Alemania
Deconstructing Desire
Jesse Simon
In addition to his career as a filmmaker, Philipp
Stölzl has directed numerous operas in Berlin (and elsewhere), and in each
production he has revealed himself to be an uncommonly good architect of
memorable, large-scale stage imagery; his visual mastery is often married to
clever readings of the text that can shift our understanding of the scenario
while remaining essentially accessible as works of narrative drama. If his
interpretations shy away from excess revisionism, they are also usually free of
obscurity.
The new production of Turandot at the
Staatsoper Unter den Linden – which was also live-streamed to an open air
audience in Bebelplatz as part of the annual 'Staatsoper für Alle' event
– displayed many of Mr Stölzl’s familiar virtues: it was a grandly-scaled
spectacle, a well-crafted entertainment, and a reasonably astute critique of
what remains a problematic text. The epic scope of the staging was reinforced
by robust musical direction from Zubin Mehta, and a cast of powerful voices who
made light work of the opera’s demands. Even those who remain vaguely perplexed
by the continued popularity of Puccini’s operas could not have failed to be
entertained.
Puccini: Turandot. Zubin Mehta, conductor. Philipp Stölzl, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, June 2022. © 2022 by Matthias Baus.
For his staging, Mr Stölzl largely avoided the
trappings of early-twentieth century oriental exotica, setting the story within
a dark dystopia: crowds of oppressed townspeople wore identical grey uniforms,
the brutal royal police wore jumpsuits of shiny red, and the trio of Liù, Timur
and Calaf stood out primarily by virtue of being robed entirely in white.
Although singer Elena Pankratova did not appear until the second act, the
figure of Turandot was a central presence from the outset: the stage was
dominated by a giant marionette controlled with a series of ropes and pulleys
by a team of about a dozen puppeteers who remained on stage in the costumes of
townspeople. It was a bold decision if only because the technical complexity of
the puppet gave the staging so many more ways of going awry; yet it ended up
being both a technical and conceptual success.
It was this giant figure, idealised and unreal, with
whom Calaf fell in love, and the fact that he continued to address his
affections to the increasingly disconnected limbs of the puppet even after the
singer had made her appearance on stage gave his infatuation a sense of
fetishistic obsession. Puccini often portrayed love less as a lofty sentiment
than a violent force of absolute destruction – consider Scarpia’s outsized
passion for Tosca or Pinkerton’s quickly-cooled fever – and Mr Stölzl seemed to
acknowledge that the dramatic flaw in Turandot is not so much the sudden
softening of an icy princess as the ridiculous implausibility of Calaf’s
persistence. The staging thus presented Calaf as possessed by an obsession
which only grew more ridiculous as it proceeded to strip the object of his
desire to its skeletal essence, then break it down into a series of abstract
component parts. The treatment of Calaf’s destructive passion and Turandot’s
reaction in the final scene, while not necessarily profound, brought the opera
to a surprisingly plausible conclusion.
Puccini: Turandot. Zubin Mehta, conductor. Philipp Stölzl, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, June 2022. © 2022 by Matthias Baus.
If the Turandot puppet dominated the visual and
conceptual frame of the staging, it was supported by a succession of dazzling moments
and well-conceived scenes. The chorus of citizens plays a considerable role in
the drama and throughout the evening Mr Stölzl was able to situate the
principal action against a background of dynamic crowd scenes. There was also
something oddly delightful about the sight of Ping, Pang and Pong reminiscing
about their lost estates seated atop a pile of skulls that once belonged to
Turandot’s would-be suitors (death, in many guises, was a constant presence).
For all that the staging relied on complex stagecraft for its visual splendour,
it remained a taut, well-paced telling of a story that derives whatever force
it may have from the parable-simplicity of its major incidents.
For its central characters, the production featured
singers of considerable power and finesse. As Liù, Aida Garifullina made a
strong impression in her opening scene, projecting effortlessly through the
orchestra while maintaining an essential softness of line that gave her distant
reminiscences of the prince’s smile their emotional weight. She was even better
a few moments later, attempting to dissuade Calaf with beautifully wrought
phrases given distinctive shape by finely shaded dynamic modulations. Her
torture and death scene in the third act was no less impressive, and her
attempt to explain the sensation of love to Turandot, accompanied by
beautifully-played solo violin, offered a moment of genuine feeling in an opera
often dominated by exaggeration. She was nobly mourned by René Pape’s Timur,
whose appearance in the first act was somewhat overwhelmed the excitability of
the surrounding crowd, but whose sensitive elegy over the body of Liù offered a
perfect blend of regal poise and profound sorrow.
Puccini: Turandot. Zubin Mehta, conductor. Philipp Stölzl, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, June 2022. © 2022 by Matthias Baus.
Throughout the evening there was no doubting the
projective thrust of Yusif Eyvazov’s voice; rather than struggling to break
through the wall of orchestral sound, it often seemed as though his Calaf was
holding himself back to achieve an optimal balance. While such effortless
strength is fairly rare – and impressive in its own way – one was struck more
by the presiding darkness of tone that allowed the lower passages to emerge
with fluidity. Only in the boldest high notes could one sense a slight
constraint, as though Mr Eyvazov was pulling back slightly from full power; his
‘Nessun Dorma’, however, built to an appropriately high level of excitement.
Elena Pankratova provided a reading of the title role
that, without ever shedding the cool, imperious tone of her first appearance,
grew more complex and captivating from one scene to the next. Although she had
no difficulty floating high notes over the massed choir and orchestra and the
end of the second act, and made her way through the demands of the torture
scene with apparent ease, her performance was shaped less by the force of her
delivery than the heightened severity with which she sketched the embattled
pride of the character. Implacable to the end, the anguish in her magnificent final
scene revealed the extent to which Calaf’s lust had destroyed a once-mighty
princess.
Zubin Mehta has enjoyed a close relationship with Turandot
for over half a century – he is, among other things, responsible for the 1972
recording which still stands as one of the most highly-regarded – but his
familiarity with the score never resulted in complacency. Indeed his reading
was often arrestingly vigorous in its evocation of the barbaric splendour of
the imperial court. If his performance often tended towards a presiding tone of
monumental solemnity, it was equally notable for the ease with which he was
able to pivot between disparate moods, giving equal weight to the frenzied
grandeur of the crowd scenes, the quiet intimacy of Ping, Pang and Pong longing
for lost places, Calaf’s lustrous ardour and Turandot’s terrifying reproaches;
even Puccini’s imagined orientalisms and passages of outright sentimentality
were woven into an appealingly grand conception of the drama.
If Turandot is still viewed as a problematic
work, its reputation may be due less to its setting or its unfinished state
than to the implausibility of its conclusion: the cruel pride of Turandot and
the selfish obsession of Calaf exist in such violent opposition to one another
that any ending which suggests the possibility of redemption through love will
necessarily ring false. While a strong cast will go a long way to smoothing
over the narrative flaws – and the evening’s cast would have been just as
impressive in a more traditional staging – the Staatsoper’s new
production, in stripping away the redemption and highlighting the cruelty of
its two protagonists, presented a vision of the drama both logical and
credible.
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