The Water’s Edge

One of the lessons we learn from opera is that relationships between humans and water-spirits rarely end well. Yet the impossibilities that prevented Ondine and Rusalka from experiencing a happy life on land appear only at the edges of Oceane, Detlev Glanert’s newest opera which recently had its première at the Deutsche Oper. If both Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s libretto and Robert Carsen’s monochromatic staging seemed content to excise the mythological in favour of an almost prosaic psychological realism, Mr Glanert’s suitably oceanic score and a pleasingly ambiguous central performance from Maria Bengtsson gave the opera’s finest moments a flavour of the fantastic. 

Mr Treichel’s libretto, adapted from Theodor Fontane’s fragment Oceane von Parceval, tells the story of a woman whose reclusive, unorthodox behaviour arouses the suspicion and…