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
Showing posts with label Met Opera. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Met Opera. Show all posts
Friday, May 6, 2011
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Last Ballo - Vargas as Gustav (finally)
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.
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.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Satyagraha
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.
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.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Prokofiev's The Gambler at the Met
That Fed Dostoevsky – sure plays a mean pinball!
That version of a line from another opera I once saw at the Met encapsulates my response to the return of the elegant Temur Chkhedze production of Prokofiev’s The Gambler, based on Dostoevsky's novella of addiction and social dysfunction set in a fictitious German casino spa much like the ones where Dostoevsky frittered himself into bankruptcy. In the Met production, Roulettenberg is not so much a green baize casino as a four-story-high pinball game, with great glass-and-metal towers to knock the balls back in, flashing and spinning, bursting lights, exploding horses and fireworks, a twirling park for the characters to circle each other when not “in play,” and a crannied attic – which expands to the width of the stage as needed – for our eponymous gambler to spend his time driving himself nuts with unrequited passion, for both the lovely Polina and the equally whimsical game of roulette. It’s not money he’s after, really, this Alexei slouching aggressively around town in a trenchcoat (in Vladimir Galouzine’s mesmerizing, physical, merciless star performance), or even Polina, really – it’s the thrill – of beating the odds – every sort of odds – life’s odds – the class system’s odds – the odds of Fate. Since that particular house cannot be beaten, the story cannot end well. We hardly laugh when a bankrupt, lovelorn General fires a pistol into his own head – the gun isn’t loaded and he’s already dead.
Prokofiev’s opera is not melodious, even by the standards of his War and Peace, which swept me off my feet when the Met revived it in December. The Gambler has no big picture, no nations running riot on the stage, and no glorious off-kilter waltzes to set the sensual scene. It is focused on the personal: on selfish individuals with no interest but their own financial welfare. The opera is a lithe, onomatopoeic score, a vehicle for a few great singing actors, and the story is tightly wound. Alexei, a typical poor Russian intellectual, works as a tutor in the family of a General, who has come to Roulettenberg, supposedly to take the waters but actually to barter his lovely stepdaughter, Polina, to a rich marquis in order to borrow enough money to win the hand of the lovely courtesan, Madame Blanche, meanwhile hoping his rich mother-in-law in Moscow will finally die and leave him her fortune. Tragically, the old lady is in fine health, comes to town herself, and loses sixty thousand at the wheel. Polina begs Alexei to acquire the money to save her from selling herself on the marriage market, and in the spectacular set piece of Act IV, he goes to the tables, breaks the bank and cleans out the town! Triumphant, he gives the money to his adored Polina – and she hurls it back in his face. Curtain.
Prokofiev wisely simplified Dostoevsky’s ugly story. In the short novel, Blanche carries Alexei off to Paris to teach him how to spend (her own great talent); but he enjoys nothing now except a gambler’s high, and returns to the casino a hopeless addict.
The shadiness of these figures is the point – notice that none of them are blood relations. In the 1870s, censors (and readers) would not have been able to endure a story in which people sell their children or parents for money, but stepchildren, adoptive parents and in-laws were fair game. Even forty years after the novel appeared, when Strauss, in Elektra, showed a family of blood relations hating each other, there was a scandal. Then Freud let the cat out of the bag about families.
The Met’s brilliantly staged, magnificently played, sparsely attended revival is the swan song of Valery Gergiev’s immensely distinguished far too brief career as the Met’s co-music director, a period that has introduced us to many wonderful, too-little-known Russian works with the cream of Russian singers and a mixed bag of Russian directors to put them over. It will immensely impoverish the Metropolitan, and the New York opera scene (thickly inhabited with Russians these days, by the way) if these works, and others we have not yet heard, vanish from the repertory and we resume mediocre revivals of the thrice-familiar.
Promenading about George Tsypin’s glamorous set these days (thrillingly lit by James F. Ingalls), besides the extraordinary Mr. Galouzine, who plays a crazed Russian as if he were, well, a crazed Russian (he’ll do it again in Pikovaya Dama next year, and you know? in Pagliacci, he was the scariest Canio I’ve ever seen); Olga Guryakova’s plum-shaped, sensuous tones as Polina; Larissa Diadkova as a far livelier (and audibly far easier to take) Grandma than Elena Obrastzova was; and a great horde of Kirov and Met regulars in smaller roles doing small but exciting things. This is one of those operas where one is very thankful for the Met titles, as we would otherwise miss a lot even if we were fluent in Russian (and I’m not).
An evening of theater at the Met to wake you up.
An important point none of the commentators at the Met have discussed: it was illegal for women to play the wheel at places like Roulettenberg. (I'm not sure how long this remained in force. Until World War I?) This is the reason Polina must use Alexei to play her money for her - she isn't interested in him in the least. Also, it is Blanche's modus operandi - she goes to the casino, spots unattached and rich-looking men, and asks them to place a bet for her. But she asked Baron Wurmser, and he was not unattached - and the Baroness had the morals police throw Blanche out. She cannot go back to the casino to find another mark until she is respectably married, which accounts for her (slight) interest in the General - but even him she won't marry unless he's rich. And when Granny arrives, she has to have a male escort to bet her money for her. No one at the Met seems to have noticed any of this, but it is quite important to the structure of the story - if only because otherwise we might think Polina is attracted to Alexei.
That version of a line from another opera I once saw at the Met encapsulates my response to the return of the elegant Temur Chkhedze production of Prokofiev’s The Gambler, based on Dostoevsky's novella of addiction and social dysfunction set in a fictitious German casino spa much like the ones where Dostoevsky frittered himself into bankruptcy. In the Met production, Roulettenberg is not so much a green baize casino as a four-story-high pinball game, with great glass-and-metal towers to knock the balls back in, flashing and spinning, bursting lights, exploding horses and fireworks, a twirling park for the characters to circle each other when not “in play,” and a crannied attic – which expands to the width of the stage as needed – for our eponymous gambler to spend his time driving himself nuts with unrequited passion, for both the lovely Polina and the equally whimsical game of roulette. It’s not money he’s after, really, this Alexei slouching aggressively around town in a trenchcoat (in Vladimir Galouzine’s mesmerizing, physical, merciless star performance), or even Polina, really – it’s the thrill – of beating the odds – every sort of odds – life’s odds – the class system’s odds – the odds of Fate. Since that particular house cannot be beaten, the story cannot end well. We hardly laugh when a bankrupt, lovelorn General fires a pistol into his own head – the gun isn’t loaded and he’s already dead.
Prokofiev’s opera is not melodious, even by the standards of his War and Peace, which swept me off my feet when the Met revived it in December. The Gambler has no big picture, no nations running riot on the stage, and no glorious off-kilter waltzes to set the sensual scene. It is focused on the personal: on selfish individuals with no interest but their own financial welfare. The opera is a lithe, onomatopoeic score, a vehicle for a few great singing actors, and the story is tightly wound. Alexei, a typical poor Russian intellectual, works as a tutor in the family of a General, who has come to Roulettenberg, supposedly to take the waters but actually to barter his lovely stepdaughter, Polina, to a rich marquis in order to borrow enough money to win the hand of the lovely courtesan, Madame Blanche, meanwhile hoping his rich mother-in-law in Moscow will finally die and leave him her fortune. Tragically, the old lady is in fine health, comes to town herself, and loses sixty thousand at the wheel. Polina begs Alexei to acquire the money to save her from selling herself on the marriage market, and in the spectacular set piece of Act IV, he goes to the tables, breaks the bank and cleans out the town! Triumphant, he gives the money to his adored Polina – and she hurls it back in his face. Curtain.
Prokofiev wisely simplified Dostoevsky’s ugly story. In the short novel, Blanche carries Alexei off to Paris to teach him how to spend (her own great talent); but he enjoys nothing now except a gambler’s high, and returns to the casino a hopeless addict.
The shadiness of these figures is the point – notice that none of them are blood relations. In the 1870s, censors (and readers) would not have been able to endure a story in which people sell their children or parents for money, but stepchildren, adoptive parents and in-laws were fair game. Even forty years after the novel appeared, when Strauss, in Elektra, showed a family of blood relations hating each other, there was a scandal. Then Freud let the cat out of the bag about families.
The Met’s brilliantly staged, magnificently played, sparsely attended revival is the swan song of Valery Gergiev’s immensely distinguished far too brief career as the Met’s co-music director, a period that has introduced us to many wonderful, too-little-known Russian works with the cream of Russian singers and a mixed bag of Russian directors to put them over. It will immensely impoverish the Metropolitan, and the New York opera scene (thickly inhabited with Russians these days, by the way) if these works, and others we have not yet heard, vanish from the repertory and we resume mediocre revivals of the thrice-familiar.
Promenading about George Tsypin’s glamorous set these days (thrillingly lit by James F. Ingalls), besides the extraordinary Mr. Galouzine, who plays a crazed Russian as if he were, well, a crazed Russian (he’ll do it again in Pikovaya Dama next year, and you know? in Pagliacci, he was the scariest Canio I’ve ever seen); Olga Guryakova’s plum-shaped, sensuous tones as Polina; Larissa Diadkova as a far livelier (and audibly far easier to take) Grandma than Elena Obrastzova was; and a great horde of Kirov and Met regulars in smaller roles doing small but exciting things. This is one of those operas where one is very thankful for the Met titles, as we would otherwise miss a lot even if we were fluent in Russian (and I’m not).
An evening of theater at the Met to wake you up.
An important point none of the commentators at the Met have discussed: it was illegal for women to play the wheel at places like Roulettenberg. (I'm not sure how long this remained in force. Until World War I?) This is the reason Polina must use Alexei to play her money for her - she isn't interested in him in the least. Also, it is Blanche's modus operandi - she goes to the casino, spots unattached and rich-looking men, and asks them to place a bet for her. But she asked Baron Wurmser, and he was not unattached - and the Baroness had the morals police throw Blanche out. She cannot go back to the casino to find another mark until she is respectably married, which accounts for her (slight) interest in the General - but even him she won't marry unless he's rich. And when Granny arrives, she has to have a male escort to bet her money for her. No one at the Met seems to have noticed any of this, but it is quite important to the structure of the story - if only because otherwise we might think Polina is attracted to Alexei.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Bet this never happened to you at the movies ...
I bet this doesn't happen at the movies:
As the flick begins, they announce that Matt Damon has a virus and had to leave; he's being replaced by someone who's never done the part before.
But it's okay.
Then, halfway through, Gwyneth Paltrow (the star) goes running off-screen, leaving the guy hanging in mid love scene.
After a moment, the screen goes dark (but not before you saw the panic in his eyes).
Pause.
Then they announce Miss Paltrow is ill, and will be replaced by (name you never heard of).
She wears the same dress and wig but doesn't look anything like her.
She takes a while to warm up, but hey, Daniel Day-Lewis walks off with the character part anyway. (As you expected.)
Somehow the kid gets through the big final scene, and the girl takes the climax.
Thundering ovation.
You never had that happen to you at the movies, did you? (Low class bastards.)
At the Met tonight, Tristan und Isolde.
Rumors of doom had been circulating since the disastrous prima on Monday.
Ben Heppner, virused up, has run back to Canada. (He's been cracking on all his high notes anyway.) The tenor who replaced him Monday was so bad, he was booed off the stage. (Ugly too, they tell me.)
So tonight they found some kid who'd never sung Tristan before.
Gary Lehman (this is a heldentenor?)
We're all very hopeful. (Besides, Matti Salminen is King Marke, and bound to be a hit.)
Peter Gelb, announcing the change, looks like he has veins of ice water and this happens all the time.
The kid is tall, well built, looks like Errol Flynn, sings okay, acts okay, keeps an eye fixed on Jimmy.
Then, halfway through the love duet in Act II, Debbie Voigt runs off stage. To get a drink of water I presumed. The tenor just sort of stands there, singing ardently to a blank stage, Jimmy keeps conducting ... the curtain comes down.
Pause.
Someone (not Gelb) comes out to say: Don't leave the room, Debbie's sick, some soprano no one has heard of (Janice Baird, and she IS on the roster) is getting dressed and will take over.
Of course she hasn't had time (much less a whole act) to warm up, but anyway:
At last we get the duet again (which means the poor Tristan will be singing more of the opera in one night than ANYONE EVER HAS).
Isolde finally warms up by the climax.
Matti Salminen walks off with it, as I knew he would.
In the intermission, my friend La Cieca (opera columnist a l'outrance, see www.parterre.com) says, "I'm speechless."
I said, "Don't tell me we'll have to replace you too!"
Well, Lehman sings Act III, the toughest workout for tenor ever composed.
Doesn't sound fabulous, but he's okay. No cracked high notes.
Isolde rushes in clumsily (she's never rehearsed), sings Liebestod. She's okay.
Silence to the last chord.
Chaos:
Standing ovation for the pair, then for the whole cast, then for Jimmy.
It's 1 a.m. and nobody wants to leave without screaming.
Nobody wanted to have been, for those six hours, anywhere else in the world.
I bet you've never been at a movie where this happened.
Live theater forever!
(And down with microphones!)
P.S. During the pause in Act II, while we waited for Isolde, we told each other stories of memorable stage disasters we'd seen. In my case, this always (but not from now on!) means the infamous Carlo Bini Gioconda. The woman behind me, however, had been at a Princess Ida in Symphony Space - the Ida had got sick, somehow they found another woman who knew the role but not the staging. In mid-Act II, where Ida falls off a bridge and is rescued from drowning by gallant Prince Hilarion, the lady fell on top of the tenor, knocking him out. Some flurry of activity, and then Hilarion appears to sing his two stanzas of aria. And the audience notices something funny: Yes, it's a different guy in the same costume. Luckily, he only had to sing that solo before being dragged off-stage till well into Act III. But I'm sure Al Bergeret was sweating blood.
As the flick begins, they announce that Matt Damon has a virus and had to leave; he's being replaced by someone who's never done the part before.
But it's okay.
Then, halfway through, Gwyneth Paltrow (the star) goes running off-screen, leaving the guy hanging in mid love scene.
After a moment, the screen goes dark (but not before you saw the panic in his eyes).
Pause.
Then they announce Miss Paltrow is ill, and will be replaced by (name you never heard of).
She wears the same dress and wig but doesn't look anything like her.
She takes a while to warm up, but hey, Daniel Day-Lewis walks off with the character part anyway. (As you expected.)
Somehow the kid gets through the big final scene, and the girl takes the climax.
Thundering ovation.
You never had that happen to you at the movies, did you? (Low class bastards.)
At the Met tonight, Tristan und Isolde.
Rumors of doom had been circulating since the disastrous prima on Monday.
Ben Heppner, virused up, has run back to Canada. (He's been cracking on all his high notes anyway.) The tenor who replaced him Monday was so bad, he was booed off the stage. (Ugly too, they tell me.)
So tonight they found some kid who'd never sung Tristan before.
Gary Lehman (this is a heldentenor?)
We're all very hopeful. (Besides, Matti Salminen is King Marke, and bound to be a hit.)
Peter Gelb, announcing the change, looks like he has veins of ice water and this happens all the time.
The kid is tall, well built, looks like Errol Flynn, sings okay, acts okay, keeps an eye fixed on Jimmy.
Then, halfway through the love duet in Act II, Debbie Voigt runs off stage. To get a drink of water I presumed. The tenor just sort of stands there, singing ardently to a blank stage, Jimmy keeps conducting ... the curtain comes down.
Pause.
Someone (not Gelb) comes out to say: Don't leave the room, Debbie's sick, some soprano no one has heard of (Janice Baird, and she IS on the roster) is getting dressed and will take over.
Of course she hasn't had time (much less a whole act) to warm up, but anyway:
At last we get the duet again (which means the poor Tristan will be singing more of the opera in one night than ANYONE EVER HAS).
Isolde finally warms up by the climax.
Matti Salminen walks off with it, as I knew he would.
In the intermission, my friend La Cieca (opera columnist a l'outrance, see www.parterre.com) says, "I'm speechless."
I said, "Don't tell me we'll have to replace you too!"
Well, Lehman sings Act III, the toughest workout for tenor ever composed.
Doesn't sound fabulous, but he's okay. No cracked high notes.
Isolde rushes in clumsily (she's never rehearsed), sings Liebestod. She's okay.
Silence to the last chord.
Chaos:
Standing ovation for the pair, then for the whole cast, then for Jimmy.
It's 1 a.m. and nobody wants to leave without screaming.
Nobody wanted to have been, for those six hours, anywhere else in the world.
I bet you've never been at a movie where this happened.
Live theater forever!
(And down with microphones!)
P.S. During the pause in Act II, while we waited for Isolde, we told each other stories of memorable stage disasters we'd seen. In my case, this always (but not from now on!) means the infamous Carlo Bini Gioconda. The woman behind me, however, had been at a Princess Ida in Symphony Space - the Ida had got sick, somehow they found another woman who knew the role but not the staging. In mid-Act II, where Ida falls off a bridge and is rescued from drowning by gallant Prince Hilarion, the lady fell on top of the tenor, knocking him out. Some flurry of activity, and then Hilarion appears to sing his two stanzas of aria. And the audience notices something funny: Yes, it's a different guy in the same costume. Luckily, he only had to sing that solo before being dragged off-stage till well into Act III. But I'm sure Al Bergeret was sweating blood.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
The Birth of an Epic?
A week ago went to War and Peace at the Met, the grandest show in New York, spectacular work in a spectacular production with a spectacular cast – decidedly a tough work to grasp on first encounter (this was my fourth such encounter, and now I get it), a wonderful night at the opera – and the theater – and the ballet – and the orchestra.
Today I listened to the live broadcast – twice, due to the magic of modern webcasting. When I was in the house, everyone was discussing whether or not we'd ever read the novel (I had, but thirty years ago), and its influence. Today, listening to the score and its four hours of easily missed exquisite detail, I found myself thinking about the book's plot, the bickering among several noble families until everyone faces national crisis, and comes through that, and lives are lost and the crisis is faced and the nation re-born and marriages transpire, happy ending.
What comes to mind very strongly is The Birth of a Nation. It seems to me plain as the nose on my face (though in fact I have a very handsome one, not as grand as Jonathan Cake's the other night in Cymbeline, but handsome) that Griffith's model was, must have been, War and Peace, point by point, even to the slaves mimicking the resigned wisdom of the serfs. I had never heard this spoke of before, am curious to see if it is a commonplace of Griffith criticism or my own discovery. (My money's on the former assumption.)
I began to think of Tolstoy's masterful construction: the two or three aristocratic families (Bolkonskys, Rostovs, Kuragins-and-Bezukhovs), the pettiness of their romantic and other involvements when the great tidal wave of national disaster rolls over them, the way the characters show their mettle in meeting it, the way their personal destinies work themselves out in a more peaceable aftermath -- and the resemblance to another work in an entirely different medium occurred to me.
Like Tolstoy, Griffith examines a couple of aristocratic families, their loyal underlings, their intertwining romances, and then hits them in the head with a shattering cataclysm that kills quite a few of them and transforms the lives and social circumstances of the rest. His very neutrality on the Civil War (and his determination to see blacks who attempt to break out of their class as contrary to the "natural") seem to grow also from Tolstoy's belief in the Russian-ness that links the class system of pre-Revolutionary Russia to a proper devotion to the Russian earth. (His racism could almost be a dreadful parody of Tolstoy's religion.) Even to the happy endings tacked on in both works after the upheavals, the story told in the American work seems to be an attempt to create the effect -- in a transAtlantic milieu -- of national epic in the manner and on the level of Tolstoy's.
For the fledgling film industry, it was an important attempt, and he chose (I believe) a significant model. But Griffith's own blindness to the evils of racism and the reality of American culture (not that Tolstoy was seeing Russia 20/20) make us uncomfortable with this relationship.
Today I listened to the live broadcast – twice, due to the magic of modern webcasting. When I was in the house, everyone was discussing whether or not we'd ever read the novel (I had, but thirty years ago), and its influence. Today, listening to the score and its four hours of easily missed exquisite detail, I found myself thinking about the book's plot, the bickering among several noble families until everyone faces national crisis, and comes through that, and lives are lost and the crisis is faced and the nation re-born and marriages transpire, happy ending.
What comes to mind very strongly is The Birth of a Nation. It seems to me plain as the nose on my face (though in fact I have a very handsome one, not as grand as Jonathan Cake's the other night in Cymbeline, but handsome) that Griffith's model was, must have been, War and Peace, point by point, even to the slaves mimicking the resigned wisdom of the serfs. I had never heard this spoke of before, am curious to see if it is a commonplace of Griffith criticism or my own discovery. (My money's on the former assumption.)
I began to think of Tolstoy's masterful construction: the two or three aristocratic families (Bolkonskys, Rostovs, Kuragins-and-Bezukhovs), the pettiness of their romantic and other involvements when the great tidal wave of national disaster rolls over them, the way the characters show their mettle in meeting it, the way their personal destinies work themselves out in a more peaceable aftermath -- and the resemblance to another work in an entirely different medium occurred to me.
Like Tolstoy, Griffith examines a couple of aristocratic families, their loyal underlings, their intertwining romances, and then hits them in the head with a shattering cataclysm that kills quite a few of them and transforms the lives and social circumstances of the rest. His very neutrality on the Civil War (and his determination to see blacks who attempt to break out of their class as contrary to the "natural") seem to grow also from Tolstoy's belief in the Russian-ness that links the class system of pre-Revolutionary Russia to a proper devotion to the Russian earth. (His racism could almost be a dreadful parody of Tolstoy's religion.) Even to the happy endings tacked on in both works after the upheavals, the story told in the American work seems to be an attempt to create the effect -- in a transAtlantic milieu -- of national epic in the manner and on the level of Tolstoy's.
For the fledgling film industry, it was an important attempt, and he chose (I believe) a significant model. But Griffith's own blindness to the evils of racism and the reality of American culture (not that Tolstoy was seeing Russia 20/20) make us uncomfortable with this relationship.
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