Reviews Performance Venice without the Carnival: Pierre Audi’s Monteverdi Cycle on DVD Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oq/article/24/3-4/293/1579248 by guest on 28 September 2021 The Netherlands Opera Ulisse: Anthony Rolfe Johnson Stage Director: Pierre Audi Penelope: Graciela Araya Set Design: Michael Simon Telemaco: Toby Spence Lighting Design: Jean Kalman Antinoo: Jaco Huijpen TV Director: Hans Hulcher Pisandro: Christopher Gillett Opus Arte DVDs, 2005 Anfinomo: Brian Asawa L’Orfeo Eurimaco: Mark Tucker Tragicomedia and Concerto Palatino Iro: Alexander Oliver Conductor: Stephen Stubbs Melanto: Monica Bacelli Costume Design: Jorga Jara Eumete: Adrian Thompson TV Recording: 1998 Minerva: Diana Montague Orfeo: John Mark Ainsley L’incoronazione di Poppea Euridice: Juanita Lascarro Les Talens Lyriques La Messaggiera: Brigitte Baileys Conductor: Christophe Rousset La Musica: David Cordier Costume Design: Emi Wada La Speranza: David Chance TV Recording: 1994 Caronte: Mario Luperi Poppea: Cynthia Haymon Proserpina: Bernarda Fink Nerone: Brigitte Balleys Plutone: Dean Robinson Ottavia: Ning Liang Pastore I/Eco: Jean-Paul Fouche´court Ottone: Michael Chance Pastore II: Russel Smythe Seneca: Harry van der Kamp Pastore III: Douglas Nasrawi Drusilla: Heidi Grant Murphy Pastore IV: Dean Robinson Arnalta: Jean-Paul Fouche´court Ninfa: Suzie Le Blanc Nutrice/Famigliare: Dominique Visse Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria Valletto: Claron McFadden Les Talens Lyriques La Fortuna: Elena Fink Musical Director: Glen Wilson Amore/Damigella: Sandrine Piau Costume Design: Jorge Jara La Virtu`/Pallade: Wilke Brummelstroete TV Recording: 1997 Mercurio, Console: Nathan Berg L’Humana Fragilita`: Brian Asawa Soldato, Lucano, Tribuno, Famigliare: Mark Tucker Il Tempo: Jaco Huijpen Soldato II, Liberto, Tribuno II: Lynton Atkinson La Fortuna: Monica Bacelli Littore, Famigliare III, Console II: Romain Bischoff Amore: Machteld Baumans At the Utrecht Early Music Festival in August 2006, a group of prominent Baroque scholars who were assembled for a symposium on Italian seventeenth- century music had the rare opportunity to engage in a dialogue with the directo- rial team for the festival’s production of Francesco Cavalli’s Hipermestra (1658).1 The Opera Quarterly Vol. 24, No.3–4, pp. 293–306; doi: 10.1093/oq/kbp015 Advance Access publication on November 3, 2009 # The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. 294 heller on audi We gleaned much from that exchange. For example, we discovered that the cos- tumes were inspired by the frescoes and paintings of the fifteenth-century Tuscan artist Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro), whose works were featured at a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition that year. What many of us felt was an uncharacteristic lack of distinction between aria and recitative was described as a desire to emulate the long lines associated with French music of the period. As a scholar who has worked extensively on the representation of women in Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oq/article/24/3-4/293/1579248 by guest on 28 September 2021 seventeenth-century opera, I was particularly astonished to learn that a character in an American situation comedy—Estelle Getty’s portrayal of “mother Sophia” in The Golden Girls—served as the model for the characterization of Hipermestra’s elderly nurse. The tension in the room was palpable. There could have been no more vivid demonstration of the very different assumptions and aims that shape the expectations of scholars and directors in productions of Baroque opera. International opera audiences are by now accustomed to novel and inventive recontextualizations of standard repertory, often achieved through the transform- ation of a work’s social and political context. As with traditional productions, these have met with varying degrees of success and failure: what is bad taste in the eyes of one critic may well be regarded as an insightful interpretive move by another. Indeed, regardless of one’s personal preferences for one or another production, the new freedom in opera directing over the past few decades has provided a much needed revitalization for audiences and scholars, and the best work more than compensates for those productions that have seemed to some viewers more intent upon shocking audiences than thoughtfully interpreting the work at hand. The situation, however, is particularly complicated in the world of Baroque opera, where production conventions are not firmly established, reliable editions are less available, and the distance of several hundred years not only raises ques- tions about basic performance practices but also the aesthetic premises guiding the original conception, production, and consumption of the operas. While audi- ences undoubtedly are familiar with traditional productions of Carmen or La Traviata, the operas of Monteverdi, Cavalli, Lully, or even Handel are not “firmly ensconced in the canon.”2 Would the Wooster Group’s meshing of science-fiction film with opera have been as well received if the featured opera had been Le Nozze di Figaro or even Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, rather than Francesco Cavalli’s lesser known La Didone?3 On the one hand, this creativity has been exhilarating— and even may well have been an important factor in inspiring some directors and opera houses to try their hands at Baroque opera. Venetian opera, with its carni- valesque mixture of comic and tragic elements, often ironic perspective, and un- abashed play with gender and sexuality is in fact ideally suited for contemporary tastes. As a scholar who has written extensively about sexuality in Venetian opera, reviews: performance 295 I have been delighted to see directors explore rather than suppress the play with sexuality and desire that is so integral to these works. It is probably far better to overdo the sexual content in a work such as Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto (1651), as was arguably the case with David Alden’s production at Covent Garden (October, 2008), than to minimize or sanitize it.4 At the same time, at least for this critic, some of the raunchier moments in Alden’s production seemed at odds both with the inherent sensuality of the music—which tends more towards Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oq/article/24/3-4/293/1579248 by guest on 28 September 2021 languor than climax—and the playful tone of the libretto, with its seductive marriage of Ovidian imagery and early modern erotica. Does Alden intend to excite viewers by emphasizing the dissonance between sight and sound, or might this be an instance in which a staging that explored late Renaissance pornography might have further aroused viewers through the coordination of sight and sound? With Baroque opera, however, the potential problems in any given pro- duction are exacerbated by conflicting orthodoxies regarding historically informed performance. In many productions of Handel’s operas one might well be disconcerted by the apparent dissonance between the reverence with which the musical text is approached and the more casual attitude about the integrity of the libretto and apparent underlying anxiety about the dramatic via- bility of da capo arias.5 While even the boldest director might hesitate to reorder the scenes in a Da Ponte libretto or eliminate characters from any stan- dard repertory, productions of Baroque opera regularly combine substantial reworkings of the poetic text with ostensibly “authentic” musical performances. (This, in fact, contradicts seventeenth-century Italian practices in which the librettist was almost always given top billing and the text of the printed libretto was transmitted in a far more stable fashion than the manuscript scores). When such alterations are done in a capricious fashion—whether for the sake of practical considerations (length), a misunderstanding of scholarship, a dis- trust of the Baroque dramatic instinct or audiences’ historical imagination—the result may not be a reconceptualization that challenges viewers, but rather the codification of a new orthodoxy, in which many essential features of the original are lost. Commercially available DVDs of Baroque opera provide a peculiar reflection of these conflicting forces, preserving for posterity—seemingly by chance—an idiosyncratic assortment of approaches. One hesitates to complain. As a scholar and teacher, I welcome the increased commercial support and enthusiasm for Baroque opera, applaud the high professional level of singing and playing, rejoice in the possibility of hearing and seeing works that I first learned at an upright piano with a photostat of the microfilm. I happily use these DVDs in the class- room, where the productions bring these works to life and stimulate discussion. Yet, for many of us an underlying discomfort remains, born of unnecessary or 296 heller on audi careless cuts, poorly translated subtitles, misreadings of music and text, and stage gimmicks that so absorb the attention of our students that they forget to listen. Among the most important of the increasing number of commercial DVDs of Baroque opera is the cycle of Monteverdi operas recently released by Opus Arte, produced by the Netherlands Opera and directed by Pierre Audi. The aim seems to have been to offer a coherent vision of Monteverdi the dramatist, presenting his surviving operas as a “cycle”: L’Orfeo (1607) and the late Venetian operas, Il Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oq/article/24/3-4/293/1579248 by guest