Happy Mozart’s birthday!
By now you probably know that if he were still around, he’d be 250 today. In the midst of the barrage of tributes, it occurred to me that Mozart and I go way back; I saw my first Mozart opera* twenty (yea, verily, twenty) years ago. So I thought I’d write a retrospective of the past two decades.
1986: My fifth-grade class goes on a field trip to see a student
production of Bastien und Bastienne, a production I remember very little of, aside from thinking the set was pretty and being
mightily envious that Mozart composed it when he was only a
year or so older than I was.
1987: My mother lets me stay up late to watch Die Zauberflöte
on "Live from Lincoln Center." The Queen of the Night’s arias make me jaw drop: I had no idea it was even physically possible to sing like that.
(The ensuing years were largely Mozart-opera-less. Then I went off to college, and…)
1995: My roommate invests in the 1992 James Levine recording of Le Nozze di
Figaro and puts it on immediately upon waking up each morning. Never a
morning person, I find myself nonetheless much more willing to get up
and face the universe with Figaro and Susanna’s duet playing in the background. Before long I’ve
started to sing "Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio" and "Voi
che sapete" in the shower. Little by little the whole thing works its way permanently into my memory banks. It’s still quite possibly my favorite opera of all time.
1996: I see my first Don Giovanni at the Lyric with a group of fellow students. Grand, overwhelmingly seductive, terrifying. I’m transfixed, even from the highest row in the balcony. I see my first live Zauberflöte there later the same semester; the high Fs are even more stratospheric than I remember.
1997-98: I head off to grad school just in time to miss the Lyric’s
production of Le Nozze (damn it all). I exemplify grad-student
workaholism that year and the following year, and barely lift my head out of the books.
1999 or 2000: I realize that my life has been getting sensorily deprived as a result of nonstop reading and seminar-paper-writing (an
occupational hazard of Ph.D. programs). I resolve to listen to more
music. I discover my university’s excellent concert series and start
springing for tickets.
2000: I become friends with a colleague who adores Mozart’s operas. We
go see a student production of Le Nozze together, passing her opera
glasses back and forth. We bond over a shared fondness for the absurdity of
the "Sua madre?" "Sua madre!" "Sua madre?!" exchange.
2001: I go with said friend and several others to see my first
professional production of Le Nozze in a nearby city. The Countess
moves us all to tears in Act 3. Afterwards, speeding homeward on the
highway at one in the morning, we talk about how she’s the prime mover
of the whole plot, and yet everything
seems to come to a halt when she appears; time and action stand still, and her music is all its own.
2002: Same opera company stages Don Giovanni. Awesome, though not quite as magnificent as I remember the one at the Lyric being.
2003-2004: My new laptop has a DVD drive. Having already explored the
public library’s collection of opera on video (including Jean-Pierre Ponelle’s film of La Clemenza di Tito with Tatyana Troyanos), I make the acquaintance of
their collection of opera on DVD. Among the highlights: Così
Fan Tutte with Cecilia Bartoli, who bowls me over with the emotional
depth she brings to "Per pietà, ben mio."
2004: I move to Charlottesville and stumble across the Sunday Opera
Matinee while browsing the radio stations one afternoon. The hosts turn out to like
Mozart too; the most recent Sunday opera was Mitridate, Rè di Ponto.
2006: The DC Opera is staging La Clemenza in May! I’m so there. I’ve never seen it performed live. There’s so much still to hear and see, I need at least another twenty years.
* Singspiel, technically. But still.
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