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Austrian festival brings back German romantic classic
2007-08-05
The Austrian arts festival, the Salzburger Festspiele, presented Friday night a revival performance of "Der Freischuetz" (The Marksman), the German romantic classic that set the stage for the works of Wagner. The lively "premiere", which included naked women at a devil's seance in a forest and freedoms taken with the libretto to get in criticism of the United States as a warmonger, got a mixed reception from the critical crowd in Salzburg, with boos and applause greeting director Falk Richter at the end of the performance. Artists are expected to take to take avant-garde-like chances at the summer Festspiele, and the Freischuetz, a tale pitting good against evil in dark woods, was updated to have a modern, more urban sheen. There were video screens to move forward the drama, references that were not in the original to uranium and cocaine and a chorus dressed as tourists, disturbing the narrative at one point as they noisily opened plastic bags to munch on candies. But the sublime music of Carl Maria von Weber shone through. It marks the early 19th century transition from strictly Italian opera to the more brooding, dense style that was to culminate in Wagner. The festival's notes on the opera call the Freischuetz "the German national opera, wherby the epitome of all things Germanic, the forest, plays the main role." The complicated plot, which includes long stretches of spoken text without music, tells how Max, a peasant hunter, must shoot a white bird in order to win the right to marry his sweetheart, Agathe. But Max's skills diminish as the crucial test approaches and he yields to temptation to make a pact with the devil in order to get magic bullets. All does not end badly however, as order and faith in God triumph. Max's Faustian pact conjures up memories of the German militarism that marked the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. But caustic aim is taken at the United States, which has won opprobrium in certain international quarters for its war in Iraq. When the devil's helper is trying to convince Max to sell his soul, he breaks off the German text to say in English: "Destruction, death, corruption, rape, war, invasion, burnt children, low taxes and religion, that is what we would kill for, that is what our hearts yearn for." And in case anyone missed this connection to alleged US policy, the play ends with the devil's helpers writing in blood on a wall "In God We Trust," the slogan on American dollar bills. Whether one agrees with this anti-American bent or not, the Freischuetz is a fair effort to revive a classic that is rarely performed and can seem dated. The audience favored the singing of bass-baritone John Relyea as Kaspar, the devel's main helper. The devil was played by the German and Austrian theater star Ignaz Kirchner, who did not sing at all but dominated the stage each time he appeared. There was some reticence from the Salzburger audience about the performances of the tenor Peter Seiffert and the soprano Petra Mariz Schnitzer as Max and his love Agathe. Seiffert told AFP after the performance that the "Salzburg premiere public is known to be reserved and critical, and it was that way tonight." He also said he did not think the Freischuetz "was meant to deliver political messages, unlike Wagner." Asked about the US connection, he said: "I wouldn't have done it like that," adding that this was the first time that English was spoken in a German performance of the Freischuetz. Soprano Alexandra Kurzak gave a strong performance, with powerful and clear singing as Agathe's cousin, the coquettisch Aennchen. German Markus Stenz drew mixed reactions for his conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic. The theme of this year's Salzburg Festival is "the nocturnal side or reason," and other operas in the program include "Armida" by Joseph Haydn and Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" as well as Berlioz's "Benvenuto Cellini", Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro," and "Requiem for a Metamorphosis" by Jan Fabre.
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