Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✩✩
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, directed by Wajdi Mouawad
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
February 7, 10, 13, 16, 18, 22 & 24, 2018
Selim to Belmonte:“Werde du wenigstens menschlicher als dein Vater”
The Canadian Opera Company’s new production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), a co-production with Opéra de Lyon, had the unusually long running time of three hours and twenty minutes. When Opera Atelier presented the work in 2013 the running time was only two hours and forty minutes. The difference in timing for the COC production has to do entirely with the effort of Lebanese-Canadian writer and director Wajdi Mouawad to prevent the opera from being “an exercise in caricature or casual racism.” To that end Mouawad, acclaimed author of Incendies (2003), has completely rewritten the spoken dialogue of Mozart’s Singspiel and then had it translated into German. The result not only does not achieve Mouawad’s goals but changes the comedy into heavy drama and, due to the addition of so much superfluous dialogue, slows the action so much the work loses all its energy.
The first question is whether the opera needs rewriting. Mouawad says in his Director’s Notes that the opera “could constitute an argument for the wholesale rejection of Islam and the East, thereby falling into larger patterns of Islamophobia in the West which would have us blame all our problems on the threat of an undifferentiated ‘Arabic’ Other”.
There are two main points to make in response. First, despite what Europeans regarded as a threat and could easily have vilified, Mozart’s opera consistently views the Pasha Selim as an enlightened man and ruler in distinction to his lower class guard Osmin. In the end it is not Osmin’s rough justice that prevails but the clemency of Selim. When Selim grants his four prisoners their freedom he says to Belmonte, son of his greatest foe, “Zieh damit hin, und werde wenigstens menschlicher als dein Vater, so ist mein Handlung belohnt” (“Go from here and be at least more humane that was your father; then will my action have its reward”).
Second, the Istanbul Opera Festival that takes place every June, stages Entführung every year at the Topkapı Sarayı, the very seraglio from which the two female characters in Mozart’s opera are abducted. It stages the work unaltered. As Yetka Kara, Artistic Director of the Festival and director of Entführung has said, “You also can’t escape the fact that Mozart strongly associates Turkishness with primitive, military masculinity which forms the opposite of the subtle and the vocal”, but he notes that the opera ends “with a choir extolling the Pasha’s good character”. His strongest argument for staging Mozart is that “Mozart gives a wonderful example of problems we still see today, fear of other cultures, lack of tolerance and the need to show understanding”.* Thus, if the people who ought to be offended by Entführung in fact celebrate it every year, what makes Mouawad think he needs to be offended on their behalf?
The action in the original opera is quite simple. It is precursor of the subgenre of opera known as the Rettungsoper or “rescue opera”. In this case, Konstanze, her maid Blonde and Belmonte’s servant Pedrillo have all been captured by pirates and sold as slaves to the Turkish Pasha Selim. Belmonte has located them and seeks to rescue Konstanze, his fiancée, and Blonde and Pedrillo who are also betrothed. The figure who stands in the way is Selim’s guard Osmin. Selim has fallen in love with Konstanze but she remains true to Belmonte. To gain entrance to Selim’s palace, Pedrillo introduces Belmonte as an architect. Selim hires him and Belmonte and Pedrillo set about their plan of how to get Osmin out of the way to abduct the two women from the palace.
In Mouawad’s production the action begins after Belmonte and Konstanze have arrived back home. To celebrate the return Belmonte’s father unveils a tête de turc, a strength testing machine, where the participants strike a stylized Turk’s head to ring a bell. The bell-ringing is timed to the cymbal crashes once the overture begins. Mouawad, who wants to avoids caricatures, thus handily caricatures Europeans as racists. He should also know that the tête de turc was invented at the end of the 19th century, not the 18th.
Mouawad’s notion is that the action is told by Belmonte to Konstanze entirely as a flashback, though soon enough Konstanze has to appear in the story and sit by to listen. Why, one wonders, are the main characters only talking about what happened now instead of on the trip back home? We see Belmonte meet Osmin, who is constructing a mobile with paper origami birds. Mouawad thus conflates Turkey and Japan as both “eastern.” Mouawad’s twist on the original is that Blonde has fallen in love with Osmin instead of her fiancé Pedrillo while Konstanze is seriously torn between love for the Pasha and her vow to Belmonte.
Mouawad’s added dialogue serves a didactic rather than comic purpose. We learn women are oppressed by men in both the East and West. Class discrimination exists in both the East and West. Women should break class ranks and stand up to men together. In fact, by the end the two couples, now in the corrupt West, turn nostalgically toward the enlightened East. Mouawad’s one misstep in teaching political correctness is to have Blonde say that any woman who allows herself to be oppressed deserves it.
If one believes the peculiar set design of Emannuel Clolus, Mouawad’s Turkey is so advanced that the Pasha’s harem is situated in a giant metal sphere with mesh sides and a solid outer shell that looks like a spaceship from a 1960s sci-fi movie. As clad by designer Emmanuelle Thomas, both the Pasha and Osmin eschew the finery well-known from paintings of the Ottoman court for simple monk-like tunics while the chorus of Janissaries, who are supposed to be an elite military corps, bizarrely have whitened faces, and white spattered T-shirts and pants and look like zombies or lepers or a crew of very bad house-painters.
The first music after the interval is a traditional Muslim call to prayer followed a Muslim prayer service on the stage. Despite this attempt at realism Mouawad allows the female worshippers to dance in the style of whirling dervishes. Mouawad thus forgets that dancing is not allowed in mosques, that women, until very recently, could not be dervishes and that Sufism, as practiced by dervishes, is a mystical sect of Islam quite separate from Sunni Islam which was the official religion of the Ottoman Empire. If Mouawad is worried about “an undifferentiated ‘Arabic’ Other”, he should not be conflating different types of Islam.
As Blonde, Claire de Sévigné produces a more rounded tone than Archibald but does not yet have her power and expressivity. As Belmonte, Mauro Peter displays a cultured high tenor ideal for baroque and 18th-century opera and for the British repertoire and gave a particularly beautiful account of "Ich baue ganz auf deine Stärke”. Owen McCausland is hampered as Pedrillo by having the usual playfulness of the role changed by Mouawad into bitterness and frustration. McCausland is able to colour his bright tenor to suit this new interpretation, but there is no doubt he shone in the two arias where he was allowed some humour – “Frisch zum Kampfe!” and “Vivat Bacchus!”. Why Mouawad allowed the latter aria in the opera is a mystery since it shows a Muslim drinking and even praising alcohol.
Goran Jurić is an excellent Osmin, fully able to take on the new seriousness and emotional depth that Mouawad gives him. Yet, as with McCausland, his greatest success is when he is allowed to sing the aria “O, wie will ich triumphieren” as a traditional revenge aria showing off its unusual bass coloratura and long-held low D to great effect. Israeli actor Raphael Weinstock in two speaking roles brings out the unconscious cruelty in Belmonte’s father (a character added by Mouawad) but gives an especially intense, complex performance in the much extended role of Pasha Selim.
Johannes Debus can do nothing about the stop-start pacing that Mouawad’s additions exacerbate. The lightness of texture and sprung rhythms one associates with performances on original instruments, are tamped down in favour of lush, dark sonorities from the strings and winds that relate Mozart’s opera forward to Beethoven’s own “rescue opera” Fidelio. Those who came to Entführung for a comic opera by Mozart only to receive a clichéd didactic drama about Western bigotry by Mouawad, who seemed tone-deaf to the sense of Mozart’s music, were not happy. The opening night audience greeted the creative team with hearty volleys of boos and hisses. It’s too bad revival director Valérie Nègre had to take Mouawad’s place in line.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This is a version of a review that will appear later this year in Opera News.
Photos: (from top) Jane Archibald as Konstanze and Raphael Weinstock as Selim; Mauro Peter as Belmonte (centre) and the tête de turc (far right); Jane Archibald as Konstanze and Mauro Peter as Belmonte. ©2018 Michael Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.
2018-02-08
The Abduction from the Seraglio