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Marietta (Rachel Nicholls) seeks to soothe Paul (Peter Auty) with her lute Picture: Matthew Williams-Ellis Die tote Stadt Longborough Festival Opera ***** Visiting Longborough Festival Opera is – has always been – one of the delights of the Midlands, and for those (including London) further afield. It’s not just a
pleasure to sit, stand or picnic with its gorgeous hillside view across
the Vale of Evesham (only
Nevill Holt, looking out over the River
Welland Valley, offers something comparable).
But its achievements are not just highly diverting, but serious too. It was Wagner that induced Martin Graham, its
founder, to turn a chicken barn into an opera house. Martin is dotty
about Wagner, perhaps of all relishing his four-part Ring Cycle (Munich
1869-70, and the last two at Bayreuth, both 1876, the year Bayreuth
opened, as part of the first complete Ring cycle). Not surprisingly, Wagner has featured in sixteen
of Longborough’s annual programmes. Next year (2023) has been announced.
It includes Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, a bold,
large-scale choice (Eugene Onegin featured in 2007). And Gluck.
Inevitably some regular repertoire has also to be accommodated: Mozart,
Verdi, Bizet (this year), Britten. But Erich Korngold’s Die tote Stadt played
to full houses: surely a message there about Longborough’s regular
audiences having faith in the Grahams (their elder daughter, at a young
age experienced in Opera production, is now Artistic Director). She has
directed not least in London, and it’s worth mentioning (I have
elsewhere) that one of her acclaimed productions was Simplicius
Simplicissimus, by Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905-1963), a truly great
indictment of war. Longborough’s audience would love it – and be
enchanted by it.
Die tote Stadt (‘The dead city’) is set in
Belgian Bruges, a location distinguished by its canals, cobbled streets,
and surviving medieval buildings. A place, however, which the central
character, one might almost say hero - the superlative, galvanising
(here Helden-) tenor Peter Auty - finds as depressing as he himself is -
immersed and absorbed by its purported gloom. The character is called just plain Paul, much as
the hero of Franz Schreker’s Der Ferne Klang, from a similar
period (the Great War) as the writing of Die tote Stadt, is
called Fritz. Does it make him, and his melancholia, somehow universal?
Perhaps, though that is not suggested in the libretto (partly Korngold’s
own, partly his highly cultured father’s). Despite two characters, both creditably
performed, the first moved and sung by Benson Wilson (baritone Frank,
Paul’s supportive companion, who strives to haul his friend out of his
appalling obsession – and finally, it seems, succeeds); plus Brigitta, a
gloriously sung, trusty housekeeper (Stephanie Windsor-Lewis, a
ravishing mezzo), plus a harlequinade of strolling players, with Paul
reappearing as Pierrot, the action focuses almost entirely on two (or
three) personalities – one, bizarrely, dead. The figure who becomes Paul’s idol, then temptress, is Marietta, a dancer with the local opera house. Rachel Nicholls, Longborough’s Isolde (2015 and 2017), bravely took on the role as a replacement. It’s a big voice – a match for Paul. You might almost call her a Heldensopran.
Rachel Nicolls (Marietta) takes wing Usually chirpy, she like Frank is critical of
Paul’s obsession. To instance this, she spots Marie’s velvet dress and
shimmering braid of hair in a glass cabinet. Paul has clung on to
everything he associates with her - and that includes, naturally, black
and white photographs (which show the action to be later 19th century). Part of Paul’s dream – for that is what it is –
brings Marietta, who has just left, back as, supposedly, his lost Marie.
He has also pleaded, ‘I want the glow of roses in this room Marie,
Marie, I see you, I feel you’. Marietta, doubling disturbingly as Marie,
steps out of a huge image – one of many powerful moments of the opera’s
script. He thinks she’s really Marie, Frank, as it happens, also has a yen for the
immensely desirable, initially optimistic but then disappointed
Marietta, but here addresses Paul’s self-imposed, desolate state: ‘Du
bist ein Träumer, ein Geisterseher’: You’re dreaming, you’re spellbound
by a phantom (ghost), your deep obsession has distorted your mind (…’hat
dich verwirrt.’) But Paul will not be consoled. Surrounded by
countless candles, this devises his ‘temple of memories’ (‘Kirche des
Gewesenen’). He dwells endlessly on the memory of Marie; surrounds
himself with mementos, and focuses entirely on his grief. We don’t know
how old Paul is, and more important still, how young Marie was when she
died (and what she died of). His life is given over to solitariness,
weeping, grieving, sobbing; and anger that she has been taken from him.
He is frustrated, anguished, despairing, all of which lead to his
illogical urge to bring her back. Auty is absolutely superb from beginning to end.
He is on stage almost the whole opera. His massive Act I aria, ‘Nein,
nein, sie lebt’ –‘she is not dead, but alive!’ and start of Act 2, ‘Was
ward aus mir?’ ‘What has happened to me?’ were stupendous – two mighty
endeavours, a masterpiece of remembering, matched not quite by
Marietta’s ‘You were beautiful like me; say, are you still like me?’ and
‘Those who love you have to share you with Saints and the dead’; and her
final reprimand, ’She is dead and gone, she has no feelings. But I am
living, I have feelings.’ The production, so horrendously gloomy yet so
alive with Paul’s misery, was by Carmen Jacobi, and caught the feel of
Korngold’s opera – I would say – to perfection. The Longborough
orchestra, for some years enlarged to house a complete Wagner retinue,
and capable of producing the most sturdy, resounding, robust and
substantial sounds, relished under conductor Justin Brown the fact that
individual solo instruments (or pairs, eg of flutes) equally came across
so vividly and intensely. A mighty undertaking, then, and an unadulterated
coup for Longborough. In its time it has staged many, and its Wagner in
particular has drawn huge accolades from critics and audiences. And
this? Yet another masterstroke. Roderic Dunnett 07-22 |
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