I watch opera in much the same way that I watch sports: with more enthusiasm than sophistication. True cognoscenti consider my opera knowledge tediously pedestrian, hardly worthy of attention. Yet I visit the opera with enough frequency that close friends consider me a vast repository of operatic wisdom (no large feat when 98% of Americans claim that their favorite opera is “the one with the phantom in it”). It is rare, at any rate, that I come across an opera I’ve never heard of from a composer that I admire. Still, every now and then my operatic ignorance becomes obvious, even to me.
Such was the case when I learned that I would be going to see Idomeneo with my fiancé, Hannah’s, family in Madrid. “What is Idomeneo?” I inquired, expecting to learn that obscure Danish composer Dietrich Buxtehude had written an avant garde homosexual autobiographopera—the title more properly pronounced “I-do-men…ehh-ohhhhh!”—that was inconveniently ahead of its time and only now finally receiving the attention it so richly deserved. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that none other than Mozart himself (“the Mozart of opera” they call him) had written Idomeneo (so named, alas, for the protagonist).
Idomeneo: A Synopsis
If you, dear reader, are as ignorant as I was upon entering the opera, you may appreciate a small diversion to describe the plot. My more opera-literate audience will hopefully tolerate the detour and may, of course, skip past the synopsis whenever they please. Idomeneo, king of Crete, promises Poseidon that he will kill the first person he meets on arriving home from Troy in exchange for sparing his life on a stormy sea. Swell guy, our hero. As fate and requisite mythic drama would have it, Idomeneo’s luckless savior is his own son, Idamante.
Idamante is meanwhile caught in entirely the wrong kind of three way, between Ilia, Trojan daughter of Priam, who is now a refugee, and Electra, a Greek woman with a vengeful demeanor and a truly alarming collection of knives. After much regal equivocation, Idomeneo defies Poseidon, the least chill of the ancient gods, who promptly sends Godzilla to turn Crete into his own personal sandbox. Somewhere along the way, Idomeneo tries to persuade Poseidon that he alone should be punished, apparently forgetting how this whole debacle started.
At this point, I was entirely prepared to watch the tragedy play out before me.
- Father kills son.
- Father kills self.
- Poseidon smushes Crete anyway.
Ahh, but Mozart has an improbably chipper ending waiting in the wings. Instead, Idamante kills Godzilla. He presents himself for sacrifice like a tame goat, but Ilia rushes in to offer her life in exchange for his. Poseidon, uncharacteristically moved by an act of selfless love, decides that killing half of Crete’s population was plenty, and that Idomeneo just needs to abdicate his throne in favor of the son that Poseidon wanted dead fifteen minutes ago. Idomeneo cheerfully agrees, having conclusively proved his own unfitness for leadership many times over. Idamante and Ilia get hitched, and everyone winds up happy except for all the people that Godzilla ate, and Electra, who kills herself after literally everyone on the island forgets that she exists.
The Teatro Real
We watched Idomeneo in the Teatro Real in Madrid. The Teatro Real (or “Royal Theater”) makes no apologies for opera’s aristocratic origins. It isn’t a large theater. Though there are several tiers of balconies (and one massive box for, I assume, the king), I’d imagine it fits maybe half as many people as the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. Still, the whole place is unapologetically lavish. Outside the auditorium, we discovered a full ring of drawing rooms, each with its own color theme that extends from the curtains to the carpets to the upholstery on what I can only assume are called “lounging couches.” Each room had its own artwork, too, from gilded mirrors to chandeliers to actual friggin’ tapestries. I don’t know what a frieze is, but I guarantee you, that theater had buckets of ‘em.
Walking around in my khakis and button-down shirt, I looked like an oversized Gap Kids ad next to the Spanish opera-going public. The Spaniards, ever mindful of decorum, have apparently NOT adopted the “business-casual or bust” garb that says “I’m a casual, cosmopolitan intellectual” to American opera fans, and “I’ve lost my mommy” to even your average Spanish futbol hooligan. I loved every second I spent in that theater. It was gaudy and opulent and overwhelming, and given half a chance I’d go back in a heartbeat.
But I might throw on a suit first.
Production
The migrant crisis in Europe clearly inspired the production design, and that setting proved effective. Allusions to modern politics were delicate, rather than crudely forced. Greek soldiers in fatigues herding Trojan refugees with bundles on their backs was plenty evocative and didn’t require any assistance from the libretto, as is so common here in the States. Ilia’s love story with Idamante did evoke some of the complexity of the crisis: the fear of embracing “the other” and the humanity of those with nothing left.
Sets
The set in this production of Idomeneo was minimalist in construction if not in scale. With the exception of the massive projection screen upstage, the chorus and supernumeraries hauled all the necessary set pieces onstage for each scene. A dining hall with thirty tables was spacious enough for an army of one hundred to celebrate, while a massive mound of life jackets provided a haunting image that conveyed the devastation left in the monster’s wake. I also enjoyed the four massive fire barrels on display during Idamante’s aborted execution. Production designers across America would have groaned with envy to watch an actor cavalierly light six-foot-tall, gas-powered barrel fires with all the care and attention to pyrotechnic safety of Wile E. Coyote.
For most of the opera, the aforementioned projection showed a calm landscape including beach, sea, and horizon. Such projections are becoming ever more prevalent in recent operas. I assume the goal is to modernize and appeal to the youth by putting something blinky behind the performers that we can watch. A poorly-designed projection can be distracting, however. For instance, during several arias the projection became a massive, crashing wave, which seemed a rather heavy-handed metaphor. It also felt overused by the time the wave embodied the third performer’s internal turmoil. Couldn’t someone’s angst take the form of a crumbling mountain? An erupting volcano? An irate Pomeranian? Nevertheless, I found that the beach backdrop set the stage for the rest of the show well. Its simplicity was helpful, grounding, and it successfully communicated a sense of place.
Lighting
Although I found Idomeneo profoundly captivating and loved how the sets and costumes served the concept of the show, the one thing that I absolutely hated about the production was the lighting. I have never been so distracted by a poor production decision in my life. The stage was perpetually lit from one side. I don’t mean to say that the singers were brighter on one side than the other. I mean that when the stage left lights were on, the stage right lights were off, and no lights struck the actors from center stage. Now, in film, or even in a blackbox theater, such lighting can be effective. You’re close enough to see into the shadows and feel the effect of a divided personality. The trouble with an opera is that most of the audience is sitting seventy feet away from the stage. If you only light the actor from one side, you make the other side of his or her face absolutely dark, invisible. We were sitting in the stage right balcony. That meant that any time the lights were striking the actors from stage left, we were literally looking at silhouettes of people, unable to see their faces. Even their costumes became nearly imperceptible in the shadows.
Ultimately, a choice that was clearly intended to convey internal disorientation instead left me wondering whether some nitwit had accidentally tripped a breaker. The lighting was effective in precisely one scene, in the storm that prevents Idamante from leaving Crete and brings the monster to shore. In that scene, the unilateral flashes of light and the chorus’ confused disorder onstage coalesced into an image that beautifully evoked the storm’s chaos. But when each singer stepped forward to perform an aria with one side of their face in complete darkness, all I could think was “turn the damn lights on.”
Performances
Idomeneo: Jeremy Ovenden gave Idomeneo a forceful presence. I found his acting convincing, totally buying Idomeneo’s tortured uncertainty. He sang well, too. Mr. Ovendon’s voice had a graveled quality that felt commanding and solid. It was a voice that simultaneously said “I am king. My word is law” and “I sometimes make promises without considering the consequences.”
Idamante: I would have loved to hear more power out of Anicio Zorzi Giustiniani’s Idamante. The orchestra drowned him out more than once and his voice didn’t have the authority that, say, Idomeneo had. Nevertheless, he was an extremely likable Idamante. He played the sympathetic victor role well, extending an olive branch to the defeated Trojans. The moral compass in any show can come across as self-important or aloof, but I found Mr. Giustiniani’s amicable sincerity moving.
Ilia: Sadly, I also found Anett Fritsch underpowered as Ilia. Her voice was lovely and clear, but there just wasn’t enough of it in several scenes. She acted her role beautifully, though. Ilia is tricky, as she needs to embody a great deal of moral complexity. As Priam’s daughter, the Greeks have just slaughtered her whole family. Yet she finds herself in love with one of the men who sacked her city, and she needs to confide in his father about it. Those are complicated emotional juxtapositions, and Ms. Fritsch embodied them masterfully.
Electra: All the performers’ voices were good, but Hulkar Sabirova’s was of a different caliber, with an unmatched stage presence to boot. Every time she stepped onstage I felt the audience’s collective intake of breath in anticipation. Her voice soared above everything else, pure, bright, and magnificent. Electra’s motivations and ultimate role in the story seem underdeveloped, as if her character were incompletely pasted into the plot. She functions as a nigh-homicidal third wheel to complicate Idamante’s relationship to Ilia, yet she spends very little time onstage with either of them, instead monologuing fiercely to the audience about love or vengeance, very often both. Electra’s role is hardly sympathetic, yet Ms. Sabirova’s performance left me almost melancholy when she killed herself, a development that appeared to stir few hearts on Crete. Applause for Ms. Sabirova at curtain call was orders of magnitude louder than the ovation for any other performer, and deservedly so.
Chorus: The Chorus very much deserves its own mention. In the U.S. I’ve become accustomed to seeing Choruses of ten to twenty: enough people to get the point across, but not so many as to kill the production budget. Idomeneo had fifty chorus members and fifty supernumeraries. It was amazing. Every time they started singing a wave of sound rushed into the audience. I could feel my hair blow in the breeze that their triumphant moments created. Particularly for Mozart, that kind of power was revelatory and provoked a swelling, tightening feeling in my chest every time they sang.
In Sum
All in all, I truly enjoyed Idomeneo. Though the lighting was distracting, the rest of the show was truly top-notch, and the show’s final moment has stuck with me:
Idamante takes over from Idomeneo: the youthful, compassionate, well-adjusted leader replacing his soldierly, war-weary father. In his first act as king, Idamante tells the 100 assembled troops that they are finished with war, and the troops, following his example, lay down their arms.
Goosebumps immediately flooded my body.
The soldiers strip off their fatigues, piece by piece, to reveal their everyday clothes underneath.
I felt my chest constrict.
By the time they faced the audience again, resolutely civilian, my breath was coming in short, shallow bursts, and my eyes looked like leaky sprinklers. Something in that moment spoke to me. The simplicity of the gesture and the scale of the cast provoked that sense of bittersweet joy that art often aspires to and only rarely achieves. Whether it’s solemn celebration or joyful mourning, that emotional gray-zone is intense. It makes you want to laugh and cry and cheer and just extend that moment as long as you can because the combination of emotions fills you far more than a single feeling ever could. It’s the type of catharsis that we seek hungrily and only find when the right time, the right place, and the right mood happen to bump into the right artistic moment to create something truly magical.