... or Carmen or Aida or - ughh! - Madama Tignola, or any of the perennial melodramas with second-rate music that crowd out new and interesting compositions from the stages of the major opera companies of the USA. The notes for this DVD speak of "King Roger" as one of the great 'dark horses' of 20th C opera history, along with Enescu's 'Oedipe' and Nielsen's 'Maskarade', that have been acclaimed by musicians but ignored by the general public. Well, I've heard both the Enescu and the Nielsen, and I thoroughly agree that they are major masterworks which ought to be staged at least as regularly as Lohengrin or Rigoletto. This DVD, however, is my first exposure to Karol Szymanowski's "King Roger", filmed at a performance of the Bregenzer Festspiele in 2009. I'd be very loath to give any such daring performance less than a five-star review - lest I be condemned to hear Manon Lescaut in saeculum saeculorum. On the other hand, I can't in good conscience recommend this DVD to anyone but a strenuous devotee to expressionist art.
Actually, the music may well be better than second-rate. It has a tumultuous grandeur. If I listened to it another two or three times, I suspect that it would reveal depths and splendors. Or perhaps hearing it as a choral symphony would focus my attention on its compositional strengths. The problem, for me, is the dramaturgy. The libretto. The stuff that happens on stage and is intended to engage my emotions. Frankly, as a drama, King Roger is pretentious symboliste drivel, a quality that this Bregenzer staging exaggerates in every manner possible. The stage is a bare set of steps, like empty bleachers overlooking a stunned orchestra. The story concerns an abstract monarch in an abstract kingdom, whose subjects are clamoring for him to apprehend a heretic. The heretic, an abstract shepherd, turns out to be a charismatic witness to an abstract God. King Roger, like Pontius Pilate, is both contemptuous and overawed, while his wife Roxana is 'seduced' by the Shepherd's message. Eventually, the Shepherd and the Queen flee together. That's Act One. In the second act, Roger becomes a pilgrim in pursuit of his wife and perhaps of his sanity. He finds Roxana, as this production shows it, in a bizarre land of blood sacrifices. Yet just when it seems that the Shepherd is apocalyptically triumphant, the Sun rises and Roger is 'restored'. Huh? was it a dream? Nah, that's too easy! A religious epiphany? Frankly, I don't hear such a message in the music, which churns on in anguish and atonal anomie.
This staging is mercilessly static. The singing is quite good, but the sound recording is atrocious, as if done with a single mike on the yonder side of the orchestra pit, so that major vocal expressions sound 'back stage' arbitrarily. If the vocal lines were 'present' and full of timbres, the music might well carry the show. What I see and hear strikes me as a missed opportunity to make a case for this neglected opera. But I'm a 'hard sell' for meta-religious expressionism. If you, dear reader, know the films of Lars von Trier -- "Breaking the Wave" for example -- and like them, there's some possibility that you'll appreciate this film of "King Roger".
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