Lehár: Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow). Iurii Samoilov, Marlis
Petersen, Barnaby Rea, Kateryna Kasper, Martin Mitterrutzner, Theo Lebow,
Michael Porter, Gordon Bintner; Chor der Oper Frankfurt and Frankfurter Opern-
und Museumorchester conducted by Joana Mallwitz. Oehms. $28.99 (2 CDs).
There really should be no apology
necessary for operettas, especially ones such as Franz Lehár’s most famous, Die lustige Witwe. But modern opera
companies persist in trying to find reasons that it is still all right to stage
works such as this – as if, somehow, the operetta genre is less worthy of
preservation than that of opera, simply because operettas are generally (but
scarcely always) lighter in tone and often involve spoken dialogue rather than
recitatives and…well, this is all nonsense, since there are plenty of operas
that are fluffier than almost any operetta (Il
Barbiere di Siviglia) and plenty of operas that are really stage plays with
music and without recitatives (Carmen
as Bizet originally conceived it). The notion that there is something inherently
déclassé about operetta nevertheless persists, more because of the genre’s
reputation for escapism and frivolity that because of any inherent lesser
worth. Some operettas, like some operas, deserve to be taken at face
value and staged accordingly, and Die
lustige Witwe is among them. But presenters persist in looking for ways to
make them somehow “more respectable” and thus allegedly more acceptable to
modern audiences.
So the Frankfurt Opera’s 2018 presentation
of Die lustige Witwe, preserved in a
live recording on the Oehms label, treats Lehár’s work as a play within a play,
a venerable approach when trying to take a “meta” view of a work and tell the
audience that they and the performers are too worldly and knowledgeable to
accept the piece if it is simply offered as the composer intended. CDs do not
include visuals, of course, but the 16 pages of photos in the middle of the
booklet included with this release show the staging clearly, including the
cameras on stage supposedly shooting the whole story for a visual presentation.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this, and it is a common approach for
maintaining audience distance from the characters in the original work. But why
do that in Die lustige Witwe? It
makes no dramatic sense: the operetta’s principal couple is as modern as can be
– onetime lovers separated by circumstance and family issues, and so wounded
that she marries a much older man who conveniently dies before the drama
starts, while he throws himself into work, drink, and a series of meaningless
affairs. And the second couple, if coached and played properly, is damaged in
its own way: Camille and Valencienne have an affair despite her being married
to a prominent man, but she realizes that they have no future together and he very
reluctantly accepts the necessity of parting after proclaiming his deep and
genuine love (which she will no longer experience) in the wonderful Wie eine Rosenknospe. Valencienne’s
crucial notation on her fan, “I am a respectable woman,” is less a statement of
fact than one of determination for the future and resignation to her marital
fate – and that makes its importance in the operetta’s denouement all the more
bittersweet.
Virtually none of this comes through in
the Frankfurt production. What it offers is basically a “party piece,” which is
indeed a legitimate way to stage Die
lustige Witwe but which undermines its emotional heft. In this approach, the
first act is built around an embassy party, the second around Hanna’s “Pontevedro
party” with its celebrated Vilja
song, and the third around the party that Hanna stages with the grisettes of
Maxim’s so she can prove to Danilo that she truly loves him and get him to
admit his feelings to her as well as himself. But take all the posing inherent
to partygoing and run it through the notion of everything on stage being acted
for the benefit of cameras shooting it for some future purpose, and you make Die lustige Witwe less than it can be
and less than Lehár intended it to be.
What saves the production and makes this
two-CD set worth hearing is the quality of the singing and orchestral playing.
Iurii Samoilov as Danilo and Marlis Petersen as Hanna are vocally well-matched
and handle their arias with skill (although their dialogue tends to be stilted
rather than passionate). Barnaby Rea makes a suitably blustery Baron Mirko
Zeta, while Kateryna Kasper is a tender Valencienne and Martin Mitterrutzner a
reasonably effective Camille – although their relationship is downplayed by
having their homespun wishes (Ein trautes
Zimmerlein) sung by Danilo and Hanna instead. This was actually done at the
operetta’s première, but then the duet was in the third act and carried a different
meaning – here it is placed in the first act, as usual when sung by Camille and
Valencienne, but it is given to the first couple rather than the second and is
sung before Danilo’s entrance aria,
which makes no sense whatsoever.
Joana Mallwitz is a conductor to watch,
and hear, in this repertoire: from the first bars of Die lustige Witwe, she leads the production with heady, headlong
pacing and superb attention to orchestral detail, bringing out the richness of
Lehár’s scoring to a greater extent than most conductors do. She does tend to
rush some of the faster music instead of giving Lehár’s wonderful melodies time
to breathe their magic, but by and large, she has a strong sense of the
beauties of this score. The Frankfurt musicians are absolutely top-notch, and
Mallwitz keeps her expectations of them at the highest possible level – with
the result that they deliver a first-class performance.
The overall CD packaging, on the other
hand, is third-class. There is a 68-page booklet that includes, in addition to
the portfolio of stage photos and other scattered pictures, five pages
promoting other Oehms releases, and 26 pages of information on the performers,
including extended listings of the accomplishments of singers whose roles are
barely visible or audible in Die lustige
Witwe. There is no libretto and no link to a place to find it online, and
even though the dialogue here is both abridged and altered, none of it is given
in the booklet (even in German, much less in translation); and, again, there is
no indication of anywhere to find it online. As for the actual story, that is
tossed off in a three-page summary, while the music and its innovative elements
are barely discussed at all. The result is a presentation that makes the
importance and continued popularity of Die
lustige Witwe incomprehensible. This is a very fine performance for
listeners who speak German and already know this work well, and thus will
welcome a chance to hear a good cast present it, in the main, effectively. But
it could have been so much more. And it should have been – both the composer
and this operetta deserve better than they are given here.
No comments:
Post a Comment