Grand Théâtre de Provence
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| Images: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence 2025 © Monika Rittershaus |
Don Giovanni – Andrè Schuen
Leporello – Krzysztof Bączyk
Donna Anna – Golda Schultz
Donna Elvira – Magdalena Kožená
Don Ottavio – Amitai Pati
Commendatore – Clive Bayley
Zerlina – Madison Nonoa
Masetto – Paweł Horodyski
Director – Robert Icke
Set designs – Hildegard Bechtler
Costumes – Annemarie Woods
Lighting – James Farncombe
Choreography – Ann Yee
Video – Tal Yarden
Sound – Mathis Nitschke
Dramaturgy – Klaus Bertisch
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (choirmaster: Aarne Talvik)
If I remember correctly, that splendidly grumpy old man Johannes Brahms averred that he would much rather stay at home and read the score than suffer yet another Don Giovanni disappointment in the opera house. Often, one sympathises—and more generally with Mozart, especially nowadays. It is, notoriously, a director’s graveyard; it has for a while also seemed to be a conductor’s graveyard too. In both cases, the Commendatore regularly calls time on all manner of easy perversities that too often masquerade in place of understanding, hard work, and genuine imagination and invention. I was nonetheless keen to see this new Aix production, the festival’s eighth and my first there. That was above all to see what Robert Icke, an almost universally admired figure of British spoken theatre – this season alone, I saw Oedipus and Manhunt (which Icke wrote as well as directed) – might accomplish in his first foray into opera.
Having entered the theatre and quickly skimmed a page or two of the programme, I felt my heart sink when I read some of Simon Rattle’s words in the programme, regardless of the good sense many others made. ‘The “Mozart” [!] I grew up with as a child – the style of interpretation I once admired – has, for most of us, become unlistenable. We’ve all evolved without realising it.’ Perhaps, then, this would be a classic instance of one element working and one distracting, with the stage performances themselves as yet undetermined. For once, alas, my inner Brahms proved wrong. There was much to admire and to consider on all fronts. Not only was this to be a serious piece of theatre; it was, certain, despite inevitable reservations, to be the best Mozart and indeed to my taste probably the best performance of music before Wagner I had heard from Rattle. This, I think, was testament not only to his thoughtful, keen-eared approach, dismissal of Furtwängler, Böhm, Klemperer, Giulini, Davis, et al. (and their admirers) notwithstanding, but also to willingness to learn from his still relatively new orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony, and to theirs from him.
Interviewed in 2015, Icke declared his responsibility ‘always’ to be ‘to the impulse of the original play, to clear away the accumulated dust of its performance history. So much of great drama was profoundly troubling when it was first done. They rioted at Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, for goodness’ sake. Audiences shouldn’t be allowed to feel nothing.’ A ‘period’ approach similar to Rattle’s (at least in theory, if not in practice)? Hardly, as anyone familiar with his work would attest. That is, in part, the problem: such notions mean such different things to people in different contexts that misunderstanding – doubtless including mine concerning Rattle’s words – is rife. Enough, anyway, of this preamble. It may have been better to plunge straight into the action as Mozart does, if arguably to withdraw a little thereafter. I wanted, though, to try to give an impression or at least a self-assessment of my own accumulated dust, if only to help explain my own admiration – some anticipated, some less so – for what I saw and heard.
Icke opens with the Commendatore, in a sense master of ceremonies, initiating his own private performance—on record, like so many of us, one might even say in neo-Brahmsian fashion. The sounds of an old, crackly performance will be heard again for Giovanni’s Tafelmusik as we approach the denouement and the Commendatore’s return. (In reality, he has never been away, conceptually or physically, as stage appearances make clear.) For there is here a strong relationship, probably identity, between the two. Does Giovanni’s murder of his nemesis thereby suggest the master of his own fate is indeed his own nemesis? Is the action that unfolds, whether from the standpoint of an old man sipping wine to a gramophone record of his youth or from hospital bed and a fatally wounded young man, drip-attached, staggering with increasing difficulty across the stage (n the second act), the Commendatore/Giovanni narrating his own story? How reliable a narrator might he be? And how reliable might live and recorded video images be? The work, even? These are not necessarily questions to be answered definitively, though nor are they trivially raised then neglected. This is – at least was for me – a call to active participation from the spectator and listener. That may be why some evidently did not care for it.
The concept takes its leave, I think, from Leporello’s line, ‘Chi è morto, voi, o il vecchio?’ To ask his master who is dead, him or the old man, is generally taken not only to be (theatre of the) absurd – clearly it is – but as merely silly. (Thank goodness this was not a Don Giovanni played ‘for laughs’, a dramaturgical misunderstanding of the highest or rather the lowest order. The ever-irksome Glyndebourne guffaw was at least avoided.) If we lose the intrinsic master-servant dialectic, highly eroticised by Giovanni’s clothes- and partner-swapping libertinism, we gain an intriguing consideration of what relationship there might be between Giovanni and the Commendatore and what their secret(s) might be. Occasional sharing of lines between characters, not only them, speaks and sings of other connections, born of theatrical experience – they work to the extent one might not even notice – and possibility. It is a standpoint; no one would claim it to be the only standpoint, but it is a fruitful one.
For we rarely ask who the Commendatore is. We arguably do not even ask who Giovanni is, though we think we do. His kinetic energy deludes, seduces us—as well as those onstage. There are neither masquerade nor masqueraders here, which is surely part of the point. Instead, the old man – or is it the young man – has summoned characters from the medical staff. Donna Elvira, the young man’s fellow inhabitant of the chameleon-realm between seria and buffo, di mezzo caraterre, is notably precisely who she says she is, her words generally disregarded: his wife. In the final reckoning, she returns to his bedside. Perhaps he is not dead after all, then: not in a banal, realistic way so much, but rather to reckon with the circularity of an abuse that is born of and returns to the family, a little girl who sees it all the counterpart, perhaps more than that, to Donna Anna. As survivors do – are we all, ‘in a very real sense’, survivors? – she teaches other women, onstage and on film. She should not have to, of course, but what choice does she and do they have?
The idea of standing between life and death – in limbo perhaps or hell, even heaven – can be considered and expressed in many ways. Giovanni’s initial, disconcerting beatific gaze suggests one way, perhaps not taken—or is it? At any rate, the idea is one arguably explored in the work or at least one it might encourage us to explore. Claus Guth’s Salzburg production was admired by many, though it struck me as in many ways problematical—not least since it took the cowardly, decidedly non-Giovanni path of omitting the scena ultima. When I think about it again, though, it certainly occupied itself with this notion. Here, the heartbeat that punctuates the action – filmic yet theatrical, auditory yet visual – brings it home arrestingly, in more than once.
Use of surtitles to convey concept rather than the text is by now a common dramaturgical device. Here, I admit I felt unease: was too much being skated over? Might not the conflict have been better brought out into the open? Did the ‘new’ words for the scena ultima threaten ironically to turn what we saw into too much of a conventional morality play? Perhaps that was the point; if so, it seemed a pity, also a little too much ‘leading’ for what we ought to have been able to grasp without. At least, though, I was led to ask the question, and it may have been my misunderstanding or simply a case of my preference/preconception not according with a valid alternative.
Rattle’s musical dramaturgy surprised me: not only from what he had said, but from what I had been told. A friend who had attended an earlier performance informed me of swift tempi. Once past a shockingly fast alla breve, even by current standards, what I heard was anything but. Who knows? Maybe I too am an ‘authenticist’ without having known it. The point was not of course speed or even tempi as such, but rather a variegated approach, giving each number its due whilst attempting to situate it within a greater whole. I did not find everything entirely convincing; when does one ever? More often than not I did, though. I also found a welcome collaborative approach not only to the production but to the cast, without ever falling into the messy trap of having them all do their own thing. This work needs a musical as well as a stage director—and it received one: one, moreover, who was as alert as any I have heard, perhaps even more so, to the array of timbral possibilities, some historically derived, some less so. The Munich wind in particular must have thanked their lucky stars.
The whole orchestra was on outstanding form, truly able to ‘speak’ dramatically: a quality Rattle associates with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and which I do with Mozart’s position between Gluck and Mozart. Again, maybe we are not so far apart after all; maybe we are ready at long last to put such ‘debates’ behind us. There were times when tension sagged a little, Rattle perhaps savouring, even loving, the score more than is ideal, however understandable. As ever, the familiar conflation of Prague and Vienna versions did not help. (For once, given aspects of the production, inclusion of the Leporello-Zerlina duet might have been an advantage.) But none of my reservations was grievous and I learned much from what I heard too.
Andrè Schuen proved an outstanding Giovanni: properly adaptive to every situation, his very core shifting as necessary; suave and strong; yet troubled and tortured. Clive Bayley’s Commendatore, unusually and necessarily more acted than sung, imparted equal conviction in the concept. If (the mature) Donna Anna seemed somewhat sidelined by that concept, Golda Schultz’s vocal palette and sparkle left nothing to be desired. Krzysztof Bączyk was likewise faced with a production in which Leporello seemed less central than otherwise, but his performance remained estimable, a proper foil to his master’s (in either incarnation). Magdalena Kožená fully captured the world of a different Elvira, words and music harnessed with insight. Madison Nono and Paweł Horodyski presented a spirited, finely sung Zerlina and Masetto with an apt taste for light sadomasochism that was not confined to them. Amitai Pati seemed at times a little out of sorts vocally as Don Ottavio, but everyone is entitled to a (relative) off-night, especially in such cruelly exposed music. All the cast, small chorus included, contributed to the realisation of the greater whole: Icke’s, Rattle’s, and the broad intersection of the two.
