JAMES JORDEN
To be an opera lover is to live a life of constant transit between
two poles, ecstasy and despair, with most of the year spent in the latter
location.
It’s not like we ask for much: only perfection. We want a conductor
whose reading of “Parsifal” is never for an instant less than gripping; a Norma
who can both sing “Casta Diva” and make the character’s final-act reversal
genuinely sublime; and a really well-staged “Don Giovanni.”
This last dream is perhaps the most elusive of all, at least in New
York. For more than a generation, the Metropolitan Opera has presented a series
of genuinely dreadful “Don Giovanni” stagings: overproduced, silly, illogical
and unmusical. The current Met production, credited to Michael Grandage, is all
these things and, worse, is performed on sets that look like Catfish Row.
It’s refreshing to note, then, that the Hungarian conductor (and
occasional stage director) Ivan Fischer avoids most, if not all, of these
pitfalls in his pared-down take on “Don Giovanni,” which returns to Lincoln
Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival for three performances, Thursday through Aug.
20, following a sold-out run in 2011. Joined by his Budapest Festival Orchestra
and a cast led by Christopher Maltman, his approach might be described as an
application of the Hippocratic oath to opera; that is, he first does no harm.
Iván Fischer on Don
Giovanni Video by Lincoln Center
What Mr. Fischer includes in his staging are only the essentials,
those moments of action necessary to make sense of the text. At the very start
of the opera, Don Giovanni and Donna Anna make their first entrance struggling,
though it is unclear (because it is immaterial) who is trying to detain whom.
The death of Anna’s father, the Commendatore, omits any preliminary swordplay,
reducing the violence to a single dagger blow from Giovanni, presumably because
the old man never had a chance in the first place.
Mr. Fischer’s method pays off most handsomely in formal, extended
ensemble scenes like the trio that introduces Donna Elvira. The joke here is
that Giovanni and Elvira know each other well — they’re married, in fact! — yet
they don’t recognize each other on a city street. Other productions of “Don
Giovanni,” including Mr. Grandage’s at the Met, contrive gimmicky reasons that
the two don’t get a good look at each other: big hats, umbrellas, hooded capes
and sudden, fortuitous glances in the wrong direction. But Mr. Fischer keeps it
simple: The two characters simply remain in different areas of the stage until
the necessary reveal.
Myrto Papatanasiu as
Donna Elvira and Tassis Christoyannis in the title role in “Don Giovanni” in
2011. Credit Ruby Washington/The New York Times
Complementing the cleanness of the stage action is the style of
costumes: unfussy modern dress. This choice, I think, is a nod to the
18th-century operatic convention that comic opera should be played “today” (as
opposed to the more sober form of opera seria, which was traditionally set in
classical antiquity or during the Crusades). Freed from the hassle of manipulating
doublets and farthingales, the performers can move naturally and easily.
But the show is not entirely devoid of frills. A troupe of
dancer/actors styled as statues (chalky makeup and white garb) whimsically
stand in for both set and supernumeraries. They start the show seated, facing
the audience, and then during the overture break off, one by one, to form a
garden for the first scene, complete with statuary, fountain and benches. Later
they show up as the rowdy guests at Don Giovanni’s party, dancing so wildly
that the first act’s prescribed imbroglio finale makes perfect sense.
More charming, though, are a couple of tangential touches. For
example, the dancers form a prancing coach to carry Zerlina for her first
entrance. Of course, a peasant girl could hardly afford such a conveyance, but
the device carries a sense of wedding-day fantasy: The girl feels like a
princess, so why shouldn’t she imagine herself Cinderella en route to the ball?
The payoff of the all this activity with statue-people turns out, a
bit predictably, to be the arrival at Don Giovanni’s supper of the
Commentatore, now himself a statue. But the celebrated moment of Giovanni’s
descent into hell, accomplished here without pyrotechnic effects or even so
much as a trap door, provokes a genuine gasp of terror, followed by a grin of
appreciation at the audacity of the effect.
It is fair, I think, to award Mr. Fischer’s staging the Wagnerian
laurel of “Gesamtkunstwerk,” or unified artwork, particularly since his
conducting so closely harmonizes with his visual presentation. His leadership
of the Budapest orchestra emphasizes transparent textures and brisk forward
movement, with a strong sense of presenting precisely what is on the page.
Mr. Fischer wrote in the program in 2011 that he was interested in
the work’s connection to addiction, its preoccupation with repetition (those interchangeable
gray figures) and the inability to stop. This makes for a strongly human
performance, perhaps a little too human. Flaubert observed of this opera that
“God’s three most beautiful creations are the sea, ‘Hamlet’ and Mozart’s ‘Don
Giovanni.’” Here is where I think Mr. Fischer’s take on the work falls
shortest: It makes not even a gesture toward mystery, transcendence, grandeur.
As a work of man, Mr. Fischer’s production is very fine, indeed,
and absolutely worth seeing. But it lacks that one element without which this
opera is not quite “Don Giovanni”: an indefinable spark of the divine.
https://youtu.be/LHmKItuKAz8
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