Upiór w operze

That the organisers had considerably scaled back, due to budget cuts, the programme of the 150th anniversary season of the Bayreuther Festspiele was something we learned over six months before the start of the previous festival. The initial plans were indeed bold: the Green Hill was to have seen the presentation of the entire Bayreuther Kanon, the last ten of Wagner’s thirteen operas as well as – much to purists’ outrage – Rienzi, an opera rejected by the composer himself. In the scaled-down version the choice was obvious: Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal, representing the “canon proper”, that is the only works staged at the Festspielhaus during the composer’s lifetime. The programme was complemented by performances of Der fliegende Holländer in Tcherniakov’s 2021 staging as well as a new production of Rienzi directed by the Hungarian duo Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka – preceded by an announcement that it would be a one-off event and that the work would not return to the stage of the Wagnerian temple. Bayreuth decided not to revive its two latest productions, Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson’s 2024 Tristan und Isolde and last year’s quite sucessful Die Meistersinger directed by Matthias Davids.

I decided to forgo the new Ring, mainly on account of its cast (Christian Thielemann took the baffling decision to entrust all the most important tenor roles – Loge, Siegmund and Siegfried in the last two parts – to one singer, Klaus Florian Vogt, so beloved by the German audiences). As I co-presented the Polish radio broadcasts of the Ring I saw that my decision had been right, although the controversy was aroused primarily by the “staging”, generated by artificial intelligence. Judging by the reactions of the critics and the more seasoned among the music lovers, the prompts had not been quite spot-on. I limited myself to Rienzi, still a rarity on the world’s stages, presented in Bayreuth in a new reconstruction commissioned especially for this year’s performance; and to Parsifal, in Jay Scheib’s staging, presented for the fourth and last time.

The recurring allegations that the Festival is unable to face up to its own inglorious past seem unfounded. That it is zealously facing up to it is something I witnessed on numerous occasions. Sometimes this turns into overzealousness and raises the question of whether the organisers – perhaps unwittingly – might be trying to combat one form of propaganda with another. Bayreuth has long abandoned the abstract approaches of Wieland Wagner and his epigones, approaches that leave plenty of room for interpretation. Like elsewhere in the world, the dominant productions at the Festspielhaus are those that are full of references to the current conflicts, threats and social ills, are increasingly politicised and increasingly reluctant to enter into a creative dialogue with the composer’s oeuvre, which is, after all, just as politicised and engaged. A similar approach was taken by the authors of the stage concept of Rienzi, who have transformed Wagner’s grand tragic opera into a story of the rise and fall of a power-hungry populist – possibly in a reference to the current political situation in Hungary, although more striking allusions are those to Donald Trump’s second campaign (it is hard to resist the ambiguity of the name Capitol, which most people today associate mainly with the seat of the United States Senate and the place where American presidents are sworn in).

Rienzi. Gabriela Scherer (Irene), Jennifer Holloway (Adriano) and Andreas Schager in the title role. Photo: Enrico Nawrath

It was mentioned before the premiere, of course, that Rienzi was a historical figure. His real name was Nicola di Lorenzo Gabrini, but he went down in history as Cola di Rienzo. In May 1347 he became the leader of a successful revolt against the rule of Roman patricians. He was a man of the people, a self-made man in the best sense of the word, a highly educated and very influential individual who dreamt of restoring Rome to its former glory from Republican era and of making it the capital of the united cities of the Italian Peninsula. During his less than a year in power he carried out a number of groundbreaking administrative, financial and judicial reforms – until representatives of the deposed Orsini and Colonna families laid siege to the city and decided to force it to surrender by starving it. It was then that the people turned away from their benefactor. Hated and excommunicated by the pope, Rienzo hid in a monastery for a few years. He thought that fortune had smiled upon him again, when yet another Avignon pope, seeking to return to the See of Peter, lifted the excommunication from the ill-fated tribune so that he could use him in the fight against the patricians. However, Rienzo failed to regain the trust of his old followers. He died during bloody riots and his rotting, desecrated body was put on public display in a church.

Cola di Rienzo was not a man without flaws, yet historians see him today primarily as a hero and pioneer of the idea of a united Italy. Wagner wrote the Rienzi libretto on the basis of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel written in 1835 as a warning to the British liberals of the day that they should not impose freedom on a thoughtless mob incapable of appreciating it. It was in a similar spirit that Wagner instructed Josef Tichatschek, the first performer of the title role: he argued that Rienzi had been called to enlighten the depraved people and raise them out of their fall.

Obviously, Hitler, who saw Rienzi for the first time in 1905, may have seen the eponymous tribune as a role model, but to say that “it all began from that” and that Rienzi was the favourite opera of the future leader of the Third Reich is a serious exaggeration. First of all, the anecdote of the “revelation” experienced by Hitler thanks to Rienzi is known solely from the memoirs of his friend August Kubizek, not a very reliable source to say the least. Secondly, at least half of the works of the Bayreuth master are in the running for the title of the Führer’s favourite opera; they include the far more ideologically suspect Lohengrin and quite apolitical Tristan. That is why presenting Rienzi in this light in the anniversary season – even if Winifred did give Hitler the manuscript of the score, subsequently lost in unexplained circumstances – is a remedy worse than the disease and, in addition, instead of shedding light on the complex context of the work, it obfuscates it even further.

If only the audience had a chance to judge the directors’ efforts. Yet the printed programme does not feature a libretto synopsis; surtitles are traditionally not displayed at the Festspielhaus; and the words uttered on the stage are sometimes incomprehensible even to native German speakers (the programme is accompanied by a separate booklet with the German libretto, but it is impossible to follow it during the performance). As a result, most spectators could not make head or tails of things, watching a staging that was at time very attractive visually but most of the time had nothing in common with the work.

Rienzi. Photo: Enrico Nawrath

The geometric set design, in a wide variety of shades of grey, sparingly punctuated by red and dazzling white, quite effectively captures the contrast between the cramped, uniform nature of private space and the openness of public space. “The people” huddle in identical cubbyholes, watch the same news programmes on television and stare at the screens of identical messaging apps. Colour and light appear only on the municipal agora, on the red-carpeted stairs, in the spectacular live projections, sometimes multiplied and reflected as if in a kaleidoscope (video by Leonard Koch, lighting by Berndt Gallasch). Yet we do not learn why the people followed Rienzi and then abandoned him. Already during the overture we see a gravely ill child, to whom Irene and Rienzi, preoccupied with each other, devote too little attention and, as a result, do not notice the child’s death. An allusion to an incestuous relationship between the two characters or an introduction of a character not present in the libretto, Rienzi’s brother, who, in fact, was an adult and died at the hands of the patricians? There is no sexual assault on Irene, only an unlawful use of her image on social media. The pantomime in Act II – instead of serving as a symbolic comparison of Orsini’s assault on Irene with the story of the rape of Lucretia, as the composer intended – turns into an amusing interlude with the Festspielhaus at the centre, featuring characters from several legendary staging of Wagner’s operas jostling for space on stage at the same time, while audience members alternately queue for the toilets or for a pretzel stall in the intervals. Admittedly, it was very amusing and brought a clear sense of relief to many, because they were able to understand what was going on at least for a moment. The action then continues independently of the libretto: in Act V, even before the final climax, Rienzi receives a fatal blow from his own sister. Nevertheless, he valiantly sings his part until the end in a set eerily bringing to mind the backstage of the theatre on the Green Hill.

The audience, some of whom had loudly booed the experimental new Ring, this time had no complaints, not even about the musical aspect of the production. I, on the other hand, became increasingly convinced that Rienzi indeed should not be staged at Bayreuth: regardless of whether we regard it as a masterful mix of Italian heroic opera and the French grand opéra or ridicule it like Ernest Newman, who called it “an attack of musical measles”, it requires a completely different setting and a diametrically different approach on the part of the conductor in charge of the whole thing. First of all, it does not sound right with an orchestra hidden in a deep, partly covered pit: under such circumstances what is lost is not only the monumental nature of the composition, but above all its dense, multi-layered texture as well as distinctive colouring, which Wagner regarded as an essential element of the dramaturgy of Rienzi. Yet Nathalie Stutzmann conducted the opera as if she wanted at all cost to avoid any accusation of showmanship: conservatively, carefully, focusing on honing the various episodes at the expense of narrative coherence. In addition, it would have been advisable to select for such an arduous and, apparently, one-off project singers specialising in a similar repertoire, even if their names meant little to the Bayreuther Festspiele regulars.

However, as a decision was taken to entrust the title role to a tenor associated with the local company, we should be happy that the choice fell on Andreas Schager, who has never been a particularly subtle singer, but does have the necessary stamina for the role and quite decent technique as well. Unfortunately, his handsome voice is already showing signs of fatigue, resulting in too much vibrato, intonation mistakes and lack of ease at the top. Nevertheless, he managed to create a striking character and had a few magnificent moments, even in the not entirely successful aria “Allmächt’ger Vater, blick herab!” (moved to the beginning of Act IV in the Bayreuth version), in which he effortlessly sang the famous gruppetti, which for some unfathomable reasons are beyond the reach of most Wagnerian tenors today. Jennifer Holloway did a fine job as Adriano, although she, too, succumbed to the temptation of pushing her beautiful soprano. On the other hand, I was disappointed by Gabriela Scherer – her Irene was completely bland, sung in a voice that was dull, somewhat breathy, getting weaker and increasingly monotonous with each act. Among the supporting characters Vitalij Kowaljow gave the best performance as Raimondo, outshining both Andreas Bauer Kanabas (Colonna) and Michael Nagy (Orsini). Surprisingly fine performances in the cameo roles came from Matthias Stier as Baroncelli, Joachim Goltz as Cecca del Vecchio and the ever-reliable Victoria Randem as the Messenger of Peace.

Parsifal. Miina-Liisa Värelä (Kundry), Andreas Schager (Parsifal) and Georg Zeppenfeld (Gurnemanz). Photo: Enrico Nawrath

This Rienzi will not go down in the history of either opera or attempts to make audiences aware of the complex evolution of Wagner’s worldview and compositional technique. It will remain one of the many stagings conceived as a tool to describe the current social and political situation, stagings detached from both the work itself and the broader context in which it was written. Another production that will not go down in history is Jay Scheib’s Parsifal, staged against the backdrop of climate crisis and the unrest caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This repulsive dystopia, completely reversing the meaning of Wagner’s message in the finale, will be remembered above all because of a gadget available to just a fraction of the audience – the famous augmented reality glasses, which, according to their users, proved even less attractive than the production itself. Sheib’s concept has already been described by many before me; let me just note that the Knights of the Grail have all the hallmarks of a fanatical sect and Parsifal destroys both Klingsor’s garden and the very cup used during the Last Supper. Apart from Act II – resembling an LSD-fuelled psychedelic orgy – the production team bathes the stage in the colours of disease, decay and poisoned earth. Blood flows not only from Amfortas’ wound: Titurel literally bathes in it, while the Flowermaidens suck it out from the bodies of the fallen. There are also allusions to the “blood minerals” extracted in conflict zones – including the Grail itself, which in Scheib’s vision takes the form of a crystal resembling cobalt spinel, one of the rarest precious stones in the world, owing its extraordinary colour to the ions of an element essential to all batteries powering modern electronic devices. These include laptops and smartphones, which were certainly indispensable to the “eco-friendly” Bayreuth staging.

However, it would be hard to formulate any complaints about the cast of this Parsifal, which also applies to Schager, who in the relatively short and rewarding title role seemed to be resting after the recent labours of Rienzi. Miina-Liisa Värelä, who made her Bayreuth debut last year as Ortrud in Lohengrin, proved to be an excellent Kundry. She has all the makings of a true Falcon, a powerful, dark dramatic soprano, with the only element still missing being greater ease at the top. All the roles written for low male voices found worthy performers, which is especially true of Amfortas in a deeply moving portrayal by Michael Volle; in vocal terms, an equally fine performance came from Georg Zeppenfeld as Gurnemanz, with convincing interpretations also coming from Vitalij Kowaljow (Titurel) and Jordan Shanahan (Klingsor). Worthy of note is also the exceptionally apt choice of singers cast in the minor roles. Contrary to popular belief, these are not Wagnerian bit parts, but roles demanding exceptional skills and often a unique type of voice (this applies, for example, to the excellent Victoria Randem as one of the Flowermaidens). I should add, not merely for the sake of formality, that the Polish mezzo-soprano Natalia Skrycka, in addition to appearing in three parts of the Ring under Thielemann (this year, as well as Wellgunde, she also took on the role of Rossweisse in Die Walküre), also sang the Second Squire and the third of the Flowermaidens in Parsifal – and she still has an exceptionally busy season ahead of her at the Berlin Staatsoper, where already in early October she will sing Marcellina in The Marriage of Figaro conducted by Marc Minkowski.

Parsifal. Miina-Liisa Värelä and Georg Zeppenfeld. Photo: Enrico Nawrath

On the other hand, I was not too impressed by the interpretation of Pablo Heras-Casado, who was in charge of musical direction. He is yet another conductor who cannot see the wood for the trees, endlessly polishing individual elements of Wagner’s masterpiece (with some phenomenal results, as the festival orchestra was in excellent form this year), yet fails to bring them together into a cohesive musical and dramatic whole, to sustain the narrative pulse, to draw the listener completely into this mystery. That is why I have decided to end my review with the collective hero of both performances – the Festival Choir, under the guidance, since after the end of the 2024 season, of Thomas Eitler-de Lint, who has worked true wonders with it. Four years ago he prepared the Leipzig Opera choral ensemble for the WAGNER 22 festival, which encompassed the composer’s all stage works. Eitler-de Lint put the knowledge he had accumulated over the years to good use in Bayreuth, inspiring the choir members, who – after years in a crisis – are finally singing with excellent projection and total commitment; at times one could get the impression that they were more aware of what they were doing than the conductors of in this year’s productions.

And there is hope in these choir singers, for I have a feeling that an era is coming to an end in Bayreuth: a time of breaking away from the sinister legacy of the Bayreuther Kreis, often at the expense of Wagner’s musical legacy. May these be the voices of messengers of peace and reconciliation.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

The motto of this year’s Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik is “Was feiern wir?” – and not without reason, as there is something to celebrate and someone to honour in 2026. The festival is celebrating fifty years of uninterrupted existence: it took place even during the pandemic, which prevented the organisation of Festival Oude Muziek in Utrecht, Avignon Festival and Bayreuther Festspiele, among others. Soon, it will be able to celebrate even more jubilees – of the Ambraser Schlosskonzerte, which were launched in 1963 and continue to take place during the Festwochen; of the Early Music Summer Academy, inaugurated in 1972, the predecessor of several educational projects run today; and of the Cesti-Wettbewerb, which has been accompanying the festival for sixteen years. This year Eva-Maria Sens and Ottavio Dantone managed to invite two previous artistic directors, René Jacobs and Alessandro De Marchi, to take part in the festival. In addition, they paid tribute to Alan Curtis, who initiated the tradition of staging forgotten Baroque operas in Innsbruck. Although the tenth anniversary of the death of the American harpsichordist, musicologist and conductor came during the previous Festwochen, this year’s commemoration may have been even more fitting given the staging of Cesti’s legendary opera Il pomo d’oro: after all, it was Curtis who presented two other reconstructed works of this extraordinary composer, the melodrama Il Tito and the dramma musicale La Semirami.

This is why I decided to include in my operatic visit to Innsbruck the “Tribute to Alan” event at the Spanish Hall of the Ambras Castle. It featured the mezzo-soprano Anna Bonitatibus as well as ten Accademia Bizantina musicians led from the harpsichord by Dantone. Bonitatibus was one of Curtis’ favourite singers. He heard her for the first time in 2001, at the Handel Festival in Halle, where she was portraying Irene in a Tamerlano production conducted by Trevor Pinnock. He immediately started working with her and that collaboration soon turned into close friendship. Bonitatibus mentioned “Carissimo Alan” among the people who had the biggest impact on her career. She worked with him until his death and their collaboration included an unfinished project of recording all of Handel’s operas. It was largely thanks to Curtis that she became involved with the Innsbrucker Festwochen, where she continues to conduct masterclasses and serves on the jury of the Cesti Competition.

The artists constructed their programme in such a way as to capture the listeners’ attention and, at the same time, pay tribute to Curtis in pieces marked by an emotional intensity and unbridled energy similar to that he himself brought to his own ventures. The concert at Schloss Ambras was thus brief but delicious. Bonitatibus’ voice may no longer be as fresh as it used to be, yet it still delights with its warm tone, characteristic rapid vibrato and complete control over phrasing, thanks to which her interpretations have gained even more intensity and expressiveness (especially in her phenomenal performance of Ulysses’ aria “No, quella beltà non amo” from Handel’s Deidamia and Anastasio’s endearingly lyrical “Sento in seno” from Vivaldi’s Il Giustino). The evening, which also featured two concerti grossi by Handel and Geminiani respectively (a standout performance among the instrumentalists came from Alessandro Tampieri, a violinist who combines incredible technical discipline with lightness and freedom of improvisation), was by no means a “musical monument” in honour of the great artist: rather, it brought to mind a well worked-through period of mourning for a departed friend, when one can finally allow oneself to return to joyful memories.

Anna Bonitatibus, Ottavio Dantone, and members of Accademia Bizantina. Photo: Amir Kaufmann

It is a pity that Curtis did not live to see the staging of Il pomo d’oro, rightly announced as the biggest event of this year’s Festwochen (also in the literal sense: according to accounts from the period, this monstrous festa teatrale lasted over ten hours). It was also announced – not quite so rightly – that it would be the first performance of the work since its premiere in 1668. The manuscript of Cesti’s five-act opera to Francesco Sbarra’s libretto has not survived in its entirety: Acts Three and Five disappeared from the score at some point. This was the form in which Il pomo d’oro was published in 1897 by Guido Adler, in the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich series he edited. Interest in the work was revived in 1982, when the American musicologist Carl B. Schmidt found fragments of the lost acts (including nearly twenty arias) in the library of the House of Este in Modena. However, a year before that a group enthusiasts staged Il pomo d’oro as part of an initiative so peculiar that it is worth mentioning it at least. A so-called chamber version of the surviving three acts with the prologue was directed by the twenty-four-year-old Eberhardt Harnoncourt, son of Nikolaus, in collaboration with the instrument maker and gambist Walter Waidosch. The premiere, featuring fifty amateurs, was held in the small town of Aidenbach near Passau. Eight years later in Vienna a “complete” version – that is, with the fragments discovered in Modena – was presented in a concert performance on period instruments conducted by Gerhard Kramer, a judge by profession and, at heart, a passionate Baroque opera lover. The cast, on the other hand, was made up of professionals, headed by Kurt Equiluz as Paride. The work impressed Martin Haselböck, the founder of the Orchester Wiener Akademie, so much that he decided to stage it. He even managed to put together a creative team, but the project did not go ahead due to logistical reasons.

Interestingly, the Boosey & Hawkes catalogue features a critical edition of the score of Il pomo d’oro – including the Modena fragments and a reconstruction of the rest of the music on the basis of other works by Cesti – by Alan Curtis himself. However, the edition is not available and it is not known if and when it will be published at all. Even more interestingly, Dantone became aware of the gaps in the score already when planning the staging for the festival anniversary season – which he openly admitted in a conversation with Paolo Scarnecchia for the Total Baroque magazine. He, therefore, decided to take the bull by the horns and create his own reconstruction, complementing a new critical edition he had prepared together with Bernardo Ticci. A very good decision, for in this version we cannot hear any “tacking”, although it lasts “only” just under eight hours. Conclusion? Either the witnesses’ accounts are inaccurate or the reconstruction could be expanded to include fragments composed in the style of Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, who composed music to numerous ballet scenes.

But it is just not quite clear whether it would be worth it, because staging this monumental celebration in honour of the House of Habsburg – albeit one loosely drawing on the myth of the Judgement of Paris, the prime cause of the Trojan War – is just as complex today as it was in the seventeenth century. Pietro Antonio Cesti apparently composed Il pomo d’oro for the wedding of Emperor Leopold I and Margaret Theresa of Spain, planned for mid-1666 in Vienna. Yet, first, the wedding was delayed, as was later the construction of the huge Theater auf der Cortina, and then the young empress had to recover after the death of her firstborn son. In the end the premiere took place to mark her seventeenth birthday, on 12 and 14 July 1668 – it was divided into two parts owing to the size of the work. The staging featured over one thousand performers, not to mention horses, elephants and lions. The architect Lodovico Burnacini – who also designed the theatre – prepared no fewer than twenty-three sets for the performance. The show had just about everything: shipwrecks, Venus descending from the night sky in a ball of fire, burning ruins surrounded by the waters of the Styx and vanishing into the monstrous jaws of the monster of Hades. In other words, a veritable theatre of miracles, which apparently overshadowed even Paris’ Salle des Machines.

Il pomo d’oro. Alberto Allegrezza (Filaura), and dancers. Photo: Birgit Gufler

Fabio Ceresa, the director of the Innsbruck production, had much more modest resources at his disposal, but his theatrical imagination was just as rich and was, moreover, supported by his impressive knowledge of Baroque opera. First of all, he appreciated the surprisingly coherent narrative of Il pomo d’oro, which stemmed not only from the libretto, but, above all, from the musical structure of the work. As a result, he was able to create two clear main storylines, that is the ruthless rivalry of the Olympian gods and the romantic vicissitudes of the mortals unfolding in its shadow – combining the fairy-tale splendour of the former’s world with the conventional, stylised modernity of the latter’s (Giuseppe Palelli’s marvellous costumes and Nikolaus Webern’s sophisticated yet functional set design, precisely lit by George Tellos). He brilliantly highlighted two characters drawn from the comedy convention: the nurse Filaura, an en travesti role, and Momo, or Momus, the god of mockery, a former adviser to the inhabitants of Olympus, cast down to earth as punishment (in Cesti’s opera, Momo also serves as a commentator on the events, breaking down the symbolic barrier between the stage and the audience). Ceresa peppers some scenes – including the Prologue, featuring the allegories of the lands of the Holy Roman Empire, and the episode depicting the council at the residence of Eolo, the lord of the winds, at the beginning of Act III – with allusions to current political and social events, sometimes rather bluntly, yet never crossing the line of good taste.

Above all, however, he knows how to leave the modern audience speechless and full of childlike wonder – and this is a no mean feat in this era of ubiquitous projections and opera’s increasingly common forays into artificial intelligence and augmented reality. Ceresa resorts to tried and tested theatrical tricks, which we fall for like children, because we have long forgotten that it can be done that way. Who would have thought that a curtain with a simple image of a skyscraper suddenly pulled down from its batten would create such a poignant impression of a city falling into ruin? Who did not burst out laughing when Giunone showered Momo with a deluge of tacky gold tinsel? Who did not stare, mouth agape, at the black abyss of the stage, where the Milky Way, made up of light points on invisible poles, was dancing?

Mauro Borgione (Paride) and Federico D.E. Sacchi (Nettuno). Photo: Birgit Gufler

Dantone showed similar imagination, entrusting the over forty roles to twenty singers, sharing the stage with the NovoCanto vocal ensemble and two dance groups, Street Motion Studio and Compagna Fattoria Vittadini. The Innsbruck Il pomo d’oro cast would in any case be sufficient for at least three productions of works representing various types of Italian Baroque opera. Because that is precisely what this work is like, unique within Cesti’s oeuvre – contrary to appearances – making liberal use of all the styles and conventions of its day. There are surprisingly melodious recitatives, characteristic of the Venetian School; there are more or less elaborate arias, ariosos and laments; there are true arie di furore, ensembles of various kinds, group scenes composed in the traditional Roman style or with elements of the polychoral and concertante techniques. The mood changes constantly: pastoral fragments alternate with scenes straight from hell; passionate lovers’ duets are juxtaposed with comic episodes; outbursts of divine wrath are separated by a short distance from manifestations of triumph and glory.

The cast included artists with voices of various colours, very diverse temperaments and even more diverse stage experience. All did more than well, but I hope I will be forgiven for mentioning only those whose craftsmanship made the biggest impression on me. Let me start with the phenomenal Giunone of Sophie Rennert, a mezzo-soprano that attracted my attention a few years ago, but it is only now that I have heard her in a role seemingly tailor-made for her. She played with it in a manner bordering on nonchalance, displaying a whole range of demeanours and emotions – from the imperiousness of a goddess of the heavens to unholy fits of rage, worthy of Sophia Loren in Matrimonio all’italiana. I was captivated by two red-blooded, passionate altos – Margherita Maria Sala, especially in the role of Alceste, and the young Mathilde Ortscheidt, winner of the Cesti Competition three years ago, convincing in the role of the nymph Ennone abandoned by Paride. Both of Ennone’s partners came trumps: Mauro Borgione singing Paride, a role nominally written for a tenor, but, in fact, from the point of view of today’s Fach classification, just as indefinable as the roles of Orpheus and Ulysses from Monteverdi’s operas, requiring a flexible voice with a broad range and clearly baritonal colour; and Rémy Brès-Feuillet, who has a dark, velvety alto countertenor, perfect for the role of the melancholic shepherd Aurindo. However, in many scenes in which he appeared the show was stolen by the brilliant Alberto Allegrezza, a versatile singer actor in the bravura role of Filaura, Ennone’s nurse. Rocco Cavalluzzi increasingly won me over with each act, in the big role of Momo, written for a high bass; another excellent performance came from Federico D.E. Sacchi, just as experienced in this repertoire, in the bass roles of Nettuno and Cecrope. I should also mention fine performance of two young singers freshly discovered by Dantone: the tenor Žiga Čopi as Marte and the bass Balázs Bán as Bacco.

Despite the fact that Dantone had at his disposal a much smaller number of musicians than the Viennese orchestra in 1668 – which was made up of five ensembles playing, it would seem, every instrument used in opera at the time – he nevertheless managed to bring out everything that matters in this score. Also thanks to a large and very nimble continuo section, constantly engaging in a lively dialogue with the soloists and the chorus.

There is just one thing that keeps me awake at night: the finale, where, in the original version, Giove presents the golden apple to the young empress, while Fabio Ceresa chose to bestow the fruits of the Hesperides’ garden on all the performers – replacing the obsequious message of Il pomo d’oro with a contemporary allegory of the unity of the European Union. The golden-haired infanta from Velázquez’s Las Meninas gave birth to three more children, only one of whom reached adulthood, and had two miscarriages. She died at the age of twenty-one, during her seventh pregnancy. Perhaps it is better not to tempt fate?

Translated by: Anna Kijak

I won’t deny that my attitude towards Hansel and Gretel is exceedingly personal. The last Warsaw staging of the opera – by two legends of Polish puppet theatre, the director Jan Wilkowski and the set designer Adam Kilian – was premiered at Teatr Wielki in 1979. It was the last Warsaw premiere for myself and a bunch of my girlfriends, because at the ripe old age of fifteen we had to say good-bye to the children’s choir. We were still quite childish, but accustomed enough to Wagner’s music – thanks to, among other things, our participation in dozens of performances of Tannhäuser, and recent guest appearances by another company presenting the Tetralogy – to be able to spot in Engelbert Humperdinck’s shimmering score not only popular German folk songs, but also verbatim quotes from the Ring and a tangle of leitmotifs organising the narrative like in the works of the Bayreuth master. Nor were we surprised at all that the musical direction of Hansel and Gretel was in the hands of the company’s boss and eminent Wagnerian Antoni Wicherek.

We were, therefore, all the more disappointed that the premiere received only a handful of reviews, most of which were scathing. The attacks were targeted mainly at Humperdinck, called by one critic a “Wagner for the poor in spirit”, and his “long outdated music”. The conductor and man behind the whole project was criticised as well: for setting in motion the huge machine of “Poland’s pre-eminent musical stage” just to show “two brans” throw a witch into the fire. Since then no one has dared to stage Hansel and Gretel in Warsaw, although elsewhere the opera is hugely popular and in some countries it is a regular feature of the Christmas season. However, it has to be said that music lovers are yet to treat it completely seriously; a tentative proposal, made a few years ago, to present the work – composed, after all, by an assistant to Wagner and teacher of his son Siegfried – at the Bayreuther Festspiele came up against fierce resistance by the guardians of tradition.

Fortunately, it did not take long for the step to be taken by the “English Bayreuth”, that is Longborough Festival Opera. There were serious arguments in favour of the decision: Humperdinck’s opera was admired by the greatest musicians of the period, including Richard Strauss, who conducted the premiere in Weimar on 23 December 1893. More triumphs came with the subsequent stagings in Munich and Karlsruhe, under the batons of, respectively, Hermann Levi and Felix Mottl, two great Wagnerian conductors. They were in no doubt that the composer had produced a brilliant synthesis of a children’s fairy tale with the loftiness of the Wagnerian myth, of references to German folklore with mastery of orchestral technique learned from Wagner.

Darren Jeffery (Father). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The whole thing started innocently enough: from an adaptation by Adelheid Wette, Humperdinck’s younger sister, who in 1889 had the idea of putting on a Christmas puppet show of Hänsel und Gretel for her daughters. Her brother was supposed only to write music to four songs accompanying the play. The home show was such a hit with the guests that the siblings expanded it into a substantial singspiel with piano. Two years later Humperdinck completed a true three-act opera, Hänsel und Gretel, to a libretto by Adelheid, who in her version omitted the most drastic scenes from the fairy tale, adding instead several good-natured characters helping the protagonists on their way to a happy ending.

Yet whatever was sugar-coated in the libretto retained its original horror and mystery in the score. After all, the roots of the Brothers Grimm’s famous fairy tale go back to the great famine, the first of the disasters that struck fourteenth-century Europe. A series of harsh winters was followed by cold springs and rainy summers. The earth refused to dry, to warm up or, even less so, to bear fruit. People started to eat dogs and draught animals. They would grind the remains of seed grain to make flour. They would hunt frogs, boil tree bark, pick out larvae from rotten tree trunks. Desperate, they would get rid of weaker children, abandoning them to their fate and wild animals in the wilderness, as far from their homes as possible, to prevent them from finding their way back. Just like in the fairy tale about siblings abandoned at the behest of their stepmother, but with the consent of their father, a woodcutter, who had been persuaded that otherwise he would have to make coffins for all four of them.

Lucy Bailey, the director of LFO’s Hansel and Gretel, decided to restore at least some of that frustration and darkness to Humperdinck’s opera. Before coming to England I feared that she might not be able to restrain herself, that in the end she would not resist the cruelty of the original. The name Bailey, one of the most important figures of modern British theatre, immediately made me think of her famous Titus Andronicus, presented at Shakespeare’s Globe exactly twenty years ago – in a staging so harrowing that spectators would faint at every performance. It was only when I arrived in Longborough that I realised that Bailey’s career began with a fascination with opera, that she learned her trade not only in drama theatres, but also in Glyndebourne and that she made her debut at Wexford already in the 1980s.

This is most likely why she did not cross any boundary in Hansel and Gretel. She saw, both in the libretto and in the score, that what remained of the original literary work was mainly a story about becoming mature enough to accept responsibility and learning from one’s mistakes, yet a story still marked by the anxieties of the period – lest children’s rebellion against parental authority turn permanently into hatred. In the Longborough production the role of the Witch is performed by the same singer as that of the Mother – a practice often followed in performances of Hansel and Gretel, mainly for practical reasons. However, Bailey followed the Grimm brothers, who in every edition of the fairy tale would suggest more and more emphatically that by killing the Witch the children, in fact, killed their evil stepmother. Yet in the fairy tale the story unfolds over a longer time-frame. In Humperdinck’s softened version the twins are found by their parents after an all-night search of the forest. This did not prevent Bailey from transferring the matricide motif to the sphere of children’s fantasy, which must have been fuelled by fear and hunger.

Joanna Harries (Hansel) and Rosalind Dobson (Gretel). Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The director skilfully builds an atmosphere of horrifying poverty from the very beginning. The first two acts take place in a monochromatic space (the sets are by Anisha Fields, who designed the costumes for last year’s excellent staging of Pelléas et Mélisande at LFO, with the whole being lit – brilliantly, as usual – by Ben Ormerod). Act One is dominated by the dirty white of the broom-maker’s cottage interior, with the floor soiled with soot and walls scrawled over with charcoal by the children. In Act Two crooked drawings of puny leafless trees replace a forest – in a space very similar to that of the previous act, though depicted in negative; this time the dominant element is black, against which greyish-white branches loom. Colours, with intense red dominating, appear only in Act Three, the action of which takes places in the Witch’s house.

Bailey builds an atmosphere of horror from what is unseen, lurking at the back of the stage or underneath it. The Witch looks like the Mother, but in rich garments: a red dress as if straight from the set of the film Cruella, just as red stilettos and a white wig of the evil queen from illustrations of Victorian books for children. There is no gingerbread house, no oven in which the old hag will be burned; the entire third act resembles a hallucination in which images as if straight from Alice in Wonderland are mixed with fragments of the children’s memories. Hansel and Gretel wake up under a huge duvet irresistibly bringing to mind a red-and-white chequered tablecloth used for special occasions; the imprisoned Hansel, only whose head is peeking out above the stage, is fattened by the Witch with thick rice pap, which the twins would have eaten the previous day, if the jug of milk had not got broken. When all is finally over, the red will disappear, but no other colour will replace it: the gingerbread children, freed from the spell, the saved siblings and their parents – still as poor as before but happy – will sing the joyous finale in the darkness of the gloomy forest and will probably return to their soot-stained huts. They will, however, be wiser, having learned that it is better to stick together in these terrible times.

Lee Bisset (Mother), Rosalind Dobson, Joanna Harries, Darren Jeffery and the Longborough Youth Chorus. Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis

Karen Kamensek brought out many hidden treasures from this score, conducting the fifty or so strong festival orchestra with verve, a spark of humour and, whenever necessary, appropriate solemnity. She firmly yet sensitively highlighted all “Wagnerisms” of the work – all the more effectively given that less than two weeks before the LFO ensemble played the final chords of Tristan under Anthony Negus. Kamensek was also excellent in leading the singers, most of whom are at the beginning of their careers, which also applies to the two main protagonists, perfectly matched in terms of both character and voice (Rosalind Dobson’s beautiful lyric soprano in the role of Gretel and only slightly heavier, though suitably “twin-like”, soprano of Joanna Harries singing Hansel). Emerging artists also did well in smaller roles (Laura Fleur as the Sandman, and Kelli-Ann Masterson, also brilliant as an actress, in the role of Dew Fairy). After her local Wagnerian triumphs, especially as Isolde and Brünnhilde, Lee Bisset took on the dual mezzo-soprano role of Mother/Witch, stealing the show primarily as a phenomenal actress, as her handsome voice is already showing clear signs of fatigue. Darren Jeffery proved to be a magnificent Father. He is an exceptionally refined artist with a soft and warm bass-baritone, perfectly even across all registers. David Eaton, too, deserves praise for preparing the Longborough Youth Chorus, made up largely of children from the local community.

There was just one thing that surprised me – that there were very few children in the audience, despite the fact that the opera was performed in English, in a very skilful and accessible translation by David Pountney. Did the parents thought that the fairy tale was too cruel? Or were they ashamed of their own emotions, for this is, after all, a story of not just hunger but also a sense of security that has been undermined – a nightmare that is all too relevant in today’s world?

Translated by: Anna Kijak