with the return of Splendorone of the favorite works of the French repertoire, is officially opened Tuesday 14 March the opera season of the Teatro Colón.
The production that will be seen of Charles Gounod’s work (with several premiere versions between 1859-1869) was born in 2015 in the theaters of Italy, Switzerland and Israel, and has the direction, scenography, costumes, lights and choreography of the Italian Stefano Poda and the musical direction of the British Jan Latham-Koenig.
Two casts will be responsible for the six functions: Liparit Avetisyan (Faust), Aleksei Tikhomirov (Mefistófeles), Anita Hartig (Margarita) and Vinícius Atique (Valentin) will lead the functions on the 14th, 16th, 19th and 21st.
On the 15th and 18th the locals Gastón Oliveira Weckesser, Christian Peregrino, Marina Silva and Felipe Carelli will take turns with them.
pruning back
after his call Nabucco of 2022, Poda returns, in this case with a version for which he has a special affection. In a dialogue with clarion What happens in the midst of the technical assembly of the enormous structures that make up the scenography, the régisseur recalls that, paradoxically, it was a DVD and a theatrical broadcast that made one of his most metaphysical works famous.
“My kind of work is the opposite of what works for cinema,” says Poda, “because it’s work on spirit, energy and it’s like mass: it doesn’t work on TV. You can do good documentation of a well-celebrated mass, but it’s like saying that Zoom can replace a face-to-face interview.”
And he adds: “In the theatre, the mystery of life, a dialectic is established, and this is irreplaceable. Music frees the chains of the body, like dreams, and allows you to discover a deeper truth than the concrete. Cinema, which is harmful, also helps, because it wins over an audience that sometimes feels awkward and wouldn’t go to the opera house”.
-What is the concept behind the set?
-Everything revolves around the image of a ring, the meaning of which is not even worth mentioning: it is the circularity of man, of time, of history. The idea for the circle started from the memory of a hamster I had as a child, and which caused me wonder and sadness at the same time, because he spent all his time spinning around on a wheel.
What always struck me most in Goethe’s text was the final sentence Faust says: “All my life I have done nothing but run”, which is what we all do: we spend our lives running To such? Towards something that at all times seems to be a priority, and suddenly we realize that this priority expires. We are always looking for something unattainable.
the magic wheel
-Was it the idea that Fausto walked inside the wheel?
-I wanted Fausto to be inside a giant wheel, but technically and economically I couldn’t do it, because it cost a lot, it was crazy, but that generated the rest of the idea.
The central idea is that of the journey of each protagonist and of the spectator: I propose a mirror in which the spectator reflects and recognizes his own journey. That’s why I don’t like to identify Fausto with an old man: he’s not a man, he’s not a woman, he’s ageless. We all reach a certain point in our existence at some point in our existence which must be integrated into this discourse.
I was interested in representing this journey of knowledge towards a goal which, whatever it may be, is unattainable. It is also the journey of civilization. Both the image of the man who walks in the hamster wheel is important, but also the image of the child who builds a sand castle on the beach and who rebuilds it every day, without remorse or arguments with himself. That’s the man, that’s Faust.
The Importance of Faust
How did the trip you were talking about go?
-The journey begins in the small world, the bourgeois world, the world of Margarita, and ends in the world of Walpurgis. The great difficulty of this work is its limitation: for the sake of synthesis a part of the book has been developed, but I feel that this does not matter, because there is the strength of the music, which is evocative: it fixes some moments, but there is no reason to be anchored to them. It’s important to broaden your horizons and redirect yourself to travel.
It doesn’t matter that the public doesn’t understand everything: it matters that when they go home they feel motivated, that they listen to the opera again and that they search. The image of Splendor It is especially important in this falsely modern age, of tremendous decadence, where we come from something we think we know and go towards an unknown, in a great epochal change, where we cling to this technological pride which is very dangerous.
-And, more specifically, what do you see in each of the paintings in the work?
-The first stop on the journey is Faust’s study, which here is the ruin of a library, of the man who has read everything, done everything, but lost faith and fell into depression, as we all have.
The first scene speaks of time: an obsession with hourglasses, time that stops and doesn’t stop, all the theatrical machinery goes on, like a clock.
The second stage is the kermesse, which is a bit like the world of Instagram, of appearances, of the denial of the passage of time, of the world of fashion, of transient values, and of what is venerated today: beauty, youth, money, power
Then comes the garden, the bare inner world of Margarita: trees whose flowers are in her.
Then comes the street, the bourgeois world, oppressed by religion, and then the church, which for Margarita is always an inner journey, and finally Walpurgis Night, prison and apotheosis.
-How did you elaborate the differences between the final version of Gounod that will be seen here, the myth and the original text of Goethe?
-The struggle between Goethe and grand-opéra shouldn’t be compared, because everything is very trivialized, it’s very dangerous. I always try not to bring anything to concrete. They call me modern, but I feel totally ancient. The modernity of today’s representations is concrete: I shun concreteness and realism, it terrifies me.
I’m not saying that what others are doing isn’t right, but I don’t know how to do it and I don’t care. Anything that plays the music and shows it is a prison, and it’s the opposite of what is meant to be given to the audience: abstraction and the ability for them to do their job.
From myth to Google
-The three main characters are strongly archetypal. How do they fit into this abstraction?
-Margarita is the easiest to explain, because she represents pure love in the context of the small world: she is not Helena, which is the world beyond mythology, which I represent in a very drastic way.
Fausto is today’s being struggling with this lack of goals and faith, with this absolutely dehumanized dimension in which we have to live, in which everything is apparently very accessible, such as knowledge, a time in which one puts any word on Google , but this is not culture or humanism: humanism is giving oneself deeply and discovering the secrets of all life, the links between disciplines, understanding that little by little everything has to do with everything: that is a long and painful process that contemporaneity solves easily and badly.
Mephistopheles is the other part of us, clearly not the horned devil: it is rationality, the dichotomy between rationality and spirit that makes us big and small, weak and strong. This is the deal that happens every day that we have to make a decision. I detach Mephistopheles from any moral, religious or historical connotation, but I also leave it open.
Source: Clarin
