Opera
What is Gurrelieder? Arnold Schoenberg’s massive cantata, or oratorio, or symphonic psychodrama, is technically a song cycle, presenting ‘Songs of Gurre’, a small Danish settlement best known for its crumbling medieval castle. A five-part sequence of naturalist poems, by the Danish ‘Modern Breakthrough’ writer and botanist Jens Peter Jacobsen, became the text of Schoenberg’s cycle, in a lacklustre German translation by Robert Franz Arnold, to which Schoenberg made few revisions.
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The great German director Götz Friedrich asserted that the action of Richard Wagner’s Ring takes place not in thirteenth-century Scandinavia nor in nineteenth-century Germany, but here and now in whichever theatre we are currently located. What he was producing was Welttheater, a piece of theatre which holds up a mirror to the world: ‘Every artistic realization must establish its “today” and “here”, the better to understand the time span which Wagner projects from a mythical past through his own epoch and on into the distant future.’
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More over-heated gush has been written about the Greek-American singer Maria Callas than about any other performer, with the possible exception of Greta Garbo. Given that Callas’s centenary has just occurred (2 December), we can expect much more of the same. Steven Knight is shooting a biopic, Maria, with Angelina Jolie, which one hopes will fare better than Franco Zeffirelli’s cringe-making version, Callas Forever (2002), which starred the unfortunate Fanny Ardant.
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Juan Diego Flórez, now fifty, rose to prominence in his early twenties. His first La Scala success, in 1996, was promptly followed by débuts at Covent Garden (1997), the Vienna State Opera (1999), and the Metropolitan Opera (2002), houses where he still performs regularly. His major roles have included Count Almaviva and Nemorino. Alfredo Germont, in La Traviata, is a new addition; he was singing it in Vienna during the recent ABR tour.
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The ABR/Academy Travel Vienna tour, now drawing to a close, has revealed some of the riches in this monumental city – the architecture, the art collections (especially the mighty Kunsthistorisches Museum and the brilliant, newish Leopold Museum, with its host of Schieles and Klimts), Emperor Franz Joseph’s Ringstrasse, the general ambience of the city, not to mention the Kardinalschnitte at Gerstner Konditorei.
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The birth of a new opera is always exciting. Unlike a play or a sonata, an opera brings together a variety of art forms, with performers and creatives drawn from many different backgrounds. The libretto of Christopher Sainsbury’s The Visitors draws on a new, more gender-balanced version of an existing play, Jane Harrison’s The Visitors (2020), currently running in Sydney and Wollongong.
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