Review: ‘Neither,’ ignored in U.S., gets extravagant German staging

Though known as the flower of the Ruhr Valley — a formerly industrial section of Germany northeast of Düsseldorf — Bochum may not exactly bloom on the world’s cultural map. The biggest tourist attraction here is a production of “Starlight Express” that has run for 28 years.

Yet if you want to see elaborate stagings of operas and music theater works of historical importance by America’s most important avant-garde composers, a pilgrimage is required up a hill in a Bochum park to Jahrhunderthalle, an enormous old factory converted to a theater and one of the sites of the Ruhrtriennale. Just don’t walk there, I was advised. The neighborhood, popular with prostitutes, is dodgy.

The festival was founded in 2002 by the late opera impresario Gerard Mortier, who had the idea of attracting federal money for the arts by turning the Ruhr’s decaying industrial infrastructure into magnificent performance venues now found in Essen, Duisburg, Dortmund and elsewhere, along with Bochum. The festival is annual, but a triennial in the sense that directors are appointed for three years.

For the last three, German composer and director Heiner Goebbels has been at the helm, and he has shown a strong interest in the major American works to which major American opera companies or festivals pay scant attention. In 2012, Goebbels was the one to stage John Cage’s largest work, “Europeras 1 & 2,” during the composer’s centennial celebration. Last year in Jahrhunderthalle, Goebbels revived Harry Partch’s “Delusion of the Fury,” for which a new set of the outlier West Coast’s composer’s signature homemade instruments was constructed.

On Saturday, the triennial opened a new production of Morton Feldman’s “Neither,” which I saw Sunday night. This is the only opera by the celebrated avant-gardist and the only opera for which Samuel Beckett contributed a text.

“Neither” was possible only because neither the American composer nor the Irish author had the slightest interest in opera. In addition, Beckett did not like his words set to music, and Feldman did not like setting words to music. Consequently, they had common ground on which to work.

Beckett’s one-page text contains but 10 sentences. There are no stage instructions. The libretto, more a poem, begins: “to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow.”

It goes back and forth between opposing forms of nothingness, “from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself.” There are “unheard footfalls only sound,” “then no sound” and finally “unspeakable home.”

Feldman set this for a soprano, whom he limited to a handful of pitches in her highest range and to a single pianissimo dynamic. Few words are penetrable. The orchestra, on the other hand, is large and features irregular pulsation, lapping and luminous phrases and exquisitely misty chords. Feldman was unconcerned that the instruments sometimes drown out the singer.

The premiere was at Rome Opera in 1997, and it was dismissed as untheatrical. But an eloquent 1991 Netherlands Opera production, four years after Feldman’s death, proved it a masterpiece. Since then, the opera has had a number of European productions, including one by Katie Mitchell at the Staatsoper Berlin this June. The only professional U.S. staging, though, was a shoddy one by New York City Opera three years ago.

In Bochum, “Neither” was put in the hands of Romeo Castellucci, and he turned the 50-minute monodrama into a self-consciously weird 75-minute extravaganza that came across as part David Lynch and part Robert Wilson.

For some reason, “Neither” reminded the Italian director of Hollywood film noir. Keeping with the either/or aspect of Beckett’s text, Castellucci then proceeded to continually contradict the action. A gangster murders a victim. The scene is repeated, and the victim kills the attacker. A cat is dead, then it’s alive, then it’s dead again, then it runs off.

Feldman said he wanted to treat each sentence as a world.

But 10 worlds weren’t enough for Castellucci, so he began with a 10-minute prelude, before the music begins. This included a woman, her young child with a doll, the dead cat and forebodings about nuclear disaster and wave/particle duality.

The opera itself involved gangsters and cops, a house lighted like one Wilson once used, the little girl turned into a statue blowing smoke, a horse off in the foggy distance, a frisky dog, a number of coal miners. I’m sure I’m leaving something out.

The atmosphere remained, at all times, threatening, with the woman, now the soprano Laura Aikin, operating in a quiet panic. Though managing the difficult high tessitura well, Aikin did not, probably could not under these extreme circumstances, sing pianissimo.

The production’s worst idea was to rope off the orchestra — the Duisburg Philharmonic conducted by Emilio Pomàrico — in a rectangle and behind a scrim at the side of the stage. Feldman’s immersive orchestration, the key to the opera, became indistinct background music, most details lost.

Castellucci also added a spectacular epilogue. A full-size train (it looked real) slowly rolled on stage, billowing smoke. It ran over the lady. Surgeons amputated her leg and propped the bloody limb up in front of a microphone to presumably utter a silent scream. When the train backed off, the woman hopped away on one leg.

There is no right way to do “Neither,” and maybe there is no wrong way either. It can be an opera about nothing or everything (or nothing and everything at the same time), and it must be rethought every time it is done.

But the extraordinary music is not nothing. That requires devotion. By not trusting the music, Castellucci made it difficult to trust him, no matter how engrossing — or not — his stage pictures.

mark.swed@latimes.com