Review of the opera Le nozze di Figaro at the Salzburg Festival

The Salzburg Festival this year, after an eight-year break, presented a new production of Mozart’s opera Le nozze di Figaro. It was released by the famous Austrian director Martin Kushey, until recently the artistic director of the Vienna Burgtheater, and the French conductor Rafael Pichon. From Salzburg – Sergey Hodnev.

The Marriage of Figaro has only been staged in Salzburg three times in the last twenty years. In 2015, it was director Sven-Erik Bechtolf’s not-so-pretentious but cozy version, depicting the castle of Aguas Frescas, where the Beaumarchais play is set, in the spirit of Downton Abbey. But in 2006, in the year of Mozart’s 250th anniversary, there was a performance by Klaus Guth with Nikolaus Arnoncourt at the conductor’s stand and with the thin-voiced Anna Netrebko in the role of Susanna. In 2023, the festival seems to be symbolically trying to return precisely to the experience of the 2000s by inviting Martin Kuschey, who at that time released Don Giovanni (2002) and Titus’ Mercy (2003) in Salzburg.

But still, Harnoncourt has been gone for seven years now. It is indicative that not one of the living masters-authenticists of the older generation was now called to the musical directors of the performance. And not, say, the usual Gianluca Capuano, who for several years has been servicing the production projects of Cecilia Bartoli in Salzburg. And not Teodor Currentzis, whose name is associated with the most unusual Mozart productions of the last decade (The Mercy of Titus, Idomeneo, Don Giovanni). It was the 39-year-old Frenchman Rafael Pichon, the founder of the Pygmalion ensemble, with whom he performs and records music from the late Renaissance to classicism – and does it quite brightly, unconventionally and ambitiously, which the Russian listener could see not only from the recordings: in 2017 It was Pishon who conducted at the Bolshoi Theater at touring performances of Katie Mitchell’s play “Funeral Night” with Bach’s music.

He has already appeared in Salzburg, but in concert programs and with his Pygmalion, and now in front of him in the pit is the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. In the best moments, Mozart Pichon and the Vienna Philharmonic in terms of theatricality, dynamism, sound culture, perhaps, approach the beautiful recording of “The Marriage of Figaro” made by René Jacobs in 2006. The listener gets some unexpected spills in the form of subtle improvisations on the hammerklavier (Pedro Beriso, accompanying the “dry” recitatives), which sound in the pauses between scenes. But in ensembles, singers have to fight hard with both the tempo and the thick orchestral sound.

However, in solo numbers everything is different: the way Pichon works smartly and tactfully with artists is really remembered. The current Le Figaro has enough first-class Mozartian voices that, obviously, would have taken their toll even without increased conductor care – be it the thoroughbred baritone André Chouin (Count Almaviva), the chiseled soprano Sabine Deveuille (Suzanne), the bass buffo Peter Kalman (Bartolo ). Or Lea Desandre, who splendidly performs the role of Cherubino, who is obviously dear to both the conductor and the director as the only positive character in this performance. But, say, Krzysztof Bonczyk’s Figaro and the Countess of the young Adriana Gonzalez from Guatemala under other circumstances could, in a stylistic sense, break out of this baroque-belkante flower garden. Thanks to the efforts of Pichon, this does not happen here – moreover, both arias of the Countess, served elegantly and fragilely, become almost the central moments of the entire opera.

Cherubino in Kushei’s performance is an ardent freak, a seducer and a poet: while during the overture the other characters, lined up in a row, pictorially use a wide variety of psychoactive substances to the extent of taste and temperament, he knows himself scribbling into his moleskinchik. The Countess is an unfortunate abandoned wife who erotically yearns while looking at a reproduction of Gustave Courbet’s controversial Origin of the World. In other words, the external, applied details differ, but the very essence of the characters is the same as that of Beaumarchais and the Mozart librettist Lorenzo da Ponte – no matter how hard the director tries to crack the cast dramaturgy of Le nozze di Figaro.

He makes the heroes a criminal gang that lives in the faceless and uncomfortable spaces that cleverly replace each other, which were created by set designer Raimund Orfeo Voigt: a backyard with a garbage dump, a neglected bathroom with gloomy tiles on the walls (aka the Countess’s bedroom), an underground parking lot, a bar where heroes generously treats Don Curzio. The last in the libretto is actually the judge who decides on the lawsuit of Marcellina (Christina Hammerström) against Figaro, but Kushei has him as a killer on the Count’s packages – like, in fact, Figaro himself. And the trial from the third act, where Bartolo and Marcellina discover their missing son in Figaro, is turned into a spree, where the characters, who have been pushed to the point of being in robes, do not themselves understand what they are saying. For some reason, all references to kinship (for example, the fact that Figaro is the nephew of the gardener Antonio and cousin of Barbarina) are completely purged even from the performed vocal text. Barbarina in her aria sings instead of “il cugino” (“cousin”) – “Susanetta” (“Suzanne”), Antonio in recitative mentions instead of “il mio signor nipote” (“my lord nephew”) a certain “questo gran signore” ( “this important gentleman”).

Cherubino in the first act steals from Susanna not a ribbon, but a stocking, and so he sings – “o fortunato calzo” instead of “o fortunato nastro”. The pointlessness of these textual interventions is all the more obvious because, for example, instead of a sword, the mafia-Count, under the proposed conditions, has to draw a pistol – but here, apparently, they could not find the right word, and Susanna in the second act suggests that the Count arm himself with a sword (“il brando prendete”) . In the fourth act, Marcellina’s aria about a goat and a goat and Basilio’s hymn to the “donkey skin”, that is, pretense, are cut out – in the theatrical sense they are somewhat pitiful, although they are almost always sacrificed, there is no special innovation here.

In addition to family ties, Martin Kushey also tries to destroy the chronological structure, trying to create the feeling with stage changes and pauses that the action has been stretched out for a much longer time than the original “crazy day”. Let’s say here is the beginning of the third act; Suzanne flirts with the Count before the start of the duet “Crudel, perche finora” – and then there is a blackout, after which the two lie on the floor disheveled already clearly post coitum. But what then are efforts, intrigues, quirks, disguises and languor poured into further music, if the master’s passion for the maid could be resolved like this, easily and in passing? The plot of The Marriage of Figaro can be deconstructed, revised, reassembled, and there are more or less happy examples of this. But not all means are good for this.