Die Liebe der Danae at Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Jupiter with his 4 exes

Conductor: Sebastian Weigle
Production: Kirsten Harms

Pollux: Andrew Dickinson (tenor)
Danae, his daughter: Manuela Uhl (soprano)
Midas: Raymond Very (tenor)
Jupiter: Mark Delavan (baritone)
Merkur: Thomas Blondelle (tenor)
Semele: Nicole Haslett (soprano)
Europa: Martina Welschenbach (soprano)
Alkmene: Rebecca Jo Loeb (mezzo-soprano)
Leda: Katharina Peetz (contralto)

I rather liked Richard Strauss's Die Liebe der Danae, another opera I had never seen before.  I will try to explain the plot.  King Pollux, who lives in a palace filled with classical art, has fallen on hard times.  His creditors are there to haul off all his belongings.  A piano is lifted into the air where it turns throughout the opera.  Hmmm.

According to the plot summery, Danae dreams of gold falling from the sky.  In our production it was sheets of paper.  We thought perhaps they were sheets of music but couldn't tell.

They think they can save things by marrying Danae off to Midas who has the power to turn anything into gold by touching it.  Midas shows up wearing gloves and pretending to be Chrystopher, the servant of Midas.  He and Danae fall in love.  Jupiter then shows up disguised as Midas to woo Danae.  He doesn't know he is already too late.  His four ex girlfriends also show up:  Semele, Europa, Alkmene, and Leda who all seem like four Barbie dolls.  Danae is more of a real girl.

First the real Midas turns everything into gold, including Danae when he tries to kiss her.  Then Jupiter turns her back into a human.  She chooses Midas over Jupiter even though he has lost his power to turn things into gold and she will live in poverty.  Jupiter gets angry and blows everything up.  The other gods laugh at him.

There is a lot of beautiful love music in this opera, but it isn't done often enough to result in very polished performances.  All seemed to be struggling with their roles.  The orchestra was much too loud, which contributed to the problem.  It was nice to see Mark Delavan again.

At the end of the opera Danae looks up--at last someone looks up--and notices the piano floating in the air.  I kept worrying it would fall on someone.  She knows we are in the tumbled down old palace and that this is her piano.  She finds the piano stool and sets it down in its former place.  She finds the suitcase of treasures from prosperous times.  She knows she is at home and is happy with her present life.

This one I could do again.  The role of Danae is very sweet.  Manuela Uhl also sang the sister in Elektra.

#ad

Die ägyptische Helena at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Menelas and Helena

Conductor: Andrew Litton

Helena: Ricarda Merbeth (soprano)
Menelas: Stefan Vinke (tenor)
Aithra, a sorceress: Laura Aikin (soprano)
Altair: Derek Welton (baritone)
Da-Ud: Andrew Dickinson (tenor)
The allknowing mussel: Ronnita Miller (contralto)

Friday night we saw Strauss's Die ägyptische Helena, me for the first time. 

It is interesting to realize that all three Greek generals in the Trojan war have returning home operas.  One of the first operas, Monteverdi's Il ritorna de Ulisse in Patria concerns the return of Ulysses to Ithica after years of wandering around lost in the Mediterranean.  He sees his wife's suitors and just kills them all.  Short work.

Elektra is another after the Trojan war story.  Agamemnon returns home to his wife and apparently fails to notice her new lover.  Instead of Agamemnon killing the boy friend, the boy friend kills him.  Elektra, his daughter, doesn't respond well and obsesses over her revenge.

The last of our trilogy is King Menelaus, whose wife was kidnapped by Paris as a gift from Venus.  He is the cause of the Trojan war and brings his wife back with him from the war after ten years of fighting.  It is to argue whether Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, is kidnapped or goes off on her own.  In this version King Menelaus seems to believe it was all her idea.  So this is one long jealous tantrum.

For some reason they are in Egypt.  Aithra, intensely obsessed with Helen of Troy, is a sorceress who apparently lives in an Egyptian brothel with a clam who knows everything.  The clam tells Aithra that Helen is in the sea near their island with her husband who is trying to kill her.  Aithra conjures a storm to distract Menelaus from killing his wife, then sends it away before it kills both of them.

Various tricks and potions are tried to trick Menelaus to take his wife back.  First they try forgetting which is temporarily successful.  The second act starts with the aria "Zweite Brautnacht,"[Second bridal night].



The plot gets vague at this point.  He gets angry, kills people, etc.  but finally they are resolved, and all ends happily.

I'm not sure this worked for me.  The final happiness was far too abrupt.  The orchestra was too loud.  I discussed this with other people, and they seemed to feel this was an acoustical problem.  The role of Menelaus is the only extended role for tenor I have heard from Strauss.  He sings constantly and very loudly.  Stefan Vinke was game.  This was a new opera for me so I have nothing to compare it to.

Elektra at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

👍🏻
Conductor: Donald Runnicles
Production: Kirsten Harms

Klytämnestra, Elektra's mother: Doris Soffel (mezzo-soprano)
Elektra: Evelyn Herlitzius (soprano)
Chrysothemis, Elektra's sister: Manuela Uhl (soprano)
Aegisth, Klytämnestra's new husband: Clemens Bieber (tenor)
Orest, Elektra's brother: Tobias Kehrer (baritone)

It was a wonderful privilege to experience this production of Strauss's Elektra at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin.  I am very familiar with Donald Runnicles, of course, from his years at the San Francisco Opera.  He still comes to us on occasion to bring us wonderful things like the recent Les Troyens. Elektra is just his stuff.  It was beautiful and intensely dramatic throughout.  Runnicles is a great Wagnerian, and this is the most Wagnerian of Strauss's scores.

Elektra comes every day to a sacred place to mourn the death of her father Agamemnon.  In our production this is something like a dirt filled trash heap.  New trash falls from above during the opera.  The other women of the palace ridicule her.

Klytämnestra cannot sleep and comes to ask Elektra for advice.  She has been executing people and enters carrying an ax.  She imagines that if she kills the right person, her nightmares will stop.  Elektra explains that it is she who must die.  In the above picture Elektra holds the ax and Klytämnestra lies on the ground.

The cast was all excellent, but it was Evelyn Herlitzius with the guidance of Runnicles who brought the opera to a state of overwhelming intensity.  It would be difficult to imagine something more difficult.  Bravi.  It was very moving.

_________________________________
I have to add:  you will notice from the pictures that this is my second opera with an ax since arriving in Berlin.  In Der Vampyr the heroine wields her ax in an attempt to hit a vampire, but misses and hits her father instead.  In Elektra Klytämnestra wanders around the house using an ax rather like a cane.  In case there is a problem she has a weapon ready.  She leaves it behind when she leaves in a hurry.

Blogging

I am in Berlin for the Strauss, 5 Strauss operas in as many days.  Today is Elektra.

I was in Berlin once in the seventies when Germany was still divided.  I remember only a few things.  I went once to east Berlin to see Nefertiti.  The buildings were all black and dented.  I went two times to the Deutsche Oper where my friend Janis Martin was singing.  I saw her in Tosca and Le Nozze di Figaro.  After one of the performances we went out to eat steak.  She told me I should have come in the sixties.

Berlin has become very modern in the intervening years.  Here and there are old buildings, but not many.  It is less chaotic than New York and more orderly than Paris.  Somehow one longs for cars that drive recklessly and people that walk too fast.

I get to practice my German which is not bad.

Salome at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Conductor: Alain Altinoglu
Production: Claus Guth

Herodes:  Thomas Blondelle (tenor)
Herodias: Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet (mezzo-soprano)
Salome: Allison Oakes (soprano)
Jochanaan: Michael Volle (baritone)
Narraboth: Attilio Glaser (tenor)

In case you hadn't noticed before, Salome is an abused child.  She is sexually obsessed because she has had sex since she was small.  My feeling is that this is absolutely so.  There are many things about this production that I could not explain, but one thing seemed clear--Herod is sexually obsessed with Salome.  You knew that.  His wife knows it.  Perhaps it is as I have long suspected, perhaps Herodias has suggested to Salome that Jochanaan would be better off dead.  Certainly she has told Salome that he is ranting about her.

Jochanaan arises from a pile of clothing on the floor wearing only underpants.  Blond girls of various ages come out and dress him.  I cannot explain the pile of clothing, but the young girls seem skilled at dressing an adult man. From years of practice, perhaps.  Salome begins in a nightgown and changes to a dress.  The other girls remain in their night gowns.  Clearly the girls represent Salome at various stages of her life.

At the end we are in a men's clothing store.  I have no idea why.  Clearly this is a regie opera.  For no reason that I could possibly explain I enjoyed this.  Strauss' Salome is generally about dancing, which here is only symbolic.  Be aware that there are virtually no opera singers who can both sing Salome and actually dance.  Our Salome danced with Herodes.  Perhaps that is why he liked it.

I have seen Alain Altinoglu before only with Jonas Kaufmann.  He conducted the Munich Manon Lescaut and the Met Werther.  He was excellent then and now.  The music was varied and interesting, expressing the changing atmosphere of the scenes as they progressed.

Alison Oakes seems a young woman, who nevertheless performed this difficult role well.  Of the others, I especially liked.Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet.  For some reason there was a lot of twitching which appeared and disappeared.  Men from the ballet stood around and then twitched.  Jeanne-Michele twitched rather better than the others.  IMHO:

Salome normally builds to an overwhelming climax, one where you also feel that someone should kill Salome.  But in this production the perversity is blunted.  She does not actually kiss the head of Jochanaan, though she says she does.  She sings and then sort of wanders off.  They don't kill her.  The effect is unmelodramatic and seems more a successfully executed revenge on Herodes than an obsession.

Footnote:  Michael Volle was the Sachs in the wonderful Die Meistersinger I saw at Salzburg.

Lieder in Berlin

I went to hear a recital with Heidi Stober at the Deutsche Oper because she and Simon Pauly were performing Lieder by Mahler, Pfitzner, and Wolf, all composers that I enjoy very much.  They know when to clap here.

Someone named Monika Rinck spoke similar but not exactly the same texts between them.  This I have never seen before. They called it Lieder und Dichter.

I have seen Heidi many times in San Francisco and three times in Santa Fe.

I had a fine dinner before at the restaurant at the opera.  I was here at this opera once before in the 70s to see Janis Martin who is not completely forgotten.

Der Vampyr 👍🏻

👍🏻
I had other choices of things to see in Berlin, but I thought Der Vampyr by Heinrich Marschner at the Komische Oper would be fun, and I was right.  Or as it says in the program 'after Heinrich Marschner.'  The Dracula novel appeared in 1897 while this opera was first performed in 1828.

Conductor:  Antony Hermus
Director:  Antu Romero Nunes

Lord Ruthven, Vampire:  Heiko Trinsinger (baritone)
Sir Humphrey, Lord von Davenaut:  Jens Larsen (bass)
Malwina, his daughter:  Nicole Chevalier (soprano)
Edgar Aubrey: Zoltan Nyari (tenor)
Emmy:  Maria Fiselier (soprano)
George Dibdin:  Ivan Tursic (tenor)

This opera is primarily about costume and makeup.  They also do not hesitate to lower painted sets from the flies which makes all the scenes flow rapidly from one to the other.  The stage is enhanced with a nice runway around the orchestra.

We begin with Edgar roaming the stage, coming out of a casket, going back in.  Then the actual opera begins with Ruthven and the other vampires, who all look ghastly.  Other ghastly looking vampires roamed the audience.  A woman behind me screamed.  Ruthven can only stay alive if he gets and kills two brides by midnight.  He sets to work.

Here is a scene with Edgar and Malvina making love.  The main arias are here.  The vampire Ruthven comes and takes her off.  Her father prefers Ruthven.  We have a ball where everyone looks lovely, but then for some reason they become hideous.  Someone shoots them all with a machine gun, including the conductor who comes out of the pit for this.

Maybe I shouldn't tell everything.  Eventually the clock strikes 12 and Ruthven has only one bride with one more to go.  Not good for him.  I have to tell the end.  Edgar gets Malwina and starts to bite her on the neck.  She pulls out her wooden stake and goes to work on him.

I enjoyed this a lot but found the music wandering away from standard Spieloper style.  Spieloper is basically the style of opera in Germany between Beethoven and Wagner, practiced by Marschner and Lorzing, and generally resembles Weber.  It differs from Singspiel primarily for the slightly more serious subject matter.  More modern musical effects were sometimes heard.

One doesn't want to always be serious.

Staging opera in the 21st century.

Once upon a time a stage set consisted of painted flat surfaces which could be raised and lowered easily for set changes.  I know at Santa Fe they don't have a space above the stage where the set pieces would usually go, so they slide them on and off at the sides like a deck of cards.  This is smooth and easy, and does not require an army of stage hands.  Who wouldn't fit on the stage at Santa Fe anyway.  There's also a big elevator at the back.

Larger companies like the Met, the ROH and the Bayerische Staatsoper look down their noses at painted flats.  They will occasionally use sets where the objects stay the same but are made to seem varied and interesting through the use of projections.  Lately the projections have started to become movies.

The current rage throughout the opera world is for a whole opera to be presented in a single set.

A set made up of two rows of boxes where the various scenes move from box to box was seen in Peter Grimes from the Met in 2008.  Another similar production was seen in Don Giovanni also from the Met.  This achieves the goal of a single set but makes each scene small and unimpressive.  It looks great in the movie theater but cramped in the house.

Cav/Pag from the Salzburg Easter Festival both was and wasn't done as two rows of boxes.  The bits of stage were framed into boxes, but on the stage things seemed to change and often extend across two or more boxes.  It was both confusing and interesting.  The way this was done seemed legitimately creative, and not just a cop out.

The single set as a giant staircase is another common theme.  We saw this in Arabella from the Bayerische Staatsoper and again in Un Ballo in Maschera from the same company.  Ballo was far more confusing than Arabella.  The visual unity did not match the story of the masked ball.  The libretto says we are in a palace, a cave, a deserted field, and finally back to a palace again.  A giant staircase doesn't communicate this at all.  It communicated that perhaps the prince was hallucinating.

My favorite of all the single set productions has been Don Giovanni in a hotel lobby from Salzburg, seen at top.  Usually the sets for this opera are difficult to follow because each small scene is supposed to represent a different location.  The hotel lobby staging was genius.  All these things might well happen in a hotel, where weddings are celebrated, meetings are held, tourists arrive and leave, bedrooms for dalliance are easily found, strangers encounter one another, etc. 

We want more than just money saving single set productions.  We still want the production to explain the action, to intensify the emotions through thoughtful design.  And yes, I know this is a difficult task. I'm starting to feel that all too often the production designer simply doesn't want to spend time discovering the opera and skips to a simple solution.

Selfie of the week

Pavol Breslik

I'll have to put him in my sexiest list.

Un Ballo in Maschera from Munich

Conductor:  Zubin Mehta
Production:  Johannes Erath

Riccardo:  Piotr Beczala (tenor)
Renato, Riccardo's best friend:  George Petean (baritone)
Amelia, wife of Renato:  Anja Harteros (soprano)
Ulrica:  Okka von der Damerau (contralto)
Oscar, Riccardo's page:  Sofia Fomina (coloratura soprano)

The Bayerische Staatsoper brought us Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera in a manner we might have expected.  The whole thing takes place in Riccardo's bedroom.  This must surely indicate that it's all a dream.  The It's all a Dream staging is certainly one of the more annoying.  My most recent one of these was Falstaff from Florence.  Interestingly, that was also conducted by Mehta.  Everything is in black and white, and the stage is a bit dark for a stream.

I watched this out of order, middle first, followed by beginning, so I noticed that the woman with long blond hair that appears mysteriously at the beginning is Ulrica the witch.  Throughout this opera a lot is going on.  The male chorus is divided into two groups:  those friendly to Riccardo and those who are conspiring to kill him.  For the first time in my experience they are both labeled and translated in the subtitles.  If you watched without text, you wouldn't guess this.

I didn't realize before this that Riccardo so dominates the action.  No excuse.  He appears in various guises:  as himself, as a dead body uncovered by Ulrica lying on his own bed, and as a ventriloquist dummy, sometimes operated by Oscar and sometimes by Riccardo himself.  Piotr sings, dummy's mouth moves.  If this means something, I didn't guess it.  I thought ventriloquists were completely out of style.  I'm surprised by what a wonderful role this is for Piotr.

Now we wake up in Renato's bedroom where he is in bed with Amelia.  Ulrica is here, too.  We're supposed to be in a field with a gallows.  Anja sings her aria.  I didn't realize Oscar actually has a bigger part.  Riccardo appears, which is fine if we're in a field but iffy when we're in Renato's bedroom.  He sleeps through the whole thing.  Renato wakes up during the love duet.  The lovers spot him, and Amelia gets back in bed and covers up.  This is rather spectacularly silly, but the plot is actually more plausible if Renato is a lot more boring than Dmitri.

I have loved the music.  Harteros may be by now my favorite current Verdi singer, though this is not the best role for her.

Ulrica is still with us at the end.
#ad