From Berkeley to Braunschweig for Karenina

Ed Gordon, a Berkeley writer, travels the world to report on sports statistics, and seeking out rare opera performances wherever he goes, but rarely writing about this hobby or rather passion of his. I managed to coax him into this account of Anna Karenina last month, a production he caught between Jo  nny Spielt Auf in Weimar and Braunfels' Der Traum Ein Leben in Bonn, among "six operas in six nights":

For those frustrated with repeatedly unfulfilled expectations from mostly mediocre (or less) new operas these days, a better quest might be to seek out older operas which, for one reason or another, did not survive the test of time.

I stumbled onto an adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina by the mostly forgotten Hungarian composer Jenö Hubay. The reason for its exhumation was ostensibly the centennial of its composition in 1914, although World War I prevented its premiere until 1923. [Opera San José presented David Carlson's Anna Karenina in 2010.]

The composer was born in Pest in 1858 as Eugen Huber, but he later preferred a more Hungarian-sounding name and elected to make the change by which he became well-known during his career. Hubay studied violin during his early years under his father, a conductor and professor at the National Conservatory in Budapest, and at age 15 he began three years of study in Berlin with Joseph Joachim.

...

The problem Hubay faced in setting Tolstoy’s 1,000-page work lay in its length. His librettists succeeded in distilling appropriate parts of the novel’s plot involving Anna and her suitor Count Vronsky, casting most of the rest aside. Other characters who play a significant role in Tolstoy’s work —  Prince Oblonsky and his wife Dolly, Nikolay Levin and his future wife Kitty, plus Count Aleksey Karenin, Anna’s husband — are reduced almost to ciphers to focus mainly on Anna. The result is a compact stage work with two hours of music in four scenes.

Musically, the opera is completely tonal, with lush orchestration and harmonies that are reminiscent of Strauss and Korngold. Musically and dramatically, the opera held the sold-out audience’s attention well. Performed mostly in the German translation by Hans Liebstöckl published in 1922 by Universal alongside the Hungarian text, the opera was cast entirely from the Braunschweig theater’s ensemble.

In the title role, German soprano Nadja Stefanoff was totally convincing in her portrayal, the angst of her imagined infidelity of Vronsky soaring dramatically in the final scene which ended in Anna’s suicide. American tenor Arthur Shen (whose biography includes a prior connection with UC Berkeley) coped reasonably well with the often high tessitura of Count Vronsky. Many of the other roles were taken by singers who had performed the previous evening in Vivaldi’s Farnace.

The stage presentation had the usual Regietheater trappings of faux-sexual action, and I spotted numerous mobile phones among the spectators in the scene at the horse race track. But other than that, it was quite a conservative concept for a German theater in these times.

Braunschweig presents excerpts from the production, and YouTube has a duet from the opera. Gordon reports that Braunschweig's next season includes such adventurous selections as Meyerbeer's Le Prophete, Werner Egk's Peer Gynt, Piazzola's Maria de Buenos Aires, and Bernard Herrmann's Wuthering Heights (which I saw long ago in Portland, now being performed increasingly here and in Europe nowadays).