Last night I had wanted to watch one of the opera videos I had just got from a so-called “flash sale” at arkivmusic.com, which included a boxed set of seven productions by director Walter Felsenstein of the Komische Oper in what was then East Berlin and a recent Zürich, Switzerland Blu-ray of Debussy’s one finished opera, Pelléas et Mélisande. I tried to run the Debussy disc but it wouldn’t load on our player (I suspect it’s a region-coding problem), so I broke out the Felsenstein box and played the earliest item on it (in order of composition), a 1976 performance of Mozart’s comic masterpiece The Marriage of Figaro. The liner notes on the outside of the Felsenstein box describe him as “one of the 20th century’s greatest creative theatre directors, who played a hugely important role in the revival of opera as a theatrical art form.” That had me fearing the worst — I worried that Felsenstein would turn out to be one of those Regietheater creeps who ran roughshod over the intentions of the original composer and librettist to impose his own concept on a work that was perfectly good as a theatre piece before he got his hands on it — but it turned out, at least on the basis of this performance, that he respected what Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte created out of Beaumarchais’ play Le Mariage de Figaro and sought to communicate it effectively rather than rewrite it to his own specifications.
Actually, in one respect Felsenstein did literally rewrite it; instead of da Ponte’s original Italian, the opera was performed in a German translation, and the German version was Felsenstein’s own — and given the auspices under which he was staging and the ideological predilections of the East German government, it’s arguable that he ramped up the anti-aristocratic social satire of the piece which Mozart and da Ponte had had to tone down to get the piece staged at all. When Mozart and da Ponte wrote The Marriage of Figaro in 1786 the source play had already been banned by the Vienna court, and it was only by promising to soft-pedal the anti-aristocratic satire of the original that da Ponte was able to get the royal court’s permission to adapt the play into an opera. I remember reading one biography of Mozart published in the 1930’s that claimed he and da Ponte completely eliminated the social commentary of the piece — which is utter nonsense: it’s written into the material and there’s no way you could have got rid of it completely without just turning it into a bawdy sex farce. The same biographer had described Mozart as going through night after night of being invited to the home of some aristocrat and asked to play for him at a big party, and Mozart doing so in hopes that said aristocrat would give him a job as his personal composer and music director — only to realize at the end of the evening that he’d just been tricked by the lure of a job into providing the aristocrat with an evening’s free entertainment. You can’t know that about Mozart without feeling that he had a deep emotional connection with the story of The Marriage of Figaro, which is about a count who tries to force himself on his wife’s maid (gee, a man in a position of wealth and power using those to get a reluctant woman to have sex with him against her will — where have we heard about that sort of thing since?) and is ultimately foiled by her, her fiancé and the count’s own wife. He probably relished not only setting a story in which a corrupt and hypocritical aristocrat got his comeuppance but slipping it by the censors at the Viennese court who had already banned the original play he and da Ponte were setting!
As Charles noticed, the anti-aristocratic satire is embodied as much in Mozart’s music as in da Ponte’s words — Mozart’s music is glorious but his writing for the Count drips with an awareness of his hypocrisy and his utter amorality when it comes to matters sexual, as well as his double standard: eager to get into the pants (or petticoats) of the maid Susanna while being ferociously jealous of his own wife. Felsenstein staged The Marriage of Figaro on simple, basic sets — mostly blank walls but with enough pieces of furniture, artworks and other items to suggest the 18th century — and blessedly did not try to update the material by setting it in modern times (though Peter Sellars’ controversial 1990’s production successfully updated Figaro by finding modern-day class equivalents for the original characters — something Sellars didn’t bother to do in his atrocious productions of the other Mozart-da Ponte operas, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte). Musically, the production was in the good hands of conductor Géza Oberfrank, who played the score idiomatically and kept it moving swiftly, and Felsenstein handled the piece’s comic moments adeptly without allowing them to degenerate into slapstick. Of the four principals — Uwe Kreyßig as the Count, Magdalena Falewicz as the Countess, József Dene as Figaro and Ursula Reinhardt-Kiss as Susanna — Dene, a Hungarian singer, was the only one I’d heard of before, but like a lot of other local productions, what the show lost in not having superstar voices it gained by having singers who were clearly used to working with each other and projecting an ensemble instead of trying to grab the spotlight from each other.
Kreyßig was a bit older-looking than I expected (I’ve always thought of the Count and Figaro as being about the same age) but he captured the stuffed-shirt façade of the character and the unscrupulous amorality that lies beneath it — indeed, especially after the revelation that in addition to Susanna he’s already hit on at least one other member of his household staff, Barbarina (Barbara Sternberger), the Count comes off as a sort of 18th century version of Harvey Weinstein. Falewicz as the Countess has the sense of wounded dignity and pride the role needs; she’s hardly as overwhelming as Jessye Norman on Colin Davis’s 1971 recording, but she’s quite fine even though she suffers more than the other principals of having to sing her big arias in rather clunky German instead of the more free-flowing Italian. Dene was the one of the four leads I found rather oppressive — he looked oddly like early-1960’s Elvis Presley and it was fun watching his chest through his open-necked shirt but it got old after a while and his swaggering seemed an odd choice to portray this version of Figaro (as opposed to the more extroverted one in Rossini’s prequel, The Barber of Seville). Ursula Reinhardt-Kiss wore her dress so low on her chest her breasts looked like a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen, but her singing was fun even though I think she overdid the pertness a bit. Still, this Marriage of Figaro was a quite good production of an opera that, even though it’s solidly in the standard repertory, is a difficult piece to bring off — and my only real quarrel with Felsenstein’s production was his regrettable decision to leave out the big arias for Barbarina and Dr. Bartolo (Rudolf Asmus) that begin Act IV, which he set in an outdoor garden with curved walking bridges and what looked like bamboo stalks. Charles joked that this set would have served equally well for the first act of Madama Butterfly and wondered what financial constraints there were on the Komische Oper that may have led them to build sets that could be used in more than one production.
