Long notorious as a bastion of conservatism and nostalgia – ah! but you should remember how Mahler did it! – the Vienna Staatsoper last year fell to a new regime commendably determined to let in some fresh air and stop pandering to tradition.
Incoming administrator Dominique Meyer and conductor Franz Welser-Möst have thrown down the gauntlet by programming the house’s first-ever performance of Janacek’s From the House of the Dead, directed by that ageing enfant terrible Peter Konwitschny.
The result was, predictably, a storm of booing from the gods and outrage in the press. None of it directed at Janacek, I hasten to add, who was nobly served by Welser-Möst’s vibrant interpretation of this astonishingly febrile and pungent score, executed in the pit with staggering virtuosity – the perfect intonation of the strings alone was worth the price of the ticket.
The cast was fine, too, though several of the junior singers struggled to make themselves heard over Janacek’s torrential orchestral writing, a losing battle exacerbated by Welser-Möst’s reluctance to turn the volume down. A great Vienna favourite, Herbert Lippert, excelled as Skuratov, and our own Christopher Maltman, making his house debut in velvet-smooth voice, deservedly won the evening’s loudest ovation as the demented Shishkov, whose tale of murdering his lover brings the opera to its emotional climax.
But oh dear, the clichéd radicalism of the production – no wonder they booed. Konwitschny is a diehard Brechtian, motivated by a kneejerk perversity and an infantile desire to shock the bourgeoisie rather than to explore the work’s wisdom. So instead of Dostoevsky’s Siberian prison camp, he places the action in the plush lounge of a modern skyscraper where the Russian mafia has taken control.
The prisoners are all members of the mob in dinner jackets, quaffing champagne and reading porn mags – Tarantino’s early movies are clearly referenced. Dog eats dog here, and nobody is any better than anyone else.
I don’t so much object to the banal convolutions Konwitschny resorts to in order to make this scenario fit the text, but I felt sickened by the cynicism which he arrogantly smears over Janacek’s profound pity for (and understanding of) those at the bottom of the heap. Where was the hope, the compassion, the spark of God?
This sort of staging isn’t the blast of fresh air that Vienna needs: it’s just the stale fug of yesterday’s leftism.
