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....
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Notes on the Ring
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.
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.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Valentino: The Last Emperor
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.
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.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Colonization and the Wooster Group's Didone
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.
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.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Iphigénie en Aulide in Rome
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 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.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
The meaning of Empress's Shadow
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
On the Fritz! A Prussian musical comedy!
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?
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?
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