Critic Sheds New Light on Mozart Opera

The spate of Mozart performances during the bicentennial year of the Viennese composer’s death may do more than fill the coffers of opera companies and summer music festivals.

It might change the way we view the prodigious composer.

“The year may show that Mozart’s life was a struggle against the frivolity of Vienna and the public’s liking for lightweight Italian opera,” said Andrew Porter, music critic of New Yorker magazine. “I think that Mozart’s great passion in life was to write opera seria (serious or tragic Italian opera). The one revelation of the Mozart year is that ‘La Clemenza di Tito’ (Mozart’s final opera) is not a strange, stiff formal old opera, but a kind of crown of Mozart’s career.”

With more frequent performances of “La Clemenza di Tito,” including this April’s production by Houston Grand Opera’s Mozart festival, Porter sees Mozart’s valedictory opera seria as the work that puts his comic operas, “Le Nozze di Figaro” and “Cosi Fan Tutte,” into proper perspective.

“In a way, ‘Tito’ was the opera he wanted to write all the time, which is why he put so much seriousness into ‘Figaro’ and ‘Cosi Fan Tutte.’ And ‘Don Giovanni,’ which was written (by his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte) as a knock-about comedy, he turned into a great tragedy.”

In light of this observation, there is some irony that Porter is visiting San Diego in connection with the Kingston Mainly Mozart Festival’s presentation of “The Impresario,” one of Mozart’s more frivolous works for the stage. For the festival, which opens its third season tonight at the Spreckels Theatre, Porter will lecture on current trends in staging Mozart operas and will supervise the semi-staged performance of “The Impresario.”

David Atherton, the festival’s music director, selected Porter’s recent English translation of “Der Schauspieldirektor,” the original title of Mozart’s one-act German-language comedy with music that Mozart turned out in 1786 as an after-dinner entertainment for the Viennese court at a royal wedding.

“The Impresario,” a farcical tale about an opera director who attempts to sign two haughty sopranos for the same role, will be performed in the Spreckels Theatre today at 8 p.m. in the opening concert of Atherton’s 10-day Mozart festival.

Porter mused that the ideal San Diego venue for “The Impresario” would be Balboa Park’s Botanical Building, which Porter walked through over the weekend.

“ ‘The Impresario’ was first given in an Orangerie with banquet tables in the center and a stage at each end. The orange trees were in tubs, so they could be moved out of the way. That arrangement wouldn’t work in the Botanical Building now because all of the plants are in the way. But it would give you the feel of the original very much.”

Although the local festival won’t provide “The Impresario” with an authentic botanical staging area, the title role will be filled by an experienced impresario, San Diego Opera general director Ian Campbell.

“It’s always fun to see who will do the impresario, which is usually done by an actor,” Porter said. “Here we have a real impresario. We hope to work in some local jokes because the original is full of local jokes. But not too many--this is not supposed to be a Peter Sellars’ job.”

Porter, who is working on an encyclopedic companion to opera, does not believe there has been an opera composer since Mozart who measures up to Mozart.

“There has never been one who was at once as instinctive and as expert. Even when the teen-aged Mozart was much too young to understand the emotions he was dealing with in the operas he wrote, he still had a sure instinct in expressing their power and passion. Wagner and Verdi, for example, had to find their way through trial and error. Rossini had the born technical accomplishment, but he did not have Mozart’s depth. I think Benjamin Britten had the felicity and also Bedrich Smetana had that sheer musicality from the start.”

This is not the first time Porter has brought his English translations of unusual operas to San Diego.

In the heyday of Tito Capobianco, Campbell’s predecessor at San Diego Opera, Porter’s translations of Abroise Thomas’ “Hamlet” and Camille Saint-Saens’ “Henry VIII” were produced by the local company.

Porter’s translations of old operas and his musicological work--he made a major discovery several years ago when he uncovered the original orchestra parts to Verdi’s “Don Carlos”--do not make him an antiquarian. On the contrary, he is an advocate for contemporary music and regrets that the public’s enthusiasm for rare operas by dead composers has supplanted a healthy interest in new opera.

“In the 19th Century, audiences wanted new operas. We have a letter from Gaetano Rossi, one of Meyerbeer’s librettists, who wrote, ‘What an awful season this is at La Scala! We’ve only had one new opera, and the public is complaining bitterly.’ You’re not likely to find opera audiences today saying that, although perhaps a few critics might say that.”

If today’s opera public demonstrates little passion for new operas, today’s singers are equally at fault, Porter claims.

“The great prima donnas and male singers of the 19th Century wanted new parts all the time. It was a matter of pride to do a new role which had been written for them each season. In our day, on the other hand, Maria Callas had one world premiere, which was an opera written by Haydn. Our singers are not brought up to think that their great glory will be to have great composers of the day write pieces for them. They see their great glory as singing Violetta or Brunnhilde better than anyone else.”

Porter sees the future of opera in the United States devolving to companies based in much smaller theaters than the typical 3,000-seat venues such as San Diego’s Civic Theatre. According to Porter, the financial difficulty of large-scale opera productions will force some regional companies to work in 1,000-seat theaters in which both older operas and contemporary works easily succeed.

“The future of opera will lie largely in smaller companies that will replace some of today’s big companies that are in financial difficulty. You need immense theaters for only a limited portion of the repertory, late 19th-Century and early 20th-Century opera. Good operas are being written today with a small cast and an orchestra of 12 to 16.”

The North American opera public may have to be wooed into the size of opera house Porter envisions. San Diego Opera’s experiments with contemporary chamber opera at the Old Globe Theatre in the mid-1960s, for example, proved a box office disaster, even though the productions were musically praiseworthy.

Porter admits that selling smaller-scaled opera will not be easy.

“The American opera public is very much conditioned to what might be called the Pavarotti syndrome. It will be a tough nut to crack, but the idea that every company in the country must produce grand opera cannot be sustained financially.”

Porter will give a pre-concert lecture at 7 p.m. both today and Friday at the Spreckels Theatre.