L'Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe (2003)
(L’Upupa and the Triumph of Filial Love)

For some years now Madrid has been involved in a love affair with Hans Werner Henze, and their mutual affection is obvious. After a rather disappointing beginning to the new season, L'Upupa finally brought great opera to the Teatro Real. Although L'Upupa seems a small-scale work at first sight, this proves deceptive; yet the work is anything but pretentious. Based on a delightful Persian legend, it shows a very different side of Henze from the tragic countenance we so admired in The Bassarids. This is an opera constructed on the juxtaposition of different tableaux in which the action continually moves on apace, avoiding any distractions. Emotions and characters are portrayed in the clearest possible way, while the orchestra seldom sounds symphonic. The whole has the feel of a fairy tale being smilingly sung, whispered even, to both children and adults.

One of the most compelling moments of L'Upupa is its conclusion, where the Old Man and his son's bride-to-be, the young Badi'at, stand gazing at the horizon, waiting for the return of Al Kasim. With a promise to be fulfilled, he has left before his marriage to meet his Demon, and we do not know if he will ever be back. Subdued lighting and the most beautiful orchestral passage of the opera leave the listener in a state of wonder.

All the singers were ideally cast. John Mark Ainsley, firstly, brought deliberate ambiguity to the opera's most complex character, stressing the human aspects of the Demon. Ainsely made [the role] his own, and it is hard to imagine a better performance. The nicest surprise came from the young Spanish soprano Ofelia Sala, who was a charming, innocent and vocally impeccable Badi'at. Hanna Schwarz, hardly recognizable beneath her make-up and costume, was a delightful Malik. Alfred Muff, as the Old Man who begins the whole story, was equally convincing whether speaking or singing. Axel Köhler and Anton Scharinger as the 'wicked' brothers, and Günther Missenhardt as the tyrant Dijab, completed a cast that will surely be hard to match in future performances - and L'Upupa certainly deserves different productions and different approaches. All benefited, too, from the musicianship of Paul Daniel, who managed to bring out the best in the Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid in one of the most impressive performances I can remember it having given.

The hot ticket at this year's Salzburg Festival is not one of the three Mozart opera productions, but the world premiere production of Hans Werner Henze's newest stage-work L'Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe (The Hoopoe and the Triumph of Filial Love). It is described as "a German comedy from the Arabian". Salzburg's artistic director, Peter Ruzicka, must be kicking himself that he scheduled only four performances of the Henze, …
Henze is now two years short of his 80th birthday and so he clearly regards his tenth opera as something of a summation of his career as a theatre-composer. As this is a Salzburg commission, Henze has clearly determined to write his own Magic Flute. L'Upupa is similarly a fairy-tale quest opera, in which the youngest of three sons of a Grand Vizir goes in search of a magical bird, the golden-feathered, black-crested hoopoe which has flown the old man's tower. The two elder good-for-nothing siblings decide to stay at home, drinking and playing cards, and plot to steal the bird when their younger brother returns. On his journey, the Papageno-like youth, Al Kasim, meets a winged demon who helps him on his quest, securing him access to the magic garden of an ancient Sultan where the Hoopoe has taken refuge. The Sultan promises to help if Al Kasim will rescue a beautiful Jewish princess from the clutches of the old tyrant of Kipungani. On the way back, they are duped by the evil brothers into parting with the bird and thrown into a well. After more adventures they finally arrive home to be reunited with the Grand Vizir (the evil brothers have been punished by demons who emerge from a magic casket).
This action-packed scenario might seem complex, but it emerges in a production of magical simplicity and ravishing visual beauty by the stage director, Dieter Dorn and set and costume designer, Jürgen Rose with a spell-binding clarity. A clarity which Henze also achieves in what must be his richest and most entrancing opera score to date. The composer has written his own libretto, based, like his Songs from the Arabian which he wrote six years ago for Ian Bostridge, on Arabian songs, but it is replete with subtle references to classic operas: Mozart's Entführung and Magic Flute most obviously but also to Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal.
His music is equally allusive, his virtuosic use of Chinese percussion recalling the Stravinsky of The Nightingale, his final orchestral peroration, an outpouring of achingly beautiful Bergian feeling that speaks directly to the heart. The final tableau is a mesmerising image of the twilight "blue hour" with the Old Man and the Princess looking into the distance and the Hoopoe back in its cage.
Salzburg did the opera proud from almost every point of view, the Vienna Philharmonic revelling in the elaborate, yet diaphanous, tapestry of sound Henze has woven for them, dazzlingly conducted by Markus Stenz. The cast, headed by the slightly underpowered Matthias Goerne as Al Kasim, includes such experienced German singers as Hanna Schwarz (Sultan), Günther Missenhardt (Tyrant), Alfred Muff (Grand Vizir) and Laura Aikin is a gleaming presence as the Jewish Princess. John Mark Ainsley triumphs in the role of the Demon. In a word, a triumph for Henze and very possibly a masterpiece which will undoubtedly travel: Berlin, Madrid and Palermo are planned; London (or, preferably, Glyndebourne) surely must follow.

The world premiere of 77-year-old Hans Werner Henze’s latest and – as he has announced – last opera has aroused almost unanimous enthusiasm. The commissioning of the work with the rather unmanageable title, L’Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe (‘The Upupa and the Triumph of Filial Love’), was one of Ruzicka’s first official actions when he was elected in 1999 as Gérard Mortier’s successor in Salzburg; an extraordinarily appropriate action, inasmuch as Henze had one of his first great international successes with the world premiere of the opera Die Bassariden at Salzburg in 1966.
Now the wheel was to come full circle and Henze rewarded the confidence shown in him by also writing his own libretto for the first time. And it really is only the title that is unmanageable. The libretto combines ingenuity with poetry, the magical with the topical; all at the intimate emotional level that makes it an ideal basis for an opera.
The theme of the tale has an Arabian inspiration: the Upupa mentioned in the title is a large colourful bird that has flown away from its owner, the old Grand Vizier. He sends his three sons out to look for it, but only one of them has the courage and strength to overcome all the dangers of the journey. Along the way he also meets a truth-seeking lifetime companion.
If you suspect some influence from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, you aren’t wrong. Among his sources Henze has credited Mozart’s librettist, Schikaneder. And in Henze’s work too the young man has a less courageous, more survival-oriented companion – here called his Daemon. But Henze has swapped the voice types around: the brave son is a baritone, his daemon a lyric tenor.

… Much of the score is sumptuously beautiful. Densely harmonised and orchestrated, its style owes much to Berg, yet stops short of atonality to wallow in a dreamy romanticism. Henze’s compositional craft is everywhere evident. Colours rich yet delicate, with shimmers of orientalism; speech is tellingly used; and natural sounds, such as the hoopoe’s fluttering wings are recorded on tape. …
Still, one can forgive everything for the magnificent final scene, which concludes with an orchestral postlude of positively Mahlerian ectasy.
Salzburg Festival has done the opera’s first performance proud. Markus Stenz, substituting for Christian Thielemann, conducted the Vienna Philahrmonic on angelically immaculate form, and Dieter Dorn played the drama refreshingly straight, in Jürgen Rose’s picture-book designs.
Al Kasim, Matthias Goerne sang with all his usual sensitivity and intelligence, … Laura Aikin and Alfred Muff were strongly cast as Kasim’s lover and father, but it was John Mark Ainsly, replacing Ian Bostridge as the Demon, who stole the show with his warm, sweet tenor and touching portrayal of a grumpy yet endearing character.
Yes, it verges on the whimsical and faux-naïf and, for some rigorous taste, the music will sound too soft-centred and unabrasive. But where else in contemporary opera do you find such seductive and imaginative charm, applied with such artistry? This production moves on Berlin, Madrid and Palermo. What a shame London has no current prospect of hearing what may well be the last opera of a 20th century master.

Hans Werner Henze's new opera provides a cool moment of charm. Mr. Henze, at 77, has
announced that L'UPUPA -- The Hoopoe, and the Triumph of Filial Love -- will be his last
opera -- his swan song, or rather his hoopoe song...
In his previous 10 full-length operas Henze has worked with [other] librettists. This time he has created his own text out of Arabian tales. Having proved his literary gifts in essays and memoirs, he perhaps wanted at last to tell his own story – the story of a son who finds his life's direction in trying to carry out his distant father's wishes.
The dutiful son at the center of [Henze's] piece is Al Kasim, who at his father's behest goes off in search of the hoopoe with golden feathers, and who makes it his own quest, discovering puzzles, challenges and opportunities that he must address. In much the same way, Mr. Henze has stayed conscious of what he owes to the great German tradition but has altered it, treaking it with lightness, ambiguity and a smile...
The heart of the piece is in the ending...the stage is silent; and the orchestra takes over for a glowing adagio. This is sunset music, and with it the composer reaches home.

The orchestral apparatus is huge - quadruple wind, a couple of pianos, five percussionists - and incorporates an important role for tape, with the sounds of beating wings, chiming bells, and calling birds, that at the beginning and end of the opera especially are artfully integrated with the orchestral textures.
But despite all these resources the soundworld never seems dense; some scenes, particularly the explicitly comic ones, may be underpinned by just a handful of instruments - a ricocheting piano solo, or an evocative trumpet - while the score's oases of lyricism, its kernels of emotional truth, are buoyed up by cushions of divided strings.
It is in those moments that Henze's debt to Berg, especially in his vocal writing, is most apparent, though the use of closed forms - an aria here, a cabaletta there, embedded in an otherwise through-composed musical structure - is another Bergian trait.
What one takes away from L'Upupa, though, is not its structural niceties, but a sense of lightness and economy, of a huge orchestra used as sparingly as possible, and of a drama that doesn't preach, doesn't labour its points, but leaves them to be uncovered (or not) as the listener decides.

Hanging over a pharmacy, at the very opening of Linzer Alley in Salzburg, is a stone slab with Trakl's poem "Im Dunkel" ("In the Dark"). It opens with the words, "Es schweiget die Seele den blauen Frühling" and ends with "Blick der Bläue aus verfallenen Felsen bricht". A long time ago, the composer Hans Werner Henze set Hölderlin's apocryphal prose writing "In lieblicher Bläue" ("In Lovely Blueness") to music in the almost one hour long "Chamber Music 1958," thereby expressing his deep longing for German Romanticism. His fairytale opera "L'Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe"("L'Upupa and the Triumph of Filial Love"), now premiering in Salzburg's Kleines Festspielhaus, ends completely in blue yet again with the tableau "Die Blaue Stunde" ("The Blue Hour"). A dark, melancholy orchestra piece magically changed into a typically German dense sound mixture by the Vienna Philharmonic under the direction of Markus Stenz.
This orchestral postlude is a filigrand farewell. Lovely blueness as the goal of all aesthetics, the goal of all the composing of Henze, who was born in 1926. Here the music withdraws into itself. Here, many years later, the music thanks its composer and humble servant. A grandiose painting in sound, deeply moving - the intense climax of a mysterious, colourful evening. This almost serenely resignating end is previously indicated in the fairytale play, which Henze discovered in Syria while searching for material for his last opera. First he wrote himself a libretto. One may like to accuse him of jumpiness and talkativeness, which a professional librettist might well have avoided. But it is exactly this laissez-faire position, this don't-take-it-seriously and quick taking the edge off of dramatic situations that Henze wanted to place at the conclusion of his work.
Above it all floats the wisdom of old age which has not yet come to rest. Thus a late work has come into being, which casually plays with the late works of famous colleagues, which fits in with "Tristan" and the "Magic Flute," that would cunningly like to renounce all excitement and all earthly activity/hustle and bustle. That now as ever formulates Henze's belief about the beautiful, as one of the unworldly categories, that the world cannot do without.

"L'Upupa" is basically a bewitchingly fragrant and sounding ornament, an oriental arabesque full of magical sounds and buffoonery, which is not even lacking in the parable character. At least he does not strike one as constantly behaving like a school master. This effect is also ensured by the subtle to coarse humour, which Dorn (stage director) with Rose’s (help design) demands from the ensemble, as well as the musical arrangement, which maneuvers continuously between concrete narration (partially spoken words, partially Sprechgesang) and modest cantilenas, between sounding and moving forms (Henze: "my theory-free harmonies") and played-back recordings of nature sounds (chirping birds, beating wings, rumbling thunder, roaring lions, and pealing churchbells).
One gets the impression that with "L'Upupa" he succeeded in - what he himself had always valued in Italy and his mother - maybe even believed to be unattainable for him: everything is easy and seemingly aleatoric, it has grace, it is “right”.