Review

Siegfried at the Met: Old swords in new forges

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 The third installment of Robert Lepage’s new Ring cycle planted itself on the Met stage last night. This was the first of the three that I have seen live (I saw Walküre in a movie theater), and I am a little confused as to how so many computer screensavers projected onto a spinning picket fence help tell the story. And Lepage doesn’t really seem to have any idea of how to stage Wagner’s music as opposed to the words. But musical values were very good. That’s life at the Met.


Wagner, Siegfried. Metropolitan Opera, 10/27/2011. New production premiere directed by Robert Lepage with sets by Carl Fillion, costumes by François St-Aubin, lighting by Etienne Boucher, video by Pedro Pires. Conducted by Fabio Luisi with Jay Hunter Morris (Siegfried), Bryn Terfel (Wanderer), Gerhard Siegel (Mime), Eric Owens (Alberich), Hans-Peter König (Fafner), Deborah Voigt (Brünnhilde), Mojca Erdmann (Forest Bird), Patricia Bardon (Erda).

As you probably have read elsewhere, the entire cycle works on a unit set known as the Machine. A narrow raked apron downstage is backed by a trench, where much of the action happens with really wonky sight lines. Above the trench hover a line of gigantic slats that spin on a horizontal axis into various configurations. The apron and slats are smooth light gray metal and serve as a surface for various video projections, the trench is black. Supposedly some of the video projections used 3-D technology this time around, but from my seat in the Family Circle and lack of previous shows to compare to I didn’t notice anything. The design has a central dissonance. The costumes, projected images (trees, a mountain landscape, a waterfall) and set pieces placed in the trench area are all raggedly naturalistic, with rough surfaces and earth tones. It’s a look similar to the old Otto Schenk production that this one replaces. But the Schenk was at least uniform: the set covered the whole stage and was similarly craggy. Here, the Machine and its surroundings are all smooth and clean futurism, cool black and gray and sharp edges. It’s a weird melange that for lack of any unifying idea makes everything look unfinished and oddly antiseptic. There’s no aura.

The undercooked visuals are symptomatic of the project’s larger lack of a plan. The Machine can’t move at many speeds, and the projections are often busily flitting away with waterfalls and fire and such, and both seem oblivious to the motion of the music–as does Lepage’s work with singers, as when Siegfried bounded onstage to Mime’s motive at the beginning of Act 2. Overall, there is no real suggestion of what the Ring could possibly be about, just a bunch of grunge band types standing still and singing. (According to this story in Opera News, the non-static parts of Act 1 of Walküre came only thanks to direct intervention by Jonas Kaufmann and James Levine. I don’t even know what to say to that.)

We see some intervening time pass during the prelude, including a rather unpleasant implication for Mime that I’ve already considered. Mime’s workshop in Act 1 is placed in the Machine’s trench, and it’s mighty cramped down there, with little blocking to speak of (and Lepage’s penchant for realism doesn’t extend to giving Siegfried tongs to hold his sword–which still produces steam when thrust into a projected pool of water–apparently heroes can handle very hot objects). Act 2 finds the Machine doing a forest act, and, yes, the bird is a projection. Fafner is a snake-like dragon who is not very mobile. Act 3 was plagued with groans from the Machine during some very delicate music, as well as some crashes and yelling from backstage. We switch from the Nature Images screensaver to the vague outer-spacey one my MacBook calls Flurry. Erda emerges as a cool mirrored fin de siècle type dress, which kind of doesn’t go with anything except the Machine, and Wotan inexplicably gets a giant yoga mat with runes on it. The final scene I found the most effective from a staging perspective, as the machine works best when it turns a bit less realistic, showing fire on the sides and mountain in the middle.

Fabio Luisi’s conducting (deputizing for again-injured Levine) owed more to the aesthetic of the Machine than the costumes. Luisi is great at bringing clarity and order to these monster scores, fishing out out details and keeping everything totally together while remaining very singer-friendly. But in this performance I found his work too brisk and controlled and efficient at first, and not exciting enough. (His tempos are significantly faster than Levine’s.) The orchestra’s sound was impeccable, but lacked weight and intensity. Luckily they seemed to gain momentum over the course of the evening. The Forest Murmurs were lovely, and the horn solos excellent.

The production suffered an even later replacement in Jay Hunter Morris’s Siegfried, who only joined the production last week. He sang a lyrical Siegfried unusually, amazingly beautifully, with strong and pleasant tone and consistent musicality, not really running out of steam until the final scene. Thanks to Luisi’s sensitive conducting, he was rarely drowned out (except for his entrance), but unfortunately the voice is ultimately too small to have enough presence and heft to really score in the heroic moments of the role. The first half of the Forging Song (the melting portion) was taken at an
unusually slow tempo, and he did not have the necessary exuberance. This was perhaps a necessary trade-off for his sensitivity elsewhere, and in all not a bad compromise. He’s a very energetic stage presence, though his characterization was unsurprisingly generalized (and I was watching this from the very distant Family Circle, remember).

Bryn Terfel’s Wanderer was less resonant and plummy than his Wotan in Walküre, sometimes sounding shouty, but his command of the text and music was tremendous and moving, despite being burdened with the costume from hell. Gerhard Siegel was a more sweetly sung Mime than most, lacking the hard nasal edge that you usually hear in this role. It sounded much nicer than usual, but in a production that didn’t give the role a clear profile ended up a little bland. Eric Owens was a cavernous marvel as Alberich, though he and Terfel sounded awfully similar in their short scene. Hans-Peter König was also very loud and deep as Fafner. Patricia Bardon sang with feeling as Erda, but the role seems a strain for her. Mojca Erdmann sang the Woodbird with a very wide vibrato and mushy German.

Deborah Voigt went in and out as Brünnhilde, getting off to a strong start with “Heil dir, Sonne!” Unfortunately after that her voice sounded extremely uneven, with wobbles in the lower and shrieks in the extreme upper areas. A few notes around the top of the staff are still very strong, and she’s loud, but this was not good. I am a little worried about her Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde.

But as for the whole cycle, well, I don’t think there’s much hope at this point. I must say that I’m really looking forward to Andreas Kriegenburg and Kent Nagano’s cycle in Munich, though, which I will hopefully be seeing next summer.

Photos copyright Ken Howard/Met Opera.

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Review

Lepage’s Siegfried and baby thievery

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Not Lepage (Parsifal in Bayreuth)

Later I’ll have much more on last night’s premiere of Siegfried from the Met. But I wanted to deal with one point independently, because if I explained it fully in my real review it would hijack the whole post.

In Robert Lepage’s new production, we see Mime find the infant Siegfried during the Prelude. He sneaks up on the dying Sieglinde, grabs her baby, and runs off. (Please correct me if I missed something here, I was in the Family Circle and it was dimly lit. But that’s what I saw. It was quick.) This directly contradicts his later accounts of Siegfried’s birth, where he says Sieglinde also gave him the pieces of Nothung the sword and told him to name the baby Siegfried (and also presumably the identity of Siegmund, which Mime does not tell Siegfried). OK, Mime is plausibly an unreliable narrator and found those things out in other ways. But Lepage never does anything else to show or explore the implications that Mime is lying when he is talking to Siegfried about his birth, it’s left hanging.

But much more severe is the implication that Mime is not an accidental adoptive father but rather a baby snatcher. The character of Mime is already a locus of several topoi of antisemitism: greediness, a whining voice, a hunched walk. The idea of Jews stealing (Christian) babies is part of blood libel (a short history of the term is here), the accusation that Jews will use their blood in some ritual, historically one of the nastiest myths of anti-Semites. I may be hyper-aware of this particular idea because it was self-consciously presented by Stefan Herheim in his Bayreuth production of Parsifal. Kundry, dressed as a nurse, steals the baby Parsifal from his mother Herzeleide (see photo above).
 
I am honestly rather shocked that Lepage did this. There is no Get Out of Jail Free card when it comes to antisemitism and Wagner, you absolutely have to be aware of the issues and either avoid presenting racist stereotypes at all or clearly foreground them (as Herheim does above). (Following three sentences added later to clarify:) Lepage’s lack of dramturgical context makes the moment interpretively messy, but more grievously he replicates the dog whistle way that these topoi work. It seems like a random insertion if you aren’t familiar with the ideology, but if you know anything about the history of antisemitism you will make the association right away (Mime = Jew = bad). And I don’t think that this is an association that needs reviving.

I’m sure that this is cluelessness or naivité from a director who shows that he doesn’t know much about Wagner, but that no one else pointed it out is distressing.


Updated to add: my regular Siegfried piece is here.

More on the rest later today. Thanks to the Zwölftöner for his lecture on Mime and antisemitism when we saw Siegfried in Vienna last April.

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Review

Don Giovanni in the Trees

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A forest is a dangerous place: a symbol for the unknown and the unconscious, both the embrace and the threats of nature and a natural state. In fairy tales, characters enter the forest to find themselves, but they inevitably find peril as well.

In this 2008 Salzburg Festival production on DVD (Amazon), Claus Guth stages Don Giovanni in just such a forest, a group of pines that rotate on a turntable to disorienting effect. Is there a world outside of it? Sometimes mist rises threateningly in the background. But despite the presence of a bus stop and Don Ottavio’s car, there’s no exit. Don Giovanni and Leporello are a mortally wounded and drug-addled Vladimir and Estragon who are waiting for… something.

I needed an antidote to the Met’s empty Don Giovanni of a few weeks ago, and this production was perfect. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s fascinating and very smartly done. The Commendatore seems to escape the duel OK, but Don Giovanni is mortally wounded and spends the rest of the opera dying; it’s never clear whether the rest of the events are actually happening or just his fervid memories or delusions. This twist plus the surreal setting mean there’s a fair amount of the plot that is not staged literally (the Serenade is sung out to the audience as a memory of seductions gone by, almost a mad scene), but this actually makes the episodic second act work unusually smoothly. The characters are modernized: Donna Anna is repressed housewife engaged to the useless yuppie Ottavio (yeah, this problem), Donna Elvira is a repressed businesswoman who is actually sex-crazed (kind of an ugly characterization, but  I can see how it comes out of the text). It’s dark and spooky–literally in terms of darkness–and the sextet at the end gets the axe. (It’s the Vienna version of the score, which means there’s the little Leporello-Zerlina duet but no Il mio tesoro and no final sextet. The cans of Pilsner Urquell may be an allusion to the opera’s Prague premiere, though.)

The main disappointment of the production is Bertrand de Billy’s bland conducting. He goes with HIP fleetness, but the Wiener Philharmoniker plays with so much vibrato that the pitch in the overture actually doesn’t seem quite stable somehow. Fortunately the cast can both sing really well and carry off the complex production convincingly. Christopher Maltman gives an intense performance in the title role, with the kind of magnetism required of a Don Giovanni and a beautiful, fairly light voice. Other vocal highlights are Dorothea Röschmann’s powerhouse Donna Elvira and Ekaterina Siurina’s impeccable Zerlina. Theatrically, Erwin Schrott’s Leporello carries the show. I’ve seen Schrott as the Don in several different productions (I’m not a particular fan but there were a few years when you basically couldn’t see a Don Giovanni without him in the title role), but I wonder if he isn’t actually better as Leporello. It suits his low voice better, and also his wit and comic timing (his Don was sometimes too funny). Anyway, here Leporello is going through some drug issues and it isn’t going well. The cast’s only major weakness is Annette Dasch as Donna Anna, whose squally tone and iffy intonation are tough on the ears, though she acts well. Matthew Polenzani is a well-sung but rather faceless Ottavio.

Video:

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Review

DVD Update, Anna Edition

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A few productions I’ve written about here are now available on DVD or will be soon. The links go to my reviews of their live incarnations. Our name of the day is “Anna.” Or “Anja.”

If you’re intrigued by the problematic charms of Anna Nicole, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera about Anna Nicole Smith for the Royal Opera House, you can see her on DVD. If you’re an Anja Harteros fan, and what opera buff is not, you can see her in Alcina from the Wiener Staatsoper. The excellent Les Musiciens du Louvre under Marc Minkowski are this production’s other main attraction. I’m guessing not too many of you made it to Graz to see Peter Konwitschny’s brilliant La traviata, with a heartbreaking performance by Marlis Petersen in the title role. (I did, obviously.) Luckily it will be released on DVD on November 15! A note to British readers: this production is likely headed to the English National Opera in the future. If you missed Atys in France or at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, you can see it on DVD too. The cast includes Stephanie d’Oustrac as Cybéle and Bernard Richter in the title role, both of whom should be improvements over the BAM singers. Soon you will be able to see Anna Netrebko’s first salvo at Anna Bolena, made in the company of Elina Garanca at the Wiener Staatsoper last April. Watch it and see why I thought David McVicar’s Met production was a model of fine Personenregie. The Vienna costumes were far shinier, though.

US Amazon listings:
Anna Nicole (Opus Arte)
Alcina (Arthaus Musik)
La traviata (Arthaus Musik) (not on Amazon yet, but CD Universe has it)
Atys (FRA Musica)
Anna Bolena (Deutsche Grammophon)

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Review

Don Giovanni at the Met

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The Met has rounded up a good cast for this Don Giovanni premiere, particularly stellar late replacements Fabio Luisi conducting and Peter Mattei in the title role. It’s a shame that despite a lot of excellent singing the evening rarely rose above lukewarm. Michael Grandage’s fearsomely homogenizing and tame production bulldozed any personality in its path.

Mozart/Da Ponte, Don Giovanni. Metropolitan Opera, 10/13/11. New production premiere, directed by Michael Grandage and conducted by Fabio Luisi with Peter Mattei (Don Giovanni), Luca Pisaroni (Leporello), Marina Rebeka (Donna Anna), Barbara Frittoli (Donna Elvira), Ramón Vargas (Don Ottavio), Mojca Erdmann (Zerlina), Joshua Bloom (Masetto), Stefan Kocan (Commendatore).

Based on this and Anna Bolena, the new Met house staging style seems to be “no interpretation allowed.” More on that in a second, let’s start with the interesting and positive part–the music. New principal conductor and Levine stand-in Fabio Luisi led an elegant and clean account of the score, with fast to moderately fast tempos and light textures. He has a fantastic sense of dramatic pace and is never obtrusively showy or different. Everything flowed along as it should. He played the harpsichord continuo himself (the first time I’ve seen a non-HIP conductor do that, I think) and was witty and well-timed without ever straying towards René Jacobs’s sports commentator fortepiano territory. He passed my Don Giovanni conductor test–how is the timing in the Act 2 sextet?–with flying colors.

The cast was almost universally strong, and well-cast for vocal size, projecting without sounding oversized. Peter Mattei’s velvety baritone is the most seductive characteristic of his Giovanni, who otherwise tends towards the aggressive and dangerous. But it is a very sexy voice, and his serenade was a highlight, simple (with tasteful ornamentation in the second strophe) and quiet. He also managed an unusually accurate “Fin ch’han la vino.”

My last impression of Luca Pisaroni was in the Wiener Staatsoper’s Nozze di Figaro, but no singer should be held accountable for that particular production. He was a delight as Leporello, funny and spontaneous in the recitatives and musical and smooth in the big aria. It is nice to see Ramón Vargas back in Mozart as Don Ottavio after his dubious attempts at heavier rep. There was palpable effort in his “Dalla sua pace” messa di voce, but he sounded sweet and clear and the coloratura in “Il mio tesoro” was long-breathed and impressively clean. Stefan Kocan was an undersized Commendatore and Joshua Bloom an excellent Masetto.

Rebeka and Vargas

The women were led by house debutant Marina Rebeka as Donna Anna (like 60% of singers these days, she is Latvian). Her cool, somewhat steely and white soprano isn’t naturally glamorous, but everything was evenly produced, elegantly musical, and solid, including her coloratura. She’s quite loud and tended to dominate the ensembles. Barbara Frittoli’s much warmer and richer-voiced Elvira was an excellent contrast to Rebeka. Her top notes often turned wobbly but I appreciated her refinement. The cast’s weak link was Mojca Erdmann’s Zerlina, whose fragile, very small soprano awkwardly shifted between a straight silvery tone and an excess of vibrato. Her phrasing was inexpressive.

But despite the good performances, no one gave a true star turn. Zachary Woolfe’s “charisma” and JJ’s “glamour” were both in short supply. The extraordinarily bland production may be to blame. If you gave any opera buff or stage manager this set and these costumes and told them to produce the most conventional Don Giovanni they could imagine, they’d probably come up with something like it. The Personenregie is detailed and not that bad, meaning that it’s clear and it’s not static. Mattei and Pisaroni are strong actors, Vargas and Rebeka less so. But Grandage has no perspective on a work that really demands interpretative unpacking. Don Giovanni is a weird, fascinating, confusing, contradictory opera, it’s a black hole of mystery, but no personality at all emerges from these harmless characters. They all seem to lack individuality and soul. It’s a smoothly executed job, but there’s nothing beneath the surface, and fails to draw you in emotionally.

Christopher Oram’s set has multiple levels of balconies and lots of little doors. This is a look we’ve seen before at the Met and it’s not one I like. The tiny space at each balcony doesn’t allow for much action, and Donna Anna and Don Giovanni’s confrontation at the beginning of the opera (something I care about a lot) was so constricted in space that you couldn’t tell what was being expressed. (I was gratified that she did not seem to like him very much, though.) The walls move around a bit, creating some variety, but it’s basically a unit set. The costumes, also by Oram, are basic frilly 18th century, with a side of our favorite (meaning least favorite) time period, the Slutty 18th Century, when even Donna Anna’s mourning dress displays lots of cleavage.

Ben Wright’s choreography is rather busy and fills the stage during Zerlina’s wedding and the first act finale, but it seems to function solely as a space filler. Grandage surrounds Giovanni with some downmarket ladies of the night in the last scene, hardly as daring a move as giving them to Scarpia but still the most originality to be found here. The final scene is a conflation of an anticlimactic Darth Vader entrance by the Commendatore and the Fire Swamp scene from The Princess Bride (minus the ROUSes, unfortunately). After a lot of am dram shaking, some hellfire does start up, but it’s too little, too late.

Despite the musical accomplishment, this was an unfulfilling evening. Unlike Jean-Louis Martinoty’s recent Wiener Staatsoper train wreck, it is not a confusing or incompetent Don, just an empty one with a discouraging lack of intellectual curiosity. Very disappointing.

Photos copyright Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera (special thanks to @PaulCavaradossi)

Curtain Call (photos courtesy of B., who unlike me had a camera and was on the orchestra level):

Video: Peter Mattei sings “Da vieni alla finestra” in a different production.

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Review

The Advent calendar’s revenge

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This is a model of Christopher Oram’s set for the Met’s new production of Don Giovanni (I wasn’t able to find a shot of the real thing, which has more railings.) It represents the return of 2008’s favorite set design fad: what I call the Advent calendar set (also known as Hollywood Squares). This set has multiple levels of little rooms, whose doors pop open and reveal people in them doing stuff. Here is a look back at its predecessors:

 Le Damnation de Faust (2008)

 Orfeo ed Euridice (2007) (no doors, but the same idea)

Peter Grimes (2008)

Doctor Atomic (2008)

The problem with these sets is that the little boxes don’t allow for enough room to do much of anything in except stand still, and the looming wall often leaves a shallow amount of stage floor. It’s a striking look and does more with the enormous vertical space of the Met’s stage than some other designs, but it often doesn’t help the drama.

Edited to add: I don’t think I invented the “Advent calendar” quip and was curious as to who did, particularly because Anthony Tommasini uses it in his Times review of Don Giovanni. The earliest example I can find is by the always-pointed Anne Midgette, in her 2008 Washington Post review of Grimes.

More on Don Giovanni later.

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Review

The Mariinsky, Gergiev and Daniil Trifonov

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On Tuesday I went to see the Mariinsky Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. To quote anonymous advisors of Rick Perry from a week or so ago, we’ve got a tired puppy (I mean the orchestra, not somewhat puppy-like pianist Daniil Trifonov, who was not tired at all). But they were still exciting! I wrote about it for Bachtrack. You can read it here.

The orchestra’s sound came as a bit of a shock after all that Viennese refinement. I think I like it, but I may be allergic to that soft-reeded sound of Russian woodwind sections.

Off to the Don tonight.

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Review

Giuditta’s Pasta

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Since I haven’t been waiting in line for standing room every night (though I promise I will be at Don Giovanni this Thursday), I’ve had some time to indulge one of my other hobbies: cooking! So here’s some operatic food. It’s not from the infamous Die Oper kocht, but rather Pasta alla Norma, supposedly renamed in honor of the opera of the same title (whose title role was first given by Giuditta Pasta, pictured). Like Bellini himself, it is popular in Sicily. And it tastes amazing.

This recipe is based on the one from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, adjusted for laziness and greasiness.

Serves 6, supposedly, but as a main course more like 3 (adjust amount of pasta accordingly).

Ingredients:

Yes, that’s a bag of frozen basil leaves. Sue me. The red pepper flakes were just hanging out there, I didn’t use them.

1 to 1.5 pounds eggplant
salt
olive oil
1/2 cup onion
1.5 teaspoon garlic
2 cups canned whole plum tomatoes, drained
pepper
3 tablespoons pecorino romano cheese, grated
3 tablespoons ricotta (or grated ricotta salata*)
some basil leaves
1 to 1.5 lbs pasta (rigatoni or spaghetti)

*Ricotta salata is a kind of salty hard ricotta popular in Sicily and required by the most traditional versions of this recipe. You can find it in Italian grocery stores. I did find some but it cost $8 (this is not only Lazy Cooking with Zerbinetta but also Cheap Cooking with Zerbinetta) so I used regular ricotta instead, which tasted fine. You could also try feta or even fresh mozzarella.

Directions:
Peel the eggplant (or not) and chop it into small cubes. If desired, salt, let sit for a while, and dry off to make it less bitter.

Start heating up some water to cook the pasta.

Brush the eggplant with olive oil and spread it out on a broiler tray or baking sheet. Heat up the broiler and put in the eggplant in for around 10 minutes or until slightly browned. (You could also dust it in flour and fry it in vegetable oil, but broiling is less greasy.)

I may have overcooked it a little bit but it tasted fine.

While the eggplant is cooking, slice the onion very thin, mince the garlic and cut the tomatoes into narrow strips. When the eggplant is done, set it aside.

Heat 1/4 cup of olive oil in a frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the onion and cook until golden, around five minutes. Add the garlic and stir, then quickly add the tomatoes and turn the heat up to high. Cook around ten minutes or until it looks done.

When the tomatoes are getting towards done (drier and turned a darker color), add some salt to the boiling water and start cooking the pasta.

When the tomatoes and onions look done, add pepper and the cooked
eggplant and stir. Turn the heat down or off if it looks like it might burn.

Add the cooked pasta along with the ricotta, romano,
and basil leaves.  Add a little Parmesan if you feel that the dish is still lacking in cheese, and enjoy.

Yum!

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Donna Anna Wore a Short Skirt

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“The fire of a superhuman sensuality, a glow from Hell, had cast its reflection over her senses and she was powerless to resist. Only he, only Don Juan, could awaken in her the erotic madness which she lavished upon him.”
-E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Don Giovanni” (1812), trans. Chistopher Lazare (A.A. Wyn, 1946)
[“Das Feuer einer übermenschlichen Sinnlichkeit, Glut aus der Hölle, durchströmte ihr Innerstes und machte jeden Widerstand vergeblich. Nur er, nur Don Juan konnte den wollüstigen Wahnsinn in ihr entzünden, mit dem sie ihn umfing, der mit der übermächtigen, zerstörenden Wut höllischer Geister im Innern sündigte.”]

“Towards all her fellow-creatures [Donna Anna] presents a coldly correct personality… it would be beneficial to her personal growing-up if she had been pleasantly raped by Don Juan.”
-William Mann, The Operas of Mozart (1977), page 468.

This post is apropos the upcoming new production of Don Giovanni at the Met. There’s one thing I will be watching for very carefully.

Donna Anna, the noblest of the three women in Don Giovanni, tends to have a bad reputation. She is “self-absorbed and aloof” (Edward Dent), “has etiquette where her feelings should be” or is “cardboard” (these citations are from Kristi Brown-Montesano’s excellent Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas). Moreover, whatever happened offstage with Giovanni, no one seems to think it was actually rape. The more you look at the text, the more convoluted this reading looks, and its grounding in the assumption that no woman alive could resist Don Giovanni (ignoring the fact that Zerlina ultimately seems to as well) is pretty offensive.

The action of the opera really begins when Donna Anna cries for rescue from a strange man in her bedroom. Her screams attract the attention of her father. He and Don Giovanni (for that is who it is) fight a duel and Don Giovanni kills the old man, thus setting off the opera’s plot. Here it is. (This staging isn’t the best but I chose it because it has English subtitles.)

The entire disturbance is touched off by Anna herself, with her line “Unless you kill me, you have no hope of escaping me.” (“Non sperar, se non m’ucidi, ch’io ti lasci fuggir mai.”) This has been often reinterpreted as, “I want you so bad.” But her following lines, crying out for servants to help catch Giovanni (which, as she must have anticipated, also catch the attention of her father), seem rather to make a secret tryst rather implausible.

The second scene contains this dialogue:
LEPORELLO: Bravo, two pretty deeds!
Force the daughter and kill the father!
DON GIOVANNI: He wanted to fight.
LEPORELLO: But Donna Anna, did she want to?
DON GIOVANNI: Silence, don’t bother me, away unless
you want something too!

Later, Donna Anna recounts the events of the night to her fiancé, Don Ottavio. Her journey through various minor keys in the recitative gives it a tense cast; Don Ottavio tends to respond in a reassuring (or, according to some, gullible) major. She then goes into her aria “Or sai chi l’onore,” wishing for vengeance on her father’s killer and, most importantly, resolving the tension of the recitative in a heated pledge of revenge for the wrongs done onto her.

E.T.A. Hoffmann was one of the earliest and most influential of the “Anna wanted/needed it” school. In his “tale” based on the opera, quoted above (full text in a different translation available here), Anna has both a passion for Giovanni and the potential to become his redeemer. Far from a a villain, the nineteenth century’s Giovanni was a tragic hero, independent, virile, charismatic, etc. Donna Anna receives a Katerina Ismailova-like awakening courtesy of his invasion. (This is generally not seen onstage. Thank goodness for small favors.) In Hoffmann’s telling, Anna then feels massive guilt after her father’s death, which sparks her lust for vengeance:

Even the raging love that consumed her soul with hellish flames, flaring up at the moment of highest gratification, was aglow, now, with annihilating hatred… she feels that only the destruction of Don Juan can bring peace to her mortally troubled soul.

Hoffmann claims to interpret the opera “purely in terms of the music and ignoring the text.”

The idea that Anna just must have felt some passion for Don Giovanni persists in both criticism and staging, though usually in subtler form than William Mann’s astonishing pronouncement that she should be “pleasantly raped.” Funnily enough, some of these analyses also claim to rest on an interpretation of the music rather than the text, but reach very different conclusions from Hoffmann. Alfred Einstein and, most convolutedly, R.B. Moberly (Three Mozart Operas, 1967) read Donna Anna’s narration to Ottavio as deceptive and dishonest (the music supposedly betrays her), and interpret her ambivalence towards Don Ottavio not as grief or trauma but as a telltale sign of her secret passion for Don Giovanni. This analysis was thoroughly demolished by Julian Rushton in his Cambridge Opera Guide to Don Giovanni: “The real indecency here [that Anna cares for Giovanni rather than Ottavio] is to suggest, in line with the worst present-day mores, that she could not care so deeply about her father, nor be horrified by the attempt upon herself.”

Stage productions today often show a Donna Anna secretly in love with Don Giovanni. But they do this with an air of Freudian mystification as to the impulses of Woman. Anna turns up as an enigma who has no idea what she wants. To me this confusion seems quite directly contrary to her portrayal in any part of the opera text. This is a lady who knows exactly who she is and what she wants to do. Making her indecisive and infatuated reinforces a value system where the Don is a hero and woman is weak. I think there’s also a lot of pseudo-empowered “she is uncontrollably attracted to dangerous men and that makes her sexy,” which is all grounded in a big pile of patriarchy, as well as the mind-blowing assumptions cited by Rushton. Besides, isn’t her righteous anger pretty badass already?

To echo Rushton, the real indecency here is how contemporary society just doesn’t take the word of a woman who says she’s been raped seriously. Donna Anna enjoyed it and is just feeling guilty because she revealed herself as a slut. This kind of rape denial shit is an enormous problem for women today everywhere, and this particular interpretation seems to be in line with the worst present-day mores.

For example, consider Anna’s actions here in Martin Kusej’s Salzburg production. I’m aware I’m considering this out of the context of the production, but it is the first scene.

This seems to be fairly typical these days with the exception of some by-the-books traditional productions. Francesca Zambello’s production when I saw it in London had Anna kissing the Don (though it’s done differently on the DVD, interestingly enough), and Jean-Louis Martinoty’s Viennese train wreck last December (pictured at the top of this post) gave her an S&M thing. I find it very disappointing that some productions that seem to have a lot of thought put into them (I am not including Martinoty here) still default to such a reflexively patriarchal portrayal.

Or take Calixto Bieito:

I can’t tell if Renée is entertaining second thoughts here or if this is just poorly staged:

Can’t we consider the Occam’s Razor of emotional decoding, the simplest solution, which is that Don Giovanni attempted or succeeded in raping Donna Anna and she was very angry about this? Apparently it’s not that easy.

Recommended non-patriarchal Don Giovanni reading:
Kristi Brown-Montesano, Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas. University of California Press, 2007.
Daniel Heartz, Mozart’s Operas. University of California Press, 1990.
Julian Rushton, Don Giovanni. Cambridge Opera Handbooks, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, eds. The Don Giovanni Moment. Columbia University Press, 2008.

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Review

Carmen in Philly: Another mantilla bites the dust

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Last night the Opera Company of Philadelphia opened their 2011-12 season at the Academy of Music with Carmen. For the first time the performance was broadcast to a big screen out on Independence Mall for an audience of reportedly 5,500 people. They got a standard Carmen elevated to memorable by a few great performances, namely Rinat Shaham’s fantastic gypsy and Ailyn Pérez’s gorgeous Micaëla.

Bizet, Carmen. Opera Company of Philadelphia, 9/30/2011. Production by David Gately, conducted by Corrado Rovaris with Rinat Shaham (Carmen), David Pomeroy (Don José), Ailyn Pérez (Micaëla), Jonathan Beyer (Escamillo).

Maybe it was the free champagne before the show (doled out in tiny portions in plastic cups) that made the audience punchy.  I don’t think of Carmen as a particularly funny opera (you know, he kills her) but evidently the people of Philadelphia disagree with me on this one, the gens certainly found the opera drôle. David Gately’s production does tend towards the opéra-comique side of things and has a few bits that are clearly intended as comedy. I liked the soldiers threatening the children to get them to stop singing, I can’t stand those squeaky buggers. But for the most part the production has everything you would expect to have in Carmen and nothing that you would not. It is a truth universally acknowledged in traditional Carmens that Don José will attempt to rip off Carmen’s mantilla in the final scene. Check. One pleasant surprise was that the production uses spoken dialogue rather than recits. Some of the spoken French was iffy, but it’s still the right choice, I think (cough Met uses recits cough).

The heart of this production is Rinat Shaham’s Carmen. She’s very experienced in this role and you can tell. Her super-smart Carmen is two steps ahead of everyone else, is always doing as she likes and never tries harder than she has to (without ever appearing uninvolved). This extended to her singing, which had a beautiful naturalness. She never pushed her dark mezzo and her French sounded very idiomatic to me. She’s got a real deep mezzo timbre, but never sounds stretched at the top. Everything worked together and convinced, plus she has that wit and spark that keeps her sympathetic and human. (Also I think it is hilarious how she wears way more clothes in this production than she did when I saw her in Salome…  as the Page.)

None of the other cast members had this level of polish and effortlessness. Closest was Ailyn Pérez’s Micaëla. I think this was the first time I’ve heard her (I may have heard her at AVA but I’m not sure) and her rich, warm lyric soprano sounds like the real deal. All she needs to do is iron out some wayward high notes and odd French vowels and she’ll be there. Less satisfying was David Pomeroy’s blank Don José. He has a large, even and strong voice (pulling an effective “démon” in the final scene), but showed little musicality or range of color, hitting the “toi” in the flower song at forte. His acting was indicated and uncommitted. My last two Josés were Alagna and Kaufmann so I may be spoiled but he did nothing for me. Jonathan Beyer did a good job managing the tricky tessitura of Escamillo, however he never stood out from the scenery. Escamillo needs flair.

Corrado Rovaris led the orchestra in an effective if not quite electrifying interpretation. I’ve heard this unreliable orchestra many times and was happy that they were having a good night. The chorus also sounded excellent, though their stage direction left a lot to be desired. The set, a brownish Seville square with a high walkway, seemed to suffer a paucity of entrances and exits, and once the chorus finally had finished entering, they tended to stay put, sometimes grabbing the nearest member of the opposite sex when required to act amorous.

Director Gately opens the curtain at the “fate” part of the prélude to discover Carmen reading her cards. While it is true to the letter of the libretto–she says that the cards have already told her she and José will die together–I find it problematic for two reasons. First, it deprives her of her great first appearance later in the opera–doesn’t that music that opens the Habañera give us a better sketch of her character than this? Shaham made a wonderful physical entrance running on at that point, seeing her sitting still, no matter how intensely, is just not as compelling an introduction.

PREVIOUSLY REVIEWED
Carmen at the Met (1)
Aldrich/Kaufmann
 Carmen at the Met (2)
Garanca/Alagna
 Carmen at the Met (3)
Borodina/Alvarez (old production)

Second, this is a very literal production. After reading the cards, Carmen hears other people approaching and gets up and leaves. But what motivates those people to enter? The curtain usually comes up on a crowd that’s already there, they’ve just been hanging out. Here they process on for some unknown reason. And how did Carmen get out of the cigarette factory into the square to read her cards in the first place? Judging by that bell, they’ve got quite a routine there. So even if you want to see Carmen as a Violetta type who knows she’s doomed, and I’m not going to argue with you about that as a valid interpretation, this is not the way to portray that. Maybe if it weren’t framed so literally–for example just happening in a bare spot that fades out instead of having her exit as people arrive–it would work better.

I would also like to note that this production included the return of the Set Piece of the Damned, which I first saw in this company’s production of Richard Danielpour’s opera Margaret Garner. This set piece is an electric campfire with a visible electrical cord that has been visibly taped down to the stage, here appearing (in duplicate, even) in Act 3. I cursed the thing then, and I do again now. The amount of incredibly visible (from the high-up Amphitheater) glow tape is also a problem–you can be safe while also being a little more subtle than that.

This may sound like quibbling, but maybe these small issues have something to do with the audience never being able to take it seriously and giggling through the whole thing. Such carelessness with details detracts from the total emotional effect. (Remember that I am that person who is convinced that Velcro is the Scourge of Opera.) This is also a way of explanation for my Anna Bolena review. I seemed to like David McVicar’s production more than anyone else, and this is probably surprising to you if you know my general dislike of traditionalism. But I think McVicar, for all his dullness in this one, doesn’t often make this kind of dramaturgical mistake, and the Anna Bolena held together in a way that is very difficult to achieve in bel canto, or actually in any opera. This Carmen lapsed on that count, and never seemed quite worthy of its protagonist. I was left a little underwhelmed, which is a bummer.

I received a lot of my early operatic education as an Opera Company of Philadelphia subscriber while I was in university, and I saw the company through a lot of ups and downs.* I think they’re on a bit of an up right now, but it’s a little hard to judge by one show. Just toss those electric campfires onto a real fire somewhere and keep on trucking, guys.

Carmen continues through October 14, you can get tickets here.

 The Academy lighting seems just right for curtain call photos, here it is (from the high-up Amphitheater, in this photo you can see at the top the giant safety bar that cuts the view of the stage in half when you sit in one of the first few rows):

*I didn’t see their previous Carmen but it was by all accounts a down, with an interpolated private eye character informing us that “this Carmen girl, she’s from the wrong side of the tracks.”

Top and third photo from OCP website, copyright unknown. Shaham/Pomeroy photo copyright Philadelphia Enquirer.

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