Thanks to the Beijing Music Festival, the Deutsche Oper Berlin has given Chinese opera fans the rare opportunity to appreciate two impressive productions directed by the renowned Gotz Friedrich (1930-2000), who startled Bayreuth and Covent Garden with the Marxist tone of his stagings of Wagner.
Last Friday and Sunday at the Poly Theater, Deutsche Oper Berlin performed Friedrich's 1993 production of Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier, and tonight and Friday they will perform Wagner's Tannhauser that Friedrich directed in 1992.
The East Germany born Friedrich - rated by some to be among the most powerful creative influences on opera in recent times - was at the forefront of those seeking to establish the central role of the director in European opera houses during the 1970s and 1980s.
Soprano Manuela Uhl plays Elisabeth in Tannhauser. File photo
Friedrich shot to fame - and notoriety - in 1972 with a staging of Tannhauser at Bayreuth, in which Wagner's pious troubadours were presented as jackbooted SS officers, grinding the faces of a disgruntled proletariat. The Bayreuth audience saw this as an imputation of neo-Nazism and booed Friedrich.
But Friedrich was no ideologue, and had been planning to defect from East Germany to enjoy the artistic freedom of the West, a step he took later the same year during a production of Janacek's Jenufa in Stockholm.
Known for his imaginative and often startling productions, Friedrich employed the stage to show how society operates, and his sets were marvels of scenic engineering. He believed that the stage should contain a structure rather than be a deceptive appearance.
Although his 1972 staging of Tannhauser at Bayreuth was controversial at the time, eventually the production was recognized as a highly original classic. Friedrich returned to the Bayreuth Festival for equally controversial stagings of Lohengrin (1978) and Parsifal (1982).
Friedrich directed his first work at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1977, and when he left his post at Covent Garden in 1981, he returned to work as general manager and artistic director at the Deutsche Oper Berlin until his death in 2000.
"Friedrich led the house to highest international reputation. The ensemble was enlarged by important singers and conductors who formed the musical profile of the house," says Kirsten Harms, now the artistic director and head of the opera house.
"Though the production of Tannhauser that Beijing's audience will see is not that at Bayreuth in 1972, it still demonstrates Friedrich's ability to startle and to draw deeply-felt acting from the principal singers," says Harms.
With both the music and libretto written by Richard Wagner (1813-1883), the three-act opera Tannhauser premiered in Dresden on Oct 19, 1845. It is much in the German romantic tradition and cast in conventional recitative, aria, ensemble and chorus.
The theme of redemption through love is typically Wagnerian. Beautiful lyrical passages include Elisabeth's two arias and Wolfram's song in Act III, and the Pilgrim's Chorus. The overture is one of the great masterpieces in that class of musical composition.
There are many layers to the story, but the central plot is a simple one. The title character, a 13th-century knight and minstrel singer, has been living a hedonistic life with Venus, the love goddess. When he tires of their luxurious - and, needless to say, very sexy - life together, he renounces Venus and returns, in search of redemption, to his virtuous love, Elisabeth.
The Beijing performance will feature tenor Scott MacAllister as Tannhauser, soprano Manuela Uhl as Elisabeth, mezzo-soprano Lioba Braun as Venus and baritone Markus Bruck as Wolfram. The orchestra will be conducted by Philippe Auguin.
(China Daily 10/07/2008 page19)
