Updated on Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 03:18 by
John Gibbons
Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Regietheater Bomb.
I’m always up for a Ring with Viking suits, if there are any left today. It works fine – better than fine – because it’s wholly consonant with the original choreographic and semantic nature of the cycle.
I sympathize with people who spend hundreds of bucks on tickets to a live performance and end up with a two-headed Wotan, an Alberich who’s a gaudy pimp or Supreme Court Justice Fricka. But consider this: you can stage these things in your mind, and I don’t just mean closing your eyes in the theater. We have the Ring as a permanent endowment. The theater of imagination in recordings or at the piano (if anyone still plays) can provide the traditional underpinnings that establish the work’s bona fides. At this point, I even see something sentimental and nostalgic in Viking helmets, but I don’t see anything regressive about desiring such a representation. The specific locus of the cycle in Northern European mythology has a deep importance for the work. Let that be said and never gainsaid. To rebut this is to rebut the place of art in history.
I once had a professor who taught Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, who wholly disputed the primacy of the relation between Arthurian legends and Tennyson’s contemporary world. Understanding that work as even primarily metaphorical does not allow us to disregard the garb the work wears. Such is the case with Wagner’s Ring. I surely don’t recommend reading the Icelandic saga Edda, or the risible Nibelungenlied with its Amazonian Krimhild (Brünnhilde) winning feats of strength. I don’t recommend that everyong go out and buy Wolfram von Eschenbach’s wierdly erotic medievalisms.
With apologies to Tolkien fans, that stuff is boring. Viking suits can become boring, too.
That’s why I love (or at least cheerfully tolerate) Eurotrash. My “personal Wagner” is impregnable, like some Pentecostalist’s “personal savior.”
Which brings us to the Copenhagen Ring, the so-called Feminist Ring production by Kasper Bech Holten.
Updated on Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 03:15 by
John Gibbons
As I am in the process of preparing a Rachmaninov/Prokofiev class, a comment from Alfred Brendel caught my eye. “…I am not a Rachmaninov fan. The piano repertoire is vast, and Rachmaninov to me seems a waste of time.” Not my view, but Brendel is not here to be a Rachmaninov fan. His specialty is German masters from Haydn to Liszt. But Brendel’s cool. Just don’t go to him to learn about Rachmaninov. So, for the purposes of this article, I want to consider if there are valid reasons to find Rachmaninov worthwhile.
Updated on Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 03:04 by
John Gibbons
Why did the Joyce Hatto discovery have to be made through technical serendipity? Why hadn’t more people recognized the original recordings? Listen to Mark Singer’s definitive podcast on how the Internet created and then corrected the Joyce Hatto myth.
Chad Batka for The New York TimesFrom left, the director Diane Paulus with the actors Phillip Boykin and Audra McDonald at a rehearsal for “Porgy and Bess” at the American Repertory Theater.
Via a tweet from Alex Ross of a NYT Artsbeat post about an Arts & Leisure article by Patrick Healy after which Stephen Soundheim unleashed one of the most convincing dissings of Regietheater I’ve ever seen. Well, he isn’t actually taking on the concept of Regietheater directly. But the director of this production, Diane Paulus, is definitely in that category. She’s directed several recent productions of opera seria for the Chicago Opera theater. Nor am I opposed to directorial creativity — I just ask that significant changes add something of comparable value to what’s being destroyed. Paulus is a director whose work I haven’t really enjoyed so far.
Since everyone else is pasting Soundheim’s whole letter, so will I:
The article by Mr. Healy about the coming revival of “Porgy and Bess” is dismaying on many levels. To begin with, the title of the show is now “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.” I assume that’s in case anyone was worried it was the Rodgers and Hart “Porgy and Bess” that was coming to town. But what happened to DuBose Heyward? Most of the lyrics (and all of the good ones) are his alone (“Summertime,” “My Man’s Gone Now”) or co-written with Ira Gershwin (“Bess, You Is My Woman Now”). If this billing is at the insistence of the Gershwin estate, they should be ashamed of themselves. If it’s the producers’ idea, it’s just dumb. More dismaying is the disdain that Diane Paulus, Audra McDonald and Suzan-Lori Parks feel toward the opera itself.
Ms. Paulus says that in the opera you don’t get to know the characters as people. Putting it kindly, that’s willful ignorance. These characters are as vivid as any ever created for the musical theater, as has been proved over and over in productions that may have cut some dialogue and musical passages but didn’t rewrite and distort them.
What Ms. Paulus wants, and has ordered, are back stories for the characters. For example she (or, rather, Ms. Parks) is supplying Porgy with dialogue that will explain how he became crippled. She fails to recognize that Porgy, Bess, Crown, Sportin’ Life and the rest are archetypes and intended to be larger than life and that filling in “realistic” details is likely to reduce them to line drawings. It makes you speculate about what would happen if she ever got her hands on “Tosca” and ‘Don Giovanni.” How would we get to know them? Ms. Paulus would probably want to add an aria or two to explain how Tosca got to be a star, and she would certainly want some additional material about Don Giovanni’s unhappy childhood to explain what made him such an unconscionable lecher.
Which brings me back to my opening point. In the interest of truth in advertising, let it not be called “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” nor even “The Gershwin-Heyward Porgy and Bess.” Advertise it honestly as “Diane Paulus’s Porgy and Bess.” And the hell with the real one.
Then there is Ms. Paulus’s condescension toward the audience. She says, “I’m sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.” I don’t know what she’s sorry about, but I’m glad she can speak for all of us restless theatergoers. If she doesn’t understand Bess and feels she has to “excavate” the show, she clearly thinks it’s a ruin, so why is she doing it? I’m sorry, but could the problem be her lack of understanding, not Heyward’s?
She is joined heartily in this sentiment by Ms. McDonald, who says that Bess is “often more of a plot device than a full-blooded character.” Often? Meaning sometimes she’s full-blooded and other times not? She’s always full-blooded when she’s acted full-bloodedly, as she was by, among others, Clamma Dale and Leontyne Price. Ms. McDonald goes on to say, “The opera has the makings of a great love story … that I think we’re bringing to life.” Wow, who’d have thought there was a love story hiding in “Porgy and Bess” that just needed a group of visionaries to bring it out?
Among the ways in which Ms. Parks defends the excavation work is this: “I wanted to flesh out the two main characters so that they are not cardboard cutout characters” and goes on to say, “I think that’s what George Gershwin wanted, and if he had lived longer he would have gone back to the story of ‘Porgy and Bess’ and made changes, including the ending.
I can hear the outraged cries now about stifling creativity and discouraging directors who want to reinterpret plays and musicals in order to bring “fresh perspectives,” as they are wont to say, but there is a difference between reinterpretation and wholesale rewriting. Nor am I judging this production in advance, only the attitude of its creators toward the piece and the audience. Perhaps it will be wonderful. Certainly I can think of no better Porgy than Norm Lewis nor a better Bess than Audra McDonald, whose voice is one of the glories of the American theater. Perhaps Ms. Paulus and company will have earned their arrogance.
It’s reassuring that Ms. Parks has a direct pipeline to Gershwin and is just carrying out his work for him, and that she thinks he would have taken one of the most moving moments in musical theater history — Porgy’s demand, “Bring my goat!” — and thrown it out. Ms. Parks (or Ms. Paulus) has taken away Porgy’s goat cart in favor of a cane. So now he can demand, “Bring my cane!” Perhaps someone will bring him a straw hat too, so he can buck-and-wing his way to New York.
Or perhaps in order to have her happy ending, she’ll have Bess turn around when she gets as far as Philadelphia and return to Catfish Row in time for the finale, thus saving Porgy the trouble of his heroic journey to New York. It will kill “I’m on My Way,” but who cares?
Ms. McDonald immediately dismisses any possible criticism by labeling anyone who might have objections to what Ms. Paulus and her colleagues are doing as “Gershwin purists” — clearly a group, all of whom think alike, and we all know what a “purist” is, don’t we? An inflexible, academic reactionary fuddy-duddy who lacks the imagination to see beyond the author’s intentions, who doesn’t recognize all “the holes and issues” that Ms. Paulus and Ms. McDonald and Suzan-Lori Parks do. Never fear, though. They confidently claim that they know how to fix this dreadfully flawed work.
It so happens that Paulus did direct Don Giovanni at Chicago Opera Theater and I saw it. Here’s a photo gallery. Unfortunately you cannot see the IKEA KLIPPAN sofas, in fuchsia, in the lobby of this night club. Or the sweet catsuit worn by Krisztina Szabó’s Donna Elvira. It was the sort of “contemporary trashy” approach on which Paulus has leaned heavily when dealing with early music at COT. Now that I have made fun of the setting, I should admit that Paulus didn’t “upgrade” Mozart’s work to the same extent she reportedly has upgraded Gershwin. Oh, there was that clever little twist where all the other characters were arrested for the Don’s death and sang their little moral epilogue in handcuffs.
Google Honors Granados
Enrique Granados was the subject of a “Google Doodle” (their name for those special logos) on July 27, his 114th birthday. I only noticed it today while perusing the Google Doodle Archives, because it was only displayed on Google’s Spain site.
In a Slate concert review, J. Bryan Lowder (yes, a musican ) examines one answer to the age-old question “how do we keep classical music new?” For composer Sean Friar, the new answer is “used auto parts.”
Wielding a cello bow, one musician caused a dented fender to produce sounds so piercingly lovely that an oboe might have been jealous. Hubcaps, when drawn over with the same implement, released a startling cry. Wheel wells struck with padded mallets created tones deep and resonant enough to challenge the horns for majesty, and gently scraped brake drums transmitted—better than trembling violins—the nervous energy of your fourth cup of coffee.
Unfortunately, the tongue-in-cheek title of the “Clunker Concerto” is itself a signal that nobody really expects to diversify the orchestra. The question is, why is the modern configuration (essentially from the mid-19th century) sacrosanct? Lowder goes on to remind us of something any orchestral musician (student or pro) already knows: that they used to invent and upgrade instruments all the time. Just look at the evolution from the harpsichord to the grand piano. The clarinet wasn’t standard until Mozart’s maturity so those guys never showed up for the earlier music.
While the 19th century saw a great deal of technical improvement of the orchestral family (valves were added to most of the brass) and sporadic expansions (e.g. the bass clarinet and booming Wagner tuba), not much else changed until the turn of the 20th century. With the crack in artistic continuity caused by industrialization and WWI, composers of the early 1900s like Schoenberg and Varèse sought new sounds and new forms from music. Unfortunately, the orchestra wasn’t having it. Musicologist J. Peter Burkholder has written that by this point, “the orchestra had been transformed … into a museum for the display of great works of art from the past,” and museums, as most artists know, are rather difficult to get into.
The piece isn’t online yet. In this video we learn that Friar composes regular chamber music but wishes to expand the percussion palette. He has no dreams of supplanting the violin with found junk (they obviously lack agility) but sees no sense in the arbitrary boundary between official and unofficial percussion instruments.
But for me, this example falls short of the “answer” that Lowder seems to be setting up. Intrusions into the standard orchestral palette seem permissible in three forms. “Crossover” sounds like ethnic instruments and arguably the saxophone; special effects; and (brake drum roll…) the percussion section! Overwhelmingly, the exploration of new acoustic sounds for orchestra happens in an ad hoc context, or it’s “only” a percussion instrument. And many are used by multiple composers?
If there is one quote from Weep, Shudder, Die: A Guide to Loving Opera that sums up Robert Levine’s case for opera as popular entertainment it’s this:
Opera is all around us — hundreds of hours’ worth on YouTube alone — and there is no excuse not to take part in it. Much like the dozen or so theaters in eighteenth-centure Venice (and then all over Europe), opera has again become familiar, popular entertainment, and it has unleashed its weird power. It still requires some commitment to knowledge and it rarely has a beat, but there’s just so much of Lady Gaga a human being can enjoy/tolerate without needing to be touched in a slightly deeper place.
The aim of this book is to get people to try opera by pointing out how available it is today (with the Met’s HD broadcasts, Opera in Cinema, DVD/Blu-Rays in the hundreds) and by demonstrating opera’s similarities as well as differences to more widely accessible genres. This comes with a little mythbusting in the bit where he anticipates and shoots down some common “Philistine” objections like the unnatural sound produced by operatic technique. Nobody objects to Gospel singers taking their voices as high as they’ll go because we recognize religious ecstasy as a justification for all that intensity. Stipulate that opera functions on a similar level of heightened discourse and its “inauthenticity” stops being a distraction. It becomes the entire point. Levine wants people to fall in love with the trained, unamplified human voice.
Another goal is to make it easier to get into opera. In chapters devoted to the top national traditions in opera, Levine covers the greatest hits with brief composer bios and historical/stylistic background, then homes in on selected facts the newbie might find most helpful and entertaining. The tone is quite chatty and there’s a liberal helping backstage gossip. Excellent beach reading.
An 8-year-old piano student takes on Anthony Tommasini's Top 10 Composers. His wonderful letter (with hand-drawn portaits intended to be Schumann and Tchaikovsky) lists the kid's "greatest" list, plus the ten he likes best. He's sorry if his departures from Tommasini's pick's hurt the critic's feelings.
Last week, the Boston Lyric Opera Annex presented Viktor Ullmann's opera The Emperor of Atlantis (Der Kaiser von Atlantis). Like its better-known counterpart Brundibar, this opera was composed and rehearsed in Theriesienstadt (the Nazi's "model camp" near Prague) and everyone involved in the opera was soon on a train to Auschwitz. Kaiser is a barely-disguised study on Hitler, war and totalitarianism (libretto by Pietr Kien) that may have hastened Ullmann's gassing. Consequently, a professional production inevitably lots of press coverage and reviews.
Decca is launching a new classical label designed to be "more relevant." Meanwhile, the topic of discussion on social media has been Alex Ross's "Why do we hate modern classical music?" from back in November and Michael Fedo's recent follow-up "Why does contemporary classical music spurn melody?" By no means is the classical twitterverse conceding that modern classical music even does spurn melody, while others are defending the place in the world for "ugly" music and debating ways to help people acquire the taste. We hope to find the time to join in the debate. Normally I'd say we missed the window, but if Fedo can respond to a November post in February...
The Queen of Spades for VALENTINE’S DAY? The Met thought it was a nice program in 2004, as I discovered during a recent rebroadcast on their Sirius channel. But what kind of romantic evening is that? This question inspired the list of bad valentine’s day operas below.
In a way, this category is too easy. Almost by definition, operas feature love stories gone tragically wrong. I’m looking for a higher level of Valentine’s Day incompatibility. Ordinary excess like Manon (Lescaut) and garden variety tragic death (sorry, Rodolfo and Mimi) won’t cut it. Also not welcome on this list is any couple who dies together for love. Individual partners who do so will be treated with great skepticism. That goes for thwarted would-be lovers, too (Ahem, baritones). And because there are so many angry spouses (rightly or wrongly) who kill each other, they don’t make the cut unless there’s something especially creepy, intense or ironic about it.
Cheating
Così fan tutte Mozart. This is just awkward. These two guys put on disguises and work an elaborate sting to see if they can seduce each other’s girlfriends. It works, and then… everyone’s kinda OK with it or seething with resentment at the altar, depending on the director.
Eine florentinische Tragödie Zemlinsky. Wife of working class husband cheats with fancy aristocrat, husband kills aristocrat with his bare hands, and wife is REALLY turned on. We hear this as much as we see it. Violence rekindling romance.
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District Shostakovich. It’s not just that Katerina conspires with Sergei kill her husband so they can be together, only to get dumped on her way to the gulag and drown herself in a river. As with Florentine Tragedy, it’s how frankly erotic the music is. The desperation and claustrophobia is a brilliant achievement by Shostakovich, but (to steal from a Twitter game/Pravda editorial) this is a muddle instead of a marriage.
Infanticide
Médée Cherubini. Jason dumps Medea, Medea kills the kids.
Jenůfa Janacek. Jenůfagets pregnant with Števa’s baby, then a jealous Laca slashes her face. Now Števa won’t marry her because she’s disfigured, and Laca won’t marry her because of Števa’s baby. Jenůfa’s stepmother drowns the baby in the river, and Jenůfa gets blamed. Once it’s all sorted out, the stepmother is forgiven on her way to jail and Jenůfa and Laca… get married? It’s really much more upsetting than I’m making it sound.
Codependency
Rigoletto Verdi. After being deflowered under false pretenses, Gilda “takes a bullet” for her guilty lover, dying for him as he jauntily sings how fickle women are.
The Queen of Spades. Tchaikovsky. Hermann loves Liza and his obsession with winning at cards is totally only about getting the money to marry her. Liza is sufficiently obsessed with Hermann, even after he kills her Grandma and won’t give up the cards, to eventually drown herself in the river.
(At this point, drowning in the river constitutes a pattern.)
Stranger Danger
Carmen Bizet. John Gibbons thought this one up. The dangerous stranger he has in mind is not named Carmen.
Duke Bluebeard’s Castle Bartok. Judith marries a guy she knows nothing about, then starts starts snooping around in his storage. The more threatening her discoveries get, the more she just has to keep opening those stupid doors. Judy, don’t just DTMFA. Run!
In A Class By Themselves
Lucia di Lammermoor Donizetti. Lucia is forced to marry the wrong man, so she kills him in the bridal bed and then loses her mind. Fortunately, her coloratura technique is undamaged. Out she comes to sing her famous mad scene in a blood-soaked gown in front of all her wedding guests. The guy she really loves then has to stab himself, unless his scene gets cut so that the mad scene can be the ending of the opera.
What makes Lucia sound even more crazy is the use of a glass harmonica in the mad scene. This rarely-heard instrument raises the goosebumps because it blends with the soprano and clashes with all the other instruments. For business reasons, Donizetti was forced to replace the glass harmonica with a flute in the original production, but this Met production was able to make the original instrumentation happen.
Salome Richard Strauss. Salome to severed, blood-dripping head of John the Baptist: “Ah! I have kissed your mouth, Jochanaan. Ah! I have kissed your mouth! It was a bitter taste on your lips, was it blood?” All this and more, over a suggestive orchestral swell. Enough said.
Lulu Berg. This one owns the Codependency category but it’s so much more than that! Husband #1 drops dead. Husband #2 knifes himself. Husband #3 shot by Lulu. (Son of Husband #3 gets really turned on when Lulu announces “I killed your father on this sofa.”) Girlfriend willingly acquires typhus to help Lulu escape jail, agrees to have sex with a man (she’s a lesbian so that’s even more of a sacrifice) to help Lulu evade jail AGAIN, and finally gets murdered by Jack the Ripper. So does Lulu, but that hardly makes up for the carnage in her wake. This is much better than I’m making it sound, but it’s not for a special date – unless you’re looking for a litmus test. (It’s probably like taking a date to see “Antichrist.” The movie version of this story, BTW is “Pandora’s Box” starring Louise Brooks.)
Here is a fairly literal rendition of the final scene. Sorry for the lack of subtitles. Lulu is now a prostitute, so reduced that she ends up paying her last client, who is Jack the Ripper. Her lover Countess Geschwitz begins to talk of making a new life for herself, studying law and working for women’s rights. She then overhears Lulu’s murder and is stabbed on Jack the Ripper’s way out. Her final words are “Lulu, I am always with you.”
And if you have a strong stomach, here is a far more lurid production. Film is an integral part of this opera, and in this version, the musical interlude before the final scene features a film of human dissection. After that, an interpretation of the final scene that makes several departures from the text.
From Peter Glushanok’s 1958 film version for WQED Pittsburgh. Dancers are Martha Graham as The Bride, Stuart Hodes as The Husbandman, Bertram Ross as The Revivalist, Matt Turney as The Pioneer Woman and Yuriko, Helen McGehee, Ethel Winter and Miriam Cole as The Revivalists’ Flock. The stage design is by Isamu Nogochi.Aaron Copland's original scoring.
Via Orchestra21, the blog of conductor Jason Weinberger
Radio stations will be blasting Domingo in Italian opera and Wagner today. But there’s a role I rather like him in that gets much less play: Herman* in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. Aka Pique Dame, aka Pikovaya Dama, aka Пиквая Дама.
As Act III begins, Herman is reeling from his semi-accidental killing of the Old Countess, the grandmother of the woman he loves. (See, he was trying to learn her rumored secret of three winning cards, JUST so he could afford to marry Liza. He’s not obsessed with the cards or anything.) Since Liza practically caught him in the act, Herman’s understandably afraid she’ll hold the whole thing against him. But Liza’s caught up in her own obsession and sends a letter offering a second chance. Great! Except the Old Countess’s ghost decides to pay Herman a little visit of her own and she’s ready to talk card games. Wanna bet what happens next?
Hint: this is an opera by Tchaikovsky, based on a scary story by Pushkin. I’m not putting my money on a happy ending.
*The guy’s name is “German” with a hard G in Russian because there is no H sound in that language. (Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s name actually begins with a “Kh” sound in case you were wondering.)
John Gibbons
