Bregenz, a delightful small Austrian town on Lake Constance, is the site of a summer month-long opera festival which tailors to the connoisseur as well as the masses. The festival features indoor productions of contemporary or other rarely performed operas. But what really brings in the crowds is the annual fully staged opera on the legendary floating stage on the Lake, a venue which accommodates 7000 people.
Since 2003, the festival has been in the hands of the British Opera Director, David Pountney. He has mounted stunning productions. This festival is acknowledged internationally as probably the most spectacular of all open air operatic venues. Aida, Il Trovatore, Tosca and West Side Story have been staged recently and this year it was Andrea Chenier which will be repeated again in 2012. Because of the complex logistical problems, operas may be shortened so that they can be performed without an intermission.
An open air venue is dependent on the elements and thunderstorms and rain represent a major obstacle. The organizers have even found a partial solution. When the heavens open up, the opera is transferred to the modern indoor, state of the art Festspielhaus (Festival Theatre), where those ticket holders with the more expensive seats can be accommodated. The smart Austrians even anticipate this exigency and the arena tickets also have a seat assigned to the Festspielhaus. This transfer is done with great efficiency and within a remarkably short time, the opera continues.
Andréa Chenier, a prototype verismo opera was composed by Italian composer Umberto Giordano. The libretto, by Luigi Illica, is set during the times of the French Revolution. It is a love story based on the life of a real historical character, the poet Andrea Chenier. He was initially an ardent supporter of the revolution but subsequently, like so many other innocent people, he became a victim of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror and was guillotined.
The main female protagonist, the young aristocrat Maddalena, falls passionately in love with Andréa Chenier. She eventually takes the place of another woman so that she could have the dubious distinction of being guillotined with her lover. The other main character, Carlo Gérard, once a servant in the service of the aristocratic household of Maddalena’s mother, becomes a revolutionary ringleader. He has always been hopelessly in love with Maddalena and falsely denounces the poet to the Revolutionary Tribunal. Then overcome by the love and dedication shown by Maddalena for Andréa Chenier, he tries to have this sentence reversed, but to no avail.
The current production was directed by Keith Warner. David Fielding’s spectacular sets comprised a gigantic head and torso modelled after the famous neoclassical revolutionary painting The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David. Marat, a medical doctor and philosopher turned revolutionary had been murdered by the fanatic Charlotte Corday. The 24 meter-high head and neck weighing 60 tons, rises majestically from an island in the lake. A series of stairways radiate from the left eye enabling singers to enter and exit at multiple levels.
Other innovative stage elements included an open book of Chenier’s poems, lying to the left of the head. To the right was a huge oval gold frame. On one occasion, acrobats performed perilously within this open frame. Marat’s hand supported an additional stage. There was also a moving platform floating on the lake. Dancers periodically appeared and dived into the water. My only criticism, and this is minor, is that there were often multiple activities going on simultaneously which made it difficult to keep precise track of all the proceedings. German subtitles were projected on the shoulders of Marat’s statue. Lynn Page was the choreographer of this unbelievable spectacle.
There was a magical effect as the opera began, with the sun setting over the lake. The first Act takes place in the ballroom of the aristocratic palace of Maddalena’s mother immediately prior to the onset of the French revolution. The action was played out on the small stage supported by Marat’s hand. The costumes (by Constance Hoffman), were flamboyant especially the exotic head gear of Maddalena’s mother. During this Act, the massive head of Marat was draped.
The rest of the action takes place during the Reign of Terror. In the transition to Act 2, Keith Warner highlighted some of the violent excesses of the revolution. From the moving platform on the lake, revolutionaries attacked, raped and murdered the aristocrats and then summarily threw them into the water. An apparition of the burning palace of Maddalena’s mother appeared on the open book.
At the onset of Act 2, the head of Marat was dramatically unveiled. This was a nice authentic touch since Illica’s libretto calls for one of the radical militants to dust off the bust of the murdered Marat which the revolutionaries had placed in a prominent position in Paris.
The orchestra accompaniment was provided by the very competent Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ulf Schirmer. They were not on site but played from the adjacent Festspielhaus and sound engineer Wolfgang Fritz deserves special credit for enabling such a smooth transfer of sound. Giant screens on both sides of the arena did project the orchestra so the audience was not completely divorced from them.
What about the singing? With such dramatic and busy staging, singing assumed a secondary role. Since this opera was performed 24 times over the course of the current season, there were rotating casts and amplification was a clear necessity. This makes it very difficult to critically comment on the voices. This opera has some memorable arias. In the performance I attended, American tenor Roy Cornelius Smith took on the challenging role of the doomed poet. His opening aria, when he reviles the aristocracy for their indifference to the suffering of the poor, was sung with brio and verve. Especially dramatic was the poignant love duet between Andréa Chenier and Maddalena which was touchingly rendered by Spanish soprano Angeles Blancas Gulin and Cornelius Smith. Ms Gulin was also impressive in the duet where she pleads for the life of her lover with the former servant turned revolutionary, Gerard, sung by American baritone Gerard Lester Lynch who also acquitted himself well. His demeanour became progressively more sombre as he realized that the revolution had become out of hand. The excellent choirs of the Prague Philharmonic and the Bregenz Festival contributed significantly to the success of the whole enterprise.
The contrast between the eclectic crowd at the floating stage in Bregenz and the elitist audience at the Salzburg Festival going on concurrently 300 km to the East could not be greater. However, there is no doubt that audience appreciation and enjoyment was equivalent at both events.
Legend to Figures
Fig 1: The draped face of Marat based on Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting in David Fielding’s dramatic set of Giordano’s Andrea Chenier on the Floating Stage in Lake Constance. Photo credit: I.S.
Fig 2: The unveiled face of Marat. Photo credit: I.S.
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