Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - The Impresario
Buxton Festival Opera, 2025
Iwan Davies, Christopher Gillett, Richard McCabe, Joyce Henderson, Owain Rowlands, Jessica Hopkins, Dan D’Souza, Conor Prendiville, Nazan Fikret, Jane Burnell, Jamie MacDougall
Buxton Opera House, 24th July 2025
As the director who is directing the drama where a director is directing a drama where an impresario is putting on a new opera production for Buxton to be called The Impresario notes while looking pointedly at the audience, the public love you breaking the fourth wall. I’m not sure how many walls are being broken in this production of Mozart's The Impresario, but as the critic enjoying putting this first sentence together, he's absolutely right. Or partly right. It would be a bit more clever if there was some sort of purpose to it, but it seems that the only purpose of this one is to use it as an excuse to gather a number of random Mozart arias into a comic situation. Which is fine, but it's not Der Schauspieldirektor and it's not really even an opera.
Christopher Gillet, the writer and director of this production for the Dutch opera company Opera Zuid in collaboration with the Buxton International Festival does give you fair warning however that what you are seeing is by no means the work composed in 1786 as Der Schauspieldirektor, which in any case was never intended to be an opera. More a "comedy with music", a play with a few numbers by Mozart included, it was felt that a comedy filled with in-jokes written for an 18th century Viennese audience wouldn't translate over to a contemporary audience. So while the premise of the impresario auditioning two sopranos for a prima donna role in a new opera is retained, the whole comedy drama as it was originally written by Gottlieb Stephanie was ditched and Gillet wrote a new context for Mozart's musical pieces.
If I can get a little bit meta and take this up another level - told you he was right about this fourth wall thing - I did wonder what the motivation was for Buxton to put on a fairly obscure Mozart work that wasn't actually an opera and which had very little original music. Buxton do have a very good track record for pasticcios like Giorgiana and comic opera. Gillet observes that he drew influence from Amadeus (since the original Der Schauspieldirektor was set up in competition with Salieri), but with its chaotic behind-the-scenes look at putting on an opera production, there's evidently a lot of Donizetti's Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali here, a work put on in Buxton as Viva la Diva. An opera within an opera, rehearsals, competitiveness, divas and everyone loves an opera about opera, Viva la Diva was a great success in 2022, so why not do more of that sort of thing? You're preaching to the converted, so you can't go wrong. Well, surely not too far wrong.
Unfortunately, The Impresario has none of the brilliance and verve of Donizetti's opera, and the comedy is rather tepid. None of that is the fault of Robert McCabe, the actor in a non-singing role who plays Leo, the impresario tasked with coming up with a new opera and trying to appease the two divas who turn up expecting to be the star soprano of the new work. Or rather, the actor who is playing the part of the impresario, being directed by an on-stage director (who is being directed by another off-stage director who is not actually the 'real' director of The Impresario put on at the Buxton Opera House, Christopher Gillet). Robert McCabe is actually brilliant at showing his frustration with the script and directorial choices, breaking the action to discuss options with the director, holding the whole thing together well. It's just not that funny.
Breaking the fourth wall of the fourth wall in fact is about the height of the comedy that includes a running joke about poffertjes (small Dutch pancakes), as well as making reference to the "wealthy" patrons of the Buxton audience. There is a diva with broken English for laughs (Nazan Fikret actually very entertaining in the role of Madam Herz with some wonderful asides) and a few obvious pop culture jokes at the expense of modern opera and Regietheater where it is notes that the archetypes of The Magic Flute can be fitted onto Star Wars. (I’d rather see that as an opera and I don't even like Star Wars and I didn't think Claus Guth's 'La Bohème in space' was too successful). I'm afraid I have no idea why the set within the set was a room from a Vermeer painting. Like the joke about poffertjes, I suspect this might be tailored for Opera Zuid's Dutch audience, which kind of defeats the purpose of reworking the original 18th century libretto to make it more relatable.
Musically, this was far from successful as an opera. To fill it out musically, classic arias from Die Zauberflöte, Così fan tutte and Le Nozze di Figaro were inserted as audition pieces (all of those auditioning just happening to choose Mozart arias as their showpieces). I'm not a fan of opera galas or recitals myself, since removing arias from their original dramatic context drains them of their power and meaning, though they can work in a pasticcio. This was a sort of pasticcio, I suppose, but none of the pieces used connected with any dramatic developments or sentiments. 'Papageno, Papagena' in particular has no relevance whatsoever outside of the context of The Magic Flute.
It's telling that the best parts of The Impresario were the pieces composed by Mozart specifically for Der Schauspieldirektor, which come late in the performance: 'Ich bin die erste Sängerin' (I am the prima donna) and the finale of 'Jeder Künstler strebt nach Ehre' (Every artist strives for glory), a chorus about art for arts sake. Thin pickings I'm afraid for sitting through a collection of unremarkable gala renditions of Mozart arias held together by a few jokes. Conducted by Iwan Davies, the whole thing was well performed, the singing excellent, the numbers unfortunately lacking purpose, meaning and sentiment when divorced from their original context. A light entertainment with Mozart arias, The Impresario was barely a gala performance within a drama, much less an actual opera.
External links: Buxton International Festival