Morgen und Abend, Royal Opera House, review: 'beautiful but turgid'

Hypnotically beautiful yet turgidly tedious, Georg Friedrich Haas’s new opera Morgen und Abend (“Morning and Evening”) is probably best experienced under the influence of some trippy narcotic. Stone-cold sober, I merely struggled to stay awake through its 90-hour – sorry, 90-minute – duration.

Its libretto is the work of prominent Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, whose world-view makes Henrik Ibsen seem like PG Wodehouse. Adapting one of his own novels, Fosse presents a landscape of bleak emptiness and a plot so archetypal as to be banal.

For the first 40 minutes, in a spoken monologue, a fisherman called Olai anxiously waits for his son to be born. The child is duly delivered offstage, and a midwife announces that mother and baby are doing fine. For the next 50 hours, the son, now himself an old man named Johannes and also a fisherman, experiences his own death and a naïve vision of heaven in which he will be without pain and reunited with his loved ones. 

I couldn’t detect any great profundity in any of this – it’s all as crashingly obvious as 1-2-3, despite the portentous dialogue circulating incantatory repetition of the bleeding obvious. I suppose we’re meant to be deeply moved by the cradle-to-grave universality of it all, but where was the individuality, the specificity, the warp and woof that makes life real and palpable?

Yet Haas’s music casts a spell. Influenced (I presume) by Stockhausen and Webern, it moves like Scandinavian weather – clouds scudding, mists thickening, wind keening, thunderclaps crashing – through a glacial landscape of shimmering microtonal sound that is both precisely calibrated and eerily atmospheric.

A huge orchestra is used with refinement, sparing in its effects and flourishes. The vocal writing in the second half of the work is complementary: voluptuous rather than angular and, in contrast to the flatness of the text, highly expressive. Aside from a strangulated Will Hartmann as the fisherman’s friend, the cast sings it with poised sensuality: Christoph Pohl as the moribund Johannes, Sarah Wegener as his daughter Signe and Helena Rasker as his spectral wife Erna.

Graham Vick’s finely tuned staging, exquisitely lit by Giuseppe di Iorio and designed in shades of putty and cream by Richard Hudson, is expert, and the performance’s only substantial weak link is the venerable Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, whose heavily accented delivery of the opening monologue in English is largely inaudible over its underpinning musical illustration. 

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