Carl Maria von Weber’s ‘The Marksman,’ moved to today’s corporate world; a song cycle by composer Jake Heggie and poet and novelist Margaret Atwood, performed by baritone Joshua Hopkins in response to the murder of his sister by her ex-partner.
By Heidi Waleson
March 3, 2021 4:45 pm ET
Trying to give Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz” (“The Marksman”) a contemporary twist is fraught with peril, since magic, omens and the power of the natural world are integral to this 1821 classic of early German Romanticism. Dmitri Tcherniakov’s new production at the Bavarian State Opera, available for streaming through March 15, cleverly transposes “Freischütz” into the modern corporate world, but it takes some work: The director’s explanatory character descriptions and “thought bubble” texts projected above the stage are essential to understanding what’s going on, so be sure to activate the English titles if you don’t speak German. Bits of dialogue have also been strategically added or excised.
In the original story, the huntsman Max must make a perfect shot in order to marry Agathe, the daughter of the head forester, Kuno, and become head forester himself. However, his aim has deserted him, and his friend Kaspar, who has sold his soul to the devil, offers him magic bullets to get the job done. In Mr. Tcherniakov’s version, Kuno owns a big corporation and is estranged from Agathe, who has left home. She returns because she plans to marry Max, a low-level employee in the company. Max is ambitious and hopes that the marriage will bring him into the boss’s inner circle.
Those insiders gather during the overture on Mr. Tcherniakov’s single set, a fancy conference room with a modernist starburst chandelier and an undulating rear wall of wood panels that swivel open to reveal a panorama of glass skyscrapers. They watch as a rifle is set up on a tripod, aimed out a side window, for Max to take his shot. A video of his view through the rifle’s scope shows the targets: people walking on the street below. Max recoils, declaring, “I cannot shoot a living being.” Kilian, one of the observers, shoots instead, and we see the victim fall. Admission to the inner circle, therefore, requires actual murder. It’s no wonder that Max spends the rest of the opera gibbering with hysterical laughter and getting increasingly drunk.
This concept darkens an already dark story, since success, it appears, requires jettisoning one’s higher principles from the outset. (Is it better or worse that at the end of Act I, chatter among white-jacketed waiters reveals that the killing is faked?) The supernatural elements are portrayed as psychological and societal. Kaspar, we are told, is a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, so the pivotal Wolf’s Glen scene, in which the magic bullets are forged, becomes his personal hallucination, into which he literally drags the terrified Max ( Gleb Filshtinsky’s lighting gives the conference-room set some extra menace here). An intense Kyle Ketelsen voices the thundering words of the Black Huntsman, Samiel, the opera’s devil, a spoken role, along with Kaspar’s part; clearly, the demon is inside him. In the finale, after Max shoots Agathe, the redemption from the holy Hermit and happy ending become merely Max’s hallucination, and Agathe is really dead. Once you’ve gone over to the dark side, Mr. Tcherniakov implies, you don’t control the black magic—it controls you.
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The production was handsomely cast. Not only was Mr. Ketelsen mesmerizing, but the poignant tenor of Pavel Černoch, as Max, went well with his aptly unhinged acting. The easy power of Golda Schultz’s creamy soprano suited the production’s concept of Agathe as an independent woman who nonetheless worries about her man. Anna Prohaska infused the bright merriness of Agathe’s friend Ännchen with spite: It seems that the two women had a romantic relationship that is now ending. Ännchen’s handsome powder-blue trouser suit and coat, emphasizing her elegant toughness, was just one of Elena Zaytseva’s telling costumes; another was Max’s green pullover sweater, demonstrating his otherness in a room full of people in chic corporate attire. Bálint Szabó gave an expansive menace to the usually minor role of Kuno, now a ruthless tycoon.
Antonello Manacorda’s conducting seemed deliberately heavy, putting a damper even on the jolly, folk-inspired parts of the score. It all made sense, particularly in retrospect, but it wasn’t much fun.
***
“Songs for Murdered Sisters,” a film streaming on the Houston Grand Opera website and Marquee TVthrough March 21 (the audio recording on Pentatone will be released on March 5), also has violence at its center. The creation of this 30-minute song cycle by composer Jake Heggie and poet and novelist Margaret Atwood was set in motion by baritone Joshua Hopkins in response to a shocking case of domestic violence: On Sept. 22, 2015, in Ontario, a man slaughtered three ex-partners, one of whom was Mr. Hopkins’s sister. Mr. Hopkins’s gripping performance of the cycle speaks to a tragedy that is both personal and universal.
The film was shot in the 16th Street Train Station in Oakland, Calif., a large room whose shadowy vastness complements lines in the first poem, “Empty Chair”: “She is now emptiness / She is now air.” We see the singer, the composer at the piano, a screen on which different colors are projected, and a single empty chair.
The language of the eight poems is spare, direct and painful, the words of the bereaved brother making his way through different aspects and stages of his grief. The piece builds skillfully, and Mr. Heggie, who writes lyrically and idiomatically for the voice, unerringly finds the musical kernel of each. One is reminded of Schubert’s “Winterreise” and of Schumann’s “Dichterliebe,” both mental journeys of grievous loss, particularly in the way that a song may begin in one emotional register, then take a sudden turn. “Enchantment,” for example, blithely recounts fairy tales about lost girls with happy endings, but concludes, “This is…not that kind of story…” Bleakness and fury gain the upper hand in “Rage,” about the desire for revenge; its introductory lines are sung a cappella, with just the harsh strum of the piano’s strings between them. And in the saddest song, “Bird Soul,” the piano imitates bird songs as the singer wonders “If birds are human souls / What bird are you?” but finally acknowledges “I know you are not a bird…I need you to be somewhere.”
James Niebuhr’s subtle film direction includes color changes—red for “Anger,” pinks and violets for “Bird Soul”—and varied camera angles. The single empty chair is the physical embodiment of one murdered sister; at the climax of the sixth song, the anguished “Lost,” which moves beyond the personal to the larger universe of domestic-violence victims, the camera pulls back to show a whole semicircle of empty chairs. And as the final song concludes, lights flicker on over the chair, warming the space for the words “You are here with me…” as the singer—and the listener—finds some real solace at last.
Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).
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