We opera critics love gazing into crystal balls. We’re particularly good at discovering Ed Milibands and backing them to the hilt. Postwar opera is full of them. Take Hans Werner Henze. He was considered the future his entire life. Yet watching a presentation of two of his chamber operas at the Guildhall School of Music last week, it was hard not to think, how? Why?
To be fair Henze never intended his early radio opera Ein Landarzt (1961) to work on stage. Originally conceived as a vehicle for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the piece concedes nothing to dramatic interest (even in this theatrical adaptation). An overwrought Kafka monologue — in which a doctor hallucinates for half an hour — is coolly despatched in an orchestral game of pass-the-parcel. Some kind of sweaty, middle-of-the-night pleasure might have come across in the claustrophobia of a radio broadcast but in this production, unimaginatively staged and hygienically acted and sung, it felt quite lifeless.
Accompanying this rarity was Henze’s penultimate opera Phaedra, written in 2007, a stage work with a mysterious genesis. Between composing the first act and the second, the 80-year-old Henze slipped into a coma. Everyone thought he was about to die. As the whole music world descended upon his Italian villa, he sprang back to life. Sadly the opera isn’t so fortunate. The coma of the first act never lifts. Partly this is down to a headache-inducing treatment of the Phaedra myth, which incorporates both the prequel about the Minotaur and a sequel about Hippolytus. It wasn’t helped by a pretentious staging that included bald goddesses in wedding dresses.
For many decades Henze’s niggardly modernism was the operatic model. After this drought, who can blame the critics for going doolally over the relative generosities of John Adams and his imitators.
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