Kasper Holten’s new Royal
Opera production of Don Giovanni has
caused quite a stir. I cannot comment, since I have not seen it, and shall not
do so until 14th. However, one feature I have gleaned from reports –
and I should stress that this is second-hand – relates to the ending.
Apparently, the opening of the final scene is cut, so that we only hear the
final ‘moral’. A journalist claimed earlier today that Mozart had done the same
in 1788. Quite how he knew is unclear. It is clearly a sign that investigative
journalism is anything but dead, since I am unaware of any Mozart scholar being
party to the details of what precisely was performed at those Vienna
performances. In fact, of course, we do
not know – and that is in many ways more interesting. Mozart may have
omitted the final scene completely, or he may not. The 1788 Vienna libretto
does not include it, though a Vienna score (not an autograph) does. Moreover,
there was also the possibility of a cut within the scena ultima, running from ‘Ah! certo è l’ombra che
m’incontrò!’ to ‘Resti
dunque quel birbon’; there are four ‘new’ bars, marked Andante, to facilitate that transition. It does not sound as though
that is what happened at Covent Garden; even if it were, the intriguing reality
remains that we do not know what
Mozart (and Da Ponte) did in Vienna, so why claim otherwise? As Julian Rushton
points out in his Cambridge Opera Handbook to the work, it may well be the case
that different ways of ending the opera were tried out.
There
is nothing intrinsically wrong with doing so now, though it seems to me that one
ought to have good reason. Another
‘version’ about which we know frustratingly, yet intriguingly, little comes from
1850: Wagner’s lost Zurich revision. He describes it as a Bearbeitung
in a letter from early that year to Theodor Uhlig, and speaks of having
'carefully nuanced' (sorgfältig nüancirt) the orchestra, made a
new translation, and various other changes, which, without a score, it is not
always easy fully to understand. That is, of course, if we take what he has to say not only at face value - there is no particular reason we should not - but also as his final thoughts on a work he would conduct eight months later. In any case, Wagner ends that
particularly discussion with the playful, 'Nun genug von dieser Flickarbeit!'
('Now, enough of this patchwork maintenance!') There are extant, tantalisingly, a fragment,
discovered in the late 1990s, comprising nine bars of off-stage trumpet cues,
also dialogue cues and another fragment of just two bars held by the University
of Leipzig. Chris Walton, one of the few to have considered this material,
speculates that Wagner’s revisions were less radical than might have
been implied, perhaps exaggerated as part of a marketing ploy. At present,
however, we might with equal justification speculate otherwise. We simply do not know. Perhaps, however,
one day an imaginative and/or foolhardy composer might even dare to enter the
mediated realm of reimagining Wagner’s reimagining – aided by a sympathetic
director and cast.
For it is, of course, true
that, for all our latter day reverence for the musico-dramatic work concept, Don Giovanni has experienced a chequered
history in that respect. Indeed, more often than not conductors and/or
directors even today will opt for a conflation of Mozart’s versions for Prague
and Vienna: largely, one fears, a matter of bowing to singers’ – and audiences’
– demands for extra arias rather than out of genuine dramatic conviction. It
is, of course, a hard pill to swallow, to lose one of Donna Elvira’s arias and
one of Don Ottavio’s; the Vienna duet between Zerlina and Leporello is
generally considered no great loss. However, there has yet to be mounted a
dramatic, as opposed to pragmatic, justification for offering the now
commonplace succession of arias in the second act. (I might, for instance, hazard
a possible explanation, as Devil’s Advocate, in the guise of heightening the
elements of opera seria display,
striking a blow against Wagnerian notions of dramatic cohesion and continuity,
but that case remains to be made.)
More extreme measures, however,
were taken in the more distant past. Berlioz, writing of an 1834 Paris staging,
was moved to lament:
It is a pity that it was
considered necessary to take various dances, extended, lopped off, reordered,
and orchestrated according to the method which seems to me so inimical to
musical sense and the interests of art, from other works of Mozart, and insert
them into Don Giovanni; without these
additions the absolutely pure style of this sublime score, boldly breaking the
public habits of the last eight or ten years, might have completed this
important revolution.
Moreover, a reference to
the Stone Guest scene, ‘the trombones, which have been silent for some time,’
suggests that, in contravention of the score, they had been heard earlier –
though, given Mozart’s reorchestrations of Handel, dismay might be misplaced.
There persisted, furthermore,
the Romantic tradition of omitting the final scene – which, as we have seen,
may or may not have some warrant in Mozart’s practice in 1788. For the Mozart
year of 1906, Mahler in Vienna not only altered some of the orchestration, made
cuts both of complete arias and ensembles and also within certain numbers, and
interpolated the finale to Mozart’s Divertimento in B-flat major, KV 287/271h. In a practice that was already being
questioned, he and his director, Alfred Roller – the latter, of course, also a
crucial figure in the history of Wagner staging – concluded with Don Giovanni’s
descent into Hell. Whereas to many modern audiences, and certainly to me, the
final sextet introduces a note of bracing, almost Brechtian alienation, framing
the action in a sense that both harks back to more ancient traditions as well
as looking forwards beyond Romanticism, there was for Mahler and Roller nothing
more to say at this point, notwithstanding the oddness of what therefore became
the final cadence. However, as Henry-Louis de La Grange notes, even in that fin-de-siècle context, many other recent productions of Don Giovanni had included it, notably
that given by Ernst von Possart in Munich. (Possart was the actor for whom
Strauss wrote his 1897 melodrama, Enoch
Arden.)
The ‘tradition’ seemed to
have died out; Furtwängler, whom, amongst post-war conductors, some might have
suspected of harbouring such tendencies, certainly did not continue it. (Much
to his credit, I am tempted to say.) And then, Claus Guth staged the work as
part of a Da Ponte trilogy for the Salzburg Festival, Don Giovanni first seen in 2008 – a little more than a century
after Mahler, and thus almost as distant from him as he was from Mozart – and
revived in 2010. (Note the transition from speaking of Mahler’s or
Furtwängler’s Don Giovanni to the
director’s.) The premise, as revealed in a brief programme
discussion, was that:
Mozart
tried to deal with all of our lives in the three hours he had for this opera.
But what if he managed to compress everything that moves and occupies us into
this framework? We must die. What do we do with our lifetime? Do we conform and
subordinate ourselves, do we break out, do we try to fit in or break loose, cut
our ties?
Interesting
enough so far, but the problem was that Guth’s realisation failed to live up to
the promise. What it boiled down to on stage seemed closer to a reality
television programme: how would someone with three hours left to live decide to
spend those three hours? By taking drugs and trying – unsuccessfully – to have
sex with a good few women in a forest, all with the help of a slightly subordinate
friend. I say ‘slightly subordinate’, since it was not at all clear what the social
relationship between the protagonists might be. Blithely casting aside
distinctions of order was one thing, but like many directors, Guth did not
provide an adequate substitute.
The
familiar conflation of the score was employed, barring the Leporello and
Zerlina duet. (It seems had been included in 2008, then cut in 2010, when I saw
the production.) I found myself quite unprepared for the absence of the final
scene, not having been made aware beforehand. Yes, expectations were
confounded, which can sometimes be a good thing in itself, and yes, of course
there was the Romantic-Mahlerian tradition to which to appeal. In context,
however, the feeling of straightforward incompletion was jarring rather than
fruitful. It was difficult to avoid the suspicion that Guth had simply misunderstood
the nature of the sextet. Its alienation effect might have rendered both work
and production more interesting; without it, we veered dangerously
close to melodrama, especially odd given the general tone of the production.
The problem was not the decision as such as its placing and indeed the
director’s reasoning. Guth claimed that Mozart was ‘bowing to convention’, yet
throughout the work Mozart had come close to destroying any such concept; the
finale could be understood to be still more radical in this context, inevitably
to us suggesting Stravinsky and beyond: the neo-Classicism of The Rake’s Progress or at least Neue Sachlichkeit.
Oliver
Knussen understands this very well in his fantasy opera (1984-5, revised 1999),
Higglety Pigglety Pop! Both Higglety and Don
Giovanni end 'outside' their dramas, in bright if tarnished D major – and
the Mother Goose World Theatre surely pays tribute to Stravinsky’s work too.
The repetitions of Higglety’s
closing-scene gala performance, no mere convention but the time-honoured tradition
of a play within a play, unsettle as they should. What do they mean? When will
they stop? That is a more radical reimagining than simply not knowing how to
conclude.
Tellingly,
Mozart’s score in performance begged for completion. It did not chillingly come
to a halt, after Wozzeck; it seemed
rather simply to stop, awkwardly. Although it was interesting, then, to hear an
accidental revival of this venerable ‘version’, in practice, however, the
inappropriate context served principally to confirm discrediting of the
tradition. Here was an instructive case of a director who seemed to have too
little knowledge of, or indeed interest in, the score; ‘respect’ for the work
would have expanded rather than lessened performative options.
Let
us see then, what happens at the Royal Opera House…
