Should opera be set in a modern idiom? This burning question found its latest answer in Munich this summer, where the Bavarian State Opera presented new productions of Richard Strauss’s penultimate opera, Die Liebe der Danae, from 1940, and of Gabriel Fauré’s only true opera, Pénélope, from 1913. Both of these rarely performed twentieth-century works are set in the legendary world of ancient Greece, and both were presented here in modern settings. Seen on consecutive evenings during Munich’s annual midsummer opera festival, the answer to the question of whether they “worked” is a genuine Ja und Nein or, as the apposite German portmanteau expresses the contradiction, Jein.
The truth is there is no simple answer. Just as a traditional production can be either beautiful or dull, so can a modern production be either clever or ridiculous. Claus Guth’s new staging of Die Liebe der Danae, which premiered in February and was held over for the festival, is an unqualified success. Danae, the classical myth tells us, was seduced by Jupiter in a glittering shower of gold and bore him Perseus, who went on to great deeds. Jupiter never gets that far in Strauss’s opera, however. In a conflation of myths devised in a preliminary sketch by the composer’s longtime collaborator Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who died in 1929, and later expanded into a libretto by Joseph Gregor, the god is a rival of Midas, the Anatolian king whose touch, or kiss, turns all that it graces to gold. Jupiter had bestowed the gift on Midas when he was a poor donkey driver and, fearing the wrath of his wife Juno, hopes to use Midas’s wealth as camouflage to take Danae for himself. Danae is susceptible because her father, Pollux, is in debt and harassed by creditors, leaving her to indulge in fantasies of gilded salvation.
In what Hofmannsthal meant to be a comedy in the style of an Offenbach operetta, Midas inevitably wins Danae’s love and kisses her, turning her into a gold statue for delivery to Jupiter. Danae’s love overpowers the situation, pleading for Midas in her transformed state even if setting things right means depriving her suitor of his gift and returning him to poverty. Jupiter stormily spells out the indignities she will face, but she rejects the god anyway, leaving him to retreat with a chastened reflection on his declining use to humanity.
Guth often imagines psychological trauma haunting the operas he stages, but here he wisely eschewed that approach to present the enduring truth, which is that the contest between love and money—a trope Hofmannsthal envisioned as comedy—stills hangs over us today. There is, mercifully, no attempt to impose any more sinister reading of the work, which might have been tempting since it came to fruition just as World War II began. Remembering the chilly reception of his earlier opera Die Frau ohne Schatten, which presented the issue of childlessness to a war-shattered Viennese population at its premiere in 1919, Strauss initially wanted to postpone Die Liebe der Danae’s premiere until at least two years after World War II was over but relented and allowed a production for the 1944 Salzburg Festival. The assassination attempt against Adolf Hitler on July 20 of that year led to a declaration of “total war”—a full mobilization of German society that among other draconian measures closed all theaters—and the Salzburg production only made it as far as dress rehearsal. That was the only occasion Strauss saw Liebe der Danae performed. Its belated premiere came in 1952, three years after his death.
In Michael Levine’s sets, Pollux’s “kingdom” is an office suite with commanding views of an urban cityscape. Strutting about as its CEO, he faces demanding creditors suited as businessmen. Jupiter stalks the scene as a wandering wise man—not unlike Wagner’s incarnation of the renunciatory Wotan in his epic mythological drama—while the flashier Midas arrives in a golden airplane wearing a gilded suit. To remind us of Jupiter’s seduction plot, the god occasionally sprinkles gold flakes from above the stage, while the cityscape is drenched in periodic showers of rain. Danae’s transformation is accomplished simply by allowing her to sink into a vast bed after Midas’s fatal kiss. The happy couple’s concluding poverty shows the cityscape as a smoking ruin after a battle, with the office suite housing them and other refugees in desperate circumstances.
Sebastian Weigle has developed into a Strauss conductor of considerable note, and he led a strong performance. One of the opera’s challenges is that it came along toward the tail end of the German High Romantic, when compositionally the only possible advancement of the driving crescendos of Wagner, Bruckner, and Mahler was to write more crescendos. The effect is exhilarating to a point, but the repeated highs lack definitive resolution. Nevertheless, Weigle powered through and employed his brass to great effect. The latest in a long line of talented Swedish sopranos, Malin Byström has been conquering one Strauss dramatic role after the next. Her Danae soared with immense passion, only fading slightly toward the end. The tenor Andreas Schager, who took on Midas during a busy summer of singing Siegfried in Vienna and Parsifal in Bayreuth, easily equaled her in a virtuoso display of technique that radiated ceaseless energy. The baritone Christopher Maltman’s Jupiter contributed a stentorian swagger.
If only Fauré’s Pénélope had as much going for it. It is a weak work, by a composer who despite many other accomplishments in vocal writing did not approach opera until he was nearly seventy; in his final decade of life, he never returned to the art form. Like Die Liebe der Danae with German High Romanticism, Pénélope came toward the end of the line for French naturalism, when all that a rival of Claude Debussy could really do was to try to sound even more sensitive and brittle. Perhaps prophetically, the Paris premiere of Fauré’s opera, in March 1913, was given just two months before the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring—given in the very same theater—shocked audiences, redefined musical modernism, and consigned Pénélope to the roster of operatic rarities.
Andrea Breth’s claustrophobic production, staged at Munich’s smaller Prinzregententheater, consigns the action—a narrative of the finale of Homer’s Odyssey—to a small petit-bourgeois house with a tiny ensemble of characters wandering in modern dress through its three sparse rooms. The title character, Ulysse’s loyal wife Pénélope, has refused to remarry despite his twenty-year absence during and after the Trojan War and is besieged by suitors. She promises to relent upon completing a shroud for her deceased father, but every night she secretly undoes the daytime work she has put into it. Ulysse returns in disguise to plot revenge against the suitors, which he metes out in this production by hanging a small number of them from meat hooks. The savagery sits oddly against Fauré’s delicate score, though perhaps it’s fairer to say that the delicate score fits poorly the relentless massacre at the end of Homer’s poem. Meanwhile, the pedestrian sets severely underserve the drama, which is already overtaken by declamatory dialogues.
Fauré created his opera mainly as a vehicle for the Swiss dramatic soprano Lucienne Bréval, France’s first Brünnhilde. The parts of Pénélope and Ulysse are big and demanding if not exactly arrestingly beautiful. Fauré introduced a basic system of leitmotifs into his sonic architecture, but the opera never rises to the same degree of psychological insight. The young Russian soprano Victoria Karkacheva gave a stellar performance, as did the American tenor Brandon Jovanovich as Ulysse. Susanna Mälkki led a fine orchestral read that responded to Fauré’s delicacy even if what was happening proved underwhelming.
