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Images: (c) Ruth Walz
Sandrina (Annette Dasch), Belfiore (Joel Prieto) |
Schiller Theater, Berlin
Podestà – Stephan Rügamer
Sandrina – Annette Dasch
Belfiore – Joel Prieto
Arminda – Alex Penda
Ramiro – Stephanie Atanasov
Serpetta – Regula Mühlemann
Nardo – Aris Argiris
Countess – Elisabeth Trissenaar
Count – Markus Boysen
Hans Neuenfels (director)
Reinhard von der Thannen
(designs)
Olaf Freese (lighting)
Henry Arnold (dramaturgy)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Christopher Moulds (conductor)
Hans Neuenfels’s production
of La finta giardiniera, to which the
subtitle – or should it be surtitle? – Die
Pforten der Liebe (‘The Portals of Love’), has been added, received its
premiere in November last year. The cliché of being destined ‘to divide opinion’
seems unavoidable here. I found it in many respects fascinating, causing me to
reflect not only upon the work, but once again upon the concept of the musical
artwork, especially in performance. That is not to say that I thought every
aspect of Neuenfels’s reworking – it seems that designer Reinhard von der
Thannen and dramaturge Henry Arnold (of Heimat
2 fame) deserve credit here too – convinced or was indeed ‘necessary’, but
then one could say the same about most allegedly ‘traditional’ stagings. I am
certainly not claiming that there is anything wrong with presenting the work ‘as
it is’, or rather ‘as it has come down to us’, which is not really the same
thing at all, but there should be room in theatre and in musical performance for
re-examination, for disruption of what one might perhaps, in Benjamin-mode,
call disruption of the work’s aura, not least when reception history plays a
role, as it does here.
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| Arminda (Alex Penda) and actors |
For there is something of a
resurrection, or better, resuscitation, of the Singspiel-tendencies within the work and its history. It was, after
all, as early as 1780, just five years after the Munich premiere, that the work
was reimagined as Die verstellte
Gärtnerin for Augsburg, a reworking with which Mozart may have been
involved. The original Italian version of the first act having been lost for
almost a century, La finta giardiniera
as we understand it would not be revived until 1979, in Munich and Salzburg. I
do not share Neuenfels’s poor opinion of the libretto, but nor do I think it an
inviolate masterpiece, should indeed such a thing exist at all. (One can esteem
Da Ponte’s libretti, without prescribing cruel and unusual punishments for
those who might wish to make changes in particular performing circumstances.)
There is, then, reordering. Recitativi
secci are, without exception, cut. And we have introduced Neuenfels’s own
German dialogue, centred upon an elderly Count and Countess: less a matter of
flash-back to the action we recognise, though there seems to be an element of
that, than of collage and sometimes of interaction. ‘German humour’ does not
necessarily communicate itself well to foreigners, even if Emanuel Schikaneder suggests
otherwise, and I cannot claim that all of it does in this particular case,
though there are some splendid moments, not least that involving painful
delivery of carrots from actors’ trousers, in preparation for their reduction
in an electric blender (pictured above, with oranges). Eyebrows might also be raised by the return of
Neuenfels’s wife, Elisabeth Trissenaar, as the elderly Countess; a Berlin
friend tells me that she reappears with wearing regularity in his stagings.
That said, I thought she performed her role splendidly, and there are plenty of
conductors who cast spouses or lovers more often than might be strictly
necessary.
More fundamentally, there remains
an alertness to the darkness of ‘love’, whatever that might be, without turning
to tragedy, a sense of fantasy, by turns
wide-eyed and surrealistic that seems to point in some sense towards The Magic Flute, and a sense in theory,
if not, alas, always in practice, that Mozart’s music is the principal reason
for our interest. Probing our conceptions of love seems to me a definite
advance upon what is in some respects a stock buffa libretto. My thoughts turned to Neuenfels’s Così fan tutte, which I saw in Salzburg
in 2000, and almost alone seem to have admired. There was kinship too with
Stefan Herheim’s brilliant rethinking, again for Salzburg, of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, a work
transformed into a new and yet ancient parable concerning love, sex, and
gender. Herheim’s staging is more thoroughly thought through, partly, I
suspect, because he has a superior ear for music, and also, perhaps a related
point, because he never stoops to banality, but if, as I hope, the Neuenfels ‘work’
should prove be released on DVD, it ought to be seen. It would, moreover, be
interesting to see whether the shock of the new would bear repetition. There is,
in any case, more than a hint here of Berlin’s Komische Oper invading the
Staatsoper, just as Harry Kupfer once made that same journey, a sense of
welcome cross-fertilisation in the city’s operatic world.
The Staatskapelle Berlin was
on excellent form throughout. Though not so often recognised as such, this is
one of the world’s great Mozart orchestras, indeed one of the world’s great
orchestras. There was fullness of tone without over-ripeness; woodwind
contributions were simply delectable. If Christopher Moulds began the Overture
with incessant haste, his reading soon calmed down, without that entailing a
loss of inner life. The delights, and they are manifold, of Mozart’s scoring
were present for all to hear, even if listeners, as many understandably did, were
confused or even appalled by what they saw on stage. The cast was excellent
too. Joel Prieto’s honeyed tone made light yet substantial work of Count
Belfiore. The match with Annette Dasch’s somewhat more hochdramatisch soprano might on paper have seemed questionable, but
in practice worked very well, Dasch’s Sandrina offering cleanness of tone and
dramatic commitment in equal measure. Alex Penda’s Arminda impressed in very
much the same fashion, seizing her role by the scruff of the neck, and turning
it into something beyond the call of duty. Aris Argiris offered a different
experience, as befits Nardo, warmer, more buffo,
welcome in its reinstatement of tendencies of character and genre the staging
sometimes overlooked, or at least played down. But all of those participating
brought something, both individually and collectively, to the experience. In an
opera of this nature, and a staging of this nature, one needs a true sense of
company, a sense that was here most impressively achieved, whether in vocal, acting,
or orchestral contribution.
