Performing the unperformable: Schoenberg's Gurrelieder in Amsterdam (2014)

Schoenberg's Gurrelieder are not an opera but for sure they have most of the necessary ingredients: a big orchestra and chorus, six soloists with demanding parts, an extraordinary score, rich in exuberant, sometimes colourful and dramatic tones and leitmotives, and a subjacent story-implied in the succession of the songs- of love, devastation, anger and finally the hope of another day.

Some time ago, I read in a forum that the problem with performing the Gurrelieder is that if we stage it we would focus more on what we see on stage rather than on the powerful and rich orchestral variety, with its wagnerian style. Nevertheless, the reasons before mentioned in the first paragraph are enough to think on a potential staged performance. That was the idea of the Dutch National Opera and its director, Pierre Audi, for staging it for the first time, 101 years later its premiere.  In addition, such an event was telecasted and later edited on DVD.

Audi sets this work during the time of its composition, during the 1910 decade, including World War I. The decomposition of the world of splendid European empires, to give way the ruin and misery of the War is similar to the self-destruction of King Waldemar. He loves his mistress Tove, a nymph-like maiden, but after her death he loses his mind and defies God, resulting in a fatal defeat. Audi takes note of this for developping the role on stage. At a first glance, the tetrical aesthetic of this production  could seem totally unrelated to the fairytale-like medieval background of the story, but when the time and circumstances of the work are known, it matches completely.

The set is a wide, dark, empty, abandoned space resembling an old factory. The narrator (a woman in this production) starts with an spoken introduction and then the Prelude begins. A man in white dress and make up appears holding a big, white-lighting globe, representing the moon. A big bed is seen in the middle, in which Tove and Waldemar appear after presumably a passionate encounter. They sing their songs with tenderness but conveying fragility and lack of confidence, as if their love were about to fall. After their duet, and now appearing as a king, Waldemar sees the Wood Dove appearing, dressed in black and with big wings, like the angel of death. Then, two little chambers appear: one totally covered in blood, where Waldemar grieves Tove, and the other totally white, where the Dove sings its tragic monologue.

The second and Third parts show the progressive twilight, self-destruction of the king, now rebelling against God. Waldemar appears unkempt, drunk, ruined physically and mentally. Indeed, the Third part takes place in a sort of gloomy bar. Before it takes place the narrator talks about night wild hunt. Then, the soldiers emerge like spectres. The man-in-white reveals to be Klaus the buffoon. When the soldiers disappear, and Waldemar dies slowly, the narrator (which is always dressed in garçon style, maybe an evocation of Pierrot Lunaire?) begins her wonderful part "The wild hunt of the Summer wind". Then, the Chorus, now dressed in white sing greeting the big white Sun appearing behind and irradiating the stage.

The Dutch Opera Orchestra is well conducted by Marc Albrecht, who conducts a powerful and at the same time intimal version of the score, with the wind section sounded rich and exuberant during the prelude, as well as the violins move the audience during Tove's songs. The orchestra, as a tutti, have spectacular moments in the Third part and the final Chorus, and the wind has again a glorious moment during the "hunt", and during this final sprechgesang scene.  The Dutch Opera Chorus and the Essen Chorus are splendid, sounding ghostly, tetric, almost religious during the last soldiers' intervention and radiant during the final "Seht, die sonne" chorus.

Burkhard Fritz sounds heroic and sometimes youthful as Waldemar, and recreates well the decline of his character as the work goes by. Emily Magee is a beautifully sung Tove, with amazing high notes. Anna Larsson sings her Dove monologue with an elegiac, dark, dramatic contralto tone. Markus Marquandt as the Peasant and the veteran Wolfgang Abilinger-Sperrhacke as Klaus are good in their parts. The Swiss actress Sunnyi Melles is the narrator, whose role is important in this production, linking the parts with her poetic lines. Sometimes whispering, sometimes loud voice give a energetic version of the spoken part.

This staged version was revived in 2018, with the Dutch Royal Family attending. Despite the challenge, we can say Pierre Audi and the DNO have created one of the great operistic events of 2014, and they succeeded... performing the unperformable.

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