THE ITALIAN GIRL IN ALGIERS • DEUTSCHE OPER BERLIN
★★★★★☆
Photo: Eike Walkenhorst
REVIEW THE ITALIAN GIRL IN ALGIERS: KNOCKOUT WIN IN BERLIN
Mexican star tenor and director Rolando Villazón knocks out the Berlin audience with a completely crazy wrestling staging of Rossini’s second best-known buffa opera, The Italian Girl in Algiers, which unfolds with an impressive cast in a huge show-style boxing ring at the Deutsche Oper.
The Italian Girl in Algiers (1813) was written in less than three weeks by the then 21-year-old Rossini, who was already a well-known name. The opera belongs to a genre that was popular at the time: Turkish and Oriental comedies, in which North Africa and the Near East are portrayed as exotic, absurd, and caricatured settings for white European low comedy—not a little xenophobic and about as politically correct today as Eskimo ice cream, Tintin in the Congo, and Rasmus the Ostrich.
Photo: Eike Walkenhorst
The local Algerian bey (leader) Mustafà has grown tired of his wife and would like to replace her with a more exciting Italian model. Mustafà enslaves the Italian Lindoro – a young man who misses his girlfriend, who happens to be stranded in Algiers after a shipwreck.
Photo: Eike Walkenhorst
The Italian beauty (the superb mezzo Nadezhda Karyazina) is intelligent, energetic, and captivates Mustafà with her flirtatiousness as the complications unfold. Mustafà (the delightfully self-indulgent Tommaso Barea) – a classic buffo-basso – is comical, self-absorbed, and constantly laughed at. The climax is the famous pappataci scene, where he allows himself to be appointed a member of a fictional Italian order whose rules are: eat, drink – and mind your own business.
Photo: Eike Walkenhorst
The Italian woman fools the entire male hierarchy and runs off with Lindoro. Men are stupid, and women are smart. A point that hits home here at the premiere on Women’s Day on March 8.
To take the edge off the semi-racist insults, Villazón has transplanted the action to a Mexican wrestling club, where the antics take place in and around a boxing ring in training suits, silk robes, and kitschy wrestling costumes with colorful, glittering masks in a spectacular look that seems borrowed from superhero culture.
The result is a theatrical feast that has divided the discerning German opera press, which ranges from describing the production as a superb reinterpretation to a pitifully crude piece of director’s theater that drowns the music in noise and is unworthy of a great composer like Rossini.
Photo: Eike Walkenhorst
However, anyone who was present at the premiere will know that Villazón has scored an audience hit with his whimsical interpretation of a rather sedate performance, which offers a sea of swirling acrobatic coloratura arias, played vigorously to the audience, who respond enthusiastically with cheers and spontaneous applause.
With this production, Villazón repeats the feat he achieved at the Salzburg Festival a couple of seasons ago, where he staged The Barber of Seville in a formally similar, comical meta-layer (Hollywood in the silent film era), which blew an enthusiastic audience away with a wild chaos of musical nonsense and opera ballads. You can read my review here.
GOT TO SEE THIS gives five stars to The Italian Girl – a well-sung, well-played, and well-produced buffa that is not only a feast for the eyes but also genuinely funny.
