Euryanthe Theatre an der Wien Vienna
Dec 19th 2018
This review has been written a long time after the event so my notes are sparse – note to self; do these asap while the events are clear in your mind and you can add to notes.
This was a slightly odd experience. I was very excited about the possibility of seeing this work on stage. It has always had a bad press in terms of the libretto – ‘operatic’ in the worst sense, being illogical, flatly depicted and/or poorly motivated characters and relationships, sudden unexpected events, loose ends, sudden changes of characters with no motivation etc. etc. – but the music such as I knew it, was superb and often that, combined with a thoughtful production, can make up for many of the flaws in works that suffer from these problems.
The first part was totally uninvolving – a dully modern abstract stage et seemed not to help the telling of the story, the acting and singing was adequate, nothing else although the performance of the overture led to great expectations which, sadly in the rest of the first part, was not fulfilled. I really was ready to leave at the interval but then something drew me back and I am very glad that it did as Part 2 was excellent. Something clicked, all the pieces came together and there was power and passion in what I saw on stage - and the set began to make more effective sense too. Even the ridiculous and implausible sudden ending did not seem to matter – partly as it was glossed over.
An interesting aspect of it was that two main characters (but not the romantic leads) Eglantine and Lysiart were very clearly major influences on Wagner for the character (and to a degree motivation) of Ortrud and Telramund. Interesting seeing this… the musical demands of the roles were very well met and the acting excellent – and one character brought off singing an aria stark naked with great aplomb! I felt from the second part on that there was a passionate intensity about the performances that really worked – not the Yeatsian ‘passionate intensity’ though!
Great to see this work and all credit to An Den Wein for being so imaginative in putting the piece on. It will be VERY interesting to see what happens when Calixto Bietio takes over an intendant.