Two men. Two nations. One goal. Can there be anyone who doesn’t know the gripping tale of Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott and the race for the South Pole? Bavarian State Opera has taken this myth-laden material and, with the help of Czech composer Miroslav Srnka, served it up as a full length opera, entitled South Pole. The resulting production is a glamorous one.
On the podium stood principal music director Kirill Petrenko. On the stage, the duel between Rolando Villazón as Scott and Thomas Hampson as Amundsen, the orchestra pit bursting at the seams, stage direction from no less than Hans Neuenfels, while ARTE recorded the well-hyped première for later broadcast. But was this really the right recipe for success, or had the Munich opera house set a different course?
In stark contrast to the star offering, the stage was sparse and remote from reality. In blindingly cold white, the polar wastes were sketched with many flat planes and virtually no props: six horses and a snowmobile, six dogs for Amundsen. That’s it. On the left, the disorganised Scott team battled against cold and madness; on the right, the markedly more successful Amundsen team. Only a single black X in the background serves to illustrate the geographically inaccessible target.
Beyond the composition of the stage, South Pole is a strictly symmetrical double-opera, sonically closer to the abstract than to the lyrically concrete. That’s audible from the first notes. “Dah-di-di-di-dit dit dah-dah-dit…” – a capella, Rolando Villazón and Thomas Hampson send each other messages in Morse code. On the stage both teams, who never laid eyes on one another in 1911, are only separated by a few metres and a white beam. Staggered by a few seconds, the tenor sang an imaginary duet with the baritone, which happens only in the head of the two rivals. In Tom Holloway’s libretto, however, both polar explorers are tormented by the same thoughts: both are consumed by the same fears.
And so, the surreal rapidly begins to take over proceedings. Srnka’s score required a new conductor’s desk to be made specially to accommodate its large A2 format. It expresses not so much the timeless ice as the stressed psychological state of the two rivals. Jarring, icy, glockenspiel-like sounds fill the foreground, sometimes echoed by the strings; there is little musical shape for the ear to get hold of. Srnka has split the orchetra into a great many individual voices, posing a challenge to make even Kirill Petrenko sweat over.
Petrenko swings his baton with the highest concentration, his gaze rarely straying from the score, but in truth, he is unable to weld a single entity out of the many different instrument combinations. The reason is not so much in Petrenko’s conducting, which is meticulous, but the highly fragmented nature of Srnka’s score. In some spoken passages, the singers have to be amplified, so as not to be submerged in the pervasive polyphony. This seldom culminates in emphasising crescendi; rather, the sound is notably monotonous and untransparently repetitive . From which, therefore, the question inevitably arises: why were such huge orchestral forces required?