History only sees him with the greatest possible contempt. The stories about him are surrounded by accolades baptized in sulfur. Varius Avitus Bassianus - a 14-year-old high priest of the Syrian sun god Elagabal won the throne of the Roman Empire in the third century A.D. As Heliogabalus (Eliogabalo) he turned his reign in such an scandalous outrage that he was murdered by his own body guards, after just three years in office. Historians throughout the ages have been united to condemn this embodiment of sin and misconduct in the most terrible kind of words. With "... the most cruel and infamous wretch that ever disgraced humanity and polluted a throne ..." (the 19th-century American historian S. W. Stevenson) and the unsurpassed "Not only the filthiest of all who walk on two legs but even of all who walk on four legs" (Historia Augusta, a Roman collection of fourth-century imperial biographies) Eliogabalo defies all description and triggers the imagination. No wonder that this rotten apple of a human being is endowed with books, a movie and an opera. After Ercole Amante in 2009, the composer Francesco Cavalli returns with Eliogabalo to the Muziektheater in Amsterdam.

Considering the outracious material that a theater-maker can draw from when it comes to a piece about Eliogabalo, Cavalli's opera plays it rather safe. Yet the original opera was rejected by his patrons and it had to wait more than 300 years for his world premiere (which it eventually got in 1999 in Crema, the birthplace of Cavalli). This rejection was probably due to the time and place of conception (Venice in the 17th century where Jesuits had a severe influence on social and cultural life). The obvious associations with nepotism, the abundant presence of prostitution and the murder of an emperor were all just a little too much for the establishment of Venice at the time.

Central to the opera are not the (supposed) excesses and atrocities of Eliogabalo, but the relationships between the love pairs Alessandro (the cousin of Eliogablo) and Flavia Gemmira (the woman Eliogabalo wants for himself) and Giuliano and Eritea. The opera may have stripped Eliogabalo from the majority of the excesses that are attributed to him, his opera version is nevertheless a wretched human being. Right at the beginning of the opera he violates Eritea and when Alessandro asks for permission to marry Gemmirra, Eliogabalo agrees but immediately make plans to get rid of his cousin. The rivalry between the self-proclaimed sun king and his cousin stems from the love and lust they feel for the same woman. The libretto is not so interested in the possible political motives behind this rivalry. In this carnival of souls, the cult of the sun is beautifully served by the tasteful and inventive use of light (by Antoine Traver). Helios would be pleased by this production in which Thomas Jolly spices up the meagre story of the libretto with a few events taken from Eliogabalo's biography.
 
Thomas Jolly already had some experience with royal dramas. He directed Shakespeare's Henry VI (all three parts in a 18-hour marathon performance!) and Richard III. For Eliogabalo he goes further back in time and broadens his horizon with his first opera production.
 
As said, Jolly adds some elements from Eliogabalo's biography to his staging. Most likely apocryphal is the story about the banquet in which the sun child buried his guests in violets and other flowers, so that some of them actually choked to death, being unable to crawl out to the top. The scene inspired Lawrence Adema-Tadema to his most famous painting (The Roses of Heliogabalo) and Louis' Fantomas' Feuillade to his film 'The Roman Orgy'. Thomas Jolly adds the power flower, this rain of roses, (which is not mentioned in the libretto) to the banquet at the end of the second act in which Eliogabalo tries to poison his cousin Alessandro. (An attempt destined to fail because cousin-dear doesn't show up.)

Most stories about Eliogabalo may well have been born of a somewhat overzealous fantasy, but it is save to say that the child emperor did everything he could to enrage the Roman establishment. Eliogabalo, who came from Syria, made the sun god Elagabal in Rome the centrepiece of all gods, even chief god Jupiter had to take a step back, and by violating the chastity of a Vestal Virgin (Eliogabalo asked her to marry him) he commited sacrilege. Above all that, he behaved rather campy - 'gender-neutral' to say it with a bit of nowadays flavor - and with his exotic dances in honor of Elagabal he distanced himself far too much from how a Roman emperor should behave. Eliogabalo awaited the ‘damnatio memoriae', a posthumously proclaimed curse by the Roman senate, in (dis)honor of his filthy memory.
 
A year ago, this production of Cavalli's opera was premiered in Paris and, like then, the baton in Amsterdam is held by Leonardo García Alarcón (a researcher in the field of Baroque music, I already drowned most pleasantly in 'Il Diluvio' of Falvetti, a piece he saved from obscurity). And like in Paris, the leading role is sung by Argentine Franco Fagioli.
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Fagiolo's countertenor sings the role of Eliogabalo -  in which the spoiled child, the dilapidated army leader and the horny womanizer come together - with virile tone. He is a man without morality. In the epitome of Fagiola, he is a grown-up child in a candy store. In addition to this Eliogabalo, the Alessandro of Ed Lyon is the moral compass of this opera. Even after it turns out that Eliogabalo wants to kill him (in order to get Gemmirra in his bed), Alessandro remains loyal to his emperor. It is not until the end that Alessandro parts from his servility when he allows himself to be crowned as new emperor and he acquits the soldiers who have lynched Eliogabalo and his loyal accomplices Lenia and Zotico from persecution. His initial hesitation to let the murder of a rightful ruler go unpunished echoes the objection the censors had against the opera at the time. The murder of a king or emperor was a controversial topic (it went too much against God's plan). And until long after Cavalli, a royal murder would cause discomfort in the world of opera (about two centuries later Verdi had to relocate the story of 'Un Ballo in Maschera' from Sweden to America because a literal reference to a king’s slaying - the opera was based on the assassination of the Swedish king Gustaaf III - could not be staged).
 
Eliogabalo, an opera from the early days of the genre, is small scaled. Chamber music kind in design. It was originally endowed with no more than 5 or 6 musicians. This production has transformed that small scale to the big stage of a modern opera house. The orchestra has been extended to about 30 musicians. The past is reflected in the staging by a small staircase that enters in the orchestral pit. The stairs, used as an extra stage left opportunity for the singers who mingle with the members of the orchestra, is a concertant element in a fully staged production.
 
Led by the orchestra, Eliogabalo is a baroque procession - in steady pace and a transluctant, organic sound -  in which historical instruments see their story accompinied by modern, spectacular images in the scenery of Thibaut Fack and the beautifully dressed singers by Gareth Pugh. After more than three centuries the music – with its baroque-styled features that are mirrored in the singers' acting – has not diminished in expressiveness. Along the long lines of recitatives, half-aria's and arias, the listener is drawn in the story that lasts for more than three hours. But length is a strength, it's like staring at a pendulum (something not unknown to devotees of Wagneroperas). It's like a tour in a world where you find yourself in the capable hands of reliable guides. It is not until  the third act – where the story is entirely focused on the two love couples - that the attention drops. Before Eliogabalo ends up in the orchestral pit with a severed head (spoiler alert), the long arch of music and storyline loses its momentum. The recitatives get a little bit stuck in staccato and the possibilities to add something spicy from Eliogabalo's biography to the production seem to have faded. However, with an enthralling end, worthy of a Salome-staging and a convincing cast it does not keep this production away from a final judgement surrounded by accolades that, for this occasion, smells of flowers.

Dutch National Opera - Amsterdam
12 - 26 October 2017

LOVE
A man falls in love with a woman who, because of his descent, is inaccessible to him. In this Romeo and Julia variation number 36,694, the father, who likes his daughter predestined for someone else, has to pay for his obstruction with a bullet coming out of a gun that goes off by accident. The pistol that goes off because it falls on the ground, but nevertheless produces a perfectly targeted shot, is one of the few coincidences in La Forza del Destino by Giuseppe Verdi that turns out to be a major plot twist (in fact, coincidence is synonym with disaster here). It’s the accident with the gun that emphasizes the tragedy of Don Alvaro, who did not meant wrong. After the death of her father Donna Leonora flees with Don Alvaro. (The story then moves from Spain to Italy.) The two lose each other and Leonora, thinking that Alvaro is dead, retreats into a hermitage where she is kept alive by the monks of a nearby monastery. Don Alvaro, who has joined the army, happens to save the life of Don Carlo, Leonora's brother who wants revenge for the death of his father. Since everyone goes under an alias by then, Don Alvaro and Don Carlo don't know from each other who they are. This will change when Don Alvaro is injured in battle and Don Carlo is entrusted with a box that contains a letter and a portrait from Leonora. Don Carlo disregards the request not to look into the box and finds out Don Alvaro's true identity. “Rache riete ich mir!” instead of “Baby, baby, baby” is Don Carlo’s adage (this is after all the Wagner & Heavy Metal- and not the Verdi & Justin Bieber-website) and when Don Alvaro has recovered from his wounds the two men fight a duel that is stopped by fellow soldiers. Don Alvaro flees into a monastery. Seven years go by when Don Carlo finally manages to find him there. In the duel that follows Don Carlo is mortally wounded and Don Alvaro flees into the hermitage (which is coincidentally near the monastery) where Donna Leonora lives / exists. With "Pace, pace mio Dio!” Donna Leonora wishes for the peace of death. An aria of superb lamentation. An aria in which all aspects of the drama are coming together and are falling into place. It took us three hours to get there and that's a bit long. It is the production of the Dutch National Opera that justifies, more than libretto and music do, that lenght.

HONOR
The word "honor" in La Forza del Destino is an excuse not to contemplate one's own actions and an abbreviation for the male frustration about sex (especially the sexuality of women). Highly topical but that doesn't mean the story is ageless. La Forza is a chest of drawers from which arias, duets and choruses are drawn that serve only emotional and entertainment purposes. And to achieve that, Francesco Piave's libretto supplies every character with a crocodile mind (there is a Frank Castorf-reference lurking here - see the Bayreuther Castorf Ring). Those characters remain as far removed from introspection and/or contemplation as possible. No rationale can save them from themselves. Above anything else, the characters have an obligation to drama. Drama that is both means and goal at the same time. Drama that is so emphatically sought after that it becomes ridiculous and if brought up, very often, comes with comical effect. In the story of La Forza, we will search in vain for philosophical or political ideas. This opera is a soap opera and the story is not bigger than the story itself. Most multi-layered in this parade of primal minds is Don Alvaro. His good intentions notwithstanding, the racism of Leonora's father and Don Carlo's blind desire for revenge, deal him a bad hand. But also he, the kind-hearted, can suddenly switches from conflict-avoiding behaviour to combat mode when he feels offended. Good for us, because it results in another beautiful aria. In order to lift La Forza's story line above it silly meanderings, a comparison between La Forza and Wagner's Ring cycle was made in the introduction of this production / performance: Alvaro = Siegmund, Preziosilla = Valkyrie and Leonora left in her hermitage = Brunnhilde left on her rock.  It's a comparison as far-fetched as it is grotesque. From Wagner's character development and ambiguity Verdi remains at more than just a giant arm’s length away. Not that it's bad. La Forza del Destino is the result of a productive day at the office and the light-cynical tone of the preceding text refers mainly to the libretto, not the music. The Dutch National Opera makes the most out of this nitwitted story that comes with some beautiful and gorgeous tunes.
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REVENGE
Before he sets himself to a staging of Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane in Berlin (in March 2018, the second Heliane this opera season, see Opera Vlaanderen’s production here), Christof Loy committed himself to Verdi’s Schicksal Opera. Just like in his staging for Mussorgksi's Khovanshchina last season, Loy uses a spacious stage with high walls and a Personenregie that reflects the dynamics of the music. It is an enlightening staging - with the exception of the utterly superfluous video projections in the worst kind of karaoke traditions – that provides Verdi's La Forza with some extra background information. A staging in which we are given an insight into the dystopian relationships within the Calatrava family. In the overture we see a brother of Leonora and Carlo dying at young age, it may give us a bit of insight into Don Carlo's irreconcilability with his sister later in the opera. Donna Leonare is sung by Eva-Maria Westbroek and her gigantic voice houses all colours of the drama. In the higher tones, however, she turns out to be a bit too monochrome. Here the power comes at the expense of eloquence. Franco Vassallo's Don Carlo has an impressive dark brown baritone that doesn't let his revenge cool down and Don Alvaro from tenor Roberto Aronica is the result of diligent, be it not unsympathetic, work. His voice and acting eventually convince and our heads, shaking in disbelief for how much wrongdoing one man can endure, grant him with a place in our, sometimes sceptic, heart.
 
There is a curse in La Forza – from the father who curses his daughter after he is mortally wounded - that is only effective because the people involved believe in it. There is more superstition in the story. Carefully played by a gypsy woman. Her voice sounds a bit meagre for a mezzo soprano but the stage presence, acting and dancing qualities of Veronica Simeoni make Preziosilla one of the most interesting and powerful characters of this Forza. The production provides her with a beautiful choreography, Simeoni’s Preziosilla is a highly credible man eater, the only one capable of looking through the covers of Carlo and Leonora, and with the gaze of someone who looks down from a future time on a time of superstition and backward social codes, she is someone who, despite her not always good intentions, can count on the sympathy of a 21st century audience that can relate to her independence.
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It may be the arias, duets and glorious choruses that lift the entertainment value of La Forza far above average, they have been composed with applause in mind. And once you hear that, you can't unhear it anymore. The way Verdi (and with him many of his colleagues) finishes an aria (on a downstroke) to demand a response from the audience feels like a door-to-door salesman who shoves his foot between the door, forcing you to buy something. And despite tradition, it’s like a commercial break, an unpleasant interruption of the flow, it keeps me from acclaiming most of the times - despite the fact that the singers have my utmost respect. Those few seconds of silence, just after you have heard something beautiful, are by far preferable over the, often dutiful, applause after an aria. In order to make Wagner's objections to Italian vanity even more tangible, there was also applause after the overture - the opening that, like the rest of the score,  was played swiftly and translucent under the baton of Michele Mariotti.
 
Drama thrives mythologization. And it is said that the curse in La Forza infected its performers. In 1960, Leonard Warren, a bass baritone, collapsed during a performance of the opera and died. The story goes that it stopped Pavarotti from singing in La Forza. In the category "Opera's with a curse", Forza is in the eminent company of Wagner's Tristan & Isolde, which, in the field of descending interpreters, goes a few steps further. In 1865, Ludwig Schnorr died a few weeks after singing Tristan's premiere - the legend goes that he left this world with a kind request for Wagner not to compose such demanding vocal lines anymore. Also among conductors, Tristan made its victims. Both Felix Mottl and Joseph Keilbert got, in the midst of conducting this opera, a heart attack that proved to be fatal.
 
In search of the meaning of life, things that happen to you can feel like divine intervention. God’s interference that tries to set you on a certain path. Fortunately, in the field of superstition and myth, there is nothing a sober mind and progressive insight can’t put into perspective. When you're young, you think that bad luck and ill-fate are intentional. If you are older you know better; then you know that they are, very often, the result of a coincidental meeting of circumstances.

CURTAIN
Coincidence makes sure that Don Carlo eventually gets his revenge on his sister Donna Leonora. It's the last thing he does before he dies from the injuries Don Alvaro has inflicted on him. Don Alvaro stays behind alone, once more lamenting his fate and the opera closes in a sublime fade-out. Making sure the audience has to save its applause for the last aria until the moment the curtain falls.

It is not spoiled with an very extensive backcatalogue of performances but this season - in the year of Korngold's 120th birthday, 60 years after his death - Das Wunder der Heliane is on the programme of two opera houses. In March 2018 it will perform at the Deutsche Opera in Berlin, until 10 October 2017 it will play with the Opera Vlaanderen. After almost half a century (after having received his first post-war production there in 1970), Das Wunder der Heliane is back in Ghent. The reason for this low rate of performances will, for one part, be due to the excessive demands of the piece (the opera needs a choir plus children's choir, keyboards including a piano, an organ, a celestial and a harmonium plus extensive sections of wind and brass). In the world of opera, people usually don't shy away from large gestures and the use of substantial resources, but the demands Korngold lay down on singers and musicians for his self-proclaimed masterpiece is even here considered exorbitant. For Das Wunder der Heliane, the word megalomaniac could be used, but this opera deserves better than the sour aftertaste that emerges from that expression. With full dedication the cast of Opera Vlaanderen responds to what Erich Wolfgang Korngold demands of them so unmercifully. 
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For the singers, in their battle with the orchestra of Wagnerian size, it is an advantage that the pit in Ghent, a little bit like in Bayreuth, is for the most part under the stage. It saves them from pushing their voices too far in an attempt to overcome the massive orchestral sounds Korngold provided for his Wunder.
 
The main roles are occupied by Ian Storey as The Stranger, Ausrine Stundyte as Heliane and Tómas Tómasson as The Ruler. Ian Storey is a tenor of Tristan caliber, who sings through his role with a smooth pace. Ausrine Stundyte attacks the title role with the energy of a young lioness. She does more than justice to the passion the words of The Stranger ignites in her. The young bass Markus Suihkonen makes a great impression as the gaoler and with Tómas Tómasson as The Ruler, this production got itself the voice of a hurricane. The Ruler of Tómasson is an aggressive and frustrated man. He lacks love and he knows it. He must settle for power. He bears in him the contradiction that makes Wotan such a tragic figure. It is not possible for both to combine power and love. For Wotan, there is a conscious choice – a choice for power that shows how powerless he really is. For the history of The Ruler we are left in the dark. It is, for example, unclear whether he can remember love from his earlier life, what path he has followed to bring him where he is now. The Ruler is being depicted as a gang leader and a drunk, a man who, despite his position at the top of the social order, has too often and for too long been on the selvedge.
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Together with designer Christof Hetzer,  Director David Bösch provides Das Wunder der Heliane with a sober scenery; a grey, post-apocalyptic world with a soundtrack in Technicolor. Just like in his production of Die Gezeichneten by Franz Schreker for the Opéra de Lyon (in 2015), David Bösch chooses to materialize the moral wasteland of the main character(s) into scenery. A scenery that, by its static nature, almost automatically emphasizes the Personenregie. And just like Die Gezeichneten, which also was banned by the Nazis for being Entarted, in Heliane the gloomy background stands in stark contrast to the incredibly colourful music.
 
In Tristan und Isolde we have to wait three and a half hours for salvation, for the final resolution of the Tristan-chord, that land mark in the history of music. (The blogpost "No Jazz without Tristan" is still under construction, I have to make a case for the hypothesis in the title, but the importance of Wagner's opera for the further development of music history can hardly be overestimated). Where the desire in Wagner's longing threatens to burn the skin, and seems forever be unattainable for satisfaction, Korngold's most ambitious opera skips, with saturated sounds, the longing and goes right for the bullseye; an Eargasm. The opera opens with the singing of S​eraphim that bring an ode to love. It is the kick-off for almost three hours of the most benevolent composed music imaginable. Korngold's sense of melody reveals a fascination, by times obsession, with the music of Puccini. With his use of leitmotifs he points to Wagner, the other giant on whose shoulders he stands. It are the music dramas of the sorcerer from Bayreuth, together with the Viennese operettes of which he conducted many, and the late-Romantic compositions of the young Arnold Schönberg, that Korngold brings together in orchestral clusters of cotton candy with which he - and with Das Wunder der Heliane unfortunately in too few performances - still surprises with miraculous musical discoveries. Das Wunder would prove to be a blueprint for his own film music with which he would influence many others. Both Max Steiner (King Kong) and John Williams (Star Wars) are indebted to him. "Operas without words", Korngold used to call his film scores. These operas without words would seriously damage his status as a composer. They would, with retroactive effect, raise doubts about the artistic merits of Heliane (because it would sound too much like film music). Doubts that may have contributed to the fact that, after the Second World War, the opera did not make it into the repertoire.
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Das Wunder der Heliane as a blueprint for film music. There is more proto-film in this opera. The overture for the third act sounds like a break,  reminiscent of the intermission music that was composed for many a blockbuster.  (Watching a black screen with the word "Intermission" on it while music is playing for fifteen minutes - David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia in the DVD player - is one of my favorite “authentic” movie experiences. And yes, it comes with a serious nerd-alert.)
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After the angelic singing with which Das Wunder der Heliane opens, we see a man sitting, chained in front of the broken screen of an outdoor cinema, leftover from an old world, banned from the present world, because movies can serve as entertainment and that is strictly forbidden in this lunar landscape.
 
“If I can’t have it, you can’t have it!” It’s this nihilistic reasoning with which The Ruler denies everyone what he himself misses most: love and happiness. In a desolated world, in which humans are stripped of what makes them human, only the right of the strongest remains. The one who is boss here shows himself not as a king with cloak and crown, but as a gangster with a sawed-off rifle barrel. His palace is an old railway wagon. A (self-)destructive world in which the message of happiness and love, spoken by someone coming from the outside, is the light in the darkness. A light that needs to be dimmed, it could only give people ideas. Ideas about freedom that would threaten the power of The Ruler.
 
In a world in which everyone is denied the right to strive for happiness, men are reduced to zombies. The choir in the second act fits in with the scenes that make series such as The Walking Dead so widely popular. Here the hordes come to pick up The Stranger, their bearer of light, the one who has promised them a different, better world.
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The words of The Stranger ignites in Heliane the love that is in her fore a long time. Trapped in a loveless marriage, she reserves it for the one she considers worthy. The threats of her husband, The Ruler, who in vain demands her love, can’t change that. She shows herself naked to The Stranger. The production shows that nakedness in a white shirt. The seduction is depicted by a shoe that is pulled out, after which Heliane shows The Stranger her ankle. You're left with the idea that the sensuality, love and sexuality that resides in story and music, with this mise-and-en-scene and Personenregie (for the most part very direct and involved) do not completely get what they deserve.
 
The Ruler takes Heliane's rejections pretty bad. He reaches for the bottle and accuses her of adultery. In a seldomly seen act of both egotism and altruism, The Stranger takes his own life because he wants to leave for eternity with the love of Heliane on his mind and at the same time save Heliane, by dying, from the wrath of The Ruler. With his death, the only witness that can exonerate Heliane from the accusation of infidelity, is gone. Heliane, like the Empress in Die Frau Ohne Schatten and Tamino in Die Zauberflöte, is faced with an ordeal. She must bring The Stranger back from the dead. If she succeeds in doing so, she is innocent.
 
In the process in which Heliane has to perform her miracle (by resurrecting The Stranger from the dead) she receives both veneration and condemnation of the people. It reminds us a little bit of Jesus who has to appear before Pilate. People who are disappointed with their (former) saviour want to see blood if the expected miracle does not occur.
 
Heliane ultimately succeeds in her assignment to retrieve The Stranger from the dead, on which The Ruler, far beyond driven, kills her. The Stranger, just back from the dead, follows Heliane to the place where the two lovers no longer have to see the dawn of a new day. It is the place Tristan & Isolde, Romeo & Juliet were longing fore. A place free of Schoperhauerian snags: free from  the impossibility to satisfy the lust two lovers generate together. Korngold had no realistic place in mind for the location of Das Wunder der Heliane. No clothing and stage props should nail into a certain time and place. The opera is not so much about dramatic development as well about breaking down the wall between the physical and mytical world. Eventually, the main characters succeed in doing so and one could say that death, by serving as a gateway to a world where the difference between mind and matter has disappeared, is supplying a happy-end.
 
Korngold was not holding back on his ambitions and pretensions when making Das Wunder der Heliane. He would present himself in this self-proclaimed masterpiece as an advocate for excess while he, despite the time he takes, never seems to push the opera beyond its natural lenght. For this opera, which is not performed too much, one should not easily deny oneself a ticket to see it live. Next stop Berlin?

Heliane: Ausrine Stundyte
Der Herrscher: Tómas Tómasson
Der Fremde: Ian Storey
Der Pförtner: Markus Suihkonen
Dirigent: Alexander Joel

​15 - 23 September (Ghent)
1 - 10 Oktober (Antwerp)

In the year of his 120th birthday, 60 years after his death, the Opera Vlaanderen presents Korngold's Das Wunder der Heliane. An opera that's not immediately spoiled with too many performances (there is actually only one good, complete recording of it - in Decca's series Entartete Music). Besides the doubts surrounding its artistic merits, the low performance quantity of Heliane will undoubtedly be a consequence of the opera's very large line-up (we have, amongst a lot more, a few chorusses, a piano, organ, celestal, harmonium, and extensive wind and brass sections - including a heckelphone or two, a baritone oboe, 1.4 metres in length, also used by Richard Strauss in Salome).

Das Wunder der Heliane from 1927 was Korngold's last opera before he surrendered to the operetta and Hollywood. In Hollywood, he would provide Errol Flynn with many an appropriate leitmotif (he wrote music for many films including Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood). Korngold, the child prodigy (Mahler compared him to Mozart), was more than once accused of epigonism in his time. His Heliane would sound too much like film music, while it was Heliane (composed almost a decade before Korngold would come up with his first full film score) that proved to be a blueprint for his own film music with which he would influence many others - both Max Steiner (King Kong - 1933) and John Williams (Star Wars) were indebted to him. "Operas without words", Korngold called his film scores. They would stain his reputation as a "serious" composer.

After his Nozze di Figaro, for the National Opera in Amsterdam last season, David Bösch will sign for this production of Heliane for Opera Vlaanderen. Modern stage props are to be expected (he once put the count in Figaro on a home trainer for instance) and a natural Personenregie that concentrates on the action (and should save us from the notorious park and bark). I'm curious to see what he will do with the sexuality in the piece. Will he treat it more metaphorically and metaphysically (sex as a depiction of the struggle between good and evil) or more literally: a hymn on the sexual act when carried out between lovers? To see this incredibly sumptuous composed opera fully staged (at last) will be something to look forward to.


Heliane: Ausrine Stundyte
Der Herrscher: Tómas Tómasson
Der Fremde: Ian Storey
Conductor: Alexander Joel


15 - 23 September (Ghent)
1 - 10 October (Antwerp)
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​The production of Salome with which Peter Konwitschny made his comeback eight years ago at the Dutch National Opera (and the international opera scene – he had suffered from a depression for 4 years) is remembered for all the wrong reasons: Jochanaan at a dinner at Herod's house with a bag over his head and a title heroine who does not die at the end but walks joyfully of stage with Jochanaan. A Salome that does not end with a fortissimo played C but with "That woman must die!" – shouted by someone in the audience. Alienation can certainly be a quality in a performance but Konwitschny’s Salome (with an happy end!) was certainly not my most cherished encounter with Regietheater.
 
Ivo van Hove's Salome for the Dutch National Opera is in almost everything Konwitschny's opposite, although he gives, like Konwitschny, Jochanaan and Salome an intimate moment together. During the dance with the seven veils we see them dancing (in a video projection  - Salome's mind). It stands in stark contrast to the misogynic reli-fundamentalist outbursts that the libretto Jochanaan further provides.

In a decadent world where dystopian family relationships create monsters, everyone is guilty. Such a world must go down, so we see a room in ruins at the end. The moon is observed differently by successively Narraboth, Salome and Herod, so we see projections of the moon in different appearances. Van Hove’s production lacks fantasy, he doesn’t add an extra layer to Strauss’s amazing piece, doesn’t need to I hasten to say because we have the music played by the Concertgebouworkest with Daniele Gatti at the helm. Gatti, completely in his element in this repertoire, smears his baton, sensitive where possible, brutal if need be, through Strauss's eclectic score. Besides the orchestra and his conductor, the singers are the real stars of this production. In search of a chicken with teeth, "a 16-year-old girl with the voice of Isolde" (Strauss's description of Salome) one found Malin Byström, a Swedish soprano that looks like the role and was, with her singing and acting skills, more than up for the part of the daughter of Herodias.
 
A few years ago, the tattoos of Evgeny Nikitin (a drummer in a punk band before he converted to opera), were the centre of a scandal in Bayreuth (in his teenage years there was a tattoo on his chest that showed some similarities with a swastika - it meant his farewell from the Festspielhaus). Besides his full-tatooed body, which conflicts with the ivory white skin from the libretto, his voice for Jochanan's role was perhaps a bit too light (it can be annoying, boosting about a glorious past when it comes to art in the present time, but I share this clip of Hans Hotter nevertheless).
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Lance Ryan (Herodes) and Doris Soffel (Herodias, Salome's mother) were good, in singing more than in acting, though Dutch Opera veteran Soffel (Fricka in Pierre Audi's Der Ring des Nibelungen production) can be Salome's grandmother by now.
 
The only opera direction I saw from Ivo van Hove, before this Salome, was Der Schätzgraber of Franz Schreker, a production in which ugly scenery and stiff Personenregie stood diametrically on Schreker's sumptuous, lyrical music. With this Salome, Van Hove largely revolves for that failure, although it was not after watching it on a big screen that I became fully aware of that. Initially, this Van Hove production also seemed to be in lack of a good Personenregie. In the theater, on a big stage, the characters can look lost, amidst of everyone who don’t add anything to the drama. On the big screen, with its advantage of close-ups and a smart zooming camera, everything that added nothing to the action and dialogue was cut out of the picture and this production benefited considerably from that. In the theater Byström was good, on the big screen she was nothing less than a revelation - I look forward to the DVD release. That this Salome at the end not only gets Jochanan's head but also the rest of his body feels like a true reward for her interpreter. It is an ending, intense as it should be, worthy of any scene The Walking Dead could come up with.
 
So my initial sceptism after the performance of June 12 - the general feeling that singers and musicians deserved better than this production  - disappeared. Time to pay it another visit in the theater.
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Why the operas of Richard Wagner have to last so long? Sometimes I get that question from a friend when I disappear for half a day into a concert hall or music theater in order to attend a music drama of the dear man. Those operas are so long because Wagner doesn’t like to take short-cuts. He is a man of repetitions - in his lyrics and his music. He loves recapitulation. His characters repeat what has happened in the previous act(s). They bring into play the events that occurred before the opera started and led into the current situation everyone is in (spoiler: not good most of the time). Leitmotifs that pass by many times - but each time slightly different orchestrated so you can spend your time with them without getting bored. Wagner was a fabulous storyteller, more in music than in words. An observation that is (and was) not shared by everyone. Debussy, for example, was not completely unsympathetic towards his music – the Schopenhauerian pessimism, the dystopian view on male-female relationships and the Teutonic passions that Wagner entrusted to his compositions -, he experienced beautiful moments in it. He only had to wait for them so damn long in those lengthy operas. You would almost think that the Frenchman never attended a proper performance of a Wagner opera because a good performance is like a train. It takes you automatically towards the end - and at the point of arrival you can only feel sorry because the trip has not lasted any longer. The Sorcerer of Bayreuth earned his nickname for a reason. He was a genius. Seven years before his death, his complete Ring des Nibelungen was staged for the first time when the theater of his own design was finished, built on a green hill in Bavarian Bayreuth. Wagner wasn’t satisfied with those performances. Where it came to both musical and theatrical aspects. Back then, in 1876, his ideas about total art and music of the future had not yet led to completely satisfactory performances. Now, 140 years later, we are still not done with them. In addition to staged versions, his operas also find their way to the concert hall for concert performances.

In December 2015 there were two performances of Lohengrin at the Concertgebouw in which the concert version was enhanced with some small elements of staging. There was a swan (a doll around the arm of an actor) and the singers were singing their role not only using the stage but also the balcony. Despite the aforementioned length of Wagner's operas, the story of Lohengrin can be summed up in just one sentence:

All this was performed in a magnificent way by the Concertgebouw Orchestra and a Lohengrin that is, probably, the best of his generation, Klaus Florian Vogt. I had to get used to him when I heard him for the first time. That was on a DVD, a decade ago, in a production of the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, directed by Nikolaus Lehnhoff and conducted by Kent Nagano. His high voiced tenor seemed a bit too light compared to the ones of Jess Thomas and Sandor Konya I was familiar with. During the last ten years, the voice of Vogt has gained in depth and color, and the role of Lohengrin must feel like a second skin by now. He must be able to sing the role in his sleep. In those years Vogt has changed my perception of how I listen to Lohengrin. Lohengrin can’t be anything else but a lyrical voice. Still heroic but with an indispensable angelic element. A vote specifically fit for this role because I don’t imagine him singing Tristan or Siegfried. In 2014 I heard him in Bayreuth and he floored the audience. And also at the Concertgebouw the public didn’t hold back in showing their admiration for this man.
 
Just his ‘In fernem Land’ was worth a visit to the Concertgebouw. And we, the lucky ones who were there, were treated with another three-and-a-half hours of the finest music. Sung by a superb cast. Also known from Bayreuth was Samuel Youn who sang the herald of the king. Large, sharp but never out of control. Falk Struckman sang a powerful king. Bad guy and girl Telramund and Ortrud were played respectively by Evgeny Nikitin and Katarina Dalayman and they did a very decent job though Dalayman had to be careful not to linger in permanent anger. Even a villain must show its attractive side now and then (the image of Waltraud Meier arises, no one like her masters the art of seductive evilness).
 
The feelings Camilla Nylund's Elsa gave me will perhaps one day end up in a poem. She was, in terms of voice and appearance, nothing less than to fall in love with. She’s welcome to ask me my name anytime.

Was Andris Nelsons missed in all this splendor? The conductor who conducted Lohengrin several times in Bayreuth (and also conducted Der Fliegende Holländer in this venue) had to cancel because of a shoulder injury. Friday (December 18th), during the first performance, I had some reservations about his replacement Mark Elder. In his reading Elder devoted much of his attention to the many colors that are on the palette of Wagner's orchestra. It was a master class in Wagnerian orchestration. The overture, the best piece of minimal music you will ever hear, was like a flower opening slowly. Incredible beautiful. Friday I felt, especially in the first act, that Elder perhaps was too much of a Kapellmeister instead of someone who came to tell a story. But Sunday (December 20th), during the second performance, it was time for the final conversion. With one performance already under their belt conductor and orchestra found each other in a performance of impeccable beauty and excellent drama . It made this Lohengrin in the Concertgebouw a sonic experience I will not easy forget.
 
It is more a matter of contemporary experience than of historical accuracy, only Parsifal was composed with the acoustics of the Festspielhaus in mind, so how Wagner should be staged today is only to be determined by our own likings. In the Concertgebouw that stage design is the diametrically opposite to that of Bayreuth where the pit is placed under the stage. The idea behind that was that the singers didn’t have to force themselves to rise above the orchestra. It makes the orchestral sound in Bayreuth a bit compressed - like playing piano with the lid half closed. Especially the brass, placed in the back of the pit, has to play their guts out. Sometimes beyond salvation. The sound in Bayreuth mixes clearly different than that in the Concertgebouw where the sound is more magnified.

Musicians and singers must be careful not to play too loud here. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, which has its home base here, has experience enough with that. But during the first performance on Friday some singers had to get used to it. Falk Struckman and Evgeny Nikitin were out there to impress and in Wagner there looms the danger to state what is already obvious. Then the tempi slow down and the volume goes up - often at the expense of text interpretation and the long lyrical line. Initially, both men had their share in a decibel party where memories of the old Bayreuther Bark (a rather unflattering name to label singing that sounds more like barking) by times came to pay a visit. And also the chorus sounded, hearing it from the balcony, at times too big. I won’t mind hearing it a bit more “hidden”. That also better serves the role it plays (that of a commentator on the sidelines). Now the crescendos lost much of their seductive power and overwhelming beauty. Not that there was a shortage of it, of OVERWHELMING BEAUTY (as always written in capitals in Wagner). My eardrums went to bed tired, satisfied and grateful at the end of a long weekend Lohengrin.

His last opera, composed with death in prospect, takes Richard Wagner to Montsalvant. The castle where Grail knights guarding the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper and in which his blood was collected when he hung at the cross. Parsifal, an opera that comes as close to an oratory as an opera probably can get, was initially only reserved for the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. The use not to acclaim after the first act didn’t last to this day (it only lives on in the most obdurate Wagnerites) but it says something about the air of piety that for a long time surrounded the piece. Not in the last place because of its creator who explicitly presented Parsifal as an transformation opera. A piece that should help people becoming better versions of themselves. Wagner knew what he was talking about. His was a complex character with the ability to create great, complex art. A nucleus in which music, philosophy, religion and theater were coming together. Only Jesus Christ and Napoleon had more books written about them.

In Parsifal one can see an opera that shows how rituals, emerged from the need for spiritual guidance and meaning, over time, can turn into dogma and corrupt whatever it is that once was pure and profound. Without the spirit from which rituals have emerged the only things that’s left are empty gestures. Parsifal sketches a world of spiritual decay. A world with Grail knights - paragons of chastity and surpressed instincts – that shows more than a few cracks. There are knights, quite a few, who fall for the temptations of the flower girls Klingsor, a magician with bad intentions (once he wanted to be a grail knight too - he even cut his balls off), has gathered around his castle. There is a king, Amfortas, who succumbed to the temptation of Kundry, and had to live with a wound, inflicted by Klingsor, that just will not heal. Kundry, some character too, taunted Jesus on his cloister to Golgotha and was sentenced to wander the world for eternity. A curse with a misogynist puff; it is her female seduction that make many a Grail knight apostate. Her suffering, and many a vampire story will endorse this, is the curse of the undead. The unability to die and therefore the impossibility to fulfill (and end) physical desires with an inevatible mental decline as a result. Ultimately a pure fool, Parsifal, is needed to jumpstart the whole thing. The hero who heals the wound of Amfortas by using the spear he wins back from Klingsor. He shows the Grail knights (and audiences) a glimpse of a future where the sun might shine. Christian symbolism aside, in all its multi-track interpretations, a recommendation for a faithful life Parsifal certainly is not.

There is room to see the opera as a spur to leave the protocols of organized religion and an urge to overcome what one has inherited from religion at home. To go back to the source. Not in manner but in spirit. Only then one can become a better person.
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On stage were crosses. Put together, sloppy and in error, illustrating a society in which the past is supposed to be understood but which ramshackle reproductions reveal that from that past and its original intentions only little knowledge is left (it bears a cynical resemblance, both in intention and outcome, to the failed attempts of American Nazis to draw a correct swastika).

​In Parsifal of the Dutch National Opera we are in a dark theater with stage designs of artist Anish Kapoor. Beautiful images with beautiful music, but a challenge to learn something about Parsifal, that the libretto did not tell us, it is not. Mirrors are kind of a Kapoor trademark (it should make him Klingsor's favorite interior designer) and Klingsor's magic mirror truely is magic here. The mirror in the second act, which comes back at the end of the third act as the Grail is revealed, delivers a collection of beautiful tableaux vivants - an invitation to enter the castle of Klingsor and the gardens that surround it. In the gardens there are flower maidens who are dangerously short of temptation. As often with Pierre Audi, the Regie is fairly abstract and rather sexless.  Beautiful but a bit detached. Often Audi's productions are open ended. Meaning that they allow the audience space to interpret a piece of itself without distracting scenic images and additional storylines getting in the way of libretto and music. As a consequence of that the seduction in the libretto doesn't take shape on stage. For the temptation Wagner himself fell victim to when he met Carrie Pringle, we're basically left to our own imagination (Carrie Pringle was a flower maiden in Parsifal's premiere in 1882 in Bayreuth, the story goes that she and Wagner had an affair and her coming to Venice to see Wagner was met by Cosima with more than a few objections. In the quarrel that followed between Richard and Cosima, Wagner had a heart attack and died that same evening).

I've attended the performance twice (December 9th and 18th). In both cases Petra Lang, the Kundry of service, was ill. She was replaced by both Alexandra Peter Amer (only the 9th) and Elena Pankratova (who sang the role last summer in Bayreuth). Pete Amer did so on the same night as her first of two performances as Walküre in an embodiment of the third act Walküre conducted by Gergiev in the Concertgebouw. She sang the part of Kundry in the first act (the Kundry for act two and three, Elena Pankratova, was still on the plane then). Both substitutes sang their part from the side while the role of Kundry on the scene was played by an actress (Astrid van den Akker). That saved the performance on the 9th from being canceled but it reduced Kundry to a bit of a ghost. The construction for Kundry (off-stage singing and on-stage acting) was maintained for the whole week. So a temporary solution became a permanent one. In an opera, that is not overflowing with action, and is directed by Pierre Audi, that can be considered a logical artistic choice. It stiffed, however, the confrontation between Parsifal and Kundry in the second act. In here Kundry was no more than a wraith, reduced to complete passiveness by the Regie. The Personenregie was, as often with Audi, marred by some parculiar choreographic manners. It seemed, for instance, to limit Bastiaan Everink (Klingsor) in his movements rather than to help him in portraying his role. The former elite soldier recognized, back from Iraq, in the music of Parsifal the real deal and made an impressive career switch to opera singer. He did, like the rest of the cast, an excellent job. From Ryan McKinny (who, besides advertising the gym, impressively beared Amfortas' sufferings with him) to Christopher Ventris, my introduction to him was on a DVD with the Nicolaus Lehnhoff production of Parsifal. Along with Waltraud Meier as Kundry, the best Kundry of this century. She doesn't do the big Wagner roles anymore but she was with her stage appearance and acting talent the incarnate desire of Wagner who preferred for his roles actors who could sing over singers who could act. (See the clip below. Kundry's comprehensive attempt to seduce Parsifal in the second act, a nice document of her superb acting and singing skills).

Both orchestra and conductor Marc Albrecht were clearly out to impress. Albrecht's direction is massive, robust and swift. And he reintroduces the use of free bowing for the violins (for each player the moment of the draw of the bow is determined individually and not collectively) to create a fuller and lusher sound. It was like the second coming of Leopold Stokowksi.

For the lover of Teutonic drama the weekend was best, submerging in a WagnerFest. A weekend that contained Parsifal on Friday and on Saturday a concert performance of Act III of Die Walküre. I was once acquainted with them through Apocalypse Now and Bugs Bunny; Valkyries (women stronger than men, half goddesses, Wotan's illegitimate offspring) which duty it is to deliver fallen warriors at Valhalla. Without helicopter sounds and Elmer Fudd chasing a rabbit - but with Valery Gergiev and the Concertgebouw Orchestra - I did put myself on a lavish Wagner meal in which the end of Die Walküre, after the five-hour Parsifal from a day earlier, served as dessert.
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Compared to Parsifal Die Walküre is more accessible. It's one of the doors through which I've stepped into the world of opera and classical music. Genre-transcending I would call it. You don't have to love opera to appreciate it. A bit like you do not have to be a lover of pop music to love Revolver and Sgt. Pepper of The Beatles and that you don't have to be a jazz cat to rank Kind of Blue of Miles Davis amongst your favorite records.

Gergiev put on the fire that burns in Wagner's drama well. The Concertgebouw Orchestra was an organic machine in which all aspects of Wagner's music, from angry snarling anger to tear-jerking melancholy, had their place and where you, after the 70 minutes of the third act, never had the idea that the first two acts were sorely missed. Although it was a bit of a disadvantage. Because in a good performance of a Wagner opera, length is a force. A tool that provides maximum impact. It counts for Die Walküre, but also for Götterdämmerung and Parsifal. In the closing parts of these operas Wagner weaves titillating carpets of sound that makes the listener, even after more than four hours of opera, do yearn for more once it's over.

As an opera Parsifal is, compared to Die Walküre, a procession at angels pace. A place where space becomes time and where the daily rhythm is stretched into a long infinite melody that gives the listener moments that are like a concertina book that can be expanded to infinity. That is, together with salvation and compassion of Schopenhauerian cut, a fulfillment of basic human desires. It awards everyone, atheist and churchgoer alike, with a moment on the threshold of eternity.

And so the year ends. A year that, for a large part, seemed to resonate with Götterdämmerung, with redemption and asceticism. Perhaps for the better. If only by the power of illusion, and if only for the duration of an opera we were safeguarded from nihilism and ill fate. 

It wasn't until days after attending my second performance that I realised how much the staging of the closing scene contradicted with the music. Where the music promised salvation we saw Grail Knights falling down, like Amfortas did earlier. With a stage full of bodies this was more salvation Jim Jones-style than the Erlösung Wagner granted us. His last opera took Richard Wagner to Montsalvant but this Audi-Kapoor production left us with Jonestown. It was the end of a year. A cruel and hard year it was. And Götterdämmerung insisted on having the last word.

I saw Buñuel's "Cet obscur objet du désir / That obscure object of desire" years ago and the movie surfaces because of its story and because of Wagner. At the end of the film loudspeakers announce that an alliance of extremist groups intends to sow chaos and confusion in society through terrorist attacks. The announcement adds that several right-wing groups plan to counter-attack. We see the main characters walking in a shopping mall in Paris when a bomb explodes, apparently claiming their lives. We are talking a movie from 1977. The scene reflects both Buñuel's past and present (Spanish civil war, World War II and terrorism – e.g. RAF, ETA & IRA - in the 70s). It can be also considered a forecasting of current events. A testimony that history doesn't necessarily repeat itself but surely, more than often, rhymes (thank you Mark Twain, for being such a quotable guy). Terror groups fighting each other for the right to commit terror attacks. The absurdity of that doesn't seem so absurd anymore.

Living our lives, our love and lust, against the background of terror attacks, political and religious in nature. While listening to Wagner. It wasn't my idea. Buñuel went there first. In the last scene of “Cet obscur objet ...” we hear music from Die Walküre. The scene in which Sieglinde recognizes in Siegmund her long-lost brother. Earlier in the movie we are treated to Die Walküre's ouverture (nerd-info: it's the Böhm-Ring). It was not the first time Buñuel used Wagner's music. In his first two films (Un Chien Anadalou and l'Age d'Or - which he made in collaboration with Salvador Dali - he used music from Tristan und Isolde).

Contemplating life, in the wake of the current state of affairs. The ears attuned to the beat of daily news - everything from the US presidential campaign till the next Celebrity Death Hoax (hello Jack Nicholson). The conclusion of it all can be no other than that mankind is not finished yet. We, as a species, are - as Carl Sagan has put it - in our puberty. And teenage angst and nuclear power make a dangerous combination indeed. Perhaps it is not until we have evolved into an life form without biomass, an intelligence without carnal lust and in no need of other physical needs, that we no longer run the risk of falling into the abyss of barbarism every now and then. We finally would be as Wagner sees his Parsifal. Someone who overcomes the world. Someone who can serve the world best because he doesn't need the world anymore. If only we don't annihilate ourselves first.
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Speaking of both Tristan and Parsifal. In spite of my intentions I'm not going to make it to Bayreuth this year. Plans to attend Parsifal and/or Tristan und Isolde were shelved with the failed attempts to get me a ticket (I'm still a few years short on the Bayreuther waiting list). But you don't need a ticket to have a video stream. It shed some light in my Wagner-loving life. Tweeting while watching Parsifal was perhaps not something Wagner intended but it made me feel, despite being outside the Festspielhaus, that I was part of a live audience.

An audience in cyberspace was certainly something Wagner couldn't have envisioned but being the man who invented the invisible orchestra he would, perhaps, be kind to the idea of an invisible audience. People from all over the world who are able to witness his Bühnenweihfestspiel thanks to state-of-the-art technology (and Cosima doesn't have to worry anymore about Parsifal being performed outside Bayreuth, Bayreuth is coming to you).
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Missing my appointment with the Festspielhaus I am, like last year, bound to my own home theatre. A place where I, recently, added a new chapter to the Wagner experience. Last summer the Solti-Ring got a budget release and this year we have another cycle for budget price. A cycle that can be considered pivotal in the history of Wagner recordings: the Karajan-Ring. For this price a steal and impossible to resist. Quick after its release date I purchased a copy, before my friends could jump to the conclusion that I, finally, got me a life.

Until the day that it becomes all clear that we were just missing Donald Trump's subliminal messages all along (It was all a joke folks!) I will have, with Karajan's Ring, the perfect summer drug. Submerging in beauty can be a tempting thing. In times of an unforeseen future (read: possible unnerving scenarios) even more than in days of wine and roses. Enter the Ring-cycle that Herbert von Karajan recorded between 1968 and 1970. Karajan, his approach more a concert performance than a staging of a music drama, delivers a gripping Ring. More gripping than I remember - from excerpts I heard on a CD with highlights and Das Rheingold (the first complete Wagner opera that came in my possession). Despite some objections I had beforehand (slow tempi and Karajan's iron grip on both singers and orchestra that prevents the drama to really unfold itself), this is a cycle I would rather not be without. Listening to it can perhaps be an indulging affair, a guilty pleasure it certainly is not. For that its qualities are undeniable.

Pierre Boulez found Karajan's chamber music approach a very important breach with the Wagnerian bombast of the past. It was an approach that acknowledged the importance of both detail in and audibility of the voices. The orchestra was there to lift up the voices, and not to fight them. The voices shouldn't struggle to overcome the orchestra. All of this, of course, envisioned by Wagner himself when he build his Festspielhaus. It was Karajan's disciplined orchestra, rich in detail and never overpowering the relatively small voices Karajan preferred to use, that Boulez marveled most. But Boulez' approach of Wagner was different than Karajan's. Boulez, with his superb sense of structure, didn't like to see Der Ring as a collection of leitmotifs.  Emphasizing them would go at the expense of  the impeccable architecture of Wagner's score. In comparison with Boulez Karajan is, in his unquenchable thirst for beauty, a bit like  stating the obvious. He does not shy away from slower tempi and accentuating leitmotifs. Debussy, no member of the Wagner-fan club, acknowledged that there were some beautiful pieces of music to be found in Wagner's operas but that you have to wait for it so damn long. It's a bit like he's talking to Karajan. His Ring can be a trip from one highlight to the other, with interludes that add nothing significant to the narrative or overall structure.

It was recorded round the same time that Solti finished his Ring cycle and I have to admit that I like Karajan a whole lot more. Solti serves the adrenalin and is the man for the special effects. He, undeliberately, shows that true drama can't exist without real beauty (his reading almost sounds like patchwork and he is pretty much a stranger to legato). In Karajan this is almost the other way around. Every “Oh” and “Ah” is sung with an obligation to beauty. Belcanto, pushed to the limits,  even at the expense of drama and narrative. Against Wagner's own intentions who, when it came to singers, said that he preferred actors who could sing above singers who could act.

In Die Walküre Gundula Janowitz sings, with a silver lining, an intoxicating and moving Sieglinde (her rendition of Strauss' Vier Letzte Lieder under Karajan was David Bowie's favorite birthday-present-to-give). But with beauty as a goal, almost in itself, her Sieglinde doesn't delve as deep as, for instance, Lotte Lehmann does for Bruno Walter (his first act Walküre from 1935 is da bomb). Jon Vickers is a heroic Siegmund and an exception to the rule that Karajan preferred small voices. Besides Vickers we have Jess Thomas (famous Lohengrin for Kempe) and whatever it is - Karajan's wish for intimacy that hits rock bottom here or Thomas being past his prime - his Siegfried disappoints. This Siegfried-Siegfried is too timid and, moreover, out-voiced by the Mime of Gerhald Stolze. The Götterdämmerung-Siegfried of Helge Brillioth is a lot better.

There is beauty, also in the Fricka from Josephine Veasey. Even in places where her character (and the story) could use a jagged edge more than a clean cut. She would rather spend the rest of her days scrubbing floors than work for Karajan again. For her, the master of detail stepped across a few lines too many in his desire for perfection.
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The Wotan of Thomas Stewart wishes for Das Ende but how he gets there we don't feel. We hear the libretto leading him there but his treatment of the text lacks insight (it pales in comparison with Theo Adam's Wotan's second act monologue for Böhm).

Helga Dernesh is not the ideal  Brünnhilde. I made acquaintance with her in Karajan's studio Tristan (also with Vickers) and her Isolde lacked warmth and compassion (you needed a lot of love potion to fall for her). She fares a lot better here than on that recording but she comes nowhere near the pantheon of great Brünnhildes where Nilsson, Varnay and Leider dwell. Not that it matter much. We can have an entertaining football match whilst not having Messi and/or Ibrahimovic on the pitch.

When Dernesh finally gives back the damned ring to the Rheinmädchen and Valhalla is burning, we are not burning ourselves on the flames. The world, even on the verge of perishing, is having an obligation with beauty more than it's bothering about its own non-existing. Perhaps this is Wagner in a nutshell. We're doomed and we don't care because damnation never felt so good. The world is ending and it sounds more beautiful than we could have imagined (and the only thing you need for a convincing staging is smoke).

"Erzählen und nicht zelebrieren." It is, in short, Hartmut Haenchen's approach for Parsifal. From Karajan can be said that he has a taste for “zelebrieren”. Having his career started in Austria and Germany between two world wars. His role, before and during the second one, controversial almost until his death, Karajan has wanted - with his ideas about music in an ideal sound – to make a pledge for the beauty and the vulnerability in man. It lifts this Ring far above average while it keeps, at the same time, the human aspects of Wagner's music drama in a blister. We can have a story with Gods, giants, Nibelungen and Walsungen, the motivations and emotions of the characters are, of course, purely human.

In one's search for the ideal Ring one balances the pros en cons. And after more than three Ring recordings one gives up the idea that there is such a thing as one Ring that rules them all. The next logical step is to become a Ring-collector and value each recording on its own merits. And find out that the one Ring that rules them all is in your head. And in your head only. Krauss reminds me of its humanity, Böhm of its drama, Karajan of its beauty, Boulez of its modernity and superb architecture, and Solti how to annoy the neighbours. The one true Ring is a work of progress. Shaped by countless hours of listening to a lot of different recordings and by attending several live-performances. The merger out of that. That's the one Ring you ultimately live with.