When Luigi Dallapiccola's opera "Ulisse" premiered at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1968, the work was met with a lack of understanding.
In the midst of the student revolt, an opera that presented the hero of Greek myth as a seeker of meaning and God-finder could hope for nothing else.
Even then, there were the kind of contemporaries who always know exactly what “the real problems” are and art should kindly address them.
Maybe it's because Dallapiccola's opera and his entire oeuvre in general are very little known in this country - one is most likely to hear "Il prigioniero" out of the half-misunderstanding that this is a primarily political work.
The "Ulisse" sees itself as the sum of Dallapiccola's work, which is also reflected in the numerous self-citations from earlier works that cannot be recognized, at least by local ears.
It is to the credit of the Frankfurt Opera that the work was again put up for discussion in all its complexity;
and it is to be hoped that at least a small Dallapiccola renaissance will emanate from this Frankfurt premiere.
Dallapiccola, fascinated by the Schoenberg school since his youth, had acquired his highly individual form of twelve-tone technique, which does not avoid tonal points of contact, developed an unusual timbre (sometimes it sounds like an extended Debussy) and in the consistently vocal part-writing it by no means shows the Italian heritage denied.
Everyman with a baseball cap and short pants
It was to be expected that the Frankfurt Opera would do justice to this, the orchestral and vocal level is of high quality;
the chorus, a protagonist of the play, conducted by Tilman Michael, does a great job;
the museum orchestra, conducted by Francesco Lanzillotta, shimmers in all colors.
However, it is Tatjana Gürbaca's production that also does justice to the existential-philosophical aspects of Dallapiccola's own libretto.
The evening seems to start randomly, with lightly dressed people strolling around on an artificial hill, in the midst of pillars in which, with a little will, one might recognize the ruins of an ancient temple.
A lady with an umbrella stretched upwards, leading a group, makes it clear: these seem to be tourists.
The costume designer Silke Willrett has probably not had an encounter with the gruesome reality of mass tourist garb for a long time.
Everyman with a baseball cap and shorts is singled out from the crowd and ritually painted – when the orchestra enters the scene he turns out to be Odysseus, and this already addresses a basic theme of the opera: the dialectics of this traveller, who even lived abroad as the ruler of Ithaca has suffered social death, has become a nobody.