Mozart: Così
fan tutte: Soloists and Chorus of the Opernhaus Zürich, Philharmonia
Zürich / Cornelius Meister (conductor), Opernhaus Zürich, Zurich, 4.11.2018.
Cast:
Fiordiligi
– Ruzan Mantashyan
Dorabella
– Anna Goryachova
Guglielmo
– Andrei Bondarenko
Ferrando
– Frédéric Antoun
Despina
– Rebeca Olvera
Don
Alfonso – Michael Nagy
Sempronio
– Francesco Guglielmino
Tizio
– David Schwindling
Production:
Director
(in absentia), Set designer, and
Costume designer – Kirill Serebrennikov
Assistant
director and Choreographer – Evgeny Kulagin
Stage
Assistant – Nikolay Simonov
Costume
Assistant – Tatiana Dolmatovskaya
Lighting
– Franck Evin
Video
designer – Ilya Shagalov
Choir
director – Ernst Raffelsberger
Dramaturgy and Russian
interpreter – Beate Breidenbach
There’s
historical flooding in Italy this week
which, exacerbated by climate change, is corroding the foundations upon which
great cities rest. There’s a ruling coalition in Italy right now that is
promising a flat income tax and flirting with Putin. There’s an extraordinary
Italian movie running in European cinemas right now, Dogman, that makes no bones about brutality and fear and our route
to ruin. And there’s a Mozart opera set in Naples that is playing in Zurich
right now, an opera that sends its heroes off to war so that they can lie to
their girlfriends, catch them in a cruel trap, and prove how deceitful women –
all women – are. Così fan tutte. If
there were ever a moment to redraft a canonical Italian opera, this least funny
of Mozart’s comedies would seem a good place to start.
What’s
even less funny is that the government of Vladimir Putin placed the director of
this production, Kirill Serebrennikov, under house arrest in 2017, the charges
apparently fabricated and likely stemming from conservative attacks on Serebrennikov’s
‘immoral’ depictions of Russian classics. America is not so far down the road
Russia has lately forged, and the midterm election results this week will only
be a partial indication of how fast she intends to hurtle into thuggish
lawlessness, but imagine Steven Soderbergh with an ankle monitor pinning him to
his couch in New York City if you want some sense of how badly affairs have
soured in the great nation of Russia. Serebrennikov is a brave and talented
filmmaker and director. Revoking his artistic freedom ‘over there’ puts the
onus on us here: our books, shows, plays, films, even operas, must become
smarter and better, and we in the audience have to follow good art where it
leads. Anything else would reinforce the intolerable status quo. There’s no
formula for how ‘political’ any one work has to be, but we owe it to the
censored not to censor ourselves with self-imposed dullness, via work that
neither reflects nor challenges our reality.
Brave
too is the Opernhaus Zürich for engaging Serebrennikov during his house arrest
– his oft-delayed trial is finally set to start November 7 – as directing
operas is one of the few things he is still able to do, now that he has been
deprived of every electronic medium except a camera, a computer unconnected to
the internet, and the USB stick of correspondence his lawyer shuttles back and
forth between him and the nearest wifi in order to connect with artists on-site
at the Opernhaus Zürich. Serebrennikov has delegated day-to-day decisions for
this production to Evgeny Kulagin, his choreographer and right-hand-man from
their days together at the Gogol Centre of Moscow. A production like this and
its wide media attention could go a long
way towards slowly taming the brazen Russian judiciary, at least in this
instance. Or not.
So
what is the production? A major theatrical coup, as it turns out. The opera comes
off here as dead serious in the matters of love and war, but sardonic in the
matters of sex and pleasure. Act I’s lovers’ tricks are far crueller than
elsewhere, Act II’s lovers’ betrayals are as solemn as any tragedy, and scores
of little gags bring incidental wit throughout. Kirill Serebrennikov has
managed, quite spectacularly, to respect the ‘sad Mozart’ (as Adorno saw him)
within a genuinely droll evening; he has teased out the parts of the story
that, implicitly and explicitly, offend our taste, and thrown them back at us
in harsh, icky, playful ways. Serebrennikov, gay, Jewish, politically
persecuted and artistically censored, is calling for solidarity with the
oppressed. He succeeded at turning Così
fan tutte into a dark comedy with a righteous political message.
 |
| Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus |
And
all without cuts or major changes to the story, I might add. The only drastic
measure is to have Guglielmo and Ferrando convince their girlfriends that they are
not just heading out into some military campaign, but that they have died in
one. The women, beyond distraught, clutch urns of their ashes and chug
barbiturates as their mascara runs. The storytelling is smartly non-committal
here: with the two men viewing the earthly events simulcast up to their
second-story perches, it’s ambiguous whether they only told the women they’re dead – a hideous act that, somehow, Mozart’s
music psychologically withstands – or whether they’re actually dead, and
watching from the afterlife upstairs. Either way, this trick rubs our noses in a
reminder that when actual soldiers join actual armies, some of them end up with a bullet to the head.
In come
two ersatz suitors hired by Don Alfonso (sung with dry confidence by Michael
Nagy), who vapes and boozes whilst the heroes are sculpting their abs at the
gym. In this staging, it’s not Guglielmo and Ferrando wearing some dumb Groucho
glasses who are courting their own girlfriends, it’s these two strangers, the hired
muscle, appearing as actual Albanians. The believability problem of the
potentially ridiculous plot? Solved. Appearing in nonspeaking roles inserted
surgically into the libretto, the men are some pretty nasty mofos. They first
appear in the thawbs of Persian Gulf billionaires, and later discard these for their
underwear, full-sleeve tattoos exposed. They help themselves to what’s in the
fridge, plop down on the couch and watch a football match or a skin flick, and
mean what they say when they beg the women to love them, or else.
Their
‘courtship’ of Fiordiligi and Dorabella thus appears in an entirely new light. When
they threaten to poison themselves, it’s no longer the harmless insistence of
yore (‘Draw near, cruel ones; see the dire effect of despairing love’ and so
forth), it’s a threat of sexual violence coming from total strangers on the
same day these two women just buried their boyfriends. Serebrennikov doesn’t need
to discard Mozart and da Ponte where they’re inconvenient to his vision, nor must
he resort to morphing the libretto into some tortured revamp. He simply adds
this layer on top, using all the topics that are already present or implied. The
effect is devastating – what Don Alfonso, Guglielmo, and Ferrando are
submitting these women to, just to win a misogynist bet, is jarring and
excruciating. Imagine hearing ‘Come scoglio’ in such a light: this Fiordiligi (Ruzan
Mantashyan, far from pitch perfect, but oh, what a rich sound) wields a gun.
There
are misfires. Although I enjoyed that Despina is made to be the women’s shrink
as much as their housekeeper as she spurs them on towards acknowledging their
libidos, poor Rebeca Olvera is made to sing both of Despina’s arias (in her
small but pristine voice) beside an incoherent, NSFW slideshow of, amongst
other things, misandrist slogans and doodles by inspired by Valerie Solanas and
her SCUM manifesto (‘Society for Cutting Up Men’). Solanas will be known to
Andy Warhol fans as the radical feminist who sent a bullet through Warhol’s
spleen. It’s one thing to provoke your audience and accuse it of complacency.
It’s another to merely show them a barrage of random pictures from a hodgepodge
of post-war feminism, with the X-rated ones sped up too fast to actually make
anyone squirm. Mozart’s operas like to end in an Enlightenment appeal for
reason and reconciliation; this part of the production implies a culture war of
an eye for an eye. Even worse is that Ilya Shagalov’s videos undermine their
own power, since several of his other images, like the footage of Pussy Riot
getting arrested, comprise a desperate call for us to fight actual tyranny,
including of the patriarchal sort.
Still,
the evening more than holds together in Act II by means of this insertion of Don
Alfonso’s two hired seducers, and by confronting Guglielmo and Ferrando with a Dorabella
who actually enjoys sex. The men are never let off the hook, and nor does it
feel preachy or moralising to show them at their chauvinistic worst. Just as in
the recent story ‘Cat Person’,
these heroes are only gentlemen until they lose control of their women, at
which point they reach straight for sexualised slurs.
The
gorgeous four-aria sequence of each of the protagonist’s reflecting on the once-unthinkable
was one long state of ecstatic anguish, the saddest ‘Per pietà’ you could ever
wish for. Vocally, baritone Andrei Bondarenko is beyond reproach, though his
acting pales next to that of Frédéric Antoun; inversely, Antoun’s singing
sounded clumsy and pinched. Anna Goryachova as Dorabella was excellently
confident in the darkness of this role, and in the production’s sexuality. Her
singing was mixed, stronger in the second half, very well blended with others,
suffering from similar pitch problems as did Mantashyan, and wonderfully
powerful in her big middle voice.
Key
to holding things together was the conducting by Cornelius Meister. He’s a
terrific Mozartian, giving a restrained but buoyant reading in the beginning of
the score before taking more license with dynamics in the second act. Here he joyously
let his orchestra breathe, impeccably flush with the singers, always aided by
Andrea del Bianco on harpsichord. Speaking of license: Meister even let
Serebrennikov insert the Commendatore's theme music from the Don Giovanni score into his orchestra; how
else could the production reintroduce the dead Guglielmo and Ferrando to Fiordiligi and Dorabella? It comes right when they’re about to marry those
boorish suitors, wearing traditional wedding dresses that look like something
from a Patrick Leigh Fermor travelogue: tradition and pageantry and repression
of women, all wrapped snugly together. The women get to unshackle themselves;
will Serebrennikov?
 |
| Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus |
See
the petition against his house arrest. The
production runs until 1 December.
Casey
Creel
