Opera
Mathis der Maier (Royal Opera) Moses and Aron (Het Muziektheater, Amsterdam) Werther (English Touring Opera)
Visual mayhem
Rupert Christiansen
There are moments when one experi- ences something in an opera house which takes one's breath away — and I don't mean being transported on wings of song. What got me the other night was the wan- ton aesthetic outrage, the sheer gratuitous atrocity of the way Peter Sellars had wilful- ly arranged for surtitles to desecrate his new production of Hindemith's Mathis der Maier at Covent Garden. I cannot imagine why the management — the police, the armed forces — had not put a stop to it.
I have no objection to surtitles in normal circumstances, but in this case the screen above the stage was darkened to the point that one could hardly read what was being projected; meanwhile, the text was simulta- neously being flashed ticker-tape style across a semi-opaque glass panel which backs George Tsypin's set. Three television monitors also burbled away above and below, and further almost indecipherable filmed images were shown on the panel. It amounted to complete visual mayhem, entirely baffling, distracting and infuriat- ing. I suppose Sellers thought he was mak- ing some blah-di-blah McLuhanesque statement about communication in an age of intense technology, but I failed to see what relevance this was to the opera. I'm not joking, I nearly stood up and screamed. Otherwise, this tiresome enfant terrible seemed to me to have created a production of staggeringly grey dullness. As usual with Sellars, the action was updated to the here- and-now — as though audiences are all too stupid to understand or to feel the reality of the past. Hindemith's complex libretto, written in the early Nazi period and medi- tating on an artist's responsibility at a time of extreme social crisis, is a complex one, and nothing was gained by removing it from its original 16th-century setting. In fact, I felt it lost any resonance at all, either to now, the 1930s or the 1520s. I didn't get any sense of the protagonist (based on the painter Matthias Grunwald) as an artist, nor did anything tell me that wars of religion and political passion were engulfing his world. For all his blustering insistence that he wanted to make the piece `empathetic', Sellars has done nothing to illuminate or clarify Mathis der Maier. If anything, he has obscured it.
Given my response to the staging, I found it impossible to concentrate on the music or form any coherent view of the opera's merits, although I guess it's a bit short on charm (even Parsifal needs its Flower Maidens). When I shut my eyes, I felt it was being quite ravishingly conduct- ed by Esa-Pekka Salonen, who brought to the music all the warmth and clarity that the staging signally lacked. The orchestra played for him like angels. Alan Titus made an uncharismatic Mathis, but there was committed singing from Inga Nielsen and Christina Oelze as the women in his life, as well as a strong cameo from Thomas Young as the rebel leader Schwalb. In all, a deeply frustrating occa- sion.
Anything staged by Peter Stein com- mands a certain level of respect, but I was disappointed by his approach to Schoen- berg's Moses and Aron, which has just fin- ished its first run in Amsterdam and will transfer next summer to Salzburg. This is a work which does not fit comfortably into the operatic canon. Even more than Mathis der Maier, its massive austerity reminds me of a great blank wall, without a chink, with- out a human face — not an oratorio quite, but an argument rather than a drama.
Unlike Hans Neugebauer, whose power- fully minimal production I reported on a few years back at New York City Opera, Stein boldly tries to animate the action and give it a reality it doesn't altogether feel comfortable with. In particular, he asks the huge chorus to run around the desert responding to the persuasions of their eponymous leaders. Unfortunately, the poor dears can't rise above the lower depths of coarse acting and repeatedly bump into bathos — we would all have been happier had they been allowed to stand still in serried ranks. Then there's the problem of the orgy around the Golden Calf. Let me just say that the goings-on in Amsterdam were quite unlike anything I've ever seen in Streatham of a Saturday, but Stein must be given credit for meticulously following Schoenberg's stage directions, bloody sacrifices and all. The scenes of monologue or dialogue, well acted by David Pittman-Jennings (Moses) and well sung by Chris Merritt (Aron), generate more conviction. Karl-Ernst Herrmann's striking set is dominated by banks of daz- zling white light and zigzag flashes of orange neon. The conductor is Boulez, incontrovertibly in absolute control of the score and its inexorable logic and stern complexity.
There is one very good reason to catch English Touring Opera's otherwise rather dim production of Massenet's Werther (it visits the Theatres Royal in York and Bath between now and 9 December), and that is the presence in the cast of Sarah Connolly. This remarkable young mezzo-soprano sings the role of Charlotte with an edge of fierce passion which recall the sainted Dame Janet Baker. There was attention to words, too, and a compelling stage pres- ence to complement the focused strength and beauty of the voice. If I was a gambling man, I'd put money on Miss Connolly.
Early Greek adventure playground
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