There are lots of obstacles that might keep you\u00a0at home listening to favorite performances\u00a0on your music\u00a0system instead of venturing out to an opera house or a concert hall. Price is one of the big ones, but transportation, cold weather, exhaustion at the end of the workday, uncomfortable theater seats, and annoying fellow audience members might also enter into the calculation. Yet if a performance is good enough, it will transcend all that and make you very glad indeed that you came out.<\/p>\n
A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a\u00a0tiny New York living room listening to a much-loved\u00a0performance of The Marriage of Figaro<\/em> on my tiny iPod. As I listened, I leafed through the pages of that week’s New Yorker<\/em> and noticed that a revival of the Richard Eyre\u00a0production of\u00a0Le Nozze di Figaro<\/em> was being performed at the Metropolitan Opera<\/a>\u00a0that very week.\u00a0I saw that it featured Luca Pisaroni, whom I have loved in other Mozart operas,\u00a0as the Count, and though I didn’t recognize any of the other names, I decided to grab a ticket for three\u00a0nights later.<\/p>\n As it turned out, Pisaroni was the least of it\u00a0(though he was very good, and so was the Figaro, a singer I’d never heard before named Adam Plachetka). This production turned out to star the women, as seems fitting for a plot whose twists all depend on female intelligence. One after another, the sopranos and mezzo-sopranos came out and wowed the audience, until we could barely believe our luck at the combination of singing talent and persuasive acting (supported, as all such performances must be, by the\u00a0sensitive\u00a0orchestra and its conductor, who was in this case the brilliant Harry Bicket). Susanna, the key\u00a0figure in the plot\u2014since she is not only Figaro’s bride, but also the object of the Count’s predatory lust\u00a0and the deviser of the plot that defeats him\u2014was performed\u00a0by the Met newcomer Christiane Karg, whose lively intelligence and assertive physical presence\u00a0was reminiscent of\u00a0Marlene Dietrich. The Countess, sung by Rachel Willis-S\u00f8rensen, had one of the most meltingly knock-out voices I’ve ever heard in the part, which made the Count’s cruel treatment of her all the more affecting. And Cherubino\u2014always my\u00a0favorite, if the role is properly done\u2014was endearingly played by Serena Malfi, whose boyish gestures evoked the sweetness of Harpo Marx\u00a0(though obviously without his\u00a0muteness).\u00a0Even the bit parts like Marcellina (sung by Katarina Leoson) and Barbarina (the very animated Hyesang Park) were beautifully done. The whole set-up made it seem as if the world of this opera was secretly governed by the women, even as\u00a0the men believed they had the upper hand.<\/p>\n It is an ugly plot, as Anthony Tommasini pointed out in his review, and particularly so when one is\u00a0thinking\u00a0constantly about the issue of sexual harassment, as people\u00a0are these days. But simply representing a lascivious seigneur<\/em> attempting to claim his ancestral droit<\/em> does not in itself constitute ugliness. It is the game-like manner in which the subject is treated\u2014and especially the emotional cruelty perpetrated by almost all\u00a0the characters on their actual and potential sexual partners\u2014that makes this opera so disturbing. I am thinking particularly of the scene in which Susanna, knowing that Figaro has come out to spy on her, pretends she is meeting a lover just to get back at him; for me, this was the most viscerally painful\u00a0moment in the whole evening, given the way Eyre had directed it.\u00a0And in this\u00a0respect Nozze di Figaro<\/em>\u00a0is not unlike the composer’s other major\u00a0operas. Cruelty, and especially sexual cruelty, seems to be Mozart’s\u00a0great theme. That he made light of it, for the most part\u2014except when he\u00a0resorted\u00a0to\u00a0excessive\u00a0heaviness, as he did in Don Giovanni\u2014<\/em>is one aspect\u00a0of the problem; and that his wondrously seductive music tempts\u00a0us<\/em> to make light of it is another.<\/p>\n Still, I wouldn’t have it otherwise. It is the plots that make his\u00a0operas so distressing, but anyone who wishes they could get just the music without the painful plot should try going to a performance of La Finta\u00a0Giardiniera<\/em>, composed when he was just eighteen. The music is recognizably Mozartean and has many lovely bits, but the plot, to the extent it exists, is a boring mess. After watching a very intelligently directed performance of this\u00a0embryonic\u00a0opera at Juilliard last month, I began to think\u00a0for the first time that perhaps Lorenzo Da Ponte was right. Da Ponte claimed in his Memoirs<\/em> that it was he, with his brilliant librettos, who really made Mozart’s reputation, and I have always treated this as an idle boast (comparable, for instance,\u00a0to his numerous\u00a0tall tales about how many beautiful ladies he left in his wake as he fled town with their fathers’ ducats). But now, having seen what Mozart did before he met Da Ponte, I have come to a new respect for the librettist. Better to have a cruel plot than none at all, because at least it gives us something to react against\u2014and, in the hands of the proper director, something to think about as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are lots of obstacles that might keep you\u00a0at home listening to favorite performances\u00a0on your music\u00a0system instead of venturing out to an opera house or a concert hall. Price is one of the big ones, but transportation, cold weather, exhaustion … Continue reading