Mozart’s Constanze

Enthralling Elegance

Mozart’s Constanze

devised by Thomas Guthrie

West Green House Opera, at the Theatre on the Lake, Hartley Wintney, 21^st July   

Review by Mark Aspen

How can such a sensitive and subtle piece provide such impact?  The musical study in black and white, Mozart’s Constanze has opened the West Green House Opera Season with a superb semi-staged recital and dance pairing, prefacing its varied 2023 programme.   

Maria Constanze Weber, who at 20 years old became Frau Mozart, has without justification had a bad press.   Alexander Pushkin, in his verse drama Mozart and Salieri, written during Constanze’s lifetime, took a sideswipe at her (and trashed poor Salieri).  Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Mozart and Salieri takes up the theme and well into the twentieth century the calumny persists with Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play, Amadeus.  The slur was compounded five years later in Miloš Forman’s film, in which Constanze is portrayed as a crude and immature air-head.

Recent Mozart biographers’ historical and musicological research has redeemed her reputation and the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, in its current edition, comments that Constanze has been treated harshly and unfairly and that earlier assessments of her character were “probably wrong on all counts”.

Mozart’s Constanze sets the record straight with a portrait that shows her as intelligent and talented, practical and, true to her name, faithful.  Constanze tells her own story of her life with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, of his loss and of her widowhood.  This autobiography is told by way of Mozart’s music, opera arias, and vocal solos from his secular and sacred works.  The role is played by soprano Luci Briginshaw with enthralling elegance and with a passionate empathy for her character, Constanze.

Earlier this year we saw Luci Briginshaw in another stand-out performance at the Hackney Empire, as the frivolous fashionista the Contessa di Folleville in Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims.  The role of the contessa could not be more different from that of the well-grounded Constanze (… neither could the opera’s venue).   Rossini’s Contessa di Folleville is much more like Shaffer’s Constanze Mozart, pre Grove’s reappraisal.

A superbly acted performance is complemented by six dancers whose fluid contemporary style expresses the emotions of Constanze, physically enhancing the implications of the sung words as her autobiography unfolds.  Their presence, skilfully and poetically choreographed by Maria da Luz, acts as a narrative to the story, woven into the action yet not obtruding on it.  The added wow factor, though, is that these dancers are also accomplished puppeteers.

The dancers are in black and white, soon becoming all white, the colour of Constanze’s costumes.  Designer, Ruth Paton has used white as the signature of both costumes and in the two-level set.  The upper level is used for the more intimate moments as bedroom, boudoir or birthing room.   This structure and the presence of the musicians, deservedly, on the stage serve to concentrate, perhaps a little too tightly, the main dance space downstage left, as another focus point.

The music chosen has a wide variety: in familiarity from the famous pieces to those known to aficionados; in tempo from the furious to reflective largos; in emotion from anger to grief.   

Luci Briginshaw tirelessly delivers all with equal flair.  The hour-long performance was parenthesised by two very different pieces.  We first meet Constanze as she opens a cappella, with the folk song Ah! Vous je dirai, maman an arrangement of based on the variations in K265, whose basic phrasing is recognisable as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, an bright introduction to Briginshaw’s bell clear voice.  The concluding Alleluia section from the sacred work Exsultate Jubilate, in contrast, could not be more decorated, her nimble coloratura a praise to the final triumphant years of Constanze, who lived to be eighty.

Perhaps it is de rigueur for a Mozartian soprano to sing Der Hölle Rache, the Queen of the Night’s aria from Die Zauberflöte, promising hellish revenge.  Here it is in illustration of the strained relationships with Constanze’s in-laws.  Luci Briginshaw remarkably handles the acrobatic arpeggios and those infamous stratospheric top F₆’s with untrammelled ease.  However, there are many beautifully lyrical passages.  With its heart rending oboe introduction, Vorrei spiegarvi is an outpouring of grief and the difficulty of its expression.  The purity of her delivery is enormously affecting.  In this context, the aria tells powerfully of the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart when he was 35 and Constanze Mozart just 29 years old.

Mozart has been a presence until this point, as a body puppet manipulated by the dancers.  He is slightly smaller than life-size (although Mozart is reputed to have been about 5ft 4ins tall), making him appear rather vulnerable. He is highlighted by the splash of colour, lifting him from the overall design, of the red frock-jacket that Mozart is seen wearing in many contemporary portraits.  Otherwise the puppet in white papier-mâché is fairly featureless.  Nevertheless the puppetry brings the figure vividly to life. 

So we see Constanze and Mozart sitting on a couch (the dancers’ backs) flirting and rapidly falling in love (to the middle section of the overture to Die Entführung aus dem Serail).  The joy of their marriage is conveyed in Solfeggio K.393 , scales and arpeggios developed with such serene concision and clarity as you could hope to hear.  Their wedding is represented by the Adagio from Gran Partita, Serenade No 10, which Mozart may have composed for the wedding ceremony.  The dancers spin pinwheel fans.  We see the lives of Wolfgang and Constanze from the glamorous days in the Viennese imperial court, to the personal tragedies of the neonatal deaths of four of their six children.  All unheard, the puppet Mozart does seem a very real person in all this, such is the verisimilar manipulation of the model, a papier-mâché heart beats.

His death then is quite shocking, as the puppet suddenly falls apart, in Vorrei spiegarvi, an oboe solo, then silence, then pizzicato strings leading into Mozart’s composition for funeral Trauermusik K477.  It is a touching moment, serendipitously enhanced by the breeze across the lake bringing the scent of flowers. 

The penultimate piece shows the uplifting strength of Constanze, in Briginshaw’s beautiful rendering of Et incarnatus est, the reincarnation of Mozart in Constanze’s rescuing of the manuscripts of his music, which was later to be a foundation of her biography of her late husband.

The eight musicians of the Orpheus Sinfonia are confident and inventive, pizzicato strings accentuate Mozart’s score whilst remaining faithful to it, as does the oboe in underlining the moments of pathos.   Orpheus Sinfonia is certainly versatile and, in last year’s Grimeborn Festival, performed a reinterpretation of Wagner’s Siegfried and, mirabile dictu, Götterdämmerung.  How’s that for punching above your weight!

There is a danger in presenting a series of musical recital that it could become much of a potpourri.  No such problem here, and co-directors Thomas Guthrie and Maria da Luz have created a seamless whole of music, dance, and wonderful singing all set in the magic of West Green House gardens, which are incorporated in Sarah Bath’s lighting design, the full magic of which infuses in as the sun sets. 

Mozart’s Constanze has a by-title, “or the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as seen through the eyes of the love of his life”.   It does more than that; it paints a portrait of a remarkable woman.  As the dancers perform, rejoicing in her life with poi-ribbons during that final Exsultate Jubilate, we see a life of triumph.

West Green’s Mozart’s Constanze is a triumph too.

Mark Aspen, July 2023

Photography courtesy of Zavertal Collection and West Green Opera