Le nozze di Figaro, Opéra national de Paris, 15 November 2025

Palais Garnier

Images: Franck Ferville - OnP
Figaro (Gordon Bintner), Susanna (Sabine Devieilhe), Count Almaviva (Christian Gerhaher)

Figaro – Gordon Bintner
Susanna – Sabine Devieilhe
Count Almaviva – Christian Gerhaher
Countess Almaviva – Hanna-Elisabeth Müller
Cherubino – Lea Desandre
Marcellina – Monica Bacelli
Dr Bartolo – James Creswell
Don Basilio – Leonardo Cortelazzi
Don Curzio – Nicholas Jones
Barbarina – Ilanah Lobel-Torres
Antonio – Franck Leguérinel
Two Bridesmaids – Sima Ouahaman, Daria Akulova

Director, designs, video – Netia Jones
Lighting – Lucy Carter
Choreography – Sophie Laplane
Dramaturgy – Solène Souriau

  
Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus master: Alessandro Di Stefano)  

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris

Antonello Manacorda (conductor)

Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro took a while to come to the stage. Completed in more or less the form we know it by 1778, it was accepted, little more than a stone’s throw away from the Palais Garnier for performance by the Comédie-Française in 1781, but its reading before the French court had Louis XVI personally intervene to prevent it. Following revisions, including the action’s transposition from France to Spain, Louis was persuaded by the Queen and his brother the Comte d’Artois (the future, notoriously reactionary Charles X) to permit a private performance in 1783 at Gennevilliers including members of the French royal family. Overruling the censor, Louis thereafter permitted its Paris public premiere the following year at the Théâtre Français on the opposite side of the river. Royal prevarication could be seen as symbolic of Louis’s reign as a whole, encapsulating in its way one of many themes in the history that led only five years later to the outbreak of the Revolution. (So too, of course, did the play itself, Napoleon’s celebrated description – ‘C’est dejà la Révolution en action!’ – serving even today to frame many a review, whether of Beaumarchais or Da Ponte and Mozart. Box-office receipts were the highest France had yet seen; the controversy ultimately did it no harm, quite the contrary. Given the place it holds in French history – not only French literary and dramatic history – the play continues to hold the stage in Paris and France more generally, though Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera has largely, if not entirely, eclipsed it elsewhere. It somehow therefore seemed a little strange – alternatively, a glimpse into reception and transformation – to hear it in Italian rather than French, for what I realised must be my first Nozze di Figaro in France, its billing as Les Noces di Figaro (rather than Beaumarchais’s Mariage) both clue and complication. The Paris Opéra would give it in French between 1793, in Beaumarchais’s own re-adaptation, and 1973, when Giorgio Strehler’s new staging, conducted by Georg Solti, would be the first to employ Da Ponte’s original Italian. 

Dr Bartolo (James Creswell), Marcellina (Monica Bacelli)

Netia Jones’s production takes its leave from that history; from a decision in some, though not all, ways to eschew it; and from the MeToo movement, less distant in 2022 than it now seems during the Trump Restoration. (Come back Charles X, all is forgiven?) The setting is backstage at the Palais Garnier, playing with the idea that opera houses in general and this one in particular come close to an eighteenth-century estate. Not having been backstage there, I learned only from Jones’s programme note that set designs, including ‘the celebrated armchair’, were reproductions of their counterparts there, dressing rooms the focus of the action—as they will in houses prove the focus and locus of dressing (and undressing). Indeed, at the close, we see a glimpse, back of ‘backstage’, and thus theatrically in front of it, of the auditorium itself. I do not think it especially matters; the framing’s the play’s the thing, and this clearly has more general reference. Staircase and all, this house has after all particular resonance in the popular imagination as an archetype, the institution itself having a longer ‘representative’ history we can take back almost as far as we like, even beyond the age of Meyerbeer, Scribe, et al. (and Wagner). Not for nothing do descriptions of changing operatic tastes more often than not use the building’s survey of celebrated lyric composers (and others) as an illustrative case in point. 

House hierarchies can, like their landed ancien régime counterparts, prove ‘challenging’, as contemporary HR-speak would have it. Indeed, outside politics and big business – I recall a splendid Guildhall School production transposing the action to a US election campaign – there may be few better equivalents. This can be portrayed lovingly, as in Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos, although there is no reason why that should not be challenged a little more, love the work though many of us may. (We love Figaro too, after all.) But that has never been the point of either opera or play, the former here sometimes supplemented by projections of Beaumarchais, for whom the cliché tends to be that his play is more ‘political’ than Mozart-Da Ponte. (It is not always so simple as that, but such is the way with generalisations. That does not make them entirely without worth.) We can reasonably be sure, though, that reports we have of abusive behaviour are only the tip of the iceberg and casting, let alone treatment, of singers has long offered an unusually egregious instance. Artistic collaboration rests even more than many other forms on personal, often highly unequal relationships: not quite a society of orders, but with several points in common. There has clearly been a ‘scandal’ at the house we see, in which the characters prepare for a performance of the opera they are previously creating; at least, the costumes they occasionally don suggest that it may be. Cherubino’s costume being several sizes too big for him, the Count’s too small – it would doubtless once have fit – offer straws in the wind for the future as well as the present. Play and opera have always done that too. 

Cherubino (Lea Desandre), Count Almaviva

But to return to the implied preceding scandal, it is clear that, as in the Count’s reassurance to all that he has foregone his feudal right, sexual harassment and worse will not be tolerated; or rather, it is clear that that is the line, shown in red to us all as Figaro cannily papers – aided by Jones’s rapid video multiplication – the walls during the Act I chorus with posters unambiguously saying ‘NO’ to such behaviour. That, however, is the easy part. Actual behaviour generally lags behind, and certainly does here, from the Overture onwards, the Count patting a ballerina on the bottom before closing the dressing room door. During the opening scene, we can also see him, next door (of course) to Figaro and Susanna, being interviewed, doubtless dispensing the public, enlightened house line, just as our Enlightenment honnête homme would have done as governor of Andalusia.

Countess Almaviva (Hanna-Elisabeth Müller), Susanna,
Figaro, Antonio (Franck Leguérinel), Count Almaviva

Presented as a more rounded character than is often the case, Don Basilio is here very much in on the act: a self-regarding and entitled music-master whose conducting of the chorus is full of exaggerated gesture and absent of musical substance, in sharp contrast to Figaro when he leads them in. The latter’s presence clearly irks his alleged musical (and social) superior who, in a nice touch, carries with him a score of Così fan tutte, ready for ‘that’ line. He later emerges from the bathroom in nothing more than a towel to harass an auditioning singer. So much for things having changed, as the Count will show at greater length. 

That Figaro’s role is as a hairdresser offers a welcome reminder of the barber of Seville’s origins, though his skills are clearly multifarious. Susanna (like Barbarina) steps forward from the corps de ballet to remind us not only of the sexism and objectification dancers face, but of their particular role in French lyric theatre. The particular treatment of female dancers by historical patrons (the Jockey Club, for instance) comes to mind, but what of the present? And not only there: who, in Britain, could forget the Johnson government’s notorious invention of ‘Fatima’, a ballerina whose ‘next job could be in cyber (she just doesn’t know it yet). Rethink. Reskill. Reboot’? An opera house requires diversity in every sense, or it simply cannot function. 

Don Basilio (Leonardo Cortelazzi), Susanna 

The treatment of Marcellina is also interesting, not least given the particular brand of misogyny levelled at ‘older’ women. (No one refers to the Count as an ‘older’ man.) Beaumarchais’s Marceline, inveighing against male exploitation of women, is partly restored via projection, and in a wonderful closing touch she dispenses with the Count’s services (that is the Count playing the Count, as it were). Rather than a woman, he has, in that unlovely phrase, been traded in for a younger model. Will the house see a new regime, under Marcellina? It is a nice thought, though we probably no more believe it any more than we believe the Count will never stray or abuse his social standing again. It was a pity, then, that we lost her aria—as so often we do. Might not restitution have begun there? 

On the other hand, if Revolution, or at least revolution, is just around the corner, who knows? In an alternative history of the Opéra, the 1960s proposals of Jean Vilar and Pierre Boulez might have been accepted, a ‘new’ Opéra would have opened in a series including the latter conducting the French premiere of Moses und Aron, a new work by Berio, and the Monteverdi Vespers—and the Solti/Strehler Figaro: who knows? We cannot change the past, but we can strain to change the future. Characterisation, including a reassessment of characters that draws upon their authorial past as well as their reception, can have consequences. Even Don Curzio, whom often one hardly notices, was given a helping hand by an additional, second-act appearance, collecting signatures for the trial to come. This was repaid that with a freshly sung performance one did note, not least in the recognition sextet, from Nicholas Jones. 

Count Almaviva

The production, then, was fortunate to have a fine cast of singing actors to bring this to life. Susannas, notoriously, have much to do—and are not necessarily the highest credited for doing so: a point with gendered as well as other social implications. Sabine Devieilhe certainly did a fine job both in her own right and as source of so many dramatic connections, her portrayal as finely sung as it was acted. Gordon Bintner’s performance as Figaro at times suggested a few first-night nerves: nothing grievous, but a sense that all would come together very soon. There was no doubting the broader brush of his portrayal, though, nor its contribution to the greater whole. Christian Gerhaher presented a moving descent into something approaching age and infirmity, his plea for forgiveness showing a man quite broken. He had been figuratively wounded earlier, at least as early as his audibly hurt ‘ma far burla simile / è poi crudeltà’ in the second act: not a hint of exaggeration, but a seasoned use of language. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller’s Countess offered a dignified yet spirited, beautifully sung Countess, equally at home in the serenity of her arias as in busy ensembles. Lea Desandre’s livewire Cherubino and Monica Bacelli’s impressive, take-no-prisoners Marcellina, and Ilanah Lobel-Torres’s unusually ‘present’ Barbarina, proved proper foils, at least on this folle journée, for the likes of Leonardo Cortelazzi’s similarly present Basilio and James Creswell’s sharply drawn, predatory Dr Bartolo. 

If Antonello Manacorda’s conducting did not plumb the depths, nor did it maintain an initially hard driven approach that might have tended unduly down either Rossinian or ‘period’ paths. To my ears, it would have done better to pay greater attention to harmony, but then who amongst our conductors really understands or at least conveys its role in Mozart, and Beethoven, now that Daniel Barenboim is semi-retired? There were no ‘period’ mannerisms, for which one must nowadays be grateful, but it ventured beyond the pleasant less often than one would have liked—and Mozart demands. Taken purely as orchestral playing, the Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Paris shone as so often it does in this repertoire. Few, if any, opera performances are perfect; how can they be when they stem from a society so imperfect? If the opera shows ‘la Révolution en action’, it is a revolution whose coming we, like so many before us, still await.

Musikfest Berlin (4) - Prohaska/MCO/Manacorda - Ives, Kloke, Mahler, and Dvořák, 5 September 2024

Philharmonie

Ives, arr. Eberhard Kloke: Seven Songs from the collection ‘114 Songs’ (world premiere)
Kloke: The Answered Question, op.131 (world premiere)
Mahler, arr. Kloke: Seven Early Songs
Dvořák: Symphony no.9 in E minor, op.95, B.178, ‘From the New World’

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

Antonello Manacorda (conductor)

Images copyright: Berliner Festspiele / Fabian Schellhorn

Musikfest Berlin’s focus on the Ives sesquicentenary continued with two commissions from Eberhard Kloke, one an arrangement of seven Ives songs for soprano and chamber orchestra, the other ‘an alternative experimental arrangement’ of Ives’s The Unanswered Question, ‘in which a differently posed question from Ives’s work is answered anew’. Kloke’s compositional activity, long focused on existing music by other composers – as conductor and composer alike, he considers himself above all an ‘interpreter’ – here also took in his arrangements of seven early songs by Mahler, dedicated, like those of Ives, to Anna Prohaska. 

In all three cases, ‘originals’ drifted in and out of consciousness: sometimes straightforwardly present, sometimes changed (whether by arrangement or otherwise), sometimes as underlay, and sometimes as a starting-point for other music by either composer. Ives’s own mysterious piano opening to ‘Thoreau’ prefaced, as in the original song, the spoken voice, ultimately leading to our first hearing of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra’s wind, directed by Antonello Manacorda, melodrama turning into song. Here, as elsewhere, Kloke’s orchestration proved sympathetic for voice and original material, musical and verbal. ‘Élegie’ offered a taste of Ives in French, both composers seemingly responding in kind, Kloke’s use of cello pizzicato almost more harp-like than the also present harp. His chamber writing permitted Prohaska to scale down her voice in singing of great subtlety that could also soar to climax—and did. Sharper-edged sonorities and harmonies in ‘His Exaltation’; a keen sense of the waters in ‘Grantchester’; and a jaunty, unmistakeably Americanism – accent to match, spoken and sung, with and without microphone – in ‘Charlie Rutlage’ were among other highlights, leading us to the closing question, already familiar from the encore to a song recital a few nights earlier: ‘Is life anything like that?’ 

Other questions, actually posed and might-have-beens, emerged in The Answered Question, partly submerged by a barrage of audience coughs. The MCO’s performance drew one in to listen, as did the spatial arrangement: two trumpets above, winds below, a further group (flute, oboe, clarinet, piano) at the back of the latter, as if in limbo. Questioning was questioned, as indeed was that questioning of question, in what came across as a post-transcendentalist refusal to accept easy answers, and accompanying unease as a result. Manacorda’s balancing and reconciliation of the instrumental parts proceeded with an ease belying the difficulty of his task, patient direction amply rewarded.  

For the Sieben frühe Lieder, title echoing Berg and perhaps Berio too, cowbells appeared: a temptation doubtless too difficult to resist. Here, Kloke offered quotation, allusion (thematic and timbral), and perhaps also illusion from Mahler’s Wunderhorn symphonies, already closely related to his song output, to produce a work I should guess extended to about twice the length of the songs alone. As the work progressed, memory, accurate and faulty, increasingly played a role of its own. A ‘Bruder Martin’ introduction to ‘Nicht wiedersehen!’ albeit with celesta and harp alongside double bass (first solo then duo) set the scene, the klezmer music of the First Symphony’s third movement joining later, surfacing in a way not dissimilar to that of the Mahler material in Berio’s Sinfonia. Saxophone was but one of the other instruments to be heard, all beautifully, expertly played by the musicians of the MCO; just as welcome, Prohaska treated the songs throughout as songs, not as would-be arias. The posthorn solo from the Third Symphony unsettled ‘Es ritten drei Reiter’. A purely vocal, folksong-like opening to ‘Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald’, elicited a sly instrumental response again evoking the First Symphony. Sleighbells from the Fourth framed ‘Das Mägdlein trat aus dem Fischerhaus’. The idea of resurrection, capitalised and otherwise, helped shape ‘Selbstgefühl’. It made for an unexpected, fascinating journey, and a surprisingly apt bridge between Ives and Dvořák.

 

Hearing the ‘New World’ Symphony from a chamber orchestra is different; it would be idle to pretend otherwise. In a well-conceived performance such as this, hard-driven at times but with undeniable drama, losses were surprisingly few. There was, moreover, unquestionable advantage in the Abbado-like sense of an orchestra of soloists coming together. Contrasts, as in the first movement introduction, were in some ways greater; nothing was prettified; and there was no doubting the symphonic integrity of the whole, whether as work or performance, a welcome change from an incoherent Mahler Sixth two nights earlier. Manacorda’s single-minded determination made for a concise, not un-Beethovenian experience, the first movement seemingly over almost before it had begun. In the slow movement, that solo and others were magically taken: as if heard for the first time, nothing taken for granted. (An extended cadenza for mobile telephone was less welcome.) Songful, soulful, yet never sentimental, the music spoke more of Bohemian words than an imagined ‘America’, and was all the better for it. Bubbly and boisterous, the scherzo teemed with life and not a little fury. I was less sure about the solo-string transition to the trio, though whether it was a strangeness too far is more a matter of taste than anything else. It had me listen, though. The finale sometimes had me miss a greater complement of strings, but the better course of action was to value what one did hear here, vehement, direct, and gripping. There was heart-rending exhilaration to the second group too, born of the material rather than imposed upon it. The struggle, once more, was unquestionably symphonic.

Don Giovanni, Vienna State Opera, 3 February 2023

Don Giovanni – Kyle Ketelsen
Commendatore – Ain Anger
Donna Anna – Hanna-Elisabeth Müller
Don Ottavio – Dmitry Korchak
Donna Elvira – Kate Lindsey
Leporello – Philippe Sly
Zerlina – Isabel Signoret
Masetto – Martin Häßler

Barrie Kosky (director)
Katrin Lea Tag (designs)
Franck Evin (lighting)
Theresa Gregor (costumes)
Sergio Morabito, Nikolaus Stenitzer (dramaturgy)

Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus director: Thomas Lang)

Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera

Antonello Manacorda (conductor)

Images: © Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn
Donna Anna (Hanna-Elisabeth Müller) and the Commendatore (Ain Anger)

One of Barrie Kosky’s great virtues as a director is that he does not impose a one-size-fits-all approach, or aesthetic, to his work with opera. There will sometimes, of course, be visual similarities – doubtless in part his, in part his design team’s – but they are intermittent and rarely, if ever, determining factors for the conceptual framework. (An especially vexing misconception of the AMOP crowd is that designs ‘are’ the production. No wonder they fail to understand anything they see.) And that framework, like it or otherwise—I have regularly fallen into either camp—is usually pretty clear. 

What puzzled me most about this Don Giovanni was a relative lack of clarity—whether in my perception or intrinsic. I think I managed to piece a bit more together afterwards, but much of it seemed, at least to me, a little undercooked: not a characteristic I readily associate with the director. Is that perhaps a by-product of its first outing having been at the height of the pandemic, when restrictions may have inhibited certain types of action? Characters certainly seem to spend a good deal of time, though far from all of it, some distance apart on a large stage. It is a rocky, rather grim landscape, many miles (literally, I suspect, as well as conceptually) from early-modern Seville (or the Venice Da Ponte’s libretto often seems fundamentally to suggest). Nothing is hidden, or concealed, in a wasteland that is anything but labyrinthine. It sprouts flora in the final scene of the first act, as do the chorus (who, whatever I said earlier on, resemble strikingly the chorus in Kosky’s Komische Oper Monteverdi Orpheus). But then it is back to the grey, rocky landscape—and latterly, a pool of water. 

That literal flowering seems to suggest some sort of Bacchic ritual, it would seem, albeit curiously shortlived. Perhaps that is the point: what does Giovanni do when things are not flowering, when the wine is not flowing—which does not even seem to happen at his feast, nor indeed ‘Finch’ han del vino’? He waits, it seems: a curious undermining of the kinetic energy that makes up his dramatic – in music and words alike – persona. Again, I imagine that is the point. Indeed, after, though only after, the performance, I sensed that, especially later on, this had been for Don Giovanni and Leporello, perhaps for the others too, a performance of Waiting for the Commendatore. Or had it? The idea of a Beckettian Don Giovanni is intriguing, but not very much more seems to be done with it. 

Don Giovanni (Kyle Ketelsen) and Masetto (Martin Hässler)

The other principal theme, perhaps related, is a centring of Leporello, who seems (not unreasonably, I suppose, given a standpoint of psychological realism) quite traumatised by his experiences with Don Giovanni. Is there a sense of abuse there? One might argue that that is intrinsic to the master-slave dialectic, though I am not sure that is quite how Mozart and Da Ponte see it. I think so, but more strong, again especially towards the end, is a sense of an ersatz father-and-son relationship. Perhaps, according to standpoint, that is intrinsically abusive. One might, truthfully yet not necessarily revealingly, observe that all of Don Giovanni’s relationships, if one may call them that at all, qualify as such. I sensed, though, that Kosky is saying more than that, without being quite clear (in my mind) what that ‘more’ is. Donna Elvira seems to be behaving rather unusually too. 

Don Giovanni and Leporello
(Philippe Sly)

Another Kosky virtue is that he knows his music. As with any director, indeed any musician, one might disagree with his response, but it would be unfair to claim that he has not considered it. A case in point here would be the concatenation of dances Mozart presents as a society of orders stands on the libertine – perhaps even revolutionary – precipice. For once, not only do we have the different bands of musicians on stage; the characters dance the appropriate dance, lending visual realisation of an extraordinary moment whose import may not always be recognised by a twenty-first-century audience. Too often, directors impose trademark silly dancing for all-comers. (There is a bit of that too, but not here.) I could not help, though, but wish that Kosky had interpreted the music, or at least how I hear it, a little more. It is not that music need always be doubled on stage, any more than the libretto need, but in the absence of a stronger conceptual lead, it might have helped. Herbert Graf’s Salzburg Felsenreitschule ipproduction for Furtwängler continues to score here. 

I am wary, as anyone should be, of saying it would have been better to have done x than y. It seems more fruitful in general to concentrate on y, though consideration of x may have some heuristic use in sharpening critique of y. For me—surely also for Mozart and Da Ponte—Don Giovanni is unquestionably a religious, indeed a Catholic, work, profoundly concerned with sin and damnation. That does not mean it must be presented as such, but it suggests performance would do well at least to find a satisfactory alternative to doing so, rather than simply ignoring the issue. That may be why, assuming God rather than Nietzsche to be dead, Kosky steps, surprisingly tentatively, toward the Theatre of the Absurd and, perhaps, beyond it to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, though neither comes across so starkly as it might. But then, perhaps neither is supposed to; if something is a context, it is not necessarily for me to say that it should become something more than that. Is it, though, for an audience member to voice bemusement concerning what, if anything, the message might be? Surely it is; for if not, not only criticism but theatre itself must be dead. And, whatever Kosky’s message may be, whatever the strange intermittent lack of theatricality to a production that yet strains hard to be theatrical, I strongly doubt he would wish to propose that particular death. 

As it was, a strong cast of singers worked hard to bring theatrical as well as musical values to the stage. Kyle Ketelsen was an energetic, charismatic Don Giovanni, owning the stage when he needed to, yet not without a sense of the chameleon when musically as well as dramatically called for. Philippe Sly’s wounded yet spirited Leporello offered a tour de force in the service of Kosky’s strangely compelling conception. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller, an initial announcement notwithstanding, and Dmitry Korchak both shone as the unambiguously seria pair, Donna Anna and Don Ottavio. They understood how coloratura works dramatically—and made us feel that. Kosky’s Donna Anna is certainly no unwilling participant: a more controversial idea now than it might have been twenty or even ten years ago, but certainly not without warrant in the score, let alone Romantic tradition. Kate Lindsey’s ‘Mì tradi’ was worth the price of admission alone; not that the rest of this captivating artist’s performance was not similarly excellent. If I were unsure quite what Kosky was trying to suggest here, there was no doubting Lindsey’s dramatic and musical capabilities of doing so. Ain Anger’s Commendatore was intelligently sung, paying commendable attention to the words as well as to overall aura. Isabel Signoret and Martin Häβler’s spirited Zerlina and Masetto likewise made much, though never too much, of their words, marrying them with sweet satisfaction to melody and overall characterisation. 

Antonello Manacorda and the Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera (to all intents and purposes the Vienna Philharmonic) seemed neither at odds, nor completely of one mind. There was no discernible attempt made to stymie the Vienna sound, commendably full on occasion, and anything but puritanical. (Imagine: puritanism in this of all works!) Yet whilst generally choosing sensible tempi – I still cannot come on board with the fashionable alla breve for Overture and Stone Guest, however ‘correct’ it is held to be – Manacorda often seemed to remain somewhat on the surface: more, perhaps, of orchestra than score. He was supportive of the cast, though, and I cannot imagine anyone being seriously disappointed. I doubt use of the all-too-familiar conflation of Prague and Vienna versions was his doing. Whoever made that decision really should have known better, but no one ever does (well, hardly ever). The outcome, save in the most blistering, powerful of performances, is always dramatically unsatisfactory; this was no exception. Prague is, of course, the answer; it would be a good start were someone occasionally to ask the question.