On Smaller Opera Stages, Daring Art Has More Room to Breathe

New York Times

4 days ago

Near the end of Judith Weir's opera 'Miss Fortune,' there is an uncanny duet between the main character, Tina, and her fate. Tina is sung by a soprano, and Fate by a countertenor. Although their music is similar, the difference in their vocal timbres creates an unsettling clash.
At a recent production of 'Miss Fortune' that I attended at the Theater für Niedersachsen in Hildesheim, a small city in northern Germany, that scene had a memorable charge. Its strange lyricism was undercut by the humor of Tina telling her destiny to butt out as one might set boundaries with a problematic ex.
It was a great operatic moment, and it played to a sparse audience in a city of just over 100,000 people.
During the past season, Germany's leading opera houses — in Berlin and Munich, in Stuttgart and Hamburg — offered largely familiar though well-rendered pleasures, along with a handful of new works by marquee artists in contemporary music. But, unlike almost any other country in the world, Germany also has a large network of smaller professional opera houses that step up, offering modernist masterpieces, overlooked rarities and work from this century. (According to the German Music Information Center, the country has 83 institutions presenting opera and music theater.)
In addition to the Theater für Niedersachsen, I traveled to opera houses in Darmstadt, Dessau-Rosslau, Lübeck, Magdeburg, Bielefeld and Kassel throughout the season. Although the performances were often at a lower technical level than in the country's opera capitals — the orchestral playing less polished, the singing rougher, the stagings and acting more beholden to clichés — they also showed a scene whose vitality remains unmatched, thanks to generous but increasingly precarious government funding.
Germany's smaller opera houses allow up-and-coming artists to hone their craft, giving onstage experience to generations of performers. Sonja Isabel Reuter, who gave an assured interpretation of Tina in 'Miss Fortune,' is Theater für Niedersachsen's only ensemble soprano. Last season, she sang four completely different vocal roles in the space of a week: Mimi from 'La Bohème,' two different operetta characters and the solo soprano part in Dvorak's cantata 'The Specter's Bride.' Her three seasons at the house, she said in a phone interview, 'were like a crash course in how to be an opera singer.'
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