A Review-Response to Milo Rau’s first opera by someone who knows nothing about opera
First things first….
Kara Chamberlain is a Canadian born England-based actor, producer, playwright, director, and musician. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Drama (honors) from the University of Alberta and a Master of Arts in Acting from Bristol’s Old Vic Theatre School. She is the co-founder of the London production company Crossline Theatre. Kara is currently writing a one-woman show about life with an anxiety disorder (“Headcase“). You can find more information about Crossline Theatre’s past, present, and forthcoming productions at www.crosslinetheatre.com and follow Kara on Instagram (@kara_chamb or @crosslinetheatre).
Second Things Second…
An Opera of the World, or Birdsongs: Milo Rau’s La clemenza di Tito
La clemenza di Tito, The Clemency of Titus, Mozart’s final opera, premiered on September 6, 1791 in Prague. The opera, which was written just two years after the beginning of the French Revolution (and which was still very much in progress) and eight years after the end of the American Revolution, was commissioned to celebrate the coronation of Leopold II (the Holy Roman Emperor) as the King of Bohemia and dissuade his subjects from revolution.
On February 19, 2021, Milo Rau and his team – in their first attempt staging an opera – premiered La clemenza di Tito at Geneva’s Grand Théâtre.
At first glance, La clemenza di Tito is an odd choice for a Milo Rau production, because itis a notably anti-revolutionary opera. It hinges on the myth of a good ruler, celebrating the wise and merciful Roman Emperor, Titus, as he works to overcome the political turmoil spurred on by Vitellia, the daughter of the deposed Emperor Vitellio, who, using Titus’s lovestruck young friend Sesto (or Sexus according to the production’s surtitles), plots to assassinate Titus and usurp the throne. The production explicitly tells us (using Rau’s favourite device of projected text above the stage) that this operamarked the birth of bourgeois art. The terms bourgeois art and committed art are defined by Rau and his dramaturgical team as an artform that allies the middle-/bourgeois class with the political and social elites, using the suffering and ideals of the lower class as creative fodder for their creations. In this art, the artistically idealized “lower classes” (a term that is in constant shift, particularly within theatre) are not invited or even able (financially or otherwise) to view for themselves. Rau interprets La clemenza as the start of post-political art, which is not quite accurate as even the projected text acknowledges that this early bourgeois art and all the bourgeois art that followed (to which Rau, the IIPM, and NTGent’s productions certainly belong) is acutely political. It marks how one group of the oppressed allies itself with its oppressors rather than revolting against them to become the oppressors of those more oppressed than themselves.
In the video shown during the intermission, Rau actually directly discusses the concept of the good dictatorship of art as well as the impossibility of political artist to portray suffering without then profiting from it – an issue present within Rau’s work.
Rau’s La clemenza begins with the opera’s final scene, the titular moment of Titus’s clemency (“May Rome know that I remain unchanged…”). Following this short scene, the production immediately returns to the true beginning of the opera to illustrate the journey to this moment of clemency and re-analyse the concept of perceived mercy from the ruling class. Anton Lukas’s beautiful set – which certainly doesn’t fit the constraints of the eighth rule of Rau’s “Ghent Manifesto”: “The total volume of the stage set must not exceed 20 cubic metres, i.e., it must be able to be contained in a van that can be driven with a normal drivers licence” – illustrates the ever-growing divide between the 1% and the other 99%. On one side of the revolving stage (the most beloved of German theatre mechanisms) is an art museum with ivory white walls that was initially covered with recreations of famous historic political paintings/images in the first scene of the production, pictures that we later learn are recreated on the stage and photographed throughout the performance. In the opening scene of La clemenza’s (i.e., the opera’s conclusion), this museum is filled, but when we return to the opera’s true beginning it is emptied and steadily refilled with the recreated images as we move back towards Titus’s clemency.
On the other side of the stage sits a massive homeless camp occupied by the population of Rome. It is overflowing with dirty tents, littered with garbage, and a giant (somewhat on the nose) white banner (which also doubling as a screen for that classic Rau projection) hangs over the stage with the words “Kunst ist Macht” [“Art is Power”] printed across it. As the artist-emperor Titus – portrayed by Swiss tenor Bernard Richter – moves about the encampment accompanied by his entourage of bodyguards and police while gesturing for the onstage cameraman (another classic Rau-ism) to follow him and witness/document his kindness and compassion but not his entourage’s brutality. However, those living in the camp serve only as objects for Titus’s art and as objects for the other named characters who mold them into their recreations of classic paintings. While the Roman populace is the central object of the art created by Titus and other elites like Vitellia and Servilia they are never made subjects and never truly succeed in elevating themselves to the position of subject. Even the “revolution” of the opera is simply the result of a petty power struggle among the elites, who are ultimately uninterested in changing the situation of the populace. They are only interested in elevating their own position.
The statement that “Art is power” is proven to be a fallacy, because art is really only power for the person who has the means and position to produce art for grand museums (like the one of the other side of the revolving stage) and massive theatres (like Grand Théâtre de Geneva). As we move through the opera, it is not Titus’s “clemency” that is revealed or even what Rau refers to as a Titus’s hypocrisy. What is revealed is Titus’s carelessness. It is not that he is a hypocrite in his perceived wisdom, compassion, and clemency, but he simply does not care about those people he paints, photographs, or directs outside of the capacity that their suffering benefits him. He does not care that they continue to suffer, it is in fact better for him if they do, because if they were to actually benefit from his art than he would lose his subject matter. He only really cares about helping those within his perceived ilk. Even the “revolutionaries” – Sesto and Vitellia – are only interested in seizing power for themselves and not in the situation of those people in camp where they plot their revolution.
The Roman populace in Rau’s La clemenza is made up of eighteen Genevans (lay-actors, as per rule seven of “The Ghent Manifesto”) while the six named (i.e., singing) characters in the original opera – Titus, Vitellia, Sesto, Annio, Servilia, and Publio – are played by an international cast of professional opera singers. Rau’s La clemenza is just as much a story of the city of Geneva – home to numerous international organizations such as the Red Cross, World Trade Organization, and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees – and exploring what the city of Geneva and its populace looks like in 2021.
Rau’s theatre is always about the human element of the production. When Rau employs a classic text in a production, he is really asking “What does this classic text say about this specific place and this specific conflict in this specific present?” So, just as the opening of the opera was rewritten to tell us about the lives and experiences of the six professional opera singers, the ending of the opera is rewritten for those eighteen extras. It tells us who they are and how they ended up in Switzerland and (by proxy) in this production.
In the conclusion of La clemenza, Rau returns to one of the many famous paintings shown – without any pomp or pageantry – in the opera’s opening (a painting also mentioned in Rau’s Everywoman): Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (c. 1560).
In the first set of introductions at the opera’s opening (the introduction of the named characters) Bernard Richter’s introductory surtitles state: “For Bernard, we could write a play with the story of every human being.” This point is then reintroduced in the closing section, “Lament of the Ordinary Man,” using the concept of Bruegel’s painting. The conclusion tells the story of a city through its ordinary citizenry, not through those who built the theatre but through those who laid down the red theatre’s red carpet. “The Fall of Icarus” is a fascinating painting, because amidst the daily life portrayed in the landscape – a man plowing his field, a shepherd herding his sheep, a ship sailing, and the assorted nature scape of trees, rocks, hills, distant mountains, and the sea – is the figure of the fallen Icarus, whose leg one only notices disappearing into the sea upon close inspection. Icarus, the painting’s titular subject-matter is largely camouflaged by the overwhelming normalcy of the larger image.
The painting tells a story of a day that is – with one exception – normal. Bruegel the Elder does not create a hierarchy of events within the painting, but instead places the fall of Icarus alongside the farmer, the shepherd, the fisher, the ship, and the landscape. There is no visible internal dramaturgy within the painting to push Icarus and his fall to the fore. It is simply and unspectacularly a part of the larger landscape. In the finale moment of the performance, Vitellia (Serena Farnocchia) tells us that in her opinion (which really means Rau’s opinion) the best way to write the story of the world is just as Bruegel did in his painting: “An off-centre image, without dramaturgy [and] without staging.” Yet it should be pointed out there is a dramaturgy to Rau’s staging of the world, the (in comparison, celebrity) opera singers are introduced at the opening of Act One and the Roman/Genevan populace are introduced at the close of Act Two (although, to be fair, Act One opens with a monologue from Dominique, an extra and part of the populace, just as Act Two opens with a monologue from Gor, another Genevan).
This final Act, particularly the “Lament of the Ordinary Man,” was (for me) the triumph of the production: what I love in Rau’s work is the focus on the ordinary over the mythic heroic and how through personal narrative finds the heroic in the private and personal. Yet I struggle with the idea of using opera – which is the most bourgeois, elitist, and closed of the bourgeois arts, marked by the excessive pageantry of black tie performances, hyper expensive tickets, and the considerable time commitment that excludes a great deal of people from performances – as a way to respond to the inherent and near inescapable failure of political act and theatre. Those watching the opera are part of the system being critiqued, and those creating and staging the opera are not only a part of the system but also benefit directly from the unevenness of this system.
Rau is actually refreshingly self-reflexive about this particular aspect in La clemenza. The production closes with a direct statement about this problem and the need for change within larger artistic institutions. La clemenza concludes with a statement that stayed with me through both viewings:
“Perhaps we are the last remnants of a bygone era. Our conflicts: unending errors. Our history: a museum of failure. Our sensitivity: a dramatisation of nature. Soon, lava will flow where our houses stand. Forests will cover everything. Birdsong will echo amidst the ruins of our cities. I wonder who will tell our story. And to whom?”
That said, as is almost always the case in theatre and art, there are certainly problematic images present within the production that should have been looked at more closely. However, there are also a number of images that are quite simply outside my field of knowledge and watching the production, I was at times unsure if I was just missing the reference for the image. I will say that one should always be careful when having two Congolese immigrants cut out the heart of the self-proclaimed “last real Genevan,” as there may be some unintended implications and undertones (but again, I might be missing a key cultural reference for this moment).
I’m also not sure if an opera is the best vehicle for political theatre, because of the necessity to maintain a level of fidelity to the original text. People are paying to see and listen to an opera and, as the director, one must stage an opera. I felt I understood the 20% rule of “Ghent Manifesto” because more than 20% of the opera was used (Rule Four: “The literal adaptation of classics on stage is forbidden. If a source text – whether book, film or play – is used at the outset of the project, it may only represent up to 20 percent of the final performance time”). I missed the usual power of deconstructing the text in a purposeful and political way, and I missed how this deconstruction allows for the intersection of public/political with private/personal. Yet, the reverse of this critique was also probably true for a number of people who are ardent opera fans: that there was too much Milo Rau in this opera and not enough Mozart.
I also have to say that I don’t know opera. La clemenza is maybe the fourth opera I have ever seen in my life and I don’t feel confident responding to it on the same critical level as regular theatre productions or political actions, because theatre and opera have inherently different dramaturgies. I don’t feel confident in assessing if La clemenza is good nor bad, nor do I think that is a particularly helpful qualifier for the production.
What I can say is that La clemenza employs a best-of of Rau and the IIPM’s bag of tricks: a rotating stage, graphic onstage violence that employs explicitly theatrical technics such as stage blood, someone peeing onstage, the same font as always on placards, live streamed film, a camera man on the stage throughout the production, the seamless switching between live streamed video to pre-filmed video, actors stepping in and out of character to introduce themselves as private persons, professional and lay actors performing side by side, various states of undress, showing the mechanics of the theatre during the perfomrance, closeups of the actors’ faces projected above the stage, surtitles to incorporate the multilinguality, and (of course) fog machines. Rau normally works within 100 minutes for his productions and La clemenza nearly twice that at 2.5 hours in length (plus a thirty minute intermission), so perhaps the temptation to indulge in every Rau-ism proved too much, or perhaps there is a running gag in the inter-production dramaturgy of IIPM and NTGent productions.
There were moments in this opera that made me flinch, moments I hated, moments I didn’t understand, moments I could have watched again and again (and in some cases did), and moments that made me laugh out loud because they were just struck me as deeply funny.
But where, at the end of three hours, does La clemenza actually land? Does it really succeed in providing a clear critique of political art? In truth it was only upon second viewing that I found this critique, however, this could easily have come from the discombobulation that accompanies the digital format in combination with the language, surtitles, cinematography, and the excesses of opera. Is the strangeness of the piece a by-product of the strangeness of the covid-safe staging that forced the performance to happen without an audience and that forced the opera chorus to spread in the space the audience would normally occupy?
I don’t have a proper response (nor the space to really discuss them here) to these questions and larger issues. I adore the final message of the performance and its poetic response to the potentiality for a radical change to take place within the artistic and theatrical institutions at this moment.
But even at the end of this long reflection, I’m still not sure if I even like opera.
Cast:
Titus: Bernard Richter
Vitellia: Serena Farnocchia
Sesto: Anna Goryachova
Servilia: Marie Lys
Annio: Cecilia Molinari
Publio: Justin Hopkins
Production team:
Musical direction: Maxim Emelyanchev
Direction: Miso Rau
Stage design: Anton Lukas
Costume: Ottavia Castellotti
Lighting: Jürgen Kolb
Videography: Moritz von Dungern
Dramaturgy: Clara Pons
Choreography: Alan Woodbridge
Lost Dramaturgin International 