The posthumous fame of the Hungarian-born, Vienna-based composer Karl Goldmark (1830-1915) rests primarily on two works, his Rustic Wedding Symphony (which has been recorded by the NSO) and the opera, Die Konigin von Saba, which opened the Wexford Festival last night.
Die Konigin von Saba (The Queen of Sheba) was inspired by a remark comparing a beautiful pupil of Goldmark's, the mezzo soprano Caroline Bettelheim, to the Queen of Sheba. What Goldmark had in mind for his first opera, premiered in 1875, was a sumptuous presentation, to match the exotic oriental tang with which he spiced parts of the work.
Patrick Mailler's Wexford production is slow-moving, stylised and formal. Massimo Gasparon's settings are spare: black panels with gilded decorations. The members of the chorus are got up like groups of male and female clones, the men wearing tight, cloth skullhelmets, the women sporting curled wigs. The breadth of the wigs seems to have inspired moments of choreographed jerky head movements (signifying what, I wonder?). And there was a recurrent tableau of salt or white sand being poured from one to another of two bowls. At the end it was spilled on the ground - the sands of time running out?
If you're looking for the Queen of Sheba to be a ravishing, seductive beauty, you won't find this conveyed in the singing of Cornelia Helfricht. Pressure and insistence are her line of attack. The opening night audience registered its reserve by according greater applause to the blind King Solomon of Max Wittges, whose commanding presence only rarely became overbearing. Mauro Nicoletti's Assad, the object of the Queen's interest makes two of a type in the work's strongest love-interest. The evening's greatest achievement of vocal allure comes in the nocturnal opening of Act II from the Astaroth of Tereza Matlova, her siren's song to catch the attention of Assad for the delectation of her mistress, the Queen.
The conductor, Claude Schnitzler, deals rather roughly with Goldmark's music, getting good results only in moments of spectacle. He seems to mark time when the writing is more intimate, and where the NSO certainly sounded off-colour on the opening night. Schnitzler doesn't always avoid jerking through transitions of mood, The evening reminded one of Rossini's comment about Wagner, that along with some lovely moments there were some awful quarters of an hour.
