Morgen und Abend

by Georg Friedrich Haas, libretto by Jon Fosse

seen at Covent Garden on 25 November 2015

This opera is receiving its world premiere at Covent Garden, directed by Graham Vick, designed by Richard Hudson with lighting by Giuseppe di Iorio, and conducted by Michael Boder, with Klaus Maria Brandauer as Olai (a speaking part), Christoph Pohl as Johannes (Olai's son), Helena Rasker as Erna (the wife of Johannes), Sarah Wegener as Signe (the daughter of Johannes) and also a midwife, and Will Hartmann as Peter (a friend of Johannes). It is based on Jon Fosse's novel Morgon og kveld.

The entire synopsis in the programme reads, in one sentence:

Morgen und Abend (Morning and Evening) is the struggle of Johannes into and out of life.

Clearly, we are not to expect a busy piece, given such a restrained precis.

In the first part, Olai is ruminating about sound and silence as he awaits news of the birth of his child. He is puzzled that all is quiet, considering that a birth is taking place, but he does not enter the room where his wife (named Signe) is. Eventually a midwife appears to tell him that he has a son, and that mother and child are well. He names the boy Johannes and looks forward to sharing the task of fishing with him.

In the second part (continuous with the first), we see Johannes, now a widower with a number of children of whom Signe is the youngest, named after her grandmother. Johannes cannot understand why Signe is distant from him, and why he can converse with his deceased wife Erne, and also with his deceased friend Peter. Eventually he realises that he is dead, and that Signe is reacting to finding his body; Peter explains that he has been sent to guide him on the next stage of his journey. 

The set is off-white and stark - a huge cloth acting as both back wall and floor, with a bed, a door, an upended umbrella and a chair on a revolve, and two small chairs and a shopping trolley off the revolve. Exactly on the edge of the revolve is a fishing boat, poised so that when the revolve starts turning the boat's alignment shifts but it does not otherwise move much. Everything is the same washed out colour, and the all the clothes match it. Even the makeup (save for Olai) seems grey.

The opening scene is static, with Olai moving across the stage to sit in one of the chairs, where he mostly stays, occasionally stretching his legs, while speaking his thoughts in the silences between crashing percussive music or quieter reflective passages. The intermittent drumbeats are possibly the loudest I have heard - the timpanist was behind a screen in the pit perhaps to protect the other players, perhaps to help direct the sound even more strongly into the auditorium. Klaus Maria Brandauer spoke in accented English, a curious effect which edged towards the comic at times, but which emphasised the simplicity of the words in tandem with the fact that they addressed the central mystery of coming into life.

The next scene concerns Johannes just after the end of his life (though at first it is not clear that he is in fact dead); from this point almost everything is sung in German, extremely clearly. However, as well as the customary surtitles, the English text was projected onto the back wall of the stage, usually with Johannes's words larger than those of any other singer. Just occasionally the sense of the words was reflected by the nature of the projection - for example a reference to the wind led to that line becoming unstable and rippled before the individual letters 'blew' away.

In the meantime, from the beginning of this second section, a bright searchlight raked across the stage, gradually changing position from stage left (shining onto the door near the right edge of the revolve), rising slowly up the proscenium arch, travelling across it and then descending on stage right. Finally, just before the end, it shone directly into the auditorium (the second blinding light in a week, after the opening of The Force of Destiny at the Coliseum). All this while, the revolve gradually turned clockwise, so that in the space of about an hour it made nearly one revolution. 

Everything is slow, then, intensely scrutinised in an unforgiving light, with no colour, no sudden movement or dramatic interaction, all concentrated on the beginning and end which all of us face. The music shimmers, the singers are solitary, or their closeness seems strange and almost insubstantial. For example, Johanne finds his wife's hands cold but is pleased to touch them. He feels he should cut Peter's hair, as they have often performed this service for each other, but we are perhaps not entirely surprised that Peter's hair is long, as he has been dead for some time. But by the end, mundane activities of this sort have faded, as Peter leads Johannes to sail away.

It is impressive, but hard, and not to everyone's taste - several people left during the performance, which lasts only 90 minutes. The staging fitted the musical style extremely well, and the singers performed the text with great simplicity and clarity.