Rising in rank
The
ranking of the Staatsoperstuttgart has risen to the top recently
in German Music theatres. More and more people are making use
of the fast ICE train connection to other major German cities
to visit the Opera that lies within easy walking distance of the
Main Station of Stuttgart. With careful planning, an opera fan
can affordably visit a different opera in a different city every
night. The newly renovated Choir Hall of the Staatsoper Stuttgart
had its grand opening on the 21st of September 2007 and its new
appearance will certainly add to the grandeur of the Opera. The
Opera has been voted Opera of the year six times and
the choir has been voted Choir of the year seven times.
In 2007 Albrecht Puhlmann succeeded Klaus Zehelein as intendant.
He focuses especially on a German and French repertoire.
Les Troyens of Berlioz and other French operas from Pucinni
and Debussy and the opera Cosi Fan Tutte of Mozart are
on the program for October - December 2007.
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ARCHIVE
- The German Ministry of Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst
Baden-Württemberg honoured singers world-wide in Stuttgart
in March 2007 with the title of Kammersänger, among
them the Bostonian, Mark Munkittrick. Tenor Helmut Holzapfel from
South Africa and Wolfgang Schöne from Germany also received
the title.
ARCHIVE
2007
- With the twin-theme Untergang der Heroen and Schicksal
des einfache Menschen, the downfall of heroes and the fate
of laymen in the Opus Magnum Les Troyens of Berlioz,
the Staatsoper Stuttgart sets a dramatic stage for Manfred Honeck,
Generalmusikdirector of the Opera. Many eyes from both
sides of the Atlantic will be on Honeck's performance in Les
Troyens as it is a Grand Opera, comparable to Der Ring
des Niebelungen of Richard Wagner, and Honeck has also accepted
a three year contract at the Pittsburg Symphony Orchestra in Pennsylvania,
USA, starting September 2008.
The
premiere of Les Troyens was on the 26th of October 2007
and rans till the 25th of November 2007. Production and stage
setting for the five-act opera are by Joachim Schlömer and
Jens Kilian.
| *
USA bits - Manfred Honeck has promised the Pittsburgh
Symphony Orchestra that he will focus on conducting the
works of 'composers of his home country', Austria, when
he takes up his post as Music Director - summer
visit to Pittsburgh/courtesy ©PPG.
* USA bits - Honeck's International Wolfegg
Castle concerts - Lindau, a charming resort town on the
shores of Lake Constance - Manfred Honeck's summer hide-out.
Next year, the International Wolfegg Concerts will take
place from June 27 to 29 - courtesy
©PPG |
Manfred Honeck in Pittsburg Post-Gazette
Manfred Honeck's
slender and transparent approach in Les Troyes
[Press - Meeting
with Manfred Honeck, Music Director, Staatsoper Stuttgart
Date: 2007-12-10 - Occasion: The Opera Les Troyens – Berlioz
Text: Argo Spier - Wordcount: 1802]
"Berlioz's
Les Troyens ... again and again the music seems to recreate
verse. To describe all the beautiful or striking things
in the score would almost be to list the qualities of the
poem." - Sir Colin Davis, Covenant
Garden 1969. |
My
meeting with Manfred Honeck on the 25th of November, just before
his last performance of Berlioz's Les Troyens in Stuttgart,
was an elative experience. His calm serenity and large, honest
approach to everything around him creates an unusually open and,
at the same time, intimate sphere.
Being
received at the back stage entrance of the building and chaperoned
by his secretary through long secret passages and hallways of
the lovely age-old Opera House, I finally entered the ‘holiness
of his abode’, his study and the office he uses. What struck
me was its absolutely functional interior layout. There was a
small corner table on which was a desktop computer and a modern
halogen lamp. The seating arrangement was a practical, four-cornered
one with a low table between both comfortable and practical chairs.
There were no decorative elements anywhere and the walls were
white - nothing to indicate that I was inside a space where one
of today’s most important conductors has his private quarters.
A
cup of coffee was brought for me and put on the table.
Something
about the arrangement of the room reminded me of the clean and
functional way the public space is arranged. Functionality is
the keynote of everything. On the floors there are huge walkways
among massive pillars for audiences weaving up and down between
floors during intermissions and there are the well-located bars
with cozy cramped spaces and openings to look up and down to the
floors above and below. Separated hidden corners and small rooms
have tables and chairs where snacks and champagne are served and
where small groups can engage in intimate discussions. Even your
seat number is also your coat hanger number so that the waiting
time collecting your coat, umbrella or other belongings after
performances is minimal. I’ve not seen this in any other
Opera House. A visitor feels very much at home, and in Manfred
Honeck's study, too, there’s that manifest welcoming.
Sitting
in front of him, I was very aware of his engagement within the
Opera. The ranking of Staatsoper Stuttgart has recently moved
to the top of German Music theatres. Since the arrival of its
present Intendant, Herr Albrecht Puhlmann, much has been renovated;
for instance, stage techniques have been upgraded and the choir
section fully refurbished. There were 14,000 more visitors last
season. Manfred Honeck was part and parcel of the package. He
is the Music Director and perhaps the greatest trump. People flock
to where Manfred Honeck conducts. I had been following his career
very closely while preparing for the interview, had studied his
background and read much of what has been published about him.
There’s such a systematic rising in his career that having
to write about a maestro of destiny struck me deeply. History
may well prove him to be one of the most influential conductors
of the 20th Century.
We
started to talk about Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck’s
influence on the work of Berlioz and statements he had made 70
years before Berlioz went to Paris (1803). Throughout the history
of opera many a debate has taken place that has effected profound
change in the attitudes and approaches towards opera and through
Gluck’s stated purpose and efforts towards reforming opera
and rescuing it from mannerisms, the subtlety of an ironic relationship
between words and music developed
“When
music vies with poetry to take the principal role, it achieves
the destruction of both.” (Gluck, 1769)
Gluck's
statement was a valid point of departure to discuss Honeck's conducting
approach towards Les Troyens, we both agreed. It carries the necessary
art-historical load for analyzing the development of approaches,
work ethics and changes through the ages and the debate that has
now been opened up with Manfred Honeck's performance of Les Troyens
in Stuttgart has its roots in this. In the long haul of history,
the subtlety of relationships as a continuous process of creative
re-definition has taken form and influenced both the composition
of operas and their conducting.
“Are
we witnessing another ‘change’ with Manfred Honeck's
approach to conducting?”
When
I asked him why the French didn’t accept Berlioz’s
operas, he replied that the time was not ripe then for the inner
glow of Berlioz’s music and he explained the importance
of music ‘as the sensitive core of human civilization’.
It is the force of direct subjective experience that is the most
important aspect of the grand happening that opera is. This is
what Berlioz wanted to achieve and this is what Honeck now wants
to capture with his stated slender and transparent approach in
his conducting of Les Troyens. This path led from Gluck, via Shakespearian
dramas and Goethe literature, and Berlioz, right up to our contemporary
20th Century scene. Berlioz’s opera aesthetic seeks to redefine
the ‘Spannungsverhältnis’ (tension) between the
so-called romantic opera and the ‘Tragédie lyrigue’.
And Les Troyens is not the Grand Opèra that many saw it
as, an outer ‘Tableau’ of the 19th Century vision,
so to speak. It is rather the redefinition of the mentioned subtle
ironic relationship between cognition and feeling. Manfred Honeck
is seeking in his fragile transparent approach to resurrect Berlioz’s
aesthetic. Like Berlioz, he too wishes to feed on the inner landscape
that music provides, music as the essential and real tableau of
the emotive, passionate and expressive scale of possibilities,
music that forms the mirroring effect of the word (cogitative).
And in this symbiosis invariably there is a disregard for the
bombastic and pompous. His approach therefore is the daring return
to origins, almost a Renaissance drive.
Berlioz’s
attempts in the 19th Century, which could be called a ‘revolt’
against Grand Opéra and which were in line with Gluck's
revolt against mannerisms, were entwined with his idea of creating
a theatre of the imagination. But it failed in Paris. The reason
for that is simple – the audiences weren’t ready for
such a revolt. This was the case, too, with the New Deutche Lied
of Wagner. His idea of opera as a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’
was also rejected at first. In this respect Berlioz (Wagner too)
was completely misunderstood by his contemporaries and his audiences.
His first opera, Benevenuto (1938), was a fiasco in France and
at the premiere of his La Damnation de Faust nobody turned up.
Both he and Wagner were forced to leave Paris.
A
colleague asked me, “Will Manfred Honeck be understood by
his audiences? In Stuttgart ... Pittsburgh?”
Speculation
may linger in the background but isn’t really to the point.
Yet one cannot help but wonder whether what he does is not also
a ‘revolt’, a ‘revolt’ now coming from
conductors of Philharmonic Orchestras instead of from composers.
Whatever the case may be, it is exciting times we live in. I felt,
as our discussion went on, that I was learning and taking part
in something very real. Yet the question of readiness for his
way of his conducting remains. Are we (unlike the French of the
19th Century) ready for a re-definition of music? What is it actually
that we want from opera, from this immaculate force field that
spreads its tentacles of feeling over us in every re-enactment
on the stage? Opera … it happens before our eyes. It comes
into us through our ears. And it touches our hearts. We hear things
we cannot express in words. There is always that subtle relationship
between the word and the sound of it. What is music? And what
is cognitive semantics?
Manfred
Honeck’s statement ‘I will conduct this masterly orchestrated
music (Les Troyens) slender and transparent’ might well
turn out to be a prophetic promise that will change the way we
all appreciate and perceive opera in the future. Personally I
cannot help but hear in it the echo of another of Gluck’s
statements in a printed version of the Alceste journal.
“I
have made every effort to restore music to its true role of serving
poetry by means of its powers of expression”.
The
Staatsoper Stuttgart with Manfred Honeck as its Music Director,
and its successful and brilliant production of Les Troyens has
set a new standard for itself this year with his conducting. It’s
a high benchmark. I predict that more operas of Berlioz will follow.
Maybe even Benevenuto will be on the list. (It is another Berlioz
opera that the ‘French didn’t understand’ and
weren’t ‘ready’ for.) From a managerial point
of view, the choice of a German and French repertoire is a great
success and an indication of how well the Opera understands the
need of its audiences for the old and a re-definition of the old.
As
time flew by while we were talking, I became acutely aware of
the fact that he had to conduct the Opera after our interview.
I looked at my watch. He had thirty minutes left. When I looked
at him, to my surprise I realized there wasn’t any sign
of stress in him. As Rainer Maria Rilke advised a young poet in
Letters to a Young Poet, "write as though you have eternity
before you." I realized that making great art is a way of
life.
I
skipped my last question about his promise to the Pittsburgh audiences,
where he is to take up the position as Music Director of The Pittsburgh
Symphonic Orchestra next season. He was quoted in July, 2007 as
saying that he will conduct and focus on composers of his ‘home
country’, Vienna. This implies a continuation of what he
is doing in Stuttgart where he conducted Mozart (Cosi fan Tutte)
alongside Berlioz’s Les Troyes.
“He
will do just that,’ I thought and looked at my watch again.
I still had a million imaginary questions for him - there were
now only twenty minutes left for him to get ready for the performance.
I became nervous. I forgot to turn off my tape recorder. And discussing
it afterwards with his secretary she said to me, ‘He hasn’t
stress, he can talk to you until five minutes before an opera
starts and still go onstage without stress’.
I
rushed to my own seat, seventh row, seat number 225. I got there
just before the doors closed. Everybody had to stand up to let
me through. He too entered at the same time and the applause started.
I remembered his last words to me then:
‘You haven’t
touched your coffee’.
Argo Spier,
Opera Critic Benelux
Opera Pages
Stuttgart - City
of vibrant Arts
| *
USA bits - Dynamic performances on the Stuttgart
art scene - The soloist of the Stuttgart Ballet, Katja Wünsch,
has been awarded the German Teater Faust Prize for her role
in the Stuttgart Ballet production 'I fratelli - Die Brüder'.
Also, the 24-year old Alina Pogostkina from Praag delivered
a memorable performance in Stuttgart's Beethoven Hall with
her Brahms Violen concerto. |
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