The year is 1792 …. the city is Vienna …. and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been dead for about a year, but his friends frequent collaborators still can hardly believe it. Moreover, Mozart’s sudden and untimely death has left his widow Constanze heartbroken and heavily laden with debts. As a gesture of support, a number of benefit concerts have been organized, featuring some of his favorite singers. One of those concerts has just occurred, but the participants are not quite ready to go home – so they have gathered at one of Mozart’s favorite haunts to reminisce about the maestro and to sing more of his music.
That was the basic premise of the performance by Carthage’s opera workshop yesterday afternoon – a presentation which we ended up calling “Mozart is Dead: Tall Post-Mortem Tales of Mozart’s Life and Music.” Since mid-summer we knew that our fall opera workshop would be devoted to Mozart, but I hoped that we could figure out a way to do something other than the typical “greatest hits” recital. Then this summer, my wife and I – at the urging of my brother Steve’s partner, Scott Nichols – attended a very exciting and innovative production off-Broadway called “The Great Comet of 1812” which was done in the style of immersive theater… in which the boundaries between cast and audience pretty much disappeared. The performers were all around us, sometimes right behind us or beside us- and it tremendously enhanced the impact of the show. The performance space happened to be set up like a rather luxurious-looking pub, with chandeliers above us, candles on the tables, and wonderful food and drink served to us throughout. And at some point during that incredible performance, it dawned on me that we might be able to do something sort of like this for our Mozart event. How about a gathering of Mozart’s friends not long after his death? And how about doing it as immersive theater? And that’s how this crazy scenario for “Mozart is Dead” came to be.
I’m so grateful that Matt Boresi and Peg Cleveland, my two faculty colleagues for opera workshop, were both enthusiastic about this unconventional idea and instrumental in bringing it to fruition. So were the twelve students in the workshop, who were charged with doing research on some of Mozart’s favorite singers and other collaborators. We eventually cast each student as a particular historic person … and they ended up being quite a colorful group: obnoxious egomaniacs, amorous philanderers, charismatic stars, etc. We had the four Weber sisters (one of whom was Mozart’s widow, Constanze) …. two of Mozart’s favorite librettists, who could barely tolerate each other …. two of the most famous tenors in Mozart’s day, who were the fiercest of rivals …. two sopranos who had each had rather checkered relationships with Mozart …. and a couple of Mozart’s favorite baritones, including a guy who may have been the composer’s best friend at the time of his death. Once we had figured out who was who, Matt had the tough assignment of fashioning a script- and he really outdid himself, writing something that was informative, poignant and hilariously funny. The other element, of course, was the music …. and we chose arias and ensembles from nine different operas, ranging from Bastien und Bastienne (writtten when Mozart was twelve years old) to The Magic Flute and La Clemenza di Tito (which premiered in 1791, the year Mozart died) – with excerpts from Idomeneo, Abduction from the Seraglio, The Impressario, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte for good measure. We began the performance with a brief excerpt from Mozart’s Requiem. And our finale began with something I put together which we called our Mozart MegaMix: in which each of our twelve singers sang one line from a famous Mozart aria (none that were part of this performance) – strung together in a fast-paced medley that generated some extra excitement.
This last week felt like a mad dash to the finish line, with the students memorizing their lines, building their respective characters, and sorting out the final details of the blocking. Last week was also our first chance to be in the recital hall where the performance was going to take place (we couldn’t be in there until “Legally Blonde” had finished up) so getting the students completely comfortable in the space was quite a challenge. And by the time we finished up with our dress rehearsal on Friday, it was hard to know just how ready we were for this. What would happen when the recital hall was full of people, many of whom who would be sitting right with the cast? Would our students be distracted? Inhibited? Downright scared? Or would they be energized and inspired? That was the $64,000 question.
I am SO happy to say that filling the recital hall with more than one hundred people was a galvanizing force for our students, and they responded with a performance beyond my expectations. And the audience, in turn, seemed to really enjoy what we shared with them. I’m sure most of them had never been at a performance like this where they were right in the middle of the action- and I think that’s one reason people seemed to be exceptionally attentive to what they were seeing and hearing. And it went quite well, aside from the last chorus (the finale to Abduction from the Seraglio, with lyrics rewritten to praise Mozart rather than Pasha Selim) which got a little bit mangled. I don’t know if our singers were so relieved to have reached the very end that they allowed their focus to fly out the window. But they recovered to deliver the final few lines very joyously and impressively, and the audience responded with a wave of warm applause. But ahead of that final chorus, there were all kinds of things to be excited about. I think my favorite sequence was when we had a Battle of the Tenors, with Nick Huff offering up “Dalla sua pace” from Don Giovanni– only to be angrily interrupted by Max Dinan, who insisted on singing “Il mio tesoro” instead, the aria used in the first performances of Don Giovanni…. a far superior aria, and written for a superior talent: “Me!” That whole sequence was deliciously written by Matt, and wonderfully delivered by these two guys, who also sang these two arias gloriously. But that’s just part of the great singing that was offered up in this program. Everyone sang well – but what was even more exciting was to see just about everyone do a terrific job of stepping inside the mind and heart of the person they were portraying.
Afterwards, I was delighted by the enthusiastic comments of several knowledgable people – including Dr. Garcia-Novelli (the Carthage Choir director), Tony Pavao (Kathy’s high school choir director and a highly regarded voice teacher), and a guy from my Adventures in Lifelong Learning opera class who saw “The Great Comet of 1812” in NYC – the show that inspired me to come up with this crazy idea – and enjoyed what we did even more. (Maybe he was just being nice, but that’s what he said.)
In the end, it wasn’t about achieving perfection. It was about challenging our students and seeing them rise to the occasion. It was about attempting something that we had never attempted before, and making it work by working together. It was about giving the students the chance to sing these arias in a setting where they didn’t get to just stand in the crook of the piano, but had to move around and truly engage the audience – which completely surrounded them. (This was Theater-In-The-Round, truly- which is so difficult for the performers.) And because we did far more to publicize this than any previous opera workshop production (thanks, Nick Huff, for taking charge of our PR and doing such a spectacular job with it) we were pretty sure that we would have a lot of people there – and just knowing that galvanized all of us to do the best work we possibly could. And the results speak for themselves …. a memorial tribute to Mozart that the great master himself might very well have appreciated. Certainly, he would have been thrilled to see twelve college students SO excited to be singing his music – and their three teachers standing off to the side, proud and pleased and relieved that this crazy idea worked out as well as it did.
pictured above: This was my view from the piano during the performance. The picture gives you a little idea of the unconventional way in which we set up the chairs. By the way, the audience was served sparkling grape juice or root beer …. and pretzels. Peg took charge of most of that and did such a great job…. on top of the huge help she was for the musical preparation of the production. As fun as it was to work with these twelve great students – Maura Atwood, Amanda Digrindakis, Becca Bowan, Clare Reinholdt, Leah Orr, Allison Schafernack, Max Dinan, Nick Huff, Zachary Carlson, Steve Hobe, Kevin Gussel, Mike Anderle – in some ways it was even more exciting for me to work with Matt and Peg. To have such skilled, supportive, cooperative, and fun colleagues is such an incredible blessing!