Among the clever considerations of the director Stefan Herheim on Benjamin Britten's opera "Peter Grimes", and there are many of them, this one is particularly far-reaching because it condenses current discussions about art, morality and the rule of law into a scenic form: In the end, the citizens see the nameless east English seaside town to the failure of the fisherman Peter Grimes like a play in the town hall.
While he struggles with storms and waves at sea and his apprentice dies, they sit in the comfort zone of aesthetic distance, consume the catastrophe as an entertainment spectacle, but are so morally outraged that no legal investigation has a chance.
Gossip triumphs over law, rumor triumphs over court - although the preliminary investigation by attorney Swallow has revealed that
Grimes' apprentice died in an accident;
even if the inspection of Grimes' hut shows that violence and neglect do not prevail here, but order and skill.
No, the G. case is clear to the citizenry: Grimes is a criminal who abuses his apprentices, putting their lives in danger and even killing them.
Jan Brachmann
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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The beautiful stage design by Silke Bauer is functional at the same time: the large interior with the ceiling like an upside-down boat hull can be reduced to a hut or raised to a church, extended to a pub or community hall, to the sea at the back (with the videos by Torge Møller , which are reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's "Monk by the Sea") or to the fairground.
Above all, however, it is an acoustic shell that amplifies the vocals and increases the intelligibility of the lyrics.
Konstantin Krimmel, despite his youth already a high-ranking lieder singer, sings the pharmacist Ned Keene with astonishing agility, who knows how to use a few seconds to draw the manipulative intelligence of his character as sharp as an eraser.
As Captain Balstrode, Iain Paterson doesn't have to force himself to put a stop to the philistine packs with the natural authority of his powerful but touchable heroic baritone.
As Ellen Orford, Rachel Willis-Sørensen can let her soprano voice flow in long, well-connected phrases with lyrical richness when she gives the apprentice John (Jakob Biber) the loving care of a surrogate mother and Peter Grimes her support, even her love.
Stuart Skelton begins his role as Peter Grimes in the pre-trial taking the oath soft, soft and bright with the inner luminosity of innocence.
His outbursts of violence are the self-defense of an unarmored man.
The fact that the voice is somewhat occupied during the poetic singing of the stars hardly detracts from his performance.
It is thanks to the conductor Edward Gardner at the podium of the Bavarian State Orchestra that the singers are able to come across so gently and nuancedly.
Anyone who has followed Gardner's work on CDs with the Chandos label or with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in recent years has experienced a conductor who knows how to create tension not through volume but through concentration.
In Munich, too, he is concerned with clear hierarchies in the orchestral writing, with the elaboration of gestures and images that have painterly and psychological significance, such as the play of the waves, the glare of the sun or the screams of seagulls and terns.
Plasticity can be heard here instead of a watered-down wiping technique from gray to grey.
How he uses the withdrawal in lyrical moments for compression,
how he pushes the dialogue through tight rhythms and lets the echoes of entertaining “light music” flash as ciphers of corrupt lust and unsympathetic whispering, all this shows Gardner as a new heavyweight among British conductors.
He will do the Oslo Opera good if he soon takes over as musical director.
Stefan Herheim, however, appears completely transformed with this production.
He used to bombard the audience with allusions to the venue, the composer's biography, the genesis of the work or current political discussions.
Many a thought was sacrificed to the fast punch line, he himself a victim of the virtuosic entertainment that was expected of him from then on.
Herheim had felt the pressure himself - he spoke of the "brand shopping" of the artistic directors in the international opera business - and escaped it by taking a long break.
What he now shows with "Peter Grimes", for example in the scene between Ellen Orford and the apprentice John, who refuses to go to church and falls asleep from exhaustion, is lingering reflection instead of jumping associations,
this is text-immanent character and relationship work instead of context illustration.
And when Captain Balstrode carries Grimes' dead apprentice in a dream sequence like one of the other's burdens, then Herheim reinforces the level of Christian parables laid out in the play - the text expressly mentions the "throwing of the first stone" and the "Pharisaic nature" of the citizens , instead of weakening them.
Few have that courage today.
Twice in the staging, the hall lights come on to glare at an audience, here in Munich, a city that has just fired a conductor whose glamor it had bathed in for seven years through a pact that secured it the comforts of distant consumption , from which she makes her judgments today as if she had nothing to do with anything.