Supposedly the Met has commissioned someone to compose an opera based on the life of Oscar Wilde, to star David Daniels who is running out of Handel works of Metropolitan caliber. Apparently someone else attempted an opera of Wilde's life for the Granite State Opera a few years ago, but it was never completed. Who knows where this will lead in an era where everyone seems to think he (or she) can write an opera but no one actually does it well. Can the librettos be at fault? (Probably not; they're mostly by Sandy McClatchy.) In any case, my friend Jeanne on the David Daniels Fans List asked if anyone knew enough about Wilde's life to sketch out a scenario.
A witch once said she thought I'd been Oscar Wilde in a previous life. I said, "Possibly ... but not in HIS." (Even my inner doubt has never impelled me to quite so self-destructive a working-out.) (I don't think.) But I have helped Jeanne out thus:
The Wilde Life !
Prologue: 1900:
Dying of tuberculosis in Paris (“Either the wallpaper goes or I do”), Oscar Wilde (countertenor) (all right, I see him as a baritone, maybe Mariusz Kwiecien, but the commission is for David Daniels) reflects upon a life mispent … drifting back to:
Act I, scene 1:
A Tuesday evening soiree chez Stephane Mallarmé in Paris, c. 1891, where Wilde (in knee-breeches, with a huge tiger lily in his hand) has been reading his new symbolist drama, Salome, hoping Sarah Bernhardt (mezzo soprano) will perform it (she has sung Salome’s last speech in a very un-Straussian style - part Gluck, part Massenet). Wilde is toasted by the crowd for his wit and defiance of prim British hypocrisy. Friends, however, urge him to tone down his decadence since rumors of his misbehavior with telegraph boys and so forth may get about. He pooh-poohs their fears and flirts with an aristocratic young poet, Lord Alfred Douglas (baritone), an undergraduate at Oxford … as the party falls away behind them, Wilde begins to sing elaborate lyrics to Alfred’s beauty. We understand that, in Wilde’s fever dream, his mind has shifted from the night they met to the height of their affair. "We were destined to meet here tonight, Oscar! It's an omen of a glorious new world, awakened to beauty!" "Oh my dear Bosey - there are no such things as omens. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that."
Act I, scene 2:
A gossiping triple chorus – aristocrats resenting Wilde for sneering at them, middle class types outraged at Wilde for making fun of their aspirations by exalting Art for Art’s Sake, street toughs threatening to do violence to a grown man who wears velvet and knee breeches and a green carnation. These sneers are heard by a lady walking through the crowd, arriving in her home and collapsing.
Act I, scene 3:
She is Constance Wilde (soprano), she’s heard all the stories about her husband, she hopes they’re not true – but she knows he ignores her these days. Her mother-in-law, the poetess Speranza (mezzo soprano), arrives, refuses to hear anything bad about her son, and urges Constance to dress more unconventionally, the sure way to win back a straying husband. Wilde finally comes downstairs – it’s mid-afternoon, he’s just getting up – and they beg him to spend the evening at home en famille. He pays them both extravagant compliments – then a telegram arrives. This, he says, summons him to a special performance he must attend. While tipping the telegraph boy, Ernest (tenor) – whom we saw earlier as one of the nastiest of the street toughs – he offers him a tip if he (the boy) will meet him at a brothel that evening. The boy is delighted to accept.
Act II, scene 1: 1895:
An ecstatic prelude leads into the crowd at the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest, cheering Wilde to the echo. As he leaves the theater, congratulations on every hand, someone hands him a note. The Marquess of Queensberry (Alfred’s father) has written: “To Oscar Wilde, posing as somdomite.” [sic] Wilde’s world falls apart (as shown by the tonality of his aria, which is in violent contrast to that of the chorus of praise, still heard in the background, the words subtly changing to condemnation). Despite the apprehension of several friends, urged on by Alfred, he resolves to sue the marquess for libel.
Act II, scene 2:
Trial scene – or rather, several trial scenes, run together in his fevered brain: The prosecutor (bass) trips him up by quoting the love letter Wilde sang to Lord Alfred in Act I, and the telegraph boy Ernest begins damning testimony joined by three other young boys, Constance begs him to flee the country before he is prosecuted for criminal behavior, and at the climax the Judge (spoken part) intones a sentence of Two Years Hard Labour.
Act III, scene 1:
1897: Wilde, in his cell, a broken man, is haunted by the voices of his mother and his wife, both of whom have died of grief. He apostrophizes an imaginary Lord Alfred, who responds with contempt – in the same words the street crowd used of him in Act II. The real Lord Alfred comes in as a visitor and tries to be reassuring, but Wilde is listening to his hallucinations, and Alfred gives up. Wilde begins to sing several stanzas of The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
Act III, scene 2:
1900: Back in Paris, tossing around bits of De Profundis, mourning that he has never found true love and that, since his wife is dead, he is forbidden by her relations to see his sons, Wilde sings of the cruel world that frowns on beauty and love … and at the end realizes that he destroyed himself out of a wish to identify with Christ and be martyred for love. He stands in cross-attitude, singing of his bleeding wounds and of his wit that will redeem humanity.
Curtain.
© 2009, John Yohalem
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Friday, October 9, 2009
Barber of Seville at the Met
Bartlett Sher’s production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia has proved one of the more admired stagings of the Peter Gelb regime, but I’ve avoided it due to a surfeit of Barbieres and to fond memories of the previous “turntable” production, which satisfied every demand one might reasonably make of a Barbiere: The complicated story was told clearly, the stage pictures were handsome and the set changes elegant, the funny business was funny and to the point, the movement rapid. Even Rossini’s thunderstorm got laughs, as a projected starry sky was gradually effaced by clouds and real rain while the set spun around below. I wasn’t crazy about the barber’s updated costume and I could have done without the donkey – the donkey is the one item Mr. Sher retained.
The new production, which I saw on October 8, does not get in the way of the storytelling (a major point! especially in a comic opera), does not introduce new sub-plots the composer never delineated (a defect of the recent stagings of Tosca, Sonnambula and Fidelio, among others), the stage pictures are attractive and will endure repeated viewing (unlike Tosca), the funny business is sometimes funny – and gives scope, as a comedy staging should, for funny performers to make it more so; there are inexplicable touches (what is that giant anvil in the sky, aside from a sign of Mr. Sher out of ideas? Why does Bartolo’s china closet explode?), and the movement is constant if not always logical. Seville, indicated in the previous production by the city’s famous white walls and a splendid conservatory in the courtyard of Bartolo’s mansion, is now implied by many, many doors and an orangery. At one point, the Count, playing a drunken soldier, makes a swipe at an orange tree with his saber – and appeared to slice it through – the best laugh of the night. I’d give the production a solid B, maybe a B-plus.
The most distinctive part of the Sher staging – aside from the moveable doors that comprise most of the set, and which are often used to delightful farcical advantage – is the platform around the orchestra pit that allows singers to leave the action and come warble to us intimately, duck out of busy action entirely, complain about how badly they are being used by other characters – or hand out business cards to the audience, as Figaro does during the curtain calls. This parade in front of the apron also allows a solid but underpowered cast to make a more powerful effect than they would if they remained center stage. There was certainly an improvement in sound quality when they stepped forward.
Among the singers last Thursday night, the smoothest, most elegant, most satisfying performance came from Bulgarian newcomer Orlin Anastassov, who possesses the requisite size, depth and legato for Don Basilio and is an amusing comic actor to boot. It is no surprise to see in the program that he is singing Boito’s Mefistofele elsewhere this year – that’s an opera that the Met could certainly use back in its repertory, and he’s a likely candidate to put over a role that calls for an agile actor as well as a remarkable voice.
Rodion Pogossov, a showman of great charm and comic energy – you may well remember his Papageno – sang a most entertaining Figaro, with a seductive and self-seductive way of phrasing. John Del Carlo, a familiar and excellent buffo quantity, fudged the racing patter of “A un dottore del mio sorte,” as so many Doctor Bartolos do, but proved an effective foil for the antics of all the others throughout the evening. You can’t have a farce if the villain isn’t convincingly alarming – if he’s not, nobody else’s antics make sense. Del Carlo, tall as a Wagnerian giant, can be alarming while full of self-pity, which is just what we want.
Barry Banks is a comic actor the equal of any bel canto tenor going – his smarmy smiles as the feigned “Don Alfonso” were especial joys – and his coloratura technique is remarkable, but the quality of the voice itself was dry in “Ecco ridente” and rather hollow the rest of the night. Dramatic intensity (as Oreste in Rossini’s Ermione) and delirious self-parody (as Thisbe in Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream) are his fortes; romantic heroes are not.
That brings us to the ladies. Joyce Di Donato is a few years into an important career. She is an excellent comic actress – you listen to her, yes, but you also watch, just to see what she’ll come up with next. She works the manic fireworks of “Contro il cor” in the Lesson Scene into a simultaneous show of brilliant vocalism and stage hilarity like no other Rosina I’ve seen, and when she dashes out on that walkway to deliver the evening’s few big phrases, her strong line suggests that many of the grander bel canto roles (Adalgisa, Elisabetta Tudor, La Favorite) would suit her well, but in some of her rapid-fire phrases in “Una voce poco fa” and elsewhere, she seemed too anxious to race up and down the scale to bother with the note-perfect ideal flow of a Horne, a Berganza or a Swenson. She seems to love to play this role and to be on stage with these other singers, but a little more technical focus (and you just know she could do it) would make hers an extraordinary Rosina instead of another very good one. Claudia Waite, the Berta, sang her “sherbet aria” with the shrill, ungrateful tone one expects of, well, Berta the laundress.
Maurizio Benini in the all but invisible orchestra pit kept the wheels turning precisely without calling attention to himself – it was not a Mozartean reading of the score but a reliable base for the farcical doings on stage. The whole evening seemed calculated in that direction, and it was gracious of him to be so self-effacing, but sometimes Rossini works well as a partnership.
The new production, which I saw on October 8, does not get in the way of the storytelling (a major point! especially in a comic opera), does not introduce new sub-plots the composer never delineated (a defect of the recent stagings of Tosca, Sonnambula and Fidelio, among others), the stage pictures are attractive and will endure repeated viewing (unlike Tosca), the funny business is sometimes funny – and gives scope, as a comedy staging should, for funny performers to make it more so; there are inexplicable touches (what is that giant anvil in the sky, aside from a sign of Mr. Sher out of ideas? Why does Bartolo’s china closet explode?), and the movement is constant if not always logical. Seville, indicated in the previous production by the city’s famous white walls and a splendid conservatory in the courtyard of Bartolo’s mansion, is now implied by many, many doors and an orangery. At one point, the Count, playing a drunken soldier, makes a swipe at an orange tree with his saber – and appeared to slice it through – the best laugh of the night. I’d give the production a solid B, maybe a B-plus.
The most distinctive part of the Sher staging – aside from the moveable doors that comprise most of the set, and which are often used to delightful farcical advantage – is the platform around the orchestra pit that allows singers to leave the action and come warble to us intimately, duck out of busy action entirely, complain about how badly they are being used by other characters – or hand out business cards to the audience, as Figaro does during the curtain calls. This parade in front of the apron also allows a solid but underpowered cast to make a more powerful effect than they would if they remained center stage. There was certainly an improvement in sound quality when they stepped forward.
Among the singers last Thursday night, the smoothest, most elegant, most satisfying performance came from Bulgarian newcomer Orlin Anastassov, who possesses the requisite size, depth and legato for Don Basilio and is an amusing comic actor to boot. It is no surprise to see in the program that he is singing Boito’s Mefistofele elsewhere this year – that’s an opera that the Met could certainly use back in its repertory, and he’s a likely candidate to put over a role that calls for an agile actor as well as a remarkable voice.
Rodion Pogossov, a showman of great charm and comic energy – you may well remember his Papageno – sang a most entertaining Figaro, with a seductive and self-seductive way of phrasing. John Del Carlo, a familiar and excellent buffo quantity, fudged the racing patter of “A un dottore del mio sorte,” as so many Doctor Bartolos do, but proved an effective foil for the antics of all the others throughout the evening. You can’t have a farce if the villain isn’t convincingly alarming – if he’s not, nobody else’s antics make sense. Del Carlo, tall as a Wagnerian giant, can be alarming while full of self-pity, which is just what we want.
Barry Banks is a comic actor the equal of any bel canto tenor going – his smarmy smiles as the feigned “Don Alfonso” were especial joys – and his coloratura technique is remarkable, but the quality of the voice itself was dry in “Ecco ridente” and rather hollow the rest of the night. Dramatic intensity (as Oreste in Rossini’s Ermione) and delirious self-parody (as Thisbe in Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream) are his fortes; romantic heroes are not.
That brings us to the ladies. Joyce Di Donato is a few years into an important career. She is an excellent comic actress – you listen to her, yes, but you also watch, just to see what she’ll come up with next. She works the manic fireworks of “Contro il cor” in the Lesson Scene into a simultaneous show of brilliant vocalism and stage hilarity like no other Rosina I’ve seen, and when she dashes out on that walkway to deliver the evening’s few big phrases, her strong line suggests that many of the grander bel canto roles (Adalgisa, Elisabetta Tudor, La Favorite) would suit her well, but in some of her rapid-fire phrases in “Una voce poco fa” and elsewhere, she seemed too anxious to race up and down the scale to bother with the note-perfect ideal flow of a Horne, a Berganza or a Swenson. She seems to love to play this role and to be on stage with these other singers, but a little more technical focus (and you just know she could do it) would make hers an extraordinary Rosina instead of another very good one. Claudia Waite, the Berta, sang her “sherbet aria” with the shrill, ungrateful tone one expects of, well, Berta the laundress.
Maurizio Benini in the all but invisible orchestra pit kept the wheels turning precisely without calling attention to himself – it was not a Mozartean reading of the score but a reliable base for the farcical doings on stage. The whole evening seemed calculated in that direction, and it was gracious of him to be so self-effacing, but sometimes Rossini works well as a partnership.
Tosca
In the end the performance does not rescue the dreary new production – still, the reason to visit the Met’s new Tosca is Karita Mattila’s bravura if wrongheaded interpretation of the title role. Mattila plays the prima donna Floria Tosca as an over-the-top old-school diva, all self-dramatizing nervous energy. This is dangerous, as the events of the last day of Tosca’s life would excite a buried Samuel Beckett heroine from torpor into frenetic activity: Tosca endures jealous frenzies, first soothed and then confirmed, a command performance before the queen, the torture of her lover, then betraying him, a brutal seduction, a hot-blooded murder, her lover’s apparent salvation, his actual death, and a desperate leap to her own.
If none of this penetrates her self-involvement, perhaps the business with Scarpia isn’t really so bad – she just gets carried away. You know: divas! Certainly the final scene of Act II in the Luc Bondy production is a tasteless mistake – Mattila’s Tosca seems neither stunned nor shocked by having been driven to murder. She plots it beforehand, hides the dagger, arranges her dress so as to incite him, kicks him off the sofa afterward to present a better “stage picture,” and in describing the event to Cavaradossi later, she acts it all out – clearly enjoying every moment spent in the limelight of her imagination. If Tosca is too self-involved to be touched by murder, if she looks upon it as just another chance to seize center stage, why should we care about her? why credit her with any genuine feelings?
While Mattila is performing, though, such thoughts seldom intrude. She whirls about the ugly barn of a church like a Roman dervish, she seizes her lover’s paintbrush to alter the Magdalen’s eyes; she exposes her legs for Scarpia’s rape; and she insists that Cavaradossi rehearse his “fake” execution with her. She cannot be still for a moment – and the payback is her “Vissi d’arte,” when, drained by Scarpia’s brutality, she goes pale and empty, lets her voice float stunned into the theater. She does not remain crushed – nothing but death will stop this woman’s playacting – but the moment itself is riveting, and the rest of Mattila’s Tosca seems designed to draw our attention to it. Since this is not the heart of the opera – Puccini reportedly found the aria a bit dull – her focus highlights Mattila’s errors elsewhere. Tosca must grow from the flibbertigibbet of Act I to the desperate adventuress of Act III, and Mattila’s Tosca does not make such a change. Her reaction to getting blood on her hands? She puts on purple gloves.
Mattila’s voice is not Italianate – as everyone has been saying since she took up Manon Lescaut a few years back. Her Manon Lescaut indeed lacked the opulent young sound of that teenage sensualist – but Tosca is a mature woman, and Mattila sings her with full-throated sensuality, passion without wilt or waver. I’ve seen Toscas of a dozen nationalities, and her sound is more idiomatic, and more beautiful, than many others of the “Nordic” school – Behrens, Nilsson and Vishnevskaya come to mind. More important is that she feels, and lives, the notes of this extreme character.
Marcelo Álvarez (an Argentine) sings a very Italian Cavaradossi, suave and romantic in “Recondita armonia” and the love duets. He lacked vocal finesse only in “E lucevan le stelle,” which was not the honeyed reverie many tenors give us. Álvarez seemed so involved in acting the words – each one clear – that the anguish of his situation choked him up. The elegiac scene that followed, however, found him Mattila’s match for power and expressive beauty.
Carlo Guelfi sang a gruff, barking Scarpia, brutally effective in Act I, but the nuanced slime of Act II was missing – and was missed. Part of the problem may have been the intrusion of three prostitutes fooling with him at the opening of Act II, and this is typical of the director’s initiatives in adding nothing to the show but unanswerable questions. Scarpia is explaining the trap he plans to set for Tosca – and why: he enjoys sex when the lady resists – and these women don’t take the hint – not at all. Are they the sort of persons in whom Scarpia would confide? No – he’s not the type to confide in anyone, least of all a woman – he’s an egotist who opens himself in soliloquy. So why are the dames here? If we’re not supposed to think about it, or to wonder why they’re hanging around, why their presence and those questions being shoved in our faces? Does Mr. Bondy not understand the words Scarpia is singing? Similarly, if the enormous church is built of unpainted brick – this is Rome? – why is Cavaradossi painting his Magdalen in it?
Tosca is a finely-crafted machine, every effect calculated to a hair; set it in motion with the proper fuel (voices and orchestra) and it will run smooth as a Lamborghini. Each entrance gives us the character: Tosca’s sensuous piety (in a theme that will come back in “Vissi d’arte”), Cavaradossi’s romantic idealism, Angelotti’s desperation. The first appearance of Scarpia is the most terrifying entrance in all opera – because Puccini set it up to be, thrusting it into the midst of a rollicking (but thirty-second-long) children’s scene. We are never supposed to relax after that, whenever Scarpia is around – and that tension pays dividends as Tosca takes her time suspecting what we feel in our skin: this man is setting his trap for her. Why are those whores getting in the way of our focus on a monomaniac evil?
Then there’s dawn amid the bells of Rome, gentle precisely so that it can be interrupted by the grim preliminaries of an execution. To rehearse the firing squad during this serene music does not bring us to the proper frame of mind for a jolt – on the contrary, it gives us a preliminary jolt that undercuts Puccini’s. We should relax until the jailor summons Cavaradossi – but try resting with all that pointless activity on Mr. Bondy’s stage.
To this ugly and irritating concept, the familiar Met forces under Joseph Colaneri brought a symphonic grandeur: the pounding strings rising to climax in Tosca’s scream as Scarpia corners her, the surge of life around the organ processional that ends Act I, the subtle flicks of this instrument or that to comment on character or story or the very real world in which the opera was set – all reminded us of how fine a contraption of interacting parts Puccini devised, even as Mr. Bondy was tearing them apart and flinging them to the winds. I liked Mattila’s abruptly blank face during “Vissi d’arte,” and Joel Sorenson’s (Spoletta’s) look of frustrated, “You’re going to let her get away with that?” during Scarpia’s interrogation, and the way Álvarez was always gazing at, and admiring, his lover – but these touches were probably invisible to most of the house.
The problem with this school of direction is that its practitioners seem to regard the score like music in a film, as an afterthought, mere accompaniment to action. It is not. In opera, the music is the main event – or as much of it as the action is. Action need not be invented to fill up spaces where there is merely music – the spaces of mere music are there for dramatic reasons. To change things without justification is not very good theater.
If none of this penetrates her self-involvement, perhaps the business with Scarpia isn’t really so bad – she just gets carried away. You know: divas! Certainly the final scene of Act II in the Luc Bondy production is a tasteless mistake – Mattila’s Tosca seems neither stunned nor shocked by having been driven to murder. She plots it beforehand, hides the dagger, arranges her dress so as to incite him, kicks him off the sofa afterward to present a better “stage picture,” and in describing the event to Cavaradossi later, she acts it all out – clearly enjoying every moment spent in the limelight of her imagination. If Tosca is too self-involved to be touched by murder, if she looks upon it as just another chance to seize center stage, why should we care about her? why credit her with any genuine feelings?
While Mattila is performing, though, such thoughts seldom intrude. She whirls about the ugly barn of a church like a Roman dervish, she seizes her lover’s paintbrush to alter the Magdalen’s eyes; she exposes her legs for Scarpia’s rape; and she insists that Cavaradossi rehearse his “fake” execution with her. She cannot be still for a moment – and the payback is her “Vissi d’arte,” when, drained by Scarpia’s brutality, she goes pale and empty, lets her voice float stunned into the theater. She does not remain crushed – nothing but death will stop this woman’s playacting – but the moment itself is riveting, and the rest of Mattila’s Tosca seems designed to draw our attention to it. Since this is not the heart of the opera – Puccini reportedly found the aria a bit dull – her focus highlights Mattila’s errors elsewhere. Tosca must grow from the flibbertigibbet of Act I to the desperate adventuress of Act III, and Mattila’s Tosca does not make such a change. Her reaction to getting blood on her hands? She puts on purple gloves.
Mattila’s voice is not Italianate – as everyone has been saying since she took up Manon Lescaut a few years back. Her Manon Lescaut indeed lacked the opulent young sound of that teenage sensualist – but Tosca is a mature woman, and Mattila sings her with full-throated sensuality, passion without wilt or waver. I’ve seen Toscas of a dozen nationalities, and her sound is more idiomatic, and more beautiful, than many others of the “Nordic” school – Behrens, Nilsson and Vishnevskaya come to mind. More important is that she feels, and lives, the notes of this extreme character.
Marcelo Álvarez (an Argentine) sings a very Italian Cavaradossi, suave and romantic in “Recondita armonia” and the love duets. He lacked vocal finesse only in “E lucevan le stelle,” which was not the honeyed reverie many tenors give us. Álvarez seemed so involved in acting the words – each one clear – that the anguish of his situation choked him up. The elegiac scene that followed, however, found him Mattila’s match for power and expressive beauty.
Carlo Guelfi sang a gruff, barking Scarpia, brutally effective in Act I, but the nuanced slime of Act II was missing – and was missed. Part of the problem may have been the intrusion of three prostitutes fooling with him at the opening of Act II, and this is typical of the director’s initiatives in adding nothing to the show but unanswerable questions. Scarpia is explaining the trap he plans to set for Tosca – and why: he enjoys sex when the lady resists – and these women don’t take the hint – not at all. Are they the sort of persons in whom Scarpia would confide? No – he’s not the type to confide in anyone, least of all a woman – he’s an egotist who opens himself in soliloquy. So why are the dames here? If we’re not supposed to think about it, or to wonder why they’re hanging around, why their presence and those questions being shoved in our faces? Does Mr. Bondy not understand the words Scarpia is singing? Similarly, if the enormous church is built of unpainted brick – this is Rome? – why is Cavaradossi painting his Magdalen in it?
Tosca is a finely-crafted machine, every effect calculated to a hair; set it in motion with the proper fuel (voices and orchestra) and it will run smooth as a Lamborghini. Each entrance gives us the character: Tosca’s sensuous piety (in a theme that will come back in “Vissi d’arte”), Cavaradossi’s romantic idealism, Angelotti’s desperation. The first appearance of Scarpia is the most terrifying entrance in all opera – because Puccini set it up to be, thrusting it into the midst of a rollicking (but thirty-second-long) children’s scene. We are never supposed to relax after that, whenever Scarpia is around – and that tension pays dividends as Tosca takes her time suspecting what we feel in our skin: this man is setting his trap for her. Why are those whores getting in the way of our focus on a monomaniac evil?
Then there’s dawn amid the bells of Rome, gentle precisely so that it can be interrupted by the grim preliminaries of an execution. To rehearse the firing squad during this serene music does not bring us to the proper frame of mind for a jolt – on the contrary, it gives us a preliminary jolt that undercuts Puccini’s. We should relax until the jailor summons Cavaradossi – but try resting with all that pointless activity on Mr. Bondy’s stage.
To this ugly and irritating concept, the familiar Met forces under Joseph Colaneri brought a symphonic grandeur: the pounding strings rising to climax in Tosca’s scream as Scarpia corners her, the surge of life around the organ processional that ends Act I, the subtle flicks of this instrument or that to comment on character or story or the very real world in which the opera was set – all reminded us of how fine a contraption of interacting parts Puccini devised, even as Mr. Bondy was tearing them apart and flinging them to the winds. I liked Mattila’s abruptly blank face during “Vissi d’arte,” and Joel Sorenson’s (Spoletta’s) look of frustrated, “You’re going to let her get away with that?” during Scarpia’s interrogation, and the way Álvarez was always gazing at, and admiring, his lover – but these touches were probably invisible to most of the house.
The problem with this school of direction is that its practitioners seem to regard the score like music in a film, as an afterthought, mere accompaniment to action. It is not. In opera, the music is the main event – or as much of it as the action is. Action need not be invented to fill up spaces where there is merely music – the spaces of mere music are there for dramatic reasons. To change things without justification is not very good theater.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Posh Nosh
"We make our own stock, but by all means buy prepared stock if you have
no self-esteem."
"I use only Tuscan Extra VIRGIN olive oil. This is an old tart."
"Cooking really upsets food."
"We bamboozle our samphire - there's no other way."
"Better get your bottarga from the source - right off the docks at
Calegari - no later than six in the morning when the fishermen are still wet."
"Thoroughly exasperate your currants ... then vilify as usual."
"Today we're focusing on the wine's color - it's gold - heavenly gold -
like God's weewee." (sips) "Better."
-----------------------------------------------
WHY have all you people been keeping this glorious gift of the BBC from me
for whom (obviously) it was designed? Or (gasp) are you too in ignorance of
its wonders? I found out about it from my next-door neighbors, and in
New York, you know, one never even talks to one's next-door neighbors.
The comedy is deceptively mild, deceptively quiet - words superbly, elegantly mis-used in highfalutin ways to mean "cook": "Degrade the eggplant into one-inch cubes"; "Brando your chicken with the butter," "assault an aubergine." Further, there's that old standby, the funniest thing in the world to any Brit, someone of the lower classes aspiring upwards and getting the tone just a bit wrong - remember Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket? On Posh Nosh, our hostess, "my father was a publican," seems blissfully unaware that the handsome, upper-class husband whom she has married and with whom she runs a restaurant is gay as Ikea on Superbowl Sunday. "Where would you be without me?" "Mykonos." In fact - the series' final episode reveals - she knows just what is going on; as long as he's happy and she's upper class, she doesn't care. "You know what mother said when she first met you? 'She'll make the trains run on time.' You know, like Mussolini." "Wasn't he a man?" "It's a compliment!"
Fortunately the eight ten-minute bite-size bits that constitute the show are to be found under "Posh Nosh" on youtube. God bless youtube - it's like sipping whiskey (notes of apple, charred sticks and plastic) through a noose.
no self-esteem."
"I use only Tuscan Extra VIRGIN olive oil. This is an old tart."
"Cooking really upsets food."
"We bamboozle our samphire - there's no other way."
"Better get your bottarga from the source - right off the docks at
Calegari - no later than six in the morning when the fishermen are still wet."
"Thoroughly exasperate your currants ... then vilify as usual."
"Today we're focusing on the wine's color - it's gold - heavenly gold -
like God's weewee." (sips) "Better."
-----------------------------------------------
WHY have all you people been keeping this glorious gift of the BBC from me
for whom (obviously) it was designed? Or (gasp) are you too in ignorance of
its wonders? I found out about it from my next-door neighbors, and in
New York, you know, one never even talks to one's next-door neighbors.
The comedy is deceptively mild, deceptively quiet - words superbly, elegantly mis-used in highfalutin ways to mean "cook": "Degrade the eggplant into one-inch cubes"; "Brando your chicken with the butter," "assault an aubergine." Further, there's that old standby, the funniest thing in the world to any Brit, someone of the lower classes aspiring upwards and getting the tone just a bit wrong - remember Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket? On Posh Nosh, our hostess, "my father was a publican," seems blissfully unaware that the handsome, upper-class husband whom she has married and with whom she runs a restaurant is gay as Ikea on Superbowl Sunday. "Where would you be without me?" "Mykonos." In fact - the series' final episode reveals - she knows just what is going on; as long as he's happy and she's upper class, she doesn't care. "You know what mother said when she first met you? 'She'll make the trains run on time.' You know, like Mussolini." "Wasn't he a man?" "It's a compliment!"
Fortunately the eight ten-minute bite-size bits that constitute the show are to be found under "Posh Nosh" on youtube. God bless youtube - it's like sipping whiskey (notes of apple, charred sticks and plastic) through a noose.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
"Too Late Now"
Do you know this lovely song?
"Too late now to forget your smile/ The way we cling when we dance a while/ Too late now to forget and go on to someone new..."
It suits my mood these days: the wry, smiling, self-conscious lyric (Alan Jay Lerner), the gently dawdling, reflective melody (Burton Lane) that matches it superbly: the A theme is in two parts, going to a false high the first time, then to a surprisingly higher one to send the sentiment soaring. A really fine merging of words and music - I wonder which came first? (With both Lane and Lerner, the words usually came first.) No wonder jazz men love to play with this tune.
The sentiment, too, is superbly ambiguous: It is not clear whether it's "too late" because the affair is over and the singer blew it, or because it's too late to break it off now that s/he realizes s/he's fallen in love, that some other person has become necessary. Both melancholy catastrophes! Thus it can be sung sadly or with an uplift at the end.
Jane Powell introduced it in Royal Wedding, the very bad 1951 film with wonderful songs (including "I Left My Hat in Haiti" and "How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I've Been A Liar All My Life") and the famous sequence when Fred Astaire dances up the wall and across the ceiling, which was later mimicked by Ingmar Bergman in Hour of the Wolf, which I suggest would not make a good musical. (An opera by Franz Schreker, maybe.)
I have recordings of "Too Late Now" with Jane Monheit (too expiringly smokily languid) and Michael Feinstein (who just plain sings it badly, with gaping ugly hollows under his voice like puddles under icy slush that you slip into and get muddy ice in your shoes) and Dorothy Loudon (who sounds 85 years old). None of them inspire me, but the lovely song does.
Happily, my friend Irwin made me a CD of 13 other versions from his matchless collection of you-name-it, including superb renditions by Mel Tormé and Ann Hampton Calloway.
On youtube, I have found Audra Macdonald in a superb "straight" rendition (she has the voice for this melody) and Peggy Lee, who seems to sing it with a sexually content smile on her lips. (I mean, that is how the lyric comes through - we do not see her on this clip.) Judy Garland is a bit too husky with it. Paul Sheesley a little too jazzy - the jazzy mind set fights with the sentiment of the song. (Of course, wandering around youtube this way, I stumbled on something else wonderful, Frank Sinatra's somewhat too up-tempo version of Johnny Mercer's "I Thought About You," another song currently repeating in my head.) (No iPod here! I just sing them to myself while biking around town!)
A fine tunesmith Lane, mostly for the movies - he had one great Broadway hit - at the same time as Royal Wedding (Finian's Rainbow, soon to be revived, a show on which I passionately fixated at age six, memorizing all the songs in Ella Logan's Scottish accent though I had no idea what two-thirds of Yip Harburg's glorious lyrics meant). Then Lane was blacklisted for years. He got back to Broadway together with Lerner for On A Clear Day You Can See Forever (Richard Rodgers having given up in exasperation at Lerner's dilatory ways - Rodgers was used to Hammerstein, who would sit in the office with him all day and come up with a lyric a few hours after they had decided what sort of song ought to go in what part of a show). On A Clear Day is also full of great tunes (and great lyrics) - "What Did I Have That I Don't Have," "The S.S. Bernard Cohn," "Don't Tamper With My Sister," the talking-to-flowers song - but the book is a mess.
Due to an accident backstage (an actress fell off a ladder), I was deprived during the recent New York Fringe Festival of a revival of 1967's How Now Dow Jones, a show that flopped memorably and was excoriated by Ethan Mordden. But friends who did see the brief revival said it wasn't bad at all (heavily rewritten, songs by Carolyn Leigh and Elmer Bernstein), and I'm in the mood to learn a new musical - but it would have to be a musical with clever lyrics and dreamy or delicious melodies, and they stopped writing that kind thirty years back when Lane and Lerner and Styne and Comden & Green were still alive, and Kander & Ebb were in their heyday.
(This is my idea of a brief, casual blog post.)
"Too late now to forget your smile/ The way we cling when we dance a while/ Too late now to forget and go on to someone new..."
It suits my mood these days: the wry, smiling, self-conscious lyric (Alan Jay Lerner), the gently dawdling, reflective melody (Burton Lane) that matches it superbly: the A theme is in two parts, going to a false high the first time, then to a surprisingly higher one to send the sentiment soaring. A really fine merging of words and music - I wonder which came first? (With both Lane and Lerner, the words usually came first.) No wonder jazz men love to play with this tune.
The sentiment, too, is superbly ambiguous: It is not clear whether it's "too late" because the affair is over and the singer blew it, or because it's too late to break it off now that s/he realizes s/he's fallen in love, that some other person has become necessary. Both melancholy catastrophes! Thus it can be sung sadly or with an uplift at the end.
Jane Powell introduced it in Royal Wedding, the very bad 1951 film with wonderful songs (including "I Left My Hat in Haiti" and "How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I've Been A Liar All My Life") and the famous sequence when Fred Astaire dances up the wall and across the ceiling, which was later mimicked by Ingmar Bergman in Hour of the Wolf, which I suggest would not make a good musical. (An opera by Franz Schreker, maybe.)
I have recordings of "Too Late Now" with Jane Monheit (too expiringly smokily languid) and Michael Feinstein (who just plain sings it badly, with gaping ugly hollows under his voice like puddles under icy slush that you slip into and get muddy ice in your shoes) and Dorothy Loudon (who sounds 85 years old). None of them inspire me, but the lovely song does.
Happily, my friend Irwin made me a CD of 13 other versions from his matchless collection of you-name-it, including superb renditions by Mel Tormé and Ann Hampton Calloway.
On youtube, I have found Audra Macdonald in a superb "straight" rendition (she has the voice for this melody) and Peggy Lee, who seems to sing it with a sexually content smile on her lips. (I mean, that is how the lyric comes through - we do not see her on this clip.) Judy Garland is a bit too husky with it. Paul Sheesley a little too jazzy - the jazzy mind set fights with the sentiment of the song. (Of course, wandering around youtube this way, I stumbled on something else wonderful, Frank Sinatra's somewhat too up-tempo version of Johnny Mercer's "I Thought About You," another song currently repeating in my head.) (No iPod here! I just sing them to myself while biking around town!)
A fine tunesmith Lane, mostly for the movies - he had one great Broadway hit - at the same time as Royal Wedding (Finian's Rainbow, soon to be revived, a show on which I passionately fixated at age six, memorizing all the songs in Ella Logan's Scottish accent though I had no idea what two-thirds of Yip Harburg's glorious lyrics meant). Then Lane was blacklisted for years. He got back to Broadway together with Lerner for On A Clear Day You Can See Forever (Richard Rodgers having given up in exasperation at Lerner's dilatory ways - Rodgers was used to Hammerstein, who would sit in the office with him all day and come up with a lyric a few hours after they had decided what sort of song ought to go in what part of a show). On A Clear Day is also full of great tunes (and great lyrics) - "What Did I Have That I Don't Have," "The S.S. Bernard Cohn," "Don't Tamper With My Sister," the talking-to-flowers song - but the book is a mess.
Due to an accident backstage (an actress fell off a ladder), I was deprived during the recent New York Fringe Festival of a revival of 1967's How Now Dow Jones, a show that flopped memorably and was excoriated by Ethan Mordden. But friends who did see the brief revival said it wasn't bad at all (heavily rewritten, songs by Carolyn Leigh and Elmer Bernstein), and I'm in the mood to learn a new musical - but it would have to be a musical with clever lyrics and dreamy or delicious melodies, and they stopped writing that kind thirty years back when Lane and Lerner and Styne and Comden & Green were still alive, and Kander & Ebb were in their heyday.
(This is my idea of a brief, casual blog post.)
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Thalia Nights (An homage to Ingmar Bergman)
Must have left twenty running shoes over years
Stuck to the floor of the gum-mangled Thalia
Long summer nights there in Plato’s glum cavern
Observing, believing, the motile shadows,
God-knows-what going on, behind, in the booth…
Arletty, the goddess, Laughton, the painter,
Mifune, the warrior, Moreau, the temptress,
Signoret, the cynic, Masina, the clown, Mastroianni, the bored –
these were our gods in the Thalia pantheon,
our greater trumps, our cards of fortune;
shaping our summers, haunting our winters.
Sing out, o bards!
Bunuel! Renoir! Satyajit Ray!
Eisenstein! Kurosawa! Fellini! Truffaut!
The syllables sing in the mouth like wine.
But most mighty of all, filmgoers’ philosophe,
Bergman the troubled, cantankerous Swede,
Took a sing-song tongue, made it sound prophetic,
Gnomic, organic, epigrammatic, portentous;
Made us see with the eyes of men being Bergman
And idealize the actress he currently bedded,
Bergman heroic! The atheist pastor!
The Freudian mystic! The thinker on film!
Even his jokes were layered with mythos –
Isn’t Death playing chess the art-house totem?
His actors were family: we followed the serial,
Image by image, aspect by aspect –
Never doubting that one would serve family supper.
Harriet, swinging the hips of false promise,
Doe-eyed Liv, crazy waif, suffering wife,
Bibi as sane as she ever was sensual –
Given the choice: Liv or Bibi or Harriet
And one long solstice Swedish night,
Which would you take?
Defend your position in two hundred words
Dripped in the glass like water-of-life.
Max, noble everyman, serious, murderous,
Handsome as some austere cathedral;
Gunnar, the distinguished we feared we’d grow into;
Erland, bitter fellow we feared that we were –
So: mix and match and match and mix –
Playing chess with the puppets he whittled unceasing
(If there isn’t a maze, there can be no solution):
The face overhearing (or reading the diary);
The couple enisled, spitting intimate daggers;
The acting troupe, offstage, lounging and lusting;
The man of God who is losing his faith;
The man of no God losing his mind;
The unman made-up,
The maid unmade;
Sex as war and war as sex;
The sea-borne dream, waves troubled as nightmare;
Papageno Vogler and Alma, the Soul –
We’ve done it that way; let’s try it this way:
The point is amusement while stating the problem.
I sing of Ingmar – Scanian lodestar –
unsinking sun of the Nordic night –
unwarming depth of the Baltic tide –
whose coolness freshened our Thalia summers.
Stuck to the floor of the gum-mangled Thalia
Long summer nights there in Plato’s glum cavern
Observing, believing, the motile shadows,
God-knows-what going on, behind, in the booth…
Arletty, the goddess, Laughton, the painter,
Mifune, the warrior, Moreau, the temptress,
Signoret, the cynic, Masina, the clown, Mastroianni, the bored –
these were our gods in the Thalia pantheon,
our greater trumps, our cards of fortune;
shaping our summers, haunting our winters.
Sing out, o bards!
Bunuel! Renoir! Satyajit Ray!
Eisenstein! Kurosawa! Fellini! Truffaut!
The syllables sing in the mouth like wine.
But most mighty of all, filmgoers’ philosophe,
Bergman the troubled, cantankerous Swede,
Took a sing-song tongue, made it sound prophetic,
Gnomic, organic, epigrammatic, portentous;
Made us see with the eyes of men being Bergman
And idealize the actress he currently bedded,
Bergman heroic! The atheist pastor!
The Freudian mystic! The thinker on film!
Even his jokes were layered with mythos –
Isn’t Death playing chess the art-house totem?
His actors were family: we followed the serial,
Image by image, aspect by aspect –
Never doubting that one would serve family supper.
Harriet, swinging the hips of false promise,
Doe-eyed Liv, crazy waif, suffering wife,
Bibi as sane as she ever was sensual –
Given the choice: Liv or Bibi or Harriet
And one long solstice Swedish night,
Which would you take?
Defend your position in two hundred words
Dripped in the glass like water-of-life.
Max, noble everyman, serious, murderous,
Handsome as some austere cathedral;
Gunnar, the distinguished we feared we’d grow into;
Erland, bitter fellow we feared that we were –
So: mix and match and match and mix –
Playing chess with the puppets he whittled unceasing
(If there isn’t a maze, there can be no solution):
The face overhearing (or reading the diary);
The couple enisled, spitting intimate daggers;
The acting troupe, offstage, lounging and lusting;
The man of God who is losing his faith;
The man of no God losing his mind;
The unman made-up,
The maid unmade;
Sex as war and war as sex;
The sea-borne dream, waves troubled as nightmare;
Papageno Vogler and Alma, the Soul –
We’ve done it that way; let’s try it this way:
The point is amusement while stating the problem.
I sing of Ingmar – Scanian lodestar –
unsinking sun of the Nordic night –
unwarming depth of the Baltic tide –
whose coolness freshened our Thalia summers.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Multi-tasking
I'm sitting at the play, writing my own play
Or I'm at a poetry slam, writing a sonnet
Or I'm at a Handel opera, humming Verdi
Or I'm at a film, tightening the edit
Or I'm at a musical, tossing the pointless song or the pointless singer.
It's when I'm alone with the paper
My mind contains nothing.
Or I'm at a poetry slam, writing a sonnet
Or I'm at a Handel opera, humming Verdi
Or I'm at a film, tightening the edit
Or I'm at a musical, tossing the pointless song or the pointless singer.
It's when I'm alone with the paper
My mind contains nothing.
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