Wolfgang Wagner’s universally praised Bayreuth Festival production of “Die Meistersinger” most clearly demonstrates the originality of its conception in its treatment of Beckmesser. Refusing to caricature Beckmesser, to represent him simply as a fool or a pedant, Wolfgang Wagner allows the character the status of a genuine poet with a melancholy, almost elegiac quality. The production dispenses with the usual clichés and the excessive pathos which often lend the opera an overly “German” quality, and concentrates on the specifically human aspect of the characters, which other productions have tended to neglect. Hans Sachs is seen not as a solemn patriarch, but as a likable middle-aged man; Stolzing emerges as a sensitive, thoughtful individual drawn towards the bourgeoisie, rather than as an aggressive aristocrat. Wolfgang Wagner has succeeded in liberating “Die Meistersinger” from its aura of Teutonic heaviness and retrieving the light and color of the original: late medieval Nuremberg truly comes to life.
Cavalleria Rusticana
Based on a drama by Giovanni Verga, “Cavalleria Rusticana” relates the lives and passions of simple Sicilian peasants. It was the first opera of the “verismo”, or realist, school. Director Åke Falck adds a cinematic dimension to what would otherwise be a fairly straightforward screen document of celebrated director Giorgio Strehler’s La Scala production by means of outdoor shots of Sicily’s splendid landscapes during the overture and intermezzo. Combined with the lavish set and costumes by Luciano Damiani, these images intensify the feeling of a sultry southern landscape as a background to the inflamed passions and violence of the action. As Santuzza, Fiorenza Cossotto’s passionate intensity make a good contrast to Adriana Martino’s gaily-dressed, light-hearted Lola. Gianfranco Cecchele makes a rakish Turiddù, and Giangiacomo Guelfi is a strong, swaggering, confident Alfio. The production was filmed in 1968.
Hänsel und Gretel
Based on a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, Engelbert Humperdinck’s beloved opera is traditionally often performed at Christmastime as a treat for children. Humperdinck had originally planned to write a simple work with a spoken text and folksong-like melodies. It turned out to be a full- fledged, Wagnerian-style opera that was premiered in 1893 by no less a conductor than Richard Strauss, who termed the work “a masterpiece of the first rank.” For this lavish production staged and directed by August Everding, a cast of top singers has been put together, including Brigitte Fassbaender, Edita Gruberova, Hermann Prey, Helga Dernesch and Sena Jurinac. Sir Georg Solti conducts the Vienna Philharmonic.
Die Fledermaus (The Bat)
The corks pop and the champagne flows in this sparkling production of Johann Strauss’s world-famous operetta with the ensemble of the Bavarian State Opera. Carlos Kleiber conducts Strauss’s music with a temperament, vigor and sensuality that bring to mind contemporary reports on Johann Strauss’s own conducting style: “His whole body was conducting – the hands, head, eyes, torso and feet of the master”. But Kleiber can also invoke another inspired model and predecessor for his interpretation: in 1894, Gustav Mahler conducted the work at the Hamburg Stadttheater, lavishing his usual care and precision on it and paving its way into the repertoire of all major opera houses.
Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman)
For his production of “The Flying Dutchman”, premiered in 1978, Harry Kupfer chose the original Dresden version of 1843, which has a rougher, more muscular texture than the subsequent editions. When “The Flying Dutchman” was performed in Zurich and Munich, Wagner himself revised the work, softening the instrumentation and appending the “redemption” conclusions to the overture and the third act. What was the reason for the heated disputes which took place between the conservative Bayreuth Wagnerians and the more progressive lovers of the composer’s music? Harry Kupfer’s production presents the entire story of the Flying Dutchman as a hallucination, a figment of Senta’s disturbed imagination. She is seen by the director as a highly neurotic, even schizophrenic young girl, whose yearning for the eternally wandering Dutchman puts her into a trance-like state, in which her own internal drama is acted out in the form of a vision. By having the character leap through the window to her death at the end of the opera, Harry Kupfer has placed a highly personal interpretation on Wagner’s notion of “redemption”.
Götterdämmerung
In 1988, conductor Daniel Barenboim, stage director Harry Kupfer, set designer Hans Schavernoch and costume designer Reinhard Heinrich came to Bayreuth to realize their vision of Wagner’s Ring. They firmly turned away from the work’s time of origin and set their sights on a “critique of the history of mankind and of the entire evolution of culture, the destruction of which we are actively furthering” (Kupfer). While Wagner’s “critique of mankind’s destructive frenzy, its coldness and alienation” (Kupfer) was rooted in Germanic mythology, Kupfer’s team locates its Ring in a present that also embraces the past and the future. The place where present, past and future converge is the “road of history”, which sets the scene for struggles of power and love, and takes us straight into the depths of the human psyche. “Harry Kupfer has created a production of great coherency, hard, cutting, transparent, which will delight those who see in Wagner a contemporary and will displease those who consume Wagner like some consecrated artifact in a museum. The entire mythological apparatus is demolished bit by bit: what remains is what Wagner himself wanted: the ‘pure humanity’ of the myth. […] The entire ‘Ring’ unfolds like an intellectual adventure that provokes unforgettable emotions.” (La Repubblica)
Rigoletto
Renaissance Italy has never been portrayed more opulently and more realistically than in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s film of Verdi’s “Rigoletto”, the composer’s first true masterwork for the stage. Towering over the production is Luciano Pavarotti as the cynical, dissolute Duke of Mantua, one of the famed tenor’s greatest vocal and dramatic roles. Rigoletto is magnificently portrayed by the Swedish baritone Ingvar Wixell. His beautiful daughter Gilda is interpreted by Edita Gruberova, one of the leading coloratura sopranos of our time. Director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, “whose stage and television work has brought a new and grandly colorful vitality to opera interpretation” (The New York Times), acclaimed Italian cameraman Pasqualino de Santis (Death in Venice) and architect Gianni Quaranta have created a spellbindingly unique atmosphere. The drama unfolds with a powerful authenticity highlighted by the historic locations in which it was filmed: Parma’s Teatro Farnese of 1628, Mantua’s Palazzo Te, famed for its frescoes by Giulio Romano, and the Palladian-style Teatro Olimpico in Sabbioneta. Riccardo Chailly’s vibrant interpretation of Verdi’s score, with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra responding magnificently to his conducting, is a perfect complement to Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s high-intensity retelling of the drama.
Beethoven, Missa Solemnis in D major, op.123
Recorded live in Salzburg in 1979, the performance of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis was one of the highlights of Herbert von Karajan’s Easter Festival that year. Amassing the forces of the Berlin Philharmonic and the chorus of the Wiener Singverein, Karajan provided an unforgettable experience enhanced by the artistry of renowned soloists Anna Tomowa-Sintow, Ruza Baldani, Eric Tappy and José van Dam. The Missa solemnis blends an age-old religious service with a musical outpouring of human emotions in an intensely personal manner. Beethoven conceived the mass for a religious occasion, the installation of Archduke Rudolf as Archbishop of Olmütz in 1820. However, he did not complete it in time and the work was given its premiere in St. Petersburg on 7 April 1824. In his score, Beethoven wrote the words “From the heart… may it find its way to the heart.” Indeed, the work’s dramatic, almost volcanic fervor never fails to go to the heart of all listeners.
Die Walküre
It began with a scandal, became the object of heated discussions, turned into a sensational success and finally blossomed into a legendary, standard setting production: Pierre Boulez’ and Patrice Chéreau’s epoch-making “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth, the “Centennial Ring”. When the production was premiered in 1976, there were brawls in the venerable Festspielhaus, with the audience divided into one mob roaring in favor and one screaming against. The main reason for the protests was Chéreau, who set the work in the time in which it was written and focused on the all-too-human passions that motivate gods and men alike. The grimy industrial era with its robber barons and suffering masses supplied the ideological underpinnings of Chéreau’s concept. Musical conservatives felt betrayed and cheapened by this association. The tide began to turn in 1977. Certain features were altered and the production began to have a more homogeneous feel. Finally, in 1980, its last year, the Ring concluded with a 90-minute ovation and 110 curtain calls. By the time Philips released the complete recording of this production in 1992, its legendary status had already begun to take shape: “Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez not only wrote a major new chapter in Wagner interpretation with their Ring, but also carried out a revolution that affected all of musical theater. Since then, no production of the Ring has been able to come near to the concept put forward by Chéreau and Boulez.” (FonoForum) Unitel’s production, the first complete recording on film of Wagner’s Ring, marked the beginning of Unitel’s exclusive association with the Bayreuth Festival.
Das Land des Lächelns
Franz Lehár (1870-1948) was incontestably one of the foremost masters of the operetta. He abounded in creative ideas, was a supreme craftsman, a temperamental musician whose artistry flowed in his blood, and a dramatist who succeeded in breathing genuine life into the hackneyed figures of the operetta genre. His most popular operettas were premiered between 1925 and 1929. These were the works whose wealth of ideas and emotionally florid, sometimes even sentimental, melodies brought them greater fame than the brilliant early works such as “The Count of Luxembourg” (1909) and “Gypsy Love” (1910) – save for “The Merry Widow” (1905), his most popular operetta of all. The works of this second creative period were also conceived with one particular singer in mind: Richard Tauber. The most typical works of this period are “Paganini” (1925), “The Czarevitch” (1927), “Friederike” (1928) and “Das Land des Lächelns” (1929). Among Lehár’s later operettas, “Das Land des Lächelns” has been particularly successful. It revels in color and rhythmic liveliness and the peculiar harmonies and melodies echo the exoticism of the Chinese setting.