Search - Mozart - La Finta Giardiniera on DVD

Humdrum Outrageousness

Giordano Bruno | Wherever I am, I am. | 12/22/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"All the Salzburg M22 productions were outrageous. "Over the top!" Intended, of course, to be fresh and challenging as theater, while maintaining the highest musical standards. Many of them failed, to my eyes/ears anyway, at one goal or the other, and several failed at both. I believe American audiences had more objections to them than European, and I know why: many European opera lovers, with far more opportunities to attend productions, would have seen and heard more conventional stagings. They would have a stock of memories of the action, the scene, etc. For them, this staging of "La Finta Gardiniera" and even more so the stagings of the later Mozart masterpieces would have seemed a fresh variation on the familiar, an extension of the possibilities of the opera.

"La Finta Gardiniera" is one of the more successful "over the top" productions of the M22 series. It is well sung by all cast members, with tenor John Mark Ainsley singing splendidly the largest role as Belfiore, Veronique Gens outsinging the other females in the lesser role of Arminda, and baritone Markus Werba making the most of his role as the lackey Roberto. The orchestra is adequate -- not especially stylish, but technically adequate; this is not an opera with much exceptional orchestral participation, so "adequate" is exactly what's needed. Mozart's boyish genius got a bit ahead of him in this score; there are arias and ensembles of brilliance, but the whole doesn't cohere as more than the sum of the parts. The quintet and septet ensembles are remarkably 'prophetic' of the sort of madcap chaos that Rossini would throw at the audiences of his later era. It's always seemed to me that Rossini wrote very fine Mozart in his way ....

The libretto, by Giuseppe Petrosellini, is as absurd as any 18th C audience could have expected, with three sets of crossed lovers all obviously destined to be properly sorted in the end. There are moments of 'self-referential' comedy that would fit easily into a 21st C Hollywood film about Hollywood; instruments are mentioned metaphorically, for instance, and the actual instruments respond from the orchestra pit. It's supposed to be "giocoso", this tale of The Pretend Gardineress, and I hope there were plenty of sight gags and pratfalls in the stagings of Mozart's times. Without the "jokes", this libretto would be flatter than the bottoms of the theater goers after 161 minutes of boredom.

The M22 staging is a witty melange of rococo details inside a modernist set. The "garden" is revealed to be a "big box" garden hardware store. Most of the characters are employees in the store, with the Podestà Don Ancise as the manager. Plants come alive, garden statues and giant flowers dance, and there's a monstrous Venus Fly Trap that plays a role in the action. It's relentlessly slapstick and surreal. After some first moments of surprise and skepticism, I found it quite entertaining. Yes, it meandered at times, but it was constrained to do so by Mozart's youthfully meandering music.

The one very valid criticism of such a staging, I would humbly suggest, is that the drama and the music tend to compete with each other. Not to clash. The spirit of the music was and is fully as outrageous as the modern staging. Rather, it's just plain hard to listen intently while so much absurdity is prancing on stage. Possibly, if I'd listened to various sound-only recording of "La Finta Giardiniera", and knew the score better by ear, I would have been less easily distracted."