Mozart22: A DVD Review Portfolio

Abstract

In the Mozart22 box set, comic opera is no mere funny business: rather, the directors of the productions reviewed here largely treat humor as a problem requiring mitigation. Is it possible that these directors are the latest inheritors of historic anxieties about comedy and music? Eighteenth-century critics worried that comedy was “beneath” music,1 and, as Wye J. Allanbrook suggests, the nineteenth-century “blind spot” about comedy was symptomatic of value systems obsessed with musical autonomy and “hostile to the comic spirit.”2 Alternatively, is the problematization of humor evident in these productions—which are more inclined to twist, update, and critique the operas' comic thematic elements and characters than to simply play them for laughs—symptomatic of the broader issue of presenting historical comedy to contemporary audiences? The comic plot points, episodes, and characters of the five productions I discuss—La finta giardiniera, Così fan tutte, Le nozze di Figaro, Die Zauberflöte, and Die Entführung aus dem Serail—are imbued with new, darker subtexts, allowing directors to signal a self-consciously complicated relationship to what might otherwise be taken for granted. Has staging Mozart's operas to create effective (or contemporary) comedy become increasingly difficult as the works age? Is there something fundamentally less enduring about comic works, and is a revisionist approach the only way to bridge the historical divide?