display

Two real kisses!

On a German opera stage!

What was customary a year ago seems to be a bitter exception in Corona times.

But with daily saliva tests and the certainty of a privately financed DVD award, the Deutsche Oper was able to let Riccardo Zandonai's “Francesca da Rimini” thunder and flatter over their boards live via stream.

The jealous riot going back to Dante, which was premiered in Turin in 1914.

This was made skilfully possible by a successful duo that Erich Wolfgang Korngold's “The Miracle of the Helians” had already opened in 2018 at the Deutsche Oper: the director Christof Loy and the soprano Sara Jakubiak.

display

Loy has been infected with the verismo virus for a long time.

As a shrewd understanding of Femmes, Fatales and Fragiles, he skilfully translated Giordano's “Fedora” and - in the last, short autumn season in Vienna - Leoncavallo's looser Tingeltangel melo “Zazà” into sober bourgeoisie.

But the renaissance of this style of opera, which is still slightly disreputable because it is vulgar and happily wallowing in the plebeian misery of women, has long since drawn wider circles.

Soprano stars Angela Gheorghiu, Anna Netrebko and Ermonela Jaho have recorded verismo albums in recent years.

Ermonela Jaho also recorded the complete “Zazà” for the label Opera Rara.

And the active Berlin opera troupe under Felix Krieger has just released one of the last pre-Covid premieres, Mascagani's “Iris” as a complete recording on Oehms Classics that is well worth listening to.

Murder and manslaughter, lust and love: scenes from “Francesca da Rimini” at the Deutsche Oper Berlin with Sara Jakubiak as Francesca

Source: Deutsche Oper Berlin / Monika Rittershaus Deutsche Oper Berlin, Copyright: Monika Rittershaus

display

Incidentally, Christof Loy is already thinking aloud for Berlin about Respighi's incense sultry witch drama “La Fiamma”, set in medieval Ravenna.

But now he was only a few kilometers south for his "Francesca";

even if Johannes Leiacker has come up with a flowered salon with a winter garden with a Claude Lorrain panorama in a proscenium-like alcove as a bright unitary stage design with almost no reference to the Renaissance.

Always an opera room free - Loy likes to unfold his emphatically penetrating psychoanalysis in such a pseudorealistic-symbolic ambience.

The choir is left out, the battle and domestics ambience populate extras.

On the eve of the First World War, Riccardo Zandonai (1883–1944)

composed an opera

in this

tragedia

in four acts and five pictures, which was not really skilfully reduced to the two-person relationship, and which was enhanced with some late Raphaelite genre scenes.

It was the only reasonably successful of his 13 stage works.

display

And acts like a shorter Italian counterpart to Wagner's “Tristan und Isolde” - in eternal parlando and with little recognizable melodic arcs.

But far less romantic, red blood is shed in a dramatically sharp contrast on white silk, the dead lie between resounding flowers, and love is only a deceptive peace in the eternal slaughter.

All registers are started up

The dramatic disposition of Carlo Rizzi and the juicy orchestra of the Deutsche Oper make the sweet and decadent a full listening pleasure even in computer headphones.

Rizzi likes it soft and hard, loud and sensitive, opens all the stops and creates a clay carpet that is sometimes plushy and silky, sometimes edgy and gaudy.

The Middle Ages are imitated musically.

One suspects Strauss and Debussy at times, but then sings it again with typical Italian cantilena.

Francesca da Rimini and Paolo il Bello, that is the unfortunate love story from Dante's 50 years older "Divine Comedy", which is in Gradara, a fortress in the Brands, should have happened.

Francesca, who for political reasons is supposed to marry the lame Gianciotto Malatesta, is led to believe that the suitor, his handsome brother Paolo, is the future husband.

She gives in when she realizes the betrayal, but Paolo has fallen in love with her.

At first she tries to suppress her feelings, and eventually they become lovers.

When the jealous cripple snaps, Gianciotto kills his wife and the rival.

Zandonai succeeded in creating a storybook that has become sound.

And in the successor to Eleonora Duse, the author of the play, the two-hourer offers a dream role for nervous, sensitive divas à la Magda Olivero, Rajna Kabaiwanska, Renata Scotto or Mara Zampieri.

display

Sara Jakubiak cannot keep up in this class, her luscious soprano unfolds too colorlessly, but very purposefully she comes close to the passion of the self-discovering Francesca as a strict angel of death between dying men.

The voice flourishes trembling in the two emotional duets with her beau, the handsome, also beautifully tenor-sounding Jonathan Tetelman (Paolo).

From the outstanding ensemble, the precisely characterizing Charles Workman (Malatestino) and the slave Smaragdi (Amira Elmadfa), who is depicted as a lesbian tuxedo wearer, make people sit up and take notice.

Despite the bourgeois, increasingly depressing gloom: a mask-free opera evening that really makes you want again, oscillating between violence, ancient tenderness and sensual vibrancy!

Check it out at takt1.de (free until March 17th), live on April 4th at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.