display
Most unusual was the end.
When the worldly, aged Giuseppe Verdi lets all his citizens of Windsor, including the recently teased Falstaff, raise the final fugue that the whole world is a madhouse and everyone is just fools, then nobody sings live at the Bavarian State Opera.
As in the Zoom conference, the ten soloists and the conductor sit in civilian clothes, each in his own camera window, singing and conducting in isolation from one another.
At some point the camera goes back to the long shot, and you can see that these last minutes are canned food that is shown on a flat screen including an easel, while the entire mask-wearing ensemble of this “Falstaff” premiere stands in silence and finally during the silence that followed goes off quietly.
That is the bitter comment that the director Mateja Koležnik has come up with for her premiere, which has been postponed for the second time and is now streamed live once without an audience, only for this involuntary separate screening.
At the beginning of the free broadcast (from now on for one month for 15 euros) the Munich National Theater was illuminated as a deserted music haunted house according to the campaign #AlarmstufeRot against the pandemic-specific stage closings.
The introductory director, Nikolaus Bachler, wore a bitter expression “due to the special circumstances”.
display
You can hear the musicians rumbling in the ditch and shouting: “Is someone from the technology there?” And there is no other humor in this actually evil, but also conciliatory farce with which the titan of the Italian opera ended a long, fulfilling musical theater life .
“A mighty outburst of cheerfulness” is at the end, says the librettist Arigo Boito.
Here it was just a blatant hangover accompanied by chattering tin, with which you, as a lonely stream viewer in your own apartment, were pushed back into the likewise not funny reality.
But this cloudy, rough staging was not funny either, although the concept for this "Falstaff", when Kirill Petrenko's last Munich General Music Director premiere originally scheduled for July at the opera festival, was of course long before the Covid catastrophe.
In her first music theater work, the Croatian theater director Mateja Koležnik remained true to her dark, minimalist aesthetic.
As recently in Ibsen's “Ghosts” at the Berliner Ensemble, her Raimund Orfeo Vogt built many double doors into an aseptically black unitary room.
They drive back and forth in three rows, mainly showing a casino run by Mr Ford, in which a mellow Falstaff stoically cheers his money at the midlife crisis gaming table.
The monochrome costumes in their seventies noble trash aesthetic with sideburns and XXL sunglasses look like from Martin Scorsese's "Casino" minus color.
In the finale we are then - again - in the fetish forest of Windsor: Ostrich feather fan-flapping revue elves with death masks ensnare the rustic Bavarian knight of the equally Teutonic sounding, in moderation horny Wolfgang Koch.
The singing staff is fucked up and unsympathetic in their icy bourgeoisie.
Most of them sound sharp and cool through the microphones.
Michele Mariotti's sober conducting is mainly rhythm-driven.
display
A ghost opera in the haunted house, a festive premiere atmosphere does not arise.
Concentration in front of the computer also quickly wanes, luckily there is something to clear out at the desk.
Even the specially offered simultaneous fellowship is no fun.
Such actions are fatal on both sides.
You want to see something, but live and real is different.
The Bavarian State Opera has long had streaming experience.
Even Jonas Kaufmann, who jumped in at short notice and outgrown his Rodolfo role, was shown in the house's more than 50-year-old “La Bohème” production.
The Puccini curdles into a postcard that sounds nostalgic;
the merchant, thwarted by the virus, is meanwhile selling his Christmas CD personally in the home shopping channel.
Of course the stages want to play, after two months of fresh start at the beginning of the season they warmed up, in front of 1000, 500, 200, and finally 50 allowed spectators.
Premieres were especially prepared for the Christmas time, which is ringing at the box office, the productions are backing up behind the scenes.
That is why it is now increasingly in front of the cameras.
display
In Zurich, on St. Nicholas Day, the baritone song pope Christian Gerhaher makes his title role debut in Verdi's “Simon Boccanegra” only in front of the Arte lenses.
For the first time, Leipzig will also stream a semi-concert Verdi “Troubadour” on December 6th.
On December 12th, the Oslo Opera House will be showing a fresh “Barber of Seville” staged by Jetske Mijnssen online.
On December 4th, Jonas Kaufmann and Elina Garanca are singing again in front of the cameras in Naples in Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana" - for 1.09 euros on the San Carlo website.
On December 13th, a new “Lohengrin”, directed by Calixto Bieito, goes on the television stage at the Berlin Linden Opera.
The Theater an der Wien has just brought a joylessly correct, corona-abbreviated, dutifully staged by the cabaret artist Alfred Dorfer and the petty Harnoncourt successor Stefan Gottfried roughly played “Marriage of Figaro” to the Mozart TV premiere.
Thanks to ORF and Arte, the Vienna State Opera, which has also just closed again for at least January 7, broadcasts five productions free of charge in December, old and new, including Henze's Yukio Mishima music theater “The betrayed sea” (on December 13).
There was also top-class modernity in a dense, stringent new production under the capable GMD François Xavier Roth at the Cologne Opera with George Benjamin's deadly successful chamber opera “Written on Skin”.
There you could pay what you wanted, from zero to 350 euros.
On Mezzo-TV you can watch Dvorak's "Rusalka" for a fee, which was played in front of an audience last week in Madrid's Teatro Real despite the high corona numbers.
Outside the disease rages, inside and far away on the screen you let yourself be spellbound by the fate of a mermaid in love who sacrifices her language to get on her feet.
Director Christof Loy intensifies this analytically by staging the exciting but little soprano-warming Asmik Grigorian as a ballerina on crutches in an old-fashioned theater foyer.
A fairytale mood does not arise, however, because Ivor Bolton acts in an anti-romantic way in the Graben, also because the symbolist opera is only reduced to another problematic couple relationship.
In addition, the brave tenor Eric Cutler is also inhibited by crutches as a prince because he tore his Achilles tendon during the dress rehearsal.
Only the ex-dramatic Karita Mattila conquers another age group with the foreign princess, lustfully dominating the stage.
And the movement choir as a court society dances orgiastically half-naked without any distance rule.
That turns off more.
You just can't get the virus that is raging in Spain out of your head.
So not a current opera?
Is everything dead or rather canned?
Not a real solution either.
Maybe we will wait until this at least completed “Rusalka” will travel to the co-producing houses in Dresden, Bologna, Barcelona and Valencia.
Perhaps then your “Song to the Moon” will have its old, late romantic beauty and pull again.