Korngold - Das Wunder der Heliane (Le miracle d'Héliane), at the Opéra National du Rhein in Strasbourg

Opéra National du Rhin, Strasbourg, Sunday February 1 2026

Conductor: Robert Houssart. Production: Jakob Peters-Messer. Sets, lighting, costumes: Guido Petzold. Costumes: Tanja Liebermann. Heliane: Camille Schnoor. Der Herrscher: Josef Wagner. Der Fremde: Ric Furman. Die Botin: Kai Rüütel-Pajula. Der Pförtner: Damien Pass. Der blinde Schwertrichter: Paul McNamara. Der junge Mann: Massimo Frigato. Richter: Thomas Chenhall, Glen Cunningham, Daniel Dropulja, Eduard Ferenczi Gurban, Michał Karski, Pierre Romainville. Angel (dancer): Nicole van den Berg. Chorus of the Opéra National du Rhin. Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg.

Photos: Klara Beck@ONR

As part of a season that includes Otello, a touring production of Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Le Roi d’Ys, Le nozze di Figaro, Händel’s Trionfo del Tempo, Hänsel und Gretel, ballets, and a couple of musicals including, for those who feel up to it, Gypsy with Natalie Dessay, the Opéra National du Rhin has just ended the first ever French run of Korngold’s fourth opera, Das Wunder der Heliane (1927). His third, Die tote Stadt, was first staged in France in the same house, twenty-five years ago. All of this testifies, I think, to the imagination shown in their programming by France’s regional opera houses (French daily Le Figaro's review of Heliane also covers the opening night of Weinberg’s The Passenger in Toulouse, calling the events ‘a double coup’).

Die tote Stadt eventually made it to Paris eight years later. Heliane, obviously, hasn’t managed that yet.

When in Strasbourg, the Opéra National du Rhin, which also performs in Colmar, Mulhouse, and smaller towns in the region, occupies a handsome neoclassical theatre with a grand, red-sandstone peristyle topped by six muses, inaugurated in 1821 and restored, after they’d bombarded it, by the Germans in 1888. Strasbourg is now less than two hours from Paris by high-speed train. This means that, with matinee seats, you can comfortably leave Paris at 10 am, wolf a choucroute near the cathedral, see the opera, and be home for a snack before bedtime. Which, as a rarity like Heliane was not to be missed, is exactly what I did.

To save those who don’t know it from scouring the web, I’ll try to sum the story up briefly here. It is based on a mystery play by the poet Hans Kaltneker, who died of tuberculosis at just 24; but, this being Austria coming up to 1920, ‘Heliane is about sex, and how the sexual act is the holiest of holies when carried out between people in love.’ (So writes Michael Haas, leader of Decca’s famous ‘Entartete Musik’ series, in a blog article well worth reading if you want to know more about the work.)

So, that plot, which (along with the convoluted text) recalls various highly-charged works from around the same period.

Heliane is in a loveless marriage to a tyrant. She falls for a mysterious, Christ-like stranger, on death row for promoting redemption through love. When news gets out, they are put on trial, but the stranger stabs himself to save Heliane. In front of the townspeople, her husband decrees that to prove she is innocent, she must restore the stranger to life. Refusing to blaspheme, she confesses her love but would rather burn at the stake than submit to her husband. A chorus of angels strikes up as the stranger is resurrected. Heliane runs to his arms. The tyrant stabs her, but the lovers remain united in ecstasy. End.

That’s boiled down from three acts, but you get the idea. The music is, from bar one, instantly recognisable Korngold, filled with echoes of Die tote Stadt and foretastes of what would become the Hollywood style and sound.

The Strasbourg production was initially toured by the Nederlandse Reisopera in 2023, and the Philharmonique uses the reduced score, for 70 to 80 musicians, commissioned by the Dutch company from Fergus McAlpine, with the blessing of Korngold’s estate, to make their tour - and more productions by houses unable to field an orchestra of over 100 - possible.

The casting was remarkably strong all round, starting with six evenly-matched judges and, in particular, Der junge Mann. Although his moment of fame is more like fifteen seconds than Warhol’s fifteen minutes, Korngold couldn't resist giving him a fearsome top note to deal with. The tall and glowering young Italian tenor Massimo Frigato, a member of the house’s Opéra Studio and Roderigo in this season’s Otello, nailed it. Bravo.

Paul McNamara is an ex-baritone from Ireland, who realised he was a tenor while rehearsing Leporello. He has since sung numerous hefty roles in Germany, and was Kazakhstan’s first ever Tristan. Both vocally and dramatically, he makes a convincingly adamant blind judge, based on which I should imagine he is, or would be, a good Herod. Franco-Australian (via Yale and Oberlin) Damien Pass has a pleasant, medium-weight baritone voice - not always audible among Korngold’s paroxysms - and an engaging stage personality: being nice seems to come naturally. 

The role of the messenger, Die Botin, is more sporadic than extensive, but it’s vehement: she’s the local bad-girl and bitch, and shows it. Estonian mezzo Kai Rüütel-Pajula, like McNamara new to me, was suitably fiery, her voice rich and colourful, her demeanour… well, bitchy. Josef Wagner I first saw in Salome in Stockholm ten years ago: ‘... a truly thrilling Jochanaan, very nearly stealing the show.’ He has sung Der Herrscher before, in the Berlin production starring Sara Jakubiak and Brian Jagde, out on DVD (and, but don’t tell anybody, on YT via Lady Izolde), where you judge see for yourself how good he is.

Our Heliane, Franco-German Camille Schnoor, another new name to me, seems to be making a career of singing more or less substantial roles in mostly regional houses: Rosalinde in Lille, the Foreign Princess in Marseille, Ciò-Ciò-San in Limoges, Rouen and Vichy, Ariadne in Limoges, and so on; she is soon to sing Micaela in Hongkong and the Marschallin in Germany (so I read: I’m not making it up). She has a full, fairly consistent voice with a darkish, round, slightly veiled timbre, and no significant difficulty coping with Korngold’s uncompromising, near-inhuman demands. She has all Heliane’s notes, but is, understandably, at her limit. Sometimes the effort shows; again, understandable, especially as she throws herself bodily into the staging. There’s little left over, so to speak, for subtleties, for variety of vocal colour, shading… Also, in the libretto’s more garrulous moments (it has those), in the middle range her sustaining power flags somewhat. I admit I sometimes wondered if, by singing Heliane, she wasn’t taking a big risk for the future. But I mention all this only to give a full account, not to detract from her achievement in mastering the role. She was of course loudly applauded.

If I’ve left American Heldentenor Ric Furman till last, it’s because, to me, he was the best-cast of all as the enigmatic, starry-eyed stranger. His is an intriguing sort of voice - does the term jugendlicher-lyrischer Heldentenor exist? - and he has a handsome and, in this production, Christ-like presence on stage - by which I mean the blond, blue-eyed Jesus of the Kitsch Christian imagery of my (and many others’) childhood. Rather like Camille Schnoor, after a Seattle Lohengrin (2014), he’s been singing big roles, mostly in Germany, many of them Wagner’s, in reasonably-sized theatres, which makes sense as his voice is, by Heldentenor standards, clear and quite light: Max-weight, you might say. His singing was spot-on all afternoon, killer notes and all, with a brilliance that suited his visionary, somewhat spaced-out character.

In this work, killer notes aren’t reserved for the soloists alone. The chorus did a miraculous job with Korngold’s thorny writing, some of it - when the mob gets its dander up - curious indeed, and presumably hard to keep together. There was, however, no miracle in the pit. I was reminded of the days, before the Bastille was built, when the Strauss of, say, Rosenkavalier was more than the Paris Opera orchestra could make sense of. Conductor Robert Houssart was perhaps too busy just keeping all the notes more or less in place to join them together in a continuous sweep, as part of an overarching vision. The reduced scoring makes the work available to regional houses, yes; but while stripping out lush, late-romantic padding, leaving us with a more raw, expressionistic sound, it cruelly exposes their orchestras. In Strasbourg, like the Paris Opera’s pre-Bastille Strauss (and sometimes its Janacek even now), the music remained disjointed, occasionally even chaotic: the orchestral start of the second and third acts were examples of that. In Le Figaro, Christian Merlin, who’s had a whole series about orchestras on French radio, summed it all up as ‘plus de rudesse que de sensualité,’ more rough than sensual.

Jakob Peters-Messer’s staging is, as you might expect from one designed to tour, relatively simple. There’s one, mostly brightly-lit space. Its two walls form a corner towards the right at the rear, under an undulating mirrored ceiling. Depending on the lighting, the space is white, grey, or that very pale green that Prada paints its shops. Reflected light makes complex, fascinating patterns on the walls, and sometimes stills from the 1933 Czech film Ecstasy, with Hedy Lamarr and Aribert Mog, are projected on them (a glance at Wikipedia will explain why).

The act-one prison is sparsely but chicly furnished with a Marcel Breuer divan and tables, i.e. from around the time Korngold was composing Heliane. The stranger wears a kind of ‘urban adventurer’ outfit (think The Lost Ark) of white cargo pants, grey tee shirt, tan jeans-jacket and boots; Heliane unbuttons a slinky, champagne silk dress to show him her breasts (in the story, she’s supposed to be quite naked). An angel - a dancer - in a grey hoodie already hovers (though not literally) around. She will act as a kind of chorus throughout the opera.

The courtroom in the second act, with a simple white tribune and orange plastic chairs, is meant to recall the trial of the Baader-Meinhof group, though if you hadn’t read that you probably wouldn’t know. The judges are cleverly dressed in sharply-tailored black raincoats, with white ties, i.e. echoing without actually representing judges’ robes; the tyrant and the blind judge are in total black. Die Botin is got up as an efficient and officious assistant. The crowd that surges in rather too visibly represents ‘all walks of life’, with people wearing or bearing the attributes of their lifestyle, class or calling, like saints in old paintings displaying the symbols of their martyrdom (e.g. Saint Agatha’s breasts on a tray), or with a castle or cathedral in their outstretched hands. There was even the imam from the local mosque, a demonstrator holding a placard, and a bourgeoise with a Louis Vuitton bag.

In the last act, the chorus/crowd, having changed their mind about the stranger, have changed their clothes as well, now appearing in Antifa-style black (or at any rate as protestors of some kind), only their diverse costumes veer just a touch too close to Fashion Week. (I remembered a friend describing the design of the Aeroflot office in London, all boxy black leather, as ‘workers’ realist chic.’) They wheel in plastic bins, and throw in placards and papers - discarding their illusions, I think; they use crowd-control barriers and wooden pallets to build a pyre, stoked by wands of fluorescent light. As apotheosis approaches, various characters clearly strike mannerist poses from baroque religious painting.

And then comes the final coup de théâtre. The angelic voices ring out, the stranger is resurrected and reunited with Heliane, and walls and ceiling crack apart, giving way to a cascade of dazzling slivers of mirror, a kind of great white way to heaven. Only it's tackily blingy. Trumpery. Deliberately so, I suspect, heaven being but a corny chimera - all smoke and mirrors, as the saying indeed goes.