The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 23 (2017) No. 1

Staging History? Eight Productions of Monteverdi’s Orfeo

Mauro Calcagno*

1. Introduction

2. Modern productions and the 1607 premiere

3. Orfeo and postmodernity

Appendix

Video Examples

Figures

References

1. Introduction

1.1 As Emanuele Senici has shown, the “liveness” of the operatic productions that DVD producers advertise as “live performances” is a construct shaped by the mediation of the camera’s eye, through editing, remixing, and a variety of factors that intervene in post-production. Senici warns us not to be deceived by claims of liveness, since every DVD production, whether or not marketed as derived from a live performance, “offers a point of view on its own mediality, and this point of view suggests a certain kind of reception and interpretation.” Senici’s caveat is useful when teaching opera on video, and it can generate lively classroom discussions. Those frequent initial shots, for example, which first show the external architecture of the opera theater (sometimes zooming in from the surrounding city) and then move into the foyer and the auditorium, aim to convey the sense of magic of the live event. However, Senici asks, “to what degree is the theatrical dimension acknowledged? Do we see the audience entering the theater? Is the auditorium shown before or during the performance? What kind of impact do such transparency and opacity have on the modes of consumption promoted by a video?”^[1]

1.2 The eight productions on DVD of Monteverdi’s Orfeo discussed in this article (see list in the Appendix) can be placed on a scale that, with respect to the conditions of performance and recording, ranges between maximal degrees of transparency and opacity. For Baroque opera, and especially in the case of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, this audiovisual dimension intersects in turn with the relationships that today’s productions establish with a historical time that long precedes our own and with modern performance spaces. If a video of an opera performance is a combination of words, music, staging, and video recording, pedagogically speaking it is worthwhile not only to keep these components conceptually separate but also to explore how their combination conveys a specific sense of historical distance between the various layers of “then” and “now.”

1.3 As far as their musical performances are concerned, the eight productions are uniformly characterized by so-called historically informed performance practices, such as the use of period instruments, this requiring preliminary explanation in the classroom. In addition, since each production approaches the aspect of staging in a different way, the instructor’s choice of one (or more) of them poses as many different pedagogical challenges. The staging approaches can range from more naturalistic and realistic ones (Ponnelle 2007 and Deflo 2002) to more radical, avant-garde and abstract ones, to the point that the singers in Brown 2006 do not only act but also dance, in unadorned modern costumes, on an almost empty stage.

1.4 Each production, in turn, presents a different relationship with the mythic 1607 premiere. As we shall see, Pizzi 2009, Ponnelle 2007, and Deflo 2002 show a high level of self-consciousness (even anxiety) in referring directly to the premiere; Brown 2006 and Audi 2005 choose to ignore it; finally, Wilson 2011, Malgoire 2005, and Ronconi 1998 are located somewhere in between. Since students would be introduced to the historical context of the premiere before viewing the video, our bridging between this context and the modern productions can be at the same time easy and problematic. As with the issue of liveness mentioned above, the relationship between the modern productions and (what we know of) the original conditions of performance can be more or less transparent, more or less opaque.^[2]

2. Modern productions and the 1607 premiere

2.1 In the opening of Ponnelle 2007, for example, we read above a reconstructed proscenium arch the words “Francesco I Gonzaga duca di Mantova e di Monfe[r]rato” (Video 1). Francesco, as we know, is the score’s dedicatee and the patron of the Accademia degli Invaghiti, which sponsored the premiere. But in 1607 the Duke was his father Vincenzo, Francesco succeeding him only five years later. The claims of historicity in Ponnelle’s production (Zürich Opernhaus, 1978) continue beyond this. As I discussed elsewhere, Ponnelle’s production shows a high degree of anxiety about being validated by the 1607 premiere.^[3] While the introductory toccata is played and the public is seated, for example, we are shown the title page, dated 1607, of the presumed original seventeenth-century score. This page, however, is manufactured, since the libretto alone was published in 1607, and the available scores date from 1609 and 1615. This is not to say that Ponnelle fails at establishing a meaningful connection with the past. When in the Prologue the character La Musica becomes Vincenzo’s wife Eleonora de Medici—and then, in the opera, Orpheus clearly stands for Francesco, and, in the Finale, Apollo for Vincenzo—the director capitalizes on the early modern tradition of matching fictional with historical figures. This production indeed provides opportunities to discuss early modern historical contexts in conjunction with today’s claims of authenticity as being illusionary and perhaps, to a certain extent, deceptive.^[4]

2.2 In the Prologue of Deflo 2002 a projected version of the top part of the score’s title page finds its way, this time, to the stage curtain (Video 2). While the opening toccata begins, the conductor, Jordi Savall, makes his entrance from where the public access their seats, dressed like Monteverdi in Bernardo Strozzi’s portrait, the theater boxes being reflected onstage by a giant mirror. As the DVD back cover claims, for this production filmed in Barcelona’s Grand Teatre del Liceu in 2002, director Gilbert Deflo drew inspiration from “the sublime art and imagery found in Mantua’s Ducal Palace, with its famous Hall of Mirrors, where the opera was first performed in 1607.” In the DVD’s extra features, the stage director indeed lectures viewers from the eighteenth-century Hall of Mirrors in Mantua. No evidence exists that Orfeo was performed in this hall and, for that matter, that today’s Hall of Mirrors has anything to do with that of Monteverdi’s time. Similar claims are made in the DVD extra features of Audi 2005, although the stage director Pierre Audi does not take inspiration from the original location, going instead for a rather abstract staging.^[5]

2.3 Perhaps the most stimulating production with respect to the mythic premiere is that directed by Pier Luigi Pizzi (Pizzi 2009). Conductor William Christie, like Harnoncourt and Savall in Ponnelle 2007 and Deflo 2002, wears a period costume (Figure 1). During the opening Toccata, the Ducal Palace emerges, like a marvelous Baroque machine, from under the stage (Video 3). For the first two acts Pizzi, like Ponnelle, simulates the original conditions of performance by evoking their spontaneity as well as the proximity between singers and instruments. The atmosphere is intimate, and some aspects of Pizzi’s staging, such as the Gonzagas sitting on the sides and the stairs descending to the space where the orchestra is placed, are reminiscent of Ponnelle’s production. However, starting from Act 3 (when the action shifts to the Underworld), Pizzi radically alters his traditional staging of the previous two acts. Christie, the performers, and the singers all change into modern attire, wearing timeless costumes. The setting becomes dark and abstract, the Ducal Palace losing its historical specificity and becoming an architectural backdrop. Because of these shifts, viewers may experience an effect of displacement, which may prompt discussions of Brecht’s “alienation effect,” the use of familiarizing or de-familiarizing techniques in opera productions, and even the concept of postmodernity (although Pizzi’s would be a soft version of it).^[6]

2.4 The production directed by Luca Ronconi (Ronconi 1998) exemplifies the connection between a creative use of space (the performers occupy not only the traditional stage space but also the orchestra space, emptied of seats) and the evocation of the mythic premiere as a private, intimate, academic ritual (here in the small Teatro Goldoni in Florence: Figure 2). The unusual features of this staging may be used to raise more general issues about the use of space in opera and theater. The metonymical relationships that the sets and costumes establish with the reality outside the stage facilitate discussion of the arbitrary meanings of theatrical representation.^[7]

3. Orfeo and postmodernity

3.1 Finally, DVDs of Monteverdi’s Orfeo can be used to introduce students to postmodern conceptions of performance, particularly in their American incarnations. Enter Wilson 2011 and Brown 2006. Choreographer Trisha Brown takes the radical step of disembodying the voice at the very start of the opera; the suspended dancer in her mesmerizing Prologue does not mouth the sung words (Video 4). This step takes the spectator into an unusual theatrical dimension, in which music is no mere accompaniment to dance. Also, while singers’ gestures traditionally underline the sense of the verbal text and are subservient to it, in this production gesture and text are often disconnected: watch “Rosa del ciel” (Video 5) or “Possente Spirto,” for example. How does Brown keep gestures and words on separate “tracks,” so to speak, yet allow the performer to establish an effective relationship with music and action?^[8]

3.2 During her formative years in New York City, Brown collaborated with artists such as John Cage and Merce Cunningham, using collage techniques. This context of production is chronologically and geographically distant from that of the Gonzagas’ Mantua, yet Brown’s staging enables these worlds to communicate. One of Brown’s acquaintances during those years was Robert Wilson. In his Orfeo (Wilson 2011) he engages in a dialogue with the past that employs a completely different strategy from that of Ponnelle or Pizzi, crossing paths instead with Brown—as the two artists literally did in New York in the 1970s. For example, the relationship between the performer and the character is not only one of representation but also one of presentation—presentation of the performer himself or herself. But Wilson’s aesthetic also diverges from Brown’s. For example, Wilson borrows more from iconographies of the past, not only in terms of the singers’ gestures but also for set and stage elements. In Wilson’s staging of the Prologue (Figure 3) the backdrop shows two converging lines of cypresses while the stage is populated by characters and animals well beyond the solitary La Musica found in libretto and score. Titian’s painting Venus with an Organist and Cupid (Figure 4 and Figure 5) provides the large- and small-scale model for a witty re-mediation.^[9] Past and present come to life in this performance and in its mediations.

Appendix

Appendix. Claudio Monteverdi and Alessandro Striggio, Orfeo on DVD

Video Examples

Video 1. Ponnelle 2007: Toccata and beginning of the Prologue

Video 2. Deflo 2002: Toccata and first strophe of the Prologue

Video 3. Pizzi 2009: opening credits, Toccata, and beginning of the Prologue

Video 4. Brown 2006: end of the Prologue and beginning of Act 1

Video 5. Brown 2006: “Rosa del ciel” from Act 1

Figures

Figure 1. Pizzi 2009: interview with conductor William Christie

Figure 2. Ronconi 1998: from Act 3

Figure 3. Wilson 2011: Prologue

Figure 4. Titian: Venus with an Organist and Cupid (ca. 1555)

Figure 5. Titian: detail from Venus with an Organist and Cupid