THE OTHER RICHARD: A STRAUSS FESTIVAL IN BUDAPEST

Transcription

1 THE OTHER RICHARD: A STRAUSS FESTIVAL IN BUDAPEST by Graham Bruce July 2014 The Hungarian State Opera, one of the most beautiful opera houses in Europe, has a fine tradition of Richard Strauss performances, something celebrated this year in a proud exhibition in one of its upstairs galleries to mark the 150 years since the composer's birth. Hungarian State Opera House - Budapest There, the glittering panorama of first performances in Budapest with celebrated casts was on photographic display: Elektra in 1910, Der Rosenkavalier in 1911, Salome in 1912, Ariadne auf Naxos in 1919, Die Agyptische Helena in 1932, Arabella in 1934, and Daphne in The display augured well for Budapest's summer Strauss festival of six operas and a gala concert. Missing from the display's photos of first performances was Die Frau ohne Schatten. Appropriately, the company's first production of that opera became the centre point of the 2014 festival.

2 Interior: Budapest Opera Janos Szikora's production involved a simple set with a domed roof held up by two hollow columns that facilitated sudden entrances and exits. Projection areas on and above the set allowed for a wealth of images which otherwise would be difficult to stage. In the scene in the dyer's hut, the nurse, capitalizing on the tensions between him and his wife, with a magic gesture caused, in the projected image, the double bed to split in two. Later, to underline the irony of the night watchman's song praising marital relations, the burning separate beds were seen crumbling. Likewise, the frying fish in the pan conjured up by the nurse - which also conveyed the cries of the unborn children (i.e. the wife's determination not to become pregnant) - featured in the projections. Often, these images contrasted the character's vision with the reality: as the nurse conjured up a vision of erotic pleasures to tempt the dyer's wife, we saw people on stage doing mundane household chores while the projections showed erotic, writhing bodies; on another occasion we saw the phantom lover on stage while projections showed a naked man walking toward the wife to embrace her. To portray the Empress's connection with the natural and spiritual world (the Emperor had hunted a gazelle which turned into the beautiful woman who became the Empress), the projections decked her first entrance with strange, exotic flowers and plants.

3 Interior: Budapest Opera Strauss's opera, first produced in Vienna in 1919, while containing some of his very finest music, is certainly difficult to stage. Hofmannsthal's libretto tells a strange, symbolic story of an Empress, daughter of the spirit world, whose marriage has not produced a child. Discovering that her husband, the Emperor, will be turned to stone after a year if she is childless, she begs her nurse, another member of the spirit world, to help her obtain a shadow, the symbol of fertility. The shadow is to be obtained by tempting the unhappy wife of a dyer to sell her shadow. The opera has a happy ending as both the dyer and his wife and the Emperor and Empress celebrate their fertility. The difficulties of the opera include many magical transformations, and magical appearances and disappearances. The costumes were a mixture of styles. The Emperor wore an elaborately decorated gold costume and crown, while the Empress's gown was equally lavish. Emphasising the very different proletarian world of the dyer and his wife, these wore contemporary clothes. Musically, the performance was a triumph as Peter Halasz drew superb playing from the orchestra, and the cast featured much fine singing. Eszter Siimegi in the very difficult role of the Empress revealed a lovely voice in its youthful prime; the crucial role of the nurse brought a fine voice and an excellent performance from lldiko Komlosi. As the dyer's wife, Szilvia Ralik was wholly convincing, as was Tinsinger Heiko as her husband.

4 Overall, then, this new staging was a performance and a production to rival those I'd seen in Melbourne, the New York Met, Paris and Munich, and made me eager for the rest of the festival. Sadly, disappointment awaited me in the repertory productions which followed. Interior: Budapest Opera Der Rosenkavalier was given the kind of stage direction where every idea, movement and gesture is over-emphasized and underlined. Indeed, the performance contained enough irrelevant stage "business" for a dozen operas. Octavian and the Marschallin made love on the floor, the large bed seemingly irrelevant; after the entrance of Baron Ochs, the bed provided the director with some stage business for Octavian now dressed as Mariandel: the latter made and re-made the bed and patted the pillows endlessly to ensure that something was happening on stage. There was, in fact, quite enough happening with the over-the-top performance of Ochs by Kurt Rydl, a surprising miscalculation by this fine, veteran singer. The Marschallin flung herself about in a fashion which was certainly at odds with her social position. The set for act two was, surprisingly, the same, minus the bed, as that for act one. Again, the scenes involving Ochs were grossly directed and the presentation of the Rose made little impact. Had the singing been any more than adequate, I might have remained for the last act; however, from the evidence of what had preceded it, I predicted that the overproduction of the Ochs / Mariandel scene would be very hard to take.

5 Festival posters: pera M A 0YAR ALLAM! 0 P E R 3S& Az arnyek nelkuli asszony Bemutatd im/" 5 *» 2S -> 31, jiin/us *j Karmester Halasz Peter I Rendezo szikora B I Arabella fm(?/'us 2?:, 30.J Karmester oiinter Neuhoid Rendezo t.,. I Salome (fro/jus 29., Junius l) Karmester Pinchas Steinberg Rendezo szik or, a Ariadne Naxoszban (Junius 3., 7.) Karmester Heja Domonkos I Rendezo Anger ftrmc Ar6zsalovag0un/us5.,!o.j Karmester Jun Markl I Rendezo AndrejsZagars Bettra (Junius 8,11.) Karmester Stefan Soltesz Rendezo Kovalik Balazs A Budapesti Filharmoniai TarsasagZenekaranak - az Opera egyuttesenek szimfonikusesljefe,] Karmester Pinchas Steinberg Richard Strauss szobranak avatasa a zeneszerzo sziiletesnapjan (jimm.) (Kligl Sandor munkaja) I wwwacetooubiwj Worse awaited me on the next evening at Ariadne auf Naxos. The Prologue featured some chaotic staging and costumes which seemed to have derived from the remnants ragbag. There was no interval and the opera prelude followed the prologue immediately.

6 The prelude was accompanied by a film which purported to inform those not au fait with the Ariadne legend with the relevant details. Thus we saw Pasiphae's horror as she gave birth to a monster, the Minotaur, then her daughter Ariadne's liaison with Theseus, Ariadne's device to help him escape from the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur, and finally her abandonment on the island of Naxos. The film was shot as a farce in the manner of a silent film - a motorcyclist complete with goggles (Theseus) scooted off leaving Ariadne to throw her arms up in exaggerated despair - and this rather set the tone for the opera which followed. There, Ariadne spent most of her time curled up in the tentacles of a huge octopus with illuminated eyes. Much humorous use was made of the phallic possibilities of the tentacles. The naked male dummies that were continually carried back and forth across the stage for no apparent reason in the Prologue were now placed in a row on the ground. One of the extras handed a knife to Zerbinetta who proceeded to disembowel one of the naked males. Bacchus's arrival coincided with that of a wingless aeroplane which plunged down vertically. No musical distinction relieved the silliness of the staging. What is often a musical highlight, Zerbinetta's big aria consoling Ariadne, seemed here tediously drawn out, and the only interesting singing was that of Tunde Szaboki as Ariadne / Prima Donna. The final opera was Elektra. This was set in a bathhouse with naked figures running about in the early parts of the opera. Determined to find something of value in this last of the operas I'd see, I argued to myself that this suggested the moral corruption at the degraded court of Klytemnestra and her paramour, Aegisthus, and anyway reflected the many fine public baths in Budapest, a residue of the early Turkish occupation. Accordingly, the five maids, dressed only in bath towels, rushed about as they discussed the degradation of Elektra. Elektra herself, lying front of stage as she sang her lengthy opening music behind a pile of sandbags, soon emerged to drag a tree around the stage. Her elaborate black dress seemed rather strange, given the previous description of her as a filthy animal, and also provided some problems for her later as she changed into a white dress on stage for her final death-dance. The great recognition scene between Elektra and Orestes, the musical highlight of the opera, was dimmed by the rather stolid acting of Gabor Bretz as Orestes lessening the effect of his very fine voice. A celebratory party followed Orestes's murder of Klytemnestra and Aegisthus, and Elektra began to celebrate with her dance downstage. She soon abandoned this, however, and began to drag the tree around again for no apparent reason. Joining the party, Orestes, together with his henchmen, all in dark glasses and resembling a parody of mafia hit men, lifted his gun and in a quite inexplicable action, shot first Elektra and then her sister Chrysothemis. What rescued yet another tiresome production was the excellent orchestral playing under conductor Stefan Soltesz and the generally good singing. Szilvia Ralik confirmed the previous excellent impression made by her dyer's wife with a fine performance of Elektra, while Chrysothemis was well sung by Adrienn Miksch, and Eva Balatoni made an effective Klytemnestra.

7 Budapest Operetta House I was at a loss to explain the extreme gap in quality between Die Frau Ohne Schatten and the next three operas. Optimistically, I told myself that it was probably a final realization, in the new production of the first opera, that the day of frivolous, indulgent productions, such as those of the three repertory operas, had passed and no longer had any place in new stagings. Yet, I longed to send the stage directors of those three operas a few blocks away to the Budapest Operetta House. There, on my one night off, I had seen a production of Franz Lehar's operetta, The Land of Smiles. At the Operetta House, those directors would have seen lovely costumes, brilliant sets, wonderful dance numbers, good singing, and... appropriate, interesting direction.

8 A trip to Hamburg soon restored my faith in European Strauss productions. Staatsoper Hamburg offered a fine production of Arabella by Sven-Eric Bechtolf. Some of our members have just seen Bechtolf's Vienna Ring, which shares the same intelligent staging strategies as this. With handsome set and costumes based on designs from the Secessionist Art period, together with excellent singing and orchestral playing, the production returned me to the delight of the Budapest Die Frau Ohne Schatten. Camilla Nyland looked lovely and sang beautifully as Arabella, matched by the charming Zdenka of Katerina Tretyakova. James Rutherford was the excellent Mandryka and Cheryl Studer, now playing more mature characters, a good Adelaide. And the next evening in Hamburg produced something even better: the finest production (by Willy Decker) of Janacek's Katja Kabanova that I've yet seen... a simple, sensitive production which went to heart of the oppression which is its theme. Back in Australia, my thoughts returned to Budapest and the comment by a German friend who joined me for the last two operas at the Hungarian State Opera. He wondered whether those looking back on this period would characterize it as the low point in European opera production. This accorded nicely with some of the comments made by those who visited Budapest later than I to see the Ring in concert at the magnificent new Palace of Arts. Amidst the praise for the excellent "semi-staging", augmented by ingenious projections, one commented that with such performances, one didn't have to put up with a lot of the silliness of contemporary productions. Interior: Budapest Palace of Arts