Vivaldi's Motezuma given U.S. premiere by Long Beach Opera

Long Beach Opera turned 30 Saturday night.  It is older than Los Angeles Opera (born 1986) or Orange County’s recently deceased Opera Pacific (1985–2008).  Begun as Long Beach Grand Opera, the company soon got over its “grand” pretentions and discovered its inner plucky essence.  It has led a scrappy existence ever since, unearthing neglected treasures, presenting recent work and reimagining everything it touches, new or old.  It cheerfully courts controversy, scrapes by on the perpetual brink of financial disaster and deserves a medal for its unequalled history of operatic innovation in America.

And Saturday night in the small Center Theater, Long Beach Opera was, once more, lovable Long Beach Opera.  This time, the rarity was the U.S. premiere of Vivaldi’s “Motezuma” in an amusingly spirited and sexy production.  First performed in Venice in 1733, this fanciful recounting of Cortés’ conquering of Mexico was never revived and the score disappeared.  A musicologist stumbled upon the manuscript in 2002 in a Berlin library, and this was hailed as a major find.

That needs to be taken with a grain of academic salt.  All of the composer’s dozens of operas are rarities, despite a vibrant Vivaldi revival on stage began also 30 years ago with a production of “Orlando Furioso” in Verona.  Every few months another unknown Vivaldi opera may get a first recording, but when conductor Andreas Mitisek asked the audience Saturday how many had ever seen a Vivaldi opera on stage, nearly everyone raised a hand.  “You always remember the first time,” he said.

“Motezuma” comes to us a large torso with only the libretto complete.  Recitatives in the first and third of its three acts had to be written anew by Italian Vivaldi scholar and violinist Alessandro Ciccolini.  With 11 missing arias from a total of 28, Ciccolini found arias in other operas that seemed to fit and finished a couple of incomplete ones himself.  Only the second act is pretty much as we can be certain Vivaldi intended it.

Mitisek and director David Schweizer took that, though, as a creative challenge.  They simply scrapped most of the phony recitatives (and most of Vivaldi’s as well).  What was left was either sung or spoken in English.  The arias were presented sung as written and in Italian.

The subject matter fascinates.  Mexico at the time of the Spanish invasion was little more than exotica for the Venetians.  But interestingly Vivaldi treats neither the Spanish conqueror, Cortés (who becomes Fernando in the opera), nor the Aztec emperor, Montezuma (Motezuma in Italian), as sympathetic.  Both are cruel and one-dimensionally pigheaded.  Fernando is arrogant and calculating.  Motezuma is self-destructively impulsive.  Neither is particularly bright when it comes to battle but more than happy to torture each other.

Far more interesting are Motezuma’s long-suffering wife, Mitrena, who is ever trying to talk sense into the emperor, and the opera’s illicit lovers -- Teutile (Motezuma’s daughter) and Ramiro (Fernando’s younger brother).

Schweitzer’s familiar conceit is to stage the opera as the opening of a museum exhibition, “Pre-Columbian Aesthetics for a Post-Modern Era.”  Gradually Po-Mo gallery-goers become Pre-Columbian characters removing modern clothes, painting themselves and grabbing helmets and feathered headdresses designed by Marcy Froehlich.  But Schweitzer dusts off an old concept (even the Broadway musical “Aida” used it) with a film that runs above Alan E. Muraoka’s set, showing the Aztecs as seen by the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, the famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and various Hollywood kitchmeisters.

Ultimately the concept barely holds but it also hardly matters.  Vivaldi was not, like Handel, a master of drama, which is why his operas will always be curiosities.  But he certainly could write dazzling arias that got at real emotions.

With a cast that appears willing to do just about anything for him, Schweitzer takes those arias and runs with them.  Teutile -- brilliantly sung by a young soprano, Courtney Huffman, just entering the professional arena -- is, for instance, treated as a supercilious young starlet.  She sings and pouts, sings and strips, sings and has sex with her lover, sings and steals the stage.  In the process, we are led to contemplate the impossible, that even Lindsay Lohan might have an inner life.  I hope opera talent scouts were on hand Saturday or will show up for the production’s repeat Sunday in Santa Monica.

The cast is full of dynamic, daring actors.  Another young singer, Peabody Southwell, was a rubber-faced Ramiro, a droopy and clueless lover faced with an erratic woman and an erratic war.  A flexible mezzo-soprano, she too is going places.  Baritone Roberto Perlas Gomez (Motezuma) and lightfooted Charles Maxwell (Fernando) added an excess of dangerous testosterone.  Cynthia Jansen was a Mitrena of hair-pulling sorrow.  Caroline Worra (Asprano) made a delightfully spectacularly transformation from museum assistant to Mexican general.

Conducting the early music ensemble Musica Angelica from a harpsichord, Mitisek kept everything moving and sparkling.  He got a little carried away with this cutting -- removing an entire scene from the third act, in which Fernando is supposed to be burned in a tower but escapes -- and ensemble work wasn’t always perfect.  But the larger god of music theater was well served. 

Happy birthday, Long Beach Opera, and hang in there. 

"Motezuma," Long Beach Opera at Barnum Hall, 600 Olympic Blvd., Santa Monica; 4 p.m. Sunday.  $45 to $95. (562) 436-6661 or www.longbeachopera.org.

-- Mark Swed

Photo: Courtney Huffmann as Teutile (top), Roberto Perlas Gomez as Motezuma and Charles Maxwell as Fernando (middle) and Caroline Worra as Asprano (bottom) in Long Beach Opera's "Montezuma."  Credit: Christine Cotter/Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Robert]

Mr. Swed is far too kind. Schweitzer’s production is mostly slapstick—postmodern slapstick of the unimaginative kind, I’m afraid. Many in the audience did have a good laugh, but the endless comical business on stage obscured the subtleties of baroque opera. Vivaldi’s arias are gorgeous, and several of them are beautifully sung by this cast, but what comes before and after the arias is often silly or, worse, pretentious. The libretto's take on the Spanish conquest of Mexico is unusual, and Long Beach Opera could have said something clever about transatlantic relations, or the practices of operatic exoticism, or the challenges of representing Mexico in California. Instead, what we got didn’t amount to anything, even kitsch.

[Esteban]

Disappointing! That's the best way to describe it. I felt that there was little respect for the piece, for the historical event, and for the audience. The production values were very poor. Definitely not what is expected from an opera by Vivaldi that is been presented for the first time in the US. The subject matter was also not taken seriously. That shows that the European insensitivity to this subject matter remains since Vivaldi's time. It is as insensitive as making a comedy about the holocaust and have Hitler being glorified during the Grand Finale. It is even hard to consider it a comedy, since it was seldom funny. It was mostly boring. The performances were good, but the show as a whole was not worth the price of the ticket. I thought all these opinions were just my personal point of view, until I found out a similar response from other members of the audience.

[Tim Bolton]

LB Opera is known for it's innovations ! That's what this was and brave enough to use 2009 methods of stage presentation....departing from traditional. Knowing this, I would wonder why one would even attend if they knew they would be disappointed.

This was a skilled, sometimes geniously staged, opera. The TIMES critic got it right!

[laurie frank]

I loved the opera. The singing was gorgeous, the staging inventive and fresh. What a difficult task for director Schweizer. He totally rose to the occassion, and created an opera that was sexy, fun and completely transporting. I watched it with a house full to the brim with high school students, not your easiest audience. They ate it up and I'm sure they will be attending the next opera to which they are invited, a triumph right there.

[Bill Keiser]

Once again, Long Beach Opera is back on track, bringing new life to less well known or, as in this case, long lost works of considerable interest and merit. When you look at the budgetary constraints under which the company operates, and the sad fate recently of cultural institutions in general and opera companies in particular, this was an almost miraculous event. And the excellence and attention to detail of Musica Antigua added to the evening's musical lustre. Thanks to The Times for letting its readers know the good news. If you missed it, there is still a chance this Sunday in Santa Monica.

[Simpson]

The idea to have the characters begin in a museum and evolve into costumed period characters was fun. Some of the voices were incredible. But the rest was awkward at best. Disappointing to see such talented singers doing slapstick and strip teases to Vivaldi.

[Carmen]

To me was like to the other 30% of the assistance: disappointing, why I said 30%?, because was the people that left the auditorium after the intermedia.
The "post modernism" is confused with a trivialization. The book was changed and the dialogues also changed ad hoc to make laugh the audience. Was very sad and upset see this Opera lost for many centuries treated in that way. The best singer definitively was Worra. The character of Teutil was the over dimensioned even more than Moctezuma. The singer had an overstellar role that for my viewpoint did not deserved. The tragedy of the ancient Mexican people was a laugh in this representation. The best of all was the music but at this moment I am not sure if I listened the Opera (music and dialogues) in their original version.

[Carmen]

Respect the "innovation" of the Long Beach Opera, from my viewpoint this representation was the step from the Opera to the comedy, I think was respectfulness or perhaps I do not understand the term "post-modernism".

There is a very serious proposal for this opera to be rewritten (in Nahuatl) with an historical viewpoint more rigorous coming from a mexican musician based in serious historical reviews.

http://gentesur.com.mx/articulos.php?id_art=1383&id_sec=7
........
Para mi modo de ver esta obra no hace innovacion, sino mas bien una satirizacion de la obra de Vivaldi. Me parece que esta puesta en escena es una trivializacion de la obra original convertida de Opera en comedia.

La liga de arriba, muestra la propuesta de un musico serio