Last night I left the opera house a little bit perplexed and confused. (And relieved that is over) How is it possible that the magnificent and intoxicating music can at the same time be completely sabotaged by annoying staging and over-the-top direction? This is how both me and a friend felt as we left the building - and to be honest, the running time of three and a half hours was simply too much, the last 30 minutes was a pure agony. We had such a nice time not so long ago with "Semele" by Handel that this time we were absolutely sure that we will enjoy "The Marriage of Figaro". I mean, its Mozart, you can'y go wrong with him, its one lovely aria after another, right? Wrong.
OK, let's mention some positive things first.
The music itself is beautiful and no one can take this away. No matter what ridiculous staging or costumes you throw at the audience, the magic of Mozart is indestructible and would work anytime, under any circumstances. I was actually surprised a few times when the voices of two female leads (Susanna and Countess) joined in the most beautiful harmony - and this happened just for a few seconds, just a few lines of lyrics - really dream-like and I would have never appreciated this on record, but hearing it live was thrilling. Most of the performers were excellent - specially earlier mentioned ladies, Björn Bürger as Count Almaviva and I loved the excellent bass singer Anthony Robin Schneider in a small supporting role. Strangely enough, I did not care much for the title role of Figaro (whom I found annoying) and much much more space was given to his girlfriend, a servant Susanna (Emily Pogorelc) so much in fact that the piece could easily be called "The Marriage of Susanna" instead. So, the performers and music were ok but ....
STAGING.
I knew that Amsterdam's opera house loves to play around with a new modern productions and most of the time learned to accept it; even grew to enjoy it, since this is a classy stage and the magic of music is usually enough to convince me. This time the staging, direction and costumes were work by a certain Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov and I have to remember this name in order to avoid anything he does in the future. He sought some far stretched social criticism in the Mozart's delightful comedy - making it thrice pretentious, like this is some call for revolution and pseudo-philosophy. ("Capitalism kills love" was written on a wall at some point) He divided the stage in some sort of upstairs/downstairs Downtown Abbey world where upper floor is reserved for aristocrats and lower for the servants - but everything is happening upstairs, so what exactly was the point of downstairs, except for cramming it with washing machines and all sorts of ugly scenery (to explain this is servant's area) AND stage was constantly full of silent, non-singing actors moving around aimlessly and confusingly. We just had to assume they were servants. Costumes were modern day and ugly: instead of revealing social status of the characters, they were mostly ill-fitting and clumsy, particularly the annoying title character Figaro who was played by some overweight person running around in tight jeans and was irritating to look at. The director also decided to "refresh" Mozart's original libretto and divided the role of Cherubino into two different people for no apparent reason: so we had a deaf/mute Cherubino (male, mostly pantomime and more or less in a state of permanent nudity) and Cherubina (female singer interpreting his sign language). This Cherubino is here really just to show off his buttocks and at one point he even jumps out of the balcony - stripping naked first. Oh well. The worst of all was another mute character invented by this director, some sort of silent personal secretary of Count Almaviva - it was a completely irritating pantomime character constantly mugging, grinning, making faces and jumping around - if this was supposed to be funny, well it wasn't and I was even a bit angry with the way this particular director assumes the audience will lap it up, as everybody here is so infantile that we will laugh at this. Towards the end the whole concept of staging otherwise beautiful piece of music became so chaotic that I gave up trying to figure it out why are people suddenly walking around with peaces of mirrors, who is this person killing everybody with a knife and why the victims later all got up and sang again like nothing happened. Was it just imagination? Servant's revenge in a dream?
I always suspected that for all its supposed free lifestyle, Amsterdam is actually a city of well-oiled bourgeoisie and not so progressive after all - it shows last night when at the end everybody gave standing ovation to this mess, I assume because audience is simply starving for operas by famous composers. There is no Mozart, Verdi or any popular composer on the repertoire, as opera house nowadays prefers either modern works or someone from inner Mongolia. But for me and my friend it was a very long performance indeed and we just couldn't wait to get out and shake off the bad taste. Apparently we are not the only ones feeling this way because this article explains everything I wrote much better:
https://www.opusklassiek.nl/opera_operette/dno_mozart_figaro_corti.htm
We both agreed that previous opera we had witnessed ("Semele") was far more coherent and enjoyable than this chaotic mess.
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