Barry Kosky's Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin at the Zurich Opera house. A review in the form of notes.

Curtain rises, beginning: the two women are frozen, they are a photograph. They then begin moving when the music changes, they are now a memory. They are dressed in black, and there is a haze on the stage. They are singing of the past. Complacent, quaint, but ever so forlorn. The two women, sung by Liliana Nikiteanu and Margerita Nekrasova, sing beautifully a sad song with folk twang. The lower voice is so earthy it sounds – how do I describe this – like a woolen muff has been dipped in wine and squeezed into sound. They sing of men – men who are deceitful in life, but who become somehow saintly in their passing. My mother says my grandmother did the same hagiographic nattering about a husband she couldn't bear until he died, whereupon he could do no wrong. Ahh, the passage of time.

Bach's Johannespassion (Part 3: the mystery of the choir)

In the past two articles I wrote on Bach's Johannespassion, I referred to the dual role of the choir (Part 1 and Part 2).

"The pain that accompanies the joy, borne of Christ's suffering, becomes our own pain, the people's pain, the choir's pain, as the choir plays the part of Christ's followers and indeed all humankind." 

"The choir itself has two roles -- to sing to God as Christians, and to reenact the passion as a mob, as Jews." 

"I find the structure of the work fascinating in the way it moves back and forth between different characters, arias, recitative and the chimerical choir."

The choir of this oratorio sings three kinds of music:

Schubert's Winterreise with Michael Volle (Helmut Deutsch accompanying) at the Zurich opera house: review and notes

I was lucky enough last night to hear Michael Volle sing Schubert's Winterreise at the Zurich opera house. Lucky because I can afford the too expensive ticket of 60 CHF. Lucky because I lucked into a seat in the first row, and to boot was on the left-hand side, with an excellent view of Helmut Deutsch's fingers at the keyboard. I've always enjoyed concerts more when my view was better, and this vicinity to the performers was a rare luxury. Lucky finally because I live in a city where Lieder are performed fairly regularly and to a very high standard. I remember spending a week in New York and finding no performances of Lieder anywhere, and now I have steady access to it, and am grateful.

So far in Zurich at the opera house I've heard:

• Pavol Breslik sing Die schöne Müllerin (well cast, well sung, strangely tense, with a fabulous encore performance of "Der Erlkönig"). Better than his recent Lensky in Barry Kosky's Onegin.
• Waltraud Meier sing various Lieder, the finest of which was her Schönberg (the great "Lied der Waldtaube" from the Gurrelieder), the poorest of which was her botched encore singing of "Der Erlkönig". I find connecting to her sung emoting to be difficult, but the Schönberg was the absolute best fit for her voice (far better than her uneven Brahms).
• and now Michael Volle, easily the biggest voice I've ever heard sing Lieder, sung bigger than Hans Hotter. Fittingly for music this intense, there was no encore, not even of "Der Erlkönig."

What is it like to have a modern Wagnerian baritone sing little Schubert, what with Schubert's almost embarrassingly intimate and twisted pain? That was my question going in, and my focus throughout. I am sad to say that Herr Volle waited until the very last song (the mercilessly desolate "Leiermann," which he sang spectacularly well) to show his mastery of delicate singing -- delicacy produced by a change in tone, a fresh rendering of the text, a greater nuance with dynamics, a capacity to haunt without resorting to force. Delicacy: overdo it and the singing is mannered and enervated. But to sing Schubert straightforward or too boldly is to repaint Van Gogh as if he were Van Dyck. You cannot use the voice of the hunter to sing the whimpering of the hunted. 

Bach's Johannespassion (Part 2: the mystery of Bach)

I had the pleasure of hearing Bach's Johannespassion on Palm Sunday in the Grossmünster of Zurich. It was sung by the Bach Collegium, in which my friend Laura sings. On Easter Sunday this year I will be in Amsterdam, and the Concertgebouw is giving the Matthäuspassion, so I will hear these two works a week apart, each for the first time. Obviously, two sung passion plays by Bach are going to have as many similarities as differences (Bach told the story of Christ's crucifixion at least three times in large-scale works), and before I sink into this later, more intimate and pensive work (Matthäuspassion), I'd like to spend more time thinking about the more intensely dramatic Johannespassion that affected me so.

For reference I really admire this recording from Munich, conducted by Karl Richter, sung by an enormous chorus of ice-cold Germans:

I find it impossible to imagine what sort of a man Bach was, harder still to imagine the emotional world he inhabited (and the far less religious one that usurped it). The music itself would point to a man of the deepest, most mystical religious devotion. The non-Biblical libretti circle over and over again around the humility needed to honor God, around the gracious gift of undeserved mercy. The thought that, until Mendelssohn, this massif of artistic ambition went mostly unperformed beyond Leipzig for a hundred years, der Schall nearly verschollen -- it boggles the mind that the question of posterity did not appear to concern him, or that any steps he took for his own posterity were only meagerly successful, and left no traces in his music. Is this Bach an artist without ego? Would our modern idea of an artist concede even the possibility of such a thing? Writing music for any given Sunday, music that lasts for a thousand years? Is this Bach merely a talented family man working to please a court patron, his talent a coincident miracle? 

Bach's Johannespassion (Part 1: the mystery of the music)

I had the intense pleasure of hearing Bach's Johannespassion on Palm Sunday in the Grossmünster of Zurich. It was sung by the Bach Collegium, of which my friend Laura is a member, and it was the first time I had heard the work live. I have been listening to it for about a year. I am besotted by it and am writing a few notes in the hope that you might also find it meaningful.

Photo Credit: Bach Collegium Zürich

Beginnings: the opening chorale

"Herr, unser Herrscher": the strings come climbing at you from a low octave, woodwinds darkening the atmosphere with a plaintive cry. The pulse is gentle and insistent. The first climax ('43) is full of mercy, climbing back down as gracefully as the ascent was anguished. Then comes the crescendo of first text: Lord, our master. It is proclaimed exclaimed, private and piercing. It feels fortissimo and sounds mezzo-forte. The strings and winds continue their ostinato thrust. 11 full minutes it takes for the ternary opening to announce that God is great, to evoke Christ's humiliation and lowliness, to announce anew that God is great.

The psychology of such music is hard to pin down; it is stupendously beautiful, affecting. It is grandly convinced of God's greatness, as bold a sound as anything intended to witness something magisterial. And the pain that accompanies it, borne of Christ's suffering, becomes our own pain, the people's pain, the choir's pain, as the choir plays the part of Christ's followers and indeed all humankind. 

How can these two conflicting sentiments be mixed? Why is it that Bach's Pietism is so articulate, so lavish in showing the exquisite nature of joy amidst suffering? Why is joy itself true most when it is seated at the table of morbidity? I think of New Orleans and its jazz funerals, the dirges preceding the hymns, death before life, Mahler's "Sterben will ich, um zu leben". They make so much of our modern pleasure-joy appear hollow, unaccompanied as it mostly is by any rootedness in the yang of sadness. 

Salome on the Zürisee: An Essay on Desire in Five Parts (Part 1)

Part 1: The Opera in the House

Sit in the 1100-seat Zürich opera house, ganz oben im zweiten Rang, for 35 or maybe 95 Franks, and bend your neck towards the stage, so that you can see more than just the front. No matter how far you lean in, your view of the orchestra is always better, which, depending on the opera and the production, might be an advantage. If the woman on your left is leaning farther forward than you care to, blocking your view of anything, or if the scene is set too far upstage, then your neck will after a while naturally revert to perpendicular to the opera, you’ll lean back into your seat, and you’ll look up to the ceiling of the house. It is mere meters away.

Sight vs. Sound: notes on the most successful opera staging I've yet seen

Of all the problems with opera, the art form to end all art forms, the conflict between the many sources of stimulation is the hardest to resolve. The feast of the senses can leave you with gout. First is the singing, which is solo, where one human voice has to hold up a house. The singing can be doubled, tripled, multiplied up to eight, and then these single voices sing different things in unison, with or without a choir behind it; and you, the listener, the seer, the audience goer, who is not satisfied with a recording of the opera, or for that matter with refraining from the potential tedium altogether, are supposed to either sort it all out, or somehow let it all in.

The other music is orchestral, and huge, but cannot be bigger than the voices, so it is hidden in a literal pit. The theatre of the thing is embedded in the singing, which is embedded in the score, and the source of the score, the thing in the pit, is meant not to be seen, but to be heard and felt. And there's no point of seeing opera in person if the theatricality makes no sense. If they try to tell the story with unsung words, as in a play, they are no longer purely operatic, so every single dramatic occurrence is sung, or sung about, on average for three hours. But they let you out, sometimes twice, to drink some alcohol, eat some canapés, and talk to your friends, if you have them, and if you do most of them are probably about seventy years old; alcohol drunk and bladders emptied if you made it through the line, they bring you back in for an hour more. Add that the sets are often still paintings with sculpture, and are expected to change a few times in four hours if you are to get your money's worth (opera is a preposterously expensive art form), and that certain operas call for ballet, and you've wrought the makings of a grand mess. No other ritual has the potential to be so exhausting, so numbing, except perhaps a Catholic mass. And should the whole thing somehow hold together, it has something of the divine.

Having been yanked around with opera for at least twenty years, I've concluded separately, indeed after each visit to the opera house afresh, that opera is incoherent, or nice, or worthwhile, only understood live, only understood in recordings, for other people, for me and only me, dead, bland, hit or miss, indulgent, difficult, a status symbol, life-changing, consummate, supersaturated, ennobling, or irrelevant. But I've never left an opera house feeling about opera the way I did upon seeing Verdi's Macbeth, staged by Barrie Kosky at the Operhaus Zürich.

The production probably isn't revolutionary, it might not even be particularly original (see the Orson Welles film), but more than any other opera staging I've yet seen, it uses the stage to show the music. Even more, it hears the music it wants to hear, and instead of settling for Verdi's imperfect musical telling, instead of yielding to Verdi's sometime inability to use music to depict drama, the staging manipulates it, brings to the fore what works, and distorts what otherwise wouldn't. The result is not somehow the perfect marriage between drama and music; instead, it's a magnificent instance of using the dramatic telling of ossified music to renew it and enhance it. It shows the full potential of the stage to keep opera alive.

Tristan och Isolde, Tristan und Isolde, Tristan and Isolde: American viewing German opera in Swedish (Part 4)

Nordische Bögen: The Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm

If you've read my earlier posts on seeing Tristan und Isolde in Sweden, you'll remember that I was at pains to find an Anhaltspunkt, a way to get my foot in the door as a first-time spectator-listener. They say that in order to train for a marathon, you don't actually run marathons, or even most-marathons. Instead you run repeatedly for a few miles at a time, and, on the day-of, you just rely on -- or pray desperately for -- other powers and skills to kick in. So might it be with Wagner. Don't think that listening at home will be the same thing as sitting in the theatre. The best preparation might read: Get your Acts together.

And so I did. It really is foolish to ignore an opera's story and plot, or to resist learning it before seeing a performance. "Let it surprise you," I previously thought. Yet with something so artificial as opera, with something so potentially lithic and removed from our daily lives, is there any possible chance of spoilers? Has anyone in the 21st century ever sat before a 19th-century opera and followed the story the way they would an Agatha Christie novel? (Can you imagine watching Tosca and wondering anxiously whether Cavaradossi will die?) Maybe. I hope so, even -- far be it from me to tell someone they're doing it wrong. But not I. Knowing how my own attention works, I now conclude it's silly to think the Handlung will unfold cleanly before your eyes in an art form as aesthetically opulent as opera.

Tristan och Isolde, Tristan und Isolde, Tristan and Isolde: American viewing German opera in Swedish (Part 3)

Eins vorweg: I was very impressed with a quotation about reviewing and criticising literature that a friend of mine shared, and I wanted to share it further. That friend is Timmy Haase, who teaches Latin and Greek literature in the U.S. It's from Practical Criticism (1929!), by the apparently important I. A. Richards:

"Details of scansion [meter], opportunities for grammatical objection, for allegations of descriptive inaccuracy, for charges of logical inconsistency, share this attraction [i.e. of "objective" or measurable criteria for evaluating texts]. To put the point generally, all those features which can be judged without going *into* the poem, all details or aspects that can be scrutinised by the mind in its practical, every-hour, non-poetical capacity, are so many invitations to make short work of the task of critical appraisement. Instead of trying the poem on, we content ourselves with a glance at its lapels or buttons. For the details are more easily perceived than the *ensemble*, and technical points seem more obtrusive than the point of the whole."  

And later, 

"The sovereign formula in all reading is that we must pass to judgment of details from judgment of the whole. It is always rash and usually disastrous to reverse the process."

With those rousing words I will attempt to write just a little about the Royal Swedish Opera's production of Tristan och Isolde (here in Swedish), and my own experience viewing it.

Tristan och Isolde, Tristan und Isolde, Tristan and Isolde: American viewing German opera in Swedish (Part 2)

I want to say a bit more about text in opera and its importance for the listener/spectator. First and foremost, opera is complex and takes practice. The untrained eye can't follow everything afoot at a football match, so why should we expect a four-hour opera to be any different? And I'm actually really bad at opera. I've sat through at least a dozen operas wondering why I was there and what I was looking for, accessing close to nothing that was occurring on stage. I've at least once gotten angry at a production (Carmen, 2001 in New Orleans) while sitting in the audience and cursed opera's ridiculousness as having nothing to offer me. As a kid my mother would take me to the New Orleans Opera company's productions and I usually relished it, but still was very much an outsider looking in. It wasn't rapturous. Those Thomas Mann salad days spent listening to Lohengrin in Lübeck? Weren't happening.

Still, the disadvantage of opera to a lay person -- it's so complex! -- is an advantage too. Just focus on what you can, because there's so much there. If the story is your entry point, focus on the story. Or focus on the singing. Or get lost in the music. But lots of people (most of my friends, say) really don't get it. The stories in operas are ridiculous! And singing criticism is for experts. And getting lost in music is precisely the problem -- twenty minutes into a performance they're left grasping at things to focus on. Never mind that our modern age makes focusing on anything for more than twenty minutes nigh impossible. Kleiner Mann, was tun? 

Tristan och Isolde, Tristan und Isolde, Tristan and Isolde: American viewing German opera in Swedish (Part 1)

I'm an American who teaches South Koreans German in Vietnam. I'm also an American who, from time to time, goes to German operas in Sweden. This leads to a number of delights in life, and a number of concomitant linguistic puzzles. I attended Parsifal in Stockholm last year, was taken aback by the quality of the performances and intensity of the music, and was a bit sullen at the number of things I couldn't parse (if all of the text had been in English, it still takes practice and wit to focus on music where the music is foremost, and text and story where they're necessary, to say nothing of the meaning and philosophy). Today's puzzle: how do I get the most out of Tristan und Isolde when I haven't read the German libretto and can only glancingly follow the Swedish supertitles?

Now, I'm of two minds about working through the text in opera. A friend of mine doesn't pay much attention to the words when he listens to opera, doesn't even see the need to attend operas live. The music is sacrosanct, the staging a distraction. His way sounds noble, but I can't manage it. I need the text to thread the music together, I need the story to access the sound. I agree that stagings are a distraction from accessing the highest spheres of music -- I find it hard to get excited about Regietheater -- but then again, nearly everything is a distraction from accessing the highest spheres of music. If I can't 'feel' Wagner, if I can't hear something mystical at all times throughout all four hours, then at least I have the story and the words to focus on. With a little luck, the words will be familiar enough that I will have mind to spare to devote to feelings and philosophising. Even if those words are Swedish.