Wozzeck and his friend Andres are cutting sticks in a field as the sun sets.  Wozzeck tells Andres of horrifying visions and Andres unsuccessfully tries to offer Wozzeck reassurance.  Wozzeck visits The Doctor.  The Doctor scolds him for abandoning his diet. The Doctor, who is obviously insane, is delighted, however, when Wozzeck tells him of the violent visions he has been having.  Meanwhile, Marie notices the regiment’s Drum Major, and the two begin an affair.  The Drum Major gives Marie earrings as he parts.  Feeling remorse for her infidelity, Marie sings her child a lullaby.

Wozzeck returns him and tells Marie of his hallucinations.  Marie is disturbed and the tension between the two of them escalates when Wozzeck notices Marie’s new earrings and begins to question her about them.  Wozzeck’s jealousy engulfs him, and he becomes wild with visions of blood.

The Captain and the Doctor are are engaged in conversation on the street.  The Doctor is giving the Captain a terminal diagnosis when they encounter Wozzeck.  The Doctor and the Captain mock Wozzeck, telling him of the affair between Marie and the Drum Major.  Wozzeck flees to a tavern where he discovers Marie and the Drum Major dancing.  The tavern idiot confronts Wozzeck, telling him ‘I smell blood,” which, naturally, sends Wozzeck into a frenzy.  In the barracks, Wozzeck gets into a fight with the Drum Major, who knocks Wozzeck down.

Later, Marie reads of the gospel account of the woman taken in adultery.  Overwhelmed with feelings of guilt, Marie joins Wozzeck for a walk in the forest.  A blood red moon rises as they are walking, and Wozzeck slashes Marie’s throat.  Wozzeck throws the knife away, and heads

back to the tavern to escape his blood dreams.  In the tavern, patrons notice Wozzeck’s bloodied hands and question him.  In a panic, Wozzeck returns to the forest to search for the knife.  When he finds it he throws it into a pond, then discovers Marie’s body.  Wozzeck’s mental state deteriorates.  He becomes convinced that he did not throw the knife far enough, and fears that it will turn up on the shore.  Desperate to retrieve the waspon and wash off the incriminating blood, Wozzeck runs towards the pond.  The Captain and the Doctor pass by and hear Wozzeck’s anguished cries, but they are unconcerned.  Wozzeck jumps into the pond, but unable to swim, he drowns.

The next morning Wozzeck and Marie’s child plays on a hobby horse.  The neighborhood children mock him for his parentage when news arrives that Marie’s body has been found.  The children rush off to see the dead body, and Marie’s child eventually joins them.

“La Boheme” this isn’t.

Purists, who really should stay the hell away from anything written by the Second Viennese School, saw Bieito’s staging and immediately put the production’s necrophilia, Elton John impersonator, and excessive nudity on their epic lists of complaints.  Bieito was characterized as the quintessential Regie nightmare.  The purist hacks looked at their libretto/bible from a two inch distance and cried foul, failing to see past their paint-by-numbers preferences.  Bieito was predictably (and oh so boringly) accused of pulling juvenile antics.  To approach Berg’s nihilistic work as if it were a holy, chiseled museum piece is nothing short of  hypocrisy.

Bieito gets to the visceral spirit of Berg’s “Wozzeck” more than anyone before him and, I suspect, this production will be the reference version for many years to come.  Bieito sets his Wozzeck in a chemical plant, a post-industrial, apocalyptic wasteland.  Marie and Wozzeck abide in the plant’s lower level, wear tattered overalls,  and are stained with grime.  Pipes exude deadening pollution, and Marie’s home is an industrial container.  Her child frequently resorts to the fetal position to shield himself from his dreary existence.  He is covered in sores, wears a death-red jumpsuit and breathes through an oxygen mask.  Marie cleans herself off and slinks into a evening dress, ascending to the upper level for her affair with the upper class, the superficially exotic Drum Major (the Elton impersonator).  Marie, Wozzeck, and their child are anonymous to an apathetic world.  The Jeffrey Dahmer-like Doctor finds an appealing cadaver among the pile and simulates sexual push-ups with the corpse.  The sight sends the already fragile Wozzeck over the edge.  The harrowing finale has Wozzeck climbing into a drainage pipe as the nude, zombie-like chorus encircles Marie’s corpse.  The children throw industrial waste at Marie’s orphan.

Bavarian Franz Hawlata may possibly be the best Wozzeck on record.  Vocally, and in performance, his is a corpulent, rabid antihero.  Likewise, Angela Denoke’s Marie convincingly projects desperation and pathos.  Johann Tilli and Hubert Delamboye capture the banality of evil all too convincingly.  Amazingly, conductor Sebastian Weigle cuts through the staged refuse and delivers music of power and, yes, beauty.

The anticipated backlash spewed by hopelessly dull, bourgeoisie critics came fast and furious.  Would I want to watch this again anytime soon?  It nearly took me a year to revisit this film, and it will probably be another year before I brave it a third time.  Like all great art, this was not easy.  And this is great art which I recommend unreservedly to everyone but the operatic televangelists.

Be forewarned: After watching these two productions of Alban Berg’s operas “Lulu” and “Wozzeck,” showering may be advisable.

Alban Berg (1885-1934) may be the most notorious member of the Second Viennese School, even more so than leader Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and Anton Webern (1883-1945).  Schoenberg invented the twelve-tone language and is considered the boogeyman of the musical avant-garde.  Webern, who composed mainly in miniature, is, possibly, the most influential of the three.  Berg, on the hand, was the most romantic of the school, as influenced by Gustav Mahler as Schoenberg.  Berg died young and did not live long enough to compose a large a body of work.  However, he did compose what may very well be the two most repulsive operas ever written.  Even Schoenberg was aghast, and urged his younger colleague to discontinue writing such filth.  A premature death stopped Berg from finishing his final opera, “Lulu.”  He completed two of the three act,s and the final act was completed in the short particell format.  Some forty years later, Friedrich Cerha completed the orchestration for the third act, which premiered under the direction of Pierre Boulez.  Both “Wozzeck” and “Lulu” are extreme operas from an extreme composer.  One would think that this fact would make  opera fans receptive to interpretive stagings.

Olivier Py and Calixto Bieito are two of the most notorious enfant terrible stage directors working in European opera today.  In 2005, Py presented a pornographic actor on stage, in full erection, for a staging of Wagner’s “Tannhauser.”  Bieito’s staging of Mozart’s “Abduction from the Seraglio” incorporated S &M and drug addiction (the story is set in a bordello), and his “Don Giovanni” explored similar themes.  In 2007 Bieito turned to adapting Berg, first with his controversial “Wozzeck,” then with an equally provocative “Lulu” in 2009.

Excerpt from Py’s stage production of Lulu

In November of 2011, Py’s filmed version of Lulu was released on home video, and it too provoked outrage among the traditionalists.  American Opera fans are among the most fanatically puritanical in the world.  Py and Bieito, while creating mixed reactions in Europe, are among the most in-demand and successful stage directors working in the genre today.  Singers clamor to work for them, and their productions usually sell out within a matter of hours and are almost always considered newsworthy events.  The European climate for opera stems from a different mindset.  Most telling was a recent newscast covering the expressionist nightmare “Magic Flute” staged by Martin Kusej.  This “Flute” gleaned wildly mixed reactions. The audience was torn between passionate applause and equally passionate catcalls.  The newscaster shrugged, “it would not be an event if opera goers were not challenged.”  In the States, opera is seen, by and large, as an art form that has gone the way of the dinosaur.  American opera houses desperately beg for contributions and wait for the annual staging of “La Boheme” to (hopefully) pull them out of the red.  It has been nearly a half century since an American staged opera was living art and a newsworthy event.  In the early 1970s even Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” was deemed sacrilegious and quickly shut down.  Contemporary America, spoon fed on banality, considers the antics of reality TV “stars” to be of higher interest.

Berg’s “take your dissonance and adult themes like a man” Lulu is not for sissies or the artistically challenged.  Berg wrote the libretto himself from Frank Wedekind’s play, “Pandora’s Box” (the same work on which G.W. Pabst’s 1929 film is based).  The opera is set at a circus, and among the ringmaster’s menagerie is the German pierrot Lulu. Her patron, a Dr. Schon, has hired the Painter to create a portrait of Lulu.  After Dr. Schon and his musician son, Alwa, leave the studio, the Painter makes passes at Lulu until they are interrupted by her husband. Upon stumbling onto the sight, he succumbs to a fatal heart attack.  Lulu realizes she is now a rich widow and marries the Painter.

The Painter becomes very successful, but unbeknownst to him, Lulu is receiving letters from her numerous lovers, one of which is the Countess Geschwitz.  The tramp Schigolch visits Lulu.  He is her father and long time lover, having first molested Lulu when she was a child.  News comes that Dr. Schon is now engaged, and Lulu is upset.  When Dr. Schon arrives at the studio he informs the Painter of Lulu’s many adulteries.  Schon also reveals that he has been having his way with Lulu since she was a mere twelve years old.  Devastated, the Painter slashes his own throat.

Widowed again, Lulu informs Alwa that an African prince wishes to marry her.  Alwa, (possibly representing Berg himself) contemplates writing an opera about Lulu.  Dr. Schon realizing that he loves Lulu, breaks off his engagement and marries Lulu instead.

In the second act, Schon becomes increasingly jealous over Lulu’s many affairs, including her relationship with the lesbian Countess.  Alwa announces that he too is in love with Lulu.  A schoolboy is another of Lulu’s lovers; he hides in Lulu’s apartment when Schon confronts his wife.  An argument breaks out, and the schoolboy shoots and kills Schon.

In a silent film interlude, Lulu is tried and convicted, catches cholera in prison, and is transferred to  hospital where she escapes with the help of the Countess, Schigolch, Alwa, and an acrobat.  First in Paris, then in London, Lulu supports herself and her entourage by becoming a prostitute, with Schigolch and Alwa acting as her pimps.

Several parties try to blackmail Lulu, and she is still wanted by the German police for Schon’s murder.  After much bad luck, including a scandalous financial investment, Alwa, Schigolch and Lulu are living together in poverty.  The Countess returns, having bought Lulu’s portrait in a gallery.  Lulu is clearly upset at the sight of the portrait by her dead painter husband.  A client, the Negro, arrives, and Alwa demands that he pay for Lulu’s services in advance.  A fight between Alwa and the Negro ends with Alwa shot dead.  Schigolch hides Alwa’s body.

The Countess, despondent over Lulu’s apparent rejection, contemplates suicide, but refrains and vows to return to Germany and work for women’s rights.  Lulu has a new client.  She is so intrigued with him that she offers him sexual services for free, but it turns out the John is Jack the Ripper!  The Countess hears Lulu screams and discovers The Ripper, knife in hand.  The slasher then kills the Countess and escapes.

Themes of Catholicism and homosexuality permeate Py’s stagings.  His Lulu begins with neon lights flashing “I Hate Sex.”  Py’s Lulu, as portrayed and sung by Patricia Petitbon, has no real control over her fate.  The only tool she has is in her sexual charisma, which she shrewdly uses to her advantage.  Clearly, Lulu was shaped by her treatment at the hands of her father, Schigolch, and patron, Schon.  Neither Py nor Petitbon, however, succumb to phony sentimentalism.  Py’s sets are adorned in violent, nauseating, kaleidoscope colors which call to mind something akin to the hues of Miles Davis “Live Evil” period.  These colors echo the femme fatale characterization of Lulu, for whom sexual predation is but a past time.

The opening begins like something out of Tod Browning‘s The Show (1927) with Lulu presented by the Ringmaster as the main attraction among his wild beasts.  A sprightly ape, a bobble head, and assorted animals appear before Lulu emerges, robed in man-eater red.  A mere few minutes into the film, Lulu disrobes and she will be nude off and on throughout the film.

Amidst the carnival milieu are sex shops, funeral homes, and pornographic cinemas.  Couples engage in simulated sexual acts in shop windows as the Painter fornicates with a bound Lulu.  A ferris wheel continually churns behind all.  When Schigolch arrives, he is dressed as an Emmett Kelly style tramp clown.  Lulu dons a pink bunny suit and gives daddy oral sex.  Conductor Michael Boder masterfully handles this extremely difficult score, alternating between jagged harmonies and free jazz, without skipping a beat.

As Schon reveals Lulu’s true nature to the Painter, death appears from above as a well-endowed topless woman in a black miniskirt and a death’s head mask.  A large portrait paints Lulu as the eternal scapegoat temptress of Genesis: Eve.

The mobile set shifts from a clutter of excessive wealth to Py’s silent staged interlude, where Lulu is roughly interrogated by the police on minimalistic, black and white, silent film-styled sets.  Much hubbub was made over the projection of a real hardcore film on the set, but the porn is blurred and witnessed by a jaded, anonymous crowd.  The Painter reappears, in black face, as the Negro.  The mobile set set shifts again for a finale doused in snow.  Schon reappears as the Ripper, attired in a Santa Claus suit, and does his dirty deed with abandoned glee.

Py’s Lulu was met with both standing ovations and attempts to ban the touring production in some areas.  “Lulu” has been filmed several times.  Christine Schafer made a superb Lulu in a 1996 production.  She was helped enormously there by Andrew Davis’ superb conducting, but Graham Vick’s production was a bit too minimalistic.  In a 2002 staging, Laura Aikin, while vocally no match for Schafer, likewise made a compelling Lulu, presenting the character as an unquestionable victim of Schon.  However, this beautiful and violent production utilized the now obsolete two-act version of the opera, and conductor Franz Wesler-Most could not seem to master the score to the degree Davis did.  Although all three of these versions have much going for them, Py’s Lulu is the most successfully filmed Lulu to date.  Like Berg, Py filters the hedonistic source material from Wedekind through artistic sophistication.  Despite the supposed “shock elements” of Py’s production, the director shows cerebral restraint in the depiction of violence and wisely concentrates on the terrifying sexual absurdity of the opera.

Unfortunately, we do not have a filmed version of Calixto Bieito’s production of “Lulu” for comparison, only tantalizing stills and YouTube clips of Bieito’s Lulu. However, we do have Bieito’s 2006 rendition of Berg’s “Wozzeck,” which we will cover next week.

Now what is an artist to do with such a ludicrous plot?  As he often did when tackling an absurd libretto, Mozart responded with inspired music.  In the true Mozartean spirit, director Doris Dorrie has just as much fun with Giardiniera as when she bounced through her 2003 staging of Cosi fan Tutte (set in the psychedelic 60′s flower children era).  Dorrie’s personality is stamped all over this charming production.  Primary colors abound.

The opening fight between Belfiore (John Mark Ainsley from Zaide) and Violante (Alexandra Reinprecht) is performed as a ballet in the opera’s overture (and done true to period—traditionalists, do not get your hopes up).  Dorrie and set designer Bernd Lepel replace the garden estate with a busy, 21st century superstore.  A black leather clad Ramiro (mezzo-soprano Ruxandra Donose) looks like an extra from Road Warrior (1981), while the two leads are still adorned in powdered wigs, making for whimsical contrast.  Veronique Gens’s Arminda could give Cruella de Ville competition and she delights in tormenting her poor Ramiro (Donose supplies meaty angst).  Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors (1986) shows up ( I kid you not), chomps down on both Belfiore and Violante, thus generating their “madness’—which takes place in a spider’s den with an arachnid that’s about as animated as Jack Arnold’s Tarantula (1955).  But, it’s all in good fun, even if a good thirty minutes of music has been excised, and if conductor Ivor Bolton and his orchestra don’t seem to have as much fun as Dorrie and company.

Dorrie wonderfully succeeds in elevating what could have been a lackluster event into a spirited Halloween-like Mozartean treat.

In 1769 the twelve year old Mozart composed his three-act opera buffa La finta semplice (The Pretend Simpleton) to a libretto by poet Marco Coltellini, which was in turn based off of Carlo Goldoni’s comedy.  It is one of the most appetizing of Mozart’s early operas.

Captain Fracasso and his sergeant Simone are stationed at the home of two wealthy, foolhardy brothers: Don Cassandro and Don Polidoro. Cassandro and Polidoro have a sister, Giacinta, with whom Fracasso is smitten.  Simone is chasing after the maid, Ninetta. Cassandro, a notorious misogynist, is continually at odds with his womanizing brother.  Fracasso’s sister, Rosina, arrives to help her brother and, with Ninetta’s assistance, Rosina attempts to seduce both Cassandro and Polidoro.  Rosina plays the part of a sexy simpleton, and she is quite successful with Cassandro.  After a night of much drinking, the brothers quarrel over Rosina (leading to a comic duel).  The quarreling is followed by dizzying amorous intrigue and romantic mix-ups.  The brothers are lead to believe that Giacanta has run off with Simone and taken the estate’s treasure with him.  Finally, Rosina, Giacanta and Ninetta end up with their chosen lovers. Only Polidoro walks away empty-handed, which leaves him happily single and unfettered.

Schlomer’s trilogy, beginning with La finta semplice, is not an odyssey for the simpleton, or the timid Mozartean opera goer.  Refreshingly, his is a richly complex, adult odyssey, which encompasses determination, crisis, confusion and eventually, possible liberation.  In La finta semplice, Schlomer replaces the recitatives with German narration (the original, Italian arias are retained).  The result here is an extraordinary tightening of the lyrical and farcical experience.  The new dialogue is delivered by an additional character named Auctoritas, hypnotically played by actress Marianne Hamre (in a bright yellow body suit, which the actress wittily referred to as her ’Kill Bill’ costume).  Hamre’s characterization embraces Brechtian concepts, acting out the narration and interacting with the opera’s characters.  With the exception of Hamre, the sets and costumes, designed by Jens Kilian, are minimalistic and devoid of color: bridal whites.  Malin Hartelius, as Rosina, commands the triangular stage.  Another addition, “Dark Rosina” (played by Anna Tenta), is a mute appendage who amusingly, and hauntingly, choreographs Rosina’s movements, until Rosina frees herself.  The Act II love duet between Rosina and Cassandro (Josef Wagner) is capped by an off-the-meter amorous dance.  Schlomer, a notable choreographer and dancer himself, intelligently directs Hartelius: she sings one thing, but dances another, acting out the Rosina underneath the simpleton facade.  The duel between the brothers becomes a battle of animated weapons.  It is so unexpected and surreal that you half expect Yosemite Sam and Bugs Bunny to show up.  Silvia Moi (Ninetta), Jeremy Ovanden (Fracasso), Matthisas Klink (Polidoro, who, in this version, does get a girl—the narrator Hamre), Marina Comparato and Mijenko Turk make up the rest of a cast with vibrant personality (how about red bras and body paint to off-set the virginal white?).  Michael Hofstetter conducts the Camerata Salzburg as if he and his orchestra get the joke.

Abendempfindung (Evening Sensation) is the second evening of Odysseys. This is not an opera at all, but a pasticcio of Mozart arias, music (including works for glass harmonica), and letters.  The legendary soprano Ann Murray plays “the Singer,” the first of three allegorical characters that represent the artist Mozart at a dissatisfied stage in his life (culled from depressing letters he wrote while in Salzburg).  More than that, the three symbolize the life struggles of artists in the world.  Marianne Hamre is the second representation (“the Actress”) and Graham Smith the third (“the Dancer”).

Murray’s delivery of the Abendempfindung aria is sensitive and blue.  Perched on a suitcase, she contemplates suicide as a way to change trajectory.  She is dependent on others and longs for complete freedom, which does not come with financial security.  This meditative theme is continued by the actress and dancer.  The three principals, each through their unique artistic expression, convey a wistful defiance in the onslaught of challenges.  Ethereal, digital imagery is hauntingly utilized to echo their fractured plight.  Hamre’s radiant dive in a pool strikes a gossamer note.  Rather than a concise narrative, Abendemfindung draws the viewer into strangely intimate visuals and emotive fragmentation.

The third evening, titled Rex tremendus, combines two unfinished Mozart operas–Lo Sposo deluso (The Disappointed Bridegroom) and L’ Oca del Cairo (The Cairo Goose)—together with movements from the unfinished “Requiem.”  Mozart scholar Erik Smith gave the first prepared performance of the unfinished operas several years ago.  In Bridegroom, Bocconio Papparelli plans to marry the considerably younger Eugenia, whom he has never met.  Boccino’s confidant is the misogynist Pulcherio.  Pulcherio realizes that Eugenia is actually in love with her former lover, the Tuscan officer, Don Asdrubale.  Pulcherio has sympathy for Eugenia, and he too falls in love with Bocconio.  Boccino’s vain niece, Bettina, is competing for the love of Asdrubale.  Metilda (a singer) and Gervasio (Eugenia’s tutor) are also thrown into the chaotic mix of confused romance.

The Cairo Goose tells the story of Celidora and Lavina.  The women have been imprisoned by Don Pippo.  Pippo has ambitions to marry Lavina, but she is in love with Calandrino.  Celidora is the chosen bride for Count Lionetto, but she is in love with Biondello.  Calandrino is flirting with the maid, Aureeta,which arouses the jealousy of Auretta’s lover, Chicchibio.  Biondello rescues Celidora and Lavina and, together, they escape to the garden.  At this point the opera ends without the appearance of a goose.

Schlomer and cast embrace the fragmentary nature of the works, and treat Rex tremendus as Mozartean performance art.  The cast from the first two evenings return. Again, Hamre is the M.C.  Murray dissipates as she is enclosed in the glass space of melancholic reflections.  Here, geese do briefly appear, like relics being taken to a faraway temple.  Aimlessness and confusion abound, but Hamre, having taken everything in, seems to be moving towards something.  The evening fades as Hamre emerges, dressed in a new, virtuous white.  Although she has, in part, come to symbolize the composer, it is she that we feel have come closest to knowing.  She lights a cigarette.  She is inexplicably moved in the sanctuary of the Requiem’s lacrimosa.  Of course,this sanctuary is temporary, but it will suffice.  This simple ending gives comforting flesh to the Requiem, far more than the plethora of edified iconography normally associated with the composer’s final work.  Thankfully, Schlomer and ensemble remove Mozart from his pedestal, and feel as if they are replacing the opera house with the intimacy of an concert performed in our own house, swimming pool, cafe, or a little art gallery.

Predictably, Schlomer’s vision has critics, one of who pointedly complained that Murray’s skirt was too short for opera.  The scope of Irrfahrten never gets in the way of personality. There is nothing so predictable as an obvious, pedestrian ”lesson” to be had here.  Rather, this is penetrating communion.  I wanted it to go on.  Joy in repetition.  That is something, I think.

Director Michael Sturminger, Blagoj Nacoski as Scipione, Louise Friba as Constancy and Bernarda Bobro as Fortune flesh out the composer’s conflicting priorities in a Buñuel-esque reverie. With Mozart’s later Giovanni, familiarity breeds contempt.  Scipione is Giovanni’s alter ego.  He finds refuge and passion within Constancy’s joy in repetition.  Constancy, coming off, at first, as a June Cleaver type, even has children here, yet she, like Buñuel’s suburban Severine, is also erotically unhinged.
Here, Friba sings Constancy’s amazingly difficult aria, “Biancheggia in mar scoglio,” while simulating a graphic sex act with Nacoski’s enchanted Scipione pinned to the bridal bed.  It is the kitten Constancy who wins Scipione.  Alas, Bobor’s voluptuous Fortune doesn’t stand a chance; she materializes as the living embodiment of “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

The opulent set designs of Renate Martin and Andreas Donhauser enhance Sturminger’s phantasmagoric cosmos where heaven is a swank hotel. Pubilius ‘aria sung from a casket and Aemillius’sage advices sung while playing golf with a miniature earth are among the quirky touches in this production.   The spirited conducting by the young Robin Ticciati compliments the actors and Sturminger’s direction.  Normally, at least on record, this dramatic serenade is a painfully dull affair (the Peter Schrier, Lucia Popp performance is a wonderful exception to the rule).  The M22 team makes what is normally dismissed as lesser, early Mozart into one of the zippier and stronger efforts of the Salzburg project.  As good as the rest of the cast and company are, however, it is the firebrand Fribo who leaves all the other good efforts in the dust.  She is a remarkably gifted singer and performer who convinces us that Scipione’s choice is an excellent one.  If only she had been sent Giovanni’s way.  She easily could have pacified that formidable beast behind her white picket fence.

Ascanio in Alba (libretto by the satirical poet Giuseppe Parini) is a classical celebration of marriage, set in pastoral, mythical Alba.  Ascanio, the son of Venus and Aenus, is engaged to the nymph Silvia and is destined to rule.  For the proceeding four years Cupid, in Ascanio’s form, has courted Silvia in her dreams.  The time has come for Ascanio to meet Silvia, but Venus has a condition: he cannot not reveal his true identity to the nymph.  This is Venus’ test of Silvia’s virtue.  Fauno, ruler of the Alban shepherds, acts as Silvia’s chaperon and implores Ascanio to honor Silvia’s modesty.  The priest Aceste attempts to assure Silvia that the man in her dreams is the very same Ascanio to whom she is engaged.  Silvia meets Ascanio and believes she recognizes him as the man of her dreams, but Fauno, under Venus’ instructions, convinces Silvia that she is mistaken.  Saddened, Silvia becomes listless and gravely ill in her distress.  She announces she will never love anyone other than the Ascanio of her dreams.  When Ascanio approaches her, she flees him.  Silvia’s virtue is confirmed ,and Aceste  assures her that her trials are at an end.  Venus, surrounded by clouds, descends by chariot and unites the two lovers.  As Aceste binds the lovers, and proclaims his own fidelity to Venus, the matriarchal goddess departs, leaving Ascanio and Silvia to prosper.

“Mozart is lucky he’s dead” wrote one critic when reviewing David Hermann’s M22 staging of Ascanio in Alba.  The reviews for this have been universally dreadful.  Ascanio in Alba is one of Mozart’s most richly inventive and sublime early operas.  Most disappointingly, however, Hermann’s production is neither, and the scathing reviews are dead on.

Although Adam Fischer’s conducting of Mozart’s music is lucid, the Italian secco recitatives are disconcertingly replaced by monotonously tepid narration (supplied by two narrators).  Christoff Hetzer’s set design required 3d glasses for the premiere audience, which is a telling sign for what comes off like a first year art school student production that reduces transcendental mythology to inept, adolescent science fiction.  The Star Trek-looking Alban shepherds appear as badly white-wigged robots who break into frenzied, epileptic seizures as they sing their chorus to Venus.  Ascanio (Sonia Prina in bald wig) appears hopping across the stage in a sleeping bag and then gets plopped onto a stack of green, rubber gym mats (those mats reappear time and again for Ascanio to sort of dance with, on, and around).  The Alban shepherds reappear, minus face paint but now with Groucho Marx mustaches, what looks like diapers on their heads, and potted plants in their arms.  Diana Damrau is an all too brief, charming high point as Fauno on a swing.  Silvia (Marie-Belle Sandis), adorned in an embarrassingly ill-fitting ballerina outfit, is thrown into a wheel-barrel, and wheeled onto stage by her chaperone, Aceste (Charles Reid), who wears a fur jacket over a golfing sweater.  In equal opportunity fair play, Silvia gets her time on the pile of green gym mats and her chance for a spotlighted slaying in the spirit while the narrators repeatedly fall, get up, fall, get up—like children playing in a cowboys and Indians game.  The gym mats become mobile Lego sets, and the narrator finally puts on 3d glasses himself (in order to let the audience know that they need to follow suit?) The meeting of Ascanio and Silvia finally takes place on, you guessed it; a green gym mat.

Prina, Damrau, and Sandis are in excellent voice, making this infantile travesty all the more a tragically wasted opportunity.

For his Salzburg production, Claus Guth’s intertwines Mozart’s neglected, unfinished work with Adama (Earth in Hebrew), by 21st century Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin, commissioned especially for this project.  During Mozart’s brief lifetime, he worked with traditional forms and then, especially later in his career, defied those forms.  It is one of the great tragedies of music that Mozart did not live another ten to twenty years.  His late works (such as the Symphony in G minor ) saw Mozart at his most expansive and innovative.  To achieve a true Mozartean spirit, contemporary directors, when interpreting Mozart, should first and foremost forget that this is the work of “THE” Mozart.

Claus Guth’s Zaide is a profoundly imaginative interpretation that conveys the Mozartean essence in ways that are surprising, provocative, and unforgettable.  Guth’s staging of Zaide is one of relentless communication. Guth and Czernowin starkly tap the fleshy context of Zaide.  Czernowin’s doomed Romeo and Juliet/Israeli-Palestinian couple in modern day Israel parallel Zaide and Gometz.  The contemporary couple, simply named Woman and Man, also contrast Zaide, Gometz, and each other. Woman and Man do not communicate in the normal sense, but through consonants, grunts, and expressions. Yet, through their confused tongues, the two couples represent sharing amidst nightmarish repression.

Contrasting the two sets of couples are a tribe of men representing the status quo, adorned in business suits and over-sized, banal, masked heads. This tribe, who constitute both the hordes of the Sultan and the lords of the institutional dungeon, also struggle, immensely, in their attempts at communication, absurdly removing their masks then absurdly placing them back on their heads.   Zaide, Gometz, Man, and Woman, succeed in communicating, despite their difficulties. However, the Sultan and his tribe only  stumble in their attempts to be heard. Because of their power, the Sultan and his thugs are impotent. In frustration and desperation they predictably reach for their only recourse: violence in the stones for the stoning.

The sets, designed by Guth’s frequent collaborator, Christian Schmidt, are cast in a crystallized, barren viridian hue. The sets also emphasize contrasts: a normal size school desk is juxtaposed against a giant school desk, and a 4th dimension made up of projected video images enhance the tortured milieu.  Mozart’s music rises from the pit (Ivor Bolton conducting The Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra) while Czernowin’s contrasting atonal music is played on the stage (by Johannes Kalitzke conducting the Austrian Ensemble for New Music).  Both conductors and ensembles are inspired, rising to what had to be a considerable challenge.

Soprano coloratura Mojca Erdmann is captivating as a down to earth, bitingly angelic Zaide.  Topi Lehtipuu’s Gomatz is beguiling, tragically sensitive and yearning.  John Mark Ainsley’s Sultan, bloodied and stern, commands nothing less than complete attention as a great wall of rigidity, which Johan Reuter’s Allazim is unable to penetrate. Andreas Fischer repels as The Father (or rather, the symbolic Fatherland) who separates Woman and Man.  Noa Frenkel is simply amazing as Woman.  She expresses Czernowin’s jarring musical language with ease and perfectly compliments Yaron Windmueller’s equally compelling Man.  Their duets together linger vividly in the memory long after the finale, which left this viewer incoherently mumbling to himself as the applause and boos of the evening faded through the speakers.

Servant Leporello is waiting outside of Donna Annna’s house.  Anna is the daughter of the Commendatore.  Leporello’s masked master, Don Giovanni, has broken into the house to seduce Donna Anna.  However, Giovanni’s attempt is cut short when he’s confronted by the Commendatore.  A duel between the two men ends in the elder’s death. Anna does not know who the masked intruder was, but she makes Don Ottavio, her fiancee, swear revenge for the murder of the Commendatore.  Leporello and Giovanni move on to other conquests, namely Donna Elvira, who turns out to be one of Giovanni’s forgotten previous mistresses.  Barely evading the woman scorned (Elvira), Leporello and Giovanni move on to Zerlina.  Zerlina is engaged to Masetto, and Leporello is instructed to lure Masetto away.  Elvira, however, returns to level numerous accusations against Giovanni.  All of this is witnessed by Donna Anna, who now recognizes Giovanni as the voice of her father’s murderer.  Again, Anna passionately pleads with Ottavio to avenge her father.  At a masked ball, Giovanni attempts to rape Zerlina, but he is interrupted by the masked trio of Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, and Don Ottavio.  After a bit of cloak-and-dagger disguise (during which Giovanni attempts to seduce Elvira’s maid), Giovanni and Leporello are reunited in a cemetery.  There, they discover a statue of the slain Commendatore.  Giovanni, tongue-in-cheek, invites the statue to dinner.  The statue speaks and accepts Giovanni’s generous offer.  Leporello is, naturally, horrified.  The statue arrives for dinner and Giovanni, defiantly refusing to cower before the ominous specter, welcomes the guest.  The statue demands that Giovanni repent, but Giovanni repeatedly refuses. Finally, the statue of the Commendatore literally drags the unrepentant Giovanni to the gates of hell.  The various couples are left to start life anew.

Classic stagings of this dramatic favorite place it within the period and cast a Casanova-like spell over the narrative.  Martin Kusej’s Don Giovanni from the 2006 Salzburg festival is far removed from that era.  Indeed, at first glance, the feeling is one of having stumbled upon a setting out of a Stanley Kubrick movie.  Mobile white walls evoke a glacial, apocalyptic vacuum.

Kusej is not in sympathy with Giovanni, and he hammers that point with all the subtlety of a finale in hell.  The duel between the Commendatore and Giovanni is an assassination of an unarmed man. The Commendatore’s blood on the diaphanous white wall returns again and again and again.  Giovanni is a product of crass, contemporary superficiality.  Don Giovanni has been a staple role for baritone Thomas Hampson for nearly thirty years.  Hampson’s voice is certainly a tad more tattered now than it was in his youth, but this serves the still handsome actor quite well here, giving his Don an appropriate weariness.  Hampson is known for his acting skills and his total conviction in this conception of Giovanni is a captivating high point amidst mixed results. Giovanni, as interpreted by Kusej and Hampson, is an existential figure, self-serving, and devouring others to enhance his own masturbatory pleasures. The sterility of that point might be seen in Giovanni’s “Deh vieni.”  In the libretto, Giovanni serenades Elvira’s maid at the window with a mandolin, but here, it is a solitary experience with Giovanni singing it alone, to no one, as the stage gradually blackens. It’s a hauntingly subdued and memorable moment.

Commercial 21st century preoccupation with self-gratification and hollow sexuality is a not-so-subtle symbolic point, manifested by multiple appearances of nebulous, underwear clad glamor models (Kusej refers to them as Greek fertility goddesses).  They strike ludicrous poses, arduously scrub floors and mechanically apply their lipstick with disturbing results.  They reappear as flabby, old Wagnerian vamps (one step removed from joining George Romero’s dead), and finally, revived and young again as monotonous dominatrices.  Surprisingly, some critics  felt it necessary to point out that the parading of the models was not erotic in the least.  ( Other critics compared it to the famous Robert Palmer video).  The lack of eroticism seems to be an excruciatingly obvious intent.

At other points, characters periodically blindfold themselves, and each other, applying symbolic layer after symbolic layer after symbolic layer.

The interaction between Leporello and Giovanni at the imagined fantasy dinner is genuinely surprising and charming (earlier, their characters exchange recitatives). The Commendatore appears on an Orwellian screen in Hell as an arctic wasteland. Giovanni’s descent is a gradual, stone-cold hardening of the arteries. Giovanni’s life has been a masturbatory one (rape and murder being characteristics of that self-gratification) and this is equated with a finale of spiritual bankruptcy. On his path to damnation, Giovanni is finally dispatched by his servant, Leporello.  These are all substantial, interpretive points that heighten the composer’s contradictory, conflicting personality traits (the composer of Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte is also the composer of the “Great Mass in C minor”).

Christine Schafer is quite good as Donna Anna, capturing the impetuous charisma of the heroine.  Ildebrando D’Arcangelo is not as vocally suited to Leporello as he was to his unique, Mediterranean Figaro. Isabel Bayrakdarian’s buxom Zerlina , adorned in a tight, golden slip, is not only a scratched up, bruised victim to the Don, but, at one point she is even carried away by his army of listless mannequins.  Later, as she comforts her wounded lover Masetto (Luca Pisaroni) she very clearly discovers that the way to comfort him lies between his legs.  Malanie Diener as Donna Elvira is a considerable disappointment, both in her acting and singing.  Unfortunately, this production is even more seriously marred by Daniel Harding’s flaccid conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic.  Harding’s direction falls far short of the insight needed for such a conceptual-minded production.  Harding is clearly no Carlo Maria Giulini when it comes to his handling of Mozart’s sensationally expressive language.  Ultimately, this Giovanni belongs to Hampson and Kusej.

Claus Guth’s 2010 production starring Christopher Maltman as the Don and Erwin Schrott as Leporello is an even darker and superior production (Guth omits the traditional finale. Instead, the opera dramatically ends with Giovanni being cast into the netherworld, which is not as radical as it sounds since that was once a performance trend with this opera).  Unfortunately, Guth’s version also is deeply flawed by uninspired direction in the pit.  The first choice in a Giovanni DVD might still be Peter Sellars’ infamous nineties version, set in Harlem and cleverly featuring the Perry twins as Giovanni and Leporello.  Flaws aside, all of these titles are considerable, thoughtful, alternative productions.

The opera was based off of Pierre Beaumarchais’ play (one of three Figaro plays), which had a well-earned reputation as subversive and revolutionary (Beaumarchais was also Voltaire’s publisher).  That Joseph II approved Da Ponte’s libretto was a little short of miraculous.  While the heavier political implications were removed from the text, the defiant, satirical tone ridiculing the aristocracy was, of course, the meat of the plot (the servants eventually best their autocratic master).  The opera, like the play, resonated with the masses. With that in mind, a non-revolutionary Figaro seems an oxymoron.

Over two hundred years later, The Marriage of Figaro remains an extraordinarily three dimensional work, which does not flinch from portraying deeply flawed characters. Numerous filmed versions of the opera have been released on DVD, but the 2006 Salzburg entry may be the most uncompromising to date.  There is, of course, Peter Sellars’ mid-nineties version (which, aptly, takes place in Trump Tower), but the line-up of the 2006 film should be a yield sign to opera fundamentalists.  The conductor, Nikolas Harnoncourt, has a well-earned reputation for “weirdness,” that possibly even surpasses the eccentric German music director Michael Gielen. Harnoncourt leads several of the M22 projects (more on those in later entries), but Le nozze di Figaro is the conductor at his most idiosyncratic and insightful.  Harnoncourt’s is not porcelain conducting here; he mirrors the disconcerting underside of Da Ponte’s libretto as interpreted by star director Claus Guth. Within a matter of seconds into the overture, Harnoncourt’s reveals an out-of-the-ordinary Figaro. Gone is the typical quicksilver effervescence. Instead, Harnoncourt’s seasoned pacing reinforces the nuanced poignancy, beauty, mature humor, and life-affirming drama of this music. Thankfully, Harnoncourt does not try to coat Mozart’s writing with a kind of Rossini whipped topping.

Oddly, the Romantics, more often than not, dismissed Mozart as one of those “powdered wig composers” and seemed oblivious to his remarkably progressive (and darker) works. While Figaro has comic elements, like Cosi Fan Tutti (the final and most complex of the Mozart/Da Ponte operas), it embraces every facet of human complexity.  If we dispense of preconceived notions and honestly approach Da Ponte’s libretto then the context, rather than the period content, of the opera prevails. Guth, Harnoncourt, Christian Schmidt (whose stage design is exemplary), a uniformly excellent cast, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the production team do just that.

Figaro is the personal attendant to Count Almaviva. Susanna is Fiagro’s fiancee and maid to the Countess Almaviva.  Figaro and Susanna are about to be married, but she is consumed with dread of the Count, who wants to revive his droit du seigneur privilege (a feudal lord’s right to sexually claim a vassal bride). The Count’s young page, Cherubino, simultaneously lusts after the Countess, Susanna, and the gardener’s daughter Barbarina. Together, Susanna, the Countess, Cherubino, Figaro, and a revolving host of characters conspire to thwart and outwit the Count’s amorous intentions.

It is Susanna and Cherubino who are the eyes of Figaro’s storm. Anna Netrebko (a bonafide opera sex symbol, but hardly an artistic lightweight) is an objectified, but conflicted, Susanna. She is pragmatic, determined, and, through sheer cunning, she attains her goal. The always interesting Christine Schafer is assurance personified as the shell-shocked spitfire, Cherubino (this male role is traditionally played by a female mezzo-soprano). He serves as an erotic sex toy for the women and a put-upon victim for his male rivals (they cut off chunks of the young lad’s hair, slice  his arm, and smear blood on his face). Both Netrebko and Schaffer resonate vividly in both their acting and singing. The men are nearly their equals. Bo Skovhus paradoxically evokes both repulsion and sympathy as the clammy Count Almaviva, who repeatedly finds dead ravens in the window sill. The Count is consumed with a Poe-like obsession for the servant he truly seems to love, yet cannot fully attain.  Ildebrando D’ Arcangelo’s gallant, mercurial Figaro scorches; he suggests neurotic impotence, yet never loses his admirable splendor. Figaro is the bastard son to Franz-Joseph Selig’s Dr. Bartolo and Marie McLaughlin’s Marcellina (who, initially, lusts after Figaro, unaware that he is her long-lost son: an Oedipal situation). Here, Bartolo is wheel-chair bound and pathetic.

Guth and company do not flinch from the libretto’s ruthless displays of erotic intrigue. The director also takes poetic liberties with the story: at the start Susanna and the Count are already engaged in an affair, and within minutes of the opening act, the Count drags Susanna into a closet for a wham, bam, thank you mam. Although the Count is secretly enforcing his privilege with Susanna, she is attracted to him while continuing to love and protect her sensitive Figaro. She wants to put an end to the Count’s sexual liberties with her, and her recourse lies with the Countess. This Figaro is comic in a Bergmanesque manner: the humor is birthed from contemplation. The strangest license taken with the libretto is an out-of-nowhere additional character, Cherubino’s angelic double, who sets the plot in motion, irritating, manipulating and advancing the dizzying range of agendas that unfold like chaotic lines in a diagram (which is literally displayed on a wall at the end of the third act). The libretto reveals the hunger of the characters. This is no vegetarian Figaro; its melancholic black and white sets, hauntingly deprived of furniture, echo the ominous decay of the cannibalistic aristocrat mindset.

Needless to say, when this Figaro was released, the opera fundamentalists were up in arms. “Psycho meets Mozart,” said one wit.  Another critic described the experience as “penance” and, naturally, numerous critics easily dismissed it as “pretentious.”  This Figaro is unsettling in an interior way, which is why some find it the most difficult, or dismissive of the M22 projects. Other operas from the 2006 Festival, while weirder on the sleeve, do not dismantle the museum-like appendage which has attached itself to Mozart’s operas, in the way this version of Figaro does. Overseas, however, numerous raves were also forthcoming: “an excitingly original production… a must for anyone who cares about Mozart,” said Time Out.  If you think comic book fans are a tad overzealous about filmed approaches to their tights-wearing heroes, then a quick glance at reactions from many American opera fans to contemporary opera stagings reveals that those Marvel fanboys are a subdued lot. American fans tend to approach opera the way some fundamentalist Christians approach the Good Book, insisting on a face value, inerrant interpretation—the King James Version.  So insistent on orthodox and/or period staging are such fans that their first line of attack against an imaginative staging is to spew tiresome venom and tag it with the oh-so-predictable label of “EURO-TRASH.”  The idea, for those so inclined, is to keep the composer locked in his or her own boxed time, shut him off to new generations, fresh interpretations, and put an institutional sheen over the work, turning it into a museum piece, rather than breathing theater.  It is no accident that opera in Europe is far bigger and better attended and supported than it is here, where its worshippers make a false, bourgeois religion out of the art form (in kind of the way smooth jazz has killed jazz).

This obviously should not be an introductory Figaro for traditionalists.  Nor should the 2009 Dutch Figaro, which features the resplendent Danielle de Niese as Susanna and is imaginatively set, by directors Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, inside a car showroom (it is actually not as ill-fitting or wacky as it sounds and really is charming). For those who simply cannot rise to the challenge, then two equally strong recommendations should suffice for a comfortable safety net: Oliver Mille’s 1994 version with Alison Hagley as Susanna (Hagley may be the quintessential Susanna on film) highlighted by Constanze Backes’ memorable rendition of “Barbarina’s cavatina” (an example of Mozart’s ability to take a simple song, about a lost pin, and turn into sublime poetry). However Bryan Terfel’s Figaro seems puppy dog cute when compared to D’ Arcangelo’s.  The more recent 2008 Figaro by David McVicar featuring Miah Persson as Susanna has already become almost a universal favorite.  Guth’s Figaro, however, restores the provocative sense of danger to Mozart’s greatest opera. It is a memorable, welcome, profoundly liberating, shattering and potent alternative in an over-crowded field of staid productions.

FEATURING: Anthony Head, Paul Sorvino, Alexa Vega, Sarah Brightman, Bill Moseley, Paris Hilton

PLOT: A worldwide epidemic leaves humanity on the brink, but a biotechnology

company saves everyone…for a price.  Anyone unwilling or unable to pay becomes the prey of a killing machine known as the Repo Man, who repossesses organs after he kills deadbeats!

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Musicals, by their very nature, are weird, pseudo-realities that insist that in some situations, you just HAVE to sing.  And dance. And harmonize with other people who also sing.  And dance.  And while it is difficult to say how that is not weird, Repo! The Genetic Opera manages to be oh-so pedestrian.  Despite a plot that is a very distinct hybrid of Parts: The Clonus Horror, any random season of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and Tommy, there is no real imagination here, no sense of true creative force or even the vaguest idea how to be artistically subversive.  It’s just throwaway horror movie culture pap that would have been forgotten already if it weren’t so damn awful.

COMMENTS:  Every now and then a movie comes along that is so strikingly different and weird, people just have to stand up and take notice.  Such a movie can become a cult film overnight, igniting passionate statements online like “[Repo!] is such an amazing and very cool artistically rich and collaboratively ingenious of characters with rich metal Gothic and opera soul.”  But then again, sometimes a movie can seem original at first glance yet really be quite plain when one takes a closer look.  Such is the case with Repo! The Genetic Opera.  It is a collection of ideas from the bowels of the Joss Whedon fan-club message boards that is not so much weird as it is totally silly.  To the casual observer, this might look like something that hasn’t been done before, but all it is at closer inspection is a series of things that have been done before, set to music.

Repo! The Genetic Opera is an idea that started in the cabaret as a 10 minute performance, grew into a short film, then somehow transformed into a 90 minute feature. And if you could tell a story in 10 minutes but stretch it out to 90 minutes, much like a taffy pull, you can bet there will be heaping gobs of sag at various points.  So, it’s the future.  The date is kind of fuzzy, and so are a number of details here, but there is a massive swell in organ failures.   It’s an epidemic that nearly crippled the globe, but luckily one company came to save the day: GeneCo!  From the smoldering rubble, they alone created a ready supply of genetically engineered organs for the masses.  They alone saved humanity.  But that saving hand did not come for free, and in more ways than the obvious financial setbacks involved in purchasing organs.  Because now GeneCo holds so much sway, that they passed through Congress a bill to allow organ repossession!  Anyone found to be skipping payments on their bills are now hunted down by the dreaded Repo Man, an agent of GeneCo whose sole purpose is to rip the organs from their recipients as swiftly as possible!

The film follows the problems of the dwellers of this 21st century dystopia.  Everybody has very maudlin, operatic issues: blood ties, family betrayals, mistrust of those closest, etc.  It makes sense here, though, because almost every spoken word here is SUNG!  That’s right; Genetic Opera takes on a whole new meaning as this kitschy sci-fi horror premise is belted out with more verve than Meat Loaf’s orgasms.  It’s a non-stop sing-along, with musical theatrics explaining the story and the central conflicts, with pieces like the classic… or the ribald… or what about the somber melodies of…

Yikes!  I just watched this movie and I can’t remember a damn song.  That’s never a good sign.  Seriously, I could not spout out one memorable or hilarious chorus, not one impressive piece of the score.  It just didn’t take with me.  If a musical is really good, you’ll be singing or humming tunes from it for months to come.  I still sing “Pretty Women” from Sweeney Todd, and I haven’t seen that in months!  Repo’s number one flaw, and arguably its number one attribute, is its musical nature.  But even I, a former fan of musicals, cannot put a mental bookmark on anything of merit here.  Looking at a track list, the song names sound familiar, like “Zydrate Support Network,” “Genetic Emancipation,” and “We Started This Op’ra Sh*t!,” but no lyrics or melodies spring to mind.

The insipid script is easier to recall, and of course the acting, which was churlish and vaudevillian, including surprise visits from Paris Hilton and Nivek Ogre of Skinny Puppy fame, and even Sarah Brightman of genuine vocal fame.  That, plus the premise, which revolves around a guy who rips overdue organs out of still-living bodies, could make for quite a gothic, bloody, ultra-campy affair.

Repo! isn’t the worst viewing experience, because admittedly some of the scenes were gleefully kitsch, and watching spines being pulled out of people’s backs and placed in bags for transportation is a pleasure we should all experience.  But Repo! The Genetic Opera is a musical that isn’t memorable, a horror film that doesn’t deliver, and a comedy mostly in the unintentional sense.  If this is your thing, it’s probably already a staple in your DVD tray, and if so, what are you even reading this for?  If you are new to this film, though, I would wait to watch it with a friend so one might at least have a laugh before returning this non-musical back to the video store.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This is a weird movie… for all its glitches and oddities, Repo! impressed me on sheer force of strangeness, originality, and audacity. Love the flick or hate it, there’s little denying that Repo! is definitely something different… I expect Repo! to be embraced and adored on DVD by the movie fans who help turn “weird” flicks into “cult” favorites.”–Scott Weinberg, FEARnet (contemporaneous)

Scene from Syberberg’s Parsifal (1982)

Comparing their geometric, sparse Parsifal to that of Neues Kino director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s controversial 1982 multi-layered collage film would be a pointless task.  Syberberg’s famous film is a case of a director with so much to say, that it literally becomes a truly rare kitchen sink moment in which repeated viewings reap priceless rewards.

Syberberg’s Jungian references abound with fascist symbolism, Nietzsche, Christian mythology, Post World War II Euro culture in a narcotic texture unlike anything before or since.  Entire books could be written about this one of a kind film.

In 1993, long before Titus, Frida, or her most recent (and amazing) work, Across the Universe, Julie Taymor was known to modern opera buffs as the director of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. Taymor filtered Stravinsky’s opera through her own undeniably powerful, highly individualistic voice.

Undoubtedly, Stravinsky (who, like Picasso, went through numerous phases, from neo-classicism to post Webern serialism and yet made everything  he touched sound like his own) would have approved of Taymor’s kindred aesthetic spirit.

When Taymor’s production first became available on the video market, word spread quickly, with many proclaiming it to be one of the very best, if not the best, opera yet filmed.

The sets (by George Tsypin), masks, sculptures, puppets, costumes ( Ei Wade), make-up (Reiko Kruk), Japanese dance and narration (the libretto by Jean Cocteau, originally in Latin, allowed for translation to the native language), Ozawa’s incisive conducting, add up to one of the most extraordinarily stylized and emotionally draining operatic experiences caught on film thanks to Taymor’s uncompromising, riveting vision.  Not too  surprisingly, Oedipus Rex was available only briefly and was finally made available again in 2005, after numerous requests.

Still, for many, Taymor’s Rex must compete with one of the oldest and still best contemporary operas on film: the 1951 film version of Menotti’s The Medium.

Gian Carlo Menotti was a powerful exception to the unspoken rule that musicians should leave stage direction to others (unlike Herbert Von Karajan, who repeatedly re-enforced the wisdom of that rule).  Unfortunately, Menotti only directed a few films.  Naturally, the Medium’s black and white cinematography expresses the haunting them of Menotti’s libretto.  This film is still talked about as the yardstick of filmed operas, some fifty years after it’s debut.

Kaijah Saariaho is considered to be one of the few undeniable giants in 21st century avant-garde music.  That she has an impassioned advocate in conductor/composer Esa-Pekka Salonen certainly hasn’t hurt.   She teamed up with him and the infamous, enfant terrible director Peter Sellars for the filmed version of her opera L’ Amour de Loin in 2005.

Sellars evocative, minimalist direction perfectly serves this diaphanous music which echoes  and flows from the likes of  Debussy and Messiaen ( Salonen, who specializes in the music of all three, is equally perfect in his interpretive powers).  There’s water and enveloping blackness aplenty, atmosphere rather than an abundance of over developed plot.  For all the hopelessly conservative, classical fundamentalists ” Let’s do everything in our power to kill the future of art-music and no longer make it a viable art form” moaning and groaning of what’s wrong in contemporary music, this production shows exactly what’s right.  It’s one of the few times everything comes together just right.

Sellars, of course, came to notoriety with his productions of the Mozart/Da Ponte operas in 1989, 1990.  His Don Giovanni takes place in “the bronks” with two African-American brothers in the lead roles, and part of the opera coming out of a boom box.  Cosi fan Tutti is set in a post punk modern diner, complete with Mozart silhouetted latrines, and Le Nozze de Figaro moves like quicksilver in Trump Towers.  Opera traditionalists practically branded Sellars as an antichrist, but his avant-pop interpretations were a literal removing of the cobwebs and done completely in a Mozartian, devil-may-care spirit.  His productions won him a legion of fans and made opera-going hip, albeit briefly.

After Handel’s Giulio Cesare in 1992 and Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins (done MTV style) in ’93, Sellars appropriately tackled Theodora for Y2K. Handel’s opera on ancient Rome and early Christianity becomes a modern parable in JFK Airport with a Swat team symbolizing the Roman Army,  the President of the United States personifying Nero, and worshipping of the ancient gods during happy hour.

In 2007, Sellars teamed with minimalist composer John Adams for the filmed version of his most universally acclaimed production, Doctor Atomic. Adams’ opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the testing of the atomic bomb is an overwhelmingly exquisite and intense post Varese electronic opera, even for those who normally do not respond to Adams’ music (ahem).  Sellars direction is a perfect marriage between an innovative, visionary director and contemporary composer.

More Peter Sellars opera on DVD:

*This is part two of a three part series. Read part one. Read part three.