Having laughed, smiled and clapped its way through the opening night of Teatro La Fenice’s production of Vivaldi’s “Bajazet,” the audience greeted the artists at the final curtain with warm applause. However, it was not a reaction shared by everyone; the final notes had barely been played before some members of the audience were beating their way to the exits, while others could not even manage to return following the interval. Some readers may well be wondering exactly what the audience could possibly have found funny about a drama focused on the abuse of power, attempted murder, humiliation, manipulation and suicide.
“Bajazet” is, after all, a grim tragedy that, apart from the final scene in which the conflicts are resolved and Tamerlano indulges in an act of clemency, has absolutely nothing that could be seen as happy, let alone comedic. Agostino Piovene’s libretto moves from one dramatically distraught and disturbing scene to the next, occasionally interspersed with expressions of higher sentiment, but one would be hard pushed to identify anything that resembles comedy. The director, Fabio Ceresa, did not see it in this way.
A Misplaced and Confused Staging “Bajazet,” written in 1735, is a pasticcio, a work comprised of new arias, older arias composed for Vivaldi’ earlier operas and arias taken from works by other composers. Although approximately 80 percent of the music is considered to have been written by Vivaldi, Ceresa found the musical numbers to.
