JANUARY 1996
A PRIMER IN THE LESSONS OF LOVE
Molière bequeathed to posterity a School for Wives
and a School for Husbands. Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's greatest librettist,
added a School for Lovers, better known by its alternate, sexist title
Così fan tutte (All Women Do the Same). Unlike Le nozze di Figaro (which
allows commentators to discuss the French Revolution) or Don Giovanni (a fine
pretext for disquisitions on demonic Eros), the third and last of the Mozart-Da
Ponte masterpieces comes with no ready-made list of discussion topics. On a bet
with an old cynic, two young officers don disguises, each attempting to seduce
the other's fiancée and succeeding, to his own dismay. Well, asks the
cynic, pocketing his winnings, what did they expect? Così fan tutte.
Many otherwise discerning critics (among them Beethoven) have thought the opera
frivolous, but few works in any medium say more about the heart's unruly
assaults on convention, about the speed with which passing fancy turns to
enslavement (or about the humiliation of failing to distinguish between the two).
Così's
celestially framed lessons for lovers come to both coasts in productions by the
Metropolitan Opera (February 8-March 14; 212-362-6000); the Opera Company of
Philadelphia (February 19-28; 215-928-2110); the Los Angeles Music Center
Opera (February 27-March 13; 213-972-8001); and the Washington Opera (March 9-24; 202-416-7800). At the Met watch for the house debut of the Italian
superstar Cecilia Bartoli as the duped ladies' enterprising chambermaid.
Cecilia Bartoli
Photo: Andrew Eccles
Mother lures doddering plutocrat into salon; daughter sings, tickles ivories . .
. a typical matrimonial campaign. But in Verlobung im Traum (Betrothal in a
Dream) the daughter's party piece is the aria "Casta Diva," if you please, from
Norma--to the accompaniment of which mother and plutocrat give voice to their
own, barely related concerns. To take Bellini's tranquil stream of rapt melody
as one strand in a Dostoevskian trio of greed and folly . . . this takes nerve.
The composer who had it was Hans Krása, born in Prague in 1899, and
Verlobung, which had its premiere in 1933, is remarkable in other ways, too,
pitting high Indian-summer romanticism against rough and rowdy honky-tonk. But
Krása was a Jew, and the talent evident in this, his first opera, was no shield against
the atrocities of his age. On October 16, 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz
and heard from never again. Now his music is at last re-emerging. Two years ago
the opera companies of Prague and Mannheim revived Verlobung in an acclaimed
coproduction that has been picked up by the Washington Opera (January
6-February 10; 202-416-7800). In anticipation of the main stage event the
company--in cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum--last
summer mounted an education-outreach project with higher moral ambitions than
most: two free performances of Krása's children's opera Brundibár
(The Bumblebee)--a title more familiar to historians of the Holocaust than to
musicians. Written in 1938-1939 for the untrained voices of the children
in Prague's Jewish orphanage, it was first performed, by them, on September 23,
1943, in the concentration camp at Terezin. The Washington cast consisted of
twenty-eight schoolchildren aged eleven to sixteen from the capital and
environs. A survivor from the original cast was on hand to applaud the
performance.
Cast members of Brundibár
Photo: Carol Pratt
The German song literature knows no theme more pervasive than that of wandering,
and nowhere is it sounded more hauntingly than in Winterreise. In two dozen
songs running some seventy minutes, Schubert chronicles a rejected young
lover's shattering winter journey into solitude and madness. The cycle is the
lieder singer's Hamlet, dangerous and irresistible, performed incessantly yet
rarely done justice to. Among recitalists active today, none finds the way into
Schubert's infinite shades of despair more feelingly than the Austrian baritone
Wolfgang Holzmair, whose lightness of timbre and beauty of tone lend the
bitterness of the material an especially poignant edge. Philips, which has
already issued Holzmair's hypnotic accounts of Schubert's Schwanengesang and
Schumann's Dichterliebe, releases his new Winterreise this month.
A North American recital tour devoted to this work will follow in February (La Jolla, Vancouver, Fort Worth,
New York, Toronto, Philadelphia, and Amherst, Massachusetts). Next, Holzmair
touches down in Washington, D.C., as the goofy heartbreaker Guglielmo in
Mozart's Così fan tutte: he is a most mercurial artist.
Wolfgang Holzmair
Photo: Sheila Rock
