At the risk of over-posting (especially considering I'm seeing Otello on Wednesday,
Walküre on Thursday, Shostakovich on Friday and Stravinsky and Beethoven on Sunday), I just wanted to say a few words about last night's performance of Mitridate at the Royal Opera House.
Wow!
For so many reasons, I'm glad I went. I feel in something of a good position to assess the work, as I just saw
Idomeneo, another opera seria of Mozart's at the end of March at the Met. Now, I had just taken the red eye in from San Francisco when I saw
Idomeneo, so my impressions were undoubtedly colored by my exhausted state of mind. However, that production was so dull and conservative, that libretto even more feeble, and that music not to my ears significantly better than
Mitridate, even though
Mitridate is the work of a fourteen year old and
Idomeneo was eleven years thereafter. Perhaps opera seria is so constricting that Mozart was unable to make tremendous progress developing in that genre. In any case, it was his first attempt at
opera seria (a term used interchangeably with
dramma per musica), followed by
Lucio Silla when he was 16,
Il re pastore when he was 19,
Idomeneo at 24-5 and then finally
La Clemenza di Tito in the last months of his life. To this list one could perhaps add
Il sogno di Scipione, a one act "
theatrical action" but with a text by the opera seria librettist non plus ultra, Metastasio, that Mozart wrote at 16. Musically, Clemenza is surely more sophisticated than Mitridate, but I can't underline how rich the orchestral textures are; it does not sound like the work of a student learning his craft. Were it anyone else, it could stand as the part of a mature corpus. I recall Malcolm Gladwell, the America's armchair social scientist-public intellectual extraordinaire remarking on Fareed Zakaria's Sunday show in support of his 10,000 hours thesis that Mozart was mediocre until his maturity. Last night disabused me of the veracity of that thesis. It is a remarkably lovely work, even as its notions of love-as-virtue in which one can "win" a romantic partner with virtuous behavior would strike a modern audience as creepy/stalker-y.
With the exceptions of the fine duet at the end of act 2 (the highlight of the whole opera, listen to Bartoli and Dessay sing it in 1998
here) and ensemble finale ultimo, the work is composed exclusively of aria/arioso and recitative. Every single singer was excellent. My complaint of the voicing is that the work is tremendously treble-heavy: four sopranos (two originally castrati) one alto (castrato, sung by a countertenor), and two tenors, one of which is a minor role. I get that "elevated" people require "elevated voices," but the lack of any bass singers (which Mitridate could well have been, leaving either of his sons to take over a tenor role) makes the tonal register begin to grate after several hours. The main soprano, Aspasia, stole the show; her coloratura was impeccable and her lyric voice showed no sign of strain throughout the evening. As the
Guardian put it, she "delivers coloratura of such astonishing accuracy that you sit there open-mouthed." I also enjoyed the main antagonist, Farnace, sung by the countertenor. His character had perhaps the largest emotional range, and even though the libretto only allowed him (and his father) the rather dull character development of assshole-assshole-assshole-assshole-penitent, he played it as well as it could be played. I have to say, Mitridate himself is a character study in being small-minded and douchey for its own sake, angry as he is that the foreign princess taken as a war tribute that he has decided to marry is actually in love with the opera's protagonist and his own younger son Sifare.
But the production.
Oh, the production.
The set was a relatively simple red floor with large moving red walls with
Mitridate, re di Ponto scrawled on them in enormous cursive. At the back of the stage was a blue cyclorama. It was the costuming, though, that grabbed the greatest attention. The characters moved in an exaggeratedly baroque manner, highly stylized and artificial, and the director decided that this emphasis on artifice from the period would be best conveyed by borrowing Japanese (and apparently Indian?) costumes. The characters all wore kimono/dress/robe like costumes, and at the waist they all jutted out to the right and left. The male characters had it about an arm's length right and left, the Aspasia had it going out either way maybe two arm lengths. The characters occasionally seemed inconvenienced by it, but dressing everyone in dress-like costumes seemed to suggest that the director was winking at us about the ridiculousness of the plot, characters, and setting. The sons had plastic looking silver armor that caught the light in an annoying way and shone it in your face. They had curved, Japanese looking Samurai swords. In general, the opera tended toward schematic and metaphorical representation rather than verisimilitude. In general, I feel that we've "done" photographic realism and that it's
much cheaper and more intellectually interesting to do something that subverts it and makes you think about what you're seeing. Given that opera is so ostentatiously
not real (unlike movies and plays), this angle to my mind is more in keeping with the inner truth of the art form.
I'm reminded of my comment on September 25th:
Saw an utterly stunning ballet at NYCB today. Balanchine in black and white. The dancers reveal the human form in such riveting beauty that I was left thinking: what if we had our operas performed with the singers singing unilluminated at the sides of the proscenium, with a ballet rather than a theatrical staging put to the music? It would be much more visually stimulating, and (especially or perhaps only in the case of Wagner) would allow for a kind of abstract interpretation of the music that heretofore is reserved, in the choreography of Balanchine, for absolute music. Abbado did a Ring without Words a few years back that's about 70 minutes long, and I would LOVE to see that staged.
Wagner was all about how Gesamtkunstwerk was the unity of music, text, and dramatic action, and it seems to me a serious phase in the visual interpretation of Wagner will dispense with the pretext of staged production (ala David Hockney in 2006 at the LA Phil) and let us see the text interpreted with the ultimate abstraction, intensity, and freedom of choreography that does not attend to the mundane workings of the plot (as Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet does, and which I find incredibly tedious): the text fills us in on the plot; the staging, like the music, can convey yet another incarnation of the drama that pervades the work across its multiple media.
"Not-reality" is of course able to be done in infinitely more ways than "reality" is, so this is less a style per se than an exhortation for opera directors to be free of conservatism and to innovate in whatever way they find compelling.
Twice during the opera the music stopped for a minute or two while supernumerary soldiers marched with a highly percussive stomping. I found this hilarious and giggled ala Mozart in
Amadeus, but a dour, proper looking man (who nevertheless only paid the £24 I did for his seat) turned round when I did so to glare at me. I gave him my best "I'm an American, don't give a schiit" face and he didn't bother me further. I can't believe that I've seen two of five of Mozart's
opere serie but only one of the Da Ponte (Figaro, and three times by my count) — I could have seen Don Giovanni in Holland Park but £67 wasn't worth it. I can wait. I think I'll see Così next March at the Met, though.
Otello and
Walküre tomorrow and Thursday. Can't wait!
