Print

Mail

wiki links

A Chinese Figaro

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Friday, Jun 30, 2006, Page 13

Stan Lai has given Chien Wen-pin's new production of Le Nozze di Figaro a Chinese setting, enhancing what is widely regarded as one of the treasures of operatic music. PHOTO: LO PEI-DER, TAIPEI TIMES

For many opera lovers Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro [Figaro's Wedding] holds a special place. It's not exactly that it's his greatest achievement in the medium -- some connoisseurs rate Don Giovanni higher -- so much as that it has a symmetrical perfection and a warmth of humanity that has no equal.

As a simple historical fact, it was probably the first time that aristocrats and servants were treated as total equals, people subject to identical sexual desires and frustrations, on the European musical stage. But it's more than that. The opera displays a fun-loving exuberance, and a joyful musical inventiveness, both rising at several points to sublime heights, that is hard to match anywhere else in Western art.

Chien Wen-pin (簡文彬), the work's conductor in Taiwan, put it differently last week. He remarked that it was the first collaboration of Mozart and his librettist Da Ponte. At first I thought this surprisingly mild praise, and only later realized that what he meant was that it contained the youthfulness and freshness that characterize many new ventures.

It flows, he added, as if to stress that analysis, like a river -- except possibly in the last act, and its two arias that hold up the action, and are often cut, will be cut again in the performances opening in Taipei tonight, and closing in Hsinchu on July 7.

The production completes the collaboration of Performance Workshop's Stan Lai (賴聲川) and Chien in all three of the Mozart/Da Ponte operas -- most recently Cosi fan Tutte last January. Most of the soloists to be heard in Figaro also appeared in the previous two works.

Figaro will be sung by Tsai Wen-hao (蔡文浩, Don Alfonso in Cosi), Susanna by Chen Yen-ling (陳妍陵, Fiordiligi in Cosi), the Count by Yu-his Wu-bei (巫白玉璽, Guglielmo in Cosi), the Countess by Chen Mei-lin (陳美玲, Dorabella in Cosi), Basilio and Curzio by Hung Yi-te (洪宜德, Ferrando in Cosi), Barbarina by Lo Ming-fang (羅明芳, Despina in Cosi) and Marcellina by Chen Pei-chi (陳珮琪, Marguerite in The Damnation of Faust in 2004). Liau Chong-boon (廖聰文, Oroveso in Norma in 2005) will sing Bartolo and Antonio, and Cherubino will be Eleonora Wen (文以莊), currently based in Hamburg where she was most recently heard as Fiordiligi in Cosi.

At a rehearsal last week Chen Mei-lin was in fine voice as the Countess lamenting her husband's philandering, even as the set designer, Donato Moreno, discussed with the lighting supremo, Chien Lee-zen (簡立人), how best to light the pink curtains of her bed. The computerized lighting will flow effortlessly from one configuration to another, Chien said, while subtly bringing out late-Ching Dynasty motifs.

Stan Lai said his decision to place the production at around 1905, just before the collapse of the Ching Dynasty, while being based on Mozart's original setting of the work in his own day, just before the outbreak of the French Revolution, also allowed him to include telephones and magnesium-flash photographs. Attempts to take illicit photos of the various loving couples in the night-time garden (where the last act takes place) is also a comment on the antics of Taiwan's contemporary paparazzi, he added.

There was much talk of ensembles at the rehearsal. Stan Lai said maestro Chien had indeed succeeded in building a Mozart ensemble over the three operas, while Reinhard Linden, the singing coach who will play the harpsichord for the recitatives, said that Figaro itself was essentially an ensemble opera. Mozart's genius for the theater was supreme, he added. Over and over again, all you had to do was think about the meaning of the words to understand why he set them to music the way he did.

In other rooms, meanwhile, dancers were practicing with their trailing streamers, singers were chatting over iced tea, and some of the artists' children were running in circles or making ingenious models out of plasticine.

"Every number in Mozart's Figaro is a miracle to me," wrote the composer Brahms. "I find it incomprehensible how someone could create something so absolutely perfect. Nothing to equal it has been done since, not even by Beethoven."

And so it seemed last week, with a happy atmosphere permeating the rehearsal room, and the young instrumentalists laughing out loud as they provided the thuds for Cherubino's landing on the gardener's flower-pots after he jumps out of the Countess' window. The extreme youthfulness of the National Symphony Orchestra is, incidentally, very notable, with the average age appearing not a day over 29. When people claim that the future of classical music lies here in Asia, you know what they mean, and sense that Taipei is very much leading the way.

Maestro Chien, himself sporting an exceptionally up-to-date haircut, commented that the doubling of the parts of Bartolo and the gardener Antonio followed the practice in the original 1786 production. This was in keeping with his own attempt to use the same team in all three Mozart operas, creating a regular ensemble along the lines of musical life in late 18th century Vienna.

Tsai Wen-hao (蔡文浩), back to his native Taiwan from the UK, will be singing the role of Figaro for the first time. Up to now he's been associated with middle-aged character parts. "Well, yes," he sighed, "that's how composers often wrote for bass-baritone voices like mine. Fortunately, Mozart is more generous with the music he gives Figaro. But then he's a political radical, challenging his master on equal terms. And remember too that in Don Giovanni it's the bass-baritone Leporello who leads the ensemble Viva la Liberta! (Long live liberty!)." The impli-cation was that you needed a strong voice to express what in the late 18th century were dangerously progressive sentiments, soon to explode into open revolt.

The opera's action takes place in Seville. Count Almaviva insists he has abolished his medieval right to take the virginity of all girls on his estate on the first night after their wedding, but in the case of his wife's servant Susanna, due to be married to his valet Figaro, he secretly hopes to revert to the ancient custom. The two servants, in collaboration with Almaviva's wife and a teenage boy, Cherubino (sung by a soprano), plot to foil his plan. The action is complicated by two older characters, Bartolo and Marcellina -- the former has old scores to settle, while the latter wants to marry Figaro herself. Other parts are for Basilio, a music teacher, Antonio, a gardener, Curzio, a lawyer, and Antonio's young daughter Barbarina.

After many complications, Susanna pretends to agree to meet the Count in the garden at night, but she has in reality changed clothes with the Countess so that the person Almaviva ends up trying to seduce is his own wife. But much else has happened, including the revelation that Marcellina and Bartolo are in reality Figaro's long-lost parents.

The true greatness of the score isn't apparent until the second act, one of the greatest achievements in music. Here ensembles build up one after the other, culminating when Figaro has to explain to the Count why Cherubino should have returned when he was supposed to have left to join the army. After much prompting by Susanna and the Countess, he finally comes up with the explanation that the boy needed the seal (il suggello) for his commission. At this moment the score undergoes a magical resolution, and we approach the conclusion of what will have been some of the most sublime 20 minutes of ensemble singing ever composed. (This is the extended Act Two finale Mozart is made to boast of in the film Amadeus).

There are many other glories, most of them striking in their dramatic appropriateness, and covering an astonishing range of emotions, not all of them happy. As the novelist Stendhal remarked, "Mozart's Figaro is a sublime blend of wit and melancholy of which there is no comparable example."

As subtitles will be in Chinese only, non-Chinese readers are advised to be acquainted with the opera's plot in more detail beforehand. There are several versions on DVD -- a fine one is that directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (DGM 073 4034). Of the many CD sets available, my favorite is an old one, dating from 1955 and conducted by Erich Kleiber (Decca 466 9-2).

Performance notes:

‘Le Nozze di Figaro' plays at Taipei's National Concert Hall tonight at 7.30pm, Sunday at 2.30pm, and Tuesday (July 4) at 7.30pm. It will also be presented at the Cultural Affairs Bureau of Hsinchu County (新竹縣文化局, 146, Xianzheng 9th Rd, Chubei City, Hsinchu County (新竹縣竹北市縣政九路146號) at 7.30pm July 7.

For ticketing information call (02) 3393-9888 or visit www.ntch.edu.tw/nso
This story has been viewed 1281 times.