AMSTERDAM — On April 23, the Dutch National Opera premiered a new production of Die Frau ohne Schatten, a work that always stretches a company to its limits. Originally planned for April 2020, the show was to have crowned Marc Albrecht’s decade-long tenure as chief conductor not only of the company but also of the Netherlands Philharmonic, its principal but not exclusive pit band. It was FrOSch, as fans like to call the opera, that first brought him to these closely associated institutions in 2008, and his long-term appointments quickly followed. What better way to celebrate the end of an era than with FrOSch 2.0?
The new director perversely attached to the venture was Katie Mitchell, who has characterized Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s monumental riposte to Die Zauberflöte “dated and misogynistic,” faulted the poetic, effortlessly intuitive symbolism of the shadow as confused, and dubbed her interpretation a “feminist sci-fi thriller.” Rehearsals in 2020 were well in hand when the pandemic put the planet on hold. The long-deferred unveiling this year therefore marked not the grand finale of the Albrecht era but a homecoming. The audience, noticeably shy of capacity, gave the maestro a hero’s welcome.
One could soon see why. Orchestrally, FrOSch weaves a magic carpet of thunder-and-star shine, hardly a stitch of which passed unnoticed under Albrecht’s clinical yet sensitive gaze. Attuned to his ways by long collaboration, the players balanced each touch of iridescence, each deep jewel tone and wash of black on black a Miltonian might have been tempted to call “not darkness, but light invisible.” Across a span of four houses, detail chased classy detail — a pang of woodwind heartache here, muted flourishes from the brass there. The range of attacca spanned the gamut from caress to knockout blow. Rather than mine the score for distinctive “spin,” Albrecht concentrated on delivering, straight musical “text” uncluttered by interpretive “comment.”
Yet instances of personal nuance were not lacking — most strikingly with the Big Bang that calls the FrOSch cosmos into existence. From the hush of expectation, a three-note gesture intones the dread name of Keikobad, inscrutable ruler of the spirit world, omnipresent yet meant never to be seen. Too brief and invariant to be called a leitmotif, played twice in a row, this grim motto tumbles to a dead stop like a runaway chunk of mountaintop. Commonly, conductors let the last note reverberate for a Gothic moment. Albrecht tamped it down quickly, casting an even bleaker, more hopeless spell.
Where, though, was drive? Where was momentum? For all its felicities, Albrecht’s reading never swept a listener willy-nilly into the stream of the drama. A similar inertia plagued the singing. The raptures of the Emperor, blissfully unaware that he is about to turn to stone, never came close to lift-off. Same story with the effusions of the conscience-stricken dyer Barak, melting with compassion for the no-name shrew he thinks he has lost forever. Heart-on-sleeve tunes like these cry out for a touch of kitsch of which Albrecht showed no trace. The women’s fierce declaratory moments, which require a more savage energy, were similarly lacking in forward thrust.
Of course, gutsier voices would have helped a lot. The part of the Empress, through whose body light passes as if she were made of glass, symbolizing her inability to conceive a child, fell to Daniela Köhler. Like most of her colleagues, she proved a conscientious singing actor, psychic with subtext, brilliant with props. But it was only in brief, unaccompanied moments that Köhler’s clean, clear soprano landed with visceral or emotional impact. AJ Glueckert’s bright timbre suited the Emperor’s buoyant spirit but wanted rounder body (and his camo suit did him no favors). As the Empress’ cigarette-smoking Mephistophelean nurse, Michaela Schuster oozed malevolence, even as her insinuating mezzo kept vanishing in the orchestral weft. As Barak, the baritone Josef Wagner brought to the party an appealing physical presence and plenty of heart. Yet his sound got covered where it most needed to dominate. As his wife, the soprano Aušrinė Stundytė cut loose with ringing high notes but seldom bound them into phrases. And so it went.
In mostly unfortunate ways, Mitchell’s production made a stronger statement. With decor and costumes by Naomi Dawson, it epitomized the current rage for huge, boxy stage structures in an antiseptic contemporary style involving split-level architecture, rooms behind rooms, construction-grade elevators for lots of heavy lifting, and lots of extra personnel to hammer home often extraneous concerns of the director. The Emperor and Empress, who live for their sensual pleasure, occupied the upstairs master suite in a hospital doubling as a deluxe resort. Downstairs, Barak and his wife dyed their fabrics in what looked like a laundromat. For Act 3, the scene changed to the bowels of the hospital, part medical lab, part makeshift prison.
In Hofmannsthal’s fairy tale, a woman’s shadow symbolizes her ability to conceive a child. In Michell’s production, it’s sonograms that reveal her fertility or infertility, and the issue arises with some frequency. Cue — over and over — hospital staff wheeling around their ugly, cumbersome paraphernalia, drawing focus from the women whose fates hang in the balance. Yes, the literal-minded high-tech veneer looks “scientific” rather than shamanic, but its bearing on the allegory is nonexistent. Sexual content of a more egregious sort is the product solely of Mitchell’s imagination. Of Hofmannsthal’s lovesick Apparition of a Youth (Egor Zhuravskii) she makes a hapless junior exec in a suit, hustled onstage at gunpoint by Men in Black who are goons of Keikobad’s. This happens on two occasions. Each time, the goons force the woman, again at gunpoint, to yank down the guy’s pants and perform rough, joyless, degrading acts. So much for her secret fantasies of romantic fulfillment. Thanks a lot, Katie.
Mitchell justifies such departures by positing that it’s the music, not the narrative, that accounts for the score’s lasting appeal. Sure. But what exactly does Mitchell suppose the music exists to express? Apart from the grubby sex, her feminist (?) inflections consisted principally of a few last-minute embraces involving the Empress, the Dyer’s Wife, and the Nurse, whose ways have long parted. Unsurprisingly, these Kumbaya sisterhood moments are gooey, gratuitous, and totally unconvincing. Equally gratuitous and unconvincing is the violence visited on the supporting players at the final curtain, popped gangland-style by Keikobad’s busy goons. I’ve noted that the opera’s creators meant Keikobad never to be seen, but in Mitchell’s show he’s all over the place, a tall, thin man in a coat with the noble head and twisted horns of an impala. What a stage picture!
