Today, to the Staatsoper. To see a ‘partly-opera’, by name Aschemond. Aschemond? A mixture perhaps
of Aschenbrödl and Frau Luna. Oh no. Much more of a mixture
than that. Shakespeare and Purcell stirred in (advertisedly) with a non-book
and 21st century music by Helmut Oehring. Sounded like a dangerously 1980s
University student cocktail. And what is this? … mixed in also with Sylvia
Plath! Mon dieu! The trendy idol of the 1980s University crowd. How old fashioned!
Oh dear. It seemed I was in for a horridly pretentious afternoon.
Well, it didn’t turn out quite like that at all.
When a piece cannily advertises in its programme that it has
a non-book, you can’t criticise it for that. In fact, it sort of did have an
outline: a series of glimpses back in time by a young man theorising on his
crazy, sexually immature, repulsively self-centred mother’s alcoholic suicide.
Ms Plath, I imagine.
However, someone wanted to use Purcell’s songs, and Herr
Oehring obviously had his settings of Shakespeare’s sonnets in his bottom
drawer, so the whole lot was turned into German text by Stefanie Wördemann, and
voilà; the non-book. The partly-opera.
With fairies in the kitchen. I’m not sure why. But they were
nice fairies and looked and sounded grand ..
The staging, too, was a surprise. Looking at the photos
before the event it looked like a boring box set. Well, the box set turned
endlessly (perhaps too much) producing a seamless action, and in spite of the
‘non-story’ requiring the same scene to be repeated several times, only in the
last half hour (when people began walking out of the audience) did it, with its
deliberately slow pace, begin to drag. I see from the libretto that cuts have
been made. More are needed. And an interval. Otherwise the slow pace becomes
oppressive.
The cast sang their two kinds of music well: Tanja Ariane
Baumgartner (contralto) got the bon-bon of the new score, Bejun Mehta
(counter-tenor) the best of the Purcell. Marlis Petersen (soprano) as the
mother did well in both, but one was so irritated by her smackable character
that one just wanted the wretched woman off the stage.
A feature of the show was the written-to-order role of the
housekeeper, played in sign-language by the non-hearing actress Christina
Schönfeld, in a show-stealing but necessarily non-singing role, and the central
grown-up little boy, the narrator, was played beautifully by Ulrich Matthes, in
the crispest clearest actor’s voice I can remember in years.
I could go on giving ‘credits’ here for miles. They fill six
pages in the programme. Two orchestras, instrumental soloists, two conductors,
dance staff (although the dance element
was absolutely pasted in), designers of this and that, etc. But for a new
piece, I think the piece deserves the attention.
I hope they work on with Aschemond.
More trimmings? Perhaps a bit of an attempt to make the central woman less
Plath and more sympathetic, a new setting of ‘Shall I?’ and cut the totally unnecessary
choreography. And without doubt, put in an interval. Oh, and for the ordinary
audience’s sake: kill that claque in the back row.
And then I think – pick yourselves up off the ground, you
who know me -- I would like to see it again.
I who, in 67 years, have never seen an even partly-modern
part-opera a second time.
The world is full of surprises!
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