The sea god Neptune has opened his terrible maw on many an opera stage – the size of a barn door, in order to show all the abysses into which the returning war veteran and king of the Cretans falls in monumental images based on Mozart’s “Idomeneo”. In his modern production in the Staathaus, Floris Visser now manages without such attempts at intimidation.
Stick figure with trident
His hero is frighteningly focused on the present, suffers from the trauma of war and ends up in the padded cell: There he doodles Neptune and his trident as stick figures on the wall. This is how it begins. That’s how it ends.
Even though some in the audience at the premiere seemed conflicted about whether such ubiquitous images of hostages, body bags and war funerals should be brought onto the stage, the Dutch director’s approach seemed well-rounded. Visser is considered one of the leading talents of a new generation of opera directors.
The Gürzenich Orchestra under the direction of Rubén Dubrovsky – Rustam Samedov worked with the magnificent choir – played clearly in front of the stage with a large cast, but remained slim and agile in terms of chamber music.
Not a sea monster
The piece is captivating: The war described by Homer between Greece and Troy, i.e. between a political axis of the Mediterranean and the East-Near Eastern axis, is over. But it resonates. On stage, Visser makes this clear through pantomimic figures that are intended to show what the psyche of those involved in the war is like.
There are no sea monsters splashing around there. But the elements earth, fire, water, air and wind remain present – sometimes from the perspective of the padded cell, sometimes on the rocky beach (set design by Frank Philipp Schlößmann).
When he returns, the Cretan King Idomeneo (Sebastian Kohlhepp) is the first person to meet his son Idamante (Anna Lucia Richter) – on the very beach where he left him as a playing child a decade earlier to go to the Trojan War. He changes his swimming trunks for his combat uniform in front of an audience.
When he sees his adult son, he is shocked: when he rescued Neptune on stormy seas, he promised that he would kill the first person he met when he returned to the island. Here Visser works with images that look forward and go back: naked and bloody like a newborn, the son stumbles in the sand. Later it is the severed head that falls into the war veteran’s lap.
Desperate hero
Bad images play mainly in his brain. And Sebastian Kohlhepp plays this conflict brilliantly, in addition to his great role as a tenor. In his role debut, he creates the virtuoso aria “Fuor del mar” with touching musicality, allowing the hero’s despair to be felt directly and to be shared.
As lovers, Anna Lucia Richter and Kathrin Zukowski sing “Idamante” and “Ilia” so rousingly that it not only crackles in the sky above Crete. Ilia’s rival Elektra (Ana Maria Labin) grabs the audience in the final aria. As the daughter of Agamemnon, who led the Greeks in the war and was killed by his wife Clytemnestra, she is also the victim of a family curse.
At the center is Idomeneo, who in the end appears like a shell of himself: broken, guilty, as a representative of an outdated state model that still works with gods of revenge. Idamante and Ilia, daughter of the defeated Trojan king Priam, take power in the end, embody the new, peaceful era and awaken hope.
In the Baroque and Enlightenment eras, Idomeneo had the status of a ruler who did not live up to his role, which is what the humanists wanted. Nevertheless, curse, revenge and blood are in the room. Visser brings zombies reminiscent of horror films out of the stage. After they have stood up like in a yoga exercise, they then walk through the stage set.
Happy end
Finally, at Visser there is quite a lot of “staff” flitting through the picture alongside the singers. But that somehow fits with Mozart’s style, as the opera goes on and on. With “Idomeneo” he broke new ground by combining the French musical tragedy that was common at court at the time with the vocal splendor of Italian opera and providing it with a happy ending.
For Mozart, “Idomeneo” based on the libretto by Giambattista Varesco was an experiment. During his lifetime, the premiere in Munich in 1781 was followed by a concert performance in Vienna in 1786. As a result, the opera was usually only performed in adaptations – shortened, with spoken dialogues or a completely new libretto. The spook came to an end in 1972 when “Idomeneo” was published as part of the new Mozart edition.
Three and a half hours, again February 22nd, 25th and 28th, on March 2nd, 8th, 10th and 13th.
2024-02-18 19:21:39
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