The Royal Opera's new Clemenza di Tito is a somewhat messy effort, musically inconsistent (though a handful of individual performances mercifully redeem it) and theatrically intransigent almost to the point of woefulness. The terrible flaw in Karl-Ernst and Ursel Hermann's production - an import from Salzburg where it was unveiled in 1992 - lies neither in its portentous symbolism nor its clumsy stagecraft (both are more than once apparent) but in its wanton, distrustful revamping of the opera's politics.
Mozart, writing as Europe was tottering under the impact of the French Revolution, examines and questions the nature of autocracy. He draws the conclusion that absolute power, embodied in the Emperor Tito, necessitates absolute moral responsibility and is purchased at the price of soul-shattering emotional isolation. The Hermanns, however, are having none of this, and present us with a portrait of Tito as an ineffectual wimp at the centre of an obscene scramble for domination, his every action the product of stage management and spin. His sidekick Publio, whom Mozart equated with justice untempered by mercy, has mutated into a hypocritical Machiavellian figure. He produces fawning crowds on cue, spies, eavesdrops and manipulates even when the libretto doesn't require him, and finally usurps the imperial throne as Tito slumps, a broken figure, into a discarded chair.
Elsewhere, the opera's political games are played out with an edgy, alienating irony which sits uneasily with the emotional directness and inherently tragic stature of the score. The set is a white, neon-lit corridor of power, mercilessly exposing the characters' private universes to an unremitting glare, and occasionally opening on to the colonnaded vistas of the public world beyond.
The costumes may be described as all-purpose power-dressing. The blokes look vaguely Napoleonic, though Tito dons a Samurai headband in moments of crisis. Vitellia, flouncing round like Eva Peron in a series of tulle New Look ballgowns, is a self-dramatising diva, who slaps on punk war paint when roused and manipulates Sesto by performing Rita Hayworth's glove striptease from Gilda. Later her actions acquire the quality of clunky debasement as she removes her imperial finery while singing Non Piu Di Fiori to a wilted hydrangea. Servilia is frumpily got up in a hausfrau's dowdy dress and pinafore, presumably intended to suggest that she has incipient bourgeois values. In the process she looks like a St Trinian's schoolgirl.
Buried beneath this goo, however, are some remarkable flashes of insight. The erotic circling between Sesto and Vitellia, shot through with hints of sado-masochism, is finely done. Sesto's psychological disintegration from nobility via derangement to self-lacerating guilt is astonishingly handled by Vesselina Kasarova. She is in fabulous voice, her every note and gesture etching itself indelibly on the memory. This performance alone makes the evening worthwhile. On the plus side there is also Vinson Cole's mellifluous Tito, musically transcending the goings-on around him, while Lorenzo Regazzo, sexily imposing, makes an extremely impressive debut as Publio.
The rest of the cast struggle a bit: Patricia Schuman's voluptuous Vitellia is hampered by stridency; Ruxandra Donose's Annio is fruitily sung in a generalised sort of way; as Servilia, Christina Oelze reveals a voice which is a shadow of its former beautiful self. Once past an unaccountably lightweight overture, Nicolas McGegan conducts with mannered gravitas, though poor coordination between stage and pit render the whole too uncertain in places for comfort.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
