Tonight sees the premiere of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni in the Metropolitan Hall on Taipei's Bade Road. It's likely to be an invigorating show, with a young cast and reportedly spectacular sets. More unusual, however, is the fact that not all the music will be Mozart's.
“Mozart wrote his opera after seeing his predecessor Gluck's opera on the same subject,” said the production's director Tseng Dau-hsiong (曾道雄). “So Andras Ligeti, the Taipei Symphony Orchestra's maestro and conductor of these performances, suggested we incorporate some of the music from that opera into our production. It's a ballet scene that lasts about seven minutes, and it shows Don Giovanni watching his doppelganger undergoing a similar fate to the one he himself is about to confront. We've placed it just before Mozart's Graveyard Scene — it should add an interesting new perspective to the story! It's something completely new. It's never been done before.”
The Taipei Symphony Orchestra (TSO) has in recent years tended to be overshadowed in the operatic sphere by the spectacular successes of the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO). But Ligeti led the TSO in a fine La Traviata last year, and it has the advantage of performing in the medium-sized and acoustically excellent Metropolitan Hall, more suitable for Mozart's operas than the over-large National Concert Hall where the NSO usually performs.
Ligeti is also an important Mozartean. His wonderful recording of three Mozart piano concertos with pianist Jeno Jando, for instance, can be heard on the bargain Naxos label (Naxos 8.550202).
At a rehearsal last week the extensive demands of the long score were in evidence. Only two-thirds of it could be run through in the time available, but even so the strong voices of several of the principals were readily apparent. Jessica Chen (陳興安), one of Taiwan's most notable sopranos, sang Donna Elvira with enormous conviction, Grace Lin (林慈音) was in great form as Donna Anna, and Liau Chong-boon (廖聰文) made a very strong Leporello. Chen, incidentally, will sing Brunnhilde in Wagner's Die Walkure in Bangkok next year, while Liau will double as Hunding and the giant Fafner in the NSO's Ring in Taipei next month.
The peasant Masetto, who has his fiancee seduced under his nose and by the devious aristocrat Giovanni, will be sung by the very strong bass Lo Chun-ying (羅俊穎). “I enjoy singing Mozart roles best,” he said. “He suits my voice. I've sung Leporello before, and last year I sang Sarastro in Die Zauberflote in Tokyo.” Rehearsals for this production of Don Giovanni began in June, he told me, resuming after a break at the end of July.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF TSO
Don Giovanni is Mozart's most paradoxical and argued-over mature opera. It tells the story of the Casanova-like serial seducer, an aristocrat who's happy to use his social position to entrap every attractive woman he sets eyes on. He's pursued by past victims who are still desperately in love with him, notably Elvira, as well as their enraged boyfriends, notably Don Ottavio, who try to overcome their inferior social position to demand reparation.
The main issue that divides critics is Mozart's attitude toward his protagonist. Some, such as Performance Workshop's Stan Lai (賴聲川) who directed the NSO production in 2004, see him as a liberating force who leaves the women he's had contact with changed forever. Others, more credibly in my view, point to the fact that Giovanni kills the father of one of his conquests in the first moments of the opera, and that from then on his moral status can't be in serious doubt. His antics may be comic, but his eventual demise is assured.
Yet even the great US musicologist Paul Henry Lang disagrees. “The spectator is so completely enveloped in the magic of love,” he wrote in 1941, “mirrored to him from all sides, that the natural measure he usually follows in human relationships vanishes, together with all scruples he might entertain toward the diabolical greatness of the hero.”
As so often with Mozart, the female characters get specially sympathetic and insightful treatment. Donna Anna, whose father the Commendatore (Commander) is killed in a duel in the opera's opening scene, gets some superb music, as does the lonely and tragic Donna Elvira. Zerlina, Masetto's fiancee, is a lighter role, and she is often played as an intelligent and experienced woman, comparable to Susanna in Figaro, despite her humble social status. The men, by contrast, especially Anna's fiancee Ottavio, are often seen as subject to mere knee-jerk reactions, though there's room for other points of view here as well.
“The opera's recitatives will be in Mandarin,” director Tseng said. “This will allow audiences to understand the story better. It's a buffa opera anyway, with comic and serious business mixed, so understanding the plot is important. Only the arias, duets and ensembles will be sung in the original Italian, with Chinese subtitles displayed.”
“Mozart's music is so great,” he continued. “All the drama's meaning is encoded in it. I even feel that performing it is like unraveling the Da Vinci code in some strange way!”
“The setting will be 17th-century, as it was intended to be. There have been too many avant-garde productions that sacrificed the music to supposed originality. But the music is the heart, the very spirit, of the work, and you must respect that above all else. The famous baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau once said that there were avant-garde stage directors who devised crazy productions but who didn't know a note of the music. We're certainly not going to be like that!”
Performance Notes:
What: Mozart's Don Giovanni
Where: Metropolitan Hall (城市舞台), 25 Bade Road Sec 3, Taipei (台北市八德路三段25號)
When: Tonight at 7.30pm and Sunday at 2.30pm
Tickets: From NT$400 to NT$1,200.
Contact: (02) 3393-9888 for reservations.
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