Rienzi Deutsche Oper Berlin
April 18th 2019
Oh dear, what a pity. VERY disappointing – to the extent that I actually left at the interval (well, it had been 90 minutes already…) I was much looking forward to seeing it fully staged, having greatly enjoyed the concert performance in last year’s Wagner nights here in Budapest. But it was not meant to be. I was engaged by neither the performance nor the staging.
I feel there are two basic ways to go about staging an opera like this – either take it as a serious political drama with some personal/political conflicts – and this may well involve changing the setting to get the director’s point across – or look at it satirically and make fun of the political angle and aspects which are a central part of it. You could also, I suppose, just take it on its own terms, set in the time in which the libretto says. I actually think this could be interesting but it would have to be very well done to be convincing I feel.
This one I felt was trying for the second option but it just did not work. During the overture we saw the title character in a modern office, in a white military uniform rolling around and staring at a screen of the world. This clearly set the mood and tone and it did for me recall aspects of Chaplin’s The Dictator which I suspect may have been the starting point.
Once the drama started the production revealed itself to be a pretty static one. The work is one where I feel there is a degree of ‘musical knitting’ many notes going on and on and, at times, not really making much dramatic or musical progress – so the production needs to compensate for this which this did not. The production was static with little involvement of the chorus although they play a centrally important musical and dramatic role. They were too often block-moved. This staging too often reflected the worst aspects of the music with musical clichés being reflected in movement clichés that added nothing in terms of making the drama unfold and of involving (me) the audience. The worst aspect of this were the repetitive, group moves that accompanied the rather ridiculous stretto theme at the end of the overture which at times approached musical and dramatic parody – but inadvertently!
The orchestra per se was very sound and the conducting decently energetic. As Rienzi Torsten Kerl was decent although with a top that weakened somewhat when pressure was put on it. Not sure what he would have sounded like at the end of the entire evening. Elizabeth Teige (as Irene) and Anneka Schlicht (as Adriano) were both perfectly sound and respectable – but with a work like this with its intrinsic weaknesses as indicated, one needs something much more to make it succeed and to compensate for those weaknesses.
Hey ho…you win some, you lose some. Next time.