Mozart - The Impresario (Buxton, 2025)

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 noted 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

Glass - The Perfect American

Philip Glass - The Perfect American

Teatro Real, Madrid, 2013

Dennis Russell Davies, Phelim McDermott, Christopher Purves, David Pittsinger, Donald Kaasch, Janis Kelly, Marie McLaughlin, Sarah Tynan, Nazan Fikret, Rosie Lomas, Zachary James, John Easterlin, Juan Noval-Moro, Beatriz de Gálvez, Noelia Buñuel

Opus Arte - Blu-ray

It's not too hard to see the point being made about in Philip Glass's new opera based on the last days of Walt Disney. The irony is hammered home repeatedly and with no great subtlety in either the libretto or the musical arrangements. Disney's animation and the safe family-friendly ideals they espouse may be revered by generations of children and their parents, but those values are derived from a rather more flawed human individual. An old-fashioned, small-town country-boy with Republican ideals, intolerant of progress, race equality or union activity, Walt Disney is depicted in The Perfect American as a megalomaniac who not only took the credit for the hard work and talent of others, but he treated them appallingly as well. So he wasn't a nice guy. Why make an opera about him?

Well, if Walt Disney and his works are held up as being the epitome of "the perfect American", even ironically, then there might be some merit in exploring prevailing bigoted attitudes and intolerance in the USA, but there's little evidence of that here.  It doesn't help that Rudy Wurlitzer's libretto is filled with repetitive, expositional and declamatory dialogue that attempts to find significance in banalities. Walt's vision for America is determined by his own small-town upbringing ("Everything that I've become has its roots in Marceline"), and that vision is defined as little more than "a magical place where dreams and miracles come true". Elsewhere, Walt's nature and achievements are summed up in snappy mottos ("Never say die!"), common clichés (Disney and his creations being "more famous than Santa" and "more recognisable than Jesus") and dull observations ("That's what he does, spares everyone the worst").

There is some attempt to find a less literal approach in the consideration of notions of immortality, but the observations are similarly trite. Walt expresses his desire to a nurse at the hospital to be cryogenically frozen so that he can be revived in the future, and hubristically compares his cartoons to Greek gods, believing that his work and his beliefs in good conservative American values will "live forever". A little more colour is added when Walt is contrasted with Andy Warhol, who was born in the same year, or in a sequence where Walt has a conversation with a reanimated robot of Abraham Lincoln, but even there, it seems like just thrown in as an opportunity to allow Disney to express some pretty distasteful views on the abolition of slavery leading to the degradation of traditional American values. The latter sequences at least allow director Phelim McDermott and designer Dan Potra a bit more freedom to experiment with the staging which, even without having recourse any actual representations of Disney characters, is impressive and colourful throughout.

The cast and performances are also exceptionally good. Despite the deficiencies of the libretto, Christopher Purves and the rest of the cast (in particular Zachary James as Abe Lincoln and Rosie Lomas as Lucy/Josh) manage to inject some personality into their characters and even some sense of melody into the singing. The musical score however is mostly lifeless orchestration of bland repetition, deadened even further by an inordinate amount of tapping percussion. It lacks any real dynamic or variety in tempo and has no sense of a distinct dramatic character or expression for the work. It's a long way from Glass at his most original and operatic best in his early Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha or Akhnaten portrait operas, but Glass has shown himself in more recent times to still be creatively inspired when the subject (Kepler) or the source (Kafka, Cocteau) are worthy. Walt Disney and The Perfect American just don't seem to fire the composer's imagination this time.

On Blu-ray and in High Definition, the recording of the opera during its world premiere run in the Teatro Real in Madrid at least looks terrific. The staging is impressive and it's well filmed, the HD image capturing the wonderful colour and lighting of the production. The audio tracks also give a clear presentation of the music and the singing both in the stereo (LPCM 2.0) and surround options (DTS HD Master Audio 5.1).  Other than a Cast Gallery, there are no extra features on the BD, but there is an essay and a synopsis in the enclosed booklet. Subtitles are in English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.

Glass - The Perfect American

Philip Glass - The Perfect American

Teatro Real, Madrid, 2013

Dennis Russell Davies, Phelim McDermott, Christopher Purves, David Pittsinger, Donald Kaasch, Janis Kelly, Marie McLaughlin, Sarah Tynan, Nazan Fikret, Rosie Lomas, Zachary James, John Easterlin, Juan Noval-Moro, Beatriz de Gálvez, Noelia Buñuel

Medici.tv / ARTE Internet Streaming, 5th February 2013

It's not too hard to see the point being made about in Philip Glass's new opera based on the last days of Walt Disney.  The irony is hammered home repeatedly and with no great subtlety in either the libretto or the musical arrangements.  His animation and the safe family-friendly ideals they espouse may be revered by generations of children and their parents, but those values are derived from a rather more flawed human individual.  An old-fashioned, smalltown country-boy with Republican ideals, intolerant of progress and union activity, Walt Disney is depicted in The Perfect American as a megalomaniac who not only took the credit for the hard work and talent of others, but he treated them appallingly as well.  So he wasn't a nice guy.  Why make an opera about him?  Well, if Walt Disney and his works are held up as being the epitome of "The Perfect American", even ironically, then there might be some merit in exploring prevailing bigoted attitudes and intolerance.  If that's its purpose however, the opera singularly fails to make its case.

Whether Walt Disney should be accorded the stature of being the subject for opera isn't so much in question then as much as whether a study of the animation giant as the "Perfect American" really has as much to say about the society we live in today as the subjects of previous Glass biographical works - Einstein (Einstein on the Beach), Gandhi (Satyagraha) or the great reforming Egyptian pharaoh (Akhnaten).  Whatever you think of Walt Disney or his children's animation films, he's not exactly the first person who comes to mind when you look around for a representative icon of American values.  Yes, the Disney animation studio was certainly one of the earliest and biggest exports of American family values, the empire of the Mouse and the Duck expanding to conquer and achieve universal recognisability in even the most remote corners of the world.  As for whether the personal attitudes of Disney persist and hold influence, there's a case could certainly be made for that, but not laid specifically at the door of Walt Disney the man.

The idea that he may have been as important as Thomas Edison or Henry Ford may form a part of Walt Disney's self-delusion, but there is no reason given why the audience should believe it or even any suggestion that anyone takes the comparison seriously.  This is a fault that lies throughout the whole premise of the opera.  Based on a novel by Peter Stephen Jungk, a fictionalised account of Walt Disney that recounts the last few months of his life, The Perfect American seems to be attempting to suggest that the flaws and delusions of one man have some kind of wider implication, but in reality it just presents the twisted views of one small-minded individual that seem to have no place or purpose on the operatic stage.  The same could perhaps be said about Mark Anthony Turnage's Anna Nicole, but the tragic story of the rise and demise of Anna Nicole Smith could arguably be said to reflect the pitfalls in following the American Dream with a broader historical scope (Marilyn Monroe) and more cutting social observation, at least on the compromised position of women within that Dream.

Like Anna Nicole, The Perfect American similarly relies heavily on a depiction of the corrupting influence of smalltown America.  But whereas Anna Nicole Smith saw it as a "shithole" that she had to escape from, Walt Disney - in the kind of obvious expositional language that is prevalent throughout Rudy Wurlitzer's libretto ("Everything that I've become has its roots in Marceline"), looks back fondly on his origins, seeing in his hometown all the good old-fashioned American values that he holds dear.  Just to emphasise his position as a reactionary and an unpleasant man, his relationship with Wilhelm Dantine - an animator on 'The Sleeping Beauty' - and their fall-out over union activities is the linking element between the three acts, but Dantine is still devastated when Walt dies.  The libretto's idea of any other kind of character development is limited to snappy mottos ("Never say die!"), common clichés (Mickey Mouse being "more famous than Santa" and "more recognisable that Jesus") and banal observations ("That's what he does, spares everyone the worst") that don't so much highlight the nature of Disney as illustrate the lack of imagination of the libretto and the treatment.

Even those areas where the work tries a less literal approach, the implications are no less obvious and at the same time no more revealing of the man other than the scale of his self-delusion.  He expresses his desire to a nurse at the hospital to be cryogenically frozen so that he can be revived in the future, and hubristically compares his cartoons to Greek gods, believing that his work and his beliefs in good conservative American values will "live forever".  A little more colour is added when Walt is contrasted with Andy Warhol, who was born in the same year, or in a sequence where Walt has a conversation with a robot Abraham Lincoln, but even there, it seems like just thrown in as an opportunity to allow Disney to express some pretty distasteful views on the abolition of slavery leading to the degradation of traditional American values.

The latter sequences allow director Phelim Mc Dermott and designer Dan Potra a bit more freedom to experiment with the staging, but to be honest, it's impressive throughout.  It's not on the same scale of brilliance of McDermott and his Improbable ensemble's work for Glass's sublime Satyagraha a few years ago, but that narrative-free work called out for a strong collaborative theatrical expression.  Here however, they still manage nonetheless to find an imaginative way to work with the rather more banal reality of The Perfect American, keeping it visually engaging and thematically relevant through projected animation sequences and supernumeraries playing the larger-than-life rabbits of Disney's mind, avoiding any Mom and Apple-Pie clichés or overly literal depictions of small-town Americana.

The performances of the cast at the Madrid world premiere run in the Teatro Real (viewed via Internet streaming) were also exceptionally good.  Christopher Purves was an outstanding Walt Disney, but all the cast managed to inject some personality into their characters and even some sense of melody into their singing.  As scored by Glass however, there wasn't much of that in the lifeless orchestration of bland repetition that lacked and real dynamic or variety in tempo and seemed to have no sense of a distinct dramatic character or expression for the work.  It's a long way from Glass at his most original and operatic best in Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha or Akhnaten, but Glass has shown himself in more recent times to still be creatively inspired when the subject (Kepler) or the source (Kafka, Cocteau) are worthy.  Walt Disney and The Perfect American doesn't seem to fire the composer's imagination this time, and it seems hardly likely to excite audiences when it comes to the English National Opera this summer.

The Perfect American is available to view via internet streaming - with some region restrictions to the UK - on Medici.tv and on ARTE Live Web.