One of the hardest things for writers and composers to undergo is the editing process – revising work, putting a thick red line through a paragraph, cutting a favourite phrase or an idea that pleases the author, but nonetheless has to be abandoned. Writing isn’t just for the author/composer; it’s for the reader/listener too. It can be a painful process. William Faulkner coined the term “kill your darlings” and this quote forms the title of the Bayerische Staatsoper’s new season.
Letting go can be the hardest thing. Sigmund Freud described the difficulty of moving on after the loss of a loved one. In his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams, he described Wunscherfüllung (wish fulfillment) as a kind of hallucination. Paul, in Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City), cannot let go. Marie, his wife, has recently died and in his self-destructive mourning, he fixates on a beautiful young dancer – Marietta – convincing himself that she is Marie. The opera, the first new production of the Bayerische season, is full of lush music, so rich and perfumed that the whiff of decay is never far away. Simon Stone directs the new staging, which stars Jonas Kaufmann as the tortured Paul and Marlis Petersen as Marietta. General Music Director Kirill Petrenko conducts Korngold’s luscious score.
If we’re looking at characters with deep psychological problems, Duke Bluebeard would easily have occupied Freud for an entire chapter. Here’s a character who cannot let go of his last wife… or wives, as his new bride, Judith, chillingly discovers. Katie Mitchell directs her own interpretation of Bluebeard’s Castle – starring Nina Stemme and John Lundgren – as part of a Béla Bartók opera-concert double bill. In 1940, Bartók emigrated to the United States because of the political situation under the Nazis in his native Hungary. Although he became an American citizen shortly before his death, he never felt settled there although he accepted – in a letter written months before his death – that he would never see Budapest again. One of the great works of his time in America was his Concerto for Orchestra, premiered by the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky less than a year before the composer’s death. Oksana Lyniv conducts this orchestral tour de force.
Count Massimiliano Moor’s grief for the “death”of his son, Carlo, is so deep that he fails to recognise his reappearance in Verdi’s I masnadieri. Based on Schiller’s Die Räuber it tells a tale of fraternal treachery and deceit as Francesco sets out to disinherit his brother, who has adopted life as an outlaw, and to claim his wife for himself. A product of Verdi’s “galley years”, Masnadieri is rarely produced, so Johannes Erath’s new staging should pique interest, especially with Charles Castronovo and Igor Golovatenko as the feuding brothers, and Diana Damrau as Carlo’s wife, Amalia.