Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo in Vienna: Juchzen and Schluchzen – Culture

It is considered to be the very first opera, Emilio de ‘Cavalieri’s “Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo” from 1600, and the proximity to oratorio, madrigal and other forms is unmistakable. Conductor Giovanni Antonini leaves no doubt about this in the new production at the Theater an der Wien with the ensemble Il Giardino Armonico. Director Robert Carsen, on the other hand, takes the play as a current model and wants to bring it into the present day – also at the price of historical arbitrariness. Which is not that easy, because the work also breathes the upper-class zeitgeist of the 16th century in terms of content. It can be dismissed as a Christian edifice or as an inspired baroque theater that shows with Italian ease and elegance how one could lead a happy life. For example, by doing without almost everything that leads to a supposedly happy life. Two years before his death, the Roman composer, diplomat, dancer, organist and choreographer Emilio de ‘Cavalieri and the librettist Agostino Manni designed these “rap presentations” so vividly that they relish the whole tragic comedy of the struggle of mind and body. And also a little weird.

The prerequisite for happiness is that the body follows the mind. What he’s doing here with a shrug of the shoulders, because he doesn’t really know where they’re going anima in search of happiness. The body is the Sancho Panza of ideal life, but also the mind sometimes drags itself tenaciously to the peak of happiness. Too much distraction, too much temptation, too much ideological aberration, too much fake news. But director Carsen also has a different idea when it comes to humor, replacing the subtle humor of the time and the comedically playful, the Italian quasi, with rather garish images. Which always works convincingly when it is not too far removed from the original aesthetics of the commedia, but just pushes them a little further. This does not succeed in the newly written prologue, but in the end it does, when the poor souls who live here in well-trained dancers’ bodies ascend towards Schnürboden, only to go contrite and then to hell again. It is funny and beautiful to see that these ascents and falls into hell, this whooping and sobbing, seem to have no end.

The ensemble succeeds in bringing the sometimes ornate, sometimes brittle sound language into a dramatically effective flow

Carsen seems to come very close to this wonderful game of allegories, in which abstract terms such as spirit, body, intellect, time, soul are withdrawn from pure thought and fleshed, as it were reanimated and appear as concrete characters, more and more as humanizations. As if we were living with them, as if they lived next door. But how do you turn it into rousing, touching theater? The best way to do this is to let that force speak, which inherently translates abstract ideas into sensually perceptible forms: music. And here we are already at the biggest surprise of the evening: How the conductor Giovanni Antonini and his early music ensemble Il Giardino Armonico sometimes succeed in creating this sometimes ornate, sometimes elegantly brittle sound language – which, like the baroque puppet theater, was so fixated on Familiar movement vocabulary – to bring them into a dramatically effective flow and to sculpt them like a superordinate figure of a god, to install an invisible and yet always present Zeus ex machina who sees and guides everything.

Anett Fritsch in the role of the anima, the soul, and Daniel Schmutzhard as the corpo, the body.

(Photo: Werner Kemetitsch)

Unfortunately, there are few moments in which this succeeds in a musical, rousing way. Antonini often seems to stand in his own way with his meticulous basic understanding of not suppressing any note and letting every sound speak equally. It often becomes brittle and freezes in correctness. Sometimes a slightly accelerated tempo would help that musical blood flows through the veins of the opera again. A little more verve would also do some of the consistently brave singers good, of whom only one proves to be really outstanding: Carlo Vistoli in the role of the guardian angel, the anima (Anett Fritsch with a suitably slim soprano) and corpo (Daniel Dirt hard) admonishingly leads through the shallows of earthly life. He not only achieves this in technically impeccable falsetto, but also, and unfortunately that is rare among countertenors, with a completely uncompromised voice that never sounds effeminate or uncomfortably artificial.

The political obsession that there is no alternative comes to the fore in the end: You have to change your life.

One or two more singers of this format and one would no longer think about the importance of this opera, shortly before Jacopo Peri and Claudio Monteverdi, who are often referred to as the actual inventors, in the long history of this genre that followed. In terms of content, it seems to have a lot ahead of most of the later warhorses. In a playful as well as persistent way, it reminds us that our civilization is not only based on progress in mobility and medicine, but first and foremost on ethical progress that has long been considered irrevocable. But as painfully as the twentieth century has demonstrated how easily and frivolously moral and moral greatness can be taken back, how quickly they collapse even in the most well-meaning ideologies, it has shown how much we need a spiritual basis. This also applies to the happy, consumptive and equally sour present. At the end of this opera, the political obsession that there is no alternative comes to the fore more and more like a sect: You have to change your life.

Do good and do not expect thanks, then the earth will be a paradise, “adorned with flowers that with singing and smiling it will resemble paradise”. So do we have to become hippies of goodwill? With his ironically exaggerated final scene, in which everyone once again intertwines as in the smoky of human love, director Carsen seems to have a little doubt. But he covers up the concerns, partly with scenic Ringelpiez and the usual opera-director idyll of re-discovery euphoria, which is always staged in an embarrassingly serious manner and, in case of doubt, needs to be understood ironically. People dance around silly (terrible choreographies by Lorena Randi) and grin broadly as if there was no tomorrow. And the music, as Antonini, the ensemble Il Giardino Armonico and above all the Arnold Schönberg Choir understand with appellative vehemence, tells us: Yes, go there and become flower children, be enlightened, spread joy instead of annoying others walk.

.
source site