Alemania
The Charm of the Partial Staging
Jesse Simon
Iván Fischer’s semi-staged Nozze di Figaro, which opened the Konzerthaus Orchestra’s season back in 2013, was both a musical triumph and an unexpectedly successful example of how to perform an opera in the non-theatrical setting of a concert hall. As a long-delayed follow-up to that excellent evening, Mr Fischer and the Konzerthaus Orchestra gave a performance of Die Zauberflöte that was simultaneously more ambitious and less consistent. Yet if the parade of ingenious flourishes seemed more clever stage-management than high drama, Mr Fischer’s reading of the score, both graceful and vigorous, was a source of frequent delight.
The main hall of the Konzerthaus, an opulent room with a great acoustic, has obvious limitations as a dramatic venue and any attempts at staging will, of necessity, be somewhat minimal. The problem of the story’s shifting locations was solved by placing a large screen at the front of the stage, onto which backdrops, illustrated in a high-fairytale style, were projected. However the screen found better use in the second act when it was used as for a series of visually-striking shadow projections; the choir of silhouetted priests who performed ‘O Isis and Osiris’ could have been lifted straight from silent-era Fritz Lang.
Much of the story unfolded along a narrow piece of stage in front of the screen – the orchestra were placed on the floor where the first two rows of seats would normally have been – but the energy of the production came from making as much of the auditorium complicit in the action as possible. Characters appeared from various doors, delivered lines from the balcony, and pushed the fourth wall out far enough to include the orchestra and its conductor if not quite the audience itself.
This freewheeling approach was established before the music had even started. Before the overture, Mr Fischer turned to address the audience, asking for volunteers who would be willing to perform the spoken dialogue; a few people put up their hands and were told to report backstage where they would be given costumes. It was, of course, all an act. But it was a good one. Mr Fischer, in addition to his abilities as a conductor, has a natural charisma and gentle humour, and his search for ‘volunteers’ doubled as a stealthy way of warming up the crowd.
The use of singers for the music and actors for the dialogue, which can produce such a jarring effect in studio recordings, had a similar effect here. The difference between the Sarastro who offered spoken advice to Tamino and Papageno and the one who sung ‘In diesen heil’gen Hallen’ was so pronounced as to be (unintentionally) humorous. Yet the doubling was also used to great effect when the actor Papageno – who spent the evening reworking Schikaneder’s dialogue into a heavy Berlinerisch – fell asleep during ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ but wouldn’t wake up when it was over. The singer Papageno spent a few moments trying to shake him awake before giving up and performing the dialogue himself.
Yet if the evening was continually enlivened by these clever moments, there were also several stretches, especially in the first act, when neither costumes nor stage-craft could save the drama from meandering. The scenes with Monostatos – inexplicably, although not inappropriately, clothed in leather bondage gear and definitely on the M side of the S&M equation – failed to generate much spark; even the finest moments, of which Papageno and Pamina’s ‘Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen’ was an obvious highlight, were successful more on musical than dramatic terms. The second act, although longer and more abstract in its content, was considerably tighter in its storytelling.
The evening was anchored by a trio of strong performances from Valentina Naforniţa, Hanno Müller-Brachmann and Krisztián Cser. Ms Naforniţa sang a pleasingly earthy Pamina, bringing luxurious depth and palpable emotion to a role that can seem glassy and distant; both her first act duet with Papageno and her second act aria ‘Ach, ich fühl’s, es ist verschwunden’ provided the evening with some of its finest singing. Mr Cser’s voice was close to ideal for Sarastro, fluid and gentle with reserves of strength more implied than revealed. His final benediction of ‘Die Strahlen der sonnen vertreiben die Nacht’ and, especially, his commanding ‘Heil’gen Hallen’ had tremendous poise.
Norma Nahoun (Papagena) and Hanno Müller-Brachmann (Papageno). Mozart's Zauberflöte. Ivan Fischer, conductor and director. Berlin, Konzerthaus, May 2016 © Uwe Arens, 2016
If many of the singers seemed to approach the evening as something closer to a concert performance with unusual costumes, Hanno Müller-Brachmann alone seemed fully committed to delivering a rounded comedic performance as Papageno. If his voice was more straight-laced and less hammy than one is used to hearing in the role – his duet with Pamina pushed the character’s nobility to the fore, and even his suicide attempt in the second act was played without irony – his generous physical performance had an energy and subtle cunning that suited the role perfectly.
There were fine moments to be found in the other roles. Bernard Richter was not perhaps the most nuanced Tamino, but he had a room-filling ardour that made credible his cries of ‘Paminen retten’ and, in the second act, he brought an almost baritonal depth to the trials of fire and water. As the Queen of the Night, Mandy Friedrich gave a compelling dramatic reading in the first half of ‘O zittre nicht’ but seemed less steady in the coloratura passages. Her ‘Der Hölle Rache’ was considerably more focused both in technical control and emotional articulation.
Yet the evening’s most consistently rewarding performance came from Iván Fischer and the orchestra, who brought an inexhaustible supply of vitality and grandeur to the music. The orchestra, small enough in size and lean enough in sound to maintain an intimacy of detail, had no problem conveying the large scale pageantry of the two finales. In purely sonic terms, they were most impressive during Tamino’s trials, where the precision of the individual playing resulted in a scene of great fluidity.
Mr Fischer, for all the theatrical flair that he brought to the conception of the performance, never drew attention to his interpretation; yet his well chosen tempi, his subtle emphases, and his obvious delight in the score itself gave musical shape and dramatic focus to each aria and scene. His ability to switch between the lyrical nobility of Pamina and Tamino, the solemnity of Sarastro and the increasing despair of Papageno, without ever sacrificing his essential lightness of touch, made for a reading of satsifying balance. Die Zauberflöte may be one of the world’s most performed operas, but it is not every day that one is able to hear it played with such great attention to detail and such instinctive command of structure.
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