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     PERFORMANCE REVIEW
   

            “There’s Something Missing Here…” – Milo Rau, Opera, and the Search
            for the Real (Mozart)
        

Review of La clemenza di Tito, music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
    libretto by Caterino Mazzolà. Orchestre de la Suisse Romande conducted by
    Maxim Emelyanychev. Stage direction by Milo Rau. Live streaming on February
    19, 2021, GTG Digital.

        Creative team: Anton Lukas, set designer; Ottavia Castellotti, costume
    designer; Jürgen Kolb, light designer; Moritz von Dungern, videos; Clara
    Pons, dramaturg; Alan Woodbridge, choir director.

        Cast: Bernard Richter, Tito; Serena Farnocchia, Vitellia; Anna Goryachova,
    Sesto; Cecilia Molinari, Annio; Marie Lys, Servilia; Justin Hopkins,
    Publio.

        

    Carlo Lanfossi
    


    Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 2, Issue 1 (Spring 2022), pp. 171–182, ISSN 2784-8949. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. © 2022 Carlo Lanfossi. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss18446.




    There’s no such thing as real opera. Not that there is no ideal or
    genuine experience of opera. Or even that opera is not “real”: of course it
    is, otherwise there would be no explanation for its stubborn persistence,
    against all financial odds, on the stages of every major opera house in the
    Western realm. Opera is very real for those who pay for it and for those
    who get paid for it. Mozart, for instance, called the new version of the
    libretto for La clemenza di Tito, which he set to music, a “vera
    opera”. Not because it was (the) original: on the contrary, he thought it
    was “real” precisely because it was a heavily revised text which he
    believed would suit better his musico-dramaturgical taste. For Mozart,
    opera was real when it let go of its own past. So, when the digital curtain
    opened for the new production of La clemenza di Tito at the Grand
    Théâtre de Genève and there was no music, no singing, only a few people
    dressed as artists/performers claiming, in spoken Italian, that “there’s
    something missing here…” (“qui manca qualcosa…”), I was not surprised.


        


    Fig. 1. Serena Farnocchia/Vitellia and Bernard Richter/Tito at the
    beginning of the show. Still frame from the streamed performance on GTG
    Digital (February 19, 2021).



    For many reviewers of this new staging by Milo Rau, however, that was just
    the beginning of a series of traumatic lacks. There appeared to be
definitely something missing from this production of Mozart’s    Clemenza: Mozart himself. Caught off-guard by the unexplainable
    absence of a composer who has been dead for more than two centuries,
    critics have blamed Swiss-born, Belgian-based, Opera-virgin Milo Rau for a
    variety of sins:



The Swiss theater artist ventured into Mozart’s    La clemenza di Tito in Geneva and imposed on the opera whatever
    was in his head. Mozart is forgotten in the process.
    
        [1]
    




    With the approval of the young conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, Rau has
    drastically cut down Mozart’s work: … a good part of the arias and a large
    part of the recitatives were replaced by spoken or on-screen biographical
    accounts.
    
        [2]
    




    We also came hoping to see Mozart’s opera, and we really only get a side
    view of that. This Tito—Mozart’s one—is swamped in Rau’s agitprop
    theatre: actually, you feel that maybe any text would have done for his
    purposes. … Of course, [Rau’s interpretation] is true. It’s just
    that, as Mozart might have said, it’s not necessarily the slightly less
    teen-activist point [Rau] was trying to make.
    
        [3]
    




    But opera and classical music are also much more, something which Milo Rau
    has no feeling for, and perhaps he doesn't even want to.
    
        [4]
    



    If we unpack the issues listed in this selection of digitally available
    reviews, the director is blamed for: cutting a good part of the opera’s
    recitatives (true, even though they were not even written by Mozart);
    
        [5]
    
    cutting too many musical numbers (in truth, not a single musical number was
cut, only a few da capo and small sections of the    accompagnati, while the finale was featured twice and a bonus
    Fantasia in C minor K.475 was performed by the conductor at the beginning
    of Act 2, which amounts to the same or even more music than any other
    recent production of Clemenza);
    
        [6]
    
    having extensively reworked the different sections of the Metastasian
    libretto (spoiler alert: Metastasio was already dead by almost a decade
when Mazzolà radically transformed the old 1734 libretto into a “    vera opera”, as Mozart himself noted);
    
        [7]
    
    finally, having no predilection toward opera and classical music (there is
    no mention of the director’s feelings towards theater, which—last time I
    checked—the operatic genre belongs to).



    I believe this last issue to be not only at the very core of Milo Rau’s
    staging of his first opera, but also one that has serious implications for
    the survival of the genre as such. For the common association of opera to
    classical music is the product of a category mistake. “Opera” is a genre of
    live theater inscribed through notation for future performances in which
    music plays a predominant (but not exclusive) dramaturgical role.
    “Classical music” is a discoursive formation referring to a variety of
    social practices and cultural ideologies which is not limited to a specific
    musical genre, and whose body of works, its canon of representative
    exemplars, is constantly re-negotiated and in flux. Thus, the problem is
    not whether Milo Rau cares or not about opera or “classical music”
    (whatever that is). The problem is that we care too much, to the point that
    we (European lovers of music from the past) are doing more damage than
    good.



    There is no opera, as long as we keep thinking about it as a relic to be
    preserved intact in a museum of historical musical artifacts, and we find
    unconceivable to adjust its content to say something about us, today, and
    to entertain the generations to come. Which is what prose theater has
    always done and will: I don’t see anyone pointing to the critical edition
    of Hamlet when it is staged in modern English with entire scenes
    and characters cut. For some reason, the same cannot be done with operas.
    The reasons put forward are many (historical relevancy, financial enormity,
    cultural distance, linguistic struggles, and so on). Yet none of them
really explains such stubborn refusal to allow stage directors to use (yes,    use) a theatrical genre such as opera to interpret the
    world we live in (task, I must add, for which not much time is left given
    the current climate circumstances). Such an obsession to keep opera free
    from what is presumed as “external” interference (stage directors coming
    from prose theater, dramaturgs coming from academia, artists coming from
    other musical cultures) is exactly that: an obsession, and as such it is in
    desperate need of analysis and consequently also a therapy.



    Rau’s staging of La clemenza di Tito makes brilliant use of the
    recent technological innovations of the Grand Théâtre de Genève’s main
    stage, in particular the rotating system allowing a double-faced set to
    display two different planes of representation. The opening side is set as
    an art museum during a trendy vernissage (Rau himself explains that it
    should resemble the Haus der Kunst in Munich),
    
        [8]
    
    while the other side of the stage represents a dilapidated trailer park
    inhabited by marginalized communities struggling to survive after some
    post-apocalyptic disaster. Dressed à la Joseph Beuys (Tito),
    Marina Abramović (Vitellia), and Neo Rauch (Sesto), the protagonists of the
    play act as a posh-lib collective of artists whose leader, Tito, is on a
    political mission to help the people from the Other (side of the stage) by
    showing their desperate conditions with the aid of media coverage,
    philanthropy for the cameras, selfies complete with depictions of their
    misery, and artistic renditions of their everyday struggles, including
    dissent and a failed attempt at revolution.






    Fig. 2. Bernard Richter/Tito and Anna Goryachova/Sesto arranging a photocall while visiting the “Other” side of the stage (act I, scene 4).
    Still frame from the streamed performance on GTG Digital (February 19,
    2021).



    In keeping with his previous works, and as a partial adaptation of the
    requests from his Ghent Manifesto,
    
        [9]
    
    Rau plays with the post-dramatic tradition of contemporary theater by
    providing the audience — through titles, surtitles and video projections —
    with details regarding the staging itself: from the biographical background
    of the company and the local actors/extras to the interpretation of the
    opera’s late eighteenth-century historical context, and from the actor’s
    comments on how they feel as they re-enact traumatic gestures to the
    juxtaposition of different signifiers with similar signifieds (e.g., arias
    performed while screened interviews explore similar topics to those
    explored in the musical number). This relentless shifting of the dramatic
    planes, in which signified and signifier are constantly renegotiated and
    remediated (and whose point de capiton, to use a Lacanian term,
    never seems to materialize), can certainly be tiring for a production which
    was intended for a streamed digital event. On experiencing it in front of a
    screen, the feeling sometimes is that of an overwhelming proliferation of
    dramaturgical angles and medial frames, leading to a potential confusion
    over what is going on. I suspect, though, that this is mostly a projection
    coming from those who have previous knowledge of the opera and who,
    inevitably, are drawn to disentangle every moment of the show and its many
    layers. This hermeneutical tour de force would likely be more easily dealt
    with by coming to it free of preconceptions and expectations informed by
    tradition.









    Figg. 3 and 4. At the beginning of act II, the actor Gor Sultanyan,
    interpreting the leader of Tito’s militia, introduces himself and his son
    as descendants of a survivor from the 1915 Armenian Genocide. When he had
    to “kill” his son at the end of act I (at this point, he stops in a moment
    of commotion), he says he just did it, like he would have done any other
    scene. The son crosses the stage and Gor holds out a hand to reach him, but
    the kid falls dead on the floor. Mozart’s Fantasia in C minor K.475 stops,
    Gor comes back to the mic, and says: “This for me was the moment I
    understood my son’s talent.” He then proceeds with the hanging of the
    rebels, and the “opera” is restored. Still frame from the streamed
    performance on GTG Digital (February 19, 2021).



It cannot be denied that, at times, Mazzolà’s and Mozart’s    Clemenza seems to stand in the way of Rau’s project. But as should
    be clear by now, this is precisely the point: for a modern staging to
    interpret what it believes to be a relevant aspect of the play, worthy of
    modern reflection and critique, the historical frictions and the
    genealogical dispersions are unavoidable and even necessary. Such
    dramaturgical juxtaposition of apparently discordant narratives, a
    trademark of Rau’s directorial style, is far from gratuitous. While on a
    superficial level it makes theater a political act, a representation of
    societal struggles which—even after centuries—are still at play, it also
    allows Rau to subject himself to a self-critique. The topic of human
    exploitation through artistic sublimation is obviously at stake when
    presenting your political views from the privileged stage of one of the
    most glamorous opera houses in one of the richest countries of the world:
“Obviously, this is self-criticism,” explains Rau in the official    Making of video for the production, “so I asked myself, in the
    bourgeois system of the economy of feelings, and the real economy, is there
    a place for criticism? Or is criticism itself just the capitalization of
    what is criticized?”
    
        [10]
    
    On a more subtle level, the simultaneous presentation of the stories’
    inherent tensions—the constant feedback through which the present
    elaborates the past, après-coup—is what opera is (or at least
    should be): a visualization of the impossibility of the Real (there is no
    real history, no real life, no real language on an operatic stage), a vocal
    performance of the indivisible remainder, a sonic rendering of the fourth
    wall.






    Fig. 5. Anna Goryachova/Sesto (act II, scene 10). Still frame from the
    streamed performance on GTG Digital (February 19, 2021).



    To be accurate, moreover, this is not Milo Rau’s first encounter with
    opera. I can still feel in my body the emotional exhaustion and commotion I
felt after attending his 2018 masterpiece    La reprise. Histoire(s) du théâtre (I). At the end of this play—a
    re-enactment of the April 2012 events and discourses surrounding the murder
    of Ihsane Jarfi, Muslim and gay, in Liege, but also a reflection on the
    role of re-enactment and theater in representing history and society—the
    actor impersonating the protagonist takes the stage alone to deliver Henry
    Purcell’s so-called “Cold Song” from King Arthur (“What Power Art
    Thou?”). Performed over an electro-synth arrangement of the aria taken from
    the 1981 version by another tragic gay figure, Klaus Nomi, the actor’s
    voice—with all its frailty and the almost unbearable weight of the several
    histories chained to those words and notes—delivered what I believe was an
    instance of opera of the Real, of the devastating impossibility for
    audiences to experience the same jouissance as the interpreter,
    and for the interpreter to experience the same jouissance as the
    interpreted. Behind such a powerful embodiment of quintessential
    theatricality, there is a deep understanding of the theoretical
    implications of modern re-enactment and genre adaptation for contemporary
    society. In this, Milo Rau is not alone. Directors coming from very
    different backgrounds such as Barry Kosky and Romeo Castellucci (not to
    mention Peter Brook), or companies such as the Wooster Group and Third
    World Bunfight, have all brilliantly demonstrated how “operatic” a show can
    be when deconstruction is explored to bring to the fore (rather
    than destroy) the core of a play. And Rau is someone who takes very
    seriously not only theater and politics, but critical theory, too, the very
same one that helped me disentangle (and ultimately enjoy) his staging of    La clemenza di Tito. Formed as a sociologist under the guidance of
    scholars such as Todorov and Bourdieu, the director has always been vocal
    and self-conscious about the mechanisms governing his approach to theater
    and the politics of realism (a particularly cogent one in the case of
    opera):



    realism as an aesthetic method is a deficiency: namely, to accept you don’t
    know how to do it, but you have to keep trying no matter what. … Realism is
    indeed something completely artificial, but also completely artistic.
    Realism does not mean something real will be represented, but that the
    representation is itself real. —That a situation arises that carries all
    the consequences of the real for those involved, which is morally,
    politically and existentially open.
    
        [11]
    



    The tension between representation and the represented is explored by Rau
    with an explicit reference to psychoanalysis:



    Ultimately, what happens here [in theater] is the famous psychoanalytical
    phrase “Je sais bien, mais quand même…,” or “I know, but still...”. Thus,
    the main characteristic of human understanding is: “That everything is only
    an image, a play, and I am only an onlooker. But nevertheless…” … This
    “nevertheless” is, of course, the irrevocable, the So-Sein—the
    essence—of the REAL (in the Lacanian sense): these figures … fall out of
    the general symbolic agreement.
    
        [12]
    




    We were, of course, extremely relieved when the Rwandan spectators [of
    Rau’s play Hate Radio, a reconstruction of a Rwandan radio
    broadcast, based on historical events] said, “It was exactly like that!” –
    although we didn’t completely understand what they meant because it wasn’t
    “exactly like that.”
    
        [13]
    



    Such a dramaturgical translation of the Freudian “fetishist disavowal”
    applies even more aptly to the operatic realm, as already noted by Slavoj
    Žižek in relation to Wagnerian metaphysics and psychoses.
    
        [14]
    
Interviewed by Clara Pons, the dramaturg for his staging of    Clemenza, Rau displayed an uncommonly deep understanding of
    opera’s peculiar dramaturgy:



    MR
    : What struck me when I first saw [La clemenza di Tito] was that everything that is mentioned in it, everything that is talked
    about, none of it is in any way visible. There is talk of betrayals,
    disasters, putsch, and all these things are not in the opera at all. …
    [In opera] being political means being explicit. To make implicit things
    explicit, to make the invisible visible. …




    I chose to represent the elite (i.e., the main characters of the opera) as
    artists. They are not only locked together in their own bubble, but they
    also literally feed on the misfortune of others to create an art out of
which they can make a living. This staging is therefore a    mise en abyme of this process, a meta-fraud! I would even say an
    auto-meta-fraud because I include myself in this process.




    CP
    : How do you translate this into staging?




    MR
    : We must make what happens on stage real and concrete. One of the
    characters has to kill his son; another is stripped and his heart exposed,
    while an artist captures the image of the hanged men in a painting à la Neo
    Rauch. … It is the dream of a bourgeoisie in an enlightened politics, the
    elitist dream of a post-political utopia. It is a dream from which we are
    slowly waking up, a dream that we are currently finishing dreaming. …




    CP
    : So, there is no way out of this paradox for you?




    MR
    : At least not at the Grand Théâtre de Genève or the Wiener Festwochen.
    Institutions are built on this paradox, including opera. There is obviously
    the very positive aspect of the sign of equality that is placed between the
    value of individuals and the beauty of art. But for me, as a newcomer to
    opera, this institution implies a negative work, in the Adornoian
    sense—i.e., that it represents the opposite of a utopia. …




    Because of the very structure of opera, I have no elements to work with: I
    don’t have the rhythm, the text, the music, to fight against this
    “negativity”. I am the servant of the structure as it is, and I can only
    use this structure by showing something that is already in it, perhaps by
    showing what is false in it. But I cannot tell any other story than the one
    that the structure carries. This is what is “negative” in the process. Even
    if I deconstructed, I could not bring another truth. So, I try to
    understand what I have to tell. This music is over 200 years old. You can’t
    transpose it or update it. … The choice of staging therefore thematizes the
    lie, the discrepancy between the discourse and the facts, in which we are
    fully involved.
    
        [15]
    



    A product of negative dialectics and an act of therapeutical resistance,
    the 2021 production of La clemenza di Tito brings about much more
    than just a fresh take on eighteenth-century opera or the role of cultural
    politics and art in a postmodern (post-critical?) world. Milo Rau’s
    Mozartian opera(tion) is a deliberate exposure of the gaps and lacks
    inherent to the genre’s production system, a re-enactment of its own
    constitutive deadlock. The 1791 Clemenza, as one was constantly
    reminded of throughout the Geneva production, came to light as an
    Enlightened musical drama celebrating the ruler’s clemency at a time when a
    post-Enlightened society was ready to behead their own masters. It was an
    outdated musical project in the first place, and Mozart’s music underlined
such discrepancy with its beautiful, passé style. The 1791    Clemenza was “meta” long before Milo Rau’s: Mozart and Mazzolà
showed their own nervous, aristocratic patrons the end of the    opera seria culture. Their Clemenza was a radical look
    back to the origins of opera and to the intellectual genealogy of
    Absolutism, which marked the genre’s slow but inevitable shift from the
    stage of aristocratic theatre to the bourgeois museum of canonical works.
    
        [16]
    
Given the deadliness of opera’s historical trajectory, Rau’s staging of    Clemenza as a museum of realist art translates in Lacanian terms
    as an imaginary mausoleum of Real works, where the impossibility of the
    Real is an almost ironic representation of art that has not been symbolized
    yet, of opera before its discoursification—a dramaturgy that is still able
    to evade the “stage to page” paradigm. The explicit political urgency of
    any of Rau’s staging is not only directed at questioning the artistic
    exploitation of everyday traumas by cultural institutions and discourses,
    but it also functions as a generational call to free opera from its own
    historical impasse, to defend it against its devotees.





        



    Figg. 6 and 7. Final scene. Still frame from the streamed performance on
    GTG Digital (February 19, 2021).



    

    

    
        
            
                [1]
            
“Der Schweizer Theaterkünstler hat sich in Genf an Mozarts            La clemenza di Tito gewagt und der Oper aufgesetzt, was in
            seinem Kopf schwirrte. Mozart geht dabei vergessen.” Christian
Berzins, “Milo Raus erste Opernregie: Ein Abend zum Vergessen,”            Tagblatt, February 21, 2021.
        

    

    
        
            
                [2]
            
            “Mit Zustimmung des jungen Dirigenten Maxim Emelyanychev hat Rau
            Mozarts Werk drastisch zusammengestrichen: … ein Gutteil der Arien
            und ein Großteil der Rezitative waren ersetzt durch gesprochene
            oder auf dem Bildschirm eingeblendete biographische Erzählungen.”
            Peter Wolf-Dieter, “Anklage mit Mozart – „La Clemenza di Tito“ als            politische Attacke an der Oper Genf,” nmz online, February
            21, 2021.
        

    

    
        
            
                [3]
            
            Robert Thicknesse, “Moving Beyond the Text—‘La clemenza di Tito,’            Geneva,” The Critic, March 17, 2021.
        

    

    
        
            
                [4]
            
            “Oper und Klassik aber sind auch noch etwas anderes, für das Milo
            Rau kein Gespür hat, vielleicht will er es auch nicht (wahr)haben.”
            Reinhard J. Brembeck, “Kunstgeschwätz zwecks Machterhalt—Milo Raus            Operndebüt als Stream,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 21,
            2021.
        

    

    
        
            
                [5]
            
            Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, La clemenza di Tito, critical
edition by Franz Giegling, Neue Mozart Ausgabe, series II, Works for the Stage, work group 5,
            vol. 20, Foreword, x.
        

    

    
        
            
                [6]
            
            For a complete list of the musical numbers performed during the
2021 production, see            La Clémence de Titus: Opéra de Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
            program notes, February 19, 2021, Grand Théâtre de Genève, 22–23. The online streaming of the show (excluding the
            intermission) lasted ca. 2 hours and 25 minutes. René Jacobs’s 2006
            recording—“nothing short of revolutionary [… as] it rehabilitate[s]
            the original score in its entirety”, claims the back cover—clocks
            in at 2 hours and 15 minutes (HMC 901923.24).
        

    

    
        
            
                [7]
            
            See Ruth Tatlow and Magnus Tessing Schneider, “‘La clemenza di
Tito:’ Chronology and Documents,” in            Mozart’s “La clemenza di Tito:” A Reappraisal, ed. Magnus
            Tessing Schneider and Ruth Tatlow, 1–32 (Stockholm: Stockholm
            University Press, 2018): 13.
        

    

    
        
            
                [8]
            
            La Clémence de Titus
            , program notes, 39.
        

    

    
        
            
                [9]
            
            https://www.ntgent.be/en/about/manifest.
        

    

    
        
            
                [10]
            
            “Évidemment, c’est une autocritique. Je me suis demandé est-ce que
            dans le système bourgeois de l'économie des sentiments, est-ce
            qu’il y a là-dedans… et de l’économie réelle, y-a-t-il une place de
            la critique ? Ou la critique elle-même est juste la capitalisation
            de ce qui est critiqué pour vendre cela après ?” Grand Théâtre de
            Genève, “La Clémence de Titus – Making of,” official video with
            interviews and backstage footage, uploaded February 18, 2021,
            00:09:00–00:09:17.
        

    

    
        
            
                [11]
            
            Milo Rau, Globaler Realismus/Global Realism, trans. Lily
            Climenhaga (Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2018), 176–77.
        

    

    
        
            
                [12]
            
            Rau, 172–73.
        

    

    
        
            
                [13]
            
            Rau, 158–59.
        

    

    
        
            
                [14]
            
            Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek, Opera’s Second Death (New
            York: Routledge, 2002), 114–17.
        

    

    
        
            
                [15]
            
            La Clémence de Titus
            , program notes, 39–41.
        

    

    
        
            
                [16]
            
            The obvious reference is to Lydia Goehr,
            
                The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the
                Philosophy of Music
            
            (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992; rev. ed. 2007).
        

    

    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    




                

                

            

                

            

          
          
        
        
        
