Jan Lauwers’ new La clemenza di Tito at the Wiener Staatsoper is one of those productions that somehow manages to do too much and too little all at once. It is serious in intention, visually ambitious and intermittently striking, but it never coheres into a persuasive whole. What emerges instead is a production that seems oddly distrustful of opera’s own powers: of singing, of storytelling, of Mozart’s score.
The central problem announces itself almost immediately. For the first two thirds of the evening, there is simply too much going on onstage, most of it driven by the troupe of contemporary dancers woven through the production. They are extraordinary – technically breathtaking, physically fearless, often more compelling than the staging around them. I would happily watch an entire evening built around that company alone. The female lead, apparently Berenice, was particularly mesmerizing: violently dragged, flipped, tossed and brutalized in choreography that was both aesthetic and unnerving. But what begins as provocation soon becomes saturation. The sequence extends so long that it ceases to sharpen the drama and instead competes with it.
That sets the pattern of the evening. Mozart’s opera is still trying to unfold, while a frenetic modern dance work seems to be happening on top of it. The singers are forced to perform not with the stage action but against it, like two trains running side by side, never fully meeting. Even after the opening, scenes of violence continued to permeate the background. I could not grasp what much of it had to do with the drama, the musical gesture, or the emotional temperature of any given moment. More importantly, it denied the audience any real moments of rest – any chance simply to listen or to appreciate the emotional ebbs and flows of Mozart’s score. And for me, opera is still primarily about the music.
This was especially frustrating because the evening offered so much to hear. Emily D’Angelo’s Sesto was the performance that most completely transcended the surrounding conceptual noise: vocally ardent, dramatically torn open and fully inhabited from first entrance to last. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller’s Vitellia and Cecilia Molinari’s Annio both contributed singing of real distinction, each capable of sending a genuine chill through the house. Katleho Mokhoabane, still very young in operatic terms, has already revealed himself a remarkable Mozart tenor, with a freshness and elegance that mark him as a singer to watch closely.
The production is not without visual appeal. The tilted wooden stage and looming triptych screen create an arresting frame, and there are moments when the use of the scrim genuinely enriches the theatrical texture. A live overhead projection of the stage action, in particular, offers one of the evening’s few instances in which technology deepens rather than diffuses the drama. But many of the other projected elements – black-and-white film sequences, abstract painting, natural landscapes – feel arbitrary, even opportunistic, as though visual variety has been mistaken for interpretive substance; they distract from the leads instead of showing them in their best light.
Then, in the final stretch, the opposite problem emerges. The production runs out of steam entirely, and one stand-and-sing aria follows another with almost nothing to anchor the audience theatrically. One need not hammer the audience with a thesis, but La clemenza di Tito positively invites a point of view: on power, on mercy, on the theatricality of rule, on the fragility of political legitimacy. If not, one must at least trust that Mozart’s opera is interesting enough to stand on its own. This production seems unable to do either.
Pablo Heras-Casado, in the pit, felt animated by a comparable desire to make the score sound urgent, fresh and dramatically charged. Often this translated into sheer speed. At times the propulsion excited; just as often, I longed for greater suppleness, finer gradation of dynamics and a more discriminating sense of scale. The chorus, meanwhile, threw themselves admirably into the production’s movement-heavy demands, but it remained obvious who was trained to move and who was trained to sing. The costumes did not help. With the chorus in modern black-and-white Sunday best and the principals glinting like Star Trek characters cosplaying Ancient Rome (so much shiny fabric, so much lamé) the visual world never settled into coherence.
There was no shortage of talent onstage, and I would happily hear this cast again. But as a total experience, this Clemenza never comes into focus. For all its seriousness of intent, it almost mocks the very medium in which it is working, as though singing, storytelling and Mozartian beauty require constant embellishment in order to signify. That is a dispiriting premise, and ultimately what makes this production, for all its effort and accomplishment, feel like a swing and a miss.
