The final highlight in my brief but very enjoyable visit to Berlin was a Staatsoper performance of ‘Der Freischütz’, by Carl Maria von Weber. In a way it was the trigger for the trip, as I’d been rather hooked by the opera after the OAE included the dramatic Wolf’s Glen scene in their 21st. anniversary concert back in 2007 (more about the Wolf’s Glen later). At any rate it set the dates. I booked a ticket online a month ago.
The Staatsoper’s permanent home on Unter den Linden has been undergoing major renovation work since 2010, not due to be completed until 2015, and the company has decamped to the Schiller Theater on Bismarckstraße, just west of Ernst-Reuter-Platz. So after changing into slightly smarter clothes (and thinking about packing for the journey home tomorrow) I took the U9 back to Berlin Zoo. Walked west along Kantstraße to Savignyplatz to find an early evening meal, from where it was a 10 minute walk to the Schiller Theater.
I had a good seat in the centre of the eighth row of the stalls. The orchestra in the very open pit was clear and very audible; in the interval I counted 20 violin seats (10+10) although I don’t think the other instruments were “in proportion”. The singers were in period dress, while the scenery was a simplified modern representation of the forest (even when the action was set outside the pub), and simple but attractive interiors. All good.
The singing was excellent, especially Kaspar (Tobias Schabel) and the delightful housekeeper Ännchen (Silke Evers); I felt that the heroine Agathe (Véronique Gens) was slightly reserved and her voice perhaps not as sweet as it should be. In the orchestra I would have liked more horns and more ‘oompah’ in the rumbustious hunting and military music (I’ve probably been spoiled by my Berlin Philharmonic recording: the Berlin Phil does horns rather well, and they sound very natural under Harnoncourt). But overall I enjoyed the performance a lot.
However, there were problems. First, two minor points to do with the Schiller Theater. As the lights dimmed and the audience hushed at the start I became aware of a faint high-pitched whistle – possibly electronic, possibly to do with the air-conditioning – and one or two people in front of me were looking around as if they’d heard it too. Since parts of the overture are very quiet it was rather intrusive, though I suppose after a time we mostly got used to it. Then, in the final act, when the forest backdrop moved slowly and quite dramatically away to reveal a big gathering of hunters and village people, the curtain track supporting the backdrop was irritatingly noisy.
My second set of complaints is more serious and concerns the production: specifically the Wolf’s Glen scene, the centrepiece of the whole opera, in which our hero Max watches his dubious fellow huntsman Kaspar cast seven magic bullets under the eye and the spell of the Black Huntsman, Samiel. The music is dramatic, and Weber wonderfully heightens the tension as each bullet is cast by having the (off-stage) chorus whisper a terrible echo as Kaspar counts out the bullets: Eins! eins... Zwei! zwei... Drei! drei...
But here the echo was not a scary whisper from the chorus but a spoken word from a single actor through the theatre’s sound system, which rather broke the spell. Earlier, at the beginning of the scene, the evil Samiel appears at the edge of the Glen and speaks his few threatening lines to Kaspar, in his “terrible voice”: here again the voice came from a loudspeaker, not obviously from Samiel, and was (for me) on the wrong side of the stage. Disappointing.
Finally, the all-important casting of the bullets was a bloody affair. Kaspar sings that he blends lead, ground glass from broken church windows, quicksilver, three bullets that have already hit the mark, the right eye of a hoopoe, and the left eye of a lynx. But in this production he in some way fashions the bullets from the internal organs of a dead animal, probably a boar, at the front centre of the stage. It gave Kaspar and Max a dramatic opportunity to smear themselves with “blood”, but actually it was an unpleasant (especially just before the interval) and in my view unnecessary departure from the text in an otherwise good production.
As we left I talked briefly to my neighbours in the audience – zwei Frauen im besten Alter – who had been visiting the Deutsche Oper, a little further west along Bismarckstraße, for the last 30 years; they clearly disapproved of some of the modern “innovations” in recent productions. Then, after collecting my warm coat from the cloakroom I set out into the very cold night and walked along Bismarckstraße to Ernst-Reuter-Platz U-bahn, where it seemed that the rest of the audience was waiting on the platform. It was only one stop on the U2 to Zoo, then on the U9 for the third time today to be home by 11:00.
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