Opera
Zettel, Squenz and Schnauz
By DAVID CAIRNS
THERE is nothing like a change of viewpoint, a totally new inflexion, for testing your opinion of a favourite work. Having had it suggested to me that Britten's A Mid- summer Night's Dream is much overrated, I was both intrigued and slightly apprehensive, a few weeks ago, at the prospect of hearing it, so to speak, in a foreign accent, at Hamburg. It was not impossible that when Puck became Took and Bottom, Quince and the rest were 'translated' into Zettel, Squenz, Flaut, Schnock, Schnauz and Schlucker, I would realise the enchantment had been purely local, too tenuous to transport, and the genius of the music would shrink to talent and mere cleverness—especially as it was said that no one at Hamburg had seen or even heard any of the English performances. But though there are inadequacies and distor- tions in the Hamburg Staatsoper version, I came away from it more sure than ever that this is a great work.
The performance has been castigated. I found it enjoyable and even, in certain respects, satisfy- ing. Helmut Jtlrgens's setting is far more beauti- ful, more imaginative, more fine, than either of the Piper versions. Dominated at the back by a huge, floating full moon, and hung with just the right suggestion of gauzy leaf and branch, it evokes the magic wood with unfailing precision and economy. Except for three low mounds and, grouped beside them, a few movable clumps of teasel-like plants eight or nine feet high (which have the strange Gothic grace of Mr. Piper's, and more, without their doodling whimsicality), the stage is bare and level over a large expanse, a forest clearing lapped by the tides of night (as the slender fingers of the strings, sliding from chord to chord, entwine the music of the first act).
Fundamental to Herr JUrgens's conception is the discreet, continuous use of the revolve, which brings one mound, and then another, into play—so that, for example, in the third act the mounds which bore the lovers move round in due time to make way for the sleeping Bottom. There is at once more mystery and more clarity in this stage picture than in Covent Garden's. Not quite all the costumes of Gunther Schmidt- Bohlander are good. Oberon, who is made to look altogether too unpleasant a figure, is dressed in scarlet robes that recall Mephistopheles on the cover of the vocal score of La Damnation de Faust. On the other hand, the plain-coloured, simply-cut clothes of the lovers are more plaus- ible and effective than the ornate costumes of Covent Garden and Aldeburgh. Visually, indeed, the Hamburg staging can scarcely be faulted.
Rennert's production has been vaguely cen- sured for not taking its inspiration from the score. I did not find it so. The fairies and sprites have a really unearthly quality; they lack the humour of their English counterparts, but they are more brilliant and insubstantial. The drama of the lovers is handled with a new sympathy, simplicity and force. It is hard to see here in what respect Herr Rennert (as or critic claims) gives evidence of insight into Shakespeare but not into Britten. On the contrary, his production of the lovers shows that he 'understands their music better than Sir John Gielgud (for all his excellence in this opera) understood it.
The rustics are a well-drilled, very German team of grotesques, who seem to have been read out Klaus by Klaus from the pages of Grimm —among them Toni Blankenheim's big, ab- stractedly authoritative Quince, with surprised hair standing up from a potato head and great flapping wrists, Kurt Marschner's squashed little sandy-haired, frog-mouthed, peering Flute, and Karl Otto's gentle, genial Snug. Their byplay seemed to me rather coldly unsmiling, but it is no more unfunny than the Aldeburgh version. The real weakness is in the individual limitations of the Bottom of Heinz Blankenburg, a crew- cut, dead-pan wide boy wide of the mark of both Britten and Shakespeare. As some one said, this is a Bottom who would have forgotten all about his dream by next day. But Mr. Branni- gan's Bottom, though a fruitily English perfor- mance, and therefore superficially more Shakespearian and Brittenish, missed the deep humours of the part just as completely. The one total disaster in Hamburg, which may be at- tributed to implacable German tradition, is that Puck is played by a girl, and a plump-thighed, bared-teethed, little teenage horror to boot, who prances and capers and thwacks the air with a kind of relentless clockwork determination which grinds the nerves quite dreadfully. I thought my sufferings must be a punishment for having underrated Master Nicolas Chagrin (whose per- formance, on a second visit to. Covent Garden, impressed me very favourably). But the Hamburg cast also boasts some excellent women, including Cvetka Ahlin (Hermia), 1-lelga Pilarczyk (Helena) and Stina-Britta Melander (Titania). These are all fine performances.
What of the musical flavour of the Hamburg Dream? It is true that the Oberon, Gerhard Stolze (who sang Mime in the Covent Garden Ring last year), has to divide the part between two separate vocal colours, tenor and falsetto. But he disposes his falsetto so as almost entirely to avoid making the change within a particular phrase, and he is a sound musician; the music of Oberon remains characteristic and beautiful in his performance. It is also true that the fairies are sung by women. This has caused a wail of protest. But the loss in musical authenticity is partly offset by the gain in dramatic vividness (the Hamburg fairies inhabit the stage with much more ease and conviction). And besides, though Britten obviously prefers the timbre of boys' voices and composes for it, he intended his opera for German as well as English theatres and must therefore have envisaged this second best (the Ceremony of Carols is an earlier Britten work that specifies the alternative of female voices) and have had greater confidence in the vitality of his music than some of his more fastidious admirers have shown. The fairies' music is still marvellous even when performed by women, and is also none the worse for all the thirds in `On the ground' being sung in tune.
Indeed, at its worst, the Hamburg performance does Britten a service by proving, to my satis- faction at least, the durability of the music, its strength to survive in all weathers. But it has done more than this. In some ways unsubtle, unidiomatic, sometimes even dull, missing in- sights that the composer's presence gave to the English performances, Leopold Ludwig's con- ducting at Hamburg has yet contributed some- thing to our knowledge of the work. Often his tempo is too slack, particularly in the scenes with Puck (though here he may have been restricted by a trumpeter with nothing like the brilliance of the admirable Mr. Harry Dilley, first trumpet of the Covent Garden Orchestra); his broader, denser orchestral colours spread a haze which blurs and softens the glittering sound-world of the London performances. Yet for all Solti's mastery, there was a note that was missing from his interpretation of the score, a note of warmth, compassion, tenderness, that is heard most strongly in Herr Ludwig's conducting of the lovers' music—music which now seems to me quite cleared of the charge of thinness and lack of distinction. In his more leisurely, relaxed (and sometimes pedestrian) way Herr Ludwig has almost added another dimension to our aware- ness of the score. Some German critics have complained that Britten has only illustrated Shakespeare and not re-created it in terms of great- opera. But to me, after Hamburg, A Mid- summer Night's Dream is a deeper work. more rich in meaning, more universal in appeal.
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