Over the past ten years the Norwegian director Stefan Herheim has been building a reputation as one of the leading exponents of Regietheater. The fact that he shows equal craftsmanship and creativity in his rather entertaining reading of Handel’s opera Serse must have played a part in the fact that two opera houses, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf and the Graz Opera, have already “snatched“ the production from the Komische Oper Berlin, where it originated in 2012. Besides being the leading opera house in Austria outside of Vienna, Graz Opera has had a fruitful relationship with Herheim: out of a total of four productions he directed there, two were originally conceived for the Styrian capital. With Herheim came not only the original costumes, the set and the lighting design, but also the conductor Konrad Junghänel and Hagen Matzeit in the comic role of the servant Elviro, whose atypical vocal profile (he is equally active as a counter-tenor and as a baritone) has grown into an integral part of the production. The rave reviews in the German press and the critical acclaim that Herheim has been enjoying in the UK since his debut at the Royal Opera House with Verdi’s Les vêpres siciliennes tempts one to wonder if the management in Graz could have played it any safer.

Handel’s late opera Serse (1738) is as outstanding in its blend of serious and comic elements today as it was at the time of its creation, when opera seria, the genre that Handel established in London, had long been purged of comic characters and the relief they provided to the heroic main plot. Handel took notice of the lighter comic genre of ballad-opera, his biggest competition in London (and, one could say, in a prophetic way, also of opera buffa, emerging in Italy at the time), as he tried to recapture his audience’s interest by choosing a seventeenth-century libretto that did not shy away from portraying the heroic character of the Persian king Xerxes in a comical vein. Not only the plot, but also the stylistic “anachronisms” such as the numerous brief aria outbursts must have baffled the audience and turned the premiere into a flop. In the end, in spite of the comic potential of many other Handel operas, it was Serse that became synonymous with a good laugh and is therefore comparatively often performed.

Herheim’s reading of the opera fits well into this comic performance tradition, but it nevertheless stays true to the director’s dominant preoccupations of the past five years or so. He is first and foremost interested in theatrical conventions, especially those contemporary with an opera’s creation, and often sets his production in a theatre comparable to the one where the opera in question was originally performed. For instance, he set his London Les vêpres siciliennes at the Paris Opera in the nineteenth century, and in his acclaimed reading of Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival in 2009, he unfolded the action as the history of Wagner production styles over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Naturally, his intentions are more complex than the simple effect of a “play within a play”: Herheim strives for a particular metatheatre where the boundaries between life and stage become increasingly blurred. To this purpose, Herheim and his dramaturge Alexander Meier-Dörzenbach thoroughly immersed themselves into the existing research surrounding opera and performing conventions of Handel’s time. However, despite the deceiving surface of period costumes and set design, Herheim’s directing could not be more different from the approach taken by Sigrid T’Hooft or Benjamin Lazar, who both seek to reconstruct these conventions in the manner of an archaeologist.

Xerxes unfolds in an eighteenth-century opera house. The star castrato, Xerxes, seeks to win the graces of the prima donna Romilda at the chagrin of his own brother Arsamene, who is Romilda’s secret betrothed. The tension is raised both by the prima donna’s sister Atalanta, possibly also an aspiring singer, who misses no opportunity to undermine her sister, and Amastris, a contralto specialising in trouser roles who wants to win back her former lover Xerxes. Indeed, the castrato is treated as a king both on and off stage by the rest of the company, consisting of a chorus and the bass Ariodates, Romilda’s father. The audience of opera seria did not necessarily distinguish between the singer’s persona and his stage presence, and the stage “action” in this production seamlessly flows between stage rehearsals of Xerxes’s military pageants as well as his crossing of the Hellespont. Amongst other things, the research invested in the production was capitalised in an imaginative treatment of gender, sexuality and voice. These are all interwoven in Xerxes’s stellar status: the appeals of his virtuoso voice and the power invested in his social status have turned him into an object of (sexual) fascination that only Romilda seems to resist. The amazing thing about the production is that it is possible to convey this aspect by the casting of both mezzo-sopranos (in Berlin and in Graz) and counter-tenors (in Düsseldorf) in the roles of the two brothers. Herheim reflects the non-reciprocal relationship between voice and gender on multiple levels: in the same way Amastris slips in and out of her male attire, Hagen Matzeit adds a vocal dimension to Elviro’s disguise as a female flower seller by mimicking the gender-bending of his masters, repeatedly switching from his baritone to his counter-tenor voice and back.

The production’s title stems from another, specifically German operatic convention of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In centres such as Hamburg, operas were often multi-lingual in that the recitatives and some of the arias were sung in German, and some arias in Italian or French, depending on the stylistic models that they followed. In Herheim’s production, the original Italian is kept only in the musically more elaborate arias, sung mostly by Xerxes and Romilda. The all-pervasive humour has many facets. There were many infantile gags of the slapstick kind built into the production that were not always equally funny, but eventually, by the end of the first act, they established a quick comical pace that propelled the action forward. The acting didn’t follow the tenets of psychological characterisation but remained stylised throughout, which worked especially well for of the portrayal of Xerxes, Atalanta and Ariodates. Stephanie Houtzeel masterfully embodied the spoiled, egotistic castrato (Xerxes), who does not temper his larger-than-life persona for a second, with caricatured, slightly camp gestures and facial expressions. Tatjana Miyus (Atalanta) was irresistible in the jealous sister’s childlike viciousness that culminated in Xerxes’s second act aria Se bramate d’amar, as she kept coming up with increasingly imaginative props to aid him in venting his anger over Romilda’s refusal. David McShane, who bore slight physical resemblance to Handel, incorporated elements of a blustering vocal rendition into the portrayal of Ariodates as a slightly dim old man, at the same time excellently conveying the low status of bass singers in operatic companies of the time. The chorus of Opera Graz was well integrated into the action, taking on roles of extras such as Xerxes’s soldiers or cupids, and following the mischief of their company’s principal singers with childish admiration and attention. They rounded off the production by singing the final coro in modern costume, a melancholic gesture of farewell to the world of eighteenth-century opera.

Even though every soloist met the acting demands of the production rather well, this is where one comes to the main difference between this production and the ones in Berlin and Düsseldorf that were praised for their singing, too. With the exception of Hagen Matzeit, the soloists are all members of the ensemble of Graz Opera. Consequently, vocally, some were less than ideally suited to their roles. This applies first and foremost to Xiaoyi Xu whose voice, although of the contralto range, lacked the appropriate timbre, did not have the necessary force to project its tone, nor the technique to spin out the numerous coloraturas that the role of Amastris requires. The young singer, who still needs to mature both vocally and musically, was obviously miscast. This was not the case with Dshamilja Kaiser (Arsamene) and Margareta Klobučar (Romilda), whose lyric voices are well suited to the repertoire and their technique immaculate. Kaiser, though, lacked in expressivity and Klobučar’s timbre was not always as crystalline as the role demanded. More accomplished in terms of a wholly rounded performance (but in a less demanding role) was Tatjana Miyus, whose small voice and fine sense of interpretation blended well with her stature and acting into a convincing portrayal of the vixen Atalanta. However, Stephanie Houtzeel was the most accomplished soloist in terms of both technique and interpretation. The abundance of mezzos specialised in this repertoire has somewhat spoiled us and, while Houtzeel certainly cannot match the sheer brilliance and fast tempi of some of her colleagues, she sings with an accomplished sense of nuance and detail.

The score was presented almost in its integral form, with only a few minor cuts in the second and the third act, such as the omission of the da capo repeat in Xerxes’s aria Il core spera e teme. It is therefore amazing that, in spite of this respect for the score, the opera seemed deprived of its more serious aspects, even though most of the pathetic, slow arias were kept. This might have been due to the predominantly humorous and detached approach taken by Herheim, alienating us somewhat from the characters, but it could also stem from the orchestral playing. Konrad Junghänel seemed intent on transferring his knowledge of historically informed performance practice to the members of Graz Opera’s orchestra, who are less versed in this repertory. However, he seems to have – perhaps consciously – contributed to the effect mentioned above by some of his tempi choices and by glossing over the affects expressed in some arias. It seemed at times as if the director and the conductor had been working together to tone down the emotions of suffering, almost as if empathy with the characters was unwanted. This was especially felt in Dshamilja Kaiser’s portrayal of Arsamene, whose character gets to sing many minor mode arias in slower tempi, but who breathed genuine sadness only in Amor, tiranno amor in Act 3. However, this could be a legitimate choice and it shows that all aspects of the Graz performance of Serse were working together to create a rounded performance on both musical and theatrical levels. It is somewhat difficult to imagine how Herheim would direct a more tragic opera seria by Handel or any of his contemporaries, but what we know about the director seems to suggest that he approaches every project highly individually, at the same time thoroughly exploring his artistic preoccupations with the history and nature of theatre.

Image © Karl Forster, featuring Stephanie Houtzeel (Xerxes) and David McShane (Ariodates).

Xerxes is being performed at the Graz Opera from 29th November 2014 until 15th March 2015.