Asmik Grigorian: The particularly loud applause during the final applause belongs to her, this delicate young woman, who has just delighted the audience in three completely opposite roles in the Salzburg Large Festival Hall – first as a teenager in love, then as a frustrated worker’s wife and finally as a nun, from her family locked away in a monastery because of a liaison with children. Asmik Grigorian stands on the ramp and is exuberantly happy about the jubilation. When the whole huge ensemble comes on stage with her, she almost falls over with euphoria. Such moments are rare even in the life of successful singers.
Asmik Grigorian, born and educated in Lithuania, is the celebrated protagonist of the festival, now organized by Markus Hinterhäuser for the sixth time. The man is a cunningly charming seducer who repeatedly and often successfully presents his audience with modernity as indispensable and overwhelming. Asmik Grigorian fits into this concept wonderfully, who is by no means a diva, but who seems to define even the most absurd roles in the repertoire as contemporary and everyday without any artistic effort. She sensationally succeeded four years ago in the role of Salome, who was fixated on a prophet. Richard Strauss wrote the erotic, shrill music. At that time, she and the audience experienced a great moment that was reminiscent of another sensational singer’s debut: that of Anna Netrebko in 2002 in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”. Netrebko is now a diva who celebrates her roles and unsettlingly maneuvers between Putin and the West. Asmik Gregorian, however, has remained true to herself and the concept of adapting her female roles to the here and now. Now she is demonstrating her art in Giacomo Puccini’s “Il Trittico”whose three wives all burn with love and have to come to terms with death in different ways.
Asmik Grigorian as Sister Angelica, who swaps the nun’s habit for the little black dress and rebels against her fate.
(Photo: Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg Festival)
No composer was more deeply in love with death than Giacomo Puccini. His sounds and often threatening chord sequences are always surrounded by death, are marked by its brutality, tragedy and darkness, but at the same time they know about the seductive charm that death can have on people. Suddenly, right at the beginning of the evening, Asmik Grigorian as Lauretta steps out of the excited, chattering tangle of people who are bizarrely worried about their inheritance and asks her dad Gianni Schicchi to give her great love a chance and a livelihood. Grigorian does it simply, intimately, movingly, calmly, her high notes are perfect magic. It is a grandiose moment of humanity in the hustle and bustle of greed. A moment like this is burned into your memory, maybe forever. And Puccini’s music provides the clue that human happiness is always endangered, it formulates the certainty that behind the greatest exuberance as well as behind every love banality, death always lurks.
The title “Il Trittico” (The Triptych) refers to an ensemble of three thematically linked pictures that was once widespread in religious painting, the middle one being the largest. Puccini transfers this concept to his opera. It begins with a profane murder of jealousy in the working-class milieu (“Der Mantel”), the focus is on a nightmare in a monastery that ends with the protagonist’s suicide (“Sister Angelica”), and it ends with a boisterous inheritance-hugging outfit (“Gianni Schichi”). Love for women and death are the connecting motifs, and it is part of Puccini’s concept that the fear of death is finally resolved in laughter.
Asmik Grigorian as Lauretta, who convinces her father Gianni Schicchi (Misha Kiria) to save her happiness with a daring swindle.
(Photo: Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg Festival)
Of the Director Christopher Loy rearranges the order of the pieces and the clothes at the beginning. Gradually, Asmik Grigorian gets bigger and bigger roles, she can constantly improve with her increasingly penetrating portraits, from the simple girl to the disillusioned wife to the psycho wreck of the suicidal nun Angelica. That is quite logical and also serves the understandable need to put the wonderful Asmik Grigorian in the center. Unfortunately, however, it destroys the meaningful dramaturgy of the “Trittico”, which wants the desolate image of a monastery in the middle and a final sweeping gesture, which launches a mockery of death, religion and society that is otherwise unusual in Puccini and redeems all seriousness in a liberating laughter.
The Vienna Philharmonic under the conductor Franz Welser-Möst deliver solid craftsmanship
Christof Loy is an unexcited inventor of today’s people and their longings and fears, he is someone who has nothing at all to do with big stage gigs, but always trusts in the singers and their enthusiasm for playing. In the “Trittico” he has three impersonal, classically bright rooms played with only a few props. Occasionally, Loy has wonderful ideas. When Sister Angelica opens the suitcase with the belongings of her child, who died young, she also finds a simple black dress. There is a change through the nun, who until then has been quietly tolerating and singing softly. Asmik Grigorian takes off his sister’s outfit, puts on his little black dress and begins to smoke. Suddenly she is the woman of the world she once was, Grigorian’s voice makes him understandable, the change from humble to femme fatale. The dream of a self-determined woman’s life is hinted at, a dream that only Lauretta will be able to live out here in “Gianni Schicchi”. There is no place for freedom and self-determination in the monastery, just as little as there is in the sadness of the workers in “The Coat”.
Oh, how much there wasn’t to discover and interpret in Puccini’s most unusual opera! The Salzburg Festival production, however, discovers nothing new, it refuses any interpretation or connection to today, it fixes the three pieces in a harmlessness that constantly mocks Puccini’s music of death. Nevertheless, there is a lot of solid craftsmanship to admire. That goes for them Wiener Philharmoniker as well as for their conductor Franz Welser-Möst, for the directing team around Loy, for the many singers who fulfill the role requirements well, but don’t make an iota anymore. This self-sufficiency works somehow, but above all it is: well-behaved. Because it presents a masterpiece whose ingenious narrative strategy and death-crazy philosophy of life do not come to the fore. With Asmik Grigorian, the audience can at least guess at the abysses. But she can, she did in 2018 as Salome together with the director Romeo Castellucci shown much, much more. Her “Trittico” comrades-in-arms in the orchestra pit and on stage have failed to elicit this extra from her. Despite these difficulties, she is the highlight of the evening: the radiant Asmik Grigorian.