Austrian Premiere of Michaels Reise

Michaels Reise, the second act of Donnerstag, itself one of seven operas forming the grand cycle Licht by the late Karlheinz Stockhausen, was performed last night at the Jugendstil Theater (about an hour’s bus ride out of the central part of Vienna). With the virtuoso playing, moving, and acting presence of Marco Blaauw (trumpet), in the part of Michael, and Nicola Jürgensen (basset horn), in the part of Eva, this evening of opera needed no singers. In fact, it’s billed as ‘an opera without singers.’ musikFabrik, the adventurous collective based in Köln, was conducted efficiently and smartly by Peter Rundel.

The opera began with a brass band of trumpets, trombones, horns, and tuba playing a kind of overture. Yet the music wasn’t anything like a brass band or an overture. The harmonies and textures were were transporting, evocative of other worlds. This beginning was, musically, one of the strongest parts of the opera, and one of the most memorable.

Then the athletics and mechanical virtuosity took hold. The trumpet player, strapped, standing, into a contraption that allowed him to zoom through the space, at least 12 feet in the air, to swoop down and back up, to be turned upside down and around, all the while performing and inserting different mutes into his instrument, was simply phenomenal. The video, projected on what sometimes appeared to be a three-dimensional large round globe, and also on the scrim, served to clarify some of the ‘stations’ of Michael’s physical and metaphysical travels. It was an artistic work in its own right, with elegant patterns that dissolved and transformed into other patterns, and that explored the gray areas between representational and non-representational depictions.

Yet with all of these wondrous and quite stunning visual events, I found the opera (or, rather, this one act) lacking in a dimension that I’m finding difficult to articulate. Perhaps it was a culmination of small disappointments---the forced nature of the improvisations; the long double trill at the close of the work (signifying the union of Eva and Michael) that lumbered when it could have been a delicate and deliciously strung out gesture; or the absolute refusal of the audience to laugh at any of the lighter places with the two clarinet players mocking and carrying on. At any rate, the evening was definitely worth the investment of time. This was the first of four relatively new operas that are being produced as part of the Wiener Festspielwoche. Next on my agenda: Wolfgang Rihm’s Jacob Lenz, early next week.