Music: Salzburg Sleeper

It’s hard to argue with Mozart, but in effect that is what festival devotees have been doing at Salzburg lately. Not that the Mozart—or the Tchaikovsky or Haydn, for that matter—has been poor; indeed, Herbert von Karajan’s new production of Don Giovanni this year was brilliant. But critics complained that the festival too often failed to gobeyond the familiar to the unusual or daring. Last week Salzburg’s directors replied with a sleeper production of an opera so obscure that it lives almost exclusively in the history books: Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s 1598 Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo. Musically, the opera does not threaten Mozart, but in the Salzburg setting, it was an imaginative and challenging departure.

Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo (Representation of Soul and Body) is a stark allegorical drama bolstered by a rich musical style and an uncommon baroque flamboyance. At the opening, the stage is silent, dark, empty. Then slowly, pitiably, a choir of 100 men and women, clad in earth-colored Florentine gowns file into place at stage center before a deep opening signifying the abyss. An old peasant and a youth approach and speak a prologue heralding the gravity of the matters to follow. Suddenly, a hidden 35-piece baroque orchestra begins the accompaniment to the introductory monody, and a spotlight picks out a bearded Father Time at the door of a pyramid above the abyss. He sings:

Give your soul to the hour of truth, Confess whether it was right to serve this vain world, Or to serve the king of heaven.

On it goes without intermission for 100 minutes. In the principal conflict, the four embodiments of man—body, soul, intellect, reason, each represented by a different singer—are tempted to sin by wenches, strapping males and rich men, each dancing a grave Ritornel. But Father Time topples the evil ones into the dust with one swing of his sickle. Then, down from clouds and golden rays above a pyramid come heavenly armies for one last triumphant encounter with the agents of hell, after which a festive ballet brings the work to a close. Accompanying it all is an array of dances, bright, martial processionals, and stirring choral frescoes that almost could have been written a century later by Handel.

If the musical style seems curiously familiar to audiences, the credit, not blame, accrues to Composer Cavalieri. A Roman nobleman at the Medici court in Florence, he introduced two techniques that are fundamental in all opera —monody, or music in which one singer performs with instrumental accompaniment; and stile rappresentazione, or recitative. He was also a pre-Wagnerian Wagnerian in regard to stagecraft. With his score, he left a detailed set of stage instructions calling for a maximum of drama, clear diction, expressive hand and body movements, costumes and props. He even specified that the orchestra be invisible, as Wagner did later at Bayreuth. All this enabled Festival President Bernhard Paumgartner and Stage Director Herbert Graf to put together a production of undoubted authenticity.

“In his introduction,” said Paumgartner, “Cavalieri proudly pointed out that he had written an entirely new kind of music aimed to unleash previously unexpressible emotions of compassion, jubilation, grief and even laughter.” At Salzburg last week, no one was doubting that—or that the Festival had found a new direction.