That famous admonition from Emperor Joseph II to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - "Too many notes, my dear Mozart" - takes on almost surreal meaning in the face of the 2006 Salzburg Festival. All 22 Mozart operas, some of which can be said to have too many notes, were fully staged. You can imagine Emperor Joseph going catatonic from overstimulation.
We're talking a good 70 hours of opera - with a price tag of upward of $10,000 when you factor in even the less expensive tickets, hotels and restaurants. So now that they're coming out on DVD thanks to Deutsche Grammophon and Decca - the first eight of 18 titles just arrived last week - I can complain about many things, but not prices, though The Magic Flute goes for $39.98 while others are $29.
98. (The entire box, available in February, lists for $539.98.
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Anyone embarking on this immersion odyssey should be forewarned: Even the best-traveled, most liberal Mozarteans will be, at some point, scandalized by the outrageous productions. Salzburg has long been a crossroads for cutting-edge opera stagings in Europe; producing 22 operas meant importing some of them from Venice, Bremen, Bonn and elsewhere.
Of particular interest are the rarely seen early Mozart operas.
Most were forgotten until recent decades, when the early-music movement came up with the keys to this dramaturgically antiquated but often musically effervescent kingdom. And even among the earliest works of preteen Mozart (his first full-length opera was La Finta Semplice at age 12), the level of invention is remarkable for a composer of any stage of maturity. Naturally, some passages are routine, though periodically you're ambushed by some of Mozart's best music, such as the Il re pastore aria, "L'amero, saro costante," with its fine-spun vocal line and yummy violin obbligato.
This isn't just a case of the sublime (his later operas) being an enemy of the excellent. Unlike the great trilogy written with poet Lorenzo da Ponte - The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte - these works inhabit preestablished molds rather than breaking them. Our understanding of these molds in unbroken form is limited.
Depending on your viewpoint, these operas are either rescued or desecrated by the rampant updating that happens onstage. But let's have some perspective here: Isn't it better to have a spirited reinterpretation than the lifeless, sight-reading performances of these works issued on CD in the early 1990s? Musical values are consistently high, if not the highest, in Mozart's birthplace.
Personally, I'd rather see updated Mozart than the generic, powdered-wig look.
If there's a common stage vocabulary, it's long black coats recalling Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, characters shadowed by distraught alter egos, and black-and-white sets with splashes of red to represent death, loss of virginity, etc. Usually by Act III, singers have stripped down to their underwear (not always a welcome sight), though in one show they wear aprons with photographic likenesses of their full frontally nude selves.
So in that context, I was delighted to see, in Nationaltheater Mannheim's Ascanio in Alba production, the goddess Venus and her minions all looking like silent film star Louise Brooks (a love object indeed) but as albinos, silver hair and all. And what does anything have to do with the mermaid-like character who enters on a swing? Truth is, many of these operas weren't about a through-line narrative - that's the anachronism we bring to the table - but rather a series of hot vignettes.
It's baroque MTV. Should you get lost, narrators announce arias and ensembles.
The most substantial production is Jurgen Flimm's Lucio Silla, a three-act work about separated lovers finding each other under a Roman dictatorship.
Due to parallels in his own time, Mozart couldn't risk having the cruel title character go to his much-deserved death. But Flimm has the dictator's throat slit as soon as he's finished singing. Leading up to that is a cast with consistent dramatic commitment singing its way through neoclassical facades plastered with spy maps and seen amid wintry lighting.
Tied for outrageousness are La Finta Giardiniera, set in the garden section of a German counterpart to Home Depot, and The Abduction From the Seraglio, which dumps all the opera's spoken dialogue and much of its plot to examine the hopelessness of marriage.
As devised by infamous director Doris D o rrie, Giardiniera has Ruxandra Donose (seen in Opera Company of Philadelphia's Cinderella a few months back) in black-leather male drag as a heavy-metal rocker, Veronique Gens making an entrance on a forklift, and John Mark Ainsley singing recitatives while crawling out of a Venus flytrap. The original character relationships are remarkably preserved; D o rrie simply externalizes emotional states with extremes, which in the last act means terrorizing everybody with a giant tarantula.
The Abduction production by Norwegian director Stefan Herheim seems to believe that harem maintenance is the only functional relationship between the sexes. But with new dialogue recontextualizing every aria, the character of Konstanze can sing about changes in her soul and have it refer to her conversion to lesbianism. Agree or not, the production has legitimate theatricality.
One moment uses a spotlight on the singers to create shadow-play on the stage's rear wall - until the shadows take on minds of their own and go their own ways.
I'm not sure if La Finta Semplice is worth its length. The Joachim Schl o mer production presents the piece as a dry run for the school for lovers in Cosi fan tutte - on four brilliantly white triangular platforms whose most acute angles meet center stage.
They become a canvas for some computer graphics (pistols, hand grenades), but you know that the whole thing hasn't great consequence when you're distracted by the hairdos.
If two titles can be skipped, they are Il re pastore and the conflation of Bastien and Bastienne and The Impresario. As staged and conducted by noted early-music specialist Thomas Hengelbrock, Pastore has a stage within the stage and all sorts of poses that serve the ideas behind the production but have little visceral impact.
Also, some of the singing is nasty. For Bastien, we visit the famous Salzburg marionettes, often seen in plain, uncostumed form as the puppetmasters argue with each other with periodic musical interludes.
Most curious of all is what should be the most deluxe: The Magic Flute with Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, plus a cast featuring Paul Groves and Rene Pape in a super-colorful staging by Pierre Audi.
The rhythmically driven Muti makes Mozart charmless, while the sometimes-Polynesian, sometimes-Bauhaus stage designs fail to make a statement in any one direction. The singing is exemplary, though only Christian Gerhaher's Papageno and Diana Damrau's Queen of the Night stick in your memory. In this era of theatrical extremes, halfhearted pleasantness is strictly for tourists.
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