Haus für Mozart
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| Images: Werner Kmetitsch |
Sarastro – Franz-Josef Selig
Queen of the Night – Kathryn Lewek
Tamino – Magnus Dietrich
Pamina – Emily Pogorelc
Papageno – Theodore Platt
Papagena – Tamara Ivaniš
Three Ladies – Alice Rossi, Štěpánka Pučálkova, Noa Beinert
Monostatos – Paul Schweinester
Speaker, First Priest – Rupert Grössinger
Priests and Armoured Men – Maximilian Müller, Maximilian Anger
Three Boys – Frederick Derwein, David Platzer, Laurenz Oberfichtner
Mozart – Vitus Denifl
Constanze – Victoria D’Agostino
Carl Thomas Mozart – Paul Tanzer
Director – Rolando Villazón
Set designs – Harold Thor
Costumes – Tanja Hofmann
Choreography – Ramses Sigl
Lighting – Stefan Bolliger
Video – Roland Horvath/rocafilm
Dramaturgy – Ulrich Leisinger
Assistant director – Bettina Gayer
Theatre manager – Kirsten Kimmig
Philharmonia Chor Wien (chorus director: Walter Zeh)
Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra
Roberto González-Monjas (conductor)
It has been a while since Salzburg’s Mozartwoche gave a fully staged version of a mature Mozart opera. The choice of The Magic Flute, directed by Intendant Rolando Villazón, was not arbitrary, but rather a centrepiece to the 70th anniversary festival’s focus on Mozart’s last year. The opera could hardly be more emblematic of 1791; it was the last, barring fragments, to be completed and first performed, although most of the score was composed before La clemenza di Tito. Moreover, Villazón’s staging is set in that year, on the final night of Mozart’s life, presenting on stage the broader concept of his final-year focus and its motto ‘Lux Aeterna’: that on his death, Mozart was for us truly born.
In that, we saw the production’s most arresting image, shortly after having heard its most arresting, if doubtless controversial, musical surprise. The Queen of the Night and Monostatos (here spelled ‘Manostatos’ after Mozart’s autograph) having threatened to destroy the temple and so on, Mozart finally expires, having been with us all along (on which more anon); the orchestra cuts to the Requiem’s ‘Lacrimosa’. I could have done without a man behind me loudly exclaiming ‘Requiem! Requiem! Requiem!’ (Thank you for your musicological input; we should never have known otherwise.) Nevertheless, the assembled company joining to sing the composer’s final music, beyond the point at which the autograph stops yet not until its close, proved surprisingly moving. The lurch back to Sarastro’s announcement of victory initially jarred, yet such musical difficulties on my part were more or less effaced by the composer’s apotheosis. In a likeable, post-Amadeus portrayal by Vitus Denifl he was transformed into a Kugel-version of Mozart, laughing and somersaulting above. Like the best of those chocolates – hint: buy them only from Fürst – it was an unexpected delight, not least to serious clowning on Denifl’s part and a strong musical account.
How we got there, scenically, had its moments. The idea of presenting Mozart’s hallucinations from his last days unable to attend a performance at the Freihaus-Theater an der Wieden, yet imagining it in his head, was a good one, especially in this specific setting, part commemorating and part celebrating Mozart having become ‘Mozart’. It combines two accounts: the first from Stendhal via the 1798 Allgemeine Zeitung (possibly from Constanze herself) following the performances at home, looking at the clock and imagining what must be on stage; the other from an 1840 letter from the composer Ignaz von Seyfried to the theatre director Georg Friedrich Treitschke telling of Mozart on the evening of 4 December 1791 hearing his sister-in-law sing the Queen of the Night’s aria in the theatre. And so, the clock bore a particular role in demarcating certain moments—rather brightly, I could not help but think, although I suppose that was the point. It also offered a place to hide; indeed, Harold Thor’s set designs proved resourceful throughout in use and reuse.
That, I think, was to be applauded, not least since a notable, welcome feature of the Mozartwoche as a whole is its grounding in Mozart scholarship: not a Beckmesserish (at best) school of ‘performance practice’, perhaps now at last waning, that loves nothing more than to condemn something as ‘inauthentic’, but rather respect for far broader and more interesting historical grounding that will enable and enrich modern performance of various kinds. Some of that one might like, some one might not, but it enters into dialogue rather than assertion of either fundamentalist domination or lazy solipsism. The problem more was that it did not become much more than a frame for what otherwise was a rather conventional portrayal of the actual dramatic action. Mozart interacted a little with the characters. He also instructed his son a little. More tenuously, Constanze became enraged at the misogyny of the priests, hitting them and her husband, suggesting their remarks were to be taken seriously, Mozart’s own music suggesting otherwise. In terms of a view about what the work ‘itself’ might be, what it might have to offer, and indeed how it might thus have ultimately come to participate in the creation of ‘Mozart’, I struggled to divine anything very much.
Moreover, further character references seemed to me obscure. Without reading in the programme that Villazón intended the Three Ladies as three female artists – a poet, sculptor, and painter – I am not sure I should have noticed. Even if I had, nothing much was done with the idea. Presenting Tamino as a musician was fair enough; he plays the flute after all. Beyond that, it seemed another missed opportunity, soon more or less forgotten; likewise Monostatos/Manostatos as commercialisation of art, and so on. In encounters between multiple concepts, some fared better than others, though those of Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder rarely so well.
To return, though, to what made that final scene – and much else – worthwhile, Roberto González-Monjas’s conducting of the Mozarteum Orchestra marked him out as that rarest of things, a musician who could draw from an orchestra a true sense of the breadth and depth of Mozart’s score, without imposing himself on it and subjecting it to strange eccentricities. One will almost always find differences between what one hears in one’s head – watching the clock, like Mozart, or otherwise – but what matters is whether one can make sense of what is put before one, whether it animates the drama, whether it enables the singers and actors to flourish. In all of those respects and more, González-Monjas’s account scored. So too did the warm, sympathetic playing of the orchestra. This ought not to be so rare as it is, but the demands of Mozart and ‘Mozart’ alike are never to be underestimated.
There was, moreover, a good sense of a troupe more than the sum of its parts among those singers and actors. Magnus Dietrich’s Tamino and Emily Pogorelc’s an alluring young pair vocally. Their arias touched and ennobled without contrivance. Franz-Josef Selig’s Sarastro is a known quantity to many of us, yet proved no less welcome in reasoned compassion for that. Kathryn Lewek’s Queen of the Night offered accuracy and bite, also reminding us that a flesh-and-blood woman lay behind the costume and coloratura. Hearing more dialogue than often one does – especially outside German lands gave a more proper sense of Papagena, as did a spirited performance by Tamara Ivaniš. Theodore Platt’s Papageno stole the show, as many do, and deservedly so, sheer theatrical presence married to innate musicality, a winning tribute to Schikaneder. Indeed, the thought occurred to me that that might have been an obvious personification for the production. But there will be other Flutes, and this offered magic enough, heightened by the experience of an afternoon visit to an exhibition at the Rupertinum, showing materials from earlier stagings, including that of Oskar Kokoschka, invited by Furtwängler, who alas died before they could collaborate. As Villazón’s concept for the festival as a whole reminds us, birth and death have always stood in a complex relationship, not least in the case of Mozart.
