To Succeed Or Not To Succeed: Theater-An-Der-Wien World Premiere Of "Hamlet"

To anyone who will listen, I will praise the Theater an der Wien as the singly most important cultural institution in Vienna for anyone who wants their art to have a pulse and not the musky smell of a museum. Those who prefer dead composers in even deader productions are better off at the Vienna State Opera, which excels at that sort of thing. Others, those who like the new, some risk, a dash of daring, the high upside (including with the occasional disappointment) go to the Theater an der Wien, that Little Stagione Company That Could, fresh off celebrating the 10^th anniversary of being an opera house again.

Without a residence orchestra, it sometimes features the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra, or the Vienna Symphony, or the Concentus Musicus Wien (when Harnoncourt was still alive), as well as visiting companies like the superb Freiburg Chamber Orchestra or Les Talens Lyriques. The chosen directors are usually interesting, the singers top-notch, the productions novel, the repertoire diverse and studded with rarities: Schulhoff’s Flammen, Mozart’s La finta semplice, Haydn’s Orlando Paladino and Il mondo della luna, Strauss’ Intermezzo, Handel’s Partenope, Henze’s Prinz von Homburg, Rameau’s Castor et Pollux, Gluck’s Telemaco, Berlioz’ Béatrice et Bénédict, Verdi’s Attila, staged oratories, and new operas by the likes of Jake Heggie, Lera Auerbach, Iain Bell, HK Gruber etc. In short, it’s just about all one can ask for in an opera house.

I have always felt this way, even before attending performances more regularly. This belief has not been shaken by a series of unfortunate picks of the performances I attended. My enthusiasm for the house has thus far survived the following operas and a few, still less notable concerts or contemporary operas:

Lazarus (December 2013) enabled the inclined viewer to judge for himself why Schubert’s unfinished opera isn’t very often played. Probably because it really isn’t very good – and not even Claus Guth’s production could salvage it, super-adding music of Charles Ives though he did. The only good things about that evening were the Simon of Florian Boesch’s, who had a solid night, and most especially the young soprano Çigdem Soyarslan, who impressed in every imaginable way as Jemina. Still, that’s precisely the point of a good cultural institution: to let the audience come to their own conclusions about which works should be re-established in the canon and which have been neglected for a reason.

The Tchaikovsky rarity Charodeyka (The Enchantress, September 2014) was the next enticing opera I got to see – and again in a production by a renowned director, Christof Loy. No luck: the cast, though dotted with a couple Russian speakers, seemed to trundle their way through the opera’s libretto phonetically, and Loy’s dancing Conchita Wurst doubles didn’t make the story – of which the singers didn’t seem informed in the first place – any more believable. Tchaikovsky, who claimed that this was his best opera, would have changed his mind on the spot. Failure is an integral part of opera, and as thus not to be condemned, but this could and should  have been better.

The nadir was reached exactly a year later, with Heinrich Marschner’s Hans Heiling in a production – if the word can be used – by Roland Geyer, the director of the Theater an der Wien. Headed by a terrific cast around Angela Denoke and Michael Nagy, and with a promising new twist in the story (namely a mother-son relationship that would have made Oedipus squeamish, from which stem Heiling’s subsequent issues and ensuing suicide), it was followed up by nothing: Downtrodden conducting and total absence of blocking or working with the remaining singers to make actors out of them and fit them in the story. I still shudder at the repressed thought of it. The few proto-Wagnerian phrases that can make Marschner’s music interesting as the missing link between him and Carl Maria von Weber were not worth it.

Since then I’ve been having a bit more luck. The Flying Dutchman (November, 2015) was very well performed in its Scottish “Donald-not-Daland” original version by Marc Minkowski and Les musiciens du Louvre. The players may have forgone a completely HIP approach in instrumentation (no valve horns, for example, and no gut strings even beyond the E string, which could arguably have been steel at the time), but they still sounded wonderful – not the least for the more pleasant timbre of wooden flutes. Oliver Py’s production, except for his inclusion of a non-singing, dancing rôle (which seems de rigeur ever since Claus Guth’s Salzburg Le nozze di Figaro, only that here it wasn’t an angel but Satan himself), was fine in combination with Pierre-André Weitz’ set – although the huge, stage-spanning, waved-about plastic sheet that doubled as the sea had a way of looking a little silly after a while. Minkowski had done a double bill of this version of the Dutchman along with Le vaisseau fantôme (based on Wagner’s libretto) before, in Vienna, in a concert performance at the Konzerthaus in 2013, also with Ingela Brimberg’s Senta. Samuel Youn was the Dutchman at the Theater an der Wien; Evgeny Nikitin at the Konzerthaus. Both were excellent. (An aside: Youn was the singer who replaced Nikitin in Bayreuth in 2012, due to the petty little Swastika scandal.)

The production to follow the Dutchman was Peter Grimes (December 2015). A great opera and well enough done, but Christof Loy’s minimalist production – just a prominent bed and some chairs – didn’t exceed medium-high expectations. He gave plenty in interpretation, basically making the homo-erotic subtext explicit: Ellen (a dramatically impressing Agneta Eichenholz) now an understanding Lesbian; Balstrode (a terrific Andrew Foster-Williams!) a semi-suppressed homosexual. But then he lost me with an annoying “fisherman’s boy”, who was here an insufferable narcissist male prostitute, selfishly at the core of the downfall of Grimes. Some secondary cast members were made more interesting (Rosalind Plowrigh’s Mrs. Sedley), others unnecessarily belittled (Andreas Conrad’s Bob Boles-goes-Pumuckl in a ridiculous red wig) During the make-belief sexual gyrations of Peter Grimes, I cringed sympathetically for Joseph Kaiser, who was vocally challenged and perhaps not entirely healthy, but who elevated the production on the strength of his charisma, acting, and beautiful voice. Cornelius Meister didn’t exceed expectations in the pit either; going rarely beyond the predictable, but impressing plenty by always doing so loudly.

Then, finally, an unqualified success: The 2016 10 Year Anniversary concert: Idomeno, uncut (!), with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra under René Jacobs in a concert performance that was so alive, so vivid, so entertaining, so well played and sung and – yes, acted – that it felt like a staged performance, and a very short one at that, and what had been my near-debilitating lumbago on tenderly gliding into the seat at the beginning of Mozart’s opera was all but forgotten on jumping out for the standing ovations. It provided that kind of musical tonic that will last for a year, if necessary and even through the next batch of operatic risk-taking gone wrong.

Such as El Juez, which was really only conscionable to have put on as a parting gift to José (Josep) Carreras… It’s an opera and libretto written to his tastes and to his very narrow, light voice – but otherwise devoid of the values that a serious opera house would want to display. The dignified, slightly amplified Carreras gave a fine rendition of a judge who, in Franco’s Spain, starts to clear his conscience by digging into the issue of the ‘lost children’, finding out in the process that he was one of those lost children himself. The Puccini-pop, cruise-line enterspainment-music that Christian Kolonovits wrote for this event was well received by a prominent but not particularly opera-typical crowd but my description should give away what I thought of it: altogether a dreadful thing and kitsch of the first order. But then, it’s not like that wasn’t fairly predictable. Except for professional curiosity and, in this case, professional duty, I wouldn’t have attended – and indeed, these sort of good-bye shows of over-the-hill musicians work for a certain type of audience and should probably just be gotten over and done with, without any critics present: An intimate moment between artist and indiscriminate fan.

This brings us to Hamlet. An opera premiere for the Shakespeare Quadricentennial, music by Arno Schreier and libretto by Thomas Jonigk, based on motifs from Shakespeare’s eponymous drama, Saxo Grammaticus’ “Historia Danica” and François de Belleforests’ “Histoires tragiques”. I wouldn’t have minded more Shakespeare and less Jonigk. The libretto tried to update the story by using modern language… alas, using a language that would never, never be spoken anywhere but a theater’s stage. Further, the motivation of the characters was hard – often impossible – to determine. If five hours of Wagner contain twenty hours of story, Jonigk’s drama didn’t contain twenty minutes. Ophelia is, in accordance with the sources, including the mythical Ur-Hamlet, the Danish ‘Q source’ if you will, a prostitute. We surmise that she was fucked by Hamlet’s father (also called Hamlet, very much present on stage for a ghost), also by Hamlet’s stepfather, and now she is hired to fuck Hamlet Jr., to take the latter’s mind off his mother (who attempts to blow him just a scene earlier) marrying his uncle. So far, your typical Shakespearean drama. But then Ophelia, equally disenchanted with the world (and complaining of cum-stains along the way) as is the young prince, kind of falls in love with him, after all, and so does he, with her. Then she changes her mind and runs off. Still, Gertrude, the mother – now pregnant with Hamlet’s cousin – gets jealous and has her killed. Then Hamlet Jr.’s uncle regrets that he doesn’t regret killing Hamlet Sr. or Ophelia (“I don’t suffer because I am a murderer, I suffer because I’m feeling so darn fine”) and wants Hamlet Jr. to kill him. Hamlet bungles that, too (not unreasonably asking if the uncle can’t just take poison instead of forcing him, Hamlet Jr., to stab him, his uncle), and gets killed. Hamlet’s mother is distraught but, remembering that little Hamlet III is on the way, she sees the silver lining. A feeling I shared with her, seeing that this was within a minute of the final curtain.

If this sounds inane, it was, more or less. Sometimes it felt as though there was a page – certainly structure – missing in the libretto. Nor was Hamlet much helped by Arno Schreier’s music, which started very proper, predictable, harmless. It’s tip-top, by the book, academy’s A+ graduation composition modernism, suitable to the purpose of accompanying the story with brass-chatter and a vocal treatment that reminds me of every modern opera I don’t remember. A carpet of shimmering strings is revealed whenever the woodwinds and brass abruptly break off one of their many climaxes. But the music relents, it becomes more confident, more tonal, adds more colors and even the occasional touch of daring beauty. Film music elements are very effectively added. !”). If only this general improvement was continuous, it might have amounted to something… but as it was, it remained ultimately on a rather inoffensive, mediocre level. That’s not to say that there weren’t many fine moments in the work; I particularly liked the chorus and the pulsating woodwinds in interaction on “Gedenke mein!” (oft repeated, it sounded as if reversed: “mein Gedenke!”), for example. But on the downside, the rôle of the Priest is an exercise in Richard Strauss-isms gone wrong: A Rosenkavalieresque comic character accompanied by orchestral music that includes a dash of Keystone Kops music; adding, in the second act, references from Salome for good measure.

The singers, meanwhile, did well with what they are given. Bo Skovhus as bad uncle Claudius, was static in tails, but regal, and vocally in command. The young André Schuen made an excellent milksop-Hamlet; he seemed overwhelmed, but that so fit the character, there’s not telling what was acting and what wasn’t… in any case, it kind of worked. Theresa Kronthaler’s Ophelia sounded good and looked great, and turned disconnected scenes into little events. Jochen Kowalski, as Ghost Hamlet Sr., exuded presence and smirky transcendence. The counter-tenor was presumably meant to sing at least some of his parts, but in the course of composition his bit was made a speaking part. (The official version being, that the text needed to be more immediately connecting with the audience, which only speaking can achieve. My money is on the fact that somewhere during the proceedings it dawned on all of the participants, that Kowalski simply doesn’t have the voice anymore, to sing any sort of larger, demanding parts, and still do the standards he once set justice.)

Director Christof Loy – obviously a Theater an der Wien favorite – kept it neat and clean (in some sense of the word) and it’s hard to fault him for any of the opera’s shortcomings. The set by Johannes Leiacker consists of vertigo-inducing, enormously high walls with flowery wallpaper on a raked parquet floor and one door. The Greek chorus (members of the Arnold Schoenberg Chorus) – which was the only singing unit to get actual lines from Shakespeare – wore an alternating mix of Tudor dress and pastel 50s clothing. The rest donned timeless modern garb or, in the case of Theresa Kronthaler’s revealing Ophelia, not very much at all.

And then there was Marlis Petersen. Her character a bitch of the first order; a seductress, a child-woman, a sensual, sexual, needy being; frail, strong, bitter, demeaned, proud, manipulating and naïve. And Petersen amid that, a magnificent actress, whose every smallest cocked eye, pouted lips, innocent look, or sinful writhing betrayed a familiarity with her character’s emotions. She carried the evening; she bestowed sense where there was little; she made exciting – however briefly – moments that were not; she turned into music parts that weren’t very musical. Without her, this Hamlet would have collapsed like an amateur soufflé.

All in all a lot of amiable effort on something not very many people will want to watch and hear out of anything but professional interest. But do try yourself: Tomorrow, on September 23^rd, at 7PM CET (2PM EST), Hamlet will be available as a live stream on the online platform myfidelio.at. On November 20^th, ORF III will broadcast it at starting at 8.15PM CET (3.15PM).¶