![]() I didn’t grasp the nuances of Figaro’s plot, but something communicated itself to me nonetheless. I felt a visceral connection to Mozart’s characters, a sympathy for them in my gut and my throat, in spite of their confusing grown-up problems. It gave me the sense of suddenly having direct access to formerly unknown adult emotions. I realize now that this production had a dream cast of leading ladies: a young Kiri Te Kanawa as the Countess, an even younger Frederica von Stade as Cherubino, the Romanian soprano Ileana Cotrubaș as Susanna. For whatever reason, maybe because I was enthusiastic about Mozart and was playing some of his easier piano music at the time, my parents bought me a VHS tape of Figaro- Peter Hall’s production, recorded at Glyndebourne in 1973. I was even a little embarrassed on the singers’ behalf: They seemed to have no idea how silly they sounded. Operatic singing struck me as jarring and unpleasant. When I was 8 years old or so, I loved classical music but couldn’t stand opera, which I’d heard only bits of on Saturday-afternoon radio broadcasts. In some ways, Figaro is responsible for my being a musician, and it’s certainly responsible for my work in opera. “Nothing like it was ever done again, not even by Beethoven.” And Figaro is the only opera I’ve ever conducted that, over the course of a given production, daily provokes some cast member to pause, shake their head, and say, “This is just the greatest fucking thing ever, isn’t it?” What moved me, in the opera’s ensemble scenes, was the sense that I was in the presence of a tightly wound ball of emotions whose strands I could never untangle. “It is totally beyond me how anyone could create anything so perfect,” Johannes Brahms once said of Figaro. I’m hardly alone in my baffled amazement. The sensation of being immersed in Figaro is no different, for me, from the feeling of gratitude for being alive. Its music seems somehow to bypass my ears and enter my heart and psyche unmediated. It is so close to reality that, in its uncannier moments, its artifice can’t be perceived. The same is true, I think, of Mozart’s other operas: As I experience Don Giovanni or Die Zauberflöte, I never quite forget that I’ve been transported to a fantastical imaginary world.īut Figaro is a different beast. ![]() When I perform or listen to Verdi or Wagner, I never forget that I’m experiencing a capital- O Opera, nor am I supposed to. In opera, artifice typically reigns supreme usually this is part of its fun. ![]() Figaro also has the unique ability to make me forget, whether I experience it as a conductor or a listener, that I’m hearing an opera at all. Mozart loves his characters, even when they’re at their lowest, and so we end up loving them too. In this three-hour transfiguration of Pierre Beaumarchais’ politically charged comedy, Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte achieve an aerial view of the human soul, a portrait both of everything that’s irresistible and brilliant and sexy about human beings, and of the things that make us so infuriating to one another. Figaro would likely be my pick if I had to choose a single favorite work of art-and that includes books, movies, plays, and paintings as well as music. But if any one work is capable of evading or surmounting this foundational impossibility, for me it’s Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (“The Marriage of Figaro”). This impossibility is opera’s lifeblood: Most of the art form’s bizarre and beautiful fruits are the result of artists’ quest for this permanently elusive alchemy. ![]() ![]() The operatic ideal, an imagined union of all the human senses and all art forms-music, drama, dance, poetry, painting-is unattainable by its very nature. O pera is impossible and always has been. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |