Alemania
Winter Kept Us Warm
Jesse Simon
Strauss’
two late mythological operas, Daphne and Die Liebe der Danae, are
often viewed as problematic and have long been kept on the sidelines for the
simple reason that no one seems to know quite what to do with them. This is a
great shame as neither can be considered minor works; indeed, Danae has
passages to rival the greatest of Strauss’ interwar operas. If it is easy to
place the blame with the libretti of Joseph Gregor – whose characters and
scenarios manage to draw from classical sources without quite hitting the vein
of universal truth that makes ancient mythology so perpetually relevant – the
new production of Daphne at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, directed by
Romeo Castellucci and conducted by Thomas Guggeis, presented a work that lacked
none of the ingredients necessary for an evening of compelling theatre.
Without
sacrificing the mythological framework or the essential structure of the drama,
Mr Castellucci transposed the opera to a world entirely of his own making. The
curtain rose on a snowbound landscape, flat and largely featureless save for a
few rocks, some distant evergreens shrouded in fog, and a single spindly tree.
Midway through Daphne’s first monologue it started to snow, and a dense but
gentle snowfall continued unbroken until the death of Leukippos more than an
hour later. The falling snow proved curiously hypnotic, creating the optical
illusion that everything on stage was attempting to float upwards.
While
the manufactured snowfall gave the staging a hyperreal beauty, as though the
action was taking place within the hermetic world of snow globe, it was Mr
Castellucci’s ability to paint with light and fog that gave the staging its
distinctive look. The events in the libretto begin at the very end of the day
and continue throughout the night and Mr Castellucci presented us with a series
of twilit and moonlit tableaux, occasionally turned golden by the artificial
light of Apollo, but remaining mostly in the spectrum of deep wintry blues.
Strauss: Daphne. Thomas Guggeis, conductor. Romeo Castellucci, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, February 2023. © 2023 by Staatsoper Unter den Linden.
Within
the barren world of the staging, Daphne had formed an emotional attachment to
the tree, the last non-human living thing around. And while Gaea, Peneios, and
their extended community of tundra dwellers wandered around the stage in parkas
and heavy boots, Daphne, in the presence of her beloved tree, stripped down to
almost nothing, apparently impervious to the elements that had forced her
family into such a marginal existence. If the libretto remains somewhat vague
on Daphne’s motivations, the staging suggested that the moment she became
untethered from the tree and allowed herself to be kissed by Apollo provoked a
kind of existential crisis that could be resolved only by returning to earth
from which both she and the tree had emerged.
The
first half of the staging – up until the arrival of Apollo – functioned mostly
as a straightforward retelling of the libretto, but the second half ventured
into far more symbolic territory. The hints were there from the beginning: to
the left of the stage was a small plinth with the initials ER (which stood
neither for Elizabeth Regina nor Emergency Room but was later revealed to be
the German masculine singular pronoun) topped with a plastic jug half filled
with a red liquid that looked like blood; in Daphne’s first monologue she
revealed an open wound in her side, possibly from the leaden arrow of cupid
that rendered her unresponsive to the romantic attention of mortals. In the
second half, however, symbolism took over from narrative culminating in a kind
of deus ex machina in which the deus was the title page from the first edition
of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. If Mr Castellucci’s subtle shift from
narrative to symbolic drama worked so well, it is perhaps because his most far
ranging associations remained rooted in the depiction of a very human tragedy.
Strauss: Daphne. Thomas Guggeis, conductor. Romeo Castellucci, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, February 2023. © 2023 by Staatsoper Unter den Linden.
The
role of Daphne may not demand the stamina of the Kaiserin or the raw
inexhaustible force of Elektra, but Vera-Lotte Boecker approached it with a
high level of dramatic engagement. In her opening monologue she seemed intent
on dispelling any sense that her attachment to nature might derive from innocence
or naivité; the elegance and agility of her phrasing (challenged only once or
twice by an excess of orchestral vigour) gave depth to her character, and the
impassioned ‘geliebter Baum’ section offered a foretaste of the crisis ahead.
During her later meeting with Apollo she was able to capture the whirlwind of
confused emotions, but she was at her peak throughout the climactic scene, in
which her grief for the dead Leukippos led first to frenzy then to lucid
clarity.
Of
Daphne’s two suitors, the Leukippos of Magnus Dietrich was coloured with enough
weight to lend a certain gravity to the character’s youthful passions; his
finest scene was his first encounter with Daphne, in which he conveyed a mood
of sullen defeat with great finesse. As Apollo, Pavel Černoch often came across
as cool and detached in a role that demanded greater ardour: both the kiss
scene and the revealing of his true identity seemed understated – especially
next to the excitement of the orchestra – although his final monologue,
delivered with forthright equanimity, was more successful.
Strauss: Daphne. Thomas Guggeis, conductor. Romeo Castellucci, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, February 2023. © 2023 by Staatsoper Unter den Linden.
While
neither Peneios nor Gaea are as central to the drama, both René Pape and Anna
Kissjudit delivered quietly great performances. When Mr Pape made his first
appearance he had a galvanising effect, greeting his kinsmen and followers with
benevolent warmth and concentrating the high expectations for the festivities
into a few elegant phrases. Ms Kissjudit was even more impressive: in her
higher notes there was a captivating radiance, but it was the effortless
strength of the lowest lying passages – which constitute the majority of Gaea’s
first appearance – that gave the performance its earthy splendour.
The
opening bars of the brief orchestral prelude evoked a mood of pastoral
melancholy due largely to the gentle overlapping of the woodwinds – who would
have thought that Strauss’ vision of Arcadia would work equally well with the
snowy desolation of the staging? – but even before the first lines had
been sung, conductor Thomas Guggeis declared a far greater interest in the volatile
passions beneath the work’s bucolic surface. It was an approach that often
yielded striking results, underlining Daphne’s fervent attachment to nature in
her first monologue, creating a mood of excited anticipation around the arrival
of Apollo, and realising the tragic potential of the climactic scenes. However
if Mr Guggeis responded with greatest enthusiasm to the score’s most excitable
moments, the uncertain calm in the aftermath of Apollo’s kiss and the quiet
force of the concluding transformation music were equally memorable.
When
Strauss composed Daphne his greatest operatic successes were several
decades behind him, and he was even further removed from the tone poems that
had brought him his initial fame. While the focussed irony that informed his
greatest operas had largely vanished (although it would make a welcome
reappearance in time for Capriccio), he had lost none of his skill as a
musical dramatist, and if Daphne can sometimes seem a casual entry in
Strauss’ operatic corpus, the new production at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden
suggested otherwise: between the expressive reading of Mr Guggeis and the densely
allusive symbolism in Mr Castellucci’s staging, the evening found a continuous
source of musical, visual and intellectual stimulation within the seemingly
placid world of this late-period tragedy.
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