Last week I took a little trip to Franconia. I was
there to see the opera company of Landestheater Coburg perform two of its new
productions under its dynamic music director Roland Kluttig. Having made his
name primarily as a new music specialist, Kluttig was appointed Generalmusikdirektor
at the start of the 2010/11 and is clearly bringing a new sense of ambition to
this company across the repertoire.
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| Interior of the Markgrafentheater in Erlangen |
First stop was Erlangen, where the Coburg company was
performing their Fidelio at the
town’s beautiful Markgrafentheater, the oldest functioning Baroque theatre
in South Germany, Wikipedia tells me, but one that in the 300 years since it
was built has undergone quite a few facelifts. The exterior is modern, and inside the boxes have been knocked through (if that's the term) and a fair amount of detailing has been smoothed over.
Still it’s a lovely little place, as is the town itself,
centred around an elegant 18th-century university complex and a famous
botanical garden (maintained by the university, but inevitably looking a little
triste in mid February).
The theatre produces its own plays, in the main building and couple of other
venues in the town, as well as hosting concerts and Gastspiele from the Coburg—a 50-mile
whizz up the autobahn. For me on this occasion it was Fidelio,
in a production (new in the autumn) by Rudolf Frey, whose work in the UK has included a
not-much-loved Maria Stuarda at Welsh
National Opera in 2013.
There were a few textual novelties: the apparently
ever-problematic dialogue was replaced by texts from Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte; and, unusually,
we had Leonore III as the overture (performed
with real vigour by Kluttig and the orchestra in the theatre’s tiny pit),
chosen possibly in part so that its greater length could provide more scope for
the dumb-show Prologue it accompanied.
This Prologue, as I read only afterwards (having assumed no
need to revisit the opera’s synopsis), set up the premise for the production.
Florestan is a journalist who has discovered some nasty secrets about his old
friend, the prison governor Pizarro. Leonore passes the material to
the Pizarro unawares, and he then locks Florestan up. Time passes, until Leonore, denied
the opportunity to visit him in prison, discovers that Florestan has died. She
‘sinks down in shock and mourning,’ we are told, and ‘before her inner eye
unravels the following story: …’.
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| Landestheater Coburg |
I’m reviewing the production in opera so will essentially leave it there, only to add that
it seems that Fidelio remains as tricky
as ever, and this framing device, though freeing the production from certain burdens
and responsibilities, also seemed to relieve it from the necessity to make a
great deal of sense on its own terms—or, at least, to feel responsible for
conveying that sense to those watching. I was left scratching my head much of the time.
The next evening’s Vixen
(directed by Alexandra Szemerèdy and Magdolna Parditka, and sung in German) was a great deal more persuasive. It was a fiercely uncompromising
reinterpretation that imagined the work as a dark, entirely unredemptive tale
of human trafficking and prostitution, and which ends in multiple deaths at the
hands of the Game Keeper. It paid little attention to Janáček’s score,
admittedly, but had at least an impressive conviction and internal coherence. (Again, I'll be reviewing this in opera, so will leave it there.)
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| Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka's Cunning Little Vixen at Landestheater Coburg (Photo © Henning Rosenbusch) |
Sitting across the Theaterplatz from the imposing and
beautifully preserved Schloss Ehrenburg (whose 1810s façade was designed by Karl Friedrich
Schinkel), the Coburg theatre is delightful. A 550-seat gem of sober classical
lines, it opened in 1840 and built up a reputation as a Wagner theatre
throughout the second half of the 19th-century; its resident set-painter Max
Brückner was recruited, along with his brother Gotthold, by Wagner for Bayreuth,
not far down the road.
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| Landestheater Coburg |
Recently it has started to re-establish its Wagner
repertory, having had something of a hit, it seems, with its 2014 Lohengrin—Kluttig told me that Wagner outsells everything in the
theatre, opera, plays or musicals; he is constantly getting stopped in the
street, on the other hand, by people asking for more Brahms in the concert
series he runs with the theatre’s orchestra.
After other successes with Der Rosenkavalier and, particularly, Pelléas et Mélisande, the decision was
made to stage Parsifal too, which
will therefore be seen there in April.
Later this season the theatre also stages a double bill of
the first German performance of Toshio Hosokawa’s The Raven and Poulenc’s La
Voix humaine. That, the productions I saw, and the fact that the beginning
of the season they revived another double bill, this time of Dido and Aeneas and Riders to the Sea, give an idea of quite how adventurous this
operatic arm of the theatre is.
I hope to return soon, not least to see the wonderful town
in slightly less wintry conditions.
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