A theatrical coup hoping for a political one: Kirill Serebrennikov’s Così fan tutte

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

Organize your teaching: 8 tips for using browser bookmarks to keep track of web-based resources

The problem: a teacher deals with a daunting multitude of documents and resources, especially if they're teaching students in the secondary school and upper school, and almost regardless of which subject they teach.

Overview, with tips and global solutions: here.

Solution for keeping track of websites: learn to use bookmarks well. Here are 8 tips and tricks.

Homework in Foreign Language Teaching: what kind of homework are language teachers assigning, and why?

In preparing for an inset on homework in my school, I began looking for advice on best practices for homework in the foreign language classroom. This sort of literature is pretty hard to find. I also realised I don't really know all that much about the homework my colleagues in the Foreign Languages department of my school are assigning, so I decided to ask them. Here is the survey I sent. The results will help us as a department to share tips, reflect on our own practice, and align our homework with the philosophy of the school.

Barry Kosky's Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin at the Zurich Opera house. A review in the form of notes.

Curtain rises, beginning: the two women are frozen, they are a photograph. They then begin moving when the music changes, they are now a memory. They are dressed in black, and there is a haze on the stage. They are singing of the past. Complacent, quaint, but ever so forlorn. The two women, sung by Liliana Nikiteanu and Margerita Nekrasova, sing beautifully a sad song with folk twang. The lower voice is so earthy it sounds – how do I describe this – like a woolen muff has been dipped in wine and squeezed into sound. They sing of men – men who are deceitful in life, but who become somehow saintly in their passing. My mother says my grandmother did the same hagiographic nattering about a husband she couldn't bear until he died, whereupon he could do no wrong. Ahh, the passage of time.

Organize your teaching: computer tips for teachers looking to keep track of their resources

The problem: a teacher deals with a daunting multitude of documents and resources, especially if they're teaching students in the secondary school and upper school, and almost regardless of which subject they teach. What do I mean by resources? 

Bach's Johannespassion (Part 3: the mystery of the choir)

In the past two articles I wrote on Bach's Johannespassion, I referred to the dual role of the choir (Part 1 and Part 2).

"The pain that accompanies the joy, borne of Christ's suffering, becomes our own pain, the people's pain, the choir's pain, as the choir plays the part of Christ's followers and indeed all humankind." 

"The choir itself has two roles -- to sing to God as Christians, and to reenact the passion as a mob, as Jews." 

"I find the structure of the work fascinating in the way it moves back and forth between different characters, arias, recitative and the chimerical choir."

The choir of this oratorio sings three kinds of music:

Schubert's Winterreise with Michael Volle (Helmut Deutsch accompanying) at the Zurich opera house: review and notes

I was lucky enough last night to hear Michael Volle sing Schubert's Winterreise at the Zurich opera house. Lucky because I can afford the too expensive ticket of 60 CHF. Lucky because I lucked into a seat in the first row, and to boot was on the left-hand side, with an excellent view of Helmut Deutsch's fingers at the keyboard. I've always enjoyed concerts more when my view was better, and this vicinity to the performers was a rare luxury. Lucky finally because I live in a city where Lieder are performed fairly regularly and to a very high standard. I remember spending a week in New York and finding no performances of Lieder anywhere, and now I have steady access to it, and am grateful.

So far in Zurich at the opera house I've heard:

• Pavol Breslik sing Die schöne Müllerin (well cast, well sung, strangely tense, with a fabulous encore performance of "Der Erlkönig"). Better than his recent Lensky in Barry Kosky's Onegin.
• Waltraud Meier sing various Lieder, the finest of which was her Schönberg (the great "Lied der Waldtaube" from the Gurrelieder), the poorest of which was her botched encore singing of "Der Erlkönig". I find connecting to her sung emoting to be difficult, but the Schönberg was the absolute best fit for her voice (far better than her uneven Brahms).
• and now Michael Volle, easily the biggest voice I've ever heard sing Lieder, sung bigger than Hans Hotter. Fittingly for music this intense, there was no encore, not even of "Der Erlkönig."

What is it like to have a modern Wagnerian baritone sing little Schubert, what with Schubert's almost embarrassingly intimate and twisted pain? That was my question going in, and my focus throughout. I am sad to say that Herr Volle waited until the very last song (the mercilessly desolate "Leiermann," which he sang spectacularly well) to show his mastery of delicate singing -- delicacy produced by a change in tone, a fresh rendering of the text, a greater nuance with dynamics, a capacity to haunt without resorting to force. Delicacy: overdo it and the singing is mannered and enervated. But to sing Schubert straightforward or too boldly is to repaint Van Gogh as if he were Van Dyck. You cannot use the voice of the hunter to sing the whimpering of the hunted. 

The Netherparts: How low country can you go?

For Easter, I visited the Netherlands. As I get older I care less and less about manufacturing experiences out of travel, am less often alone when I travel, and am despite my deadened aesthetic sensitivities more confident with age that I am seeing a place on my terms while still somehow submitting to it. So it was with the Netherlands, and here are my notes.

The first thing I noticed about Amsterdam was that it is overrun with Brits, and perhaps the best way to illustrate the Dutch character is in comparison to its neighbors. If Brexit was an impulse for people who complain about too many Poles living in their midst, then perhaps Amsterdam needs a counter-gesture (Brittenuit?) to close its airports to the flights leaving every three minutes from England's airports. Or maybe they, the locals, simply don't give a Dam.

The British there travel in packs, either in groups of twenty twenty-somethings or as pleasant families; their is no other deployment visible of Brits in Amsterdam. You don't see tour buses full of retirees, or romantic couples, or thirty+ sports tourists, for example. You either get prams, or Instagram (strollers or rollers?). It is not as if the twenty-somethings you see are on their best behavior. The only favor they would appear to do the city, besides filling its coffers with cash and its canals with upchuck, is that in comparison they make the Dutch seem so poised. Placing a British twenty-something tourist in Amsterdam, all dolled up and blinged out, next to a Dutch twenty-something local is like putting a donkey next to a thoroughbred, except that the donkey speaks a language you mostly recognize, and the thoroughbred speaks ... well, more on what the Dutch speak later.

Bach's Johannespassion (Part 2: the mystery of Bach)

I had the pleasure of hearing Bach's Johannespassion on Palm Sunday in the Grossmünster of Zurich. It was sung by the Bach Collegium, in which my friend Laura sings. On Easter Sunday this year I will be in Amsterdam, and the Concertgebouw is giving the Matthäuspassion, so I will hear these two works a week apart, each for the first time. Obviously, two sung passion plays by Bach are going to have as many similarities as differences (Bach told the story of Christ's crucifixion at least three times in large-scale works), and before I sink into this later, more intimate and pensive work (Matthäuspassion), I'd like to spend more time thinking about the more intensely dramatic Johannespassion that affected me so.

For reference I really admire this recording from Munich, conducted by Karl Richter, sung by an enormous chorus of ice-cold Germans:

I find it impossible to imagine what sort of a man Bach was, harder still to imagine the emotional world he inhabited (and the far less religious one that usurped it). The music itself would point to a man of the deepest, most mystical religious devotion. The non-Biblical libretti circle over and over again around the humility needed to honor God, around the gracious gift of undeserved mercy. The thought that, until Mendelssohn, this massif of artistic ambition went mostly unperformed beyond Leipzig for a hundred years, der Schall nearly verschollen -- it boggles the mind that the question of posterity did not appear to concern him, or that any steps he took for his own posterity were only meagerly successful, and left no traces in his music. Is this Bach an artist without ego? Would our modern idea of an artist concede even the possibility of such a thing? Writing music for any given Sunday, music that lasts for a thousand years? Is this Bach merely a talented family man working to please a court patron, his talent a coincident miracle? 

Ideally, being a teacher makes you smarter, to include with technology (no matter what you teach) -- but there are no guarantees.

There's this extraordinary blogger in England named Marc Scott who teaches computing and technology in schools. My brother, also a teacher (of math), referred me in 2013 to an article he wrote that persuaded me once and for all of a few things:

• Using a computer is like driving a car: the technology of the interface allows you near total ignorance of how things work. 
• I adore driving, and am still afraid to open the hood. Even now, if you want to teach me car part terms beyond "bumper", "steering wheel" and "rearview mirror", I would probably put my fingers in my ears and sing the Star Spangled Banner. I was like this with other things too, for most of my life.
• It reminded me of when I used to see people who could figure things out that I couldn't (like the kid during a school video project who could set up a VCR to record sound correctly even when the cables made it less than obvious). Here's the worst thing about me: I would peevishly make them help me, and tell myself meanwhile that I was better than them for not needing to know such things. Is this what it's like to be very, very wealthy?
• Being a good troubleshooter is the result of all kinds of intellectual successes working together: being patient, thinking logically, the dull-flush of trial and error, refusing to personify the problem, cultivating intuition. 

Of note here is that I used to be the sort of person who liked to get frustrated. Imagine what that is like, to prefer to get upset when it is more strenuous to do so than to relax. To perform one's frustration, via tantrums, even in adulthood, concomitant swearing and all. Imagine too the intellectual stuntedness of someone who has taught himself that growing angry, that throwing remote controls when you hit the wrong button and can't exit the menu without accidentally changing settings, is the normal way to deal with a problem; that the indignity of having to sort something out is far more grievous and pressing than the indignity of being a whining idiot.

From impulsive and in many ways stubbornly anti-learning, to a teacher. That's me.

Bach's Johannespassion (Part 1: the mystery of the music)

I had the intense pleasure of hearing Bach's Johannespassion on Palm Sunday in the Grossmünster of Zurich. It was sung by the Bach Collegium, of which my friend Laura is a member, and it was the first time I had heard the work live. I have been listening to it for about a year. I am besotted by it and am writing a few notes in the hope that you might also find it meaningful.

Photo Credit: Bach Collegium Zürich

Beginnings: the opening chorale

"Herr, unser Herrscher": the strings come climbing at you from a low octave, woodwinds darkening the atmosphere with a plaintive cry. The pulse is gentle and insistent. The first climax ('43) is full of mercy, climbing back down as gracefully as the ascent was anguished. Then comes the crescendo of first text: Lord, our master. It is proclaimed exclaimed, private and piercing. It feels fortissimo and sounds mezzo-forte. The strings and winds continue their ostinato thrust. 11 full minutes it takes for the ternary opening to announce that God is great, to evoke Christ's humiliation and lowliness, to announce anew that God is great.

The psychology of such music is hard to pin down; it is stupendously beautiful, affecting. It is grandly convinced of God's greatness, as bold a sound as anything intended to witness something magisterial. And the pain that accompanies it, borne of Christ's suffering, becomes our own pain, the people's pain, the choir's pain, as the choir plays the part of Christ's followers and indeed all humankind. 

How can these two conflicting sentiments be mixed? Why is it that Bach's Pietism is so articulate, so lavish in showing the exquisite nature of joy amidst suffering? Why is joy itself true most when it is seated at the table of morbidity? I think of New Orleans and its jazz funerals, the dirges preceding the hymns, death before life, Mahler's "Sterben will ich, um zu leben". They make so much of our modern pleasure-joy appear hollow, unaccompanied as it mostly is by any rootedness in the yang of sadness.