a fine bromance
Some of you cher public will no doubt see the pendulum as swinging too far in the other direction, but La Cieca finds this particularly convincing and exciting deptiction of the relationship between Don Giovanni and Leporello a refreshing change of pace after the listless staging of Mozart’s masterpiece currently in the Met’s repertory. The men are Simon Keenlyside and Kyle Ketelsen; they are eventually joined by Veronique Gens as Donna Elvira.
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Sorry – some button might have got pressed in mid-edit. What I meant to say in that last para was ‘Still, a director can have imagination enough to do his or her own thing’.
Gundryggia, looking at your authoritative post on the Tristan thread, I think some of us can surmise that an old friend has returned, but beyond that I won’t venture – do remember the rules of anonymity.
Regie: But to pretend that it’s what Mozart or Da Ponte might have had in mind or cued is disingenuous.
And to pretend that Mozart or da Ponte in their wildest imaginations could have guessed that two centuries after their deaths Don Giovanni would be performed constantly in all the world’s opera houses? Is that not rather disingenuous too?
Especially in an era when one can hear and see a wide variety of Don Giovanni performances at the click of of a button, it is imperative that a new production of so familiar a work must be in some way experimental. Otherwise opera is nothing but a walking corpse. What impresses me most about Bieito’s work here is its deeply experimental nature. I or I should say “radically” experiemental, in the sense that this production seems meant to challenge one’s most fundamental understanding of the work’s meaning.
I think I have written before about how my yardstick for truly great acting is Marlon Brando — not the spectacular effects or enormous personal magnetism of the performer, but rather his ability to make and play dramatic choices that are both utterly unexpected and yet, upon reflection, utterly believalbe. Brando’s art is to reveal to us a previously undiscovered meaning that is so honest and true that it feels like it must be inherent in the work and we simply have overlooked it until now. At its best, I think this is the level Bieito’s work achieves in this Don Giovanni.
I hardly think Mozart and da Ponte would object to a director’s finding and revealing new and unplumbed depths in a work; certainly not if they could fathom the notion that within a few days the same audience members could, if they liked, witness a totally different and (it is to be hoped) equally valid performance of this opera.
Last word (from me, though clearly Cieca has to have hers): I’ve found unexpected meanings from all sorts of disciplined and music-aware directors, several of whom I’ve cited. For me, Bieito is not one of them.
And I’m really not anti-regie (a meaningless term: there is only insightful regie and self-indulgent regie). For the record, I’m not anti-Reggie either, though his slow-burn approach isn’t my way of savouring Wagner.
Hmmm…
Interesting discussion. Don G. has never been one of my favorite operas – but this take on it has made me rethink it.
On a lighter note, I would gladly have Kyle Kettelson’s children.
You are going to have to step in line and fight his wife….
La Cieca – I enjoy rethinking opera. (I attended the premiere of the Vick Trovatore in 2000 and I enjoyed it, warts and all). I also agree with something you said above, that the other characters in Giovanni should get the short end of the stick. (I even tried to make this point above).
I even think Bieito is a very smart man. I adore the fact that he made Selim and Osmin into abusive whoremongers in Serail. I just don’t think you need to slice off nipples, get pissed on by other characters and dance around dick-naked to make this point. In fact I think this type of thing is arguably cartoonish and anti-intellectual. Does a Bieito staging open the door for slightly less controversial stagings which are similarly intellectual? Maybe. I have to keep thinking about that. But I know for sure that I’m not in his audience and I don’t see a need to defend his work in its extremes.
As to your question, “why not simply do the works in concert form,” the answer is easy: An audience needs something to hold their attention while they sit on their ass in the same tiny seat for three hours. Simon Bocanegra is basically a 3-hour symphony, but it’s nice to see people walking around up there while it’s playing. Sometimes you might even enjoy the story. I mean, nobody loves or hates an aria for its text.
But when the staging upstages the music, then I can turn your question around on you: Why not simply do the staging as a theatrical play? You could use selected musical excerpts from the opera as a soundtrack. Bieito has staged Houellebecq’s Platform. He could go into theater and present whatever vision of whatever opera he wanted.
P.S. La Cieca, why don’t you spend your energies trying to get NYCO to be the avant-garde house and leave the Met as is? I moved away from the northeast a few years ago, so I didn’t follow the Mortier debacle, but if I were in charge of NYC tourism I’d love being able to tell any tourist from anywhere in the world that they could come to NY on any given day and have their choice of traditional venue or non-traditional venue. Let the Met have its crushed velvet, and let the NYCO have the crushed glass. No?
I am with Hovie in his observation that when the staging distracts from the music there is a problem. I thought Donna Ana having sex with Ottavio during Non mi dir was taken too far. It makes sense, but I don’t need to be beaten over the head with it. All I could think about was all the times back in the Dominican Republic when I would play my records too loud and the neighbors would yell at me to stop that woman from screaming while having sex. Directors like Bieito should apply to themselves that rule women should follow before going out: Look at yourself in the mirror and take one thing off. In their case maybe a few dozen. If these people were not so egotistical and could edit themselves their works would be so much stronger. Of course then they wouldn’t be able to be so contemptuous of their audiences.
Hovie: The Vick Trovatore I would not call rethought so much as overthought. Ecch, what an idea-free mess!
Regie (somehow I read that as Robin gestern), I don’t mean to argue with a very sophisticated musician but when I look at the score of Don Giovanni I see five measures of D major following two measures in d minor (descending scale of 16ths shifting to transitional measure with descending quarter notes) that mark the Don’s death — the scene has of course been in d minor but the change occurs before the beginning of the final scene.
My point put simply was that IMHO Don Giovanni is an absurdest piece where virtually nothing is straight forward. We have a famous seducer who begins the opera failing to seduce a woman and fails to seduce every other woman he approaches throughout the opera. The first Don was a tenorish 22 year old who by the standards of travel in that time could not have begun to accumulate even a small percentage of the number of conquests ‘the catalog’ attributes to him — yet Da Ponte and Mozart wrote that aria fully knowing how incongruous even ridiculous it would appear. The time frame of Don Giovanni is one day, fitting in all that happens results in wild juxtapositions which become rather giddy — probably no more than an hour or so after killing the Commendatore, Don Giovanni is boasting about smelling women accurately (he’s wrong again for indeed he is making a funny and naughty mistake — he’s smelled this woman plenty) and trying to seduce her only to have her turn on him furiously, twenty minutes later he’s after Zerlina (a breakfast party possibly the morning of the actual wedding), not so much later (noon?) he’s trying to rape Zerlina or so she wants it to seem — she leaves willingly enough with him and he doesn’t take her far away where she couldn’t escape him. And on and on, the comic or strange juxtapositions, the oddly motivated behavior (why don’t Anna and Ottavio go to the police once they realize that Don G killed her father but instead get themselves up in fancy dress to go to a party given by that same person?) make the opera really bizarre. I think that should be reflected in the staging, though there are many ways to do it, Bieto is hardly definitive.
why don’t Anna and Ottavio go to the police …
A digression, perhaps–but were there police of the type we know now in 18th-century Seville of Anna & Ottavio’s day? Or would Ottavio be expected to do his own law enforcing as part of a gentleman’s code of honor?
Of course, in an updated production that question would come up–I remember in the Peter Sellars production, Ottavio was himself a cop, which would make things a bit more explicable.