Opera - Peter Conrad revels in the sexual energy of Strauss
When planning Arabella, his last collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss plaintively asked the librettist to supply him with "another Rosenkavalier".
That's not how it turned out. In Arabella, baroque pomp gives way to a mean, mercenary realism; the rococo masquerade curdles here into an unfunny farce about a down-at-heel aristocratic clan, holed up in a dubious hotel and scheming to sell off an alluring daughter.
Now, however, a production of Arabella treats it as more than a wan reprise of Der Rosenkavalier. At the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, the director Peter Mussbach has elicited the discontent, violence and obsessiveness in the work; Christoph von Dohnanyi, conducting our own Philharmonia Orchestra, ensures that the score sounds genuinely angry and eruptive, rather than overblown; and Karita Mattila, singing the role of Arabella for the first time, uncovers a character who is tormented, depressed, sometimes cruelly playful, and finally transfigured by a combustible joy.
Thanks to Mussbach, the comedy of manners becomes an edgy, psychologically jangled social drama. Erich Wonder's set is a hotel that might have been designed by Philippe Starck: a luxurious limbo where transients circulate, lost in an unhomely opulence. Guests ride escalators towards the sky, then pause on cantilevered balconies to contemplate suicide. The grey-uniformed functionaries might be conducting the souls of the dead to their resting places upstairs. They behave devilishly when off duty; one page moonwalks like Michael Jackson. During the ball scene where Arabella chooses a husband, the lobby is given over to a literal pandemonium, with feral urban freaks cruising and carousing.
Dohnanyi intensifies the drama by running the second and third acts together. The link is a symphonic interlude, usually taken to represent the offstage deflowering of Arabella's sister Zdenka. In this production, instead of coital romping, the orchestra conveys post-coital misery: Zdenka staggers down the twisting stairs, assailed by a hot blizzard of rose petals (a reference to American Beauty), and creeps into a corner of the lobby to curl up, invisible and wanting only to die, beneath her security blanket.
Mattila is, as always, both astounding and adorable. I have seen her ride a horse, eat a banana and do the splits onstage in Don Carlos, Fidelio and The Queen of Spades, respectively. In Arabella, she strolls on blowing her nose. Why not, as the character has come in from the wintry Viennese outdoors? The gesture is typical of her relaxed naturalness, the almost animal candour with which she bares the emotions of her characters. Wagner called music "the art of transition", and Mattila has an uncanny capacity to expose the confused metamorphosis of moods, physically enacting the modulations you hear in the score: Arabella's hesitation between glee and dread as she thinks about the ball, or her scornful hilarity as she dispenses with unwanted suitors (by blowing champagne into their faces through a straw). In one scene she wears a black PVC mac, in another a blue chiffon ball dress: she is half dominatrix, half a cloud floating somewhere above the earth. Other Arabellas - Renee Fleming last December at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, for instance - produce the notes bodilessly, and stop time by the endless elongation of their breathing. Mattila has no patience with such cool self-control. She sings urgently, with a fierce ardour, and the ecstatic vocal climaxes are like sunbursts.
As Mandryka, the Croatian landowner who liberates Arabella from the purgatorial hotel, Thomas Hampson resembles a backwoods Wotan, clad in a bristling fur coat probably cut from a bear he killed on his estate. Challenged by Mattila, Hampson forgets his usual preening self-consciousness; the character's rhapsodies and rages pour out unstintingly. Barbara Bonney's Zdenka is a tragic victim, not the customary cute, androgynous soubrette. And as Matteo - the officer spurned by Arabella and tricked into a sexual assignation with Zdenka instead - Hugh Smith delivers with psychotic abandon some of the most throat-tearing music Strauss ever wrote for a tenor, and he plays his scene of fatuous misunderstanding with Arabella as a virtual rape.
The end, as directed by Mussbach, ignores the convenient compromises of farce. Matteo, unreconciled, sits brooding with his revolver, then slouches off to shoot himself. Mandryka hurls away a glass and smashes it; Arabella reacts to the splintering with a shock of delight. In the last bars, instead of retiring to her solitary bed, Mattila hitches up her skirt, slides down the gilded vertical slope of the set on her backside, and hurls herself at Hampson like a projectile: she is the very embodiment of comedy and its carnal happiness. A good thing the curtain falls so quickly, as consummation no doubt happened there and then in that permissive lobby.
The production is being filmed before its Paris run ends on 28 April. Even better, it comes to Covent Garden in 2004. Don't forget.
Peter Conrad is the New Statesman classical music critic
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