The Unbearable Lightness of Antigone

When last night’s final performance of Tomasso Traetta’s opera Antigone drew to a close, I found myself drawing a sigh of relief that I had made it through yet another Berlin Staatsoper production with René Jacobs and the Akademie. This particular production was especially hard for me to swallow, although not because of the music, which I felt was the best part of the opera. Last night I found myself still fully enjoying certain passages, glad that the Akademie had taken the opportunity to explore this wonderful music and wondering to myself why Traetta, whose style is a bit like that of Mozart gone drunk on the bittersweet of Neapolitan melodrama, isn’t better known.

No- it was the staging that was annoying the hell out of me. In fact, it was so bad that when the Bulgarian stage director Vera Nemirova was booed off stage by the crowd during the final curtain call after last Thursday's performance, I was relieved, as it dispelled my doubts that perhaps I was missing something 'significant' here. But not that there was any really significant to see. The only prop she used, apart from a hole on stage that allowed those who died during the opera to descend into hell, was an aluminum life guard’s chair. That was fine for the first half of the opera, but when the second half began and it became clear that nothing new would appear, you just began to wonder whether Vera Nemirova had been given the challenge to stage an opera for less than 100 Euros or if she had taken the rest of her money and bought a cozy villa in the South of France.

Quite frankly, I expected more from a stage director whose unique productions have earned her praise by Opernwelt and The New York Times. I knew for example that her interpretations of Richard Wagner’s Ring at the Frankfurter Oper and Alban Berg’s Lulu at the Salzburger Festspiele in 2010 had been controversial, receiving both praise and criticism by the press and public, but they were both extravagant productions that made full use of modern staging techniques. Moreover, because the Ring and Lulu are both well known, it was probably harder for stage director to get away with the kind of treacle Vera presented in Antigone. Most of those who would have attended the productions in Frankfurt and Salzburg would have at least known the plot and music so well that they would have demanded only the best from that the staging.

And that’s what I expected too. Before we began rehearsals for Antigone, I watched some videos of Vera Nemirova's staging of the Ring and Lulu on YouTube, and to be honest, I was actually hopeful to find something interesting this past month, because her productions were both challenging but inspiring. But it wasn’t to be. Perhaps it’s because Traetta’a Antigone, which is based on Sophocles’s tragedy about King Oedipus’ four children caught in the grip of Creon, ruler of Thebes, is simply not her fare, not the standard meat and potatoes operas of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. As was popular during the Age of Enlightenment, the opera incorporates a ‘happy end’ conclusion, putting Creon on the spot and forcing him to turn back on his initial decision to sentence Antigone to death for her actions. Yes, happy endings might seem cheesy in our modern eyes (especially as the original version is pretty gruesome) but back in the 18^th Century this was representative of the ideal that man was ruler of his destiny and that good could indeed prevail over evil.

But Vera Nemirova couldn’t seem to accept that. It's too bad, because rather than just letting the plot to stand on its own two feet, she decided to take matters into her own hands and kill both Antigone and her lover Haemon off in the end. This changeobviously had serious consequences on the music, forcing René Jacobs to juggle things around and splice in a diminished seventh chord (suspiciously lifted from Mozart’s Magic Flute) into the final cadence of the last duet in order to musically send the two lovers off to their demise. If the opera could have just ended there, all would have been well and good and nobody would have known better. Unfortunately Traetta didn’t want things to end that way and concluded the opera with one final ‘happy we’ chorus that, well, Vera Nemirova just couldn’t ignore. So when the two lovers suddenly reappeared from their hell hole and everyone suddenly started singing about how glad they were for this joyous day, it was bit like being told that life isn't so bad after all after getting the wind knocked out of you. You just don’t believe it.

Add to all of this staging that seemed to more represent a clichéd version of life under a brutal Soviet dictator than the sad eloquence of a Greek tragedy, and I kept on feeling that the public was being intellectually insulted by the use of visuals that had been long sitting in Vera Nemirova’s remainders box. In fact, for almost every trick she used, be it the backdrop of menacing grey sky, Creon’s cruel Chauchesku-like personality (with his gold cardboard crown and his skinhead henchmen), or the choir, who looked like a cast of fill-ins for Lars von Trier’s Dogville while Antigone (and everyone else) suffered, the staging seemed to be deliberately willed and forced upon the music. It was as if she was simply annoyed by Traetta’s writing in certain moments, and decided to take the opportunity to mock it out through the use of kitsch elements, rather than attempt to understand the music's sublimity.

It’s a pity, because personally, I have the feeling that Vera Nemirova just entirely missed the point of Antigone. No it’s not the best drama, but it was good, and I suspect that in 1772 Traetta had composed the work knowing that the sublime music and elaborate staging would at least produce some damned good shows for the public, and that was enough. In fact, I kept on thinking to myself that this would have been one time where I would have been interested in seeing an ‘original’ performance of the opera, performed using 18^th century costumes and sets. It would have at least been an interesting challenge, as it would have given the modern opera audience the chance to experience opera put within the mindset of the Age of Enlightenment. Vera Nemirova instead displayed a version of Taetta’s Antigone that only proved that she had absolutely no comprehension of the unbearable lightness of the Age of Enlightenment.