by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles and I the
second item in the Arthaus Musik set of Walter Felsenstein’s opera videos from
the Komische Oper in East Berlin back when East Germany (officially the
“Deutsche Democratische Republik” — “German Democratic Republic”) was still a going
concern. I don’t recall what order the videos were originally sequenced in when
I got the box but I refiled them in chronological order by date of composition,
so after the first item we’d watched previously — Mozart’s The Marriage of
Figaro from 1976 — the next one
was the next opera by Mozart and ace librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, Don
Giovanni. Alas, the video was from
1966, 10 years earlier than the version of The Marriage of Figaro, and therefore was in black-and-white — East
German TV hadn’t adopted color yet — and the image was blurry around the edges
and had the lack of definition common to even the best-preserved videotapes of
its vintage. There were some other strikes against this Don Giovanni: it was performed not in librettist Lorenzo da
Ponte’s original Italian but in a German translation by Walter Felsenstein and
Horst Seeger (which, like Felsenstein’s translation of da Ponte’s Marriage
of Figaro, sounded quite good in the
ensemble scenes and the recitatives, but the big lyrical arias suffered —
still, perhaps because Mozart was Austrian and therefore German was his native
tongue, Mozart in German sounds better than Verdi in German), and it stuck to
the original 1786 Prague version of the score. Mozart composed Don Giovanni for the Prague opera — which made it appropriate
that Felsenstein used a Czech conductor, Zdenek Kosler, for this production —
and later tweaked the score for Vienna, replacing Don Ottavio’s original aria
“Il mio tesoro” with “Dalla sua pace,” and adding a comic scene between Donna
Elvira and Leporello, “Restati qua,” that ended with Elvira singing a new aria,
“Mi tradi,” in which she laments that she’s still attracted to Don Giovanni
despite the shabby (to say the least!) way he’s treated her.
Most modern
productions follow a conflated version that leaves out the “Restati qua” scene
but includes “Mi tradi” and gives Don Ottavio both arias — but Felsenstein followed the original
Prague text and therefore deprived his Elvira, Anny Schlemm (one of only two
singers in this cast I’d heard of before), of her big lyrical moment. Now for
the good news: this Don Giovanni is one of the most exciting, committed, passionate opera videos I’ve
ever seen of anything. There’s
been an ongoing debate in the opera world for almost a century now (ever since
international transportation became fast and efficient enough that singers
could fly all over the world instead of remaining attached to only a few opera
houses their entire careers) about the merits of international casts with the
best voices available for the roles versus local casts whose voices may not be
as “major” but who have the advantage of regularly working together and relating to each other dramatically. This
video is a souvenir of a time when East Germany, and the Eastern bloc in general,
were still largely cut off from the rest of the world artistically:
occasionally an Eastern-bloc singer like the Bulgarian bass Boris Christoff
would be so good opera managers would
defy the political roadblocks to hire him (though when Rudolf Bing was hired to
manage the Met in 1950 and wanted Christoff for King Philip in Verdi’s Don
Carlos, bureaucrats at the State
Department yielded to McCarthyite pressure and denied him a visa, so Christoff
didn’t sing at the Met until 1956), but Western stars almost never performed in
Eastern theatres. The downside was that Eastern Bloc opera fans didn’t get the
biggest names from the West; the upside was that the singers they did get were used to performing with each other and
could play off each other dramatically in ways considerably more difficult for
an international cast who fly in for a specific production and then fly away
again to different parts of the world. There are other good things about this Don
Giovanni: conductor Kosler, whom
I’d known mainly for his recordings of Dvorák symphonies and other Czech
orchestral music back home with the Czech Philharmonic in Prague, tears through
the score and plays it as drama, not a cute comic farce.
The singers are all excellent in their roles —
though I was startled at how tall the tenor singing Ottavio, John Moulson, was;
he didn’t have the melting sweetness in his voice one expects (I expect,
anyway) from this part (and the German translation didn’t help) but he looked
convincingly butch and a reasonable alterative to Don Giovanni (Györgi Melis,
the other singer here I’d heard of before) for the affections of Donna Anna
(Klara Barlow). Barlow’s Anna was the best performance in the cast; though
costume designer Sylka-Maria Busse made her look way too much like Morticia Addams for my taste (yes, I
know she’s supposed to dress in
black because she’s in mourning for her father, the Commendatore [Herbert
Rössler], whom Don Giovanni kills in the opening scene, but she didn’t have to
look like she just emerged from a swamp!), her acting was visceral and she
managed to make Anna’s single-minded determination to avenge her father’s death
and her own near-ruination at Giovanni’s hands believable. Anny Schlemm was
almost as good as Elvira, and Melis as Don Giovanni was appropriately hunky and
hot-looking even though one wonders how his rather lame seduction lines ever
worked on anybody, let alone the 2,065 women
he’s previously bedded in the backstory. One problem with the production was
Rudolf Asmus’s Leporello, Giovanni’s faithful servant and butt of some of
Giovanni’s nastiest practical jokes: he sings acceptably but not at the level
of the rest of the cast, and he’s considerably shorter and stouter than Melis —
which makes hash of the scene in which Don Giovanni and Leporello switch
clothes and impersonate each other to facilitate Giovanni’s attempted seduction
of Donna Elvira’s housemaid. The other principals are Eva-Marie Baum as
Zerlina, the peasant girl Giovanni attempts to seduce in the duet “La ci darem
la mano” (which became a favorite of 19th century composers — Chopin
and Liszt both composed variations on it for piano), and Fritz Hübner as her
fiancé Masetto. Baum sang well enough but it’s odd that this, not either of the Donnas, was 19th-century
superstar Adelina Patti’s preferred role in this opera, and she and Hübner did
the best they could with the “Batti, batti” duet in which Zerlina offers to let
Masetto beat her up as his revenge for her almost having yielded to the Don’s seductions.
That’s
inevitably going to be a problem for modern audiences, but in a lot of ways the
politics of Don Giovanni seem
awfully au courant in the age of the #MeToo
movement. Giovanni himself comes off — especially the way Felsenstein staged it
— as a sort of combination Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump, convinced that
because he was born into money he therefore has a God-given right to have any
woman he wants and throw his money around on lavish parties. His invitation to
the dead Commendatore, represented by a giant statue in a cemetery, to come to
his place for dinner comes off as a marvelous bit of cheekiness, well within
the Don’s character — and Charles was surprised that in a regime devoted to
materialism Felsenstein was able to keep Mozart’s and da Ponte’s original
supernatural ending (the statue of the Commendatore comes to life and literally drags Don Giovanni down to hell) instead of
fudging it (as Russian director Dimitri Tcherniakov did in a recent production
in which the Commendatore was an actor hired to impersonate the dead man and therefore get the Don to confess
his crimes and/or go totally crazy). Interestingly Don Giovanni is one of only two Mozart operas in which he used
trombones, both times to signal supernatural interventions in his plots — here
where the statue speaks and accepts Giovanni’s dinner invitation, and earlier
in Idomeneo when the god Poseidon
literally functions as a deus ex machina and lets Idomeneo off the hook, allowing him not to sacrifice his son Idamante as he had previously
pledged. Also among the pluses of this Don Giovanni are the sets by Reinhard Zimmermann, which are
solid, unstylized and actually look like the late 18th century; it’s
a real pleasure to see the old-fashioned realistic approach in an era in which
so many opera productions are set in junkyards or among bits of stylized
hangings of cloth, metal or glass that look like they came from junkyards!
