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Donizetti, Don Pasquale:  New production directed by Roy Rallo, Soloists and chorus of Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar, orchestra Staatskapelle Weimar, conducted by Martin Hoff. Weimar, Germany. 31.1.2009 (MM)

Picture © Marsha Ginsberg

For many decades the best German opera productions have mercilessly explored the texts and subtexts of old operas.   Stories that were once innocent have been subjected to analysis that erupts on the stage into surprising, sometimes shocking story telling, and at times even unexpected revelations of meaning.  Such was still the case when Weimar's new Don Pasquale fell into the hands of American stage director Roy Rallo.

The age-old comic process of youth overcoming obstacles placed by its elders is the crux of Donizetti's opera.  Before the inevitable reconciliation of youth and age this story perpetrates a complex trick that is really mean - even its perpetrators think so, leaving us finally somewhat ambivalent in our feelings about the new generation.  Mr. Rallo's sympathies were clearly with the older generation. The opera ends not on the exhilaration of youth, but on a defeated sense of aging.

In Weimar Don Pasquale's house was an old folk's home, populated by old folks.  Real old folks.  Exploiting these folks is of course not a unique theatrical trick, having been used in recent times notably by Barry Kosky and Robert Carsen.  In Weimar these venerable souls expressed a collective wish for their lost youth.  Miracles were in store!  Not only could the cosmetic surgeon Dr. Malatesta transform Norina into the sex bomb needed to stimulate Pasquale's sexual apparatus, he could also offer the old folks the outward appearance of their lost youth. 

American set designer Marsha Ginsberg provided an idealized old room for the action of the opera, idealized in the sense that it looked like a really old real old room, one that was in its prime long, long ago.  Its walls are now a faded, pale, Easter blue, one corner showing smoke residue from a bygone wood stove, and old furniture where the old folks sat, obviously scavenged from forgotten corners of the DDR.

Costumes, the work of Doey Lüthi, were rich in detail too, as they were surely scavenged from the piles of garments found in second hand stores, discarded as fashions have changed over the decades.  Norina, first a nurse in the old folks home, transformed herself by donning a magnificent 1940's gown, then surgically assumed gigantic tits plus lots of platinum hair before resolving herself into a very plain socialist matron.

Dirty tricks (of fate) abounded at the premiere.  Early in the performance a television failed to illuminate, the missing images obviously meant to provide crucial motivational information for the story.  Pasquale jabbed at the television remote (did remotes exist in bygone DDR days?)  triggering extreme light cues that illuminated the love affair of Norina and Ernesto, and left us with the expectation that there would be some extreme light cues at their later reconciliation.  The moment was indeed scenically set up, but any light cue was missed.

Dirtiest of all was the last minute cancellation of the Dr. Malatesta (attributed to a back injury suffered from slipping on Weimar's icy streets).  The role was taken by a confident young Korean baritone, Ji-Su Park, a member of Weimar's opera studio.  Mr. Park's presence as an aggressive young surgeon seemed totally natural in an uncanny way (at least it worked well for the Americans in the audience as Asians have an important presence in American medicine).  But surely it altered the tonality of the production, as the story telling would have been quite different if the plot were motivated by a contemporary of Pasquale.

Like all the more successful of German productions, this one too relied on its strong concept to showcase effectively the ensemble singers typical of German repertory opera houses.  Notable was Ernesto, the fine tenor of Uwe Stickert (though those of us who intimately know retirement homes would have made him the maintenance man/janitor - he would have been much easier to costume as well).  The Norina of Heike Porstein was well sung, though she was more comfortable as the good hearted, simple nurse than as Donizetti's strident Norina.  The Don Pasquale of bass-baritone Damon Nestor Ploumis was a fine success.  One might have wished for a larger vocal presence but he brought subtle coloration to this character, seemingly defeated at the end, certainly not entirely reconciled to, and perhaps confused by the story's outcome.

Mr. Rallo's Don Pasquale was not without its coup de théâtre.  Playing on the Italian word Pasqua (Easter), Easter eggs appeared on stage, Pasquale and Malatesta donned bunny masks for their patter duet (an hysterically funny play on bunny's mouths eating carrots).  The twenty or so old folks broke open the eggs to find photographs of themselves, thereby discovering rebirth into the prime of life through the miracle of photography and the richness of memory.  Thus this simple sentimental comedy assumed profound human dimensions.

All this in spite of what came out of the pit.  Conductor Martin Hoff confused Donizetti with Beethoven, perhaps because it was a blustery cold, snowy night in Weimar and sunny Italy is so far away, and the opera was sung in German anyway.

Michael Milenski


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