R. Strauss’s Arabella, Opernhaus Zürich, 15.05.2022

I don’t think I am alone in considering Arabella a masterpiece, and I have often wondered why it is so rarely staged. This evening the answer was evident to me – the forces required are above what an opera house is able to offer in regular circumstances. It is obvious that all main roles are hard to sing, but sometimes one forgets that the small parts are also very tough to sing, not only the Fiakermilli – Elemer is pretty hard and the fortune-reader is tricky, just to name two. To make things worse, the score doesn’t spare the orchestra one second. And we cannot forget – it is also hard to stage. If you are going for a traditional staging, then you need the full glamour (and it is not going to be low-budget). On the other hand, the libretto is so deeply connect to the Viennese setting that it is very difficult to stylize, update or adapt. So let’s talk about the staging first.

As much as in his production of Rosenkavalier for Salzburg and New York, Robert Carsen finds it important to show this in the context of its creation. As the plot doesn’t go as far as the 18th century as in the case of the Marschallin, the Count Octavian and the Baron Ochs, having it played in the 1930’s makes far more sense for the Waldners. It is bold – and probably only approved by the Intendant because we’re in Switzerland – to have swastikas all over the place – and it makes sense in a the-sound-of-music point-of-view. Mandryka comes from a Romantic context of castles and forests and rescues Arabella from a corrupt and perverted society. God knows the world is sorely in need to be reminded of the dangers of evil and extremism, but I guess the point would have been more efficiently taken if the approach were less heavy-handed. You know, when we slowly take in and suddenly realize “Good Lord, they’re nazis!” For instance, the ballet in the interlude between act 2 and 3 with the yodellers being “assaulted” by the SS troopers was the dictionary example of overkill – and it was noisy and I’d rather hear Strauss music without it. Anyway, unsubtle as the whole thing was, I could live with it. I could live with the unimaginative Personenregie too, even if it tended to the overbusy and the emphatic. What really turned me off was the scenery. I don’t think any grand hotel in Vienna in the 1930’s would look so ugly and common as in this staging. I guess managers of less grand hotels would have lost their jobs if they let the carpet in the main lobby as rippled as the one seen on stage this evening. Call me conservative, but I missed a staircase too. Its absence involved lots of character vanishing backstage and appearing on the second floor and then screaming their lines for someone on ground level.

I guess that maybe three or four opera houses in the world have an orchestra capable to perform the score of Arabella with paramount standards of excellence. And the Opernhaus Zürich is not one of them. I don’t write this as nay-sayer, but it is important to establish this fact to explain this particular performance. Conductor Markus Poschner offered a formidable account of the score, one that would have left audiences in the Vienna State Opera or in the Semperoper in absolute awe. The orchestral sound was full and rich and well blended, the tempi were dramatic, flexible in keeping with the dramatic situations with swift accents and some vertiginous passagework from the strings. A more cautious conductor would have noticed that the forces available were sorely tested by the fireworks-like conducting and would have probably adapt the concept to something more foolproof. To be honest, in most of Arabella’s and Zdenka’s music, it worked. It felt grand and emotional. Not really so in Mandryka’s music, when the impression could be of lack of polish and sometimes awkwardness. In all honesty, nobody could say it was not exciting, and these musicians gave their all this evening. Let’s say it just isn’t one for the records. You’d have to be there to get the picture.

When the 2021/2022 season was announced, the name of Anja Harteros appeared in the cast list. I don’t think that, at this point, anybody believed she would actually sing. So the big suspense here was to guess who would replace her. A couple of months ago, this German soprano was supposed to sing R. Strauss’s Four Last Songs with Marek Janowski at the Tonhalle until we heard that she would be replaced by Hanna-Elisabeth Müller, a singer I had seen only once in the part of Zdenka when Harteros herself was singing Arabella. Ms. Müller’s voice has developed since then and, although there is little tonal glamour, she managed to do a more than decent job in that concert. The problem is that “tonal glamour” is a requirement for Arabella, and I was curious of how she would fare in a Lotte Lehmann role. Well, it seems I’ll still have to discover, since she was replaced in the last minute by Jacquelyn Wagner. I am not sure that Ms. Wagner has a Lotte Lehmann voice either – but neither Lisa della Casa or Kiri Te Kanawa could be described in those terms – and Ms. Wagner comes fresh from her Elsa in Salzburg and has one recording of Arabella to her credit. When I heard her live many years ago as Micaela in Berlin, I recall a Mozartian voice of some purity and creaminess of tone. Her incursions in heavier repertoire have since then brought about a certain graininess à la Deborah Voigt (without the heft) that is not immediately appealing. It is still a lyric soprano’s voice, one without the last ounce of volume necessary for us to hear everything she sings in her middle register. Yet it is a very healthy voice, one that goes up and down through her registers without any visible shift or hesitation. She took the whole first act to warm – what is understandable, considered she was flown in only yesterday for this performance – and at moments seemed overshadowed by her Zdenka. In act 2, her soprano showed its full bloom, she seemed more at ease and sang effortlessly the high-lying phrases of her duet with Mandryka. Most importantly, she proved to be able to let the exposed high notes spin and gain projection without forcing, especially in the last scene, which she sang really richly. She is a singer incapable of bad taste and, being tall and blond, is just convincing enough in the part. If she doesn’t look and sound truly seductive, at least there is some patrician restraint in her, which is more than I can say of some Arabellas I have seen.

I wonder how the pairing of Hanna-Elisabeth Müller (as Arabella) and Anett Fritsch (as Zdenka) might have sounded, because these are singers of similar Fach and repertoire. Ms. Fritsch is one of those sopranos whose glory is rather the middle than the high register, what maybe at odds with the tessitura of the role of Zdenka. As it was, she was often the most hearable person on stage. As she used the text with unusual intelligence, there was always an interesting turn of phrase (also in terms of tone colouring) to entertain the audience. But the hallmark of a good Zdenka is how she handles her high notes, especially if she can float mezza voce in the duet with Arabella. Predictably, that was not the case here. Ms. Fritsch worked hard and didn’t disgrace herself at all, but her high register could be piercing and was never smooth. That said, she shone in all conversational passages, especially in her scenes with Matteo, when she could provide the necessary intensity without tampering with a bright, feminine basic sound. I took a while to recognize Pavol Breslik in the latter role. I had not heard him in a long while and the voice has now a darker quality and a little bit less projection than I remembered. He handles the high notes famously and has the right personality for the part. This performance had more than one Wagner in the cast, as Josef Wagner (as in the première) takes the role of Mandryka. His is a curiously smoky voice, what makes him work hard to pierce through the orchestra, except in high notes, which are tightly focused and big. We can see he knows when he needs to scale down for the more lyrical passages, but his tonal palette is not very wide. To his favor, he has the right attitude and looks for the part and is comfortable with both comedy and romance.