At one point in Heart Chamber, Chaya Czernowin’s fourth and latest opera, a filament bulb casts rusty light over a nuclear family. Audiences, seeing the actors through stage designer Christian Schmidt’s glass apartment façade, could mistake it for an incubator’s heat lamp. On a patch of lawn outside, soprano Patrizia Ciofi agonizes alongside her character’s “internal voice,” embodied in contralto Noa Frenkel. She–Ciofi’s character has no name, just a pronoun–wonders: will convention pull her into that autumnal glow of domesticity? For a person falling in love, this sort of thought may flicker across the mind but go unvoiced. Performed in Berlin on Friday, December 6, Heart Chamber renders private anxieties seldom acknowledged in love stories at an operatic scale.
Deutsche Oper Berlin, situated among dwellings and streetscapes like those onstage and in videos by rocafilm, proved an accommodating home. I saw everything from my seat, near an electronics control desk staffed by Czernowin and engineers from SWR Experimentalstudio Freiburg. Black boxes flanking the stage housed the quartet Ensemble Nikel on one side and a pair of soloists on the other. Double bassist Uli Fussenegger began the performance with a pulsing solo, an anti-overture that zooms in rather than opening out. Singer Frauke Aulbert interjected periodically with vocal explorations like those a person might make alone at home. Claus Guth directed Ciofi, Frenkel, baritone Dietrich Henschel, and countertenor Terry Wey through Czernowin’s succession of states. As in many operas since the 1990s, traditional notions of plot give way to encounters and visions, the timeline fractured.
HEART CHAMBER, Director: Claus Guth, World premiere on 15 November 2019, Deutsche Oper Berlin, copyright: Michael Trippel
Ciofi’s She and Henshel’s He appear right away, with Ensemble Nikel striking chords as the singers sit below films of themselves walking. The set rotates; audience members watch these strangers approach one another on the public stairway outside the apartment. The jar of honey that She drops and He picks up, brushing her hand, becomes more than a plot device. Later videos will show ants crawling over it, and its hue recurs in the lighting (by Urs Schönebaum) of dreams. Sweetness has nothing to do with its metaphorical role. Its symbolism comes from its strange sensuousness, its wild organic substance bottled up in human modernity–characteristic images for Czernowin. It inhabits a web of metaphors: crawling skin, visceral butterflies, the sting of a fight, pressure to follow the hivemind. The apartment comes to look like an ant farm, and the buzzing of bees surrounds listeners via a speaker array.
Johannes Kalitzke led the Deutsche Oper’s Orchestra with force and forbearance. In one extraordinary series of transitions, a conflagration of low brass in the pit yielded to silence under a video. Henshel then sang out his thoughts, answered by the tubist and contrabassoonist, and Ensemble Nikel picked up the thread. Antoine Françoise’s crashing piano figures leapt out of the texture, then volleyed around the room in an electronic loop. Finally, lights illuminated the sixteen-member choir stationed up in the loges; equipped with hand percussion, they entered with commentary. Few weave such disparate sounds as deftly as Czernowin, who wraps listeners in an audiovisual tapestry while leaving threads visible.
Ciofi and Henschel cut distinct, believable emotional profiles, confident in their delivery of Czernowin’s melodies, whispers, and stammers. The final line of Czernowin’s libretto, which blends literary reference with everyday utterance, comes from She: “I love you.” The opera could only end this way, given the trip-ups it finds in the path to that declaration. Frenkel and Wey blended while also handling specific outpourings of excitement and worry, converging as their external selves grew together.
HEART CHAMBER, Director: Claus Guth, World premiere on 15 November 2019, Deutsche Oper Berlin, copyright: Michael Trippel
Czernowin has said that Heart Chamber represents a return to and revision of ideas in Pnima (2000), her first opera. Between the two came Adama (2006), a tale of ill-fated, cross-border love, and Infinite Now (2017), an outcry and elegy. Heart Chamber‘s roots in her output run deep, and critics have already compared it to modernist operas past.
Yet it stands apart, distinguished by its assembly of media, metaphors, and streams of information to achieve startling immediacy. Like the autofiction that readers have devoured in the past decade, Heart Chamber offers shocks of recognition and empathy. The protagonists remain nameless, their meet-cute oddly specific. Few people dream of moss consuming them when stressed over their love life. But despite this mix of abstraction and particularity, Czernowin and collaborators conjure emotions and sensations that ring true. Heart Chamber’s formal grandeur and mediated multiplicity contradict its intimacy of expression and sound. The operatic cast, orchestra, and choir, plus Ensemble Nikel’s rock-ish instruments, seem to contradict Czernowin’s microscopic levels of detail and, often, volume. Yet the space between immersing vastness and tiny sparks of human experience is where you and I and everyone fit. We all have heart chambers. Czernowin just chose to listen in.
