Mozart Minus Drama

...The comically symmetrical pairs of lovers are the targets of good-natured but nonetheless relentless satire...

...A similar realism was exacted from the singers, who were taught to play their roles like actors and who were for once appropriately costumed and made up: E. J. Dent, the great critic of Mozart opera, recollected a Marcellina who was "a stout and vigorous woman of five and forty or so, glaringly overdressed, with a red face, thick black eyebrows meeting in the middle, and a very unmistakable moustache...

...The Figaro is ponderous and loud-mouthed, his "Se vuol ballare" failing to suggest the ironic, mocking warning implicit in the words, "You may go dancing, but I'll call the tune...

...Recently a much better performance of Così was released by Angel (3631 D/L), with Karl Böhm conducting...

...Perhaps this failure shows up most blatantly in The Marriage of Figaro, surely the most richly peopled and perfectly constructed music-drama ever written...

...And Cherubino, creditably sung by Sena Jurinac, falls short in "Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio" of the breathless ecstasy which Conchita Supervia alone among the singers of our time has known how to achieve...

...Bartolo misses the grotesque mock-heroic quality in his vengeance aria...

...Instead of the bedroom of Figaro and Susanna being a rococo boudoir, it was designed as an authentic servants' chamber, with dirty plaster walls supported by rough beams and hung with moth-eaten, crimson damask panels that had formerly seen service in the Count's drawing room...

...These lovers, so stereotyped and artificial, still manage to live their farcical existence intensely —thanks to the power of Mozart's score which, though it too is often parody, bestows energy and beauty on its own target...

...Ignoring the question of the English translation, which was awkward and crude, the whole production turned out almost a caricature of Mozart's design...

...Brownlee's Don is an unforgettable characterization— fiercely energetic, mercurial in temperament, one moment gracious and charming, the next cruel and threatening, superbly disdainful of fortune, laughing, shouting and, at the end, hurling defiance at his fate in a voice that rings like steel...

...On one side, he appears an heroic, almost mythic figure: effulgent with spiritual and physical energy, an anti-god whose ruthless drive toward conquest cannot be checked by any human force, only by the awesome power of the supernatural...

...their soaring protestations of passion are inherently ridiculous—and just as the farce of the dramatic situation undercuts the ostensible sincerity of the music, so the power of the music sweeps us into regarding the lovers more seriously than the libretto alone warrants...

...beautiful sets and costumes were provided by Rolf Gerard...

...The famous overture is taken too fast and articulated too sharply to have its proper comic effect...

...Like the two greatest Mozart conductors of our day, Sir Thomas Beecham and Fritz Busch, Mahler recognized that the essence of Mozart opera is its drama—no fancy dress ball but a panorama of human experience almost Shakespearean in its crowded intensity of life...

...The failure to realize individual characters in Mozart is paralleled by the failure to evoke the atmosphere, the imaginative ethos of the operas...

...her mistress, the Countess, "la triste femme délaissée...

...the Count, jealous, lecherous and proud...

...Doubtless the gravest fault of most modern performances of Mozart operas is their failure to realize the composer's profoundly ironic vision...

...In the best modern performance, Herbert von Karajan's 1951 Vienna Opera production, faults, failures and distortions crop up from the first note...

...But despite some very fine acting and singing by Elisabeth Schwartzkopf and Christa Ludwig, this version runs to the opposite extreme of the Met's...

...While Mahler's production may not have been strictly true to Mozart's conception of Figaro, it marked a great advance beyond the going thing...

...Employing distinguished musicianship, particularly conspicious in his powerfully controlled realizations of the great ensembles and finales, and a sophisticated sense of comic acting—which may be partly owing to Carl Ebert, his stage director— Busch brought to Don Giovanni all the requisite gifts...

...The Count seems elephantine...

...The result is preserved on a Columbia recording featuring Eleanor Steber, Blanche Thebom, Richard Tucker, and Roberta Peters with Fritz Stiedry conducting—as fine a cast, one would think, as could be assembled...

...Mozart's Don Giovanni is at once heroic and preposterous, glamorous and ugly, "the glory, jest and riddle of the world...

...Needless to say, the charm, wit and irony of the opera is lost in the blaze of musical pyrotechnics...

...Così consists almost entirely of brilliant set pieces—arias, duets, trios and quartets—composed in a delightfully florid Italianate style that offers the singer marvelous opportunities and fearsome challenges...

...and, significantly, it was decided that the opera should be sung in English in an up-to-date translation by Ruth and Thomas P. Martin...

...Yet, the Don is also a farcical figure whose seductions invariably fail, whose heroic energies are spent in baffled intrigues, and whose every action is undercut by the cynical mockery of his servant...

...Today there is not a single dramatic baritone or basso buffa who can be compared with Brownlee or Baccaloni...

...Beaumarchais' satiric thrust at the aristocracy provided Mozart with a galaxy of characters whom he intensified and idealized through music: Cherubino, the love-intoxicated page...

...This opera, the most sophisticated, exquisite and the least frequently performed of Mozart's mature works, requires an especially fine touch because of its subtle interplay of wit and sentiment...

...With all the modern emphasis on dramatic reality in opera production, what we have in fact are rich-voiced singers who look well and move gracefully—and that, I would suggest, is not much of an achievement for even an operatic actor...

...Yet in the hands of contemporary conductors and singers this dizzily whirling world of amatory intrigue—with its wit, irony and moments of keenly felt passion —is reduced to a suave vocal concert...

...Today this once-daring conception is taken for granted...

...Singers and orchestra alike pounced on the opportunity to display their dazzling American virtuosity, and the score was traversed with the speed and accuracy of a well-aimed bullet...

...Collaborating with a famous scene designer, Mahler, who was then director of the Vienna Imperial Opera, mounted a production of The Marriage of Figaro that set tradition on its head by treating the opera as a realistic drama of 18th century life...

...Almost without exception, the characters are not ably realized, the excitement of the interplay between personalities is lost, and in recorded performances the illusion of the unfolding dramatic sequence with its kaleidoscopic alternations of mood, atmosphere and situation is only dimly suggested...

...The only recorded performance that captures the fullness of Mozart's complex conception is the Glyndebourne Festival production of the mid-'30s, directed by Fritz Busch with John Brownlee as the Don and Salvatore Baccaloni as Leporello...

...Performers and audiences alike acknowledge that Mozart was one of those rare musical geniuses who had an extraordinarily high degree of literary perception and imagination, that his operas abound with vividly conceived and psychologically penetrating characters, and that his command of theatrical conventions and devices is greater perhaps than that of any other composer who wrote for the stage...

...Instead of evoking Cosi's delicious atmosphere, its "gentle note of sighing sensuality," the singers twitch and jerk like puppets dancing on wires to the fast, hard, overdriven pace of the orchestra...

...Yet none of this graceful music can be taken quite seriously, for practically every note is a subtle mockery of the very idea of operatic virtuosity...

...and Figaro himself, quick-witted, adroit and selfassured...

...Whereas the Met's performance is excruciatingly high-pressured, this one lacks the vivacity and animation essential to Mozart's vigorous farcical style...

...Susanna squeaks to show excitement...

...And in Brownlee and Baccaloni for once he had an extraordinary pair of singing actors who could make even the barest recitative an exciting episode...

...the maid Susanna, fresh, innocent yet shrewd...

...Alfred Lunt was called in to coach the singers and direct the staging...

...ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman Mozart Minus Drama Sixty years ago when Mozart's operas were still regarded as antique Dresden china, almost too fragile to survive the rough traffic of the stage, Gustav Mahler made a daring, if somewhat misguided, effort to smash the conventional image of Mozart as a powdered courtier striking poses in gilded salons...

...An especially flagrant instance was the Metropolitan Opera's revival of Così fan tutte in the early '50s...

...Not content to perform the opera merely for its music, he sought a total theatrical effect, with strong characterization, scenic color, and a sharply defined, consistent dramatic style...

...But though everyone now espouses the ideal of Mozart opera as music-drama, one rarely hears a performance that satisfies even the most rudimentary requirements of good theater...

...This great performance, which is once again available on the Elektron label (80598/600), stands as a monument to the genius of Busch, who despite the handicaps of casts that were uneven and orchestras that were not up to the highest modern standards consistently achieved superb results...

...The Met spared no pains to insure a production that would be as clear and exciting dramatically as it was sure to be musically...

...Don Giovanni, in particular, demands a much more sophisticated treatment of its central character than is usually provided by our handsome but emptyheaded baritones...

...The Don is perhaps the greatest of all roles for the singing actor...