Aribert Reimann – Lear
Bo Skovhus; Staatsoper Hamburg;
Simone Young
ArtHaus Musik 109063
Shakespeare’s King Lear was an obsession with Berlioz and even more so with Verdi who, as the legend goes, threw his half-written score into the fire in a fit of self-disgust. It took 100 years and two world war disasters before German composer Aribert Reimann actually succeeded in turning it into an opera at the suggestion of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who sang the title role in Munich in 1978. Since then it has enjoyed a moderate success around the world, but in 2012 the Hamburg Opera, now under the leadership of Simone Young, very much devoted to the avant-garde, revived it with this inspired, completely original staging by Karoline Gruber.
Apart from being brutal and gruesome, Lear is the hardest hitting tragedy of the Bard because it hits so close to home. Everyone will sooner or later become old and will sympathize with Lear’s predicament. The tragic fault that causes his downfall is self-deception and an over-inflated ego that make him subject to flattery and an easy victim to his avaricious daughters. Reimann uses the entire play as his libretto, a play that moves on many different levels – personal, familial, political, psychological and philosophical (one of the most often quoted of all Shakespeare) – and must have been horrendously difficult to come to grips with. Reimann’s expressionist, atonal music is, however, so well suited to his subject and so well integrated with it that the power of the play reverberates even stronger than in the prose version.
At the head of the young, energetic and dedicated cast Danish baritone Bo Skovhus is one of today’s most exciting and original artists who simply towers over this production, but Andrew Watts’ heartrending portrayal of “poor boy Tom” Edgar cannot easily be forgotten. With conductor Simone Young’s supreme command over the score (especially in the haunting Intermezzo with its bass flute solo) this awesome set is much recommended.
