Henze is back on boards

Review by our roaming critic, Susan Hall:

Hans Werner Henze’s Prince of Homburg is playing at Oper Frankfurt. Jens-Daniel Herzog has created a dream world full of beauty mixed with horror. The production is set outside time. The original play, a classic, by Heinrich von Kiest, takes place around the Battle of Fehrbellin (1675). Victory helped defeat the Swedes and build up the Brandenburg-Prussian army. 

Neither Henze nor his librettist Ingeborg Bachmann, were history buffs. Heroism is no virtue. The play deals with the conflict between honor and obedience, man’s conscience and the laws of state, the individual and society.

Prince Friedrich, a brave cavalry officer, disobeys an order. Although he is instrumental in winning a crucial battle, he is court-martialed by the ruling elector, and sentenced to death. The Prince is first confident he will be released, then terrified that he will be executed. We hear Henze’s personal experience of trauma drawn in music, as execution is contemplated. The sounds of acceptance are yielded up by the orchestra under the superb conductor Takeshi Moriuchi.  At last the Prince realizes that authority is correct. In the final act, the Elector begins to question his own values and realizes that even under law and order there must be a reward for moral conduct too.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno told Henze that the music was not chaotic enough. Henze replied, “What a thing to say! There you are every day, trying to put something reasonable and clear on paper, and somebody comes and says it is not sufficiently chaotic.”  We hear a riot of color and imagination. A golden thread of lyricism and narrative drives the work. It is both effusive and clear,  gentle and emotionally charged. 

Writing music for Henze was an irresistible compulsion. Some have called it spectral.  Certainly, textures are built. The sounds of emotional  tension, the drumbeats of the battlefield, a horn’s cry to battle, scratching rapid movements at the top of the strings and also beautiful musical lines in chores and also the lovely singing of Natalie, (Magdalena Hinterdobler). 

The men too are in splendid voice. Domen Krizaj in the title role is on stage for all three acts presented as a unified whole. His physical reactions are relevant movements that never cease to amaze. Yet his dream-like struggle to do the right thing captivates in vocal lines.  

The set’s turntable is home to a cell-like rectangle covered with see-thru netting. Another skeleton of a rectangular box on which most of the opera’s action takes place. Their shapes give the illusion of a linear movement across stage front lipt and rear. In fact, we discover, in some circles which appear to be on an oval, that they’re probably in customary positions used for maximum effect in Herzog’s staging. Lighting by Joachim Klein turns a deep dark night blue into fiery red and then a glowing warm yellow as a morally complex but emotionally satisfying concussion is reached. The costumes are of various primary colors and often appear as a paintings. The soldiers wear red jackets.

Moriuchi captured the dense timbral references and carried them, as the composer intended, on a light cushion. Voice and orchestra often combined to good effect. Annette Schoenmueller as the Kurfuerstin camped it up occasionally, as did soldiers in the background. Henze winks in the music and director Jens- Daniel Herzog encourages body winks to match the mood.

Henze describes his music as the sound of his inner life: speaking to human emotion and contributing to contemporary society. Music for Henze was the living, breathing sound of resistance to any kind of system, a means of creating political and cultural freedom.

I bought it in Frankfurt, and when the final curtain dropped and then didn’t rise and didn’t rise and didn’t rise for bows, I smiled.  Well, are they telling us we have just dreamed this opera? The curtain finally rose and the singers were greeted with wild applause.