Ian Bostridge as Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni, Royal Opera House, 2003.

My problem with Mozart
His operas are wonderful to sing, says Ian Bostridge. But why do the tenors always get such short shrift?
Friday January 13, 2006, The Guardian
All over the world, opera houses, concert halls and professional and amateur musicians are celebrating Mozart: this month marks 250 years since his birth. Particularly ambitious is the Salzburg festival's plan to perform every one of his operas over a single summer season. As a classical singer I am, inevitably, making my own modest contribution to the celebrations: singing Mozart arias in a recital in Hamburg, and appearing in a production of Don Giovanni at the Vienna State Opera. I don't perform a great deal of opera but, having the sort of tenor voice that suits Mozart rather than Verdi, the former figures largely in my career as a theatrical performer.
But there is a problem with Mozart, one I readdress every time I sing in one of his operas. It has been said - often - that Mozart tenor roles are boring.
This is an opinion that I am anxious, for obvious reasons, to rebut. However, the evidence to support it is easy to find: when do people get bored in the Marriage of Figaro, otherwise one of the most miraculously satisfying works in the western canon? When the irritating minor character Basilio, a small-town Machiavelli of a singing teacher, insists on singing his aria in the final act, delaying the denouement and spoiling the fun. He is (unfortunately for me) a tenor.

It's the same in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, the opera Mozart wrote immediately before Figaro. Belmonte, the tenor hero, has a wealth of gorgeous music lavished on him. His three beautiful arias are, however, one, perhaps two, too many for the dramatic structure. Wenn der Freude Tränen Fließen and Ich Baue Ganz interrupt the action and are dramatically inert. While technically challenging, their difficulties are meant to be hidden by the accomplished singer, so that people will only notice if they are sung badly. They do not embody struggle in the way Constanze's bravura aria Martern Aller Artern does; many aficionados will come to the opera just to hear the dramatic intensity offered by Constanze's vocal martyrdom. The tension and psychological realism of Belmonte's famous first aria, O, Wie Ängstlich, the ardour of the reunion quartet, the painful rapture of the Belmonte/ Constanze duet as they confront death towards the end of the opera - these are, for me, the moments of Belmonte's that live most intensely, both when singing and when listening to the piece. It takes resolute cutting and cunning direction to rescue Belmonte from being a tiresome goody-goody or a self-satisfied prig.

But it's Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni who is the most revealing example of my problem with Mozart. Critics and audiences alike complain of his passivity. He stands as the virtuous and ineffective opposition to Giovanni's demonic life force, and is bound to suffer in comparison. But in fact, act one makes sense for Ottavio in terms of storytelling and dramatic pace. His duet with Donna Anna after her father's murder by Giovanni is powerful and affecting; the aria Dalla Sua Pace is a touching and economical moment of stasis, theatrically highly effective.

It is the second-act aria, Il Mio Tesoro - a piece of exquisite time-wasting - that can do for Don Ottavio. This is an aria that explicitly admits it is holding up the action. "Meanwhile, go and console my beloved," Ottavio sings as he prepares to alert the authorities to Giovanni's miscreancy. It sounds like a beautiful and irrelevant serenade, and it has had, rather revealingly, a healthy life as a concert aria without dramatic context.

In fact, Mozart only ever intended Ottavio to have one aria. Il Mio Tesoro was written for the original Prague production, Dalla Sua Pace as part of the revision for a subsequent run in Vienna. This is often presented as a matter of horses for courses - different sorts of aria for different singers. But it was also, evidently, a case of second thoughts being better than first. Without Il Mio Tesoro, Ottavio disappears rather in act two, but that is in the nature of the plot, which focuses at that stage on Don Giovanni's supernatural comeuppance.

It's no use worrying that Don Ottavio in his delayed vengeance isn't fleshed out into a operatic Hamlet surrogate. Act one's drama and tenderness and the extraordinary ensembles in both acts should be enough for any tenor. The problem is that many contemporary productions, anxious to placate an underused singer or maximise the use of an expensive tenor, encourage the singer to do both arias. Being one of the tenors all too eager to be placated - if I'm offered a lovely aria to sing, who am I to refuse? - I can't really complain. More beautiful music, less effective drama: it's a commonplace operatic dilemma.

Don Ottavio's inadequacies have been explained as those of an opera seria character inhabiting a dramma giocoso - a character from the old form inhabiting the new. Yet it strikes me that of all the Mozart roles I have sung, the most satisfying is the title role in a so-called opera seria: Idomeneo, the earliest opera of Mozart's to enter the repertoire. Idomeneo's arias always seem to emerge from the drama, to amplify and intensify it, aided by the brilliant accompanied recitatives that precede them and weave them into the musical-dramatic structure.

Eighteenth-century operas on heroic subjects, mythical or classical, are sometimes seen as the antithesis of Romanticism in music, bound as they are by the rules of classical drama, formal and restrained. This is certainly the world Don Ottavio comes from. Sitting in Milan's La Scala last month, however, listening to Daniel Harding's triumphant debut conducting Idomeneo, I was struck, despite the anti-Romanticism of Harding's approach in terms of sonority and texture, by the utter Romanticism of the piece. The great, passionate, intense sweep of music that is the first act, from the overture to Idamante's recognition of his long-lost but forbidding father, is Romantic in conception and, like the plays of Shelley or Byron, impossible to represent fully on stage. It is shattering music of the mind, psychological and intense.

In a peculiar sense, despite the ritual and ceremony of this grand opera seria, it's much nearer the inner dramatic world of Schubert or Schumann. For all the beauties of Mozart's more mature stage works - and Don Giovanni remains an extraordinary piece of music theatre in which to participate, even if you're playing its least interesting character - Idomeneo remains the most satisfying to perform for a tenor, from a selfish point of view at least. It was Mozart's favourite among his operas, too, no doubt as much for what it tries to do as for what it actually achieves.

Ya no es sólo lo bien que canta...es que además este chico tiene más muebles en la cabeza que IKEA.

pues yo le voy a oir cantar en el liceu el lunes 20 de febrero...pero trae un programa de schumannnnnnnnnnnnn..en año mozarttttttttttttttt

Cuanto mejor amueblada esta una cabeza, mejor se canta.
Estoy convencido.

Teniendo en cuenta que Bostridge es, a día de hoy, más que probablemente, el mejor cantante de Schumann, el dia 21 de febrero vas a comentar en este foro que has alucinado y que fue una maravilla. Y si no, al tiempo.

bueno...mejor.. ..pero hubiera preferido un homenaje a Wolfie, francamente

Es que se canta (y se toca) con la cabeza, no con las cuerdad vocales (o con las manos). Bostridge es un auténtico ejemplo de músico con cultura (músico que canta o cantante-músico), por desgracia algo no demasiado común en el mundo lírico. A mí me encanta, aunque tengo entendido que su Don Ottavio en Londres (si mal no recuerdo) fue abucheado, aunque esta información la recibí del "boca a boca" y desconozco hasta que punto es fiable.

Suscribo lo que dices, aunque para haberse llevado el máximo premio a la coherencia debería no haber omitido Tamino en su mini ensayo, brillante por lo demás.

Mi opinión (no muy original, es la más obvia) sobre Don Ottavio es que el propio Mozart lo maltrata a proposito, haciendo que, a pesar de tener bellísimas arias, te vaya causando urticaria con sus apariciones, por lo pusilánime y cobarde de su actuar toda la obra. Bostridge dice que dramáticamente es un personaje que rompe el drama en algunos momentos. Pues eso, quizás es intencional y Mozart deseaba que el público pensase... "Vale, eres la virtud en persona (por lo bello de las arias y "pureza" de sus actos), pero eres el personaje más aburrido y detestable de cuantos pululan por la obra, ¡desaparece!"

Por otra parte, el Sr. Bostridge debe estar muy centrado en el lied, pero me extraña ese supuesto abucheo. Siendo la suya una buena voz para Mozart y con su técnica, puede no haber gustado la aproximación al personaje, pero tanto como para abuchearlo...

Ya que hablamos de él, ¿alguien ha visto esa especie de película-ensayo que él protagoniza llamada Winterreise, basada en el ciclo de Schubert? Estoy pensando si pedirla a Amazon.

Pues... de alli se explicaria lo que dice Bostridge cuando afirma que tiene "problemas" con el Don Ottavio y se extiende para decir mas aun, que tiene "problemas" con Mozart...
... y tampoco menciona a Ferrando... Me da la impresion que aparte de Idomeneo, los otros roles no le gustan...