Jakob Lenz, opera by Wolfgang Rihm

The Closing Chapter, Part I: Jakob Lenz

In the past few weeks I’ve been fully immersed in completing SUCKTION, a ‘woman meets vacuum cleaner and they merge’ cyborg hyper-operetta, for the upcoming performances at REDCAT in Los Angeles (July 31, August 1 and 2). Consequently I wasn’t able to keep up with daily entries, but there are some remaining highlights of my stay in Vienna that I want to share...and this is one.

Of the four contemporary operas that were part of the Vienna Spring Festival, I found Wolfgang Rihm’s Jakob Lenz (performed on several evenings in May at Hall E in the Museum Quarter) to be the most immediately engaging...in part, I believe, because I had just finished reading Georg Büchner’s only ‘narrative text,’ Lenz (written in 1835), and therefore brought a deeper personal understanding to the production. Yet I’ve delayed writing about it until now, as I wanted to take my time and to absorb the after-effects of an extraordinary production that suffered from one near-fatal flaw.

Lenz, based on extant sources, is a biographical narrative chronicling nineteen days that Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) stayed with a pastor, Johann Friedrich Oberlin, in a pastoral mountain setting, hoping to overcome his schizophrenia. As a writer once admired and befriended by Goethe (who later rejected him), Lenz has been critically portrayed as being inhumanely treated by Goethe and his literary circle. During Lenz’s extended visit with the pastor Oberlin, his mental illness led to suicide attempts and to difficulties for Oberlin, resulting in Lenz’s expulsion from the village.

Rihm’s second chamber opera is more than a biographical study about Lenz. He foregrounds the societal abuse inflicted upon those who suffer from schizophrenia, and explores the extreme fluctuations between light and darkness. In the opera, Lenz was brilliantly and fearlessly brought to life by Georg Nigl, who performed in and out of water with such abandon that I feared for his health---as did critics who wrote about this production. (In Büchner’s text, Lenz often immerses himself in a fountain in the village; in the opera, Lenz would hurl himself up the side, over and down into a dumpster / tub of water, sometimes joined by other cast members/villagers.)

The flaw: there were two lengthy spoken sections, accompanied by electric guitar and a kind of bluesy folk song, that were ‘disapproved’ by Rihm in an insert in the program. In fact, these interludes dissapated the compact, focused energy from the opera, making it seem top-heavy in these lengthy interludes. The style of this music was foreign to Rihm’s highly individual writing, itself fresh and playful after thirty years. (The opera was written in 1978.) Although I wasn’t privy to the backstage developments, this usurping of the composer’s intentions by the director seems to be an unfortunate trend. Otherwise, the direction, by Frank Castorf, was terrific, and the Klangforum Wien performed with commitment and stellar artistry under the dynamic, sensitive conductor, Stefan Asbury.

Wolfgang Rihm remarks, in the program notes, that “Chamber opera is not a ‘little opera.’ It is much more, similar to the relationship between chamber music and the symphony...” He goes on to say that complexity, in a chamber context (in this case, comparing chamber opera to grand opera), can be more sharply focused and thus capable of a more intensive ‘provocation.’ Clearly he has mastered the chamber opera form, and like seeing the rare film that does justice to a novel, my memories of Büchner’s quasi-novella will forever be enhanced by this production of Rihm’s opera.