Pacey, dynamic imagining of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro is a hit

Floris Visser’s new production of Mozart’s Die Hochzeit Des Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) at Essen’s Aalto Musiktheater is overwhelming. I think it sets a challenging benchmark for generations of Figaro yet to come.

It has pace. The revolving stage, quartered into the rooms of the Almaviva palace, is constantly in action as characters move seamlessly through doors from one set to another, or stand front of stage as their world changes behind them. The cutting-edge Dutch producer does not believe in his characters standing still.

As the emotions of Mozart’s comic opera with a deadly purpose – the condemnation of sexual abuse in a class system which tolerated the ancient tradition of droit de seigneur – oscillate between the forces of love and lust the characters are physically torn one way or the other, amplifying the power of Mozart’s music.

Love and lust are the elephants in Visser’s room. So much so that they are introduced as characters in the form of two newly created silent players, Satyr and Cupido. They wrestle with each other as the action ebbs and flows, the embodiment of the changing – often contradictory – emotions sweeping the characters and the plot along.

Ah yes, the plot. Here is a handy synopsis for newbies, from the New York Met’s current production. I thought English might help!

Back to Essen, where a lusty Satyr has just emerged from the orchestra pit. He is handily-horned, cloven-hoofed, bare-torsoed. Visser uses him both to follow and sometimes drive the action. At dinner, pre-performance, I asked about the hooves.

Visser’s enthusiastic explanation was an exemplar of the often-unheeded detail that goes into every opera production. Created as a high-heel, only without the heel, by melding a softish shoe with, well, a hoof, the ankle of James Michael Atkins, Satyr of this parish, becomes a convincing fetlock. Now you can while away an idle afternoon creating a fetlock of your own.

Atkins is something of a sport. Not only does he have to frequently exit front stage into the pit by jumping onto a trampoline to prevent him breaking his ankles, but he is also often driven to surreptitious drink by the absurdities of the characters’ behaviour, tippling from handy decanters as he lurks in the background observing their follies.

It is sometimes moot whether he is driving the characters’ actions, or they are astonishing him, super-satyr, with their increasingly lustful behaviour. A three-in-a-bed moment with Susannah, the Countess and Cherubino – only a moment mind you, before they remember themselves – has him looking on like an apprentice.

He is partnered by Cupido, Mick Morris Mehnert. To carry the alliteration to its logical conclusion Mehnert is in the merde. Halfway through dinner Visser was phoned to be told the “short person” was stuck in traffic somewhere between Berlin and Essen. First, he would make it for the second half. Then, another phone call. No cupid at all.

Why Cupido had decided to practice his arts in Berlin – maybe the abundance of nightclubs? – remained unexplained. Maybe Essen was far too respectable. Let me put it this way, Visser was unhappy. As unhappy as Wotan after Siegfried breaks his spear. My only advice to Cupido is to high tail it up that autobahn back to Berlin. Essen, for the foreseeable, will be too hot to handle.

So, in all honesty, I can only speculate on the impact the “short person” – that’s a politically correct German term for a dwarf – would have had on the action. I will be privileged to see a film of a performance on a day when there was less traffic on the autobahn. I shall update after that.

Til then reports of previous shows will have to suffice. Cupido and Satyr are in conflict throughout as they vie to dominate the characters’ loving or lustful instincts and end up having a pillow fight in which feathers fly. On the night, Satyr’s solitary conflict with the pillows – which still produced a satisfactory cloud of white down – seemed rather sad. He was missing his opponent.

What is Visser’s point? Are these creations simply an absurd distraction? The whim of an overimaginative director? Far from it. Cast back to last year’s Glyndebourne and his breath-taking La bohème in which the silent figure of death, stalking – and caring for – Mimi, was invented.

Like Mimi’s Death, Satyr and Cupido are not “extras”. They are powerful lenses through which the complexities of Beaumarchais’ characters and da Ponte’s libretto can be more minutely observed. In a sense, they represent us, the audience, with all our conflicting emotions, connecting us across the fourth wall. We are locked into this plot, like it or not.

Visser, not content with two extra characters, introduced a third. The set. During the course of the opera the whole rotating edifice was gradually overwhelmed by nature. We were witnessing a crumbling social order. Its decline was marked by steadily encroaching greenery. A wreath of ivy around a mirror. The painting of green walls in a bedroom. The clever transformation of Figaro and Susannah’s bedroom into the garden in which the final act is played out. A green heart, painted on the wall by the amorous Cherubino, morphed into a fruit.

The action is not set in period but around the end of World War I. In England. Visser explained that anything more modern would be meaningless as the pre-French revolutionary class system requiring deference in which Beaumarchais set the action was gone by the mid 1920s. 

The feel was Downton Abbey, on its last legs, with the beautiful abbey mirroring the decline of its dynasty, relentlessly reclaimed by nature. Cherubino was sent to war in a “Tommy’s” uniform complete with gas mask. It was clear the house and its elegant rooms were being dismantled. The old order was pulling stumps.

Pictures stood on the floor, removed from the walls. A poignant portrayal of the Count and Countess on their wedding day was turned to and from the wall by the characters, depending on the state of their emotions. At one moment Count and Countess stood together in abusive physical conflict, in stark contradiction to the loving emotions in their wedding portrait, while striking the same pose. Detail. Detail. Wonderful producer’s detail.

Gideon Davy, the set designer, worked Visser’s magic to perfection. Theirs is a fruitful partnership. At the interval I was introduced by Visser to one of the dramaturgists, Savina Kationi, who has worked in Hamburg, Meininger and – most significantly – Bayreuth. I think she is a Wagnerian heroine. Coping with Visser’s demanding eye for detail in every meaning-laden action of the characters deserves her immediate elevation to Valhalla.

Essen’s Aalto Musiktheater, built in 1988, is as near perfect acoustically as any opera house can be. It started life in 1959, the brainchild of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, but the vagaries of the Ruhr economy delayed its completion. With 1,300 seats it feels intimate and all the boring but essential elements – like clear sightlines from every seat – have been carefully observed.

Friends in Essen told me that the dark, narrow entrance to the foyer represents Essen’s mining history, the way into the shaft which miners used every day on their route underground. Now, they go to the opera instead. All around are modernistic totems to the Ruhr’s heavy engineering pedigree – Westenergie Turm, a gleaming stainless-steel tower housing a local energy supplier. Now, a far cry from Essen’s dangerous mine shafts.

Standout voices were Jessica Moorhead as the Countess, Miriam Albano, Cherubino, Bettina Ranch, Mercellina and Marcel Brunner, Figaro. I didn’t much care for the voice of Tobias Greenhalgh as the Count. Occasionally tuneless.

Wolfram–Maria Märtig conducted the Essener Philharmoniker, a small orchestra, but more than capable of filling the space. I learnt from my neighbour in the audience, the Serbian mother of the second flautist, that her daughter was one of four students learning their trade with the orchestra. She enthused about the culture of camaraderie that her daughter had encountered. We gave the second flautist an indiscrete wave before curtain up. She waved back.

Essen had not been on my bucket list of opera venues until Visser’s Figaro prompted this visit. But it will now be in the diary for a return trip. Germany is full of Staatsoper and City opera companies offering performances with fresh insights. Worth a journey. Only, unlike Cupido, be sure to make it in time.

Who dares wins. Floris Visser has dared with his Essen interpretation of Figaro and won hands down. A fresh take on a well-loved work, true to the spirit and musicality of the composer and librettist, delivered with emotion, engaging vigour and humour. Does opera get any better than that?

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