Luci Mie Traditrici or The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
A review by Shane Anderson
Director: Rebecca Horn, 2008
Music: Salvatore Sciarrino, 1998
Conductor: Beat Furrer
Ensemble: Klangforum Wien
La Malaspina / Soprano: Anna Radziewska
Il Malaspina / Baritone: Otto Katzameier
L’Ospite / Counter Tenor: Kai Wessel
Il Servo / Tenor: Simon Jaunin
‘Performer’: Antonio Paucar
Summary:
A Duke receives a Visitor, the Duchess cuckolds the Duke, the Duke slays both the Duchess and the Visitor. The Duke repents.
Words ebb and flow out of mouths, the music is like sea foam.
The violence of silence and the already known.
The Good: ‘No, se dal sangue la rosa ebbe il natale’
Horn’s production was at its most successful when it explored the uncanny (such as the cloaked figure that sung the prelude from upstage or the other cloaked figure which slunk across the stage during Act II’s 3rd Intermezzo) and its relationship to the skeletal, dare I say, minimalist, structure of Sciarrino’s music. These moments made the music’s near silence feel threatening.
This threatening, potentially dangerous, dimension was also explored in Horn’s use of a falconer stroking a tempered falcon upstage, as well as chairs elongated on point-standing knives. When Horn created a sense of tension on stage – the sort of tension that was explored in the libretto as well as musically in Sciarrino’s score, which wove together a number of nuanced gestures (including a process of extension and compression in the voices, which created a certain tension to the words, the plot and to operatic tradition by extension) with a disintegration of late renaissance (the Intermezzos are particularly demonstrative of this aspect) – Horn was able to ‘bloom roses from blood,’ as the libretto suggests. It was an unspeakable beauty.
I often held my breath.
The Bad: ‘Mio destin così vuole’
Whether one finds a plot like Luci Mie Traditrici’s ‘tried and true’ or ‘tired and terrible,’ is a matter of contention, and frankly, irrelevant. What’s important, however, is that the libretto and the music can be understood as soup stock – the score and libretto reduced gestures and themes and traditions to their most flavorful essentials; thereby allowing themselves to serve as the basis for a potentially wonderful, rich soup (read for: opera experience) in the hands of a master chef. Instead Horn’s production, when it wasn’t exploring the uncanny, felt like a mouthful of sand. It was mostly sand.
The movements of the actors were arid, repetitive and distracting. Horn failed to extrapolate on the plot and the textures of the music in a way that would have done them justice; and the gestures felt like The History of Opera in slow motion on an old VCR. It was like a video piece of a museum piece.
Most distracting or unfortunate, however, proved to be the tent-like bed on stage that wasn’t only hideous, but also followed the chalky Chekovian principle of props (which, here, can be stated thus: “if there’s a covered structure on stage, then it’s going to uncover something in the end”), which is neither nourishing nor refreshing.
I held my breath, yes, but my eyes were often closed.
The Ugly: ‘A Dio, a Dio, sempre vivrò in tormento’
After the performance, I talked to a friend. One of us mentioned the set. She said something about the 80s. I said something about the 80s. I said, “it really distracted me, I can’t believe that anyone would use such a blatant rust colored red for a bed someone would die on.” She said, “yes, but it was the 80s,” meaning that we should forgive them. I said, “but the piece was composed in 1996.” She said, “did Rebecca Horn design a stage for the future?” We both laughed. I said, “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” and then Michael Keaton shot up out of the stage and his head spun around and he laughed real loud as snakes came out of his eyes.
Final word: It was a mediocre performance theatrically and a spectacular one musically. Unfortunately, they were not integrated enough to compensate for any of their internal weaknesses. Beat Furrer and his Klangforum Wien Ensemble, who were spot on, nevertheless, kept me rapt and wanting more.
