You have to admit it: in the original, the two main characters seem rather staid. The good-hearted but clumsy huntsman Max wants to marry the virtuous and pious daughter of the hereditary forester, who knows nothing else to do with her time than to sit around waiting for her future husband. Max, who is compelled to engage in a shooting trial to prove his suitability as a husband and son-in-law, is so desperate that he is prepared to engage in the dark arts of his jealous colleague Kaspar. This goes wrong by a hair's breadth, but with the help of the heavens, catastrophe is averted and the couple's union is made possible.
In this new production of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz at this year’s Bregenz Festival, director and set designer Philipp Stölzl undertakes the task of updating the dusty 19th-century stereotypes and making them comprehensible to a modern audience. It is also aimed at a broad audience who may never have seen a Weber opera before, but who expect high entertainment values.
He has succeeded 100% in the latter. Stölzl transforms Der Freischütz into a giant spectacular played out in the style of a horror film. He cleverly incorporates the newly renovated lake stage into the action. A dilapidated village rises up from it, the crooked houses half submerged in the mire. A frosty atmosphere prevails; the buildings are covered in snow. The destruction and brutalisation of the Thirty Years’ War have left their mark everywhere. Between the stage and the auditorium lies a swamp (technically speaking, a pool of water about 25 centimetres deep), in which the key scenes take place.
The climax of the spectacle is the Wolf's Glen scene: a blazing circle surrounds the bullet-casting Kaspar, zombies swim around him in the water. Max’ undead mother warns him from her coffin, his beloved suffers a fit of hysteria in her dangerously tilted bed. Samiel appears on the head of a fire-breathing dragon, the village bursts into flame and half the church tower blows up. The technical team and the stunt troupe Wired Aerial Theatre send their regards.
The material is mainly updated by means of spoken text. Jan Dvořák has replaced Friedrich Kind’s original libretto with a completely new version. The most striking feature is the expansion of the role of Samiel, who only appears in the Wolf's Glen scene in the original. In Bregenz, as the omnipresent red devil, he becomes the narrator, game master and mastermind of the action. Moritz von Treuenfels intervenes, corrects, mostly not in the spirit of Weber and his librettist. “He who builds on me builds well,” he says to Max.
A side-effect of this new dialogue is that it takes up too much time and in turn requires drastic cuts to the music. The incidental music composed by Ingo Ludwig Frenzel for accordion, double bass and harpsichord, which occasionally accompanies the spoken dialogue, also distracts from Weber’s music. The opera Der Freischütz thus becomes a play with musical interludes by Carl Maria von Weber.
A stronger focus on Weber's music would certainly be worthwhile. Under the direction of Enrique Mazzola, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Prague Philharmonic Choir produce a dramatic and colourful interpretation, as always playing inside the Festspielhaus and broadcast outside via a sophisticated loudspeaker system.
The four main roles of the premiere cast (who also sing in this second performance) are at their best, despite having to sing under the most difficult conditions. Mauro Peter’s Max pleases with a melodious tenor and plays excellently the role of the clerk and outsider in a brutalised world of hunters and peasants. As Kaspar, portrayed as a war veteran, Christof Fischesser is a textbook villain and seducer, with his sepulchral voice.
Nikola Hillebrand’s Agathe shines with a fantastic soprano and a multi-layered interpretation of her character. The director's unconventional interpretation of Agathe’s desperate desire to marry Max is that she is already pregnant and wants to escape the expected disgrace by getting married. The role of her bosom friend Ännchen, played by Katharina Ruckgaber, is given the most crass reinterpretation: Weber’s chambermaid becomes an emancipated woman of today. With her lesbian tendencies, she also tries, strongly supported by Samiel, to dissuade Agathe from her love for Max.
Stölzl obviously has great difficulty with the positive ending of the opera. The director has already presented his version of the ending at the beginning of the play, even before the overture: Agathe, fatally shot by Max in the shooting trial, is buried, while the murderer Max is hanged. After the whole opera has been shown as a kind of flashback, Samiel then appears during the “real” trial and explains to the unsettled audience that mercifully, the original ending should not be withheld from them after all. However, this is not without irony: the clothes of the hermit, who appears as a deus ex machina and announces the conciliatory end of the love story, contain – horror of horrors – none other than the demonic Samiel himself.