Grosses Festspielhaus
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| Images: Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus |
King – Roberto Tagliavini
Amneris – Ekaterina SemenchukAida – Anna Netrebko
Radamès – Francesco Meli
Ramfis – Dmitry Belosselskiy
Amonasro – Luca Salsi
Messenger – Bror Magnus Tødenes
High Priestess – Benedetta Torre
Shirin Neshat (director)
Christian Schmidt (set designs)
Tatyana van Walsum (costumes)
Reinhrad Traub (lighting)
Martin Gschlacht (photography)
Thomas Wilhelm (choreograpy)
Bettina Auer (dramaturgy)
Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Ernst Raffelsberger)
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Riccardo Muti (conductor)
It is a good thing to put even
one’s most settled judgements to the test from time to time. Seven years had
passed since my most recent encounter with Verdi in the opera house: seven
years of (relative) good luck since. If the nauseating La traviata remains a nadir in the
benighted ‘repertoire’ – better or worse than Donizetti, or about the same? who
cares really? – then the mindboggling tedium of Aida anoints it a serious contender for any such reckoning. However
fine the performances, and they were generally excellent here, any revival of
so unremittingly banal a work will prove, at best, an absurd misallocation of
resources. There is infinitely greater interest in any randomly selected note
of Webern. As Boulez memorably put it, ‘Verdi is stupid, stupid, stupid!’ Quite
why anyone would claim to know better remains a mystery.
Aida
apologists seem to like to
laud it essentially as a chamber opera, scenes of intimacy at its heart,
contrasting with the pomp and ceremonial of grand opera. Fine, but that is
hardly enough. It matters whether such scenes are any good, of any interest.
All we have here is a ‘bog standard’ – with apologies, for the first and last
time in my life, to Alastair Campbell – clash between public and private,
generalised in the extreme, with ‘characters’ so thinly drawn, if indeed they
be drawn at all, that a non-partisan listener cannot even begin to care. They
all sing the same sort of stuff, about the same sort of stuff, at interminable
length – it may be a relatively short opera, but it certainly did not feel like
it – to a plot whose implausibility is so contrived as not even to amuse.
(Maybe onstage elephants would have helped in that respect, if no other.) La clemenza di Tito, Mozart’s or anyone
else’s, this is not; indeed, it is
difficult to imagine a greater vulgarisation of the classical AMOR/ROMA
dilemma. Of all the tragedies of occupation and war, why would the weird self-obsession
of a woman who, rather than try to rescue her lover, elects instead to enter a
tomb in order that they be buried alive, even register? She deserves no better,
but what about poor Radamès? It would be nice to be able to care, but if
somehow one manages to do so, it will be on account of a performance, not the
work.
Frankly, their sentimental
festival of smothering – would they at least not have sex for the first and
last time? – cannot come quickly enough, even though it does not. Meyerbeer is
more dramatically interesting, certainly more historically important. Perhaps
this might work very occasionally as the exhumation of historical curiosity,
the recipient of due criticism, but to place such drivel at the heart of the
repertoire is too silly even to qualify as ‘edgy’ or critical performance art.
If Aida is actually a satire on a
well-heeled, self-regarding audience’s willingness to sit through anything,
however dull, provided that its abject lack of taste and judgement be
flattered, then is it not about time that someone finally explained the joke to
that audience?
All that said, there is
doubtless something for an interesting director to say; there always will be,
even if the work does not deserve it. What one hears about Hans Neuenfels’s
Frankfurt Aida sounds fascinating,
all the more so for 1981: the slave girl an Ethopian cleaner and a typical
Verdi audience screaming blue murder. Likewise Peter Konwitschny for Graz the
following decade. Shirin Neshat is certainly not one to join their number;
instead, alas, she joins the number of film artists who have nothing much to
say about opera, or at least cannot say it. Her production is as dull as the
work itself, creditably – I think, but now begin to wonder – shorn of the
traditional vulgar trappings, but with nothing to put in their place. There are
some half-hearted video (of course) images of refugees, but that is about it,
other than a ‘stylish’ look and a vast revolving set which sometimes does not
quite revolve as it should. (The second interval seems to have been mightily prolonged
on that account.) Could we not at least have had the death-wish slave girl as a
suicide bomber or something? Weirdly, she seemed to dress very much as Amneris;
perhaps that is what happens when you have Anna Netrebko in the title role. The
priests’ slightly strange look initially suggests parody; alas, nothing else
does. There is nothing much else to it apart from the designs, at least nothing
I could discern.
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| Aida (Anna Netrebko), Radamès (Francesco Meli), Amneris (Ekaterina Semenchuk) |
Netrebko, perhaps needless to
say, offered vocalism of a quality that would be spellbinding, were it expended
on more interesting material. No degree of vocal shading seemed beyond her, the
trademark richness of tone ever present yet variegated; if only the bizarre Orientalist shading of her make-up had shown a sensitivity that came anywhere close... Francesco Meli’s
Radamès was every bit as impressive, perhaps still more so, as handsome and
noble of tone as of aspect. Ekaterina Semenchuk was every inch the fiery mezzo,
again completely in command of her instrument and, insofar as the non-staging
permitted, her dramatic performance; I should love to hear (and to see) her as,
say, Ortrud. Roberto Tagliavini sounded a bit wooden as the King, but that
permitted some degree of contrast with Luca Salsi’s animated Amonasro. Choral
singing was excellent throughout, indeed outstanding, as was the playing of the
Vienna Philharmonic under Riccardo Muti, its shading every bit as exquisite as
Netrebko’s, the sweetness of string tone very much of old. Muti clearly
cherishes the score almost beyond price, however incapable I may be of
understanding why. His partnership with this orchestra rarely disappoints; here
he showed himself once again to play it as if it were a piano under his
fingers. If I found the pace rather slow at times, that was doubtless a
consequence of my feelings towards the work; enthusiasts, I am sure, would have
loved it.
I doubt there can have been
many superior performances of the opera throughout its history; I equally doubt
that I shall persuade myself to hear another. As for Verdi, see you in another seven
years’ time? Perhaps.
