Strange Strauss Salomé, Bayerisches Staatsoper

A strange Strauss Salomé from the Bayerisches Staatsoper.  Salomé is a strange opera, whose meaning is elusive and defies easy answers. Strange isn't wrong per se. Sometimes strangeness yields great insight even if it might take a degree of insight to grasp in the first place.  In this case,  strangeness seems to have been done for its own sake, without much thought behind it.  For one thing, this Salomé started not with Strauss but with Mahler. A veiled man appears, apparently singing a song from Kindertotenlieder, though the tessitura is so high it's close to falsetto.  Is Pavol Breslik (Narraboth) singing or mouthing the song of an offstage singer ?  Perhaps Krzysztof Warlikowski wants to make connections between parents and children in the songs, generation conflict in Salomé and the offstage voice of Jochanaan, the idea doesn't fit, or go very far, and isn't developed in the rest of the staging. 

In the palace, the courtiers lounge about like zombies, their body language stylized. They smoke and grasp tiny vials, whose purpose will be revealed later.  Some sort of erotic connection between Hérodias (Michaela Schuster) and the Page (Rachael Wilson), which makes you wonder about the dynamic between mother and daughter, but distracts from the obvious kinkiness of Herodes' (Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke) feelings from Salomé. (Marlis Petersen). This is a dysfunctional family, in dysfunctional times,  but caricature isn't the way to go.  Jochanaan (Wolfgang Koch) crawls out from the floorboards  A truly Wagnerian apparition. "Heisst ihn herkommen, auf dass er die Stimme Dessen höre, der in den Wüsten und in den Häusern der Könige gekündet hat" delivered with baleful portent. The horns that introduce this passage and the timpani with which it ends are there for a purpose. Perhaps that's why Warlikowski emphasises Salomé's sadistic streak.  She's rewarded for her cruelty by Johannan's curse but the masochistic bitch (not the singer) likes it.  Is he making connections between Wagner, Strauss, and Hitler?  Such connections may or may not be valid but here there's so much going on that they can't be developed beyond superficial shock level. Strauss's opera is much more nuanced, more sympathetic to female sexuality and suffering,  and doesn't lose sight of the fact that Salomé, like Elektra, might not be what she becomes had she not been abused herself.

The banquet in the palace is staged, the guests lined up one side of a long table, an obvious parody of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, though the connections are dubious. Sure, Christ and his apostles were Jewish, but what does that imply ?  Does a smell of anti-semitism cling to this staging  where cynicism overides humanity ?  Herodes  justhappened to be Jewish : Strauss's opera is about people, not Judaism itself. The introduction to the first dance was gorgeously played- exotic, seductive, elusive.  The dance itself rather more predictable - Salomé in white lace embracing a dancer in a skeleton suit.  As if to distract attention further, a multi coloured backdrop  dominates the scene, with pseudo-medieval figures like lion and unicorn, which might please audiences who want colourful decor at all costs, but isn't really relevant. Any "beauty" in this scene is delusion. When the head of Jochannan is delivered to Salomé, in a box, Petersen alternates sensuality with sharp, brittle flutterings.  Now, for the trick ending. the final scene takes place in another busy, crowded backdrop. Jochannan's back, fullyl restored, having a cigarette with the crowd. Nabbaroth's back, too, holding a gun. Later he hands out treats, like at a party.  What is in those little vials ? Cyanide ? Strange I can cope with, but this confounds me.  Warlikowski generally is a good director but this time he seems to want to channel Barrie Kosky.  Not a good thing ! Wonderful playing though, conducted by Kirill Petrenko, who is, I think, better at opera than in orchestral work. 

Don Carlos, Paris - Jonas Kaufmann star production

At last - Verdi Don Carlo from L'Opéra de Paris, with Jonas Kaufmann,  Elina Garanča, Sonya Yoncheva, Ludovic Tézier, Dmitry Belosselskiy, Ildar Abdrazakov, conducted by Philippe Jordan, 2017 directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski on arte.tv.  Highly recommended on all counts.  Absolutely wipes the floor on the Royal Opera House (Italian version)  production from 2013 (please read more here).  The more he sings Don Carlo, the better Kaufmann gets into the soul of the character. Here he's supported by a wonderful cast, and superb direction from Jordan and Warlikowski.  Note, I said "direction" from conductor as well as director, because opera is Gesamtkunstwerk : everything operates together to enhance the drama.  If it was just about singing, we wouldn't need opera at all, and line singers up doing scales for comparison.  Unfortunately it takes a bit of thought to figure out how and why a production works as a whole. So much easier not to think !  You can't expect perfection every time, and shouldn't, but this one fires on all cylinders.

Stunning singing, not only from the soloists but supports and chorus, unusually inspired because they seem to be thinking about why and how the drama works.  Perhaps this is what gives this production the edge : everyone' engaged.  Verdi's Don Carlo is a tragedy, human beings trapped in situations they cannot resolve, no matter how privileged they might be.  Not for nothing Don Carlo and Elizabeth de Valois meet in a forest. Freudian symbolism before Freud, extended by the images of horses frozen in immoboility, not living beings.  Don Carlo's collects cuttings from newspapers to learn where he's supposed to stand in the game. He wears a cricket top, but isn't yet a player.  This idea of games and strategems runs throughout the production, for very good reasons. Realpolitik rules, not  human feeling. Religion intensifies the rigidity : the church plays games with souls and minds. Everyone's forced into rules not of their own making. Hence recurring images of walls, some solid, some tantalisingly transparent, like bars in a cage. Prisons with pretty decor are still prisons.

From the libretto, we know that Elizabeth senses her marriage as death.  She can trust no-one, and must be constantly on guard. Hence the image of the women as fencers, dehumanized, forced to be constantly alert.  A typical Warlikowski meme but a good one. This is the backdrop to the relationship between Elizabeth and Don Carlos, underlining the tension and fear that suppresses their natural instincts.  Hence the sub plots with Rodrigue, Marquis of Posa : who dares stand up for the oppressed, and with the Princess Eboli, who misinterprets signals.  Philip II reads the signals right, but his solution, forced on him by the church, is extreme. Only in death can there be justice.  No surprise that the bust of Charles V looks aghast !  He's learned the hard way that mortal status means nothing.  The death of Don Carlos is depicted in a black and white film image like the newspapers he studied in his youth. (Please read my piece Psychological Thriller on Ernst Krenek's Karl V, a completely different opera, but with similar ideas)   

Janáček From the House of the Dead, ROH and memories of Chéreau

Scene from From the House of the Dead, Patrice Chéreau 2007

Leoš Janáček From the House of the Dead at  the Royal Opera House, London, last night, conducted by Mark Wigglesworth in a new production by Krzysztof Warlikowski.  Of course, some in the audience had to do their ritual booing. What did they expect?   Cuddly animals dressed as people? "Respect the Composer" is the mantra of the booing mob. It's probably too much to expect from them even a basic knowledge of this opera, but the least they could do is listen to the music.   Like an infernal machine, the repetitive rhythms hammer and pound until their pulse threatens to overcome your own.  A metaphor for the dehumanizing effects of a world where men (and women) are destroyed for no reason than the maintenance of order for the sake of order.  Respect the composer and his music, don't expect prettified feelgood.

Mark Wigglesworth's conducting certainly played up the violence, and rightly so, since there's nothing cute about a society that needs gulags to keep people under control.  Luckily for me, I learned this opera audio-only, from the Vaclav Neumann recording, rather than from Mackerras, so I think of it in terms of the music first. The first time I experienced the opera live was when Perre Boulez conducted the production directed by Patrice Chéreau : a historic event in many ways, impossible to forget.  Boulez conducted with an unnerving intensity: red hot holds nothing back but ice-cold suggests invisible horrors too dangerous to contemplate. The tragedy of human suffering, so fundamental to Janáček's vision, grows ever more powerful in contrast.  From the House of the Dead is actually more humane than some assume. Janáček cared about people. As Chéreau pointed out, what really pervades the opera for him is its implicit humanity. Under the harshness and violence flows surprisingly strongly a sense of “compassion”, as he puts it, which runs like a hidden stream throughout the opera, surfacing at critical junctures. It is also totally non-judgemental. Neither murderers nor guards are held to account, they simply exist. Thus the famous phrase near the end, “he too was born of a mother”.

At a discussion session after the performance I heard in Amsterdam in 2007, someone in the audience (beware that type) asked Chéreau why he didn't costume the prisoners in orange, to protest Guantanamo Bay. Quick as a flash, Boulez said: "We are in Holland. In Holland, Orange is the Royal House". In a nutshell, the art of visual literacy : images mean different things.  Chéreau's prisoners could have been Everyman in their drab garb, in a set dystopian in its abstraction. The prisoners engaged in pointless, repetitive work (building a ship in landlocked Siberia) but it doesn't overwhelm the stage. Instead there's an explosion when the bags of waste paper the men have been collecting blow up and scatter all over the stage: Substance now, waste no longer.  This explosion coincided with a dramatic climax in the music.  In a single striking image, the message is that men who have been thrown away by society are not detritus, whether they can fight back or not.

"Coherence", said Chéreau that eveing so long ago, "between ideas, music and drama, is the basis of interpretation".  Stagecraft is not decoration : it is Gesamtkunstwerk, the drawing-together of different elements into a whole.  Audiences often go for shallow productions because they are bright and jokey, but that isn't necessarily "what the composer intended".  Warlikowski's production has a bit of everything.  His thing for vivid jewel colours against black and white usually works extremely well, though less so in this case.  Maybe ROH chose him to please the punters, so they can tell the difference between prisoners, guards and visitors (which, arguably, should be minimal, just as there often isn't much difference in real life).  Huge structures dominate, which is a good thing as they suggest overwhelming forces  intimidating small figures. It's a rather well-organized prison, probably not too remote, since there are a lot of outsiders here, including blow-up dolls. Presumably these suggest how society dehumanizes women, treating them as objects, which is perfectly valid and connects to the central idea that the men in this prison are "in the house of the dead".  ROH wouldn't have dared show real women getting kicked about, and in any case no-one "should" need the details.  London punters go berserk over two seconds of tit, glimpsed for a moment in an entirely appropriate context, so they can't be expected to understand that their own sensibilities are not more important than being moved by the suffering of others. The Prostitute (Alison Cook) as symbol, in bright-green hot pants cavorting chastely with the boys.  (Or not so chastely, given that she looks 14.) Nothing wrong with that image per se since prostitutes are the "prisoners" of a messed-up world.   Chéreau had the Eagle shot, but for a moment we glimpsed its glory. Maybe I missed Warlikowski's Eagle, but perhaps The Prostitute serves a similar function: she gets out alive.

Big names for the parts where older voices work well like Willard W White as Alexandr Petrovič Gorjančikov, Graham Clark as Antonic the Elderly Prisoner.  Stefan Margita sang Luka Kuzmič, as he did in the 2007 run as did Peter Hoare, singing Šapkin.  Pascal Charbonneau sang an impressive Aljeja. Ladislav Elgr sang Skuratov and Johan Reuter sang Šiškov. Alexander Vassiliev sang The Governor. As always, House regulars like Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts, Grant Doyle and the always-superb Royal Opera House Chorus were good and reliable.  Nice dancers, too, writhing and twisting their (very attractive) bodies, expressing what is suggested in the music but which ROH probably needs to censor for fear of punter wrath.  This production is not the best, but by no means is it the worst.  But there is not a lot you can do with London audiences who can't be bothered to find out about a composer or an opera beforehand and insist on kitsch and circus. Inevitably that means compromise, which is not good for art.