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| Images: SLT / Tobias WItzgall |
La Colonnella – Hazel McBain
L’ajuntata maggiora – Katie Coventry
Marchesa – Nicole Lubinger
Amaranto – Luke Sinclair
Il Conte – George Humphreys
Admiral – Yevheniy Kapitula
Il gran Colombo – Michael Schober
Girasole – Alexander Hüttner
Director – Alexandra Liedtke
Set designs – Philip Rubner
Costumes – Johanna Lakner
Dramaturgy – Anna N.M. Lea
Lighting – Sebastian Schubert
Chorus and Supplementary Chorus of the Salzburg Landestheater (chorus director: Mario El Fakih)
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| La Generala (Daniele Macciantelli), Il Conte (George Humphreys), L’ajuntata maggiora (Katie Coventry), La Colonnella (Hazel McBain) |
If it often proves difficult to think or write about, say, Alexander Zemlinsky without invoking his still-more-celebrated brother-in-law, how much more difficult is it for Salieri—without, well, you know mention of a certain other composer contemporary to him, perhaps all the more so in Salzburg. Or perhaps not, since Salieri has been doing relatively well there of late. Last year’s Mozartwoche offered him a number of opportunities, those I heard very well taken. This year, the bicentenary of his death, the Landestheater gives his 1795 dramma giocoso, Il mondo alla rovescia, on which he had begun work in 1779, only to set it aside and return to it in 1792, renewing an initial collaboration with his (and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s) friend Caterino Mazzolà, who the previous summer had worked with a Salzburg composer on a revision of Metastasio’s La clemenza di Tito for Leopold II’s coronation as king of Bohemia. (In the meantime, Mazzolà’s libretto, then entitled L'isola capricciosa, had been set by Giacomo Rust, briefly Hofkapellmeister in Salzburg, for the 1780 Venice carnival.) It is perhaps ironic that we now know Mazzolà best for an opera seria, when by far the greater part of his operatic work was in the buffo genre, here taking its leave from Carlo Goldoni’s Il mondo alla reversa (another Venice carnival piece, by Baldassare Galuppi in 1750). Some may know another Salieri collaboration, La scuola de’ gelosi, but any opportunity to acquaint oneself with further Mazzolà as well as further Salieri is greatly welcome. This opera, given its modern premiere in 2009 in the composer’s home town of Legnago, is now heard in a new version prepared at the behest of conductor Carlo Benedetto Cimento by the same musicologist and mandolinist Bernardo Ticci, now drawing on all available sources. Some music, including a vocal duet with mandolin, here played expertly onstage by Mert E. Akyüz, thus receives its first hearing since 1795.
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| Generala, Conte, wedding guests |
This is not the place for a synopsis, but for a work that will be unfamiliar to most, the basic idea is that two shipwrecked Europeans, a Count and Marchioness are taken captive by a female General (Generala, hence I have kept Italian in the cast list) and the island society over which she rules, one in which usual gender roles have been reversed, so that men do the housework, women do the soldiering, and so on, so that the Count comes to enjoy being fought over by two women, the Generala and a younger Colonella, whom he favours and with whom ultimately he will elect to stay on the island. In a sense, the idea is simple, but its ramifications are not, a dichotomy well realised in Alexandra Liedtke’s staging, brought to life in excellent, often outstanding performances from a fine cast and the Mozarteum Orchestra, galvanised by Cimento, for whom this resurrection has clearly been a labour of love.
Projection of a few words and pictorial scenes sets the scene, yet it is still a surprise to see men in happy if oppressed domesticity when the curtain rises, clad in Barbie (Ken) pink, cleaning equipment to hand, soon lorded (ladied) over by military women who engage in the crudest of seduction—though a question immediately posed by the shadow projection of its outcome is how consonant that particular act might be with the island’s ‘natural order’ of things. Doubtless it can be and for some in a twenty-first century will be, but the question hints at an inability of any of us to escape certain aspects of gender roles, whether or no we wish to do so. The variety of means – action, designs, thought bubble interventions, etc. – with which points are made might sound didactic on the page, yet notwithstanding one or two sobering exceptions, for instance a reminder of the gender pay gap today among musicians, the general tone is comedic, even comical. If one does not get one reference, say to Barbie, one will probably do so another, say to The Magic Flute or to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, alluding to the Count’s arrival on land as well as gender-reversal, as he sits to be painted. And lest you think this all sounds too binary, the painter and dressmaker Girasole are evidently more interested in one another. (In the programme, we learn that, ‘according to Salieri’, presumably Mazzolà too, the latter will end up partnering the Generala’s adjutant, but it counsels us to find out the meaning of ‘lavender marriage’.) So the production lightly yet firmly develops the drama from its original state, well aware of the differences in outlook between societies 230 years apart, but also of what has not changed. I was a little surprised to see the Generala’s grotesquerie – the joke being she is an older woman, sung en travestie by a basso buffo – go unquestioned, but perhaps that is also the point. We have not moved on as much as we think, and we still find the premise in large part absurd. The production’s openness to different standpoints is a strength and arguably a necessary one.
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| Amaranto (Luke Sinclair) and others |
Intention is always a fraught issue, whether in performance or ‘the music itself’ (‘TMI’), a once-fashionable problematising term in musicology (feminist critiques included), but from which we now have mostly moved on. Whether Cimento ‘meant’ to bring to the fore things I thought and heard I cannot possibly know without asking him, but I can certainly say that much did come to mind, dramatically and conceptually. Above all, he drew outstanding, committed playing from the orchestra, big-boned and subtle, characterful and situational, fully aware of structure, form, dramatic momentum, and their interaction. No, Salieri does not have the gift of musical characterisation that someone else does, but nor does Haydn; even Gluck’s gift here is distinctly limited in comparison. Very few composers from any period of musical history do, if indeed that is what they are attempting (which we should by no means take for granted). I found particularly interesting the way vocal writing and number form more generally adapted or did not according to gender reversal. Was this parody? And if so, whose parody was it anyway? How much was playing with expectation, in a different way from Così fan tutte, yet one whose requirements for musical learning did not, amongst the more knockabout material, necessarily seem less. Moreover, the wind and specifically brass writing, often associated, obviously enough, with militarism set me to think how much might this have been (re-)conceived, or at least received, as an opera in wartime, coming about two years before Haydn’s Missa in tempore belli. Indeed, in broader conception, Haydn’s Goldoni opera Il mondo della luna, written only two years before Salieri’s initial compositional work, often came to mind dramatically—and perhaps even musically.
Individual performances were uniformly excellent. Daniele Macciantelli clearly had a ball as La Generala, never putting a stage or vocal foot wrong whilst doing so. If you wanted to know how soprano coloratura – and much else – might be used to convey toxic masculinity/femininity, Hazel McBain was your person as La Colonnella. George Humphreys managed the competing demands – allure, cunning, and resolve – as well as, well, any woman might have done. In a strikingly different role from Lucio Silla (not JC Bach’s), in which I saw him last year, our Amaranto Luke Sinclair showed that comedy, properly understood and presented, is so much more than mere amusement—whilst offering that too. In a ‘smaller’ role that nonetheless seemed considerably greater, Alexander Hüttner did likewise as Girasole. Nicole Lubinger’s Marchesa’s journey to greater feminist self-knowledge was finely traced. As the Generala’s adjutant, Katie Coventry similarly combined striking stage presence and every musical virtue, as she had as Cecilio in that Lucio Silla. Yevheniy Kapitula as the Admiral and Michael Schober’s Gran Colombo rounded off the cast in ‘smaller’ roles that yet contributed to an evening that was so much more than the sum of its parts.
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| Colonnella, Conte, Ajutanta |
Overall, then, the overt emphasis was comedic, although creditably not to the extent one could not also consider what else might have been done, always bearing in mind that no one staging or performance is likely to cover all bases. Dramas worth performing are usually more open, if sometimes to the discomfort of their creators, than any single approach will allow. Scenically, what I missed was a stronger sense of that wartime context. That is not a complaint but rather an observation concerning what further layering might be added—and doubtless reflecting my own historical (and contemporary) preoccupations. Austrian defeats of the previous year 1794 (Fleurus and Aldenhoven) would doubtless have informed the first critical responses of many to an opera premiered in January 1795. And there may be reason to consider a gendered element there too. Little more than three years earlier, during the Bohemian coronation festivities for Emperor Francis II’s father and predecessor, Leopold II, La clemenza di Tito received star theatrical billing, its premiere the evening of the coronation itself. That, however, was as first among equals in a programme that also included August Kotzebue’s topical, one-act comedy Der weibliche Jacobiner-Club, pitting the Parisian Madem (sic) Duport, radicalised by revolution, against her traditionalist husband.
There is a case to be made that bourgeois revolutionaries strengthened gender binaries and power relations; certainly with hindsight that seems to have been the case. But it was not necessarily how things seemed at the time. Comedy was often a ‘safe’ way of expressing and exaggerating fears of social upheaval. Revolution and the revolutionary wars, which were how the former most immediately manifested itself in this part of Europe, might also threaten another variety of the ‘world turned upside down’, or at least be feared to do so. Music could – and did – deepen and question such assumptions and indeed their questioning too.
