2023-09-18 17:05:34
Berlin-Tempelhof Airport, Hangar 1: 1,400 spectators on two stands opposite each other. In between there are 240,000 liters of water in a 24 by 22 meter large, 50 centimeter deep water basin. On a swimming board and around it in the water 83 choir singers, 40 extras, three soloists. On one narrow side there are 82 musicians and a fearless conductor.
Anyone who does something new in Berlin has to announce it loudly and clearly. Whether it’s the new Fotografiska pseudo-museum in the luxuriously renovated “Am Tacheles” district during Art Week or, at the same time, the Komische Oper, which is being relocated for the next (at least) five years due to renovations to the main building, and which wants to conquer and play in various city locations in addition to the Schiller Theater. And right from the start, it takes over Tempelhof Airport, which has been obscenely dysfunctional for 16 years, as an architectural overture.
What was fine with Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker in 2008 with the Stockhausen sound happening “Groups” as well as the Volksbühne crasher Chris Dercon with Boris Charmatz’s “Fous de danse” in 2017, which was already ticked off a few months later, is now acceptable to the artistic director duo Susanne Moser and Philip Bröcking : An event was needed. Nothing works better in Berlin. Even if you hear largely with your eyes. Although: The naturally amplified acoustics aren’t that bad.
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They have undertaken a legendary, and also legendarily unwieldy, work: Hans Werner Henze’s communist-inflected agit-prop oratorio “The Raft of the Medusa”, made famous by its Hamburg premiere in 1998, which was furiously canceled due to political turmoil among the participants.
It has just been re-released on CD, in a furiously exciting Capriccio recording under Cornelius Meister with the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna, the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, the Vienna Boys’ Choir and the vocal soloists Sarah Wegner as La Mort and Dietrich Henschel as Jean-Charles as well with the snarky Sven-Eric Bechtholf as speaker Charon. And even in acoustic nirvana, the fascination for Henze’s “Oratorio volgare e militare”, which is only 75 minutes long, immediately returns.
A work of confident, legendary combative sound protest that brings together all musical powers. Henze dealt with the sinking of the French military frigate “Medusa” on its journey to Senegal in 1816. The rich passengers were given lifeboats. 154 members of the lower race had to endure on a self-built raft, where quickly – to the point of cannibalism – man’s man became a wolf. Only 15 of the rafters survived the inferno.
Dazzlingly dense score
When the event was turned into a large-scale painting by Théodore Géricault three years later, the discourse began in France about what had become of the ideals of the revolution. In the post-1968 era, there were similar arguments about Henze’s music manifesto dedicated to Che Guevara, student revolt and extra-parliamentary opposition. This still fits into the harmonious, fascinating, sculptural sounding whole using eminently musical-dramaturgical means – long of course beyond the zeitgeist of the time.
Even if it sounds a bit hollow during the dress rehearsal in the hangar, Titus Engel conducts the orchestra and choir of the Komische Oper with cutting precision, unrelenting rhythmic drive and a wide range of dynamic tension. In this way he brings out the last dramatic drop of water and the finest splash of color from the dazzlingly dense score, which, with its angular defiance and melancholic resignation, has not grown a bit old.
As operators of the water basin, the Komische Oper is once again relying on Tobias Rache and his designer Rainer Sellmaier. Scratch can do mass choreographies and grand operas like only a few musical theater directors can currently. But here the force of the place led him all too quickly into the trap of realism from which he can no longer escape.
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Star director Tobias scratch
While looking for a place, the very prop-like raft (more like a wooden block in the vastness of the room) is floating in the water with its remaining crew, choreographed according to Géricault. At first one turns up one’s nose at the whitewashing (the sublime Günter Papendell’s Jean Charles, who raises his red cloth, is by no means black); but instead it is the impasto chanting Idunnu Münch as Charon.
In 2018, the Italian installation artist Romeo Castellucci designed “The Raft of the Medusa” at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam as neither abstract realism nor as a tricolor parable of freedom, equality and fraternity. He removed the already stylized events with videos, clearly distinguishing between the survivors singing in German and the deceased singing Dante in Italian.
1,400 spectators, 22 meter large pool: Henze in the hangar
What: Jaro Suffner
In Berlin’s Hangar 1 we are in a clear today, everyone remains trapped on a boat and in a pool. There’s an Adriatic feeling at times with rubber ducks and air mattresses in screaming swimwear. The raft can also be dismantled into planks that you can walk on over the water, even a Jesus traipses past. Two cabin boys are the first to go overboard, then sing from somewhere, just like the dead who gradually disappear over the stands.
There is artificial fog and bright bulb skylight, but somehow these are all just theatrical substitute devices that are repeated all too often. Just like the performances of Gloria Rehm, alias La Mort, who mostly trips along the edge of the pool and acts seductively as a sinister diseuse in a black glittering dress with dazzlingly beautiful cantilenas.
You don’t get caught, you stay at a respectful viewing distance. Especially since at the end, completely to be expected, the large hangar door to the airfield opens and the surviving 15 walk into the Berlin night. While the white tents of the real refugee camp shine on the horizon. The art didn’t want to depict reality, but despite the great effort, this time it wasn’t artificial enough.
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