Radical interpretation of a rare opera
The Medea myth has provided great material for opera composers over the years, and it's not difficult to see why. It has all the ingredients - as it's played here in this version - for the operatic favourite, the 'melodramma tragico'. There's a joyous wedding - between Creusa and Jason - but a psycho ex-wife, Medea, who still represents a threat to the union, and a struggle over custody of the kids from her and Jason's previous marriage, which he wants annulled based on the fact that the witch cast a spell over him. Don't they all. And would you believe it, the ex turns up at the wedding and causes a bit of a scene. Nightmare. For the director of this production of Mayr's 1813 opera Medea in Corinto, Hans Neuenfels, the story is about people living in fear and acting out of fear. You might not get that quite so much from the original score and libretto, but that at least is the spin put on this production of a rarely performed opera recorded in 2010 at the Bayerische Staatsoper...
Deconstruction Disaster
I was practically doing cartwheels when I found out that a Mayr opera was going to appear on DVD. Over the last twenty years or so, he has become one of my favorite late 18th-early 19th century composers.
What I hadn't counted on was a Hans Neuenfels deconstruction job. After admitting that the stage production isn't boring for a minute,it becomes clear within the first ten minutes that Neuenfels began planning before he heard a note of Mayr's music ! He began thinking about Medea and not Mayr's and librettist Romani's Medea.
The composer and librettist, turn the legend into a conventional bad girl/good girl melodrama, a forerunner of Wilkie Collins type storytelling. The political subtext which Neuenfels brings to the fore is barely present in Romani's libretto, and not at all in Mayr's music. The subtext is really that opera fans are stupid, and that Mr. Neuenfels is going to set us straight !
Here we have a Creusa considerably nastier than Medea. She is cold, cruel...
Absolutely superb about this old bloodthirsty Greece.
That production of this opera is superb and revives the music quite grandly. Of course that does not increase the variety of voices that still are three sopranos, fours tenors and one bass, or rather bass-baritone. It does not change the fact that the music is post-Mozart and pre-Verdi, hence it has lost the Mozartian creativity and had not reached yet the Verdian power. But the show is absolutely and flabbergastingly great.
The setting as a two-storied structure is a good materialization of the extremely hierarchical Greek society of the time on any kind of criteria: ethnic, social, or whatever. Greeks were the top provided they were free. The stage director visualizes this fact regularly in the opera. At the very beginning two male slaves fight in front of Creon: one is killed and the other is executed after being crowned the winner. Then three slave women are just put to death on the stage. The Greek society of the time is an extremely blood-thirsty society and all...
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