To Make the Blood Boil
EDINBURGH FESTIVAL
By CHARLES REID
ARATHER rackety Mahler Eighth (the so-called Symphony of a Thousand) at Edinburgh last weekend, and two productions by the Wiirttemberg State Opera, from Stuttgart—a Zauberliote so under-festive (despite GunnIda Janowitz's shining Pamina) that the memory of it rankles slightly, and a fervently imagined new Wozzeck which made eight hundred miles there and back the most natural thing in the world.
This Wozzeck was all the more striking for an anomaly it threw in our teeth. A name-part written for baritone and thus interchangeable with the Scarpias, Hans Sachses, Papagenos and Iagos of this world, was given, believe it or not, to a tenor. It is true that Gerhard Stolze is no ordinary tenor. He is a 'character' tenor of the subtle, reflective Wagnerian sort. What more penetrating or more justly sung than his Mime and Loge? Another consideration. Wozzeck is no ordinary baritone role. Not only is the tessitura relatively high, but much of it is written according to the sprechgcsang code. That is to say, there are phrases and stretches where, to heighten the dramatic effect, the singer is required not to hit a given sequence of notes dead-centre but to aim at pitch- approximations which shall be neither speech nor song but something in between. The sort of thing, in short, that makes the confirmed bel-cantoist's blood boil and makes some of the unconfirmed ones feel a bit tetchy now and then.
At the King's Theatre Mr Stoke seemed to be taking everything in his laryngeal stride, if
may mix my physiology. How could any- thing sound wrong when everything looked so right? Pallid face from the sick bay. Ringed
eyes. Gait of a man sleepwalking through un- speakable nightmare. Sometimes nightmare turned to daylight hallucination. Sometimes the sense of being everybody's stooge and washpot suddenly pierced him through. When these things happened his furies were contorted and frightening.
Once away from Mr Stolze's immediate spell, however, I began to wonder what had really been going on. To what extent had speech-song tessitura been jacked up? How many phrases were shouted that should have been 'approxi- mately pitched'? Short of following the per- formance from score with a pencil-torch it was hard to say. Certainly, some of Mr Stolze's higher passages in conventional notation were silver, nothing less. They might have come from Loge's mouth. Wozzeck assuredly needs heavier tone than this. As well as a stooge he is a stabber. And a stabber with residual silver in his throat somehow doesn't make psychological sense.
But these, let me repeat, were belated objec- tions, points that didn't occur to me until on the way back to my hotel. The compulsion of Mr Stolze's performance point-blank derived in part, of course, from production. By 'produc- tion' I do not mean only or particularly Leni Bauer-Ecsy's designs, though these were telling enough. (Who will forget the wry, mincing grin of the anatomy-lecturer's skeleton in the con- sulting rooms scene? Or the street where Wozzeck is chivvied by the Doctor and the Hauptmann: raw brick wall spiked with broken glass and, as backcloth, a hideous checkerboard of tenement windows?) What I have in mind essentially is the nuance and main accents of
Glinther Rennert's direction, phase by phase. At or near the curtain he built up most of his scenes to an action-climax which fused into Berg's music and made one piece with it.
Mr Stolze was not the only singer whose personal talent multiplied through Mr Rennert's knack of visual crescendo. The scene outside her hovel where Marie resists and wrestles with the Drum Major, then slyly melts and yields to him, echoed the music's form and superb impetus without a wasted pout or glance or fumble. As between eye and ear, this was glove- fit. But it would not have been so if the Marie had been of inferior timber to the Wozzeck. Irmgard Seefried brought to the higher of Marie's soliloquy phrases a blazing lyrical anguish. She took us from Biichner's world to that of Dostoievsky. Yet there was no fluffing of sociological imprints. The lip-curl, the ready- for-anything swing of the arms were straight from the gutter. A third eminence of the night was Marie's child, an uncanny blue-eyed little thing who toyed in utter absorption with his mother's fatal earring (a finely imagined stroke, this) and sang the final 'Hop, hop' with excep- tional clearness—even if not much closer to the beat than is usually the case.
Another out-of-the-way joy was the orchestra. I would not say the Stuttgarters know their way around Berg's score or have a finer touch for it than their Covent Garden opposite num- bers. The difference was that from a stall a few rows back in the acoustically dry King's Theatre, I heard many details and sound per- spectives which I had never suspected before. The conductor was Carlos Kleiber, son of the late Erich Kleiber, who first brought out Wozzeck, staking his reputation on it, in Berlin forty years ago. As well as zest for detail, young Kleiber has the poetry of the music in him. That was clear, to cite one page only, from the balm he drew from the strings in the marvellous interlude between the second and third scenes of Act I.
As heard from a balcony seat, Mahler's Eighth turned out to be another acoustical close- up, though of a less agreeable kind. In the 'Veni, Creator,' as occasionally in the Faust scene, a string of distinguished soloists seemed more con- cerned to hold their own against the choral and instrumental forces piled up behind them than to pi duce true, smooth tone and a well- oiled interplay of parts. I cannot say what a relief it was when we reached the Younger Angels on the subject of Roses and heard at last a stretch of really soft singing. For what went before I blame the Usher Hall rather than the conductor, Alexander Gibson. And I wouldn't dream of decrying the blaze of the last pages, with all that supplementary brass. There are gilt cherubs with trumpets on top of the Usher Hall organ case. I'll swear they joined. in. They were welcome.
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