Berliner Festspiele and Musikfest Berlin Present LE GRAND MACABRE Review — Under the Doomsday Clock’s Glare

The commotion in the seats is so startling that it’s difficult to place the exact moment in the score when it happened…

Two seats down, an oversized man seems to have fallen out of his seat.  He is stumbling towards the aisle.  His belly hangs out from his too short shirt with a perhaps popped button or two.  He is wobbling.

Is it a heart attack?

Is he in a diabetic coma? 

IS HE DYING?

We had just been craning our necks 180 degrees and upward to see Nekrotzar (sung by baritone Leigh Melrose) with his blood red-orange and green-black painted torso and long ratty grey hair.  While Nekrotzar parades into the seats with his entourage in tow, Helsinki Chamber Choir members seem to magically emerge near the hall’s rafters, while our heads are turned.  The breathtaking grandeur of Philharmonie Berlin is somehow morphed into the feel of a puppet theater.

You will likely agree—- Imaginative staging doesn’t get better than this. 

Berliner Festspiele Puts an Artistic Focus on Our Perilous Time

This feigned medical emergency happens in the second act, which is performed in less than a fortnight before elections when a Nazi 2.0 party is widely reported as the projected winner in at least one German state.  Perhaps reflecting the anxiety-laden zeitgeist,  Ligeti’s libretto is augmented in this production with an explanation of the Doomsday Clock and its mere seconds to midnight reading on 2026 New Year dawn.

We see projected bright orange heads scattered around the sumptuous Berlin Philharmonic hall like billboards silently emoting the trademark “THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”  These same familiar orange heads with the slogan Our Great Leader also adorn the t-shirts of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra musicians. Conductor Nicholas Collon also wears this Trump-like logo T-shirt, which we all see when he commands us to rise for the Breghellian National Anthem.

Sounds of Fascism

Though one can read that Ligeti aimed to make an anti-opera with this work, the storyline has all the trademark fanciful far-fetched leaps one can find in even the most mellifluous and lyrical bel canto opera.  Nekrotzar is out to end the world— a world where human’s lowly desires abound. We meet a dominatrix who dies early on (Soprano Heidi Melton as Mescalina), but somehow has a comeback in Act II, and her submissive yet lacking-in-the-man-department husband (Bass Karl Humi as Astradamors) who rejoices at her death.  A counter-tenor Prince (Andrew Watts) has to contend with power struggles, and the rising masses, whom he is warned about by the head of his secret police (Soprano Sarah Aristidou).  The most good-natured of the characters is a drunk (Tenor Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke as Piet the Pot), whom Nekrotzar turns into a horse ,and who, in turn, gets his nihilist master deliriously drunk on what he thinks is blood. After Nekrotzar destroys it all, he wakes from his drunken death to realize it didn’t really end.  To paraphrase— if we are thirsty, we are alive.You may end up agreeing with this writer that the ins and outs of the plot line are borderline inconvenience.

Ligeti’s music, however, is a different matter.  Fellow chanters at demonstrations who shout This is What Democracy Looks Like might similarly imagine Ligeti joining in to shout This is What Fascism Sounds Like! This is music that never wants you to feel comfortable. The opera starts out with the same kind of blaring car horns we are conditioned to feel as get out of the way warnings.  We hear jarring tinny notes. Alarm clocks sound.  Songs are sometimes hiccup laden, as though Ligeti worried we might find melody in it.  Soprano Aristidou—strikingly garbed in tinsel silver from head to toe and flashing 10-inch claw-like nails— is tasked to re-purpose her considerable coloratura skills to make noises that experience as distant cousins of song. When the strings have a brief break out into melody we realize it’s a joke, much like the countertenor’s la-la-la’s, one of the unending jabs Ligeti seems determined to make in anti-opera style.

Truth to tell, watching the orchestra members and especially the percussion section run hither and yon to make the music happen is more than a little of the show’s hook.

Musikfest Berlin and Berliner Festspiele’s opening was a loud endorsement for planning a visit to Berlin to catch this festival in years to come.

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