tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38730260096382333792024-02-22T12:15:40.066-05:00Cafeteria RusticanaMusic and theater and opera and art and the whole damn thing.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.comBlogger106125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-35176135521406402182012-04-26T12:59:00.002-04:002012-05-01T22:00:24.218-04:00Malta 1: A surprising little nation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<p>Perhaps the sleeper of the archaeologic touring cruise in March was Malta, where we paused between Crete and Sicily. No one expected much and the ship's exceptional library possessed no special volumes on the place. Everyone was bowled over, and we did not even have time for the beaches or the Neolithic temples, or more than one meal.</p>
<p>I should not have been overbowled. I knew about the Great Siege (1565), the ur-event of Maltese history. I knew about the Order of St. John of the Hospital that, driven from its earlier home in Rhodes by the Turks in 1523, was given a new one by Emperor Charles V in 1530.</p>
<p>And how did <i>he</i> get Malta, you ask? or, you should. Malta had been attached to the Norman kingdom of Sicily in 1091, when Count Roger I de Hauteville seized it from the Arabs who had been there some two hundred years and who left their language, the basis of modern Maltese, when they departed. Sicily was acquired in 1282 by the kings of Aragon, whose multinational state included Barcelona, Mallorca, Provence, the duchy of Athens and, eventually, Naples. The last king of Aragon, Ferdinand the Catholic, married Isabella of Castille, whose possessions included a spurious claim to the Americas. Charles was their grandson and, after Ferdinand's death in 1516, their heir. On his father's side, he was also heir to the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg properties in Central Europe, and the Valois-Burgundy territories, today the BeNeLux.</p>
<p>Malta did not figure too significantly in all this. While the island has been very prosperous at times when the Mediterranean Sea has known peace - the height of the Roman Empire, for instance or, later, of the British Empire - when war is bruited and pirates are a-lurk, Malta's superb position at the meeting of the eastern and western Med has made it an object of lust as much as an entrepðt, and its coastline full of harbors and excellent beaches, selling points today, has been a welcome mat for corsairs for three thousand years. There are few ancient villages on the coast - the inhabitants always preferred to dwell out of range of pirate lookouts. The ancient capitals, Mdina on Malta, Rabat on Gozo, are built on defensible rocks at the center of their islands. The rich but homeless Knights (an aristocratic and celibate military order of Crusading origin who possessed - still possess - vast properties all over the Catholic world) did not especially want Malta, so far from the seats of power and so inviting to attack. They were hoping to get Syracuse in Sicily or Modon in the Peloponnese. Corfu maybe. It didn't help that Charles threw in Tripoli (now in Libya), and expected them to defend that too.</p>
<p>But Charles was a busy man - he was trying to suppress the Protestant uprisings in Germany, to fight wars against France and Turkey, and to conquer the Americas all at once, and his army had just sacked Rome for several weeks of hideous violence in 1527, which made it difficult for him to get along with the pope. Malta was the best he was willing to offer the Knights; he had no time to reconquer Rhodes for them. In return, they only had to pay him one ceremonial Falcon a year (Malta, with no woods to hunt in, was famous for bird-hunting). Everybody knows that because we've all heard Sidney Greenstreet explain it to Humphrey Bogart while plying him with drugged liquor during the second reel.</p>
<p>The Knights settled down in Malta but they soon realized it was barely defensible. The local nobility (Aragonese or Sicilian in origin) withdrew to Mdina in a huff. The Knights built a couple of forts near Birgu, as its name implies an international merchant town that happened to be set on one of the greatest harbors on earth. But the Birgu had been built before the invention of artillery. Now the great fear was that the Ottoman Turks or their Algerian corsair allies would seize the great high ridge across the harbor and put cannon up there. A small fort was built at the end of the ridge, another near Birgu. In the nick of time.</p>
<p>In 1565, Suleiman the Magnificent, who had opened his reign forty years before by taking Rhodes from the Knights, sent a huge flotilla (perhaps 15,000 soldiers, meeting up with thousands more from Algiers and Tunis) to Malta. The Siege lasted three months, all summer. The Knights and the Maltese held out, but the Turks were about to overwhelm them at last when the Viceroy of Sicily finally arrived (it had taken him that long to raise an army - he couldn't just leave Sicily undefended - Sicily is a very large island) to hit the Turks in the rear. The autumn weather was turning and the invaders gave up. Suleiman died. Jean de la Vallette, the grand master of the Knights, was the idol of Europe, and the city he immediately began to build on the high ridge across the harbor was named Valletta in his honor. (The Knights sent several galleys to the Spanish-Venetian-papal fleet that destroyed the Turkish navy at Lepanto six years later.)</p>
<p>Generals always plan for their last war, and for the next 233 years, the Knights built one citadel after another around the Grand Harbor (and its smaller neighbor to the west), forts and curtain walls and gun emplacements according to the latest in technology. No enemy navy ever came to assault them again, but that might be because one look at the place would discourage most of them. In 1798, when the Knights were nervous about the French Revolution and its upending of the traditional order, its enmity to the Catholic religion, its seizure of the Knights' huge properties in France (most of the Knights were French by birth), Napoleon Bonaparte paused at Malta "to take on water and supplies" for the fleet with which he intended to conquer Egypt. The Knights nervously allowed the French to come ashore, and the French seized the islands. The Knights set up shop in Rome thereafter; they are still there, the smallest sovereign nation in Europe, even smaller than the Vatican across town.</p>
<p>In 1800, the British (who had destroyed the French fleet at Aboukir), chose Malta for a base to control the Mediterranean route to Egypt and India. This led, inexorably, to the SECOND iconic event in Maltese history, the German aerial siege of 1941-42. Reckoning (correctly) that Valletta and the Grand Harbor could not possibly be taken by land or sea assault - there are few more fortified places on earth - the Nazis came by air, a possibility the Knights had never considered. The islands were thoroughly pummeled (11,000 houses destroyed) and everyone was on half-rations, but they never surrendered. George VI awarded the entire archipelago the George Cross.</p>
<p>By 1965, however, having lost India, Palestine and Egypt - even Cyprus was about to go - the British were ready to abandon, uh, ship. The Maltese, for their part, though all fluent in English by now, had come to resent the ages of foreign dominion. They wanted a nation of their own (within the Commonwealth of course, and at first retaining the Queen), to be run their way, and they wanted parity for their own language. In fact, like many peasant tongues, Maltese did not have an official written version until 1934. Its ninth-century Tunisian-Sicilian Arabic (I'm told Maltese and Tunisians still understand each other with little trouble) had been mingled and overlaid by centuries of Italian, Catalan, French and English - there had been lots of Italian immigration, as kings uprooted whole towns of troublemakers or refugees and shipped them to depopulated Malta. Maltese might be called a Romance vocabulary on an Arabic grammatical base, rather the way English is a Romance vocabulary on an Anglo-Saxon grammatical base. The Maltese themselves get all huffy about the Arabic part, as they are <i>very</i> Roman Catholic (divorce has only just become legal there), and prefer to say that their language is of Phoenician/Carthaginian roots. (Like Arabic and Hebrew, a Semitic tongue.) That the Carthaginians were there is beyond dispute; whether they left anything behind may be questioned. (The Romans left some elegant ruined villas.) St. Paul, shipwrecked on the island in the first century CE, said the inhabitants were barbarians, that is, that they understood him neither in Greek nor in Latin. Paul's Greek was excellent; his Latin we must take on faith. But what did the islanders speak? We may never know.</p>
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<p>There were, as I knew, three great artistic reasons to visit Malta, all of them in the co-cathedral in Valletta. (It is called the co-cathedral because the island's original cathedral was in Mdina, where the bishop still dwells.) Two of these treasures are paintings of Saint Jerome and of the death of John the Baptist by Caravaggio, bad boy of the Late Renaissance, who fled here in 1608 after a murder in Rome and a dust-up in Sicily made the mainlands too hot for him. As payment for his work, he was (though not of noble birth) inducted into the Order as a Knight, but his savage temper and bad habits got the better of him here, too, and he was hurried out of town. He died a few months later on the shore, struggling back to Rome in hopes of a papal pardon.</p>
<p>The other great artistic treasure in the co-cathedral has been called "the most beautiful floor in the world." (To read about it in more detail: http://www.danemunro.com/mostbeautifulfloor.html) The floor consists of the intaglio marble tombstones of the Knights of St. John, each one inlaid with pictures, inscriptions, coats of arms in colored marbles. Marble is not natural to Malta; all these rare and gorgeous hues of stone had to be imported - but the Knights were very rich. The cathedral is full of carpets (so tourists don't wear away the stones) and chairs (for services), but much of the floor is always visible. A book containing pictures all of them has recently been published. It retails for 187 euros, and it's <i>heavy</i>. I restrained my lust.</p>
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<p>Outside Valletta - in the hinterlands of the island and, indeed, often on Gozo - are Malta's other famed historic attractions, the megalithic temples and ritual cemeteries that often predate the megalithic structures of the rest of Europe (Britain, Spain, France, Sardinia, Greece) and even the pyramids. They have been excavated and most of the treasures (many of startling quality) found therein are in the National Archaeological Museum in Valletta. These temples are so unlike the megalithic structures found elsewhere that no definite relationship between prehistoric Malta and the rest of the world has been determined. Not until the Copper Age (when invaders, perhaps peaceful ones, arrived from Sicily) or the Bronze Age (when Phoenicians and, possibly, Greeks and Etruscans showed up) is there any certain influence in either direction.</p>
<p>Therefore historians are puzzled as to how the manpower, the skill, the wealth to build these extraordinary structures was amassed. True the islands had more trees and more arable in those days, and the sea may have been considerably lower (which would have made Malta, Gozo and Comino one rather large island, able to grow far more food), and some historians think it may have been a cult center and place of pilgrimage for much of the region. Others theorize a textile industry to create export income. (No textiles that old survive on Malta or anywhere on earth.) Maltese ceramics have not turned up in distant lands and the island has no mineral resources - obsidian and tin, like food ever since Norman times, had to be imported from Sicily.</p>
<p>All we can say is: The local engineers were mighty good, and some of their productions have inspired modern artists. The famous tiny statue of a reclining goddess looks mighty like a Picasso to me, and I saw the coiling, spurred vine motif from Tarxien, just outside Valletta, reproduced in vivid polychrome on an art-nouveau street kiosk in Palermo. Moreover, in a tiny museum devoted to the theater arts in Syracuse, there are a number of set models from 1920s and 1930s stagings of Greek tragedies in that (originally Greek) city whose primitive, even mythic power of masses and shadows strikingly resembled the massive temples of Malta. <i>That</i> can't be an accident, and I wish more designers of classical opera would take their inspiration here.</p>
<p>We were all of us astounded by, and delighted with, Malta. One woman enthused, "Now I understand why Churchill and Roosevelt met Stalin here!" She had it confused with Yalta - my Russian friends died when I repeated this story.</p>
<p>As soon as I got home, I searched online for a cheap mark-down copy of the book of the co-cathedral floor (no dice), and in the NYPL for a history of Malta, finding Brian Blouet's dated (1967) <i>Short History of Malta</i> (published my Praeger, my pal Manya's Dad), which I am now devouring. One interesting reflection is to compare the expensive Maltese obsession with defense works (and the frequent devastations and population clearings that mark the island's history) with the similar history of the Scottish isles, the contrasting history of Iceland (another environmental disaster story, somewhat fewer pirates), the islands of New York Harbor (not quite so obsessed with defense), and the islands of the San Juan and Georgia Straits in the Pacific Northwest, whose development proceeded largely unphased about defense. The Caribbean, too, but I've barely been there. Do Havana's defenses and Cartagena's resemble Malta's? I do not yet know.</p>
<p>More to come.</p>Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com86tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-4210895796395240812012-02-09T21:42:00.006-05:002012-02-09T23:05:56.441-05:00Sophocles and Sickness and Classics Reclassified<i>These Seven Sicknesses</i> at the Flea Theater on White Street (TriBeCa, roughly) is Sean Graney's revision of the seven surviving Sophocles tragedies into one very long and involved play (four and a half hours, with dinner break and bad Thai food served to fill it) that begins with the epidemic of <i>Oedipus the King</i> and concludes with the attempt of Oedipus' daughter, <i>Antigone</i>, to spare the city both dishonor and contagion by burying her slain brother, Polynices. Besides the Oedipus trilogy, the seven plays include three plays involving the enormous Trojan War mythos and one play (<i>Trachis</i>) about Herakles, peripheral to these two sagas but linked through the figure of Philoctetes. (Is he even in the Sophocles text? That's the sort of detail with which Graney plays very fast and very loose.)<br /><br />In Chicago, at the work's premiere, this was performed by an eight-actor troupe, which could be great fun (I remark, having delighted in the six-actor-and-a-versatile-box <i>Cymbeline</i> recently staged by Fiasco Theater), but at the Flea they have a very young 40-actor band so none of the roles need to double up (which is good, since many of the roles appear in more than one play: Oedipus, Antigone, Creon, Philoctetes, Odysseus), and they tend to be young, fit, attractive, talented, unclothed and covered in gore. The gore that was kept offstage in Ancient Greece is something modern audiences accept, indeed expect, so - bring it on. There is also one mad action scene, the massacre by Ajax of the sheep he, driven mad, believes to be his fellow Greeks, a scene that precedes the opening of Sophocles' <i>Ajax</i> and took up a bit too much time in <i>Sicknesses</i>. <br /><br />I attended this, in part, because I like to see (technically) hot young actors strut their stuff in the classics, and in part because I hope to see all of the surviving Greek tragedies someday. There are only 32 or so. (I haven't seen any of the Roman tragedies - they are hardly ever given.) My score is rather high, if one includes - versions - musicalizations. My Sophocles record is excellent:<br /><br />1) Oedipus the King - Saw a film of it (Irene Pappas?), and Stravinsky's opera.<br />2) Oedipus at Colonus - The Gospel at Colonus at BAM. (Sophocles done as a gospel church music service - thrilling!)<br />3) Antigone - Saw the Anouilh version (pointedly commenting on the Vichy regime) on television once. Otherwise, Graney's is my first.<br />4) Ajax - Some theater company on Wooster Street did this a couple of years back.<br />5) Women of Trachis - I've seen Handel's version, <i>Hercules</i>, staged by Les Arts Florissants at BAM and by Peter Sellars at Lyric Opera of Chicago. Graney's is the first time I've seen it as a spoken play, but Handel is quite close, actually.<br />6) Electra - Besides Strauss's opera (many, many times), which is drawn from Hofmannsthal's version of Sophocles, I saw Zoe Wanamaker and Claire Bloom do it on Broadway. <br />7) Philoctetes - Saw this in Greek at the theater at Epidavros. Also in English a couple of times, in Seamus Heaney's translation. (Was that the Pearl?)<br /><br />Aeschylus:<br />1) Prometheus Bound - That repertory company on East 13th Street did this recently, with a black African actor who had performed it also in London.<br />2) Seven Against Thebes - The only version I've seen of this on stage was <i>Seven</i>, a hip-hop musical, at Theater Development Workshop on East 4th. Fabulous! Great energy, hilarious mythical jokes only I got, many hip-hop jokes I'm sure I missed.<br />3) Suppliants - Perhaps the oldest extant Greek tragedy. A Romanian troupe brought it to the Lincoln Center Festival in 1997 (my chemotherapy summer) and I sneaked in. They mimed the stories of the other two (lost) parts of the trilogy of the Danaids, the 50 sisters forced to marry their 50 cousins, whom they murdered on the wedding night. Fascinating. Hope one day to see Salieri's first hit, <i>Les Danaides</i>.<br />4) Persians - The other candidate for "oldest extant tragedy," the only survivor about a contemporary event (the Persian defeat by Athens at Salamis). Roberta Maxwell played Atossa at Pace. The production seemed to be, a bit heavily, about our Iraq misadventure. Not crazy about this, however much I agreed with the politics.<br />5) Agamemnon - Saw this on television when I was about ten. It's tough going for modern audiences - we know what's <i>going</i> to happen - but it takes a long time to happen. And I've seen Tanayev's opera, which is actually part one of a trilogy. Oh, and I think there was a Serban version at La Mama.<br />6) Libation Bearers - Saw this when Ariane Mnouchkine did the <i>Atreidae</i> in Brooklyn (and I skipped her Agamemnon). Glorious. <br />7) Eumenides - Ariane Mnouchkine. I thought I was in the presence of gods. <br /><br />Euripides:<br />1) Alkestis - I'm not sure I've ever seen this one staged, except as Gluck's <i>Alceste</i>.<br />2) Medea - His most popular play. Saw Judith Anderson do it on TV, Cherubini's opera, Lorraine Hunt in Charpentier's opera (more closely based on Seneca's Roman tragedy than on Euripides) and a staging by the Greek Active Theater Company in Seattle, with a chorus of the Drag Queens of Corinth lip-sync'ing "Don't Leave Me This Way." Oh, and Diana Rigg on Broadway and Fiona Shaw at BAM - but the guy in Seattle was better.<br />3) Hippolytus - Don't think I've ever seen this staged. Modern audiences don't like the asexual hero, sympathize more with Phaedra. Saw an opera once called <i>Syllabaire pour Phedre</i>. Sorry I missed the version of Phaedra that played in Princeton in November.<br />4) Mad Hercules - Saw this at the Fringe Festival done as a country-rock musical called <i>Hercules in High Suburbia</i>. They had a big, black muscular actor in the lead, and he went with it, doing Muhammad Ali all night: "I tore the Hydra limb from limb/ And I wasn't even mad at him!" Splendid.<br />5) Ion - Two actors did this Off Broadway a year or two ago, playing all the twenty or so roles (actors putting on the play, whose own story resembles that of the play), splendid, but incomprehensible to those who did not already know the story. (So I loved it; people beside me couldn't figure it out.)<br />6) Phoenician Women - That company on Wooster Street did this a few years ago. The Oedipus story boiled down, an awful lot of material in one night!<br />7) Electra - I think I've only seen this done as a rather humorless film. (Irene Pappas?)<br />8) Orestes - That company on East Thirteenth did this one a year or two back. Strange play.<br />9) Iphigenia in Aulis - Gluck's opera, seen in Rome with Stoyanova and Gubanova. Terrific show. Also saw Ariane Mnouchkine's splendid version, attached to the <i>Atreidae</i>.<br />10) Iphigenia in Taurus - Gluck's opera, seen at NYCO and the Met, and an even sexier staging at the Manhattan School of Music.<br />11) Helen in Egypt - I've seen Strauss's opera, which is quite different from Euripides. But someone is staging the play in Manhattan, I seem to recall.<br />12) Suppliant Women - Haven't seen it. Always get it confused with Heracleidae.<br />13) Bacchae - Took part in a production at school in Greece. Saw it a couple of times since then, never successfully (in my view). Also: <i>Dionysus in '69</i>, a memorable teenage night - I'd never seen classic plays done that way! And now everyone does them that way - <i>Seven Sicknesses</i> is a direct descendant. <br />Have taken part in several pagan readings of the Arthur Evans version of the script, usually as Pentheus - because his were the issues I felt I needed to address, meditate, consider. But now I think it's time I took on Dionysus. Until David Ives's <i>Venus in Fur</i>, in which Pentheus is a masochistic playwright, Dionysus is now Venus (or an actress playing her) - as with Mnouchkine, I felt I was in the presence of a deity, or of a human possessed of deity. Best <i>Bacchae</i> EVER! The opera by Szymanowski (<i>King Roger</i>) is not especially dramatic.<br />14) Trojan Women - Best version I've seen was the Andrei Serban version at La Mama that combined the play with Hecuba and was not in any comprehensible language.<br />15) Andromache - Rossini's <i>Ermione</i>, one of his finest tragedies.<br />16) Heracleidae - Never seen it.<br />17) Hecuba - Saw Vanessa Redgrave do this, not too effectively, and the version combined with Trojan Women by Serban.<br />18) Rhesus - Not really Euripides and, anyway, never staged.<br />19) Cyclops - Saw this done as a rock opera this last fall. Terrific! <br /><br />So someone has to do <i>Heracleidae</i> and <i>Suppliant Women</i>. That's all there is to it. Has to. <br /><br />I have also seen a few Aristophanes comedies, no Menander though.<br />Aristophanes' comedy is even more obscure to modern ears than the tragedians' tragedies.<br />1) Lysistrata - The most popular. Besides a staging or two, I loved Schubert's operetta, <i>The Ladies' War</i>. <br />2) Peace - My first Al Carmines musical was his version of this play.<br />3) Birds - Have the video of Braunfels' lovely operatic version, <i>Die Vögel</i>.<br />4) Clouds - Was this the one? Some little company staged it with a woman in the leading (male) role.<br />5) Frogs - Very popular nowadays, but no one has found a successful equivalent to the Aeschylus-Euripides contest that is the body of the play. Most recently seen at that company on East Thirteenth Street on a hot tip from the usually reliable Michael Feingold. Not good.<br />Haven't seen the rest.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-84691962886473162692012-01-14T03:07:00.001-05:002012-01-14T03:08:31.781-05:00The fatal cell phone call during Mahler's NinthI'm imagining a movie scenario ... a young maestro playing with his wife and children. His son is being very annoying with a toy gun, and the father puts it in his pocket. He's all tux'd up for a concert, and he forgets to give the gun back when he leaves. In mid concert, a cell phone goes off. He glares behind him, and sees an elderly concert-goer fumbling with his phone. It ceases to ring. The maestro returns to the music. Half an hour later, at a moment of extreme musical serenity and involvement ... the phone goes off again. Obviously the same one. The idiot has left it on. The maestro turns white with fury, and it goes on and on. He grips his pockets and finds, to his surprise, the toy plastic gun still in one of them. He whips it out and aims at the old man, who is stubbornly refusing to pull out his phone, acknowledge that it's his mistake. But the sight of the gun is too much. He turns white as a sheet with fear. Someone else, seeing the gun, drops a violin ... or something else that makes a sharp, shocking noise. The old man in Row A believes it's a shot and slumps, dying, to the floor. His wife screams. Uproar in the hall. Newspapers stop the presses. TV moralists denounce. The maestro's smug best friend, who is really the maestro's wife's lover, makes suspiciously soothing statements that sound callous and revelatory when they are printed ... as they are. The maestro takes a leave of absence, but every time he hears a cell phone, his skin turns green and clammy. He's beginning to drink a great deal. His hands are haunted by a tremor. He hallucinates conversations, convinced his wife and her lover tricked him into pulling the toy gun out of his pocket in mid-concert. He has visions in his room. The sound of the sea sounds like a concert. He rises to conduct it, but the crashing surf ignores him. He sees the musicians in the surf, laughing at his instructions. He reaches out for a baton -- and seizes a poisonous snake by the tail. The venom has soon paralyzed him on the veranda floor. Before the snake can inflict an entirely lethal bite, his young son sees what is happening through a window of the veranda. He reaches for his toy gun -- but it isn't near to hand. He gets the real one instead. He fires at the snake but the bullet goes wide -- and right through the conductor's temple. The only hope is to call for an ambulance. The boy runs screaming out of the house but there's no one for miles in any direction. However, the conductor, jolted lucid, despite the masses of blood oozing out of him, manages to reach through a jacket and find his cell phone. He dials an emergency number. The operator puts him on hold. The music for "hold" is the symphony he was conducting that night in New York ... he suffers a massive convulsion and dies before our eyes ...Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-7327912543733943332011-12-11T09:26:00.003-05:002011-12-11T09:31:25.859-05:00D'Albert's Der GolemD'ALBERT: Der Golem<br />With Greiner; Morouse, Reiter, Akzeybek, Kanaris. Chorus of the Theater Bonn, Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, Blunier. German text only. DG Multichannel Hybrid MDG 937 1637-6 (2). 119 minutes.<br /><br />In just seven days, the rabbi can make you a man. But, as with any creation, there are no guarantees: designed to defend the ghetto, the golem might go mad — frustrated by love for his unresponsive creator — or for his creator's daughter. Worse — or better, from an opera duet point of view — the daughter might love him. But the sacrilegious nature of this subcreation can have only one ending: the monster, misunderstood and not quite human, must be destroyed. <br /><br />In some form or other – novels, plays, operas, films – The Golem was one of the most popular tropes of the 1920s. After World War I, the baneful aspects of science, of the servant becoming the destroyer, were on everybody's mind. This led notably, in Prague (the golem's home town), to Karel Capek's play, <i>R.U.R.</i>, from which we get the word "robot."<br /><br />Eugen d'Albert's opera <i>Der Golem</i> had its premiere in 1926, shortly after another mad-scientist opera, Hindemith's <i>Cardillac</i>, by the same librettist, Ferdinand Lion. The medieval myth offered the late-romantic composer plentiful meat for magical effects, from an emperor's alchemical diorama to the cabbalistic rituals of creation spell and un-spell – these sound not unlike the Amme's magic in Strauss's <i>Die Frau ohne Schatten</i> of 1919. The Golem's creation is followed by a simple duet in which the rabbi's daughter, defying her father, teaches the mute to speak, and its passionate successor as they fall into forbidden love. Imagine the stringency and neurosis of Schreker or Busoni resolving into something sweet, not unlike Lehár. D'Albert takes full colorful advantage of these opportunities, deploying a huge orchestra elegance. His control is never in doubt; the drama is swift and spare. He pushes his musical language to the edge of the atonality being concocted at the time in Vienna, but is not quite willing to go over the side, to abandon German post-<i>Tristan</i> tradition.<br /><br />The score is not in any way distinctive: it lacks any moment with d'Albert's stamp on it — his and no one else's. Perhaps one would hear more d'Albert in <i>Der Golem</i> if one knew more of his twenty operas than <i>Tiefland</i>, the only one that gets an occasional nod. (This 2010 production of <i>Der Golem</i>, the first in almost twenty years, comes from Bonn.) It was the lifelong despair of the composer that his fame as a piano virtuoso seemed to preclude any taste for his compositions. <br /><br />The opera is cinematically brief – two hours of music in three acts – and its plot is spare: the rabbi ruminates on his forbidden acts, but performs them; his apprentice longs for Lea's love, but she falls for the pupil she has taught to speak. The golem, rejected as a son-in-law, goes mad and must be destroyed. The libretto is in prose not verse (there is no translation in the booklet), and so does not dally with poetic flights. There are inspirational moments and not surprisingly, considering that this recording was made from stage performances, cries and wails that may not be notated. To see it staged would be interesting; these sounds will appeal to any admirer of lush orchestral storytelling. <br /><br />The Bonn cast, all unknown to me, present the story with refreshing excitement: after so many operas, d'Albert knew how to write for voice even over mighty orchestral effects. Mark Morouse, in the title role, barks his first monosyllables with such relish it is almost a pity to hear him become civilized. Ingeborg Greiner has a Germanic anguish in her sobbing soprano that suits Lea's strange loves. Alfred Reiter, as Rabbi Loew, meditates with clarity. Tansel Akzeybek sings the most desperate character, the rabbi's necessary assistant, Lea's frustrated lover. Stefan Blunier renders d'Albert's score stageworthy, with brasses gleaming and trim percussion. For a recording made from stage performances, there is no untoward vagueness in the presentation. <br /><br />(reprinted from <i>Opera News</i>)Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-14819280207488252422011-08-12T13:07:00.002-04:002011-08-12T13:20:01.864-04:00The Secrets of LisbonRaúl Ruiz’s masterpiece is <i>The Past Recaptured</i>, the finest “capture” of Marcel Proust’s fiction in its multi-layers and multi-consciousnesses and mysterious transpositions of time and emotion. How much of that film’s greatness is due to his appreciation of Proust and the filmic techniques called for to capture his philosophy of time and memory in this very different medium, and how much to Ruiz’s own penchant for telling tales within tales in exotic atmospheres at a glacial pace could not be clear from that single movie.
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<br />He has now brought out <i>The Secrets of Lisbon</i>, a four-and-a-half-hour film cut down (!) from a six-hour-long television mini-series. It looks and feels like such a series: High class Masterpiece Theater, the settings (in the royal palaces of Portugal, Lisbon's gorgeous Sao Carlo Opera House, and elsewhere) and more attention to costumes and furnishings (and carriages from several periods!) than to subtleties of acting. The endless details of Castelo Branco’s novel (which I do not know – has it been translated from the Portuguese? Why would anyone bother?), one of about a hundred he scribbled in his sixty-five anguished years, potboilers all, are somewhat straightened out (we may guess) into a narrative full of Manueline curlicues. It looks terrific, but it’s slow, slow, slow, and most of the scenes are indoors. It’s a thrill about the end of the fourth hour when two characters fight a duel, but the action lasts only a few seconds and ends inconclusively with one of the duelists explaining everything (of course, he doesn’t explain everything) to his unsuccessful challenger rather than killing him. It is typical of the film that this eerie flashback (most of the movie seems to be flashbacks) is followed, as the two men drive away in a carriage (it is now about 1840), a figure apparently unknown to us strolls into the abandoned duel-yard and fires an antique pistol – into his own head. By this point in the movie, we know better than to question this – Ruiz will tell us who the suicide is in his own good time. (He does.)
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<br />Did Almodovar get his inspiration from Castelo Branco? Just add gay sex and sex-change operations, neither of them in Castelo Branco’s universe, whether because he could not conceive of such things (it’s possible) or because Portuguese censorship would never have permitted their mention, and there: You have Almodovar.
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<br />But it was not Almodovar that I thought of during the long spaces between seductions, plots and periwigs of <i>The Secrets of Lisbon</i>. Well, let me tell you its convoluted plot (as much as I remember on one viewing) and see what you think of it. We first meet Pedro – who is called Joao – as a 15-year-old in a boys’ school, much teased because he has no last name and the other boys have as many as five. Whisperers think he is the son of old Padre Diniz, the head of the school, who takes a close interest in him. In fact, begetting Joao-Pedro is almost the only thing Padre Diniz, a man with a long, hidden past, has not done, but we learn his secrets only slowly. Joao-Pedro’s secrets are easy enough to penetrate: In a fever, he sees a beautiful visitor; she has brought him a child’s theater as a present. She is the mysterious Countess of Santa Barbara, and of course Joao-Pedro is her love-child. That’s simple enough. But why can she never visit him? Because her husband, the wicked (or is he?) Count has locked her up and beats her, abetted (or is he?) by his lover, the mysterious Eugenia, the only character who never does tell us her secrets. (I bet they’re in the novel, and I bet they’re juicy.) And why is Padre Diniz so interested in the lady’s case? And why is he pretending to be the brother of Sister Antonia, who runs the convent in which the Countess ultimately takes refuge? And who was Joao’s father, and what became of him before he gasped out the whole sordid story to Padre Diniz in a deathbed flashback? And what became of the burping ruffian who shot him? (This turns out to be significant years later, but what doesn’t?) And why has Padre Diniz a special interest in the fate of adulterous countesses pregnant by their lovers? (You may well ask. Well, you may not, but old Brother Sebastian knows and will certainly tell us.) And why does Padre Diniz pick the purse of the beautiful and amoral Duchesse de Cliton? And how does the mysterious Alberto de Magelhaes (that’s Magellan, in Portuguese) make his money? And why does he lavish it on Joao-Pedro, who nonetheless tries to kill him, urged on by the vengeful Duchess – a lousy conspirator, by the way, as she gets fits of the giggles every time one of her silly stratagems comes off? (What else comes off is also pertinent, and she does have splendid shoulders.) Suffice it to say that no deed, good or ill, goes unpunished, and the whole tale implies that God is a compulsive reader of gothic novels and, having plenty of time on his hands, is in no rush to reach the denouement.
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<br />It may be helpful to viewers to know dabs of Portuguese and French history between 1780 and 1840, or maybe I’m the only one who would notice or care. There are references to King José, his autocratic prime minister the Marquis of Pombal (destroyer of the Jesuit Order), his mad daughter, Queen Maria I who fled to Brazil, her son Joao VI, his sons Pedro IV (Dom Pedro I of Brazil) (supported in Europe by England and the liberals) and Miguel, the usurper (supported by Spain and the radical right). And the French (Bonapartist) invasion, conquest and expulsion by Wellington, which would not be important if Padre Diniz had not been a soldier in the French army at the time. Typical scene: Portuguese soldiers’ firing squad shot by an ambush to rescue a French officer … the officer goes off with Diniz, only to become the lover of … well, never mind. Back in the bushes, peasants pick the pockets of the dead. That’s the joke. The peasants and their smocks and clogs remain the same actors in the same costumes throughout the film, no matter the era – no doubt this is accurate – until the late twentieth century, rare was the Portuguese peasant who could afford a change of clothes in sixty years.
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<br />What all this reminded me of, while watching, was <i>Scaramouche</i> (1952, Stewart Grainger, Janet Leigh; there’s also a 1923 silent version I have not seen that stars hot, gay Ramon Novarro) and <i>Anthony Adverse</i> (1936, Fredric March, Olivia da Havilland, Claude Rains and wicked Gale Sondergaard who won her Oscar for it), both of them much more active movies. They are both even (I would say, but it’s been thirty years since I saw either one) better movies, certainly based on better stories – though it would surprise me not a whit if Rafael Sabbatini and Hervey Allen had actually stumbled on Castelo Branco’s <i>The Secrets of Lisbon</i> at some point and said, “I can plot better than that – I can run rings around my characters, bring history to life, and have it all make sense at the end.” This is the advantage of art over reality: The wacky coincidences and mysteries can all tie together in a well-plotted novel, epic poem, movie, play, grand opera. In life, they remain mysterious and coincidental.
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<br />But <i>Secrets of Lisbon</i>, with its initial focus on a young boy puzzled about his identity, recalls many other, finer works of art. One problem with <i>Secrets</i> is that Pedro-Joao is not very interesting and that, unlike Anthony Adverse (for example), he does not at the end go abroad to forge a new life in the New World and forget the sordid past, he goes to Portuguese Africa and dies there, dictating the opening words of his story. That’s not an uplifting ending, but did it inspire Proust to end his great work with the narrator back at the beginning, blessed with understanding, starting to write the great work we have just completed?
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<br />It is difficult not to see the type of plot-crossing, coiled-secrets novel Castelo Branco wrote as a feature of the new bourgeois era, related to such similarly contorted (but usually better) books as Fielding’s <i>Tom Jones</i>, Dickens’s <i>Great Expectations</i> (Padre Diniz reminded me, now and then, of the lawyer Jagger – but we never get anything personal about Jagger – a far more imposing character nonetheless – or perhaps as a result) and <i>Bleak House</i> (seeing guilt-wracked Lady Dedlock as an epitome of guilt-wracked but far less happily married Angela de Santa Barbara), Dumas’ <i>The Corsican Brothers</i>, even Esther Forbes’ <i>Johnny Tremain</i>. (Aside: All of these have become films, of course – Tony Richardson’s <i>Tom Jones</i>, starring Albert Finney, is a masterpiece; David Lean’s <i>Great Expectations</i> is pretty close to one; Masterpiece Theater did a tidy job on <i>Bleak House</i> some years ago, and Disney murdered <i>Johnny Tremain</i>. <i>The Corsican Brothers</i>, aside from a few humorless efforts, has become two sublime comedies, <i>Start the Revolution without Me</i> with Donald Sutherland and Gene Wilder as two sets of identical (?) twins scrambled at birth, and Cheech and Chong’s lewd and crude <i>The Corsican Brothers</i>.)
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<br />You could even toss in the more epic sagas of George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy and Hendrik Sienkowicz – heck, why not? There are probably Scandinavian, Spanish, Italian, German, Turkish, Japanese novels of this variety that I do not know or suspect. And there is our first home-grown example: Hawthorne’s <i>House of the Seven Gables</i>. Dumas and Dickens set the pattern; everybody followed. It was part of the elevation of the bourgeois family to iconic status during the industrial transformation. In a later avatar, on a less literary level, they became the long-kept-secret mysteries of Chandler, Hammett and Ross MacDonald – whose mastery of demotic prose has nonetheless made them classics and kept them best-sellers while Dumas and Castelo Branco waste away, forgotten and ignored.
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<br />I mention <i>Johnny Tremain</i>, a prize-winning young adult novel of the Boston Tea Party and associated events leading up to the outbreak of the American Revolution, in part because it was the first novel ever to win my heart. I was nine years old, which is to say, this was not long after the events the novel describes. It was the book I clutched constantly to my bosom for two years, that is, until I discovered Tolkien. (I do pity those who did not discover Tolkien at eleven. By sixteen, you’re probably already too sophisticated for it. Of course, Tolkien has a coiled: But what is their real identity? sort of plot too, if you think about it.)
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<br />But I loved <i>Tremain</i> because, never having read a family-plot novel before, I found its mysteries, its obsessions, its coincidences miraculous and astonishing. I have given the book to many a child among the (almost readerless) new generation, and I return to it myself once a decade, maybe, and the book holds up. For one thing, I see the bones now, shining through Esther Forbes’s wonderfully firm fleshy prose. Johnny, poor and arrogant, a prize apprentice, is obsessed with his blood relationship to the wealthy Lyte family. In the book, his pride is brought low and he earns his way back up, partly due to the loyalty of his friends (notably Cilla and Rab) but mostly due to finding himself, making his own way, earning his place in society and understanding (as he participates in pre-Revolutionary intrigues) how that society can be, should be, reformed. His own qualities lead him to the book’s climax, when he discovers the truth of his birth and is offered (by Cilla) the return of the silver cup that symbolizes it, and his entire past. He is strong enough to reject this symbol (at nine I couldn’t imagine why – a beautiful silver cup is a beautiful silver cup, eh?), to reject the Lytes as they have rejected him. When his beautiful cousin Lavina Lyte finally informs him of the true secret of his birth, he rejects that, too. “You can put in quite a claim for property when this is all over, if there’s any property left, which I very much doubt,” she tells him. But he doesn’t want their silver or their property – or their name. (He does concede that he will call this reigning beauty Aunt Lavinia in the future.) He wants to be an American, his own man, an adult without childish aspirations based on family – the American myth incarnate. All that is left is for Forbes to inspire him to fight, which she does by having the Redcoats kill Rab at Lexington in the First Shot of the coming war.
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<br />Rab is perfect. He is brilliant, brave, noble, true, sexy – he’s got to go; so that highly imperfect Johnny may flourish, inspired by his example. There’s nothing else a good novelist can do with Rab. This event shattered me (as it does Johnny) when I first read it. Now I see it is inevitable, the last dollop of plot before the end. (That the book came to an end also shattered me. I wrote bitterly to Esther Forbes on the subject, and her charming postcard back is pasted into my copy of the book.) So he does and Johnny is resolved to rebel, free of encumbering foofaraw, the stuff that makes Pedro-Joao just want to die, that makes Marcel just want to recapture the past. As for Scaramouche and Anthony Adverse – well, they run off to the New World to make a New Life, and best of luck to them – but Johnny’s already there, thanks, so there’s nothing for him to do but put his hand down on the operating table for the ghastly (no anesthetic, no antiseptics) operation that will symbolically make a man of him. I have only just noticed this might be a circumcision reference, but that can’t be conscious on Forbes’s part: Johnny’s crippled hand apparently holding him back – the scar is made of silver, symbol of false idols throughout the book – is the principal symbol around which she constructs her marvelous, eternally splendid tale.
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<br />But the story is older than Forbes, older than Castelo Branco, older even than Fielding. The youth who does not know who he is, or where he fits into a society he doesn’t understand, and who turns out to be of exceptional birth to match his outrageous luck and talent, is one of the oldest stories. It is Figaro’s story in <i>Le Mariage</i>, and his discovery that he is the son of the old woman who wants to marry him is Beaumarchais’ witty spoof on <i>Oedipos Tyrannos</i>. (Beaumarchais actually got his own surname and his title of nobility from marrying an older noblewoman who had inherited them.) It is Oedipus’s story, too: the foundling, crippled like Johnny Tremain, raised by royalty but discovering rumors of his adoption, confronting and conquering the enemies of his society – only to discover he has been too shrewd by half. It is the story of Joseph, sold into Egypt and rising to outsmart (and forgive) his wicked brothers. It is the story of Moses, the king’s sister’s son who turns out to be nothing of the sort. It is the story of young Zeus, the god of Mount Ida on Crete, concealed from his voracious father. It is the story of bewildered Herakles, of bewildered Hamlet, of bewildered Telemachus, of bewildered Aeneas: There’s a job to do, and I have to do it, even if it means putting aside love and pleasure and everything else. It is the ur-myth, or one of them.
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<br />We never know quite who we are. We search in the trunks in the family attic, those of us lucky enough to have family attics, those of us lucky enough – or are we? – to know our birth families. Such an attic can contain treasure but, like Aeneas’s father on his shoulders, it can be almost too much to carry from the ruins of the past into the new world where our own work must be paramount. Aeneas is always pius; we have the option of tossing it aside, and the American dream is that we can. This may not be true – as Faulkner says, in <i>Absalom, Absalom</i>, “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” It may be forgotten, and each generation takes most of its memories with it to the grave. But something survives to haunt us, and fictions that tell the stories of such searches, such discoveries, such mysteries, sordid or wonderful, therefore appeal to us. We can adore them and puzzle them like Sophocles and Freud, or we can spoof them like Fielding and Beaumarchais and Almodovar. But they never lose their appeal.
<br />Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-42641128793684661162011-05-06T11:37:00.002-04:002011-05-06T11:46:06.272-04:00The Lepage Die Walküre at the MetBrünnhilde: Deborah Voigt; Sieglinde: Eva-Maria Westbroek; Fricka: Stephanie Blythe; Siegmund: Jonas Kaufmann; Wotan: Bryn Terfel; Hunding: Hans-Peter König. Production by Robert Lepage. Metropolitan Opera Orchestra conducted by James Levine. Performance of April 28.<br /><br />There’s a lot to be said for lowered expectations. After last fall’s cramped, over-busy staging of <i>Das Rheingold</i>, I was prepared for a rough night at <i>Die Walküre</i>—and enjoyed the occasion very much, the staging, the direction, most of the singing, even the costumes. If I’d attended the opening, I might have been less pleased. A friend whom I met at this, the third, performance clued me in on all sorts of changes, not least in the improving command of his music on the part of Bryn Terfel. On the third night, there was only one major machinery mishap: Siegrune (Eva Gigliotti), broke the straps that held her to her bucking “horse,” and landed with a thump in the trough behind the forestage. She leaped (nothing broken!) into the wings, and when (after, no doubt, cursing and moaning mercifully inaudible to us) she bounded back onstage for a war-cry or two, there was applause. At the Met, audiences take the singer’s side against malicious, high-concept scenery. This may not be true at other performing venues. <br /><br /><i>Die Walküre</i> has always been the most popular drama of Wagner’s <i>Ring</i>, performed far more frequently than the others. The doomed romance of Siegmund and Sieglinde is the most moving human relationship in the entire cycle, their undeserved doom winning our deepest sympathy, and Wotan’s tragedy is nowhere made more manifest than in his renunciation of Brünnhilde, the daughter who has been his second self. Parents, children, lovers, loners, schemers who fail—everyone who falls into any of those categories, or sympathizes with one of them, will feel the terrific pang in Wagner’s matchless musical setting of these situations.<br /><br />The questions I always ask before the curtain rises on <i>Die Walküre</i> are, first, can these singers sing it properly? That is, beautifully, with enough breath and power for the theater in which they find themselves, and can they act, so that the lengthy debates of Acts II and III hold our attention? Then, what pitfalls will the director fall into? Will Siegmund start fondling Sieglinde the moment he sets eyes on her (which always makes me feel sympathetic to Hunding) or will their physical communication be only by eyes and exchanged drinks until their climactic embrace at the end of the act? They are two people who have never been able to touch anyone all their lives, and this first contact should mean something, should come only after we know their stories, anticipate their destinies. Then, how will Brünnhilde’s transformation from unfeeling goddess to sympathetic woman during the “<i>Todesverkündigung</i>” duet be manifested? And will the director and the singers be able to make sense of the end of Act II, where Wagner has given them far too cluttered a set of events to perform? And, last act, lacking real flying horses and real magic fire, how will they indicate flying horses and magic fire?<br /><br />A great deal of the answer in the Met’s new production, by Robert Lepage, depends on special mechanical effects created by lights, projections and twenty-four “planks” that perform as athletically as anybody. You may remember them from <i>Das Rheingold</i>, as the roof of Alberich’s cavern and the staircase down to it from Valhalla, the bridge towards that castle and its monumental walls as well. This time around, the planks portray the rustic insides and (later) the slate roof of Hunding’s hut, a snowcapped mountain (getting all the icier with Wotan’s chilly mood), eight cavorting steeds in the Valkyrie Theme Park™, a tulgy wood or two, heaving in the wind, and a stage-wide winged bird-beast of prey. They are also the plasma-screen projection TV of Siegmund’s bardic imagination, and that’s going entirely too far—savages racing about like animated cave paintings are mere kitsch and as unnecessary as subtitles. Just listen to the leitmotifs and Wagner will tell you exactly what’s going on. Lepage also provides a gigantic plastic eyeball (programmed for light show!) to illustrate Wotan’s narration, and a spectacular ram’s head-armed High Victorian settee for Fricka, but rarely did I feel in Act II (as I had with the cave paintings) that he had gone too far, illustrating what simply did not call for illustration. Many of the meditative sections of Wagner’s great drama were indeed meditative: The music, the singing, needed no specific illustration because the music, the singing, were the drama, and what it was about. I wasn’t sure Lepage had got that important Wagnerian memo; perhaps he has.<br /><br />Was Lepage or some less exalted figure responsible for the moving around of the humans in this staging? Someone has paid attention to the psychological underpinnings of the drama, which is an excellent thing. Though there are certain things I itch to tweak, in many ways it is an improvement on earlier stagings, even the sacrosanct Schenk production. Siegmund’s rush through the forest (those planks again!) was quite alarming, and can’t be easy to render safe. It will also exhaust the average tenor, but then, he has a time to catch his breath before singing again, and he spends it lying across the Hundings’ hearth. Sieglinde, who has been out gathering wood, finds him there and touches him, gingerly, to see if he’s still alive. At this, Siegmund seizes her hand—plainly the reflex of a hunted man and no flirtation. Later, Hans-Peter König—not merely a bass of golden age vocal stature, who only has to open his mouth to remind us how fallen, in other categories, is the modern Wagnerian estate, but also the funniest Hunding ever—ambles brutally home, tosses his bearskins on the sword-hilt conveniently sticking out of a tree, and, without looking at him, sticks his spear across the stranger’s chest as if to say, “What the hell is he doing here?” The focus on the scene that follows is, correctly, not on Siegmund so much as on the portrait of an unhappy marriage that Siegmund has interrupted. <br /><br />I’ve always hated the salacious impulse of modern directors to have Siegmund and Sieglinde flop down and do it on the kitchen floor as the curtain falls on Act I. Surely she loathes her unhappy home, Hunding might wake at any moment, and Siegmund’s whole message has been: There’s a great big world full of springtime and love out there! Let’s go and enjoy it! Wagner says they rush out into the night, and I’m with him. So, happily, is Lepage, for as we watch, the planks that have been the inner wall of Hunding’s hut turn into the slate roof, and we’re out in the woods. Excellent.<br /><br />In Act II, the planks became a sort of mountain platform with a cavern beneath, and on this floated Stephanie Blythe, our Fricka. Though sizable, Blythe has never had the slightest difficulty racing about the stage and up and down reasonable obstacles, but Lepage has not been willing to risk this. He gives her a motorized wheelchair with rams’ heads on the arms (in Norse mythology and in Wagner’s text, Fricka drives a chariot drawn by rams), and here she must sit and discourse with Wotan. Being Blythe, she has no problem acting in this contraption: seething goddess, neglected wife, yearning erstwhile lover, implacable lawyer (G.B. Shaw said Fricka represented the Law to Wotan’s Church). I found rather touching her extension of a hopeful hand to defeated Wotan, and his sarcastic kissing of it. The next “effect” was the popping up from the cavern under the rocks (the planks again) of a circular plastic “eye,” a screen on which Brünnhilde watches suggestive videos while Wotan tells her his tale. Cute but kitsch, and unnecessary. <br /><br />For the <i>Todesverkündigung</i>, we were back in plank forest, but nothing much should happen during Siegmund and Brünnhilde’s stichomythia, at least until its conclusion, when he takes up the sword to slay Sieglinde and Brünnhilde, in stopping him, unknowingly becomes human herself. Here Deborah Voigt abruptly deflected his blade with her shield, and disarmed him with her spear. It was startling, as the moment should be. <br /><br />I’ve rarely seen the scene that ends Act II staged with all its elements clear and visible, gods “hovering” protectively over mortals, a lot of weapons-play, witnesses to things incomprehensible if not invisible. And how many Brünnhildes can pick up all the pieces of broken Nothung and get Sieglinde offstage in the allotted time? Lepage managed most of it to a thrilling degree. Hunding and his men simply did not “see” Wotan or Brünnhilde; nor, so far as we could tell, did Sieglinde, motionless until the moment Brünnhilde (whom she has never seen before, remember) addressed her. Wotan strode forward with his spear to break the useless sword in Siegmund’s hand, then stood back to allow Hunding to strike the death blow. Siegmund died cradled in Wotan’s arms, reaching, touchingly, to the face of the invisible father he has barely known. Then—a little too hurriedly, methinks; he should have godlike dignity even in his wrath—Wotan chugged off stage in pursuit of his errant daughters. It seemed to me that there were far too many men around, Hunding’s confederates but, in fact, Lepage’s crew. There is nothing for them to do, no reason for them to move, and they neither moved nor sang. Two or three would fill the bill. <br /><br />And so to the scene that is usually a snap: Wotan kisses Brünnhilde, her godhead falls away, she sinks sleeping into his arms, and he lays her out on the mountaintop before summoning the fire to surround her. Here, Lepage let his ambitions for a startling tableau run away with him, adding many an unnecessary complication in order to produce an image that, while impressive, even chilling, hardly seemed worth the bother. We should focus on Wotan and his feelings (lovingly described by the orchestra); instead we are distracted by the sight of the snow-covered mountain sinking into the earth, the spear-cradled Valkyrie (a body double) carried to the top of it and hung upside down as we, presumably, witness from above, in dolly shot. It’s quite a coup de théâtre, but aren’t we attending an opera? Shouldn’t the emotional focus of the story be Wotan’s feelings, and not: How the hell does she stay up there?<br /><br />The singing ranged from good to spectacular—alas, the best of it came from the two least loved of the figures onstage, Fricka (Stephanie Blythe), rock solid but warm and womanly, and Hunding (Hans-Peter König), who opens his mouth only to caress the ear, reminding one of Kurt Moll, Matti Salminen and the other Wagnerian basses of more golden ages. The weakest link was Sieglinde, Eva-Maria Westbroek, a handsome woman and a fine actress with a large, womanly instrument, who sang “Du bist der Lenz” consistently flat and her final triumphant outburst in Act III all over the place, never consistently anything or anywhere. She’d been suffering from a cold a week before, at the opening; perhaps it lingered, unannounced. In any case this was not an enjoyable Sieglinde. <br /><br />At my first <i>Die Walküre</i> (Nilsson, Jones, Vickers), forty years ago, a veteran of many Rings beside me turned to her friend and said, “Such a pleasure to see a Siegmund and Sieglinde who actually resemble each other.” I think Vickers wore a blond wig, actually. At this latest one, Westbroek and Jonas Kaufmann seemed to be wearing curly chestnut wigs—in any case, the resemblance of these tall, slim persons in dark garb (especially when they first warily looked each other over, profile echoing profile) was striking enough to seem uncanny, as Wagner desired—score for the Met’s wig and makeup department! Kaufmann, currently one of the world’s most admired tenors but one whose voice had seemed a little small for the Met even against a Traviata orchestra, gave us a darkly baritonal, cautious Siegmund, meeting nearly all the role’s challenges with full weight. The “Wãl-” in his Act I-concluding “Wälsungen Blut” was flat, as if his strength had given out by that time, but the invocations of “Wälse” earlier in the act were stirringly done. He seemed to have the measure of the Met’s acoustics and to know just how far he did not need to push to be heard in a suave “Winterstürme” and the ominous phrases of the <i>Todesverkündigung</i>. His ability to race through quite a dangerous little maze of log palisade/thick forest, to fight almost credibly with a broad sword and to die with an anguished gaze on the father-god who has betrayed him won him a deserved ovation. <br /><br />I’d been dreading Deborah Voigt’s assumption of the role of Brünnhilde, and I still wish they’d find someone else for it, but she managed a decent, B-level Valkyrie, devotedly acted, and she looked terrific in a costume carefully modeled on the Victorian armor and silken flounces of Amalie Materna’s creation of the role at Bayreuth in 1876. She brought the proper emotions to her singing, the exultation to the war-cry (no trills of course), a sense of inexorable doom to the all-important <i>Todesverkündigung</i>. But Voigt’s voice these days suggests little in the way of color, of metal, of shine; half the time she scrapes it over gravel. It is the ruins of a voice and therefore, though she gives an enthusiastic performance, it does not sound heroic. This is less painful in the long, narrative stretches of a Wagnerian part than it was in lyric Puccini last December, when she was simply a gray, blank space on a colorful canvas; in Wagner she is able but uninspiring. <br /><br />Bryn Terfel seemed inadequate to Wagnerian power in <i>Das Rheingold</i> last fall, but either his health has improved or he has devoted more attention and energy to the far longer and emotionally deeper Wotan of <i>Die Walküre</i>. There were moments (such as the beginning of his Act II narration) where his bad habit of acting, spitting, thrusting lines rather than singing them proved briefly tiresome, but by and large this was an honest, forceful, intriguing performance, one that holds proper weight in the opera, with real lyricism when he dwelt on the springlike love of the twins or his youthful ambitions, and in the long last exchange with the desperate Brünnhilde. His diction was excellent, he never fell back to crooning as he has been known to do when singing Mozart. His acting was full of intriguing touches, like the unloving kiss he forces himself to place on Fricka’s outstretched hand, nor did the wobbling planks beneath his feet give him the slightest insecurity. He played an imposing if unlucky king of the gods with conviction and authority.<br /><br />James Levine was too weary to climb up to the stage at the end of the festivities; the singers applauded him from the stage apron. Other indications that he has changed were apparent. For one thing, he kept the surge of Wagnerian power at a low simmer: His singers never had to fight to be heard. This is new. Perhaps it was a concession to the less than godlike power of Kaufmann and Voigt, but Levine has never made such concessions before; he has usually been a conductor you had to fight for stage attention. Many a glorious note has risen clear and singing over the years to the front regions of the top balconies of the Met’s horseshoe, inaudible in the orchestra seats. If this was a new control, a new generosity, it was very pleasing in Row M. If there was less of an emotional swell to the final parting of Wotan and Brünnhilde than one likes to feel, let’s be generous and credit the awkward new staging. But I’m strongly tempted to go to another performance, somewhere high in the Family Circle, to check my perceptions of the Wagnerian temperature, usually at white heat in those polar regions.<br /><br />If the new <i>Rheingold</i> made one wonder about the Met’s priorities and the advisability of the entire endeavor, the new <i>Walküre</i> makes me look forward with interest to the remainder of the cycle.<br /><br />John YohalemBrightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-13571898837872181232011-01-16T16:24:00.007-05:002011-01-16T16:48:34.500-05:00Ellen Stewart, La Mama of all New YorkEllen Stewart has died, La Mama herself -- old, venerable, full of years, ringing her bell and raising hell to her dying instant, but still: It's a different New York now. For a glorious time it was the New York she made. Now it's not; it's Donald Trump's New York, Rudolph Giuliani's New York, Bloomberg's New York, Julie Taymor's New York. <br /><br />She came from Chicago (though she spoke with a mad self-devised faux-Caribbean accent) and started producing theater Off Off Off Broadway before there <i>was</i> an Off Broadway scene, in the early 1960s -- the police saw a lot of white men (actors, auditioning) going to see this black woman who lived below street level in an old storefront on the (then) utterly disreputable and unsafe Lower East Side. They drew the natural conclusion, and busted her for prostitution. She crowed about that! <br /><br />She started a restaurant, Café LaMama, because she couldn't afford a theater license but could afford a cabaret license, and she gave every sort of entertainment on its tiny stage, while comestibles were ... more honored in the breach than in the observance. Your eyes would bug out at the list of her alumni! Tom Eyen, Tim Miller, David Sedaris, John Kelly, Ethyl Eichelberger, Jeff Weiss, Andrei Serban.... LaMama (accent on the last syllable, please) became a veritable Alcina, the witch of Ariosto's poem (and so many operas), Manhattan her enchanted island, where every star-struck kid was transformed into a flowering tree or voracious menagerie animal of art!<br /><br />A year or two ago I went to a revival of Tom Eyen's "Why Hannah's Skirt Won't Stay Down," a tour-de-force which got Eyen noticed because the only character on stage besides Hannah was a beautiful youth, stark naked. This was not common at the time and got the whole production hauled off to court. The revival starred the original Hannah, back to celebrate its fortieth anniversary ... and a boy who couldn't have been in the original, not having been born yet back then. Ellen introduced it, bell a-ringing, and pointed out a demure, very respectable lady in the audience as "the one who put up the bail money for me when this play was closed. So you see," she added, "sometimes the things I tell you are actually true."<br /><br />By the time she died last week, the city had sold her (for one dollar) a huge building with theaters in it on East Fourth Street, named it the Ellen Stewart, and she could sell tickets to tell her tales of the tours of Baalbek, the arrests for indecent exposure, and was still bringing in the latest companies from Tunisia and Belarus, holding international marionette festivals, seeking out talent, and attempting to complete her project to rewrite and stage every Greek tragedy. No one could do what she did today on the sort of shoestrings she worked on for her first thirty years of producing. <br /><br />What will kill New York, however, is that there is no place for dirt-poor but creative young kids to live and interact for a couple of years while they figure out what they want to do artistically; there was in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. You could get a roach-infested, toilet-in-the-hall, tub-in-the-kitchen, muggers behind every potted plant, cold-water flat for $18 a month on the Lower East Side in 1970. (I know. I went home with guys who lived in such places.) Now it's $1000 a month as far out as Bushwick in darkest Brooklyn -- forget Manhattan! I don't know how they do it. Fewer and fewer of them will.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-58734591616160696652011-01-04T13:26:00.003-05:002011-01-04T13:30:12.591-05:00What a Difference a Fanciulla Makes!Same opera, same production, same cast—but the difference was like night and day. On January 3rd, an indisposed Debbie Voigt was replaced by Portuguese soprano Elisabete Matos in Puccini's <i>La Fanciulla del West</i>. Matos had made her Met debut on December 22nd, a scheduled performance in the same role. In Europe she sings Sieglinde, Gioconda, Iphigenie, Chimène, Butterfly. <br /><br />Matos is a genuine spinto — except when she sounds like a real lyric — except when she sounds <i>hochdramatisch</i>. In Europe, she sings in all these categories, but to hell with <i>fach</i>. She has a golden, gleaming sound, warm and fragrant when she lets her guard down romantically (and Minnie, remember, is a girl who loves love stories), lyric and casual when jesting with her family of miners, and though brilliant and full (and smack on pitch for the B of “stelle” and the C’s in Act II), her voice is never harsh in anguish or triumph. With a Minnie of this quality, Puccini’s opera finally and worthily celebrated its hundredth birthday at the Met. (Can we have her back again soon? Please? As Butterfly, say, or Sieglinde?) <br /><br />Matos, though younger, looks very like Debbie Voigt: She cuts a sturdy figure, more athletic frontierswoman than fashion model. A natural actress, she seemed to know each miner inside and out, able to play with them, tease them, slap them about, tousle their hair. This makes all the sillier Giancarlo Del Monaco’s staging of the opera’s climax, when Minnie begs the miners to spare her lover’s life: She has no need to fire guns at them. She knows and we know they’ll never shoot at her. They adore her. She’s never asked them for anything before—and now she does, and of course they let her and her lover depart together romantically into the sunset. (Del Monaco, thinking as usual that he’s cleverer than Puccini, sends all the miners off with them, instead of having them wave farewell.) <br /><br />With a different prima donna, a genuine Fanciulla at the heart of the opera, every singer on the stage seemed to turn up an energetic notch or two—glorious high notes from Giordani, fine contributions from Owen Gradus’s Jake, Keith Miller’s Ashby, Dwayne Croft’s Sonora and, well, drinks around the bar, boys! I mean, ragazzi! Great work by all hands. A starry night.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-82712533079542808972010-11-27T10:43:00.000-05:002010-11-27T10:44:22.784-05:00True Blood: The Opera (proposed casting)<i>True Blood: The Opera</i><br /><br />Cast:<br /><br />Sookie Stackhouse: Elina Garanca<br /><br />Humans: <br />Jason Stackhouse: Mariusz Kwiecien<br />Granny Stackhouse: Ewa Podles<br />Tara: Danielle de Niese<br />Lettie Mae: Angela Brown<br />Lafayette: Lawrence Brownlee <br />Detective Andy Bellefleur: Dwayne Croft<br />Sheriff: Bryn Terfel<br />Eggs: Eric Owens<br />Hoyt: Paul Appleby<br />Hoyt’s mother: Stephanie Blythe<br />Arlene: Sondra Radvanovsky<br />Rene: Roberto Alagna<br />Terry Bellefleur: David Daniels<br />Amy: Kate Lindsay<br />Steve Newlin: Richard Croft<br />Sarah Newlin: Kate Aldrich<br />Wayne: Evgeny Nikitin<br /><br />Vampires:<br />Bill: Jonas Kaufmann<br />Eric: Simon Keenlyside<br />Nan: Nina Stemme<br />Jessica: Ljuba Petrova<br />Pam: Marina Poplavskaya<br />Lorena: Soile Isokoski<br />Russell: Charles Anthony<br />Sophie-Anne: Anna Netrebko<br />Godric: Juan Diego Florez <br /><br />Other types:<br />Sam Merlotte: Ramon Vargas<br />Maryann Foster: Joyce di Donato<br />Daphne: Christine Schaefer<br />Tommy Mickens: Anthony Roth Costanzo<br />Crystal Norris: Wendy Bryn Harmer<br />Melinda Mickens: Natalie Dessay<br />Alcide: Luca Pisaroni<br /><br />Discuss.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-56924945600170447022010-11-04T18:43:00.003-04:002010-11-04T18:47:19.373-04:00Trovatore at the MetIt’s difficult to be reasonable about <i>Il Trovatore</i>. Reason is the last quality we expect from any of its characters or situations. They are extreme people, yielding unreflectively to extreme passions. Verdi’s score expresses just that element (richly evident in its source, a blood-and-thunder Gutierrez drama somewhat watered down for the libretto in order to appease papal censors), and the singing should emerge with just this sort of unreasoning passion. We may not believe that X loves Y, but we ought to believe their minds are at fever pitch: “I’m going to hit that orgasmic high note if it kills me.” No, you never hear a <i>Trovatore</i> like that any more, but back when all theater was live theater and <i>Il Trovatore</i> was the most popular theater piece on Earth, that’s the sort of excitement you could hope for. If you want it now, you might want to check out the old RCA recording with Milanov, Barbieri, Bjoerling and Warren. And that was an everyday Metropolitan Opera cast!<br /><br />The Met’s current David McVicar production in Charles Edwards’s unattractive but functional sets (time period: Spain during a civil war—any old civil war—there were plenty to choose from, but anyway it’s not the one in 1410 where Gutierrez set it) is not without its absurdities. (Why are all those floozies hanging around the soldiers’ camp, acting so very camp, when the general is formally reviewing his troops?) But the job gets done and sets up the singers to play their parts with minimal fuss. <br /><br />One particular thing struck me about the leading singers on this occasion: None of them had their eyes glued to the conductor. Singers who sing to lovers, tormenters, wounded children or God while keeping an eye on the baton the whole time are often a necessary evil, a whimsy one grows used to, but it was a pleasure to have the stars of this revival, though they never lost the beat (and conductor Marco Armiliato never let Verdi’s powerful rhythms fade or grow less than propulsive), looking at each other the entire night. They were in it, they were on it. This is one of those professional touches you hardly notice if you’re not looking for it—and are accustomed to too many singers who can’t manage it.<br /><br />You seldom get four top stars in top form in a <i>Trovatore</i>, but the opera calls for just that. On this occasion no one sang badly but the glitter was seldom gold. The men had it rather over the women; their voices seemed better designed for singing Verdi. One felt in especially good hands with the Count di Luna of Željko Lučić, who makes one think the great days of the Verdi baritone live again. His “Il balen” was flawless, the long, long line filling the house without effort, each note on the proper pitch as though his throat could not consider putting it anywhere else. I don’t remember there being quite so much bladework in this production, but Lučić certainly startled the house when he drew his sword through his hand, drenching it in blood, in his determination to possess Leonora. He held his own in the confrontational duets and trios, too.<br /><br />Marcelo Álvarez sang his offstage serenades beautifully (to the accompaniment of a harp that never appeared—hey, guys, he’s a <i>troubadour</i>, y’know?) but his double aria in the besieged fortress seemed on the gruff side and he ran out of voice by the time of the dungeon scene. Hoarseness seemed to be the problem; perhaps, like Franco Corelli, he should conceal glasses of water around the set. His canteen in Act IV seemed not to have been filled, and he needed it. He looked a romantic enough figure whenever he did not stand in profile.<br /><br />Patricia Racette’s Leonora is not the loopy teenager jumping around the set played by Sondra Radvanovsky in this production: Leonora may be a teenager, but she’s a lady of high Spanish birth, and she knows it; Racette knows it, too. Spanish <i>grandezza</i> used to mean something, and Verdi’s Leonora is that sort of dignified character. <br /><br />Racette is such an intelligent singer, so persuasive in her understanding of predicament, that I wish I liked her voice better. Her instrument always seems too small for the Met. She manages very professionally, but the voluptuous floods of sound that other sopranos have brought to the role, the voice that seems to define Leonora’s desperate heart and new-awakened passions, are not at Racette’s disposal. Her “Tacea la notte” was fascinating as vocal storytelling, but the tidal rise at its conclusion did not overflow. “Di tale amor” was, as it usually is, a bit of a mess, drawing no applause—Sutherland is the only soprano I ever heard sing it flawlessly, and the rest of her performance was inert. (“Di tale amor” is one of the few cases where I’d like to take his <i>Orsinitá</i> the composer aside and say, sternly, “Maestro, this tune isn’t good enough; go write a new one.”) The convent scene was no celestial flight, and Racette seemed out of breath in much of Act IV; there were many thin notes and others not precisely where one wanted them. Racette coped with the part but she did not take joy in it, or exploit its opportunities.<br /><br />Marianne Cornetti has the heft for Azucena, but it takes her an awfully long time to warm up. Her “Stride le vampe” was loud but pitchless. Only at the end of the “Condotta” did she give evidence of the ferocity of a maddened Gypsy—her final notes actually brought forth the first responsive “echo” I’ve ever heard at the Met! The dungeon serenade, however, gave Cornetti place for her most beautiful singing of the night. <br /><br />Alexander Tsymbalyuk, as Ferrando, has a clear, persuasive young bass but he bleats a bit. Renée Tatum was not the first confidante in my experience to make us all wish Inez had more to sing. The monks’ offstage “Miserere” in Act IV was downright heavenly, evidence of what those guys can accomplish when they’re not swashbuckling around shirtless, fighting with knives and spitting in each other’s faces, as they were obliged to do at other times. <br /><br />The acting from all hands gave evidence of a bent towards melodrama. This is not out of place in <i>Trovatore</i>, of all operas, but many were the moments (“Ah sì, ben mio,” for example) when I felt the singers would give Verdi his due and us a better time if they’d stand and deliver in the old-fashioned way, instead of emoting like antsy banshees, losing their breath and tripping over their own feet. <br /><br />The omission of nearly all cabaletta repeats implied a desire not so much to energize the occasion as to get it over with. That’s no way to do <i>Trovatore</i>; <i>Trovatore</i> must breathe. Oxygen keeps the embers hotter.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-13620602479394764292010-11-04T18:35:00.002-04:002010-11-04T18:40:18.445-04:00Intermezzo at the City Opera<span style="font-style:italic;">Pace</span> Tolstoy, happy marriages are not all alike, but they require a lot of work. I am not referring to the hectic happy marriage of Richard and Pauline Strauss, the model on which Strauss constructed <span style="font-style:italic;">Intermezzo</span>, his portrait of the composer at home with the non-stop assault of his termagant wife accusing and blaming and admitting she’d find it dull to live with someone who didn’t fight back. I’m referring to the supremely happy marriage of artist and role (which, like any happy marriage, calls for luck and hard work) now on offer at the New York City Opera, where Mary Dunleavy has taken on the shrewish coloratura flights and turn-on-a-dime changes of mood that are Christine Storch. <br /><br />Dunleavy’s honeyed voice resembles that of Renee Fleming before that grande dame became so affected and spoiled. I first heard Dunleavy’s sturdy lyric soprano as that roughest of dramatic coloratura workouts, Konstanze in Mozart’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Seraglio</span>, and a woman who can handle Konstanze with credit can probably wrestle tigers. More recently she has been an admired Violetta (which I did not see). I wouldn’t have thought of Christine as a Dunleavy vehicle, perhaps because the part was created for the more opulent vocal charms of Lotte Lehmann, perhaps because the last time the City Opera presented it, the role was taken by Lauren Flanigan. Flanigan’s lyric skills were severely tested by the Strauss orchestra but her voice has a dangerous edge to it that made her an exciting Christine. <br /><br />Dunleavy lacks that edge, but her girlish qualities are stronger than they seem (as was probably also true of Pauline Strauss, for whom her husband wrote so many of his loveliest songs), and she has no problem riding the full blast of a lush orchestra. At moments of stress, a metallic sheen (very Strauss, very Jugendstil, like the gold slathered on a Klimt portrait) gleams through the instrumental texture, which argues not merely ability but craft: Dunleavy knows just how to slice through a heavy orchestra without putting herself under undue strain. Nor did it hurt that, with her marcelled hair and suave twenties costumes, her pert, imperious manner recalled the slangy heroines played by Myrna Loy and Jean Arthur. Add to this a balletic figure and a charm that almost persuades you Christine would be endurable, and you have the finest achievement of a singing actress on New York’s opera stages this fall.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Intermezzo</span> is one of Strauss’s conversational operas—the Prologue to <span style="font-style:italic;">Ariadne</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Die Schweigsame Frau</span> are similar—in that, though the score is full of melody, the voice seldom flows into easy, relaxing song. This is a major reason for the opera’s rarity in non-German-speaking lands, but with Dunleavy’s lyricism joining the fragments of <span style="font-style:italic;">sprechstimme</span> and endearment and tirade, I felt as I do with a good Handel or Verdi <span style="font-style:italic;">recitativo accompagnato</span>, that this was more interesting, more full of character, than song would be. Strauss uses the same richly symphonic language for the mythic and grandiose (in operas like <span style="font-style:italic;">Die Frau ohne Schatten</span> and the “operatic” portions of <span style="font-style:italic;">Ariadne auf Naxos</span>) as he does for the day-to-day domesticity of the “Sinfonia Domestica” and <span style="font-style:italic;">Intermezzo</span>. Perhaps he saw no difference between the mythic and day-to-day family discord. Today, with a flood of new operas loosed upon the world dealing with messy everyday lives, neglecting antique myth or historical pageant, perhaps <span style="font-style:italic;">Intermezzo</span> will prove to have been a harbinger of a change in operatic style, just as Strauss’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Elektra</span> was a harbinger of new musical looks at classical Greece.<br /><br />The other triumph, musically speaking, was the lush Strauss score as led by George Manahan, which swept the evening’s welter of events along like the ice skater’s waltz mimed (on in-line skates) in one of <span style="font-style:italic;">Intermezzo</span>’s many locales without drowning the singers. Vocally, the entire cast seemed well chosen and on their toes, as Pauline Strauss (a terror to her housemaids) would no doubt have imperiously insisted. Nicholas Pallesen sang the not quite credible saintly Robert Storch—Strauss’s self-portrait—with suave dignity, though some stretching for high notes implied that he might not have handled a full-sized leading role so easily. Andrew Bidlack as the young parasitical baron that snobby Christine unwarily picks up showed a fine, easy lyric tenor one hopes to hear more of. Jessica Klein was a pleasure as the most put-upon of the maids. A debutante named Tharanga Goonetilleke gave the three lines of the Baron’s girlfriend a deep, sexy contralto throb that made everyone’s ears open wider.<br /><br />The handsome, stage-smart production was by Leon Major. Andrew Jackness’s sets and Martha Mann’s costumes looked handsome and in period (which is early, respectable Weimar) without evidently straining the budget.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-86590092458847286092010-10-13T12:36:00.004-04:002010-12-24T01:18:15.179-05:00Joan Sutherland: A Silver Voice, a Gold Voice, a Blue Voice (part 2)All right enough about her mediocre stage sense. Let’s talk about the Voice. It was a cool instrument – another nickname she earned on her Italian debut (<i>La Stupenda</i> is the one everybody’s heard) was “<i>La Callas fredda</i>” – cold Callas.
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<br />On my personal vocal color scale, which runs from a voluptuous red (Tebaldi) or blood-orange (Leontyne Price) or purple (Caballé) or red-purple (Troyanos) to white-hot (Rysanek) or runny yellow-green (Sills), Sutherland is among the “blue” sopranos – which has nothing to do with “blues” in the pop sense of the term. (Ella Fitzgerald had a blue voice, but Billie Holiday had a <i>blues</i> voice, which is very different.) Diana Damrau is blue. Mirella Freni is blue-ish. Karita Mattila is ice blue. Regine Crespin was deep blue shading to violet. Sutherland was true blue (like the Garter ribbon). There is a coolness here that can take on the passion in the music but does not inject passion where the music lacks it, could possibly use it.
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<br />There were two or three Sutherland voices with the passing of time. I call these the Silver voice and the Golden voice and (after 1981) the droopy voice. When Sutherland made her first recordings in the late fifties and early sixties (<i>Emilia di Liverpool</i>, the first recital (with her perfect “O luce di quest’ anima”), the first All right enough about her mediocre stage sense. Let’s talk about the voice. It was a cool instrument – another nickname she earned on her Italian debut (La Stupenda is the one everybody’s heard) was “La Callas fredda” – cold Callas. On my personal color scale, which runs from a voluptuous red (Tebaldi) or blood-orange (Leontyne Price) or purple (Caballé) or red-purple (Troyanos) to white-hot (Rysanek) or runny yellow-green (Sills), Sutherland is among the “blue” sopranos – which has nothing to do with “blues” in the pop sense of the term. (Ella Fitzgerald had a blue voice, but Billie Holiday had a <i>blues voice</i>, which is very different.) Diana Damrau is blue. Mirella Freni is blue-ish. Karita Mattila is ice blue. Regine Crespin was deep blue shading to violet. Sutherland was true blue (like the Garter ribbon). There is a coolness here that can take on the passion in the music but does not inject passion where the music lacks it, could possibly use it.
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<br />There were two or three Sutherland voices with the passing of time. I call these the Silver voice and the Golden voice and (after 1981) the droopy voice. When Sutherland made her first recordings in the late fifties and early sixties (<i>Emilia di Liverpool</i>, the first recital (with her perfect “O luce di quest’ anima”), the first <i>Lucia</i> and <i>Rigoletto</i>, <i>The Art of the Prima Donna</i>, her voice sounded smaller than it was, bell-like as the canary sopranos of old but truer because more firmly grounded in dramatic soprano technique. (Callas, too, learned her amazing flexibility after dramatic training, and it shows in the guts she could bring to <i>Anna Bolena</i> or <i>Il Pirata</i>. Ditto Caballé, who like the other two ladies thought she was destined for dramatic soprano-dom.) Well, fluttery has its place (Zerbinetta, Philine, Olympia), but I like to feel, to hear, that the glorious façade rests on sturdy foundations.
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<br />The silver voice, the airy flights, the easy passagework faded after a vocal crisis around 1962. By 1963, when she recorded her first <i>Norma</i> and <i>Traviata</i>, and 1964, when she recorded <i>Command Performance</i> and <i>Alcina</i>, the silver voice was gone forever. In its place was what I call her Golden voice: molten honey caressing the line. She could still do ornaments to make anyone gasp (the first <i>Puritani</i> and <i>Semiramide</i>), but the flavor is different. It is a tribute to her skill (and Bonynge’s coaching) that so little was lost, that her ability to race through the notes was so little affected. But she had to re-learn everything in her repertory, and while it sounded good, even great, it did not sound the same. She could no longer be a girl – she was always a woman.
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<br />An old obnoxious opera friend, Stan Cohen, the sort who disparage almost everything and insult you for daring to have a differing opinion, used to say, “You should have heard Sutherland in the sixties! The <i>chances</i> she took! The perfection!” Happily, pirates of those <i>Puritani</i>s and <i>Semiramide</i>s and Donna Annas do survive. Security was important to her, and she never took a high note and didn’t make it (if she didn’t think she had it, she’d transpose it). Her days of triumph were incredible. The story goes that after she first sang <i>Norma</i> in the U.S., in Philadelphia, Monsterrat Caballé came backstage to rave about the performance. Joan said, “Ah, but after you sing it, they won’t come to hear me sing it.” Caballé, flabbergasted (and she’s no blushing violet), replied, without thinking, “Oh I could never sing it. I don’t have the high notes.” “You don’t need them!” laughed Joan. “They’re not in the score!” Indeed, she was the first soprano ever to sing “Casta diva” in the original key, Bellini having lowered it for Giuditta Pasta before the premiere.
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<br />Such chances indeed: In </i>Traviata</i>, she used to toss off the elaborate Tetrazzini variation to the end of “Sempre libera,” which is not exactly true to the dramatic situation (Violetta is hysterical, yes, but also emotionally exhausted) but sure is an impressive bit of vocalism. She didn’t make a big thing out of it; she just sang it for sheer fun, to give us a memorable thrill.
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<br />I heard Sutherland’s <i>Norma</i> at the Met in 1970, twice in the spring and twice in the fall, with Horne three times, Cossotto once. She did it in four acts rather than two, and the production was as ugly as most <i>Norma</i> productions tend to be. The fourth <i>Norma</i> was a surprise, an event. We settled in for the prelims and the Druids’ march (has it ever been more rumpty-tum than in Bonynge’s hands? But nothing can save that silly march) and then Joan singing another perfect “Casta diva,” oh ho-hum. In fact, since that day, I have heard it sung perfectly by only two other sopranos, Montserrat Caballé and Ann Donaldson. Sutherland and Caballé made <i>Norma</i> seem so easy (after Callas had made it seem so career-defining and ultimate) that, losing their traditional wary respect for the role, all sorts of ladies with no business doing so attempted <i>Norma</i> and faced varying levels of opprobrium for it: Rita Hunter, Renata Scotto, Shirley Verrett, Jane Eaglen, even Sills. But only dimly did I guess back then how lucky I was. (Callas fans were livid. A lapel button frequent at the Met: “Sutherland is Clotilda” – the confidante role Sutherland had sung to Callas years before.)
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<br />And then, that fourth “Casta diva,” came a surprise: As she rose to that first D in alt (ah-ah, ah-ah, ah-ah, ah-ah, AH) – she blew the note. Shock rippled through the house. Sutherland blew a note! This had never happened. Every other singer, sure. Don’t stop the presses. Some of them made whole careers out of it. But not Sutherland!
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<br />What it felt like was someone climbing a flagpole, only to find the ball at the top has been greased. She went for it – and over the top and down the other side. Except she pulled herself up short and tried again – and went back over the other side, wobbling about, trying to find the secure seat – at the top of a greased flagpole. No one would be surprised if a singer panicked at this point, but Sutherland was all pro, no panic. She held herself steady in that precarious position. And a strange thing happened in the orchestra, where we assumed Bonynge could do nothing but beat time: He did have control, and he exercised it now, and the orchestra abruptly were playing twice as slowly as before – as if reaching out a steadying arm to guide the soprano down the flow of arpeggios to the end of the verse. And this was just the first verse.
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<br />Let us imagine her feelings at this point: The voice is not in perfect control and another verse of “Casta diva” must be sung, and every one of the four thousand people present is at seat’s edge and wide awake, not believing what they were hearing, aghast to hear more. You could have heard a pin drop or a bracelet rattle – but no pins dropped and no bracelets rattled in all the house.
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<br />And, a little bit slower, a little bit more carefully, she sang the second verse and, as the chorus joined in, ascended the mountain of fioritura to the climactic D. And sang the most flawless verse of “Casta diva” that has ever been sung – since Ponselle anyway – maybe since Malibran (who transposed it). It was a perfect feat of singing, each note a rounded outsize pearl the same size and texture as each other note, the evenness that was the bel canto singer’s ideal in each phrase – to the swift descending chromatic scale without a note smudged that concludes the hymn. Bid set, made and won. If it had been anyone but Joan, you’d almost suspect her of doing it on purpose just to get us to pay closer attention, but she never went in for that kind of swank. (Of Scotto, I’d believe it.) And only complete coolth, complete professionalism could have brought it off.
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<br />Bonynge usually tried to suppress applause after arias and hurry on to present the succeeding cabaletta as part of a unity, but that night he laid down his baton and sat back while we roared for quite some time. Only then did Joan, clearly feeling her oats, throw herself into two ornamented verses of the delicious cabaletta. Not exactly introspective on this occasion, but who cared? It was an occasion. We were thrilled to be there.
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<br />And we suddenly realized why she insisted on having her husband in the pit: She was scared. She had made a lot of recordings, her fans knew them well. She was beginning to be unsure she could compete with studio perfection. She needed all the support she could get. It is a problem faced by every recorded artist. We used to mutter that Ricky selfishly insisted he be part of her contract package, but I don’t believe this was true: A letter in the Met Archives from the management – evidently of my mind – asked Bonynge if he’d mind his wife singing a performance with another conductor on a date when he was obliged to be out of town. He replied that he’d no objection at all, but he didn’t think she’d do it.
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<br />Act II of that famous <i>Norma</i>, by the way, ended with one of those interpolated high notes Sutherland placed in the score, ending (in this case) the tremendously exciting trio Bellini had composed. (Angela Meade sang it in her Caramoor <i>Norma</i>s last summer.) I was seated in the top row of the Family Circle, a fathom and a furlong from the stage. The kid next to me shocked me by attending the opera in a see-through shirt (or maybe I just envied him his skinny torso). When that note, solid on its flawless breath control came out at us, building and building and building and then at the peak of our endurance (we were all holding our breaths), abruptly descended to the tonic to end the act, the chest of the kid in the see-through shirt expanded until it nearly burst through, he seemed to be having some sort of seizure, and only when Joan let her breath out did he collapse, spent (in some way or other), into a huddle in his seat. I forgave so responsive a music-lover his bêtise of dress.
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<br />The mid-seventies were a difficult time for New York opera-goers. Eternal verities were challenged. Rudolf Bing may have been idiosyncratically out of date (he adored obscure Verdi, but he never took bel canto seriously), but at least he had been in charge. After he left, in 1972, for a dozen years no one seemed to be in charge. Deals were done and undone and many chances missed. Sutherland brought her <i>Fille du Regiment</i> from Covent Garden to the Met with the Pav (and, later, Alfredo Kraus), and it was a triumph – she loved to cut up on stage – and then a gorgeous <i>Puritani</i> in 1976 with a starry cast, the Pav, Milnes and James Morris, to back her up. <i>Puritani</i> is a long night for the soprano; at the prima she looked frankly exhausted; by the last one, she was having fun and tossing the roses that had been thrown to her back among the audience (after giving one to Pav and one to Ricky to be sure). Then there was the <i>Hoffman</i> in (yet another) new edition, where her Olympia had big painted pink roses on her cheeks, her Giulietta descended from the top of the stage to the bottom in a suspended gondola against a watery backdrop, and her expiring Antonia was loud enough to wake a sanitarium.
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<br />Then, for some reason, she quarreled with the powers running the Met. They asked her to sing Konstanze in Mozart’s <i>Seraglio</i>, and though Mozart was not a great composer for her (though her Donna Anna on record – made in her Silver era, and under Giulini’s careful control – is superb) she assented, on condition that the Met do her a favor and give her <i>The Merry Widow</i>. She had the production already; they’d only have to rent it. It may or may not have been a mistaken idea, but the operetta works in the Met, as Frederica von Stade and Placido Domingo proved some years later. The Met was unwilling to trust her. I’m not sure what the third opera in this package was to have been – perhaps <i>Luisa Miller</i> or <i>Ernani</i>, but I was hoping for <i>Semiramide</i> or <i>Les Huguenots</i> or <i>Lucrezia Borgia</i> – but instead three or four years passed with no Sutherland at all, and this was the more to be regretted because she went through another vocal crisis around 1980. Another soprano of equal success might have retired at this point, but for whatever reasons – she was used to acclaim, a hard taste to renounce – she went on. And it wasn’t the same. There were roles she should not have sung, second recordings that did not match the first ones, a few trainwrecks.
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<br />Opera lovers who began to attend in the eighties and were only going by what they heard (as is natural) scowled at Sutherland. She was so unconvincing an actress – a thing that had always been important but was becoming more so in a televised generation. Callas, lately dead, was now deified, and if Sutherland surpassed her in vocal gift, she never pretended to match her in dramatic instinct. She had worshipped Callas, but she never imitated her – and she was right not to try.
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<br />Over the years, I heard Sutherland in several concerts and galas and in fourteen complete operas: the Haydn <i>Orfeo</i>, Bellini’s <i>Sonnambula</i>, <i>Norma</i> and <i>Puritani</i> (no one but Joan ever got new productions of all three out of the Met), Donizetti’s <i>Lucia</i>, <i>Maria Stuarda</i> and <i>Anna Bolena</i>, Massenet’s <i>Esclarmonde</i>, Delibes’s <i>Lakmé</i>, Mozart’s <i>Don Giovanni</i> – alas, not the run with Solti conducting in the late sixties but a decidedly inferior group under Bonynge ten years later – Verdi’s <i>Rigoletto</i>, <i>Trovatore</i> and <i>Traviata</i>, and the four heroines in Offenbach’s <i>Tales of Hoffmann</i>.
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<br />The later performances were not up to standard: <i>Anna Bolena</i>, <i>Lucia</i>, Leonora, Elvira. She had become, as many of the younger fans sneered, “Moany Joanie.” Her pitch tended to sag below the note, although she could usually rise to a brilliant top. I thought the old mezzo training was coming through nicely, and that with retraining and study of a new repertory, she might have a new career. Her lower register was a cello register, Stradivarius-hued. What an Erda or <i>Favorite</i> she might have been! But why should she bother? She was nearing sixty, she was rich, she had a title, she was the living symbol of Australian never-say-die athleticism in her art.
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<br />When Tito Capobianco ran Opera San Diego, made a point one year of hiring Sutherland to sing Rosalinda in <i>Fledermaus</i> when he had already persuaded the soon-to-retire Beverly Sills to sing Adele. The ladies, whose fans were at daggers drawn, had never met, and became great friends instantly. (Sutherland used to sing the Czardas in Hungarian, the rest in English, not that anyone could tell the difference.)
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<br />A year or two later, when Sills was director of the City Opera, I ran into them strolling, regally tall, arm in arm, through the promenade of the State Theater. The occasion was the City Opera’s first <i>Alcina</i>, the Handel opera first unearthed for Sutherland. The star was Carol Vaness – and if she was nervous in Sutherland’s presence, she gave no sign of it in a magical performance. Sutherland sat prominently in the first seat in the First Tier, applauding everything heartily – but getting an ovation herself at the beginning of Act III. Her recording of the opera (with a breathtaking supporting cast: Berganza, Freni, Sciutti, Alva, Flagello) seems very old-fashioned today, when we have all learned a great deal more about baroque opera, but the rhythms are sprightly and the vocalism sensational. It is an adorable document.
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<br />I kick myself for missing some of Joan’s mid-career performances I could have attended – she’d given up Handel (those original <i>Alcina</i>s must have been astonishing), but I could have seen her in <i>Beatrice di Tenda</i> and <i>Lucrezia Borgia</i> (her video recording of this last, though late, is quite fine) and, most tragically of all, <i>Semiramide</i>, which she sang with Horne at the Lyric Opera of Chicago when I, who had never been west of Pennsylvania, was too young penniless and scared to risk a trip to so big and bad a city. I had also missed, by a year or so, her concert <i>Semiramide</i> at Carnegie Hall. I’m told she wore a gown of red sequins, shimmering regally, with a white cashmere shawl over her shoulders and bosom in the opening scene. She returned in this getup in the second scene, and as the prelude of her aria, “Bel raggio lusinghier” (“A bright ray of sunshine illuminates my heart”), was played, she let the shawl fall away – revealing that the front of her sequined gown was a glittering sunburst, perfectly synchronized with the text and the explosive showpiece she was about to sing. Let no one doubt she was a diva of the highest order.
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<br />I hope her copies of those awful sonnets never turn up.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-66333644378546876872010-10-13T12:27:00.003-04:002010-10-13T15:17:33.298-04:00Joan Sutherland: My Starter Diva (part 1)Sutherland was my Starter Diva. <br /><br />I was sixteen and knew nothing about opera, had just seen my first <i>Traviata</i> at the City Opera (Patricia Brooks, Placido Domingo), was entranced by the melodies – especially the Brindisi and “Sempre libera” – and wanted more. It is typical of my relationship to the zeitgeist that just as the world succumbed to the joys of the steady back beat, I fell completely in love with voluptuous melody. <br /><br />I had long loved the tunes of Arthur Sullivan (whose mother was Italian), but bel canto promised a far richer trove. I went to E.J. Korvette’s (remember Korvette’s?) and looked for some likely-looking Verdi. A display offered three new compilation disks (tracks snipped from earlier recordings): Bellini, Handel, Verdi, arias sung by a lady waltzing grandly across the front cover in great swirling swaths of black tulle. I’d never heard of Bellini, associated Handel with chorales. Verdi was the man. The lady’s name was Joan Sutherland. “She’s good; my parents like her,” said my best friend, who was advising me.<br /><br />Oh, was she good! Oh were the melodies sumptuous (“Ernani, involami”; “Santo di patria”; “Caro nome”; the Bolero from <i>Vespri</i>), and the voice every bit the same, clear as spring water, soaring up and down the scales by clear steps, fast or slow as you like, each tone ravishing, the trills so precise you could distinguish two separate notes, the runs sung just as they were written, the high E-flats in alt brilliant but never shrill. And since it was all in a language I didn’t know, the diction seemed just dandy to me.<br /><br />Sutherland was the ideal Starter Diva because so much of what she did was technique, on the surface. Once you knew the repertory, you might long for more pathos in a Desdemona, more fire in a raging Luisa Miller, more brooding in a Violetta … but if you were after flawless sound, flawless technique, she was it. I urge tyros not to start with Callas, because the voice’s flaws will irritate you and until you understand the repertory, you won’t understand what she’s doing. Callas did a lot, but much of it was subtle. Sutherland could be subtle, but technically, not dramatically. <br /><br />I became obsessed as only an adolescent desperate to stave off the sex urge (I knew it was going to be trouble) can be. I bought all her recordings and thirsted for more. The melodies of <i>Alcina</i> and <i>Lucia</i> and <i>Puritani</i> still carry me back to those dizzy, fantastic days; when music was so much more real to me than academics or personal relationships or anything else in my life. In dull high school classes (which was nearly all of them), I would keep myself awake by writing sonnets to Joan. Some of them were acrostics, spelling out her name. All of them were terrible (though when I sent them to her, she charmingly overlooked that fact). <br /><br />I read her biography, the first one, which made her out to be an unpretentious, unsophisticated, hardworking Australian girl, guided by a clever Svengali husband and a bunch of tough teachers to display her exceptional gifts, fend off terrible health problems, and renew repertory long thought dead. The story was like a Hollywood film, far too good to be true. Later biographies and unauthorized rumors presented a different woman: down to earth, yes, but determined to get to the top if talent and hard work could take her there, very conscious of just who she was and how important to opera, the recording industry and Australia’s self-image, loving a laugh but with no sympathy for the lazy. Ambition and hard work and a firm set of the chin makes more sense than the modest maiden pushed to the forefront. She knew she was remarkable. She knew she wasn’t Lily Pons or Callas, but she was Joan Sutherland. (It is absurd to ask, as mediocre reporters always do, Who is the new Callas? The new Pavarotti? The new Sutherland? The new Horne? The great artists are always unique – therefore, catch them while you can.)<br /><br />But let’s go back to my first exposure to the Sutherland instrument live and in person. I had written another sonnet and brought a dozen roses. And four albums for signature. But would I have the nerve to go backstage with them? The place: Carnegie Hall, the occasion American Opera Society’s presentation of Haydn’s <i>Orfeo ed Euridice</i> (aka <i>L’anima del filosofo</i>), with Nicolai Gedda as Orfeo, and Sutherland increasing her exposure by copping the bravura aria of a Spirit in Act II. Like Marcel on first seeing the actress Berma, I found it difficult to reconcile my anticipations with the superb but somehow alien occasion. The music was very odd: a chorus of Maenads tore Orfeo to pieces (following the myth, as Gluck does not), but they were Haydn Maenads – imagine a maddened horde of Dresden china shepherdesses. And yes, I got up the nerve to go backstage where I couldn’t think of a thing to say.<br /><br />A year later, at the Met, in more comprehensible circumstances, a pair of <i>Sonnambula</i>s back to back – but I was not ready to understand Bellini, though many authorities (including her husband) think the simple, naïve Amina is Sutherland’s best characterization. There was a song recital in Newark, with “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” and “Home, Sweet Home” among the encores – the latter drew titters from the hall. Sutherland might really have been happier as a Victorian grande dame, invited to Windsor for the occasional recital.<br /><br />There was an all-Handel concert at Hunter. In the second half, she came out to sing “Ombre pallide” from <i>Alcina</i> and couldn’t locate the music on the stand. Bonynge and the orchestra waited patiently. She turned the pages left, she turned them right. Nervous giggling began among the crowd. The usually bland face was suddenly expressive to a degree, deepening worry, maintaining cool, Aussie housewife “now where did I leave that casserole?” And suddenly, like sun breaking through clouds, relief burst out upon her features and we broke into laughter and applause. She was very communicative – just not in the artificial arena of the theater. <br /><br />Backstage after that concert (I’d brought a new sonnet and four more albums to be signed – I thought it rude to bring more than four) someone had a recording of Haydn’s <i>Orfeo</i> for her signature. “Oooh, you pirates!” she cried, shaking a finger. But she signed. <br /><br />A word on her acting: No, she was not a stage animal. As her biographies make clear, she had to force herself to learn to do all that stuff, and she needed careful coaching. Once she had the thing down, though, she had it down – she could do it walking in her sleep – and I mean <i>Lucia</i> or <i>Traviata</i>, not just Amina. But if anything went wrong, she had no idea how to fix it. Either you are the sort who is comfortable on the stage and can ad lib with no trouble, or you are not. It can’t be learned. Sills could improvise, live the role. Sutherland could not. Too, I don’t think her earthy sense of self could quite get the hang of being the loveliest princess in the world, her face dazzling tenors into transports and baritones into skullduggery. She was happier in comedies, making fun of herself, as in La Fille du Regiment – a very Australian trait. <br /><br />Many’s the time I’ve seen her do something, and thought, “Whatever you do up there, don’t do that!” only to have her – do just that. <br /><br />There was the <i>Esclarmonde</i> where the director and designer had set her up (she didn’t even have to sing, just stand there) as a Byzantine icon, worshipped by the chorus and Massenet’s incense-like music. But she had to remain veiled (because if a man saw her, she’d lose her magical powers – you know, opera as usual), and the veil was somehow awry. So what? But she couldn’t stop fiddling with the veil. We were all staring (the staging led all our eyes) at her supposedly immobile, dignified, iconic figure, and she couldn’t stop finicking with the goddam veil. All she had to do was not do anything at all. But this did not occur to her.<br /><br />There was the <i>Trovatore</i> in San Francisco – her first essay at that role, which was not one of her great ones. She had her costumier run up her own costumes, as usual, distrusting house designers. (“What’s wrong with our costume?” wailed a Met flak once. “It’s cheap and vulgar,” said Joan. “Vulgar perhaps, but cheap never!” he replied.) Joan’s costumier apparently thought <i>Trovatore</i> was set in the eighteenth century; in fact, it’s the early fifteenth, and the rest of the costumes reflected this. Too, they were all in blues or browns or a touch of orange. But not Joan: she was in a huge pink farthingale. She did add tremendously to the realism of the second performance (I thought) by remembering to unlock Manrico’s prison before throwing the door wide open. But that was not the moment I best remember from that rather dreary Trovatore. The big moment of shudder that night came during Pavarotti’s “Ah si, ben mio.” The director had him to one side, facing outwards, with Sutherland’s back to us, listening to his every ardent syllable. And she did that. But as she turned towards him, she trod on her long pink underskirt. It was going to be tough to move out of that awkward position, so, imagining that our attention was focused entirely on Luciano’s golden phrases, she took advantage of the quiet to kick the skirt out from under her dress – unaware that, in that lighting and against that brown background, her pink bustled bum was the most eye-catching object in the house, and her every gesture in it was being shoved into our faces.<br /><br />Then there was her <i>Lakmé</i> in Philadelphia. Joan, playing the lovely daughter of the bloodthirsty Hindu high priest but got up to resemble the Rock of Gibraltar as, I assume, a tribute to the majesty of the British Empire, sang the piss out of the Bell Song and was rewarded with minute after minute of hysteria. On and on it went, longer than the aria. And she was on her knees, and no doubt they were unhappy. At last she looked at us and broke tableau with a gesture: “Oh calm it down, girls,” she might almost have been saying. “It’s just me, you know, and I’m not going to sing it again.” We laughed. She was a pal. It was her moment. Victoria de los Angeles, observing Sutherland on TV, once remarked, “You just look at her and you know she would be such a <i>chum</i>.”<br /><br />And then there was her final <i>Lucia</i> at the Met – the one captured on video. This is unfortunate, as there was (at nearly sixty) a marked falling off. She lowered the Mad Scene a step, for one thing. For another, where in earlier years (I first saw her sing it in 1970 and 1971), she had run the hundred-yard dash in and out all over the stage, all while tossing off flawless runs and leaps and trills and variations, in 1985 (was it?) she could only manage about twenty yards of dash. I was in standing room for the first two acts, but as the curtain came down on the sextet (remember when they did the sextet properly, with no stupid photographer to mess it up?), a young couple with, no doubt, suburban trains to catch leaped up from seats in Row B on the aisle and raced to the exit. I got there first, and they gave me their tickets. So there I sat for the Mad Scene with my friend Maaike beside me, marveling at how well Joan acted as well as sang a part she had performed over three hundred times at that point. <br /><br />Then came the moment. She was staring at us, eyes demented, prepared to sweep down and roulade us to death. And her shawl slipped from her shoulders. Out of character, she looked down, hoisted it to one shoulder, then to the other, then back to look at us, ready to sing, in character – demented. Maaike muttered, “Oh God.” Indeed, theatrical tension has seldom been so entirely dispelled. <br /><br />I said to Maaike later, “You don’t understand. This is what proves Sutherland is a major actress! If Callas or Sills had dropped the shawl, they’d have let the shawl go hang, and we’d never have seen them kick it away. But Sutherland instinctively realizes that to a really madwoman, dropping your shawl is just as significant as stabbing your groom 29 times on the wedding night. They are equally momentous in her eyes! Sutherland has equated them. She has made Lucia real!” No, I didn’t believe that, but I was very proud of concocting it and have used the story many times as an example of how a true opera devotee will defend his diva against all probability and all sanity. <br /><br />Perhaps the most impressive feat I’ve ever seen on any stage also involved Sutherland. She sang four <i>Rigoletto</i>s at the Met in June, 1972; I got to two of them. Ruggiero Raimondi as Sparafucile awed me then and forever by carrying a sack on his shoulder, a sack containing Joan and while singing lowered it gently to the stage it so that Sherill Milnes (not even trying to lift it) could haul it down front, kick it a few times, and out popped Joan, trilling away. At the later performance, Ivo Vinco sang Sparafucile. He had an attendant ruffian with him to carry the sack. <br /><br />(to be continued)Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-86832650077976123382010-05-11T12:31:00.008-04:002010-05-11T13:29:23.979-04:00Ross Macdonald had a firm ... ouch, scream, eeyii-oh!"Mister, I seen 'em hard-boiled before - but you're - twenty minutes!" - Billy Wilder, <i>Ace in the Hole</i>. <br /><br />The word I always use for my favorite author of hard-boiled detective fiction, Ross Macdonald (ne Kenneth Millar), is "Wagnerian." Lew Archer (there is no one in Wagner like Archer, but how Wagner would have enjoyed it if there had been!) is always hired to solve some minor crime (a little swindle, an oil spill, a little murder, the theft of some letters), and he always turns up a long-lost ancient forgotten unsolved crime or faked identity or something else everyone kind of wishes he wouldn't bring up. It can go back twenty years. Thirty. And once he's on the case, he can't be stopped. You'd think someone would figure that out and shoot him early on. But they can't. He's narrating. And (unlike real life) it all ties together in the end. <br /><br />Exploring the Gulag (my storage space on Vandam Street), because it simply must be emptied so I can put things there so I can live in an habitable apartment (song cue: Stephen Sondheim's "What More Do I Need?"), I came across a trove of Ross Macdonald mysteries. Macdonald is my favorite, preferred even to his partners-in-hardboiled-California-tec-dom, Hammett and Chandler, and to his splendid wife, Margaret Millar. <br /><br />Of all mystery writers (not that I've read that many), my favorites are Sayers (great writing, though her murders are usually improbable at best), Edmund Crispin (splendidly roundabout and elegant), Sarah Caudwell (a lawyer and a witch and a lesbian to boot!), and Tony Hillerman. What - aside from excellent style - did they have in common? They created characters and societies. I'm intrigued by their alternate worlds. Agatha Christie, on the other hand, never created a believable character or a credible plot. And she's a terrible writer. Simenon I can't get into. I shall continue to try. Mickey Spillane - another terrible writer with unbelievable characters and the same repetitive plot. (Macdonald's plot also repeats, deriving from his own brutal childhood as he admitted, but he makes it seem less variations on a theme than a universal set of truths.) John Le Carre is a very good writer, and I like him when he's brief - but he's seldom brief. <br /><br />I had just loaned (I think it was a loan; he may not agree) four of my favorite Macdonalds to a friend in Boston: The Chill, The Blue Hammer, The Goodbye Look, The Wycherly Woman. Hope I get them back eventually. But I only reread them about once a decade, which keeps the effect fresh. Often I'm halfway through a reread before I remember who done it. And among the trove, besides several whose plot I had forgotten (or was thrilled to revisit) was one I had not read before! I savored the opening sentence - did I know it? No. I savored the typical lurch into the case before someone hired Archer, never realizing he was going to search deeper than the hirer wanted. Not familiar. I savored the characters: typical. And Archer's seduction of each to get the info he wanted. The roundabout plot. The lost identity.<br /><br />(It's her SISTER! I wanted to scream at him. We've been told she has a sister. If the girl isn't acting like the blackmailing slut you know she is, it's not your instinct that's wrong - it's your i.d. This is her SISTER! Archer figured it out, but only a day later. Never mind. My favorite Sayers is The Nine Tailors, and I figured out who the corpse was, and who had killed him, chapters before Lord Peter ever did. Even the emeralds were no surprise to me.) <br /><br />It occurred to me I didn't even know which was the first Lew Archer novel. (It's The Moving Target, not one of the strongest, poorly filmed as Harper with giggly Paul Newman mis-playing melancholic Lew.) So I found a web site with ALL of Macdonald listed on it, in chronological order so I can deduce several trends as they rise and fall, and can pass along my recommendations to you. I have omitted most of the early and non-Archer ones, as I do not find them as enjoyable and often have not finished them. He took a couple of years to find his style, did our Ken (Ross), and this is no surprise. Even Mozart nodded, and his early works, extraordinary for a child, are nothing brilliant compared to any adult.<br /><br /> * The Moving Target (1949) - I will now reread this to see how Archer began his illustrious career. <br /><br /> * The Drowning Pool (1950) - One of the weakest of the series, inexplicably popular.<br /><br /> * The Way Some People Die (1951) - Some women just can't help driving men mad. Y'know? Lew is not yet forty and hates gangsters. (VERY GOOD)<br /><br /> * The Ivory Grin (1952) - Good appearance of the corpus delecti. Though I knew what it was long before Lew did. (VERY GOOD)<br /><br /> * Find a Victim (1954) - Unforgettable opening sentence. Femmes fatales, oversexed and undersexed, and the way a career in law enforcement eats the soul. The family romance in full Wagnerian throttle. (GOOD)<br /><br /> * The Barbarous Coast (1956) - I lost it at the movies. (GOOD)<br /><br /> * The Doomsters (1958) - I don't remember this one.<br /><br /> * The Galton Case (1959) - Famously the most autobiographical, the one where he stopped fending off the impulse to make fiction of his own story, it also has the wildest switcheroo plot, wherein nor Lew nor reader knows what to believe. (Neither do most of the other characters.) (TOP RATING)<br /><br /> * The Ferguson Affair (1960) - This is not a Lew Archer novel, but his replacement is very much up to the mark. Terrific plot. Mistaken identities proliferate. Old ghosts return to haunt. Hollywood is corrupt and so is money. (TOP RATING)<br /><br /> * The Wycherly Woman (1961) - More mistaken identities. I wasn't taken in, but I enjoyed Lew's ride. (VERY GOOD)<br /><br /> * The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962) - Hippies are making Lew - and Ross - nervous. (GOOD)<br /><br /> * The Chill (1964) - Won all the prizes, wildest, most Wagnerian plot of all, what's a little incest as long as it's kept in the family? (TOP RATING)<br /><br /> * The Far Side of the Dollar (1965) - I forget this one, too, but will reread it.<br /><br /> * Black Money (1966) - Rather short, as though Ross (and Lew) were going through the motions. But a rather intriguing denouement all the same. (GOOD)<br /><br /> * The Instant Enemy (1968) - Another one I can't remember. <br /><br /> * The Goodbye Look (1969) - Terrific. Even remembering the details, I found I couldn't remember <i>all</i> the details. And when Archer, in a hospital bed, pretends to be asleep so the housekeeper who denied ever seeing the photograph before can sneak in and reclaim it joyously ... welcome to Archer-land. (TOP RATING)<br />This is also - I think - the first book in which he actually goes to bed with one of the attractive women who are always throwing themselves at him. Such is the zeitgeist of 1969, eh?<br /><br /> * The Underground Man (1971) - Another I've forgotten. Looking forward to it!<br /><br /> * Sleeping Beauty (1973) - This brings in another of Ken Millar's causes, conservation: An oil spill or two are at the bottom of the mystery. You're very tense as Lew races around California searching for - and just missing - the angry young woman he met in chapter one. Will she live long enough for him to save her? She didn't in a previous volume or two. Meanwhile, a little adultery never hurt any private eye we ever knew. (TOP RATING)<br /><br /> * The Blue Hammer (1976) - The last, and the man is still at the top of his game. Amazing how murdering one's half-brother can transform a painter's style ... or did it? And amazing how time can transform the painter's model. Wild and maelstromic plot. (TOP RATING)<br /><br />They've reissued a lot of these, some of the best (The Chill) and some of the worst (The Drowning Pool). I can't guess the logic of it.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-42853640191809935842010-03-17T12:32:00.003-04:002010-03-17T12:36:52.360-04:00Venus in Fur addendum ...Has it ever occured to anyone - it might have, it has only just occurred to me - that the idea for <i>One Touch of Venus</i>, the Kurt Weill-Ogden Nash extravaganza starring Mary Martin (Ava Gardner in Hollywood), the story of a young man who kisses an ancient statue of the goddess Aphrodite, whereupon she comes to life and wreaks happy havoc on New York - the show that gave us "Speak Low," the most sensuous of all Broadway theater songs - came to someone (Moss Hart? someone like that) who had been reading Sacher-Masoch's novel <i>Venus in Furs</i>, the foundation document (with de Sade's <i>Justine</i>) of Sado-Masochism, in which the protagonist is violently aroused by a statue of that goddess on the grounds of a sanitarium in eastern Austria-Hungary and then meets, as it were, the goddess's living incarnation? <br /><br />This came to me not at David Ives's play but on Facebook today, when someone referred to "violating a statue," having mis-spelled "statute."Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-45347877744151897372010-03-13T13:29:00.004-05:002010-03-13T13:40:24.997-05:00Venus in FurTo celebrate what would have been my mother's eighty-ninth birthday last night (had she not died on February 4), went to a play. She'd certainly have approved.<br /><br />The best new play I’ve seen in years: <i>Venus in Fur.</i> (by David Ives, a witty man.) A playwright (Wes Bentley) has made a play out of Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel, the eponym of Sado-Masochism (which novel everyone knows about but no one seems to have read – anyway, I sure haven’t), and he’s annoyed with all the actresses who have auditioned, and at the last minute one more shows up (the divine Nina Arianda), apparently a typical ditzy New York/L.A. brainless blonde, screaming, “Fuck!” when things go wrong, wearing inappropriate (for the era) fetish clothes, not understanding his allusions. <br /><br />She nonetheless insists he let her read for him, “You don’t have to tell me about sado-masochism; I work in the theater.” And she puts on a Victorian dress and suddenly, like a light-switch, she’s a self-possessed aristocratic Austro-Hungarian of the 1870s with an entirely different accent (more or less British) and entirely different manner and movements, and he falls under her spell, and then every now and then she snaps out of it, is a ditz again (with no pause, it’s hilarious just to hear her do it, the moment you hear her whiny American accent the illusion shatters and we’re back in the rehearsal room), and she leaves him utterly bewildered and gradually demolishes him, exploiting the sado-masochistic feelings he’s always denied - and turns out (possibly) to be the goddess Aphrodite come to punish him for his self-suppression and his male condescension to women - and by the end she has him eagerly playing a girl whom she, as a man, exploits and crushes - most amazing (and funniest) performance I’ve seen on any stage in years - and probably the best staging of the central confrontation of the <i>Bacchae</i>, though using hardly any lines from that play. A major pagan event. Absolutely riveting.<br /><br />At the end, my date, Nika, said, “Did you notice?” (I hadn’t.) “While we were doubled over laughing, most of the people in the audience didn’t get it at all; they had no idea what it was about.” <br /><br />One could spend a night, many nights, just watching emotions play on Arianda's by no means conventionally beautiful face. Wonderful, wonderful.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-38457739850286954792009-12-28T10:37:00.002-05:002009-12-28T10:42:26.364-05:00Der Fledermausmann! A new year's eve travesty<i><b>Der Fledermausmann</i></b><br /><br />An impression of certain confusing events on a recent Saturday afternoon in an area with poor radio reception.<br /><br />(…static establishes that we are listening to a broadcast; then a familiar voice intones:)<br /><br />“…As the curtain rises, we find ourselves in 19th-century Vienna, in the elegantly appointed bedroom of an aristocrat, Count Rudolf Wehn, whom we find just waking up in bed with his young ward, Octavian. From their amorous chit-chat, we learn that they are secretly Vienna’s caped crusader against crime, <i>der Fledermausmann</i>, and Fritz, <i>des Knaben Wunderhorn</i>, or horny boy wonder. A sudden commotion in the corridor announces the arrival of the Count’s country cousin, Rosalinda von Eisenstein, brushing aside the protests of Count Rudolf’s devoted but incompetent butler and cabbie, Schatzendorff. Rosalinda is broke and has come to town seeking Rudolf’s help to get herself a rich husband, ideally innocent young Alfried, only son of the <i>nouveau riche</i> former burlesque queen Baroness Fanny Waldner. Octavian quickly disguises himself as a maid and hops back into bed with the Count, hoping Rosalinda will detect nothing untoward. But Rosalinda is instantly smitten with the pretty girl (or so she thinks), and attempts to make a date with her, at a <i>heurige</i>, an inn in the Vienna Woods equipped (as we will find in Act III) with a <i>chambre separée</i> ….”<br /><br />(…more static and occasional bursts of late-Romantic music, including, during the Act II Ball chez Prince Metternich, an interpolation from the same composer's operetta <i>Die Diskoprinzessin</i> of the only waltz song in 4/4 time: “Lvov, City of Lvove,” sung by a masked Galician tenor over the sound of a game of skat in the next alcove, and then, during the preposterous shenanigans in the Viennese country inn at the end of Act III, Jenny, a streetwalker, sings that bitter indictment of the bourgeoisie, “Das Garmisch-Partenkirchen-Lied,” the number that is said to have caused the censors of the Duke of Wölfenbüttel to ban the premier performance. At last, to our great relief, at the end of the third intermission, the familiar voice returns, to dissolve the Gordian knots of the plot:)<br /><br />“Act IV opens in the major metropolitan jail of Vienna, where we meet Schlivovitcz, the comic jailer, a non-acting role. Enter, in great excitement, Alfried’s governess, Adele, who, you may remember, has disguised herself as a man to penetrate (as it were) the Viennese underworld. Since Adele is played by a baritone in drag, Schlivovitcz assumes she is the thug she is dressed as, and Adele has some (humorous) difficulty fending off his lewd advances. At last, however, she obtains an audience with Prince Metternich (played, you doubtless recall, by a mezzo-soprano <i>en travesti</i>), and reveals to him that the gang terrorizing metropolitan Vienna is led by a contralto with her arm in a sling. This can be no one but Rosalinda, who was wounded by Octavian in the Act II melee. Rosalinda is dragged off to a term in the dungeons of the Spielberg. Prince Metternich (twirling his mustachios) resolves to take an “interest” in Adele’s future career as an actress and offers her a ceremonial glass of champagne from his high leather boot. If she quaffs the whole thing in one gulp (and of course she does), she has accepted the arrangement. Meanwhile Octavian and Alfried have realized that they are meant for each other, and Count Rudolf, brushing aside a tear, departs in his <i>flederfiaker</i>, or bat-cab with Schatzendorff, as the curtain falls.<br /><br />“The applause you’re hearing greets Maestro Spiegeltraum as he makes his way through the pit and asks the orchestra to rise. The House lights are going down, and we are ready for the concluding act of <i>Der Fledermausmann</i>….”<br /><br />As ready as we’ll ever be, anyway.<br /><br />(c) 2009, John YohalemBrightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-36448842051661796042009-12-26T20:29:00.003-05:002009-12-26T21:03:16.974-05:00Kandinsky at the GuggenheimDon't ask me why I bothered, but after a tedious soggy Saturday visiting the Mum in bleak Westchester (she claims she's been evicted, or possibly kidnapped by space aliens, but was looking forward to our theater date ... what theater date?), I got off the train at 125th Street and caught a bus down Fifth Avenue, reaching the Guggenheim Museum about 5:15. On Saturday nights from 5:45 to 7:45, entrance is pay-what-you-wish to this overpriced museum, and the Kandinsky retrospective runs only through January 13th. The line in the pouring rain was around the block and as far as Madison Avenue, and when I finally got in the door at six, the line behind me was still out of sight. As usual when I go to the Guggenheim, I took an elevator to the top and worked my way backwards, but this show foolishly (in my opinion) starts with his earliest work at the bottom of the spiral and his last works at the very top. <br /><br />Would seeing it in proper sequence have made a difference? To my ankles perhaps.<br /><br />I just don't get Kandinsky. He doesn't send me. I don't know what he's saying. His pictures are far more pleasing when viewed from very far away (across the museum, say, from the opposite gallery spiral), and I find him much inferior in coherence to his friend Joan Miro and hopelessly unappealing beside his pal and neighbor Paul Klee, and less decorative than, say, Jackson Pollock. Very few of the later oils delighted, and the earlier ones were simply messy. Compare them to, say, Odilon Redon - one artist is a visionary, the other seems to be a kid mucking about with fingerpaint. And Kandinsky is not the visionary. <br /><br />However, one of the side galleries was full of works on paper, and these had all the coherence, the focus, the charm that the works on canvas conspicuously lacked. I would happily spend an hour wandering in that suite of rooms (two or three), and would love to have a small booklet of reproductions of these items in pencil or water color or gouache, but only five or six of the oils that filled the spiraling Guggenheim did I want to take home. <br /><br />Perhaps I should have taken the headset (free!) for some pointers, but I detest these things; I'd rather be alone with the art and my own thoughts. As at the Barnes, to which I shall return January 3rd with Chris and Felicia. <br /><br />You can't like them all. But you have to see them all to know who speaks to you.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-48829038975137379662009-12-25T11:17:00.004-05:002009-12-25T12:31:01.104-05:00Gramercy Park and FlahooleyLast night, for the first time, I finally made it to the annual caroling in Gramercy Park. It’s the one day of the year when anyone may enter the park, otherwise locked and reserved to the neighbors. It's a New York place and I've always wanted to go there, but I could never quite manage to be there for the Christmas Eve caroling. This is the more absurd as the event is managed out of Calvary Church (on Madison Avenue nearby) and I used to know the guys who ran the music there pretty well (the late Calvin Hampton; Harry Huff, now of Harvard). But the weather was sometimes against it or I had tickets or I forgot about it. This year the weather was fine, snow mostly cleared from the streets, thirty degrees F, so biking was easy. I biked by at four and passed the folks setting up; they told me to return at six. But at five-thirty the Anvil fell - as I call it - and I could do nothing but nap. At six, I was awake, and a-bike, and up to 22nd Street.<br /><br />Disappointment.<br /><br />The carols were sung into microphones, which I detest, accompanied by tinny electric pianos, <i> and they were out of hot cider</i>, and I just looked at the statue of Edwin Booth (as Hamlet, I think), and we both rolled our eyes, and I left. (Poor Edwin was stuck there.) The great tragedy is that the little kids loving the occasion (“It’s the perfect Christmas Eve!” I heard parents exult) will grow up with no idea that Christmas caroling ever did not include microphones and tinny electric pianos – the same way a hundred years ago (or whenever) people sighed that youngsters would never be able to imagine Christmas without electric lights on the tree. What a cheap business. Glad I won't have to do it ever again. <br /><br />I can only stand Christmas music when it is sung by amateur voices without amplification or accompaniment at my window in the snow. As I live on the sixth floor, I'm pretty safe even from that. I avoid stores or diners at this time of year, and at Dan's party last week, I made him take the carols off the CD player (sung by Clay Aiken, who does have a pretty voice), and I was less than thrilled to hear the Bob Dylan Christmas album somewhere or other recently. (At first I thought it was someone imitating Dylan, and thought it pretty funny.) <br /><br />... but the whole Gramercy occasion in turn made me think of my mother singing Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill’s “The Saga of Jenny”:<br /><br />Jenny made her mind up when she was three<br />She herself was going to trim the Christmas tree.<br />Christmas Eve she lit the candles - threw the taper away –<br />Little Jenny was an orphan on Christmas Day.<br /><br />Poor Jenny!<br />Bright as a penny.<br />Her equal would be hard to find.<br />She lost her dad and mother,<br />A sister and a brother,<br />But she would make up her mind!<br /><br />- which I am thinking of now (in Mum's voice) as I may indeed be an orphan later today, and before New Year almost certainly, though she does keep rallying, I don't know why. This morning she was mildly demented, wishing me happy birthday (it's in August). She's an hour out of town. It would be nice to drop in for five minutes and pay her bills, but that's four hours out of the day. I am trying not to be frantic. <br /><br />After the carols, detours for a lousy cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee and a haircut (barber named Jacob, "Where are you from?" "Where do you think?" "Uzbekistan?" I suggested. "How did you know?" "Tashkent?" "No, Samarkand." So I have a haircut from Samarkand! No sky-blue tiles: I got it buzzed very short, so I can maybe shave it <i>all</i> off. A suitable mourning gesture, eh?<br /><br />From the haircut, I went to Theater for the New City on First Avenue at 10th Street, where Harlem Repertory Theater is performing (through January 3rd) the preposterous 1951 musical, <i>Flahooley</i>, renowned as Barbara Cook’s first show (and only teaming with Yma Sumac), and generally considered unrevivable. It's a Christmas fable ("Not believe in Saint Nicholas? Ridicholas" - welcome to Yip Harburg-land): A monstrous toymaker (B.G. Bigelow) is hoping to corner Christmas, but his rivals, A.E.I.O.U. and Sometimes Y and W Schwartz, have undersold him. Happily, someone rubs a lamp, brought by a Middle Eastern potentate in crisis ("The Soviets are moving mountains <i>without</i> Mohammed") and a genial Genii named Abou appears. (“Imagine! A genii with claustrophobia!”) And the local puppetmaker ("You Too Can Be a Puppet") hopes to win a promotion and the girl of his dreams (Barbara's role) by inventing Flahooley, a doll that screams "Dirty Red!" whenever anyone says something subversive. All very silly, some charming songs, some amazing performers. <br /><br />With a great deal of help from multimedia (puppets, marionettes, projections, cartoons, films, puppets playing people, people playing marionettes) but no microphones at all, ten performers - nine of them splendid - put this show on with a straight face, at such a breakneck pace (90 minutes) that you had no time to notice the plot didn't make much sense. Lots of jokes about fascist Americanism creeping into our free society that haven't aged at all. Business is bad and fantasy is good, and that was all Yip Harburg needed. The tunes by Sammy Fain are Grade B for 1951, which means they'd be A++ on Broadway now. The lyrics keep tickling and re-tickling, and reprises are good because it's a second chance to get the rapid-fire puns and plays on words. Perhaps best of all, they didn't cut all of Yma Sumac's unsingable material - they just kept Yma Sumac! A girl in veils wiggles her hips and pretends to yodel, and Yma is on the soundtrack. Otherwise, accompaniment was a nifty little combo (no electronics!). A little social message, yes, but otherwise just a pack-up-your-troubles zany evening of the sort Broadway hasn't known in fifty years, Off-Broadway in thirty. <br /><br />Among the performers I was particularly delighted by Alexandra Bernard, an amazing singer and actress, as a vicious secretary and, later, a vamp Flahooley; and by Primy Rivera's delicious camp turn as Abou the Genii (who gets to sing <br /><br />"The Springtime Cometh, <br />hummingbird hummeth, <br />sugarplum plummeth, <br />heart <br />it humpty-dummeth, <br />and to summeth up <br />the springtime cometh for the love of thee! ... <br />Lad and lass <br />in tall green grass <br />gaily skippeth, <br />nylon rippeth, <br />zipper zippeth..."),<br /><br />- anyone who has seen <i>Finian's Rainbow</i> lately knows what to expect - and everyone in New York <i>should</i> run to see it -<br /><br />also, John Wiethorn and Natalia Peguero, charming as the lovers, and Daniel Fergus Tamulonis as B.G. Bigelow, the practical joker as dictator - it was evidently Tamulonis who designed the many sorts of wacky puppet presences in the story, though these included some manipulation (in a trial sequence sending up the HUAC hearings) in the manner of <i>Avenue Q</i>. There was just a little dancing, impressive considering the cramped space. The only weak spot was Yip Harburg's grandson Ben, who played a puppet and sang so badly it was hard to say if he or the part was more wooden. <br /><br />And all this was only $18! <br /><br />After that I went to Ty’s (my local), which was mostly empty (it got fuller later), and met a couple of guys who were into opera and musicals, and we talked about those for a couple of hours. A perfect ending for the night, eh?Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-34896230074780266732009-12-19T13:42:00.002-05:002009-12-20T13:09:47.064-05:00A Broadside at the Barnes' Door - 2.,The Visit<b>A Visit to the Barnes Foundation</b><br /><br />The Barnes is a stately mansion a little smaller than the Villa Borghese – or so it seems because the ceilings are a whole lot lower. It was built not to inhabit but for display, c. 1925, and has panels mimicking Cubist sculpture inserted in the façade here and there, where classical statuary would have been placed in such a building just a few years earlier – the joke, I’m sure, was Barnes’s idea, and the effect of crazy synthesis intentional.<br /><br />Barnes’s personal taste – and he seems to have consulted no one else – was eclectic, belligerently modern when that was still an issue, but with a great love of the past and the primitive, especially when he felt the primitive had a link to impulses that also guided modernism. I have read no scholarly tomes or articles about him, so my reactions below will be my personal guesses as to what motivated his choices, his arrangements, and so on. There have been studies of this, and people with real art chops have discussed it, but let us be, as I was, a moderately well-read but untutored stranger entering a house full of wonderful objects. <br /><br />Barnes purchased medieval Flemish and German paintings, illuminated manuscripts (removing and framing the pages), Titian, Tintoretto and Giorgione – at least, he thought it was a Giorgione at the time –Dürer (ditto), El Greco, Rubens, and so on, though he arrived at the auction a bit late for the masterpieces of known painters. These are interspersed with the moderns for which he is famous.<br /><br />He did rather better with Degas, Manet, Renoir – acres and acres of awful Renoir – Cézanne, Van Gogh, Sisley, Gauguin, Rousseau, Seurat, Braque, Picasso, Matisse, and such up-and-comers as Bonnard, Modigliani, Miró, de Chirico, Paul Klee, Jules Pascin, Chaim Soutine (of whom he was an early discoverer and regular patron) and Jacques Lipchitz sculptures. The dozen or more small Lipchitz sculptures are almost worth the price of admission, if you ask me. Too, he kept an eye out for neglected Americans like Mary Cassatt, James Glackens, Maurice Prendergast and Charles Demuth. There are individual paintings by Marie Laurencin (a splendid sketch of a woman in a cloche hat), Puvis de Chavannes (Prometheus comforted by the daughters of Oceanus), Courbet, Corot, Odilon Redon and lots of works on paper. <br /><br />He was also fond of bronze and ironwork of medieval provenance, hinges, kitchen implements, tools, locks, the more original and hand-made the better, and of African sculpture (big with the Cubists), Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek and other pottery and artifacts, some Chinese and Japanese painting, Navaho rugs, pre-Columbian pots.<br /> <br />Is that eclectic enough for you?<br /><br />“Why don’t they put all the African things together, and all the Etruscan things together, so you know what you’re looking at?” a woman near me grumbled. But that is precisely what every other museum in the world would do – does – and precisely what Barnes was determined not to do. His very point is the juxtaposition and the scattering of assumptions and preconceptions.<br /><br />Did I get the message Barnes intended me to get? Maybe not. No way to be sure. I got the point that a Milton Avery will startle me more if it shows up between a Renoir and a Puvis de Chavannes than it would in a gallery of moderns. I got the point about triangles (when I heard a docent explaining them to a group of visitors), and the paintings are mostly set up so that the two on the outer edge on the same level pair off in some way, and triangulate with the one on top, and the one in the center triangulates with the little ones on top at the edges. And I sort of liked not having the name of the artist glaring at me (you have to go up to the frame and squint) so that I took in the art without being obstructed by preconceived notions of the artist, or even of the era in which it was painted – so that different artists of different cultures and eras could seem to be interacting, having a conversation on the shape of a skull or the texture of water. I liked the unexpected – landscapes by Renoir or Modigliani, whom one associates with portraits, caricatures by Demuth when you’re prepared for something that will balance that Cézanne, Cézannes that seem to defy his usual preference for greens and pinks with a welcome turn toward brown and gold and blue, the Monet of his wife at her embroidery frame, the very early (1906) Picasso of two women exulting with two bulls, the shocking Soutines everywhere, the French medieval heads set down among Lipchitzes and looking exactly as modern as they did, and his fondness for the unsophisticated art of devout Mexican peasants, juxtaposed with medieval masters on the same themes.<br /> <br />This is not a museum to pass through in indiscriminate haste; it forces you to guess something new about the art, to take in the grouping and then look at individuals without knowing who they are and where they would fit in the traditional continuum.<br /><br />And I very much liked the primitive metalwork hung over the paintings or beside the paintings, scattered all over the house, so that no one has any idea why he hung any of it where he hung it, but he was very precise that it was part of the grouping and was never to be moved. <br /><br />This is a museum that thinks about art, about the impulse, about the commonality of sophisticated and unsophisticated, educated and uneducated, skill and eye. It is one of a kind. Why transform it into just another of the hundreds of ordinary museums that people walk through without noticing very much? Why fill it with crowds of not very interested people, as the Met and the Louvre are so tediously crowded? Why not let those who love art have something for themselves? <br /><br />Two hours was enough to “look at” everything, if not enough to “see” it all. I would have liked to sit over coffee for half an hour, recuperating, and then return and go through it again, or focus on things I hadn’t had time to give total attention to, but the Barnes is purposely not set up for such things. Two hours is all my feet will stand of any museum any more, at any one stretch. (So I’m glad I did the Louvre young, and can take the Met in small doses whenever I have the energy.)<br /><br /><b>P.S.</b><br /><br />My friend Chris Berg (the noted composer) says my description so excited him he has reserved a place to visit the Barnes on its last unedited day, New Year's Eve. That was so charming a notion of a way to ring out the old year that I decided to join him.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-34143489829375409342009-12-18T20:28:00.007-05:002009-12-19T13:44:36.457-05:00A Broadside at the Barnes' Door - 1, The Voyage Out“I’ll go to Hell fer ya –<br />Or Philadelphia –<br />Any Old Place With You.”<br />– Lorenz Hart. (music: Richard Rodgers)<br /><br /><b>The Voyage Out</b><br /><br />I’ve put off going to the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, for years, distracted by tales of how difficult it was to reach. These tales were exaggerations. On a chilly morning, last Thursday, I woke at dawn, raced to Allen Street, caught the Chinatown bus to Philly ($10), was there in two hours, got the 44 bus to Ardmore on Market Street (two blocks from my arrival point), and was at the gate of the Barnes Foundation in forty minutes. The trip can also be made (for those without cars) by New Jersey Transit to Trenton, then SEPTA (the Philadelphia subway, which goes as far as Trenton) to Merion, a little more than half an hour from the Barnes. You have no excuses.<br /><br />Well, you have: There may be no more Barnes at the Barnes, a fact that upsets the neighbors (signs protesting the move line the street); the whole caboodle may be transferred into the city. I had no comment on this before I saw the place; now that I have, I think moving it or changing it would be a great shame. It is unique. It was designed to be unique by Albert C. Barnes, millionaire, art collector and didact, and it is. Out here in the (relative) boonies, he has us in his power: only certain numbers may enter, at certain times, and it isn’t made too convenient to stay: no café near the premises. The artifacts are arranged as he directed they be arranged, following no rules clear to anyone else, bewildering even the docents, and they make the effects that he wished them to make. When much of the collection was displayed in the Philadelphia Museum some years ago, it didn’t have half the impact it has in situ – there were crowds, there were too many hideous Renoirs all lumped together, there was Jerry Garcia in the next aisle (I was impressed) – it was just another museum show. I wouldn’t go again. I’d go to the Barnes again – if I could. (Four of the eighteen galleries are closing on the first of the year; the rest remain open and very worth seeing.)<br /><br />I knew it would be a good day because I won my point. I took a cab to Allen Street and Canal (though I could have walked to West Fourth and taken the B or D to a nearby subway) and the driver’s name was Jose Chavez. My game is to look at the name (and the photo) of the cabbie and guess what country the driver is from. If I get it right on the first guess, I get a point. More than one guess: no points. Jose Chavez could be from any one of forty countries (including the U.S.), but I considered the current makeup of New York: most Latinos here are Puerto Rican, Mexican, Colombian or Dominican. I guessed Dominican Republic – yessss! (Not quite so impressed with myself as the time the guy was from Mali, and I got that on the first guess!) <br /><br />My reservation at the Barnes was for 1p.m. They will not admit you without a reservation. The hard part is scheduling one’s arrival precisely when you don’t know how much time buses, trains, subways will take. And it was quite cold, below freezing and windy. Nothing was predictable. <br /><br />There are rival Chinatown buses available. I had chosen Apex, but their office at 11 Allen Street was closed. Happily, I remembered 28 Allen, across the street and just up the block, was the address of Eastern Bus Lines. $10 one way, $20 round trip. The 9a.m. bus was comfortable and half empty. En route home, I had a choice between 5p.m. and 6p.m., and suspected there would be fewer commuters on the former. There weren’t half a dozen people on the vehicle, and they dropped me in TriBeCa, eight blocks from my door. But that is to anticipate….<br /><br />The Reading Market under the old and glorious terminal of the Reading Railway (pay owner four times throw of dice; if unowned you may buy it from the Bank) reminded me of the Granville Island Market in Vancouver, and happily I couldn’t eat many goodies due to wheat allergy … but the corned beef (mustard but no bread for me) was ace, and there was (alas) a used book store run by a gentle black man who sold me a glossy picture book of Central Asian architecture and told me just where to find the bus to Merion. Good esoteric-religious-magical collection, too. <br /><br />The bus to Merion cost two dollars, and they took bills, as most bus lines outside New York do. (Please note, MTA.) Forty minutes (SEPTA would have been twelve). Guy behind me on a cell phone, in a passion: “They stopped me, and for what? A busted tail light? Who can see if the tail light is on when you’re driving? And I had the registration right there in the car, but not my insurance card because I was in a hurry this morning, and it’s cold and I got damn-all done in town today … so they impounded the car … that will be towing fees … and I have to see a judge to get it back, so there will be court fees … I mean, I had my license … they just don’t like to see a black man driving a Lexus, that’s all it is … probably be two days before I can get it back … and they’ll charge me for storing the car! It’s because the city is broke. The town is flat broke. They are nickel-and-diming us….” He sounded ready to fire a gun to begin with, but twenty minutes of rant cooled him down. I had hoped to nap, but it’s as well he kept me awake, as the driver did not call out my stop, and missed it by four blocks. An attractive house across the way, encircled by wrought iron porch in the form of vines and bunches of grapes, named Rose Hill, I think.<br /><br />Down the road, noticing the little “The Barnes belongs in Merion” signs, and a billboard on one fence, giving out flyers with names you can write or email to protest the removal of the collection. “Why build another Barnes? We’ve got the real one right here!” I took copies of the handouts, and will write. You can find out about all this at www.friendsofthebarnes.com.<br /><br />See Post 2, The Visit, for my account of the Barnes itself.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-68708186817028901362009-11-07T15:42:00.005-05:002009-11-07T16:24:34.409-05:00Wild Child, Euripides' Ion and my array of Greeks<i>Wild Child</i>, currently playing at New World Stages on West 50th Street, is the sort of theater that might have been designed with me in mind. Two actors with split-second variation of mood, manner, accent, affect, character, movement, stance, play the innumerable characters of an Off-Off-Broadway updated staging of Euripides' <i>Ion</i> (perhaps the most obscure of the master's extant tragedies, perhaps justly), plus the entire audience and assorted flashbackeroos, while the star and his wacky family turn out to have a family history not unlike the operatic one depicted in the play. <br /><br />There are references to a children's book of Greek myths that inspired the boy to put on puppet plays of those theatrical sources and led inexorably to his present non-career - "I put on Greek tragedies with sock puppets - I even cut a hole in Medea's mouth so, after killing her children, she could eat them. But then Orestes got lost in the wash...." - similar early exposure to the myths led <i>me</i> to religious revelation as a born-again Pagan! - while other incidentals refer to a performance of Richard Schechner's outrageous (often nude) version of Euripides' <i>Bacchae</i>, <i>Dionysus in '69</i>, which as it happens was a revelation to me in my late adolescent pre-hippie days. <br /><br />So I was very glad to be there, and enjoying myself, and following the plot, and feeling gratitude to Michael Feingold for directing me thither!<br /><br />But the collected comments on the NYTimes review of the same item - five raves, two "whatwazzat? <i>boring</i>" imply that this is theater for only a certain sort of audience. If you need to have your comedy served to you in bite-sized clearly underlined bits, <i>Wild Child</i> is not for you - you have to be able to participate, to pay attention, to follow complicated plots between hilarious (sometimes off-color) humor, to catch and retain the clues that tie it all hilariously together. I guess it helped me to know Euripides, though I'd never seen any <i>Ion</i> before and I bet half the audience thought the actors had made the play up.<br /><br />I am in some doubt as to whether or not to count this on my list of Greek plays as an actual attendance at a performance of <i>Ion</i>. <br /><br />All this was a bit heady after a very odd phone conversation with my brother, who seems to wish to behave in a civilized fashion, and I am trying to respond <i>a tempo</i>, but if any chat with him extends longer than ten minutes he is hacking away, sticking shivs in my ribs, raking up old nastiness, as if he has nothing neutral to say on any occasion. Fifteen minutes of him per year is my limit. Still, a great relief considering what I have been anticipating. Mum is still going strong, or rather weak, which is why I suggested he come now and not wait till Christmas by which time she might be gone. Without my aunts and cousins and many friends offering long-distance hugs I'd be in a pretty dizzy place. But the family resonances with those in the play, I mean, well....<br /><br />I had rather hoped <i>Ion</i> might complete my list of Greek tragedies, that I had now seen every extant one, in some form or other, but on checking my list, I find that I have never attended any version of Euripides's <i>Suppliant Women</i>, <i>Heracleidae</i> or <i>Cyclops</i>, his (or anyone's) one surviving satyr play (and no one knows who wrote <i>Rhesus</i>, sole survivor of Greek tragedy of the later, decadent generations), so I still have not completed my list. <br /><br />Some may think me still further off, as I admit I've only seen <i>Alkestis, Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen in Egypt</i>, and <i>Andromache</i> in operatic redaction (recantations?)(and the last was Rossini's <i>Ermione</i>, based on Racine, not Euripides), and <i>Antigone</i> only in Anouilh's version and <i>Hippolytos</i> only via Racine's <i>Phaedra</i> - ditto Sophokles' <i>Women of Trachis</i>, where I've only seen Handel's oratorio, <i>Hercules</i> (though staged) - and only the hip-hop <i>Seven Against Thebes</i> (surprisingly good fun) and the gospel version of <i>Oedipus at Colonus</i> (even more so) and the country-rock version of <i>Madness of Herakles</i>, <i>Hercules in High Suburbia</i> (delicious). <br /><br />As for Aristophanes - I haven't done well there at all, especially as few of them were made into operas (Al Carmines' <i>Peace</i> was a standout, and Schubert did a version of <i>Lysistrata</i> set during the Crusades), but one opera I am particularly eager to see is the recently recovered <i>Die Vogel</i>, Braunfels' lovely, late romantic but <i>sane</i> version of Aristophanes' <i>The Birds</i>, which was given in Los Angeles last April. <br /><br />An absolutely fascinating piece in <i>New York Review of Books</i> in October by Daniel Mendelssohn (whose critical writing I love), in the context of Joanne Akalaitis' production in Central Park last summer (which I missed) explains <i>Bacchae</i>'s weird construction better than I've ever seen it explained by anybody: as Euripides' riposte to Aristophanes' <i>Thesmophoriazusae</i>, an assault on Euripides' view of women. I don't think I've ever read this play, certainly haven't seen it. Is this a new conclusion of Mendelssohn's, or has it been generally mooted for ages? He certainly makes his case and (as usual) makes me sorry I missed the production under discussion. <br /><br />I've never seen a satisfying production of <i>Bacchae</i> (<i>Dionysus in '69</i> was satisfying as theater, but not as a production of <i>Bacchae</i>), and familiarity with the work of the two lead actors in this one (both of whom DM panned) kept me away. Alan Cumming got it mightily wrong in the last <i>Bacchae</i> I saw - he never played Dionysus; in fact, he never plays anything but Alan Cumming, for which I have a limited tolerance. <br /><br />Sadly, the Mendelssohn review is <i>not</i> available on line at the NYR site. You have to borrow it from a friend or track it down at the library (October issue). I let my subscription to the NYR lapse because they PILE UP, and too many things in this apartment pile up. I turned down a pass from a charming and intellectually stimulating Frenchman last Tuesday because I didn't want to have to locate him under the other piles. This is unfortunate.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-5057129656795112982009-11-01T13:03:00.003-05:002009-11-01T13:09:25.375-05:00Podleś as Tancredi at Boston OperaAt the time of the premiere of <i>Tancredi</i> in 1813, Rossini, not quite twenty-one years old, had been composing works for the stage for three years and was still not world famous. The sands were running out. It is in this light, perhaps, that we may view the opera that made his reputation throughout Italy: young man in a hurry to show off everything he can do in the way of melody, declamatory recitative, duets both pathetic and passionate, and one of those soon-to-be-world-renowned Act I “Rossini” finales. That <i>Tancredi</i> was the giant step may surprise modern audiences, for the opera is not a comic one – at least not intentionally. <i>Tancredi</i> is serious – even tragic, if the alternate “Ferrara” ending rediscovered by Philip Gossett is used, as it was by Opera Boston. <br /><br />Rossini is best remembered as a composer of comic operas like <i>L’Italiana in Algeri</i> (four months after <i>Tancredi</i>) and <i>Il Barbiere di Siviglia</i> (three years later). But it isn’t just the stories that tag him: his music has a tendency to bubble, to froth, even when the direst matters are under discussion or depiction. His thunderstorms never threaten the levees, you can dance to his martial choruses, and as for pathos – that relies to a tremendous extent on the gifts of the individual singer. Rossini’s orchestra won’t tug your heartstrings all by itself – they are present to accompany, perhaps to sympathize, with the singing actors of his day, who prided themselves on the subtlety of feeling they could express. Composers who used too many instruments, too heavy and participatory an orchestra, were generally reviled in Italy as “Germanic.” You know – heavy metal thumpers like Mozart – but also, later, Meyerbeer, Weber, and even Verdi. If the orchestra takes the lead role, who is the prima donna here? Who is accompanying whom? <br /><br />Rossini lived to see the taste change, and his great serious operas – <i>Tancredi, Semiramide, Otello, L’Assedio di Corinto, Mosé in Egitto</i> – all but forgotten. Singers forgot how to sing them and audiences forgot how to appreciate them. They have returned to favor in the last generation or two, a phenomenon led by dynamic mezzo-sopranos who could do what needs doing with a Rossini trouser role or pathetic heroine: Giulietta Simionato, Teresa Berganza, Marilyn Horne, Lucia Valentini-Terrani. Tancredi was one of Horne’s great roles, and it was she who brought back the forgotten tragic ending. (Rossini’s audience insisted that the hero survive, and there’s no particular reason he shouldn’t.) Today Horne’s successors include Cecilia Bartoli, Vivica Genaux, Joyce DiDonato and Ewa Podleś. <i>Tancredi</i> is especially identified with the latter, and Boston Opera staged it for her at the sumptuous, exquisitely restored Majestic Theatre, where any spectacle is sure to seem more of a treat. <br /><br />Podleś is not a singer to everyone’s taste. Her voice is idiosyncratic to a degree, with a huge range from plummy low notes to a sturdy upper register, exceptional coloratura technique and sometimes imperfect line. The ranges break and re-break, there are melting legatos with growly interruptions. Her dramatic commitment, however, is total, and her use of her skills – and her flaws – is canny and entirely at the service of dramatic presentation. A tragic monologue by Podleś is never just a collection of notes but felt emotion in beautiful song. Her tone is shaded with doubt or anguish, her cascades of ornament underline passionate resolve. A Podleś performance is what bel canto is about, and she has a passionate following, out in force in the Boston performances. They were well rewarded.<br /><br />As a stage figure, Podleś is matronly but in trouser parts she carries her weight in a way that seems masculine, not laughable. The Bostonians were only close to laughter at one point, when for the umpteenth time Tancredi muttered that no one had ever suffered as he was suffering – laughable since he was suffering only due to his inability to believe his lover had not betrayed him – and that was the librettist’s fault. <br /><br />It was a star performance in a star part, and at 57, Podleś shows no sign of flagging powers. Her death scene in particular, nearly unaccompanied and quite startling for the era, was intensely theatrical. <br /><br />The plot of <i>Tancredi</i> is drawn from a Voltaire tragedy; boiled down to libretto form, it is one of those tiresome stories based on a silly misunderstanding. If the heroine would only say, “But I didn’t send that (unaddressed) love letter to a Saracen; I wrote it to Tancredi,” everything might be cleared up. She never does say this, for reasons perhaps clearer in the play. True, Tancredi is in exile, proscribed as a traitor by those who fear his popular appeal, and to have written to him at all makes Amenaide a disobedient daughter and citizen. It might even endanger Tancredi, who, unrecognized, is back in town to fight the national (Saracen) enemy, and who also accepts (but why?) that the intercepted letter must have been written to another man – hence our lack of sympathy with his unreasonable suspicions. Why does Amendaide never speak? Because it would end the opera too soon? That’s not a good reason. She never offers us another.<br /><br />With a story of this sort, the watchword for the director should surely be a Hippocratic: First, do no harm. You can’t make it make sense; the singers will do that (or they won’t). But don’t insert subplots that have nothing to do with the action – you will only raise questions that no one will ever answer. This is just what director Kristine McIntyre has done. She has decided Amenaide is pregnant out of wedlock, and presents this to us by having her stripped to her slip at the end of Act I. At this point everyone on stage is singing something, but no one refers to the pregnancy. Why show it if you’re not going to talk about it?<br /><br />Either Tancredi has been sneaking home pretty often or the pregnancy has lasted several years – or else Amendaide really is sleeping around. These are questions Rossini never raised and therefore does not address. Tancredi wears no mask – why does no one recognize him if he was in town two months ago? If he made love to Amenaide, why is he so quick to believe her faithless? Why is the government willing to put her to death, though any Christian regime would surely spare a pregnant woman, at least until delivery? And why does her father forgive her, as no Sicilian father would in this or any other era? <br /><br />McIntyre’s reasoning appears to have been that her soprano, Amanda Forsythe, really is pregnant. The rational response would be to put her in a larger costume and ignore it. Shazaam! No inane unanswered questions. <br /><br />It is also clear why McIntyre set the piece in 1935 – nothing to do with political resonance (as she claims), but because the costumes are cheaper to procure than those of twelfth-century Sicily would be. She make think fascism in Italy between the world wars was an important issue – it is – but it’s not an issue Rossini ever addressed, and it does not explain how a Muslim army could be besieging Syracuse in the 1930s. <br /><br />This was not a staging to inspire pleasure. The sets, too: ugly brick walls.<br />Amanda Forsythe, a popular presence in Boston’s opera scene, sang Amenaide. She has a very sweet, rounded soprano and ornaments elegantly, but her voice is quite small. The high points of the performance were her duets with Podleś, who gallantly scaled her own voice down to match Forsythe’s, so that we reveled by the minute in their deliciously twining phrases: bel canto heaven. Yeghishe Manucharyan, as Argirio, her unsympathetic father, displayed impressive skill at Rossini passagework in a thin, unattractive tenor. His sound was stronger in Act II, but not enough to make me eager to hear this voice again. DongWon Kim was impressive in the thankless role of villainous Orbazzano, and Victoria Avetisyan revealed a pleasing mezzo as Isaura, who has a “sherbet” aria in Act I. Sherbet arias were inserts, often written by some student or hack, and there is no reason to include them unless the singer justifies it. The second such aria was too much for its second comprimario. Conductor Gil Rose accompanied the vocal flights with welcome restraint, and the Act I finale built very nicely, but he didn’t draw a very impressive “Rossini crescendo” from his players during the overture. <br /><br />A friend points out that none of the oversexed castrato or trousered female roles in opera ever do actually father a child, in or out of wedlock – that job is left to a tenor, baritone or bass. (One exception: Cherubino fathers a child – but we don’t find out about it until Beaumarchais’ sequel, <i>La Mére Coupable</i>, which was sort of made into an opera in Corigliano’s <i>Ghosts of Versailles</i>.) Opera lovers are cool with a woman singing of love to another treble voice, but shouting “Daddy!” to an alto parent evidently pushes the barrier. No doubt modern opera composers will update this convention in short order.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-6407862986308994442009-10-24T00:52:00.002-04:002009-10-24T00:56:00.583-04:00Prelude to a TragedyHe caught my eye. <br /><br />He did not so much as move, but he caught my eye. It would have been bad form for him to move – they are trained to immobility during the sacred rites. He looked like a statue, a column holding up a temple, a noble palm tree – a bit stiff, but well-proportioned. My eye, involuntarily, a reflex, wandered up and up him, seeking the roof or the sky. <br /><br />The face – not pretty – stern, rather. Piers of bone, eyes strictly forward, not looking at anything, anyone, certainly not at me. It would have been insolent for him to look at me. Something told me he would never be insolent – not with intent. So stiff, so rigid – like a kouros statue – what was the attraction? We like them stiff in Egypt, of course. But sensuality is not the usual response to a statue, unless a pornographic one.<br /><br />At first, I was aware of no such sympathy. I was aware of him merely from the corner of an eye, through a haze of kohl. It would be a preposterous breach of etiquette for me to look at him – I, in whose veins the blood of Isis flows. A man is a man; I am Egypt – as my nurses, the priests, my father, have always told me. A breach of etiquette, for me from my ceremonial place to notice any man, a breach worthy of rebuke by even the most indulgent parent. <br /><br />A mere man may give one aesthetic pleasure – like a statue, a column upholding a temple, or a tree lifting its fruit out of my yearning reach – but a priestess does not feel for him the way a mere woman might feel, the way I have been told it is beneath me even to understand. And he did move me, aesthetically – but other men are taller, or more graceful, or more beautiful, or even stronger, perhaps braver. Why did my eye linger on this one?<br /><br />Ginger, my first look. And the second, the third? A whispering look, a tapping glance, like a sprinkle of salt on bread, so that one might not detect, or analyze, the quality that adds to one’s savor – until that taste is not there, and all else is bland to boredom. <br /><br />So the second time, the third, the fourth – until I began to seek him with my eye whenever the honor guard of my father’s young captains appeared to take part in this ritual or that, to notice how this muscle flexes and that extends, observe the light flash in his eye or the shadow dimple his clean-shaven cheek, and assure myself that my regard extends no deeper than my eye’s calm appreciation, of his symmetry, of his dignity, of his skill. All the while I compare him to others, and find him superior in this way, inferior in that, until there comes a moment when I realize I have not looked at any other figure for quite some time – not even at my august parent on his throne – and that I have rearranged my life, without thinking about it, so that I attend more often than I did those ceremonies he is likely to attend, and then more often still until my presence perhaps seems incongruous, calling for explanation, an explanation I cannot give, to the grave and ancient formality of those whose business it is to guide us below to match, stately pomp for stately pomp, the celestial procession marching above. It is as if the Moon were rising out of her courses, eclipsed at an unlikely season, or as if the Sun shone by night. <br /><br />Almost I do not care, how the thing may appear, though inside myself a truer self (or is it?) opens kohl-lined eyes, amazed at my folly, but reassures me I am not so rapt that I cannot cease my mad behavior at any time, only that I do not see the need to do it yet.<br /><br />But what do I care for their glances, their raised eyebrows, the priests, the courtiers, my old nurse? I hardly see them, in my impatient tension that can only be relieved when he enters, or aggravated when I stand like a statue, a column, a tree, immobile as a carved goddess, through an entire rite not daring to move my eyes yet a tumult behind them – and he does not come at all. <br /><br />How did I reach such a point, where nothing else matters any longer but the sight of His Insignificance whose name I am not even supposed to know, though of course I have found it out?<br /><br />His coming can never be taken casually because, as often as I have seen him, puzzling and calculating and appreciating and enjoying every angle of every feature, the play of light and shade, the ceremonial dance of his unselfconsciously athletic movement, when he is not there, though I spend hours of my sleepless nights attempting to call it up to myself, and though a thousand coincidences of shape, of texture, of color in other circumstances call him up to me involuntarily, still his every appearance, his hallowed looks are always a surprise, such that at first I am not sure it is he, it might be someone else, and not even an attractive someone else, for he never stood in precisely that posture, or did he?<br /><br />Then I realize it is indeed he, and at first I flatter myself that his unfamiliarity means I am over this strange addiction, and I watch this new aspect of him idly, in amusement, only to feel in my inmost heart the familiar quickening of pulse and interest, and know that I have not conquered this perverse and alien feeling. Quite the contrary. Quite the contrary.<br /><br />I stare, and I do not care who sees it, knows it, so long as one person sees it, knows it, acknowledges what he sees, what seems more obvious to me than the ray of light permitted entrance to the cavernous gloom so that it may magically fall precisely on my father’s exalted self immobile on the throne, or the stifling smell of incense, or the glum and eternal rhythms of the chanting priests, and yet it seems invisible to him, and to everyone – my secret.<br /><br />Of course his eyes do not flicker in recognition or secret message, for I am the Princess of Egypt and it would be insupportable insolence and indiscipline in him to do so. I admire this, his discipline; one could built empires upon it. One has. Yet, oh, how madly I could wish he were not so disciplined! Though empires fell!<br /><br />Some others among the captains not so well bred (I surmise – I expect – no, I know there are) who look at me as if I were a woman, and he, he does not, or does he do so only when he knows I do not look at him, at some intricate portion of the ceremony charged to my care, and he is so clever that I have not caught him at it?<br /><br />But I am cleverer still.<br /><br />He is moved when I am present.<br /><br />I see this, I cannot doubt it. Yet I do doubt, do crave the power to see his heart and know its thoughts and reasons, but there’s no help for the wishing it, as they say. <br /><br />I see that he is moved that I am so often present. His eyes, once so stiff, start and turn, shadowed perhaps, when I arrive with my suite of the noblest and loveliest of the slaves captured in my father’s wars, who surround me in many-hued diaphany, when I enter the place of ceremony. <br /><br />If it is a ritual where I am not expected and have no fixed part, he stares straight ahead, as he did at first, and I, peering from a hidden place, can feast upon his unconscious posing. But if it is a ritual where I am a principal, where I am to enter in my noblest garb and my hieratic jewels, surrounded by the fairest and most dignified of my ladies, then I find, and blush for seeking it, exulting in it, that he wears the signs of one who has been waiting, anticipating – as I in my time have done for him and his regiment of captains. His eyes seek me out, still cast slightly down or away, for it would be insolent, punishable, for him to stare at the Princess of Egypt. His eyes seek and though they never look at me directly, they find – for I see them aflame, and his bearing straightens, and his color reddens as though the blood in his veins flowed quicker than it lately did, swiftly as the Nile in flood. <br /><br />I feel the link, from his heart to mine, this though my blood is that of the gods and his merely human. I care not a fig for that. I feel how we know, how we understand each other, and it is not in our heads, this understanding, but in our hearts, our blood. My knees turn to water, but I am the Princess of Egypt, bearer of the ichor of Isis, and I remain as erect, as proud, as if I were a statue, a column, or a warrior trained to march through deserts. Beneath features that never move – for there is no call, in ceremony, for expression upon the kohl-masked face of the Princess of Egypt, and I am well-trained and obedient; I do not move – beneath my painted face, the woman exults, that the proud palm bears its fruit for her, that it will be sweet to her taste and no one else’s!<br /><br />I exult and yet fear when I learn from my spies, who have overheard the priests and my father’s councilors, that he – he – has been noticed for valor, and skill in command. Perhaps he will have high rank in the new war. Perhaps he will depart, knowing nothing of my heart, which belongs to him now, as truly as my soul belongs to Isis.<br /><br />So I summon my ladies. I have many ladies, princesses brought in tribute to the greatness of Egypt, or captive ladies whose exotic beauty has earned them a place in the array that follows me, the heiress of Egypt: pale skins, dark skins, skins stung by the sun or the tang of the salt wave; hair of even more exotic hues and textures; eyes that are not always even black. They have been carefully chosen. They are like a ceremonial garment, as they follow me, shimmering, their presence so far from a homeland where such looks are common itself a tribute, an adornment, to the imperial splendor of Egypt. I put them on or off like a garment, an ornament. When I say to them, “Come, let us attend this ritual where the new general is to be named, and the gods of victory are to be invoked for him,” if they raise their eyebrows, it is perhaps because they have realized I have a motive other than patriotism or the ritual place of my duties as a priestess in attending such things. But I no longer care, I have never cared, it is beneath me to care, what they think with minds that have never been trained to the sublime.<br /><br />When I enter the room, he will see my ornamental robe of attendant ladies, and he will marvel at the woman amidst this splendor, the woman who – he must have realized by now – loves him as a woman, as well as a princess, a priestess, the daughter of Isis, Egypt loves him.<br /><br />The trumpeters relax; they will lift their full lips to the silver and brass when the signal arrives that my father has come. They relax, their hands at their sides. <br /><br />He has not been seen. <br /><br />Beyond the portal of the great room where my father will come to speak the word of command, to name the general, to present the campaign, to be hailed as a living god, I arrive and I see him, speaking in the vestibule to one of the priests. The priest goes but he lingers, longing to hear if his or another’s is Egypt’s glory. I know; I already know; I have learned the unknown; I have my spies. He ponders and meditates, he does not yet know – unless he has come to expect it – as surely he must have done – that I am here, too – that I have observed, am observing him. One of my ladies, a copper-dark captive, intrudes in my way, looking towards that portal, not seeing her mistress – an interference, a slight. I could have her whipped for that, but I am too full of the joy that is coming; I brush her aside like a fly with my fan, to let my eyes gaze and drink their fill of him. I am taut as a cord on the hooks of a loom. <br /><br />I must speak to him. It breaks the protocol, but I must speak to him. It is time. Bare seconds before the trumpets sound. Motioning my ladies to remain where they are, I step unprecedentedly forward. The thing begins.Brightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3873026009638233379.post-21770979879501547012009-10-20T01:49:00.006-04:002010-01-02T09:56:02.568-05:00Oscar Wilde: The opera synopsisSupposedly the Met has commissioned someone to compose an opera based on the life of Oscar Wilde, to star David Daniels who is running out of Handel works of Metropolitan caliber. Apparently someone else attempted an opera of Wilde's life for the Granite State Opera a few years ago, but it was never completed. Who knows where this will lead in an era where everyone seems to think he (or she) can write an opera but no one actually does it well. Can the librettos be at fault? (Probably not; they're mostly by Sandy McClatchy.) In any case, my friend Jeanne on the David Daniels Fans List asked if anyone knew enough about Wilde's life to sketch out a scenario.<br /><br />A witch once said she thought I'd been Oscar Wilde in a previous life. I said, "Possibly ... but not in HIS." (Even my inner doubt has never impelled me to quite so self-destructive a working-out.) (I don't <i>think</i>.) But I have helped Jeanne out thus: <br /><br /><i><b>The Wilde Life !</i></b><br /><br />Prologue: 1900: <br />Dying of tuberculosis in Paris (“Either the wallpaper goes or I do”), Oscar Wilde (countertenor) (all right, I see him as a baritone, maybe Mariusz Kwiecien, but the commission is for David Daniels) reflects upon a life mispent … drifting back to:<br /><br />Act I, scene 1: <br />A Tuesday evening soiree chez Stephane Mallarmé in Paris, c. 1891, where Wilde (in knee-breeches, with a huge tiger lily in his hand) has been reading his new symbolist drama, <i>Salome</i>, hoping Sarah Bernhardt (mezzo soprano) will perform it (she has sung Salome’s last speech in a very un-Straussian style - part Gluck, part Massenet). Wilde is toasted by the crowd for his wit and defiance of prim British hypocrisy. Friends, however, urge him to tone down his decadence since rumors of his misbehavior with telegraph boys and so forth may get about. He pooh-poohs their fears and flirts with an aristocratic young poet, Lord Alfred Douglas (baritone), an undergraduate at Oxford … as the party falls away behind them, Wilde begins to sing elaborate lyrics to Alfred’s beauty. We understand that, in Wilde’s fever dream, his mind has shifted from the night they met to the height of their affair. "We were destined to meet here tonight, Oscar! It's an omen of a glorious new world, awakened to beauty!" "Oh my dear Bosey - there are no such things as omens. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that."<br /><br />Act I, scene 2: <br />A gossiping triple chorus – aristocrats resenting Wilde for sneering at them, middle class types outraged at Wilde for making fun of their aspirations by exalting Art for Art’s Sake, street toughs threatening to do violence to a grown man who wears velvet and knee breeches and a green carnation. These sneers are heard by a lady walking through the crowd, arriving in her home and collapsing. <br /><br />Act I, scene 3:<br />She is Constance Wilde (soprano), she’s heard all the stories about her husband, she hopes they’re not true – but she knows he ignores her these days. Her mother-in-law, the poetess Speranza (mezzo soprano), arrives, refuses to hear anything bad about her son, and urges Constance to dress more unconventionally, the sure way to win back a straying husband. Wilde finally comes downstairs – it’s mid-afternoon, he’s just getting up – and they beg him to spend the evening at home <i>en famille</i>. He pays them both extravagant compliments – then a telegram arrives. This, he says, summons him to a special performance he must attend. While tipping the telegraph boy, Ernest (tenor) – whom we saw earlier as one of the nastiest of the street toughs – he offers him a tip if he (the boy) will meet him at a brothel that evening. The boy is delighted to accept. <br /><br />Act II, scene 1: 1895: <br />An ecstatic prelude leads into the crowd at the premiere of <i>The Importance of Being Earnest</i>, cheering Wilde to the echo. As he leaves the theater, congratulations on every hand, someone hands him a note. The Marquess of Queensberry (Alfred’s father) has written: “To Oscar Wilde, posing as somdomite.” [sic] Wilde’s world falls apart (as shown by the tonality of his aria, which is in violent contrast to that of the chorus of praise, still heard in the background, the words subtly changing to condemnation). Despite the apprehension of several friends, urged on by Alfred, he resolves to sue the marquess for libel.<br /><br />Act II, scene 2: <br />Trial scene – or rather, several trial scenes, run together in his fevered brain: The prosecutor (bass) trips him up by quoting the love letter Wilde sang to Lord Alfred in Act I, and the telegraph boy Ernest begins damning testimony joined by three other young boys, Constance begs him to flee the country before he is prosecuted for criminal behavior, and at the climax the Judge (spoken part) intones a sentence of Two Years Hard Labour.<br /><br />Act III, scene 1: <br />1897: Wilde, in his cell, a broken man, is haunted by the voices of his mother and his wife, both of whom have died of grief. He apostrophizes an imaginary Lord Alfred, who responds with contempt – in the same words the street crowd used of him in Act II. The real Lord Alfred comes in as a visitor and tries to be reassuring, but Wilde is listening to his hallucinations, and Alfred gives up. Wilde begins to sing several stanzas of <i>The Ballad of Reading Gaol</i>.<br /><br />Act III, scene 2:<br />1900: Back in Paris, tossing around bits of <i>De Profundis</i>, mourning that he has never found true love and that, since his wife is dead, he is forbidden by her relations to see his sons, Wilde sings of the cruel world that frowns on beauty and love … and at the end realizes that he destroyed himself out of a wish to identify with Christ and be martyred for love. He stands in cross-attitude, singing of his bleeding wounds and of his wit that will redeem humanity.<br />Curtain.<br /><br />© 2009, John YohalemBrightshadowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04839714759427606012noreply@blogger.com2