A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Mozart Pt3
It’s not terribly surprising that my intention to write a survey of Mozart’s vocal music has resulted in three parts. The astonishing genius of this 18th century Austrian is unrivalled in history. There was already an almost incredible flourishing of musical genius in German-speaking central Europe, starting with the births of Bach and Handel in 1685, taking us through Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn, on to Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler and beyond to Berg and Schoenberg. During this period, wars raged, empires came and went, revolutions took place, diseases proliferated, new powers emerged, and old ones faltered. There was perpetual danger from the Ottoman Empire, and Russia was emerging from centuries of political slumber.
And yet, in the midst of all this, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart appeared, shone and disappeared again, all in 35 short years, leaving behind a legacy of classical music which is almost impossible to believe. Society was changing too. The old certainties of class, religion and political power were being challenged, most notably in France and America, and the first dawning of the industrial revolution, laying the foundations of our modern life, was hinting at a vast new horizon opening up before mankind. The expansion of Europe beyond its boundaries, for good and bad, began to lead also to a gradual understanding of Eastern culture, and the necessity of trading and maintaining some sort of co-existence with the ancient empires of the East involved a broadening of the mind and a breadth of vision previously unknown.
Somehow, Mozart’s place, at the centre of all this, seems almost inevitable. With the appearance of Beethoven, born only 14 years after Mozart, one can only wonder at the mysterious alignment of the stars and planets which resulted in the two greatest musical geniuses ever, living at the same time. It is believed that the two men met in Vienna during Beethoven’s first visit to the city, in the late 1780s, when Mozart’s star was at its brightest. It is difficult to imagine, but, if one was a member of the Viennese aristocracy from 1780 through to 1830, and managed to survive war, revolution and disease, one might have been present at the first performances of all the great Mozart and Beethoven compositions.
After the reasonable success of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ in Vienna in 1786, and its extremely successful performance in Prague at the end of that year, Mozart and Da Ponte threw themselves into the creation of ‘Don Giovanni’, commissioned by the Impresario of the Prague Stavovske Divadlo (Estates Theatre). Mozart apparently insisted that Da Ponte be engaged for the libretto, even though he was busy working on other projects in Vienna. Consequently, to save time, Da Ponte “borrowed” quite a lot from a libretto by Giovanni Bertati for the opera ‘Don Giovanni Tenorio’ by Giuseppe Gazzaniga, performed in Venice early in 1787, based on the very popular story of Don Juan, first dramatised by Tirso de Molina in the early 17th Century. Mozart’s opera was scheduled to open on 14th October but was not ready. The story goes that Mozart only completed the score, with the Overture, on 28th October, with the first performance a day later, but it seems to have been a huge success from the beginning, under the rather lengthy title ‘Il Dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni’ (The Rake Punished, or Don Giovanni), described by Mozart as a Dramma Giocoso, a Playful Drama, or a Drama with Jokes. Truth be told, it is at times light-hearted, and there are comic scenes, but compared even with ‘Figaro’, which has its serious moments as well as comedy, it is hardly a side-splitter, especially at the end when Giovanni is dragged down to Hell. The jolly moral ensemble at the end was excised quite early on, and it was only in the 20th century that this final ensemble was re-instated. Only the humorous servant, Leporello, contributes much fun to the proceedings, and an attempted rape followed by the murder of an old man at the beginning, the cruel betrayal of an almost demented, love-sick woman and then the attempted seduction of a virginal peasant girl, all before the interval, hardly point to a playful drama!
What is not in question is that the score is a marvel, and one of the pinnacles of Classical Music! I have been fortunate to appear in ‘Don Giovanni’ several times, as the Commendatore, the aforesaid old man, who is murdered and returns as a living statue in Act 2, and, at the end, drags the Rake to his punishment in Hell. Interestingly, at the start of my career, in the televised masterclasses at the 1980 Edinburgh Festival with Elisabeth Schwartzkopf, which I wrote about in “A Singer’s Life” Part 13, I sang Leporello’s Catalogue aria, in which Giovanni’s servant explains to Donna Elvira, the love-sick woman referred to above, how he keeps a list or catalogue of all his master’s amorous conquests, capped by the astounding total of 1003 in Spain alone! I assumed I would sing the role in the future, but never did. It was a pretty good match for my voice, but people told me that with me singing Leporello, it would need a very big Don Giovanni, both physically and vocally, and that the Commendatore (a rank in society similar to Commander in English) suited me better.
As with the Marriage of Figaro, there are 4 roles in Don Giovanni which can be sung by, more or less, the same voice, the Don, Leporello, Masetto and the Commendatore, and indeed the possibilities are even greater, as there are no out and out baritone parts, like the Count in Figaro, to confuse the issue. There have been many great bass Giovannis – Ezio Pinza, Cesare Siepi, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Ruggiero Raimondi – but the role needs more than just a voice. It needs a swagger and a total conviction of the Don’s ability to seduce women at will, an attitude that allows him actually to invite a statue to dinner, and not be nonplussed by the statue’s arrival! Now, my friends all know that I am hardly a shrinking violet, but to be truthful I simply do not possess that inner resolve and conceit that one needs to play the Don. Friends are permitted to disagree!
Consequently, I always sang the Commendatore, which involved a short but dramatic sword fight, followed by a spell lying dead, until carried out by some strong chorus members. Once, as I lay there dead, trying to control my breathing after running around fighting the Don, I nearly died again, as the soprano singing Donna Anna, whose father I was, and who has a long scene weeping and wailing over my demise, got so into the part that she almost asphyxiated me with her ample bosom as she lay on top of me! A fate worse than death!
This was in the excellent Jonathan Miller production at the London Coliseum with ENO, where I sang the role many times. After being carried off, I had an hour and a half to wait before I reappeared in the graveyard scene as the statue, but most of that time was taken up with putting me into the look-alike statue costume with look-alike facial make up, as you can see from this photograph.
After my appearance in the graveyard, accompanied by sepulchral trombones, there was not too long to wait until I got to sing one of the greatest phrases in all opera - “Don Giovanni, a cenar teco, m’invitasti, e son venuto”. Of course, at ENO, it was in English, but this portentous phrase “You invited me to dinner, and here I am!” marks the beginning of the brilliant dinner scene, ending in Giovanni being dragged into the flames of Hell. Mozart and Da Ponte contrived to fit musical jokes into the scene too. The band playing for Giovanni’s prandial entertainment play a tune from ‘Una Cosa Rara’, the opera by Vicente Martin y Soler for which Da Ponte supplied a libretto and which had opened at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1786, six months after ‘Figaro’. Leporello notes his pleasure at the tune to Giovanni, but when the band strikes up Figaro’s tune ‘Non Piu Andrai’, the servant admits that this is a tune everyone knows and loves, implying, correctly, that Mozart was in a different class from his Spanish colleague. Everyone nowadays gets the joke about Figaro, but it is delicious to realise that there is a double joke going on, largely lost on a modern audience, but which would have had a contemporary audience rolling in the aisles.
Again, recordings are numerous, but my favourites, once more from long ago, are those conducted by Giulini and Klemperer.
The last in the trio of miraculous operas with libretti by Da Ponte was ‘Cosí fan Tutte’, which premiered, once again at the Burgtheater in Vienna, on 26th January 1790. This theatre, which opened in 1741, the creation of the Empress Maria Theresa, adjoined the royal palace, the Hofburg, and was the venue for all sorts of wonderful plays, operas and concerts, until its replacement further round the Ringstrasse in a building designed by Gottfried Semper, in 1888.
‘Cosí fan tutte’ translates into English as “So do all women”, and has proved problematic, both in title and plot, ever since its composition. The fact that it has been known by its Italian name (on the assumption that most people don’t know what it means!) is indicative of these problems. The idea that all women are fickle and are unable to prove faithful under any provocation is deeply unpleasant, and the fact that the plot revolves around a bet by Don Alfonso that his military friends Guglielmo and Ferrando, who swear on the eternal fidelity of their girlfriends, will be proven wrong, and that they themselves will be the instruments of this infidelity, means that this “comedy” isn’t very funny! The fact that there are many extremely amusing episodes in the opera, and that the whole idea of the two lovers pretending to go off to war and returning, unrecognised, as exotic Albanian noblemen, is preposterous, and therefore literally incredible, doesn’t mean that the basic plot is any less unpleasant.
I have sung Don Alfonso several times, and I must say that the last time I swore I would never sing it again, such was my revulsion at having to play such a despicable trick on two innocent women. I know it’s only acting, and I have played many much more unpleasant and downright evil characters, but somehow, Alfonso and his sidekick Despina, the girls’ maid, fill me with loathing. The supposed happy ending when the trick is revealed and the lovers are reconciled, works less and less well the more often I watch the opera. Nowadays, in performance, it often ends as a sort of semi-tragedy, as the four lovers sing of their happiness while weeping inwardly. It appears that the plot didn’t offend the sensibilities of a late 18th century Viennese aristocratic audience too much, but the opera’s subsequent performance history, and the fact that it was never seen in the USA until 1922, hints at perennial problems. Modern productions have tried to make the problems of the plot more agreeable, for example showing us that the two girls recognise their lovers immediately in their disguises and turning the whole thing into a huge double joke. I still find it hard to imagine singing Alfonso again. Mind you, as you can see from the photograph of me as Don Alfonso in a production set in the India of the British Raj by Midsummer Opera, I was a bit younger then, and probably it wouldn’t occur to any managements to book me anyway!
The crucial dilemma arises because Mozart wrote some of the most beautiful vocal music, even of his illustrious career, for Cosí, and to lose the chance to sing and hear such magnificence would be criminal. I suppose many people just think that, since the plot is so ridiculous, like lots of other operas, they might as well sit back and luxuriate in its glories, and not dwell too long on the vagaries of the story and the cruelty of its premise.. It is a hard opera to cast, as the tenor role of Ferrando is fiendishly difficult, and the soprano role, Fiordiligi, is even harder. The story goes that the first Fiordiligi, Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, who was apparently Da Ponte’s mistress at the time (his numbers rival Don Giovanni, it seems) was disliked by Mozart so much that he wrote a role that leaps over several octaves, just to cause her trouble. Fortunately for us, wonderful sopranos have been found who can sing it, and, in the right hands, its difficulties can be put to good use, as her arias are simply magnificent when sung well. My old mentor, Elisabeth Schwartzkopf, was rather good on the recording conducted by Karl Bőhm in 1962! That would be my recommendation for the best recording, and, obviously, if you’re only listening to the music, the problems of the plot and the staging melt away! That recording also features the Spanish tenor Alfredo Kraus as Ferrando. He was not known as a Mozart tenor, and indeed his interpretation is not universally admired, but, for me, he is absolutely glorious in the role, and it is worth buying the box set simply for him. If I tell you that, as well as Schwartzkopf and Kraus, the recording also features Christa Ludwig, Giuseppe Taddei and Walter Berry, and is conducted superbly by Bőhm, you can see why I recommend it so highly.
It seems extraordinary that, after 3 articles about Mozart, I feel I have been able only to touch on his genius, but I hope you have enjoyed my look at his music from the perspective of a singer who has been fortunate enough to sing many of his roles. The fact that he has given us so much wonderful music, and yet died at the age of 35, is almost unbelievable and hard to comprehend. What else might he have written if he had lived a little longer? At least we can enjoy what he left us, works of the most profound genius and beauty.
