ICSM Online Journal > Reviews

Walter Braunfels Die Vögel, Mittelsächsisches Theater, Freiberg, 30 September 2006 and in repertoire

Reviewed by Michael Eagleton
posted 14 Feb 2007

The tiny Mid Saxony Theater in Freiberg , believed to be the oldest working theatre in Germany, is nothing if not ambitious. Their principal offering in the current 2006–7 season, alongside a new Don Giovanni in the spring, is the Aristophanes-derived Die Vögel by Walter Braunfels, which so enthused Bruno Walter when he conducted its first performance in Munich in 1920. Lying unknown for many years after WW2, this seductive yet fragile ‘Lyric Phantasy’, as its composer titled it, has now had no less than five productions over the last six or seven years, reaching beyond Germany to Geneva, and the USA.

The Freiberg staging, by the Intendant, Manuel Schöbel, in designs and costumes by Susanne Goder, illustrated that fragility, recognising that simplicity is the essence, but not entirely avoiding the pitfalls inherent in any tale of the animal world whose inhabitants are more human than humans themselves. Since the action takes place in the skies above, squeezed between the realms of humankind and the Gods, the plain white scrim box was a perfectly adequate setting, especially when, as here, cleverly lit, and with some imaginative back-lit puppetry in the battle which ensues when the Gods take vengeance on the over-arrogant bird kingdom. There was colour in plenty in the bird population, a whole aviary of lovingly detailed costume, but herein lay the problem, the effect tipped into the twee by a little too much squawking and flapping. And when mobility is impaired to the extent suffered by the Nightingale with her impossibly long train, and the Hoopoe, king of the birds, enclosed in a suffocating legless sack, maybe practicality should have intervened.

Perhaps it was fortunate that both were able to do little other than stand and sing. Esther Hilsberg was a remarkably confident soprano, unfazed by the stratosphere that much of her part inhabits, while Guido Kunze’s jovial baritone ruled his subjects with gusto. The two interlopers, Loyal Friend and Good Hope, both escaping the trials and tribulations of the human world below, were an excellently matched pair, Angelo Raciti and Joachim Goltz, and there was a stentorian Prometheus from Michael Brieske, looking very much, though presumably not intentionally, like Einstein.

The young conductor, Jan Michael Horstmann is making a speciality of this area of the repertoire (he is a Korngold enthusiast) and certainly knew how the piece should go, but his small band, the strings especially, sounded sparse and undernourished, sometimes embarrassingly so. The chorus, too, though generally secure, lacked weight.

But perhaps the biggest disappointment was the apparent lack of interest shown by the citizens of Freiberg . At the performance I attended on 4 November, the fifth in the run since the first night in September, the theatre was less than half full, and since it seats less than three hundred, that is not a huge audience.

(Photos by Detlev Müller of the Freiberg production of Die Vögel)

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