In the eyes of many opera fans, operetta is an inferior genre: superficial, cliché-ridden, musty and often misogynist. Andreas Homoki, Intendant of Zurich Opera, takes the opposite view and is currently staging one operetta every season. This year, he has chosen Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow. Homoki’s recipe: bring in a director who is known to be successful in the field and cast a pair of internationally famous stars in the lead roles. That can’t be a low cost option, but we’re talking about Zurich here.
The stage direction is in the hands of exactly the right kind of expert: in his ten year tenure as Intendant of Komische Oper Berlin, Barrie Kosky has staged glamorous revivals of many forgotten pieces from the era of Berlin operetta. Kosky was allowed to hand pick his choice of soloists for the main roles: soprano Marlis Petersen in the title role of Hanna Glawari and baritone Michael Volle as Count Danilo. Is the recipe, one might ask, complete?
In the back story to the piece, the wealthy Danilo has rejected marriage with the penniless Hanna, on grounds of status. On the rebound, Hanna has married the millionaire Glawari, but her husband has died shortly after their honeymoon. A couple of decades later, the pair meet again: Danilo as Secretary to the Pontevedrin ambassador in Paris, she as the millionaire widow seeking to marry again, to whom, unsurprisingly, every man within reach pays court. The ambassador hopes that Hanna will choose a man from Pontevedro, so that her millions will flow to the ailing (imaginary) country. Sadly, Danilo is the only one to demur. Very soon, it becomes possible that he is indeed her chosen one, but we will all have to wait for the closing scene for their first kiss.
Petersen is perfectly cast as Hanna. With a past career including Lulu and Salome, she can summon an exceptionally broad range of emotions. Thus she can simultaneously hold the irritating suitors at bay while ensnaring the reluctant Danilo, until he is finally brought to the point of confessing his love. Her rather light soprano sounds sometimes seductive, sometimes commanding, sometimes melancholic – exactly the mixture that’s wanted.
The role of Danilo isn’t quite so suited to Volle’s character and voice. His baritone is often too heavy and too loud, and in the dances, he looks like proverbial bull in a china shop. However, he shows plenty of acting skill: when he is drunk, awkward or jealous, he is very lifelike.
Amongst the other roles, Martin Winkler was well suited to the ambassador Baron Zeta, who he played in entertainingly comic style. Zeta’s wife Valencienne and Camille de Rosillon, who are having a clandestine affair, make up the second loving couple: Katharina Konradi played to perfection the double personality of “respectable wife” and thrill-seeker. Disappointingly, Andrew Owens’ Camille faded vocally and one felt sorry for him in this hapless, put upon role. The fact that the role of the servant Njegus was turned into a trouser role, with Barbara Grimm, was in keeping with the genre.
Kosky stages The Merry Widow as a whirlwind spectacle. For two hours, the scene is a continuous party whose venue shifts from the Pontevedrin Embassy to the Glawari salon to Maxim’s night club. in Klaus Grünberg’s sets, we see through a curtain more or less concealable revolves which can be used as circus, variety show, dance floor or pavillion for a rendezvous. The costumes, designed by Gianluca Falaschi, give us riotous colour, opulence and fairy-tale magic. The Zurich Opera Chorus and Ballet made significant contributions to all this eye candy. Thanks to Kim Duddy's sophisticated choreography, the group scenes in particular become memorable sequences that freeze into a brightly lit image at the end of each musical number.
The entertainment value of this staging is high, the pace blistering and it masters the proverbial lightness of touch of the Operetta genre. You can’t play it with depth, Kosky is quoted in the Opera House Magazine. Of course, one can try to find political or societal critiques, in a piece premiered in 1905, in a way that was customary in the wake of the Second World War. But that would probably be at the cost of losing the the very thing that gives this operetta its charm. At least, Kosky relativises the latently misogynistic character of The Merry Widow by placing two self-confident female characters on stage in the form of Hanna and Valencienne. From that ... an ending, in which an epilogue from Hanna provides a riposte to the hostility to women of the “wives’ march” in Act 2. “Zuhause markiert ihr oft das Alter, doch auswärts seid ihr lose Falter,” she sings from the piano (at home you can behave your age, but outside you are loose butterflies).
Musically, The Merry Widow is best described as a series of timeless hits with some dialogue sitting in between. Earworms like Valencienne’s “I’m a respectable wife”, Danilo’s ”Oh fatherland, you cause me by day”, Hanna’s "There lived a Vilja, a maid of the woods" or the love duet “Lippen schweigen, s’flüstern Geigen” will linger long after the performance.
Musical responsibility for the evening was entrusted to conductor Patrick Hahn, just 28 years of age. His CV is notable for containing a period as General Music Director in Wuppertal in which he developed a flair for jazz and for the Chansons of Georg Kreisler; his affinity for Austrian Chanson was certainly audible in his interpretation. However, if you take as a yardstick the recording of Franz Lehár's improvisation (recorded on a mechanical cylinder) on some of the Widow's melodies, played in the opening credits of the first act, you realise that the young conductor still has room for improvement. Lehár allows himself to play the piano with great rhythmic freedom, which Hahn was unable to match with the orchestral sound of the Philharmonia Zurich.
Translated from German by David Karlin
