Music
Berlin trio
Robin Holloway
0 n holiday for a week visiting Berlin for the first time, it was impossible to resist sampling all the city's three opera houses. Reporting on them must be less a regular review than a sort of restaurant column (for a genre dubbed 'culinary' by Brecht), dipping in unwoo'd by smiling publicists, ascertaining the state of the house as it actually stands, unbeglamoured by the excitement of a new production on its first night. I took pot-luck and didn't even have programmes giving names of singers, pro- ducers, conductors. A genuine innocent abroad.
The fare at all three was unexceptional. It's a fact of life that the jam always seems to be yesterday and tomorrow, but one doesn't need to travel so far as Berlin to catch Aida, Flying Dutchman, Rosenkavalier! Nor what I settled for as most convenient to other arrangements, the Staatsoper's Freischtitz and the Magic Flute on two successive evenings, at the Deutsches Oper and the Komisches Oper respectively. Masterpieces all but hardly rarities.
Weber's evergreen pastoral first saw the light at the Schauspielhaus within a few minutes' walk of its contemporary, the Staatsoper on Unter den Linden. It's curi- ous that this germinal source for every sub- sequent hunting-horn and horror-filled Romantic German forest, telling an heroic fairy tale polarising primal innocence with primal evil, should have come to birth in the epoch and place that still represents the genius of neo-classicism in its purest severi- ty. Without, all is disciplined geometry in the Berlin of circa 1820; within, all is sensi- bility and yearning. The characters and sit- uations in this picturesque period-piece can with unloving treatment seem not only slight but slightly silly. Yet the score has a classic authenticity, tapping with involun- tary power the currents of national feeling in number after number, that deftly touch- es base with never a false note.
In this performance this was true too of the orchestra, on this week's sampling the most disciplined of the three, distinguished especially by the sweetness of its principal woodwinds. But it cannot altogether be said for the production. The domestic scenes shone with the music's own lucent gentleness. But rustic and sylvan settings were stiff and harsh, the forest presented an oppressive palisade rather than the realm of liberty in all its inviting ambiguity. And the supernatural element was frankly kitsch — slinky ministresses of evil, naked male chests dimly perceived through clouds of dry ice, oceans of ketchup daubed upon the hero from a handy haunch of venison. No fiery wagon-wheels or screeching night- birds! Bring back the gothic trimmings! Instead, bargain-basement irony as the final joyful resolution was undercut by hav- ing Agathe return to a now emptied stage to find her Max, head in hands, over- whelmed by despairing guilt at his diabolic pact which, for all that it has been cleansed by text and music alike, is plainly destined to blast their life together for ever after.
So to the successive Magic Flutes. The Deutsches Oper (the former West Berlin house) is a building to sink your heart and make you unglad to be alive. From the foy- ers and landings — vast dead spaces in `natural' colour where the human form divine is debased into specimens on an architect's board — to the gaping hole of the auditorium, which needs all the camels, elephants, pyramids it can get. But despite the Egyptian setting Zaubeiflote is an inti- mate work, taking badly to any attempt at aggrandisement. They tried to close the gap by having most of Papageno's comic business emerge from the pit to play on the narrow causeway separating it from the front row of the stalls. The engaging singer's gallant sallies at audience-rapport were weighed down by leaden routines and fatal slowness.
Behind him, on stage, all was lavish yet pedestrian. A colossal dinosaur-serpent was (wo)manned by the Queen of the Night's majorettes; Sarastro's followers toiled en masse over Nilus's slimy fields; tricks galore with neon and laser — no expense spared, failing wholly to enchant or surprise. The Queen had no high note, Sarastro no low, both disappointing at just the places to which any audience legiti- mately strains.
No other singer was even negatively memorable. The orchestra was satisfactory by routine. The dispatch with which two magic-bell players (typically wasteful) dis- appeared after their last twinkling moments, could be sensed in the whole band. The conductor had earlier shown similar impatience by cutting repeats in the sublime little 'Masonic March', thereby sav- ing perhaps one minute, but leaving one with amputated ears. Zaubetflote is at once a pantomime that has delighted its audi- ences ever since the 1790s, and a mysteri- ous allegory that has fascinated a noble succession of creative minds from Goethe onwards. This production tries for and utterly vulgarises both.
Such a joyless evening needed the cor- rective that the Komisches Oper next day largely supplied. Here a concrete bunker is merely the shell of an interior with great visual fun — plenty of mirrors and gold, and absurd statues struggling in stucco with umbrellas, pythons, mandolins, to support the ceiling; twisty rococo to bring a smile to the spirit and set the mood right for Mozart's subversive explorations of it.
The production's accent was Spanish rather than Egyptian'. The basic decor of chunky façades spinning on revolves could have served better still for Don Giovanni. Thebes was invoked for the three temples, but Sarastro's sect turned out to be Quaker or Jansenist, liberally decked in bowlers and tricornes. The master himself sported a long Napoleonic cape, and presided over board meetings like Parsifal on Wall Street.
The Queen his counterpart appeared as a Madonna complete with high altar, while Papagena before her transformation into buxom young Frau looked like Mother Courage as dressed by Kathe Kollwitz. This feckless and exuberant eclecticism accorded well with the patchwork of into- nations which makes up the music itself. Even while pantomime miracles were given their head, nothing was vulgarised into glitz.
The three boys were delicious in close- harmony, adding tender depths of com- radely solicitude to the near-suicide scenes first with Pamina, then Papageno. Earlier, his jokes and audience-familiarity caused ripples of fun not embarrassment. Indeed the only twinge came, as with Freischiitz, right at the end, unsanctioned. by text or character or, what matters still more, by the transparent self-evidence of the music. Her ordeals passed, night banished by sud- den sunburst, yet Pamina rejects the yoke of firm loving husbandry, to commence her marriage on a note of confrontational aggression. Will they never learn?
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