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“Fledermaus ”

“It‘s no good crying over spilt milk’ – ‘Glücklich ist, wer vergißt, was nicht mehr zu ändern ist’: the melodious-melancholy motto of Strauss’s operetta, the “Fledermaus”, 126 years after the first performance can still buck up some despairing soul. ‘The situation is hopeless but not serious’: a quintessentially Austrian remedy for all ills of the spirit, potent against even such crises as the collapse of the Viennese banks which occurred shortly before the original performance and was forgotten in a rapture of waltzing.

Hans Neuenfels is directing Die Fledermaus in the Felsen-reitschule. Photo: Mike Wolff

The Queen of Operetta

No wonder that this Queen of Operetta has effortlessly beaten off all onslaughts on the genre up to the present day. Not only has the cinema ever since the days of the silent film paid tribute to the charming winged mammal – no less an actor than Emil Jannings played the the prison warder Frosch in Ernst Lubitsch’s “Fideles Gefängnis” – but some of the most significant directors of theatre and opera have proved sensitive to the charms, particularly the hidden ones, of “The Bat’s Revenge”. In his Basle production Herbert Wernicke had a festive throng which was not merely squiffy but absolutely plastered stagger down a spiral staircase from almost the ceiling of the stage into the abyss of the dark orchestral pit, a symbol of what was to occur in reality a few decades later. Maurice Béjart in Brussels introduced among the personages moving around Gabriel and Rosalinde Eisenstein a figure with a diabolical similarity to Count Dracula who kept sampling the blood of the drunken guests at Prince Orlofsky’s ball and later transformed himself into an uncanny Frosch: the townsman in a tailcoat, a slack, lethargic society. Only in the frenzy of enjoyment does one feel free – and in prison.

Elisabeth Trissenaar as Frosch

With the prospect of a new production of the “Fledermaus” at the next Salzburg Festival to look forward to, one may one may well wonder with what new variation the director, Hans Neuenfels, will send his “Fledermaus” out on its nocturnal flight. Neuenfels’s interpretation of “Così fan tutte” at the last Festival was certainly sufficiently ‘malicious’ in its treatment of the love theme. So we should be prepared for a thing or two with Strauss. All we know at the moment is that the premiére will be on 17. August 2001 at the Felsenreitschule; that Marc Minkowski will be directing the Mozarteum Orchestra and the Schönberg Choir; that Christoph Homberger will be playing Eisenstein; Elzbieta Szmytka, Rosalinde; Matthias Klink, Alfred; Ernst Theo Richter, the prison director, Frank; Olaf Bär, Dr Falke; and Malin Hartelius, Adele. And then there is the rôle of Frosch – for “Fledermaus” connoisseurs the secret, central figure in this tangle of Austrian confusions: it is played by Elisabeth Trissenaar, a lady-Frosch, as it were. As, however, she is well acquainted with ‘her’ Neuenfels, having worked with him on numerous theatre projects besides being married to him and being herself Viennese by birth, she is sure to know how to evoke the abysses of the royal-and-imperial Hapsburg world in an alcoholic fog of slibowitz. ‘Herr Doktor, we have been walled in!’ cries Frosch in dismay as, loaded to the gills, he staggers out of the filing cupboard he has mistaken for the exit. A few years later, it was not only the darkly divining Frosch who was walled in but the whole “Reich” with all its Germanic concomitants. That is how political operetta can be if one listens for its hidden undertones.