The formidable hotelier reborn as an opera villain
Glyndebourne has set ‘The Magic Flute’ in the decadent Hotel Sacher in Vienna. Rupert Christiansen reports
Take a straw poll of operatic villains and the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Die
Zauberflöte would surely emerge the favourite – the mercurial coloratura and tingling top Fs in her two arias always provoke wild applause (even if the poor singer misses them, as she often will). The role was originally composed for Mozart’s sister-inlaw Josefa Hofer – a plonkingly dull actress, apparently, but a singer with a brilliant technique who continued performing the part all over Europe for more than a decade after the composer’s death.
The character of the Queen is a conundrum. At her first appearance, she looks and sounds like a wronged mother, whose daughter Pamina has been kidnapped by the evil Sarastro; she has benign servants and speaks kindly and encouragingly to Tamino. By the second act, however, she has become an outright nasty on the warpath for vengeance, whereas Sarastro has become the voice of God, despite his misogyny and corrupt entourage.
Why? What is going on here? Some have thought that the Queen is an ambivalent portrait of the
Empress Maria Theresa, who had died a decade before the opera’s premiere in 1791. Others have speculated that at some late stage in rehearsals, the librettist and director Emanuel Schikaneder changed his mind for practical reasons about the tenour of the plot – and to hell with psychological consistency.
In any case, the muddle at the heart of this pantomime fantasy allows directors considerable leeway for interpretation, and for this summer’s new production of the opera at Glyndebourne, the French-Canadian team of André Barbe and Renaud Doucet have taken full advantage of it by setting the opera in the context of the real-life Hotel Sacher in Vienna, depicted upstairs and downstairs in a visually arresting series of cartoonlike black-and-white backdrops, and casting the Queen of the Night in the guise of a formidable woman who managed the institution between 1892 and 1929.
Anna Sacher had a contemporary British equivalent in Rosa Lewis, who ran the Cavendish Hotel in London and posthumously became the subject of the popular television series The Duchess of Duke Street. But whereas Rosa and her establishment were highly respectable, an aura of dubious loucherie hovered around Anna’s reputation.
The daughter of a suburban butcher, born in 1859, she married the chef Eduard Sacher, who had worked as a pâtissier at Vienna’s venerable and aristocratically patronised Café Demel. Here he developed a recipe for a chocolate and apricot jam cake, passed to him by his baker father Franz, who had once presented the confection to Prince Metternich at a banquet. It soon became all the rage.
Shortly afterwards, taking his recipe with him, Eduard raised enough capital to build a tavern on the Parisian model, in which small private dining rooms – known as chambres séparées – allowed wealthy gentlemen to consort with their mistresses or worse, and no questions asked. Newly prosperous and morally decadent Vienna took to this offer so enthusiastically that Eduard was able in 1873 to open a large hotel in the city centre, just opposite the opera house. Its atmosphere was hedonistic: one of his most frequent clients was Crown Prince Rudolf, the sex-crazed drug addict who scandalously shot himself and his lover at the Mayerling hunting lodge in 1889.
When Eduard died in 1892, Anna was only too ready to take over the hotel’s management. A stout, formidable and decisive woman, who smoked cigars and was permanently flanked by her pet dogs, she was uninterested in policing her customers’ morals, and the Sacher’s chambres séparées became so notorious that the straitlaced considered the place little better than a brothel. But it was also extremely luxurious, efficiently run and celebrated for its fine wines and gourmet cuisine, not least the Sachertorte.
After the First World War and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Anna Sacher went into decline. She retired shortly before her death in 1930, having fallen out with her son Eduard jnr, who had against her will entered into league with the rival Café Demel, an institution (coincidentally also run by a widow named Anna) which claimed patented ownership of the recipe for Sachertorte and pursued a vicious lawsuit that lasted until the Sixties.
One of its most frequent clients was the sex-crazed Crown Prince Rudolf, who shot himself and his lover