as aristocratic sister and brother, the peerless Troyanos as actress Clairon - oh, listen to those endless phrases of hers - and Karl Ridderbusch a magnificent La Roche (Nazi, sadly, but che artista, which will do if only for the duration of the recording). How well I remember its original LP boxed-set cover, such a poetic incarnation of the music/words issue.

Enough for now, but it might be worth recording the sources we traced.

For the discusssion between Olivier, Flamand and La Roche bringing Gluck into the argument, the Overture to Iphigénie en Aulide, amazingly available in a 1928 recording using Wagner's concert ending with Strauss conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra .

Still not found any precise tracing of the Piccinni opera buffa references, two of them, very jolly: anyone out there able to help?

The Countess cites a bit of Couperin which sounds like 'Le tic-tic choc' in Strauss's Divertimento arrangement, and of Rameau's 'Fra le pupille di vaghe belle', an afterthought, I believe, to Les Indes galantes; Carolyn Sampson has made a rather helium-y recording of it.

Much more obvious, to me at any rate, are Strauss's self-quotations after La Roche's aria (where I've just pinned down an elusive reference from Schubert's 'An die Musik'): the ranz des vaches farewell music in both Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben, obvious bits of Ariadne auf Naxos and Daphne (bizarrely, that passage is cut from the Royal Opera performance). The masks and Sancho Panza turn up in the delightful little servants' scene.

Finally, if anyone cares, who's to be the Countess's choice, 'words' Olivier or 'music' Flamand, or inseparable both?  I'd say the argument is always firmly weighted in the composer's favour, and of course his is the last music Strauss quotes. I managed to sneak that point in my Strauss-operas article in the Covent Garden programme for the two concert performances. Don't miss the second tomorrow if you can get a ticket (there seemed to be a few available at both ends of the price range on the Royal Opera website, despite rumoured sold-out status).

Last musical notes here should belong to a recording I didn't know existed, and which doesn't appear on my 8 CDs of Strauss conducting. The YouTube clip is ascribed to him, and is a performance of the Moonlight Music (originally the piano interlude and postlude in the satirical anti-publishers song-cycle Krämerspiegel) before the Countess's final scene. Habe dank, Meister.