Farewell? Renée Fleming as the Marschallin.
Photo: ROH Catherine Ashmore
When Der Rosenkavalier turns into a piece for our own times, you know two things: first, the director has a classic production in the making; secondly, we ourselves are in a lot of trouble.
Robert Carsen's staging at the Royal Opera House sets the action in the year Strauss composed the work, 1911. The empire is imploding in slow motion. Arms dealers are the moneyed arrivistes. Violence simmers under the surface, sometimes explodes. The Field Marshall's palace boasts crimson walls and giant, imperial-era paintings. Outwardly, all is elegance, beauty and shiny show, the Marschallin choosing Klimtesque gowns from a fashion parade and a troupe of "house-trained dogs" drawing oohs and ahhs (especially the bulldog and the borzois); and the silver rose is massive, not only a ton of silver but full of crystal sparkles. It's an artificial rose of the future, set against the living, delicate but doomed red ones the Marschallin cradles and sniffs. For underneath there lurks "degeneracy": a brothel-load of prostitutes in Schiele-like revelations, an Octavian who knows a lot more than he lets on, and sexual danger looming around Sophie from Ochs's troops (Sophie nevertheless startles her father and the importunate Ochs with new-found defiance). The palace reveals doors within doors within doors; every level conceals another.
Matthew Rose as Baron Ochs and Sophie Bevan as Sophie
Photo: ROH Catherine Ashmore
But this is a world on the brink. As the Marschallin delivers her reflections on the passage of time, a shudder of recognition goes through us. She is talking not only about ageing, but about the world itself, about everything that surrounds her. Yes, this is Renée Fleming's likely farewell to London's operatic stage, and yes, the Marschallin is no spring chicken, however fabulous she looks and sounds. The implications are much wider, though. At the end the place disintegrates, showing us the battlefield horrors of World War I - and soldiers aim a gun at a drunken child named Mohammed. The veracity of this imagery hits home so hard that one becomes fearful in earnest for where we are all going now. Remember, historical fiction isn't only about the past; its task is to be about today.
Big plaudits, then, to Carsen and his designers Paul Steinberg (sets) and Brigitte Reiffenstuel (costumes). The lighting is by Carsen and Peter von Praet. Musically, too, this performance couldn't be much more memorable if it tried; even if not every singer precisely matches every listener's ideal, the quality of insight, the excellence of the singers and the chemistry between them could scarcely be bettered.
Fleming's Marschallin is the incarnation of olde-worlde glamour. Her voice still has its amber-mellow beauty, if perhaps scaled down from its full glory, and her singing communicates with profundity accentuated by its directness and poise. As Octavian, Alice Coote brings oodles of character to her tone as well as her acting; this lad is awkward and stiff in army uniform, yet abrupt liberation follows in Act III when, dazzling in drag in a brothel, he/she displays a startling understanding of how to tantalise and torment the justifiably muddled Ochs - and whether Octavian has learned all this from the Marschallin or acquired it elsewhere is perhaps a moot point. Sophie Bevan as her namesake sounds warm and golden rather than cool and silver, yet her high notes at the presentation of the rose seem to reach heaven itself.
Matthew Rose's Ochs is no mere bumpkiny boor, but a powerful man out for a good time that doesn't please those around him and tramples - Trumples? - over societal norms with disruptive relish. It's almost impossible not to feel vaguely sorry for him as "Mariandel" delivers him her nasty dose of over-worldly Viennoiserie. Luxury casting for Annina and Valzacchi in the shape of Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke and Helene Schneiderman, as well as Faninal - the many-dimensional voice of Jochen Schmeckenbecher.
The greatest magic of all: Andris Nelsons, red-shirted, open-armed and open-hearted, unleashing the music and letting it fly out of the orchestra's players, hushing the levels for Fleming and allowing the visual marvels to be cradled in a sensual richesse of sound.
It's hard to believe that this could be Fleming's farewell - but then, there's a lot that's hard to comprehend right now. She may be departing together with our golden age of opera. That's a topic for another time, but reinforces an important message: let's never forget we were lucky enough to have and hear this.
On a lighter note, a special little plaudit for a startling appearance in the onstage band of two characters that apparently reference "Geraldine" and "Josephine" from Some Like It Hot. A very endearing anachronism.
Meanwhile I may get up in the night and stop the clocks.
I am running a new occasional series of exclusive star interviews on JDCMB. Here is the first... Matthew Rose takes centre stage, appropriately enough, in the Royal Opera's new production of Der Rosenkavalier - and it's not going to be a pink, fluffy one. The British bass talks to me about Baron Ochs, Bottom and Brexit...
Matthew Rose rehearsing for Der Rosenkavalier, with Helene Schneiderman as Annina. Photo: Catherine Ashmore
If I’ve arrived at the Royal Opera House
stage door expecting the kindly, bearded presence of a King Marke, I’m in for a
surprise. The new version of Matthew Rose instead boasts sideburns, a hefty moustache
and a military demeanour. The British bass may be as imposing as the Wagnerian monarch he sang last summer at ENO, but today he is still virtually in character from ongoing intense
rehearsals for Covent Garden's new Der Rosenkavalier. Singing
Baron Ochs, he remarks, settling into the tallest chair we can find, is “like
doing seven operas at once”.
“Robert
Carsen, our director, said just now that Baron Ochs is probably the most
brilliant character ever invented in opera, with such bravado and such belief
in himself,” Rose declares. People often see Ochs as a bit of a buffoon, he adds, but it’s not
necessarily so: “He speaks French and Italian, he knows about the world, he’s
very educated – but he happens to act in a way that is very different from
everyone else in Vienna. He’s from a house in the middle of nowhere where he
can behave as he wants, so that’s what he does and he comes to Vienna thinking
he can get away with it there too: meeting his bride-to-be, with the
Marschallin, who’s his cousin, he just says exactly what he wants to say. This
staging has him as a soldier as well, though, so there must be some kind of
discipline there. And he’s very entertained by himself. He’s a very entertaining
character.”
Matthew Rose, with the former look
Entertaining the opera may be, and Ochs
with it, but this time we can expect something a little edgier on stage. “I’ve
done the role just once before, in Chicago, so I was trying to get all the
words into my head,” Rose says. “That was a very traditional Rosenkavalier, very fluffy. Many of the
productions you see are fluffy, very pink and lovely. This isn’t like that.
This is definitely not fluffy.”
Carsen has set the production in 1911, the
year of the opera’s composition, rather than the Mozartian era envisaged by
Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. “It’s pre World War
I, pre change of everything, Austria before everything went tits-up there: a
very important time both historically and artistically,” says Rose. “It fits in
very well with how things are here.”
Indeed, the primary purpose of historical
fiction is arguably not only to explore a bygone era, but to reflect back
crucial elements of our own through its prism – and this opera is no exception.
Rose has little doubt that “things here” are about to go very tits-up indeed.
On the morning the Brexit decision was announced, he made for Westminster with
a takeaway coffee, expecting a demonstration in protest to materialise. He was
astonished when it didn’t. “Why are we allowing this to happen?” he growls. “Brexit
is going to ruin this country in a way I think people don’t understand. I don’t
see how anybody could think any good could come out of it.”
Rose as Sparafucile in the ROH's Rigoletto
Photo: Johan Persson/ROH
At a recent press event Alex Beard,
chief executive of the Royal Opera House, explained that Brexit has already hit
the organisation hard because of the fall in value of the pound: the cost of
paying many people in other currencies has risen 20 per cent. “It’s obvious how
it’s going to affect us in the arts – it puts everything in peril that we do,”
says Rose. “Our industry is in a terrible situation. This opera house thrives
on people coming in and out internationally, very freely and easily, and doing
things often on a very ad-hoc basis. Who knows what’s going to happen to that,
and who knows what the pound is going to do? All these knock-on effects… In the
US Trump can be voted out after four years, but I think the UK is in worse
shape, as we’re stuck with the referendum result forever.”
Rose has a foot in both countries: he has been living more or less in
mid-Atlantic, between New York and Blackheath, south-east London, for some
years. Though he grew up in Seaford, five miles down the road from
Glyndebourne, he came to the idea of professional singing relatively late.
“Singing has always been part of my life,
though I didn’t take it seriously at first,” he says. “In my last year at
school I was singing in the choir, but there were lots of other people doing
things seriously and I wasn’t one of them. A new music teacher arrived at the
school and he was the first person who suggested to me that I might consider
becoming a professional opera singer. I’d never even thought about it before.
Then I went to university at Canterbury and Benjamin Luxon and his wife were
there and they took me to the next step.”
As Bottom in Glyndebourne's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Photo: Robert Workman
Attending a summer course in Italy, he met
Mikael Eliasen, artistic director of the Curtis Opera Theatre at the Curtis
Institute, who invited him to Philadelphia to audition. He spent five years
there, though at first, he remarks, “it was quite embarrassing. I think I went
in the same year as Lang Lang. He went in being already this world-class star
and I was starting from scratch, so it was quite an intimidating situation.”
The department was relatively small, with
around 25 singers, yet put on five operas a year, Rose recounts – a preparation
for stage life more hands-on and intensive than most. His teacher was Marlena
Malas, who was based at the Juilliard School in New York, and whom he still
consults. “I had my lessons every Monday at five o’clock, looking straight
across to the Met,” he remembers, “and whenever I did something wrong, she’d
say: ‘Do you wanna sing thereor not?’”
He certainly did, especially after he
started attending performances every week after his lesson. “The Met has always
been a shrine to me,” he remarks. “Now I do two or three operas there a season
and it’s a wonderful family to be part of. There are lots of friends around,
people in the orchestra with whom I went to college, and I feel very at home there.”
His most recent Met stint was as Leporello
in Don Giovanni: “Leporello is my favourite role in the world,” he declares.
“He’s an amazing character. Da Ponte wrote some of the greatest librettos in
history – as did Hofmannsthal – and Leporello’s journey through the opera,
especially the second half, is just miraculous.”
After five years at Curtis, Rose felt “ready
to go out and have a career”. Back in London he auditioned, and was accepted,
for the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme at the Royal Opera House. Next
thing he knew, he was on stage with Angela Gheorghiu, Roberto Alagna and Bryn
Terfel in David McVicar’s production of Faust. “At that point you have to up
your game,” he considers, “and there’s no better way to do it than standing on
stage with these people.”
Rehearsing the ROH's La Bohème. Photo: Yuri Vorobiev
Coming back to Covent Garden some 14 years
later, he notes, it is hard to shake off the association – “up to a point I’m
still ‘Matthew Rose who was on the Young Artists’ Programme…’” But now he has
travelled full circle and himself coaches the young singers on the scheme:
“It’s a nice role reversal. I feel so grateful for things that have been passed
to me. We all absorb these things that we distill within ourselves and
hopefully can pass them on again. I’ve done lots of teaching these past few
years and I really enjoy that.”
To various teaching activities, Rose adds a
strong commitment to the Blackheath Concert Halls near his London home: “I’ve
been heavily involved in activities there for ten years – we’ve done wonderful
community projects, started a children’s choir and have a new children’s opera
commissioned for next year from Kate Whitley. I’d love to be part of making it
into a really wonderful centre for the arts in south-east London, though of
course it’s easier said than done…”
Another favourite London location is the
Wigmore Hall: here he sings Schubert’s Winterreise
in February 2017. And then there’s Schwanengesang
a few months later at Carnegie Hall, New York. “How lucky am I to do that!” he
remarks. “Schubert was my first great passion that really got me into singing,
when I went to a Schubert Day at the Royal College of Music in his bicentenary
year, 1997.
“I love Lieder, making music with one
pianist, being in control of what one wants to do – whereas in opera one is
told by many people what to do. And I love orchestral concerts. Of course I also
love being on stage, but you’re compromising so much when you sing opera:
you’re trying to do 17 different things at once and you’re rarely going to be satisfied.
But I love standing there with an orchestra, making music. At the end of the
day, I’m a musician and I love to make music. And if there’s a bit of acting or
being a bit silly involved,” he adds, “that’s OK.”
Rose certainly has risen to fame with in
roles that are comic, yet with an undertow of complexity: “I’m quite a silly
person, so being on stage being silly comes quite naturally,” he suggests. Besides
Leporello, he has been particularly lauded as Bottom in Britten’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, at Glyndebourne and beyond; he will be singing the role at a new
Aldeburgh Festival staging by Netia Jones in summer 2017. He is a long-standing
devotee of Aldeburgh, having attended many courses there as a student and
nursing a passion for the musicality and dramatic excellence of Britten’s
operas. “Bottom in particular has been very good to me,” he notes.
One does sense, though, that underneath
there is little about this perceptive and down-to-earth artist that is remotely
silly. Even golf is a serious matter for him: “It’s not for unwinding,”
he says. “It’s something I love to do well and in many ways it is like singing:
concentrating hard, switching that concentration on and off.”
As for his dream roles that remain, those
aren’t so silly either. “I’d love to have a crack at Philip II,” he says.
“Gurnemanz in Parsifal will hopefully happen next year, and certain other
Wagnery things would be nice… But I’m having the most incredible year at the
moment, doing Leporello, Bottom and Baron Ochs, and the song recitals. I
probably ought to retire after it! What I’ve done so far has far surpassed
everything I ever dreamed of and I’m so lucky to have done what I’ve done. If I
stop now, I’ve had a very nice time and a very nice career and maybe it’s time
to go and have a very nice sleep.”
Now he really is being silly, or so one
hopes. There is the whole of Der Rosenkavalier
to look forward to, with a dream cast and Andris Nelsons in the pit: “There’s
no one classier in the world than Renée Fleming,” Rose enthuses. “Alice Coote
and Sophie Bevan I know very well, and it’s nice to be reunited with Jochen
Schmeckenbecher [singing Faninal], who was in the first opera I ever did as a
student in Philadelphia – it was The
Magic Flute, I was a priest and he was Papageno.” As for Nelsons, “The
orchestra sounds unbelievable with him. He’s got it all. This is the hardest
role I’ll ever do,” he adds, “and everyone’s being so nice to me. It’s a huge
honour and I’m very grateful for this situation.”
Curtain up is this Saturday at 6pm: and the
appropriately-named Rose is set to be a cavalier of a whole new kind. Beg,
borrow, or ninja a ticket.
Der
Rosenkavalier, Royal Opera House, from 17 December. Book
here.
It's the big 150th anniversary today, so here is a little something to celebrate, with pics from my visit to Garmisch in 2012. First, the incomparable Fritz Wunderlich in one of the composer's most beautiful and ardently summery songs, 'Heimliche Aufforderung'. And you can watch the whole of Der Rosenkavalier from Glyndebourne free online here, starring Kate Royal, Teodora Gheorghiu and, of course, the fabulous Tara Erraught, whose star shines bright.
It is often said that behind every great man there is a great woman;
but not every great composer can claim to have achieved a long and happy – if somewhat
tempestuous – marriage to his muse. The soprano Pauline de Ahna was the
powerful presence behind Richard Strauss: his wife, his inspiration and a diva
in every sense. Over his many decades he drew on plenty of different spurs to
musical action, but none more consistently or more powerfully than the soprano
voice.
Strauss’s operas remain arguably his finest achievements and the Royal
Opera House has already marked the 150th anniversary of his birth with a new
production of Die Frau ohne Schatten (1918), the
most complex, symbolic and magical of his collaborations with the playwright
Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Despite its baffling fairytale premise, it deals at heart with matters that are human and domestic: the longing for a family.
Strauss was born into the centre of the German operatic world; his
father, Franz Joseph Strauss, was the principal horn player at the Munich Court
Opera. Loathing the music of Bavaria’s local megastar, Richard Wagner, Franz
Strauss was the only member of the orchestra who did not stand up in respect
when the composer’s death was announced to them. His son took a different view:
“I remember clearly how, at the age of 17 I feverishly devoured the score of Tristan
[und Isolde] and fell into a rapturous ecstasy,” he recalled.
In his teens he composed prolifically; and Hans von Bülow (the first
husband of Cosima Liszt, who then married Wagner) helped him to secure his
first conducting post in Meiningen when he was only 21. Later he held vital posts as conductor in Munich,
Weimar and Vienna; film exists of him on the podium in advanced age at the
Salzburg Festival.
He announced his engagement to Pauline de Ahna shortly after the
soprano – starring in his first (and not very successful) opera, Guntram – had astonished the musicians in
rehearsal by throwing a piano score at him. She was, he later wrote, “very
complex, very feminine, a little perverse, a little coquettish, never like
herself, at every minute different from how she had been a moment before".
They settled in 1908 on the outskirts of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where Strauss
built a substantial jugendstil villa
with the proceeds of Salome’s success; his study housed an Art Deco desk
with a specially commissioned matching piano (pictured above).
“My wife is often a little harsh,” he is reported to have said, “but
you know, I need that.” Not everybody did. Indeed, her cantankerous personality
attracted note from many quarters. In the late 1920s my grandmother-in-law was
dining in a restaurant at Kochelsee, near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, when she
spotted at a nearby table her father’s occasional skat (card game) companion
Richard Strauss and his wife. The waiter apologized to Frau Strauss: they were
out of the fish she wanted. He offered her, instead, a nice fresh Saibling. “I
don’t want that scheisse [shitty] fish!” the great lady expostulated,
according to grandma-in-law.
“Strauss would never have become a great man without Pauline,” insisted
the composer’s friend Manfred Mautner-Markhof. The pair’s volatile relationship left its mark
directly upon Strauss’s music, notably in both the Symphonia Domestica
and the tone poem Ein Heldenleben – in the latter she is personified by
a solo violin. But above all, her presence is felt in the power and sensuality
with which he wrote for the female voice, whether in the frenzied finale scene
of Salome, the celebrated trio towards the end of Der Rosenkavalier, or the ecstatic and soaring lines of his solo
songs, including his wedding present to Pauline, Cäcilie.
It was another area of Strauss’s life that housed his most difficult
moments. In 1933 – by which
time he was nearly 70 – he was made head of the Nazi administration’s Reichsmusikkammer,
a state music institute that aimed to promote “good German music” by Aryans.
Declaring that he had been appointed without being consulted first, Strauss
said – perhaps naively – that he hoped he could “do good and prevent greater
misfortune”. He was forced to resign, though, in 1935 when a letter he had
written to Stefan Zweig, the Jewish librettist of his opera Die Schweigsame
Frau, was intercepted by the Gestapo and found to contain cynical words
about the regime.
His attitude towards the Nazis in the ensuing years contained
loathing, but also bursts of sociability – not idealistic as much as
self-interestedly pragmatic. Ultimately both Nazis and anti-Nazis judged
Strauss “a total bystander” or, as Goebbels, put it, “unpolitical, like a
child”. Nobody could escape the fact that he was by then the greatest living
German composer – yet also an intractable soul, uninvolved and caring only for
his family and his work.
Nevertheless, he expected too much of the Third Reich. Strauss’s
daughter-in-law was Jewish; her mother was imprisoned in the concentration camp
at Terezin. The composer drove to its gates believing he could rescue her by
pulling rank; but the guards would have none of it. Eventually he was publicly
humiliated by Goebbels for having made disparaging remarks about Lehár,
Hitler’s favourite composer of operetta. “The art of tomorrow is different from
the art of yesterday,” Goebbels said to him. “You, Herr Strauss, are
yesterday!”
Strauss’s music, though, had the last word. In 1948, the year before
he died, he completed his Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra. Here the
musical language may belong to an earlier age, but its beauty and universality
transcend any such concerns. The last song, “Im Abendrot” (At Sunset) describes
an elderly couple spending the quiet evening of their lives together. “Is this
perhaps death?” asks the soprano, while two flutes evoke a pair of larks rising
towards the heavens. It was his last and perhaps most perfect offering to his
beloved muse, the soprano voice. On 8 September 1949 he died, aged 85. Pauline
outlived him by just eight months.
Pictured right: a statue of Beethoven that stands in Strauss's house. The story goes that when the Americans arrived in the area at the end of the war and turned up at the villa to investigate, one of them asked Strauss who this was. The somewhat unimpressed composer told them it was the Gauleiter of Garmisch.
(This is an adjusted version of my article that appeared in The Independent in January.)
If you only do one thing in London over the next few weeks, make it this: go and see Der Rosenkavalier at ENO.
The opening night on Saturday...where to start? The dream-team cast? OK, Amanda Roocroft is The Marschallin for the first time - not that you would guess for a moment she had not been born singing this music. Roocroft is one of the finest actresses in British opera right now - look at her awards for all that Janacek. She can effortlessly evoke the charming, open-hearted aristocrat on the one hand, and, lurking just beneath the surface, a self-destructive woman whose fear of losing her beloved young lover leads her to chase him away; act I's conclusion leaves her cradling a cushion in despair. Sarah Connolly is everyone's perfect Octavian: glowing, dashing, her voice as silvery as her armour (and those of us who follow her updates on Facebook were extra-pleased to see her as she'd been stuck on a motionless train with points failure for half the afternoon).
But perhaps most stunning of all was the debut of Sophie Bevan as Sophie (above, pic by Clive Barda). A star is born? You can't argue with the goose-bumps: you can't always explain them, but you know them when they happen. The moment Sophie opened her mouth, it was clear that she is no common-or-garden girl soprano, but one with potential to reach some very special places indeed. At no point while she sang did one have to glance at the surtitles; every word was clear as the proverbial bell, and every twist of character projected with relish. The voice - pure, flexible, snowy and effortlessly voluminous when required - never faltered; and the magical moments following the presentation of the rose as Sophie and Octavian fall in love made us all fall in love too. The audience went mad for her. I can't wait to hear what she does next.
Nor can you argue with John Tomlinson as the odious Ochs. Some of us feel that the opera contains too much Ochs and too little outrage over his ghastliness (the programme notes said that Strauss makes us like Ochs, but actually no, he doesn't) - but 'John Tom' is so convincing that what one remembers is a) the 18th-century setting would have condemned him to the guillotine had Strauss and Hofmannsthal not shifted the action to Vienna instead of Paris, and b) the world premiere, in 1911, took place only six years before the Russian revolution. Rosenkavalier as social commentary for its own time and maybe for ours too... Meanwhile, so involved was the singer with his role that in the scene with the attorney he turned physically scarlet with anger.
David McVicar's direction of a production as opulently golden as its music is typically astute and detailed - probing, questioning and poetic. For instance, why doesn't Octavian dressed as Mariandel slip out of the boudoir to escape Ochs's attentions? Because the mystery doors in the wall are so mysterious that he can't work out how to get them open. And the last gesture of Octavian towards the departing Marie-Therese before turning back to Sophie sparks an idea that we may not have seen the last of that affair after all...while young Mohamed the page boy has a crush of his own to pursue after curtain-down.
Down t'pit, Ed Gardner was working a magic of his own. This was a shimmering, generous, expansive Rosenkavalier - running to 4 hrs 10 mins, it was 25 mins longer than the theatre's estimate - but not a second of it was excessive. The music had room to breathe, grow and smoulder. Super violin solos from leader Janice Graham and some very lovely woodwind playing.
I have only two complaints. First of all, fine though the diction of the singers was, this opera's entire musical world is so bound up with flow of the German language that in English it just sounds all wrong. That's nobody's fault. I imagine the translation could have been more inspiring, but perhaps it would be a losing battle in any case. The other issue is that the set scarcely changes from scene to scene - without differentiation between the Marschallin's olde-worlde palace and the Faninal's new-build house, half the matter of class distinction, which is such an overriding theme, can't help but be somewhat submerged. Still, sets cost money; and, quite honestly, this cast could have performed in concert alone and still convinced us every step of the way.
First of all, I'm delighted to announce that I have "a new gig", contributing to The Spectator Arts Blog. My first piece is out today and it's a look at six of the best young opera singers I've come across in the last year or so. First up is Sophie Bevan, who will be singing her namesake in Der Rosenkavalier for ENO from Saturday. And five more budding superstars... Read it here.
And it's Mozart's birthday, and it's Friday, so here is some Friday Historical Mozart: the first movement of the Concerto for Three Pianos, with Sir Georg Solti (conducting and playing), Daniel Barenboim and Andras Schiff, and the English Chamber Orchestra. Happy 256th birthday to our darling Wolferl!
