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| Four Operas in Berlin Bring the Drama Down to Human Size | Four Operas in Berlin Bring the Drama Down to Human Size |
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| BERLIN — For sheer quantity of opera, few cities can rival Berlin, which has three major companies to serve a population of 3.5 million. The current season is even more eventful than usual: The Staatsoper, which tends to attract the most star singers of the three, has returned to its newly renovated theater after a seven-year exile. The more feisty Komische Oper is celebrating its 70th anniversary. And the Deutsche Oper continues to unearth unusual repertory in the western part of Berlin. | BERLIN — For sheer quantity of opera, few cities can rival Berlin, which has three major companies to serve a population of 3.5 million. The current season is even more eventful than usual: The Staatsoper, which tends to attract the most star singers of the three, has returned to its newly renovated theater after a seven-year exile. The more feisty Komische Oper is celebrating its 70th anniversary. And the Deutsche Oper continues to unearth unusual repertory in the western part of Berlin. |
| But after a week seeing new productions at all three opera houses, led by some of Europe’s most renowned stage directors, I was struck by the lack of grandeur on display. Two war horses, “Tristan und Isolde” and “Salome,” and two obscurities, “Das Wunder der Heliane” and “Blaubart,” tended, for better and worse, to cut the mythical and mystical down to human size. | But after a week seeing new productions at all three opera houses, led by some of Europe’s most renowned stage directors, I was struck by the lack of grandeur on display. Two war horses, “Tristan und Isolde” and “Salome,” and two obscurities, “Das Wunder der Heliane” and “Blaubart,” tended, for better and worse, to cut the mythical and mystical down to human size. |
| These scores are decadent, late-Romantic monsters — except for the goofy “Blaubart,” which mocks such seriousness. They are full of so much rich orchestration and abstract philosophizing as to collectively cause indigestion. But while audiences could luxuriate in all the excess, the directors seemed to be searching for something more intimate. | These scores are decadent, late-Romantic monsters — except for the goofy “Blaubart,” which mocks such seriousness. They are full of so much rich orchestration and abstract philosophizing as to collectively cause indigestion. But while audiences could luxuriate in all the excess, the directors seemed to be searching for something more intimate. |
| The Staatsoper still excels musically, first and foremost. At “Tristan” last Sunday, the company’s director, Daniel Barenboim, led an orchestral performance of formidable dramatic weight and conviction. The theater’s renovation hasn’t solved a problematic acoustic; the sound is raw and unblended. But that wasn’t entirely a bad thing for this most interior of scores. | The Staatsoper still excels musically, first and foremost. At “Tristan” last Sunday, the company’s director, Daniel Barenboim, led an orchestral performance of formidable dramatic weight and conviction. The theater’s renovation hasn’t solved a problematic acoustic; the sound is raw and unblended. But that wasn’t entirely a bad thing for this most interior of scores. |
| Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging presents a diffuse, meandering psychodrama. His sets locate the story in a world of heartless one-percenters, one in which Isolde’s anger — and, eventually, her love — registers as a ray of emotional light. The details, however, don’t seem to have been fully worked out, such as video snippets that hint at a traumatic event in Tristan’s childhood. (By Act 3 he is stumbling around an abandoned dacha, accompanied by his parents’ ghosts.) | Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging presents a diffuse, meandering psychodrama. His sets locate the story in a world of heartless one-percenters, one in which Isolde’s anger — and, eventually, her love — registers as a ray of emotional light. The details, however, don’t seem to have been fully worked out, such as video snippets that hint at a traumatic event in Tristan’s childhood. (By Act 3 he is stumbling around an abandoned dacha, accompanied by his parents’ ghosts.) |
| Wagner’s own ideal of aesthetic unity would seem to doom to failure Mr. Tcherniakov’s and Mr. Barenboim’s disparate approaches. While I found neither music nor staging completely satisfying, there was something appealing in their friction, the overheated music and the conviction of Anja Kampe and Andreas Schager as the central duo warming Mr. Tcherniakov’s chilly interiors. | Wagner’s own ideal of aesthetic unity would seem to doom to failure Mr. Tcherniakov’s and Mr. Barenboim’s disparate approaches. While I found neither music nor staging completely satisfying, there was something appealing in their friction, the overheated music and the conviction of Anja Kampe and Andreas Schager as the central duo warming Mr. Tcherniakov’s chilly interiors. |
| “Tristan” (which had its premiere in 1865), with its intense chromaticism and eroticism, begot a series of even more lurid operas, including “Salome” (1905), which Hans Neuenfels has directed for the Staatsoper. It portrays the ancient court of Judea as a repressed Addams family, with goth touches, but avoids any conspicuous moralizing or whiff of Christian salvation. | “Tristan” (which had its premiere in 1865), with its intense chromaticism and eroticism, begot a series of even more lurid operas, including “Salome” (1905), which Hans Neuenfels has directed for the Staatsoper. It portrays the ancient court of Judea as a repressed Addams family, with goth touches, but avoids any conspicuous moralizing or whiff of Christian salvation. |
| If you do want salvation, you need to head to the Deutsche Oper for a rare outing of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Das Wunder der Heliane,” from 1927. The logical end point of the decadence of “Tristan” and “Salome,” it travels even further down the road of chromaticism and sensationalism, with much of the sweeping drama of Korngold’s later film music (“Anthony Adverse,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood”). | If you do want salvation, you need to head to the Deutsche Oper for a rare outing of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Das Wunder der Heliane,” from 1927. The logical end point of the decadence of “Tristan” and “Salome,” it travels even further down the road of chromaticism and sensationalism, with much of the sweeping drama of Korngold’s later film music (“Anthony Adverse,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood”). |
| The plot concerns a messianic Stranger who arrives and brings what the libretto euphemistically terms “love” to a tyrannical Ruler’s oppressive land. The Ruler’s wife, Heliane (the smoky-voiced soprano Sara Jakubiak), falls for the Stranger, first stripping for him and then eventually resurrecting him from the dead (the “miracle” of the title) to prove her own purity. | The plot concerns a messianic Stranger who arrives and brings what the libretto euphemistically terms “love” to a tyrannical Ruler’s oppressive land. The Ruler’s wife, Heliane (the smoky-voiced soprano Sara Jakubiak), falls for the Stranger, first stripping for him and then eventually resurrecting him from the dead (the “miracle” of the title) to prove her own purity. |
| The opera is a kitschy, exploitative sanctification of monogamy cloaked in gorgeous music, and Marc Albrecht conducted the Deutsche Oper orchestra with lush colors and outstanding sensitivity to the singers, even in the thickest passages. But the director, Christof Loy, stages this luridness with his typical restraint. Johannes Leiacker’s set is a plain courtroom; the dystopia seems to have doomed everyone to identical suits and cocktail dresses. | The opera is a kitschy, exploitative sanctification of monogamy cloaked in gorgeous music, and Marc Albrecht conducted the Deutsche Oper orchestra with lush colors and outstanding sensitivity to the singers, even in the thickest passages. But the director, Christof Loy, stages this luridness with his typical restraint. Johannes Leiacker’s set is a plain courtroom; the dystopia seems to have doomed everyone to identical suits and cocktail dresses. |
| As with Mr. Tcherniakov’s “Tristan,” Mr. Loy’s austerity stands in sharp contrast to a ripe score. The eventual return of joy, love and happiness doesn’t get so much as a special lighting cue. The staging is so vague as to be toothless; this opera demands a stronger interpretive hand. It is tasteful in a way the opera is not. | As with Mr. Tcherniakov’s “Tristan,” Mr. Loy’s austerity stands in sharp contrast to a ripe score. The eventual return of joy, love and happiness doesn’t get so much as a special lighting cue. The staging is so vague as to be toothless; this opera demands a stronger interpretive hand. It is tasteful in a way the opera is not. |
| The Komische Oper offered a tart dessert to all this richness in the form of Offenbach’s operetta “Blaubart,” a comic take on the old tale of Duke Bluebeard and his serial marriages that parodies Wagnerian seriousness. While rarely produced, it is a signature piece for the Komische Oper, whose founder, Walter Felsenstein, directed a production that was popular in the 1960s and ’70s. | |
| The director Stefan Herheim has produced a kind of intellectual “Spamalot.” The show alternates cancan dances with interpolated allegorical figures of love and death arguing about the meaning of life and theater; numerous tributes to the Felsenstein production; and an aggressively updated libretto full of topical humor at the expense of Berlin’s perpetually disastrous construction projects. At its best, it’s anarchic fun, but at three and a half hours it tends to drag, particularly when the music stops. (The performance is streaming on the website Operavision.) | The director Stefan Herheim has produced a kind of intellectual “Spamalot.” The show alternates cancan dances with interpolated allegorical figures of love and death arguing about the meaning of life and theater; numerous tributes to the Felsenstein production; and an aggressively updated libretto full of topical humor at the expense of Berlin’s perpetually disastrous construction projects. At its best, it’s anarchic fun, but at three and a half hours it tends to drag, particularly when the music stops. (The performance is streaming on the website Operavision.) |
| One of the operetta’s greatest assets is its heroine, Boulotte, a lusty peasant who is a welcome antidote to the eternal feminine embodied by Isolde and Heliane. In this version, she and her fellow wives haven’t been killed but are in hiding. They go on a crusade for revenge against Bluebeard — singing, in the updated titles, “crush his balls” — but the operetta lets Bluebeard off easy, demanding only repentance before forgiving him. | One of the operetta’s greatest assets is its heroine, Boulotte, a lusty peasant who is a welcome antidote to the eternal feminine embodied by Isolde and Heliane. In this version, she and her fellow wives haven’t been killed but are in hiding. They go on a crusade for revenge against Bluebeard — singing, in the updated titles, “crush his balls” — but the operetta lets Bluebeard off easy, demanding only repentance before forgiving him. |
| I wanted a more robust treatment of gender — in 2018, especially — from a production whose staging of corruption and power is quite sharp. But this failure is, sadly, perhaps the staging’s most realistic element. | I wanted a more robust treatment of gender — in 2018, especially — from a production whose staging of corruption and power is quite sharp. But this failure is, sadly, perhaps the staging’s most realistic element. |
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