This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
OPERA Mozart’s last wager


La Clemenza di Tito PALAIS GARNIER, PARIS (TO 8 OCTOBER)


here is something terribly moving about Mozart’s last opera, a work often dis- missed as a potboiler. How it fell so utterly out of fashion (and remains so in many quar- ters) is a mystery: so much for taste and discernment. Actually its tranquil surface hides something seriously profound and trou- bling: Mozart – the great philosopher- composer of the Enlightenment, whose belief in reason and in the power of the human heart to change, and to change the world, blazes through The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute – wrestles with his convictions and the things which bothered him all his life: infidelity, betrayal, human wickedness. In 1791 this was hardly academic, either.


T


The script is a piece of expert, didactic adu- lation from 1734 by Pietro Metastasio, the great librettist of princely opera seria, and was routinely re-set by various composers for coronations. So it was here: but the monarch in question, Leopold II, had a sister, Marie Antoinette, under virtual house-arrest in the Tuileries after her fateful flight to Varennes. Mozart could hardly have been unaware or indifferent. He was also a sick man, although only 35, and would die six months later.


‘Complete opera, complete joy’: Hibla Gerzmava and Stéphanie d’Oustrac in La Clemenza di Tito in Paris


TELEVISION The enforcer


Educating Essex CHANNEL 4


A


mong the many changes to the education system made by Michael Gove has been


an assertion of the right of teachers physically to restrain pupils. Nonetheless, to touch a child at all remains a career-threatening act in many schools, as we saw in Educating Essex (22 September), an eye-opening documentary series about a comprehensive in Harlow. The programme mixed fly-on-the-wall


observation with interviews with pupils and staff, concentrating in this first episode on deputy head Stephen Drew. Mr Drew struck me as a hero, responsible for discipline but committed to a policy of “no permanent exclu- sions”, which deprives him of the most potent weapon in the teachers’ armoury. Passmores school has had good Ofsted


reports, and one of the things that makes it stand out is its insistence on a strict uniform code, prized as a way of introducing consis-


26 | THE TABLET | 24 September 2011


tency into the sometimes disordered lives of its pupils. Mr Drew is the enforcer, laying down the law for the benefit of children who “just don’t understand the word ‘No’” (he blames the parents). From the start of the school day, he patrols the corridors looking for undone top buttons, unauthorised coats and, particularly, hoodies. “He is an evil over-lord who will completely


incinerate you if you annoy him,” complained one boy, before admitting that Mr Drew was “actually quite fun” as a history teacher. No doubt he was on his best behaviour for the cameras, but what came across here was firm- ness leavened by patience and generosity; where we might see only slack-jawed adoles- cent truculence, he looks deeper and finds intelligence and kindness. Towards the end of the episode, we saw him tangle with Carmelita, a GCSE-year stu- dent with a red hoodie. She refused to give it up, offering instead to put it in her bag. Mr Drew, no fool, suspected she would put it back on the minute he went away. “So pleased we’re starting the day with conflict,” he said. If he has a sin, it is a weakness for gentle sarcasm. Carmelita, Mr Drew admitted, reaching for the profession’s favourite euphemism, is “one of the most challenging young people we’ve


Titus was a legendarily magnanimous Roman emperor, here beset by plots. Their instigator is Vitellia, fixated on marrying him but constantly relegated by other candidates, though Titus is quite ignorant of her affections. In her rage she persuades her own besotted suitor, Sextus, to assassinate Titus – although Sextus loves Titus no less than he does her and is agonisingly aware of his hopeless thral- dom to Vitellia’s beauty. Mozart sets the work as a series of intense conversations and solil- oquies, unremittingly earnest, which could not possibly exist in any medium (except per- haps Shakespeare) but opera, with its universalising, metaphoric power: these peo- ple may be discussing minutiae of Roman politics and personal vendettas, but are mouthpieces for the contemplation of whack- ing great matters of life and death. Willy Decker’s old staging, last seen a decade ago in Paris, takes Tito utterly seriously: a bare stage, a skewed proscenium, no props but a huge lump of marble that gradually crumbles to reveal a statue of the emperor, a black-clad chorus like birds of prey forcing Titus to renounce his real love, the Jewish princess Berenice, and policing the action with unfor-


giving disapproval, John Macfarlane’s vivid impressionistic drop-curtains, and a nerve- shredding intensity and intimacy of human contact on stage. The sensitivity of staging is at its best in key scenes: where lovers Annius and Servilia say goodbye after she is picked out as Titus’ bride, but come up with the radi- ant line “May life be shorn of all that is not love”; Titus’ examination of guilty Sextus: two friends, one having tried to kill the other, and he now legally obliged to kill the first; Vitellia’s sexual blackmailing of Sextus; and finally the dawning of appalled self-awareness and repen- tance in this Lady Macbeth-like character. Adam Fischer leads a performance that is


more of a piece – orchestra, stage, singers – than anything I have witnessed for years: complete opera, complete joy. There is a bur- bling clarinet obbligato in a couple of arias that suddenly made sense as the dawning of some sort of grace. A kind of electric bond ties Fischer to the singers, who perform excep- tionally, notably Stéphanie d’Oustrac’s tormented Sextus and Hibla Gerzmava, with a magical voice of feathery delicacy and a heart of steel, as Vitellia. Klaus Florian Vogt hasn’t the agility for Mozart, but it’s a nice open sound that suits a man determined to challenge people, in the nicest possible way, to be good. His method is to set up a wager: his mercy against all evil – forgive everyone and risk the consequences. You feel Mozart is no longer sure of the outcome: maybe good- ness is not enough after all. But what is the alternative? There is a resignation and fatalism in Tito that is new to Mozart. But there is optimism and determination too; all victories are provisional, at best – but that’s no reason to give up the fight. Robert Thicknesse (www.operadeparis.fr)


ever had”. Inevitably, she told him to go away – not in those words – and the school’s auto- matic punishment for swearing at a teacher came into play. She was sent home on a one- day suspension. There, she told her mother that Mr Drew had pulled her by the shoulder. At which point, things became potentially


very serious. Even in the girl’s excitable version of events, acted out for the benefit of the head teacher, Mr Drew did no more than touch her upper arm. Nonetheless, the head felt obliged to treat it as an accusation of assault. Luckily the school is covered by an extensive network of closed-circuit TV cameras. These duly revealed that Mr Drew had never come close to Carmelita who, nonetheless, stuck by her story. “It’s not that I don’t believe you,” said the head. “I can’t believe you, because it’s not true. There’s photographic evidence. We can go to court if we need to.” The head accused her, not entirely unrea- sonably, of trying to “ruin somebody’s life”. She was suspended until the end of term, which seemed not to trouble her unduly. I was reminded of something Mr Drew had said before the incident: “Once you’ve got a young person and they don’t care what you do, you’re stuffed.” And that’s a problem for all of us. John Morrish


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36