It's time for Berlin to remember its heritage

Pure propaganda. In the name of art. You could already do that in the 18th century. Louis XIV, the absolutist king's lodestar for all European monarchs, set an example. Architects, sculptors, painters, composers, choreographers, singers, actors, dancers - they all had to convey the king's political message about the good, just monarch.

A learned student was Frederick II of Prussia, not called the Great for nothing. Above all, he made opera a top priority and wanted to compete with Versailles, Munich, Vienna and Dresden. He personally looked after castrati and prima donnas, for his court orchestra he engaged the flute virtuoso Johann Joachim Quantz and the composing brothers Johann Gottlieb (also an important violinist) and Carl Heinrich Graun (also a virtuoso singer).

And because the otherwise Francophile Friedrich was a fabulous fan of Italian opera, Carl Heinrich Graun - like Georg Friedrich Handel and Johann Adolph Hasse - phenomenally appropriated their style with pompous coloratura and sprawling da capo arias. The great Friedrich himself wrote the libretti or at least the templates for three of his operas, which are always about the virtue and grace of the rulers.

In 1749 a "Coriolano" was created. “Montezuma” (1755), set in the Inca Empire, is dug up again and again. The Rome-based “Silla” from 1753, about a dictator misguided by hubris and amorous desires who, in the last few meters of the opera, turns into a do-gooder who forgives everyone and renounces his laurel crown, of course he means Frederick himself. The king as the first servant of his state, understander his subjects, always striving for their well-being.

A grandiose product of this sounding "glorification industry" of the monarchy. Three years later, of course, Empress Maria Theresa had to accept that Frederick, who was actually not at all a peace-lover, invaded Habsburg Silesia and unleashed the Seven Years' War and redrawn the map of the great European powers.

All of this is already resonating in “Silla”, which surprisingly has not been gloriously revived in Prussia after 270 years, but at the Innsbruck Festival for Early Music in its unabridged four and a half hours of play. Why not in Berlin? The three Friedrich works at the Lindenoper (“Montezuma” was released in 1982 by the Deutsche Oper im Hebbel-Theater, directed by Herbert Wernicke), that would definitely be a bigger, more local patriotic project than the constant stream of new Monteverdi trilogies.

Especially since the "Silla" - the king provided the complete French prose draft, court poet Giovanni Pietro Tagliazucchi translated everything into Italian verse - is a really good piece. It is also a wonderful highlight and conclusion under the thirteen-year artistic directorship of Alessandro de Marchi, who in his last Innsbruck festival production in the Tyrolean state theater conducted the festival orchestra from the cembalo with aplomb.

His era wasn't always happy either. Nevertheless, he managed to rediscover important rarities such as Provenzale's "La Stellidaura", Broschi's "Merope" and Pasquini's "Idalama", some of which have been recorded on CD.

A well-known crew of singers gathered for the exciting and meaningful “Silla”. The cast alone with the four countertenors Bejun Mehta (a metallic Silla), Samuel Mariño (the delicate lover Postumio), Valer Sabadus and Hagen Matzeit (both sometimes lyrical, sometimes manly councillors) was top class.

Then there was the patrician Ottavia, the love object Sillas who finally generously ceded to Postumio, to whom Eleonora Bellocci gave flaming soprano rage; as well as their persuasive, but then also outraged mother Fulvia – breathed through once more with mezzo vibrance by Roberta Invernizzi. The intriguer Crisogno, who was banned in the end, was a bit heavy on the tenor Mert Süngü's throat.

Berlin's ex-opera director Georg Quander, who is no stranger here, staged simply but powerfully in the typical Frederician-Roman panoramas of the time. The costumes also cite antiquity, rococo and androgynous today.

Especially in the second and third acts, when the music drives the characters more and more furiously in front of it and becomes dramatically believable in duets and trios, it becomes clear how close Graun comes to the reformer Gluck. And yet he still cultivates the great airs of melody, the sprawling aria – albeit integrated into long-established causal musical contexts that are no longer an end in themselves.

A surprising opera treat. Next Easter it can also be enjoyed in Brandenburg's Schlosstheater Rheinsberg - where the young Friedrich founded his first court of muses. This “Silla”, gloriously revived in Innsbruck, made lavishly audible why the Friedrich operas by Graun must also be played in Berlin soon.