Faith and the Devil in Music and Vision 22 agosto

Faith and the Devil
GIUSEPPE PENNISI reports on
Janácek and Strauss at the Salzburg Summer Festival

The Salzburg Summer Festival (27 July to 29 August 2011) is one of the most important European cultural events. It offers not only classical music (operas, symphony and chamber concerts), but also a section devoted to contemporary music and both classical and modern dramas. It is in a stage of transition because in 2012 a new Director General will be responsible for the event: Alexander Pereira, who has for several years been the successful Director of the Zurich Opera House. Pereira has the reputation of being less interested in experimentalism than his predecessors: it is rumored that next year only one operatic title (Zimmermann's Die Soldaten) could be considered 'rare' -- it is seldom performed, even though it was premiered over forty years ago -- and everything else would be 'safe bets' like La bohème, Carmen and Die Zauberflöte. It's hard to understand why 'safe bets' are required: in spite of the high prices, the demand for tickets is around 800,000 whilst availability is about 600,000. Salzburg features four theatres, one open air theatre and a large number of concert halls.
This Summer, the festival's theme, Faith and the Devil, is well reflected in the program: for example, the drama section includes full performances of Goethe's Faust, starting at 5pm and ending between 2.30 and 3am the following day, the operas deal with 'high subjects' and the concerts also look at the afterworld.
In a week, I could get only a feeling of the festival. In this review, I report on two of the seven operas in the schedule. In a future article, I will report on the concerts. I selected two operas on the basis of the following criteria: a) they should be new productions; b) their performances are comparatively rare; and c) they involve co-productions likely to be seen also in other theatres and countries. The two operas are Leos Janácek's Vec Makropulos (generally translated into English as The Makropulos Case or The Makropulos Affair, although actually in literal translation it means 'the Makropulos thing'), and Richard Strauss' Die Frau ohne Schatten ('The Woman Without a Shadow'). Both operas deal with philosophical issues on the future of one's life and of humanity.
Vec Makropulos is one of Janácek's last works. Premiered in 1926 in Brno, it is based on a then successful play by Karel Capec which appears like a thriller: the gradual uncovering of the mystery surrounding the opera singer Emilia Marty, who is in possession of detailed information about facts and documents long past (and of critical importance in a major trial which has lasted over one hundred years) and who exerts a strange fascination on everyone coming into contact with her. In three acts and a total duration of about ninety minutes, we discover that due to a strange set of events and a potion -- the 'Vec Makropulos' -- she has lived for 337 years. Her original name was Ekaterina Makropulos: she has changed it several times (but always keeping the E M initials). She lost the 'Vec Makropulos' (ie the recipe for the potion) in about 1820, and unless she finds it again, she will have to die. Well, she gets back into possession of the 'Vec Makropulos' but discovers that she is tired and no longer has the desire to live for another three hundred years. During the previous three centuries, she has lost all her friends and affections; now she wants to die. She gives the 'Vec Makropulos' to a younger singer, Krista, who decides to burn it.

From left to right: Angela Denoke as Emilia Marty, Raymond Very as Albert Gregor and Ales Briscein as Janek in Act I of Janácek's 'Vec Makropulos' at the Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2011 Walter Mair. Click on the image for higher resolution
The score is extremely complex for both orchestra and singers. Firstly, the opera is, perhaps, Janácek's most successful attempt to merge words with tonalities so that the audience could grasp each and every nuance of a complicated trial thriller lasting ninety minutes (instead of the nearly four hours of Capec's play (where the main plot is intertwined with lengthy philosophical discussion; this however can hardly be fully appreciated unless the audience understands Moravian (the language of the libretto) and often the opera is performed in translation. The Salzburg production rightly opts for the original language and generous supertitles in both English and German. Secondly, until E M's final arioso, the opera is constructed on musical fragments joined in a large variety of combinations; a real challenge for both the orchestra and the singers. The fragments include many solo parts but are introduced by a vast, and quite formal overture and linked with interludes. (The third act interlude -- at first fast and shrill and then slow and lyrical -- was magnificent.) Thirdly, all the characters are very vividly designed, from the stunning central personality, E M, to the smaller subsidiary roles; this entails the need for excellent singers to also have very good acting skills -- thus an outstanding cast.

From left to right: Raymond Very as Albert Gregor, Peter Hoare as Vitek and Jurgita Adamonyté as Krista in Act I of Janácek's 'Vec Makropulos' at the Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2011 Walter Mair. Click on the image for higher resolution
The 13 August performance had all these elements. The opera is coproduced with Teatr Weilki (Polish National Opera), and most likely from Warsaw, it will travel elsewhere in Europe. The stage direction (Christoph Marthaler), sets and costumes (Anne Viebrock) and lighting (Olaf Winter) transformed the stage of the huge Grosse Festpiele Haus into an oversized Court of Law where in the first act the legal trial takes place and in the third act, E M is questioned by the others about her origins, whereabouts and real name. The action is fast and continuous, without interruption. Acting and singing are superbly molded.

From left to right: Sasha Rau as Jin Ling, Silvia Fenz as Mary Long, Linda Ormiston as a Scottish maid, Angela Denoke as Emilia Marty, Johan Reuter as Jaroslav Prus, Raymond Very as Albert Gregor, Peter Hoare as Vitek and Jochen Schmeckenbecher as Dr Kolenatý in Act III of Janácek's 'Vec Makropulos' at the Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2011 Walter Mair. Click on the image for higher resolution
The baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen is tight but his gestures large; the Wiener Philharmoniker responds very well to his tense conducting, opening up into a real post-Romantic song in the final scene. Angela Denoke (E M) is one of the few sopranos that can cope with a role where she has to go from conversation pieces to declamation to a large arioso with impervious Cs. Raymond Very, a good dramatic tenor, is Albert Gregor, E M's great-grandchild falling in love with her. Johan Reuter is a mellifluous baritone, Jaroslav Prus, who sells E M the 'Vec Makropulos' for a night of (frigid) sex. Ales Briscein is Jaroslav's son, who commits suicide when he understands that his father has had intercourse with the woman he fell in love with. Jurgita Adamonyté is the young Krista who burns the 'Vec Makropulos'. There were standing ovations for all and accolades for Esa-Pekka Salonen and Angela Denoke.
Die Frau ohne Schatten, seen 14 August, is almost a contemporary of Vec Makropulos as it was premiered in Vienna in October 1919, but they are musically and dramaturgically very different. Nonetheless they have similar philosophical and even religious implications. In Vec Makropulos, the key question is the meaning of life if there is no afterlife, and the meaning of affection, even of sex, if one of the partners is immortal. In Die Frau ohne Schatten, conceived and written during World War I and based on a host of complicated Asian tales, two main themes are interlinked: a) the meaning of a childless life (as children are the bridge between the past and the future); and b) the need for a path of suffering in order to reach joy and happiness. I strongly disagree with musicologist David Murray who states that the opera 'has no social dimension whatever' and that 'Hofmannsthal's imagination was gripped with two womanly types -- one a spirited maid ethereal to the point of suffocation, the other all too human'. The correspondence between Hofmannsthal (who wrote the complex libretto) and Strauss reveals that the confrontation between the two types of women was not as important as the search for the meaning of the continuation of the human species during a phase of great suffering (World War I).

Anne Schwanewilms as The Empress with children's choir and extras in Richard Strauss' 'Die Frau ohne Schatten' at the Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2011 Monika Rittershaus. Click on the image for higher resolution
Die Frau ohne Schatten is seldom performed outside the German speaking world because of the tremendous means it requires: twenty-four principals; a huge orchestra (violas and cellos in double sections like the violins, mostly quadruple wind, extensive percussion including glass harmonica, and offstage woodwind septet, a dozen extra brass, and wind and thunder machines); a double chorus and a children's chorus. No less demanding are the stage set requirements: eleven changes of sets (in three acts, lasting about four hours), most of them without even a short intermission to move props (there are seven intermezzos all on the same leitmotif) and a series of special effects: singers descending from an upper stage to a lower stage, fountains and waterfalls appearing on the stage, one of the protagonists being turned into a statue and the like. Some twenty five years ago, a Jean Pierre Ponnelle La Scala production attempted to solve these problems by making use of highly stylized Chinese Theatre. More recently, in Florence, Yannis Kokkos' production (see Music & Vision, 2 May 2010) followed very traditional lines; the production was difficult to forget for its splendor but helped the theatre to go almost bankrupt. Only major houses, such as the Metropolitan Opera House, where a Herbert Wernicke production has been on for a few seasons, can afford to stage it.

Michaela Schuster as The Nurse and Peter Sonn as The Apparition of a Youth with (behind) Maria Gruber, Andrea Schalk and Liliya Markina as chorus girls in Richard Strauss' 'Die Frau ohne Schatten' at the Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2011 Monika Rittershaus. Click on the image for higher resolution
The stage director Christof Loy had a rather innovative idea that ruffled quite a few traditional feathers. For this Salzburg production, shared with the Wiener Staatsoper, where it is expected to become a repertory item, he does away with all the Asian tale mythology and special effects. The plot is set in the early sixties in the Sofiensaal where for the first time, under the direction of Karl Böhm and with a stellar cast, Die Frau ohne Schatten was recorded; in the same studio (now no longer operational) Georg Solti conducted the first stereophonic recording of Wagner's Ring (still a magnificent piece of work, not a collector's item). As the recording sessions for Die Frau ohne Schatten proceed, the singers enter the psychology and the drama of the characters; thus, the emphasis is not on the complex and elaborate tale but on a human, maybe too human progression to childbearing, happiness and compassion for others. It is honest to report that many European (especially Italian) opera critics have not appreciated this approach but that, after more than four hours of music, the audience saluted it with fifteen minutes of applause for the cast, the conductor, the stage director and the costume designer.

Evelyn Herlitzius as The Dyer's Wife (centre) with Vivien Löschner and Sabine Muhar as actors in Richard Strauss' 'Die Frau ohne Schatten' at the Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2011 Monika Rittershaus. Click on the image for higher resolution
Such an approach to staging may very well fit the score better than the colossal/special effects style. Indeed, Die Frau ohne Schatten has a huge expressionistic orchestral canvas (including grandiose scenic descriptions) but few lyrical set pieces. Instead, like in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, very intimate dialogues and arioso, strung upon a rich orchestral chain, are linked by elaborate recitative. Thus, the musical director has a very difficult task, especially at the end of the second act when the orchestral richness may cover the voices.

A scene from Richard Strauss' 'Die Frau ohne Schatten' at the Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2011 Monika Rittershaus. Click on the image for higher resolution
Christian Thielemann was the conductor (as well as for Wernicke's very different production for The Met in New York). His baton helped the Wiener Philharmoniker, the Staatsoper Chorus and the Salzburger Festival Kinderchor to have the right pitch throughout the performance. The cast was top-class. It's impossible to mention all twenty-four soloists, so I'll focus on the five protagonists. Evelyn Herlitzius (Die Frau) dealt very well with the impervious role and her sumptuous acute filled the two-thousand-eight-hundred seat theatre. The young and attractive Anne Schwanewilms (as The Empress) was quite good, and just sublime in phrasing and legatos. Michaela Schuster was an effective 'Nurse' but with a few difficulties in descending to grave tonalities. Wollfgang Koch (Barak) is one of the best available Wagnerian-Straussian baritones. Stephen Gould (The Emperor) is still a good heldentenor.
Copyright © 22 August 2011 Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome, Italy

SALZBURG FESTIVAL
LEOS JANACEK
RICHARD STRAUSS
ESA-PEKKA SALONEN
VIENNA PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA
VIENNA STATE OPERA
SALZBURG
VIENNA
AUSTRIA
GERMANY
CZECH REPUBLIC
POLAND
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