Another broadcast from the Old Met today.
The Mozart operas are the great artistic wonders of the world, and it deeply saddens me that so many intellectually active people who live their lives guided by Shakespeare never get to Mozart. It's not just that Mozart operas are, for me at least, the greatest operas ever written. It's that they manage to do things which not even Shakespeare can. We'll sadly never know how Mozart would have responded to Romanticism, but Mozart picked up where Shakespeare left off. It took Shakespeare his entire career to arrive at The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, and practice what the literary critic James Wood calls the 'comedy of forgiveness.' Every contemptuous thing Mozart's characters do is suffused with compassion and examination for the reasons why they did it. Mozart is the lessons of Tolstoy compressed to their essence, and the lessons of Chekhov examined in greater depth.
There are, for me, so many ways to fuck Mozart up. But there are two ways to perform the Mozart operas that truly work. There's the historically-informed way, or the old romantic way. It's easy to say things so basic, but such is the purity of Mozart that hybrid approaches don't really work, because within those strictures, there are so many pratfalls. The period informed needn't be done with period instruments, but it does have to take the research into account and perform with the agility Mozart demands. It has to be done with classical formal balance and perfect balance between the instruements and the singers, it requires pure lightness of texture and voices, it requires absolute vocal agility and security. Older listeners heard this all the time from Levine's Met and Davis's and Haitink's Covent Garden, from Sawallisch's Bavarian Opera and Suitner's Berlin Opera, from John Eliot Gardiner's period forces and wherever Charles Mackerras conducted. One does not hear it, however, from more newfangled Mozartian period approaches. The much adored newer recordings of Rene Jacobs and Teodor Currentzis and even my beloved Nikolaus Harnoncourt are un-Mozartian, all three artists are admirable in other music, and in the case of Harnoncourt could not possibly be more admirable in some (including Abduction from the Seraglio...), but in their Mozart operas, there is no Mozart in the Mozart. Furthermore, one doesn't hear it in older recordings that take a more classical approach: those of Karl Böhm or Erich Kleiber or Erich Leinsdorf or Georg Solti or (oy) Herbert von Karajan. Their attempts at classical lightness, often admirable attempts, are so often weighed down by the heavy vocal tread of their singers, who were trained in the era of Wagner and Richard Strauss, and don't understand the necessity of a completely different approach.
The other approach, the old, romantic approach, extremities of tempo, freedom for the singer, more slovenly execution, can work, but it requires everyone in the ensemble to be on the same page. Modern romantics like Barenboim and Muti can't get it together, because their singers are much too light for their approaches. The singers can't impress the same force of personality as their conductors, and as a result, the focus is entirely on the bobbing head in the pit, which no doubt is how Barenboim and Muti like it.... But then there are the older romantic Mozartians. Not a grim teutonic Wagnerian romanticism like Furtwangler's, but a lively, happy romanticism from the era of Weber and Schubert that lets the light in, one finds it from Bruno Walter, Thomas Beecham, Ferenc Fricsay, Carlo Maria Giulini, and most famously today, Fritz Busch.
Busch's Glyndebourne recordings of the Mozart operas, mostly from 1930s London, are legendary. But today, when death is all around us, listen to this liveliness to take your mind off of it. This Marriage of Figaro is sloppy as hell, it practically plows through the whole piece, but it's pure life and joy. The critic Joseph Horowitz, who is a frequent email correspondent, writes of the old Met that at the old Met, conductors like Bodanzky and Panizza don't support the singers so much as they inspired and inflamed them. The old Met was a dialogue between stage and pit of mutual synergy. The singers are sometimes off the beat, the orchestral execution is far from perfect, and the singers occasionally veer off pitch.
Who cares. This is Mozart as the best of the 19th century performed him, not the Apollonian Mozart whose balance and equanimity between happiness and sadness makes us realize the terms on which we must live life; but rather the Dionysian, vibrant Mozart, full of life and joy, who reminds us that life is worth living.
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