Originally Published in Tablet Magazine:
http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/music/13917/lord-of-the-ring/

There is perhaps no modern artist for whom ideology figured more centrally than Richard Wagner, the subject of this month’s Bard Music Festival in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

In addition to a slew of concerts exploring Wagner’s entire musical output, the festival features a panel discussion on “Wagner and the Jewish Question” as well as performances of ambitious works from Wagner’s most famous Jewish rivals, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn—the two main targets of Wagner’s infamous essay “Judaism in Music.” In early August as prologue to the festival Bard staged a rare production of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, which, though little seen today, was among the most-performed operas of the 19th century, with over 1,000 performances at the Paris Opéra.

When not composing operas that exalted Teutonic ideals of bravery and purity, one of Wagner’s favorite pastimes was writing anti-Semitic tracts, even though, as the saying goes, some of his best friends were Jewish. And in the early 1840s, one of his greatest Jewish friends was Meyerbeer, the granddaddy of French Grand Opéra and one of the 19th century’s most popular opera composers.

Meyerbeer’s Grand Opéra was a powerful influence on Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Work of Art), a fact that Wagner tried to hide in a series of spurious arguments in the essays “Judaism in Music” and “Opera and Drama.” In terms of grandeur, Wagner’s music dramas are a direct outgrowth of Grand Opéra. Wagner merely outstrips the competition with “bigger, louder and longer” operas, as the scholar Thomas Grey has put it. You could say that Wagner wanted to out-Meyerbeer Meyerbeer.

Wagner’s damning of Meyerbeer has had unfortunate consequences in terms of how the French composer has been studied, to say nothing of his virtual disappearance from the opera repertoire for nearly a century.

In his youth, Wagner expressed admiration for the cosmopolitan dimension to Meyerbeer’s music, which was achieved through the mixing of different national styles. Such impressions can be gleaned from an 1837 letter, in which the 24-year-old Wagner identifies his sympathies with Meyerbeer’s international program, which for Wagner pointed toward a “new direction.” Wagner calls the elder composer “the perfect embodiment of the task that confronts the German artist” and endorses the mixture of Italian and French musical styles.

In 1840, Wagner went to Paris to seek Meyerbeer’s support. In letters and diary entries from the period, Wagner has nothing but admiration for his mentor. In one letter to Meyerbeer, Wagner writes, “Goethe is dead—but he was no musician; there is nobody left but you.”

After two years of failure and hardship in Paris, however, Wagner changed his tune. Soon he would hiss that Meyerbeer’s music is as bastardized as a Yiddish translation of Faust.

In a 1843 letter, Wagner vehemently denies Robert Schumann’s suggestion that Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) “smacks of Meyerbeer.” Wagner insists that to draw inspiration from Meyerbeer would be “the death-knell of my creative powers.” This letter highlights Wagner’s growing disillusionment with Meyerbeer while suggesting anxiety about his own creative state. Many of the points he makes in the letter to Schumann resurface in “Opera and Drama,” this time with an overtly anti-Semitic element.

Starting with the first version of “Judaism in Music,” which was published 1850, Wagner’s vilification of Meyerbeer, as both composer and as Jew, is complete. His campaign against Meyerbeer had it seeds in the events of the summer of 1847. After a failed attempt to get his Rienzi staged at the Prussian Court Theatre in Berlin, Wagner was near financial ruin and was contemplating suicide. That Meyerbeer had been involved in managing the funds for Rienzi sent Wagner into a fit; he put the blame for the opera’s failure squarely on Meyerbeer’s shoulders. Such accusations against a man who by all accounts did much to help and encourage the budding Wagner betray the deep paranoia and mistrust that came to characterize him more fully in later years.

Wagner sought to gradually oust Meyerbeer from the operatic pantheon and claim for himself all that he felt to have been once possessed by onetime mentor. In a surprisingly short period of time, Meyerbeer went, in Wagner’s mind, from being opera’s savior to its most nefarious corruptor. That Meyerbeer is not regarded as the foremost influence on Wagner today is testament to the effectiveness of his smear campaign.

Among Wagner’s criticisms of Meyerbeer is that his music is “fake revolutionary” and seeks only to gratify the listener. Wagner elaborates on his disdain for the Meyerbeerian world of the Paris Opéra House in his response to a letter by Franz Liszt, who had asked whether Wagner had penned “Judaism in Music” (the first publication of the essay was unsigned). “I cannot exist as an artist in my own eyes or in those of my friends, I cannot think or feel anything without sensing in Meyerbeer my total antithesis,” he wrote. The need to extricate himself from Meyerbeer becomes a “necessary act if my mature self is to be fully born.”

The basic critiques present in Wagner’s correspondence as early as 1843 resurface in “Judaism in Music” and “Opera and Drama” with bluntly anti-Semitic undercurrents. With its talk of mauscheln (so-called perverted speech that could in turn produce only perverted music), and its claim that Meyerbeer stole from Weber and Rossini, “Opera and Drama” argues that Meyerbeer was inherently incapable of producing absolute music: “As a Jew, [Meyerbeer] owned no mother-tongue, no speech inextricably entwined among the sinews of his inmost being.”

The litany of accusations includes a caricature of Meyerbeer as a gibberish-spewing creature of “monstrous ostentation.” Additionally, Wagner derides his cosmopolitanism, which Wagner now claims jumbled various genres, national styles, and stage effects together in one “mass of crude confusion.”

In vilifying Meyerbeer, Wagner was concurrently finding a scapegoat for his unhappy Paris years and a convenient way of denying any notion of artistic indebtedness. Indeed, in order for Wagner to become German opera’s new “Messiah,” he had first to distance himself as much as possible from the long shadow of his predecessor. In essence, Wagner argued that he couldn’t be like Meyerbeer because he wasn’t Jewish.

In this day and age, we are more convinced by Wagner’s music than by his rhetoric. Sadly, however, the enormous influence that Wagner exerted on the way that music is made and thought of has made a serious reassessment of Meyerbeer’s output all but impossible.

A.J. Goldmann is a writer based in Berlin. His articles on art and culture have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The Christian Science Monitor.

Lowery and Hosseinpour’s storybook staging of Orlando Paladino at Berlin’s Staatsoper © Ruth Walz 2009

Directors Nigel Lowery and Amir Hosseinpour joined forces with René Jacobs for Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s new production of the Haydn rarity Orlando Paladino, which had its premiere at the house on May 8. The event marked a reunion for the two directors and Jacobs, who collaborated on last season’s premiere of Telemann’s Der Geduldige Sokrates. (Like Orlando, the Telemann staging was a coproduction with the Innsbruck Early Music Festival.)

Once among the most popular of Haydn’s operas, Orlando is an intriguing mix of opera seria and opera buffa elements that brings to mind Don Giovanni, which it predates by five years. The libretto, based on an episode from Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso (the source material for countless other operas), tells of the paladin Orlando’s fury on discovering that his love, Angelica, queen of Cathay, has eloped with Medoro. While the lovers hide in a nearby castle, the king, Rodomonte — also infatuated with Angelica — pursues Orlando across the countryside and enlists the aid of the shepherdess Eurilla, who falls for Orlando’s squire, Pasquale. After much antic confusion involving the warring rivals and wild savages, the sorceress Alcina sets everything right by erasing Orlando’s memory of Angelica.

Orlando is an ensemble piece, and the Staatsoper gathered a persuasive cast of players that sounded superb both in the showy arias and en masse. German soprano Marlis Petersen was not an obvious choice for the noble, suffering Angelica. Her visceral performance and earthy voice might have struck a purist as out of place in a Haydn opera. But her dizzying coloratura was put to good use here, and her huskier tones enhanced the parlando writing, which she dispatched with judicious rubato. Her soulful account of “Aure chete,” a two-tempo rondo with oboe obbligato, was one of the evening’s high points.

The women surrounding her were equally impressive. The South Korean soprano Sunhae Im was a sprightly and adorable Eurilla. The petite singer twirled, pantomimed and whistled her way through this playful role with seemingly inexhaustible zeal. She sculpted her phrases beautifully, with agile, buoyant phrasing. Bulgarian soprano Alexandrina Pendatchanska made a spine-tingling Alcina, with her rich low register and even vibrato.

As for the men, Norwegian tenor Magnus Staveland was fully committed as the wishy-washy Medoro. He sang heroically, with precision and creamy texture. Italian baritone Pietro Spagnoli was likewise impassioned as Rodomonte, here dressed in full pirate regalia, but his singing was rough in patches and occasionally lacked finesse. Victor Torres, an impressive Argentine baritone, was charismatic as the Leporello-like Pasquale. He brought careful phrasing and warmth to his patter songs and love duets with Eurilla and earned laughter for his comical falsetto.

In the surprisingly small title role of Orlando, Tom Randle performed with full force. His searing tenor was well suited to the role of the mad knight, even if his lyric urgency often turned hysterical — an understandable turn of events, considering that he was directed to run around manically with an axe for a good part of the evening. Not surprisingly, Randle regained composure and control in the final act after Orlando’s rehabilitation, singing with heroic plangency.

The production’s storybook staging hardly succeeded in breathing life into the libretto’s one-dimensional characters. Much of the flavor of last season’s Sokrates was in evidence, especially in the deadpan slapstick, pantomime and heightened artifice of the sets. But this Orlando lacked any genuine stylistic and thematic coherence: it was a Monty Pythonesque collage of fairy tale, absurdist drama and cartoon. The mise-en-scène included a troupe of dancing savages in gray beards, a creaky castle, incongruous costumes and a giant pair of scissors that Alcina — so far as I could tell — used to lobotomize Orlando. Even if one admits that Haydn was somewhat unsure of how to integrate the buffa and seria styles in this opera, Lowery and Hosseinpour still failed the piece by sidestepping that ambivalence entirely in a staging that — however colorful and spirited — soon grew tiresome and frequently verged on the ridiculous.

Luckily, the lack of directorial clarity never seeped into the orchestra pit, where Jacobs led the Freiburger Barockorchester in his own performing version of the score. Among early-music specialists, the Freiburg musicians are known for performances that are both historically accurate and fresh. All evening long, they gave a polished performance that combined elegance and playfulness. In their hands, the music sounded alive, unpredictable and surprisingly flexible, perhaps nowhere more so than in the supple work of the very busy continuo, particularly the dazzling improvisations of the cembalo.

A. J. GOLDMANN

Deutsche Oper Berlin’s final new production of the season was the German premiere of Peter Hall’s elegant take on Rossini’s La Cenerentola (or Aschenputtel, as the fairy tale is known in German), originally staged at the 2005 Glyndebourne Festival (seen May 20). Coming at the end of an especially dynamic DOB season that saw premieres of forgotten operas (Die Ägyptische Helena, Marie Victoire) and striking — if not always successful — new visions for more popular fare (Tannhäuser, Ariadne auf Naxos), this traditional production of a repertory standard proved anti-climactic.

Stylish sets and costumes lent a decorous, somewhat musty flavor to the performance: although the designs were well-suited in a good old-fashioned way to the light, energetic nature of Rossini’s early masterwork, they generally lacked the edge and verve that this reviewer looks for in contemporary productions. The most artistically compelling design element on offer was Peter Mumford’s stark, finely focused lighting, realized at DOB by Jerry Skelton.

But there was plenty of good news in the vocal department. Romanian mezzo-soprano Ruxandra Donose lent her earthy, dark-hued voice to the title role. Her singing rang out clear, rich and well-balanced and she navigated the runs with remarkable ease and assurance, a few shrill high notes aside. Her highly polished “Non piu mesta,” capped a thoroughly accomplished performance and earned her showers of applause.

Martina Welschenbach and Lucia Cirillo sang the evil stepsisters, Clorinda and Tisbe, respectively, with appropriate histrionics neatly alternating malice and goofiness. They were a pleasure to watch, even if they often seemed vocally interchangeable. Of the two, Cirillo, an Italian mezzo-soprano, had more success distinguishing herself.

Top vocal honors among the men went to Mario Zeffiri, a Greek tenor known for his interpretations of bel canto repertory. He put his buttery, agile voice to heroic use, tearing through his runs with alacrity, few perceivable breaks and ringing high notes.

DOB ensemble member Simon Pauly, a German baritone, was less supple as Dandini, but he made up for his vocal imperfections with effective comic acting: there was much heft and wit to his somewhat rough-hewn singing.

The evening’s Don Magnifico was bass-baritone Lorenzo Regazzo, who wore his despicable character’s ruin almost proudly, communicating it through a pointed, seething delivery that was occasionally overwhelmed by the orchestra. The routine drowning-out of the soloists seemed due to a last-minute substitution for the scheduled conductor, Paolo Arrivabeni. Filling in for Arrivabeni was Guillermo Garcia Calvo, a young Spanish maestro who is engaged at the Vienna State Opera. He delivered an incisive, intelligent and lively performance that was rich with drama and humor despite its balance problems.

A. J. GOLDMANN

From Operanews.com

It appears that Intendant Kirsten Harms may be making Deutsche Oper the most consistently interesting opera house in Berlin. Not that the company’s new Tannhäuser, which had its premiere in November 2008 and returned for three additional performances in May, was an unqualified triumph. But it was a staging of undeniable courage and surprising clarity of vision. Like her 2007 production of the double-headed Cassandra/Elektra, Harms’s DOB Tannhäuser was as remarkable for its savagery as for its moments of transcendence.

Performed in the Dresden version, this Tannhäuser was a dazzling, epic production with more than a few baffling touches. It featured naked nymphs, flying gargoyles, a fairy-tale medieval court for the Act II contest scene and sinful pilgrims roasting in a fiery pit of hell. If it wasn’t always clear what message Harms was trying to convey in moments such the final act, here set it in a military hospital, the occasional indeterminacy of the staging only contributed to the cumulative effect.

Magnificent singing accompanied Harms’s bizarre tableaux. The May 10 performance offered a rare and unexpected chance to hear the extraordinary Ivar Gilhuus, a longtime soloist at the Norwegian State Opera, in the title role. (The Norwegian filled in for indisposed American tenor Scott MacAllister.) From the start of Act I, Gilhuus was in excellent form, delivering well-sculpted phrases with a freshness and energy that he retained (against the odds) all evening long. Although Gilhuus’s sheer vocal force was undeniable from the beginning of the night, his heroic tenor was undermined by some rather wooden acting and, early on, a curiously unvaried declaiming style. As the performance progressed, he gained dramatic confidence equal to his singing abilities. He faltered most visibly at the end of Act II: his “Nach Rom!” lacked the appropriate oomph.

Gilhuus’s colleagues were equally riveting when they hit their targets, which was more often than not. To German soprano Nadja Michael fell the demanding task of singing both Venus and Elisabeth. Michael gave full measure to the goddess of love with her wild, deliriously agile voice; she brought a refreshing amount of earthiness and sensuality to the virginal Elisabeth. In the end, the two characters were not so clearly differentiated as they could have been — one supposes that was part of the reason for casting Michael in both roles — but the soprano was always vocally electrifying and physically alluring. Her chief problem was consistently — and maddeningly — indistinct diction.

The ever-dependable Markus Brück made a persuasive Wolfram, who in this production is Tannhäuser’s active rival for Elisabeth. His “Abendstern” aria became a love song to the dying Elisabeth, charged with equal measures of spiritual and corporeal yearning. His ardent legato was the cornerstone of a refreshingly straightforward interpretation. Kurt Rydl has been in better form that he mustered here as Hermann. His steely voice often turned raspy, and his low notes were off-target at times. Lenus Carlson, another old hand, was impassioned as Biterolf but had some trouble staying on pitch. Clemens Bieber’s Walther, while more controlled, was halting and indistinct.

Conductor Philippe Auguin led a white-hot performance, propelling the orchestra with such force and momentum that the singers at times rushed to keep up. Luckily, audibility was never a problem, partially because the frequently mobile set produced an echo that reverberated eerily through the theater.

A. J. GOLDMANN