Henze's "Phaedra' by the Opera Company (2nd review)

Hans Werner Henze's Phaedra, his latest opera, is his 14th. He has also written nine symphonies. True, Henze has lived a long time— he's 84 now— but that's a pretty fair-sized body of work no matter how you slice it.

Henze should be better known, but his career has largely fallen between two stools— one named Strauss, the other Stockhausen. Richard Strauss is the last German composer to be widely performed in the concert hall or on the opera stage.

Wolfgang Sawallisch conducted enough Strauss to last some of us a long time during his tenure in Philadelphia, but no fellow countrymen of later vintage. Hindemith once received the occasional hearing (Leonard Bernstein liked his Symphony in E-flat), but his star has faded. When one reflects that the Austro-German tradition from Bach and Handel on is the backbone of the Classical repertory, it's extraordinary that no German composer born since 1864 is part of it.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was Henze's close contemporary and rival in the 1950s. Both came of age in the postwar era, when German music was looking for new direction after the enforced sterility of the Nazi years and the very different dogmatism of Serialism. Henze was modern, but not "advanced"— not, that is, the enfant terrible that Stockhausen would be with his pathbreaking 1955 score, Gesang der Junglinge.

Stockhausen would become the darling of the avant-garde before going off into delusions of Wagnerian grandeur, while the kingmakers of the Darmstadt and Donaueschingen festivals wrote Henze off as too eclectic and tame. Audiences were even reputed to like his music— an unpardonable sin in the 1950s and 1960s.

Mental breakdown

Henze went his own way. The Bassarids made his name as an opera composer, and he worked with distinguished librettists, W. H. Auden and Ingeborg Bachman among them. Honors and recognition slowly accrued. In Europe, at least, he's a significant figure in the music of the past half-century.

This success didn't forestall a mental breakdown some years ago, compounded by the death of Henze's long-time companion. Phaedra, premiered in 2007, may be regarded as a personal testament of sorts, and an affirmation of life late in the composer's own journey.

The story of Phaedra might seem an odd choice for such a statement. In the Greek legend, Queen Phaedra is made to fall in love with her stepson Hippolytus by Aphrodite, whose rites Hippolytus has neglected. When Hippolytus rejects Phaedra, she falsely accuses him of rape to her husband, Theseus. Hippolytus is slain by his outraged father, whereupon Phaedra hangs herself. Not much uplift here.

Henze's real concentration is on the figure of Hippolytus (in the German, Hippolyt). He's a hunter with no time for women in general, and has generally been taken (like the Christian Saint Sebastian, whose symbol is the arrow) as a homosexual martyr-figure.

Eco-friendly pacifist

In Henze's telling (a pastiche of episodes from Euripides and Seneca), Hippolyt is a guileless young man simply attracted to "the forest"—in short, an eco-friendly pacifist. He too has a patron goddess, Artemis, but she's of little help as he is pursued by the erotically maddened Phaedra, and slain finally by the savage figure of the Minotaur, whom Theseus himself has killed but apparently brought back to life to exact his revenge. The first act ends with Hippolyt's death, and Phaedra's suicide.

Act II, which is entirely devised by Henze and his librettist, Christian Lehnert, deals with Hippolyt's resurrection and restoration to life. His dismembered remains are shown in computer-generated imagery as being collected and fed through a laboratory process in which he is put together and made whole again. After a largely static process in which Hippolyt confronts a dizzying array of projected images meant to represent rebirth in a sacred grove (Nemi, a real-life shrine of Artemis where Henze made his own home), followed by historically pointed images of death, metamorphosis and rebirth, the hero's rejuvenation is complete.

Very little occurs dramatically, although Phaedra returns in the modern guise of a streetwalker who briefly tempts Hippolyt. The opera ends with the fully purged and purified hero ready to embrace his future, and his fate.

Homophobic Germany

Some of the Act II material is a musical-visual realization of material from Henze's autobiography, Bohemian Fifths, in which he describes coming of age in homophobic Nazi Germany and being forced to fight on its behalf. Henze's experiences are rendered in symbolic form— a Nazi eagle passes by among the parade of projected images—but it's clear enough that the dismembered hero (a reference to Dionysian sparagmos or rending, and also to the sacrifice of the Year God in the rituals of various Indo-European peoples)— is meant to represent the artist's own suffering and self-reconstruction.

There is an inherent narcissism in this device that has a long lineage in German opera, from Weber's Der Freischutz to Wagner's heroic stand-in, Siegfried, as well as the bourgeois hero of Strauss's Intermezzo. Henze's self-portrait is certainly modest, too, next to the mystical maunderings of Stockhausen. But the German quest-hero is too overdone (and, after the horrific example of Hitler, too sinister) to be handled without irony, and you'll find precious little irony in Henze's Hippolyt.

Avoiding passion

The opera's dramatic interest, such as it is, is confined mostly to Act I, while Act II is essentially didactic, a vocalized Lehrstück in the manner of Brecht. The music, composed for a chamber orchestra dominated by percussion and winds with occasional electronic reinforcement, is consistently fresh and inventive, and Phaedra's melismatic vocal lines, as sung by mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford, were highly expressive.

Tenor William Burden, as Hippolyt, was too stilted and passive a figure to engage much interest, his only passion, as it seemed, being expended in the avoidance of passion. The goddess Artemis (countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo), who lovingly restores Hippolyt in Act II and who presumably represents Henze's own late companion, Fausto Moroni, is a figure part muse and part lover, but a little too vampish for either.

How much can be done

In a work so dependent on its visual elements, the sets and lighting by the Mexico-based Philippe Amand were striking, although a little too William Kentridge-y in the scene of Hippolyt's physical recuperation that begins Act II. Conductor Corrado Rovaris got vigorous and suitably pointed playing from his ensemble.

If Phaedra is dramatically problematic, the vitality of its music made it a work very much worth experiencing. Like last year's production of Benjamin Britten's The Rape of Lucretia by the Opera Company of Philadelphia— likewise a chamber opera and lalso featuring Tamara Mumford— it reminds us of how much can be done with a relative economy of means on the musical stage. But when words are sung, plot can also help.♦


To read another review by Peter Burwasser, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.