So let’s talk about Donizetti’s Viva la Mamma. It is a very curious item in the repertoire, one I had never thought I would actually see in the theatre until this evening. Considering its pocket size and its apparent unpretentiousness, it is curious how it received so much attention from the composer throughout his life. The opera was first performed in Naples (apparently in Neapolitan dialect) in 1821 with the title “Le Convenienze Teatrali”. Ten years later it was performed, in a new version, in Milan (in Italian) and then in its “final” version 6 months later back in Naples. The inverted commas are explained by the fact that Donizetti would later try to make a fourth version, but poor health prevented him from completing it. Its claim to fame actually is the fact that the role of Mamm’Agata is sung en travesti by a baritone.
I had seen the opera only once on video, in a performance from Madrid. Although it was a first-rate affair in a production by Laurent Pelly, I confess I struggled a bit with it. First, it is a comedy with two jokes – singers (and their families) being difficult and some members of the cast pretending that they can’t sing, and producing lots of weird noises and off-pitch effects. Second, the mother in drag is something – and I am not trying to be politically correct here – that makes it seem that there is something unfeminine with a woman who is not trying to please anyone. In that video, Carlos Álvarez never exaggerates nor indulges in caricature, yet there is this unpleasant aftertaste in the whole thing. There are large chunks or recitative (at least in the edition adopted in the Teatro Real), the arias are not Donizetti at his best, but the ensembles are just delightful – and that is why I finally made my mind about seeing it.
It seems director Melanie Huber has experienced something similar when she read the libretto, for her staging is an exercise in making a work essentially outdated into something that makes sense in our days. In a new edition, created together with Stephen Teuwissen, she has a new and central character in Donizetti himself, not entirely in prime mental state and fantasizing about making of Le Convenienze… his last masterpiece, while creating all the other characters on stage in his mind. He is very much his own enemy in this task and has even his own personal demon, who assumes the shape of… Mamm’Agata and sabotages the whole project. In this context, the fact that the character has a male voice is explained by the very fact that she is not a woman – and we can always see the troublemaking demon behind the disguise. Moreovee, this also made the whole thing simply funnier. Although the actor cast as Donizetti offered a terrific performance, at moments things sound too philosophical for the circumstances. Maybe if the dialogues were all in Italian, the very nature of Italian language would have made it sound more entertaining. However – and this is a very personal observation – what spoiled a bit the fun for me was the excessively clownish Personenregie. Nothing is funnier to me than a comedy where nobody is working hard to make you laugh. More than this – where everybody is doing their parts seriously. This adds an extra dimension of humor to everything – rather than just watching people bouncing and falling down. But anyway, it was refreshing to see that the creative team really gave more than one thought to the text and produced something that one could somehow relate to.
The new edition also brought novelties in musical terms: numbers were not performed in the same order one as in the usually hears score, there were numbers borrowed from other works and freshly composed (an overture by Sebastian Androne-Nakanishi) for this Zurich première of the work.
In a work like this, there is not much one can say about the conducting, other than it did not stand in the way of the singers, although tempi were generally on the fast side, what is good for comedy but technically challenging in terms of singing. The video from Madrid had one advantage over this one, which was the casting of Nino Machaidze, who was obviously the person in the prima donna role. In ensembles, the part often carries contrasting material and this can get lost to the audience if the singer is a bit short on volume. That said, this was a very solid cast, obviously dominated by Ambrogio Maestri as Mamm’Agata. He just oozed voice and seemed to be having the time of his life in this mischievous and cranky take on the role. The other Italian in the cast, Pietro Spagnoli, shone in the role of Procolo, the diva’s husbamd, and proved to have an amazing ability of singing off-pitch on purpose. Andrew Owens was entirely at ease with the vocal and acting demands of the part of the German tenor whose name nobody can pronounce and Denis Uzun’s mezzo soprano is almost too rich and beautiful for the part of Luigia.
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