"Zaide" Mixes Mozart With Dialogue

(first published in The Cincinnati Post Feb. 13, 1992)

Talk about a cliff-hanger.

During the final bars of Mozart's unfinished opera "Zaide," the harem girl Zaide and her lover are on their knees begging the sultan for mercy. They've been there more than 200 years. Do they live or die?

Come to the first University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music's performance of "Zaide" Thursday at Patricia Corbett Theater and find out - or go to New York next month to see CCM's cast perform it in Lincoln Center.

Not that CCM has tinkered with Mozart. Not a note has been added or subtracted, said director Malcolm Fraser. Instead, they've taken the opera and made it part of a play, newly written by British playwright John Mortimer (creator of "Rumpole of the Bailey" on PBS).

Fraser approached Mortimer after hearing him discuss opera on British radio.

"I asked him would he be interested in becoming another da Ponte to Mozart (Lorenzo da Ponte was Mozart's most famous librettist)." Mortimer accepted the challenge. Picking up on one of Fraser's suggestions, he incorporated the opera into a play dealing with a Middle Eastern hostage situation.

"That's actually what happens in the opera," Fraser said. "An Eastern potentate has taken a prisoner. The play sets that context, and the opera becomes an escapist fantasy of the hostage."

Mozart wrote "Zaide" in 1779, then set it aside when it seemed unlikely to be performed. Considered a forerunner of his "Abduction from the Seraglio," it's about a young woman taken captive by Sultan Soliman. She falls in love with a fellow captive, Gomatz. They try to escape but are captured and condemned to death. One of Zaide's arias is well-known from the film "Amadeus."

The play takes place "in some Lebanon-like country," Mortimer said. Hostages are being held in a shattered building, which was once a palace of Soliman. "It is haunted by these ghosts," he said.

The play begins with a long monologue by the hostage. He "dreams" the opera, which "slightly takes over reality," Mortimer said.

Mortimer not only wrote the play for "Zaide" but supplied spoken dialogues for the opera. Mozart intended to use such dialogues between the musical numbers, but they have been lost.

The production has a cast of actors and a cast of singers, all students in CCM's opera and drama departments. "Each singer has an actor that reflects his or her character," Fraser said.

The "Zaide" cast will join a CCM delegation of 112 that will go to New York in mid-March to perform as part of Lincoln Center's Mozart bicentennial celebrations. In addition to "Zaide," to be performed March 12, CCM's Philharmonia Orchestra and Chamber Choir will perform Mozart's Mass in C Minor, K.427, during the visit.

Giving CCM's new "Zaide" visual form was a gradual process, said set designer Thomas Umfrid. Several concepts were discarded, including a huge desert made of carpet that would have rolled up the back wall and a Salvador Dali idea, "with naked ladies and pomegranates floating through the air.

"About halfway through our design process, we decided to chuck all references to literal things," said Umfrid. The result is abstract, with scenic elements contrasting the textures of the desert (sand, rough walls) against the opera's dream world, symbolized by a bright-red circle motif.

"At one point we pull the desert - a huge piece of cloth with a beige/red color shift - out of one of the circles."

There's a shiny black deck with a gold mirrored floor where much of the opera occurs. The circle itself conveys an oriental quality, Umfrid said.

Dean Mogle's costumes enhance the contrast between the "real" and operatic worlds, with muted tones for the actors and opulent, multi-layered costumes for the singers. (A note to the environmentally conscious: The studs on the armor worn by Soliman's guards are smashed bottlecaps and jar lids.)

Moving between spoken and sung environments created another problem, Umfrid said:

"We didn't want to write more Mozart," but we needed "a commonality of sound." Conductor Gerhard Samuel obliged by writing a "soundscape" that underlies the dialogue.

Do Zaide and Gomatz lose their heads at the end? Nobody is telling. There are "alternative endings," though, Mortimer said: "The 'real' play ends in a different way from the opera.