La clemenza di Tito, Royal Opera, 17 May 2021

Royal Opera House

Tito – Edgaras Montvidas
Vitellia – Nicole Chevalier
Sesto – Emily D’Angelo
Annio – Angela Brower
Servilia – Christina Gansch
Publio – Joshua Bloom
Senators – Jeremy White, George Freeburn
Berenice – Fumi Kaneko
Conspirators – Amanda Baldwin, Tim Parker-Langston, Nicholas Sharratt
Guards – Andrew Carter, Davy Quistin

Richard Jones (director)
Ultz (designs)
Adam Silverman (lighting)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)
Mark Wigglesworth (conductor)


Over fifteen months since I had last set foot in an opera house—for Carmen at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden—it felt extraordinary to be back. All else would be secondary. Constant frustrations and persistent fears of the new ‘Johnson variant’ shutting down everything again made for a background of great uncertainty. Comparisons with the crisis of the social order sweeping Europe during the 1780s and 1790s will shed little light, yet all of us this side of Dido Harding and her fellow profiteers crave a degree of certainty some way beyond that our world affords us. Like the Prague Estates commissioning La clemenza di Tito to celebrate Leopold II’s coronation as king of Bohemia, we clamour for something we knew and loved well, whilst knowing that it can never be the same again—and that it almost certainly never was.


That something might be Imperial Rome, Habsburg clementia austriaca, or both, as recreated by the Caeasarian poet Pietro Metastasio for Charles VI’s name-day. It might be Metastasio as set by forty composers prior to Mozart, among them Caldara, Hasse, Gluck, and Mysliveček. It might be Metastasio as galvanised by Mozart’s revisionary librettist, Caterino Mazzolà, transforming blank verse into ensembles and, crucially, three acts into two, rendering the moment of revolt the choral climax of the first, as opposed to an offstage event mentioned in recitative. It might be Metastasio-Mazzolà transformed by Mozart; it might the lives of artists and audience, traumatised beyond measure not only by the dread virus, but by the fundamental, immeasurably deadlier disease of neoliberalism. At all times many, barely daring hope for the endgame and, more to the point, having no idea what it will be, find themselves craving reversion and restoration. Revolution, taken literally, invokes turning of the wheel; it was only events in France that turned its meaning to rupture—and even then, only partially. To see Mozart once more on the Covent Garden stage came close to many such impossible dreams.


Or rather in this case, hearing Mozart from the pit and onstage came close. Anyone could point to occasional flaws in ensemble, but to experience ensemble at all, whether from orchestra, chorus, soloists, or tutti, was more than enough for now. The last time I had seen this opera on this stage, it had been conducted by that emperior among Mozartians, Sir Colin Davis. Now was not, however, a time to look back, whatever the splendours and delights of those performances. For this was 17 May: if not quite le grand retour, then the beginning, we can only desperately hope, of the end. Secco recitatives were cut, but anyone can live with that, given Mozart’s lack of involvement in them; what remained was performed convincingly indeed. (I should certainly credit the harpsichordist, if I knew who it had been.) 

This was not a Tito of immense grandeur, but looking at, listening to the world around us, there may have been good reason for that. Moreover, distancing within the pit, musicians one to a pit, necessitated a smaller number of musicians than ‘ideal’, whatever that may mean—or which may simply have been an aesthetic preference. Wigglesworth conveyed an inner, more domestic drama to the score that was not identical to Davis’s, Böhm’s, Muti's, nor anyone else’s—how could it be?—but which spoke from ruins on and off stage. It kept going in the face of adversity, and did much more than that. Swifter than we may be accustomed to, it was yet never harried and found time to relax: to savour many moments of woodwind—not only clarinet—beauty; to express pulsating life in Mozart’s inner strings; to urge us on to a close uncertain yet necessary.


Edgaras Montvidas’s youthful, mellifluous Tito enhanced that sense of present urgency, of a need to resist turning back. Politically Orphic, if you like. Nicole Chevalier occasionally struggled with her lower notes: how long must it be since many of these singers have appeared regularly, or at all, on stage? Hers was nevertheless a spirited, multi-dimensional Vitellia, more likeable than often, which seemed to be a choice. Emily D’Angelo’s Sesto captivated in a moral struggle framed by allure and weakness whose twin masculinity was only highlighted by the trouser role’s—originally castrato’s—blurring of boundaries. There was no doubting, moreover, her/his cleanness of line and general stylishness; likewise for typically fine performances from Angela Brower (Annio) and Christina Gansch (Servilia). Even Joshua Bloom as Publio, a thankless role, found space to shine. The Royal Opera Chorus, offstage throughout, made a welcome return too: doubtless equally true for its members.


Richard Jones’s production, however, was a bit of a mess. The vague neoclassicism, interior as well as exterior, of set designer Ultz’s Capitol worked well enough, so far as it went. Like the spareness of much of Mozart’s score—so different from that heard in the more-or-less contemporaneous Magic Flute—there was potential not only to frame, but also to propel, the drama before our eyes. Except it did not. Jones seemed on auto-pilot, offering little beyond a vague ‘look’ of fascism and football: a combination that might have been productive yet was not. Was the architectural model a Speer reference, imperial counsellors’ tailoring suggestive more of Berchtesgaden than south of the Alps? Perhaps, yet if so, it again went for little. Italian graffiti seemed not so much evocative of emptiness as merely empty. Why did a silent Berenice traipse around the set early on? Vitellia’s piece-by-piece destruction of her garland in ‘Non più di fiori’ could have been a model for careful attention to text not as artefact but as living drama. Much else, however, looked haphazard or even absent.


Shop-soiled ‘postmodernism’, laziness, or hasty quasi-improvisation? Probably all of the above, for this was ‘school of Richard Jones’ enough to suggest deliberate choices, however difficult the circumstances. A closing image of Tito running around the stage as if having scored a goal proved one of the most half-hearted attempts at Verfremdung I have seen since—well, Jones’s Covent Garden Bohème, which could not be excused by pandemic exigencies. Brecht is not to be reduced to a look, even by late capitalism; nor is opera. More in the way of Personenregie would have done this the world of good. Perhaps the singers will develop a stronger dramatic focus themselves as the short run progresses, responding to the mise-en-scène in ways beyond the director on this occasion. It is, in so many respects, early days. Maybe the present, however haunted by the past, always feels like that. Amidst all the uncertainty, it remained quite something to be back.

Don Giovanni, Semperoper Dresden, 20 March 2017

Image: David Baltzer

Semperoper 

Don Giovanni – Christoph Pohl

Commendatore – Michael Eder
Donna Anna – Maria Bengtsson
Don Ottavio – Edgaras Montvidas
Donna Elvira – Danielle de Niese
Leporello – Evan Hughes
Masetto – Martin-Jan Nijhof
Zerlina – Anke Vondung
 

Andreas Kriegenburg (director)

Harald Thor (set designs)
Tanja Hofmann (costumes)
Stefan Bolliger (lighting)
Anne Gerber (dramaturgy)

Sachsischer Staatsopernchor Dresden (chorus master: Cornelius Volke)

Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden

Omer Meir Wellber (conductor)

Busoni, great composer that he was, revered Mozart as greatly as any composer – well, any composer other than Bach, of course. Although Busoni came to Mozart through the nineteenth-century, broadly speaking ‘Romantic’ tradition(s), and although he lauded, in the preface to his own edition, Liszt’s Réminiscences de don Juan for possessing ‘an almost symbolic significance as the highest point of pianism’ (quoted by Charles Rosen), he seems not necessarily to have appreciated the darker side to Mozart as strongly as some of those who came after – above all, Wilhelm Furtwängler, whose recorded performances remain as astounding, as symphonic, as daemonic, as ever. It is a truism, perhaps a cliché, that we all make our own Mozart. Up to a point, that is of course the case, yet that does not make every viewpoint, every experiment, equally worthwhile. Our age, by and large, has not done very well, albeit with noble exceptions. Whereas Dresden did Busoni himself fine service indeed, the previous evening, in his Doktor Faust, this (musically) misconceived Don Giovanni did not, alas, mark anything like its finest hour – mostly on account of the conductor.

 

It has become one of the many clichés to be read in reviews of Don Giovanni performances to call it a director’s graveyard. (Bizarrely, the same seems to have become true of recent stagings of Le nozze di Figaro, a work until recently seemingly imperishable. Così fan tutte rarely does well, either.) Perhaps, but there are certainly exceptions. Most recent of those for me was Stephan Kimmig’s brilliant production for Munich, which I saw last summer. Insofar as one could tell, the fault here did not lie with Andreas Kriegenburg’s production either. It starts promisingly, in a swish fashion or modelling agency, a world of expensive, ruthless vacuity enthroned. (What could be more contemptible than mere ‘fashion’? There are lessons, largely unheeded, for performance there too.) '2064 donne', we read on a wall poster. Such is clearly an environment in which Don Giovanni, aided by Leporello, can have his pick of the depressingly interchangeable ‘girls’. Harald Thor’s set designs and Tanja Hofmann’s costumes work well, adding to what one can discern of the concept. The problem is that it all becomes rather lost. I suspect that tighter revival direction – I do not necessarily mean this as a criticism of the person to whom this was entrusted: there may not have been enough time, enough resources, and so on – would have made everything much clearer. As it is, for an alarming amount of the time, the singers seem to have to make their own drama from the designs, and that is more or less it. They generally did pretty well at that, but there is a limit to what can be expected of them, and, modern(ish) look aside, it all comes a little too close to a repertory night in Vienna.

 

That said, there was much to enjoy in a number of the vocal performances. Christoph Pohl’s Giovanni was a serious assumption, whose depth crept up upon us. Equal attention was paid to words and line, as with Evan Hughes’s quicksilver Leporello. The occasional intonational slip aside, Maria Bengtsson’s Donna Anna proved very well focused. A pleasingly ‘big’ sound could be made, although likewise the voice could offer laudable intimacy. Coloratura offered few problems to her; nor did it to Danielle de Niese as Donna Elvira. Likeable artist though she may be, however, an intrinsic thinness to her voice shone through in ‘In quali eccessi, o Numi … Mi tradì’. Might she have been better off as Zerlina? I wondered whether Anke Vondung, who sometimes lacked sparkle in that role, in an admittedly dependable performance, might have better suited to the mezzo part. Martin-Jan Nijhof’s Masetto was likewise dependable enough; perhaps with stronger direction, more might have been made of both peasant characters. Edgaras Montvidas, however, offered a beautifully sung, thoughtfully assertive Don Ottavio. One longed to hear more from him, if not from Michael Eder’s weak Commendatore (strange, given how strongly cast that role tends to be). With the Staatskapelle Dresden on fine form, strings and woodwind equally beguiling, the stage should have been set for a very good evening. And yet…

 

For all the chatter, most of it uninformed, we hear concerning so-called Regietheater, an opera worth its salt – many, indeed a bewildering proportion of those in the benighted repertory, are not – will fail if it is not also a piece of Dirigententheater. What Omer Weir Welber did to Don Giovanni genuinely shocked me, although it angered and, worst of all, bored me still more. I say this not because I am hostile a priori to performances that play with the work concept. Far from it, even in Mozart: one of the most enlightening performances I have seen of a ‘version’ of Don Giovanni was heavily cut and reversed the genders of all but the (anti-)hero himself. To mess about, glibly, crassly with the score to no apparent end other than to massage the ego of the conductor is, however, something upon which it is difficult to look with anything other than horror. The Overture should have alerted me, but conductors sometimes do strange things there, taking it as ‘their’ moment. Regrettable though the new alla breve orthodoxy for the opening may be – there are good reasons to follow the practice, but mere fashion is not one of them – one can live with it. A Rossini-like breakneck speed to what followed was more disturbing. The sudden appearance, and disappearance after a few bars, of a harpsichord bewildered. Not half as much, though, as did the turn at the end towards what has long been known, somewhat problematically, as its ‘concert ending’, which may – or may not – have been written for Vienna. One can only wish that it had not, for it remains unconvincing in the extreme, whatever view one takes of where the ‘alternative conclusion’ should start. (If one wants a concert ending, one is better off with the serviceable, if uninspired, solution offered in most recordings – and concert performances.)

 

There was worse to come, though, much worse. Exhibitionistic continuo playing is another curse of our age, it seems, but I have never heard anything quite on this level, before. Quite why we had harpsichord and what sounded like (I presume it was a trick of the acoustic, but who knows?) some sort of amplified early-ish, but not that early piano, I have no idea. There did not seem to be any obvious, or even elusive, point being made, and the lion’s share was reserved for the latter. Not being able to see the pit, it took me a while to realise that it was Welber playing whatever that strange-sounding instrument may have been. Whereas some more interventionist accounts seem to offer a commentary on the action – one can argue about whether that is what a continuo player ought to be doing, but that is another matter – this seemed to be simply a case of ‘look at me’, or rather ‘listen to me’. One tires quickly of formulaic figures, but they would have been preferable to the lounge pianist meandering we heard here, replete with all manner of very strange harmonies, endless sequences of Scotch snaps, keyboard crashes and clashes, changes of metre, and so on and so on. (It was the sort of thing that certain undergraduates find hilarious after a few bottles of wine, whilst everyone else looks on, baffled and not a little irritated.) One recitative, at least, seemed to end in entirely the wrong key, rendering its non-transition to the ensuing aria both painful and inexplicable. A mismatch of tuning between the instrument and orchestra did not help, either.

 

That, however, was almost as nothing, compared with Welber’s tampering – again, to no discernible end – with the orchestral score. This was not some Mahlerian retouching, nor indeed was it something more artistically adventurous. It sounded utterly arbitrary, and involved the apparent deletion – to begin with, I thought it must be a matter of strange balance, but then realised better, or worse – of certain lines, leaving either nothing, or an opportunity for one of the continuo instruments to play instead. The orchestral introduction to one second-act aria – I cannot remember which: perhaps a blessing... – was removed entirely, the music played instead by the harpsichord. In another number, during the first act, the other continuo instrument loudly banged out the orchestral line an octave higher, doing its best to obliterate the orchestra. Another orchestral ending was close to drowned out by crashing, clashing keyboard chords. Unmotivated tempo variations – sometimes quite at odds with what was being sung onstage – only compounded the mess. When Welber settled down, he seemed perfectly capable of delivering a reasonable enough performance; the problem was that he rarely did.

 

The unholy conflation we generally endure of Prague and Vienna versions is perfectly understandable as a sop to singers, and their fans, although it remains dramatically quite unjustifiable. One might make a case, if one were so minded, for Vienna, if only out of difference, but frankly, it would be misguided at best. Nevertheless, that was pretty much what we heard here – with the important proviso, rarely heard, that there is much we simply do not know about Mozart’s Vienna performances, and we should almost certainly do better to speak about them in the plural. It was mildly interesting to hear the duet for Zerlina and Leporello: the first time, I think, that I have done so in the theatre. It is unworthy of Mozart, though, especially unworthy of the Mozart of Don Giovanni; it might perhaps be rescued by imaginative staging – the libretto surely cries out for something truly sado-masochistic – but such was not the case here. Given the ‘liberties’ taken elsewhere, it was difficult not to feel sorry for Montvidas, losing Ottavio’s second-act aria. In context, though, anything that would hasten the end was no bad thing. Except, of course, the end did not come. The increasingly fashionable practice – it should be stressed that we do not know that Mozart did this, and/or how often he did so, in Vienna, and people should stop claiming that we do – of omitting the scena ultima was practised here, and so the work, such as it remained, simply stopped rather than closed. The proto-Brechtian alienation effect of the ‘moral’ was thus entirely lost, as in Claus Guth’s over-praised production (Salzburg, La Scala, Berlin), in which the uncomprehending director arrogantly accused Mozart of having bowed to convention. Let me put it this way: if you want to do what Mahler did, you really need to be of Mahler’s stature.

 

I shall close with words from Julian Rushton’s review, in Eighteenth-Century Music, of Ian Woodfield’s book on the Vienna Don Giovanni:

Some versions of Don Giovanni acted in the composer’s and librettist’s lifetimes were outside their control (most obviously the singspiel versions), and knowledge of these richly informs reception history. Probably undertaken with no intention to slight the original, they document what seemed theatrically presentable in an irrecoverable time and place; this does not afford them status as a template for later interpretations. The modern theatre is not the eighteenth-century theatre; layers of meaning have accumulated that require access to a text we can ascribe to definite, even if multiple, authorship. … Woodfield … points to the irony of performances today going ‘authentic’ just as ‘the academy’ is beginning to take a more flexible view of such texts. We are indebted to him for presenting the ingredients that make up the early forms of Don Giovanni but we should not regard it as intrinsically wrong to adopt a version of nearly identifiable authorship rather than remixing the Don Giovanni soup for every modern production; we can safely leave that to the stage director.

That seems about right – or does it? Is it a little too prescriptive? In theory, perhaps; in practice, when one suffers – well, you know the rest… At any rate, let us not disdain a thoughtfulness, a respect for Mozart and Da Ponte, that goes beyond a juvenile ‘look at or ‘listen to’ me. Two great Mozart conductors, duly honoured in the Semperoper foyers, would surely have nodded wise assent. Colin Davis and Karl Böhm, however, knew very well that it was ‘not all about them’.

Die Fledermaus, English National Opera, 30 September 2013

Coliseum

(sung in English)

Gabriel von Eisenstein – Tom Randle

Rosalinde – Julia Sporsén
Frank – Andrew Shore
Prince Orlofsky – Jennifer Holloway
Alfred – Edgaras Montvidas
Dr Falke – Richard Burkhard
Dr Blind – Simon Butteriss
Adele – Rhian Lois
Ida – Lydia Marchione
Frosch – Jan Pohl

Christopher Alden (director)

Allen Moyer (set designs)
Constance Hoffman (costumes)
Paul Palazzo (lighting)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Eun Sun Kim (conductor)

 

 

Champagne is constantly evoked in the libretto of Die Fledermaus, an all-too-ready explanation for the events that have taken place or are to follow. As Prince Orlofsky sings, ‘Champagner, König aller Weine! Hoch die sprudelnde Majestät und ihre Untertanen!’ or, as Frank ruefully comments, ‘Der verdammte Champagner!’ We could have done with a few more bubbles here, especially following the interval.

 

The ultimate question, then, is: what is it that falls a little flat? It is not always easy to put one’s finger on it; by the same token, there are a good few things to admire, so it is perhaps better to put off that question a little longer. As implied above, the first act is on the whole rather fun and indeed much of the rest of the production makes one think. (That is a red rag to the bull of a certain self-satisfied variety of opera-goer, let alone operetta-goer, but who cares?) Christopher Alden’s staging quite rightly does not take the easy road; if one is going to plead the cause for the defence, especially in a case such as this, then one needs to dig beneath the surface. The Overture presents both the gigantic version of Eisenstein’s pocket watch, which will haunt the staging throughout, and figures of bats themselves, before we see the bat. (Incidentally, should ENO not call the operetta, The Bat, rather than employing a German title?) As the performance progresses, we realise that the surrealistic occurrences may not be just that; Rosalinde’s marital bed, one of many handsome designs by Allen Moyer, conjures up fantasies that prefigure Freud, but they are the stuff of the drama itself, not something superimposed. Indeed, the blurring of boundaries between what is ‘dreamed’ and what is ‘real’ is one of the strongest features of Alden’s production. It takes us forward so that, in his words, ‘the ponderous nineteenth-century Victorian bedroom of Act I cracks open to let the fresh air of Act II’s 1920s-ish celebration of loosening up, freedom, and creativity.’  Except, and I suspect this may be where I part company from many others, the problem is not that the production goes too far; I am not sure that it goes far enough. One does not really feel what Alden describes. If there were an ‘orgy’, as I had heard it described prior to the performance, then somehow my friend and I managed to miss it. A little more abandon would not have gone amiss. ‘The reactionary crackdown on subversive degeneracy in Act III’s prison’ likewise does not really come off. Indeed, it seems tacked on, the Nazi thuggishness of Frosch an all-too-easy card to play, a card which, moreover, seems uncertain as to whether it be intended parodically. The alarming overacting of Jan Pohl in the role would seem out of place on just about any stage, or indeed in a 1970s situation comedy; but here, when more subtle expectations have originally been set up, it seems all the more striking a misjudgement, presumably on Alden’s part.

 

I confess to initial scepticism about the idea of Johann Strauss in English, but if translation must be done, then Daniel Dooner and Stephen Lawless did a fine job indeed, a striking contrast with the previous ENO effort for Fidelio (David Pountney). Whilst all was going well, there was genuine wit to be savoured – and the later problems certainly did not lie with this accomplished translation. Eun Sun Kim’s conducting of the score proved varied. It began in mercilessly hard-driven fashion, but calmed down, and if sometimes it felt more observed than felt from within, there were passages in which the rhythmic lilt was winningly conveyed. For that, of course, the orchestra itself deserves credit too. Yet one could never quite kid oneself that this was the ‘real thing’, a slippery concept, and in repertoire such as this, dangerously amenable to all manner of unpleasant, völkisch interpretations. Perhaps, however, and this goes for the contribution of the cast as well, performances will sound more at ease with themselves as the run continues.

 

There was much to enjoy from the cast, Tom Randle predictably subtle, no mere caricature, as Eisenstein, and Julia Sporsén an attractively-voiced Rosalinde. Andrew Shore displayed considerable comic as well as musical gifts as Frank. Jennifer Holloway offered vocal depth as Orlofsky, though many of her words were quite incomprehensible, partly no doubt a result of the thick, allegedly ‘Russian’ accent she was obliged to adopt. I continue to find the idea that ‘regional’ or ‘foreign’ accents are intrinsically hilarious at best questionable, but it seems to have become a staple of such events, doubtless as a substitute for genuine comedy. Likewise, if Edgaras Montvidas’s Alfred and Rhian Lois’s Adele tilted too much towards such caricature – probably not their fault at all, certainly jarring with the more interesting aspects of this conflicted production – they offered considerable vocal rewards, as did Lydia Marchione as Ida. Richard Burkhard’s Falke had some problematic moments vocally; Simon Butteriss offered a Dr Blind as camp as (presumably) requested by the director. Choral singing was generally of a high standard. It was, though, that elusive sense of ‘company’ that was perhaps most lacking. Again, that may rectify itself in subsequent performances.

 

I wonder, though, whether the principal problem lies with the work itself. Of course, one does not expect it to be Parsifal or Saint François d’Assise; even so, it remains rather thin stuff: better than Lehár, no doubt, though otherwise, Offenbach’s wit, style, and satire seem preferable in just about every respect, and perhaps transfer better to a modern, international house. Granted, this is a very difficult genre to get ‘right’; Elisabeth Schwarzkopf claimed to find it trickier than opera. Is it really worth the trouble, though? Perhaps it is better off left to the ‘traditional’ likes of the Volksoper, though Alden et al. certainly merit thanks for trying something more provocative. Given ENO’s puzzling neglect of Richard Strauss – surely a work such as Intermezzo ought to be right up its street – it would probably be better advised to transfer its allegiance to him for the next few Strauss outings. Once a decade or two seems about right for Johann.