BREGENZ, Austria — It’s Dodgers caps, L.A.-themed T-shirts and Lakers shorts on the shores of Lake Constance. What makes Los Angeles especially cool to Bregenz teens as they cruise the third-largest freshwater lake in Europe, I can’t say. But one ardent 20-something salesperson told me that he found Austria to be too confining and tradition-bound, whereas he believed that there was opportunity for all in L.A.
Bregenz, however, has ambitions of its own that L.A. only dreams of. This town with a population the size of Beverly Hills, and a fraction of Beverly Hills’ wealth, produces a monthlong major arts festival that boasts a budget of $31 million and draws more than 250,000 visitors in July and August. The excellent Vienna Symphony is the resident orchestra. Along with conventional symphony and chamber music concerts, a bit of dance and theater is thrown in. The festival further hosts multimedia projects, lakeside tango, children’s programs and other miscellany events.
But opera is the main draw. A neglected major opera is revived each summer in the handsome, acoustically vibrant Festspielhaus Bregenz. This year it is a brilliant production of George Enescu’s epic “Oedipe.” The impossibly big draw, though, and the one that attracts four-fifths of the festival’s audience, is an opera on the Seebühne. This gigantic stage is built directly on the lake and intended for spectacular sets. Bleachers accommodate an audience of 7,000.
This year’s “Die Freischütz,” Carl Maria von Weber’s early 19th century opera about a huntsman who makes a very bad deal with the devil for a magic bullet, opened last week and runs through Aug. 17. All 27 performances are expected to sell out as usual for the kind of spectacle that exists nowhere else. A fanciful set of creepy, gothic wonder provides real estate for the dead to rise from their graves, for circusy aerial special effects, for intrepid singers to cavort in and out of the water, for nymphets in bespangled bathing suits to splash about, for a fire-breathing dragon to act Godzilla-like and for a light show to be projected on an enormous moon. Las Vegas, eat your heart out.
Austrian director Philipp Stölzl’s flamboyant production may not take Weber’s opera altogether seriously, but Austrians take going to the opera very seriously. The opera is performed without intermission. There is no picnicking or refreshments. The show, a bit over two hours, starts at sunset, which is 9:15 p.m. in July. It may be later if it rains, and it often does. No umbrellas. If necessary, the performance moves indoors, semi-staged, for those who hold higher-priced seats (the range is from around $30 to $500).
It didn’t rain opening night, although an earlier forecast warned it might. But it was cold, which hardly stopped the fancier crowd dressing formally and toughing it out.
Outside of Germany, “Freischütz,” which had a major influence on Wagner and German opera, has lost its popularity. Even in Germany, the one production that has helped keep the opera vital is Achim Freyer‘s sensationally surreal 1980 staging at Stuttgart Opera, and it still remains in the company’s repertory. Freyer, of course, is remembered for L.A. Opera’s 2010 “Ring” cycle, not, alas, still in our repertory.
On the other hand, Stölzl’s production, which premiered last year (each production on the Seebühne is given over two summers) and can be streamed, already feels stale in its goth ghoulishness. The devil, Samuel, becomes here a creepy wise-cracking narrator. The hunter, Max, is a clerk. His fiancée, whom he accidentally kills with the devil’s bullet, seems more interested in her maid than the clerk. The wintery set is a zombie-infested village that had been destroyed in the Thirty Years’ War.
Somehow, though, the singers (there are multiple casts and conductors over the summer) manage to impress as they tromp in and out of a presumably frigid lake. What impressed far more was how good they sounded. There were no large speakers visible, and the orchestra remains inside the theater. Yet amplification proved beguiling. Directionality of the singers was true to life. There were many startlingly realistic sound effects, including thunder off in the distance that fooled me into fretting that I had not come prepared for a thunderstorm.
Paul Gay, center, as Oedipus in the Bregenz Festival production of Enescu’s “Oedipe” in the Festspielhaus.
(Daniel Ammann / Bregenz Festival)
The gorgeous, stately production of “Oedipe,” which follows Oedipus from birth to his final years, couldn’t have been more different. Any commentary you pick up is certain to describe this French opera by a Romanian composer, which Enescu worked on for a quarter century before completing in 1931, as one of greatest operas of the 20th century. The premiere in 1936 in Paris was a triumph, but the work remained inexplicably little seen outside of Bucharest, where it was performed, not to the composer’s liking, in Romanian.
I didn’t see any L.A. caps or T-shirts in the Festspielhaus for the first of the three “Oedipe” performances, but a native Angeleno conductor, Lawrence Foster, is responsible for the first major revival of the opera. Foster, who was a regular conductor at Music Center Opera (now L.A. Opera) in its early years, made the first major recording of “Oedipe” in Monte Carlo with an all-star cast, giving the opera widespread attention.
Even so, “Oedipe” has remained little mounted, and perhaps Andreas Kriegenburg’s incandescent Bregenz production will be what it finally takes to revive “Oedipe” for real. It just so happened that it was Kent Nagano, shortly after he resigned as music director of L.A. Opera in 2006 to head Bavarian State Opera in Munich, who enticed Kriegenburg, a noted Berlin theater director, to try his hand at opera with a celebrated production of “Wozzeck.” A miraculous Kriegenburg production of Wagner’s “Ring” followed in which characters and the chorus became the scenery.
Kriegenburg has done that again, pitting Oedipus, the individual, against a world, in the form of a chorus, that was against him from the start, foreordained as he was by the gods to kill his father and marry his mother. The revelation of Enescu’s opera is both the intensity with which Oedipus tries to be a useful member of society, and how, after having paid his penance as a blind old beggar with only his daughter as companion, finds salvation through enlightenment.
Enescu’s score weaves East and West, the archaic and the modern, with the ancient Greek source of the myth turned Eastward. In the process, the cosmopolitan modernist composer connects seemingly modernist devices like microtones to their historic roots.
Hannu Lintu conducts here with extreme clarity of purpose, every detail worth noting. The large cast, headed by Paul Gay as a commanding Oedipus, excels, while the great Prague Philharmonic Choir puts the full scope of the drama in perspective. In the end, though, Lintu’s clearheadedness and Gay’s visceral power lack the suspension of reality needed for the spiritual elevation of Oedipus’ redemption, which is painfully drawn out — significantly lengthening an already long and challenging work.
Nonetheless, this production finds the sublimity in our submission to fate, whatever that may be. The Bregenz Festival’s fate, it has just learned, is that its government funding for next summer will be foolishly cut by 30%, around $3 million.
The sublimity of this “Oedipe” is fateful thanks to the festival’s probing new artistic director, Finnish mezzo-soprano Lilli Paasikivi. Her first Seebühne production will be “La Traviata” next summer. She may have to be frugal, but the festival has many corporate sponsors, Mercedes-Benz, Coca-Cola and Leica Camera among them, along with its massive crowd of ticket buyers.
On the other hand, L.A.-sporting folks in Bregenz should maybe be careful what they wish for. The cutback in federal funding for the arts in Austria sounds a little too close to home.
