Le Nozze di Figaro (24.5.86)

Assume the worst, and that in the coming conflagration all knowledge of Italy and things Italian had been lost.  Assume also that by some freak one of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas had survived, like the fairy of Hope in Pandora’s wicked box.  From that music alone it would be possible to reconstruct the meaning and richness of the Italian language.

Or so one might think listening to one of those operas.  For aside from the generally accepted though little thought-upon profundity of those works, there is another aspect which is almost as breathtaking in its virtuosity: its use of secco recitative.  In a way it is a typically Mozartian feat of turning what is normally a liability into a glorious virtue.  And yet like so many facets of his art it is one which can be obscured by crass heavy-handedness.

Mozart’s recitative is at once totally conventional, with its regularly placed perfect cadences and its repeated notes which rise and fall with the words and inflection, and totally innovative in the musicality which is invested in it.  In many ways it straddles two worlds; both that of opera’s late Renaissance origins, where its substance was entirely recitative, in an inspired imitation of the unknowable Greek drama, and of Wagner’s fervent fusion of recitative with aria, again representing an attempt to turn back to the wellspring of dramatic art.

In the final analysis performances of the great trilogy of Mozart operas stand or fall not by the bravura of the arias, but by the sensitivity brought to bear on the secco.  This is why the re-discovery of the Drottningholm Threatre with what can only be called its Mozartian acoustic has proved such a revelation to our jaded ears.  For two centuries we have witnessed the gradual inflation of an art which is almost obsessively human in scale.  A comparable act of philistinism would be to blow up the small-scale perfection of a Vermeer to make it more readily visible.

True Mozart – that is a performance which is true to him and shows him truly – therefore demands a small-scale auditorium with voices to match.  Ideally these should be young, and totally lacking in the fuzzy accretions a thoroughly matured voice seems to gain with the years.  In this respect Kent Opera’s recent performances of Figaro in the Theatre Royal in Brighton were exemplary.  There was a company young in all respects, with a fresh cast which had reached the stage where the voices were strong enough to allow the singers to revel in their growing prowess, but not such well-worn instruments that the performance went ahead on autopilot.  The orchestra was similarly unhackneyed in its playing, and sufficiently small that you could hear all the details without constant knowing nudges from the conductor, and of a size which never forced the voices.

What emerged from such propitious conditions was a performance which was fully credible and hence deeply enjoyable.  It also allowed the potential of Andrea Loader’s stunning Cherubino to show itself – surely the beginning of a great career.  If for no other reasons than this young singer’s glorious tone, bright-eyed intelligence and lissom body – all so right for the part – Mozart would have love this production.

(27.5.86)

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