Vulture Wally

Die Geier-Wally, or "Vulture Wally", the novel from 1875 by  by Wilhelmine von Hillern (1836-1916). It's  best known to many from the opera La Wally (1892) by Alfredo Catalani. I've been watching the film version, made in 1921, a smash hit in the post-1918 era. Perhaps it was popular because it portrays a woman who can't be tamed -- a free spirit whom the inhibitions of society cannot restrain.  Wally represents the "New Woman" of the modern world. The photo at right comes from the frontispiece of the 1921 reprint of the novel.  

Die Geier-Wally is not a true Bergfilm like Arnold Fanck's Die heilige Berg, made only 5 years later, technologically and artistically a far greater work of art, but it's interesting and apparently much closer to the novel than to the opera. Walburga Stromminger was a fearless teenager, a tomboy as tough as a mountain goat. The villagers on the alpine valley don't like a vulture, which might presumably attack their herds. Wally  volunteers to go get it. She's lowered down a steep cliff by rope and beats off the giant bird (2 metre wing span) with a dagger. The vulture fights back because it's guarding its nest, so perhaps it wasn't an evil spirit. Anyway, from thence Walburga is known as Geier-Wally, or Das Geier-Mädchen, the Vulture Maiden. In the film, she's next seen making her First Communion in a pretty dress, with a fancy cake and flowers ,  conventional feminine conformity. But then she climbs a tree, most unladylike. She also falls hopelessly in love with Bären-Joseph, who's killed a big bear that was supposedly a danger to the community. Wally's father, the Höchstbauer, is the richest man in town and wants Wally to marry Vincenz Gellner. Wally, who can chop wood better than a man, accidentally knocks Gellner out, and is thrown out of the house by her father. She 's also mad at Joseph who seems attracted to an outsider, Afra, so she storms off to live alone in the mountains, like a Berggeisr or mountain spirit of legend. Only when she's driven by desperation does she seek the company of humans.

When Old Stromminger dies, Wally returns as lady of the Höchstbauer manor. She's dressed in fancy velvets but has no illusions about the people around her, who once were so happy to condemn her. A bull runs amok and Joseph is gored trying to tame it. A village celebration is held. In front of everyone Joseph dares Wally to resist a kiss. The pair stalk each other until Wally collapses.  It's a cruel prank, for which Wally wants revenge. Gellner chases Joseph into the hills, where he falls into a ravine. Guilt-stricken Wally descends into the abyss and saves him. Afra, it turns out, is his sister. Wally and Josph embrace, lovers at last. Consider the psycho-sexual and violent undertones  and the element of class war ! The Romantiker wasn't "romantic".  Wilhelmine von Hillern must have been an interesting person, though she lived an ostensibly upper middle class existence.

What's also interesting about this film which was made by Gloria-Filme Catalani in Berlin, is that Henny Porten, who plays Wally, was also,part of the production team. Unlike the director Ewald André Dupont and designer Paul Leni, who both ended up in Hollywood, Porten remained in Germany, making movies for UFA to protect her Jewish husband. Both survived the Third Reich. Leni's designs add a lot to the film, for he chooses dizzyingly Expressionist angles to accentuate the steepness of the mountains, and the predicament Wally faces. Although the interior scenes are detailed to the point of claustrophobia, the mountain scenes look "modern" in that Leni sets up shots of white snow background with jagged trees and rocks - virtues of B&W, which colour can't quite emulate.

Resurrected, Montemezzi's epic La nave

David Chandler braved Hurricane Sandy to fly to New York to catch the first performance in more than 70 years of Italo Montemezzi's  epic La Nave. The opera was written in 1918, with a libretto by Gabriele d'Annunzio (photo, left),  flamboyant poet, hero and creator in some ways of modern Italy. The opera was last performed in 1938, as the performance materials were destroyed  by bombs in World War 2. However, the full manuscrpit score survived, so La Nave can now be heard again.

Montemezzi's La nave "is a strange story concerned with the foundation, or rather the promise of the foundation, of Venice as a great maritime power; the plot is permeated with Italian nationalism, and contains a good deal of obscure motivation. But the music is magnificent from start to finish, and the opera certainly deserves to be staged, so the full grandeur of Montemezzi’s conception can be appreciated. Almost all the critics of the opera in the past agreed, whatever their other objections, that Montemezzi’s orchestration and treatment of the choir were extraordinarily impressive, and the New York performance showed they were right. The orchestration, clearly akin to that of L’Amore dei Tre Re, is Wagnerian, yet the Wagnerianism is refracted through an Italian sensibility, with a gripping nobility, sweeping, cinematic quality, lyrical voluptuousness, and restless play of instrumental textures. The sheer lushness of the score was beautifully brought out by Israel Gursky’s passionate conducting of the Teatro Grattacielo orchestra, and his timing seemed to me faultless — he let the music breathe, but also drove it along with irresistible momentum."

Read more here in Opera Today. David Chandler's latest book is a collection of essays about Italo Montemezzi, so he's the authority to listen to.  Chandler specializes in North Italian opera in the post-Wagner, post-Verdi period. He's also a specialist on Alfredo Catalani (La Wally) Read more by following the label below on Catalani.

Catalani's Water Nymphs

Another reason we need to know Alfredo Catalani. This is The Dance of the Water Nymphs from  Catalani's opera Lorely (1890). Harps to lull you into romantic dreams, but almost immediately the strings rip it asunder Darting, nervous energy. These Lorelei are like fishes, beautiful but physically strong and agile. The music seems to flip and twist as a fish does when for  a moment it's glimpsed, leaping out of the water. Sounds of distant hunting horns : the Lorelei seem to listen and react. Alarm, urgency, and a melody which sounds deliberately sweet, as if the Lorelei are springing into job mode, combing their tresses to lure unwary men. A beautiful finale, shimmering like haze over water. This is conducted by Arturo Toscanini, who admired Catalani so much that he named his daughter Wally after Catalani's best known opera. Luckily she lived before the name took on its modern meaning.

Please see other posts on Catalani with useful links !!!! (click on label below)

The man who wrote La Wally - Alfredo Catalani

Alfredo Catalani wrote La Wally, but what else do we know about him? He's an intriguing character, so admired in his time that his contemporaries considered him equal to Verdi and the next great hope of Italian opera. Arturo Toscannini revered him so much that he named his daughter "Wally" (rather less unfortunate a name than it would be now). "Catalani has been squeezed into musical histories as an ‘inbetweener’, for his great love of Wagner led him to write operas which seek to reconcile the Verdian tradition with the German music-drama. This lofty ideal has generally endeared him to neither the Verdian nor Wagnerian camps" writes David Chandler, who has collected and collated all known resources about Catalani and produced two new books on the composer.

Read Chandler's article "Alfredo Catalani : the Great In-betweener" HERE. The books are : The First Lives of Alfredo Catalani and Alfredo Catalani: Composer of Lucca. Get them on amazon HERE.  More still, on the publisher's site (Durrant Publishing).

Both are painstakingly researched, using original, contemporary sources, with additional chapters on the music and recordings. It's extremely well analyzed. Many music historians aren't necessarily good historians, but Chandler uses his sources intelligently. The books are very well written indeed. Highly recommended. I'd suggest that we need to understand Catalani to interpret Puccini and those who followed. (Puccini was born in the same town four years after Catalani but taken up by the powerful publisher Ricordi, who promoted him heavily). I had the great fortune to meet David Chandler last year at the Opera Holland Park production of La Wally. HERE is a link to his review "Between Heaven and Earth", in The London Magazine. This is by far the most authoritative review around. If only all commentary could be as thoughtful as this !  It's not only knowedge but the way knowledge is applied. Chandler also writes great stuff for Opera Today.

Catalani La Wally Opera Holland Park -first thoughts

Preparing for Alfredo Catalani's La Wally at Opera Holland Park, I was struck by its potential. It's an Italianate Der Freischütz. The music may be good-natured Romantic, but the heroine, Wally is extraordinary. She's an elemental, part-woman, part nature spirit, lives alone, in the wilderness, surviving, one imagines, on sheer force of will. Compared with Wally, Carmen is a wimp. This story isn't set in the high Alps for nothing. The mountains loom upwards towards the stratosphere. Extraordinary heroine, extraordinary setting : mountain peaks, frozen glaciers, crevasses, snowstorms and an avalanche. And then the star herself, Gweneth-Ann Jeffers, who created a sensation in 2010's OHP La Forza del destino. Jeffers is unique.Her voice rises fearlessly to any challenge, and is capable of exquisite colour and sensitivity. And she has a personality to match and stage presence. This woman is a born diva and can act so well she can fill a stage on her own (which she does in Act IV). Potentially an ideal Wally.

But was the Opera Holland Park production team working from the same score? There's almost no way anyone could stage La Wally realistically, for a narrative like this demands suspension of disbelief. Landscape settings on this grand scale would have been technically impossible in Catalani's time. Realism in opera isn't "tradition" but aberration. This opera is surreal nature fantasy, but that doesn't mean banal. Designer Jamie Vartan sidesteps the issue altogether, using a painter's dropcloth, suspended by guy ropes that remain clearly visible throughout and threaten to trip the singers at several points. Only in the very end does the dropcloth make sense, when it's manipulated to look like mountains, but by then the opera's nearly over. Until that point, we're staring at the carved portico that remains of Holland Park House which completely  undercuts the idea of open horizons and wilderness. Since the opera itself comprises two distinct parts it might have been more effective to realise the difference with different settings, Perhaps filmed projections would work in the first part, contrasting the banality of village life with the turbulence of nature in the mountains? Even a good old fashioned painted backdrop of mountains and kitsch, so the singers can do their thing unburdened.. 

The staging is so awkward that if you didn't know the plot you'd be lost. Gellner (Stephen Gadd) chases Hagenbach (Adrian Dwyer) up to the peaks and pushes him into a crevasse in the glacier. Wally struggles up the slopes, and pulls him out. Danger, urgency, heroism. If this were a Leni Reifenstahl mountain movie, you'd see slippery ice-clad precipices, and bursts of snow as crampon digs into rockface. (I'll write about Riefenstahl's movie The Holy Mountain next week). Catalani's music describes the urgency and struggle. Whirling figures like wind, trudging staccato, tearing, screaming figures from the string section, alarums from the brass.  Instead what we get at OHP is a trestle table not three feet high, covered with cloth. Gadd scuffles with Dwyer who rolls onto the other side of the table.

And what of Wally, that extraordinary creation? Director Martin Lloyd-Evans keeps Jeffers busy doing things like change her clothes. .As Wally's music shows. It's passionate, throbbing with frustration. That's why Ebben? Ne andrò lontana is so poignant. Wally knows what leaving civilization means. Wally is a complex, confused personality who takes eveything to extremes. Which is why she overreacts to the silly game in the tavern. And why she has no qualms risking her life to save Hagenbach. Jeffers sings with great force and depth, but she's directed to move in an inhibited way, as if she's domesticated and gussied up. Pearls? By nature she's an Edelweisss. Maybe this direction is trying to show how Wally is trapped in the village, but it doesn't bring out the exceptional vividness in her character. I've been following Jeffers's career for about five years and am convinced from past form that she is capable of much more than this. Great potential, underutilized, a wasted resource.

If Jeffers isn't able to act much in this production, her singing makes up for it. Her Act II and Act IV arias are superb, emotionally nuanced, richly coloured.. Jeffers's Wally thinks and feels deeply, and you "hear" the role much more than the largely cardboard way it's shaped in this production. Jeffers sings abroad these days but she really should be groomed for greater things in this country. She's an asset British opera should nurture properly.(and yet another Oxford Lieder Festival graduate).

Generally strong cast.  Adrian Dwyer and Stephen Gadd sing Hagenbach and Gellner better than they are called on to act. Stephen Richardson's Stromminger is weighty - pity the character dies after Act 1. Alinka Kozari's Walther is bright and wittily characterized. Charles Johnston was Il Pedone and Heather Shipp a sparky Afra.

Peter Robinson conducted. Catalani's music isn't sophisticated, relying more on atmospheric effects to paint imagery. Horns on one side, trombones and trumpet on the other, "calling" to one another as villagers in the Alps might do. The sound of distant hunting horns, long booming alpenhorns (trombones), the sound of cowbells, bright sunny flute motifs, not-quite-Ländler dances, just bucolic enough to be humorous. Yet when the story develops into tragedy, Catalani's writing leaps into higher gear. Stormy passages, dread with foreboding, reinforcing Wally's arias. The avalanche roars through the orchestra. We see an acrobat hanging from a rope on stage but the music has already told us that Wally and Hagenbach have been so overwhelmingly engulfed that no trace of them remains.
 
Get to this Catalani La Wally at Opera Holland Park because it's unlikely that there'll be another production any time soon. Don't worry too much about the staging. Focus instead on the singing and the orchestra and enjoy. I'm probably going again Wednesday. A more formal  review is here in Opera Today.  My focus is on the opera and its potential, which is why I avoid doing shallow.

Photos : Gweneth-Ann Jeffers as Wally and Adrian Dwyer as Hagenbach. Photo Fritz Curzon.
Gweneth-Ann Jeffers as Wally and Stephen Richardson as Stromminger. Photo
Fritz Curzon.