From Operanews.com:

IN REVIEW
BERLIN — Marie Victoire, Deutsche Oper Berlin, 4/22/09

Ottorino Respighi’s Marie Victoire arrived at Deutsche Oper Berlin in April for five performances (seen April 22). Marie Victoire was written in 1913 but went unperformed until 2004, when the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma presented its stage premiere under the baton of Gianluigi Gelmetti. The French-language libretto of Edmond Guiraud, adapted from his play of the same name, deals with the tribulations of a countess who survives the French Revolution and its aftermath by dint of luck.

The DOB production by Johannes Schaaf was alternately striking and slapdash, a concept that proved hauntingly effective in communicating the drastic changes from the ancien régime to the rise of the bourgeoisie. The sansculottes and Jacobins of the preposterously mannered Act I had much in common with the rabble in Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part I. More effective were Act II’s Reign of Terror, in which a debauched aristocracy put on a Baroque opera in the shadow of the guillotine, and Act III’s evocation of early-nineteenth-century middle-class city life.

Respighi’s expansive score has much to recommend it, chiefly the rich, if oversaturated, orchestration that registers as a bizarre hybrid of Strauss, Debussy and Ponchielli. The score also incorporates many militaristic and sacred motifs and effects (snare drums and church bells abound), as well as musical citations from late-eighteenth-century French opera. However, the glut of musical references and styles provides too heavy an accompaniment for the comparatively impoverished vocal writing. Extended lyrical passages frequently turn monotonous; melisma is put in service of melodrama and gives the work a mock-heroic flavor. There are some stirring arias and choruses, but all in all one has the impression of listening to a lushly colored (and über-long) tone poem supplemented by voices. One imagines Respighi tinkering to strike out a third way between Wagner and Verdi and coming up with this quasi-symphonic solution.

Marie Victoire poses difficulties to an opera house above and beyond the usual travails involved in reclaiming a lost work: the piece contains more than twenty singing roles. DOB assembled a worthy lineup that included both ensemble members and guest singers.

The young African–American soprano Takesha Meshé Kizart sang the title role with impressive lyricism and stamina, her powerful high notes and coloratura shadings supplemented by controlled dynamism and keen dramatic conviction. Occasionally, phrases that lay in the passaggio or her middle to low range turned heavy and molasses-like.

DOB stalwart Markus Brück played Marie’s husband, Maurice de Lanjallay who is presumed dead for much of the opera. Brück put his velvety baritone to excellent use. Bass-baritone Stephen Bronk, in the more substantial role of Cloteau, Marie’s onetime servant and later her warden at a revolutionary prison, struck the right tone between arrogance, humility and affection that his conflicted character required. Simon Pauly, cast as the conscientious writer Simon, deployed a stirring, robust voice but came across as stiff and overly noble. Tenor Germân Villar sang the amorous Clorivière with appropriate doses of nobility and lyricism. His effortless volume and even production held up until the remarkably tense final scene. The orchestra sounded superb, though conductor Michail Jurowski had difficulty establishing dynamic levels that were kind to his singers. In his hands, however, the score sounded more thickly lacquered, full-blooded and strange than in Gelmetti’s approach five years ago. Let’s hope that further productions or a commercial recording can make this worthy opera known to a wider audience.

A. J. GOLDMANN

From Operanews.com:

IN REVIEW
BERLIN — Der Vetter aus Dingsda, Komische Oper Berlin, 5/3/09

For the third consecutive year, Komische Oper Berlin has chosen to greet spring with a new production of a frothy confection more at home at the boulevard theater than at the opera house.

After productions of Léhar’s Das Land des Lächelns (2007) and Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate! (2008), KOB set its sights on Eduard Künneke’s Der Vetter aus Dingsda (The Cousin from Nowhere), a near-forgotten 1921 operetta (seen May 3) that was once a great favorite with Berliners. The company dusted it off and dressed it up in a kooky Bollywood-inspired production by Cordula Däuper that features extensive projections of Shah Rukh Kahn film clips. But despite an elegant and playful staging, there isn’t much about Dingsda that seems to make it a rediscovery of note.

Der Vetter aus Dingsda is an eminently melodious and waltz-filled entertainment so light and fizzy there is no need for champagne at intermission. It shares much, musically, with both Lehár and Johann Strauss in the elegant waltzes and string-heavy, ebbing melodies. However, Künneke also weaves in other popular dances of his day, including Boston Waltzes and foxtrots. Additionally, Künneke seems to borrow from Puccini in the lyrical passages, Rossini in the ensemble scenes, and — surprisingly — Mahler in the folksy wisps and strains that one detects in Act I.

One of the work’s main problems is that a wafer-thin plot is burdened with sustaining two and a half hours of drama and music (the ratio between the two seemed to be about 50:50). The libretto concerns Julia, an orphan on the cusp of womanhood who, seven years before the start of the action, has pledged eternal love to her cousin Roderich. As she waits for her cousin to return from far-away Batavia, her scheming guardians plan to marry her off to their nephew August, and she is courted by a local government official. Julia’s heart is thrown into confusion by a stranger: he may or may not be Roderich, but he is, in fact, the nephew August. The arrival of a second stranger (the real Roderich, who has totally forgotten about his cousin) sets everything right. The opera is about fantasy, mistaken identity and self-deception and finding love unexpectedly.

That this Vetter production proved a delight through and through despite its lack of substance owed much to the spirited singing and acting talents of its well-coordinated ensemble. Soprano Julia Kamenik sang Julia de Weert with bright, booming tones, a heavy quiver and suitably old-fashioned schmaltz, conveying her character’s juvenile puppy-love and herzschmerzen masterfully in this none-too-strenuous role. Anna Borchers, a petite soprano, lent a sense of annoyance and stubbornness to the part of Hannchen, Julia’s best friend. But like many of her costars, Borchers had difficulty making the transition between the dramatic and operatic elements of the work whenever the music was at full-throttle.

The KOB enlisted two of its most charismatic tenors as the two strangers. Christoph Späth was eminently likable as Julia’s unlikely love interest, August, and despite some strained top notes at the beginning of his performance, he lent the evening its most genuinely operatic moment with “Ich bin nur ein armer Wandergesell” (I’m only a strolling vagabond), one of Vetter’s enduringly popular numbers. Thomas Eberstein made a spectacular helicopter entrance in Act III as the real Roderich. The ensuing seduction scene with Hannchen was smoothly sung and acted with physical daring.

Physical comedy made for a large part of Uwe Schönbeck and Christiane Oertel’s performances as Julia’s hysterical, bickering guardians, here portrayed as kitsch-loving bourgeoisie.

It could be argued that the real stars of the evening were Berthold Kogut and Verena Unbehaun, who brilliantly pantomimed (and less impressively sang) all evening long as the intrusive and ubiquitous servants. With their deadpan expressions and zombie-like posture, they seemed to have been beamed in from a Fassbinder film. Their fluid exits and entrances via trapdoors were among the most inspired touches in this charming trifle.

A. J. GOLDMANN

Originally published in the July 8 issue of The Forward

In 2008, the German city of Munich celebrated its 850th birthday amid much fanfare, and various cultural institutions were asked to mark the occasion. When the recently opened Jewish Museum was approached, it reacted with ambivalence. Indeed, for nearly half the history of Munich — more than 400 years — Jews were excluded from taking part in the life of the city.

This is where Bernhard Purin, the museum’s director, stepped in. Last September, the museum unveiled its contribution to the festival year, City Without Jews: The Dark Side of Munich’s History, a stark and effective exhibition about the various persecutions and expulsions that formed the bedrock of Munich’s history of antisemitism long before the Holocaust. The exhibit runs until the end of August.

Opened in May 2007, the Jewish Museum Munich is the youngest Jewish museum in Europe. The contrast to Jewish Museum Berlin — Germany’s most famous such museum — could hardly be more striking.

Where the Berlin museum attempts an exhaustive history of the Jewish experience in Germany, starting with the Middle Ages and leading up to the present day, the approach favored by Munich is to represent the history of Jews in that city via a compact and thoughtful permanent collection that combines interactive installations, artwork and a few well-chosen ritual objects and historical artifacts. A visitor can take in the exhibit in less than an hour, before making his way upstairs to view the changing exhibitions.

The same impulse for compression characterizes City Without Jews, which tells its story through a dozen small displays of representative objects and video interviews.

For instance, the pogrom of 1285, sparked by accusations of ritual murder, where between 68 and 187 members of Munich’s first Jewish community were locked inside their burning synagogue, is signified by a 19th-century edition of the Nuremberg Memorbuch, the 1296 commemoration of prominent community leaders and martyrs compiled by the Nuremberg Jewish community.

The 1349 accusation of host desecration — a common medieval accusation that the Jews abused the consecrated host in order to repeat the suffering of Christ — is represented through a 1624 painting, which was displayed for nearly 200 years in Munich’s St. Salvator Church. The old folklorist legend of the Wandering Jew inspired artists from Heinrich Heine to Richard Wagner before the Nazis twisted it to embody all the degenerative traits they ascribed to the Jews. This phantomlike figure that has, over time, emblemized the internal experience of Jews in the Diaspora is represented by a coat stand with an umbrella and an old edition of the newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung; it is a reference to a Lion Feuchtwanger story in which the Wandering Jew is spotted in Munich’s famous Odeon Café, reading a newspaper.

The Nazi persecution and mass murder are metonymically represented by an empty trunk with the initials of its last owner, Rosa Picard. A businesswoman from Munich, Picard filled the trunk with valuables and entrusted it to a Christian family before she and her family perished.

A counterpoint to this decidedly downbeat exhibition is the three-part series of temporary installations, Places of Exile.

“We wanted to answer the question:Where did the Jews of Munich live when they were not allowed to live in Munich? So we looked for three places of exile,” Purin explained.

After exhibits on Istanbul and Tel Aviv, the final installment, on display until August 30, looks at New York City’s Washington Heights, which became the center of Munich’s exiled Jewish community during World War II.

In particular, the exhibit focuses on Beth Hillel Synagogue, a Conservative congregation founded in 1940 by the chief rabbi of the Munich Jewish community, Leo Baerwald, who had fled Germany. The first services, held on Rosh Hashanah of that year in the Paramount Hall on 183rd Street, attracted 800 people.

Initially, services were held in German and followed the tradition of southern German Jews, known as Minhag Schwaben. German Jews were such a prominent minority, and so much German was spoken on the streets of Washington Heights in the 1940s and ’50s, that they ironically nicknamed the neighborhood “Das Vierte Reich” — or the Fourth Reich.

In the first decade, the congregation grew to 750 families from 200 and moved into a former post office at 571 West 182nd Street, just south of Yeshiva University. As members became more assimilated and prosperous, services were increasingly held in English. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the congregation was in steady decline caused by suburbanization and the new waves of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, which changed the demographic of the neighborhood.

In 1980, Beth Hillel merged with the Orthodox Congregation Beth Israel and, despite ever-shrinking numbers, managed to survive until 2000, when it finally closed its doors. Today, the building on 182nd Street is home to a department store.

Purin’s co-curator for the project is Celia J. Bergoffen, an urban archeologist who excavated the Eldridge Street Synagogue mikveh in 2001. Together with Purin, she conducted interviews with members of the community and tracked down pertinent artifacts.

“It was funny to see that they were very professional in talking about their childhood in Germany, because that’s what they are doing in schools and for the [Steven] Spielberg video project, but they never were asked about the other 80% of their lives, which started in 1939 or 1940, when they were teenagers in Washington Heights,” Purin explained.

Among the surviving congregants of Beth Hillel is Eric Bloch, a professor emeritus at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who was born in Munich in 1928. In an interview with Bergoffen, he discusses the role that the congregation played in easing the transition to America: “I think the importance of Beth Hillel and the other Jewish congregations was to help immigrants establish themselves in the new country. They were a very important source of support.” The interview is published in the exhibition brochure, which can be ordered, free of charge, from the museum.

Among the items installed in the exhibition are two memorial stones from Munich’s destroyed main synagogue and a yellow Jewish star that wound up at a synagogue in Paramus, N.J. Another relic is the parochet (ark curtain) from Beth Hillel, which was found in 2002 at a Berlin flea market.

“It is in some ways a little bit funny that the history of this congregation in Washington Heights will now be kept in Munich,” Purin mused.

City Without Jews: The Dark Side of Munich’s History and Places of Exile 3: Munich and Washington Heights are on view at the Jewish Museum Munich until August 30.

Berlin’s Neue Synagoge—begun in 1859, set ablaze on Kristallnacht, and lovingly restored to at least some of its former glory in the 1990s—has already seen its share of history. But there will be a bit of new history in the onion-domed building on Saturday, when Israeli-born choreographer Nir de Volff premieres Action!, the first dance performance ever held in its confines.

Using historic sites for artistic purposes is not uncommon in Berlin, where directors, choreographers, and musicians are often invited to make site-specific works. In the past year alone, the director Christoph Hagel staged a Haydn opera inside the Bode-Museum, the choreographer Sasha Waltz used the interior of the Neues Museum for a dance performance, and Sir Simon Rattle brought the Berlin Philharmonic to the just-closed Tempelhof Airport for a concert. But for de Volff, who lives in the German capital, the Neue Synagoge offered a unique opportunity. “In Berlin, there are all these potential places with nothing really happening in them,” said de Volff, a Petach Tikvah native who moved to Berlin in 2003. “But they are very powerful with their architecture and their history.”

His new piece, de Volff said, is an exploration of the nature of faith drawn from his own experiences and those of his three collaborators, Elik Niv, Rahel Savoldelli, and Margret Sara Gudjonsdottir. Though loath to discuss the work in detail before its premiere, de Volff offered a summary of some the show’s basic elements. The piece will unfold in four different locations in the synagogue. In one portion of the show, God grows bored and enlists the performers to make a film. In another, a preacher stands on a soapbox and pontificates about nothing. In yet another, a singer surveys the audience and prophesies, in song, how each of them will die.

“What I’m interested in is how you take reality and twist it with irony, humor, or a lot of darkness,” de Volff said.

Although the building no longer functions as a synagogue—it’s now a museum—de Volff said that its history constrained at least some of his artistic choices. A dream, he said, was to invite in local prostitutes and interview them as part of the performance. Though this didn’t come to pass, de Volff does warn that the show begins with something not often seen within synagogue walls. Even so, he stressed that even when outlandish, Action! never violates the respect that the building deserves. “There will not be a cheap provocation. Provocation maybe. But there’s logic behind every single thing we do,” he said.

After studying dance in Tel Aviv, de Volff spent several years working in Amsterdam prior to moving to Berlin. After three years spent with a large dance troupe, he decided to focus on his own projects. “I wanted to make small ensemble pieces focused more on my journey as an Israeli, not being part of a Benetton collection—different people, different colors, different backgrounds,” he said. One recent project was 3Some, a personal and often political piece about the complex, at times fraught, relationships between Israelis and Germans. The hour-long show had a successful run in Berlin and was also performed in Amsterdam and Prague.

When de Volff and his newly-formed company approached the synagogue two years ago about using their space, he found officials there surprisingly receptive to the idea. “I think they were open and waiting for the right person to give the first try,” he said. “Maybe it’s also the last time.”

Originally published in the June 24 issue of The Forward

Before embarking on a trip to Switzerland in the 1880s, the great rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch is reported to have said, “When I shall stand before God, the Eternal One will ask me with pride: Did you see my Alps?”

This apocryphal quote is the jumping-off point for a new exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Hohenems that explores the Jewish love of the Alps.

Hohenems sits at the foot of the mountains in Vorarlberg, Austria. Nearby Lake Constance attracts summertime visitors to the internationally renowned Bregenz Festival.

Hohenems is a toy-sized town surrounded by towering cliffs and distant peaks. Whenever you look up, nature reminds you both of its grandeur and savagery. You can walk the town center in an hour, see the old town square and renaissance palace or the winding streets of the old Judengasse.

It is here, in a stately 19th-century villa once owned by Jewish textile magnates, that a Jewish museum opened in 1991. The permanent exhibit details the small yet prosperous Jewish community that thrived here for 300 years. Nowadays, the only Jewish resident is Hanno Loewy, the museum’s director. But his institution — the only Jewish museum in the region — attracts Jews from Innsbruck, Zurich and Geneva.

The morning of my visit, the museum opened early to give tours to energetic yet curious elementary school children, with whom I nearly collide on my way to Loewy’s office.

The idea for the exhibit came to Loewy in the Swiss Alps. While vacationing, he encountered Orthodox Jews. “It was fascinating to see how devoted they were to this landscape and to this experience,” he said, in reference to the large Orthodox leisure culture in the Swiss Grisons. In fact, kosher resorts in places like Davos attract religious Jews from all over the world.

Getting from this kernel of an idea to an exhibition took nearly four years. The first step was to talk to people. “The reaction was very much the same with a lot of people — both Jews and non-Jews. The first was always, “Jews and the Alps? What do you mean? Jews and pirates? Is that a subject?” he recalled. “Jews are people of the coffeehouse, and they definitely are no mountaineers. Jews are luftmenschen, that’s the basic idea!”

After this initial resistance, people opened up and passionately shared their stories. “In a way, what we learned is that to be a real luftmensch means to be a very physical person, because the real luft is on the top of a mountain. That’s the place where heaven and earth meet. You need a lot of physical power to really meet the spirit,” he explained.

Loewy’s first idea to organize the exhibit topographically proved impractical both for design and for content. “Our idea was to create mountains and to walk through a kind of landscape,” Loewy said. The exhibit is now arranged thematically and fits into various pine structures. For instance, the portion that deals with leisure culture in the early 20th century is modeled after a hotel balcony. You duck through a tunnel to learn about stories of flight and escape. On the outer walls of a cabin that visitors cannot enter, you find the history of Aryanization. Finally, contemporary Jewish tourism is displayed inside a sukkah, whose rooflessness represents the connection between earth and heaven.

After Loewy and his colleagues had amassed mountains (no pun intended) of information, they whittled down their selection by seeing what “catchy objects” they could get their hands on.

Luckily, they were able to track down a great many, including the Opel bicycle that Theodore Herzl rode around the Aussee region, where his family vacationed in the 1890s and 1900s. Another easily accessible vacation spot for Viennese society was Semmering, a pass where intellectuals and artists like Arthur Schnitzler and Gustav Mahler would go to experience nature in a comfortable bourgeois environment.

On display are the walking stick and flask belonging to Sigmund Freud, who liked to spend his summers on the Semmering in the company of Schnitzler, Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg. Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor Adorno preferred hiking in the Dolomites.

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, an avid climber, used to cite the Alps as a reason he found to keep living during the Holocaust: “Mountain climbing, the memory of how the rock feels, this was one of the reasons to survive the concentration camp horrors.” His mountain hat and rope are on display.

Beyond showcasing objects such as these, the exhibit details Jewish contributions to tourism, winter sports, medicine, climbing and ethnography — often in the pursuit of advancing German culture.

Take, for instance, Paul Preuss, the spiritual father of free climbing, who completed 1,200 ascensions (including 300 solo and 150 first ascents) before plunging to his death at the age of 27. Or perhaps Eugenie Goldstern, an ethnographer whose investigations into alpine folklore and everyday objects was invaluable to the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art.

Other Jews, such as Julius and Moritz Wallach, promoted Tracht, or German regional folk dress — Lederhosen for men and Dirndls for women. Their specialty store in Munich popularized the Bavarian costumes until the business was Aryanized (although that word seems especially absurd in this context) in 1939. Jewish physician Raphael Hausmann helped turn the Italian town of Merano into an internationally famous resort and spa destination by promoting the “the Merano Grape Cure.”

But the dark side of this history also looms forbiddingly. The Nazis considered the Alps a fortress. This led violinist and mountaineer Joseph Braunstein to lament in 1936 that the Alps had gone from being “Europe’s playground” to a “military training field.”

The Nazi fascination with the Alps had been nurtured by a string of highly successful films from the 1920s and ’30s, known as the Bergfilme (Mountain Films) that depicted in ways both thrilling and hokey man’s struggle against the relentless forces of nature. This genre gave Leni Riefenstahl her first experience as a director, collaborating with the communist Hungarian-Jewish writer and film theorist Béla Bálazs on the film “Das Blaue Licht.” In fact, many left-wing Jewish artists, including composer Paul Dessau and photographer Helmar Lerski (who also designed special effects for Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”), were as captivated by these epic mountain adventure fairy tales as the films Nazi admirers. (“Das Blaue Licht” was one of Hitler’s favorite films).

The Alps ceased to be a place of leisure and inspiration and instead became a battleground for hateful ideology. Starting in the 1920s, Jews were banned from joining the Alpine Association. A caricature from 1922 shows a fat Jew with a hooked nose desecrating German culture by wearing Tracht. Antisemitic comments are scribbled in the margins of a 1921 register from the St. Moritz Palace Hotel. In 1938, Jewish-owned spas and hotels were Aryanized, and the property of Jewish guests confiscated.

As early as 1939, the Nazis even set up concentration camps in the Alps, many of them connected to Mauthausen. One such camp was at Ebensee in Aussee, where Herzl’s family used to spend their summers. There are stories of daring escapes — many unsuccessful — across the mountains into Switzerland. More escapes took place after the war, when Ebensee was converted into a displaced persons camp and 3,000 inmates crossed the 7,900-foot-high Krimmler Trauen Pass en route to Palestine.

After this weighty history, the exhibit takes a detour across the Atlantic, with a short display on the Catskill Mountains — or “Jewish Alps” — supplemented by paraphernalia from the Concord Hotel and Grossinger’s. It’s a suitably quirky note to land on, especially when viewed alongside the Orthodox vacationing that was Loewy’s starting point for the exhibit: saying in effect, you can take the Jews out of the Alps, but you can’t take the Alps out of the Jews!

But what exactly, after all this, is the Jewish relationship to the Alps? It is a question that the exhibit resists answering explicitly. Instead, Loewy hopes it provokes discussion about the Alps as one of mankind’s natural heritages, and not belonging to a single nation or people. He adds that the exhibit has attracted members of mountain clubs and Tracht aficionados — in other words, people who otherwise would not enter a Jewish museum.

In the end, Loewy returns to his Orthodox Jews vacationing in the Swiss Alps. “As Jews, we live in a polycentric world, with many important places. The top of an Alpine mountain can be an experience of Zion,” he said.

As I was about to go, Loewy told me about an Orthodox Web site he came across where a student posted a shayla (query) about his rebbe’s teachings: “When mashiach comes, will God move the Alps to Eretz Yisroel?”

Did You See My Alps? is at the Jewish Museum Hohenems from April 28 through October 4.