Castellucci's 'Requiem': a cryptic and (in)disputable spectacle in the wrong hands

The Polish thinker Władysław Tatarkiewicz wrote that the artistic work is a conscious human activity, capable of reproducing things, constructing forms or expressing an experience, with results that can delight, excite or shock. It is beyond doubt that every staging is an artistic act that reinterprets and visualizes a previous reality, be it literary, musical, visual or a mixture of the three. In this case, the always controversial Italian director Romeo Castellucci has made an interpretation of death and life as circular cycles from the Requiem and other works by Mozart linked more or less with a death that, for the musician and in accordance with a famous letter sent to his father, was "man's best and true friend."

As in the cinema of the recently transferred David LynchCastellucci's language is cryptic and loaded with meanings that escape a first level of reading. And even a second. Obviously, there will be those who like the proposal and those who don't; those who understand and enjoy it and those who don't understand but enjoy it just the same. But one thing is certain: this show leaves no one indifferent. The pity is that the Italian director abuses some resources. For example, the dancing scenes with a folkloric background, which are repetitive.

However, the montage includes surprising images that, despite the coldness inherent to the Castellucci factory, have a great impact. For example, an ending crowned by the baby kept on the floor while the enormous panel rises to drop the ash that we are all going to become. Brutal, in the context of a staging that occasionally impacts although it hardly moves.

Castellucci speaks in an interview published in the Liceu's program of "fading out of life as the origin of all possible human beauty […]; the complete opposite of what is expected from a funeral mass, this Requiem "celebrates life." Being an unfinished work (and more or less arranged and finished by Franz-Xaver Süssmayr), Mozart's mass for the dead has been since time immemorial a potinated, revolted and adulterated work, often with good intentions: a musicologist Miguel Ángel Marín 'Mozart's 'Requiem': A Cultural History).

Castellucci doesn't poop anything, but the show should sell for what it is: a stage proposal about death and life, with music by Mozart and Gregorian antiphons. Thus, it would not lead to confusion for those who feel cheated at the box office, thinking that they will see and hear another version of the last work in the Mozartian catalogue.

But in the case of the Liceu show (premiered in Aix-en-Provence in 2019) there is a problem: a musical level that is leaking from all sides. In the heart of the house they are forced to dance while singing really complicated passages, but the result is minimal, with a flat and nuanceless reading of the work. Under the orders of a Giovanni Antonini who is too concerned with matching time and dynamics and with passages in which he gets irremediably lost, the orchestra plays with uneven planes and with false entrances. And the soloists (Anna Prohaska, Marina Viotti, Levy Sekgapane and Nicola Ulivieri) are compliant and little more. That is to say, one Requiem Scenically powerful but musically in the wrong hands, except for the child member of the Montserrat Choir School Miquel Genescà, especially in the antiphon In paradise from the beginning and the end of the show.