Customer Reviews

Donizetti - Maria Stuarda [VHS]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This is not a performance of Donizetti's opera. Scenes from the opera (sung in Italian) are interspersed with scenes from Schiller's play (spoken in German). The result is ... well, I don't know what name to give to the result. Petr Weigl has made some pretty good opera films, and some pretty awful ones, but this one takes the cake as the worst trashing of an opera ever committed to film. It doesn't do much for Schiller's play, either. The singing (what there is of it) by Joan Sutherland, Huguette Tourangeau, and Luciano Pavarotti is very good (Weigl obtained a pre-existing sound recording of the complete opera and sliced out the little bits that he needed for his film), but there's not enough of the opera or of the play for any music drama or any other sort of drama to happen. Avoid this DVD and buy the CD set of the opera instead. If you're interested in Schiller's play, just read it.

Bloodless bland facial expressions and body language as accompaniment to deliberately emotional full-body singing is a disconnect I don't find appealing. Just letting your mouth hang open as long as a note is held does not convey the fire or the ice of the musical content and intent. Yikes. This is painful to watch when these two genres -- Italian opera and German dramatic play -- are mixed, but never really blended. I'd rather watch a too-old Sutherland and an un-English Pavarotti impersonating their characters through music than watch actors impersonate characters while impersonating singers.

It all comes across hollow/empty/fake/contrived to this viewer/listener. This is a hybrid that thankfully cannot reproduce itself.

Petr Weigl deserves praise for his bold experiment, a combining of the rhetoric of Schiller with the lyricism of Donizetti to achieve something higher, a Shakespearian heft in the telling of the sad tale of the Scottish queen, Mary Stuart. Unfortunately, the tale as related does not transcend the soap operatic, and this despite the beautiful voices of Sutherland, Tourangeau and Pavarotti. The end result is essentially no more than vintage melodrama. The characters parade past the viewer as if on stilts. The combination of the rhetorical and the lyrical emerges simply as doubly pretentious in the unfriendly (because realistic) medium of film. The director's intention was fascinating. It is too bad that the resultant film is no more than mediocre.

If you think this is a complete performance of Donizetti's "Maria Stuarda", think again. It's nothing of the kind. I'm not even sure WHAT this is. Scenes from the opera are mimed by actors -----to the recording, no less, of Joan Sutherland-Hugette Tourangeau on London Records. Both sing spectacularly well, but in this context, it makes no effect whatsoever. One is far better off just purchasing the recording on CD. I cannot speak for everyone, but I find this to be a complete failure of an attempt to combine two mediums. By such halfway measures, nothing is accomplished. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone. I gave it one star only because I couldn't give it a zero, which is exactly what it is.

The film attempts to combine Schiller's play with Donizetti's opera. The target audience may be opera lovers who grew up in countries where Shiller is taught and revered in highschool. The Czech actors are dubbed in German for the dialogues and in Italian by the Decca recording of the opera, for the sung scenes. The film starts with 15 minutes of an exceedingly tedious dialogue in German. Watching the Czech actors proceed from dubbed spoken German to the dubbed voices of famous singers in Italian is absurd beyond belief. The whole thing has the logic of a Monty Python sketch, and casts some doubt on director Petr Weigl's artistic judgment. The audio and video quality are excellent.

My opera discussion group has just considered Maria Stuarda. The general consensus was that this production was the most interesting and best production available on DVD. Admittedly it is neither the opera nor the Schiller play, but it is a very interesting dramatic juxtaposition of the two. And it is important to remember that the Donizetti libretto is based on the Schiller play.

This is a Petr Weigl movie production. As with his others, he demonstrates a superb sense of place, costume and drama. The music he has chosen is sung by Sutherland, Turangeau and Pavarotti at the height of their powers. His actors by singing and speaking during the filming while the soundtrack is playing have mastered the lip-synching, and as usual are superb actors who look their part.

There are a few times when the insertion of the Schiller drama is intrusive (the sellf-immolation during the final scene comes to mind), but mostly it enhances what is going on. The Fotheringay scene cannot be bettered, and the confession in the final act sends shivers down my spine every time I see it.

I realise that there are a lot of purists out there who have almost visceral negative reactions to this production. I have a positive one. Give it a try with an open mind. It is well worth it.

This is not going to work, not even foor opera fans. This is a play done with real settings, yet with a lot of dialogues and suddenly the actor/actress sing an operatic aria and then cut short and then another scene...

Sutherland and Pavorotti singing was not as good as one would expect-- we can't see their acting, and nd the sound is not so good in any event. The costume is, however, very good, so is the photography. Acting is not bad. But where is the drama,the climax or anti-climax...It's the form it takes that causes the audience most trouble.

One would accept an opera with real setting like Onegin with music written by Tsaichovsky etc more readily.

This DVD is of Maria Stuarda is in fact a film, which is a... of Donizetti's opera. Dramatic scenes and arias arechopped and changed around at will, with huge chunks of music missing,suddenly interspersed with German dialogue. This is bad enough; whatis worse is watching ... eastern european actors and actressestrying ... to lip synch to Joan Sutherland's magnificentvoice. The makers of the film didn't even specially record thesoundtrack, they just lifted directly from Sutherland's full recordingof the opera. I would recommend anyone to steer clear of this....

I could not disagree more strongly with the review that says these actors look rediculous! i thought they did a magnificent job of difficult lip synching with both the german dialog, and the singers voices, whcih by the way are truly outstanding, especially huegette tourangeau's incredible mezzo/contralto singing, the likes of which i have never heard another mezzo equal, and i have been listening to opera for over sixty years! magnificent!

Once you realize that this is not to be Donizetti's opera, but rather Weigl's own creation that consists of Schiller's dialogs in German and Donizetti's music in Italian, you'll love it. Weigl chose the parts from both that he found important to show us the aspects of a relationship of the two queens. He created a film that fluently moves from German to Italian, from talking to singing. Both German dialogs and (of course) singing were lipsynced, but there is nothing to be affraid of - as always with Weigl, actors did an excellent job. I think there cannot be more European film than this - Czechoslovak actors "speak" German and "sing" Italian. Turn on the English subtitles to get the complete image. Well, you either like an idea of a multilingual film or not. I happen to like it. As for an opera part, being a fan of mezzos I love the idea of transposing the role of Elisabeth for contralto. This brings a better contrast between the queens as well as gave a chance to Huguette Tourangeau to be revealed to me :-) I must admit I like her (and Kamila Magalova, who plays Elisabeth) more than Joan Sutherland (and Magda Vasaryova). If you find Maria Stuarda interesting, don't forget to check out also The Turn of the Screw, Rusalka or Winterreise.