After the Party: Mozart Revisited, Man and Music

The "Mozart year" is over. And with it, the excesses that first defined the short-lived Austrian composer and then submerged his memory in a torrent of commercial hype and cocktail-party chatter.

The Complete Mozart Edition, an unprecedented (and somewhat futile) recording project undertaken by Phillips to present every note the composer penned (even as musicologists discover new ones, each less significant than the previous), still clutters the shelves. Similar ventures by other recording companies add to the heap of re-releases (at last count, the Sony classical catalogue included no less than three different box sets of Mozart re-issues). As the year's hangover subsides, a disquieting question seems inescapable" can we still take Mozart's music seriously?

The initial signs seem promising. Period-instrument ensembles, whose preoccupations often serve as an index of the most exciting and ground-breaking activity in classical music interpretation, are forging ahead in their revision of the Mozart canon. As the Mozart bicentenary wheezed to a close, John Eliot Gardiner embarked on a project to record all of the operas; his first release, Idomeneo, has solidified Mozart's claims to mastery of opera seria as well as opera buffa.

In January, Christopher Hogwood offered a concert performance, with the Handel and Haydn Society, of Mozart's second and last effort in the serious vein, La Clemenza di Tito. The renewal of these two pieces, which circumscribe Mozart's years of maturity and his best musical output, has been the major revelation in the months after the festivities anticlimaxed with innumerable performances of the Requiem last November.

The Magic Flute Music dir. Teresa Marrin at Lowell House Dining Hall.

But what is missing is a creative re-evaluation of our understanding of the composer himself. The immensely popular Milos Forman film Amadeus effectively destroyed the image it set out to falsify: the delicate porcelain infant seated at a porcelain keyboard. But as the child prodigy gives way to the giggling imp, the relationship between the reprehensible or at least unremarkable man and his great music becomes paradoxical. And, ironically, the popular conception of Mozart has been shaped by a film in which the composer is a supporting actor.

The Mozart of the public consciousness is now an absent author, a passive mouthpiece for, according to Salieri in the film, "the voice of God." But in a world without God, whose voice is it that we hear in Mozart's music?

It is a question that we instinctively shrink from. And our incapacity to account for the power that undeniable resides in this music leaves room for cynicism and the logic of the market. Mozart the man is today an inscrutable phenomenon and, as such, we have no reason to assume a priori that his music is good, that his long-dismissed serious operas deserve another look.

The sneering cynic, contemptuous of Mozart's "pretty" music, and the record company huckster, who likes "pretty" music because it sells, offer us two sides of the same worthless coin. They both depend on Forman's film and is assassination of Mozart the genius, the child prodigy whose music was great because it was the work of a great man. The film liberates us from what may be an illusionary image of Mozart, but leaves us with no reason to judge the music as worthwhile. The notion that the "voice of God" resides in the notes of this music carries little credit if we acknowledge no such God.

AMADEUS AT THE LEVERETT OLD LIBRARY

The Salieri of Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, from which the film was adapted, sees the transcendent in Mozart's music, and, inevitably, the immanent in his own. And his own barrenness torments him. He despairs that he can only hear, and not create, the absolute music that flows from his rival's pen. In this sense, Amadeus is brutally relevant, as it engages the quintessentially post-modern problem of creative importence. More coherant and more powerful than the film it spawned, the play presents itself as a speculative exercise rather than a revisionist biography.

The play centers even more closely than the film around Salieri himself and his frustration with God's refusal of his bargain in favor of an immoral brat. Salieri's God is an angry deity, a scornful, faceless presence in the action of the play who mocks his servant with Mozart's high-pitched giggle.

The Leverett House Arts Society production of Amadeus (directed by Grace Fan) effectively exploits this difficult but potent script, and presents an earnest reading of Shaffer's Salieri. Arthur Wu dominates the production with his impressive control of both voice and gesture, and makes the psychological portrait of Salieri's anguish convincing. Jessie Cohen plays an irrepressible and eminently likable Mozart, and the casting of a woman in the role of the composer-child emphasizes the youthful and effeminate side of the composer's character as Shaffer interprets it.

Amadeus dir. Grace Fan at Leverett Old Library Through April 11

The supporting roles are less impressive but competent, the positive exception being Justin Levitt, who makes the most of the play's hilarious characterization of Emperor Joseph II as a benign fool. More troublesome are the Venticelli, played by Howie Axelrod and Eleanor Kincaid, and the three nobles, Baron von Strack (Alfred di Venturi), Count Orsini-Rosen-berg (Peter Galatin) and Baron von Swieten (Arzhang Kameri). The Venticelli are cold and supercilious while the nobles are earnest and straightforward in their delivery: thoughtful characterization would have thing the other way around. Finally, overacting is a recurring problem with these roles, since minor disputes and even neutral exchanges inevitably explode into shouting-matches, threatening to detract even from Wu's thoughtful and truly moving performance.

THE MAGIC FLUTE AT LOWELL HOUSE

As recorded passages from the Magic Flute play in the background to the Leverett House performance, the real thing takes place in the Lowell dinning hall. This year's Lowell House Opera production aims, according to the program notes, to uncover "the plethora of possibilities in the opera...without trying to create a singular impression," while simultaneously offering "a dawn to dusk retrospective of Western civilization."

It fails in the second task, while succeeding (all too well) in the first. And, although the great music of the opera lends credit to any interpretation, this one, perhaps because of an excessive (and incomprehensible) desire to avoid one single, coherent reading of the admittedly open-ended opera, falls flat.

The music makes the evenings a worthwhile proposition. In spite of dreadful limitations, Teresa Marrin, the music director, has managed to come up with a compelling reading of Mozart's score. Her tempi are brisk throughout (occasionally creating problems for some of the singers), and betray a wager on the comic rather than the mystical. The playing is controlled, and some roughness in the brass is more than forgivable given the splendid delivery of the all-important flute part.

Unfortunately, the rest of the production does not meet the uniformly high standard of the accompaniment. The major roles are well sung, but, apart from Paul Lincoln's effectively goofy Papageno, the characters do not reveal the depth of psychological development implicit in Mozart's music. Oliver Worthington brings to the role of Tamino a lovely voice but little more, and Ling Ning Xu's Sarastro is dignified but unprepossessing. Worst of all, the Queen of the Night (Maria Tegzes), who has a voice that stands up to the test of her role's legendary difficulties, completely fails to command the first majestic and then terrifyingly desperate presence that the music indicates. She slouches across the stage in a posture of submission, and her character doesn't provide the necessary evil counterweight to Sarastro's embodiment of good.

These discrete flaws are tied together by the fundamental problem in this production: the lack of a coherent vision of just what the opera is about. It is evident in the translation of Schikaneder's libretto, which, in cutting huge chunks of dialogue, makes the opera's story seen hurried and almost incomprehensible (even if the original, with its sudden plot reversal, is itself somewhat incoherent). The transitions are sudden, and such delicious scenes as the first act duet of Pamina and Papageno are deflated by a lack of preparation. The half-hearted characterization of the singers conspires with the awkwardness of the adapted libretto to empty the opera of power, and not even the sight gags and Papageno's antics can revivify it.

The set most clearly indicates the confusion that the program notes try to mask as a sophisticated eclecticism. The deconstructionist hodgepodge of arched and beams is neither especially effective nor lovely to look at. Furthermore, the disquietingly oblique references to "the architecture of I.M. Pei, the collections at the Louvre, two thousand years of Western religious tradition, Ptolomy's [sic] astrological maps, the sculpture of Noguchi..." disperse the attention and cannot make up for the producers' failure to face the opera and its performance tradition, making an informed (never mind inspired) reading.

This production, as it aims to provide a new interpretation, unwittingly raises our initial question: can we, chic, savvy post-moderns that we are, that still take Mozart seriously? And the answer that stares this disappointed reviewer in the face: not if we waffle about the expansiveness of his music without stopping to think what it is about. The message that is built into the Magic Flute concerns love, human and divine, fraternal and romantic. The element of farce that is undeniably present in the opera does not obliterate or even minimally detract from the power of this message. It is a message, though, that is only implicit, and that needs to be interpreted--which is what the Lowell House Opera production of the Magic Flute has failed to do.

A good, and an inspiring counter-example is John Eliot Gardiner's recording of La Clemenza di Tito (to be released April 21 on Deutsche Grammophon Archiv). Here, a truly innovative approach (using period instruments) combines with a genuine reappraisal of the opera as a whole, and the result is nothing less than a revelation. Mozart worked on both Tito and the Magic Flute at the same time during the summer of 1791 and at great speed. Yet, while the music of the Magic Flute has met with universal praise almost since its premiere, that of Tito has been disparaged as the product of a sick and exhausted man, and as a hastily-written, half-hearted effort. Eliot Gardiner's recording gives the lie to this bit of received wisdom, by showing how full of life the piece truly is.

Tito is Mozart's second and last opera seria, and shows a master grappling with a heavily codified form and using it to his compositional advantage. Although the form had traditionally excluded ensemble singing, Mozart's greatest successes had been with the extensive ensembles in his great comic operas. Accordingly, he came up with a compromise that went beyond even his ensemble writing for these operas: the finale to the first act, which combines an on-stage ensemble and an antiphonal chorus.

As the scene ends, the ensemble sings piano, and the chorus interrupts with anguished cries, forte. The orchestral accompaniment bolsters the two, and mediates between the frenzied terror of the citizens and the personal, funereal sadness and remorse of the principals--the consequences on respectively the public and private levels of Titus' murder.

All of this is brilliantly rendered by Eliot Gardiner and friends. Furthermore, the principals negotiate the passages of secco recitative with a rare sense for the shape that can be given to each phrase. Anthony Rolfe Johnson as Tito does an admirable job with a role that too easily becomes lifeless and statuesque. Anne Sofie von Otter is a brilliant Sesto, while Julia Varady's Vitellia is truly arresting, combining sensuality with vengeful duplicity. The orchestral playing, through the ministrations of the English Baroque Soloists, is tightly controlled and thoughtful, and the obbligato parts are spectacular. This is a truly visionary interpretation of a work that badly needed one.

To those who will protest that a comparison between a low-budget student production and a high-powered professional recording is invidious, I can only respond that budget and musical talent place no limitation on imaginative and thoughtful interpretation. The difference between the two productions is that Eliot Gardiner, like Peter Shaffer's Salieri, sees a transcendent quality, an absoluteness, in Mozart's music, rather than a mine-field of ambiguities, ripe for exploitation with just the right deconstructive impulse. Granted, ambiguity and equivocation are inevitable as long as we communicate solely in words. But when music is joined to them, absolute, inexpressible meaning is possible. I hope we can still hear it.