From a season that brings us a reprise of the Pierre Audi Walküre and shares with us Katie Mitchell's vision on Richard Strauss' Frau Ohne Schatten, the double bill Pagliacci / Cavalleria Rusticana was a convincing kick-off. An opera season in which the Dutch National Opera in addition to its (usual) Teutonic repertoire offers more room for Italian opera (Rossini's La Cenerentola and Verdi's Nabucco are on the programme and also blockbuster Carmen should in context of serving different tastes, attracting a possible wider audience, not go unmentioned).

It was a start of the season in which we also met the new chief conductor who after this season (Marc Albrecht has his last year with DNO) will make his appearance in the Amsterdam opera house. With the young Lorenzo Viotti (he is only 30 years old), the Dutch National Opera has brought in new talent. A conductor who, with his early debut for DNO (prospective conductor Mark Elder had to cancel due to health reasons), immediately left an unforgettable impression. After Ingo Metzmacher, an advocate of 20th-century opera, and Marc Albrecht, a specialist in scorching (late-) romantic repertoire, the Dutch National Opera is recruiting with Viotto a conductor who has hitherto mainly 19th-century Italian repertoire under his belt. In addition to his first performance for DNO, received with reviews written in accolades, let's hope that Viotto's preferences will not lead to an overly conservative choice of programme and that his traverses in German and more modern repertoire will lead to just as much success as his triumphal march along this Leoncavallo / Mascagni double bill.

More than just a hot-blooded sermon on human lust and love, the jealousy and violence-fuelled intrigue in (somewhat) stereotypical Italian drama was neatly parked between a fine piece of Regietheater and a more traditional storytelling method. A production that was not only suitable for those for whom Italian opera is synonymous with a genre. Also for those who are generally more concerned with the Germanic branch of the opera family (yours truly) was the adaptation by Robert Carsen (previously responsible for Dialogues des Carmelites at DNO) of Pagliacci / Cavalleria Rusticana worth its price for admission.

He played a game with the perception of the audience and directed in this way not only the emotion but also made an explicit appeal to the mind. In Pagliacci it is not entirely clear to what extent protagonist Canio can distinguish reality from performance, and Carsen makes this diffuse boundary between reality and theatre the starting point of his production. He changed the usual order of the two operas, making Pagliacci a piece that was performed in the theatre where the cast of Cavalleria Rusticana was preparing to sing in an Easter Mass. This choice helped Cavalleria to become the somewhat surprising musical winner of the evening. Pagliacci, sparkling and grim, was the support act for a sultry high mass in Cavalleria in which a tapestry of heavenly close-harmony singing was unfolded. An exercise in choral singing led by Ching-Lien Wu, who played herself, in which the choir turned from their usual role as spectator and commentator into a protagonist and excelled - perhaps even more than it usually does in productions for DNO.
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Not only in Cavalleria but also in Pagliacci was the choir more than just a bystander and became thus the real leading star of this production. It sat on the first three rows in the hall, as part of the audience. In what seems to be a trend, circus people who don't want to limit themselves to the dimensions of a stage (Tannhauser in Bayreuth last summer), the members of the choir were spectators and participants in one. They acted, reacted, applauded, exhorted to silence and played with the conventions of (Italian) opera with its (pre-programmed) applause after an aria.

It worked like a two stage missile. Pagliacci became  - with an excellent Brandon Jovanovich in the role of Canio - a first highlight that just after the intermission only seemed to be the prelude for Cavalleria Rusticana. Canio and the people he killed, Nedda and Tonio, turned out to be just actors. The murders before the intermission were just part of a piece of theatre-in-a-theatre. It made Pagliacci a kind of support act - a role that Cavalleria Rusticana usually plays when these two operas are paired - which did not mean that what was presented to us in Pagliacci was stripped of its emotional gravity. Pagliacci presented as a performance-in-a-performance did not diminish the involvement of the viewer any less as the credits of a movie do when we, the audience, are reminded that the personages we saw were only actors.
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Of these singer-actors, Brandon Jonovich as Canio gave a grim, intense performance that in the aria Ridi Pagliacci found a (expected) highlight that at times looked like a trailer for the upcoming Joker movie. In the theatre show that Carsen built, there was room not only for strong acting, but also for old-fashioned Italian singer drama. With a classical feeling for grand gestures in voice (and behaviour, a tweet during the rehearsals in which she complained about the fact that DNO did not allow her to take her dog inside the theater suggested such a thing) Anita Rachvelishvili sang the role of Santuzza. An interpretation for the lover of glowing, powerful opera singing. A voice, full in all registers, that captured all (extreme) aspects of the drama. As if Renate Tibaldi and Maria Callas fought their classic battle between beauty and expression and found in Rachvelishvili's performance a rutted, tantalising amalgam.  In a roller coaster of emotions, Rachvelishvili brought Santuzzi to life. The woman Tiruddi rejects because he is in love with Lola, Alfio's wife, and, in this production, has been banned from the choir. As Santuzzi, Rachvelishvili, confined with a tormented heart, gave shape to a warm-blooded angel of revenge. She tells Alfio about his wife's affair and thus initiates the duel in which Alfio kills Tiruddi. The extent to which this death is 'reality' or merely theatre-in-a-theatre ultimately remains - when we see ourselves in a mirror on stage at the very end (when the curtain has fallen) - a question with an open answer. Carsen peels off the layers of theatre reality and leaves the final answer to the question of what is real or not to the audience. Of how far a theatre-maker can stretch an idea until it deprives the spectator of its illusion is up to everyone individually to determine.

This Pagliacci  / Cavalleria Rusticana goes meta, appeals to the mind so that the emotion lingers longer. At the Dutch National Opera it may have been since Simon McBurney's staging of Raskatov's A Dog's Heart that a production gave such added value to text and music. One can only hope that the rest of the new opera productions this season will have something of the originality and inventiveness of this one. It was about the dynamics of theater and not about the grandeur of visuals. With my only reference in this matter, the museal opera film that Franco Zeffirelli once made of this diptych, my expectations were somewhat reserved but that a theaterical layer could be of such additional benefit to classic verismo-repertoire came as more than just a pleasant surprise.
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​Visiting Bayreuth is more than just visiting an opera. Bayreuth, for those with an interest in Wagner, is like an open air museum,  whose magic works from the moment you step outside the station and you see, on your right, the road that leads to the Green Hill. In Bayreuth the whole city is a stage, with little Wagner statues to greet you and street names that remind you of the sole purpose of your visit. Here the combination of historical awareness and expectations, often sky-high after waiting for years to get oneself a ticket, create their own prelude to a performance that begins long before the Festspielhaus opens its doors. 

Five years ago I've visited the place for the first time. I went to see Lohengrin but more than that I went to see (and hear) the theater that the composer - who had become nothing short of an obsession by then - had built. Like a kid in a candy store, I had never felt so excited before a performance, not since I went to see the idols of my youth, Canadian rockband Rush, in concert many years prior. Lohengrin in Bayreuth was my acquaintance with the famous acoustics of the Festspielhaus and its infamous absence of climate control. Lohengrin in Bayreuth was also my first serious encounter with Regietheater (for lack of a better word). Hans Neuenfels' production made rats out of soldiers and gave, with animation and video, the original story a Rashomon-kind of spin. I did not comprehend it complety, by times the libretto seemed hidden behind theatrical extravaganza that was both entertaining and distracting. Needless to say I enjoyed it tremendously. Attending an opera in Bayreuth was a Gesamt-experience of many things: the notice that one was standing on - let's not get carried away but yeah - sacred ground, it was about music and one's own personal relationship with it, about theatre and the power of imagination and, of course, about the history of Europe and the sensitivites around Wagner that were nowhere better felt than in Germany. In Bayreuth, staging Wagner was a reckoning with the past. In the modern staging of Hans Neuenfels the avant-garde came from the need, had it roots in the conviction, that in order to keep Wagner's music dramas relevant for the present day they had to be saved from a stained past. So much I understood. 

It was not until a considerable time later that I began to appreciate Neuenfels' Lohengrin more for its artistic merits than for its good intentions. After Bayreuth I had bought a video of a Lohengrin with Placido Domingo in the title role. A traditional production by Wolfgang Weber with beautiful scenery. Cheryl Studer was Elsa and Claudio Abbado conducted, no complaints there. But after Act 1 I felt a bit bored and after Act 2 I thought: Why bother? Because for beautiful pictures to come with an opera I just have to close my eyes. You can make your ideal staging in the mind, Wagner's music supplies you with everything you need. After three acts of Weber's Lohengrin I craved for a staging in which the director had turned the scenery into something more than just a depiction of the obvious. A staging that was more than just an atmospheric picture to a story. I began to appreciate more the kind of staging that added its own dynamic to music and text, a staging that gave with theatrical findings, added plot twists and changed perspectives -even if those add-ons went against intuition and libretto-, the opera a more idiosyncrastic outlook; the kind of staging that not only served the storyline and libretto but also dared to operate on a more independent level. So I bought a DVD of Neuenfels' Lohengrin, the production I saw in Bayreuth, and was not disappointed. If I want to see a staged Lohengrin I return to  the rats in the laboratorium rather than Domingo in a beautiful cloak acting like a statue.
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To the question what scenery to add to Wagner's music drama Tobias Kratzer already came up with highly praised answers for Götterdämmerung, a production that went - sadly - under my radar. In his Tannhäuser for Bayreuth he makes extensive use of video, grants the audience a view on the Wartburg, offers some more or less traditional stage imagery in the second act but hangs those bounded to tradition pretty much out to dry (and one is surprised, measured by the booing the production teams often receive, how many in the Bayreuther audience are still capable of being unpleasantly surprised, even shocked, by new ideas, so many years after Wieland Wagner dragged the operas of his grandfather away from romantic "naturalistic" scenery).

In Kratzer's take on Tannhäuser the mountain of Venus becomes a circus company. It is here that Tannhäuser,  dressed as a clown, lives the adage of the young Wagner  („Frei im Wollen, frei im Thun, frei im Genießen“ / Free in the will, free in doing, free in enjoyment). In the circus of Venus, Tannhäuser finds the company of a drag queen (Le Gateau Chocolat) and a dwarf and together they drive around in a van. Tobias Kratzer likes to toy around with ideas and to tease, not only his public, but also fellow theater makers. In the overture we see the circus van pass a billboard with on it a reference to Joep van Lieshout's biogass installation of the previous Bayreuther Tannhäuser production („Biogas-Anlage mangels Nachfrage geschlossen“ / Biogas plant closed due to lack of demand). The circus van is going to the Burger King where they tap fuel from a parked car and leave without paying. When a police officer tries to block their way, Venus hits the gas and drives him over. From that moment Tannhäuser begins to feel remorse. There is a dark side to his freedom, the bohemien lifestyle comes with a price that he - by the time the overture is over - is no longer willing to pay. He goes back to where he came from. That place is Bayreuth. 
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From the circus back to Bayreuth. From lowbrow entertainment to highbrow art. Tannhäuser is a story about love and lust and social acceptable behaviour. But here Tannhäuser is more about finding your place in society than trying to solve the problem of the masculin mind that tries to cope with both love and lust. Kratzer steps into the Bayreuther tradition of demythologizing Wagner and takes the themes of love, lust and salvation to micro-level. Makes them part of a story of human proportions in a production for a public that was raised with movies and video clips. 

Kratzer gives us Tannhäuser in the circus, and we connect it (amongst other things of course) with Fellini. The dwarf with a tin drum makes us think of Die Blechtrommel, a story about a kid that, in protest to the mature world, refuses to grow any further after his third birthday. And where a linden tree (ein Lindenbaum) to a 19th century audience, familiar with its literary meaning (a leitmotif for love and death), gave extra meaning to the song "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore"  from Schubert's Winterreise, so the film references work for a 21st century audience as visual leitmotifs that emotionally widen the image of circus people as social outcasts. Bohemians whose drama often is hidden behind smiles. 

Love and lust are motives, raher than main themes, in a story of finding your place in the world. The sexuality is part of a lifestyle. It gives Tannhäuser flesh and blood and the result is moving. What if the place where you find love (and lust) is not accepted by mainstream society? How does one stay true to oneself when peer pressure forces you to change your ways? Kratzer leaves the religious aspect pretty much out of his concept (Rome is where the police station is) and transits Tannhäuser's story (and sexuality) to topical times with nods to the LGBT-movement. 
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20 years ago he sang in The Phantom of the Opera and now he has already 100 Tannhäusers under his belt (and he is on his way to 100 Tristans). Stephen Gould was a very impressive Tännhauser who had in Lise Davidsen a stupendous Elizabeth at his side. Last minute substitute Elena Zhidkova (she stepped in for Ekaterina Gubanova) carried the role of Venus on small but strong shoulders and brought comic relief to the role; in the second act she infiltrates in the singer context  at the Wartburg where she can't barely hide her boredom about the prudery on display. 

As in both the Meistersingers from Katerina Wagner and Barry Kosky, and Stefan Herheim's Parsifal, we see in Tobias Kratzer's Tannhäuser Bayreuth on stage of the Bayreuther Festspielhaus. And like in Hans Castorf's Ring we find in the use of new media, video, means to extend the stage, to go where the eyes of the audience normally don't go, in this case backstage and outside the Festspielhaus. In a time with cameras everywhere, privacy is an illusion. We see Wolfram backstage, in distress, seemingly intented to call it quits, when someone with a score reminds him of his performance duties.   

The ambiguity of Wolfram, Tannhäusers friend who struggles more than anyone else with his love, lust and moral standards, gets a bit of a frightening touch here. He dresses himself in Tannhäuser's clown costume to get closer to Elizabeth. We’re eying to a Pagliacci turn of events when they kiss and we step into darkness when Elizabeth recognizes Wolfram but nevertheless has sex with him. By lack of the real Tannhäuser she settles for a substitute, she swops the real thing for an illussion. It leaves both Elizabeth and Wolfram devastated. Wolfram's aria: "O du mein holder Abendstern" becomes a cry of regret and Elizabeth eventually takes her own life. 

Elisabeth ends up dead in the arms of Tannhäuser while a video playing in the background shows us the two driving away in the circus van to an imaginary place beyond the horizon - the only place where their love can exist. It is a kind of a transfiguration in love, a fullfillment of the deepest of all desires far away from the material world, a salvation in mind only. From the circus back to Bayreuth to, eventually, a theater of the mind. Place where - as contemplated before - very often the finest of stagings are. 

In Nicolas Glazer’s Birth, Nicole Kidman is a woman who has lost her beloved husband. In shock and at a loss she marries a man she doesn’t really love. One day a boy shows up who claims to be the reincarnation of her dead husband. It brings her out of balance, it’s a thing that can, of course, not be true. Still unsettled by it, she enters a theater where a performance of Die Walküre is about to begin. During the overture we see her face, slowly descending from reason and common knowledge to a point where what is unthinkable, that her beloved husband came back to her, might perhaps be true. It is a movie within a movie, a scene that works on many levels; the new found function of the music, the role it gets apart from being an overture to an opera, the beginning of a night out – the promise of a new beginning in her troubled life. A scene like this, and I don't know of any other example where the use of Wagner's music outside his own operas works in such a transcendent way, is like a leporello that hides many questions and possibilities. For the Wagner afiencado, always glad to hear his music in unexpected places, the scene can harbour some questions about his or hers own relationship with the music of the sorcerer of Bayreuth. What does Wagner's magical world exactly add to one's own world? What is his music capable of doing? In the scene the music gives extra meaning to the slowly changing expression on the face of Nicole Kidman and that face, in return, adds another layer of meaning to the music. It is a scene where the relationship between fiction and reality, the friction between them, opens a door that reality and fiction alone can not open. It paves the way for the possibility that there is, in fact, something like magic. It can put Wagner's pretentions, art as a replacement for religion, into new perspective. It can be a reminder for what an opera staging can be, something that escapes the syntax of a nice picture that comes with beautiful music, something that perhaps can transgress genre and media boundaries, and brings the mind on a plateau from which opera and life look as new.

He lived there from 1839 to 1842, sought the support of Meyerbeer, but Richard Wagner saw his attempts to work his way up to an established name in Paris (the cultural capital of Europe, of the world) fail. In 1861, to his great delight, he seemed to be given another chance when he was asked to stage a French production of his opera Tannhäuser in Paris. Extensive preparations followed; the music was revised, the sets were designed by three artist who were amongst the most famous of their time, and more than 160 rehearsals took place until the premiere.
 
It wasn't supposed to be. Tannhäuser in Paris was a fiasco. Main cause: the Jockey Club, a group of men of the aristocracy who had to miss their ballet at the beginning of the second act because Richard Wagner, that stubborn Teutone, allowed artistic reasons to take precedence over the conventions of the Grand Opera. Wagner had placed the ballet at the beginning of the opera, at the end of the overture, because from a narrative point of view it was the most logical spot. The members of the Jockey Club, who were usually still having dinner during the first act, and more into the bosoms and bare legs of the ballerinas than into opera, were all but pleased. They disturbed the performances to such an extent, handed out whistles and rattles to the audience, that Wagner felt compelled to withdraw the opera after three performances. Despite the fact that he found supporters and kindred spirits in French artists, such as Charles Baudelaire, Wagner would not live to see the day that he would be a household name in Paris; it did not leave him without a grudge. "Without any pose, I assure you that I do not believe in any revolution more than the one that starts with the burning down of Paris," he wrote, and in 1870, at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, Cosima writes in her diary: "Paris is being bombed, who doesn't want to listen, has to feel [...] Rumours about a truce. To our displeasure, R. wishes a bombardment."
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In his new production of Tannhäuser for the Dutch National Opera, director Christof Loy brings Paris and Wagner together again. He has the Jockey Club appear as well as knights of the Wartburg as participants of the bacchanal in the mountain of Venus. The world of Venus and the Wartburg come together in what most resembles a painting by Degas (Foyer de la Danse). One world, one stage image, in which lust and prudery come together, separated only by the male perspective on the woman - the way in which the man sees a woman (as a saint or as a whore).
 
The story of Tannhäuser is the story of a man who tries to find a balance between these two opposites (are they really opposites?); a search for the answer to the question how to be a man, how to be a human being. In his career, Wagner would repeatedly return to the question of lust & love, salvation and the role of women in it. In a superlative way. His talent to expose the drama hidden in the human condition with compelling musical prose can be considered awe inspiring.

Tannhäuser (consistently addressed as Heinrich, named after the semi-mythical minstrel Heinrich von Ofterdingen) begins the opera that bears his name behind a piano, composing. As the overture progresses, the room changes from a quiet artist's place into a bacchanal in which members of the Jockey Club are chasing ballerinas. The staging of the overture is, as is often the case in this opera, the part that appeals most to the imagination. There is nudity and sex, with or without consent. We are in the mountain of Venus, that part of the masculine mind where the woman serves only as a prey for red hot testosterone. After a long stay there Tannhäuser has enough. He is fed up with constant copulation, he wants to return to the mortal world, to nature, to the world where he will be able to be creative again. The instant satisfaction in Venus' garden of lust deprives him of the inner struggle necessary to give birth to a dancing star (after Nietzsche who, at the moment that Wagner started composing Tannhäuser, wasn't even born).

Wagner would later present an unsurpassed and all-encompassing argument for it with Tristan und Isolde, but the premise that art is unrealized sex is already hinted at in Tannhäuser. Tannhäuser, the minstrel of the Wartburg, is left behind in the coital world of Venus with an unsatisfactory feeling and asks the goddess of lust to let him go. The goddess feels rejected and is surprised that Tannhäuser wants to return to the mortal world; she is shocked by his ingratitude. What Tannhäuser really wants becomes not entirely clear. Once back in the world where pure love is considered the highest ideal, the Wartburg, the world in which Elisabeth is waiting for him, he insults and shocks his entourage by chanting the glory of lust. The source does not dry up by drinking from it, he tells his friend Wolfram during the Sängerkrieg, the singing contest in the second act. Wolfram von Eschenbach is, in this production perhaps even more so than usual, with Tannhäuser the most important male character of the opera. His struggle with his ideas about pure love, his inability to indulge in lust, puts him in sharp contrast with the rest of the members of the Jockey Club whose madonna-whore complex is as big as the hypocrisy they are guilty of. The hypocrisy, that lurks in the background when they condemning Tannhäuser, is prominently placed in the foreground by Loy. Here hypocrisy is not just suggested for those who want to see it but finds an unambiguous representation on stage.
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The masculine inability to see love and lust as an unity is reason for Loy to supply both the world of Venus and the world of the Wartburg with the same stage image. The result is a rather static space that is not abstract enough to be interpreted too broadly. As a consequence the emphasis lies, almost automatically, on the Personenregie. This works very well in the mass scenes (with a magnificent chorus!). The more intimate scenes would probably have benefited from a higher dynamic in the scenery; for a more compelling effect, the suggestive music could have been paired with a more inventive graphic representation.
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Tannhäuser's struggle, his quest, his audacity plus the fact that he too - as in a Sartrean world (l'enfer c'est les autres) - gives in to peer pressure (let's go to Rome) make him like a real man. It makes him one of the more sympathetic characters who usually populate a Wagner opera. In Daniel Kirch's interpretation, Tannhäuser is more of a rascal than a hero, a man for whom the creation of turmoil almost is like a goal in itself. Kirch had to look for the pedals at the start but once going his performance fitted in perfectly with Loy's concept.
 
Wolfram was an exceptionally strong role by Björn Burger, a powerful interpretation of a man full of doubt- it made the principled Wolfram a more congenial man, less of a trotter, than he sometimes can be.
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Stephen Milling, who combines a tall posture with an equally large voice, is a regular inhabitant of the Wagner-sphere. The Danish bass (a.o. Hunding in the Copenhagen Ring, Hagen in the Bayreuther Castorf Ring) sung and acted Landgraf Hermann with known authority. It is a role he will also sing later in the year in Munich and Bayreuth (in the new Tannhäuser production of Tobias Kratzer, theatre maker who directed an excellent Contes d'Hoffmann last year for DNO). As Elisabeth's uncle, he is organising a singing contest, a singing contest with a woman as the main prize ( Wagner would take it as starting point for his Meistersinger) in which the old partriarchal convention, the woman as a commodity, as a kind of Stepford Wife, is ubiquitous. Loy deserves credit for breaking open Tannhäuser's patriarchal world, putting it in a perspective that synchronizes more with topical times, without turning the result in something artificial.
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It is Wagner's instinct, his genius, that saves Tannhäuser (the opera) from a grotesque gap between love and lust. He turns Venus, the goddess of lust, into a woman who also wants love while Elisabeth, a model of pure spiritual love, is longing for sensual pleasures as well. With music, he juxtaposes both body and mind, while at the same time lets them intertwine. Loy had both women, following Wagner's instinct and not his libretto, appear at the beginning of the third act. Like two women embodying together that one woman that the man does not see (or does not want to see).
 
In Amsterdam, Ekaterina Gubanova made her role debut as Venus. She will also sing the role in Bayreuth this summer. She combined a big voice, by times a bit sharp,  which was not entirely out-of-character, with a convincing stage presentation. Her Venus was a multi-layered woman who did not get stuck in lust and envy and carried the weight of her role on strong but sensitive human shoulders.
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That drama and beauty often go hand in hand was proven by Elisabeth's performance by the Russian soprano Svetlana Aksenova. In an ethereal garden of sound, Aksenova picked flowers of desire and clamped a rose of passion between her teeth. She brought to life an Elisabeth who carried with her both the exaltation and the drama of love, in which her love for Tannhäuser, which she loved more than the other way around, condemned her to a certain death; the only one in the opera as we shall see. Her performance gave her character a beauty that by Elisabeth's inevitable faith took on a monumental dimension. From her Teure Halle on, at the start of the second act, she expressed an irresistible desire for something pure in this world, something that has not yet been affected and contaminated, like snow that is still free of footsteps ...
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Like Lucas van Lierop, who took care of the role of Heinrich der Schreiber, Julietta Aleksanyan comes from the Dutch National Opera Studio, the training institute of the Dutch National Opera. As the young shepherdess she reached to great heights in the first act - a performance that promised much for the future
 
In Tannhäuser, Wagner is still a few operas away from his with leitmotives woven tapestries of sound; the orchestral accompaniment is of a rather austere nature, is characterised by an economic use of ideas and deliberate chosen moments of exuberance. It is music that Wagner would revise several times after the premiere in Dresden and to which he would add beneficent, mystical sounds. Sounds that would bear witness to his newly acquired musical findings in a Tristanesque world, anticipating Sacre-like violence. Sounds that are like a second home for conductor Marc Albrecht. As always, Albrecht let the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra shine in romantic repertoire. In 2020 Albrecht will leave the Dutch National Opera - unfortunately without having conducted a complete Ring cycle - and with his orchestra he laid the foundation for what was a strong performance indeed.

For the redemption of the man, the woman has to die, it's a constancy with Wagner. In this production Elisabeth does indeed die by taking on Tannhäuser's sins but in addition to Tannhäuser's salvation she also provides salvation for everyone. Tannhäuser stays alive and the opera ends as it started, with an orgy. Tannhäuser slowly begins to understand the depth of Elisabeth's sacrifice and removes himself from Venus. The cheerfulness on stage comes with a bitter taste, for one may wonder what one has really learned from it all. When asked how to find the balance, in life, between the sensual and the spiritual, Loy explicitly leaves the answer open.
 
There is usually no shortage of quality in the Wagner performances of the Dutch National Opera and also this Tannhäuser can be considered (after an excellent Tristan last year) first rate. Wagner-lovers know what to do by now, as do the rest of the opera-loving public: they will find their way to the Muziektheater in Amsterdam.
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Why bother about the tempi in a Wagner opera or the orchestration of a Schumann symphony if one can at the same time listen, not literally of course, to one of the most extreme forms of music on the planet, deathcore, and actually enjoy that? Why bother about  contrapunctal finesse in Bach and Mahler when all it takes is an unholy barking from the pits of hell to entertain oneself? Does brute primal force not exclude layered, 'civilized' craft, and vice versa?

​If extreme music only was about relentless noise, about extremism as a goal in itself, about violent mayhem as a gimmick, than those questions - with ears apparently not in need of distinguishing racket from music - would meet an answer that could exist of just echoing the question: indeed why bother. If the vocal lines were only about moaning like an animal, without context, listening to it would not have been fun but in music, good music (see/hear the accompanying clip for illustration) that shakes and slides over the gravel pit chords of a drop D-tuned guitar, the grunt becomes an ingredient in a meal with more than just one taste. Something exciting & fascinating by which the song escapes the syntax, the predictability of a simple chorus-couplet scheme. Out of the guttoral vocals and heavy instrumentation a world emerges, an aural representation of a state of being; a force of nature, mentally and physically, in which one recognizes things that forces one to awe, things that one most likely prefers to keep at an appropriate distance in daily life. 

Isn't that exactly one of the beautiful things in art? To enjoy and enrich oneself, to get to know something, with what one prefers to avoid otherwise? It is an emancipation of dissonances, a way to tell with dissonances, disturbing sounds, a story that in the core is sensitive to the things most beautiful and thus vulnerable in life. It is music, in my experience,  that  cares for the love in life, rather than for hate and/or nihilism.   

Topics in the genre often range from teenage angst, depression to downright suicidal thoughts. They testify to the hardship of life and provide, at best, a channeling of emotions. They are, if possible, an airbag for life's heavy incentives. The lyrics are testimony to the sensitivity of its musicians, something that is certainly not to ignore, but as it is with programme music (symphonic poems by Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss) it are one's own associations rather than the accompanying text which provides the real impact, turning the listening into an experience to cherish.

De Nederlandse Reisopera, the opera nomads who keep surprising us with interesting and inventive productions, brings in the darkest months of the year Die Tote Stadt to life on the various stages in Holland. After an extraordinary Fliegende Holländer last year (read the review here), they take with Die Tote Stadt again a German opera to the stage in which the concentric circles that revolves around love (preferably unconditionally) and death (always irrevocably) come together in a production in which great gestures are always in connection with the most subtle of feelings and the theatrical potential that lies in this late-romantic piece is articulated with skill. It results in an evening filled with lyrical drama, to experience, as often in good art, on multiple levels.

Die Tote Stadt is the third opera by Erich Wolfgang Korngold who had, at the time of composing, with Der Ring des Polykrates and Violanta, already two successful operas (as a 23-year-old!) to his name. The success of these operas made Die Tote Stadt, even before the premiere, to a sought-after piece, of which several theatres in Germany competed with each other to be allowed to give the world premiere. This eventually led to the rather unique situation that in 1920 the world premiere took place simultaneously in Köln and Hamburg (Otto Klemperer conducted in Köln, his wife sang the role of Marietta there). Despite the success of his operas and the fact that at the age of 11 the composer had been labeled by Gustav Mahler as a musical genius (he better didn't go to the conservatory, there was nothing he could learn there any more), Korngold's career was ultimately one in which the expectations raised at a young age were not completely fulfilled. This was, in part, due to the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. Because of them the composer fled to America (to find a job in Hollywood). There the film soundtracks earned him two Oscars (for Anthony Adverse and The Adventures of Robin Hood) but the step from a composer of operas to a composer of moviescores would seriously damage Korngold's image as a serious composer. 
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Die Tote Stadt is an opera about a man in Bruges who scourges himself and his immediate surroundings with the memory of his deceased beloved Marie. It is the story of Paul who has locked himself up in a room that he has decorated as a temple for the woman whose death he cannot accept. Death shows itself inexorably in his mind and any attempt by his friends to free that mind, to penetrate it, seems doomed to failure. The struggle with what has been frozen in time seems to be a futile one, everything that can lead to a possible new life is tainted by the inviolability of death. Marietta, in whom Paul recognizes his deceased beloved, finds him a strange guy but feels attracted to him nonetheless. It will be her will to life that ultimately causes her to attempt to persuade Paul to exchange the memory of his deceased Marie for a new life with her, a new love.

Music and libretto follow Paul's journey from the dark grey world of the first act to a world full of colour, the world of Marietta,  in the following acts. Marietta is mirrored, projected on a large screen, to a few female protagonists from Hitchcock films. Kim Novak, Grace Kelly and Janet Leigh. Portraits of actresses who are like visual leitmotifs. They indicate what Marietta is; the woman as a substitute (Kim Novak in Vertigo), and they predict her fate (Janet Leigh in Psycho). Marietta and Marie's appearance are played by Iordanka Denlova. A Bulgarian soprano who combines the requested zest for life and feeling for the theatrical in a role as powerful as it is sensual. Acting and singing melt together in a woman who, contrary to the libretto, is not to survive the opera.  But more about that later.
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Turning to the world of opera in 2009, former rock singer, Swedish tenor Daniel Frank by now has added the Wagner roles Tannhäuser and Siegfried to his repertoire. Roles that have to carry an opera, and that experience is expressed in an interpretation of Paul that is firm yet by times a bit erratic. For the sensual, that titillating of Korngold's melody lines that have to lift the piece, we have to wait for his duet with Marietta, the famous "Glück, das mir verblieb". But from that moment on it's a hit. From that moment on music, lyrics and staging pick you up to deliver you almost 3 hours later, the mind satisfied and the spirit ripened, at the exit of Theater Carré where a glance at the city that is anything but dead, Amsterdam, has proved itself to be a perfect host for the dead city; 19th century Bruges. A city that is by then engraved in the mind like a woodcut of Frans Masereel. 
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For the plot this production goes back to George Rodenbach's novella "Bruges la Morte" on which the libretto is based. Korngold's father, Julius, music critic of Die Neue Freie Presse, where he succeeded Eduard Hanslick, proposed to stage Paul's murder of Marietta in Paul's mind. Here the opera adds a ray of light to the dark ending in the novella; Paul is given a second chance. With Korngold the drama lies in the fact that Paul has to face that a resurrection, an Auferstehung, of a loved one is impossible (we'll have to turn to Mahler's Second Symphony for that). 
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A murder, an act of violence, in a dream as trigger for catharsis. Director Jakob Peters-Messer does not find this credible and sees his finding supported by Sigmund Freud's dream theory, well known at the beginning of the twentieth century. Peters-Messer draws the murder away from the libretto, away from the dream, and places it back into reality. This is scouring with the text and libretto that, from the dark beginning, express an increasing alienation from reality. In art, and in opera perhaps even more so than in literature, theatre and film, aesthetics largely determine the content. Many an implausible opera plot is saved by music. This is also the case with Korngold and the musicians who serve him here. Sensual colorite rises from the orchestra pit where conductor Antony Hermus and the Noord Nederlands Orkest bring to life what Korngold entrusted to paper almost a century ago. What seems far-fetched from a narrative point of view is made acceptable by the music, making the turn the libretto makes to the novella a unnecessary one.

Paul's friends, Frank and housekeeper Brigitta, see Marietta's corpse lying on the floor and when Frank asks Paul if he might not go to another place now that his memories of Marie apparently no longer hold him to his room in Bruges, we see police and medical staff. That other place, in the libretto another city, can be interpreted here as a cell in the prison or institution. When the curtain falls for the rest of the cast, Paul is the last man standing, singing a reprise of "Glück, das mir verblieb" - the aria he sang in duet with Marietta in the first act. It is a farewell to Bruges and a farewell, in this production, to his freedom. He exchanges the prison in his head for a real one. The dream of reality has put an end to the dream of love.

Thus, De Nederlandse Reisopera brings Die Tote Stadt to life almost one hundred years after its premiere. An opera by a composer who has been somewhat neglected by music history. The thoughts of Korngold and the composers who suffered a similar fate, popular during the interbellum and for a big part forgotten after the Second World War, make this production an extra sympathetic one and a justifiable attempt to evade from obscurity where history so mercilessly has condemned it to. It would therefore be nice, with the success of this production fresh in mind, if someone contemplating possible productions for upcoming seasons thinks of the name of Franz Schreker. 

Theater Carré Amsterdam - 30 January 2019

Conductor: Antony Hermus
Noord Nederlands Orkest
Choir conductor: Andrew Wise
Consensus Vocalis

Regie: Jakob Peters-Messer
Stage design: Guido Petzold
Costume design: Sven Bindsell

Paul: Daniel Frank
Marietta/Marie: Iordanka Derilova
Frank: Marian Pop
Brigitta: Rita Kapfhammer

Do not pay attention to the music. Keep on talking. Thank you. 

There are hardly any more cynical words imaginable to urge the audience to be silent. However, the request is anything but cynical, it must be taken literally. It serves as an introduction to Erik Satie's Vexations. Music d'Ameublement. Music while you're doing something else. Music that may be regarded as a forerunner of elevator music and noise. Music that tonight has to prepare the audience for the piece Mouvement by Helmut Lachenmann. A piece that, sandwiched between Mozart's symphonies 39 and 41, should lead the listener to a new world of sound, perhaps even to a new way of listening.

A listening experience in which every sound can be music. A listening in which the listener himself can check the boundaries of what he considers music, what he wishes to consider music. An aural journey that will go from the first Viennese school to the acoustic techno, Musique Concrète Instrumentale, of Helmut Lachenmann. A journey that can perhaps best be described as a descent into modern Nibelheim - a place where the consumer society has taken the place of nature. Perhaps a combination with the music of Gustav Mahler would have been more appropriate. Where Mahler tried to capture the essence of nature in his symphonies, one can say with Lachenmann, and this is mere a listener's opinion, that he aims for the world after nature. The world of the industrial revolution and its outcome, the modern consumer society. Lachenmann creates sound images that must point the nowadays listener to the essence of their desire to consume. He aims his arrows at instant satisfaction and his music certainly does not have an obligation to please. Instead of ecstasy and entertainment Lachenmann seeks danger, stirred by alienation, frustration and confusion - a danger every composer should strive for in our time, The real danger for him comes from the listener who wants to be entertained and the composer who wants to please. 

There is this story about Ennio Morricone, told by Lachenmann, who did not want suites from Once Upon A Time In The West to be played on the same evening as Lachenmann's Mouvement. Despite Morricone's objections, Morricone and Lachenmann shared the same programme, with both composers sitting side by side during the concert. Aware of what the famous film composer thought of him, Lachenmann (a great admirer of Morricone by the way) didn't dare to say anything to the Italian maestro. What Morricone, the good, found so bad & ugly in Lachenmann's music, the story doesn't tell and it won't become clear tonight either. Because that music turns out to be exciting and by no means as inaccessible as might have been feared beforehand. 
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For the creation of his music, Lachenmann doesn't use other kind of instruments than Mozart had at his disposal. Where Mozart sought innovation in his orchestration, for example fitting in a clarinet where an oboe was more in the conventional line of expectation (in symphony 39), Lachenmann takes other, more extreme, paths. He ignores the academic rules on how to play an instrument and moves aside classical harmony and counterpoint.  Thus oboes are used as percussion instruments, the bow of cello and double bass does not play only the strings but also the body and tuning pegs; a kettledrum is put upside down. With something as anachronistic as a classical orchestra, he emancipates sound into music. He looks at modern times with classical means - like making an engraving of a computer screen. With the result, in which every sound can ultimately be music, what is heard must also be felt. It is an awareness through sound. A music that leads to thinking, whether or not about concrete topics. Music that takes you back in your thoughts, makes you aware of those thoughts without the need to formulate or express them. It leads to a kind of "knowing through feeling". It seems to be both inspired by Wagner as well as revolting against it. Over the rainbow bridge that leads to Valhalla, Lachenmann lays a grey carpet. He covers the opulent colours of Romanticism with shades that are (much) less seductive but the question whether there is music in his soundscapes does not come to mind. For example, the confusion that can arise from a piece like Heinz Hölliger's string quartet - am I listening to randomly chosen notes or a composition? - stays here at great distance. Lachenmann's acoustic techno (it would lend itself well for an unplugged session with Nine Inch Nails or Mike Patton's Fantomas) sounds too structured for that, too comfortable also.
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Lachenmann's music is no less structured than the classical music that preceeds it, but the ordering effect of his music - which is able to sharpen the mind, to make you feel smarter (if only by the power of suggestion) - is less compelling than with Mozart. It appeals more to one's own interpretation. You have to feel it. The resonating of the air. The sine waves that land on your eardrums. Attending it live is (even more than with the classical repertoire) a necessary condition for possible appreciation. The Jupiter symphony can sound good on your smartphone, Lachenmann not. His music is for modern ears an invitation to link image to sound. An invitation that, once accepted, turns the head into a space that one can travel in. The fact that this journey leads less far into unknown territory than was previously thought says something about the emancipation process that the dissonant has gone through over time. Film music makes ample use of it. Of note clusters that are used purely for their suggestive power. The contrast that lies in Lachenmann's work - catching the modern world with classical means - makes his music, at least the music I became acquainted with tonight, a fascinating experience. (It seems that nothing offends Lachenmann more than saying that you find his music interesting, so I will mark my words here.) It is an experience in which tuning the instruments prior to a Mozart symphony becomes part of the programme.​

How does one listen to Mozart when one have just breathed the air of a new world? Does the introduction to new music provide a new perspective on old music? Tonight's concert did not give an unambiguous answer to that. Before the intermission I felt some reservations about the performance of Mozart's 39th symphony. Under the baton of Francois-Xavier Roth, the rendition of Les Siecles sounded a bit stiff. As if the piece was a bit underrehearsed. After the break, after Lachenmann, the Jupiter and the Overture Nozze (as encore) sounded significantly better. But that was simply because of the performers and (probably) because of the compositions themselves. Also in music of centuries ago one can, every performance again, stare into a new world. For example in that superbe Adagio of the Jupiter symphony. A sound carpet that is like a sky with clouds in which one can see faces appear, again and again, the longer one looks at it. It are meandering sounds that are an invitation to fill in the silence between the notes with one's own panoramas. In that Adagio, music automatically becomes a landscape in which one can let the mind wander. Here Mozart reached out a hand to his 20-21th century colleague. His music became here, as the musical companion of Lachenmann's Mouvement, a sound in which the spirit was encouraged to go on a journey of discovery itself. It was as if the two composers, each a child of their own time, met on the banks of the IJ and engaged in conversation.
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​Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ - 12 January 2019

Les Siècles orchestra
François-Xavier Roth conductor

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Symphony 39
Helmut Lachenmann Mouvement
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Symphony  41
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Nozze di Figaro - overture (encore)

This year the winter solstice coincided with a performance of Enesu's Oedipe. On the shortest day of the year I saw the opera about the man who blinds himself after he finds out that the man he once killed was his father and the woman he married was his mother. The Romanian composer George Enescu was a musical child prodigy. At the age of four he played the violin, at the age of five he started composing and at the age of seven he went to the conservatory in Vienna where he graduated at the age of thirteen. After that he went to Paris where he studied with Massenet and Fauré. Oedipe had a difficult history of creation (the time of composition was interrupted by the First World War). It was almost 25 years after Enescu had put the first ideas for Oedipe on paper that the opera premiered in Paris in 1936. Only to be forgotten afterwards.

The Dutch National Opera brings Oedipe in a production by Fura dels Baus that could previously been seen in London and Brussels. A very justified attempt to keep this opera artistically alive. My introduction to it was anything but a punishment. 

In the poisonous mud that caused an ecological disaster in Budapest in 2010, the theatre makers of Fura dels Baus found inspiration to provide Oedipe's stage image with clay. The poisonous clay in Budapest as an analogy to the plague epidemic that is ravaging Thebes. Clay as a depiction of the world of Greek antiquity. The world of Sophocles and the Oedipus myth. 

Enescu's only opera, in this respect he is in the company of Beethoven and Debussy, strings together the story of Oedipe with music that has freed itself from the romantics of the 19th century and shows itself to be acquainted with the modernity of the 20th century without sailing into atonal waters. Enescu remains true to the classical tonal music system and adds in the score, which he spices with elements of Romanian folk music, his own harmonic inventions and the use of quarter tones. Enescu's music surprises with its originality and the inventive use of orchestral means. Besides a grand piano, celesta, harmonium and Glockenspiel we hear a singing saw and a whip against a piece of wood. The large orchestra may sound impressive, but Enescu is more concerned with the richness of sound than with gratuitous orchestral force. He does not escape the inevitable orchestral eruptions during dramatic events either but Oedipe's tragedy is musically dressed up with a remarkable consideration for detail (especially for those who see finesse as an important condition for acceptance and appreciation). For me the opera made me think (associations are difficult to control) of George Benjamin who, in his Lessons in Love and Violence (a favourite of the past opera year), does not so much as drive the drama forward with his music as well freezes it. Frozen horror instead of music that boils the blood. As if the music - by keeping a certain rational distance to the depicted events - emphasizes what the story implies with every new turn of events: that it is a tragedy to be a human being. How to deal with this, how to conform yourself to your fate, is the task for every human being and a possible victory over fate consists only in accepting that fate in the end. 

The musical world of Oedipus is a symphonic one. A world that, with every listening, prints its musical splendour in your brain (I have, after last Friday's performance, listened to it several times and the voyage of discovery through the mythical-human world of Enescu's Oedipe is one where the musical richnes continue to reveal itself). It's a world with music that can be used as a film soundtrack, but in general Enescu keeps far from emphasizing what's already obvious. You get a taste of musical umami that has a strange hypnotic effect (for me comparable to the last half hour of Wagner's Götterdämmerung, where the music has both a very explicit and a strong suggestive effect). Next to the orchestra, the choir plays a leading role in this beautiful palette of sounds. At the premiere in 1936 some singers complained that the vocal parts seemed to be written more for violin than for the voice and - certainly in context with the excellent orchestra and choir - this performance of the Dutch National Opera brought some vague memories of that old complaint to mind. The demand on the vocal parts were considerable and listening to an otherwise excellent Johan Reuter in the title role, one might hear possible reasons why this opera has not become part of the standard repertoire yet. 

​Oedipus is a name that today is perhaps identified as much, if not more, with the complex that bears his name than with the original myth. The opera pays no further attention to this, but a reference to Freud is made in the scene in the second act in which Oedipe doubts his origins and tells his foster mother Merope about the images that are haunting his mind. The setting here is one of a patient sitting on a psychiatrist's sofa. 

In the lower regions of the strings, the base on which the opera rests, the male voices find their natural habitat. In this dark musical world the female roles for the Sphinx (Violeta Urmana) and Antigone (a sparkling and moving Heidi Stober) stand out. The role of the Sphinx is one with notoriously difficult quarter tones, Urmana (known from her role as Kundry in Parsifal under the baton of Adam Fisher) fulfills that task of singing those notes with great dramatic effect. Music and image create a terrifying sphinx.  Her appearance comes with horror-like elements. Slowly she crawls over the back of a fighter plane into the field of vision of Oedipe who - in order to pass - must answer her question properly. "What is stronger than fate? Enescu and librettist Fleg replace the original question "What walks in the morning on four, in the afternoon on two, and in the evening on three legs?" with a (perhaps less childish) question with the same answer: "man". That question on life and death, we know it from both Wagner and Monty Python, is answered well by Oedipe. The Sphinx surrenders and hears her dying notes pass into the rising glissandi of a singing saw. With this musical discovery she leaves the story with a laugh. A laugh that places Oedipe's answer in an ambivalent light. Because is man really capable of overcoming his fate? Not for Sophocles anyway, but Enescu sticks an epilogue to Oedipe's story, which more or less brings the story to a good end. Oedipe may plead his innocence because he did not know that the man he killed was his father (Laios) and the woman he married was his mother (Jocaste). His intention, not the deed itself, is of guidance to determine that he's innocent. And Oedipe, as a reward, can see again. After a shower which cleanses the burdened mind of Oedipe (the staging here does not avoid cliches) he is given a new future after death. Walking into the light and out of the story. Leaving this opera year with a worthy closener. 

Dutch National Opera - 21 December 2018
Oedipe: Johan Reuter
Tirésias: Eric Halfvarson
Créon: Christopher Purves
Le Berger: Alan Oke
Le Grand-Prêtre: François Lis
Phorbas: James Creswell
Le Veilleur: Ante Jerkunica
Thésée: André Morsch
Laios: Mark Omvlee
Jocaste: Sophie Koch
La Sphinge: Violeta Urmana
Antigone: Heidi Stober
Mérope: Catherine Wyn-Rogers

Beyond the rationale that 20+ complete cycles (on CD, DVD and harddisk) is already more than one person possibly will and can listen to in his or her lifetime, it calls me: DER RING. The prospect of going through the whole endeavour of Wagner's Nibelungen saga with another cast, another orchestra and another conductor is hard, if not impossible, to resist for the Wagnerite that resides in me for almost two decades now. A cycle, moreover, with a conductor that has proved himself in Wagner. Who showed with beautiful and enthralling renditions of Lohengrin and Parsifal that he knows how to find the key to the Erlösungsbedürftige operas of the self-proclaimed composer of the music of the future. New, in tremendous sound, critically acclaimed, every bit a Ring of our times. The fear of missing something defeats the notion to restrain oneself, by far, and I listen to the woodbird in my head telling me to pick it up. So I add another cycle of DER RING, the one from Hong Kong with Jaap van Zweden, to my collection. Because the one Ring that rules them all is made out of many. 

Van Zweden’s reading is one of someone who knows that drama has to evolve, to develop. He knows that drama, and intrinsic to that: beauty, can't be summoned by cheap tricks. Van Zweden doesn’t ride the fast lane but in a good Ring it isn't of any importance how long it takes to make it to the end of Götterdämmerung. In a good performance that end will always come too soon. And a good performance this is.

Van Zweden's tempi may be wide (they prevent Act 3 from Siegfried from fitting on one CD, thus cutting the road to Brünnhilde's "Heil Dir, Sonne!" in half) but he certainly doesn't choke on slowliness.  In his approach Van Zweden leaves the orchestra room to breathe. Breathing, and the writer in me who wants to put into words what music does to him, means to him, repeats himself when he states that breathing is the most important thing - whether it concerns a Bruckner symphony or a Slayer song - in music. Wagner's orchestral demands for a magical world of sound are met by the Hong Kong Philharmonic with remarkable cunning and comprehension.  In what is their first series of Wagner operas, they rise, under the baton of Van Zweden, to the occassion. Together with the singers they fully emerge in a musical world in which large gestures don't forget to connect with the most intimate of feelings. Feelings that lie at the core of every story. Feelings, all too human, that live in the heart of even the mightiest of Gods.

In The Hong Kong Ring the vocal performances do not always reach the level of their sublime orchestral counterparts but in Matthias Goerne it has a Wotan of great beauty. The transformation from the Chief God as a relatively flat character in Das Rheingold to a God of flesh & blood in Die Walküre finds in Goerne’s interpretation a terrific depiction. In Wotan’s Farewell, Lieder Singer Goerne brings out Schubert in Wagner, extremely moving, with a serious attack of goose bumps as a result.

Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen
Matthias Goerne (Wotan), Petra Lang (Brünnhilde - Die Walküre), Heidi Melton (Sieglinde/Brünnhilde - Siegfried), Gun-Brit Barkmin (Brünnhilde - Götterdämmerung), Daniel Brenna (Siegfried - Götterdämmerung), Simon O’Neill (Siegfried - Siegfried); Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Jaap van Zweden

See also: One Ring to rule them all >>

Opera and movies are intertwined. Once the movie theater manifested itself as a kind of 20th century reincarnation of the opera house, their influence on each other showed itself significant (George Lucas' reference to Star Wars as a space opera is illustrative). From opera, movies lended the diva. Sometimes literally. From Geraldine Ferrar in DeMille's movie-adaption of Carmen (1915) to Maria Callas in Pasolini's Medea (1969). In a silent movie opera star Ferrar could not be heard as a singer but her appareance  and appeal alone were big enough to draw a large audience. One didn't have to hear her voice to hear it. The appareance of a famous singer on a silver screen came with implied vocalization.

Opera inspired movie makers how to use music as a support to moving pictures and opera showed movie makers the power of a diva. In the case of Geraldine Ferrar the diva was given a new audience outside the theater and concert halls. One very famous, and notorious, movie director that had his ways with divas was Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock combined his craftmanship for making movies with his personal obsessions, demons and preoccupations. Like many good artists his personal demons were of inspiration for his art. Limiting the area of the exploitation of one's shortcomings to art, away from society, is what separates the artist from the criminal and it is there where the memory on Hitch is stained. As movie director he crossed a few lines. His obsession for divas, preferably blond, his fascination for the female protagonist in his movies, led to 'harassment in the workplace' as Tippi Hedren (actress for Hitchcock in The Birds and Marnie) would testify years later. Hitchcock's movies, although they certainly carry the stamp of the era they were made in, stood the test of time. His behaviour didn't; the time in which he made the work that saved his name for posterity, saved him from a certain #MeToo.
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From the opera house to a movie theater back to the opera house. 

From composer Nico Muhly and librettist Nicholas Wright comes Marnie. Marnie tells a story that is, of course, best known by the movie (from 1964) of Alfred Hitchcock but more than on the movie,  the opera is based on the book by Winston Graham.  It's Muhly's third opera (after Dark Sisters and Two Boys) and its first opera based on a book (Dark Sisters and Two Boys were made after real-life events). More than Hitchcock's movie the opera follows  Graham's storyline. The result is a (techni)colorful production by Michael Mayer that is as filmish as Hitchcock's movie. It is an enthralling excursion into a world of a woman that makes herself a living by stealing from her employers. It's a story about compulsory behaviour with a trauma at its core. 

Marnie is a woman, trapped between the trauma of her youth and the social codes of her time. The story, set in England in the 50s, begins with Marnie stealing from her employer Strutt. There she first meets Mark Rutland, a business man who lets his his eye fall on her immediately. He will blackmail her into marriage when she applies for a job at his company. Threatening to expose her as being a thief, Rutland manages to get the thing he wants. (In a time and society in which women are hardly more than commodities to men - as wife,  prostitute or mother -, referring to a wife as a "thing", as cold and rude as it sounds, is perhaps uncannily apt.) Marnie might be the one who violates the law but nobody is innocent is this story. She is wanted, by Mark Rutland (baritone Christopher Maltman in a role that shows Rutland much more vulnerable than Sean Connery does in the movie) and his brother Terry (countertenor Ienstyn Davies who, like in Thomas Ades's Exterminating Angel, plays an arrogant and bourgeois character). Terry tells his brother Mark like it is (accusing him of using Marnie as his slave) but more than a righteous mind he probably is a bad sport. (He is hurt by Marnie's  rejection - it makes his true motives for his quest for truth highly questionable, he is just as bounded to his entitlement as his brother.) 
 
The trauma of her youth lies at the root of Marnie's facade of hiding behind different characters. Next to Isabel Leonhard as Marnie, those characters, personages of the mind, are portrayed by four actresses/singers that function as an Marnie's inner choir. A source of contemplation and a depiction of the past that Marnie carries with her. In the staging we see both straight forward storytelling and a more abstract representation of elements of the story. The police men that are on Marnie's trail are not represented by characters of name but by dancers who serve, in 1950s coats and trench hats, as an artist impression of the arm of the law. On another occasion the ballet of men stage a choreography, imaging the dynamics of a foxhunt (in which no fox or horse is in sight). In that fox hunt Marnie is supplied with a beautiful aria.  A highlight in the opera. An embellishment of the moment that is key in the story and in the depiction of Marnie's character. In the foxhunt her horse Forio, the only subject worthy of her love, will get mortally wounded. She will not commit her love to anyone or anything else afterwards.   
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Nico Muhly delivers the story of Marnie in fluent music that echoes his former collaborations with Philip Glass. The inevitable traces of minimal music are confined, enough to save his score from becoming a descent into arperggio-hell. The result is dissonant yet accessible. With a staging that is as accessible as an arthouse movie. An opera production that is a  culmination of music, drama and theater that challenges the audience yet invites it to take the trip to a world of love, deceit and self-determination. A world that justifies the opera its own place, away from Hitchcock's movie. More than in Hitchcock's film, the opera delves into the possibilities to use image and sound in a more abstract way, it results in a world of Marnie that is more graphic to the mind. 
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More than just creating an atmosphere Muhly pays attention to the music as a counterpart to the text, as an extra layer to the storytelling. The musical score leaves the orchestra room for concerto moments. Moments in which the music becomes more that just the forward moving vessel that brings the story home. Moments in which solo instruments claim their part. Like the hobo who serve as an inner voice and deliver musical motives of contemplation. Also for those who will go to see this opera with Hitchcock's film as main point of reference (and who doesn't?), the ghost of Bernhard Herrmann's soundtrack, fantastic as it is, will not likely come to haunt him/or her. 
 
Amidst the music and the drama it is the title role of Isabel Leonard that shines. Every bit a movie star in her own right, Leonard's interpretation of Marnie makes the tragic and the strenght of Marnie almost tangible. From a victim of circumstances she becomes a woman on the road to self-discovery. Like the book, that is written from the "I"-perspective, the opera sees the story through her eyes. It is a perspective of the unreliable narrator because Marnie is anything, willingly and unwillingly, but bound to the truth. The awareness of the audience of this adds significantly to the realm of suspense and alienation. One enters a world in which things eventually are not what they seem to be. When the end comes and the plot unfolds itself - after the true nature of her trauma is exposed - and Marnie has to face the music (pun intended) she can choose, for the first time in her life, her own path. 
 
The end of the story can be looked upon as more positively than how the writer originally intended it. It is an end in which the woman, when everything is over, ultimately determines her own future. A woman who is, in her own words, free despite (spoiler alert) the fact that the police finally gets to her. After her attempts to break free from the patriarchal clutches of society, the handcuffs of the police are merely uncomfortable, her newly gained awareness and self-esteem can be seen as nothing less than a triumph. Earlier in the story, Marnie shows herself as a woman who wants to be independent. And, regardless of her actions being justifiable, she claims her right to be so. She releases a powerful "No Means No" when she defends herself against Mark Rutland's advances. A sign of strength that resonates with the present time of #MeToo.  A time in which the voice that had been silenced for many years finally claims its rightful place in the public discourse.
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Although an opera usually is more emotional-driven than plot-driven - it uses music rather than plot twists to engage - this production differs enough from the movie to surprise those solely familiar with the movie on the area of plot. Its music and staging makes it into a piece of convincing theater, worthy of anything the master of suspense, Hitchcock himself, could come up with.   
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Marnie (Nico Muhly), production for the New York Metropolitan, seen in Pathé Opera