Bathhouse with violas – Newspaper Kommersant No. 152 (7353) of 08/22/2022

The most important opera premiere of the Salzburg Festival, as in the case of last year’s Don Giovanni, was entrusted to the tandem of conductor Teodor Currentzis and director Romeo Castellucci. Their creation is an unthinkable theatrical evening that combines two terribly heterogeneous works: Béla Bartok’s opera The Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1918) and Carl Orff’s opera-oratorio The Comedy of the End Times (De temporum fine comoedia, 1981). I watched the grand experiment Sergey Hodnev.

Before the start of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, in addition to the prologue read out by actor Christian Rainer (“…Where is the stage: outside or inside us, ladies and gentlemen?”), a desperate infantile cry was heard from the Rock arena; he broke off, replaced by women’s lamentations. It seems to be a director’s instruction: they say, take the story of Bluebeard and his fourth wife Judith as a statement about a dysfunctional marriage due to family loss – especially since soon the inconsolable Judith did appear on the stage, holding an infant corpse in her hands.

In fact, everything is not at all like that: the director and artist Castellucci takes Bartok’s modernist masterpiece into metaphysics, and besides, it is quite a road with visual images that is reliant on figurativeness. The stage is pitch dark, while the stage itself is ankle-deep in water. The walks and torments of two characters dressed in black (although ready to show off at the most desperate moment) are illuminated by the live fire of miraculously igniting simple lath forms arranged around the stage – pillars, crosses, beams, a hoop. In the end, in the middle of the stage, letters flash up, forming the word ICH (that is, “I”), informing even the most narrow-minded that this is not about the stone castle of the ill-fated ducal couple with all its forbidden rooms, but even, according to Teresa of Avila, “inner castle.”

In this beautifully structured, mesmerizing darkness, there are the flexible and remarkable works of the Lithuanian soprano Aushrine Stundite (Judith), the star of the Salzburg Elektra, who appeared in the unfortunate 2020, and the Finnish bass Mika Kares. There is Teodor Currentzis at the head of not his own musicAeterna, but the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra – and this is definitely a great achievement in the Salzburg career of the Greek-Russian maestro, who never before at the festival so amazingly dissolved in the score without any hint of pose. On the director’s side, there were all sorts of details (like a sketch with copulating mannequins), in terms of elegance reminiscent of a crushed bug on a shirt-front, but in general, if we limit ourselves to Bartok, it was a strong, interestingly arranged and quite workable event in the theatrical sense, which is just right to remember for a long time.

But to remember him – at the suggestion of the Salzburg quartermaster Markus Hinterhäuser, who proposed just such a combination – will have to be precisely in a bizarre connection with the last opus of Karl Orff, his Comedy of the End Times. Perhaps it would be more understandable in this case to translate the Latin comoedia as “action” or “play”, but then the echo with the Divine Comedy, important for this year’s program, would be lost. Like Dante, Carl Orff conceived in his declining years a work that was by no means comic in the generally accepted sense, but connected with the ultimate fate of the universe.

The point here is not that the events of the Last Judgment are brought to the stage (at least in a covert, and even demonstrative form, this happened in numerous composer adaptations of the form of the Catholic funeral mass, “Requiem”). Orff was carried away by the theological concept of “apokatastasis” (apokatastasis ton panton, that is, “restoration of everything”), which exists in the Christian worldview on dual rights – it seems to be a condemned teaching, but at the same time it is traced back to many revered fathers and teachers, headed by St. Gregory of Nyssa. If God did not create evil, then it cannot pass into eternity and must disappear at the boundless end of time – sinners and even demons will repent, and, in the words of the apostle, “God will be all in all.” Orff’s “Comedy”, combining texts in ancient Greek, Latin and German, was completed in 1971, in 1973 Herbert von Karajan performed it at the same Salzburg Festival, and in 1981 the composer created the final version, causing a loud sensation, which was performed at the festival now.

Here it was already not so much about the dissolution in the author’s text, but about the thrill of colossal ambition – in the score of “Comedy”, in addition to the fragments that sound in the recording, an unthinkable number of instruments, primarily several dozen percussion instruments, are spelled out. The Comedy opens with the Greek hexameters of the Sibyls, promising a fiery end and eternal punishment for depraved humanity (since they are bad, their ensemble depicted ritual murders of children on a dark stage again); here is the main memorable vocal work, the fiercely ringing vocalizations of Nadezhda Pavlova in the role of the leader of the prophetesses. Then comes the hermits, who refute this bloodthirsty theology (a crowd of “anchorites” pulls a chopped off tree trunk onto the stage and plays around it their “sacred spring”, only now bloodless).

A picture of the final universal disasters follows: first skeletons crawl out from under the stage, and then the choristers (the Perm musicAeterna choir, the Salzburg Bach choir, and the children’s choir of the festival had to take part in the Comedy). Their drama is terrible: it’s nice to get out of eternal rest to an unwashed court, but it still doesn’t work to sympathize with the corpulent choir artists crawling out of the hold, wrapped in pink nylon tights to depict reviving bodies – although this is offered to us with obvious references to the images of the Last Judgment with Luca Signorelli and the old Flemings. The repentance of Satan, which is important for the composer (all the same Christian Reiner, naively changing clothes from black to white), is also smeared, turning with the words “Father! I have sinned” again into an angel of light, – at this moment Bluebeard and Judith appear, holding out the apple of Eden to Dennitsa; here we understand that Bartok’s opera was also shown to us as a story of the fall into sin: there we are talking about curiosity, but this, they say, is Eve’s curiosity.

On the one hand, how not to welcome the gesture of the festival, completely uncompromising, intriguing, resolutely arguing with the image of summer Salzburg as a convenient bourgeois entertainment. And demanding in every sense: who else, if not festival events of this caliber, should be conscious and take on such projects, which are difficult both for ordinary philharmonic life and for the average opera repertoire. The gesture is at least in the same row, for example, with the “Soldiers” by Bernd Alois Zimmermann (also, by the way, a thing not devoid of both well-known gigantomania and polemical sound in the context of the post-war avant-garde), which Alvis Hermanis staged in Salzburg exactly ten years ago. It was still under the previous quartermaster, prudent Alexander Pereira, but the “Soldiers” then fired. Markus Hinterhäuser is, of course, incomparably thinner and deeper than his predecessor, and still, in the case of an artificial combination of Bartok’s duet opera and Orff’s loudly boiling oratorio, this literally cosmic colossus gives rise to only frustration – approximately like a canon for four viols on the theme of Bach’s choral prelude “Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit”, which sounds in the recording as the finale of Orff’s “Comedy”. It seems to be thoughtfully and unanimously exposed with pathos, lights and fogs before the most respectable public eschatological depths, but found there only sweet and sour melancholy.