Neuwirth: Bählamms Fest
Libretto by Elfriede
Jelinek
Olive Fredricks (alto) - Mrs. Margaret Carnis
Jan
Buchwald (baritone) - Philip
Frédérique Friess (soprano) -
Theodora
Aleksandra Kurzak (soprano) - Elizabeth
Tim Severloh
(counter-tenor) - Jeremy
Maite Beaumont (mezzo-soprano) - Violet
Dominik
Maringer (actor) - Henry, Mrs. Carnis' favorite dog
Philharmonic State
Orchestra of Hamburg
Patrick Davin (conductor)
Vera Nemirová
(director)
Sunday 30 June 2002
Deutsches Schauspielhaus,
Hamburg
A production of the Hamburger Staatsoper
Even before the performance started, it became clear that the German
premiere of Olga Neuwirth's Bählamms Fest would hardly be the average
opera experience: While the electronically enhanced sounds of a finger running
along the rim of a water-filled glass emerged from 14 speakers placed in the
three tiers of the auditorium, it was snowing. Some people in the audience tried
to shield themselves by holding newspapers or magazines over their heads and
bodies; others took it in stride as being "part of the Kunstwerk" and let
themselves be snowed in.
Neuwirth's 1999 music-theater piece, with a libretto by famed Austrian
dramatist Elfriede Jelinek, is based on Leonora Carrington's Baa-Lamb's
Holiday
, written in 1940 in German-occupied France. The surreal story is packed with violence
and sexual 
perversion, with werewolves
and people returning from the dead, all culminating in some sort of ritualistic
mass slaughter. It unfolds in the secluded country house of Mrs. Margaret Carnis
(the name is a conflation of the Latin terms for dog and meat), which has been
cut off from the rest of the world by heavy snowfall. Years before, Mrs.
Carnis crossed the
species barrier with her favorite dog, Henry; the offspring of this encounter,
her son Jeremy, is a werewolf whose thirst for blood makes him kill one lamb
after another. Theodora, the young second wife of Mrs. Carnis' sadistic,
alcoholic son Philip, falls in love with Jeremy. At a feast of the lambs (in
this production, a sort of tumultous revue-cum-orgy), he appears
disguised as the archangel Gabriel. When the lambs realize that he is in fact a
werewolf, it's too late. In the end, Jeremy, having been shot and killed by the
police, appears to Theodora, promising to come back to her if she stays
beautiful, pale and young. In the very last image, however, we see Theodora grow
old.
For Bählamms Fest, Neuwirth uses a spectrum of electronic devices and pre-recorded sounds. Singers' and actors' voices are at times distorted by software which makes them sound like space aliens from a science-fiction film. When Mrs. Carnis and her dog eat lobster, the cracking of the shell and loud chewing sounds are played from a tape. The score calls for only six string players (two violins, viola, two cellos, double bass) and a small wind section, but with a large percussion section, electric guitar, piano, celesta, synthesizer, accordeon and even theremin. The dark, melancholy writing consists mostly of small cells of sound (not necessarily melody) combined in various permutations to make an aural collage. Howling and hissing effects are contrasted with jazz elements, qutotations of Baroque music and a Jewish children's song. In certain passages, short musical figures which Neuwirth calls "mobiles" can be used and combined freely by the musicians. The 13 scenes of the opera are connected by "ice/snow islands" — orchestral interludes that Neuwirth uses to reflect a cold reality robbed of true emotions.
Designer Stefan Heyne's semi-circular camouflage set sported several
TV-screens on which sequences from the old television shows Lassie and
Flipper were
shown, reflecting Theodora's frequent mental escapes to the seemingly
sheltered world of her childhood. For the feast of the lambs, the ceiling
of the space rose to reveal endless oversized supermarket shelves of shrink-wrapped
meat. Vera Nemirová's splatter-film staging (produced by the Hamburg State
Opera) dripped with stage blood — on the brutally torn wounds of
werewolf victims, on beheaded corpses — yet showed remarkable talent
for carving complex characters. Under conductor Patrick Davin's leadership, the
singers — especially Olive Fredrick's mysterious Mrs. Carnis, Tim
Severloh's Jeremy and Frédérique Friess' Theodora — cut gripping
figures in this fascinating, disturbing, strange opera.
