Nationaltheater, Munich
Don Giovanni – Erwin Schrott
Commendatore – Ain Anger
Donna Anna – Albina
Shagimuratova
Don Ottavio – Pavol Breslik
Donna Elvira – Dorothea
Röschmann
Leporello – Alex Esposito
Zerlina – Eri Nakamura
Masetto – Brandon Cedel
Old Man – Ekkehard Bartsch
Stephan Kimmig (director)
Katja Haß (set designs)
Anja Rabes (costumes)
Benjamin Krieg (video)
Reinhard Traub (lighting)
Miron Hakenbeck (dramaturgy)
Chorus of the Bavarian State
Opera (chorus master: Stellario Fagone)
Bavarian State Orchestra
James Gaffigan (conductor)
All told, this was probably the
best Don Giovanni I have seen and
heard. Judging opera performances – perhaps we should not be ‘judging’ at all,
but let us leave that on one side – is a difficult task: there are so many
variables, at least as many as in a play and a concert combined, but then there
is the issue of that ‘combination’ too. At any rate, whilst not every aspect
might have been the ‘very best ever’ – how could it be? – all was of a very
high standard, and much was truly outstanding. I even began to think that the
wretched ‘traditional’ Prague-Vienna composite version might for once be
welcome; it was not, yet, given the distinction of the performances, the
dramatic loss was less grievous than on almost any other occasion I have experienced.
If Daniel
Barenboim’s Furtwänglerian reading in Berlin in 2007 remains the best
conducted of my life, there was nothing whatsoever to complain about in James
Gaffigan’s direction of the score. It was certainly a far more impressive
performance than a Vienna
Figaro last year, which led me to
wonder how much was to be ascribed to other factors, not least the truly
dreadful production; perhaps, on the other hand, Don Giovanni is just more Gaffigan’s piece. The depth and
variegation of the orchestral sound was second, if not quite to none, than only
to Barenboim’s Staatskapelle Berlin. This was far and away the best Mozart
playing I have heard in Munich. Even if the alla
breve opening to the Overture were not taken as I might have preferred, and
certain rather rasping brass concerned me at the opening, I find it difficult
to recall anything much to complain about after that; nor do I have any reason
to wish to try. Tempi were varied, well thought out, and above all considered
in relation to one another. Terror and balm were equal partners: on that night
in Munich, we certainly needed them to be.
This was, I think, Stephan
Kimmig’s first opera staging, first seen in 2009. I shall happily be corrected,
but I am not aware of anything since. If so, that is a great pity, for the
intelligence of which I have heard tell in his ‘straight’ theatre productions –
alas, I have yet to see any of them – is certainly manifest here. There are,
above all, two things without which an opera staging cannot survive: a strong
sense of theatre and a strong sense of intellectual and dramatic coherence. Equally
desirable is, of course, at least something of an ear for music, and
coordination between pit, voices, and stage action seemed to me splendidly
realised too.
A perennial lament of mine
concerning Don Giovanni productions concerns
refusal or inability to understand it as a thoroughly religious work. Here,
there is certainly some sense of sin; its relationship to atheistic heroism is,
just as it should be, complex. And the reappearance of the Commendatore and
(excellent) chorus at the end, some, including the Stone Guest himself, in
clerical garb, reminded us, without pushing the matter, that authority is at least
partly religious here. There are other forms of authority too – Don Ottavio’s
ever-mysterious reference to the authorities perhaps intrigues us more than it
should, or perhaps not – and they are also represented: military berets,
business suits, and so forth. A libertine offends far more than the Church; and
of course, the Church as an institution has always been many things in addition
to Christian (to put it politely).
Katja Haß’s set designs
powerfully, searchingly evoke the liminality of Da Ponte’s, still more Mozart’s
Seville. The drama is not merely historical, although it certainly contains
important historical elements. But above all, there is a labyrinth – one I am
tempted to think of as looking forward to operas by Berg, even Birtwistle,
perhaps even the opera that Boulez never wrote – in which all manner of
masquerading may take place. Social slippage and dissolution – above all the
chameleon-like abilities of the (anti-)hero – need such possibilities, which
are present here, in abundance, in a setting that both respects traditional
dramatic unities and renders them properly open to development. A warehouse,
containers revolving, opening and closing, changing and remaining the same,
provides the frame. Yet we are never quite sure what will be revealed,
languages of graffiti transforming, never quite cohering, Leporello’s catalogue
– and, more to the point, its implications – foreseen, shadowed, recalled.
There is butchery – literally – to be seen in the carcasses from which the
Commendatore emerges. There is glitzy – too glitzy – glamour in the show
Giovanni puts on to dazzle the peasantfolk; but it does its trick, coloured
hair and all.
And there is an Old Man,
observer and participant, sometimes there, sometimes not. Everyman? The
nobleman, had he outstayed his welcome, not accepted the invitation? He is
clearly disdained, even humiliated (what a contrast, we are made to think,
almost despite ourselves, between his naked body and the raunchy coupling – or more
– around him). That is, when he is seen at all: and that is, quite rightly, as
much an indictment of the audience as of the characters onstage. Part of what
we are told, it seems, is that this is a drama of the young, who have no need
of the elderly. Not for nothing, or so I thought, did Alex Esposito’s Leporello
exaggerate his caricatured sung response to Giovanni’s elderly women.
It is, then, an open staging:
suggestive rather than overtly didactic. In a drama overflowing with ideas,
that is no bad thing at all. Coherence is, whatever I might have implied above,
always relative; the truest of consistency will often if not always come close
to the dead hand of the Commendatore. For this was a staging that had me
question my initial assumptions: again, something close to a necessity for
intelligent theatre. (I assume that the bovine reactions from a few in the
stalls were indicative of a desire for anything but.)
If religion lies at the heart
of the opera, too little acknowledged, perhaps at least a little too little here
too, then so does sex. Sorry, ‘Against Modern Opera Productions’, but
there you have it; this really is not an opera for you, but then what is? Don Giovanni and Don Giovanni ooze – well,
almost anything and everything you want and do not want them to. They certainly
did here, which is in good part testament to this superlative cast. Erwin
Schrott’s Giovanni may be a known quantity – I have certainly raved about it before,
more than once – but it was no less welcome and no less impressive for that. ‘Acting’
and singing were as one. He held the stage as strongly as I have ever seen –
which means very strongly indeed – and his powers of seduction were as strong
as I have ever seen – which means, as I said… His partnership with Esposito’s
Leporello was both unique and yet typical of the dynamically drawn
relationships between so many of the characters on stage. Leporello was clearly
admiring, even envious of his master; their changing, yet not quite, of clothes
and identities was almost endlessly absorbing its erotic, yet disconcerting
charge. Esposito brought as wide a range of expressive means to his delivery of
the text as any Leporello, Schrott included, I remember. Their farewell was
truly shocking, Giovanni picking up his quivering servant from the floor,
kissing him for several spellbinding seconds, then wiping his mouth clean on
his sleeve and spitting contemptuously on the floor. It was time finally to
accept the Commendatore’s invitation, issued with grave, deep musicality by the
flawless Ain Anger.
I had seen Pavol Breslik as Don
Ottavio before. There could have been no doubting the distinction of his
performance in Berlin, under Barenboim, although neither artist was helped
by the non-production of Peter Mussbach. Here, however, Breslik presented, in
collaboration with the production, perhaps the most fascinating Ottavio I have
seen – and no, that is not intended as faint praise. This was a smouldering
counterpart to Giovanni, unable to keep his hands off Donna Anna, and frankly
all over her during her second-act aria. Their pill-popping – he supplied the
pills – opened up all manner of possibilities, not least given the frank
sexuality of their, and particularly his, reactions. The beauty of Breslik’s
tone, silken-smooth in his arias, added an almost Così fan tutte-like agony to the violent proceedings. In Albina
Shagimuratova, we heard a Donna Anna of the old school: big-boned, yet
infinitely subtle, her coloratura a thing of wonder. Combined with the
uncertainty of her character’s development – again, most intriguingly so – this
was again a performance both physically to savour and intellectually to relish.
So too was that the case with
Dorothea Röschmann’s Donna Elvira. Her portrayal – Kimmig’s portrayal – would certainly
not have pleased, at least initially, those for whom this is in large part a
misogynistic work. (It seems to me that they misunderstand some, at least, of
what is going on, but that is an argument for another time, and I am only too
well aware that it is not necessarily a claim that I, as a man, should be
advancing anything other than tentatively.) Downtrodden, yet beautifully sung,
in the first act, she nevertheless came into her defiant own in the second,
above all through the most traditionally operatic of means: sheer vocal splendour.
What a ‘Mi tradì’ that was!
Eri Nakamura gave the finest
performance I have heard from her as Zerlina, seemingly far more at home in
Mozart than when I heard her at Covent Garden. This was a Zerlina who both knew
and did not know what she was doing – as a character, of course, not as a
performance. And finally, Brandon Cedel’s portrait in wounded, affronted,
unconscious yet responsive masculinity proved quite a revelation: I do not
think any Masetto has made me think so much about his role in the drama. Nor
can I think, offhand, of any Masetto so dangerously attractive – again, like
Ottavio, in some sense an aspirant Giovanni, but one still more incapable of
being so. Morally, of course, that is to the character’s credit – but in this
most ambiguous of operas, and in this most fruitfully ambiguous of productions,
one was never quite sure.
