Hardly any event features as frequently in operas as death. The record is only challenged by its usual counterpart – love – with which it makes a tried and tested duo for the most varied narrative purposes. Heroic deaths, vengeful deaths, sacrificial deaths, heart-wrenching deaths, spectacular deaths, even – to be fair – bizarre or lengthy deaths have always populated the stage. And yet, their factuality is usually eluded: even by the standards of fiction, operatic death hardly ever feels tangible, and grief is a motif rather than an emotion.
It is probably for this reason that when Georg Friedrich Haas’ opera on a libretto by Händl Klaus, Thomas, premiered in 2013, some objected to a depiction so unfiltered of the process of mourning, deploring it as voyeuristic. However, Barbora Horáková’s new production for the Staatsoper Unter den Linden didn’t circumvent the harshest aspects of loss, not scandalous but common symptoms of despair in the face of a loved one’s death.
Horáková’s first concern is to convey the intimacy of the piece. As the title suggests, Thomas centres not on the dead – Thomas’ boyfriend, Matthias – but on the living, tracing his personal journey of grief. The only hints at a shared, collective ritual appear grotesque and inconclusive through the eyes of the protagonist, whose love and pain remain singular. Staging the chamber opera in the theatre’s old rehearsal room proves convenient, as it removes any barrier between audience and actors. The resulting space is pliable to change and reinterpretation: recognisable at first as the hospital where Matthias dies, it soon turns out to be a nebulous room in Thomas’ mind.
Encounters are presented to the public in a distorted form where doctors, nurses and the funeral director assume the likeness of fantasy creatures or typical characters – vampires, angels, a seductress. And as Thomas oscillates between tenderness, denial, anger and remembrance, two see-through curtains are drawn across the room, blurring his and our view. Together with some TV sets placed among the audience, the curtains also function as screens for projections of images of the past and present: Thomas’ own memories intermingle with scenes of other people’s deaths, or with videos transmitted directly from a camera carried by actors on stage.
A marked choreographic element also contributed to the production’s installational character. Movements are calculated to manifest the protagonist’s relation to those around him, producing a motion that is almost incessant but never overwhelming. In addition to the singers, Horáková introduces a non-speaking double for Matthias to visualise the disconnection between the material reality of his body and Thomas’ idea of him. The double therefore lives in a liminal state where he’s both dead and alive, the contradiction making him physically exposed and vulnerable. But in the final scenes this presence withdraws as the actual Matthias seems to awake, and the two lovers are left alone to have dinner in one last moving moment of domesticity.
Written for a small ensemble of percussion and plucked instruments, Thomas is representative of Haas’ idiom, based on microtonality and the extensive use of the overtone series. Through the combination of timbral and harmonic qualities, the opera acquires a distinctive sound which allows for the recurrence of certain thematic cells (particularly significant is the tritone interval). Conductor Max Renne preserved the uniformity of the score and guided the musicians through its minimal transitions, signalling the turning points scrupulously, making sure they wouldn’t get lost in the swarming flow. This care for details was especially fruitful since Thomas heavily relies on rhythm, both musical and dramatic. Renne paced the performance fittingly, from the quiet start marked only by Matthias’ laboured breathing, to the more animated central scenes, to the again quiet final scene.
In the title role, Jaka Mihelač stood before the audience for the entire evening – after all, the opera adopts his viewpoint. He combined an intense stage presence with a malleable, robust baritone, a great match for Haas’ partially melismatic vocal writing. From extended phrases to small fragments, Mihelač never missed the mark. Among the eccentric, if not sinister, figures around him, Elmar Hauser’s Michael (a nurse) and Clara Nadeshdin’s Frau Fink (the funeral director) stood out thanks to a sinuous, soft countertenor and an imposing yet agile soprano, respectively. Finally, Matthias’ relatively small part was made notable by baritone Gabriel Rollinson, whose serene, composed portrayal fit well in the final reconciliation between the two lovers.
