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New York Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
For His Met Opera Debut, a Director Takes On ‘Salome'
The director Claus Guth, wearing a scarf and coat, was pacing the frigid auditorium of the Metropolitan Opera during a recent rehearsal of Strauss's 'Salome,' going over lighting and visual cues. It was only a few days before opening night, and he was optimistic. 'New York can carry you on an enormous, beautiful energy,' he said. 'It's an adrenaline — not a stressful feeling, but a sensation of being alive.' Guth, 61, who was born in Germany and has spent most of his career in Europe, has won acclaim for his experimental, exacting approach to operas new and old. Now, he is bringing those sensibilities to his Met debut, directing a new production of 'Salome' that opens on Tuesday. Inspired partly by Stanley Kubrick's film 'Eyes Wide Shut,' Guth has infused the opera, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's decadent retelling of the biblical story, with elements of a psychological thriller. Menacing figures walk around in ram masks on a black-and-white stage. A naked woman appears and disappears. A girl strokes a doll's hair before pulling out its arms and hitting it violently against the ground. Guth said he wanted to highlight the suffocating rules of the Victorian society portrayed in Wilde's play. He focuses on telling the back story of Salome, the 16-year-old princess and stepdaughter of King Herod, portraying her as a victim of abuse and trauma who becomes obsessed with John the Baptist, eventually demanding his head. 'I wanted to bring to life this rigid system — the invisible lines around what is allowed and what is not allowed,' Guth said. 'It's a portrait of a young woman growing up in this world, with its strange rules, trapped in a family prison.' 'Salome' is one of opera's most emotionally charged and demanding works. For Guth's staging, the Met has lined up the soprano Elza van den Heever in the title role; the baritone Peter Mattei as John the Baptist (known in the opera as Jochanaan); and the tenor Gerhard Siegel as King Herod. The Met's music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conducts. Guth's Met debut is coming somewhat late in his career, but it is the start of a longer-term relationship with the company. In future seasons, the Met will import his 2023 staging of Handel's opera-oratorio 'Semele,' a co-production with the Bavarian State Opera, and his production of Janacek's 'Jenufa,' which premiered at the Royal Ballet and Opera in London in 2021. Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, described Guth as one of Europe's most inventive directors, saying his 'commitment to coherent storytelling' set him apart. 'There aren't that many directors who are brilliant enough to be original but are also able to tell the story in a way that doesn't require a guidebook to understand what you're seeing,' Gelb said. Guth was born in Frankfurt and grew up in what he has described as 'quiet, wealthy surroundings.' As a child, he dabbled in Super 8 films, but he felt he was not being exposed to the gritty realities of life. He moved to Munich for college, studying philosophy, literature and theater, with dreams of becoming a film director. In his 20s, he had an epiphany about opera while working as a camera assistant on a production at Bayreuth, the festival in Germany that Wagner founded nearly 150 years ago. In this art form, Guth saw a way to combine his interests in music, theater and visual art. 'Suddenly, it clicked,' he said. 'My passions came together.' He rose swiftly in the European theater scene, with celebrated stagings of contemporary operas like Luciano Berio's 'Cronaca del Luogo' at the Salzburg Festival in 1999. He garnered praise for his unconventional approach to classics, especially those by Strauss and Wagner, including the 'Ring,' 'Der Fliegende Holländer' and 'Tannhäuser.' When Gelb approached Guth about staging a new 'Salome,' he already had a production under his belt at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. But Guth wanted to create something entirely different for his Met debut. 'It's boring for me to do the same thing,' he said. 'I need risk.' The Met's 'Salome' was originally planned as a co-production with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, where it premiered in 2021. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, though, the Met cut ties with the Bolshoi and built its own sets for its staging. For his 'Salome,' Guth said, he wanted to give the title character a sense of agency — to show that she's 'not just the puppet and product of her education.' 'It's the biography of Salome — the development of a young person,' he said. 'I was looking for something that everybody could connect to.' Nézet-Séguin said that Guth had made 'Salome' freshly relevant by shining a light on the abuse of children and vulnerable people. 'He manages to emphasize a story that is really telling for our times,' Nézet-Séguin said, 'without detracting at all from the opera.' The Dance of the Seven Veils, one of the opera's defining scenes, is often portrayed as a striptease. But in Guth's version, the dance is a moment of reckoning, as seven versions of Salome, including van den Heever, portray the horrors of her upbringing. Van den Heever said Guth had created a 'dance of the fragmented mind, of the subconscious.' As a 'six-foot-tall person who is supposed to be in the body of a 16-year-old,' van den Heever said, she initially found it difficult to inhabit the character. But, she said, she was helped by Guth's clear vision of the opera and an emphasis on working as an ensemble. 'You are always part of a greater story,' she said. 'You're part of a tableau, of a painting.' In the lobby of the Met recently, Guth basked in the morning sun before heading to rehearsal. Although he has not worked at the Met, he is no stranger to New York. In 2023, he brought a show called 'Doppelganger' to the Park Avenue Armory, staging Schubert's 'Schwanengesang' as a dreamscape in a soldiers' hospital. He first encountered the Met in the 1980s, when he came to New York for an internship at CBS. Back then, as a young man, he bristled at the traditional, gaudy look of some productions. But he found himself drawn to the music. Decades later, he appreciates the energy and focus of the Met's singers, orchestra players, staff and crew. 'The Met is enormous, but it sometimes feels very intimate,' he said. 'I feel immense joy and gratitude. I feel at home.'
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Renowned Wagner tenor Peter Seiffert dies aged 71
The renowned German opera singer Peter Seiffert has died at the age of 71, his agency reported on Tuesday. Seiffert, a celebrated interpreter of Wagner, passed away on Monday in his adopted home near the Austrian city of Salzburg after suffering from a severe illness. The Bayreuth Festival, the annual celebration of Wagner music, released an obituary stating, "The opera world loses a truly great, a wonderful singer with him." Seiffert, known for the lightness of his voice, portrayed the title role in Wagner's "Lohengrin" and Walther von Stolzing in "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" (The Master-Singers of Nuremberg) at the festival from 1996 to 2005. The festival noted that Seiffert impressed not only with his voice but also with his profound character interpretation. Bavarian Minister of Arts Markus Blume praised Seiffert, saying, "He was not just a singer but also a storyteller, magician and charmer." The conservative politician highlighted the strong connection Seiffert had with Bayreuth and the Bavarian State Opera, noting the audience in Bavaria adored him. Seiffert was born in 1954 in Düsseldorf as the son of singer and pop composer Helmut Seiffert. He began his career in the late 1970s at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf and Duisburg. From 1984 to 1992, he was a member of the ensemble at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. His career also took him to many major opera houses in cities such as Vienna, Milan, London and New York. Seiffert's signature roles included not only Wagnerian heroes like Parsifal, Tannhäuser or Tristan but also characters from French and Italian works, such as the title role in Verdi's "Otello." Seiffert was awarded the German honorific title of Kammersänger (Chamber Singer) for distinguished singers of opera and classical music multiple times.
New York Times
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Edith Mathis, Radiant Swiss Soprano, Is Dead at 86
Edith Mathis, a light-voiced Swiss soprano who sparkled in Bach, Mozart and Weber and was the agile-voiced favorite of several of the conducting giants who dominated mid-20th-century concert halls, died on Sunday at her home in Salzburg, Austria. She was 86. Her death was announced by the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where she sang throughout the 1970s and '80s. But she was also a star in all the world's other major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, illuminating roles like Cherubino and Susanna in Mozart's 'The Marriage of Figaro,' Ännchen in Weber's 'Der Freischütz' and Marzelline in Beethoven's 'Fidelio,' which she sang five times at the Met in 1971 under Karl Böhm. She was a favorite of his, as she was of his rival for conducting pre-eminence in the last century, Herbert von Karajan. The dozens of opera, oratorio, cantata and song recordings Ms. Mathis left behind illustrate why: a clear, bright voice, perfect intonation even on the highest notes, an unaffected manner and absolute service to the text — 'the voice so reliably radiant and clear, the musicianship so reliably impeccable,' the British critic Hugo Shirley wrote in Gramophone magazine in 2018, reviewing a CD collection released by Deutsche Grammophon in observance of her 80th birthday. She was, the dramaturg Malte Krasting wrote in a tribute for the Bavarian State Opera, 'the epitome of an ideal Mozart singer.' She was also ideal in the German lieder repertoire — Schubert, Schumann and Hugo Wolf — many of whose songs she recorded with all-star partners like Christoph Eschenbach and Graham Johnson. When, for instance, she sang the Schubert song 'Schlaflied' in a 1994 recording with Mr. Johnson, she gave a slight, barely perceptible push to the German word 'jedem' ('all' or 'every'), in the line 'And is healed of all pain.' The extra measure of reassurance for the poem's subject, a young boy, adds a dramatic point to the whole song. And it illustrates what critics found most admirable about her singing, which they sometimes contrasted with the more exaggerated manner of, say, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, with whom she sometimes sang — they recorded Bach's 'St. Matthew Passion' and Haydn's 'The Creation' together, among other works. She was faithful to her material, yet she didn't shy away from giving it an interpretive nudge. Mr. Fischer-Dieskau's more emphatic style, by contrast, ensures that a listener never misses the point. 'Her manner is unfailingly direct, and she exudes a yearning, almost girlish, enthusiasm,' Tim Page of The New York Times wrote of a song recital in 1985. 'This was an afternoon sullied by neither pretension nor profundity. Miss Mathis came, she sang and — too gracious to conquer — she captured our affection instead.' In her numerous Schumann song recordings, Mr. Shirley wrote in Gramophone, 'words sit clearly on a steady vocal line without ever disturbing it.' She made her debut at the Met as Pamina in Mozart's 'The Magic Flute' under the conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski in January 1970 and went on to sing there 25 times between 1970 and 1974. The critics never seemed to find anything to reproach her for. As Marzelline in Beethoven's 'Fidelio,' the New York Times critic Donal Henahan wrote in 1971, 'Edith Mathis acted sensibly, and her pinpoint intonation made her silvery tone seem surprisingly robust.' Three years later, Harold Schonberg praised her performance in Strauss's 'Der Rosenkavalier': 'A big controlled voice comes from that little body. She is one of the distinguished Sophies in Metropolitan Opera history.' Ms. Mathis entered popular culture, briefly, when a duet from Mozart's 'The Marriage of Figaro" that she sang with the soprano Gundula Janowitz figured in the soundtrack to the hit 1994 film 'The Shawshank Redemption.' The music 'soars over a prison yard, signifying joy and hope in a world of despair,' Zachary Woolfe of The Times wrote in 2014. She gave few interviews over her career and was described by those who knew her as modest to the point of shyness. In a rare 1992 interview with the music journalist Bruce Duffie, she reflected on what some critics deemed a cautious, protective attitude toward her own voice — for instance, she would never accept a full-throated Wagnerian role like Brünnhilde. 'When I try a role, if I feel it's too heavy for me then I will never do it,' she told Mr. Duffie. 'I might just wait perhaps until later, but I wouldn't do something which hurts the voice, and where I have to force against the orchestra. That's impossible.' Edith Mathis was born in Lucerne, Switzerland, on Feb. 11, 1938. She once recalled in an interview with the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Switzerland's leading newspaper, that her parents, and particularly her mother, cultivated her ambition to sing. In her teenage years, she said, she typed invoices in an office in the morning, to placate parents worried about the uncertainties of a career in music, and in the afternoons went to the local conservatory. She also studied at the conservatory in Zurich. She made her operatic debut in 1957 at the City Theater in Lucerne as the Second Boy in 'The Magic Flute.' From 1959 to 1963 she was part of the ensemble at the Cologne Opera House, and in 1963 she joined the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. She first sang at the Salzburg Festival in 1960, in a concert, and at the Glyndebourne Festival in England, as Cherubino, in 1962. She won a number of awards for her recordings, including the Prix Mondial du Disque de Montreux, in Switzerland, and taught song and oratorio at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna from 1992 to 2006. She made her last appearance as a singer in 2001. Ms. Mathis is survived by her husband, Heinz Slunecko, an art collector, and two children, Bettina Mathis and Tom Mathis. An earlier marriage, to the conductor Bernhard Klee, ended in divorce. In her interview with Mr. Duffie, Ms. Mathis spoke of the singer's isolation: 'We have no excuse,' she said. 'A conductor can say, 'They didn't play well for me,' and a pianist can say, 'The piano was very bad, and was not in tune, or was a very old instrument,' but we singers are our instruments, and we have to do the whole business ourselves.'
