SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mozart, Die Entführung aus dem Serail: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of Welsh National Opera, Rinaldo Alessandrini, conductor, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 13.2.2010 (GPu)

Conductor: Rinaldo Alessandrini

Director: James Robinson

Set Designer: Allen Moyer

Costume Designer: Anna R. Oliver

Lighting Designer: Paul Palazzo

Chorus Master: Stephen Harris

Belmonte: Robin Tritschler

Osmin: Petros Magoulas

Pedrillo: Wynne Evans

Konstanze: Lisette Oropesa

Blonde: Claire Ormshaw

Pasha Selim: Simon Thorpe


Comedy – as a theatrical genre – is about far more than just laughter. While the lesser forms of the genre, such as farce and pantomime, essentially justify their existence by their ability to provoke laughter, the great comedies – such as those of Shakespeare or Mozart – attempt far more than the simple amusement of an audience. The essential comic plot has largely remained unchanged since it was codified by the Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence, drawing on Greek New Comedy. A young man wants a young woman (often the motif is doubled by the addition of a second couple); their desire for union is thwarted by some opposition, often in the form of an older man, sometimes a parent, sometimes a figure of authority. Sufferings, even threats of death, come the way of the young lovers (a socially superior young lover is often assisted by his servant), but near the end of the narrative a twist in the plot makes it possible for the hero to have his will – marriages ensue, often accompanied by a more or less explicit promise of a new and better society. Situations which seem likely to provoke revenge (the mechanism of tragedy) are turned into occasions of forgiveness (the mechanism of comedy). Human folly stops short of evil action, and men (and women) are ‘saved’. Comedy, we should remember, grew (as did Tragedy) out of Greek religious systems; where tragedy enacted the death of the hero or fertility god, comedy completed the cycle through its imagery of renewal and, metaphorically, resurrection. It is appropriate to think of the use of the term in another, later context, too. Dante’s great poem of salvation – after the journey through Hell and Purgatory, was originally called simply the Commedia.

This long preamble (for which I apologise) is a necessary prelude to an attempt to understand the deficiencies of James Robinson’s production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Mozart’s starting point in the composition of the work was a libretto (Belmont und Constanze, oder Die Entführung aus dem Serail) by Christoph Friedrich Bretzner. Mozart worked with Gottlieb Stephanie to revise and enhance this libretto – and almost without exception the changes Mozart insisted upon took it away from mere farce and towards Comedy, in the sense outlined above. The strategy wasn’t based on the exclusion of the simply funny – far from it; rather on the framing, as it were, of the ‘funny’ with words and music that aligned the result with the serious dimensions of the comic genre, with its capacity to speak of the conflict of the generations, of the power of love, to create myths of confinement and liberation, to enact powerful narratives of salvation, to trace the development of the human being’s recognition of the supreme value of forgiveness. In The Tempest Prospero (prompted by Ariel) finally (in Act V) decides how to treat his enemies:

Though with their high wrongs, I am struck to th’quick,

Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury

Do I take part. The rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance.

The sentiments are those of Pasha Selim at the close of Mozart’s opera – indeed, they are very much key sentiments of the Enlightenment. In the final quartet of the opera, the young European lovers celebrate Selim’s decision:
 

Nichts ist so häßlich als die Rache;

Hingegen menschlich gütig sein,

Und ohne Eigennutz verzeihn,

Ist nur der großen Seelen Sache!
 

(Nothing is as loathsome as revenge; but being humane and kind, forgiving without self-interestedness, can be done only by the large-souled). These words follow Osmin’s continued rage and demand for revenge, in contradistinction to his master’s sentiments. Stephanie and Mozart present us, verbally and musically, with a diptych made up of, on the one hand, the rational choice of forgiveness and, on the other, the continuing emotional confinement of revenge. The moment is one of considerable profundity. Yet, the absurdity and excessiveness of Osmin’s language and sentiments are also funny – and performance has to achieve a tricky, but glorious, balance. In the libretto Osmin storms from the stage in a continuing rage (rather like Malvolio storming off in Twelfth Night, declaring “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you”). In this production he had a slapstick heart attack and, lying dead on the stage, was first covered by Selim with what looked like a frilly nightgown and was then stepped over by the rest of the cast. Comic business, as in so many other places in this production, was intrusive, forced into parts of the plot where it was inappropriate, where it could only serve to trivialise. Perhaps the crassest example came in Act II, where Lisette Oropesa’s Konstanze was obliged to sing the dreadfully demanding, but dramatically intensely powerful, ‘Martern aller Arten’, with its imagery of agony, pain and death, while being treated to a display of silk scarves, shiny shoes and fur coats – as if such temptations represented the limits of what Selim could imagine by way of torture. It was very much to Oropesa’s credit that she still managed to communicate much of what words and music were about, despite the pantomimic comedy going on around her.

Robinson’s production sets the work on the Orient Express at the beginning of the 1920s. This, of course, generates many a clash with the libretto – on a train which has left Istanbul and is making its way across mainland Europe to Paris, it is hard to see what use Belmonte’s ship would be to any plan of escape, for example. There were many more such examples, so that another texture of distraction was set up.

The chronological updating gave rise to more serious difficulties and inconsistencies. In an interview with Simon Rees, contained in the programme, James Robinson says some remarkable things about his conception of Pasha Selim:

“We have set the opera in the 1920s, in the earliest part of what now feels to be the modern era, after the First World War and its social changes both in Europe and in Turkey, and as a result Pasha Selim can’t just be shown as an exotic: he has to be understood as a personage of the modern era. He has to be appealing as well as threatening. He is in conflict with himself because he has one foot in each camp, east and West, and he has already suffered as a result of his contact with Europe, through Belmonte’s father”.

So, “as a result” of setting the opera in the 1920s, Pasha Selim “has [my italics] to be understood as a personage of the modern era”. Presumably this was why Simon Thorpe’s Selim was dressed in fashionable western clothes throughout, while Osmin wore Ottoman robes and fez. But the westernising of Selim destroys one of the most significant points in the dramatic and thematic shaping of the whole opera. At its conclusion, the redeeming action of forgiveness comes from a Turkish figure, from an Islamic figure who behaves with a charity beyond that with which Christians have treated him. It is a moment which grows out of the complex Viennese attitude to the Ottoman Turks which was compounded (for all kinds of good historical reasons) of simultaneous fear and respect. By making Selim so thoroughly westernised, this production robs the opera’s key moment of its significance, and seems, rather unfortunately, to carry (perhaps not intentionally) a suggestion that the westernised Turk is capable of noble behaviour (because he is westernised) while the unwesternised Osmin is not.

A predominantly young cast generally acquitted themselves pretty well, given that they found themselves in a production which so often seemed to conspire against the meaning of what they were singing (I am referring to both musical and verbal ‘meaning’). Lisette Oropesa, making her European debut, coped very decently with the vocal demands of her role, even if she didn’t quite leave one with the sense that she was possessed of the kind of remarkably “flexible throat” that Mozart found to characterise his original Constanze, Catarina Cavalieri. Of her dramatic abilities it was hard to make a very confident judgement – she was costumed and directed as though she were a kind of ingénue from an Agatha Christie novel, which militated against her developing any full or consistent portrayal of the remarkable figure of Mozart’s Constanze. Robin Tritschler’s Belmonte was perhaps at times a little underpowered, vocally speaking, though his work was generally pleasant – again he was hampered by the production’s conception of the character – his initial bumbling entry with tennis racquet and bag of tennis balls (for the sake of a predictable joke) made one think of P.G. Wodehouse more than Viennese singspiel.

Claire Ormshaw made a pert and sparky Blonde and, in a strand of the opera where laughs were more appropriate, displayed good comic timing, as well as displaying a satisfying vocal control, as in her high-spirited version of ‘Welche Wonne, welche Lust’. Wynne Evans’s Pedrillo was a figure of broader humour, and there was some engaging mugging in his performance and a good deal of physical comedy (again, finally, too much in a production which couldn’t resist every opportunity – or presumed opportunity – for a gag). Evans’s tenor was nicely contrasted with Tritschler’s much lighter voice and rang out well in such ensembles as the quartet which closes Act II. His performance of ‘In Mohrenland gefangen war ein Mädel’ had an attractively lyrical playfulness and wit (the strings of the orchestra made a particularly valuable contribution here).

The Osmin of Petros Magoulas was generally effective, though, like many a modern bass he found difficulty in encompassing all of the remarkable range which the original interpreter of the role, Ludwig Fischer, evidently had. At the kind of simplistic level at which so much in the production worked – in the interview already mentioned, James Robinson talks of what he sees as the work’s essential affinities with the American tradition of screwball comedy – this theatrical caricature made an effective contrast with the more sophisticated figure of Pasha Selim, a role interpreted by Simon Thorpe with an air of natural authority, making some very telling uses of silence and hesitation and conveying a plausible sense of power restrained (within the limitations created by the ‘modernisation’ of his role, as outlined above).

At times the compartmented nature (it was a train after all) of the elegant set (stylish but inappropriate) was used quite well to suggest parallels of thought, of action and reaction; this, of course, might have been done just as well with a set based on the Pasha’s palace itself.

Rinaldo Alessandrini’s conducting was, for the most part, hard-driven and fast – sometimes surely a little too fast. But many orchestral details – and the opera contains some quite wonderful orchestral writing (‘accompaniment’, perhaps for the first time in Mozart’s operas, seems too limiting a concept) – were well, and unobtrusively, brought out, such as the flutes, horns and bassoons in Blonde’s ‘Welche Wonne..’ or the exquisite passages for woodwind in Constanze’s ‘Welcher Wechsel …’.

Instrumentally and vocally this fell short of being a great performance – but it did something approaching justice to the power and beauty of the work. The same, unfortunately, could not be said of the production - this may not quite have been Murder (Operacide?) on the Orient Express, but it was too close for comfort.

Glyn Pursglove