Nymph and her sense of snow – Newspaper Kommersant No. 43 (7488) of 03/15/2023

At the Berlin State Opera “Unter den Linden” there are premiere screenings of Richard Strauss’s opera “Daphne” staged by the famous Italian director and artist Romeo Castellucci. Enjoyed the beauty of music and visual score Esther Steinbock.

No matter how much you describe the artistic decision of Romeo Castellucci, no words can replace the effect of presence: “Daphne” in the Berlin opera is a pleasure not only for auditory receptors (Richard Strauss’s amazing late opera is not only a very little-known rarity, but also not a match for “Salome” or “Electra” by the same author – is staged infrequently and does not cause a stir), but also for visual ones. The simplest thing to say about the spectacle is that it’s snowing on the stage.

There is no novelty in this decision itself, theatrical snow is a device rather hackneyed than original. But with Castellucci, it loses its decorative effect, acquiring totality: the snowfall begins shortly after the beginning of the action and ends before the finale. And this is not just a private phenomenon of scenography. Snowfall occurs in a winter landscape that fills the entire scene and is constantly changing. Heavy, sometimes literally “lead” snow clouds either cover the white winter desert, or recede, allowing the sky in the distance to clear up with a thin strip of daytime blueness or sunset-dawn yellowness. Light, of course, Romeo Castellucci creates individual miracles.

Daphne, as you know, is a character of ancient Greek mythology, a nymph from the myth about her and the god Apollo, who pursues her. The libretto by Joseph Gregor is based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Euripides’ Bacchae. Of course, the plot of the “bucolic tragedy”, as the opera genre is designated, has a completely different, so to speak, climatic background – Greece, heat, olive trees, and so on. But to say that Castellucci moved the action of “Daphne” somewhere in the northern latitudes would be a mistake. In the middle of the performance, with the appearance of Apollo, a huge fragment of some ancient frieze appears on the stage, previously lying in the snow. That is, it was not Castellucci who arbitrarily exiled Daphne, the god and the shepherds to freeze to Siberia or Lapland. Just an icy cold came to Greece. Is it because of the fashionable climate agenda, which today neither the famous German theater nor the famous Italian director would dare to neglect? Surely she was also paid tribute to this staged decision.

But, of course, Castellucci speaks not only and not so much about the problems of global cooling. His winter is obviously the winter of culture and the winter of Europe as such. Daphne, running from earthly passions closer to nature, appears, like all other characters, in warm winter clothes – and during her first aria, she undresses to her underwear, remaining unseasonably undressed until the very end of the opera. The shepherd Leucippus tries to put a coat on her, but Daphne is not cold, she clings to a stunted tree that miraculously survived in the middle of a snowy desert – this is the only “creature” to which she is drawn. In essence, Castellucci’s Daphne runs not so much “where” – to the wild, but “from where” – from modern society, in which the loser Leucippus is not much different from the owner of Apollo’s life (it is interesting that both opponents, in whose struggle he wins, of course , deity, – tenors).

Then Apollo will pour thick theatrical blood on Leucippus from a canister with the inscription “He”, which from the very beginning flaunted on a separate pedestal in the proscenium. And the second canister, with the inscription “She”, will remain untouched. Because the blood also testifies to the flesh inseparable from it, while Castellucci’s Daphne is more of a metaphor than a specific earthly creature. And the most mysterious, beautiful and unexpected scene of the play happens when from above, from under the grates, like a divine message, the huge cover of the first edition of Thomas Stearns Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” descends. This book, full of references to the cultural codes of different eras, according to Castellucci, “shows European civilization in wounds.” The cover literally puts pressure on Daphne, but the heroine bears her weight on her shoulders. It’s time to say that Vera-Lotte Böcker not only sang the part of Daphne perfectly, but also played her full-blooded and convincingly. Conductor Thomas Guggais and the rest of the soloists, as well as the choir, were also at their best, fully letting the audience feel the dramatic beauty of Strauss’s music, but without such a strong Daphne as Böcker, nothing would have happened.

One must see with what conviction and desperation Daphne digs into her grave in the finale, raking a snowdrift and scattering frozen earth around her. Gradually, it disappears under the stage, and a tree, literally torn out of the ground, rises with its roots up and hangs in a dark space where it has finally stopped snowing. There are moments in musical theater when you want the fading sounds to last forever, so that the black curtain does not fall as long as possible – and the finale of Daphne is one of those happy theatrical minutes. Is it possible to say that the performance is also about the strategy of decisive escapism, the price of which is death? Perhaps yes. Can we say that this is a triumph of outraged individuality? Especially if you remember the history of the creation of the Strauss opera. Its premiere took place in Germany, at the Semperoper in Dresden, in October 1938, when there could be no other triumphs around, except the triumph of the will.