BERLIN - A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

BERLIN – A NIGHT AT THE OPERA October 16, 2009

Last night I visited the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. It is a modern building, directly next to a metro station ,and was packed to its very ferro-concrete rafters. Operatic Berliner buffs were wearing their finest and German fashion was out for the night – though obviously somewhere else. There were bow ties and suits, lace gloves and floor length dresses. Some had even put on their best pullover for the occasion and polished their polyester.

The auditorium certainly favours the orchestra as we couldn’t hear most of the singers or perhaps they just weren’t of full voice. It was Verdi’s Falstaff – an opera comique, based, as you will all know, on Shakespeare’s ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ – where the opera is set. It features a fat, fatuous and infatuated Sir John Falstaff and his intrigues with some married women. It would not be written today as fat people are allowed to successfully fall in love too. Sir John was sung and played by Ambrogio Maestri who was well-chosen for his voice, his knack with Italian and his size. Though the role of Mr Fenton was admirably sung by Yosep Kang, I can’t think many oriental gentlemen would have been in Windsor during the 16^th century and there is no mention of Henry IV ever popping into the Jade Palace for a chicken chow mein on his way to war. There are the obligatory opera buffoons and, apart from wet toast, there is little less funny and more annoying than opera buffoons. These ones were particularly ill-played.

The sets were wooden – indeed, there was a lot of wood - which kept gliding about between scenes. The first scene, at the Garter Inn, looked more like a Travis Perkins timber yard and when it moved to the Ford’s house it looked more like the setting for a 1940s Agatha Christie house murder.

Though Windsor is on the Thames, a dockside it is not. Yet, there were extras - sorry, the chorus - by the payroll load. Men were forever moving packing cases about and women were washing and folding so much linen that they could change the beds at a Holiday Inn.

Obviously the state-run Deutsche Oper has too much money, employs on a scale of Ben Hur and their subsidy is grossly overspent. The crowd scenes had more people on the stage than you’d see in Harrods on the first day of the sales. A whole orphanage of kids came on at the end with one dressed as a bunny much to the sympathetic whimpering of the audience and whose hopping made you want to put him in a pot with carrots.

A lot of cloth went into this production. The costumes were an odd mix of from Old Dutch Masters and the whole thing looked dubbed in Brueghel and Bosch. Many outfits caused endless trouble to the performers, but amusement to us, as they kept tripping in their frocks or getting lost in them.

The finale had the whole stage packed with the four hundred extras dressed in an assortment of odd frocks and costumes as for Trick or Treating in Taunton. But, in opera, even a Windsor wood at midnight is an occasion for a masked ball.

There were elves & nymphs, goblins and fairies, pixies and Bubbles de Vere dancing about without much point or direction - and the kids, who were there to look cute. Of course, there is always the upstaging extra. The one who nods and slaps his thigh as if he understands what’s going on and is integral to the plot (‘What plot? It’s an opera!’). We had one here and just as the curtain is about to come down he rushes to lie down in front of the principal singers. Alas, the final curtain didn’t decapitate him.

As the cast took their bows, the audience took to their feet. They’d loved it. A chap behind me was apoplectic with pleasure clapping his hands to numbness and squealing ‘Bravo, bravissimo!’.

Odd being in Berlin watching the Deutsche Oper performing an Italian work dressed as Dutch and based on a play by an Englishman set in Windsor. Opera can be nonsense in so many languages.

Like the cast - how very European.

Pol Ferguson Thompson