The Magic Flute, Berliner Staatsoper (Schiller Theater), December 8, 2010

A good author gives us both sides of ourselves; a great author puts them in tension with each other, as Mozart and Schikaneder did in the Magic Flute by giving us Tamino and Papageno, and Pamina and Papagena, just as they already live in tension within ourselves. If the academic and intellectual puzzles over which part the author or the artist meant (as did the great Egyptologist Jan Assman in his recent book, Die Zauberflöte), he provides a small number of us who read him with the opportunity to extenuate the problem. On the one hand he consoles us by telling us the tension we already felt in ourselves is true and legitimate, but on the other he lies by making this a literary conundrum reveal some great author’s intentions when in fact it is nothing more than a conundrum that Tom, Dick, Harry, and I, face in our lives every day and even every moment.  To put it in suitably gross terms, at home we are Papageno but at work we are Tamino.

Tonight in Berlin, the 199th performance took place of the version of the Magic Flute that premiered here in 1994. The names have been changed to protect the innocent, mostly, and so has the venue.  The usual house Unter den Linden is closed for repairs that will take three years, and the Staatsoper has moved to the Schiller Theater on Bismarckstrasse, just a few blocks from the Deutsche Oper. While they are there it will repay the visitor to go to the second floor lounge during intermission and study the concave inside of the etched glass window work, cubist in style, whose outside is the primary architectural feature of the house, easily viewed on the web. Adam and Eve are featured in the middle of 34 vertical panes.

The house has a very unusual feature that has been lavishly exploited by the current production of the Magic Flute, and probably by other productions that have been brought here.  The stage can extend around the orchestra’s sides to a concourse along its front, separating the orchestra from the first row.  The singers can walk a complete circuit around the orchestra and, when they do they give the audience an opportunity to be disarmingly close to them while they are singing at full volume. I will need to ask my psychotherapist why tears came to my eyes when Papageno and Papagena sang their duet so close to me, sitting in the third row center, and why during her bravura aria in Act Two the Queen of the Night stopped at the same place and seemed to be singing with flawless virtuosity to me alone.

This old and traditional production does not need a new description.  The sets are reproductions of the old Schinkel decorations from 1816, and nobody cares if the soloists’ shadows are cast on the backdrop as they used to be in the time of limelight. But again the special flooring and doorways of the Schiller Theater have been provided for refreshing special effects that break down the barrier between the audience and the stage. In his first appearance Sarastro is located in the audience, singing from the boxes on the left; Papageno once emerges from the orchestra; and there are side doors on the concourse around the orchestra that provide for exits and entrances outside the actual plot while it is being played out a little further back on stage.

I learned tonight what Tamino needs to be because Martin Hormich failed to achieve it. He must be inherently attractive so as to make the Queen’s ladies fight over him, capable of guessing the truth better than Papageno, capable of a conversion when he finds he was right, and manly enough now to live up to his new high calling; but Hormich unfortunately, tonight at least, seemed to have only one voice and one emotional message: sing hard. I think everybody in the house was relieved for the few moments while Tamino was passing the test of silence! Pamina (Adriana Queiroz) on the other hand, was supple, emotionally satisfying, and very much in tune.

Papageno was one of the favorites, as Loge tends to be in Rheingold, because of his refreshing frankness.  But Hanno Muller-Brachmann who sang the role has a very great voice and moves very well. For me a highlight was the choreography (by Roland Gawlik) of the Three Ladies at the very beginning, each vying to tend to Tamino while sending the others to report back to the Queen.  Theirs will never be more than a minor role but it will seldom be played more enjoyably, and competently, than here.  Another highlight was Sarastro sung by Alexander Vinogradov: his arias are the best and truest of the opera, and Vinogradov sang them that way, with all the low notes despite a sinus congestion that appeared only in his nasal syllables. The conducting of youthful Alexander Soddy and the performance of the orchestra started with some sag in the high violins but soon got completely onto the mark and up to Mozart’s thrilling pace.

It is a wonderful innovation of this production that at the end all the Papagenos and Papagenas that these two had just vowed to create in their own images, actually show up. At the end, the stage is filled with all twenty of them along with everyone else in the cast; and even the Queen of the Night helps Sarastro remove his mantle and place it onto the shoulders of the newly betrothed royal pair, Tamino and Pamina.

The Realm of Night and the Realm of Day are again reconciled, and the Pagageni will continue to have their lives and live them without knowing any better. It is a reconciliation achieved by heroism in the case of Tamino, and divine mercy in the case of Papageno, the two paths that all of us find ourselves moving along, all the time of this life. – Ken Quandt

Tristan und Isolde, Berliner Staatsoper unter den Linden, September 7, 2008

Tristan is probably a little nobler than most of us but certainly the
most unlucky of all. This must be the idea behind staging the entire
opera on a fallen or sleeping or even dead angel, which Harry Kupfer
first introduced here in 2000. This season?s revival plays only three
times. I made the trek in honor of my close and recently departed
friend, Phil Raines, a noted Wagner scholar who died this July 4.

The stage is almost filled by a large, bronze sculpture, on and around
which the action takes place. It is a huge prone angel with a round
child's head, one wing ramping down to the floor of the stage and the
other arching upward as a wing might. In Act I its wings serve the
spatial needs of the ship perfectly. But paradoxically, the whole
stage is too empty to present a continuous identity of place requisite
to this end. In the present production the place Tristan died was the
same place he taught Isolde the metaphysics of love in Act II. Isolde
died exactly where she and Tristan sat at the end of Act II before
Marke?s entrance, which was the same place where Brangaene switched
the potions in Act I.

Tristan wears a full length coat and Isolde a red robe with black
brocade around a black dress. Brangaene is in blue. Katarina
Dalayman brings a Mona Lisa look to the role of Isolde and Clifton
Forbis is almost a Heldentenor.

Tristan is a man ennobled by his suffering, ultimately the suffering
of orphanhood. Once this is grasped Act III, which I have always
dreaded, it takes on the dimensionality of Sophocles' Oedipus of
Colonus and we suddenly find ourselves on a very high plane indeed.
Isolde stands over Tristan looking at the audience motionless, a
silent martyr to his nobility; in Act II she is perched upward on the
ramp of the angel's wings and watches the humiliation of Tristan,
kneeling on the ground with his head in his hands, as King Marke's
monologue pours out his disappointment over him. Her poses include an
element of Stabat Mater that reaches its culmination in the Liebestod,
where the angel on which the action takes place rotates and Isolde is
left on the stage alone, to lie down on its other side while the
lights dim to nothing.

The late Wagner scholar Phil Raines, who died this July 4, had been
asking what Tristan meant when, replying to Marke's monologue, he says
he could not answer his question and that Marke could never understand
the answer anyway. This production demonstrates that Tristan's
childhood was mangled by the death of his father the moment he
inseminated his mother, and of his mother the moment she bore him, a
degree of dismemberment others cannot understand even if they try.
This is the source of his boundless yearning, a yearning not for
Isolde?s love but a yearning much older, from a time in the gray
morning light when he first heard his father was dead. Through his
rambling autobiography, we learn from Tristan that ?The Look? that
moved Isolde so much when he "came to" in her healing cave and she
spared him was not the beginning of a life redeemed by love but only
the beginning of an eternal yearning. He had almost succeeded in
sublimating his yearning by winning her for Marke, but now, with ?The
Look,? he saw the loving face he had been denied seeing at birth, the
face whose life became dedicated to him by dint of his vulnerability.
Once he drank the potion, he became powerless to deny he had had this
experience, and he was doomed.

The solution for Tristan is to return to his mother's womb, as he says
right after Marke's monologue. But he needs Isolde at his side, to
look down at him again and at his wound, so that he can go back the
way he came, by reversing the process she began when she brought him
back to health and he looked into her eyes.

Daniel Barenboim is a great Wagner conductor. Many of the familiar
orchestral passages were deconstructed and given a new shape, and the
tonal dimensionality of the music was almost always fully represented.
The orchestra, however, was much too loud for the singers (from my
seat right under the chandelier) and tended to impose its own musical
line regardless of what they could contribute. The greatest loss was
the wandering extravagances of Isolde and Tristan's Act II scenes.
Almost no magical moment was given space to appear, though there are
several there. Even in the dramatic Liebestod the singer and the
orchestra were poorly matched. But the music here is so great and
builds so much to the same conclusion that even without coordination,
even with early entries by the horns, and even with a sluggish and
broad representation of the beat, everything was still brought in and
moved forward. Dalayman was able to trump the orchestra with sheer
power whenever she needed to, but should not have had to.

The sloping wings of the angel were hard for the singers to walk on.
Nobody slipped, but a distracting amount of care has to be taken to
balance oneself. Even in the Liebestod Isolde had to position herself
just right onto a low platform in the sculpture to make sure she could
sink without falling off.

I felt the voices of Dalayman?s Isolde and Michelle DeYoung?s
Brangaene were oddly too similar, perhaps a result of DeYoung?s
gradual movement into soprano parts (she sang a piece of Sieglinde?s
music at the Metropolitan Opera?s National Council Auditions last
February). Gerd Grochowski's Kurwenal was particularly convincing in
Act III and was justifiably applauded. Christof Fischesser's Marke
included a very moving and credible loss of temper at the end of his
monologue, when he drags Tristan part way across the stage by the arm.
Forbis reminded us that only a true Heldentenor can sing his heart
out in the way Tristan requires. It will be interesting to see what
Barenboim brings to his Met debut performances with Dalayman and Ben
Heppner later this fall.
- Ken Quandt