On Stage

...The one lapse was to have the Count and Countess seated downstage center with their backs to the audience during the wedding dance, and so deny us the drama of their conflicting expressions...

...He is the Peter Brook of France...

...Yet opera singers have begun shedding excess tonnage, and have in extreme cases been known to take acting lessons...

...the costumes by the RSC's Farrah are wonderfully glittering or sinister, although sometimes too dazzling for their wearers...

...It is Le nozze di Figaro, not il matrimonio, and the inflected genitive is preferable in English for human beings...

...The Soldiers' Chorus is obviously meant as a triumphal anthem...

...incidentally, isn't the opera called Figaro's Wedding...

...Arrabal is trash no matter how you direct him...

...No opera, however, is...

...His work, which I haven't seen, may be fine for Arrabal and Gombrowicz, with whose plays he scored his biggest successes: Gombrowicz is surreal and "perverse" enough to be able to survive directorial arbitrariness...

...Strehler has sound movements for the performers that are compatible with what they are saying and doing, with their social and psychological states...

...Beautiful singing and fine orchestral playing go a long way, but anyone who has had the relatively rare privilege of witnessing a brilliantly directed opera knows how much greater the enjoyment becomes...

...not for nothing was Beaumarchais one of the forerunners of the Revolution...

...What exactly does that mean...

...But is that necessarily an invitation to unbridled stylization...

...The great Josef Svoboda designed giant stone structures and halls that suggest Egypt or Mycenae more than Cyprus and look less and less appropriate as the situation becomes more intimate and the tragedy more personal...

...Like Strehler, Jorge Lavelli, the French-based Argentinian director who mounted the current Faust (a huge hit in Paris), also comes from the theater, but from what might be called the radical-chic theater...

...I shall not go into the musical aspects of the offerings, since this column, like me, was not made for music criticism...

...A Swiss composer of no distinction, he had achieved fame as director of the Hamburg Opera, and was chosen for the difficult Paris job with Georg Solti as principal guest conductor...

...the customary timid Cherubino would not be so fickle nor so arouse the Count's jealousy...

...The Marriage of Figaro is based on Beaumarchais' somewhat heightened comedy of manners, yet there is much tangy realism in it, too...

...The following observations are prompted by the recent New York visit of the Paris Opera, offering a repertoire consisting of The Marriage of Figaro, Faust and Otello...

...So Strehler has picked a cast, most of whom look human and have some acting ability, and has found decently believable things for them to do—except, of course, when they must stand still and let their singing speak and act for itself...

...A barefoot little girl in a nightgown appears upstage center and, playing hopscotch, slowly advances toward the equally slow curtain...

...These two Georges working, as it were, in concert, achieved something seldom available at the Met: an event of simultaneous musical and theatrical excellence, by George...

...The staging, though never perversely nonsensical, seems tentative and unfinished, and the chorus in particular flounders...

...Movement in drama can be reasonably naturalistic because some plays are naturalistic...

...Why...

...and that one of the causes of Wagner's eventually making it so big in France was his anti-Semitism—witness Vincent d'lndy's horrid little book on Wagner and French music, where the German giant is used as a club to beat down d'lndy's half-Jewish but twice as gifted competitor, Ravel...

...Most embarrassing is the strangulation scene, with a weighty Otello stalking a massive Desdemona on top of a bed that sags visibly but justifiably...

...This may be Marguerite's reborn soul, but why a soul, no matter how reborn, should play hopscotch in the snow, remains unclear...

...Be that as it may, since Lieber-mann's accession the company has been inspiring noises other than hearty snores from the audience...

...does not much care for Mozart, or indeed any opera before, say, Norma...

...Instead of ascending to heaven, Marguerite disappears into this pit as snow begins to fall on a Faust not dragged off to perdition by Mephistopheles, but lovingly supported by him...

...The last act—always a bit unconvincing, for the one thing you cannot make persuasively visible on stage is total darkness wherein the characters can barely see one another—works better than usual because Strehler has had his able designer, Ezio Frigerio, forgo the usual pavilions and colonnades...

...Barbarina, rightly, becomes more of a saucy minx than a naive peasant lass, and Susanna is a woman no less feelingful than the Countess...

...This sounds perhaps like the ultimate obviousness, and may in fact be that to everyone except operatic directors —who, partly because of a lack of experience in straight theater, and partly because of having to deal with operatic stars possessing too little talent for serious acting and too much bulk for serious movement, have settled for becoming directors of naval operations navigating ungainly hulks in a way that at best avoids mid-sea collisions...

...That is why The Marriage of Figaro, as conducted by Georg Solti and staged by Giorgio Strehler of the celebrated Piccolo Teatro di Milano, was such a revelation even to an operagoer who (heresy, I know...

...To Foust, Lavelli's deliberate aberrancy does only harm...

...It enhances our experience when the emotions involved become sights no less than sounds...

...as such, it needs to be staged effectively, even if the primary emphasis is rightly placed on musical values...

...The good old Paris Opera had become a verygrimy institution indeed, with an artistic grayness not unlike the Parisian facades before Andre Malraux administered a good scrubbing to them...

...Or is there, at least in the more veristic operas, and in some others as well, room for a happy medium,' a combination of stylized elements with bits of humanizing credibility...

...A little later, though, the four soldiers needed to carry off the dead Valentin are miraculously sound of body and limb...

...once dialogue is sung, farewell naturalism...

...For the Walpurgisnacht the dome descends, encasing the cavorting of gamblers and cancan girls in an overturned translucent fish bowl, while Faust and Mephistopheles, in identical pearl gray top hats and cutaways, gambol with other cancan girls on a funny (and noisy) wire-mesh gallery that encircles the fallen globe...

...On the evidence of the productions here, the results are of uneven quality, but at least chances are being taken and much-needed foreign talent has been brought in...

...The entire action takes place within the confines of this edifice, and if the text has couples walking in a garden singing about trees, you may be sure that the nearest thing to vegetation we get is laundry hung out to dry...

...Lavelli must inflict on it his ponderous pacifism by making every last soldier some kind of barely erect cripple in a uniform worn to a frazzle...

...Then Rolf Liebermann was hired as general director...

...They have been replaced by a pleasant garden backdrop, a wall or two, a few potted plants, plus much open space to convey atmosphere and—with the help of an only slightly above-normal wattage moon—make the convoluted romantic goings-on perspicuous...

...Yet one doesn't even have to be a drama critic to appreciate Strehler's rendering movement in opera functional and natural...

...And Cherubino is now a horny youth who takes to female disguise with alacrity as a help to seduction, it hardly matters of which woman...

...Otello, staged by Terry Hands of the Royal Shakespeare Company, fell somewhere between the preceding productions...

...Still, unlike in the Faust, the singing is generally fine, and the orchestra under Solti shines like a jewel in an Ethiop's ear...

...Staging, I repeat, is scarcely less important in opera than in straight theater...

...The curse of French artistic—and especially musical—life has always been a certain conservative provincialism, or, to put it less politely, a chauvinistic xenophobia...

...I have often felt that the reason the French made so little for so long of Berlioz was his internationalism, which included marriage to an Englishwoman...

...Unlike a cantata or an oratorio, an opera is conceived in complementary terms—as a human situation in which the score translates existential givens into musical equivalents, just as the libretto translates them into verbal and visual ones...

...To give a typical example, when Figaro sings his cavatina, Se vuol ballare, he slides the Count's suit that has been hanging all along on a clothesline centerward, and, by way of cleaning it, administers a sound caning to it in rhythm with the music—but, wisely, only during two or three separate and widely-spaced bars...

...Grossest of all is the prison scene, with Marguerite in a straitjacket and fright wig, and almost everything played below stage level so that only the heads and shoulders of the principals are visible...

...Hands, whose first try at opera this is, may not have been prepared for the short rehearsal periods opera stars are available for...

...From the Swiss designer Max Bignens, Lavelli has obtained something like a vast, round, domed, abandoned railway station made out of mottled but translucent gray plastic, with enough girders, catwalks and winding staircases to suggest also some 1875 exhibition hall (the costumes are indeed 1875), a kind of begrimed Crystal Palace...