Margrethe Fredheim / Rezensionen

February 13, 2022 . The German forest is sawed up, the romantic opera is dismantled. A hell of a noise roars in the Wolfsschlucht. It's not an orchestra, it's three chainsaws and a chipper that are deafening to the ears. Huge real spruce trunks are abused there. Ersan Mondtag's Kassel production of Carl Maria von Weber's "Freischütz" wants nothing to do with folkloric patriotism. It tells of the war, the post-war period and the war of man against nature. In earlier productions of "Freischütz" the war was only suspected or hinted at. The opera was written around 1820, after the Napoleonic Wars, its plot of the trial shot with the devil's bullets is dated to shortly after the Thirty Years' War. So all characters have the war experience in their bones. In Mondtag's production, not only is the villain Kaspar (Flippo Bettoschi) a brutalized ex-soldier, but also the huntsman Max (Mirko Roschkowski) a war victim: a drug addicted soldier traumatized by his wartime experiences in a psychiatric hospital, monitored by doctors and nurses. On the stage there is a kind of hunting lodge with the inscription "outpost". Behind it the German forest looms high and dark (stage: Nina Peller) as a painted backdrop. However, the house is rotated again and again and then shows huge hallucinogenic mushrooms and the sober room of a hospital on the back.Even before he sings a note, Max moans: "Is it war again?", then an army of zombies (actually the peasants of the rifle club) attack him. The direction of the direction, to understand the whole event as a projection, as a psychiatric experience of intoxication, turns the entire opera upside down.Samiel (Jonathan Stolze) is no longer a devil, but a doctor and commentator who takes the spoken texts from the singers and eagerly quotes from Lautréamont's "Gesängen des Maldoror" or reports on the atrocities of the devastation of Magdeburg in 1631. The libretto text and the stage plot run parallel to each other and only touch one another at certain points. Patient Max, in a psychiatric gown or strapped to the ward bed, sings "Dark Powers Ensnare Me". One sees them on stage, the colourful, bizarre phantasms of an intoxicated brain. Costume designer Teresa Vergho came up with a lot of ideas for the opera choir.Or it is joked. In Kaspar's drinking song he does not sing "Without this trifolium there is no Gaudium, but rather "without Laudanum" (the drug). When Agathe (Margarethe Fredheim) sings confidently "The eye is eternally pure and clear, lovingly perceives all beings", glows behind her a burning red cloudy sky with no sun and a huge eye sinking in. Annchen (Emma McNairy) sings of "shy girly manner" while whipping three lustfully moaning men with the dominatrix whip.In this hallucination scenario, the Wolf's Glen scene is no longer noticeable. The music rages with memory motifs and horror variations, Samiel emerges from the sinking with clawed feet, Max squirms in a bad trip on the hospital bed.

“Regelrecht aufhorchen lässt die Norwegerin Margrethe Fredheim mit glockenklarem, auf langem Atem geführtem, wohltuend unforciert blühendem Sopran. ”

“Die Marie der Margrethe Fredheim gefällt durch einen gut sitzenden Sopran, mit schöner Offener höhe."

“Margrethe Fredheim ist eine hervorragende Fiordiligi,der die von Sopranistinnen gefürchtete, mit Koloraturen und anderen Schwierigkeiten gespickte Arie Come Scoglio geradezu mühelos gelingt. Aber auch ihrer anderen grossen Arie Per Pieta wird sie gerecht und findet eine Gefühlstiefe von berückender Innigkeit.”​

“Ihr tief timbrierter Sopran verfügt nicht nur über eine herrliche Rundung und einen faszinierenden Bronzeton, der Errinerungen an eine längst vergangene Gesangsära wachruft, sondern auch über die im letzten Finale geforderte Attacke. Man kann nur hoffen, dass dieser Stimme weiterhin die nötige Ruhe zum Reifen gegönnt ist; das kostbare Material ist aussergewöhnlich. ”

The Staatstheater Kassel has now given its second symphony concert on the Day of Prayer with this philosophically and musically extraordinary work. It is deep in the black romance and the establishment of the Kassel "Ring" director Markus Dietzfocuses on the surprisingly modern aspect of the loneliness of the individual. Manfred's Faustian features - one feels reminded of Schumann's "Scenen aus Goethes Faust" - are expressed in a self-destructive tendency to forget. Dietz does not emphasize the hero's incestuous love for his sister, which triggered suicide, but in his version of the text makes Astarte a distant lover, the object of an aching longing, but also only an exaggerated mirror and transfigured ideal image of Manfred himself. He feels a guilt that with existence itself and which he tries to master with the help of the elemental spirits and an "Alpenfee" as an incarnation of the romantically exaggerated, sublime nature.Under the precise hands of Francesco Angelico , skilfully guiding the musicthe Kassel orchestra unfolds the expressive beauty of Schumann's ideas. Mendelssohnian light, gloom overcast by basses, longing calls, discreet restraint in the melodramas, sublime simplicity as in an opera by Gluck in the address to Astarte, but also heroic fullness, for example in the introduction to the third "section" of the great poem, are realized with care and a sense of sound. However, the acoustics of the Martinskirche allow only little differentiation; the balance between woodwinds and strings, strangely enough sometimes also a rounded sound of the brass are obviously difficult to optimize. The chorus, on the other hand, sounds in some places from a reverberant approximation, then again powerfully present, but could mix the sound more smoothly. That shouldn'tMarco Zeiser Celesti 's rehearsal, but rather the placement, because in the finale the opposite of the choir (from the gallery) and the orchestra succeeds admirably. As the narrator, Markus Dietz avoids pathetically charging Byron's chosen words. He maintains careful distancing and a measured declamation that pays attention to meaningful references. Meret Engelhardt also follows this line as a speaker and uses a melodious, unforced diction. Schumann gives the soloists Margarethe Fredheim (soprano), Maren Engelhardt (mezzo), Daeju Na (tenor) and Magnus Piontek (bass) roles that are not exactly rewarding. One leaves the concert not only impressed by Schumann's profound music, but also deeply touched by material that shockingly radicalizes the inexpressible longing of Romanticism, as ETA Hoffmann has captured it in literary masterpieces.