In all 51 institutions participated in the marathon-like event, presenting full and truncated programs that ranged from African drumming to Verdi and Mozart to cabaret to political satire to clubbing.

(Below: A map of participating venues and how to get there)

Tickets for the evening were a meager 15 Euros, which included transportation via a fleet of shuttle buses that zipped from north to south and east to west - and were consistantly packed all evening long.

I began my evening at the Staatsoper unter den Linden (see image below), where crowds a thousand strong were waiting to see a program of excerpts from the Magic Flute (Zauberflöte) that was performed on the hour. The crowds and queues I encountered at the Staatsoper were harbingers of things to come: the staggering turn-out made this particular “Long Night” a logistical nightmare.

By dint of pure luck, I managed to talk my way into the first tier of the theater, where I stood and enjoyed an obstructed view of the performance - though, in truth, I was more interested in observing the enthusiastic audience and the thunderous applause they gave to Papageno and the Queen of the Night.

Afterwards, I walked to the nearby Komische Oper, where that evening’s performance of Traviata was being projected outside for the benefit of a crowd fressing themselves with Bratwurst and pretzels in the soothing spring evening.

The mob in front of the KOB was even more impressive than at the Staatsoper. No one seemed to have much of an idea of what was in store for them. This turned out to be a selection of Verdi marches and arias performed in the foyer by a “Salon Orchestra” and KOB ensemble members.

The salon orchestra “Illusion” plays a light Verdi medley

Soprano Erika Roos sings “Merche diletta amiche”from I Vespri Siciliani

Meanwhile, in the baroque opera house itself, a baffling DJ set / lightshow was taking place. Most seemed as confused as I was by DJ Jürgen Grözinger, who was spinning opera LPs while drenched in a blue light.

After an ill-fated attempt at seeing a Bulgakov play at the Maxim-Gorki theater, I sallied forth to the Admiralspalast for a preview of the German version of Mel Brooks’ musical “The Producers,” which makes its début at that theater in mid-May.

It is forbidden by German law to display Nazi insignias anywhere outside of an educational or dramatic setting. Unfortunately, there’s no dispensation for satire, which means no swastika armbands or dancing in formation during the classic “Springtime for Hitler” number. In place of swastikas the actors wear red-black-and-white armbands with pretzels on them.

(Below: girls in the theater lobby in stereotypical German dress promote “The Producers”)

The program at the Admiralspalast kicked off with an effectively schmaltzy band that performed a “Berlin Revue” that included a suitably nostalgic and mushy performance of “Du gehst durch all meine Träume.”

1941’s “Du gehst durch all meine Träume”at the Admiralspalast

The principle cast members of “The Producers” were introduced and performed some scenes of dialogue and music from the show. Cornelius Obonya uncannily channeled Nathan Lane as Max Bialystock. Andreas Bieber made a less winning impression with his annoyingly whiny Leo Bloom. Herbert Steinböck made Franz Liebkin into a lovable (psychotic) dope and had the audience in stiches during some Chaplinesque double talk (Hear audio excerpt below). And Bettina Mönch was a delightful ditz as the Swedish bombshell Ulla.

Audio except of a scene from the Berlin production of”The Producers”

Ulla (Bettina Mönch) sings “When You’ve Got It, Flaunt It”

Max (Cornelius Obonya) and Leo (Andreas Bieber) sing “We Can Do It”

Next door to the Admiralspalast is the Kabaret Distel, which performs political satire (get those images of Joel Grey out of your head). On exiting the Producers preview, I somehow got swept into the Distel’s performance of “Jenseits von Angela” (a none-too-clever pun on the German title of Isaak Dinesen’s memoir), which - judging from the audience’s reactions - must have been wickedly funny, though I understood precious little aside from easy puns and slapstick.

(Below: The Distel Kabaret)

At the beginning of the evening, six hours had sounded to me far too short a time period to enjoy such a cultural smörgåsbord (those accent marks are courtesy of spell check, not me!). With the evening nearly at an end (it was close to one a.m.) I was starting to get exhausted. Still, I felt I should milk the evening for all it was worth and, so, found myself at 12:50 riding the last shuttle bus #5 into Tiergarten - Berlin’s central park - to the famed Tipi der Zelt. Tipi is a throwback to the good old days of Berlin nightclub culture. In a city that is very suspect of nostalgia, the roaring 20s is practically the only epoch of the 20th century that people continue to romanticize. (Is there really much else to be proud of?)

I arrived just in time to catch the final number in a colorful and campy drag show: an irreverent and batty conclusion to my very full evening.

(Below: drag show at Tipi der Zelt)

Originally published at http://forward.com/articles/104963/.

—

“An artist, especially a Jewish artist, cannot remain neutral in these times. He cannot escape to still lifes, abstractions and experiments.” These words, uttered in 1934, belong to Polish-Jewish illustrator and political caricaturist Arthur Szyk (1894–1951).

As one of World War II’s most widely circulated propagandists, he fought the National Socialist regime and the Axis powers with all the venom his pen and brush could muster. Once ubiquitous, Szyk has fallen into near-total obscurity since his death more than half a century ago. Now, he’s experiencing an unexpected rehabilitation.

After successful exhibits of Szyk’s work in Washington, D.C., and Berlin, the artist returns to New York for the first time in more than 30 years. “Arthur Szyk: Illuminated New York” is on view until April 26 at the Broome Street Gallery in SoHo and is the latest contribution to the rediscovery of this once ever-present but now largely forgotten artist. The exhibit offers a chance to reassess Szyk’s legacy by showing his powers as a propagandist, cartoonist, illustrator and illuminator of manuscripts.

Szyk (pronounced “Shick”) in an artist whose work is recognizable, even if his name isn’t. Even in America, where he achieved his greatest measure of success, only a fraction of the true Szyk has been passed down to us, mostly via his intricate illuminated Haggadah and several illustrated books (Hans Christian Andersen’s “Fairy Tales” and Mother Goose’s stories — both of which are still in print). Aside from exhibits organized in the past decade by the Arthur Szyk Society in Burlingame, Calif., Szyk’s name and much of his work have remained in obscurity since his death.

Szyk was born in Lodz, then a part of the Russian Empire, to an upper-middle-class family. Though his household was a secular one, Szyk grew up surrounded by the heroic stories of the Bible. His father, the owner of a textile factory, was blinded by an irate worker during 1905’s Lodz insurrection. He supported his son’s desire to be an artist and funded his art education in Paris. While honing his stills at the Académie Julian, the young artist submitted political drawings to papers back in Lodz, the first of which was published when Szyk was 16. During his subsequent studies in Krakow, Szyk developed a political consciousness that was influenced by his teacher, Teodor Axentowicz, the Polish nationalist painter and illustrator. As a contributor to the satirical Polish journal Smeich, Szyk drew on themes of antisemitism, worker abuse and the German militarism. During this time, he also became active in the Jewish intellectual scene. He was on a study trip to Palestine, organized by a Jewish cultural organization, when war broke out in 1914. After serving in World War I on the German Front, Szyk returned to Paris, where he exhibited and established himself primarily as a commercial artist. His highly detailed and ornamented style, reminiscent of medieval miniatures and illuminated manuscripts, attracted many patrons, among them Orientalists and antiquarians.

One striking work from the Paris period is “The Scribe” (1927). In the painting, an old man in medieval garb sits at a desk, writing a Dadaist poem in dense, near-impenetrable German on a parchment scroll, with a modern pen. Out a window behind him is a modernist landscape with a highway and a plane overhead. The image is awash is decoration and detail. The main figure stares directly at the viewer, with deep, pendulous eyes. His purple-and-blue robe is offset by an oriental breastplate and a medallion. Behind him is a brick wall, fat cherubs smoking pipes, a dollar bill, a medieval tapestry, a cubist painting with the name “Picasso” written across it. Like the various objects depicted, the painting itself is a fascinating synthesis of the old and the new. The over-saturation of symbols, along with the collagelike composition of disparate elements, brings to mind surrealism, while the grotesque style is reminiscent both of the Neue Sachlichkeit and the works of Bosch and Bruegel. With his oddball synthesis of ancient techniques and modern themes, Szyk deliberately uses medieval and renaissance styles to comment on the present age.

But it is Szyk’s impassioned political art that looms large. These fierce, persuasive works led Eleanor Roosevelt to call Szyk a “one-man army” against Hitler. In addition to savage caricatures of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, Szyk rendered images of Nazi brutality that he hoped would raise awareness of the Holocaust. (A 1941 drawing depicting a heap of Jewish victims is eerily reminiscent of photos that would later emerge from Auschwitz.) The intricate detail Szyk includes in every face brings a heightened sense of immediacy to the tragedy. This same profound attention to details characterizes all of Szyk’s work, drawing us closer and closer, despite our revulsion at what is being depicted.

As early as 1933, Szyk caricatured Hitler in a variety of guises: Attila the Hun, a gangster complete with fedora and Tommy gun, and a crazed buffoon with stubble and patched clothing. He also depicted Göring as a Cossack and Goebbels as a skunk. In an undated sketch (probably from 1933), Szyk portrayed Hitler as A pharaoh, anticipating a theme that would become dominant in his work — the situation of the Nazi regime along a historical continuum of antisemitism. In “The Scroll of Esther” (1950), the book of Tanach describing Haman’s plot to annihilate the Jews, he depicts Haman wearing a swastika. He represents the wicked son of the Haggadah as a fully assimilated German Jew with Bavarian feather hat, leather boots and gloves, riding whip and Hitler mustache. Another dazzling watercolor, “Wagner” shows the famously antisemitic composer seated at an upright piano. Out of the instrument bursts a grim cornucopia of Nazi head honchos, Valkyries, a skeleton in Prussian military garb, warplanes, tanks and high notes that are literally screaming.

Perhaps Szyk’s best-known work is his lavishly illuminated Haggadah, for which he drew on the rich tradition of ornamented Haggadot that dates from the 13th century and flourished in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Work on the 48 full-color pages occupied him from 1934 to 1940. Originally, he included Nazi symbols in the illustrations to establish a link between the oppression in Egypt and Nazism, but he was urged by his British publisher to paint over them for the final version. The Haggadah includes a dedication to King George VI, which can be read as a cry for help on behalf of the European Jewry: “At the feet of your most gracious majesty I humbly lay these works of my hands, shewing forth the afflictions of my people Israel.” As in much of his Judaica work, Szyk is interested here in reinterpreting the past to make it relevant to the present. On display in the Broome Street exhibit is the new edition of the Szyk Haggadah, recently published by Irvin Ungar, the leading authority on the artist.

Szyk’s work in Paris and London won him considerable fame, and the artist arrived in America in 1940, amid rumors that the Nazis had put a price on his head. It was in this country that he enjoyed the most prestige and influence. In addition to numerous one-man shows in New York and Philadelphia, his work ran in many large-circulation magazines, including Collier’s, Esquire and Time, and was displayed on U.S. Army bases, in military publications and in public office buildings. He drew commercial advertisements for the war effort, and they appeared in major newspapers, a Manhattan telephone directory and a billboard in Times Square. Esquire reported that his political art was more popular with soldiers than with pinup girls. Szyk was everywhere, and even the intelligentsia took notice. “Just as we turn back to Hogarth and Goya for the living images of their age, so our decedents will turn back to Arthur Szyk for the most graphic history of Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini,” Pulitzer Prize winning critic Carl Van Doren wrote of Szyk’s work shortly after the war. “Here is the damning essence of what has happened; here is the piercing summary of what men have thought and felt.”

The sense of moral outrage that inspired his WWII work never left Szyk, and he did not remain silent in the face of perceived injustices in his adoptive countries, Britain and the United States. The same anger that provoked Szyk to attack fascism led him to openly criticize policies of the governments that he supported. Some works that date from his years in England condemn British policy in Palestine, including the White Paper and what he saw as pandering to the Arab League in the interest of oil.

Szyk lauded America’s fight against global fascism and fervently supported the democracy and tolerance of his adoptive country. But he was not blasé or blind to those aspects of America that were less attractive. In addition to his idealized portraits of American presidents and illuminated versions of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, he produced works that attacked segregation and racism in America. A postwar drawing depicts a black war veteran on his knees as two Klansmen wait in the background with rifles. Another drawing ridicules the paranoia of the McCarthy era by suggesting that anyone who had red blood and a heart left of center was a communist. Szyk was himself under investigation from the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, four months before he died of a heart attack, though few details of the investigation are known.

So what accounts for Szyk’s fall into obscurity? Encountering Szyk today, one can postulate several factors. His work was very much of its time, and often bound up with the war effort. Szyk also didn’t live long enough to evolve new periods and styles. Most centrally, perhaps, is the lack of subtlety in much of his work. Like all caricaturists, he works with types and visual shorthand that, for all the intricacy of the drawings, grow tired after a while. But it often seems that Szyk’s imagination was inversely proportional to his sense of nuance. When Szyk found a suitable symbol or metaphor, he stuck with it. He drew endless variations on a few choice themes. Perhaps this would not be so much a problem were it not for the lack of movement in his work. For all their busyness, his drawings and paintings are surprisingly static. His was essentially the art of illustration, and his posthumous reputation was made at a time when the illustrator’s art was held with less esteem than it was in Hogarth’s day. Amid the radical upheavals and challenges that came with art of the late 20th century, Szyk and his archaic language have been largely ignored. His work’s evident combination of stasis and lack of subtlety has made it difficult to appreciate in an age that values kinesis and shades of gray.

Though agitprop looms large in Szyk’s oeuvre, the artist was no mere propagandist. He eschewed the abstract, densely intellectual trends in modern art in favor of making very clear political statements. The heightened realism and the grotesquerie of his style lent themselves equally to his book illustrations and his later agitprop work. When he saw Europe go up in flames around him, he lashed back with all the venom he could muster, creating forceful, persuasive art that was unapologetically representative. Encountering Szyk today, what emerges from behind the canvas is a master painter and draftsman with unflagging courage, conviction and commitment.

Ungar, who acts as curator of the Arthur Szyk Society, feels it is especially meaningful that Szyk is back in New York with the Broome Street Gallery show. “Almost all of his political art was created by Szyk in New York,” Ungar said. The show features 50 original drawings and paintings, some of which have never before been displayed. “These are powerful works that have never been exhibited before,” Ungar said, “and I’ve brought them to New York.”

One of the few surprises of this year’s Academy Awards ceremony was the snub of Ari Folman’s “Waltz With Bashir,” the animated film about the First Lebanon War that seemed poised to win Israel its first ever statuette for best foreign film. Instead, the Oscar went unexpectedly (some might say inexplicably) to the Japanese film “Departures.”

But despite the Academy’s mysterious selection process, the widespread critical acclaim of “Waltz With Bashir” shows that Israeli cinema is a force to be reckoned with. Both “Bashir” and Joseph Cedar’s “Beaufort” — which snagged an Oscar nod in 2008 — represent the wider prominence of Israeli cinema on the international film scene. Historically neglected, Israeli cinema has seen a renaissance in the past decade, with Israeli films cropping up regularly on the festival circuit, including five at the current Tribeca Film Festival.

Now seems like a good time for a critical re-evaluation of this often neglected national cinema. Enter French-Israeli filmmaker Raphael Nadjari, whose 210-minute-long documentary “A History of Israeli Cinema” enjoyed its world premiere at the 59th International Berlin Film Festival in early February. Astonishingly, the sold-out audience was deterred neither by the running time nor that the film dealt with cinematic artifacts largely unknown outside Israel.

Nadjari, whose 2007 film “Tehilim” screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, divides “A History of Israeli Cinema” into two parts. The first spans the years 1933 to1978, starting with the earliest films made by European Jews in Palestine during the British Mandate. The second part covers the years 1978 to 2005 and examines the wave of films dealing of political issues and the trend toward a more personal approach to cinema.

Nadjari tells the story through interviews with film professionals, critics and intellectuals — including Amos Gitai, Joseph Ceder, Avi Mograbi, Yehuda Ne’eman, Menachem Golan, Moshe Ivgy and Zeev Revach — and extensive use of film clips, which are woven into a kinetic and engaging documentary that invites the audience to share in the process of discovery.

What makes “A History of Israeli Cinema” so successful is the engagement that Nadjari achieves though an almost Talmudic dialectical process — the way that the confluence of voices and visual quotations often refer back to and reflect each other. In the film, Nadjari eschews narration and remains hidden behind his sources. In person, however, he is eminently talkative.

Nadjari arrives late for our meeting, dressed casually in black. His sympathetic face is set off by a short coif, and light beard and rectangular black-rimmed eyeglasses. Nadjari carefully measures his words and speaks in eloquent — if not always grammatically flawless — English with lilting accents of French and Hebrew.

Nadjari was hardly an expert on the subject of Israeli cinema when the French TV channel ARTE approached him about making the film. And he never imagined that the finished product would end up running three-and-a-half hours. As Nadjari plunged into a full exploration, the format of his film changed. “It became the story of our gaze, our look on things, he said. You share in the development of our own consciousness.”

From the beginning, Nadjari wanted his film to be analytic. “The film is not a showcase. To me, the Israeli cinema is like an invitation to think about the function of cinema,” he explained. “Should cinema continue to raise all the questions of man, of woman, social, ethical, ethnical, religious, non-religious? It’s amazing to see the high quality of debate in a cinema, which is much more interesting because it is kind of the way our imagination works, and is sometimes not quite conscious.” One walks away from Nadjari’s film amazed that Israeli cinema is such an open forum for multiple viewpoints and perspectives, given the country’s never-ending religious, ethical and geopolitical conflicts.

While we never get to hear Nadjari’s opinion explicitly in his film, his guidance is evident in the care with which he weaves together interviews and archival footage. He sees himself as mostly glossing the terms of the debate and attempting a definition. “Probably I’m trying to make a pshat,” he said, referring to a method that Bible scholars use to understand the text. “Trying to define things is trying to disambiguate and to show the complexity.”

In the course of the film, filmmakers and scholars sit around, debating terms and fighting to reinvent definitions. “Whatever is in motion, whatever doesn’t have a form, is always reinventing itself. That’s what’s unique about it.” Nadjari said: “These films are crazy. They are leftovers of fictions that can’t negotiate to build a national history. It’s so interesting to see how deconstructive all this is. Like every time you want to have an idea, it gets deconstructed. Next time you have an idea, it goes in debate.” This constant flux of a national art form that continually struggles to find its identity makes Nadjari’s subject elusive. In keeping with this sentiment, Nadjari urges that his film is not the definitive history of Israeli cinema: “To me, this film is a step in the research.”

Nadjari says that the technical aspects of Israeli filmmaking have often overshadowed the issues the films themselves raised. “We’re talking about the build-up of a conscience,” the filmmaker continued, “on a place that struggles to find its ethic. So it’s really interesting in the sense that we see a cinematography that some people could call boring — but in fact they didn’t see it, because people, when they go to films, are obsessed with efficiency.” He compares Uri Zohar’s classic “Hole in the Moon” to the work of French film pioneer George Méliès, a director whose appeal exceeds the craft of his films: “It’s not well written, it’s not well said. But it’s so beautiful.”

The historical fact that Israel missed out on the chance to pioneer the art of film is crucial for Nadjari, who says that Israeli cinema was aware from the first that it could not be original. But this late start was far from a disadvantage; it just created new opportunities. “If Israeli cinema could not be original, it tried to become exemplary. And if it couldn’t be exemplary, so it tried to become unique. And if it wasn’t able to be unique, then it tried to expose contradictions,” he explains that the insecurity and restlessness of Israeli film makes it an elusive subject for documenting. “It will always go out of your hand because it has no form and in the end - it will always be original. That’s the funny thing; in the end it will always be exemplary.”

Where does Nadjari sees Israeli cinema heading in the future? “What it clear to me,” he said, “is that Israeli cinema will start again. And in that sense, Israeli cinema will take an extremely different position, contradict completely everything. Israeli cinema was only interesting when it decided to propose a dialectical access to its meaning, in the sense that each filmmaker would enter in the eternal questions of ‘What are we? What should we be? Where are we heading to? Where are we coming from? What is our identity? What is our hope? What is our despair?’” Nadjari explains that the debate of the “function” of Israeli cinema encompasses philosophy, entertainment, nation-building and propaganda.

Nadjari interprets the recent Oscar excitement surrounding “Waltz With Bashir” as illustrating the point. “What does it mean?” he asked rhetorically. “That it’s the definitive achievement of Israeli cinema? But it cannot be this.” This is but another facet of Israeli cinema that makes it so fascinating to observe, this constant rush to produce the definitive statement. “That’s what I like — because these films are each time a breakthrough. Breakthrough after breakthrough.”

A.J. Goldmann

Colette. The name conjures up belle époque Paris in all its glamour, sophistication and decadence. Given Colette’s stature in 20th-century letters, and the fascination that her life continues to exert, it is surprising that so few filmmakers have sought to bring her work to the screen.

Born Sidonie-Gabriele Colette in 1873, Colette was hailed in her day as France’s greatest female writer. She was known equally for her writings — among them the novels in the Claudine series, “The Pure and the Impure” and the libretto to Ravel’s opera “L’Enfant et les Sortileges” — and for her scandalous love life. She didn’t do much to conceal the latter, which in the course of three marriages included countless affairs with men and women, even one with her stepson.

The slender, semiautobiographical volume “Chéri,” which tells of an aging courtesan’s love affair with a 19-year-old boy, is Colette’s best-known novel. It is the prime example of Colette’s prose style, which has been described as impressionistic in reference to its precise, sensual style whose economy also strikes the reader as elliptical.

In the moralistic atmosphere of 1950s Hollywood, it was tricky to present Colette’s account of the risqué demimondaine, and its glorification of the courtesans who relied on wealthy playboys and aristocrats to live in a state of opulence. Minnelli’s solution was to mask the morally problematic content with a color-drenched tribute to fin de siècle Paris re-created with the help of costumer and production designer Cecil Beaton.

The candy-colored Paris of “Gigi” is the world of Renoir, Seurat, Boudin and Toulouse-Lautrec. Minnelli takes much pleasure in conjuring up impressionistic and art nouveau tableaus. These distract us from the parallels between the role of the courtesan and prostitution, creating an imaginary aura of innocence.

Mr. Frears certainly relishes in re-creating this fascinating world, and the several filming locations for “Chéri” include a villa designed and owned by Hector Guimard, who designed the entrances for the Paris Metro, and the legendary Maxim’s restaurant, which was also featured prominently in “Gigi.” But behind the elaborate coiffures, hats and overstuffed sitting rooms, Mr. Frears engages more faithfully with his source material than Minnelli could a half-century ago.

Screenwriter Christopher Hampton was preparing a script about the life of Colette when producer Bill Kenwright asked him to work on “Chéri.” Mr. Hampton was guided by fidelity to the source material, but soon became aware of the challenges in adapting Colette. “If you love a book and you want to adapt it, you want to try and translate the qualities of the book,” Mr. Hampton told me at February’s Berlin Film Festival, where “Chéri” had its world premiere. “But having said that, if a book is as elusive and impressionistic as ‘Chéri,’ you have to shape it in a certain way.”

For Mr. Hampton, who also collaborated with Mr. Frears on the 1988 movie “Dangerous Liaisons,” Colette’s literary style did not seem cinematically feasible at first glance: “She would describe in two lines what would take you on screen a couple of pages. She would say [of her character], ‘She went to Biarritz and didn’t have a very good time.’” Mr. Hampton contends that this aspect of her writing has stood in the way of more films derived from her work.

Indeed, the task of producing a filmmable adaptation of “Chéri” was too tall for Colette herself. “Adapting something like ‘Chéri’ even defeated her,” says Mr. Hampton in reference to a French version of “Chéri” from the 1950s whose screenplay Colette wrote. He adds that Colette’s screenplay “doesn’t look to have caught whatever the quality of the novel is.”

One challenge lay in finding a way to capture the ambiance of the novel. “It is tone and atmosphere as opposed to plot and narration, which is easier,” Mr. Hamilton says. Another was researching to capture a historical milieu, which Colette often assumes that the reader is familiar with.

Actress Michelle Pfeiffer says she delved into Colette’s life to prepare for her role as the aging courtesan Léa. And while she created Léa in her own image, Colette always hovered close by. “I focused a lot on Colette and who she was,” Ms. Pfeiffer explained in an interview in Berlin. “She was definitely a woman who was considered scandalous. She was ahead of her time.”

Ms. Pfeiffer feels that Mr. Hampton’s dialogue has nailed the novel square on the head. “It’s so well matched with Colette. So it’s almost hard to separate her voice from his voice,” she explains.

One strategy that Messrs. Hampton and Frears hit upon was to include a narrated prologue that quickly sketches the world of the courtesan. Mr. Frears himself provides the narration. “Actually it’s exactly what they did in ‘Gigi.’ That was what Maurice Chevalier does,” says Mr. Frears, referring to the dandyish Honoré Lachaille, played by Chevalier, who periodically steps out of the film to address the audience in “Gigi.”

“He says ‘this is this person,’ ‘that is that person’ and ‘thank heaven for little girls.’ It’s such a bizarre world. You have to explain it.”

Mr. Frears came to the project having read only the script. While making a period picture always presents its unique challenges, Mr. Frears says that what was most difficult was striking the right tone. “It was getting the right pitch. It’s a tragic story about frivolous people,” he says.

While the world of “Chéri” is so utterly different from our own, neither Mr. Frears nor Mr. Hampton felt the need to modernize. “She’s just a remarkable writer and very mature and has an enormous amount of insight into the human heart,” says Mr. Hampton, adding that these are qualities that make Colette vital and relevant today. “All great writers are modern. Sophocles is modern. Otherwise they’re no good. You don’t want to read them anymore.”

Of Berlin’s three opera houses, the Komische its Berlin is the least likely to bring in big names, preferring to rely in large measure on their ensemble singers. So it was surprising that the legendary Anja Silja — a Berlin native — chose to make her Komische Oper Berlin debut in late January, at the age of sixty-eight, in a new production of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades by Thilo Reinhardt (seen Jan. 25). The Old Countess is a relatively recent entry in the soprano’s repertory: she learned the role two years ago for a production in Vienna. But while Silja was the production’s main selling point, the real star was director Reinhardt, who conceived a beautiful and irreverent German-language production. The German text was credited to Bettina Bartz and Werner Hintze. (Incidentally, it was in this language that the opera was given its New York premiere in 1910, conducted by Gustav Mahler at the Metropolitan Opera.)

Reinhardt, a former assistant to Achim Freyer and Ruth Berghaus, fashioned a highly successful art deco mise-en-scéne. The set, designed by Paul Zoller, seemed to have been modeled on Manhattan’s Chrysler Building, with reflective elevators providing elegant exits and entrances; the green and yellow color scheme reflected in the wall paper, the sofas and tables was brought out to great effect by the expressive lighting of Franck Evin. The outlandish costumes by Katharina Gault were in keeping with the 1930s décor. Reinhardt’s staging also contained unexpected moments of brutality (sometimes a bit overdone) and brought to mind the director’s marvelous 2007 production of Contes d’Hoffmann, one of the best for this risk-taking house.

A highlight was the Act II Intermezzo performance of Daphnis and Chloe, choreographed by Robert Heimann. Chloe was done up as Little Bo Peep, and Daphnis, none too subtly, wielded a hammer and sickle and wore blue overalls; his rival, Plutus, was on stilts, wearing a gold tuxedo and matching top hat. The stagehands were vixens in white boots and pink miniskirts and feather hats, and Chloe’s flock was made up of choristers in business suits and sheep masks. The irreverence of this pastorale was balanced by the chilling entrance devised for the Tsarina, here represented by a skeleton in a display case carried onstage by Orthodox monks.

The singing was a bit patchy, although not without its moments of discovery. The evening’s Gherman was Kor-Jan Dusseljee, a KOB regular whose powerful voice often sounded raw and exposed: he showed his true mettle — and his worthiness to take on such a demanding role — in the more dramatic scenes of the opera. In his first scene with Lisa, his Gherman urged Lisa to kill him with his own gun — and surprisingly, Dusseljee sang better at gunpoint. His descent into madness (which here included cross-dressing and sexual suggestions with the Countess) was frighteningly convincing. Before the Act II climax, Dusseljee sounded clipped and understated amid the tense music, but he gained in confidence and ability during the scene’s violent conclusion.

As Lisa, Orla Boylan landed big high notes, full of emotion if a bit too aspirated. Her pleasant trill was nicely controlled, but her midrange was tepid. She showed some shrillness when she reached for too big an effect — a regular occurrence in this overtly emotional performance.

Other male standouts included baritone Philip Horst as Count Tomsky, the officer who first tempts Gherman with the knowledge of the Countess and her curse (“Odnazhdy v Versale”), and the easygoing tenor Thomas Eberstein, a KOB stalwart who pulled off his role of Chekalinsky with perverted glee. Mirko Janiska made a dashing impression as Prince Yeletsky, especially during his bold and arduous “Ja vas lyublyu,” in which he presented Lisa with a tiger-fur coat.

And then there was Silja, the center of attention as the eponymous “Queen of Spades.” Early on — although her high notes were shockingly incisive — Silja seemed unstable vocally: her midrange is now fairly threadbare, she often resorted to a near-speaking voice for low passages, and there were some exposed breaks in her voice, especially in the passaggio. During her principal scene in Act II, she broke off inelegantly at the ends of phrases, but she nailed her aged character’s melancholy and tragedy. Despite her highly audible imperfections, it was a thrill to see Silja onstage again. This role could become one of her late-career specialties: Martha Mödl, after all, sang the Old Countess well into her late eighties.

The other female standout was mezzo-soprano Karolina Gumos as Pauline, who sang her single aria “Podrugi milyye,” with its generous piano accompaniment, amid choristers who downed vodka shots. She sang with zest and relish, her voice darkening after she took a swig from the bottle.

The chorus was most effective during Act III, where Reinhardt made his only blunder as director. During the final scene, Lisa was dragged around the stage, humiliated, beaten and possibly raped, as her fiancé, now enraged by her love for Gherman, did nothing to intercede. It was a brutal and pointless misstep in an otherwise clearly realized production.

Alexander Vedernikov led a curiously muted account of the score that often relegated the orchestra to a supporting role, but which made highlighted instruments stand out forcefully, as it did some sloppy work from the horns. One sensed that Vedernikov was up to something — and by the final scene, he let loose the orchestra with suitable demonic fury.

A. J. GOLDMANN

When Kirsten Harms assumed artistic management of Deutsche Oper Berlin, during the 2007–08 season, she made clear her commitment to presenting forgotten works by composers both obscure and well known. In her first season as Intendantin, the house mounted arresting productions of Vittorio Gnecchi’s Cassandra (performed in tandem with Strauss’s Elektra) and Walter Braunfels’s Jeanne d’Arc — Szenen aus dem Leben der Heiligen Johanna. The trend to resurrect lost work continues this season with new productions of Strauss’s Die Ägyptische Helena and Respighi’s Marie Victoire.

Helena arrived at the house on January 18, in a production directed and designed by Marco Arturo Marelli, with costumes by Dagmar Niefind. It was less visually arresting than last season’s “rediscoveries” (in particular Christoph Schlingensief’s overstuffed take on the Braunfels opera) but also potentially less distracting.

This curious 1928 fantasy is the fifth collaboration between Richard Strauss and his favored librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Helena belongs in the pantheon of high-flying Strauss heroines, yet this opera feels oddly superfluous: it has remained outside the standard opera-house repertory for eighty years. There have been recent efforts to revive it, including a 2002 recording from Leon Botstein and the ASO and a flashy 2007 production at the Metropolitan Opera. Both those projects were made possible by the participation of soprano Deborah Voigt, the paradigm of the vocal powerhouse needed to carry this dramatically confusing and musically oversaturated work.

Ricarda Merbeth, a distinguished interpreter of Strauss, Mozart and Wagner and a veteran of Bayreuth and Vienna, was DOB’s Helena: the German soprano was the best thing about this uninspired production, which failed to make a case for the resurrection of this work. Merbeth has agility, heft and clarity to carry this demanding role off: it was scarcely her fault if she couldn’t manage to make sense of her character, or indeed much else of the heady libretto, an odd marriage of ancient myth and fantasy that falls squarely in between the self-consciously avant-garde Elektra and the sublimely ornamented Die Frau ohne Schatten. The plot is a historical what-if: in Hofmannstal’s reimagining of the Trojan War, Helena is whisked away from the murderous rage of her cuckolded husband, Menelaus, by the sorceress Aithra, who orchestrates a peaceful reconciliation between the two.

With Helena, Strauss continued his mad love affair with the female voice. Merbeth filled the house effortlessly, soaring above the dense orchestration: her bold, ornamented passages in the sumptuous Act II aria “Zweite Brautnacht” were particularly impressive.

Merbeth may have been the evening’s star attraction, but she was well supported by her colleagues. American soprano Laura Aikin was a bright-voiced, creamy Aithra, who held up well alongside Merbeth in their duets. Menelas, like so many Strauss tenor roles, is a punishing and thankless part, yet Robert Chafin — another American artist — gave the Spartan king a vocally convincing and dramatically compelling performance that cut through the thicket of female voices: his work was so brazen that he not only held his own against Merbeth and Aikin but seemed to be waging war against Strauss’s disdain for the male voice. The powerful Danish baritone Morten Frank Larsen and tenor Burkhard Ulrich also did excellent work as Helena’s suitors, Altair and Da-ud.

Though ill conceived — it combined garish design with fussy stagecraft — Marelli’s production didn’t seem to take itself seriously enough to become genuinely disruptive. The stage was bathed in blues, pinks and greens, and it rotated to reveal three different sets. Aithra’s island palace was an upscale brothel, with wig and corset-garbed floozies galore on tap to entertain visiting legionnaires. Here and in the desert, carnival-like murals of sand, palm trees and ruins adorned the walls. Luckily, Marelli’s trashier ideas did not encroach on the bedroom, seat of the main marital drama and the setting for the opera’s most compelling music. Here, an upside-down couch and palm-tree jutted out from the reflective wall — surrealistic touches that brought to mind the aforementioned (and superior) Met production by David Fielding.

The evening was about the singing and the music. Maestro Andrew Litton drew a lush, often bombastic account from the orchestra that heightened both the defects and merits of this imperfect work.

A. J. GOLDMANN