Sphinx

Two blog posts in less than a fortnight? It’s probably obvious that I’ve had a bit of a holiday, caught up on some sleep and generally recharged; Berlin and Potsdam for a long weekend, returning to my favourite city after three years of plague and chaos (one of my more elaborate jazz compositions is called ‘I Still Walk Those Streets in my Dreams’, as during lockdown I regularly found myself walking down Unter den Linden or, more commonly, through familiar places in Zehlendorf and Friedenau). Kaffee und Kuchen, Königsberger Klopse, Kindl*, KaDeWe (which has reorganised its food hall to focus on actually serving food, downsizing the cake section and greatly reducing the beer offering, so may not actually be going back in future…) and Kulturhaus Dussmann…

Cultural highlight was Le Nozze di Figaro at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, with Daniel Barenboim conducting. I’m not a huge devotee of Mozart, but would now readily admit that experiencing the entire opera, seeing how the famous bits fit together into a whole (albeit a very episodic whole), was a revelation, especially when performed by such outstanding musicians (Peter Kellner as Figaro was a last-minute stand-in for someone I’d actually heard of, and a star is seriously born; Elsa Dreisig as the Contessa was just amazing; and one of the things that really struck me from seeing the whole work was how far Mozart wrote great parts for the whole cast, not just a couple of stars with minor supporting roles).

But for me it’s always about the Gesamtkunstwerk, the setting and the drama as well as the music, however anachronistic this may be in the case of Mozart. This isn’t always a positive, though that doesn’t necessarily spoil things – I just draw different pleasures from the experience. There are three basic reactions: entering into the director’s vision and thinking further about its implications (Castorf’s Ring, Tcherniakov’s Parsifal); violently disagreeing with the whole thing and developing an extensive critique (Kosky’s Meistersinger); and imagining how I would stage the opera if someone was stupid enough to give me the chance – this is the standard response to a setting that is simply a bit meh.

This Figaro was unavoidably in the third category – a case study in gimmicky modernisation (Let’s open with a 1980s aerobics class! They won’t be expecting that!) that adds more or less nothing at all to the drama, or even makes sense. I can see the reasoning behind making the Contessa an aging pop star and the Count her record producer as well as husband – what’s the modern equivalent of ius primae noctis? The powerful record or film producer demanding favours! #MeToo! – but it wasn’t terribly convincing. As Mark Berry noted, you could have done the whole thing in period costume without losing the slightest bit of meaning or interest, which is always a bad sign; see his review for more painful details…

What would be my approach? The obvious starting-point is that Figaro is a comedy – but, as so often, that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be funny, but rather is a matter of narrative structure, the threat of upheaval and revolutionary change that then returns to the status quo. The social norms that uphold both political hierarchy and male dominance are questioned and threatened, but at the end restored and reinforced. It’s the operatic equivalent of six people trapped in two rooms, forced to experience an endless cycle of relationship drama with each other, where attempts at breaking away are always doomed and attempts at relationships with people outside the circle are soon corrupted and undermined – and obviously this is why The One With The Flashback is the best Friends episode, where the full horror of their situation becomes unmistakable, that the logical outcome is that, eventually, each of them will sleep with all the others.

The heart of the Figaro drama is the toxic relationship of Count and Contessa – she gets the heart-breaking arias and the sympathy, but one might plausibly argue that he is equally miserable in a less sympathetic manner. How can it be a happy ending for those two to remain together at the end? The answer in Huguet’s production is to have a lot of clowning at the finale, showing that they still get on each other’s nerves – and then have the Contessa run off with Cherubino. This is the Wrong Answer. Emphasise the implausibility of genuine reconciliation by all means, but the point is then precisely not to resolve it; they cannot escape each other except through death.

What about Figaro and Susannah and all the rest? The first – perhaps most plausible and conventional – reading is that they are normal people being dragged into the gravitational well of that central relationship, forced to play out its patterns, slowly robbed of any distinct existence of their own; Susannah becomes the Contessa, Figaro the Conte and so forth. Or, if you like, the claim that these are universal human emotions, simply a slice of life, with toxic power imbalances permeating all relationships (yes, I could do a Thucydides take…).

But I wonder also about a kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead interpretation, in which the tragedy is deliberately decentred (just as directors like Huguet don’t seem to notice it at all), and we’re mainly offered the oblivious activities of bit players in the foreground with only glimpses of what’s really going on (could perhaps also heighten the political elements of that background activity). Or a combination, as the well-meaning (but also self-centred) machinations of everyone else certainly make things worse for the Contessa, even as she’s persuaded to join in.

My final thought, even less coherent than the above, derives from one of the books I read over this holiday: Fumi Okiji’s fascinating Jazz As Critique, which shows how exploring Theodor Adorno’s notoriously misconceived account of jazz is actually productive – in a way, using ideal-theoretical Adorno to critique real-existing Adorno, but still more reading him, and jazz, through a specifically black frame of reference. Charles Mingus plays a prominent role in this account, as composer, performer and spokesman for black artists, and there’s a nice discussion of his piece The Clown, which offers raucous, disconcerting carnival music as accompaniment to a story about a clown who finds that it’s his own suffering, rather than all his attempts at comic business, that makes people laugh. This tension seems to lie at the heart of Le Nozze di Figaro too…

*In fact mostly Potsdamer Braumanufaktur organic beers, but once you get into the alliteration thing it’s hard to stop, and I do like the Kindl Dunkelbock now and again; likewise Köstritzer Schwarzbier.