Cafeteria Rusticana

The fatal cell phone call during Mahler's Ninth

2012-01-14T03:07:00.001-05:00

I'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 ...

D'Albert's Der Golem

2011-12-11T09:26:00.003-05:00

D'ALBERT: Der Golem
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.

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.

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, R.U.R., from which we get the word "robot."

Eugen d'Albert's opera Der Golem had its premiere in 1926, shortly after another mad-scientist opera, Hindemith's Cardillac, 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 Die Frau ohne Schatten 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-Tristan tradition.

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 Der Golem if one knew more of his twenty operas than Tiefland, the only one that gets an occasional nod. (This 2010 production of Der Golem, 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.

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.

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.

(reprinted from Opera News)

The Secrets of Lisbon

2011-08-12T13:07:00.002-04:00

Raúl Ruiz’s masterpiece is The Past Recaptured, 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.

He has now brought out The Secrets of Lisbon, 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.)

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.

But it was not Almodovar that I thought of during the long spaces between seductions, plots and periwigs of The Secrets of Lisbon. 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.

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.

What all this reminded me of, while watching, was Scaramouche (1952, Stewart Grainger, Janet Leigh; there’s also a 1923 silent version I have not seen that stars hot, gay Ramon Novarro) and Anthony Adverse (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 The Secrets of Lisbon 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.

But Secrets of Lisbon, with its initial focus on a young boy puzzled about his identity, recalls many other, finer works of art. One problem with Secrets 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?

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 Tom Jones, Dickens’s Great Expectations (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 Bleak House (seeing guilt-wracked Lady Dedlock as an epitome of guilt-wracked but far less happily married Angela de Santa Barbara), Dumas’ The Corsican Brothers, even Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain. (Aside: All of these have become films, of course – Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, starring Albert Finney, is a masterpiece; David Lean’s Great Expectations is pretty close to one; Masterpiece Theater did a tidy job on Bleak House some years ago, and Disney murdered Johnny Tremain. The Corsican Brothers, aside from a few humorless efforts, has become two sublime comedies, Start the Revolution without Me with Donald Sutherland and Gene Wilder as two sets of identical (?) twins scrambled at birth, and Cheech and Chong’s lewd and crude The Corsican Brothers.)

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 House of the Seven Gables. 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.

I mention Johnny Tremain, 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.)

But I loved Tremain 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.

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.

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 Le Mariage, and his discovery that he is the son of the old woman who wants to marry him is Beaumarchais’ witty spoof on Oedipos Tyrannos. (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.

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 Absalom, Absalom, “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.

The Lepage Die Walküre at the Met

2011-05-06T11:37:00.002-04:00

Brünnhilde: 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.

There’s a lot to be said for lowered expectations. After last fall’s cramped, over-busy staging of Das Rheingold, I was prepared for a rough night at Die Walküre—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.

Die Walküre has always been the most popular drama of Wagner’s Ring, 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.

The questions I always ask before the curtain rises on Die Walküre 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 “Todesverkündigung” 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?

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 Das Rheingold, 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.

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.

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.

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.

For the Todesverkündigung, 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.

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.

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?

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.

At my first Die Walküre (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 Todesverkündigung. 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.

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 Todesverkündigung. 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.

Bryn Terfel seemed inadequate to Wagnerian power in Das Rheingold 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 Die Walküre. 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.

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.

If the new Rheingold made one wonder about the Met’s priorities and the advisability of the entire endeavor, the new Walküre makes me look forward with interest to the remainder of the cycle.

John Yohalem

Ellen Stewart, La Mama of all New York

2011-01-16T16:24:00.007-05:00

Ellen 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.

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 was 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!

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!

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."

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.

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.

What a Difference a Fanciulla Makes!

2011-01-04T13:26:00.003-05:00

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 La Fanciulla del West. 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.

Matos is a genuine spinto — except when she sounds like a real lyric — except when she sounds hochdramatisch. In Europe, she sings in all these categories, but to hell with fach. 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?)

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.)

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.

True Blood: The Opera (proposed casting)

2010-11-27T10:43:00.000-05:00

True Blood: The Opera

Cast:

Sookie Stackhouse: Elina Garanca

Humans:
Jason Stackhouse: Mariusz Kwiecien
Granny Stackhouse: Ewa Podles
Tara: Danielle de Niese
Lettie Mae: Angela Brown
Lafayette: Lawrence Brownlee
Detective Andy Bellefleur: Dwayne Croft
Sheriff: Bryn Terfel
Eggs: Eric Owens
Hoyt: Paul Appleby
Hoyt’s mother: Stephanie Blythe
Arlene: Sondra Radvanovsky
Rene: Roberto Alagna
Terry Bellefleur: David Daniels
Amy: Kate Lindsay
Steve Newlin: Richard Croft
Sarah Newlin: Kate Aldrich
Wayne: Evgeny Nikitin

Vampires:
Bill: Jonas Kaufmann
Eric: Simon Keenlyside
Nan: Nina Stemme
Jessica: Ljuba Petrova
Pam: Marina Poplavskaya
Lorena: Soile Isokoski
Russell: Charles Anthony
Sophie-Anne: Anna Netrebko
Godric: Juan Diego Florez

Other types:
Sam Merlotte: Ramon Vargas
Maryann Foster: Joyce di Donato
Daphne: Christine Schaefer
Tommy Mickens: Anthony Roth Costanzo
Crystal Norris: Wendy Bryn Harmer
Melinda Mickens: Natalie Dessay
Alcide: Luca Pisaroni

Discuss.

Trovatore at the Met

2010-11-04T18:43:00.003-04:00

It’s difficult to be reasonable about Il Trovatore. 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 Trovatore like that any more, but back when all theater was live theater and Il Trovatore 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!

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.

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.

You seldom get four top stars in top form in a Trovatore, 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.

Marcelo Álvarez sang his offstage serenades beautifully (to the accompaniment of a harp that never appeared—hey, guys, he’s a troubadour, 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.

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 grandezza used to mean something, and Verdi’s Leonora is that sort of dignified character.

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 Orsinitá 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.

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.

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.

The acting from all hands gave evidence of a bent towards melodrama. This is not out of place in Trovatore, 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.

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 Trovatore; Trovatore must breathe. Oxygen keeps the embers hotter.

Intermezzo at the City Opera

2010-11-04T18:35:00.002-04:00

Pace 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 Intermezzo, 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.

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 Seraglio, 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.

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.

Intermezzo is one of Strauss’s conversational operas—the Prologue to Ariadne and Die Schweigsame Frau 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 sprechstimme and endearment and tirade, I felt as I do with a good Handel or Verdi recitativo accompagnato, 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 Die Frau ohne Schatten and the “operatic” portions of Ariadne auf Naxos) as he does for the day-to-day domesticity of the “Sinfonia Domestica” and Intermezzo. 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 Intermezzo will prove to have been a harbinger of a change in operatic style, just as Strauss’s Elektra was a harbinger of new musical looks at classical Greece.

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 Intermezzo’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.

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.

Joan Sutherland: A Silver Voice, a Gold Voice, a Blue Voice (part 2)

2010-10-13T12:36:00.004-04:00

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 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 blues 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.

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 (Emilia di Liverpool, 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 blues 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.

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 (Emilia di Liverpool, the first recital (with her perfect “O luce di quest’ anima”), the first Lucia and Rigoletto, The Art of the Prima Donna, 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 Anna Bolena or Il Pirata. 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.

The silver voice, the airy flights, the easy passagework faded after a vocal crisis around 1962. By 1963, when she recorded her first Norma and Traviata, and 1964, when she recorded Command Performance and Alcina, 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 Puritani and Semiramide), 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.

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 chances she took! The perfection!” Happily, pirates of those Puritanis and Semiramides 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 Norma 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.

Such chances indeed: In Traviata, 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.

I heard Sutherland’s Norma 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 Norma productions tend to be. The fourth Norma 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 Norma 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 Norma 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.)

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Act II of that famous Norma, 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 Normas 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.

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 Fille du Regiment 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 Puritani in 1976 with a starry cast, the Pav, Milnes and James Morris, to back her up. Puritani 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 Hoffman 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.

Then, for some reason, she quarreled with the powers running the Met. They asked her to sing Konstanze in Mozart’s Seraglio, 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 The Merry Widow. 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 Luisa Miller or Ernani, but I was hoping for Semiramide or Les Huguenots or Lucrezia Borgia – 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.

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.

Over the years, I heard Sutherland in several concerts and galas and in fourteen complete operas: the Haydn Orfeo, Bellini’s Sonnambula, Norma and Puritani (no one but Joan ever got new productions of all three out of the Met), Donizetti’s Lucia, Maria Stuarda and Anna Bolena, Massenet’s Esclarmonde, Delibes’s Lakmé, Mozart’s Don Giovanni – alas, not the run with Solti conducting in the late sixties but a decidedly inferior group under Bonynge ten years later – Verdi’s Rigoletto, Trovatore and Traviata, and the four heroines in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann.

The later performances were not up to standard: Anna Bolena, Lucia, 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 Favorite 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.

When Tito Capobianco ran Opera San Diego, made a point one year of hiring Sutherland to sing Rosalinda in Fledermaus 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.)

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 Alcina, 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.

I kick myself for missing some of Joan’s mid-career performances I could have attended – she’d given up Handel (those original Alcinas must have been astonishing), but I could have seen her in Beatrice di Tenda and Lucrezia Borgia (her video recording of this last, though late, is quite fine) and, most tragically of all, Semiramide, 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 Semiramide 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.

I hope her copies of those awful sonnets never turn up.

Joan Sutherland: My Starter Diva (part 1)

2010-10-13T12:27:00.003-04:00

Sutherland was my Starter Diva.

I was sixteen and knew nothing about opera, had just seen my first Traviata 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.

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.

Oh, was she good! Oh were the melodies sumptuous (“Ernani, involami”; “Santo di patria”; “Caro nome”; the Bolero from Vespri), 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.

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.

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 Alcina and Lucia and Puritani 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).

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.)

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 Orfeo ed Euridice (aka L’anima del filosofo), 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.

A year later, at the Met, in more comprehensible circumstances, a pair of Sonnambulas 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.

There was an all-Handel concert at Hunter. In the second half, she came out to sing “Ombre pallide” from Alcina 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.

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 Orfeo for her signature. “Oooh, you pirates!” she cried, shaking a finger. But she signed.

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 Lucia or Traviata, 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.

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.

There was the Esclarmonde 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.

There was the Trovatore 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 Trovatore 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.

Then there was her Lakmé 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 chum.”

And then there was her final Lucia 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.

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.

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.

Perhaps the most impressive feat I’ve ever seen on any stage also involved Sutherland. She sang four Rigolettos 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.

(to be continued)

Ross Macdonald had a firm ... ouch, scream, eeyii-oh!

2010-05-11T12:31:00.008-04:00

"Mister, I seen 'em hard-boiled before - but you're - twenty minutes!" - Billy Wilder, Ace in the Hole.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.)

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.

* The Moving Target (1949) - I will now reread this to see how Archer began his illustrious career.

* The Drowning Pool (1950) - One of the weakest of the series, inexplicably popular.

* 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)

* The Ivory Grin (1952) - Good appearance of the corpus delecti. Though I knew what it was long before Lew did. (VERY GOOD)

* 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)

* The Barbarous Coast (1956) - I lost it at the movies. (GOOD)

* The Doomsters (1958) - I don't remember this one.

* 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)

* 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)

* The Wycherly Woman (1961) - More mistaken identities. I wasn't taken in, but I enjoyed Lew's ride. (VERY GOOD)

* The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962) - Hippies are making Lew - and Ross - nervous. (GOOD)

* 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)

* The Far Side of the Dollar (1965) - I forget this one, too, but will reread it.

* Black Money (1966) - Rather short, as though Ross (and Lew) were going through the motions. But a rather intriguing denouement all the same. (GOOD)

* The Instant Enemy (1968) - Another one I can't remember.

* The Goodbye Look (1969) - Terrific. Even remembering the details, I found I couldn't remember all 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)
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?

* The Underground Man (1971) - Another I've forgotten. Looking forward to it!

* 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)

* 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)

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.

Venus in Fur addendum ...

2010-03-17T12:32:00.003-04:00

Has it ever occured to anyone - it might have, it has only just occurred to me - that the idea for One Touch of Venus, 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 Venus in Furs, the foundation document (with de Sade's Justine) 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?

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."

Venus in Fur

2010-03-13T13:29:00.004-05:00

To 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.

The best new play I’ve seen in years: Venus in Fur. (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.

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 Bacchae, though using hardly any lines from that play. A major pagan event. Absolutely riveting.

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.”

One could spend a night, many nights, just watching emotions play on Arianda's by no means conventionally beautiful face. Wonderful, wonderful.

Der Fledermausmann! A new year's eve travesty

2009-12-28T10:37:00.002-05:00

Der Fledermausmann

An impression of certain confusing events on a recent Saturday afternoon in an area with poor radio reception.

(…static establishes that we are listening to a broadcast; then a familiar voice intones:)

“…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, der Fledermausmann, and Fritz, des Knaben Wunderhorn, 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 nouveau riche 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 heurige, an inn in the Vienna Woods equipped (as we will find in Act III) with a chambre separée ….”

(…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 Die Diskoprinzessin 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:)

“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 en travesti), 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 flederfiaker, or bat-cab with Schatzendorff, as the curtain falls.

“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 Der Fledermausmann….”

As ready as we’ll ever be, anyway.

(c) 2009, John Yohalem

Kandinsky at the Guggenheim

2009-12-26T20:29:00.003-05:00

Don'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.

Would seeing it in proper sequence have made a difference? To my ankles perhaps.

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.

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.

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.

You can't like them all. But you have to see them all to know who speaks to you.

Gramercy Park and Flahooley

2009-12-25T11:17:00.004-05:00

Last 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.

Disappointment.

The carols were sung into microphones, which I detest, accompanied by tinny electric pianos, and they were out of hot cider, 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.

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.)

... but the whole Gramercy occasion in turn made me think of my mother singing Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill’s “The Saga of Jenny”:

Jenny made her mind up when she was three
She herself was going to trim the Christmas tree.
Christmas Eve she lit the candles - threw the taper away –
Little Jenny was an orphan on Christmas Day.

Poor Jenny!
Bright as a penny.
Her equal would be hard to find.
She lost her dad and mother,
A sister and a brother,
But she would make up her mind!

- 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.

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 all off. A suitable mourning gesture, eh?

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, Flahooley, 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 without 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.

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.

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

"The Springtime Cometh,
hummingbird hummeth,
sugarplum plummeth,
heart
it humpty-dummeth,
and to summeth up
the springtime cometh for the love of thee! ...
Lad and lass
in tall green grass
gaily skippeth,
nylon rippeth,
zipper zippeth..."),

- anyone who has seen Finian's Rainbow lately knows what to expect - and everyone in New York should run to see it -

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 Avenue Q. 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.

And all this was only $18!

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?

A Broadside at the Barnes' Door - 2.,The Visit

2009-12-19T13:42:00.002-05:00

A Visit to the Barnes Foundation

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Is that eclectic enough for you?

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.)

P.S.

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.

A Broadside at the Barnes' Door - 1, The Voyage Out

2009-12-18T20:28:00.007-05:00

“I’ll go to Hell fer ya –
Or Philadelphia –
Any Old Place With You.”
– Lorenz Hart. (music: Richard Rodgers)

The Voyage Out

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.

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.)

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!)

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.

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….

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.

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.

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.

See Post 2, The Visit, for my account of the Barnes itself.

Wild Child, Euripides' Ion and my array of Greeks

2009-11-07T15:42:00.005-05:00

Wild Child, 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' Ion (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.

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 me 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' Bacchae, Dionysus in '69, which as it happens was a revelation to me in my late adolescent pre-hippie days.

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!

But the collected comments on the NYTimes review of the same item - five raves, two "whatwazzat? boring" 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, Wild Child 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 Ion before and I bet half the audience thought the actors had made the play up.

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 Ion.

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 a tempo, 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....

I had rather hoped Ion 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 Suppliant Women, Heracleidae or Cyclops, his (or anyone's) one surviving satyr play (and no one knows who wrote Rhesus, sole survivor of Greek tragedy of the later, decadent generations), so I still have not completed my list.

Some may think me still further off, as I admit I've only seen Alkestis, Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen in Egypt, and Andromache in operatic redaction (recantations?)(and the last was Rossini's Ermione, based on Racine, not Euripides), and Antigone only in Anouilh's version and Hippolytos only via Racine's Phaedra - ditto Sophokles' Women of Trachis, where I've only seen Handel's oratorio, Hercules (though staged) - and only the hip-hop Seven Against Thebes (surprisingly good fun) and the gospel version of Oedipus at Colonus (even more so) and the country-rock version of Madness of Herakles, Hercules in High Suburbia (delicious).

As for Aristophanes - I haven't done well there at all, especially as few of them were made into operas (Al Carmines' Peace was a standout, and Schubert did a version of Lysistrata set during the Crusades), but one opera I am particularly eager to see is the recently recovered Die Vogel, Braunfels' lovely, late romantic but sane version of Aristophanes' The Birds, which was given in Los Angeles last April.

An absolutely fascinating piece in New York Review of Books 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 Bacchae's weird construction better than I've ever seen it explained by anybody: as Euripides' riposte to Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae, 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.

I've never seen a satisfying production of Bacchae (Dionysus in '69 was satisfying as theater, but not as a production of Bacchae), 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 Bacchae I saw - he never played Dionysus; in fact, he never plays anything but Alan Cumming, for which I have a limited tolerance.

Sadly, the Mendelssohn review is not 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.

Podleś as Tancredi at Boston Opera

2009-11-01T13:03:00.003-05:00

At the time of the premiere of Tancredi 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 Tancredi was the giant step may surprise modern audiences, for the opera is not a comic one – at least not intentionally. Tancredi is serious – even tragic, if the alternate “Ferrara” ending rediscovered by Philip Gossett is used, as it was by Opera Boston.

Rossini is best remembered as a composer of comic operas like L’Italiana in Algeri (four months after Tancredi) and Il Barbiere di Siviglia (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?

Rossini lived to see the taste change, and his great serious operas – Tancredi, Semiramide, Otello, L’Assedio di Corinto, Mosé in Egitto – 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. Tancredi 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.

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.

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.

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.

The plot of Tancredi 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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

This was not a staging to inspire pleasure. The sets, too: ugly brick walls.
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.

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, La Mére Coupable, which was sort of made into an opera in Corigliano’s Ghosts of Versailles.) 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.

Prelude to a Tragedy

2009-10-24T00:52:00.002-04:00

He caught my eye.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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!

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?

But I am cleverer still.

He is moved when I am present.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

He has not been seen.

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.

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.

Oscar Wilde: The opera synopsis

2009-10-20T01:49:00.006-04:00

Supposedly 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.

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 think.) But I have helped Jeanne out thus:

The Wilde Life !

Prologue: 1900:
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:

Act I, scene 1:
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, Salome, 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."

Act I, scene 2:
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.

Act I, scene 3:
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 en famille. 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.

Act II, scene 1: 1895:
An ecstatic prelude leads into the crowd at the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest, 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.

Act II, scene 2:
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.

Act III, scene 1:
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 The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Act III, scene 2:
1900: Back in Paris, tossing around bits of De Profundis, 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.
Curtain.

© 2009, John Yohalem

Barber of Seville at the Met

2009-10-09T13:49:00.002-04:00

Bartlett Sher’s production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia has proved one of the more admired stagings of the Peter Gelb regime, but I’ve avoided it due to a surfeit of Barbieres and to fond memories of the previous “turntable” production, which satisfied every demand one might reasonably make of a Barbiere: The complicated story was told clearly, the stage pictures were handsome and the set changes elegant, the funny business was funny and to the point, the movement rapid. Even Rossini’s thunderstorm got laughs, as a projected starry sky was gradually effaced by clouds and real rain while the set spun around below. I wasn’t crazy about the barber’s updated costume and I could have done without the donkey – the donkey is the one item Mr. Sher retained.

The new production, which I saw on October 8, does not get in the way of the storytelling (a major point! especially in a comic opera), does not introduce new sub-plots the composer never delineated (a defect of the recent stagings of Tosca, Sonnambula and Fidelio, among others), the stage pictures are attractive and will endure repeated viewing (unlike Tosca), the funny business is sometimes funny – and gives scope, as a comedy staging should, for funny performers to make it more so; there are inexplicable touches (what is that giant anvil in the sky, aside from a sign of Mr. Sher out of ideas? Why does Bartolo’s china closet explode?), and the movement is constant if not always logical. Seville, indicated in the previous production by the city’s famous white walls and a splendid conservatory in the courtyard of Bartolo’s mansion, is now implied by many, many doors and an orangery. At one point, the Count, playing a drunken soldier, makes a swipe at an orange tree with his saber – and appeared to slice it through – the best laugh of the night. I’d give the production a solid B, maybe a B-plus.

The most distinctive part of the Sher staging – aside from the moveable doors that comprise most of the set, and which are often used to delightful farcical advantage – is the platform around the orchestra pit that allows singers to leave the action and come warble to us intimately, duck out of busy action entirely, complain about how badly they are being used by other characters – or hand out business cards to the audience, as Figaro does during the curtain calls. This parade in front of the apron also allows a solid but underpowered cast to make a more powerful effect than they would if they remained center stage. There was certainly an improvement in sound quality when they stepped forward.

Among the singers last Thursday night, the smoothest, most elegant, most satisfying performance came from Bulgarian newcomer Orlin Anastassov, who possesses the requisite size, depth and legato for Don Basilio and is an amusing comic actor to boot. It is no surprise to see in the program that he is singing Boito’s Mefistofele elsewhere this year – that’s an opera that the Met could certainly use back in its repertory, and he’s a likely candidate to put over a role that calls for an agile actor as well as a remarkable voice.

Rodion Pogossov, a showman of great charm and comic energy – you may well remember his Papageno – sang a most entertaining Figaro, with a seductive and self-seductive way of phrasing. John Del Carlo, a familiar and excellent buffo quantity, fudged the racing patter of “A un dottore del mio sorte,” as so many Doctor Bartolos do, but proved an effective foil for the antics of all the others throughout the evening. You can’t have a farce if the villain isn’t convincingly alarming – if he’s not, nobody else’s antics make sense. Del Carlo, tall as a Wagnerian giant, can be alarming while full of self-pity, which is just what we want.

Barry Banks is a comic actor the equal of any bel canto tenor going – his smarmy smiles as the feigned “Don Alfonso” were especial joys – and his coloratura technique is remarkable, but the quality of the voice itself was dry in “Ecco ridente” and rather hollow the rest of the night. Dramatic intensity (as Oreste in Rossini’s Ermione) and delirious self-parody (as Thisbe in Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream) are his fortes; romantic heroes are not.

That brings us to the ladies. Joyce Di Donato is a few years into an important career. She is an excellent comic actress – you listen to her, yes, but you also watch, just to see what she’ll come up with next. She works the manic fireworks of “Contro il cor” in the Lesson Scene into a simultaneous show of brilliant vocalism and stage hilarity like no other Rosina I’ve seen, and when she dashes out on that walkway to deliver the evening’s few big phrases, her strong line suggests that many of the grander bel canto roles (Adalgisa, Elisabetta Tudor, La Favorite) would suit her well, but in some of her rapid-fire phrases in “Una voce poco fa” and elsewhere, she seemed too anxious to race up and down the scale to bother with the note-perfect ideal flow of a Horne, a Berganza or a Swenson. She seems to love to play this role and to be on stage with these other singers, but a little more technical focus (and you just know she could do it) would make hers an extraordinary Rosina instead of another very good one. Claudia Waite, the Berta, sang her “sherbet aria” with the shrill, ungrateful tone one expects of, well, Berta the laundress.

Maurizio Benini in the all but invisible orchestra pit kept the wheels turning precisely without calling attention to himself – it was not a Mozartean reading of the score but a reliable base for the farcical doings on stage. The whole evening seemed calculated in that direction, and it was gracious of him to be so self-effacing, but sometimes Rossini works well as a partnership.

Tosca

2009-10-09T01:06:00.002-04:00

In the end the performance does not rescue the dreary new production – still, the reason to visit the Met’s new Tosca is Karita Mattila’s bravura if wrongheaded interpretation of the title role. Mattila plays the prima donna Floria Tosca as an over-the-top old-school diva, all self-dramatizing nervous energy. This is dangerous, as the events of the last day of Tosca’s life would excite a buried Samuel Beckett heroine from torpor into frenetic activity: Tosca endures jealous frenzies, first soothed and then confirmed, a command performance before the queen, the torture of her lover, then betraying him, a brutal seduction, a hot-blooded murder, her lover’s apparent salvation, his actual death, and a desperate leap to her own.

If none of this penetrates her self-involvement, perhaps the business with Scarpia isn’t really so bad – she just gets carried away. You know: divas! Certainly the final scene of Act II in the Luc Bondy production is a tasteless mistake – Mattila’s Tosca seems neither stunned nor shocked by having been driven to murder. She plots it beforehand, hides the dagger, arranges her dress so as to incite him, kicks him off the sofa afterward to present a better “stage picture,” and in describing the event to Cavaradossi later, she acts it all out – clearly enjoying every moment spent in the limelight of her imagination. If Tosca is too self-involved to be touched by murder, if she looks upon it as just another chance to seize center stage, why should we care about her? why credit her with any genuine feelings?

While Mattila is performing, though, such thoughts seldom intrude. She whirls about the ugly barn of a church like a Roman dervish, she seizes her lover’s paintbrush to alter the Magdalen’s eyes; she exposes her legs for Scarpia’s rape; and she insists that Cavaradossi rehearse his “fake” execution with her. She cannot be still for a moment – and the payback is her “Vissi d’arte,” when, drained by Scarpia’s brutality, she goes pale and empty, lets her voice float stunned into the theater. She does not remain crushed – nothing but death will stop this woman’s playacting – but the moment itself is riveting, and the rest of Mattila’s Tosca seems designed to draw our attention to it. Since this is not the heart of the opera – Puccini reportedly found the aria a bit dull – her focus highlights Mattila’s errors elsewhere. Tosca must grow from the flibbertigibbet of Act I to the desperate adventuress of Act III, and Mattila’s Tosca does not make such a change. Her reaction to getting blood on her hands? She puts on purple gloves.

Mattila’s voice is not Italianate – as everyone has been saying since she took up Manon Lescaut a few years back. Her Manon Lescaut indeed lacked the opulent young sound of that teenage sensualist – but Tosca is a mature woman, and Mattila sings her with full-throated sensuality, passion without wilt or waver. I’ve seen Toscas of a dozen nationalities, and her sound is more idiomatic, and more beautiful, than many others of the “Nordic” school – Behrens, Nilsson and Vishnevskaya come to mind. More important is that she feels, and lives, the notes of this extreme character.

Marcelo Álvarez (an Argentine) sings a very Italian Cavaradossi, suave and romantic in “Recondita armonia” and the love duets. He lacked vocal finesse only in “E lucevan le stelle,” which was not the honeyed reverie many tenors give us. Álvarez seemed so involved in acting the words – each one clear – that the anguish of his situation choked him up. The elegiac scene that followed, however, found him Mattila’s match for power and expressive beauty.

Carlo Guelfi sang a gruff, barking Scarpia, brutally effective in Act I, but the nuanced slime of Act II was missing – and was missed. Part of the problem may have been the intrusion of three prostitutes fooling with him at the opening of Act II, and this is typical of the director’s initiatives in adding nothing to the show but unanswerable questions. Scarpia is explaining the trap he plans to set for Tosca – and why: he enjoys sex when the lady resists – and these women don’t take the hint – not at all. Are they the sort of persons in whom Scarpia would confide? No – he’s not the type to confide in anyone, least of all a woman – he’s an egotist who opens himself in soliloquy. So why are the dames here? If we’re not supposed to think about it, or to wonder why they’re hanging around, why their presence and those questions being shoved in our faces? Does Mr. Bondy not understand the words Scarpia is singing? Similarly, if the enormous church is built of unpainted brick – this is Rome? – why is Cavaradossi painting his Magdalen in it?

Tosca is a finely-crafted machine, every effect calculated to a hair; set it in motion with the proper fuel (voices and orchestra) and it will run smooth as a Lamborghini. Each entrance gives us the character: Tosca’s sensuous piety (in a theme that will come back in “Vissi d’arte”), Cavaradossi’s romantic idealism, Angelotti’s desperation. The first appearance of Scarpia is the most terrifying entrance in all opera – because Puccini set it up to be, thrusting it into the midst of a rollicking (but thirty-second-long) children’s scene. We are never supposed to relax after that, whenever Scarpia is around – and that tension pays dividends as Tosca takes her time suspecting what we feel in our skin: this man is setting his trap for her. Why are those whores getting in the way of our focus on a monomaniac evil?

Then there’s dawn amid the bells of Rome, gentle precisely so that it can be interrupted by the grim preliminaries of an execution. To rehearse the firing squad during this serene music does not bring us to the proper frame of mind for a jolt – on the contrary, it gives us a preliminary jolt that undercuts Puccini’s. We should relax until the jailor summons Cavaradossi – but try resting with all that pointless activity on Mr. Bondy’s stage.

To this ugly and irritating concept, the familiar Met forces under Joseph Colaneri brought a symphonic grandeur: the pounding strings rising to climax in Tosca’s scream as Scarpia corners her, the surge of life around the organ processional that ends Act I, the subtle flicks of this instrument or that to comment on character or story or the very real world in which the opera was set – all reminded us of how fine a contraption of interacting parts Puccini devised, even as Mr. Bondy was tearing them apart and flinging them to the winds. I liked Mattila’s abruptly blank face during “Vissi d’arte,” and Joel Sorenson’s (Spoletta’s) look of frustrated, “You’re going to let her get away with that?” during Scarpia’s interrogation, and the way Álvarez was always gazing at, and admiring, his lover – but these touches were probably invisible to most of the house.

The problem with this school of direction is that its practitioners seem to regard the score like music in a film, as an afterthought, mere accompaniment to action. It is not. In opera, the music is the main event – or as much of it as the action is. Action need not be invented to fill up spaces where there is merely music – the spaces of mere music are there for dramatic reasons. To change things without justification is not very good theater.

Posh Nosh

2009-09-17T21:37:00.004-04:00

"We make our own stock, but by all means buy prepared stock if you have
no self-esteem."

"I use only Tuscan Extra VIRGIN olive oil. This is an old tart."

"Cooking really upsets food."

"We bamboozle our samphire - there's no other way."

"Better get your bottarga from the source - right off the docks at
Calegari - no later than six in the morning when the fishermen are still wet."

"Thoroughly exasperate your currants ... then vilify as usual."

"Today we're focusing on the wine's color - it's gold - heavenly gold -
like God's weewee." (sips) "Better."

-----------------------------------------------

WHY have all you people been keeping this glorious gift of the BBC from me
for whom (obviously) it was designed? Or (gasp) are you too in ignorance of
its wonders? I found out about it from my next-door neighbors, and in
New York, you know, one never even talks to one's next-door neighbors.

The comedy is deceptively mild, deceptively quiet - words superbly, elegantly mis-used in highfalutin ways to mean "cook": "Degrade the eggplant into one-inch cubes"; "Brando your chicken with the butter," "assault an aubergine." Further, there's that old standby, the funniest thing in the world to any Brit, someone of the lower classes aspiring upwards and getting the tone just a bit wrong - remember Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket? On Posh Nosh, our hostess, "my father was a publican," seems blissfully unaware that the handsome, upper-class husband whom she has married and with whom she runs a restaurant is gay as Ikea on Superbowl Sunday. "Where would you be without me?" "Mykonos." In fact - the series' final episode reveals - she knows just what is going on; as long as he's happy and she's upper class, she doesn't care. "You know what mother said when she first met you? 'She'll make the trains run on time.' You know, like Mussolini." "Wasn't he a man?" "It's a compliment!"

Fortunately the eight ten-minute bite-size bits that constitute the show are to be found under "Posh Nosh" on youtube. God bless youtube - it's like sipping whiskey (notes of apple, charred sticks and plastic) through a noose.

"Too Late Now"

2009-09-12T10:03:00.006-04:00

Do you know this lovely song?

"Too late now to forget your smile/ The way we cling when we dance a while/ Too late now to forget and go on to someone new..."

It suits my mood these days: the wry, smiling, self-conscious lyric (Alan Jay Lerner), the gently dawdling, reflective melody (Burton Lane) that matches it superbly: the A theme is in two parts, going to a false high the first time, then to a surprisingly higher one to send the sentiment soaring. A really fine merging of words and music - I wonder which came first? (With both Lane and Lerner, the words usually came first.) No wonder jazz men love to play with this tune.

The sentiment, too, is superbly ambiguous: It is not clear whether it's "too late" because the affair is over and the singer blew it, or because it's too late to break it off now that s/he realizes s/he's fallen in love, that some other person has become necessary. Both melancholy catastrophes! Thus it can be sung sadly or with an uplift at the end.

Jane Powell introduced it in Royal Wedding, the very bad 1951 film with wonderful songs (including "I Left My Hat in Haiti" and "How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I've Been A Liar All My Life") and the famous sequence when Fred Astaire dances up the wall and across the ceiling, which was later mimicked by Ingmar Bergman in Hour of the Wolf, which I suggest would not make a good musical. (An opera by Franz Schreker, maybe.)

I have recordings of "Too Late Now" with Jane Monheit (too expiringly smokily languid) and Michael Feinstein (who just plain sings it badly, with gaping ugly hollows under his voice like puddles under icy slush that you slip into and get muddy ice in your shoes) and Dorothy Loudon (who sounds 85 years old). None of them inspire me, but the lovely song does.

Happily, my friend Irwin made me a CD of 13 other versions from his matchless collection of you-name-it, including superb renditions by Mel Tormé and Ann Hampton Calloway.

On youtube, I have found Audra Macdonald in a superb "straight" rendition (she has the voice for this melody) and Peggy Lee, who seems to sing it with a sexually content smile on her lips. (I mean, that is how the lyric comes through - we do not see her on this clip.) Judy Garland is a bit too husky with it. Paul Sheesley a little too jazzy - the jazzy mind set fights with the sentiment of the song. (Of course, wandering around youtube this way, I stumbled on something else wonderful, Frank Sinatra's somewhat too up-tempo version of Johnny Mercer's "I Thought About You," another song currently repeating in my head.) (No iPod here! I just sing them to myself while biking around town!)

A fine tunesmith Lane, mostly for the movies - he had one great Broadway hit - at the same time as Royal Wedding (Finian's Rainbow, soon to be revived, a show on which I passionately fixated at age six, memorizing all the songs in Ella Logan's Scottish accent though I had no idea what two-thirds of Yip Harburg's glorious lyrics meant). Then Lane was blacklisted for years. He got back to Broadway together with Lerner for On A Clear Day You Can See Forever (Richard Rodgers having given up in exasperation at Lerner's dilatory ways - Rodgers was used to Hammerstein, who would sit in the office with him all day and come up with a lyric a few hours after they had decided what sort of song ought to go in what part of a show). On A Clear Day is also full of great tunes (and great lyrics) - "What Did I Have That I Don't Have," "The S.S. Bernard Cohn," "Don't Tamper With My Sister," the talking-to-flowers song - but the book is a mess.

Due to an accident backstage (an actress fell off a ladder), I was deprived during the recent New York Fringe Festival of a revival of 1967's How Now Dow Jones, a show that flopped memorably and was excoriated by Ethan Mordden. But friends who did see the brief revival said it wasn't bad at all (heavily rewritten, songs by Carolyn Leigh and Elmer Bernstein), and I'm in the mood to learn a new musical - but it would have to be a musical with clever lyrics and dreamy or delicious melodies, and they stopped writing that kind thirty years back when Lane and Lerner and Styne and Comden & Green were still alive, and Kander & Ebb were in their heyday.

(This is my idea of a brief, casual blog post.)

Thalia Nights (An homage to Ingmar Bergman)

2009-09-09T16:09:00.003-04:00

Must have left twenty running shoes over years
Stuck to the floor of the gum-mangled Thalia
Long summer nights there in Plato’s glum cavern
Observing, believing, the motile shadows,
God-knows-what going on, behind, in the booth…

Arletty, the goddess, Laughton, the painter,
Mifune, the warrior, Moreau, the temptress,
Signoret, the cynic, Masina, the clown, Mastroianni, the bored –
these were our gods in the Thalia pantheon,
our greater trumps, our cards of fortune;
shaping our summers, haunting our winters.

Sing out, o bards!
Bunuel! Renoir! Satyajit Ray!
Eisenstein! Kurosawa! Fellini! Truffaut!
The syllables sing in the mouth like wine.

But most mighty of all, filmgoers’ philosophe,
Bergman the troubled, cantankerous Swede,
Took a sing-song tongue, made it sound prophetic,
Gnomic, organic, epigrammatic, portentous;
Made us see with the eyes of men being Bergman
And idealize the actress he currently bedded,
Bergman heroic! The atheist pastor!
The Freudian mystic! The thinker on film!
Even his jokes were layered with mythos –
Isn’t Death playing chess the art-house totem?

His actors were family: we followed the serial,
Image by image, aspect by aspect –
Never doubting that one would serve family supper.
Harriet, swinging the hips of false promise,
Doe-eyed Liv, crazy waif, suffering wife,
Bibi as sane as she ever was sensual –
Given the choice: Liv or Bibi or Harriet
And one long solstice Swedish night,
Which would you take?
Defend your position in two hundred words
Dripped in the glass like water-of-life.
Max, noble everyman, serious, murderous,
Handsome as some austere cathedral;
Gunnar, the distinguished we feared we’d grow into;
Erland, bitter fellow we feared that we were –

So: mix and match and match and mix –
Playing chess with the puppets he whittled unceasing
(If there isn’t a maze, there can be no solution):

The face overhearing (or reading the diary);
The couple enisled, spitting intimate daggers;
The acting troupe, offstage, lounging and lusting;
The man of God who is losing his faith;
The man of no God losing his mind;
The unman made-up,
The maid unmade;
Sex as war and war as sex;
The sea-borne dream, waves troubled as nightmare;
Papageno Vogler and Alma, the Soul –
We’ve done it that way; let’s try it this way:
The point is amusement while stating the problem.

I sing of Ingmar – Scanian lodestar –
unsinking sun of the Nordic night –
unwarming depth of the Baltic tide –
whose coolness freshened our Thalia summers.

Multi-tasking

2009-08-23T16:14:00.004-04:00

I'm sitting at the play, writing my own play
Or I'm at a poetry slam, writing a sonnet
Or I'm at a Handel opera, humming Verdi
Or I'm at a film, tightening the edit
Or I'm at a musical, tossing the pointless song or the pointless singer.
It's when I'm alone with the paper
My mind contains nothing.

The Passion of Ingmar

2009-08-18T11:36:00.003-04:00

What to do in New York at 1a.m. on a Monday when it's too hot to sleep and you're too old to face Splash or anyplace else that might be open and entertaining:

Borrow an Ingmar Bergman movie from the library!

There seems to be a general change in attitude towards Bergman, once regarded as among the cinema's authentic living geniuses, ranked with Fellini and Bunuel and Ozu when few others were (no Americans, needless to say), a man whose profundity of vision, his conflicted attitude towards God, parents, mistresses-as-muses, solitude in Scandinavian winters, sex in Scandinavian summers, madness and art seemed close to the core of Western thinking on these subjects. We (in New York) flocked to the Thalia and the other art houses to take it all in, parse it, get our heads around it. His disgust at civilization, even civilization taken sparingly from the p.o.v. of a barren island in the Baltic, seemed to mirror our own disquiet at the inadequacy of the civilization of free, consumerist satiety. If God had no use for us (being in an existential crisis), we wanted Bergman to use us, or tell us at what star to gaze in God's stead.

From this emerged a dozen films as good as any anyone made in the postwar era: Wild Strawberries and Monika (Scandinavian sex!), Sawdust and Tinsel and The Magician and Fanny and Alexander (life is theater! or it would be better if it were!), Winter Light and Through a Glass Darkly and Hour of the Wolf (there is no God; I might as well go mad), The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring (life was lousy in the Middle Ages, but at least it was intense in those days, not crass!), Shame and Passion and Scenes from a Marriage (I'm breaking up with my girl, no wonder the world is coming to an end), Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata (even women can't handle family - we already know men can't) and even so perfect a "costume" sex comedy (Smiles of a Summer Night) that Woody Allen and Stephen Sondheim tried without avail to imitate, to build upon, to improve its magic. (Sondheim's version is at least pretty to hear.) Even Fellini and Bunuel would be hard put to equal such a variety of masterpieces. For two or three decades the ideal collegiate thinking-couple's double bill (or, one filmbuff dorm neighbor said, the ideal film to take a dumb girl that would keep her quiet while he had time to think) was Wild Strawberries and Seventh Seal - so much so that a celebrated short in subtitled nonsense-Swedish (Madeline Kahn's film debut: "Have a cigar?" "Phallica symbole?") was Die Duve, a parody of both of them at once. (Death and Inga play badminton; the Dove of salvation intervenes ... all over Death's black nightshirt.)

Okay, I didn't understand them. Or I thought I understood them. Or I had no idea what was going on. Watching The Virgin Spring and The Magician for the first time at maybe 18, I remember, I was puzzled that the story wasn't "signaling" good guys, bad guys, what the hell this tale was about in the way I was accustomed to having stories laid out for me in Hollywood movies. Why was the girl raped and murdered, when she had done nothing to deserve it? (One may ask the same in Rigoletto, eh?) Because that's how it happens in real life: grow up and try to understand that. Why did the lawyer let his young wife elope with his half-wit son? It didn't seem fair. It wasn't fair - but it was the more understanding conclusion. Why did the knight lose at chess? Why did the madwoman rape her brother? Why do people in these movies pretend to go out the door, but actually stay behind to overhear a phone conversation or even a seduction?

Besides Hour of the Wolf and The Magician (ur-documents of the LSD generation), Persona, Smiles, Virgin, Strawberries, Seal and the splendid autumnal masterpiece Fanny and Alexander (and how many other writer/directors have produced eight supreme masterpieces?), and The Magic Flute, the first of the great filmed operas that set a whole generation rethinking the unfashionability of that form, the Bergman work I would select as his most perfect work of art is the seldom-cited Shame.

The story seems typical of Bergman after he had got over his middle class Stockholm soap opera settings of the '50s and could create whatever world he wanted: Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman (two of the most famous faces of the period, precisely because of the range of roles they played in Bergman's films - Max usually standing in for IB, Liv often standing in for IB's current lover, who was Liv for about five years) are a married couple living on a farm on a small island somewhere. Where isn't clear, and isn't important - what is important is that it is the center of a war zone, that armies and guerrillas are battling through the movie, taking as much notice of the rights and feelings of the couple as armies usually do. (The marriage might almost be a metaphor for Sweden, neutral since 1814 but hardly immune to upheaval as two world wars and the cold war erupted around it. Bergman was among the few notable Swedes willing to remember how pro-Nazi many of his countrymen were.) The destruction of their world, of their relationship to it, mirrors the increasing bleakness and violence and dishonor of the couple's relationship to each other. When she commits adultery and he avenges it with a horrifying betrayal, we are shocked. When he commits a skulky murder, she (and we) are too stunned to react any more. The ruin of their civilization mirrors the ruin of their marriage - at the end they cling to each other because neither of them has anything else - including hardly any will to survive. Most magical and unsettling of all: just as the film began with Max recollecting a pointless, ominous dream, it ends with Liv recounting a different, equally ominous one. It is bitter and beautiful and complete.

In contrast, The Passion of Anna (as it was called in the U.S. - as Ullman points out in the commentaries, that is not its title in Swedish, which is merely The Passion), Bergman's next film and his first one in color, which uses the same cast (plus Bibi Andersson, last seen in Persona), is a mess. When I saw it, still under the spell of the genuinely strange Hour of the Wolf and the genuinely perfect Shame, I was confused. For one thing: who is killing all those animals? Somehow I got the impression it was Anna (Liv), probably because of the American title. Use Bergman's title, remove that clue, and I have no idea.

So I got it from the library and watched it again last night, for the first time in forty years, and now it makes sense - aided by the commentaries of three of the stars (Ullman, Andersson, Erland Josephson). The movie doesn't make sense, but now I know why it doesn't. Bergman, a control freak (what great director has not been?), always had his scripts down, and his shots calculated, and there wasn't much to do but shoot them (Nykvist did that, of course) and barely edit. But whatever was in the original script, it wasn't what got filmed. For one thing, the dinner party of the four leads, when Max von Sydow's Andreas really encounters the others for the first time (he's already met, and eavesdropped on, Ullman's Anna), is not scripted: they were told to improvise as if inhabiting the characters as they then understood them, and quite a lot of the personal got into it. Ullman is still upset that much of her improvisation was edited out - though she asked for it, because she felt Bergman's idea of Anna (who believes she is living the utter truth when in fact she has based it on a lie to cover an unpalatable truth) was unjust, a blow aimed at herself for breaking up with him - so she defended Anna, and herself - and Bergman got back at her (she feels) by cutting the speech.

The film is not neat, as Shame is neat: it is an incomplete metaphor, perhaps because Bergman knew life is not neat (but art is our attempt to correct that). I found the dawning relationship between these two damaged, lying people, Andreas and Anna played by Max and Liv, unconvincing - a desperate move on the part of both - because they find themselves with nowhere else to go and nothing to do. I was more stirred by the scene where Bibi's Eva, unhappily married, gets drunk and, dancing to some old bebop, casually seduces Max - not because she wants him, but because he happens to be there and somewhat sympathetic, and sex will take her mind off her insomnia and her unhappy marriage. Erland's Elis takes photographs of Max, but the tension in the air during this session leads nowhere - he remains utterly enigmatic - though he suspects his wife has slept with Max. There is none of the power of the scene in which the vampire makes up Max's face in Hour of the Wolf. Perhaps the moral is IB telling me to get over my obsessions with artistic artifice and face the reality that there aren't always neat endings and solutions and meanings. And the greatest sign of this is that the brutal murder of animals (a puppy Max rescues from a noose, eight slaughtered sheep, a horse set on fire) does not end when the likeliest suspect is brutally driven to suicide. Max and Liv seem to have alibis, Bibi is utterly unlikely, Erland was in Milan, or was he? No, the slaughters go on to the end, as if they were occurring spontaneously (like the war in Shame) to mimic the breakdown of our characters, which climaxes with a furious Max, chopping wood, turns the axe on Liv, then beats her up on camera.

Just to make it all the more confusing, there are postmodern moments that were not scripted and seem to be trendy afterthoughts (responses to Bunuel and Godard?): each of the four actors is asked, on camera, to discuss the character s/he is playing. We get a lot of background that way that the screenplay does not give us, but still ... it comes across as cheating, as trying to be au courant in 1969. It is beneath Bergman, I think.

So, not a satisfying Bergman film - not one of the great ones by a long chalk - but further meditation on his besetting themes. Recommended for that, and for the first experiments in color (the olives and oranges and browns that would remain his palette in Autumn Sonata, and only shift to scarlets in Whispers) and the shots of Liv Ullman at the height of her imperious, vulnerable beauty, and Bibi Andersson utterly adorable just a little past the peak of hers, and Max the very symbol and totem of Scandinavian manhood in the aging prime of his.

An exchange at Les Huguenots

2009-08-04T15:22:00.002-04:00

On the damp campus of Bard, where four performances of Les Huguenots are a highlight of this year's Summerscape Festival, illustrating the theme of influences on Richard Wagner (while he rolls in his grave), I ran into many, many friends.

Neil and James: Are you familiar with Meyerbeer's music?

Moi: Am I familiar with Meyerbeer's music?! Why, I had it with my mother's milk (between Cole Porter numbers). I even sang Meyerbeer at my bar mitzvah, instead of that tedious old Biblical exegesis.

Neil: What did you sing? "Si j'étais coquette"?

James: No - he sang "Prëtres de Baal."

Perhaps you'd have to know my rabbi to understand why this was so funny.

All right - full disclosure - I do not have a rabbi and I never had a bar mitzvah. But I am fond of Meyerbeer (up to a point). And I do have witty friends.

Ensor at MoMA

2009-07-23T12:29:00.002-04:00

Nika and I went to MoMA yesterday to see the James Ensor show, which is not overwhelming or without interest, but puzzles more than it pleasures.

Did he just go a bit dotty at the end? No - not at the end. At some fairly early point? No one seems ready to say. His public behavior as he became a national institution was respectable enough. As to what went on his head - no one knows. But he wasn't productive.

That's the first thing that struck me about the James Ensor show at MoMA: the paintings begin well enough with some promising but hardly unusual impressionists from the early 1880s (he was born in 1860). North Sea skies, gobs of paint close up, reveal their restless beauty when viewed at an angle or from across the room. Studies of his father reading a newspaper, his sister sewing, might be Renoir or Vuillard. As for the skies - yes, he knew Monet, had crossed the Channel for a peek at Turner in the Tate. The influence of Whistler is everywhere: gray on gray.

But also there is something antic, something that does not fit: self-portrait in a flowered hat (with peacock feather), say. Or a confrontation of two figures in carnival masks. Or one figure (often Ensor himself) surrounded by, assaulted by, skulls or masks or figures wearing them. The show explains: His mother kept a souvenir shop downstairs; carnival masks were a major item. He was surrounded by them all his life, filling his nightmares (of which clearly he had many) and his ambitious dreams. He also loved satirical cartoons, of which the 1880s-90s were a golden age. His politics at this point were anarchic left: down with everything. But he found he disliked his fellows (except for one or two good friends) quite as much as he disliked the folks in power.

A drawing of his aunt, asleep in her oh-so-proper Belgian lace and black, impeccable bonnet and corseted figure (such ladies were common enough on Ostend streets as late as the 1950s), but surrounded by hideous masks making faces, filling her dreams (or Ensor's own troubled, antisocial fantasies). A Temptation of St. Anthony with Ensor as the hallucinatory saint. Christ entering Brussels, met by a brass band but the onlookers paying no attention. Was Ensor a wounded mystic or did he identify with the scorned Christ or was he just unable to find a proper direction for his art? His boasted desire to paint light turns up very little in the way of exquisite exploration, at a time when Van Gogh was already dead and Monet was still fantasticating and to the current young crowd (Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Gris) Ensor must have seemed undistinguished and old hat.

But the big mystery is: why all this creativity in the 1880s, much less in the 1890s and not a damn thing after 1900. He lived till 1949. He was an eminent figure, ennobled and awarded by his country, trotted out as a living institution, perfectly sane - just utterly unproductive. Art had gone its way; it did not renew Ensor. He was over and out well before he turned forty. Does he have a place in the saga of Modern Art? Yes. Is it an important, productive, ineffaceable place? No. You can skip him and you'll hardly miss a thing.

He painted up there to keep his hands and his eyes busy, and maybe to stave off demons in masks. He wasn't painting for us at all.

Note: The mask is a curious artifact, and it interested Ensor far more than faces did. He did very good impressionist faces, but they did not fascinate him. People doing one thing, living one soul, while wearing the face of something else - that interested him. But he did not find an art where he could make something important out of this discovery.

Brooklyn and Queens on a hot weekend

2009-06-08T14:55:00.001-04:00

I have seen BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music evolve over thirty years from salvageable hulk of ruin amid scenes of ruin (with unusual performances), to punk palace of the arts (with its own snazzy crowd of devotees and lots of Euro-art), to major grande dame of the city arts scene, jewel set in glittering renewed downtown Brooklyn. At the moment it is holding a Muslim Cultural Festival, with Asia House and other institutions around town – music, theater, dance, film, “storytelling” from a dozen countries – and I am getting to as much of it as I can.

There was a “souk” in BAM’s car park this past weekend, the usual arts and crafts (overpriced), the usual unhealthy junk food – and some exceptions. At the Turkish booth, a bunch of ladies in headscarves brought home-made stuffed vine leaves (best I’ve ever eaten) and home-made baklava (ditto, especially when it had been sitting in the hot sun a while), and some Lebanese guys had spinach pies shaped like hamantaschen. Someone was selling witty T-shirts for far too much money, such as, on a covered wagon, heading a whole train of such, “Why settle? … Israel!” which could be taken to support either (any) side of the question, eh?; “Surf Saudi Arabia! Sportsman’s Mecca,” “Petro sexual,” “Come out to … Iran!,” “Party Like Iraq Star,” “Gaza Strip Club XXX,” and “Afghanistan!” above images of a wind surfer on the ocean. There was very good Middle Eastern music but the CDs on offer were mostly recent, jazz-inspired, beatboxed shit - if it uses microphones or electric instruments, I'm not very interested.

Across the street, by the way, is Mark Morris’s building, an old hulk completely gutted and refitted and modernized for his dance troupe, with rehearsal halls to rent to others. Typical of the modesty of the man: The new cornerstone, prominently visible, was laid in 2000, so it reads: “A.D. MM.”

According to an article I happen to be proofreading, 46 percent of Queens is foreign-born (a record for U.S. counties), and the borough is huge, in addition, with well over a million people. All sorts of cool folk live there now.

All this as prelude to Sunday when, fed up with being cooped up by ill health in gorgeous weather, I took the bike (via E train) to Roosevelt Avenue for Queens Pride. I’d somehow never made it before, and by the time I arrived, the parade was over (if it had ever been) and a street fair on rainbow themes filled a dozen blocks where the Indian, Pakistani and Afghan colonies meet various Latino enclaves as the E train crosses the 7. (There are also a Thai temple and a Jain center not far down the street.)

Several stages had lip sync drag mamas or folk acts or rappers to which almost no one in the crowd paid attention, there was lots of unhealthy food, there was a guy giving out cards of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, lots of condom distribution, petitions to sign (I signed one to save the libraries of Queens from budget cuts), free hepatitis shots and STD screenings, someone selling straw cowboy hats (I bought one, and it saved me from sunstroke), a bin of used CDs (Ann Hampton Callaway scatting standards in tribute to Ella, a bargain for $2), and I got pair of binoculars for $10 which won’t hurt me when I lose them, as the $140 ones did, there were assorted well-built young men but it was very neighborhood, much of the crowd was straight and enjoying the festa part. I’ve always preferred that Gay Pride be a festa for all, not just Our Crowd.

After an hour or so, I’d had enough of it, so I began biking aimlessly southerly, pausing for beer at an Irish bar (barman from Galway, “city of the tribes” – “I have friends who spend the summer there,” I told him; “Have they got a summer there?” he was skeptical) with a waterfall and barbecue in back, drifting down Greenpoint Avenue through ethnic neighborhood upon ethnic neighborhood, all unknown to me, over the Newtown Creek into Brooklyn. The plaza around the east end of the Williamsburg Bridge, once full of elegant bank buildings, then a ruin for decades, is now reviving nicely – some of the banks are now churches; others are, once again, banks – and through the Valley of the Shadow of the Hasidim to Fort Greene and on and on, miles and miles, most of it amazingly less shabby than it was in the 80s. I attempted a bridge to Manhattan, but my thighs were having none of it.

At last I was at BAM again – easy to spot from a distance because it is beside the Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower, a Romanesque domed minaret spire, the oldest skyscraper in Brooklyn and one of my favorites in the city. (The ground floor, currently in restauro during condo conversion, has a sublime Cosmatic pavement which I trust will be preserved.) The Turks were out of vine leaves, so I got spinach pie instead to wash down more baklava. Then I took the bike by subway back to the Village. Another week of exercise and I’ll be able to handle a bridge or two.

Old movie houses (often full of fine deco detailing) and old banks (usually of turn-of-the-century grandeur: many domes, imitating either the Pantheon or the U.S. Capitol/St. Paul’s; many colonnades of one or another classical order) and old churches tend to switch functions: churches become theaters, banks and movie theaters become churches; banks become carpet warehouses. I favor retaining the old buildings just to vary the streetscape, prevent it becoming lethally dull, so I am delighted when they are preserved, whatever the organization.

Mahler meets the Shekinah - A solution?

2009-05-21T21:52:00.003-04:00

Went to hear Boulez conduct the Mahler 8th the other night - that's the one you probably have not sung in the shower, as it is the Symphony of a Thousand and they wouldn't all fit. They didn't fit in Carnegie Hall either. (And Loren Maazel is doing it next month as his farewell to the Philharmonic - or rather, four farewells - he never can say goodbye, no no no.) The text of this leviathan (or do I mean behemoth?) is in two parts, first a setting of the 8th century hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus ("Come, Creator Spirit"), the second a setting of the last scene of Goethe's Faust, Part 2: Faust's soul saved from damnation by the intercession of A Penitent (i.e. Gretchen from Part 1) with the Triple Mother-Virgin-Goddess (so addressed), and the Eternal Feminine Calls Us On from above.

That was appropriate, as I'd sneaked in without a ticket and had to climb the stairs to the top of the building (puff puff puff). At the first performance of this work in New York, Anna Mahler was present and said to an usher friend of mine, "Not one of Papa's best." I have to agree with her. Though I thought otherwise the last time I heard it, under Levine, with the BSO. (Another friend suggests the Metropolitan Opera House would be the right size for this symphony. John G, who was present on this occasion, says only the Royal Albert Hall is the right size with the right size organ, and we all know how important that is.)

As I reached the top of the stairs, I found the evening's usher was a stranger (to me), a tall, lanky, sexy, long-haired youth. Before I'd located an empty seat (sparse at these Mahler concerts), a guy I know slightly arrived, and began to harangue the young usher on the Faust Legend, its medieval and operatic and Goethean variants. As I'd written about the Faust legend for Opera News and the Met Opera program, I listened intently; later, this fellow explained to me that the usher is a young genius and leader of a "dark metal band" (whatever that means) which has dealt with satanic themes (don't they all?), but that he is also interested in the late romantic orchestral-operatic equivalents for death-thrash-metal (equivalent may be the wrong word here), and Greg is trying to introduce him to unfamiliar mythic concepts (such as music without electronics), which desire is perhaps lust-inspired on his part, but what the hey? A natural adjunct to pedagogy in many ancient societies, is it not? And this kid is definitely of age. (Plus, I think the philosophe is hot, frankly: chunky bronze Sicilian.)

Then he turns to me and says, "How do YOU think the parts connect in this symphony? Why did Mahler put them together?" really not knowing. And I hadn't ever thought about it myself (late Mahler not being my specialty).

But suddenly it was all very clear, because I'd just been reading Carl Jung's Answer to Job, which discusses the "divorce" between God the Will and God the Creative Spirit, and how that Creative Spirit is personified in Jewish mysticism as the Shekinah, and in Greek-Christian mysticism as Sophia, and how that spirit was necessary (and necessarily feminine) to God's creation of life itself, and his plans for the earth, and his assault on Job took place because Sophia was on sabbatical or something (Satan merrily slipping into her advisor's place), and her return and unification with God solved Job's dilemma by assuring him that God would be born as a human and find out what he'd been missing, an event only made possible because Sophia was to be incarnate as Mary. (I'm very dubious about all this as EVENT, or theology, but it makes sense as MYSTIC BELIEF.) (Mystics will believe ANYTHING. As you know. They believe, for one thing, that they've been told to believe it by those, as Cole Porter would say, "in the know.")

And suddenly it seemed to me that what Mahler was up to (a Catholic convert of somewhat mystical bent, and married to a femme fatale named Alma, of all symbolic names) was to join the invocation to the Judaeo-Christian god as Creator Spirit to Goethe's guilt-ridden self-invented pardon for Faust (his own questing, amoral, inventive spirit) by an eternal feminine who is given many names and many roles in the poem (Mater Gloriosa, Maria Egyptiaca, etc.) but who is clearly, in all cases, a synthesis subdivided by whole in the supernal Mary (bearing a very slight resemblance to any human Mary), queen of heaven, consort of God and (since God can only be one) his female alterity, anima to the divine animus, in short Sophia-Shekinah. Thereby invoking pardon for his (Mahler's) sins (whatever they were) and justifying his life as the manifestation of God's creativity, just as the original text (completed only a year before Goethe's death after forty-odd years of work, was a similar justification of his life as such a manifestation. (Could Goethe believe in a God who was not an aspect of Goethe? I mean, we all have that problem, but he had it especially rough because it seemed so very obvious to everyone that He was.)

So entirely by chance - the chance that I was reading Jung (on the recommendation of my friend Fritz Muntean of The Pomegranate magazine) - I think I have solved everybody's problem about why Mahler put these two texts together in his magnificent setting. Even if it's not one of Papa's best. (As, say, Das Lied von der Erde or the Wayfarer Songs are.)

The Wampire of Windsor?

2009-05-03T21:23:00.003-04:00

There aren't many takes on the vampire and zombie movie that have not been worked - Lizzie Bennett fighting zombies is only the latest. But what if Jane were a vampire herself? She'd have lived a lot longer and written more. And who would deny a few pints to our divine Jane, eh? Lives there the reader with soul so dead? And if they're dead - why not unearth them?

Or maybe not Jane. Maybe Jane's been done done done to death. (At 41, of Addison's disease.) Maybe what we need for an unexplored angle is an unexplored angle:

Victoria, Queen of the Vampires! (The Zombie of Windsor? The Widowed Wight of Wight? The Boggle of Balmoral?)

A flying saucer crash lands on the mausoleum at Frogmore, causing untold (well, who has the time?) damage and an unpredictable radioactive reaction bringing to life - Queen Victoria! Teeth bared, widow's cap at the read, fingernails 108 years a-growing, she stomps off into Windsor Great Park, pausing to rip a few young Etonians to pieces and perhaps an unwary history master hoping for inside dope on his thesis about the origins of the Triple Entente and the maladministration of Afghanistan. Soon her bloody (sorry) flag waves over an empire where the full moon never sets....

Notes on the Ring

2009-05-03T21:20:00.003-04:00

We’re off to watch the world end
The wonderful world of the Ring –
The wonderful wonderful wonderful world --
The Ring that's the king of bling!
If ever a wonderful Ring there was
Then Wagner's is the one because
Because because because because because –
Because of its meanings so variause ...
We're off to see the world end,
The wonderful world of the Ring!

A friend remarked that fewer people were in scenic horned helmets and witty caps. (I wore a witty cap, from the Seattle Opera.) But on the whole it was a decent audience, lots of young people attending (perhaps) their first Rings. Is this spin-off from the Tolkien films? Or are they tired of lousy electronic imitations and want to hear real singing and see real sets? Wagnerites of the Future, come out.

Valentino: The Last Emperor

2009-04-30T09:41:00.002-04:00

Just saw a movie about Rome. It was not The Da Vinci Code or Gladiator or even Roman Holiday (they were selling little toy gladiators and every sort of Roman legionary in all the souvenir shops of Rome); the movie I saw wasn’t even by Fellini: it was Valentino: The Last Emperor (the filmmaker was thinking of Pu Yi, not Valentinian III), recounting the designer’s last couple of fashion shows and the celebration of 45 years in the business, for which they took over the Ara Pacis (lovely shots of manikin statues in red or white evening wear reaching out in ritual supplication towards the altar) for a show of his Best of the Best, then a grand party in the temple of Venus and Roma (with new – artificial – columns) opposite the Coliseum (they didn’t even mention what food was served), with fireworks and lady acrobats from Cirque du Soleil spinning overhead in couture. He gets the Legion of Honor and pointedly thanks his lover of 45 years. He throws fits. The seamstresses (all women) throw fits. The money managers (all men) throw fits, but who cares? (Favorite scene: the seamstresses, who have been stitching in the background for forty years, by hand, no machines, fly to Rome to see the memorial exhibition in the Ara Pacis, and the Emperor greets them with kisses and roses at the door.) The gowns are spectacular. So are his houses. (I really want the Louis XIII number outside Paris – and I’ll keep the big Irish major d’omo.) Well: I recommend this.

Hal, who has not seen it but has seen a lot of other films about designers that I have missed (Mizrahi, Jacobs, Saint-Laurent), remarks that this glossy genre actually shows the wear and tear, the isolated personal temperament, the sheer drudgery steps towards magnificence of the journeyman artistic genius at work in a world with other – shadier – priorities, far better than do blah Masterpiece Theater-type documentaries about practitioners of the more prestigious arts. I’d agree with that, too, having only seen this one (and knowing almost nothing of Valentino before I went in). Unless you are in love with process (as I am, in theatrical or architectural context), making art, no matter how glorious, is, let’s face it, boring to the outsider. How can it be brought to life? Song and dance, perhaps.

Colonization and the Wooster Group's Didone

2009-04-23T12:16:00.003-04:00

Last week - my review appears on Opera Today - I attended the Wooster Group's production of Cavalli's 1641 opera La Didone at St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO. As you know if you've read my - or any - reviews of this production, the opera - well, the second half of it (the first, concerning the fall of Troy, is omitted) - is presented more or less in tandem ("sync" would be an exaggeration) with Mario Bava's 1965 Italian horror film, Terrore nel Spazio (Terror in Space, but usually presented here as Zombies from Outer Space or some such title). The stories are intercut, the film is shown on monitors while singers perform the opera and actors the movie script up front, singers sometimes saying lines from the movie, actors sometimes saying lines from the opera, two sets of surtitles making everything clear except when they don't. There was some very funny acting and some lovely singing, and it wasn't like any other Cavalli opera performance you may have attended. Or Monteverdi. Or Wagner.

What struck me afterwards (but I wasn't sure I wanted to go into it in my review for Opera Today, for an opera-loving audience who would have enough trouble just figuring out, from reading it, what was going on), was the crux of both stories, the hook on which Elizabeth LeCompte of the Wooster Group had hung both these overcoats. Didone, while centering on the story of Aeneas loving and leaving Dido while on his way from the ruin of Troy to found the civilization that would become Rome (and conquer both Carthage and Greece), has as its subtext the power of Destiny to overrule personal inclination. Aeneas has a job to do, and sex - even sex mandated by his mother (the goddess Venus) - and personal inclination of any sort may not be permitted to interrupt.

In Terrore nel Spazio, meanwhile, the crew of a space ship trapped on a dying world whose inhabitants, desperate to escape and survive, hope to do so by invading the minds and souls of space travelers, thereby ensuring their transport to some more habitable, more vulnerable planet. The rivalry of souls, inborn and invasive, within a single human body is thus compared to the rivalry of civilizations over which shall survive, which is worthy to survive, which has the right to survive. Rome's egotistical certainty of its overriding supremacy is compared to the egotism of both the refugee aliens and the starship crew (human? or are they?) that wishes to reject them.

Carthage was itself founded by colonists from Sidon in Phoenicia, to the annoyance of the local tribes (Numidians, Mauretanians, et al.) in what is now Tunisia. (The Phoenicians called it Africa - whether this is a Phoenician word or Numidian is not clear. Perhaps it's a Phoenician version of a word in the local tongue that they couldn't pronounce - kind of like "Illinois" or "Mexico" or Gascony/Vizcaya/Biscay, the Roman/French/Spanish pronunciations for the place the inhabitants call Euskadi). Carthage rapidly made itself the major power of the Western Med, to the annoyance of previous Phoenician colonies in places like Cadiz and of Greeks in Ampurias, Marseilles, Naples and Syracuse, and of Etruscans and Romans. (The Romans, not being nautical, were less bothered at first than others.) But all these cities, except possibly Rome, had also been founded as colonies by distant civilizations, to the greater or lesser resentment of natives, whose accounts of the matter have not come down to us. (Neither have the Etruscan or Carthaginian accounts, but no matter.)

None of these peoples were aboriginal, but then - who is? There are always movements of people, and it's hard to find uninhabited real estate. The Pilgrims were notoriously lucky - European epidemic diseases had devastated New England's Indians just before they showed up. Other Europeans in America had to go through the motions of purchase or conquest before they could set up camp and begin full-time exploitation. Look at the problems the Israelis have had due to starting their nation on property with a pre-existing population they had no wish to assimilate (and who did not wish to be assimilated). The difficulties have been hardly less (and may perhaps prove at least as enduring) as those Biblically described of the Hebrews when they arrived in Canaan from Egypt.

Colonization is a memory of bad conscience for most modern civilizations - we all dispossessed somebody, even if it was so long ago (Persians and Elamites, Japanese and Ainu, Picts and Scots, Fomhors and Tuatha da Danaan) that hardly anyone remembers it now. The Chinese may be aboriginal - but in what portion of modern China? Less than one-fifth was the site of the original Han civilization - Zinkjang, Tibet, Manchuria were none of them remotely part of it. The Abos of Australia are not taken seriously by more recent immigrants because they did not think of building a civilization at all, for 180,000 years.

To see this as a source for the science-fiction delight in extraterrestrial rumor, or as a sidelight to the ancient Roman obsession with its almost certainly fictitious descent from Troy (a feature of Rome's cultural self-consciousness when faced with the glory that was Greece, or even Etruria), is a very sly, very witty dig at all our securities. That Wooster Group makes this quip by way of a lovely performance of a superb forgotten score is to do us all a favor: we can take the performance as it is, or we can enjoy it as a spark to think about the meanings of colonization, of the guilt of the colonizer and the resentment of the colonized, of the way civilizations merge or do not merge, evolve or do not evolve, and the way technological advancement proceeds inexorably, devising justificatory myths whenever the guilty conscience requires them, cut to fit our need to survive. Space aliens may not feel this, but then - they are fictitious too. And unlike the Gods, they do not have an earthly provenance.

Iphigénie en Aulide in Rome

2009-04-10T20:12:00.002-04:00

Rome’s opera house was built in 1880, on the site of the villa of Pauline Bonaparte, in the explosion of building that followed the unification of Italy with Rome as its capital. A sleepy papal city of pilgrims and ruins within ancient walls was transformed into a modern bustling metropolis, pierced by railways and Parisian-style boulevards, its acres of glorious ruin gradually unearthed from a thousand years of protective soil cover. That theater was completely rebuilt (as the proscenium proclaims) in 1928, under tiny King Victor Emmanuel III and Benito Mussolini, the “leader.” The result, on Piazza Gigli, is a “futuristic” travertine box surrounding a tinsel horseshoe with an improbably grandiose ceiling mural – what opera features a charioteer mastering four fierce horses with one hand and a naked blonde under his other arm? The building contains memorials to Gigli and Del Monaco, but not to Callas – who, fifty years ago, famously snubbed the president of the republic from this very stage.

The less pricy seats go fast and it is illegal to re-sell them on the plaza, but it is not illegal to buy, so I held up a sign and got one in a box on March 24 (despite a hailstorm) and a place in the gallery on March 26.

The urbane gentleman who shared the box with me and two girls from Oslo (who thought they were attending Gluck’s Orfeo) said, “You’re lucky you came tonight – it was probably your last chance – they’re about to go on strike.” “Which unions are striking?” “All of them.” He was, happily, wrong, and I got to a second performance. Yes, it was worth a second hearing.

In March, the only opera to be seen in Rome was Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide, under the baton of Riccardo Muti, naturally sung in the original French by a Bulgarian diva and a Russian supporting cast, and staged (conservatively, rationally) by a Greek director. Posters elsewhere in town announced Masaniello, but that was a new rock opera about the Neapolitan folk rebellion, and not, alas, Auber’s 1828 masterpiece. There was also something brand new called Il Re Nudo, but I didn’t even look into that.

Iphigénie would seem an unusual opera for an Italian audience – the dialogue is accompanied declamation, barely set off from the arias, and there were no full stops after fiery vocal display (there is little fiery vocal display in Gluck’s “reform” operas) to inspire audience demonstration. Indeed, though the ends of the acts and the conclusion of the opera were met with enthusiasm, the opera itself was only interrupted by applause on two occasions – an outburst for Iphigénie’s great Act III aria, “Adieu, vivez pour Oreste,” and another for Clytemnestre’s tirade, “Jupiter, lance la foudre,” near the evening’s end. Older Italian opera-goers may have been puzzled. As for the younger ones – at the Tuesday performance, there were two rows of children in the orchestra section, looking about ten years old, fully suited and party-dressed. I cannot imagine they remained awake for three long hours of Gluck’s declamation (there is one duet and one brief quartet in the entire work), but awake or asleep, their behavior was impeccable. If there was a fidget or a cough, it drew no attention.

Yannis Kokkos’s staging was elegant, spare, classic, and focused on the story. Sliding panels shut off or opened the space, so the chorus could abruptly reappear, having changed from Greeks into Myrmidons or back again (Greeks wore wigs, Myrmidons breastplates). Whether Greek or Myrmidon, the chorus sang with mimed gestures, illustrating the text in a somewhat hieratical manner. A broad staircase pulled back to permit the ballet, then slid forward so the singers could pose upon it strikingly, the Greeks in white Louis XVI wigs, the leads in yards and yards of flowing cloak of some glistening drape, tossed about passionately to express emotion more flamboyantly than Gluck’s stately verses permitted – since I’d spent the day observing mythic and/or saintly figures on the walls of the Villa Borghese tossing fabric about for the same purpose, this made perfect sense to me. But costume drawings from the company’s last production of this opera, in 1953-54, displayed in cases in the salon, looked more amusing: ballet boys with Hector helmets and ladies in revealing peploi.

Most of the singers started weak but became stronger. Alexey Tikhomirov, the Agamemnon (whom the company seems to favor, based on the number of photos in the portico of the house – and he is a handsome, commanding figure), is a Russian bass, with a serene growl and a kingly set to the shoulder, but the higher reaches of the part brought strain and a very different timbre; at the March 26 performance, he petered out during the soul-searching monologue that ends Act II. Maxim Kuzmin-Karavaev sang a reassuring Calchas. Avi Klemberg seemed too light for Achille at first, on March 24, but he put some exciting force behind his desperate utterances in Act II. Pietro Pretti, Achille on the 26th, had a far easier tenor and was handsomer as well. Ekaterina Gubanova, the Clytemnestre, began slowly but built to terrific outbursts that galvanized the house – this is another of those operas (like Il Trovatore and Lohengrin) that are designed for the mezzo to steal, if she cares to, and has the power to sweep the soprano off the stage.

However, the star of the evening, in the title role, was Krassimira Stoyanova – little used in New York (where she has sung a thrilling Traviata and Donna Anna at the Met, plus Valentine in OONY’s Les Huguenots and, most excitingly, Anna Bolena) but a popular star in Vienna and Barcelona in such roles as Desdemona, Luisa Miller and La Juive.

Stoyanova has a creamy, pastel sound on which the tremors of Iphigénie’s doubts and terrors made a delicious effect, but she easily produced the power of the girl’s passionate affirmations of duty at the opera’s climax, when she goes willingly to the sacrifice that, in the end, the goddess does not demand for the very reason that Iphigénie has proved heroic. Like the rest of the cast, too, Stoyanova sang in quite comprehensible French (the surtitles were in Italian), and declaimed the drama with the dignity of the Comédie Française. There was a lovely moment when, having been presented with golden stalks of wheat by the welcoming Greeks, Iphigénie, in private, lets them fall, heartbroken, from her arms, and she was capable of taking part in the nuptial dances of Act II with dramatic gestures. Her sincerity, the attention she paid to whomever was addressing her, the rise of tension and strength in her voice as passion rose in the music, the way her voice blended with others on the few occasions this was permitted by the composer made for a most satisfying account of a long and sometimes shadowy part. Though not a great beauty, Madame Stoyanova looked appealingly pretty in white with a blue overmantel and her hair tied up à la Grecque. (She looked far handsomer in Rome than she did in that black shmatta in the Met’s Don Giovanni last fall.)

Kokkos is the sort of director who manages to get his singers to the lip of the stage whenever they have a lot to sing – a courtesy singers delight in, as it gives them a vocal advantage. It is to his credit that this usually did not seem unnatural, and the moving staircase permitted Agamemnon, for one, to be close to us and far away at the same time. The tiny goddess Diane who swung in on a moon-on-strings (rather the way the gods emerged from machines in Greek drama) was not impressive, the voice being thin and silvery and unworldly rather than powerful and godlike, but the ritual movement of the stately or angry choruses was very well managed.

Riccardo Muti cut the instruments down to something like the numbers Gluck must have employed, and his stately tempi supported the singers well and kept the event flowing at a stately, inevitable pace. He followed Gluck’s edition except in the final scene, where he substituted Richard Wagner’s revised ending of 1847, eliminating the wedding demanded by French formalists (in defiance of Homer and Euripides) in favor of Iphigénie’s transference to Tauris. This made a slight disturbance in the orchestral fabric of the occasion – from Gluck we are catapulted into something rather like the conclusion of Tannhäuser – but left those of us familiar with Iphigénie en Tauride more comfortable.

The meaning of Empress's Shadow

2009-01-29T03:02:00.005-05:00

Last night I was wasting time on youtube because someone had told me the Salzburg DVD of Die Frau ohne Schatten (Solti/Studer, Marton, Lipovsek, Moser, Hale) from 1992 was on it in 25 bite-size segments. This is a hell of a way to see a major four-hour music drama, but I started Act III and was immediately hooked - the beauty of the score always sends me places - and the images (except dorky light sabers for Barak's sword and the torches) were sublime. I think I really must run out and purchase this.

Studer sang the music wonderfully well, holding notes cleanly and swelling them till they seemed to overwhelm the orchestra at that sublime moment when the shadow-less Empress enters the presence of her terrible, invisible father, Keikobad, king of the spirit world. There she is given the chance to save her husband from being turned into stone (he is a mortal who has dared to wed her, a crystalline spirit), but to do this she must drink from the Waters of Life, which will give her a shadow - the shadow belonging to the humble Dyer's Wife. True, the Dyer and his Wife will be destroyed, but they're just common, ordinary people - at the beginning of the opera, the Empress had never met such people and had no feeling for them but curiosity. Her husband is the man she loves, the only man she really knew three days ago, and his plight is her doing. She must save him. But as she steps forward to drink, she hears the anguished cries of the Dyer and his Wife, whose agony she has observed for three days while hiding in the shadows of their house. She can't do it. Even the sight of her husband's pleading eyes (the rest of him is stone) cannot break her new resolve. She feels the pain of the ordinary humans - speaking, not singing, she cries, "I will not!" and rejects the waters of life and the stolen shadow.

The music fades, a violin figure replaces the orgy of doom-laden sound, and - I've never seen it done better - the Empress stands bewildered in a sudden knife of white light coming from behind her, from the wings. At her feet and stretching across the stage is - a shadow. A shadow that moves with her movements. Not the haunted shadow of some other woman, but her own. Since she can feel what ordinary humans feel, empathize with them though they mean nothing to her, she is herself now fully human, no longer disembodied spirit - and so she has her own shadow - and her husband, too, now the human husband of a human wife, is restored to her. And the shadow of the Dyer's Wife is restored to her, and she is united with her husband as well, newly enlightened, able to appreciate and love her as more than just a sex object. And all four of them are worthy to produce more humans - and their unborn children sing and rejoice.

This is the message of the opera: we are not fully human unless we can feel for other humans. It is not, interestingly enough, the message of Strauss and von Hofmannsthal's model, Mozart's Die Zauberflöte - Pamina already feels empathy for other humans when the opera begins, for the moment she meets the unknown, idiotic, clownish Papageno, she wonders about him, his family, and sympathizes with his hope for love. But it is the message of Wagner's Ring (one of its messages), for (as GB Shaw pointed out in The Perfect Wagnerite), the point where the Ring is transformed and makes its meaning clear is the moment in Act II of Die Walküre when Brunnhilde, the thoughtless warrior-daughter of Wotan, a "shadowless" goddess who has been simply doing her father's bidding all her life and despises the mere humans, even her half-brother and half-sister Siegmund and Sieglinde, in duet with Siegmund suddenly feels his anguish at parting from his sister, the pain of human life and its quest for love and acceptance - emotions she can have no way of understanding - and resolves to take Siegmund's side against the express commands of her father. For this hopeless defiance (which does not rescue Siegmund), in Act III she must lose her goddesshood - she has chosen (instinctually, without considering the consequences) the part of the short-lived humans for whom all such decisions mean more than death can to an immortal god. If she understands them, and their eternal loss, she has become one herself. Wotan, who hoped to create a child independent of his will and thought Siegmund would be that child, realizes too late that Brunnhilde is the independent child he dreamed of - and at the very moment he realizes it, he must also renounce her forever - as close to a human loss as he will ever know. It is the emotional climax of the eighteen-hour cycle (and if Wagner had done nothing else, the fact that he has devised a musical setting appropriate to this issue would crown him a master despite all his human and inhuman flaws of character).

These two supreme operatic moments in two supreme operatic masterpieces come to mind the more just now because my friend Peter Bishop over at Quakerpagan blog has been reading the Old Testament [sic] in something as close to the original Hebrew as he can manage in order to get at its meaning, which as someone familiar with the Christian mythos he naturally reads differently from the Jews who wrote it, a fact that troubles him a little, so that he is eager to test his ideas with Jewish readers. (I'm little help here, having grown up in an atheist home and never having studied Hebrew.)

But I suggested to him that the Christian interpretation of the O.T. might be held to run thus: that God having created humans and told them how to live, was frankly puzzled by their manifest and constant inability to follow the rules with any sort of constancy. (This is, actually, an interpretation placed on the historical data by Jewish theologians after hundreds and hundreds of years of lousy luck implied to them that God was angry, ergo they must be doing something wrong. Which is not how I read the evidence, but is prophetically traditional.) So it seemed to me that the God of Israel (whether or not he was the one and only god, and I don't believe he was/is) was like the Empress and Wotan and Brunnhilde simply unable to conceive of human life, to feel empathy with it - that he just wasn't very bright, or he was very preoccupied. Therefore (switching to the Christian mythos here), he resolved to be born himself as a human, and thus experience life in a human body and a human society, thereby learning what the odds against obeying his rules really were. Only then (after about thirty years) did he get it, and decide on a new dispensation: you have to love others as you love yourself. (I would argue that his experience of being human can't have been very deep if he thought that was attainable. The ego is stronger than god, for most people.) Or anyway, have faith in him as god (that's a lot easier) and he'd pardon you for not being able to do all the rest of it. This got him crucified, but whether that was necessary or not (as Christians believe) is another problem I have with the whole theology.

In any case, what Wagner was doing (consciously? unconsciously?) and what Strauss and Hofmannsthal were doing to echo him was to create a female avatar of that god in a music-drama that would universalize the notion, or make it mystical enough to defy organized religion. (Unless art is just another organized religion.)

And you can enjoy both these operas without giving all this a thought. But if you're in tears at Brunnhilde's sacrifice, and at the Empress's redemption, that's probably why.

On the Fritz! A Prussian musical comedy!

2009-01-07T01:20:00.006-05:00

Potsdam Productions is proud to announce the forthcoming arrival of

On the Fritz!

A sparkling new musical about Prussia's gayest prince (and greatest king)!

Tentative casting has been announced:

Cheyenne Jackson is ... FRITZ! Warrior! Philosopher! Flute player! Flesh flute player!

with

Marc Kudisch as ... Mad King Frederick William, who never met a giant he didn't like

Mary Testa as ... Queen Sophie Charlotte

Joanna Gleason as ... Maria Theresa (the arch enemy)

Martha Plimpton as ... Wilhelmine of Bayreuth (the sister)

Maria Friedman as ... Amelia of England (the girl he thought he wanted to marry)

Kristin Chenoweth as ... Elizabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel (the girl they made him marry)

Hunter Foster as ... Katte (Fritz's ... friend)

Harvey Fierstein as ... Field Marshal Leopold von Anhalt-Dessau

Malcolm Getz as ... Kammermeister C.P.E. Bach

and special guest star Nathan Lane as ... Voltaire

... or maybe Fierstein should play Voltaire and John Cullum shold play Dessau

P.S. My friend Doug Rose suggests this be re-named Puttin' on the Fritz! and that it conclude with lots of dancing girls (mädchen in uniform?). But I like to end with a big tune (call me old-fashioned - go ahead, everyone else already has), so it's New Year's Eve 1762, the Seven Years' War is just about lost, Russian troops are stomping through Berlin, the whole barracks is depressed, when in bursts Fritz, and in a rousing song-and-dance (Cheyenne Jackson can sing and dance, and I'm not going to waste my star), cheers everyone to a show-stopping frenzy - whereupon someone (suggestions?) bursts in with the news that the Tsaritsa Elizabeth Petrovna has dropped dead (this really happened), and Prussia is saved and has even won the war. And the curtain comes down on standing ovation for Cheyenne (who earned it), and everyone goes out humming something by Graun or Stamitz. Some BIG tune like "Stout-Hearted Men" or "Song of the Vagabonds" - am I showing the antiquity of my taste here?

Nathan the Wise vs. Eleazar le Juif

2008-12-29T04:01:00.002-05:00

December 28, Feast of the Holy Innocents, patrons of all fictitious victims on whose account we grow sentimental while ignoring those at risk but too familiar.

I felt in the need for jollification but not for spending much money. Looking through the Village Voice theater listings, I found that the Pearl Theater Company, a tiny rep co. on St. Mark’s Place (I’ve seen them do The Rivals and Maria Stuart and Philoctetes), were giving Gotthold Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1779), and to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the company, were charging $25 a ticket. That seemed very reasonable (there were lots of families speaking foreign tongues in the tiny house), so I biked on over.

I do not know, but I know of the play – though I did not know it was the first play staged in Germany after Nazi surrender (and one of the first banned when they took over). I also knew Lessing, the son of an Evangelical minister, had been a bright light of the Berlin Enlightenment under Frederick the Great (idea for a musical: On the Fritz, the happy-go-lucky adventures of Prussia’s gayest prince …) and that his best friend was Moses Mendelssohn, whose candidacy for the Royal Academy Lessing advanced, only to be vetoed by the king, though he admitted MM “possessed every qualification for membership but a foreskin.” I also heard a lovely story from old Baroness de Popper, of how a friend of her father’s, learning she had never been to the theater (she being then nine or ten), took her to the Burgtheater to see Nathan, and they sat alone in the imperial box (the gentleman being a friend of HM’s), and she was utterly enthralled (it’s a pretty damn well-made play), and sat staring at the stage, not even seeing anyone come into the box, until the lights went on at the interval, and she looked around and there was Franz Josef. (“And was he wearing his crown and everything?” asked her granddaughter, when she told her the tale.) And he said, “They get younger and younger,” shaking his head, and then took her to the buffett, and got her everything she wanted.

I also knew Lessing had put into the play the medieval fable about the sultan (in this case Saladin) who challenged the richest Jew in town to say which of the three great religions was the true one (figuring to get at least a huge contribution if not a conversion out of him) and the Jew responded with the fable of the three identical rings, one genuine, two imitations, that a father gave to his three beloved sons, each of whom believed he possessed the true one, “but as to which was the true one, that would only be revealed by the example of the one who loved his brothers most.” Whereupon Saladin repents his blackmail and offers the Jew his hand and friendship. Nearly everyone turns out (after an explosion of ill temper) to be a nice guy in this play: Jews, Muslims, Christians, and furthermore all the young people turn out to have been born into a group other than the one they believe is theirs. Only the patriarch is bloody minded, and Nathan outfoxes him. The plot is very mathematical, and would not work if the actors did not make the figures threatening and pardoning each other human, and the company were all quite good, and a mix of races to boot (with no great logic to it as far as putative ancestry goes).

At the end, when (contrary to most such plots) the young people who have fallen in love discover they are brother and sister (oh well), and far from being a Jewess and a Prussian Templar are both children of Saladin’s dead brother (and a Christian girlfriend slain by her relations for having an affair with a Muslim), Nathan turns to us and says, “You may think this extraordinary, a fable, a miracle – in fact it is the common tale of our lives: for whenever we meet other humans, we encounter our kin.” (I daresay it says “men,” not “humans” in the German, and in older translations, here and throughout the text. Lessing, like Moses Mendelssohn and Mozart and Beumarchais and most of the Founding Fathers of America, was a Mason.)
The mystery about this, is that at the end – and also several times during the play when such sentiments are invoked by other characters – I found myself close to tears, and this happened again when trying to describe the plot to others that night or the next day. I mean, it’s not like I’ve changed my medication or anything. And I’m not usually so affected by the plots of plays or operas, even when well acted (or sung).

However, the back-story of Nathan and his “daughter” struck me another way: Nathan explains that his wife and their sons were burned alive while hiding in a factory from anti-Jewish Christian riots, that for three days he prayed to be saved from his hatred of the Christians, and on the third day, just as reason reasserted itself, a groom accosted him (as in Sophocles’ Oedipus, the groom turns up of course, 19 years later, as a hermit friar), having been sent from his Christian friend Wulf (who turns out to be the Muslim Assad) who was going to war (to be killed), and wished to entrust his Christian baby daughter to Nathan. Nathan soon loved the child, named her “Rachel,” and raised her in ignorance of her birth (but Nathan’s Christian housekeeper knows the truth). When the Patriarch learns of this, he wants Nathan burned at the stake for distracting a baptized soul from the true faith, and we’re actually worried until Saladin saves the day.

The reason this struck is that, in 1835, 56 years after Nathan was first printed (and long after it had become a classic), Halévy presented his opera, La Juive (to a libretto by, inevitably, Scribe – who surely knew Nathan well). And though set in 1415, not 1190, La Juive is oddly similar/dissimilar to Nathan: Eleazar, a goldsmith, lost his wife and sons during riots in Rome many years ago, but rescued a Christian infant he has raised as his own daughter, “Rachel.” As in Nathan, a Christian has fallen in love with Rachel – but it is the sneaky Prince Leopold, disguised as a Jew, not a hot-tempered Templar who turns out to be Saladin’s nephew (and Rachel’s brother). Again the church demands that the Jews burn (because an interracial love affair is anathema), though Rachel, broken-hearted, agrees to spare Leopold’s life. The emperor does not appear – no Saladin ex machina here. The one voice of reason and tolerance is not Eleazar’s – he hates all Christians – but Cardinal Brogny’s – and he is ignored, except by Eleazar, who taunts him: before he took holy orders, Brogny had a wife and a daughter, who vanished in the fire that killed Eleazar’s family. “I happen to know your daughter lived, and was raised by Jews,” he says. Brogny misses the point we get – he begs for the missing info; Eleazar enjoys refusing. But, alone, sentenced to die, he wonders if he can take his adored Rachel with him to death – thus the opera’s most famous aria, “Rachel, quand du Seigneur.” Usually omitted: An offstage chorus of bloodthirsty Christians, and Eleazar’s cabaletta, resolving to keep Rachel from those awful people. So to the climax: Eleazar asks Rachel if she would live, without him, as a Christian; her heart broken by Leopold, she says she would never abandon her faith, and leaps into the caldron of boiling oil. “With your last breath, tell me where my daughter is!” cries harmless Cardinal Brogny. “She is there!” Eleazar cries, pointing – and then leaping after her, as the Christian crowd exults.

This opera was a major hit until Nazi times – it was the fourth of the great grand operas. Eleazar became, rather than Nathan, the symbol of the Jew, his feelings tender only for his own, hating the rest of the world (howsoeverbeit justified). I feel a great distaste for him when I see the opera – impressed by his heroic perversity, but not admiring, or affected, by him and his predicament. The Cardinal and Rachel are the only likable characters in the opera, and their principles do not triumph. What did people think when they saw Tamberlik and Viardot sing it – or even Caruso and Ponselle? (Tucker begged Bing to revive it for him; Bing flatly refused.) Halévy was a completely secularized Jew, the head of the French Conservatory – he wrote ten other operas, none of them remotely as successful. His daughter married Bizet (who boasted on their wedding eve that neither of them believed in any religion), and later was the first hostess to admit Marcel Proust to her salon (he was at school with her son). When I wrote about La Juive for the Met program, and for Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (another Scribe script), which premiered the next year (Meyerbeer was a Berlin Jew, who continued to practice all his life – he had promised an elderly relation in his youth – but whose daughters married into the Christian nobility), I suggested that these spectacles of religious persecution and massacre were as popular as they undoubtedly were (in Paris, and everywhere else, for a hundred years) in part because they flattered the audiences that such events were of the past, that they could not happen again, people having become so enlightened.

But why did hateful Eleazar and his Rachel supersede lovable Nathan and his Rachel in the popular mind? Is this more of the phenomenon of the rise of the New Anti-Semitism during the nineteenth century, when conspiracy theories began to proliferate, and every wicked tendency in society that could not be traced to the Freemasons or the Communists or the Anarchists or the Nihilists was freely ascribed to the Jews?

And why does it bring tears to my eyes to see actors (even damned good actors) playing the earlier, we’re-all-human-kindred message of the Enlightenment presented 130 years after it was written, and in the one city in the world where the war seems to be going the right way, 9/11 or not?

Ibsen's Ghosts - His answer to Hamlet?

2008-12-24T16:24:00.000-05:00

From the library, got four DVDs of Dame Judi Dench in this, that and the other for the BBC, most notably The Cherry Orchard and Ghosts. Hadn't seen either play in donkey's years.

Ghosts is an all-star treatment: Kenneth Branagh as Oswald, Michael Gambon as Pastor Manders, Natasha Richardson as Regina. The play was a shocker when written because the very word "syphilis" was not uttered in polite society outside a doctor's consulting room, and it is not uttered in the play either -- nor does it come into focus until the very end. (If you watch it waiting for sex to come to the fore, you'll have a long wait.) The play's more pertinent issues are hypocrisy of society, church, state, men, women -- even incest gets a bit of an airing. One has to wonder, because the play is such a well-made machine, each irrelevant bit of dialogue turning out to hint at other themes that grow larger until they engulf the story, what sin Mrs. Alving has committed that she is so very terribly punished by the final curtain. The fact that she is beginning to open her mind, to consider things her society condemns, makes her sympathetic in the early scenes, and she remains more honest than the grown men of the play. But her lies for the husband she had grown to hate, and her lies to the son she worships, evidently lead step by step to the awful end. What has she done? (It is unlike Ibsen to condemn women, except unloving women, as in John Gabriel Borkman.)

But the reason I bring this up on this newsgroup is that it struck me during the scenes where Mrs. Alving is obliged to disillusion her adored Oswald about the personality of his father (and connive with Pastor Manders in concealing that father's vices) that the model for this story is that play all Scandinavians know, Hamlet: the Gertrude-Hamlet relationship (and the relationship of both to the ghostly dead king) that is the crux of the relationships in that play.

And I wondered if anyone has written about this, or noted it: the madness of the son, the necessary killing of the reputation of the dead father, the way his ghost lingers anyway (unseen, unheard) in his house, the mother who has never admitted that she loved, and attempted to run away with, another man, the more-than-brotherly love the son feels for the girl who turns out to be his sister, the cheerful fate she goes to that the older woman tries to save her from, the misbegotten councils of the girl's ridiculous old father, the boy sent abroad to keep him from knowing his father's fate, the fate that follows him anyway, in his corrupt heredity.

Well it renews my respect for Ibsen, though I still can't regard it as ranking among his great plays (Wild Duck for me).

Witchy Sex Magic at the Movies

2008-12-03T15:50:00.000-05:00

A kiss may be just a kiss, but I think it can be sexier than porn. Always thought so. So I had some sighing moments during Were the World Mine, which has been touring the indie film festivals, raking in award after award, especially as an audience favorite. (Obviously, it has been an audience favorite at festivals favoring the young and the queer, but it has also delighted audiences not so young and not so queer.)

What no one seems to have mentioned is that the English teacher is a Witch.

The movie is set in small town America, with its big trees and narrow prejudices. (Somewhat integrated though, which is a modern change for the better.) The focus of this particular town is a prestigious all-boys’ prep school, renowned (for fifty-six years!) for its annual school play and, more recently, a winning rugby team. Are these things compatible? The gym teacher doesn’t think so – his arch-rival, the English teacher with the witchy red hair and the all-too-mischievous sparkle in her eyes wants the boys to give up practice time to read Shakespeare, and perform it, some of them in drag, some of them playing fairies. And she has given the role of Puck to one of the poor scholarship boys from the wrong side of the tracks, who happens to be queer, as everybody knows (no one talked about that when I was in high school, another era). His mom knows, his best friends know, the other kids know (and write “Faggot” on his locker), no doubt the star rugby player he craves knows, though he and his girlfriend pay no attention. It is one of those crises that mean so much to teens and so little a few years later.

The English teacher, who balks at nothing, gets her way: the boys are going to wear tights and wigs and wings, and they are going to perform “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (without understanding a word of the poetry), and Timothy is going to memorize Puck (stealing a few of Oberon’s lines because the screenwriter has no principles). And one magical night, as he stares at the page, the words start fading in and out of sight, and suddenly he finds a strange purple flower in his hand, the very pansy Puck sought out (at Oberon’s command), “love-in-idleness.” And it squirts. And those squirted … misbehave. Usually with those of their own sex.

Merry hell is accordingly wreaked on the straight-laced little town before, at the English teacher’s magical command, an indoor rain obtrudes on the festivities (I told you she was a Witch!) and all may “be as thou wast wont to be.” But now, remembering their strolls on the wild side, they have a much calmer, more amiable view of those across the street. And one person (I saw this coming a reel away) does not switch back….

Those who know the play well, in its many versions and interpretations (my favorites are the Frederick Ashton ballet and the Benjamin Britten opera), will get a kick out of the use of lines of the dialogue (especially the four lovers’ confrontations) for the feelings of the confused rugby players and their friends, and those who like male-male or female-female gooey screen kisses will have their fill (it doesn’t get heavier, but it’s sweet) – calf’s eyes of every conceivable variety are also featured – will enjoy this thing, and there is a rock-flavored score that I had no trouble ignoring (with musical numbers of endearing silliness), and there are messages about tolerance and what’s-so-terrible-about-love-of-any-flavor. And there are very pretty, rather talented young actors. (But the haggard mother and the witchy teacher were my favorites, and they are not so young.)

And once again sex-magic triumphs over hate. On screen if nowhere else.

The Ides of March

2008-12-01T00:36:00.001-05:00

Obviously a book about Julius Caesar with the title The Ides of March may lack a certain edge of suspense that some readers yearn for. But a brilliant author finds ways to offset that.

Thornton Wilder's The Ides of March was written in 1948. I had never heard it referred to by anyone (though it got excellent reviews in its day), but stumbled on an old paperback copy in the library's discard box. (You never know what will turn up there.) It sat on my shelves then for ages, until I needed something very slim to fit in the pocket of a sports jacket I was wearing to the opera. To my surprise, I found it one of the finest works of fiction,especially historical fiction, that I have encountered in years (well, since Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red anyway). And the suspense comes from the exploration this "collection of documents" provides into a dozen fascinating characters, reading their letters, their private notations, historians' commentaries, poesy (from Catullus), secret agents' reports, etc. All the main characters are brilliantly drawn, all are impressively distinct, and each one is so surprising and so delightful that the tension comes from anticipating still more surprises and delights as document succeeds document -- and Wilder never disappoints.

Wilder (one of the most learned American writers of his time, by the way, and the winner of three Pulitzer Prizes) admits he is not trying to reconstruct history; this is a "fantasia on historical themes." Some of the characters in the novel are people who were dead before 45 BCE, when his story begins (Clodia-Lesbia, Catullus, Clodius Pulcher, Caesar's aunt Julia); one or two are inventions; but the others (most magnificently the thoughtful, superhuman Caesar himself, Cleopatra - yes, she was in Rome that year, a celebrated actress, Caesar's silly second wife Pompeia and charming third wife Calpurnia, his ex-lover Servilia, HER son Brutus, his wife Porcia, and the orator Cicero) were alive and kicking, and their words as set down here bring figures to life who might or might not have lived, who represent real human beings as they might have existed, lived their lives, thought about politics and poetry and religion, 2000 years ago. Or so it seems to me, who dislike "modern" types in "historical" novels.

All too short but entirely delicious this taste of a brilliant writer's consideration of certain historical problems, and his elegant solutions to telling such a story from so many viewpoints, allowing us to appreciate them all.

READ THIS BOOK. GIVE IT TO EVERY INTELLIGENT READER YOU KNOW.

By the Waters of Casablanca (the opera)

2008-10-19T11:20:00.002-04:00

The gray, impalpable figure in the chapel of Milan’s Casa di Riposo did not look at me. His familiar face, beard, rigid posture offered me a cold, shadowy shoulder. Verdi was dead.

Gentle fingers touched my arm. Another shade. “Madame Strepponi!” I cried, not too surprised – she rests there, too, beside the maestro.
As usual, the great lady was not thinking of herself. “He is bored – my Verdi. Death provides so few distractions. He must compose.”
“What can I do?” I said, helplessly.
“Find him a libretto!” she commanded. “Some theatrical property that has not yet been presented on the lyric stage. Something truly musicabile, in a style that will inspire him – personalities, confrontations, great issues of the soul! Do they still write such operas?”
“These days, they usually keep that sort of thing for the movies. Which – now that you mention it – gives me an idea…”

Come il tempo passa, ossia Casablanca

Act I
The curtain rises on Rick’s nightclub-casino in French Morocco, 1941. The Americans aren’t in the war yet, but Rick is an American. [No doubt you expect a tenor, but I hear Bogart’s grating tones in the baritone register, and Simon Keenlyside does agonized, internal roles so very well.] His constant companion and best draw is jazz pianist Sam [tenor – Anthony Dean Griffey for colorblind casting – if we use Lawrence Brownlee, he’ll have to have a bel canto showpiece].

Chorus: Tutti vengono da Rick. (Everybody comes to Rick’s.)

Ugarte [stout character tenor – Kim Begley could have fun with it], a European with a dubious air, sneaks up to the crazy Russian bartender, Sasha [light baritone – Mariusz Kwiecien], hoping to see Rick. Sasha is vague as to Rick’s whereabouts, and Ugarte slinks off. Sasha flirts with Yvonne [mezzo – Denyce Graves or Michelle De Young - well neither of them slink, exactly, but neither does Borodina any more], a slinky chanteuse but, herself stuck on Rick, she flips him off.

Enter Louis Renault, Casablanca’s corrupt police chief, hitherto loyal to his Vichy paymasters. [alto – I see the shifty Louis as a trouser role – Alice Coote or Beth Clayton – but it could also be sung by David Daniels.] Louis is showing a German visitor, Major Strasser [tenor – Kurt Streit] around the local hotspots. Strasser asks about Rick, whose anti-fascist background in the Spanish Civil War (cue: castanets in orchestra) he knows; Louis remarks “If I were a woman, I would be very much in love with Monsieur Rick.”

Rick joins Strasser and Louis for dialogue sung over riffs from Sam’s piano.
“Perche vieni a Casablanca?” (Why did you come to Casablanca?)
“Pelle acque.” (For the waters.)
“Ma, Casablanca aque non ha! E deserto!” (But there are no waters here! It’s the desert!)
“Mi hanno mal’informato.” (I was misinformed.)

Rick excuses himself when he spots Ugarte in the shadows, and while Sam leads a rousing jazz number, learns that Ugarte has murdered two Germans and stolen their signed letters of transit, good for anyone who carries them to flee the country. He begs Rick to hold onto them while he packs. Rick reluctantly agrees.

While Rick is hiding the papers, Major Strasser begins to chat up Yvonne. To Sasha’s chagrin, she flirts back. Comic quartet (cynical comments from Louis).

Enter Victor Laszlo (bass – Rene Pape) and his lovely companion, Ilsa (soprano – Renee Fleming would kill for this role, but I’d prefer Anna Netrebko for her overt, accented sexuality, or perhaps Diana Damrau, who is Bergman cool). While Laszlo chats with like-minded exiles, Ilsa turns to the piano.

“Suonalo, Sam.” (Play it, Sam)
“Non di che cosa parla, madamigella Ilsa.”
“No? Suona ‘Come il tempo passa.’ Dee-di-de-di-de-di….” (Play ‘As Time Goes By.’)
Relucantly, Sam plays the tune (which Ilsa performs as a sortita, with coloratura cadenza) … only to be interrupted by a furious Rick.
“Ho vietato di mai suonare quella canzone, Sam!” (I told you never to play that song, Sam!)
“Salute, Rick,” says Ilsa, behind him. (Orchestra thunders minor key version – ominously,) She introduces him to Laszlo, whose reputation for fighting the Nazis in Czechoslovakia is well known to Rick.

Their brittle trio is interrupted by gunshots and screams: a man has been slain just outside the door. Louis hurries out … and returns with the news that Ugarte has been shot. Strasser triumphantly proclaims that Ugarte was a murderer who had stolen two letters of transit. His entourage (a barbershop quartet of Axis officers) usurps Sam’s piano for the Wacht am Rhein. In response, Laszlo leads the band, Sasha and even Yvonne in the Marseillaise. This becomes a Chorus of Refugees (By the waters of Casablanca) longing for the freedom of their various homelands.

Strasser, irate about the chorus and no happier to learn that Ugarte did not have the letters of transit on his person, commands Louis to close Rick’s down. Louis does so on the grounds that he’s discovered gambling on the premises (“Son stupefatto, stupefatto” – I’m shocked, shocked), commencing a stretta in which all the characters comment on the precarious situation. The curtain falls.

Act II, scene 1

Rick, in his room, drinks and broods on Ilsa’s betrayal (cello obbligato and aria: “Ella giammai m’amo a Parigi” – She never loved me, even back in Paris). Louis enters, warning that Major Strasser will be furious if Laszlo gets away. When he goes, Ilsa rushes in to explain that she secretly married Laszlo, the great freedom fighter, before she ever met Rick; Laszlo escaped from a concentration camp but refuses to flee to America without her. She offers herself to Rick if he’ll give her the letters of transit – for Laszlo.

Grand duet (over an ever more chromaticized ‘As Time Goes By’):
“Hai scordato, Rick …?” (Have you forgotten, Rick … ?)
“Parigi? Eri vestita di blu … i tedeschi erono vestiti di grigio …”
(You wore blue. The Germans wore gray.)

She falls into his arms as the curtain descends.

Act II, scene 2

At the airport, Laszlo sings a brindisi about being drunk on libertà. Ilsa shows up, saying Rick will bring the letters of transit, and they sing of the future they fly to – while Ilsa, aside, ponders her real feelings.

Rick comes in with the papers – but Louis has followed him. Rick pulls a gun on him, urging Laszlo to take Ilsa and catch the plane.

“Ma Rick –?” Ilsa whispers, as Laszlo turns toward the runway. Rick snarls: “I problemi di due personcine non ammontano a una colline di fagioli,” (The problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans), launching a trio in three-four time (with Laszlo) that becomes a quartet (when Louis chimes in). “Sempre avremo Parigi … Guardandi a te, bimba.” (We’ll always have Paris … Here’s looking at you, kid.)

Laszlo and Ilsa walk toward the plane; tension builds as the propellers rev (timpani rolls over a low brass march). A jeep drives up, Strasser at the wheel. “Laszlo dov’é?” he demands. Louis nods at Rick, who still has him covered. Strasser, angrily, seizes the phone and demands to be connected to the conning tower. Rick shoots him dead. (Descending arpeggio crash.)

The plane takes off, just as Strasser’s German quartet drives up. “What has happened?” they demand. (Crashing arpeggio.)

Louis responds in cold, official tones: “Il Maggior’é … assassinato … Raccogliete i sospetti usuali.” (Round up the usual suspects.)

As the Germans drive off in frustration, Rick gazes fondly at his new companion-in-arms: “Louis – questo sia l’inizio di un’ amicizia bellissima.” (I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.)

Crashing arpeggio segues into the Marseillaise.

© John Yohalem, 2008

Veronica Plays Her Harmonica

2008-09-04T12:20:00.002-04:00

I almost got killed by the suddenly opening door of a parked car on Hudson Street last night, and that was when I was cold sober. When I biked home from Marie's after three margaritas, there were no incidents.

Marie's Crisis is the piano bar just off Sheridan Square. I've been going since the late 70s, when Pat was behind the piano and we used to sing medleys from "On the Twentieth Century" and "Sweet Charity"; nowadays I'm just grateful if "Rent" and "Hedwig" are kept to a bare minimum. I don't really trust the taste of Jim Allen, who plays Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays to three or four a.m., and it annoys me that when someone requests "Man of La Mancha," instead of playing the show's good songs - "Dulcinea," "Aldonza," "You're All the Same" - he just plays "Impossible Dream." However, on this occasion, when I stepped down into the bar, they were singing "Hey There, You With the Stars in Your Eyes" and "Hernando's Hideaway," so I figured I'd stick around although the bar proved to be unmanned.

At last I went up to Maggie and said, "I'm going to quote a classic piece du theatre: Who do I have to fuck to get a drink around here?" She said, "Not me, honey; I'm not working tonight." (Nor, alas, was she singing - she does a dy-no-mite "Nightingales Sang in Berkeley Square" or, more frequently, "Roxie" (from "Chicago").) Maggie, however, knew who would be fetching drinks, and it was a woman named ... I forget ... but she mixed her very first margarita under my directions (which were perhaps stronger than the bartender would have made them) and she had frizzy red hair, and she sang a very funny song called "When Veronica Plays Harmonica on the Pier at Santa Monica," which I swear I've never heard before (but I've been wrong before):

"One fish was using Lifeboy - she knew how he felt -
She'd never smelt a smelt that smelt like that smelt smelt -
So Veronica packed up her harmonica and left the pier at Santa Monica."

She had no idea who'd written it, she got it off of microfilm and only knew Kay Kiser and his band (the Kollege of Musical Knowledge) had done it in the 1940s (or was it the 30s?), and it certainly made a contrast with Filippo Marchetti's "Romeo e Giulietta" (very pretty - Marchetti was a contemporary of Verdi's, but he sounded like Donizetti, which is why no one paid much attention to him) and Mascagni's "Il Piccolo Marat," (very exciting, 1961 - was this Del Monaco? who was the soprano? NO ONE in opera sounds like that any more! Alas!) which I had been listening to all afternoon on webcast from some crazy Swiss radio station that plays nothing but opera 24 hours a day. (This is the second most ridiculous programming for a radio station that I've ever heard of in my life. The MOST ridiculous radio programming I've ever encountered is no opera at all. Anyway, I try to hook two or three times a week.)

I told her I'd check the song out with my cousin Michael Lavine, who knows EVERYTHING Broadway and usually has a copy of the sheet music.

Then I had a long confab with a youngster named Rich who hangs out at Marie's Tuesdays and Wednesdays and occasionally sings there, which means they often give him free drinks. (No one offers me free drinks when I sing - knuckle sandwiches, yes. Or, "How'd you like to step outside and sing that - while the rest of us stay in here?") So they did not allow me to sing "Down in the Depths on the 90th Floor" or "Where Is the Life that Late I Led," but I hung out until they'd done "My Funny Valentine" and "You Can Count on Me" and "Someone to Watch Over Me" and a couple of Sondheims. By that time I was on my third margarita, and I figured I'd better wobble home before they sang a medley from "Sound of Music," which always drives me off.

I used to go to Marie's to cruise. There were very pretty boys last night but happily I am all over that. Now I just hope for some Gershwin or Harold Arlen.

New York Fringe Festival

2008-08-22T08:38:00.004-04:00

I've been to seven or eight events at this year's New York Fringe Festival, and I have to say I'm disappointed: either this year's 200+ efforts are not up to the last two or three years', or I'm picking them wrong. Monologues about one's life are interesting as, say, bar conversations (with me allowed to insert comments and tell stories too), but they are not inherently theatrical, and people have to get over the idea that just because you have a degree in acting and experiences to share makes them so. A show called "I Hamas" was full of interesting reportage on being Palestinian in California and going to Ramallah to connect with one's roots and being sorry one has achieved this, but it wasn't theater.

Burlesque is back, with a vengeance (what needed to be avenged? the lost honor of Baby June?) but also a difference: in the old days, burlesque meant scantily clad young (or not so young, but buxom) women saying (or depicting) set-ups and sly or vulgar guys hitting out with obvious or ancient punch lines; today burlesque means scantily (or not even) clad young men saying set-ups, while the vulgar punch lines come from the women (or drag queens). I'm the last man to object to eye-rolling, barely clad, well-built young men (in "Box Office Poison," "One Seat in the Shade," "The Boy in the Basement," et al.) - or at least the last man to object to them so far - but except in the last-named play, the situations were so trite, the jokes so antique (was there a line in "Box Office Poison" that wasn't forty years old, utterly filthy, or both?) that I did not need to stifle my laughter - it wasn't there to be stifled.

"The Grecian Formula" had some excellent actors and a lot of in-jokes for those familiar with ancient Greek theater and history ("odes" in badly rhymed doggerel verse recited between segments of plot, e.g.), but did not sustain interest enough to lure me back from intermission. (The title is about the level of the humor - no, it's rather better than most of the humor.)

Yesternight I attended a genuinely good play, but then it was Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," with a woman in the title role. (No, that part didn't work, but everyone spoke Shakespeare well, which gives me pleasure.) The most fascinating thing about that (aside from the charming idea of having soothsayer's warnings, rumors, chorus lines, etc. muttered in loud whisper from all around the room in the dark - and the one laugh-line, when Cassius says, "It's my birthday") was a previously unsuspected nonprofit performance space in a ruinous gothic public school building on Suffolk Street near the Williamsburg Bridge. (Everyone around me in the audience lived in Boerum Hill or Prospect Heights, which figures. Only old farts like me can afford Manhattan.)

But after Brutus had finally got splooged in his fatigues, I allowed myself to be lured by a friend to "The Boy in the Basement." It was an 11:45pm show, the theater is in back of my house in the South Village, and several of the women involved were members of an improv troupe whose ongoing skits were the pinnacle and glory of last year's Fringe - notably the mordant wisecracking Lynne Rosenberg. The premise was: an excessively melodramatic young fellow (with a female pen name) is writing soft-core gothic porn (what Jane Austen would be writing, anyway texting, if she were, like, alive and horny and 22 and in college today) with a quill no less at one corner of the stage, driving himself to erotic satisfaction, while stage center four college roommates (a vixen, a virgin, a slut and a new age wack) have discovered a slim, hunky burglar in the basement. Of course they don't want to turn him in - since he's only stealing to help his sister get an operation - (what sort of operation is she running? was my question, never answered) - but each of the maidens has her way with him (or vice-versa as he turns every sort of table), as he lies chained at their mercy (showing very little inclination to escape, how unrealistic). The playwright (Katharine Heller, doubling as the vixen) proceeded to toy with our expectations as if arousing us fed some kind of urge on her (or the entire company's) part. Nick Fondulis toyed with our more prosaic expectations as the surrogate author. Tom Macy toyed with ... well he could if he wanted to, I'm sure. Lynne Rosenberg didn't have enough to do; I'd love to hear her talk about Palestinian Rights or tell bad old dirty jokes with her flawless timing. Meghan Powe and Anna Stumpf were also funny; Michael Solis was also cute. Souls were almost the only thing not bared. (Tom did try to suck on Meghan's virginal toe. He can have mine for the stomping. I'll even wash it first.)

There was a happy ending, which is to say, I was tempted to return, and voted it Best in the Fest. There is one further show at 10 on Saturday night.

Larry Hart in my dreams

2008-08-22T08:24:00.004-04:00

Last night, in my dreams, I was in a cafe and in walked Lorenz Hart, most superb of New York song lyricists, the poet laureate of "Manhattan," "Blue Moon," "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," "This Can't Be Love," "Falling in Love with Love," "My Funny Valentine," "Where or When," "The Lady is a Tramp," "It Never Entered My Mind," "Ten Cents a Dance," "There's A Small Hotel" - well, where does one stop? (I've stopped after ten - I could easily name, no, sing fifty more.)

Not only was he present, he was in a terrific mood ("because anything is more fun than being dead, to be frank"), and full of perceptions about musical theater (his favorite show since his demise in 1944 was, surprisingly, Frank Loesser's "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" - he didn't mention Richard Rodgers at all). We had cocktails and shot the breeze and admired the waiter's rear end, and he sang me some of his lesser-known ditties (all previously unknown to me, and full of elegant - and somehow coyly homoerotic suggestive rhymes - I wish I'd written them down), and we talked about my grandmother whom (it turns out) he knew slightly - they both had crushes on the same singing cowboy radio star - whose name I also forget at the moment. And just as she (my grandmother) was about to join us for a nightcap - it turned into a morning cap.

Well, it's good to know he's having a better time in the afterlife than he did in this one. Don't you agree?

Anyway: Happy Bosworth Day (Richard III killed in battle, 1485).

As Time Goes By (the opera)

2008-08-16T11:45:00.004-04:00

What the world needs now, I hope you will agree, is a brand new Verdi opera, and the principal reason we don’t have one is that Verdi died in 1901. But the secondary reason (I feel) is that there has not been a libretto worthy of Verdi’s steel for even longer than that. And as I riffle through dramatic properties of the last few generations, certain screenplays leap out at me and say: THIS would be a great Verdi opera! Vertigo is one. Forbidden Planet is another. But the overwhelming cinch for first place, and I have taken the liberty of “opera-izing” it, is:

Come il tempo passa, ossia la Casablanca

Libretto in two acts

Act I
The curtain rises on Rick’s, the snazziest nightclub-casino in French Morocco. It is 1941. The Americans aren’t in the war yet, but Rick [baritone – Simon Keenlyside, who does tormented so well] is an American. His constant companion and best draw is pianist Sam [tenor – Anthony Dean Griffey for colorblind casting].
Chorus: Tutto il mondo viene a Rick. (Everybody comes to Rick's)
Ugarte [baritone – Richard Paul Fink], a European of doubtful reputation, sneaks up to the crazy Russian bartender, Sasha [baritone – Mariusz Kwiecien], hoping to see Rick. Sasha is vague as to Rick’s whereabouts, and Ugarte slinks off. Sasha flirts with Yvonne [mezzo - Denyce Graves], a chanteuse, but she sneers at him.
Enter Louis Renault, Casablanca’s corrupt police chief. [alto – I see this as a trouser role – Alice Coote or Beth Clayton – but it could also be sung by David Daniels.] Louis is showing the new German “military observer” around the local hotspots. The Germans have no authority in Morocco, but the French have to be cautious around the masters of Vichy. [Major Strasser, tenor – Kurt Streit.] He asks about Rick, whose anti-fascist history he knows; Louis remarks “If I were a woman, I would be very much in love with Rick.” But he’s ogling a refugee’s young wife even as he sings.
Rick joins Strasser and Louis for dialogue sung over riffs from Sam’s piano. “Perche vieni a Casablanca?” “Pelle acque.” “Ma, Casablanca acque non ha! E deserto!” “Ho misinformato.” He excuses himself when he spots Ugarte in the shadows, and while Sam leads a rousing jazz number, learns that Ugarte has murdered a German spy and stolen two letters of transit, good for anyone who carries them to flee the country. He begs Rick to hold onto them while he packs. Rick reluctantly agrees.
While Rick is out hiding the papers, Major Strasser begins to chat up Yvonne. To Sasha’s chagrin, she flirts with Strasser. Quartet (with Louis’s cynical comments).
Enter Laszlo (bass – Rene Pape) and his lovely companion, Ilsa (soprano – Renee Fleming would kill for this role, but Anna Netrebko would project sensuality). While he chats with like-minded exiles, Ilsa turns to Sam. “Giocale, Sam.” “Non capisco che voi parlante, madamigella.” “Gioca ‘Come il tempo passa.’ Dee-di-de-di-de-di….” Relucantly, Sam plays the tune … only to be interrupted by a furious Rick. “Lo dici giammai giocale quell’ canzone, Sam!” “Dessa la riquiesta.” “Chi?” He turns. “Salute, Rick,” Ilsa says. (Orchestra plays minor key version – ominously,) She introduces him to Laszlo.
Their brittle trio is interrupted by gunshots and screams: a man has been slain just outside the door of the casino. Louis hurries out … and returns with the news that Ugarte has been shot fleeing from cops because he has violated curfew. Strasser triumphantly proclaims that Ugarte was a refugee – and that he’d stolen two letters of transit. His entourage (a barbershop quartet of Axis officers) usurp Sam’s piano and sing the Horst Wessel Song. In response, Laszlo leads the band, Sasha and even Yvonne in the Marseillaise. They drown out the Germans and Yvonne falls into Sasha’s arms. (Comic duettino if there's time.)
Strasser, in recit, commands Louis to close Rick’s. He’s no happier to learn that Ugarte did not have the letters of transit on his body. Louis closes Rick’s on the grounds that gambling takes place on the premises, commencing (“Son stupefatto, stupefatto”) a stretta in which all the characters comment on the precarious situation. The curtain falls.

Act II, scene 1
Rick, in his room, drinks and broods on Ilsa’s betrayal (Aria: “Abbiamo avere Parigi”). Louis comes in, hoping to learn if he has the letters of transit, warning that Major Strasser will be furious if Laszlo gets away. Then Ilsa arrives. She explains she secretly married Laszlo before she met Rick, that he escaped from a concentration camp but refuses to flee without her. Extradition by the Nazis is only days, maybe hours, away. She offers herself to Rick if he’ll give her the letters of transit – they’ll trick Laszlo into getting on the plane to Lisbon alone.
Grand duet (over an ever more chromaticized As Time Goes By):
“Hai scordatemi, Rick …?”
“Scordarti? Tu? Parigi? Giammai. Tu (wore) blu … i tedeschi (wore) gray …”
“Son con Laszlo … il grande guerrier della liberta. Devi noi aita …”
“No. Mi partiti; in tempo, tu lo partirai.”
He resists, denounces her treachery, refuses to believe her – but does believe her. She falls into his arms as the curtain descends.

Act II, scene 2
At the airport, Laszlo (with a chorus of pilots) sings a brindisi about being drunk on libertá. When Ilsa shows up, she says Rick will bring the letters of transit, and the two of them sing of the future they fly to – while Ilsa, aside, wonders what’s taking Rick so long.
Rick comes in with the papers – but Louis has followed him. Rick pulls a gun on him, urging Laszlo to catch the plane as quickly as possible. “E mia moglie?” “Anch’ella.” “Ma Rick –?” she whispers, as Laszlo turns toward the runway. Rick snarls: “Le probleme di tre piccoli uomini n’accontono a una colline di fagioli,” launching a trio in waltz time (with Laszlo) that becomes a quartet (with Louis).
Laszlo and Ilsa begin a slow march towards the plane; tension builds as the propellers rev (depicted by drum rolls). A jeep drives up, Strasser at the wheel. “Laszlo dov'é?” he demands. Louis nods at Rick, who still has him covered. Strasser, furiously, seizes the phone and demands to be connected to the conning tower. Rick, after warning him to put it down, shoots him dead. (Crashing descending arpeggio from the strings.)
The plane takes off, just as Strasser’s German quartet drives up. “What has happened?” they demand. (Crashing arpeggio.)
Louis responds in cold, precise, official tones (over an ironic echo of Strasser’s leitmotif): “Il colonello e … assassinato … Ritrovate i sospetti usuali.”
As the Germans drive off in frustration, Rick gazes fondly at his new companion-in-arms: “Louis – penso ch’e la commincia d’una bellissima amicizia.”
Crashing arpeggio segues into “As Time Goes By,” concluding with a dash of Marseillaise.
Curtain.

To the New York Review of Books

2008-08-13T07:10:00.002-04:00

On the back of the fourth renewal notice since March, this time pleading with me to explain why I was not renewing my subscription:

Dear NYR of Books,

I love the NYReview - but it piles up. It piles up. I live in a small apt., like a Collyer brother of yore. Things fall apart. The closet cannot hold. Ask me what I like to do in bed: read, edit, watch opera DVDs, eat meals, exercise, plot, plotz.

I read slow. I hate to throw things out. I dropped The New Yorker and all the glossies because they fall off the bed onto the floor and are slippery there and that's dangerous for a bachelor. I didn't get the New Yorker on disk, though tempted, because ... who has the time? I read slow.

I love to take NYR on trips and read them on insomniac nights, intending to leave them behind one by one across Italy or Turkey or British Columbia - but I always seem to bring them home with me anyway. One last article I didn't get to. Y'know? And they pile up.

I love Tony Judt. And Tim Ash. And William Pfaff and Charles Rosen and Paul Krugman and Andre Aciman and Orhan Pamuk and Alison Lurie and Charles Simic and Daniel Mendelsohn. But ...

Spent Feb to May finally getting through back issues 2005-2008. I'm almost back to 2004. Pretty good, eh? If new ones kept arriving, I'd never have made it. Threw out 20-30. Saving the odd article, clipped, put inside books or into a special notebook. But they pile up.

It piles up. And it's on line (bless you - and the TLS - and the London Review - and The New Yorker - and The Nation - and Foreign Affairs). And if I want to read an article that you have not put up on line (the one on the myths inspired by Alexander the Great, e.g.), it is in your table of contents and the public library is five blocks up Seventh Avenue.

So there you have it. The most pretentious words I ever read were Gertrude Stein's (inexact quote, read it 30 years ago): "Gertrude Stein feared that one day she would have read all the books she wanted to read, but in time she realized that this would not happen."

Never mind writing them, too, which I am trying to do.

Fonds,

John Yohalem

P.S. Fonds to Tony Judt. And Bill Pfaff and Tim Ash and Charles Rosen

Die Soldaten

2008-07-18T00:07:00.001-04:00

Bernd Alois Zimmermann was a sensitive, none too healthy 21-year-old music prodigy in 1939, when he was drafted into the German army. He was invalided out in 1942, but that was quite enough to give him a lifetime’s horror of the brutalities of war and what militarism does to society (especially German society). This was not a new idea, though the Nazi Era saw the worst, the apotheosis, of it, and there had been protests before — one of them, The Soldiers, an eighteenth-century play by J.M.R. Lenz, is a didactic fable that shows the notion of military glamour corrupting young people, relations between the sexes and between the classes, and politics.

Zimmerman turned the play into an opera according to serial principles but with many additional threads from other arts, intending, it seems, to outdo Wagner in its melding of different arts into “total theater,” with opera, a 110-piece orchestra with special percussion and jazz units, spoken theater, ballet, film, television, circus, electronic music, tape and sound techniques to tell a tight, unpleasant, unglamorous little story. Comparisons to Wozzeck are obvious — let’s just say Wozzeck is a whole lot shorter and more focused. (Wozzeck is also based on a play of earlier date.) Die Soldaten premiered in Cologne in 1965. Having said what he had to say, Zimmerman killed himself in 1970.

Stagings of Die Soldaten must always be special events — the work is not for small companies or repertory productions. The singers have to be first-rate musicians and first-rate actors, the orchestra huge and expert, the special effects cannot easily be fudged. For this year’s Lincoln Center Festival, the Ruhr Triennial brought their 2007 staging to the Park Avenue Armory, home base when it was built in the 1880s of the most fashionable regiment in town and thus an ideal space for the purpose, both in terms of its block-long size and the military trappings, which have recently been spectacularly refurbished and will keep you agog for the intermissions of any event you attend there. (The City Opera hopes to use it for the New York premiere of Messiaen’s St. François d’Assise in 2010.)

As an event — as a theatrical experience — there can hardly be two opinions of Die Soldaten’s success: It is overwhelming, fascinating theater, a live performance designed with cinematic technique. The impossibly huge room (stretching from near Park Avenue to Lexington) was given a T-shaped stage — the crossbar at the Lexington end, the narrow centerpiece down the center to the seats. The orchestra played on one side, the percussion ensemble on the other. The audience, a thousand of us, sat on rising seats at the Park Avenue end, but our seats were on rollers on six train tracks. For close-ups on the crossbar, we were silently brought east to it; then we were silently moved backwards as scene after scene unfolded on the central stage, where characters were sang while walking, sometimes through each other’s “rooms” on a stage set with sparse evocative furnishings. A Turkish bath for the soldiers, a countess’s salon, a snowy street, the steppes of Russia’s battlefields were thus evoked. There was no interruption between scenes; the continuity made the swiftness of the sordid story of a young girl’s descent from innocently accepting presents from an officer, to his kept woman, to everybody’s whore, to freezing beggar all the more devastating and, at least in this version, inevitable.

No doubt the horrors of war (between men and women, as well as between armies) can be affectingly presented in melodious ways — Prokofiev’s War and Peace comes to mind, and few operas end with more quietly devastating effect than Tchaikowsky’s Mazeppa, as the heroine, having gone mad, lullabies a dying man she believes to be her lost baby. But war in the mid-twentieth century has been savage beyond the stretch of melody, and seemed to Zimmermann to call for unhummable music. Yet he did not make the mistake of many of his atonal contemporaries — his singers do not simply screech at the top of their lungs to express intense feeling, but use the full range of their voices so that subtler shades of meaning can get across. Conversations in this opera do not turn into set pieces — lovers sing at cross purposes, a trio for three arguing women never blends but leaves each of them in her separate world. This is naturalistic and appropriate, but leaves one sometimes wondering if opera is really the medium for Zimmermann’s vision — certainly not traditional opera, but then Die Soldaten is hardly a traditional opera.

It would be amusing to consider what a composer a hundred or two hundred years earlier would have done when setting Lenz’s play: Charlotte’s folk song of broken hearts in the opening scene would have a recognizable melody so that it could return as her sister’s life descended step by step on the social scale, from girlfriend to mistress to whore to beggar. The loutish soldiers’ reflections on the honor of women (or lack of it) would be a merry chorus instead of a collection of brutal shards of tone. Desportes, the “noble” lout who seduces Marie and gives her to his gamekeeper for rape when she becomes too importunate, would have time for a drinking song before Marie’s old boyfriend poisoned him (as, brutally, melodramatically, he does). The trio of three arguing women who never listen to each other would be sublime in the hands of a Mozart.

We can be touched by such methods, but Zimmerman didn’t want to touch us — he wanted to batter us, to shove our faces in it, to eliminate the distance that art necessarily allows for, to make us feel war. He wanted big faces on movie screens to demonstrate the horrors he’d scene at the Front. David Pountney’s production, though the lighting effects (by Wolfgang Göbbel) are subtly brilliant (wavering spirals over the action of a drunken party; shadows that swallow characters when the story has no further use for them), shoves us into, and among, its lurid story by having us zoom across the theater into the girls’ bedroom and the soldier’s mess, then pulling us back for scenes of perspective or of long walks or a nightmare “ballet” sequence in which the ever less clothed, less conscious Marie is tossed from one pig-masked black-tied brute to another. This cinematic variety of perspective makes it easier to notice, for instance, that Marie’s clumsy, childish walk in Act I has become a kept woman’s flounce by Act III, and for a devastating final image to have her — rejected in the snow by her father, who does not recognize her — staggering down endless, featureless streets into a steppe laden with snow-covered dead bodies, recalling Germany’s Russian campaign of World War II.

But what would Zimmermann have done with his brittle, savage, shocking style of composition if, by chance, any of his characters had agreed with each other? If two people had shared love, for example (all the yearning is one-sided here)? It’s difficult to see how that would work in his system, and one admires his cleverness in designing a libretto where it never happens: this is all confrontation, cross-purposes, asides and social cruelties. Verdi and Mozart and Wagner could set confrontation beguilingly, but that is not Zimmermann’s intention. The tonal texture did not outrage (some people left at the intermission — a pity, as the second half was the more exciting) but it did not please, soothe, appeal — it is not meant to. This is art designed to explicate brutality. I enjoyed the intrusive off-kilter atonal jazz band in the banquet scene; another effect of some charm was a percussive rumble like distant freight trains that turned out to be an uncomposed thunderstorm breaking on the Armory roof.

The singers sang with microphones (necessary in the Armory, and suggested by the composer). Microphones can cover lack of volume but not disguise other sins. Let it be said that none of them sounded as if this fantastically difficult music put them out unduly, and I’d be very interested to hear what they can do unamplified and with more gracious sounds to produce. Their acting was superb across the board, and went as far as the manner of movement, the stance adopted in different social situations (a countess alone does not move like a countess in front of social inferiors; a bourgeois boy stands differently when he has enlisted as an officer’s orderly).

Claudia Barainsky was Marie, whose descent is the trajectory of the opera, and her changeable, corruptible moods — innocent flirtatiousness, hauteur when criticized, wracked with jealousy, despair, numbness — guided every phrase as well as every step. As the opera opens, she is bursting with life; as it ends she is empty — and every step, every sound, is part of that picture. Claudia Mahnke sang her sister in a way to contrast at each step — echoing but adjusting her sister’s flightiness with caution, as if to show us that safety could have been an option. Helen Field was splendid as the countess willing to save Marie — as long as Marie agrees not to seduce the countess’s son.

Among the men, the most striking picture and the most interesting sounds, ingratiating, contemptuous, amorous, disgusting, came from Peter Hoare as the officer who corrupts Marie and — in the opera’s stagiest, most satisfying but unrealistic moment — is murdered by her old fiancé. Kay Stiefermann was almost sympathetic as a less amoral but less intelligent officer.

Steven Sloane, aided by a dozen close-circuit televisions, kept musicians and singers and machinery in step through a grueling night to the final shattering tableau.

Is this sort of multiple-effect total-art-work the wave of some budget-unconscious future? Is it necessary to abandon melody and the art of unamplified singing to achieve it? Such questions arise but do not interrupt the presentation of one of the world’s great theatrical and moral messages.

The art of mis-casting: Dionysus and Lola

2008-07-09T05:08:00.004-04:00

On Saturday I got to the Scottish National Theater's version of Euripides' Bacchae at the Rose Theater - the one where the draw is Alan Cumming as Dionysus. Wrong but not bad (as Bacchaes go, and I've seen or taken part in a lot of them). On Sunday I got into the Encores revival of Damn Yankees with Sean Hayes, Cheyenne Jackson, Randi Graff and Jane Krakowski. Everyone was good - but Jane.

So I'm pondering this at five in the morning (having just wakened from a rather delicious dream in which a favorite opera singer accompanied me on a quest to buy rare postage stamps, and suddenly he began licking them and I began licking them and we began licking each other, and the next thing I knew - well, I do wake up with a grin on my silly face after a dream like that, don't you?).

Bacchae is a difficult play; no one ever said it wasn't. It was found among Euripides's papers when he died (in exile), produced posthumously, and has aroused mistrustful accusations of blasphemy et al. ever since. I've seen it several times, played Pentheus twice and Tiresias once - I'm beginning to think I should consider undertaking the god's part next. I'm beginning to understand him.

Dionysus appears in several different "characters" - he is the stern, offended god newly returned from near-martyrdom at birth and a triumphal tour of the Far East to establish his cult among the unbelievers (including his difficult family) in Thebes. Then he is the antic, jolly leader of a band of maniacal devotees (sort of like Charles Manson), enslaved by wine and sex and excess generally. Then he appears in disguise as one of the eastern devotees, captured and questioned by King Pentheus, the determined, arrogant, order-obsessed, neurotic, insecure young ruler of Thebes - whom he proceeds to seduce. The king goes mad - yielding to his own repressed female side, his curiosity about the mysteries of the ecstatic god - and, dressed as a woman (even more of a disgrace for Greek men than for us), follows his tempter to the hills - where the madwomen tear him to pieces, led by his own blinded mother. The god has vanished, but he returns in the final scene. By this time our own attitudes have been altered - from thinking Pentheus a foolish brute to deny the ecstasy that is part of human life, and Dionysus right to resent his tyrannical unbelief, we have now come to think the punishments of this unhappy royal house much too harsh, to sympathize with mad, bereft Agave and wretched Cadmus. Dionysus, returning, makes no attempt to reacquire our sympathies - he washes his hands of the whole thing - he's only been the instrument of destiny, after all. (There is some doubt about the authorship of the last speeches.) We are in uneasy awe of the wayward but omnipotent god, almost fearing to protest what we certainly feel - are meant to feel - is injustice on his part, however tit for tat.

It's difficult - to say the least - for any director to link the first scenes of the play to its ending. There is no neat tying of the circle into a circle. The plot moves but the fable has no clear moral. We are uneasy with the Powers that Be, and religious ritual is not supposed to leave such an aftertaste.

Alan Cumming plays himself. (Can he play anything else? I've seen no evidence of it.) He does the first speeches of Dionysus as Scottish shtick, with little jokes and flirts and asides (almost), as if poking fun at this silly story. Considering the nature of the play's opening, this seems a bit over the top but not incorrect - Dionysus is supposed to be controlled uncontrollability. I accepted this, and also the wonderful Afro-Caribbean music-stylings of the chorus (all black women). I accepted the stiffness of Pentheus and the madness of Agave. But the seduction of Pentheus by Cumming's Dionysus was not ... comprehensible. They did not make it real. They did not explain the hypnosis, the trance, the spell the god casts. Cumming was not playing it - he was mouthing the lines in some other handy spirit. It was not part and parcel of what we knew. The continuity was not here. The final scene, too, seemed abrupt and out of place - I keep hoping a Dionysus will create by his movements or attitudes the link that is difficult to find on the page. Cumming did not show it.

Damn Yankees is another sort of drama about confronting the supernatural. This Pentheus is a baseball fan who wants to win the pennant from the Yankees, and the demon who tempts him is an entirely comical devil - nothing threatening about him, even when he asks where all this will end, and Sean Hayes, in a low, suggestive murmur says, "Oh I think we both know the answer to that." The drag he gets to wear - far better than any outfit of any maenad - is a young, buff body, in this case Cheyenne Jackson's. No one is complaining. But Pentheus never mentions a wife (he had one, though - per Greek mythology, he was the great-grandfather of Oedipus), and Joe Hardy left one behind - middle-aged, perhaps, but sturdy. To counter her influence, the devil conjures - Lola! The 172-year-old vamp from tempting Providence (also the hometown of Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls - what does this mean?).

Lola is not meant to be seductive any more than Mr. Applegate is demonic. She's a put-on. She says she drives men to suicide and women to divorce, but do you believe her? Gwen Verdon wasn't so much a brilliant dancer (though she was that) - she was a great comic. She put Lola over because she seemed to believe every word of her allure while every gesture kidded the idea. This was a popular way to handle sex in those days - Marilyn Monroe did it, too. Later Raquel Welch and Ann-Margret got some of their funniest mileage from the idea. But Verdon was also no beauty, which made the whole story that much madder.

Jane Krakowski has not thought the role out; she has merely imitated Verdon's routines (as was clear when I got home and played them on youtube), and her imitation is lifeless though expert. Yes, she can dance. Yes, she can move the moves. Yes, she has a far prettier singing voice than Verdon ever had - as if that meant anything. Looking nothing like Verdon (aside from an even flatter chest), she goes for Marilyn lookalike, which suits her coloring but does not suit the part. She does not link with the other characters. She's doing a solo turn in a book show. There is far more chemistry between Cheyenne Jackson and Randi Graff than he ever shares with this Lola - and he's not the one holding back.

It'a a lacuna in the midst of an otherwise charming revival. Even Sean Hayes makes more in his parody of Gwen Verdon's seductive dance than Krakowski does.

Forgiveness: Fatih Akin's Edge of Heaven

2008-06-25T11:28:00.006-04:00

Cedric demanded that we go to Film Forum last night for the final showing of Fatih Akin's Edge of Heaven. I was of two minds, but it was my last chance to get together with Cedric before he goes to Istanbul next Sunday (I was there last October), and sell him my last 50 YTL note and my akbil (bus-tram-ferry token), and the movie, made by a German of Turkish parentage, is about the entwinement of the two nations in these times, which will work itself out still further this afternoon, I daresay, when they take each other on in the EuroCup - a game I hope to watch if I can find a pleasant restaurant showing it. (I watched Turkey beat Croatia last Friday, and Spain beat Italy, in the presence of los Reyes yet, on Sunday, both on penalty kicks - does anyone ever shoot a goal in this game?)

So we went to Edge of Heaven, and I have to say I found it touching, a gently rambling roundabout bit of storytelling about the conflict of generations, of lifestyles, of nationalities - and about reconciliation, and love that transcends these boundaries.

Romantic love, which is usually the metaphor in dramatic art for such reconciliation, would be the easy way out, but Akin does not take it. I give him points for that. The two sexual relationships among the six main characters are both unfortunate and lead to unnecessary and destructive violence. I gather that Akin's previous film, which concerned a "marriage of inconvenience," also did not take an easy, romantic way out, so that the love that did arise seemed more adult, had more important obstacles to conquer. I admire an artist who can make us understand love without using romance.

The film's tortuous, winding path takes us past many coincidences - a cute trick, but not an unrealistic one - and we do not learn, for instance, until the end that the first scene of the film (which is repeated) occurs chronologically after the rest. In the early part of the film, too, we see a character trying to teach a class on nationalism and revolution in a German college - ironically, he is a German-born Turk - and we see someone asleep in the classroom. When we see the image again, half the film later, we know a great deal more about both these characters (who never actually meet) and, among other ironies, we know the sleeper is an actual revolutionary. Akin, whatever his politics (and they clearly transcend nation and religion and other artificial boundaries in their sympathies), shows that the urge to political violence, however idealistic, can easily lead, as it does, to pointless violence: the gun that is one character's McGuffin accomplishes nothing useful and, indeed, slays her lover. But the Muslim fundamentalists who urge - no, COMMAND - a Turkish prostitute in Bremen to give up her immoral ways - are unsympathetic characters, though they do help the plot along. The segments of the movie are set apart by two scenes of a coffin being loaded on Turkish airlines - one a Turk being sent back to Turkey, the other a German being sent back to Germany. The murders are unintentional, but the culpability is general, as is the hideous remorse.

The climax for me comes when a Turk explains to a German the story of Bayram - the Muslim holiday that celebrates Ibrahim's attempt to follow God's will to sacrifice his son Ismail, and God's prevention of the sacrifice. This is the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, too, of course, and the German sees that, in wonderment. It forms a link between the two and a window between the cultures, and it also strengthens the resolve of both to love people they have been unable to forgive. The sacrifice of Isaac is not only a major theme for Jews (it recalls, perhaps, the moment when their forebears ceased to practice human, especially infant, sacrifice, which remained a custom among many of their Semitic relatives for centuries longer), it is also a major theme in Christian iconography (cf. the altar mosaics of San Vitale in Ravenna, where the sacrifice of Isaac is on one wall and the crucifixion on the opposite wall), where the sacrifice by Abraham of his son is held to prefigure the sacrifice of Jesus by his father. (But Isaac is not, of course, Abraham's "only-begotten son," as reports often have it - Ishmael is the first, and there are six younger sons, per Genesis.) This is recalled also, gorgeously, in Britten's Canticle No. 2, where Isaac is sung by a boy soprano - though I have heard it sung by David Daniels who, with Anthony Griffey at Carnegie Hall, turned it into a magical ten-minute S&M opera.

Somehow I find art that feels, that makes us feel, forgiveness between enemies (or uncomprehending adversaries) more touching than almost any other, as in the two supreme moments in Figaro: In Act III, when Marzellina and Susanna, who have been close to pulling each other's hair out, rush to each other's arms, and at the end of Act IV when the Countess pardons her husband. (Anything that undercuts that moment is an enemy I shall be loath to forgive and cannot comprehend.)

But back to the film: enhanced by six splendid performances (notably Hanna Schygulla, Fassbinder's muse, as a chilly German mother whose heart breaks and is renewed), the film is also radiant in its depiction of Bremen and Hamburg neighborhoods (hardly the best ones) and the sea and the steep, steep hills of the slums of Istanbul, and finally of Turkey's Black Sea coast. None of these shots are of places a Tourist Board would want you to notice, or think about when considering travel plans, but all of them are fresh, exciting, stimulating, wonderful hints of the countries beyond. And as in the movie Hamam, Istanbul becomes a symbol of renewal, of eternal rebirth, of acceptance, of the glorious mixture of different cultures.

Hamlet in the Park

2008-06-12T02:05:00.002-04:00

The Hamlet in Central Park has not opened yet, so it is fairly easy to get in. Helps, no doubt, that the cast is less glittery than sometimes in the Park - and glittery does not always mean the best acting. My last Hamlet in the Park (30 years ago?) was Stacy Keach (unaccountably omitted from the program on past Danes in the program), who was good but sometimes perverse in his line readings (in a rather charming way), and who furthermore was rained out. (There was lightning and thunder last Saturday, too, but not a drop of rain.)

The best part of that ancient performance was Barnard Hughes, the finest of all possible Poloniuses (Polonii?). Ah, how he read that letter! He was so funny I was almost glad to have to leave before he got skewered. This time I waited eagerly to see how Sam Waterston would do the letter - well, Sam is no Barnard, and that's a fact. He brought in Ophelia (Lauren Ambrose) and obliged this shy girl to read the letter herself. I can't imagine her doing this, and neither could Shakespeare. The point of doing it is that no one ever has done it this way; that it makes no sense matters not to Oskar Eustis. Mr. Eustis - like so many directors of classical plays and opera and other well-known pieces nowadays - seems to feel that he has not done his job unless he's done something utterly perverse that no one else has thought of. There is no point to this. This tendency (there are other instances of it) mars a generally fine production with some generally fine moments and perhaps the best Hamlet I've ever seen undertake the part.

This is Michael Stuhlbarg, who is 39 (the oldest NYSF Hamlet ever), and in many other ways does not seem ... typical casting. He is shorter (and used to be much stouter) than most of the cast (and nearly all the population of Denmark). He is a tenor Hamlet - his voice pipes high above the others - and we are used to baritones in the part (at least in Ambrose Thomas's opera). But as I noticed 18 years ago (was it?) when he played the nothing part of the Clown in A Winter's Tale and completely stole his scenes from every other character, Stuhlbarg knows how to speak Shakespearean verse, getting the laughs but also the intent of every word and play on words. Never once did a line of verse pass by as words, words, words - it was all pointed, all defined for us - he brought us along on his outrageous outing. I was not utterly convinced by his melancholy at the beginning of the play, though I was by his antic anger bursting out in the throneroom scene. Later, when he went mad, he was very good - for one thing, genuinely funny - in love with his wordplay and the games he wove (for us) over the heads of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius and Claudius. (Only Gertrude seemed to move him to make sense, though you can't say he was respectful about this.) Especially fine in these scenes was his costume - a demented combination of an old royal uniform and pants rolled to the knee above bare feet. This made sense of his carrying a sword in a kingdom obviously set in 2008.

The scenes where I thought he overdid it - overencouraged by Eustis, I fear - were the play scene, when he flirts lewdly with an uncomfortable Ophelia. He was more than casually rude to her - he ground her nose in it, waggling his crotch in her face. Unless he really was mad, or really hated her, this made no sense - he later claims to have loved her - there is no way he could inflict this public humiliation on the least malicious of his enemies (if she must be that) and really care for her. It seemed a gratuitous sexual pose.

Again, in the bedroom scene, when his threats to his mother (a gracious but not too distinctive Margaret Colin) led him to assault her, climbing up between her legs - Shakespeare has her fear murder, but rape seems far more likely, and it does not seem necessary - the point has been made, it need not be driven home. In any case it is interrupted by the entrance of the Ghost (Jay O. Sanders, also the excellent Player King and Gravedigger), not in armor (as before, and in other Hamlets) but in his pajamas, wearily, as Hamlet might be used to seeing him in this his parents' bed on other occasions when he may have been rough-housing with Mama.

That was a Eustis touch I liked. So was having Ophelia (gone punk, which was fine for Ambrose but not right for the play) re-enter, mad, with a cache of stones that she identifies as flowers, going about knocking people on the head with them. At first I liked the pent-up aggression of this Ophelia (who had been so waiflike before), but it doesn't fit with her flowery death that follows soon after. And if she cuts her hair short, how does it grow again by her funeral?

Another Hamlet touch I liked: like everyone, he can't tell Rosencrantz from Guildenstern (the usual laughs; they both wore bowlers), but he couldn't remember Francesco or Bernardo's name either, and had some trouble with Horatio's name. Message: He's not a politician! He's dwelling within too much. He's not doing all this to make FRIENDS.

Andre Braugher was a politician, but he is not an expansive Claudius (my first was Henry da Silva - in the Park, to the dreadful Hamlet of Alfred Ryder - you win some, you lose some); Braugher seems to keep his thoughts to himself, to create no persona to rule Denmark. He lacked a spark, a reason his subjects elected him over Hamlet in the first place.

It seems to me that Shakespeare has set up all the other likely fellows in the play so that we can compare them to Hamlet, see why the dopey world prefers to admire them, and understand why in fact none of them are fit to wipe his spittle. They are all decisive - and Hamlet is not. The message is: Decisive misses too much, is too hasty, rushes in where meditation would be better. Thus Horatio is a cipher (but not so bad he must be killed by Fortinbras upon usurping the throne - another Eustis touch - I object, because Horatio must live on to tell us Hamlet's story); Fortinbras is a warlike brute; Claudius a murderer; and Laertes a hothead and a hypocrite. Usually.

David Harbour seemed too burly, too physically much to be the gallivanting fencer who tries to keep his sister away from the prince. He wept too much (though Stuhlbarg made us hear the references to tears in the speeches that justified this). A role that always seems too much the playwright's convenience, seemed here too much the director's.

But Stuhlbarg speaks verse beautifully and (on one of those ghastly humid nights too!) was full of energy, dashing around the stage and bouncing through the part, delighting in every figure of speech, making them mean things, playing with those meanings, playing with the syllables, a feast of gorgeous language. He may or may not fear ghosts, the Devil, murderers, false friends, love - but he was absolutely unafraid of the longest and toughest role in English-speaking theater. Bravo.

Catch him!

Aristophanes is still dead

2008-06-06T14:03:00.004-04:00

Old Comedy, recommended by New York’s most literate critic, Michael Feingold in the Voice(who seems to have loved it because it is full of esoteric references, all of which he got), is David Herskovits (and Target Margin Theater) and David Greenspan’s rework of Aristophanes’ Frogs.

I’ve seen many attempts to revive Aristophanes, and the only successful one was Al Carmines’s Peace 40 years ago, which kept the bare bones of the plot and made an Al Carmines musical of the rest. (Franz Schubert tried to do something like this with Lysistrata. But he lacked Al C's pissass pizzazz.)

Old Comedy was particularly bad. Like all attempts at Frogs, they had no idea what to do with the playwrights’ contest, so it was a mere bore, incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with the playwrights of the fifth century B.C.E. I got all the esoteric jokes, every one of the mythological and dramaturgical references, all the Tartarean in-jabs that no one else seemed to know – but none of them, none of them, were funny. And I agreed with all the political humor, attacks on Bush, Cheney, Iraq, et al. – but none of them were new. (Several were as old as Aristophanes.) The scene with Charon was good, because he was portrayed by Tina Shepard, a good actress, but the rest, though farcical and knockabout and learned as all heck, didn’t draw a giggle or a smirk from those of us who stayed. (The actors bade a cheery farewell to the first walkers-out – in later scenes, they did not do so – it must be depressing.) So I’m annoyed with Michael F and shall tell him so. Keep your erudition to your salon conversation.

And it wasn't just the script, you know - there was so much cutting we had no chance to learn, from interaction, who the characters were - you knew or you didn't know - and it didn't make any difference which. If the show had been slower, and given us more shtick to let us meet Dionysus and his slave and Herakles to boot, we might have had time to find their shenanigans funny.

The one moment when the show came alive was the Frogs' Chorus and invocation of Iacchos (footnoted), when there was an energy present, a liveness painfully absent from everything else on stage.

Aristophanes on the modern stage is a dead letter, sure ruin where the tragedies can at least be funny. Pointed sketch humor does not travel through eons. Edith Hamilton compared Aristophanes's anarchic wit to Gilbert's, but Gilbert had Sullivan; Aristophanes needs one. Can we send someone down to the Underworld to bring back Al Carmines, perhaps? (In any case, neither Aristophanes nor anyone else has any use for David Greenspan.)

Playwrights Who Make Us Squirm

2008-06-06T13:45:00.003-04:00

Just saw the revival of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls at the Biltmore – the play that famously begins with a drunken dinner party (in 1982) for a “modern woman,” Marlene, whose six voluble guests, all of them legendary or anyway historical, include Pope Joan, patient Griselda, and an imperial concubine from 14th-century Japan. Only later, in the more naturalistic scenes (Marlene has just been promoted – over a man! – who has a heart attack in consequence – to a managerial position at a head-hunting firm), did I realize what Churchill was up to. Like me, she reads a great deal of history and spends a great deal of time chatting with folks long dead, especially when traveling in their former haunts. And as the play plays out, and you see what Marlene’s rise to the “top” has cost her, and why she has been willing to pay (and has tried to ignore the price), you understand why she chose those particular “top girls” for her celebratory dinner. (In real-time probably a solitary stinking-drunk-night.)

In fact Marlene has no friends she dares confide in, rely on, let go in front of – so she must bring them in from the past, dead (even imaginary) ladies who cannot betray her or rival her for the attention of any men present. (Men barely count at all in her world – they’re just work-mates or playmates.) By the conclusion, when melodramatic if predictable ancient secrets have been unearthed, you understand Marlene's life, the price she has had to pay for success that makes her unhappy, lonely, and drunk, and the ghastliness of the alternatives she would probably have faced had she made other choices.

This is a bit of a trial, I infer (from comments on the NYTimes review), for audiences expecting an ordinary drama – many of them left before the end last Tuesday. It’s also a tour de force for seven actresses (in 15 parts), which no doubt accounts for its popularity with producers and performers. I found the “employment interview” scenes uncomfortable to sit through – brought back the agonies of my own job-seeking when I did not want the jobs on offer, could not imagine what I did want.

Long live playwrights unafraid to make us squirm, eh?

And the acting was wonderful, most notably Elizabeth Marvel (Marlene), Mary Catherine Garrison (as an itchy kid and a chippie trying for a job), Mary Beth Hurt, Jennifer Ikeda as an employment "counselor" who accidentally talks too much of her own empty life, belying her delicious smile, Martha Plimpton as another itchy kid and as drunken Pope Joan, Ann Reeder as a cheerfully ruthless employment "counselor", and Marisa Tomei as Marlene's bitter sister - she was not good, however, with the improbably Scottish accent of a Victorian traveler, and in fact accents are a problem throughout, though aside from Tomei's Scot, they did not prevent me finding the machine fascinating.

The Sound and the Fury at Elevator Repair Service

2008-05-12T01:20:00.007-04:00

The idea of making a theater piece out of Faulkner's most difficult novel sounds outlandish, although in fact it was made (at least, the title was) into a very bad Hollywood movie with Joanne Woodward and Yul Brynner (throwing out the plot of the novel, though, as Hollywood usually did with Faulkner). Furthermore, I myself used to dream myself to sleep (like Benjy seeing "shapes") imagining a turgid modern vaguely atonal opera on the subject to be staged at the City Opera with a set of a mansion built around a staircase mounted on a turntable, so Dilsey (contralto) could haul herself up while Caroline (mezzo) stood at the top muttering, "Dilsey! Dilsey! Dilsey!" at interminable length - aren't you glad you all missed that? Caddy (soprano) sang a lovely serenade to Benjy (tenor, but with only two notes, a wordless wail).

When the Times gave a rave review to the Elevator Repair Service's staging of the first of the "days" of Faulkner's novel, I raced over to New York Theater Workshop to grab a ticket, and put off reading Michael Feingold's review, which is just as well as he panned it. And I went and the performances are amazing, and the book came back to me (which is more amazing), and the many friends of mine who happened to be there were impressed (though they found it a bit long), but the thing I cannot quite figure out is how comprehensible the story would be to anyone who has not read Faulkner.

I fell in love with Faulkner in that gray year when I had not quite graduated after four years at Columbia and was trying to decide if graduate school made sense. I spent a lot of time reading. My parents had sold the old homestead, and I felt torn up at the roots. I read Sartoris, and enjoyed its view of a Gothic, past-focused society that could hardly have been more different from the one in which I had grown up, and then I read The Sound and the Fury, and then lots of commentaries on it, and then - in the course of a year - every other work of prose Faulkner ever published, except A Fable, which is unreadable. (I often met other Faulkner fiends back then; almost every one of them confessed to stymie in the face of A Fable. A Fable, with its Christ symbolism set in World War I trenches, was the result of winning the Nobel Prize.)

For years I said Faulkner was my favorite American novelist. (All my Southern friends glared and said, "You only like him because he's exotic to you. It's all real to us." I loved McCullers and O'Connor and Walker Percy too.) Then one day it occurred to me that I'd never REread any of these books.

Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury right after two events that shaped his life: he married the racy divorcee he'd been pining for since they were kids together, and he read Ulysses. Both of these things, and his Southern heritage, somehow clicked. He'd already invented Yoknapatawpha County in Sartoris; now he let it take him places like a barnstorming biplane. This had a disastrous influence, in its turn, on a boy like me, already all too inclined to overwrite and elaborate and parenthesize. (Does anyone still read Faulkner? Except when assigned?)

Well, unread for thirty years or not, it all came back to me: a terribly dysfunctional family (plus Negro retainers) in the fading turn-of-the-century South.

For those who might be going (and I do recommend it - for that matter, I recommend the book, too), Jason Compson has married the neurasthenic passive-aggressive Caroline Bascomb. She invalids herself to life while he drinks himself to death. They have four children and a square mile of plantation property that will eventually be sold and become a golf course. It is 1898. (But it's also 1928 and 1911.) The couple have four children, plus a family of black servants. The three chapters of the book are told (stream of conscious) by the three Compson sons; the fourth chapter is omniscient. The focus of the book is the Compsons' only daughter, Caddy (Candace), who represents the South: she is beautiful, high-spirited, affectionate, kindly - and impure. Her sexuality is stronger than she is, and this emasculates the men around her, who think it is their job to protect her, as an aspect of Southern Honor, all they have left since they lost their money during the war and reconstruction.

Quentin, the eldest son, inherits all his father's failings - he's an ineffectual intellectual, and his inability to preserve his sister from dishonor drives him to suicide. (He's even ineffective at that - Faulkner brought him back to narrate Absalom, Absalom, his most operatic novel, the one with both incest and miscegenation.) His last day occupies Chapter Two. Chapter One is given to Benjy, the youngest child, who is autistic or something of that sort - unable to speak, or think, unaware of time and inclined to jump back and forth around it - he adores Caddy and the housekeeper, Dilsey, and is regarded as a family disgrace by his mother. His recollection of Caddy as a child climbing a tree and getting her drawers filthy was the image that started Faulkner writing. Dirty drawers stand for sex. Oh, you got that, did you? The play dramatizes - and includes a full reading of - Chapter One. The p.o.v. moves, and different actors play different characters with complete fluency and identification - and I always found them not merely convincing but easy to figure out, as they changed gender and race and age and accent with the same fluidity as their text.

Chapter Three belongs to Jason IV, the third child and second son, the one who is neither an Old Southern Gentleman nor an Idiot, but who attempts to belong to the new, ugly, racist but successful South - and who fails at that, even though he has no heart and loves no one but himself, which Faulkner thought the prerequisites of survival in the ugly new world. In this section we learn that he has blackmailed his sister, gelded his idiot brother, and defrauded his sister's illegitimate child - who has the last laugh, however.

In Chapter Four, Dilsey takes Benjy to her church - which is a black church, of course, but is used to her bringing him along. (No one in the white family believes in any sort of God.) It is Easter Sunday - Chapter One was Good Friday, Three was Holy Saturday, Two was the day of Quentin's suicide 17 years before. And we only now find out that the night before, young Quentin (Caddy's daughter) has broken into her uncle Jason's room, stolen his life savings, and run off with a traveling salesman. The family is ruined; the Southern traditions are dead or debased; the South has not risen again, but Christ has - as an idiot howling at a black church.

When last heard of (in a 1945 epilogue) Caddy had become the mistress of some Nazi bigwig. I used to assume she ended her life as an apparatchik in the DDR. The family estate, of course, has become a golf course - allowing Benjy to scream every time one of the golfers calls, "Caddy!" and he remembers everything.

So the Old South is dead except for writing up stories, which Faulkner had just gotten started doing - and then he inspired Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Donoso, Cortazar, Vargas Llosa, Amado, Rushdie and Pamuk. So you can't say it didn't lead to anything constructive.

David et Jonathas: What were they smoking?

2008-05-11T16:51:00.002-04:00

American Opera Theater is the grandiloquent name of a Washington, D.C.-based semi-professional (but, rather, post-student) company that has just brought its production of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's 1688 work David et Jonathas to the magnificent (but, for something like this, far too large) opera house of BAM to make the sort of New York debut that makes the opera lover want to skip a few seasons and catch them in five or six years when they've got their priorities on straight.

Musically, however, it was a memorable occasion.

Tim Nelson, the 28-year-old master(in his own) mind who runs the company, seems to have left other details in incompetent hands while he went his own artistic way. Both halves of the show, in front and behind the footlights, made one doubt the wisdom of this decision.

Surtitles, for instance. I've often deplored surtitles, but for a work whose story is unfamiliar (and is confusing in any case, since the music was intended for performance between great chunks of spoken text that no longer exist and might have cleared a few things up about the story - next time you attend Follies, say, try to imagine what the story is from the songs by themselves) surtitles are probably the best way to go. The A.O.T. thought them too expensive. Okay, the next choice would be a clear synopsis, given out well before the curtain - but no, we arrived to learn (after an interminable wait for the ONE person giving out will-call tickets) that there were no programs or synopses available. (They turned up at intermission, but there was no guarantee of that.) Another notion would be to costume the players appropriately, so at least we knew who they were. It wasn't until David was mortally wounded in Act IV (or was it Act V) that I realized he was actually Jonathas, and that David was the other guy. Hey, backstage: one of these boys is a prince, the other a shepherd - SOME visual differentiation is possible.

And I've read the Book of Samuel, and I fail to see ANY homoerotic resonance in this story whatsoever. The highly heterosexed David's love for Jonathan (also married with children) is not Young Boys of Old Canaan down at the Adonis on "cut" night; when David says he found Jonathan's love "surpassing that of women," he doesn't mean the sex was hotter, he means male bonding was a more intense thrill for him than getting off with his harem and dozens of wives (including Jonathan's sister).

Also: I realize this is a fairly youthful work, but there was nothing in the score that suggested Charpentier would someday produce "Depuis le Jour" in Louise a mere 200 years later.

But I stayed. I stayed and, once Saul had rubbed blood on his (not uninteresting) chest -- better developed than his voice, and flatter too -- and the buxom girls playing Hebrew warriors (or were they Philistines?) had waved flags around in a tradition borrowed from the Met's worst impulses, TO EVERYONE'S SURRPISE the music was just lovely. Several of the singers (notably David - I mean Jonathan - well the one who was sung by boyish but female Rebecca Duren - and also a blonde in the chorus, I think Emily Noël) were quite delicious upon the ear, and if one closed one's eyes (as was often necessitated by glaring lights and fulsome smoke), two and a half hours of blissful Charpentier fell happily upon the senses and one could almost believe it was Les Arts Florissants on a (virtual) off night.

I mean it was good; it was an enjoyable concert. What the story was about (not much of the Book of Samuel) and what the text was about and most of all what the staging was about and what the company producers thought they were doing were never clear, amateurish at the most charitable estimation, but it was a most enjoyable concert, a lovely evening of music from the golden era of Louis le Grand.

I wish Tim Nelson's company well and respectfully suggest they begin by getting rid of Tim Nelson.

Dream: Nilsson explains her Norma

2008-05-07T09:19:00.002-04:00

Dream:
I am in a small Swiss café after a hard day sightseeing landscapes that (appropriately) resemble the oeuvre of Paul Klee, and as I scan the menu for anything affordable (snails, perhaps ... no, one snail ... welcome to Switzerland), I realize the woman at the next table, hiding behind dark glasses, is Birgit Nilsson. She catches me looking at her. I say, "I've read your book and I know you don't like stalkers, but I'm just the biggest fan of yours ..." Graciously, she invites me to join her.

In a café with Birgit Nilsson! The sky's the limit! Three snails! And dunkelweisen to wash them down.

Nilsson reminisces. She especially recalls her aborted desire to record Norma with Franco Corelli (though he'd already done it with Callas, of course). And suddenly, join with me now in those thrilling days of yesteryear, we are in her hillside villa in the mountains outside Zurich, and the record company, frantic, is threatening law suits, and Corelli is sobbing and hysterical all over the landscape, and Nilsson in the middle is very calmly explaining that she thought she could sing it, but on closer attention to the score realizes this is out of the question. And we circle - besuited lawyers, belawyed suits, Corelli, Nilsson, her husband, his wife, Karajan maybe (no; Serafin), Christa Ludwig (the proposed Adalgisa - of course, she'd sung it with Callas), Tito Gobbi (what was he doing there?), Jon Vickers (who was not singing Pollione if Corelli was, but my subconscious is not easily explained), and me, all of us circling an enormous tree whose flowers (black, gray, brown, maroon, cobalt blue) resemble ribbons tied into flower-shaped knots) and we are circling and chanting as if celebrating some pagan rite, which perhaps explains what I am doing here, and then we all go into the house for a very Swiss sort of breakfast with scones and muesli and rashers of trimmed bacon, and akvavit in the coffee, and the execs simply do not understand Nilsson's reasoning and Corelli does but he's more upset about the damage her decision will make on his own career and the sun rises over the pure white modernist lines of the rather unattractive chalet ...

In the old days, someone would have asked me to sing opposite Nilsson (or maybe even instead of Nilsson), but my subconscious seems to have figured out, over the years, that I am not going out on stage, don't even hint it.

Baltic Overtures! or, A Little Knight Music

2008-05-06T21:39:00.002-04:00

I've been fond of Sondheim shows ever since A Little Night Music (how did I ignore Follies and Company for so long? Was I blind -- or just heterosexual? A little of both), and of Bergman films even longer, I got to wondering: why did Bergman's blithest film strike mordant Steve's gong? (And why did he use so few of its wonderful lines? Well, IB probably insisted the entire screenplay be off-limits.)

I mean, so many other of Bergman's flicks seem to much likelier Sondheimerie.

So herewith -- and I submit for your consideration and any parodies you care to add -- and with apologies because I haven't seen the movie in thirty-five years and have no doubt forgotten some of it --

BALTIC OVERTURES, or A Little Knight Music
An operetta by S----- S-------- based on The Seventh Seal by I------ B-------

Suggested casting:
Death: John Cullum
Knight: Raul Esparza
Squire: Mandy Patinkin
Aging Actor: Marc Kudisch
Joseph: David Hyde Pierce
Mary: Kristin Chenoweth
Barmaid: Bernadette Peters (or Emily Anderson)
Witch: Idina Menzel (or Faith Prince)
Knight's Lady: Marin Mazzie

Songs to include (go ahead -- make a suggestion):

1. No Place Like Sweden (Home from the Crusades) (It Takes Two)
2. Chess Moves (in the form of haiku) (or perhaps Come Play With Me)
3. The Glamorous Life (aging actor's song)
4. There Are Angels in the Sky (recording your sins, condemning you to Hell) -- this could be sung in antiphon with It's Hot Down There
5. Waiting Around for the Guy Upstairs (Death explains)
6. Inquisition Tonight
7. Witch raps as she is burned at the stake -- but that's another story never mind let's forget about it
8. A Weekend in the Plague Ward (big Act I finale)
9. The Sun Sinks Low - as Low as It's Going to Go - no, really
10. Can That Boy Svenska
11. Ablutions -- what happened to them?
12. It's Called a Cap-a-pie
13. Getting Buried Today (finale ultimo)

An Opera for Beltane

2008-05-04T15:56:00.001-04:00

I suppose I should have been spending this lovely Beltane Sunday out in the woods a-conjuring summer in, but WWUH (University of West Hartford) has a Sunday afternoon opera program with a sweet tooth for unusual works, and their choice today was the new Naxos 8669 recording (from a 1996 Seattle Symphony concert - what took 'em so long?) of a genuine May Day opera, Howard Hanson's 1934 Merry Mount, libretto taken from a Hawthorne short story (but Hawthorne unaccountably omitted the extensive witches' sabbath-devil's orgy sequence from his version).

I remember when Hanson, who ran the Eastman School in Rochester for forty years, grumbled at salutes to 80-year-old Aaron Copland as the "grand old man of American music," that Copland wasn't old enough for this distinction and Hanson was. In any case, both are dead now, and Hanson's music is far from well known, as he lacked the jazz inflections and winning populist emotions that kept Copland up top. On the other hand, Copland never composed an opera for the Met, and Hanson did. I first discovered this years ago when my grandmother gave me her collection of old librettos - her husband (who died in 1935) having had a sweet tooth for opera. The Met, in Gatti-Casazza's day, felt a certain commitment to American music, and every year or two there was another world premiere - although not one of the works so created (unless you count Puccini's California Gold Rush drama, La Fanciulla del West) endured more than a season or two, and none are remembered today: Peter Ibbetson, Mona, The King's Henchman, Shanewis, The Great God Brown. With all their faults, these stylish works were a damn sight better operas than such Met commissions as The Last Savage and The Great Gatsby and An American Tragedy and The Voyage. (But none of them is half as good as Fanciulla.) (This leaves Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra in some middling limbo. Anyway, rep standards they have never become.)

Merry Mount is an expert score, melodious in a late-romantic but pre-Schoenberg style. Its resemblance to movie scores (the field into which the more populist American and European composers were moving with a vengeance at the time of its premiere) is neither accidental nor displeasing. The vocal lines are not extreme enough to put it out of the range of revival, though the enormous cast may be. (At least we don't have excessive unsingable high notes, often fallen back on by post-tonal composers to express extreme emotion because they have given up all other musical methods of expressing it - melody used to accomplish this, remember?)

The centerpiece of the opera, for pagan music-lovers, is the great witches' sabbath that ends Act II, a wonderfully sensuous (not merely discordant) scene in which a Puritan minister, tempted by the flesh (in particular the flesh of a lovely Cavalier aristocrat, Lady Marigold Sandys, whom he identifies with the goddess Ashtoreth), falls utterly and gives himself up to demonic allegiance. What with religious hypocrisy running rampant in the U.S. these days, such a scene might with profit (prophet?) be presented by regional opera companies fed up with the lack of controversy under which they are forced to labor. Anyway, it's great fun for a pagan, and I'd love to see it staged somewhere. True, American witches may have problems with the final scene, in which local Indians attack the Puritan village, burn it to the ground, and scalp a couple of folks before being driven off.

Heartily recommended. (Why doesn't Botstein put this on?)

Seraglio: Some comments and background

2008-05-01T13:46:00.002-04:00

1) As you may have noticed at last night's performance of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio at the Met, the role of Konstanze is unsingable, at least in the house the size of the Met.

2) Joseph II's mother, Maria Theresa, had just died in 1780, and partly in celebration of the fact that he now had unbridled control over her hereditary lands (Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, Belgium, Lombardy, etc.), Joseph propounded the Edict of Toleration of 1781 (or was it 1782?), in which all loyal subjects might practice their religions in private, including Protestants, the Orthodox, Jews and Muslims. This was brand new -- no European state since the pagan Roman Empire had ever had such a law -- among other things, the Pope (who in those days seldom left Rome) came to Austria to beg Joseph to rescind the law -- he paid no attention. (Joseph also closed all monasteries and convents in his domains unless they were "useful," that is, if they ran hospitals or schools. They're still mad at him in Austria for this.)

Mozart's attitude towards a sublime equality of religious faiths, which was obviously personal since he then joined the Freemasons and wrote The Magic Flute (after Joseph's death), which share this philosophy. Seraglio thus follows not only Mozart's personal beliefs but the current political line.

3) Joseph was trying to hold his hereditary lands together by playing the German cultural nationalism card. He had founded a national theater in Vienna, and the finest actors and playwrights in Germany took part in it; his national opera was an attempt along the same lines, to free Germany from Italian and French cultural superiority. The opera house, however, was a failure - the time was not ripe - and Seraglio, its last premiere, was its only success. When Joseph said "a monstrous lot of notes," he meant it wasn't a simple ballad opera on the lines of The Beggars' Opera (imported from London, and a great hit all over Germany), but had these Italianate flowing lines for Konstanze and Belmonte that could only be sung by very accomplished Italian-trained singers.

He was right.

4) This did not prevent the opera from being Mozart's most popular work in his lifetime, performed all over the Empire. (It didn't reach Italy till 1956. Callas sang the premiere.)

5) Its moralism and its noble Muslim pasha have made Seraglio the most popular opera (with Aida) in non-Christian opera houses. It is performed every year in the Seraglio of the Topkapi palace in Istanbul. But its philosophy is a very 18th-century Rights-of-Man pantheistic multiculturalism. I certainly see it as a splendid counterargument to the "all Muslims are hateful and out to get us" attitude common in this country nowadays (and in Europe too).

6) The quartet at the end of Act II is the first conversational concerted passage in opera that does not interrupt the action and in which all the characters sing characteristically, blending their personalities to advance the drama. It is from this (and the quartet in Idomeneo) that the ensembles of Figaro spring, and with them all of 19th-century opera.

Reading Proust

2008-04-24T19:09:00.011-04:00

(with apologies to Jonathan Larson but not many)

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred pages –
Five hundred twenty-five bonny mots introduced –
Five hundred twenty-five thousand well-perused pages –
How do you measure the reading of Proust?

Five hundred twenty-five thousand mild fits of asthma –
Five hundred twenty-five social axes to grind –
Five hundred twenty-five thousand strolls in the country –
How do you measure the time of the mind?

In snubs –
In snobs –
In snarls –
In snarky artists –
In ma-
deleines
you dip in your tea –
In conversations
And railway stations
And invitations
To someone’s for tea,
In beaches –
And leeches –
And nouveaux reaches –
And finding some new artist to be.

What about lo-ove? (Selfish old love)
What about lo-ove? (It’s never requited)
What about lo-ove? (Sleep to forget it)
What about lo-ove? Art comes from love.

Five hundred twenty-five uncompleted sonatas,
Five hundred twenty-five girls in Albertine’s bed,
Five hundred twenty-five thousand duchesses’ parties –
How do you know when your Proust has been read?

Five hundred twenty-five thousand lavender curtains –
Five hundred twenty-five thoughts you realize at last –
Five hundred twenty-five thousand cattleya orchids –
How do you know you’ve recaptured the past?

Last Ballo - Vargas as Gustav (finally)

2008-04-24T02:27:00.005-04:00

Hearing that Sal Licitra, whom I don't much like, had pulled out of the opera tonight, and would be replaced by Ramon Vargas, whom I do like, and who has sung the role of Riccardo/Gustav III all over the world BUT NOT HERE, I biked up to the Met for Ballo in maschera, got a $20 ticket for $20 (Row X, side) at the door, and - bonus! - a guy with a parterre box seat to the May 14 First Emperor sold it to me for $50. My friend Jack, who was there, referred to the tenor in absentia as “La Creatura.” Cute, eh? And Jack isn’t even gay. (I can’t wait to spring it on La Cieca.)

Act I was pretty bad – no one was singing well but Steffi Blythe, who got a thunderous ovation. Real DARK low notes. Vargas sounded dry, but he was enjoying himself, romping around the stage, doing ooga-booga gestures to make fun of Ulrica’s predictions of his imminent demise, etc. Dmitri Hvorostovsky was a stick. Ofelia Sala, though a bit busty for it, was rather more boyish (at least tomboyish) than most Oscars in this production, who are frankly femmefemmefemme.

Act II was an improvement – Angela M. Brown was not good in the aria, but warmed up in the all-for-love duet, and Vargas was sounding more like himself. Dmitri H still unbending stiff. Good work from Schowalter & Tian as Amos & Andy (the only half-breed Indian-Africans with an ancestral castle in Massachusetts Bay).

I figured I’d stick around to see if Vargas could pull off his Act III aria, then dash. To my surprise, everyone was kind of on board. Dmitri was almost acting, sang a decent Eri tu (though huffing and puffing between phrases, as he always does when singing Verdi), and Brown’s Morro, ma prima was genuinely good Verdi singing. She’s just not reliable or consistent is my complaint. Maybe there’s a real Verdi soprano in there, but who can tell?

The aria was Vargas in clover, the best singing all night, real Verdi-ismo, beautifully phrased, ardent, soaring, filled the house. My only Bravo. (No; I did it again for his curtain call.) So I decided what the hell, I’d stay for the final duet. Sure enough, he and Brown were in tip-top form. That silly overblown production almost concealed it, but … there they were. I wanted to say, as if I were the Emperor, “All right, now you’re UP for it, let’s have Act I all over again.” But no – for one thing, Steffi had already gone home.

Salute to Larry Hart

2008-04-23T01:39:00.004-04:00

Larry Hart is in no need of an assist from me. He's in clover, enviable in almost any songwriter who didn't compose tunes who has been dead 65 years.

Tunesmiths, after all, can make you hum even if you forget the lyrics; Larry Hart's lyrics can be hummed. Think of, say, "Mountain Greenery": "We could find no keener re-treat from life's machinery than our mountain greenery home" or, from "Blue Room": "You sew your trousseau and Robinson Crusoe is not more far from worldly cares than our little blue room way upstairs." Rodgers wrote the melodies first, and then Hart would put the rhymes on the important notes.

I'm always discovering Rodgers & Hart songs I had not encountered previously (or not memorably), and I'm always discovering something else glorious about his placement of a word or a line or a witticism where one did not expect it. I often acquire CDs of Rodgers & Hart specialists (all female, hmm), and can recommend or discourage you: Ella Fitzgerald (A, as always - and she sings the verses); Barbara Cook (B - a trifle jejune - she was still in her 30s - but often affecting); Flicka von Stade (C - it's not her voice that is operatic overblown, it's John McGlinn's orchestrations - still, she does a lovely mix of standards and oddities); Eileen Farrell (B - I know it's a classic, and you'll hate me for this, but I find her a little overbearing in places, such as "Can't You Do A Friend A Favor" - she does a lovely "You're Nearer" though); and Dawn Upshaw (A - she has splendid Broadway chops and, now that she is no longer an opera star, really should be doing operettas on Broadway ... except, oops, it's no longer the 1930s or even the 1950s, is it? - anyway, her "Thou Swell" with David Garrison and "Why Can't I?" with Audra would alone be worth the price). Lee Wiley did half a dozen R&H sides, mostly unusual stuff - all of it perfect - but especially "A Ship Without A Sail" and "You Took Advantage Of Me."

Elsewhither, having recently had access to most of the Ben Bagley collections and their incredible horde of treasures (far too many of them flustered with damned electric piano arrangements, but NOT ALL), I was knocked all of a heap by Dorothy Loudon's "If I Were You" (a typical Larry Hart joke song based on a feeling of being unloved - cf. Von Stade's overblown version), Blossom Dearie's "A Lady Must Live" and "I Can Do Wonders With You"), and there's a wonderful duet called "Try Again Tomorrow."

Currently my favorite R&H songs (this changes a lot) are: "Wait Till You See Her" (from By Jupiter), "You Have Cast Your Shadow On The Sea" (from the flawless score of The Boys from Syracuse), "I Wish I Were In Love Again" (from the almost flawless score of Babes in Arms), "Way Out West on West End Avenue" (ditto), "It Never Entered My Mind" (Higher & Higher - how can such a perfect song come from a flop?), "This Is My Night To Howl" (Connecticut Yankee, which also produced "Thou Swell," "My Heart Stood Still," and "Can't You Do A Friend A Favor"), "You're Nearer," "Like A Ship Without A Sail," "Why Can't I?", "Mountain Greenery" and "Too Good for the Average Man" (which is probably my motto for the whole Hart oeuvre). I've always wanted to sing "Give It Back To The Indians" at a pagan gathering, ideally when my friend Thundercloud, the Lakota shaman of Seattle, was present. Major un-PC.

And I don't just like Larry for things like:
"I like a prize fight that isn't a fake/ I like the rowing on Central Park Lake/ I go to opera and stay wide awake" or (same song, but it's my motto:)
"I'm all alone when I lower my lamp" - ooh, can't you feel those L's hissing?

or "You have what I lack myself/ Now I even have to scratch my back myself"
(which I have filked to: "Since you've gone I kick myself/ Now I even have to suck my dick myself")

or "Only my book in bed/ Knows how I look in bed/ I only mean to imply/ Everybody has someone - why can't I?
"If love means merriment/ I should experiment/ With an electrical guy/ Even old maids find a burglar - why can't I?"

or "The shortest day of the year has the longest night of the year, and the longest night is the shortest night with you"

or even "When he talks he is seeking/ Words to get off his chest/ Horizontally speaking/ He's at his very best"

- what I really love are the lines that hold back on the punchline till the last line or the last word.

"Wait Till You See Her" - a perfect love song (and Larry cleverly put the pronouns where they would not rhyme, so it can be sung about a "him" or a "her" with equal grace) - and an epigram: Wait Till You See Her/Him ... followed by all the amazing comparisons you could like, but ending: When you see her/him ... you won't believe your eyes."

or "He Was Too Good To Me," about a breakup, listing all the things he did for her, and ending, "It's only natural I'm blue? ... He was too good ... to be true."

That is to say: Hart (like all the greatest American lyricists, down to the last of the noble line, Mr. Sondheim and the late Mr. Ebb) could take a demotic cliché hanging on the line out to dry and turn it into a witticism, a musical witticism: spare, elegant, poetic but not highfalutin, the poesy of the man and woman in the street. The man and woman dancing in the street.

Satyagraha

2008-04-20T22:20:00.004-04:00

Satyagraha is a mighty odd duck to encounter if you are seeking a traditional opera-going experience or anything like it. The piece is not a music-drama, an enactment of a story by singers using musical means to express their emotions. Instead of an impersonated text, the characters enact scenes from Gandhi’s early struggles to invent and apply his philosophy of pacific resistance to tyranny while singing/chanting gnomic phrases from the ancient Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.

For another matter, vocal art is – how to put this? – not foregrounded in this musical stage piece, though the duet performed by Maria Zifchak and Ellie Dehn in Act III, evolving into an ensemble as Gandhi leads his followers in a triumphant march for striking coal miners, is as gorgeous a piece of sheer vocal sound as the Met has presented all season. Richard Croft, who from his years as an early music tenor (renowned for his limpid Handel) has learned how to fill a simple line with subtle emotion, playing Gandhi made the feeling of enlightened, undramatic mystery both accessible and moving – which I think is what the composer wished to achieve (and failed to achieve, to my mind, in his Akhnaton). These performances are not “operatic” except in the sense that they come from “characters” and sing without microphones, but they thrill the ear for all that.

Philip Glass’s “opera” is more of an oratorio, but not even that, for the text does not pretend to tell any kind of stage-story. The Gita texts are illustrated by symbolic dioramas of six scenes from the early life of Mahatma Gandhi, plus, as prologue, the most famous scene from the Gita itself, and mimed moments in the lives of three contemporaries who influenced or were influenced by Gandhi: Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore and Martin Luther King. The scenes presented take place in British South Africa before World War I. There, Gandhi developed a philosophy and a following for peaceful resistance to oppression before he took this message home to India, whose liberation he was ultimately instrumental in effecting.

In this extraordinary production by Phelim McDermott to designs by Julian Crouch with lighting by Paule Constable, the use of multimedia from modern and ancient sources (puppets, shadows, processions, stilts, aerial stunts, projections, moving projections), has been carefully calculated. Movement and design exquisitely accompany the musical and dramatic presentation, which demonstrates in its cumulative power the effect of synchronized musical, dramatic and stage structure into one concentrated act of storytelling. This marks a painful contrast, for example, to the Met’s stagings of Lucia and Peter Grimes earlier this season, where the directors (unaccustomed to opera and unfamiliar with the works they were handling) seemed perversely determined to defy and contradict the dramatic intentions of the creators, to use their stage smarts to frustrate the telling of the tales. Perhaps because of the difficulty Satyagraha would have appealing to any traditional opera house audience if it were given perverse or slapdash treatment, or perhaps just because the composer is alive and present to protest, Satyagraha has been given a production with a care and a thoughtfulness – a concern for the work – that the Met seems unwilling to lavish upon more standard fare.

Newspapers, a frequent trope, represent the sort of metaphor the staging plays with. Gandhi’s revolution might well have fizzled without this avenue of appeal to the “great British sense of fair play” – a thing that did not usually prevent the government from doing whatever it wanted. For the first time in history, the whole world was watching and Gandhi’s moral force was in people’s faces, not an ignorable event in some distant corner of the planet.

Building on this point, newspapers serve screens on which to read subtitles or through which to see shadow puppet shows. Newspapers are balled up as weapons hurled at Gandhi by hostile crowds, and are laid out on stage by busy followers representing, perhaps, the repetitive motions of the labor force (in fields or in factories) who were Gandhi’s audience and his constituency – and the intended beneficiaries of his work.

Special congratulations are due to chorus master Donald Palumbo (the hero, in fact, of the entire season) and to Dante Anzolini, who had the unenviable job of leading the Met orchestra used to more variation than what they play in Glass’s slow-moving and repetitious score, and accomplished this with great success.

The score itself builds upon the usual Glass arpeggios, the repetitiousness that makes each intrusion a fascinating relief. In a Glass score, melody, like text, has been discarded as an expressive tool – and I, for one, deeply regret the fact that melody has ceased to speak to much of the contemporary audience, or anyway to contemporary composers of opera.

What Glass has replaced these things with does not serve the traditional purposes of opera, and so we must examine what purpose an “opera” now has. He relies on rhythm, and he makes tremendous – sometimes excessive – use of it, for instance to express the hieratically slow progress of the peace movement. Then, there is a tremendously effective moment near the end of Act I when the regular four-square rhythm we have grown used to abruptly lurches into a syncopated beat to suggest the turbulence created by Gandhi in his acquiescent society – a traditional trick, and I was grateful for the hint of something comprehensible in Glass’s method.

At the end of Act II, I was also much amused when Gandhi’s followers threw their identity cards into a pit and brought in a torch to set them on fire. Glass, evidently unable to find a way of setting such a moment in his personal stylebook, fell back on illustrating flames in a manner that would have been familiar to Tchaikowsky (in The Maid of Orleans) or Verdi (Otello), never mind Wagner. Glass renounces expressiveness, but when he finds he needs it, he has to go back to the classics to steal it. It is like the very young couple next door sneering at your old-fashioned notions of haute cuisine and then coming by to borrow a cup of sugar. Refined, unhealthy – and necessary to bake an operatic cake.

The crowd in the (packed) house on April 14 seemed, many of them, new to the labyrinthine Met: they were not sure where the rest rooms or café bars were located; when they all rushed for coffee at the intermissions, I (having caffeinated before the performance) enjoyed a flute of champagne to mellow out. The lines seemed unusually short. The house was filled, as it is on all the best nights, with the buzz of conversation debating the performance – from the old and puzzled to the young and disputatious. This may be further evidence that Satyagraha does not appeal to, and on acquaintance does not produce, the sort of excitement favored by the usual opera lover. That there is a passionate market for it cannot be doubted. Is that market best served by luring it to the Met? Will they return for opera-as-usual or will they insist on this standard of production, to the point of downgrading star singing?

Satyagraha, by whatever fortunate combination of forces, under whatever conjunction of stars, is a magnificent night at the opera.

Hindu Deity of the High C's

2008-04-19T12:59:00.002-04:00

Discussing the Hindu pantheon last night in the usual place for such things, a sleazy gay dive, explaining the Hindu take on monotheism (of course there's only one god - all 370,000,000 of them are one) to a (somewhat) religious Jewish friend, and Ganesha's birth from Parvati and Shiva, and Parvati's relationship with Kali-Durga, and he intruded, "Is Pavarati the Hindu god of singing and overeating?"

I'm sure you're as appalled as I was.

"I think I'll save that one for appropriate recycling," I muttered. He responded with whatever the Hebrew greeting is for the eve of Passover. (I wouldn't know; we gave all that stuff up a couple of generations back.)

Multiculturalism lives!

(P.S. You probably thought the Hindu deity of the High C's was Radamastor, Lord of the Waves, q.v. Meyerbeer's L'Africaine.)

Andre Aciman's memoirs

2008-04-18T01:08:00.003-04:00

Andre Aciman's new novel got such good reviews that I decided to read his memoir, Out of Egypt, published to great fanfare, reviews, awards in 1994. A thoroughly enjoyable family story full of "characters" and bygone customs and competing narratives and a sense of oncoming not-exactly doom. I was in college with an Alexandrian Jew named Andre Bernard, his father an Egyptian Sephardi, his mother French (fled to Egypt when the Vichy regime took over in France), who had themselves fled Egypt when King Farouk was overthrown by the nationalist regime eventually headed by Nasser. (1953) Aciman's family stayed on a few more precarious years, as one by one their property was sequestered (British and French nationals in 1956, others later - Aciman's father claimed Turkish nationality, and held out till 1965). The Jews who had lived in Egypt since at least the fourth century B.C.E. were finally expelled from the land, as they were from all the Arab lands (where, as in Egypt, they had often lived for longer than the Arabs had) in the wake of the independence of Israel, too bitter a pill for any Arab regime to swallow. The Christian communities are not doing so well in these lands either - they are also more ancient than the Muslims in such nations as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Yemen, but it isn't helping them. The Christian Palestinians are in no higher favor with the Israeli authorities than the Muslim Palestinians - a difference is that the Christians are more likely to have relatives to take them in abroad.

It is all part of the sad rise of nationalism around the Mediterranean that has been a tragic part of the history of the 20th century. The Med used to be surrounded by transnational cities like Alexandria - Constantinople, Barcelona, Algiers, Beirut, Smyrna, Thessalonika, Trieste, Split, Durazzo, Venice. Now only Marseilles (and perhaps Napoli, with its African and Chinese immigrants) remains a great cosmopolitan metropolis. The others are monuments to one nation each. (Splendid article on this by Jerry Miller in the current Foreign Affairs, by the way.)

One thing surprised me in Out of Egypt was the author's careless reference to the Muslim holiday of Ramadan - Ramadan, he tells us, was a spring holiday, always a sign that the summers at the beach were about to begin. And I can easily believe this was true in the last year or even two of his life in Alexandria, years that would imprint himself on his careless memory in all the years that followed, but Ramadan is not a fixed holiday on the solar calendar - the Muslim calendar is lunar, and its holidays move steadily backwards year by year, falling ten days short of our calendar. This year Ramadan was in October; next year it will be in September. It seems surprising that someone who grew up in a Muslim country did not remember this. But then, as he subtly points out (he never states it), Alexandria was not a Muslim city, it was a polyglot city, a polynational city, a polyreligious city - until Nasser gradually cleansed it, of Brits and French (after their failed war for the Suez in 1956), of other Europeans later on, of Jews steadily, and ultimately even of Copts, the aboriginal inhabitants of Egypt (insofar as anyone is). Andre's family spoke Ladino among themselves, French as a common tongue, English or German or Italian in separate family groupings, Hebrew only when it had to be remembered for prayers, a sort of pidgin to the servants (Arabs all) - but Arabic never. At his great-grandmother's hundredth birthday party, she fondly says she's lived in Alexandria fifty years, half her life, and doesn't know more than fifty words of Arabic. Andre is ordered to study Arabic by his father (who fears government spies), but he flunks the class steadily, unable to take any of it seriously, even to learn the letters. He recites suras from the Koran, but cannot translate them or understand them. Conversational Arabic is out - his friends are all Jews or Christians anyway.

More controversial, I gather, is the question of how much of this story Aciman remembered and how much he invented, or varied. Some writers insist the star figure of the first chapter, his scoundrel greatuncle Vili, confidence man, auctioneer, secret agent, womanizer, demagogue, professor is not in fact a real relative but a notable Alexandrian distantly related (most of his scenes in the book take place before Andre is born, and are so presented) but not quite the man Aciman writes of. Some writers express outrage that the book won a non-fiction prize.

But ... it's a memoir. Memory is a tricky thing. Memoirists make things up, add details, subtract others, enhance the portrait (it's a portrait, not a photograph), omit a color or a defect, or underline one to get a heartier laugh. Vili is a great character. No writer could resist inventing him, enhancing him, building him up. I'm on the side of the writer in this one.

Too, as Aciman admits (and we know his academic credentials), his favorite novel is Proust's, and Proust's novel is pieced together from many an unforgettable character devised from enlarging upon the characteristics of real people Proust knew. He never said his novel was anything other than fiction, but the boundaries where Marcel leaves off and "Marcel" begins are seldom clear-cut. This is how writers work. We may read a novel and wish we knew what genuine experiences produced it ... but if it is a real work of imagination, then the experience was only the nugget of what appeared on the page ... and in any case, even in the factiest non-fiction, the writer's viewpoint is never objective ... it is not what another person would have seen or said ... it is not what god (whichever) would have noticed.

I was thinking of that, unoriginally enough, when I wrote a poem last weekend (which appears in a post on my other blog, urbanepagan) and sent it to several friends, and a few of them asked who the love affair remembered romantically in it had concerned. The answer surprised them: I made it all up. Or no, that's not true or fair, I took bits of this event and that affair and this imaginary moment and put them together with sentiments long saved to produce the poem. It is what writers do. They don't just list the facts. How dull that would be.