BERLIN — The end of the opera season in Berlin featured two new works, both daring and experimental, but quite different from each other. New mainstage operas in Europe, and perhaps especially in Germany, have typically been far more adventurous than those in the U.S. Substantial government subsidies have, in the past, given German companies the freedom to take bigger risks. That spirit endures for now, bolstered by the surprising enthusiasm of a younger, hipper audience, quite different from the older crowd that shows up for more traditional fare.
But shrinking arts budgets here are having an impact. At the Komische Oper Berlin, a new production of My Friend Bunbury, Gerd Natschinski’s 1964 musical adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, was recently canceled due to austerity measures. While not a new work, Bunbury is considered a masterpiece of a type of music theater that once thrived in East Germany.
LASH: Acts of Love. By Rebecca Saunders and Ed Atkins. Deutsche Oper Berlin — World Premiere
Rebecca Saunders is a British composer living in Berlin. While LASH is her first opera, she has achieved considerable renown for her concert works, which offer a unique sound world focused more on timbral complexity than tonality, often using traditional instruments in unusual ways.
LASH is a collaboration with Ed Atkins, a video artist and performer, who co-wrote the libretto (in English) with Saunders, as a commission for Deutsche Oper Berlin (seen July 1). Everything about this opera is thoroughly original: concept, text, score, instrumentation, staging. It sways from “post-dramatic theater” to performance art. It’s surely not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re in the right frame of mind, it’s an engrossing experience.
A woman is dying (or has just died: the reality is blurry, as in Joyce) and she explores her memories, regrets, erotic experiences, and losses, mostly via a series of flashbacks. The libretto consists almost entirely of short phrases that are repeated and sometimes deconstructed, sometimes by more than one person, sometimes on pitch, and often with different tempos. The language is poetic, often abstract, stream-of-conscious, and sometimes quite dark and bitter, with a sense of regret and anger, as reflected in the raw language. The f-word is a recurring motif.
From the beginning, the woman is split into four unnamed personalities: two sopranos (Anna Prohaska and Sarah Maria Sun), an alto (Noa Frenkel), and an actress (Katja Kolm). They each come and go, interacting, signing separately and together in combinations, sometimes as lovers, when one becomes the partner, but more often as representations of the same person.
There’s a lot of discussion about body parts: skin, hands, genitals, but especially the eyelash, which serves as a metaphor for the body, living and dead, and is an ornament. But as the opera progresses, it turns more to the quintessential opera obsessions, sex and death: “Death beside/beneath/inside/atop the sex” and “I wanted to ask how sex and death report life.”
The elaborate production, by the Irish theater group Dead Centre, uses boxes that arrive and disappear hydraulically to display a bed, bathtub, living room, or gurney, creating a hermetic world. Video projections, mostly live, are used extensively, so that a camera might focus on a woman’s lips in extreme close-up, or a single eye, blowing the image up to the size of the stage.
The large orchestra, with 69 musicians and including three synthesizers, electric guitars, and a large percussion section, produces a wide range of effects and textures, among them a Baroque sound. The vocal parts are mostly recitative and Sprechstimme but are occasionally sung. Each of the singers has a motif: Sun, for example, has a sort of yodeling sound, which can morph into a trill. Both soprano parts include stratospheric high notes. The orchestra often goes its own way, in swelling percussive interludes and a range of exotic sounds. Enno Poppe conducted with remarkable precision and coordination, considering the complexity of the score.
Acting and vocal performance were impressive. In the end, however, it was the show itself — the performance, the originality of the score, the imaginative production — that stood out, not the substance of the opera, which remained elusive, despite the novelty of the text and hypnotic spell it often wove.
The theater was nearly full, and the audience was enthusiastic.
Cassandra. By Bernard Foccroulle with Text by Matthew Jocelyn. Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden
Bernard Foccroulle might be best known as the director of La Monnaie in Brussels and the Aix-en-Provence Festival, but he has also had a major career as an organist, conductor, and composer. For his first opera, which premiered at La Monnaie in 2023, he joined forces with Canadian librettist Matthew Jocelyn for a work that combines the story of the Trojan king Priam’s daughter, Cassandra, with that of a young climate researcher turned standup comedian. This was the German premiere, seen July 3.
The opera opens with a prologue: A scholar reads the story of the visionary Cassandra, whose warnings went unnoticed (when she rejected Apollo’s advances, he cursed her so that she would never be believed). We see Troy, pictured as a modern city, collapsing into ruin, the stage littered with bodies and parents clinging to dead children, all amplified by live video close-ups.
We then find ourselves observing a stand-up comedian, Sandra, who we learn is a climate researcher but who has somehow achieved success in comedy. She intersperses her comedy act with serious warnings about climate change, quoting her own research. There’s a studio audience: extras in some of the boxes and amplified applause. But the essential problem is that her jokes aren’t funny, not for the real audience, and she comes across much more like a televangelist, berating “sex fiends” named Donald, Jeff, and Vladimir, whom she blames for “raping the earth.”
We learn a great deal about Sandra. As she signs copies of her latest book, she meets a climate activist, Blake, who becomes her partner. Blake wants to have a child, but Sandra puts him off, not wanting to bring a child into such a perilous world. He boards a ship to Antarctica for a planned political action and dies when it sinks mysteriously. Meanwhile, we meet Sandra’s obnoxious wealthy parents and her pregnant teen sister.
Ultimately Cassandra, whose own story has found its way into interludes, joins Sandra to reassure her. “No one will ever take my voice away from me,” Sandra declares at the end, vowing to continue and encouraging us to join her.
The excellent production, from La Monnaie, was directed by Marie-Eve Signeyrole. A giant cube represents Troy, then splits in two and morphs into a beehive, which becomes the opera’s central metaphor, with the initial vast swarm of bees diminishing over time as the planet warms. Other scenes are configured using the cubes, with props arriving hydraulically or moved around by the chorus.
Foccroulle’s score ranges appropriately through the centuries. Troy is depicted via something like Monteverdi, sung by the chorus. The bees get Penderecki, via violins. Antarctica is summoned via a quote from Bach, again by way of the chorus. Stravinsky shows up in the modern scenes. Meanwhile, Sandra is followed around by a marimba and Blake by a saxophone, which even conjures him when appropriate after his death.
This was a gifted cast. Katarina Bradić portrayed Cassandra with a warm, rich mezzo-soprano, ably conveying her despair. Soprano Jessica Niles came through with piercing high notes as Sandra while also doing her best with the stand-up gig. Gidon Saks and Susan Bickley each did double duty, portraying Sandra’s parents as well as Hecuba and Priam, the parents of Cassandra. Soprano Sarah Defrise was an expressive Naomi. Valdemar Villadsen succeeded in the more lyric role of Blake. Conductor Anja Bihlmaier gave the score a balanced, sensitive reading. The chorus was superb.
The strength of the evening was Foccroulle’s complex, fascinating score. But the text failed to cohere, stitching together too many subplots. Some were banal, especially Sandra’s long scenes with Blake. Others, especially Sandra’s unfunny comedy routine, simply didn’t work. In the end, the evening seemed overlong, even at less than two hours.
The Staatsoper theater, though smaller than that of the Deutsche Oper, was only half full, with patrons slipping out after each scene.
