During the past three summers at Pepsico's Summerfare Festival in Purchase, New York, wunderkind director Peter Sellars has taken great pains to make Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart palatable to the general public. People who are not opera buffs may think of Mozart's greatest operas--Cosi fan tutte, Don Giovanni, and Le nozze di Figaro--as rather silly stories performed by singers in powered wigs. Sellars has tried his utmost to de-wig Mozart.
In 1986, Sellars, the iconoclastic and playful director of John Adams' Nixon in China, who also set Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto in the contemporary Middle East, set Cosi fan tutte in a diner during the post-Vietnam War period. The next year he took Don Giovanni and peopled it with drug dealers, users, and criminals in Spanish Harlem. And, most recently, last summer he placed Le nozze di Figaro atop the fifty-second floor of Manhattan's Trump Tower. You can't say he's not making it easy for newcomers to music drama.
I think the Don Giovanni is an out-and-out masterpiece and admit it's going to be difficult to keep a straight face when watching a traditional production in the future. Don Giovanni is about pain and darkness--hell, in fact--and what is a better example of hellish horror than the drugged world of the inner city?
One of the most exquisite pieces of music Mozart ever wrote occurs in the first act of Cosi, the farewell trio, "Soave sai il vento.” The two sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, along with the older and sager Don Alfonso, are singing goodbye to their respective swains, Ferrando and Guglielmo. "May the wind be gentle," they sing. "May the sea be calm, and may the elements respond kindly to our wishes."
Ordinarily in productions of Cosi the ineffably beautiful trio seems hopelessly out of kilter with the farcical plot--a diamond in a rain gutter--and the war to which the young men head off is no more than a concept of war. By setting the action temporarily near to the attenuated misery of Vietnam, Sellars is bringing the opera closer to us. The action has bite and resonance. Had Mozart lived in our time, surely it is not unreasonable to speculate that his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, might have availed himself of the Vietnam War's artistic convenience.
For the Upstairs, Downstairs overplotting of Le nozze di Figaro, Sellars chose the exorbitantly expensive ugliness of Trump Tower. Beaumarchais' world of aristocrats and their attendants transfers beautifully, at least conceptually, to the moneyed inhabitants of Trump Tower. In American society, money is aristocracy.
So, in his Mozart trilogy, Sellars--and this is something no reviewers have bothered to point out, busying themselves instead with opinions on the controversial director--has, in three broad strokes, sketched a portrait of our current society from the high (Le nozze) to the low (Don Giovanni) with the "real people" in between. His decision to set the operas in this way is clearly no random or whimsical idea: There is a method behind his outrageousness.
Bad Decisions
Regrettably, the recent production of Le nozze is, of all things, something one least expects from Sellars: boring. It is as though Sellars has not
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