München Return to Montsalvat

There’s this girl in overalls building this house. Then this bloke in jeans and T-shirt turns up with his swan and starts helping her. But what none of us in the standing rows of the gallery can understand is that they are building a room which does not have a door. This produces a lot of speculation in the interval of how this would affect a marriage.

Now, in the first act, the couple seems to be building the walls with hebel blocks. In the second act, there are walls already constructed of clay bricks. But, by the end of the Act, there is a huf house but built almost entirely of beautiful wood!!! It looks a lovely house in which each of us would be happy to live.

Alas, in the third Act, one of the walls has fallen off! We can see the people inside and all their private goings-on! It looks like a twenty degree roof with the ridge about a third of the way across the width. To the left of the ridge is a two level arrangement with a balcony whilst, on the right, there is a high ‘cathedral’ ceiling above an impressive lounge for entertaining with a beautiful wooden staircase leading upstairs.

But, hang on, there’s the matrimonial bed in the lounge! Now the chap in the T-shirt is pouring petrol (i.e. gasoline) everywhere and is setting fire to the bed and the surroundings. He obviously prefers his old fashioned Montsalvat home and his father Parsival doesn’t think he’s ready to leave home yet anyway. So he grabs his swan ready to go back home but the swan turns into the brother of the girl whose house he has just burned down. And everybody is happy about it!!!!

Yes, it’s another of those silly Wagner productions. The programme is full of plans and pictures of houses and directions on how to build them. I thought this was supposed to be an opera called Lohengrin. I want knights in shining armour and beautiful maidens in flowing robes not jeans and T-shirts without even a Tommy Hilfiger name on them.

I hate it when trendy directors forget the MOST important things about a building site. There’s no  portaloo and a brewup hut.There is a concrete mixer there but nobody seems interested in using it. And that huge pile of concrete materials will NEVER be used if they are simply going to build a wooden house which looks awfully prefabricated to me.

Oh dear! I’ve forgotten the railway bridge above these goings on. The chorus does some singing from there high above the stage but so far back that they are bound to be out of sych’ with the orchestra. And they are.

More of that later! I’m in Munich and we have “Winter in Herbst” giving us snow in October. I suppose the fates are punishing me for leaving nice Leipzig and its sausages. The local Munich sausage is white. I am assured, by people who serve it, that it must not be heated too violently or it will explode. They look very similar to the weisswurst that we can buy in Australia and they never explode when I treat them badly.

I’ve visited Munich a number of times over the years and the centre hasn’t changed much. Last time I was here the ‘guest workers’ were demonstrating in the pedestrian precinct outside St Peters Church. Now ‘guests’, that look pretty permanent to me, seem to be living very happily in an area just West of the main station. Here you can buy exotic food that I have never heard of. They have pictures of the meals you can buy and they use Western script but I have no idea what the food actually is except for the gyros and souvlaki type of dishes. I stick to sausages and fruit.

On the day I arrive, it starts snowing and doesn’t stop until I leave. Many people tell me, “It was warm until you turned up!” It’s just above freezing point all day so I find my nearest Aldi and buy one of their weekly bargains – a “doppeljacke” – which keeps me very warm all week.

My first event is a ballet evening celebrating the hundred year anniversary of the Ballet Russe. I manage to buy an awful ticket for this but I presume that I will see at least some of the stage. The Ballet Russe is an event in history that affected all the arts. The costumes were so wonderful and the original sets were beautiful. I still remember the choreography of ‘Les Biches’ at Covent Garden in the sixties where Bronislawa Nijinska herself actually had a hand in the recreation. I only remember this now because the Munich programme had a picture of the Covent Garden production. I remember so clearly all those movements of the three men and I even ask the man at the box office if they use them in this production. I do a little dance in front of the box office and he looks at my curved arms, smiles and says “Yes, they do!!” But, in his turn, he gives me a good ‘standing seat’ with seating behind. According to my friends in the gallery, this was the best seat.

The first ballet of the evening is, Sheherazade. This is a feast of music before we even look at the gorgeous costumes. It’s great because ALL the dancers are killed except Zobeide, who kills herself. How neat is that!!!!

The second ballet is ‘Les Biches’ with music by Poulenc, one of the most underated composers of the last century. You can read anything into this ballet that you want except for the fact that, at the end, all three men are still wearing the white sashes they had on at the beginning. The costumes look identical to the original production with ‘twenties’ long dresses and exaggerated ostrich feather headware. The ensemble dances are especially exciting when men and ladies dance in unison. The sets are “luxurious minimalism” which I love!!!

The ‘lads’ wear period tight-fitting bathing costumes, more revealing than ‘speedos’ for their time. The contrast between their dances and the sophistication of the ladies is entrancing. And there’s this mysterious lady in blue who keeps appearing, sometimes going into the wings with one of the ‘lads’. The whole thing is such an entertainment! You can’t help smiling all the way through the ballet. And Poulenc’s music is a masterpiece which sets the scene perfectly

‘Once Upon an Ever After’ sets the story of ‘Giselle’ to rights. Giselle dies again here but the Wilis manage to kill Albrecht this time, thank goodness – a ‘bad lot’ that one!!! But some swans from ‘Swan Lake’ appear and chase them off. Then we have slices of Swan Lake and ‘Sleeping Beauty’ all over the place. The dancing is almost as crazy as the action. At one point the audience couldn’t help breaking into applause when the whole corps was hopping backwards in a very exotic motion. It was all good fun for me despite the serious comments for ballet followers. The whole thing is set to Tschaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. Wow!!

But soon I was back for ‘that’ Lohengrin. I look at the programme but I do not buy it. It is 164 pages on how to build houses. There are pictures of different types of house. There are engineering drawings of houses. There are pictures of flooded houses.Then there are houses with flat roofs and some with very high pitch roofs. Others have satellite dishes bigger than the house itself … and so on.

But the music is fine. The singers give decent accounts of the parts and the orchestra seems a different band from the lot I had heard two evenings earlier. I was assured that this was because of their excellent opera conductor Kent Nagano in comparison to the rubbish ballet conductor on Tuesday. (I suspect the real reason is probably rehearsal time?) The sound level when everyone is singing out is very loud at times but this may have had something to do with the fact that the stage was completely bare of sound absorbents.

You may think that, because I am in a ‘standing seat’ in the fourth gallery that I am with the ‘down and outs’. No way!!! This is where the cognoscenti hang out! This is where you hear all the goss!!! I heard how well Simone Young – who had “left” the Sydney Opera House job – was doing. She is highly thought of in Hamburg. “She speaks perfect German, you know”, says one gallery stander. Because Germany spends so much on opera and because there are so many companies, this is where most singers come to ‘pay their dues’ before moving on with their careers. And tonight we hear a singer, Jonas Kaufmann, who is moving very fast indeed.

Another feature of the ‘standing rows’ in the gallery is that this is where the medium height and tall people go. If you sit in a normal seat for a whole act of an opera especially Wagner, you undergo serious torture for your music. In the interval, you have to walk around vigorously to restore some circulation of the remaining blood which hasn’t solidified, in your body. With the standing places, it is the other way round. We all collapse into the seats around the gallery level and chat until it is time to stand again.

A very weird thing about this opera house is that there is an amazing amount of space where people can hang out during the intervals. The most beautiful room is on the third level where you can buy coffee. BUT, if you want espresso, you must descend to the depths of the level below the pit. The man sitting next to me at the ballet only wants espresso so he has to depart quickly at the end of each ballet to get his charge of espresso. I never did fathom the reason for that.

On Saturday I buy the bargain of bargains, a Bavaria ticket which allows me to travel anywhere in the region. curiously this includes Salzburg which is definitely NOT Bavaria. You can even travel to Lindau – on the border with Switzerland – with this ticket.

I get an early train to Regensburg where I look over the cathedral and watch the Danube flowing very swiftly today. I then catch a train which travels on single line routes all the way to Salzburg. I love travelling on single line railways as they go through country areas across fields and through forests. The rolling stock here is simply two carriages with the motor between the two so, if you are at the front or back, there is hardly any sound. What a treat it is to see the country this way!!!

When I reach Salzburg, I catch a normal bus and travel through the town and up the valley where snow is still falling and settling not far above us. I will return here as soon as hotel prices drop substantially. After the bus ride, I take a normal train back to Munich with a group of people from the USA. One couple from Montana are fascinated by the fact that I have stopped in Billings, their “local town” – two hundred miles away from where they live!!!

I pay my required visit to the Hoffbrauhaus and tell some visitors from Yorkshire where Hitler held his meetings. Even the umpah band seemed out of puff this visit but I was only there at lunchtime. Prices are too expensive and I simply cannot look a litre of beer in the face, let alone drink it!!

On Sunday I go to the Dom to hear Rheinberger’s Mass Op 126. Although born in Leichtenstien, Rheinberger spent almost all his life in Munich. The Dom has a reverberation time of about seven seconds, I estimate. But the music seems to bear this in mind. The skilful writing makes for a very pleasant sound which wafts through the building as from miles away. The organist uses his ‘squeaky’ stops to make pointilist additions which can in fact be heard very clearly through the overall sound. I fancy I even hear a carillon in one section of the piece.

On my way down the pedestrian precinct, I meet my friends from Montana again. They are heading to the city centre for a Third Reich Tour! I wish them well and we are sure we’ll meet again if I ever pass through Billings again! The weather is still fairly miserable but they are smiling and I am smiling. What more do we need than this?