This is my second Henze opera after The Bassarids. He declared at the time that it would be his last (he was seventy-seven when it debuted)...and then he went ahead and wrote two more, just for good measure. You've gotta admire that level of artistic drive.
Seeing another Henze opera was a perfectly reasonable thing to do given how much I liked The Bassarids; it needs no justification. But if you want to know how crazy my brain is, I'll make an admission: the biggest reason I had for wanting to see this was that I'd never seen an opera starting with 'U' before. Now the only letters I'm missing are 'Y' and 'X.' Those will not be easy. You could say that Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades shouldn't count for 'Q,' given that any romanization of the Russian title would not start with the letter, but you are overlooking the fact that I don't care. So, you know.
The libretto is Henze's own, following in the tradition of Arab and/or Persian folklore. It also owes a certain amount to Zauberflöte, as he himself acknowledged. The idea is that there's this king who's visited every day by this hoopoe in which he takes delight (I suppose it's obvious that that title is bilingual; "upupa" is Italian for hoopoe), but one day he tries to touch it and it leaves for good. He is heartbroken, so he sends his three sons to find it. His elder sons, Adschib and Gharib, are lazy and scheming and bad, but his youngest son Al Kasim is noble and virtuous and the usual things that youngest sons are in these stories. So he's the one who goes after the hoopoe. First, he meets a fallen angel known only as "The demon," who helps him. Why he's fallen is never specified. Anyway, he and the demon find the hoopoe, along with several other treasures. They also rescue a princess, named Badi'eat, and she and Al Kasim inevitably fall in love. His brothers try to take credit for finding the hoopoe but fail and are banished. Al Kasim and Badi'eat are to be married, but first Al Kasim has to go and give an apple to the demon, which he had promised. The piece ends there, and I guess it's meant to be ambiguous whether he succeeds or not, but the apple business seems to me like a fairly easy quest, I have to be honest.
Regardless, I found this one enchanting. There aren't, to my ear, any super-huge musical highlights, but the whole score is sparkly and evocative, augmented in places with the use of birdsong. Singing-wise, I really liked the countertenor Axel Köhler as Adschib--it's a smallish role, but I really love Köhler's voice; looking back, I see I singled him out for special praise in Rinaldo and, yup, I want to see and hear more of him. Really, though, it's the story that stands out. The whole thing has an appealing storybook aesthetic. Al Kasim and the demon will inevitably make you think of Tamino and Papageno, but while Al Kasim is, really, about as dull as his inspiration, the role of the demon--brilliantly played by John Mark Ainsley--outdoes his, really. He's one of the most interesting and appealing characters I've seen in an opera, and his relationship with Al Kasim is truly moving.
Yeah. Henze. Good stuff, and not just because it starts with 'U.' I will definitely be exploring more of his oeuvre in the future.
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