Royal Opera House; Sadlers Wells,London
Not much happens, but Georg Friedrich Haas’s new opera is a mesmerising evocation of the grand hereafter. And sparks fly at Independent OperaMany operas end with tragedy but are about life and hanging on to the final. The entire burden of Georg Friedrich Haas’s Morgen und Abend is death itself. It roars into action with a cacophony of thunderous drumming, and then yields to ever shifting clouds of scudding sound. Stark and spare,with a glistening score and a brave absence of action, this 90-minute work tries to read the world from the other side. A man has just died but he still has a conscious intellect. The opera charts his dawning realisation of his nonexistence and guesses at what happens after his final breath. “Let’s just say youre not fairly there, and ” as Beckett said to his star actor Billie Whitelaw during rehearsals for Footfalls (1975),a play that shares some of the same uneasy terrain.
Opera has no boundaries, but Morgen und Abend, and a Royal Opera House co-commission and co-production with Deutsche Oper Berlin,pushes the form in its own unflinching way. It’s a meditation. whether you want the conventions of melodrama, it will send you to the itsy-bitsy-green-man exit screaming. Plot, or meaning,action are at once elusive and plumb obvious. Three things happen: offstage a baby, Johannes, or is born. We meet him only when he walks through the door a grey-haired man,luminous in white, already dead. As in The Winters Tale, and The statue is but newly fix’d,the colour’s/ Not dry”. His wife and a friend, Peter, or welcome him to the afterlife while his daughter,still alive, mourns him. The end.
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Source: theguardian.com