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Royal Madness and Exotic Desire: Masterworks by Mozart and Handel from Glyndebourne Opera Festival

2017; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/thr.2017.0058

1939-9774

Johanna Keller,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Royal Madness and Exotic Desire:Masterworks by Mozart and Handel from Glyndebourne Opera Festival Johanna Keller (bio) Among the rolling chalk hills of England's South Downs, near the village of Lewes, is the Glyndebourne Manor House, a grand pile with Elizabe than timbers, sparkling bay windows, and ornate stonework. In the 1920s, the music-loving scion John Christie inherited the house and began to host amateur musicales. A decade later, he married opera singer Audrey Mild-may and, after traveling to Bayreuth and Salzburg, the couple determined to start their own summer opera festival, which they did in 1934. They began at the top in terms of talent. They gathered musical luminaries of the time, many of them fleeing the Nazis, including renowned conductor Fritz Busch and Rudolf Bing, who later became the near-legendary head of the Metropolitan Opera. Eighty-some years later, world-class talent is still the centerpiece of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, which has established and preserved its own set of very particular traditions. Performances begin in the afternoon so that the opera cognoscenti can catch the train from London just after lunch. Evening gowns and tuxedos are de riguer. The interval between acts is lengthy so audience members can walk in the splendid gardens and picnic on the lawns—think champagne in straw hampers. Every devoted opera lover should go there at least once. Over the decades there have been updates. In 1968, Glyndebourne established a touring company to take its productions around the UK [End Page 296] The original 300-seat auditorium was expanded several times until a new opera house with a capacity of 1,200 was built and opened in 1994. Long renowned for its Mozart operas and influenced by historical performance practice, the company includes two resident ensembles: the London Philharmonic Orchestra playing on modern instruments and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment using original instruments. Finally, like other major opera companies, Glyndebourne has begun to exploit new media to share its productions more widely by, for example, teaming up with the London Telegraph five years ago to live-stream and blog its seven-hour performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The company has also released many of its performances on video, most recently two productions from the 2015 season, Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Handel's Saul on the Opus Arte label. As can be seen and heard in these releases from last year, Glyndebourne maintains a tradition of brilliantly inventive conceptions. These videos belong on the shelf of any music-lover's library. They are almost diametrically opposite in their directorial conceptions, yet they are important productions bound to become classics. Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) was a break-through for Mozart, marking his first great public success in Vienna. The year was 1781 and he was in his mid-twenties, full of energy and bursting with ambition. He had just left his provincial hometown of Salzburg and was shaking loose from his overbearing patron, the archbishop, as well as escaping the watchful eye of his loving but demanding father, Leopold. With his reputation preceding him, Mozart arrived in the cosmopolitan city of Vienna and soon connected with Johann Gottlieb Stephanie the Younger, director of the newly established Burgtheater. This populist theater was a favorite project of the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II, so the stakes were high. Impressed by Mozart's work, Stephanie proposed to find a suitable libretto and hired him to write the music for a Singspiel, an operatic form with spoken dialogue. In a letter to his sister, Mozart wrote that if the opera were successful, he would be as popular in Vienna as a composer as he was as a clavier player. Things were going well. To top it all off, Mozart was head over heels in love with his landlady's middle daughter, Constanza, whom he would marry just three weeks after the premiere of his new work. The libretto that Stephanie proposed and adapted himself was based on one by Christoph Friedrich Bretzner, which had been set by another composer and performed in Berlin (after the success of...