Handel’s Giulio Cesare: Met HD-Opera style, post-modern Bollywood mash-up

David Daniels as Giulio Cesare

Dear friends and readers,

The Met ended its 2012-13 HD season with the superb Glynbourne production by David McVickers of Handel’s Giulio Cesare. From the inspired idea of setting the action in 19th century colonialist India loosely conceived: some of the outfits were 18th century and some contemporary 21st century (Dessay’s last dress and her slip-dress on the bed respectively), some mythic Renaissance (the triumphant close outfit of Daniels. The point was to evoke the colonialist world run by whites — none of Cesare or Cleopatra’s immediate servants were white. To the naturalistic acting and mostly exquisitely beautiful singing (exceptions were Daniels’ first aria, Achillas’s baritone which didn’t carry far though he looked right as the ruthless torment and would-be rapist of resistant Cornelia, Patrica Bardon.

Stand-out performance by Alice Coote as Sextus:

Christophe Dumaux as spiteful lascivious yet comic Tolomeo and (as ever) the actress-singer Dessay. Coote was subtle, fearful when she should be, shocked, comic. To the use of Indian style Bollywood gestures and dance steps, and orientalist comedy: Rachid Ben Abdeslam as the nervous servant Nirenus.

It all fit together. (See Cast, story, list of books.)

Part of the way the opera-makers broke the barriers of baroque formalized stylized acting and repetitive lines of song was also to insist on the staging, kinds of voices, motifs, attitudes, practices (and some of the costumes too) of the 18th century. A proscenium stage within the stage with columns up and down the side. Ships which cross the framed artificially flowing waters — such rich colors.

I noticed it’s called a Bollywood Giulio Cesare — it’s not; it’s eclectic, taking what it wanted from repertoire of genre cliches to achieve comedy: it sort of made fun of Handel’s opera. Here are Cesare and Cleopatra as a 1920s competitive couple:

Here they are all sexuality until a frantic revolutions turn the scene into slap-stick comedy:

Cesaer (David Daniels) and Cleopatra (Natalie Dessay)

Sometimes Dessay danced a Charleston (all gay innocence):

and sometimes Dumaux was a silly vain Brit in a tennis-outfit and then again a transvestite in drag:

At the same time it took the story seriously — especially distressing to watch was Achillas’s (Guido Loconsolo) humiliation and suggestive torture (brought in everywhere in contemporary art) of Cornelia:

Achillas

The self-conscious variety reminded me of last year’s pastiche Enchanted Island as fantasy mash-up. I’d call this post-modern mash-up. Nonetheless, my favorite moments were the serious ones. I found touching Cornelia’s relationship with her clinging clumsy son, Sesto. I loved the more melancholy arias, like Dessay’s haunting “Piangero, la sorte mia:”

This opera reminded me of how important the costumes (here by Brigitte Reiffenstuel) and masque-like nature of the genre is.

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These past four years have provided me with my real first experiences of actually going to a full season of opera at a given opera-house. I don’t know that I have a sense of a general theme or feel or outlook for a season at the Met. Izzy suggested this year Diva’s predominated. A few got to choose an opera that would be done. Eva-Marie Westbook brought back Francesca di Rimini. The great ones made the opera, like Joyce Didonato as Maria Stuarda. But the Met seems to me to have no perspective but that of strong entertainment, piquant and original productions which do not offend the audience. Pleasure, interest-arousing variety and bringing in money and a larger audience are key here. That’s why the celebrity Broadway-like productions.

I find all the more grating (and condescending) the insistence each time of said hostess (or host) that the experience of “live-opera” in the house is so much superior to that of the person in the far-off theater. I wonder if they believe that? They must say it: how else how justify huge prices? The Met management fears their live audience members will revert to movie-going. Doubtless some people have. That means big loss of revenue for their donors come from their live audience members.

Joyce DiDonato — close up from Maria Stuarda

While I do not underestimate the visceral effect of live performances, for myself seeing operas in HD-format genuinely competes with seeing and hearing them live. For each opera I’ve been able to understand what’s going on for the first time, to really see the action and acting close enough to be affected by it. I’ve not fallen asleep as yet, and I still fall asleep every once in a while when Jim takes me to a live opera even when we are not sitting too far off. Despite the irritating hype and inanity of some of the interview talk, I enjoy and learn something from watching the stage crews set up the stage between acts and the “hostess’s” talks with costume and other tech people and even the occasional honest intelligent singer. That’s part of what I value of the experience. And yes I like the informality of the audience, the lack of false showing-off.

I now have favorite singer-actors. I recognize less well-known superbly-talented people. I begin to have knowledge of the repertoire.

From Susan Herbert’s Opera Cats: gentle reader, can you guess which opera is alluded to here? (answer in comments)

The experience lifts the year so that next year I’m again wanting to go to almost all the productions. Saturday dinner Izzy, Jim and I have good talk about the opera. $20 each for admission.

Ellen

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Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini: Pre-Raphaelite picturesqueness brought back

And she to me: ‘There is no greater sorrow
than thinking back upon a happy time
in misery …
One day, to pass the time away, we read
of Lancelot — how love had overcome him …
this one, who never shall be parted from me,
while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth …’ Dante, Inferno 5, translated Allen Mandelbaum

Act One: the stage scene as a whole

Act One: Francesca (Eva-Maria Westbrook) and Paolo (Marcello Giordani) meet: he pretends to be her bethrothed

Dear friends and readers,

The 1984 Pre-Raphaelite picturesque production of Riccardo Zandoni’s Francesca da Rimini (libretto Tito Ricordi) is wonderfully absorbing in its HD Met Opera format (conductor Marco Armiliato; production Pero Faggioni; set designer Ezio Frigerio; costume designer Frana Squarciapino, lighting Gil Wechsler). I had not expected to enjoy it so much. Breaking through the fussily-decorated elaborate Pre-Raphaelite picturesque and early 20th century art deco decor, its core and action are fuelled by primary passion: the coerced marriage of Francesca (Eva-Maria Westbrook) secured by trickery: Paolo (Marcello Giordnai), the youngest handsome brother of the groom allows himself to be presented as the groom); these desperate adulterous lovers driven passionate in the way of Cavalliero Rusticano or Il Pagliaccio; the violent brutish lame murderous anguished husband, Giancioot (Mark Delavan); the even more brutal vengeful one-eyed malacious younger brother, Malatsetino (Robert Brubaker).

It’s the stuff of a verismo tale except occurring among aristocrats of the 13th century, and first turned into literature by Dante who presents the lovers after death in fifth circle of hell,

… a place where every light is muted …
The hellish hurricane , which never rests,
drives on the spirits with its violence;
wheeling and pounding, it harasses them … (Inferno 5)

“damned because they sinned within the flesh … now here, now there, now down, now up, it drives them./There is no hope that ever comforts them — no hope for rest and none for lesser pain.”

The story has a basis in actual events, and before this 1914 opera after a play by Gabriele d’Annunzio whose language came through the modern English subtitles (“The stars are drowned in the sea” Paolo says), the story had been told in many versions, staged, sung, painted mostly (it seems in Pre-Raphaelite style). Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1855) tells the spiritual after-death Dante version:

.

but Alexandre Cabanel (1870) prefers the theatrical murder (reminding me of Wallis’s Death of Chatterton, which is just now hanging at the National Gallery in DC, part of a Pre-Raphaelite exhibit):

What distinguishes this opera is its highly dramatic play with effective vigorous scenes, sung to music said to be a mix of Strauss, Puccini and Debussy: the love duet at the close of the second act which in the required way the lovers are reading of Lancelot, let the book fall and then “read no more” is just sweepingly swayingly lush,

It ended as swiftly as Cav and Pag; the words were simple and music felt sudden and elemental at the close: the lovers are stabbed to death and the bodies drop on the stairs, with the actors making sure they ended up flung over one another.

It was said the production was revived because Westbrook asked for this, and she sang and acted her part to perfection. She did carry the opera; she was hardly ever not there, and was endlessly singing. She got to wear the loveliest of embroidered costumes. In her interview she insisted the story was not just credible; coerced marriage happens still today. This is a big disingenuous since the motives given the lovers are hopelessly lachrymose and ethical, but the situation is given bite by ferocity of the behavior of the husband and his demented brother. Delvan was powerful, Brubaker memorable, especially when threatening Francesca and then going down below to behead a man in the midst of being tortured and screaming. Jim said Giordani sung weakly; I wished the lines about him had said she loved him for his goodness and kindness, for he’s not handsome, nothing like a Rufus Sewell.

The opera is fleshed out by Water Scott like happening: a comic minstrel opens the piece, offering to serenade Francesca’s ladies with the story of Tristan and Isolde (anticipating the story to come) — we are led to fear for his life because at the hands of these criminal males. Her ladies were characterized enough, her sister (a kind of Dido relationship):

A supposed battle takes place in Act 2 which is not convincing as the production did not take advantage of modern screen computer techniques at all. It was grotesque, with a gold-layered siege ram set on fire (like something taken from an Aida set). In act three a bloody head is flung about in a pillow case.

Delavan as Gianciotto in a Walter Scott-like knight-warrior outfit (aware he is a bad guy in the interview he asked our “hostess” what she had in her wallet)

And what a pleasure it was to see a new great grand opera. While I knew the story of course (the opera audience does not practice the inhibiting nonsense of no-spoilers), I had no idea how it would work out as an experience. The surprise element added to my experience.

Any flaws? well, yes. It just took too long between scenes which intervals sometimes seemed much longer than the acts. At one point the camera cut away far too quickly from a genuinely moving scene to Sondar Radvanovksy as “hostess” which her commercial blurb and hype. While we really enjoyed watching the behind-the-scenes setting up of the scenery and curtains, and painted flats, there was just too much of it, and it made the production feel as staid as some Victorian drawing-room. I’d love to see a new post-modern kind of production, with maybe a mimed scene of the woman raped by the husband, a far more effectively suggestive violence for the battles, and a mimed-coda added on where we see the lovers in hell. In Claus Guth fashion, it could critique even Dante for punishing those whom life had punished enough.

Rodin’s The Kiss (1888), said to be originally titled Francesca da Rimini

As to the play itself, there was something funny to see the principles act out the love scene over a book, and wait for the book to drop. Everyone accepted this because it was in Dante. More seriously, while here was the inevitable falsifying of sexual life so that what was the real horror of this situation, marital rape, was obscured from view; as Izzy said, the “lesson” of the play was not that adultery was evil. The lovers are not evil. It was deceit and brutality that were the evils in this opera. So it had no trouble speaking to our time. As Maria Stuarda seems to have not been revived for decades and now is utterly a propos, so Francesca da Rimini, if revived for a diva, seemed to please the audience strongly for its fable and presentation, which (to refer to the Pre-Raphaelite exhibit’s comments on my blog), revealed a pseudo-medieval, literary highly sexually liberated (for the men) art fit the pre WW1 world.

Few women in the arts or as patrons have interested themselves in her story. Josephine Bonaparte bought a 19th century painting of the story; Gabriele d’Annunzio’s play was written for Eleanore Duse:

Eleanore Duse as Francesca da Rimini (1901)

and Olga Gorelli, a 20th century Italian composer wrote some music.
Renata Scotto played the part with Placido Domingo as Paolo, and Cornell MacNeil as Gianciotti in 1984, the production now available as a DVD.

Ellen

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Rigoletto in Las Vegas (a rape story), a 19th C Lohengrin (swans anyone?): Re-settings can jar

Gilda (Diana Damrau) and Rigoletto (Zeljoko Lucic) coping inside 1950s be-finned car (Rigoletto at the Met)

Elsa von Brabant (Annette Dasch) and Lohengrin (Jonas Kaufmann) coping among soaked wheat shafts (Lohengrin at La Scala)

Dear friends and readers,

Full disclosure: usually I like re-settings. I have enjoyed each of our local DC Source Theater (director Clara Huber) updatings of Mozart by a rewrite of the libretto and re-staging of the opera. It made the Mozarts more understandable in our terms. Of the few Euro-trash doings of opera I’ve seen (on HD screens), all but one rightly I thought undercut the reactionary nature of the numinous personages in the opera play; Claus Guth’s Don Giovanni turned the providential pattern of Mozart’s play into a story of despairing refuge. I was deeply stirred by the abstract re-staging of Traviata with the acting of Natalie Dessay. But the change has to be genuinely thought out; it cannot be done just to attract a younger audience (as I suspect the new Rigoletto has been) or out of embarrassment (which I think was the reason for resetting Lohengrin out of 10th century raw beasts and crudities). The money motive and the vanity motive have to be downplayed if art is to transcend the realities of its concrete situation and players.

So not all re-settings, no matter how at first allegorically seemingly right (sleazy, mean Vegas for Rigoletto), and physically preferable (primitive swamp, duelling in Lohengrin) work out. For the Rigoletto the altered placing was too specific, called too much attention to moral irritants and absurdities in Verdi’s opera (the Duke “sure a dreamboat“); in Lohengrin the original words referring to things in the 10th century kept were out of whack with the singer’s 19th century clothes & environment. This is the most charitable lesson one can take away from this past week’s two HD operas.

Each time I’ve seen Verdi’s Rigoletto (about 3 before this) I’ve wept copiously as Gilda lays dying and Rigoletto begs her not to leave him all alone, not to die. This time I couldn’t quite; there was something slightly risible about Damrau and Lucic doing their scene over and in the trunk of a 1950s cadillac. I thought to myself they had to practice not to fall off. I had also been jarred into paying attention to the actual happenings of Rigoletto partly because the language had been partly updated.

When Gilda rushes from the duke’s lair where she had been abducted and then seduced into having sex with him, I realized for the first time this was a post-rape scene. If she were a virgin (something the subtitles still insisted upon), it must’ve hurt, there must’ve been coercion. She certainly seemed upset at having been tied up and put into a sarcophagus and dumped into a man’s room. By rights Rigoletto should have rushed her to the police. It will be said that in terms of the re-setting Rigoletto as comedian side-kick of didn’t dare offend duke as casino owner but these were not the terms upon which the man was suffering. Further what an ass she was. Not only she but in the next act, most unlikely Sparafucile’s prostitute-sister, Maddalena (Oksana Volkova) who declared how much she loved this shit Duke (Piotr Beczala):

There seemed something wrong in the fun Piotr Beczala was having as the relaxed Dean Martin type when he was more than a cad; a continual heartless rapist who had ordered the local police to murder a sheik outraged by his daughter’s sexual spoiling. As a 21st century audience we still could have felt for a father whose culture made him take loss of virginity as the equivalent of a young women’s destruction and his shame forever, but then we were being asked to take it as fun, as trivia because the “rat-pack” as the Met introducers and discussions in the intermissions persisted in calling Frank Sinatra and his friends’s famous nightclub life together. The setting had the paradoxical effect of calling attention to the problems in Verdi’s conception. Lost were what made the story despite this ultimately dismissive treatment of women as people moving nonetheless.

What might be a valuable lesson in compassion, a source of identification in our autonomous lives was ridden over. The re-write called Rigoletto a Quasimodo at one point. That’s right. Hugo and then Verdi had made the aging fool a hunch-back, a de-formed disabled man who had taken on a vicious and spiteful carapace partly because of the way he’d been treated by others. Lucic had the slightest high shoulder, the slightest limp, his jester status slightly unfortunately not forgotten by his absurdly brightly-colored variegated sweater:

Rigoletto as usually staged shows a man all alone; the words of the libretto which insist on the unusualness of his having no family around him but Gilda were kept and this condition of isolation, of this one girl being all his home, his security, his peace (usually she is envisaged in a garden apart from the court) was lost. He cries “non lasciarmi”. The Met understandably had kept the original Italian libretto, and not only did Lucic and Damrau sing with exquisite beauty, strength and psychological distraught tragic feeling, they made the Italian come out clearly.

Most crucially, neither of the principles had changed their decades-long understanding of their characters one iota. During the interviews in the last HD performance (the interviews in one HD opera have now become an ad for the upcoming one) Lucic said emphatically his character believed the curse of the wounded father of the first act (in this version an Arab man who Rigoletto mocked by putting a towel on his head); a 16th century man as understood by 2 19th century ones would have. But not a hired comic in a 50s nightclub. Lucic said with overt irony and explicitly as if he had no idea what director, Michael Mayer had been talking about, he was to be “Don Rickles. Jim told me this comic is said to have made laughter out of the most vicious impulses: he would pick and ridicule a customer at one of the nightclub tables in front of everyone else, causing most people there (who comes to such a scene) to laugh derisively. Diana Damrau was even more unable to see any change she could make in her character. In one of her interviews she came close to saying as the best praise she could come up with that new production had not ruined the opera or her character for her.

While I watched I felt that not a lot more than these two central characters be re-thought had needed to be done to make the switch in setting function in some new way. Beczala clearly had made the leap into relaxed cad (as he showed in his interviews too); the use of the chorus girls did have the effect that many say Euro-trash is meant to: it undercut the solemnity with which this pro-elite form usually takes itself and diminished him physically too: the audience could be heard laughing as the girls made these faces, arched their bodies and brushed him with their feathers:

But by the end of the opera and on the way home I realized the the serious core of the piece had been trivialized. The Met people are anything but feminists and it’s the last thing they’d want to do to make the audience take this rape seriously so rather than think about that they decided to take the whole situation as so much gay decadence. What were the lives of Dean Martin (whom one of the courtiers, Marullo, was got up to look like)? I began to wonder if Sammy Davis Junior (whose photo was flashed during intermission) gave to black American causes. Jim assured me Davies quietly had; he had, like Obama, been half-white, in his case Jewish, an outsider on several counts, as he was slightly deformed and small for a man.

I think in the case of Rigoletto we were better off being left alone in quieter staging, abstract, old-fashioned — as Ronald Blum says the best moments were when the principles were on the stage alone; if the terms of what happened were not to be changed, you should not make the setting neon-lit 20th century. If you update it specifically, you must update the meaning of the action too. Some of this was recognized by the audience. The people we were sitting next to agreed with us (and others) that the actor-singer for Sarafucile (Stefan Kocan) was brilliantly effective. Much younger than the rest of the central cast, he really enacted a nasty coarse thug, as ready to kill for money at a moment’s notice as he was filled with a sense of his own rich luxurious elegance:

Having a bartender listen to Rigoletto morose broodings was effective. Maria Zifchak as a egregiously corrupt guardian-Giovanna out of some 1940s comic noir film was funny and effective in the same way Stephanie Blythe as Madame Ulrica had been earlier this year in Un Ballo en Maschera. Maybe they needed to stage the production as a 1940s movie, a reflection of how reality was understood not what any reality had been. I did enjoy those costumes and a couple of the minor performers where an imitation of a star or type as seen in movies was intended.

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Jim said the problem in both cases was in the opera itself.

This certainly felt true as we watched Lohengrin at the West End Cinema (DC movie-house, not far from Foggy Bottom Metro station). This time the action was mythic, and it seemed to me Claus Guth was trying to make sense of its contradictions in modern terms and it just wouldn’t do. This was another opera that would have been better staged as simply and barely as possible.

This photo with a different Elsa (Anja Harteros) comes from a rehearsal shot

At first I thought we were to take the action as Lohengrin or Elsa’s bad dream (see story). There were extras dressed as a young Elsa and her brother (whom she is said to have murdered) wandering about in Act I; at every opportunity Lohengrin was laying on the floor as if asleep. But as things progressed, I could see that wouldn’t work, and eventually the opera became about a wedding night that just went all wrong. Elsa (Annette Dasch) couldn’t adjust to not knowing who her husband Lohengrin (Jonas Kauffman). Well in real life what woman would? As with the Met Rigoletto production the people looked the roles; Kauffman so handsome and Dasch pretty, young, with flowing hair. but this was patently not real life as having them get themselves soaked and also go on about a swan no one had seen (like many another producer Guth just eliminated any attempt at an artificial swan) made clear.

The libretto had not been changed so Guth’s re-staging had nothing to do with the words. In the original play, the second act opens with the evil couple, Friedrich von Telramund (Tomas Tomasson) and his wife, Otrud (Evelyn Herlitzius) in bed together, having just fucked after coming home from some raucous drunken festival. Guth had them sitting at desk, trussed up like modern politicians in suits that were militaristic. Otrud’s outfits reminded me of Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits (while running for president) or Angela Merkel today (the German chancellor). So the parallel with the bad wedding night for the good couple was lost and nothing gained as modern day politicians do not duel with one another so the scene in context made no sense at all:

Watching the sword-fight I was therefore alerted to them being performing singers who were up to this sort of training and gymnastics on a stage.

In other words, if the myth is silly (and misogynistic as the idea is women should be content to obey and know nothing), it doesn’t help to break the suspension of disbelief altogether. During the intermissions I had become reminded that La Scala as an Italian theater and this was opening night and patrons were not altogether pleased that Wagner instead of Verdi had been chosen. If this production failed in the live theater and was at moments ridiculous to the audience in the movie-house it was not the fault of the principles. As Martin kettle (who describes the sets too in the Guardian) says, Kauffman especially has a haunting voice and manner, Evelyn Herlitzius was theatrically effective as an ambitious woman:

Tomasson was a figure out a Michael Haneke movie about rigid Nazis (e.g., The White Ribbon). Again I enjoyed more minor character roles: Rene Pape as a solemn official was what is called luxury casting.

In a sentence: these productions had the effect of pointing up problems in the operas.

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I cannot say I was bored at either production; they were lessons in what one can and cannot do to older operas whose stories or themes have become unacceptable (embarrassing), outdated (the duke rapes Gilda and this is not “rat-pack” amusement) or I fear (in the case of Rigoletto as a disabled person) uncomfortable.

The Lohengrin setting at times was meant to look like a stage, to be self-reflexive (this seems to be a favorite motif this year). My favorite piece of the setting for Rigoletto were the chandeliers: they were exactly the same ludicrous artificial ones as in the real theater, but here the self-reflexivity seemed to me to mock the whole event. They are mechanical and go up and down. It was apparently felt chandeliers could not be done without in the palace the opera house was supposed to be; OTOH, you could not have them too elaborate or get in the way of seeing.

Operas were in the 19th century staged for people with money who wanted to be flattered into thinking themselves as rich and powerful as the people on their political and social stages. I’m all for exposing this worship of rank, wealth, the misogyny, reactionary nonsense, religious stupidities of myths. But it’s not easy to do with intransigent material when you also desire to please and attract an increasingly larger modern audience.

Mee-ee-ow …

Ellen

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The HD Met Berlioz’s Les Troyens; or, heroines who die on pyres (in this case surrounded by boxes)

Susan Graham sang & acted Dido magnificently (Berlioz’s Les Troyens)

it’s not over until the soprano dies

Dear friends and readers,

Since this is 3 weeks overdue (the HD transmission of the Met Berlioz’s Les Troyens occurred January 5th, while we were in Boston), and the production was some ten years old and if not senseless quite, disappointing, I’ll keep to what was good and puzzling feebleness.

For me the opera came alive in the third act. The man who sang the lyric song opening it mourning about the coming journey and loss was poignant (either Iopas, poet at Dido’s court or Pathus, Aeneas’s friend or maybe it was Hylas a Trojan sailor so Eric Cutler, Richard Bernstein or Paul Appleby — the subtitles left something to be dseired). I can find no cast lists at Metopera.org; they are not made easy to find; I am shown where I can request a cast sheet, but that would take time. We didn’t get a cast sheet tonight as we were watching the night re-run. Then came Bryan Hymel who sang beautifully and trembled with emotion as he acted the coerced Aeneas.

I can’t find a still of him alone which does justice to him: we do see Voigt to the side, and next to her the woman who sang Ascanius (very well, a mezzo).

Susan Graham also came into her own. She finally commanded the stage which had been mostly silly — boxes and pieces of wood were everywhere throughout the opera and the backdrop illuminated bunches of wheat-looking objects. The last act was relatively bare and dark for a good deal of the time.

I thought of Catherine Clement’s Opera, or the Undoing of Women, and when I came home today read the section of heroines who die on pyres. Such heroines sing out their resistance to losing. They lash out against all Rome stands for (think of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, of the cold ambitious Augustus in Antony and Cleopatra). They refuse to be disdained. The betrayal of all that makes life worthwhile is before us, burning burning burning. Or going up in suggestive smoke — as in this feeble production by Francesca Zambello who utterly failed to articulate why she did what she did more in her interview during the intermission. What was wanted was some sense of how she viewed the 19th century transformation of Virgil.

This final scene almost made up for the intermittent failure and absurdity of the other 2/3rds of the opera.

Until then there had little inward drama compelling the scenes. I’m not sure why it is that the opening act with a fine Cassandra (Deborah Voigt) failing to warn her lover, Coroebus (a fine distinctive voice — Dwayne Croft?), that Troy is about to be destroyed; and after it is so destroyed (off-stage with people running backwards and forwards on bridges on stage, round and round), Cassandra persuading the women of Troy to commit suicide — was so flat, a matter of going through the familiar motions. It just lacked any projection of passion. The New York Times agrees but doesn’t try to figure out why. The fantastic horse was effective visually, but a paper-mache mechanical is limited in its emotional effects even when lit up by purple light and surrounded by spears in interesting geometric patterns.

The second act turns the stage into this decorative Arcadia (complete with streamers as in a party) which is supposed to stand for paradise. Eventually glass greenhouse with plants in it surrounds the characters. Dido is all benignity and strength among her family members and court; Aeneas arrives, the familiar love story ensues.

The boxes and pieces of wood come in all forms and types — this is from the second act

The whole of the history of journeys, the past, identities is reduced to a love story. The greenhouse is taken away and we have a make-shift throne where Dido and Aeneas with courtiers and relatives near by sit down (for all the world as if they had taken refuge in the Nutcracker) to watch at least 45 minutes of dance and ballet. It being well after 10:30 pm I fell asleep. Probably the dancing was good, it just went on for too long. In the 19th century productions the two dances would have occurred at separate points in the opera. I woke up to listen to the soaring love exchanges between Hymel and Graham as Dido and Aeneas, he abandoned, she melting.

But duty — as we all know — intervenes. And the next act opens up with huge sails all over the stage (against which the two male arias described above are sung). These are pulled off like so much curtains to reveal a great circle on the wall and the pyre — covered with the usual boxes and pieces of wood.

Here the boxes were differently wrapped

The opera needs to be re-produced, re-thought completely. I don’t know what one is to do with all the vast choral numbers which do seem to go on and on. This is an opera where the composer has been overtaken by the presence of the super-ego who as chorus appear in piles of bodies, or crowding the stage, or in rows, often in ridiculous costumes with funny hats. Maybe ruthlessly cut them down. I rather liked the use of whitish ghostly cosmetics and costumes for Coroebus, Priam, Hector and Cassandra in the last act probably because each was carrying a wide bowl of fire which cast an odd gleaming light on them, but in the earlier part of the opera where the outfits were left in ordinary bright light, they seemed something left over from the outside of a vaccuum cleaner.

I do tire sometimes of the inane interviews. Joyce DiDonato is becoming an more animated interviewer but she spoke at the level of “how exciting it all is.” Some time or other I should count how many times the word “exciting” is uttered to substitute for content. And the hype. No one can do an opera “like this” “but the Met, only the Met” has the resources. Fabio Luisi injected a little content when he said the opera was formal and Berlioz imitating Gluck but as he didn’t explain himself that did not get us very far. And the idiotic pop psychology as explanations for how they are doing the characters grate as substitutes. When the interviewer and singers do come to talk of the singing, then conversation can become realer. Or when they speak generally of a a change in production where when the decor is modernized or turned into “Euro-trash” (half-satiric) the general slant of the character changes. Maybe the Met has the worst talk in interviews of all the HD opera companies we now see.

It has been a genuinely cold day and as before when we came to the opera re-run, the theater was nearly empty. HD opera is not popular when it’s not also live at the same time. Maybe 15 people at most. During the first intermission we talked with a Swedish couple near our age. They seem just to have started coming to the HD operas and wondered how we had found out about it originally. “The Net” I said. “Ah!”, they were not much on it. When we said the opera (up to that point was oddly passionless), they said we should go to Eastern European operas. Just deplorable. As the second intermission began (audiences are friendly in these HD movie-house presentations), I heard someone say it had become very frigid outside and started to snow lightly. I’d say over half the audience left after the second act, so for the third act there were at most 6 people (including Jim and I) in the audience. They thus missed the best part of the opera, what was worth the seeing and hearing. In our area the Metro does cease around 11:30 pm. We had our Jaguar which does not do well in snow, but we stayed because Jim does so love opera and we were rewarded with that final powerful act after all.

Coming out at midnight, all was quiet. I tripped along as lightly as I could in my ballet slippers in the snow showered parking lot. We drove super-slow home, round-about where we could avoiding hills (stayed on flat blocks). It’s good to feel and see some winter (as long as you are not homeless) and the pussycats were glad to see us when we got in. They were entwined with one another not far from the grates where the heat comes out in our house.

Ellen

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A Maria Stuarda for the 21st century: the HD production at the Met

Maria Suarda (Joyce DiDonato) helped up scaffold by (Jane) Anna Kennedy (Maria Zifchak)

Dear friends and readers,

A grim and somber production, I think highly original. Joyce DiDonato’s singing and acting as the bewildered queen (probably was the sympathetic interpretation) was magnificent. She drew out the notes so slowly (there was a robo-camera at the bottom of the stage and many close-ups) that you could watch her face change as her notes changed, and Elza van den Heever perfect in her role as wary, driven, haggard Elizabeth (I will use the familiar Englished names). While the tenor, Matthew Polenzani as Leicester sang well, the way this was acted made him superfluous, irrelevant, this was no love tragedy. The one strong male who seemed to matter was Matthew Rose as the jailor-comforter of Mary, Talbot. The clash was of two women who don’t understand one another at all, shout insults, one murderous (Elizabeth), the other intensely persuaded she should be queen (Mary).

Elza van der Heever as Elisabeth (note the pants under the skirt) sneers at Joyce diDonato as Mary

The production design and matching costumes (David McVicar and John Macfarlane) are not at all called for in the libretto. A key quality in Donizetti- Bardari’s concoction is it’s all surface. The psychology doesn’t quite make sense, there is no depth there. And all the politics are removed. So McVicar and Macfarlane made a masque for our era and then Joyce DiDonato poured herself into it. It opens in what we were told was a version of the globe and there were acrobats on a high stag- like rise.

The space soon seemed a abstract court scene all reds and blacks. Elizabeth takes coarse teasing in good stead and is persuaded much against her will to meet with Mary. The scene then morphed into a symbolic forest, bleak, cool colors where Mary is walking with Hanna and her ladies. Then the royal hunt is heard and the encounter (never happened in history because Elizabeth knew better than to do this) which in the play goes very badly. 11 years pass in the intermission.

It was the second act that made it. It opened with an aging trembling Elizabeth, nearly bald, waiting for her ladies to finish trussing her up in a heavy gown with hideous red wig.

The woman politician being made up

This becomes a scene in a throne room where the rise of the first scene is now a table. Here she is pressured, but also wants to sign Mary’s death warrant by Cecil (Joshua Hopkins). Unlike Schiller’s Elizabeth, she is not torn about executing Mary. The room turns into a prison with the wall of graffiti.

The table comes up to later the bottom rung of a scaffold as the scene turns into a black box stage. And then very long, drawn out, Mary in prison told she is to die, Mary confessing to Talbot, Mary adjusting her mind, the choral scene of grief and lamentation (the music like a funeral march), and then Mary comes out again bare-headed in red, jeered at sotto voce by Cecil but allowed to voice her supposed forgiveness of Elizabeth, and then long slow prayer song and then with Hannah up to her death.

I can see why it was not done and Donizetti’s Anna Bolena was. Anna Bolena is an action-packed play with light moments and certainly much romance in comparison. It was not until our time that this scripted opera can be played with people sitting there unsurprised. It had a checkered history on stage. It was supposed to be staged in Naples in 1834 but censorship issues got in the way (the execution, the two women clashing so calling each other whore, harlot, illegitimate). The two first singers got into a physical fight too. It was performed in a much milder version but that didn’t go and then at La Scala in its original script which disappeared pretty quickly. It was seen as very lurid. Revised according in 1865 it still was not acceptable (from Program notes by Helen M. Greenwald).

It really brought to mind other executions; we have become a society attuned to politicians murdering one another again, a world of prisons, people in them for years on end, and the powerful and newscasters delivering all fake performance before cameras. It may be said the contrast is in my mind (Saddam Hussein does not go out praying but cursing) but not the spectacles we see on TV where of grave opponents or treatise-signers, and lawless murder in the background. I thought of Marie Antoinette so dignified, but also the contrast somehow: Madame du Barry dragged out of her house to be guillotined when an old lady and ferociously fighting and cursing to the last moment.

Elsa van den Heever as Elizabeth wore high-heeled boots, first white then blood red mannish clothes. Under the wide skirt were heavy pants; she stalked about like a man. I really expected her to appear in armor with a assault weapon at any time. I liked the way Elizabeth was re-conceived, she was vital, not marmoreal. There was understanding for her, compassion when she looks so bad. Joyce DiDonato was all severe femininity. Not sexy but let’s say in the equivalent of a black pants suit. The white stomacher a version of a tailored blouse. She gradually moves to all black, until the last scene in a red gown (Mary is said to have worn one). Both auburn hair, both age intensely, Elizabeth looking haggard, bitter, ghost-like with semi-bald head before she has the wig put on in the opening scene, and Mary become someone continually shaking, distraught; she takes her auburn wig off when she comes out just before she climbs the stairs to her death. The parallels of Elizabeth putting on the wig and Mary taking it off effective. Under the wig a real women, the wig a kind of crown. At the close Mary was all regret, all humility, all loss, heroic visionary victim.

The theater crowded, and audience was pleased — some from conversations I overheard surprised to be so. But I also heard people discussing the characters in ways that showed me few people knew the history and this might (like many a bio-pic) just serve to mislead them further. The real Machiavel of Mary’s downfall is missing in most fictional retelling (except in Scott): James Stuart, Earl of Murray who became Regent once Mary came to the English shore. He outwitted her with ease. The historically real Elizabeth was in fact a good politician and wanted peace, and not to spend money. She hesitated at marriage and was right. She would have lost her independence and thus power. Leicester loved Leicester and had hoped to be king. It’s possible he had his first wife killed (see Scott’s Kennilworth).

The historically real Mary continually made bad decisions; her love life comprised and made her vulnerable to charges. Her choices were stupid (Darnley) or macho male adventurers (Bothwell). It was egregious folly to plot to kill Elizabeth while imprisoned by Elizabeth. In the 18th and 19th century Mary was the beautiful glamorous victim (from Lee’s Recess, through Scott and Schiller), her glamor allowing men and women to find her alluring and her supposed power attractive, and Elizabeth was the jealous Machiavel old maid. Bette Davis’s mid-20th century towering ambiguous character turned into a political figure in the Glenda Jackson series; and this has developed into the feminine semi-pathetic dignified figure that Helen Mirren played. 21st century: Elizabeth is softened into a pure lover first of Leicester and then Essex; Most recently in a popularly costumed version we have the new romance: Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth and Barbara Flynn as Mary.

Well this Met production is not romance, it’s a new opposition, a political allegory. So a must-see.

Peter Gelb may say he chose to do Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda at the Met (never done there before) because he wanted more Bel Canto opera because that extends the repertoire, but it seems to me not a coincidence the really original production (not at all called for by that libretto) made the play relevant to our time. Two years ago Izzy and I saw Schiller’s Maria Stuarda in a WSC production, twinned with a semi-free adaptation of Shakespeae’s Richard III. The WSC brought out direct parallels between the characters in both plays and politicians’ treachery & barbarity today, and while Donizetti changed Schiller’s play by making Leicester a central love interest (the women are supposedly rivals for his love), and the 17 year old librettist, Giuseppe Bardari, simplified or made much feebler the words of the original play, still I think the parallels of cross-killing the WSC highlighted were in this Met production more subliminally.

The New York Times review; WQXR: a dark Maria Stuarda; and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Ellen

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Les Miserables: from Hugo parables for our time

Clear away the barricades/And we’re still there! (Thenadiers) …

But the tigers come at night/with their voices soft as thunder … (a lyric in one of the quieter songs) ….

There’s a pain goes on and on. Empty chairs at empty tables. Now my friends are dead and gone …

The 2012 film had last year’s Occupy movement in mind

Ensemble, Signature Theater, DC/Virginia 2008

Dear friends and readers,

Christmas day we (Jim, myself, Laura & Rob, and Izzy) went to see the musical movie version of Hugo’s Les Miserables, directed by Tom Hooper, an adaptation for commercial film of the original book by Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boubil, Englished and made Dickensian by James Fenton and Wm Nicolson (lyrics Herbert Kretzmer), produced by at least 9 people, some original (Cameron Mackintosh), some film types (Eric Fellner), featuring most notably and successfully Hugh Jackman as Jean ValJean, Anne Hathaway as Fantine (Izzy said later that after a while all she had to do was she Hathaway and she began to cry):

Raped, stripped, her very teeth taken from her

Daniel Huttlestone as Gavroche (this Artful Dodger provided the most unexpected totally alive moments of the production),

Eddie Remayne as Marius and Aaron Tveit as Enjolras, the young revolutionaries on the 1832 barricades (representing the 1870 uprising which was put down with more killed than in the whole of the 1792-3 so-called Terror), Samantha Barks as Eponine were as a group stronger and more effective than the first quarter or so of the film. I suspect Hooper felt more at home with them than the wildly romantic pursued Valjean. He changed Fantine to be sexual in lieu of a gamine — for me this did make Hugo’s tale relevant for women. Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen as the Thenadiers were faultless but over-directed into exaggerated grotesquerie, and Jim felt that their lines, some of the rawest most powerful in the whole piece, were placed so as to lose the central impact they were meant to have.

Thenadiers with young Cosette

I found Tom Hooper’s production of intense interest as film, as an instance of what contemporary computer, non-naturalistic and symbolic theatrical, on location, close-up and aggressive film-making can tremendously effect. I’d like to see it again to study how the camera was daringly used to turn the vision of the novel into world-as-nightmare.

The music is as stunningly piercing as ever: I was again unbearably moved by the destruction of Fantine, the heart-break of Eponine, the nobility of Jean Valjean and the soaring revolutionary defiance of Marius and Enjolras. At first I thought Marius the actor who played Bingley in Joe Wright’s P&P (2005) and Enjolras, Elliot Cowan as Darcy in Dan Zeff’s Lost in Austen (2008), both deeply appealing types.

The film’s Eponine (Samantha Barks) dying in Marius’s arms — both elegant, white, archetypal mainstream in looks

By contrast, Jim said no one could sing (!) and they all held their notes too long, Hugh Jackman was miscast (not so) and the whole production (which he said serious reviewers all agreed with) “a mess,” but apart from Russell Crowe who tried hard but just could not get up the seethingly pro-murderous law-and-order evil of Javier I thought them all stirringly effective and recognized that we had here a typical faithful BBC production. I’ve read about 3/4s of Norman Denny’s translation of Hugo’s novel, and unlike the musical, this film adaptation seemed to go through the book phase-by-phase. I don’t say the film had the original coherence, taste, brilliance of Hooper’s Daniel Deronda for the BBC (2002) or even the poignancy of The King’s Speech (2011), but it not intended to be subtle, but rather to sock its cri de coeur of the disenfranchised and powerless to wide varied audiences, and make huge returns in money.

Jackson as Jean Valjean, the tender-hearted caring for Fantine, promising to bring up Cosette, her daughter

********************

I know I need say no more as so many have already, since there have been so many reviews not only on this musical film (among them Miss Izzy), and the many productions, French, the original London, the Broadway one, various intermediary as well as concerts versions, but the straight dramatic films and the musical version Jim thought and still thinks the outstanding best, Eric Schaeffer’s Signature version, with Greg Stone the closest to Hugo’s conception of Jean Valjean I’ve seen:

and Felicia Curry as an inspired Eponine type:

But I think we can contribute to the ongoing conversation about Les Miserables. We have now seen or perhaps I should say heard the musical four times. Jim did once read about and attempt to sort out the original pre-production show from its first staging and I’ve also read Notre Dame de Paris (in French this time), and Hugo’s powerful anti-capital punishment novella (The Last Day of a Condemned Man (an English translation). And I watched two recent “straight” films.

Alphonse LeGros, Le Repas des Pauvres (cover illustration for Hugo’s novel)

The soul in darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who causes the darkness (Denny’s translation of Hugo)

*********************

Before the musical was ever produced it was changed to include an overt providential patterning, religious emotionalism, and images of family types sticking together, with the Thenadiers as hypocritical aberrations we are expected to be amused by.

Jim:

Thirty years ago, Alan Boublil and Claud-Michel Schonberg decided to write a musical adaptation of Hugo’s Les Misérables. By 1980, they had a demo tape, themselves the sole performers: voice and piano. They took it to London and got sufficient backing for John Cameron to orchestrate what they had written and to record it with actual performers. This record is commercially available: call it “the French text.” Both Cameron Macintosh and James Nederlander of New York were interested in producing it, with changes. Nederlander actually optioned it, but the option lapsed.

By some later point in time Macintosh had talked Trevor Nunn into directing it. He brought in the RSC and John Caird. Herbert Kretzmer was hired to write the English lyrics, after James Fenton’s attempt was abandoned. The Macintosh/Nunn/Caird/Kretzmer collaboration was produced, first by the RSC as part of their London season at the Barbican, then by Macintosh in the West End, in 1985. Call this “the English text.”

Three major changes mark strong differences between the French text and the English text: the English text is more religious; the English text is, if anything, conservative politically where the French was more à gauche (to the left); the English text is a much bigger show. Nunn seems to have been responsible for the religious emphasis. The French text had scarcely mentioned God: a couple of “God knows how” sort of phrases and two mentions in Jean Valjean’s final lines, closing the piece.

La lumière, au matin de justice,
puisse enfin décapiter nos vices
dans un monde où Dieu pourrait se plaire
s’il décidait un jour de redescendre sur la terre.

Cosette, aime-le
Marius, aimez-la
qui aime sa femme
sans le savoir, aime Dieu.

Nunn added the scene with the Bishop of Digne; the scene where Jean Valjean wrestles with his conscience: “Who am I”; “Stars”; “Dog eats dog”; “Bring him home” and the dreadful scene where the spirits of Fantine and Eponine flank Jean Valjean as he dies (memory claims they were even dressed in white, but memory is unreliable and sometimes exaggerates for effect).

I add that Hugo is anti-clerical; the priests who harbor Valjean are pariahs and despised by all the other church people we meet. There is no afterlife. “Les Miserables” means not just the wretchedly poor but miserable in a more general sense and includes the outcasts, underdogs, rejected of society, and radical critics and rebels (who often do very badly economically and socially). Take, Book 2: Book 2, “The outcast.” The opening sequence of the movie follows this — prison for no crime at all, cruelty in a long sentence, hounding afterward with no forgiveness or any opportunity to be a productive member of legal society.

In case anyone might think this kind of thing can’t happen, he or she need only read a newspaper or journal article about who goes to prison in the US, for what, for how long, the typical use of extreme solitude (which Atul Gawande in a persuasive article in the New Yorker argued is a form of super-expensive torture): very long prison sentences, no reprieve, for small crimes having to do with drugs. Inside may be a step up for some, but it’s very bad socially. Women’s prisons are even worse than men’s, for they are subject to sexual harassment, parted from their children ruthlessly. Meanwhile bankers steal billions, flout the law and are not even brought to trial.

But the musical takes Hugo in the direction of Thatcher’s 1980s:

Jim:

Some of the depoliticizing between the French and English versions may have been unconscious, the result of removing specifically French references. In the French text, the students are carefully organizing coordinated risings:

Au Pont au Change, toutes les sections sont prêtes
Grantaire attend à la Barrière du Maine
les sculpteurs, les marbriers
tardent à se joindre à nous
mais les maçons de Montreuil
seront tous au rendez-vous

In the English text, they seem to take it on themselves to rise, because who wants to confuse the audience with the masons of Montreil. But “Empty chairs and empty tables”, added for the English text, clearly condemns the students: “Don’t ask me/What your sacrifice was for.” More, Javert, in the French text, is not really to be taken seriously. In the English text, thanks to “Stars”, he’s the second leading man.

Nunn also made Les Misérables a grandiose show. DCist in its theater preview wondered how Signature would fit it into “much smaller quarters than usually house the famous turntable-style set.” Nunn had added choruses, he added scenes, some, like “Turning”, quite unnecessary. Nunn justified “Turning” on the grounds that the women didn’t have enough to do otherwise. Of course he then used the revolving set to manage the quick scene changes. All these changes made the show worse.

I don’t mean to say that in all aspects the English text is worse than the French text. Many of Kretzmer’s lyrics are much better than those of Boublil/Schonberg. The bridge of “I dreamed a dream”, for example: “But the tigers come at night/with their voices soft as thunder.” There is nothing remotely like that in the French text. The best line in the show, from Madame Thénardier, I’m sorry, Mme. La Baronne Thenard, in “Beggars at the feast”: “Clear away the barricades and we’re still here” (perhaps the profoundest line in contemporary theater), was added. “Beggars at the feast” is the reprise of “Master of the house” which bulks up and makes rollicking — and Dickensian. Nunn had directed Nicholas Nickleby — “Devise d’un cabaretier” where Thénardier complains he is one “qu’une destinée contraîre a planté dans ce canton” and thus has become, perforce, an innkeeper)

The 2008 production had La Boheme not Dickens A Tale of Two Cities in mind

Jim had gone up to Eric Schaeffer, to say this Signature production was better than the London production we had seen years ago. “This sounded better than it was, since the London production had left me rather cold.”

Jim:

Schaeffer managed, in the Signature production, to minimize these changes. He could do nothing with the religion and politics that are baked into the English text. One cannot not sing “Stars” or “Bring him home.” And Javert did take the penultimate curtain call. But he could and did de-emphasize at least some. The business with the saintly Bishop of Digne went quick. In the final scene, Fantine and Eponine sang with Jean Valjean, but they stayed on catwalks leading to the stage (and neither dressed in white).

And he made the show intimate. The MAX theater is a black box. For this production it seated around 250. It was set up as a thrust stage, with two catwalks leading to the corners of the box, screened at the back. Sliding doors in the screen allowed mass movements onto the stage (for choral entrances or the barricade). The orchestra (two winds, five brass, three keyboards, guitar, bass, two percussion) was set on a balcony behind the screen, the conductor’s image on two screens visible from the stage. The audience, then, was on three sides. No more than six rows on any one side. Every member of the audience was closer to the cast than any member of the audience would have been in a conventional proscenium theater with the orchestra in a pit between the audience and stage.

In this setting, he brought out the quiet elements of the score. There are many. Of the 28 numbers, a majority are either soliloquys or conversations. We eavesdrop, up close, on them. The actors eavesdrop with us. In “A heart full of love”, Eponine is on the catwalk, members of the audience on either side of her, as she overhears Cosette and Marius (the same location, exactly, as she will occupy in the second act finale). She is suddenly lit as she reacts. We do not know how long she has been there. She is us. And we sympathise. Schaeffer doesn’t shrink from the noisier numbers. “Master of the house” is duly rollicking. He accepts the Dickensian parallels: Cosette in Paris reminds us of no-one more than Lucy Manette.

But the heart of this production are the quiet lyric pieces: “I dreamed a dream”, “Who am I”, Fantine and Jean Valjean’s duet around her deathbed, “Stars”, “In my life”, “A heart full of love”, “On my own”, “A little fall of rain”, “Drink to me”, “Bring him home”, Javert’s suicide, and, yes, the second act finale.

******************

To conclude,

There have been 19 (!) film adaptations, most recently a French mini-series with Gerard Depardieu as Valjean and John Malkovich as Javert, and in 1998 an English, with Liam Neeson as a noble Jean Valjean; Geoffrey Rush as Javert (hard and steely), Uma Thurman as Fantine (the raped Cecile in Les Liaisions Dangereuses), Hans Mathisen as Marius (deeply felt), Ann-Marie Duff (wry, realistic) the last two also in Davies’s adaptation of Dr Zhivago. Depardieu practically stands for France (remember Martin Guerre) and Malkovich (Valmont, Jekyll-Hyde) has had a long career playing evil types; the English cast shows the connection between Zhivago and Hugo. Five translations into English are available.

The story, characters, events are a parable for our time.

To turn it into a film musical with the whole repertoire of montage, location, psychological in-depth acting is to make it more available to everyone. On Christmas day almost every seat in the auditorium was taken. We were just in time and had to sit in the front row.

I remember that in London Patti LuPone sang Fantine, but she was far away — we were in the back of the orchestra. Anne Hathaway is right on top of us, close up, the story made utterly contemporary. When she sang the pain goes on and on I found myself remembering my own anguish. I was rooting for Enjolras all the way.

ENJOLRAS

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!

(I wish).

Izzy is right. You need not see this version probably. Jim is right too: perhaps another would be more thrillingly sung. This was over-produced and not controlled enough. But I would say not only don’t miss it, but also read the book, go on to Notre Dame de Paris and then The Last Day in the Life of a Condemned Man. Les Miserables‘ vision is more than of the wretched of the earth; he shows how such wretchedness is made deliberately and what it feels like to be hunted down, scorned, fearful, alone. Don’t skip the supposed digressions (Waterloo for example): the history, analysis of how society is organized into exclusionary cliques, the skewed values of church and courts passionately laid out and as relevant today as ever.

Ellen

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Joe Wright and Tom Stoppard’s Anna Karenina: a theatrical triumph

Stiva Oblonsky, Anna’s brother (Matthew MacFayden) and Kostya Levin, the 2nd major contrast to Anna (Domnhall Gleeson)

Anna Karenina (Keira Knightley): a cut off promotional shot (not in film) of her in a long red robe, filmed from afar (as described); she’s fulfilled the promise of Bend It Like Beckham, Pirates of Carribean (2003), The Duchess (2008)

Friends, readers, if you see one extravaganza of costume, virtuouso acting, stunning shots, from a brilliant book, let it be Wright and Stoppard’s Anna Karenina. Stoppard and Joe Wright have translated Tolstoi’s masterpiece into a filmic masterpiece which uses a theater combined with far shots on location (contradicting what is led into and out of) and substituting stylized comedy and at times operatic rushes of scenes for Tolstoi’s realism, with a great deal of effective help from Keira Knightley (she ought to get the Oscar for this), Matthew MacFayden (is there a type left he has not played), Jude Law as Karenin (another actor who escapes typing and as the unimaginative yet intense and idealistic husband searingly hurt is not recognizable)

Law dissolves into the blackness of this brooding shot;

and luxury casting for minor parts (Olivia Williams as Stiva’s mother; Shirley Henderson as a very nasty woman at the opera who humiliates Anna for sitting by her in a box; Michelle Dockery as the frozen friend who will be seen with Anna anywhere, everywhere because society is all:

What made it was Stoppard’s use of the theater (to be expected from Stopppard, given his oeuvre) together with Wright’s Lawrentian sexual drenching and effective juxtapositions of crashing and still scenes. The film opens in a theater, ends in one; at the same time into the theater (which is again and again redone) is projected the most realistic of happening, people, animals events and they are used with striking insight and effect. Sometimes the characters are wandering about in a deep backstage where they meet other characters and suddenly the scene switches to a real house, or field, or street or the train. Then inside the theater Anna walks into a blended home environment and is asking permission of Karenin to visit her incorrigibly promiscuous brother, Stiva, in order to persuade Stiva’s many-timed pregnant wife, Dolly –

After Anna goes to live with Vronsky, Dolly (Kelly Macdonald), says she wants to invite Anna to hers, but she does not — utterly conventional and kindly throughout and this a normative moment, common film-making

– to forgive him. Anna then walks out into a train, powerful real, a trip where she meets Vronsky’s mother. This first one ends suddenly someone throwing himself or be mistake getting caught under; we return periodically to the train station and of course end there is a terrifyingly held moment as she stands there just before the final leap.

Here’s a six-minute clip offered by Wright online to show his film: his theatrically staged sequence.

The film’s worst flaw is seen here: the wooden acting of Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Vronsky until about half-way through the film when he seems to become an electrifying center of whole scenes — as when he drives a horse across a stage too roughly, the poor animal falls with a crash, moans, groans, and as Vronsky T-J shoots the beast. The character is so real in the novel, so fully examined, as a shallow man whom Anna imagines to be this brilliantly deep feelingly true person. In Tolstoi, Anna’s is a bitterly ironic illusion. It’s Karenin who has the depth of feeling. After conquest, Vronsky grows bored and Anna becomes frantic with her losses.

Perhaps the film-makers thought this paradigm nowadays would not be liked so they made Vronsky really in love. He is driven to throw Anna off when the society’s treatment of them and her suspicions of him because he is accepted and goes about with beautiful women still tear them apart. T-J may have been picked because he is nearly as beautiful as Rupert Freud (he was that type). Anna pretends not to care about the ostracizing, but she does. She misses her son. Where T-J is effective is after Anna (as it were) goes mad and he can match her inner wildness with a distraught aggressive sensuality.

So as the movie progressed, the whole experience of film-making may have engulfed T-J and he came up to it. He did what he needed to do in the scene where he furiously and meanly drives a horse to the ground and then shoots it to death. This is the most savage scene in the film and montage, placement, are intended in filmic ways to make a woman stop and think before marrying a man such as Vronsky.

Keira Knightley has become a great actress and Matthew MacFayden has again proved himself one as insouciant comic Oblonsky. She is actually somewhat heavier than she used to be. She now has upper arms. Her wardrobe is just spectacular. More than that it’s aesthetically right in so many scenes.

One stands out in my mind: she’s in a scarlet red robe standing by a window, everything else dusk or grey and white light. She’s smoking and staring out the window. Vronsky In some of the traumatic scenes beginning in the last quarter her face begins to take on a new look. You would not recognize her. I long to see it again the way I did her in The Duchess. I’d say The Duchess (based on Amanda Foreman’s take on the life of Georgiana Spencer) was self consciously feminist and that came out of the material adapted.

Here the material might be called proto-feminist: the point is made repeatedly that Anna cannot escape Karenin, she cannot take her child; it is she who is ostracized, she who is powerless to act freely. An emphatic contrast is
made between her brother, Oblonsky whose casual adultery with a governess (of course fired) the film opens with; she visits his wife, Dolly (Kelly MacDonald) and with no trouble really gets Dolly to forgive him, and by the end of the film Oblonsky is back having affairs again. Neither his appetite or job is at all disturbed until the last moment of the film, when he and his again devoted forgiving and pregnant wife have Levin and his wife, Dolly, to stay with them. We see Stiva (of all people) grieving behind a door.

It’s not Tolstoi’s novel, and some of departures were those I expected: the moralistic Levin story is made tertiary. Levin is your salt-of-the-earth character. In Stoppard’s version Levin has much to learn from Kitty who when she first saw him was a shallow ancient regime flirt. Levin who works alongside his peasants (troubling them by so doing according to Tolstoi) would have ejected his alcoholic brother, who have been bankrupted by gambling, especially with his ex-prostitute wife. After Kitty realizes Levin’s “worth” and marries him, and comes to the farm, Kitty sponges down the brother with the help of this “whore” and she and her sister-in-law become linchpin types within a family and agricultural system. This is Tolstoi stuff, minus any concern for reform.

The medium itself throughout, reasserting itself: a theater:

Are we on stage? in the lobby? in a street with snow? it’s a fantasia

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But for me Anna’s story is what matters: she is the rebel; she is not a cow, not a sowing instrument. She wants an individual life, companionship, conversation and yes good sex.

In these novels, a long period of erotic awakening turns into a similar slow burn of disillusion and then, despairing, self-destruction. Amidst this we keep our souls alive.

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. — R. L. Stevenson

I doubt if in Tolstoi Anna stands for these principles. I read the novel as I do Lafayette’s Princess de Cleves where the princess has fallen for a Jungian animus. Vronsky is a type descending also from Austen’s S&S (Willoughby), and includes motifs like Trollope’s Burgo Fitzgerald’s cruelty to his horse in CYFG? signalling what he would be to a wife or mistress.

The whole paradigm originates in the 18th century and is usually presented as a warning lesson for the awakened woman. This is how Roger Shattuck in his Forbidden Knowledge sees it. He inveighs against the alternative view which urges women and men to liberate themselves. Recent women’s novels use the paradigm to show women’s lack of freedom, e.g.,. Sarah Waters’ (Affinity); A. S. Byatt’s Possession. When gone into personally with no imposed lessons it’s still verboten, and you can find women novelists using pseudonyms; one great one is an Italian novel, the pseudonym, Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment.

One long swoon

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I expect that Wright and Stoppard are hoping to have this Xmas hit (remember The King’s Speech?), to win over Les Miserables. I did love the costumes and far shots. This is a favorite, again a cut-off shot from the Net but in the film we see a wide scene of a platform, snow, mist, hear the sounds, and then zero in on her in that outfit:

It’s not happening as yet in my local moviehouse. The theater was only half full. Why? it’s a woman’s story as told, not a man’s. Recently I’ve watched a series of films by women: Agnieska Holland’s The Secret Garden and Washington Square were among them. Again, both make explicit the tabooed point of view that is left implicit in the original text and by viewers sometimes overlooked or denied, with a far greater delicacy of approach. Here is a more delicate moment which might make us remember a cutting painful scene in Emma: Wright and Stoppard opt for playfulness; Levin and Kitty try to reach one another through alphabets:

Kitty (Alicia Vikander) and Levin

What makes this a male film out of a male book? In Tolstoi is the great sympathy Wright gives the conventional male (that’s why Levin survives into the film too). In this clip that Wright authorized on line we have both males, Vronsky and Karenin; in Tolstoi it’s Anna who is contrasted to Levin; here the contrast is Vronsky (macho promiscuous male) versus Karenina (Mr Knightley under great strain in an amoral court world). The film ends with Levin and his wife sitting down to dinner with Oblonsky (who has to retreat for a moment) and his and Karenina who ends up in the meadow with his and Vronsky’s child, with Anna under the ground.

Shall we feel for male who holds society up, Karenin or the male who disrupts it, Vronsky? and it’s not fair that Stiva, however he loved his sister, gets away with it. (D. H. Lawrence stuff; see also Atonement). By contrast, Tolstoi’s book is with Anna (ultimately the most moral character in the book) and Levin (the second most, on a conventional plain) as his tragic and hard-working poignant cynosures; they are sincere, authentic. They do not resign themselves like Oblonsky’s wife Dolly.

It is a woman’s film because it dwells on women, how they look, we are invited to gaze at them again and again as women and as men.

I’ve never read the whole novel. As with Moby Dick where I skipped alternative chapters: I was so irritated by Levin I passed all chapters with him as focus. That left me with a much slenderer novel, half the structure. I’m also not sure whose text I read, who was the translator. Nowadays that makes me ashamed — not the reading every other chapter.

This film makes me want to read the whole novel, slowly, or listen to a great reader read it. Does anyone know of any powerful great reader who has done this on MP3s available generally?

Ellen

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Verdi’s Un ballo en maschera: new HD starkness, with exursis on the roving camera & interviews

Gustavo (Marcelo Alvaraz) and Amelia (Sondra Radvanovsky

So, friends and readers,

They sang their hearts out and acted the parts superbly well. To begin with what what is most memorable, second most and so on: Dimitri Hvorostovsky as the sexually betrayed husband best friend to the king, Count Anckarstrom (Renato), baritone in his role in the third act, was shaking from his controlled hysteria at his wife and decision (just) not to kill her when he’d done his magnificent long aria.

Count Anckarstrom, Renato (Dmitri Hovorostovsky)

Stephanie Blythe as the sybil Ulrica, as her name reveals a Scott like mad prophecy moment turned into the nervous cynical court fortune teller was superb; her entrance in trailing coat and sleuth-woman hat which she then took off they improved on what in the opera has become cliched stuff. She was attention-getting with her pocketbook with its large gold clasp, cigarette and flask (liquor):

Ulrica (Stephanie Blythe), Gustavo, Oscar, Gustavo’s page (Kathleen Kim)

Suddenly I wish I knew what Scott was available in Italian and what the Italian texts were like. The graveyard scene (contradictory as were they all with its Icarus ceiling and white walls):

Amelia, Gustavo, Renato

Act 3 is songfest, from extraordinary alluring thrilling melodies, to ominous choruses. The set as a whole, symbolic on top, walls, including the soprano in a slip falling against a white wall with a single large symbolic object nearby reminded me of Willy Dekker’s Traviata. David Alden was the producer and Saul Steinberg the set designer and they have clearly been influenced by Euro-trash (as it’s called operas) as well as Broadway too.

Stark was the aim, simplify and symbolize the mode.

The opera does have problems. One could say of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito there’s more there; they could do this or that. This one is what it is. It feels ungrateful to say that but it’s more dated than Traviata: the complicated plot for example. And the depiction of women’s chastity with the implication that if she had had a full sexual relationship with the king, she would have been abhorrent is deeply anti-women — especially as the opera is ultimately based on a real 18th century king and his court, Gustavus of Sweden who took the wife of his chief supporter and courtier for his mistress. Many plays of the Jacobean era show this was common; other sources show the way a married couple could rise in court was that she become the king’s mistress. They also show inevitably often the “cuckolded” man became humiliated and sometimes killed the wife and/or the king or tried to (e.g., Beaumont and Fletcher’s King and No King). The original, Una vendetta, had political matter which is feebly reflected because of the censorship. At the real court there was a fortune teller, who when she told of the king’s death and it came true, was shunned.

It is true that had Verdi been able to explore some truths about politics at court, this would have been a sizzling important opera. Had he been able at least to present as aspect of where revolutions come from, court coteries, ditto. If we knew something of his preoccupations, something never gone into or rarely during intermissions. As he was not, and they do not, the opera remains contradictory, half-baked partly senseless antics leading nowhere. It feels ungrateful to say this but it should be said. As Clement says in her Opera, or the Undoing of Women or Kerman in his Opera as Drama, the content of the opera matters.

It is what it is, and the Met did its best to make the emotions that are believable effective, resonate. They provided absorbing entertainment through the masque background, costumes, and intermission material.

So I enjoyed it and was glad we went. I really feel it was the first time I truly saw it. I understood it for the first time, the subtitles of course did that, and the staging underlined what was happening inwardly. So for the first time I was roused by the music — having understood the content of the lyrics and what the gestures of actor-singers meant. Sondra Radvanovsky: first time I ever saw her; she effective.

Amelia in her chair Hamlet-like over a skull, Ulrica behind her

During his interview Dmitri Hvorostovsky swaggered and preened, and looked out at the audience and camera instead of at Deborah Voight, but he sang so well and is attractive. The tenor Marcelo Álvarez had a feel for it as an Italian opera, and that’s what it is, complete with comic fishermen, smugglers, men laughing at a cuckold, patriotic choruses. Oscar (Katherine Kim) didn’t make any sense in his white suit with white wings, the job was to provide a coloratura soprano throughout. I’m glad we went even if in insight into the human condition this was the equivalent of a pop melodramatic movie of 1950s TVm a proto-Sopranos.

Middle career Verdi. The soaring of Traviata, Rigoletto (a new production coming up this season), La Forza del Destino, Trovatore. Who can resist these if well done?

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What the roving camera shows before the opera, during the interviews, just afterwards central to experience

It is real fun, an education, fascinating to watch the crews during most of the intermissions. (There are some where there is little for stagehands to do.) The stage is somehow not quite de-mystified. You are in on what’s happening behind the screen. We love that. This time we witnessed (if you were watching a small spat between the chief carpenter, head of the crew, and one of his people protesting apparently against being asked to clean the mirror-glass. Beneath his dignity, not important enough.

It takes hundreds of people to put up the scenes the curtains open up on. You learn a lot about staging as you watch them.

You feel part of the here, now alive aspect of things because the camera shows us the audience. They cannot see us, but we see them.

I can find no shots online of Deborah Voight (soon to be Cassandra in Les Troyens) as hostess for the interviews this time. I didn’t expect to. Nor probably Susan Graham (soon to be Dido in Les Troyens). None of the tech people and crews moving, pulling down, putting up pieces of staging.

The interviews and watching the crew set up the stage are part of what we the movie-house audiences are offered — and cannot be seen by the live people in the house. It adds a lot — pace each hostess’s mantra about how much better it is to be in the house, I’d say from the second tier up it’s not. We are taken to the costume shop, to the dressing rooms, hear taped interviews with composers and directors that can be informative, watch rehearsal sessions.

So a little on these.

Bootleg photo of intermission scene that I found on the Net — possibly by someone using a cell phone

This time, as I say, Deborah Voigt did it; she frequently has (as also Renee Fleming). They are personable and seem comfortable, feel like they are ad-libing, are comfortable and can cope with whatever their interviewees say or do. At one point the camera allowed us to see Deborah chatting with the two people she was about to interview from afar (while we watched the sets set up — and hard physical labor it was too) and I could see she had a teleprompter with the words she was to say facing her. That with its words is usually unseen by movie-house viewers.

The ability to be hostess (or host) takes a very different kind of talent to that of singer-actor within the opera play-world. Sondra Radvanovsky was the hostess I saw for the Otello, whose behavior was so cliched and absurd, so frozen. She could not get herself to react spontaneously enough — or seem to — the interviewed. So as a singer-actress I’d never have identified her as the same person. She certainly didn’t remind me of the stiff cliched inappropriately (for her body) overdressed, over-sexed hostess. Joyce Didonato was marvelous as Sycorax and in the interview done “at sea-level” in this production of her practicing Maria Stuarda promises a stunning performance. She was a very poor hostess, dull, lifeless.

As hostess (or host), you don’t have the mask of “being in your character” and you come out as partly yourself. So no or not-as-much hiding. Since inveighing against Radvanovsky’s super-tight, super-sexy outfit, I’ve since realized that the clothes the host or hostess wears (and jewels the hostess wears) are provided by the Met. There are credits saying Miss so-and-so dressed by. I didn’t know that. So Radvanosky was dressed by the Met that way.

Jim tells me that Radvanosky is said to have a gay following (fans who refer to her as Sondra); this kind of thing is known. Maybe she was dressed that way because of this perceived following. Renee Fleming by contrast has not. I’ve noticed what I’d call snobbery towards Fleming among people who go to opera; they call her vulgar! vulgar. Opera itself, the whole thing, including house is an extravaganza of vulgarity on one level — crass, unashamed revelling in luxury, in the apparatus of wealth: let’s pretend to be aristocrats going to a palace. But I grant Fleming may be is perceived as “wholesome: and her roles and outfits as hostess are all traditionally feminine.

Photo of Fleming from a story telling of how she is gone to for hostess type help

I would believe that the women singers especially have some say in what they are going to wear too. The older ones do have this problem of ideals of youth and real slimness. I’ve been told that Deborah Voigt had the operation where you have your stomach stapled to make herself thin enough to do the heroine role in the Ring. I can see that Radvanosky is still playing sexy young or youngish women. She may feel — as some women do – that dresses that are youthful and tight make her look younger and thinner. I should probably on principle sympathize (feel for “my sisters”), but I’ve a real distaste for clothes that announce people as super-rich and glamorous and my experience is looser things that swirl around your body make you look smaller at least and maybe thinner. But these sort of looser clothes are not glamorous. Those who dress the actress-singer and she collaborating study carefully each choice of clothes.

Deborah Voight is dressed slightly mannishly in suit-like outfits, shoulder-length blonde hair in a flip page-boy.

Telling: the hosts just wear tuxes, much less trouble and yet despite the women having troubles such as I’ve suggested, for the 4 year period we’ve been going I can count on one hand how many times there has been a male host. Three times is all I remember. The first time we went: Thomas Hamsen was personable, handsome, but he never did it again of those I’ve gone to. We have gone to a concert of his at the Carnegie.

Eric Owens, the brilliant black singer who was so marvelous as Alberich in Wagner’s Ring: he seemed embarrassed to do it, determined to come out all sweetness and light, utterly harmless. So he was countering myths about black men — by contrast, let’s recall he had played Alberich using from deep within himself his own felt resentments as an outsider. On the stage as singer he has a mask; not as host.

And once Placido Domingo. He was charming and unashamed in asking for money. I could imagine his pitch at fund-raisers. But he was a bit unusually stiff, watching himself. Too much is riding on the success of these HD productions? more than money perhaps?

Photo of tech crew backstage found on the Net

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To conclude, I had an exchange of email letters with a friend who has been going to these HD operas for about 6 years and (like us) goes to the European operas transmitted by HD. He buys a season ticket to the Met nowadays and this year is going to several operas from La Strada, the Royal Opera House and elsewhere in NYC movie-houses. He wrote: “I have the busiest opera schedule this season I’ve ever had.” He’s even nowadays going to the New York City opera “something I haven’t done in years. Most of this is due to the fact that HD productions are the greatest thing since macaroni.”

Us too. Jim is planning several of these Eurocinemas. We’ll get to see Lohengrin, two more operas with the very handsome Jonas Kauffman, two more with the magnificent Simon Keenleyside. We nowadays go to Opera Lafayette, in summer Castleton in Virginia and Wolf Trap. I seems we hardly have a month without an opera. It’s hard to find time to go to an ordinary movie. And I remember years where we never saw one opera, especially when PBS goes through periods of not doing them — lest they put off an audience who never watch PBS anyway.

I read some in the audience in the Met theater are resentful. They complain they suspect the staging is nowadays done for the movie-houses. (They can see the cameras this year.) Why should they (those who do) pay $300 a seat, when we poor plebs pay $20. This is not the first time technology has made available to many what was once available only to a few. And this has changed what’s available — often with some disadvantages coming in.

I’ve no doubt this new technology and all the new kinds of staging, scenic design, half-Broadway productions will bring in a much bigger traditional audience of classical music lovers, usually older people with time and money to go on weekends and weekdays or evenings. It will bring in younger people too: again and again I see Izzy so charmed by the younger singers in the present productions as well as the more modern operas. She loved The Enchanted Island. Doing so many a year will exert pressure to expand the repertoire into the baroque and modern. It already has. Everyone must really act. The production design must be good and appropriate. All this may cause new 20th and 21st century operas to be mounted, and then more written. These can speak to us the way a Un ballo en maschera can’t.

As to the disadvantages, they have not yet emerged — except the pressure on singers to look conventionally young and beautiful. That was happening already.

Ellen

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La Clemenza di Tito: powerful core cries out for new production

Elina Garanca as Sesto

Barbara Frittoli as Vitellia

Dear friends and readers,

So we went to yet another of these HD transmissions of Metropolitan opera productions and all three of us enjoyed it so much that Jim and I bought tickets for next week’s Un Ballo en Maschera for the 2 of us (Izzy can’t come, going to an ice-skating communal watch event), though until every single Un Ballo we’ve ever seen has seemed an incoherent mess, and encore tickets (a second set) for 2 of us of Les Troyens because Jim bought before he realized there was an conflict with this year’s MLA (we’re going) and we don’t want to miss it (Izzy will see the first live broadcast on her own).

This despite the manifest hollowness — or maybe senselessness at the heart of the way this 1984 production was (and for all I know most productions are) done. The grandiose still fake stone set is dull, and so too the inanely sexless, or asexual costumes for the 3 central male roles, two sung by female mezzo sopranos, Sesto and Annio (Kate Lindsay) in short skirts and tights and boots, and one by a stiff lifeless tenor, Giuseppe Filianoti (his idea of acting is to make his eyes bulge out at you). The core is riveting and basically the whole of the opera: Sesto (an ambiguous female-as-male) loves Vitellia (an ambitious woman ignored by Tito who drives Sesto to try to murder him) and there is no self-abasing act, no sordid or encompassing terrorist deed Sesto will not do for Vitellia, including (as Sesto does in the opera) set all Rome on fire in an effort to murder Tito, the emperor.

As presently done this makes no sense. Why should Sesto behave this way? She is presented as so innocent and moral she might still believe in Santa. What’s needed is to have it made clear Sesto wants to have sex with Vitellia (it’s not even hinted), and Vitellia refuses Sesto, rejects her and will have nothing to do with Sesto unless Sesto murders Tito. Then the disdain Vitellia continually manifests would have some content too. Sesto must in other words be presented as an active masochistic lesbian (and her costume bring this out) with Vitellia as the sadistic part of the pair or at least sexually flexible on behalf of gaining power by marrying Tito (and satisfying him in whatever way) so she may become empress.

Much of the opera are extraordinary arias sung by these two women. In the first half Sesto driven wild by need and Vitellia the (misogynistic) female who is the nasty woman scorned. Fittoli plays the first half partly comically in order to deflect the sheet disconnect to Tito and Sesto — Vitellia in the production while dressed very sexually, or got up in one of these 3 yard wide gowns stiff with jewels, seems to have no knowledge of sexuality or how to manipulate it beyond the costume put on her (which she seems unaware of).

In the second half when Sesto has been caught and condemned by Tito because she won’t tell who put her up to it, Sesto is all abject before Tito, in rags, chains, worn sandals, but not because she wants to be used by him, no she seems to need to cling to him in his purple quilted bathrobe, at his neck a frilly lace cravat and brooch.

Note the irons on her wrist, she drags chains about too — what could be more incongruous?

In this same second half Vitellia suddenly guilty turns up in the usual gothic white nightgown, extremely low cut. Tons of hair on her head throughout. Her costume is will do, just.

Tito right now is your Sir Charles Grandison without a sliver of self-awareness. Told by the young lovely Servillia (Lucy Crowe) in the first half of the opera she would rather not marry him, but prefers Annio, Tito immediately gives Servillia up as the right thing to do. Upon which we get this exquisitely poignant duet:

Annio and Servillia

Annio and Servillia can stay the same: the thus-far chaste young heterosexuals, with the source of Annio’s love for Sesto not yet aparently to Annio (though maybe Sesto could understand). But Tito must turn up as a gallant hero, good as well as debonair (failing that self-deprecating drag?). Then we would know why Sesto yearns for him too, and why Vitellia cannot attract him, hard as she has apparently tried. I’m not sure there is anything one can do about the content of his arias, they are so hopelessly jejeune but the acting could be of a man mocking himself as he is torn with his need to be ethical while he confronts these women who have (to him rightly) inexplicably tried to murder him. Jim suggested the director, Calixto Bieito is up to it; he of a Carmen which is admittedly far too fussy, what’s wanted is something more in Claus Guth’s vein or Willy Dekker’s HD Traviato.

The opera is made up of extraordinary arias of exploration and display by Sesto of her emotional life, and by Vitellia of her a semi-comic and then plangent journey spite to overwrought anguish. On the side, intertwined in, the parallel Annio for Sesto, and Servillia for Vitellia. Think of it as the soliloquys by the major characters in long 17th century heroic romances based ostensibly on classical history. The chief character comes from classical history, Tito, reigned two years when he was killed, not enough time perhaps for him to become egregiously corrupt and malign. But all else is made up, a heroine’s text (woman centered) about private sex life.

Mozart keeps us at it and the paradigm is as tightly controlled and climactic as you might like. And the singers sang beautifully – especially Garanca. Her voice was beauty itself. Frittoli was as powerful as she had been as Elvira, Lucy Crowne has lovely tones, and Kate Lindsey may someday step into Garanca’s shoes. They kept the viewer and listener intent, absorbed in them while they sang and the camera kept close on them.

All else should be shorn away into large abstract symbols or re-set. Perhaps fin-de-siecle Europe, say Vienna, a cabaret, or everyone in art deco clothing, or surreal rock, anything but the still statues and hard-to-climb up and down steps that cover the stage. In one of the interviews, the hostess, Susan Graham did asks Garancia how she got up and down without seeming to look. Garancia said her boots were very good. Not slippy at all.

While hiring famous Broadway directors, set-designers, getting the most modern of technology going, the Met is still leary of growing up sexually or presenting these often deeply reactionary operas as underlyingly transgressive. As I watched the super-good Tito I thought of today’s world leaders, the Syrian and Israeli Prime Ministers, who appear keen to murder chldren, shoot up thousands of civilians point-blank (fish-bowl style), the US drones: the numinous awe of the production around Tito would not have been true even of the 1790s. Mozart surely had heard of the incompetent but tenacious Louis XVI, his emigre armies waiting to put back the ancien regime, and Marie Antoinette, and her ladies and jewels and the guillotine meted out to them. Citoyen Capet.

This is an 18th century opera, quintessentially so. The typologies, the aspiration, the symmetrical design. Tito is a good guy. We want good men. He ought to be presented in some way that makes him attractive. It’s apparently also autobiographical in that it was Mozart’s last opera written in his last hard year and he pours himself into it. But the 18th century need not be a museum piece. Made relevant, re-thought, sharply satiric (right now the dramatic ironies Mozart sets up just seem disjunctive with the blind characters), you might get full audiences. Today at the Hoffman moviehouse, about 1/3 of the seats were empty — well maybe a quarter. At the Met I could see the place was not near full.

Next week’s Ballo is one such re-thought opera; Les Troyens a new production. One may hope the latter has done for Dido what Catherine Clement would like see done for most opera women in her Opera, or the Undoing of Women (see “It’s not over until the soprano dies”). I doubt it, but surely we have gone beyond marveling simply at Vitellia’s duet with that saddest of horns and not looking to see how it is that Mozart passed beyond hell-hath-no-fury and chained women.

After all this is an opera where at the close the women are not undone. They are all winners, whether in skirts or trousers.

Ellen

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Purcell and Tate’s Dido and Aeneas & Manuel de Falla’s Love by Sorcery at the Source Theater

The death of Dido

Dear friends and readers,

Sometimes we do go to live operas. And most of the time it’s one of the productions of Carla Huber’s In-Series, now in its 30th (yes thirtieth!) year. I want you to know how wonderful, original and daring this theater has been.

We were privileged on Tuesday night to be able to to go to a performance of the now over 200-year old chamber Baroque opera by Henry Purcell (composer) and Nahum Tate (librettist-poet): Dido & Aeneas, his abandonment of her taken from Virgil’s 4th book of the Aeneas. I think this may be the third time I’ve seen it: once downstairs in Vivian Beaumont Theater in NYC (a 1970s short-lived attempt to do small operas at the Met, Piccolo Met), once at the Folger, and now on just off U-Street.

This time the theater was so crowded, there was not an empty seat. I fear not everyone knew what they were in for. I heard one woman gong on about the interesting plot, and during the intermission someone behind me exploded with irritation because she was completely grated upon by the formality, conventions, music itself of this 17th century piece. She “had not expected this!” The second piece was a ballet by Manuel Falla, El Amor Brujo (Love by Sorcery), whose puppet show version of Don Quixote Jim and I saw at Castleton a couple of summers ago, Master Pedro’s Puppet Show. It was very still: basically we watch a woman’s nightmare enacted in front of her.

I suspect many in the audience were there for Carla — or because they go to her productions. She seems to know so many people, even recognizes us (or pretends to successfully). She is a miracle woman. Thirty years ago she quit a teaching post in music in a local college and started up this theater. Most women who do it (and women do it) leave off after a couple of years at most: Catherine Flyte ran out of money; you have praise that’s high and not many people come; it’s vexing and tiring and often thankless. Exhausting. She manages partly by devoting half her time to Spanish cabaret which brings in a popular crowd. But she does not compromise quality, taste, intelligence either in her higher culture or more popular ethnic productions. Sometimes the costumes and production design is clearly done on a shoestring budget, and she moves from theater to theater. But she sustains herself. Five Mozart operas where the libretto was rewritten to be modern and relevant. Carmen redone from Jose’s point of view.

This Dido and Aeneas was stylistically performed, beautifully sung, and the costumes lovely and appropriate, but (as we have before) we wondered if there is not a problem in the opera itself. Nahum Tate’s libretto seems to veer between sceptical slightly mocking comedy (subtly seen in the light-hearted witches) and the plangent tragedy of an abandoned woman. That Aeneas is given this hopelessly inadequate explanation for himself does not help matters in the sense of understanding the opera’s stance. Jim suggested that perhaps the origin of the first production explains the see-saw quality where sometimes you find something ludicrous in language or act and cannot be sure it was meant to be funny. Purcell did the opera for a school of young women (girls really) and wrote a moralistic “warning lesson” for them. Nahum Tate, fresh from the Restoration theater, with its ribaldry and misogyny made fun. Or perhaps it was the other way round.

Remarkable how many of these masterpiece-gems in the later 17th cetnury are plays written for schoolgirls to perform: Racine’s Athalie one example. Even more: how adult and grave the content can be.

Be that as it may (as they say), the music is exquisitely poignant in Dido’s famous lament. I embed a YouTube from Hampton court; do click and listen:

I know much less about Love Through Sorcery. It too places a forlorn woman at the center, but she is not a passive or accepting victim. The first version was a gypsy scene. Originally Candelas was a gypsy from Cadiz who goes to a cave to a sybil to ask the witch to conjure up her lost lover. As directed by Alan Paul, this version gave us a working woman whose lover has died, but she cannot rid herself of ambivalent memories. She works up the courage to summon him, and remembers good as well as very bad times in order to exorcise the demon from her soul. The piece included dancing by an alter ego, pantomime, much poetry. I suppose it was a ghost opera. By contrast, Falla’s Don Quixote episode was witty and pessimistic. Both modern disillusioned pieces.

An excerpt of the ballet done traditionally in a large theater:

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I asked the next morning on C18-l was there any literature, any secondary studies of this play. No answer cameth. But one friend said she finds herself driven wild by Dido: the play is so a male point of view.

The libretto is written strictly from a man’s POV … I, too, love the music -— Purcell was a musical genius -— our choir has sung some of his works [from his and Dryden’s “King Arthur”] and they were more fun to sing every time we rehearsed them). She was a queen! She’d get over that guy in no time flat -— I can’t stand Aeneas in this version. I just want to go up and slap her, shake her, and say “Get a grip, girl!” But that’s just me, most likely.

An essential source: “Stanley Sadie & associates, New Grove Dictionary of Music (‘Grove 5′) for reliable sources, mostly musicologists, on Purcell. (Purcell, one of my favorite subjects.)”

It is true that Purcell turns Virgil’s stoic male tale into one of the many tragedy queen operas to come. No different I suppose than many of our (by some) worshipped modern numinous stars and dead queens too (Marilyn Monroe dead at 33, Princess Diana), only more obvious. Think of all the Schiller based operas. A number of women poets wrote satiric responses to these tragedy queens, among them Anne Finch on Jane Shore (the play itself was political), Elizabeth Tollett on Anne Boleyn, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu on Mary Queen of Scots, to name but three.

So, gentle reader if you require an antidote to Dido’s lament, here’s

An Epilogue to a new play of Mary Queen of Scots [never finished], design’d to be spoke by Mrs Oldfield by Mary Montagu

What could Luxurious Woman wish for more
To fix her Joys, or to extend her Power?
Their every Wish was in this Mary seen,
Gay, Witty, Youthful, Beauteous and a Queen!
Vain useless Blessing with ill Conduct joyn’d!
Light as the Air, and Fleeting as the Wind.
What ever Poets write, or Lovers vow;
Beauty, what poor Omnipotence hast thou!
Queen Bess had Wisdom, Councel, Power
How few espous’d a Wretched Beauty’s Cause!
Learn hence, ye Fair, more solid charms to prize …

If you will Love, love like Eliza then,
Love for Amusement like those Traitors, Men.
Think that the Pastimes of a Leisure Hour
She favour’d oft — but never shar’d her Power.

The Traveller by Desart Wolves persu’d,
If by his Art the savage Foe’s subdu’d,
The World will still the noble Act applaud,
Tho’ Victory was gain’d by needfull Fraud.

Such is (my tender Sex) our helpless Case
And such the barbarous Heart, hid by the begging Face.
By Passion fir’d, and not with held by Shame,
They cruel Hunters are, we trembling Game.

Trust me Dear Ladys (for I know ‘em well),
They burn to Triumph, and they sigh — to tell.
Cruel to them that Yeild, Cullys to them that sell.
Beleive me tis by far the wiser Course,
Superior Art should meet superior force.

Hear: but be faithfull to your Interest still,
Secure your Hearts, then Fool with who you will.

and Anne Finch’s The audience tonight seems so very kind. Tollett is not so satiric because her Anne writes the night before she is to be beheaded, but she is far wryer, corroded than Tate and Purcell’s Dido. It is also fair to say that Dido has not been picked as a favorite tragedy queen by other men, and in women’s poetry is often used as a Penelope type icon: strong, individual, independent, and ethical, even if done in the end. Anne Finch identifies with this Dido in an autobiographical teasing poem to her husband, asking him to come home after a quarrel: A Letter to Daphnis at London

Not that I don’t love Traviata.

I digress in order to suggest some lines of identification and full context. for both Dido and Candelas (who might be seen as a quiet prosaic daughter of Merimee’s Carmen in the short tale).

We ate out in a nearby good small French restaurant and I had my first ratatouille in years. Washed down by Merlot. Jim a steak similarly washed down.

In January Carla will do Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito on Mozart’s birthday. Since Jim and I and Izzy are going this Saturday to an HD Met performance I’ll be able to compare. I’ll bet Carla’s is as good, and perhaps more relevant. Who knows? maybe the libretto will be one of her updated ones.

In honor of the In-Series and Carla Huber, apparently not a lamenting dying nor ghost-haunted lady.

Ellen

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