Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Don Giovanni
L'Opéra National de Paris, 2019
Philippe Jordan, Ivo Van Hove, Étienne Dupuis, Ain Anger, Jacquelyn Wagner, Stanislas de Barbeyrac, Nicole Car, Philippe Sly, Mikhail Timoshenko, Elsa Dreisig
Paris Cinema Live - 21 June 2019
It's not as if Mozart's operas works aren't already clearly progressive works, in their musical qualities as well as in their expression of the injustices and inequalities within society, and as such they always seem to be capable of revealing other aspects and changing facets that reflect the times we are living in. The 'droit de seigneur' of Le Nozze di Figaro can certainly be applied to contemporary situations, showing that Mozart was already there with #MeToo long before its time and there's also something about Don Giovanni that takes in all the complexities of male and female relationships on a deeper and more universal level.
If we can recognise what is universal and true in Mozart's Don Giovanni, it doesn't need a director like Ivo van Hove to bring it out or add anything new to it. Not that you have to, since attempting to fit those works to contemporary morals and attitudes can still be problematic. Sometimes the best thing you can do is let a work speak for itself and the sign of a good director is knowing when to step back and where to intervene and what to highlight to bring to the attention of the audience. Van Hove's setting of his Paris Opera production consequently aims for the universal, blending modern and period characteristics, but feels almost respectful of Mozart in terms of the plotting, not daring to mess with it too much.
Of course in Don Giovanni, certain choices have to be made by any director that have considerable influence on the tone of the work. One of the first choices any director has to make is whether Don Giovanni is a seducer and a lover of women or an aggressor and an abuser. Even within that you have to determine whether he is a victim of his own desires, incapable of being anything but his nature (and whether the women who are drawn to him are not more than creatures of nature too) and thus deserving of some sympathy.
Some productions in the past have suggested that Donna Anna was leading him on, that the killing of the Commendatore is just an accident or self-defence, that his only real crime is arrogance in believing that he is above the laws of nature, that he is in control of them, that there is no harm or consequence to his behaviours, that he is exempt (whether through nobility, vanity or just arrogant superiority) from paying any price for his actions. While it's valid to explore the many possibilities that this fascinating character and the other fascinating characters play in the opera (and they all have an important part to play), there's no real doubt about how Mozart saw Don Giovanni. It's in the original title; a dissolute punished.
Ivo van Hove clearly wants to stick with that line of thinking, and I'm minded to consider the previous Paris Opera production directed by the filmmaker Michael Haneke in relation to this, Haneke making the original title explicit, taking a political spin on the work and making the punishment very much a case of earthly justice of the people deposing a cruel, thoughtless and arrogant leader. Van Hove's choices are less imposing on the work and not so politically minded, but his outlook on it means that the production unquestionably has a darker colour that doesn't permit the usual comic interplay with Leporello. Van Hove's contribution, if it adds up to anything, is in holding to this consistent tone, in getting the performers all working together to bring that character to the fore and making it feel as deep and real and meaningful as Mozart scores it.
What is also noticeable about this production - although really you should already be aware of this - is that the women in Don Giovanni are amazing. Mozart's enlightened thinking was genuinely far ahead of his time. Without having to expressly evoke any contemporary application, it's evident enough to anyone currently witnessing the rise of the #MeToo movement that these are women in Don Giovanni who are here prepared to stand up against their aggressor, not let society say that they are complicit, nor let it make them doubt their own nature. The may have been naive perhaps in their expectations of someone like Don Giovanni, but nothing more than that, and he has gravely abused their nature, their trust and their person.
That comes out well, and it's a director's job to ensure that that it does, so whether you recognise Ivo Van Hove's hand in this (as with his theatrical work his directing of actors is a lot more subtle than his bold and experimental scenic touches suggest), his choices and directions unquestionably strike an accurate and consistent tone. And it's not just in the casting and performance of Don Giovanni, although Étienne Dupuis is outstanding as a serious, calculating and manipulative noble here, his singing and performance striking a superb balance between charming and utterly deadly, but how the other characters respond to him is vitally important.
I've pondered before when considering Le Nozze di Figaro how important the secondary roles are in Mozart's operas, and concluding that if you give due attention to the casting and character of all the roles, there are greater dividends to be found. There's no such thing as a secondary or minor role in Mozart's operas - in the Da Ponte trilogy of works at least - and that the operas achieve their true greatness when all of them are given serious consideration. I don't think Don Giovanni can be anything but great, but when you give those superbly detailed characters (in terms of personality, as well as in the incredible pieces of music that Mozart writes for them), the true genius of the complexity of people's behaviour and their relationships is apparent.
In that respect, this is a great Don Giovanni. Director intervention might appear minimal, but the coaching of the performers to find the real people within those roles, to bring out what Mozart and Da Ponte put there is evident here. Of course, it's consideration of the fate of the women that is just as important, if not more important than Don Giovanni (although Don Giovanni and Leporello must also be taken seriously in how they display another side of human nature), and when you do that, not only do you get heartfelt, fiery performances from Jacquelyn Wagner as Donna Anna and Nicole Car as Donna Elvira, but you get the whole richness of women's sentiments and personality when you take that attention down to Elsa Dreisig's sincere Zerlina. Superb singing from Philippe Sly as Leporello, Stanislas de Barbeyrac as Don Ottavio, Ain Anger as the Commendatore, and Mikhail Timoshenko as Masetto kept a strong consistent tone across all the relationships in the production of this work.
How much the production design contributed to the overall impact of the work is difficult to determine, but it clearly worked well. The whole opera takes place here outside Don Giovanni's imposing grey castle with little of the usual film references that you associate with an Ivo Van Hove production and instead more of an Escher quality, or Duke Bluebeard's Castle in the sense of the maze like entrapment of the castle's staircases, alleys and doorways. Modern suits are mixed with medieval attitudes. It's uniformly grey, but there are flashes of colour there when the director wants to draw attention to aspects of the drama and the music.
There is little also of the director's customary use of projections, Van Hove keeping those tricks in the bag until later for maximum impact. The use and wielding of guns give an extra edge of danger, of threatening masculinity and abuse of power. The effects are saved for the finale, as you might expect in the descent to hell scene. What you might not expect is the superb handling of the necessary final sextet, often cut in darker interpretations of the opera. Here it is necessary to give a sense that this dark masculine world can be healed and it's women, Mozart's women - the clue already revealed in the seemingly throwaway scene between Zerlina and Masetto - who are the healing force in the opera. I expected something a little more radical from this director doing Don Giovanni, but no it didn't need it. Van Hove sees what is important in the opera, in Mozart's outlook, and he nails it.
L'Opera de Paris, Culturebox
Ernest Chausson - Le Roi Arthus
L'Opéra National de Paris, 2015
Philippe Jordan, Graham Vick, Sophie Koch, Thomas Hampson, Roberto Alagna, Alexandre Duhamel, Stanislas de Barbeyrac, François Lis, Peter Sidhom, Cyrille Dubois, Tiago Matos, Ugo Rabec
Culturebox - 28 May 2015
There's nothing too complicated about Graham Vick and Paul Brown's concept and sets for this production of Chausson's Le Roi Arthus (King Arthur) at the Paris Opera. Evidently with Vick, it's not going to be period King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table wearing suits of armour, but then Chausson's opera has very little to do with the myth or even adherence to traditional characterisation. Except in one respect. It's really nothing more than a variation on the common opera theme of the illicit love affair that betrays a king, and really if it wasn't set as King Arthur, the characters here could be replaced by others without any significant changes. Like King Marke, Tristan and Isolde for example.
That hardly seems like a fair comparison, but it's a valid one, since Chausson's opera - his only opera and one that is rarely performed - does wear its Wagnerian influences heavily. Lancelot's love affair with the Queen Guinevere takes place in secret in the second scene of Act I, the couple intensely wrapped up in their love for one another as Lyonnel (Kurwenal) looks on worriedly, aware of the consequences of them being discovered by the king. Their declarations of love approaches a peak where they sing of their profound divine ecstasy and how the rest of the world seems like a confused dream, just as Mordred (Melot) rushes in, catches them in the act and is struck down by Tristan... er, I mean Lancelot.
Despite the evident aspirations to match these sentiments with Wagnerian through composition and sweeping crescendos of large orchestral forces; despite a few Ho-he-Ho-ho's and a labourer (Steersman) lament at the start of Act I, Chausson's score never even comes close to the soaring transcendence and ecstasy of Wagner. The comparison that is begged is unfortunate, for were it not for a libretto that is rather dull and domestic, having none of the profundity of Wagner's philosophical weight and poetic expression, Le Roi Arthus does actually have a musical force of its own or of a particular French post-Wagnerian tradition (Franck, Massenet) where it sits rather better.
The disparity between the musical qualities of Le Roi Arthus and the narrative of the libretto are unfortunately all too apparent in the production at the Opéra National de Paris. Graham Vick can't find any real conceptual element to grasp onto other than the rather domestic nature of the drama. Arthur's Britons are more like Glastonbury hippies who, after defeating the Saxons, rope their swords into a circle and build a flat-pack house for their King. Scattered books speak of the disarray that follows, and a red plastic sofa speaks of the lust that upsets the cosy atmosphere of the happy family. Is there any deeper level to be drawn out here that Vick is missing by not setting it in Arthurian times? I don't think so.
It's well worth applying more attention however to Philippe Jordan's conducting of the orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris. Divided into three acts with two scenes each, all separated by symphonic interludes, Jordan reveals more than the superficial Wagner similarities that the narrative leads one to hear. Aside from the symphonic interludes, the scoring and performance of Arthur in Act II, Scene II suggests a closer affinity with Golaud from Pelléas et Mélisande, or even King Phillip II from Verdi's Don Carlo. That kind of wealth of influence and reference is there in Chausson's scoring, and Jordan brings out the whole dynamic and range of the possibilities that are there in the music.
If only it was all put in the service of something worthwhile, as the characterisation in Le Roi Arthus seems to have no real-life foundation or insight of its own. Arthur has none of the complexity of Phillip II and is indeed little more than the kind ruler (in chunky wool cardigan) suffering the anguish of suspicions and cruelly betrayed by his closest friend and his wife. Lancelot is all conflicted between love and duty, struggling over questions of honour and nobility, but prone to being swayed by the machinations of a woman. And, yes, that's about the level that Guinevere operates on, having no qualms about her actions, able to brazenly carry on with Lancelot and lie to Arthur, manipulating both men away from their finer nature.
Within the restrictions of those poorly defined personality traits, the cast nonetheless perform admirably, all of them well suited to this repertoire. Written as it is, you can even indulge Le Roi Arthus as being the only way you'll ever hear Sophie Koch and Roberto Alagna singing Tristan und Isolde. Koch fares better in the Wagnerian stakes as she has such experience and ability in the mezzo-soprano roles. She brings a thrilling intensity here to a wonderfully scored but ultimately rather thankless role. While it's clear that Alagna could never sustain the demands of a Tristan and is stretched at the more intense parts of Le Roi Arthus, he's in his element as the romantic hero and consequently terrific in the main as Lancelot. Thomas Hampson's voice isn't as robust as it once was, but he is still commanding here as Arthur and particularly impressive in his 'Ella gaimmai m'amo' scene.
It's in Arthur that there is some room to expand on the themes of Le Roi Arthus as being a little more than run of the mill domestic drama. The aforementioned scene does see Arthur's world implode, his abandonment by Guinevere and his betrayal by Lancelot cutting deeply, hitting a strong king at his weak point. In it he sees the collapse of everything he has strived to achieve, leaving the way open only to death. He calls out to Merlin, seeking power beyond what is human, but Chausson's score - as rich as it is and as all Parsifal-like as it gets to in the Third Act finale, is inadequate to take the piece to that other level where that work, Tristan und Isolde, Don Carlos and Pelléas et Mélisande all reside.
Links: Culturebox
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Die Zauberflöte
Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, 2014
Pablo Heras-Casado, Simon McBurney, Stanislas de Barbeyrac, Mari Eriksmoen, Kathryn Lewek, Josef Wagner, Regula Mühlemann, Christof Fischesser, Andreas Conrad, Ana-Maria Labin, Silvia de La Muela, Claudia Huckle, Maarten Koningsberger, Krzysztof Baczyk, Elmar Gilbertsson
ARTE Concert - Live Streaming, July 2014
Simon McBurney's idea of using a live video feed that shows hand-drawn backgrounds and the employment of live foley effects is, I presume, a way of making Mozart's Die Zauberflöte a little more spontaneous and interactive. It's a way of connecting to the same live impulse as the performance of the music itself, and since music is all-important in the conception and execution of this particular work, that's not a bad idea. In theory anyway. In practice, it doesn't really contribute a great deal during this performance of the production filmed at the 2014 Aix-en-Provence festival.
There's more to the direction of the production than this - and not all of which works terribly successfully either - but essentially, the visual impression of the stage design sets the primary tone of the work and it seems to run contrary to the intent. There's considerable effort put into making the work light, playful and noble, but the stage remains dark and in shadows throughout. The stage makes extensive and good use of a platform which is raised and tilted throughout the journey and the trials, the underside meaningfully and practically revealing a lighting rig. Clothes are everyday casual, Papageno looking like a mountain-hiker with no bird-like characteristics at all. The three ladies wear combat patterned canvas clothing. None of it however looks terribly 'magic kingdom'.
In fact, the overriding impression given is that there's an awful lot of effort put into achieving very little effective results at all. An artist draws background lines and scribbles with chalk on a blackboard (which eventually coalesce into words and phrases by the end of the journey into enlightenment), some shadow puppets are used, and numerous extras are required to wave around folded pages to represent birds. Some of the projections are "traditional", showing a swirling serpent, using a row of books to indicate the way into Sarastro's kingdom, but mostly it feels a very laboured way to achieve immediacy, simplicity and spontaneity. At its worst - in a scene like Papageno's playing around with bottles that fail to synchronise with the live sound-effects created in an on-stage booth - it actually works against the idea of spontaneity and simplicity and just kills the lightness and humour of the situation.
At least the intention is clear here, whereas the purpose of some of McBurney's other directorial choices are less evident. The Queen of the Night's account of Pamina's abduction works well and achieves an immediacy when you see it enacted in the shadows of the stage, but why is the Queen of the Night depicted as an old lady who hobbles onto the stage with a walking stick and is carted off in a wheelchair at the end of her energetic coloratura aria? Why are the three boys likewise skeletal old men? All of the characters undergo a transformation over the course of the work, but neither of these points really fit with the characterisation or the essential purpose of the work.
McBurney, in interviews and in the Aix Festival Programme, seems nonetheless to have a reasonable concept here that does come through at stages. The multimedia approach matches the multifaceted range of Mozart's work, and in regards to Die Zauberflöte it also manages to touch on the magic of simplicity, of understanding the world and achieving wisdom by seeing it through a child's eyes. The veneration of music, as a magical means of reaching that level of purity and as a resolution to all conflicts, is covered well in the ceremonial aspects of the staging and in the reverential handling of the flute. Music is at the centre of this Magic Flute and is instrumental in bringing about this new and better society, "through friendship and love".
If the staging is a bit laboured and ultimately indifferent in as far as the impact it has upon the work, the actual performance of Mozart's score by the Freiburger Barockorchester is just wonderful. Pablo Heras-Casado marshals the rhythms and pace of the work brilliantly and with delicacy, achieving that necessary playful lightness, spontaneity and the magical simplicity that the stage production aims for but never quite achieves. The singing too is just beautiful right across the range - on note, with a sense of really enjoying and feeling the work. Christof Fischesser is one of the best Sarastros around, and he's matched against a strong Königin der Nacht in Kathryn Lewek. Stanislas de Barbeyrac and Mari Eriksmoen sing purely as Tamino and Pamina as well as giving the roles some personality. There's no lack of that either from Josef Wagner's Papageno or Regula Mühlemann's Papagena.
In the end, Simon McBurney's production of the Magic Flute for Aix-en-Provence gets there and finds the beauty at the heart of the work, but if it succeeds and proves enjoyable, it's more to do with the expression of Mozart's incredible musical talent. Under Pablo Heras-Casado's musical direction, with the wondrous performance of the work by the Freiburger Barockorchester and with some very fine singing, this is one of the best accounts of this opera I've heard in a long time. And even if Simon McBurney's stage direction doesn't bring all that much to it, this is still a very impressive Die Zauberflöte.
Links: ARTE Concert, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence
