Revisionists Come Calling : Opera review: Hindemith’s ‘Mathis der Maler’ gets a fresh production, courtesy of Peter Sellars and Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Covent Garden, once synonymous with the very Establishment Royal Opera and Ballet, is, these days, one of London’s trendiest neighborhoods, a center of fashion, upscale restaurants, adventurous graphic and visual design. The Royal Opera, on the other hand, remains an exclusive world apart. But leave it to a couple of feisty Angelenos, making their Covent Garden debuts, to change all that.

Peter Sellars and Esa-Pekka Salonen--with the help of such regular Sellars collaborators as costume designer Dunya Ramicova (who, like Sellars, teaches at UCLA), set designer George Tsypin and lighting designer James F. Ingalls--have fashioned a production of Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” that puts on stage the kinds of things one sees on the surrounding streets.

Ramicova’s sophisticated, up-to-the-second costumes might have come from the window of Paul Smith around the corner from the Royal Opera. Tsypin’s amazing sculptural set of mirrored panels and a complex wooden framework is just the sort of deconstructivist architecture that Prince Charles rails against. Ingalls’ brilliant lighting (the set takes on a different character with every lighting cue, never looking the same twice throughout the long, four-hour evening) has all the vitality of the most avant-garde lighting-fixture shops.

All of this has generated mixed reviews, and, of course, controversy, especially given the nature of Hindemith’s philosophical opera. “Mathis” revolves around German painter Matthias Grunewald and his involvement in the Peasant Uprising against the Catholic Church during the Reformation. For its admirers, the opera is simply one of the most profound spectacles of the 20th Century.

Through Mathis, Hindemith, living in Berlin in the 1930s, confronted the whole issue of the artist and his role in society. And he did it with enough specificity, including a scene in which the church burns Martin Luther’s books, that the Nazis banned the work. (The controversy helped prompt Hindemith, whose wife was Jewish, to emigrate to America.) Although rarely produced outside of Germany (it is mainly known through the popular symphonic suite Hindemith devised from it), the opera has been revived to celebrate the centenary of the composer’s birth last month.

For Sellars, Hindemith’s opera relates directly to our times, and he has been actively drawing parallels, in newspaper and magazine articles, between the Nazis and current political events--comparing, for instance, California’s Proposition 187 with Hitler’s 1933 proposal to limit education to foreigners and those of mixed race. However, the production itself does not specify time or place, which seems to have left some critics feeling that Sellars has made the opera difficult to understand.

Here, the Catholic Church authorities seem like cold businessmen/politicians in their muted suits. They control brutal, slightly futuristic riot police who in turn control a rebellious populace who could be demonstrators anywhere, anytime. The unchecked march of capitalism, Sellars makes clear, is scary business.

There is very little color in this grim production, except, significantly, for Mathis’ yellow shirt and for the red subtitles that scroll diagonally across the set, like advertising, but fractured by the broken surfaces. Three television monitors and occasional video projections of nervous flashing imagery bathe the stage in a curiously threatening monochrome technological flicker.

In this environment, Mathis--torn between sympathy for the people, with whom he fights, and his compulsion to make art, which is supported by the church--becomes the typical Sellars’ character. He must go through every possible state of mental, emotional and spiritual anguish, and even renounce love, before he can paint his masterpiece, the Isenheim Altarpiece (which is today in Colmar, France). It is only after that painting comes to life in a vision that Mathis can finally transcend both politics and art and be at peace.

What is intentionally missing from Sellars’ production is the sense of radiant spirituality that usually infuses the opera. Also missing is any allusion to the actual imagery of Grunewald’s masterpiece. When Mathis finally reveals his canvases in the last tableau--blood-red neo-expressionistic blotches of color that one might see in a grungy gallery on a gray Berlin street--their vivid brilliance shocks.

Nor is there radiance in Salonen’s conducting. While conductors often like to bathe the score in warm, mystical light (which can verge on kitsch), Salonen seconds Sellars’ harsh view of the opera as vivid drama. But in so doing he also asserts powerful authority over both orchestra and chorus (the chorus sits, in street clothes, in the front theater stalls), with thrilling musical results.

The singers too, for the most part, are able to live up to Sellars’ vision. In the leading role, American baritone Alan Titus somehow manages to portray an artist going through every possible form of emotional conflict, crushed by the demands of art, society and love, and still sing convincingly. Both sopranos, Inga Nelsen Ursula and Christiane Oelze as Regina, women stronger than Mathis who eventually show him the way to comprehend his spirit and his art, offer consistent vocal radiance that shines brightly through all the harshness of their circumstances.

Tenor Stig Andersen, vocally monotonous, disappointed as the conflicted Cardinal Albrecht, Mathis’ patron, whose transformation from tyrant to simple monk is unconvincing. But Royal Opera is generous in its casting of small roles, with the likes of mezzo Yvonne Minton as a countess debased by the uncontrollable crowds and tenor Robert Tear as a Dr. Strangelove-like Capito, the Cardinal’s malicious adviser.

Royal Opera is also generous with its well-made program book (the kind we never find in America), which not only includes Sellars’ own synopsis of the plot, but beautifully printed Grunewald reproductions and several substantial essays, including an excerpt from a speech that Toni Morrison recently gave at Harvard on the marketing of power.

The theme of “Mathis” is the need for society to support the artist and the artist to be a member of society. And although circumstances in Britain, with its government cutbacks for the arts, is far from perfect today, this production demonstrates that just such a situation still can and does exist in Europe, as well a complex discourse on it, to an extent seldom found in the United States.

* “Mathis der Maler” runs through Wednesday at London’s Royal Opera.