“Melancholy of Resistance”: Berlin State Opera: In the Interspaces

The city is rotting, but within it four interconnected people strive for order in very different ways. For Madame Pflaum, her apartment is the retreat space that she wants to maintain. Madame Esther, on the other hand, has a political renewal as her goal: to clean up on both a small and a large scale. She wants to involve her husband, from whom she lives separately, for this. Monsieur Esther is supposed to use his reputation as a former music school director to propagate the new order. Of course, he spends his days analyzing music and, above all, strumming chords on his piano again and again and finding the “real mood,” the ideal harmony.

He detests his wife, and only the threat that if she refuses she will move back in with him makes him give in to her urging. The messenger is Valouchka, postman and son of Madame Pflaum, who is the only one who feels harmony and is blissfully blind to the neglect around him. He, who is internally defenseless, faces the deepest fall. When a violent gang of thugs hits the city, he allows himself to be taken away and takes part in the crimes. Accordingly, he has no place in the new order that Madame Esther recently established.

If the – indeed annoying – decay just happens, it is difficult to say why a new order should be wrong.

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Is this a political plot? A few details in the libretto that Guillaume Métayer set for “Melancholy of Resistance” based on the 1989 novel of the same name by László Krasznahorkai indicate this. The violent criminals who complete the chaos do not even seem unwelcome to Madame Esther. They serve as an opportunity for her to summon soldiers and establish military-based rule; Maybe she even organized the night of the swinging wooden clubs herself.

However, it remains completely unclear why the garbage is piling up, the streets are becoming unsafe and the trains are no longer running properly. If the – indeed annoying – decay just happens, it is difficult to say why a new order should be wrong. It had long been planned when the French composer’s opera would premiere. It was not possible to predict when the date was set that the Rassemblement National would become the strongest party in the first round of the French parliamentary elections on the same Sunday.

In fact, the leading capitalist states in the West are becoming less able from year to year to secure basic functions of coexistence. If you don’t ask about the causes, the right-wing authoritarian answer seems appropriate. This is not to say that the opera promotes this answer. Of the four main characters, Madame Esther is certainly the least popular. But she alone acts purposefully. As the title suggests, resistance is characterized by melancholy. The opposing forces privatize, evade; perhaps this is precisely the political diagnosis.

The work is announced in the subtitle as a “cinematic opera”. In fact, a large screen dominates Amber Vandenhoeck’s stage design. In front of it is the piano with which Georges Esther investigates pure sound. The directing team around David Marton distrusts the opera, which works with a “bombastic size dimension”. It’s true that, especially in larger theaters, the individual figure on the stage is far away and their physicality, even their facial expressions, are only perceived from a distance. Filming events and projecting them in a greatly enlarged format has not always been a successful practice for decades.

The evening at the State Opera takes this principle to the extreme. In the program book, Marton emphasizes the winning side: »With every rehearsal I feel what the cinematic aspect of human warmth can give us, beyond the technical dimensions of the apparatus. Namely, looking at the fine nuances of expression, at telling details of a living space – an emotional closeness to the actors themselves.«

In fact, thanks to the screen, you can also see facial details from the last row and from 3rd down. The paradoxical consequence, however, is that when the singers are not filmed backstage but actually perform, they seem dwarfed. Why do we care about this tiny figure when we can see the huge projection again? The “cinematic opera” misses out on a major advantage of live performance over all the recordings available on the Internet: namely, that an audience is confronted with the physical presence on stage.

And the music? The voices mostly move between speaking and singing, with quite impressive turns of phrase. Wherever you hear it and see it in close-up, you also notice it. The situation is different with the orchestral part. The predominance of the visual is so great that the instrumental accompaniment is reduced to the soundtrack. Apart from a few loud chords that Dalbavie added at turning points in the plot, you have to keep reminding yourself to listen carefully. The composer manages without concise motifs, takes the freedom to use modified quotations where appropriate and knows how to mix sounds so cleverly that you wish you could hear the music without all these images.

Mixing genres is a risk that often fails. The same applies here: the opera – already full of references between text, music and scene – is overwhelmed by the film. The film, on the other hand, not only requires a high entrance fee, it also lacks a compelling dramaturgy. The different arts each have their own rules.

All of this was carried out in an exemplary manner. It is thanks to Marie Jacquot’s conducting that the quality of the orchestral part could at least be guessed at. Among the singers, the countertenor Philippe Jaroussky deserves special mention, who gave the elusive idealist Valouchka his voice that stands between the sexes, but also made his fall into reality oppressive.

Next performances: July 4th, 7th and 10th

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