Hotel Metamorphosis
“A panoply of human feelings” – thus director Barrie Kosky describes Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Combined with Antonio Vivaldi’s virtuosic and varied music, individual stories from this unique epos of antiquity blend in a special theatrical evening created for the Salzburg Whitsun Festival.
“Almost any emotion,“ from fury and revenge to boundless joy, can be found in Ovid’s stories, according to Kosky, recounting as they do “transformations of human bodies into something else”, be it a tree, an animal or water itself. For Hotel Metamorphosis, these stories are interwoven with arias, choruses and instrumental music by Antonio Vivaldi, allowing the audience to discover them in altered forms. Within this cosmos of human feelings, we encounter Arachne, a flawless weaver who challenges the goddess Minerva and is ultimately transformed by her into a spider. Myrrha finds herself morphed into a tree, having desired her own father and shared his bed. His statue of a perfect female body becomes a living lover for Pygmalion. In his overweening self-love, Narcissus ignores the advances of a nymph and finally only exists as a voice.
In its astounding virtuosity and spellbinding expressivity, the human voice is the emotional core of Vivaldi’s arias, ensembles and choruses. Opera as an art form was young at the time and revealed playful lightness, subtle humour and an unbridled zest for transformation. This led to the emergence of the pasticcio, whereby a new work was assembled from extant pieces by one or more composers. The original plot elements were adapted, or a completely new story was invented around the selected pieces of music. This open and versatile form of opera and oratorio had its heyday in Italy in the first half of the 18th century.
Taking its cue from this tradition, Hotel Metamorphosis is a pasticcio for our times: within Ovid’s complex emotional worlds, present-day people can be glimpsed. Vivaldi’s music offers a colourful spectrum between melancholy and joy, light and darkness. With this production, Cecilia Bartoli returns once again to an artist to whose reassessment as an opera composer she made a significant contribution as early as 1999, when her legendary Vivaldi Album appeared. Alongside her, Varduhi Abrahamyan, Lea Desandre and Philippe Jaroussky, the actress Angela Winkler appears on stage at the Haus für Mozart as a narrating Orpheus figure. The colourful, varied music will be rendered in all its radiance by Gianluca Capuano and Les Musiciens du Prince – Monaco, opening up a versatile sonic space for the soloists, dancers and chorus. For Barrie Kosky, music and staging thus merge in “a meditation on Ovid’s themes, with music by Vivaldi”. Ovid and Vivaldi: to the director, this is “a match made in heaven”.
Olaf A. Schmitt
First published in the Festival insert of Salzburger Nachrichten