Richard III, Theater an der Wien
Theater an der Wien at the Kammeroper, Vienna, 17/6/24
Richard III, by William Shakespeare, and music by Henry Purcell, Kateryna Sokolova, director, Benjamin Bayl, music director
There is no such opera as ‘Richard III’. Shakespeare wrote a play. Henry Purcell wrote several masques or ‘operas’ or musical arrangements for dramatic works, including three based on Shakespeare plays, none of them ‘Richard III’. What we have here is a pastiche of Shakespeare and Purcell, devised with considerable skill and assurance by director Kateryna Sokolova, musical director, Benjamin Bayl, and dramatist Kai Weβler. Shakespeare’s words – or some of them - are spoken in German, in a translation by August Wilhelm Schlegel, and arias by Purcell and a number of his contemporaries are sung in English. The rich musical selection is sourced from Purcell’s operas, ‘King Arthur’ (notably ‘Cold Song’, and ‘See, See, We Assemble’) ‘The Fairy Queen’ (‘Now the Night is Chas’d Away’), ‘Timon of Athens’ (‘Hark How the Songsters’) and ‘Dido and Aeneas’ (‘Oft She visits this Lone Mountain’, ‘When I am Laid in Earth’), from Purcell’s arrangement of Aphra Behn’s play ‘Abdelazar’, and other sources such as his Funeral Music for Queen Mary, and ‘Come Ye Sons of Art’. In addition there are striking contributions from other contemporary sources, such as Jeremiah Clarke’s ‘Ode on the Death of Henry Purcell’, Matthew Locke’s ‘The Tempest’ and traditional songs such as ‘Bedlam Boys are Bonny’. All are carefully selected and sequenced to illustrate the rise of Richard in Act 1, in the anarchic years at the end of the Wars of the Roses, and the despair of Richard’s fall in Act 2, with the developing threat presented by Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. Musical accompaniment is provided by the Bach Consort of Vienna, led by Benjamin Bayl.
Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’ is dominated by the personality of Richard of Gloucester, the hunchback third son who schemes and kills his way to becoming King Richard. In this production we have three Richards on stage: the German actor Soren Kneidl, the Swiss baritone Christoph Filler, and the Austrian dancer Fabian Tobias Huster, with Richard’s heraldic boar attached to his shoulder to represent the King’s deformity. All appear together and separately, demonstrating the many-sidedness of Richard’s character, the self-pity of the disabled child, rejected at birth by his mother, the cruelty of the sociopath, the deceitful lust of Lady Anne’s suitor, and the fledgling, self-mocking conscience of the King. It is a device well suited to dramatic alienation, as well as to Shakespeare’s humanist spirit, which leaves no evil unexplained and unquestioned.
The three Richards are well supported by British-Austrian soprano, Louise Kemeny, a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, who plays Anne Neville, Richard’s Queen, and widow of his first victim, Henry VI’s son Edward. Ms Kemeny sings powerfully and expressively, despite suffering from a cold as we were warned from the stage, and her strong stage presence, not only as Anne, but also Hastings and a tavern singer, captures both the tragedy of this piece, as well as its bawdy comedy. Apart from the three Richards all the performers play multiple parts. More strong support is provided by Martina Neubauer, as – to name her principal role – Dame Cecily, Richard’s mother, Johannes Bamberger as Clarence/Richmond and Antoine Amariu as Edward IV.
Purcell’s music is alongside other Restoration music, at the heart of this production. Benjamin Bayl describes Purcell’s music as the ‘pop music of his day’, a reflection possibly of the extent to which it has been adopted and adapted by popular musicians of the twentieth century. We all know the staccato rendition of ‘Cold Song’, and various popular versions of Dido’s Lament. Here ‘When I am laid in earth’ is sung by Richard on the eve of Bosworth, as deserted by his supporters, he faces death. ‘When I am laid in earth, May my wrongs create no trouble, no trouble in thy breast; Remember me, remember me, but ah! Forget my fate.’ A poignant ending, when we remember that Richard’s fate was to be killed on Bosworth field, his body paraded through Leicester and tossed into an unmarked grave – only recently recovered from under a public car park in that city.
Shakespeare, for all his greatness as poet and dramatist, was also a powerful propagandist for his Tudor lords. His Richard is a caricature of evil. This piece largely follows his lead, but with the benefit of hindsight we are allowed some equivocation. This is after all the same Richard of whom the York city fathers on hearing of his death two days after it occurred, at a time when there was nothing to be gained and much to be lost from such a sentiment, said,
‘King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was through great treason piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this city.’ York city fathers, 24 August 1485.
