Michael Haneke's Cosi "the best in years"

While Michael Haneke is in Los Angeles, waiting to discover how many Oscars Amour will land tomorrow, his new production of Così fan tutte premiered tonight in Madrid.

The director left a note for the audience: "I wish you an evening exciting. If you like the show, cross your fingers for me at the Oscars. If you don't, please do the same".

Haneke's production, which his proud compatriots at Kurier have pronounced "probably the best staging in years" blends period and contermporary references. Speaking earlier in the week the director said  "Trying to reproduce pure historical reality is an illusion. We don't know exactly how opera was at the end of the 18th century. We only have images from the last 70 or 80 years. We have a duty to transpose the work to the present".

One member of the Amour cast won't be joining Haneke on the red carpet in LA. William Shimell, who played the elderly couple's philandering son-in-law in the film, is back on stage singing the part of Don Alfonso at the Teatro Real.

Comments

[SJT]

Oh look, it's the sofa from our Gotterdammerung Gibichung Hall. Co-pro reaches new levels of collaborative economy...

[Siggy]

"We have a duty to transpose the work to the present."

No you don't. The only duty you have is to present an entertaining, thoughtful and perhaps provocative staging - whether that involves setting in the original period, present day or in outer space...doesn't matter as long as it works. Please don't invoke 'duty' as an excuse.

That said the blending of period and contemporary in this production looks interesting.

[Miriam]

Siggy wrote "No you don't" in reply to "We have a duty to transpose the work to the present."

I would have been tempted instead to use just an eight letter word that begins with "b" and ends with "t" ;-)

[Oroveso]

Isn’t all Opera an illusion? Wasn’t it an illusion for Mozart and da Ponte? Real human beings do not go around singing life’s joys and miseries. It’s ALL illusory, and therein lies it’s fascination. I don’t know about Mr. Haneke but I have in my personal library books containing copious pictures of elaborate engravings, lithographs, prints, watercolors, etc, of production designs (sets and costumes) going WAY back (1900s, 1800s, 1700s). Randomly thumbing through pages here’s just one: “Throne room with cloud effects for Gluck’s ALCESTE. Scenery by François Joseph Bélanger for the first Parisian production in 1776. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Opera.” Without a time machine we will never know for certain but one can assuredly discover a great deal about the stage action and acting of opera in past centuries by simply reading. Mr. Haneke has chosen the cheap, easy and lazy way out.

[Andres]

Quite surprised to read some of the comments about one of the very few greatest masters of the cinema of our time and certainly of any time... He may not be a full time opera director, but his DG was pretty decent and this Cosi looks fantastic. He does know his classical music, and I'm most intrigued by the use of Schubert in his latest Amour - given the impressive critical and financial success of this movie, why do you think he needs to invest time, effort and reputation directing opera (this opera) as well? I do wish I could see this in Madrid.

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2012/11/michael-hanekes-amour-and-music-time
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Intermezzo replies - Indeed, particularly as his opera productions have been noted for their naturalism and psychological depth, not for any fancy concepts or directorial trickery. It makes me wonder what some people want - presumably affectless stuffed dolls in crinolines, Zeffirelli-style.

[regkarpf]

"We don't know exactly how opera was at the end of the 18th century. We only have images from the last 70 or 80 years."

What an absurd statement. We might not know how opera - particularly the voices - sounded then, but we certainly know how it looked.
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Intermezzo replies - No, we don't. Così was only given ten times during Mozart's lifetime, and there is barely any evidence of the look of those shows. We don't even know for certain what Mozart himself looked like, given the contradictory evidence of the extant portraits.

A few designs for other operas have survived, as have a few artistic representations, but those don't tell us how the performers behaved on stage, which is the point Haneke is really making. He's a director, not a set designer - his interest and purpose is in eliciting performances from performers. The cited time scale parallels the emergence of motion pictures. What he's saying, effectively, is that you can only understand "exactly" how a show was by observing it in action.

[regkarpf]

But with respect, knowing what Mozart looked like hasn't much to do with it, and Haneke's remarks don't seem to me just to relate to Cosi. However little we know about the performances of Cosi in the composer's lifetime, there is no obvious reason to suppose it was performed in a different style to other operas of the period. And about those we have plenty of visual evidence. We know the theatres, have drawings and paintings of contemporary singers and costumes, and have a pretty good idea of the style of scenery and the lighting. True, we can't know how people moved and acted, just as we can't know how they sounded. We might make intelligent deductions from the poses we see struck in portraits, which incidentally was the approach taken by William Christie's forces a little while back when they attempted an "authentic" producion of Landi's Sant'Alessio (available on DVD). That might, or might not, have produced a correct result, but it is a complete non sequitur to say that because we don't know exactly how a work was done originally, we have a "duty to transpose the work to the present".
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Intermezzo replies - Mozart's looks are simply an example of the incompleteness and probable inaccuracy of visual records - of which we have remarkably few, incidentally. If Christie really had to resort to copying poses from portraits, that illustrates the problem perfectly.

As for the new point you raise, I think the quote I linked to (which was the only English translation of his interview I could find) oversimplifies Haneke's comment. What he actually said was "Wir sind jedes Mal neu verpflichtet, uns mit dem Werk auseinanderzusetzen, zu sehen, was es uns heute zu sagen hat," which means "we have a duty to wrestle with the work anew each time, to see what it has to say to us today" (From http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/interview-mit-michael-haneke-operninszenierung-mozart-ja-wagner-nein-/7817570-2.html - for German speakers). I don't think any director, even the most traditional, would disagree with that. If you really imagine no production of Così is authentic without flats and candlelight, I suspect you're in a very small minority.

[FC]

Inter...please don't edit this, but I really have to give a massive middle finger to the commenter above. The photos look stunning, but it's the direction that makes a Hanake production.

I pray that I can make it to Brussles this Summer!

[Diane]

A pedant speaks ...

You will have a greater chance of making it to Brussels if you learn to spell it correctly!