from a distant shore

The San Francisco Opera season was capped by Iphigenie en Tauride, which seems to be the latest of those works that suddenly reappear out of the dim reaches of speculative revivals and for a year or two take living hold of every stage, major and minor. If the reason for Iphigenie’s sudden popularity among schedule-setters is that Susan Graham wants to sing it, then I can’t blame her or them; it’s a spectacular part and she is spectacular in it, striding forth from the blackness in a long black dress with her dark hair unbound. Pylade was Paul Groves and Orestes was Bo Skovhus; both were excellent but I did feel that Skovhus was just a bit blank in the part; I would have preferred it if SF Opera had cast the more intense and involved Nathan Gunn as Orestes rather than in the revival of Barbiere last fall. (Or in both; I’m agreeable.) The chorus stood in the pit and dancers took their place on stage, so that any fighting/pleading/rolling on the ground necessary could be done without vocal inhibitions. The black walls of the set closed in, providing the right sense of constriction and control. (The walls slowly lifted at the end, blinding us with light; the three leads walk slowly and separately away. The separation was, I thought, a mistaken imposition; you don’t necessarily need triumph at the end, but there’s no reason the three refugees shouldn’t walk or wander off together as logic and plot would suggest.) Chalk was used to write names on the walls: Clytemnestre on one side, Agamemnon opposing, and Iphigenie in the center (though I only know what was on the left side because I saw a second performance from the center – the left wall wasn’t visible from my usual seat). The names were erased with water, which streamed down like blood, leaving the walls marked with swirly delicate white clouds of evanescent chalk dust. So simple, so powerful. I’ve thought of this whole season, with its Opera 101 quality, as The Rosenberg Rebuke to the unadventurous San Francisco audiences, and with this Robert Carsen production I felt that Pamela gave us one last message, one that Gluck was also giving to his original audience: you don’t need high-society costumes and fancy furniture and elaborate sets that look like the paintings in cheap hotels, you don’t need stale works done in a style as antiquated as the audience; you don't even need fancy vocal fireworks; you just need talented singers totally committed to the drama. About a month after I saw my last performance, I dreamt that I was in a theater and Henry James was talking to me about his version of Iphigenie. I know where the Henry James part came from – I had read an article about him earlier that same day and was visited by one of my periodic urges to re-read The Wings of the Dove – but at some deep level the memory of generous self-sacrificing Millie Theale had shaken loose the haunting figure of Iphigenie.