Sellars’ Mozart: Anger Behind the Smiles : Modern Da Ponte operas at final PepsiCo Fest

PURCHASE, N.Y. —  Peter Sellars sports a spikey-fluffy crew cut, an Oriental-punk wardrobe, a probing gaze and an impish grin. The kid looks for all the world like a latter-day Amadeus.

Ensconced these days on a spacious, bucolic campus of the State University of New York, he also acts like a latter-day Amadeus. Often convincingly.

It would be easy not to take him seriously if he weren’t so brilliant. Listen to the music and look at how he reacts to it on the stage. Read his formidable, clever, exhaustive, evasive program notes.

At 31, he doesn’t exactly qualify as a Wunderkind any more, and he chafes at the inevitable enfant terrible label. Still, he has retained the power to shock. It is a healthy power.

He constantly forces his audiences to re-examine perspectives and redefine expectations. He takes nothing for granted and allows his followers no lazy luxuries. At a Sellars production, one cannot sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.

These days, three Sellars productions are serving as the central focus of the 10th and final PepsiCo Summerfare. The impending end of this adventurous, multi-discipline festival is occasioned by the withdrawal of corporate support. The situation implies a sad commentary on artistic priorities and on the encouragement of private subsidy in the kinder and gentler 1980s.

Be that as it may, Sellars remains ebullient. He is having his way with Mozart.

It is a bold, stimulating, illuminating, vexing way. It can be a willful, contradictory way. It is often wonderful, sometimes awful, ultimately painful.

The pain is intentional, probably useful. Sellars doesn’t happen to see Mozart as a distant, carefree genius who cranked out music primarily to spread sublime cheer. The director doesn’t view Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s inspired and inspiring librettist, as a master of pat opera buffa formulas.

In his controversial productions of “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Cosi fan Tutte,” Sellars has introduced garish contemporary values, reinforced jarring socio-political undertones and isolated daring erotic impulses. He has searched for dark shadows behind the seemingly sunny wit and found an aura of agony and desperation beneath the whimsy.

It can be argued, of course, that Sellars goes too far, that he tends to impose his own bleak vision upon fundamentally optimistic vistas. His detractors like to accuse him of committing aesthetic rape in the guise of dramatic reinterpretation.

One certainly can worry that his yanking and jerking of tone, symbol, form and mood finds only partial justification in Mozart’s rhetorical scheme. One can feel discomfort when Sellars subjects 18th-Century elegance to 20th-Century brutality.

Nevertheless, even when he is at his most irritating, even when he flirts with chronic interpretive perversion, Sellars still manages to sustain interest and compel admiration. The reason is simple. He cares passionately about the material at hand.

Moreover, he has won the trust and devotion of an extraordinary ensemble of singing actors--or are they merely acting singers? These youthful, urgent virtuosos could, and no doubt would, execute ornate cadenzas for him while standing on their heads under water or tossing off fouettes atop galloping stallions.

Sellars takes liberties. That goes without saying. He places the action of “Le Nozze di Figaro” on the 53rd floor of the Trump Tower in glitzy Manhattan. He plays “Don Giovanni” in a Harlem slum populated by dope pushers, addicts and street punks. The compressed action, he notes, “starts at midnight and lasts till 4 a.m. that morning, or eternity--whichever comes first.”

He moves “Cosi fan Tutte” to a chromy eatery called Despina’s Diner. This nostalgic seaside dive serves as a hangout for a couple of naval-reserve officers and their troubled girlfriends.

The updating in each case enforces obvious gains in immediacy as well as indisputable losses in logic. In the “Figaro” skyscraper, for instance, the frequent references to aristocracy and specific geography become nonsensical. So does the pivotal matter of Almaviva wanting to exercise his historic droit de seigneur with Susanna.

Sellars shrugs and asks us not to be too literal when it comes to such details. He may be dealing in painstaking modernist verismo on the surface, he reasons, but he is concentrating on broader, more important issues. Certain plot contrivances become irrelevant in context. Some things are real, some things require the suspension of disbelief.

So, at least, he would have us believe. It isn’t always easy.

Ironically, Sellars would seem to be a real purist, and something of a scholar, when it comes to the treatment of the score. In musical--as opposed to theatrical--matters, he sees no reason to second-guess either Mozart or Da Ponte.

He insists on using the original Italian texts, even if this leaves much of the audience confused regarding the verbal nuances so carefully articulated by the cast. He disdains the distraction of supertitles (for once they actually might be welcome). Instead, he prints a lengthy scene-by-scene apologia in the program. Then, often as not, he turns the lights out, making reading an impossible dream. Contradictory impulses are at work here.

When it comes to the musical text, Sellars and his sympathetic Kapellmeister Craig Smith give us every note Mozart intended, and then some. Both Marcellina and Basilio get to sing their bravura arias in the last act of “Figaro.” The much-maligned Leporello-Zerlina duettino graces “Don Giovanni.” Ferrando’s part in “Cosi” becomes a bel-canto obstacle-course marathon.

As if all this weren’t enough, interpolations are also permitted--just as they were in Mozart’s day. Dorabella savors the flourishes of a tragic aria that the composer intended for another occasion (“Vado, ma dove?”). Even more jolting, the adagio from the E-flat Serenade, K. 375, serves as introduction to Countess Almaviva’s “Porgi amor.”

“We respectfully submit,” instructs Sellars in a revealing if rather pedantic program note, “that this too is music and request that you don’t talk while it is played. . . . Reading, thinking and listening are, however, permitted.”

Recitatives are performed virtually complete, with strikingly natural inflection, extreme flexibility and liberal application of the Luftpause . Cello and fortepiano function as continuo collaborators. Imaginative embellishment of the vocal line is encouraged. Appoggiaturas are applied generously and with expressive point. Mozart never sounds so stylish in Salzburg or at the Met.

Nor does Mozart enjoy comparable intimacy in such stellar locales. Sellars insists that these operas demand a small theater. “The audience must be able to see the singer’s eyes,” he says. The hall in Purchase seats 560.

Finding appropriate housing may pose a crucial problem if, as is hoped, the Mozart-Da Ponte “cycle” is eventually transferred to Southern California. Contrary to some reports, Sellars has not scheduled the operas for the Los Angeles Festival, which he will begin to oversee in 1990. The idea, however, continues to intrigue him.

Meanwhile, Mozart in the PepsiCo manner will be exported intact to Paris. Performances of “Figaro” and “Don Giovanni” are scheduled in December at the Bobigny Maison de la Culture. Even more significant, all three operas soon will be taped for television, and for posterity, before live audiences in Vienna.

Sellars admits to no qualms about bringing his very American coals to this quintessentially Austrian Newcastle. “We wouldn’t have wanted to play at the Staats-oper or the Theater an der Wien,” he says. “We didn’t want to do battle with certain traditions. But the television studio is neutral territory.”

Whatever the Viennese think of Sellars’ Mozart, they won’t be bored. They might even be excited.

They will find a “Figaro” propelled by the protagonists’ anger, frustration and sexual liberation. In the glassy Almaviva penthouse, everyone seems to lust after everyone else (in sometimes unexpected permutations and combinations). Secrets are constantly exchanged and repeatedly distorted. Love turns instantly into lust and, ultimately, into frenzy.

Violence lurks beneath every smile. There isn’t much room here for tenderness.

A very gawky Cherubino executes pelvic thrusts as rhythmic counterpoint to “Non so piu cosa son.” By rights, the music accompanying Sellars’ version of the Count’s duet with Susanna should be played on a pornograph. The Countess and the pansensual Susanna--both of whom had found great pleasure in undressing the page boy--exchange enigmatic, languorous gestures during their letter duet.

“There is a shared moment,” writes Sellars, “that they could never talk about and that will never need to be mentioned.” Hmm.

None less than Mark Morris choreographs an outrageous mock-rock fandango in the wedding scene. Sellars concocts his own sarcastic punctuation for the chorus-line dance in the not-so-grand finale.

It is all very dry, very wry and strangely poignant. Compared to the so-called comedy of “Don Giovanni” and “Cosi,” it is uproarious.

Sellars turns the dramma giocoso of “Don Giovanni” into a squalid melodrama. The erstwhile rake is now a leather-jacketed gang leader who shoots up during the champagne aria. Donna Anna is an addict, too (this explains the agitation of the cabaletta after “Non mi dir”). Ottavio is a vice cop. Masetto is a sadist, Zerlina a masochist (“Batti, batti . . . “).

One soon learns to accept the desolate characters and grim milieu, up to and including a banquet catered on a tenement doorstep by McDonald’s. The gritty realism exerts its own bitter compulsion, and does little harm to Mozart in the process.

All is lost, alas, in a surreal epilogue that turns the paltry Harlem nightmare into a Giotto-Dada cartoon of the Last Judgment. A coffin, presumably the Commendatore’s, goes a-flying on strings while an angelic child triumphs over an anti-hero who strips to his skivvies and descends to hell through a manhole.

It is supposed to be terrifying. It isn’t.

There are fewer miscalculations in “Cosi.” Sellars invents a sardonic love-hate relationship between a very put-upon Despina and a very hard-bitten Alfonso. The other, more conventional couples are filled with doubt and obsessed with misery from the start. The lovers are full of doubt and incipient misery from the start.

This dramma giocoso becomes a bleak, multi-layered study of deception and its consequences. No one believes the inherent masquerades. No one trusts anyone. The final resolution turns out to be a six-part mad scene. There is no catharsis. The cruelty goes on.

Sellars would be the last to claim that his way of looking at these operas is the only way. It is, however, marvelously provocative and profoundly engrossing. We may never want to laugh again at dizzy Despina in her banal disguises or at the bizarre Albanians in their phony-amorous postures.

Nor, after seeing and hearing Sellars’ casts, will we be eager to accept the operatic charades of ordinary divas and divos. Even when dramatic achievements outweigh vocal sophistication, this is a stock company of remarkable intelligence, finesse and versatility.

Sanford Sylvan focuses the disparate agonies of Figaro and Alfonso with honesty and clarity. Jeanne Ommerle musters Susanna’s pathos without sentimentality. Sue Ellen Kuzma doubles knowingly as Macellina and Despina. Susan Larson’s lanky Cherubino turns into a devastating Fiordiligi.

James Maddalena, better known as the operatic Nixon in China, offers a splendidly raunchy Count as prelude to a vulnerably macho Guglielmo. Frank Kelley exchanges Basilio’s sleaze for Ferrando’s wounded ardor. Janice Felty exudes fire and smoke as Dorabella. Jayne West emerges eminently sympathetic as Countess Almaviva.

The “Don Giovanni” cast is dominated by identical twins: Eugene Perry in the title role and Herbert Perry as Leporello. Both sing with dark, fuzzy-toned fervor, act with canny nonchalance. For once, the observer can accept the premise that the sidekick can impersonate the boss.

Dominique Labelle introduces a searing Donna Anna. Lorraine Hunt is a stridently eloquent Elvira, Carroll Freeman an aggressive Ottavio, Ai Lan Zhu an M-Zerlina worthy of Elmore James’ S-Masetto.

No one settles for cliches.

Craig Smith conducts all three operas with equal concern for stylistic authenticity and emotional truth. He is a master.

Adrianne Lobel designed the cool corporate-modern penthouse for “Figaro” and an impeccable diner for “Cosi,” complete with a silhouette of Wolfgang Amadeus on the men’s room door and one of his bride Constanze gracing the lady’s room. It is a nice touch. George Tsypin created the appropriately incoherent facade for “Don Giovanni.”