Mozart - Die Zauberflöte

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday September 30 2018

Conductor: Ben Glassberg. Production, sets, costumes, lighting: Romeo Castellucci. Choreography: Cindy Van Acker. Algorithmic architecture: Michael Hansmeyer. Artistic collaboration: Silvia Costa. Added dialogues: Claudia Castellucci. Sarastro: Gabor Bretz. Tamino: Ed Lyon. Sprecher: Dietrich Henschel. Königin der Nacht: Sabine Devieilhe. Pamina: Sophie Karthäuser. Erste Dame: Tineke Van Ingelgem. Zweite Dame: Angélique Noldus. Dritte Dame; Esther Kuiper. Papageno: Georg Nigl. Papagena: Elena Galitskaya. Monostatos, ein Mohr: Elmar Gilbertsson. Erster Priester / Zweiter geharnischter Mann: Guillaume Antoine. Zweiter Priester / Erster geharnischter Mann: Yves Saelens. Drei Knaben: Sofia Royo Csoka, Tobias Van Haeperen, Elfie Salauddin Crémer. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, MM Academy & La Monnaie's Children's and Youth Chorus.

Mozart

As it happens, I was quite amused just this last week by a cartoon in VIZ lampooning what you might call "contemporary-art-speak." In it, two "artmakers", Poppy Bullshit and Araminta Bollocks, gaze over their tea at a broken biscuit: "Hmm... yes... that is challenging my preconceptions about the intrinsic nature of biscuits. It's a telling juxtaposition of form and content... I've always regarded Hobnobs as being round... And yet this one isn't. It's an artistic tour de force dripping with dramatic éclat...!" I forwarded it to half a dozen gallery-owners I know, as they prepare for this autumn's Paris art fair, the FIAC.

Romeo Castellucci's complex new production (there's an awful lot going on) of Die Zauberflöte in Brussels, probably the most radical reworking of an opera I've yet witnessed, clearly sets out to challenge any preconceptions about the work we might have, and should probably have been billed explicitly as being more a contemporary study of it, resulting in a piece of performance art devised around the musical numbers, than Mozart's and Schikaneder's singspiel as such. The spoken texts are not used at all (not, I know, for the first time) and I wouldn't be surprised if some people saw Castellucci's deconstruction/reconstruction more as an outright hatchet job.

It's hard to understand, let alone sum up what, according to the lengthy programme articles, all his intentions are. This may explain the unusual length of some of the professional reviews, struggling to give readers a reasonable overview. Basically (I'll have a shot at it), he appears to be challenging (yes, like Poppy's biscuit) the assumptions (including sexism), ambiguities and inconsistencies of the original when held up to a 21st-century light, working through such issues as masculine and feminine, patriarchal and matriarchal power, birth and death, order and chaos, stage fiction and real life, and no doubt many others, with a strong emphasis on the Queen of the Night as a positive mother figure and some strong questioning (call it even turning the tables) of Sarastro's own legitimacy and his promises of a radiant future of liberty and fraternity, if not exactly equality.

Visually, the two acts are in total contrast. After the breaking of a slender, horizontal, flickering neon tube at the start, then some enigmatic, origami-like folding of coloured mats on the floor, blue, red, black... act one, behind a softening gauze, is all white and all symmetrical: white sets, white, mid-18th century costumes (mostly: some of the girls are in more modern underwear) and wigs, stiff, formal gestures, and all the soloists with doubles, mirroring their actions from the opposite side, apart from the Queen of the Night, who occupies the central axis, alone. The stage starts out fairly empty apart from some white string curtains and moving white cut-outs at the rear, forming and re-forming symmetrical neo-rococo patterns reminiscent of Rorschach inkblots - only white - and sometimes of skeletons. Singers and dancers, in white, turn on (white) revolving platforms-within-platforms, orrery-like.

The chocolate-box prettiness (seductive but saccharin vision of Sarastro's realm?) is nevetherless perturbed by, for example, dancers oozing out of chrysalises, one of the production's various startling references to birthing and motherhood (see act two). Gradually, large and still larger white forms, computer-generated architectural meringues on a monumental scale, fill the stage. Dancers bring in giant plumes of white ostrich feathers, eventually fanning them out to perform swirling Busby Berkeley routines until, at the end, things seem to break down into a spat between the races (black dancers and white) inside what is by now, as my neighbour said, a giant pavlova. As I mentioned above, there are no spoken dialogues, just the musical numbers separated by silence: a purely formal affair, more decorous and decorative than dramatic.

All this white, rococo fluffiness has disappeared when the curtain rises on act two. The set is now an institutional-looking room with stackable chairs, all sandy beige and everyone on stage is in similarly beige overalls and blond wigs (which they pull off when they "get real" as it were), with large letters on their backs indictating their abbreviated names. I can't give a bow-by-blow account, it would be too long, but here are some elements:

• Poetical/philosophical texts by Claudia Castellucci revolving around some of the issues I listed in my third paragraph above and, also, explaining albeit enigmatically that the neon tube, later a tube of mother's milk (see below) is a horizon. These were not, to me, hugely convincing (but then I didn't understand all of them, not being a hardened intellectual) and I've seen them described in the press, where reviews have been what you might call mixed, as "pseudo-profound".
• Three young women baring their breasts to have their milk pumped through tubes, by little milking-machines on the floor, into bottles. As I said, some of the references to motherhood in this production are quite startling. They take their bottles and empty them into a horizontal tube recalling the opening neon.
• Ten people credited as "amateur actors", all of whom have come through real trials, unlike the lame ones in Schikanader's story that can all be escaped by playing the flute.  The five women tell (in English) how they were born or went blind to a greater or less degree. They are associated with darkness and night. The five men tell how they all survived fire and explosions, albeit with terrible burns. The are associated with light and fire.
• During the musical numbers, the above do awkward, amateur dances, form tableaux vivants recalling some famous paintings, e.g. I think Goya's Third of May, and at one point cluster together into a scrum to "give birth", through the top, to some of their members (recalling the chrysalises in act one).
• The women on the left push the central wall down on the men on the right: victory of night over day, dark over light?
• For "Der Hölle Rache", Pamina - I think it was Pamina; the blond wigs were perhaps intended to give a degree of universal, or at any rate shared, value to all the characters - slumped on the floor, douses herself in blood; the Queen then douses her in milk (and at the curtain calls everyone takes care to avoid the large, spreading puddle of mingled blood and milk).
• At the end, the Queen upends the slender horizontal tube still hanging above the stage, emptying the milk on to the stage.

The tissue of ideas and references/cross-references was thus dense. Too dense for a single viewing. Some people might say impenetrable and pretentious: pseudo-profound, as quoted above. But I think there was sincere, serious intent behind it; it was very well directed, however you felt about the concepts; I like productions that make you think and leave you puzzling; and I certainly like them a lot better than the conventional, trivial kind served up the next evening in Paris at Les Huguenots. Also, Castellucci's version had the distinct advantage of ditching many of the work's insufferable niaiseries. A definite bonus.

Vocally speaking this was a typical Brussels Mozart production, with a well-rehearsed and consistent team cast, in which, however, three stood out: Sophie Karthäuser, because (once again) her experience shows; Sabine Devieilhe for her spectacularly accurate coloratura, even if she doesn't project the same degree of excitement as Natalie Dessay used to; and Ed Lyon - I hadn't heard him for years, and was glad to find he's matured into such an elegant, subtle Tamino, taking his subtlety as far as some daring but nicely-judged pianissimi. It's a pity, though, that Ben Glassberg's conducting was a bit nerveless. Somebody up on my balcony evidently wasn't pleased: he booed the conductor very loudly indeed.

Il Giardino di Armida also covered this production.

Here, one of Maestro Wenarto's friends tackles Papageno very convincingly.