Mozart Goes American

...The operatic stage director of significant audacity or, for that matter, of startling impudence, is taking on that certain luster which used to gild the prima donna, the great conductor, and, at one time, even the composer...

...The Commendatore was gunned down when he came to Harlem looking for the man who'd ruined his daughter...

...This noble hope of Giovanni's Sellars probably owed in some part to that extraordinary figure of German romanticism E.T.A...

...he had forgotten that such a thing was possible...

...The principal theme of these operas, and an incessant preoccupation of democratic art and thought, at leastin the days of democracy's emergence, is nobility: what nobility truly consists in, once the artificial distinctions among men that exist in an aristocratic society are done away with...

...This is understanding of a lofty order, attainable only by persons who know their intellectual breeding to be so far above reproach that they never actually have to think about anything...

...Yet strangely enough, Peter Sellars's recent offerings were as memorable as any operatic productions you're likely to see these days...

...she is engaged to the Count's servant, Figaro...

...This madcap fantasy of rebellion—it could not have been anything more than that—was the climax of Figaro's political career...

...However one might hope that it will...

...Over the past three years, Virginia Opera has set Carmen in Tijuana, with death-courting pachuco boys wheeling around on motorcycles...

...One might almost be convinced, if only Mrs...

...W ithin these new interpretative boundaries, there is room for all kinds of maneuver, after a fashion...

...In the absence of new operas (or anyhow of new operas that audiences want to hear...

...In The Marriage of Figaro, the Count Almaviva, who once loved his wife but who is bored with his marriage, lusts after his wife's maid, Susanna...

...and that offers, in most cases, forgiveness, which may or may not include salvation or consolation or the hope of changing one's wretched life...

...Peter Sellars is the most famous opera director in America—really the only one anybody who is not an opera-going regular can be expected to have heard of—and he owes his celebrity precisely to his untiring outlandishness...

...A pack of them do, though, every chance they get...

...Not to be confused with verismo—the late nineteenth-century Italian movement that was actually not about realism so much as it was about the tenor's high notes—hyper-realism represents a profound imaginative collaboration between the director and forensics experts from the coroner's office: it is the high art equivalent of the snuff film...

...Bohême as aboriginal vegetation rite...

...after all, there is boredom, and then there is numbing tedium unto death), something new has to be done to the old ones...

...Even so, Sellars's version was ludicrously glum and, from the start, in the service of fashionable politics...

...there was nothing to suggest that his repentance was anything less than genuine, that the change in his soul was only a temporary aberration...

...At West Berlin's Deutsche Oper, the Duke passed up the usual court entertainments in order to practice alchemy in a cemetery while some of his courtiers fornicated—if that is the correct technical term here—with skeletons...

...Of their duet "La ci darem la mono," commonly performed as a piece of blithe cynicism on Giovanni's part, Sellars observed in his program notes, "Two lonely and frightened people long to taste again the pain of innocent love...

...Fifteen years ago, this kind of talk was strictly academic, and arcane even among professors...

...now persons with but the slightest pretense to cultivation—in fact, such persons especially—take these notions for granted...

...In Sellars's updated consideration, as Giovanni and his followers boogied half-naked in the street, one saw what this hope had come to: in the name of absolute liberty, the tyranny of the body's pleasure had laid hold of the democratic soul, and was not about to let go...

...Cavalieria Rusticana, Wagner's Ring, and Cavalli's La Calisto are among the operas that have gotten the plutonium treatment elsewhere, although accounts of the Cavalli production in Santa Fe last summer suggest it really had less to do with Armageddon than with cross-dressing, just as the composer intended...

...This was a man born to be guillotined, and more than once...

...Non piu andrai," customarily Figaro's taunting but not unaffectionate adieu to Cherubino, whom the jealous Count is sending off to the wars, became a heroic tantrum...

...Of Sellars's three Mozart productions, Don Giovanni was the most remarkable, and the most heartbreaking...

...The vogue in operatic staging that Sellars represents is becoming a tiresomebusiness, but Sellars himself at the top of his form is illuminating and inspiring: when someone with superior theatrical intelligence and purer interpretative motives comes along and does the best thing a director can do—render Mozart as he understood himself, in a production one cannot take one's eyes off—he will probably see through Sellars in order to do so...

...Mozart knew well the disorder that life in an aristocratic regime engendered in the soul: how it perverted honorable feeling into corrosive vanity and lust for power among the nobly born and into blinding resentment among the common...

...One could not but be reminded—although it is highly unlikely that this comparison is what Sellars had in mind—of Saul Bellow's caustic Mr...

...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 For a caviling voice will insist that this was not Mozart's Don Giovanni but Sellars's...

...Margherita, after killing her baby, chopped it into pieces and stashed them in the freezer, as Betty Crocker might do in a Sam Shepard play...

...The other main characters were similarly pitched toward hysteria, and their salvation was all the sweeter for the bitterness of the misery they had endured...

...and in any event the reader who looks intently at the Lowell might well find his understanding of the Sappho or Rimbaud or Pasternak deep-ened...

...singing "Darla sua pace," he held a gun to his own head, and when Giovanni later sauntered defiantly past him, Ottavio, cowed, looked away...

...Mozart's four greatest operas, the three collaborations with da Polite and the one with Schickaneder, Die Zauberflote, or The Magic Flute, are among the masterpieces of the democratic epoch in the hopeful splendor of its youth...

...one can admire them for what they are, so long as one does not pretend they are the real thing...

...Of course, when Sellars writes of "the more urgent idealism...

...However, in 1787, "Viva la liberta," even in Giovanni's mouth, must have rung with the hope of democratic revolution that would do away with Giovanni and his kind, for good...

...the Bonn Oper, in Franco's Spain, with Carmen stabbed to death in a hotel room and Micaela vomiting into a sink at the sight...

...Once everything is permitted, as the Marquis de Sade was among the first to understand, whatever can be done will be done...

...The class system that Mozart wrote about remains in place two hundred years later in the New World ask Leona Helmsley's maid [sic...

...This Don Giovanni will not likely be surpassed any time soon for intelligent boldness and profound seriousness...

...They are disfigurements of the original, but inspired disfigurements...

...Sellars's characteristic method superimposes American modernity upon the world of the opera he is directing, so that the original necessarily appears distorted...

...W hat gave Sellars's Don Giovanni its unusual dramatic force was Giovanni's struggle, however inadequate, however doomed, to regain his own soul...

...The operas show what happens to nobility as an aristocratic society understands it when it runs full tilt into certain disconcerting forces of nature...

...Opera has yet to shake its reputation as the most conservative of the performing arts...

...Sammler reflecting, back in 1970, on the contemporary taste for the most virulent forms of noble savagery: "Millions of civilized people wanted oceanic, boundless, primitive, neckfree nobility, experienced a strange release of galloping impulses, and acquired the peculiar aim of sexual niggerhood for everyone...

...Faust was a hippie willing to take his transcendence wherever he 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 could get it...

...the anger behind Figaro's servile decorum, as the masterly calm with which he tells himself he will get the better of the Count gives way to a ferocious bellow of vengeance...

...Yet Sellars did not deny him the possibility of true regeneration...

...Superb in stagecraft, riveting in the intense specificity of the singing actors' portrayals, bearing the mark of an estimable directorial intelligence, these were worthy and serious efforts to illuminate Mozart's genius, however remote and singular the vantage from which Sellars viewed the operas...

...There are far greater matters for Sellars to trip over: "And, let's face it, in the America of the 1980s, as in the Vienna of the 1780s, the ancien regime is crumbling, whether it cares to admit it or...

...After one has accounted for the distortion, however, one can often perceive the original all the more clearly through Sellars's lens...

...As Figaro sang, he strewed garbage on the floor, hurled eggs at the Count, and captured Basilio in a sofa-bed that sprang shut like a bear-trap...

...Giovanni presently composed himself, went about the customary business of seduction, then finally decided simple rape was what he was in the mood for...

...Sellars made it plain that those who most hated the foul Giovanni and who ached for vengeance were themselves responsible to a significant degree for the harm they had suffered at his hands...

...There is meta-fictional opera: an apparently straightforward story revealed to be a play within a play, or a dream within a play, or a play within a dream...

...Sellars is no Sammler, but his Don Giovanni envisioned a society destroying itself in its passion for a demented wild nobility that promises liberty utterly without bound—a false nobility conceived by democracy in its most reckless folly...

...The Opera News reviewer in West Germany was flummoxed recently by a conventional staging of the opera...

...and that voice will be right, or right enough anyway that it must be listened to...

...In the throes of his need for Susanna, Sellars's Count writhed on the floor and caressed himself, like a masturbatory snake that had sprouted hands...

...There was a great deal to be admired in this Cosi, yet one could admire it only if one pretended to ignore Alfonso whenever he was onstage, which was of course rather often...

...The Count is a tyrant tyrannized by his own lust and pride, and in Sellars's production he was as loathsome a specimen Sellars's characteristic method superimposes American modernity upon the world of the opera he is directing, so that the original necessarily appears distorted...

...Figaro was sullen and smoldering, and he ignited when he came upon the Count and Cherubino and Basilio all in pursuit of Susanna...

...Sellars is very much a man of the left, an ardent polemicist, and he can be terribly funny in his most solemn moments...

...A cynicalnobleman, Don Alfonso, bets two young friends of his, Guglielmo and Ferrando, that the women they love and esteem as supremely virtuous are in fact like the rest of them, and will be unfaithful the first chance they get...

...military adviser working a computer terminal in a hotel penthouse...

...and it was inevitable that this iconoclasm should find its way at last to the only art where there was anything left to smash...

...Art types and in-tellectuals who don't know anything else know that racist, classist, and sexist assumptions underlie every purported truth and beauty, while those subtler still have been indoctrinated into the meaninglessness of all deconstructed meaning, including their own...

...Sellars's best work as an opera director reminds one of those exceedingly free poetic translations by Robert Lowell that he called imitations: renderings of Sappho, Rimbaud, Pasternak in a modern American idiom, and indeed in Lowell's own distinctive voice...

...Among the gentle Swedes, Puccini's Turandot, the Chinese princess who poses her suitors three riddles to try their worthiness, and who has twenty-seven of them beheaded for answering wrong, turned out to be a victim of child abuse...

...Fortunately for the operas themselves, Sellars committed his gravest offenses against them in his program notes...

...Arkansas Opera Theater has put on a 1930s Caribbean Rigoletto: the hunchbacked jester became a bartender, the Duke of Mantua, the nefarious boss man...

...The swelling future holds the voodoo Zauberfibte...

...Don Alfonso was a zombified Vietnam vet who swigged rotgut from a paper bag...

...and Boris Godunov with the title role sung by a countertenor in a Dan Quayle mask...

...Cosi fan tutu...

...In most every art iconoclasm has of course always been the fundamental tenet of modern orthodoxy, indisputable as the voice from the whirlwind...

...A somewhat more complicated boredom on the producer's end complements the consumers' need for snazzier entertainments: this is the boredom of the intelligentsia known as post-modernism, which consists of a principled disaffection with virtually all of civilization as we know it, and of a proud fascination with one's own ability to see through the vast elaborate cultural edifice and to discern its foundation of yet more elaborate untruth...

...that searches the tragic pain of discovering oneself to be a fool...

...Tosca, the tragic voice of freedom lost, has bitten the dust in Mussolini's Rome, by way of the English National Opera, and, courtesy of New Jersey's Hollybush Festival, in Reagan's Central America, where the villainous Scarpia was a U.S...

...when the partying crowd came to Zerlina's aid, however, and she called down heaven's vengeance on Giovanni, he collapsed before his accusers, and -could not get back up...

...There is no foreseeable end to this kind of thing...

...On the operatic stage, these notions are embodied in productions that tend to be daftly earnest in their promotion of correct thinking, or relentlessly puckish in their travesty of any pieties whatsoever, or some of both...

...So now, America is turning right as the rest of the world is turning left, and the historic moment is passing from our hands into the hands of others who have been waiting a long time...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 21 of moral gargoyle as the world will allow, rivaled to my mind only by the Count I once saw in an East German television production of the opera...

...No, they don't all do it, or at least not all the time, or not yet anyhow...

...In particular, the operas examine nobility as it manifests itself in private life: in the relations between masters and servants, and above all between lovers, or husband and wife...

...they both reflect and reflect upon the new age and its prevailing beliefs...

...There was depravity enough to go around, in this dark world...

...Already in operatic staging there exist certain conventional forms of innovation...

...SSome fifty years after Orson Welles set Macbeth—Shakespeare's, not Verdi's—in Haiti during the reign of Emperor Jean Christophe, the theatrical avant garde has turned its attentions upon opera, and the lyric stage will never be the same...

...There is no such suggestion in the original...

...only when he is reduced to begging his wife's forgiveness does he manage to recover his true nobility...

...I f The Marriage of Figaro shows comedy eluding tragedy, by a hair's breadth, as a fly eludes a flyswatter, Cosi Fan Tutte shows comedy developing inexorably into tragedy, as several laughing flies get flattened...

...He wrote operatic music that exposes men for fools...

...he had bought a diner a few years back, and now manned the cash register while his unhappy girlfriend, Despina, did the real work...

...the reduction of the mysteries of love and death to the pertinent neural and endocrine processes;opera to be shrieked rather than sung...

...stole the show with a cameo appearance in a non-singing role...

...Those that are some of both, like Peter Sellars's, offer the variegated pleasures of a night at the opera with all the Marx Brothers: Harpo, Chico, Groucho, and Karl...

...In the Count's feckless pursuit of Susanna, and in his fear that his wife is betraying him with the young courtier Cherubino, the Count sees the beloved image of his own nobility smashed...

...This Giovanni clearly fell in love, if only for a moment, with Zerlina—a Korean girl of radiant decency, about to get married...

...Cosi is a work of bitter sorrow, in its understanding that, once love has been stripped of its noblest illusions, nothing remains that is worthy of the name of love...

...Compared with certain intellectual high crimes, the mere desecration of operatic masterpieces seems a slight thing...

...Boldly reconsidering each detail of the most familiar works in the repertory, Sellars makes every opera he directs as modern as all get out, and he set Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, first performed in 1786) on the fifty-second floor of Trump Tower, Cosi Fan Tutte (1791) in a seaside diner, and Don Giovanni (1787) in Spanish Harlem...

...Helmsley could arrange for her maid to do her time for her...

...and E.T...

...He employed a wealth of musical nuance to expose this disorder: one hears the comical preening fury of Bartolo, as he alternates between trumpeting rage and self-congratulatory patter that evokes a preposterous triumphant strut...

...The actual productions did have their faults—there were puerile or ill-considered touches here and there, some of the mannerisms got irksome after a while—and Cosi was severely flawed—but for the most part, they were dazzling...

...Ultimately, however, Sellars's historical analysis does not stand or fall on the question of whether one rich bitch who cheats on her taxes gets what she deserves...

...significantly, it took place at the end of the first act...

...He had the pathos of a man whose depravity is virtually irredeemable yet who cannot rid himself of the hope that he might still be saved, and by a woman's love...

...There is hyper-realism: a baptismal immersion in an extravagance of squalor...

...He saw that, while for some people this disillusion might be the prerequisite to happiness, as in The Marriage of Figaro, for others it is the beginning of bewilderment or even despair, as in Cosi Fan Tate...

...Mozart also knew how difficult it is to free oneself from such disorder...

...And then, most important, there is politically charged anachronism: the action dislocated from its original setting and recast either in the time and place of the opera's composition, or in the here and now, or somewhere in the blighted radioactive future...

...r-T7 here is an overriding reason for this superabundance of novelty...

...continued on page 24) Arkansas Opera Theater has put on a 1930s Caribbean Rigoletto: the hunchbacked jester became a bartender, the Duke of Mantua, the nefarious boss man...

...Sellars took the opportunity to indulge his own revolutionary inclinations, but he honored Mozart's understanding that the ecstasy of revolution would not cure the torment of the human heart...

...Susanna moved in a horrified daze, like someone walking away from a terrible car wreck, yet she possessed the uncanny grace of a ministering angel: during the duet "Sull'aria," she led the Countess in an exquisite swirling dance, compelling her as by magic to follow her movements...

...The Countess was a woman in ceaseless mourning for her lost happiness, weeping in bed, immobilized by unabating grief...

...As in the other arts—for that matter, as in every aspect of modern life—simple boredom on the audience's part requires for its relief continual applications of excitement, however inane it might be...

...As it turned out, Ottavio's suspicion that there might have been something between Donna Anna and Giovanni was correct, at least in part: her "Non mi dir" was a confession that it was her own drug habit that had brought her to Harlem...

...the chilling amour-propre in Count Almaviva's eroticism, as the arching legato phrases that delineate his longing crumple under the sharp marcato buffets of his suffering pride...

...but don't bet against it...

...Singers really hate it when that happens...

...What he understood more deeply and rendered more poignantly than any other artist is the agony of disillusion that one must undergo in order clearly to distinguish genuine nobility from its common imitators...

...It is Karl, of course, who gets the really big laughs...

...Laugh if you want to...

...and the English National Opera, in a surreal automobile junkyard, with a squad of porn-porn girls cheering on the toreador Escamillo...

...At the Pepsico Summerfare in Purchase, New York, this past season, he presented the supreme tour de force of his still youthful career: his emphatically American staging of the three operas that Mozart composed to Lorenzo da Ponte's librettos was a cultural event as momentous as any premier of a new opera in some years...

...the vacuum cleaner hose turned itself into the well-known serpent in the garden...

...During the final act, Figaro was to lie, curled up and shivering, on the ledge of a balcony fifty-two stories above the street, wrongly believing Susanna unfaithful, and despairing as deeply as the Count or Countess...

...Don Ottavio, a policeman, plunged his hand into the Commendatore's blood to swear vengeance for the murder and for Donna Anna's rape—actually, it was Donna Anna who pressed his hand into her father's blood—but he could not be certain that she had in fact been raped...

...Sadly, he proves that the noble love the young lovers profess is empty talk...

...Donna Elvira had a touch of mischief in her, too: she was unmistakably a party child, with a taste for feral pleasures...

...Giovanni was a black drug dealer, himself an addict, who possessed a terrible allure for white girls of respectable background...

...He was to collapse again later, after singing "Deh vieni alla finestra," serenading a woman who never came to the window, who was not there to answer his deepest need...

...Sellars's rhetoric is flavored with both the imperturbable moral smugness of the Harvard seminar room and the breathless addled fervor of Bughouse Square, circa 1930: "Socially the operas have hardly dated...

...In Geneva, Berlioz's Les Trovens was set in the aftermath of nuclear war, most likely upon the urging of the local Chamber of Commerce, which of course banks heavily on the disarmament trade from out-of-town...

...Sometimes the brilliant touches were fascinating enough that one could do just that, but on reflection one has to remark the hole blasted through the center of this production, by misguided ideological mortar fire...

...Boito's Mefistofele, as Ken Russell conjured him in Genoa, insinuated his way into the edenic household of Faust and Margherita disguised as a vacuum cleaner salesman...

...It would be pointless to insist that such things must not be done, for there they are...

...however, for some time now, especially in Europe, but also increasingly in America, the order of the day has been the transmogrification of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century operatic masterpieces into something that only the late twentieth century could produce...

...that will inherit the earth, or seize it, the heroism he exalts is clearly not that of Lech Walesa or Violetta Chamorro or the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, but rather that of the liberators leading the great leftward turning: Ortega and Qaddafi and Mengistu Mariam, the PLO and the African National Congress and the Sender() Luminoso...

...The here and now tends to be the pedagogical instrument of choice, lending itself so agreeably to the revelatory purposes of a politically incisive intelligence, enabling one to lay bare the intricate and generally unsuspected connections between, say, Spain during the Inquisition and Fort Wayne under the Bush regime...

...For some reason Rigoletto has become an avant-garde favorite in the German-speaking countries...

...This adventitious explanation of motive, this equation of political disgust with erotic disenchantment, was an intrusive touch that skewed Sellars's entire production...

...Traviata among the Clay People...

...Although Sellars, at thirty-one, continues to be spoken of as an enfant terrible—and according to his many detractors what is not merely infantile in his work is simply terrible—in the Algis Valiunas is a writer living in Chicago...

...Hoffmann—the A. in Hoffmann's name was his own emendation, and it stands for Amadeus, as in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—although in Hoffmann's telling of the Don Giovanni story it was the failed hope of sublime earthly love that inspired Giovanni's demonic sexual rampage, while in Sellars's it was precisely amid his worst debaucheries that Giovanni hoped for such love most fervently, most painfully...

...In Sellars's view, Alfonso's experience of war, his understanding of the terrible lie at the heart of public life, had disabled him in love, destroyed any chance of private happiness...

...The lengthy program notes and plot summaries that Sellars wrote for his production of the Mozart–da Ponte operas constitute a pronouncement on the class struggle that would make a Rumanian secret policeman break out in giggles...

...The scene was a haunting one, and there were many in this production of comparable power...

...In the innovative spirit of the Marquis, who undertook to imagine and perhaps even to induce every pleasure and every pain the human body could possibly know, every operatic masterpiece will eventually be rendered in every conceivable setting of sufficient geopolitical_ piquancy of mythopoeic cachet...

...pursuit of interpretative novelty he in fact takes markedly after some of his elders...

...When Giovanni sings the praises of liberty, he is in fact declaring his own aristocratic sexual privilege: he is rousing himself to attempt to rape the peasant girl Zerlina...

...The production ended in a starburst of joyous exuberance, but it showed, far more acutely than any other I've seen, how Mozart's most exultant laughter is giddy with the exhilaration of tragedy barely averted...

...In the Mozart-da Ponte rendition of the story, Despina was the young sisters' maid and was no match for Alfonso...

...To anyone who has troubled to think, it is apparent that the political ascendancy during the 1980s of American conservatism—typically American, typically democratic, in its moderation—has speeded the crumbling of various tyrannies, fascist and socialist alike, including some foul regimes that prudence required we make our allies, and it has helped to inspire a burgeoning passion for democracy throughout the world...