Between Kafka and Crossroads

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.