Weber’s Der Freischütz is the finest neglected opera in or hovering on the edge of the canon. It’s not entirely bewildering why it should be, but there are ways of coping with structural defects, which is what it suffers from. Yet I don’t think there has been a UK performance of it since Edinburgh in 2002 (not counting the Berlioz version last year at the Proms), when Jonas Kaufmann sang Max in a concert performance. Perhaps concert performances are the best idea, since the one last week at the Barbican, under Sir Colin Davis, was thrilling and moving. Yet even it wasn’t entirely convincing on the structural problem, which is that almost all the significant action, and there is a fair amount, occurs in the spoken dialogue, of which there are enormous quantities.
The solution opted for at the Barbican was to have Malcolm Sinclair, actor and frequent participant in musical events, read a narration written by Amanda Holden. Quite a dramatic narration, with Sinclair semi-impersonating some of the characters, but the shift from that to the music was sometimes awkward. Still, the performance was a great success, and, as ever, I left wondering whether at last we might have a chance to see it more often.
Even German friends of mine say that Freischütz is ‘too German’ — as if anything could be. I think what they mean is that it has a certain kind of Romantic naiveté that one only comes across in German works. When he conducted it in Salzburg in 1954, Furtwängler wrote, ‘In this work, the world is still full of mystery. We must forget that we are living in an age of world-embracing technology that no longer brooks any secrets.’
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