Dionysian Ecstasy
The Bassarids, an opera by Hans Werner Henze, with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Komische Oper, Berlin, October 2019.
THE KOMISCHE Oper was one of two major opera houses in the old East Berlin, and in comparison to the stately Staatsoper, it was the more folksy venue. Performances there were always in German, whatever the language of the original, and though the selections weren’t always comic operas per se, there was a tendency to put on productions that would be inviting to a general audience. The building, too, was less intimidating than the elegantly columned, marble-encased Staatsoper. It consisted of a rather prosaic modern shell wrapped around a gemlike old theater, and its various function rooms (for coat-checking, drink-selling, and so forth) were austere enough to eliminate any sense of economic or cultural inferiority that might be harbored by poor East Berliners.
To a certain extent this distinction persisted even after the fall of the Wall in 1989. Whereas the two other opera houses in the united Berlin (the Staatsoper and the former West’s Deutsche Oper) proceeded to render up all the standard operas in their original languages, performances at the Komische continued to be presented in German, and the audiences came largely though not entirely from the former East. The productions often retained at least a whiff of the old Brecht-style attitude toward political theater, too. The first opera I ever saw there—in the autumn of 2003, before I knew a word of German—was a rather striking production of Fidelio that featured a gigantic, looming, bare-bones set, at once obviously stagy and obviously prisonlike. As the chorus called out “Freiheit!” in Beethoven’s well-known salute to freedom, my seatmate, who was fluent in German, asked if I could tell what the sets, costumes, and performances were hinting at. I nodded and said, “East Germany.”
The director’s aesthetic—or lack thereof—is almost always the sticky point of opera performances in Berlin, since the music can pretty much be counted on to be great. These days I’m more likely to go to the Komische Oper than to either of the other two Berlin opera houses because I know I can rely on the directorial choices made there. Its experimentation tends to be seriously considered rather than merely showoffy, and the principles guiding any given production are at once evident and subtle. In fact, I would have to say that under the artistic direction of Barrie Kosky, the Komische has yielded up there (the friends who took me were on their third visit to that production), and in the last two years alone, I’ve seen both a genuinely witty and moving performance of Prokofiev’s and an astonishingly good .
