West Edge Opera: Wozzeck

The final opera in this year's West Edge Opera Festival was Alban Berg's Wozzeck, with Hadleigh Adams in the title role & Emma McNairy as Marie, conducted by Jonathan Khuner & directed by Elkanah Pulitzer. I am always glad for a chance to hear anything by the Second Viennese School composers, & this powerful, rich, & resonant score is always welcome, & though I had some reservations about some aspects of the production, on the whole this was a strong performance of a modernist classic.

My reservations mostly had to do with some aspects of the staging. The single set is a bank of chairs, with a clinical greenish look, as if we were in an operating theater or a lecture hall. You get a sense of surveillance, often with an educational veneer, & pedagogic techniques made omnipresent & intrusive – all very well, but the seats weren't actually used much. People rarely sat in them or watched from them, so it was more of a potential metaphor than an actual piece of stagecraft. There was a large drain in the center of the stage that was used for a number of things (the site of experiments on Wozzeck, when water is poured on him; the site of Marie's murder, when buckets of symbolic blood are emptied on her; the site of the pond in which Wozzeck dies) & it is, again, suggestive of lives going down the drain, of wasted resources & abilities, but it wasn't quite the centerpiece of the staging that I was expecting.

This brings us to the topic of what we've heard about a production before we see it & how it influences our viewing; I had been told that the drain was absolutely essential & that the use of it was the reason the opera was, against usual practice, performed with an intermission. Maybe I'm missing something (I say that sincerely) but I didn't see how its use made the intermission necessary, & though I was grateful for said intermission (the first time so I could move away from the people next to me – seriously, who brings a bag of crinkly snacks to Wozzeck? – & the second time so I could relieve the ache in my arthritic knees by standing & walking), it really does lower the dramatic temperature to have a break after only about half an hour.

We open of course with Wozzeck shaving his Captain (Spencer Hamlin), who berates him for pretty much anything he does, because he can, being a Captain & all, &  then Wozzeck goes to the Doctor (Philip Skinner) who pays him pennies (to Wozzeck, essential income) for participating in bizarre experiments, such as not urinating (the need to urinate is purely mental!). Both the Captain & the Doctor, strongly sung, very present, are absurdly, cruelly funny in their limited vision & their way of berating & controlling their social inferior. Then the Drum Major (C Michael Belle), with whom Marie will have an affair, comes on. He is plump & preening & very very pleased with himself. The absurdist, cruel-edged humor should continue. Instead, this staging has the Drum Major smack Marie around & then sexually assault her. It's a shame they went for this generic, not to say cliched, approach to this character, as it removes one element of the strange acerbic comedy of the piece by making the Drum Major just another violent abuser instead of a self-satisfied Maker of Cuckolds. Someone like him wouldn't feel that he has to abuse a woman to win her over. And why is Marie attracted to him if he treats her so brutally? Yes, that could & does happen, but that's a different story, not the one the music tells here. (I'm guessing this is a directorial choice & Belle could have provided a different vision of the character.)

The staging, though often evocative & poetic – I particularly liked having the chorus of children coming in on all fours, backs arched, like the feral animals children are, before straightening up & doing their thing – is, as I realized when discussing it with some audience members who maybe hadn't seen the opera as often as I have, perhaps a production that works best if you're already very familiar with the action. The staging of Marie's murder & the discovery of her body is particularly confusing, as she gets moved away from the drain/lake but is still supposed to be in the forest so the children can go gawp at the dead woman – you really have to know the appropriate action already for the staging here to make sense.

McNairy is a commanding presence as Marie (making it even more puzzling that she would just continue accepting the Drum Major after he assaulted her), though it's believable that her life is so emotionally impoverished that the pompous Drum Major could win her with a few earrings. The handsome Hadleigh Adams is an affecting & unusually elegant Wozzeck, though perhaps a bit recessive. That's not an inappropriate choice for a character who is so dominated & beaten down by the world around him & its cagework of social systems, but when he breaks out in violence towards Marie at the climax it's undercut because we've already seen the Drum Major behaving the same way. It becomes just more of the same.

All that aside, any chance to hear this score (led with strength by Khuner) & to see these superb performers is a pleasure. Obviously I didn't agree with all the staging, but better a production that makes you ponder why you don't like something rather than one that makes you sit back & see just what you expect to see.

West Edge Opera: David & Jonathan

For those who love baroque opera as I do this is a bit of a golden age, but even so works of the French baroque are still a bit rare, despite their great beauty, & I assume it's because staging works originally financed by an absolute monarchy are more demanding on modern budgets than those paid for by the fickle audiences of London, so I was excited to have the opportunity to see Marc-Antoine Charpentier's David & Jonathan at West Edge Opera, directed by company director Mark Streshinsky & led musically by Adam Perl.

I decided to prep by listening to the recording I was sure I had, though as I dug through the boxes & boxes & piles of CDs (if you saw the quantity you would understand why I was so sure I had a recording already) I realized that somehow I had missed this one. Of course I forthwith bought a couple of recordings, one of which came with a blu-ray of a production done in Versailles, which is musically beautiful & gorgeous to look at but frankly incoherent even for someone familiar with the Bible & Handel's Saul. So let me say right off that Streshinsky & Pearl have shaped the work into something that made sense, had dramatic & emotional flow, & was extremely moving, so well done West Edge.

The work's potential incoherence lies not only in the original libretto by the Jesuit priest François Bretonneau – as a work written by a priest for a Jesuit college, he doesn't need to spell out certain plot elements, such as the reason the Witch of Endor is startled & angry when she discovers Saul's identity – but also in its original performance circumstances, as it interlarded a spoken drama in Latin on the same subject that presumably clarified identities & relationships. To add to the confusion, Jonathan in our day is often played by a soprano, & though cross-gender casting is frequent in baroque opera, & even one of its appealing characteristics, it makes more sense to have a tenor play the role, as was done at West Edge (Aaron Sheehan was Jonathan & Derek Chester was David, & both performed with sweet sincerity & plangent beauty).

This version opens at the court of Saul, King of Israel (as everyone who knows the story knows, Saul is a plum dramatic role, intensely sung here by Matthew Worth). There is a celebration of David's victories; we start by seeing his defeat of Goliath re-enacted, to the delight of the court, by a giant puppet of the Philistine champion &, playing David, one of the four agile dancers prominently featured in this production (Marcos Vedoveto, Christopher Nachtrab, Max van der Sterre, & James Jared, & unfortunately I do not know which danced David; the choreography is by Benjamin Freedman & the puppet design by Paul Hayes). There is some initial comic by-play between the two combatants, including puppet Goliath literally knocking David over with his Big Swinging Dick, until the famous slingshot is produced & David beheads the puppet foe, to the delight of the court of Israel (& that of the West Edge audience).

This is a striking & clever opening, as it sets the tone for what we're going to see: a theatrical representation of a story that is already well known, played in a dramatic, stylish way in front of a court that is also theatrical & on display, with a cheerfully explicit sexuality. As David & Jonathan watch the battle, it is clear that they are in love with each other. This production is what would nowadays be termed joyfully queer. There is a certain element of fantasy to this approach – any dynastic power is going to demand at some point that its heir get together with someone who can produce a legitimate heir, & never in the history of royal favorites has any favorite, male or female, been greeted with the simple, clear, & genuine joy with which the court, as represented by the chorus, greets this pairing. But the approach makes basic emotional & dramatic sense & I went with it. (I heard some in the audience later criticizing what they felt were overly explicit moments in the staging but there was nothing that we haven't seen staged plenty of times with male/female couples.)

David & Jonathan go through a coupling ceremony, but David soon has to flee the court, as Saul's jealousy, suspicions, & instability grow. He goes incognito to see the Witch of Endor, who gives him an oracular & striking session (sung with smooth power by Laurel Semerdjian). I know this scene is supposed to take place at night, hidden away, but this was one of several moments when I wished the lighting had been a little brighter, if only so I could fully appreciate the wild black loops & Spanish-moss-like hangings of the Witch's outfit (Marina Polakoff designed the costumes). The Ghost of Samuel (Richard Mix) shows up in white, & gravely gives Saul the news he guesses & we already know: he has been jettisoned by Jehovah.

The helpful titles let us know that time has passed; David & Jonathan have been forced by circumstances to separate, & David has found refuge with the Philistines, now fighting for them & their king Achis (sung with easy presence by Wilford Kelly, & the queering of the story continues, as Achis is usually accompanied by handsome young men, in the shape of our dancers). Joabel (a strong Benjamin Pattison) of the Philistine court doesn't like or trust the arrangement with David, & works to incite a war that will end with the deaths of Jonathan  & Saul. From there the story unfolds with grace & sorrow, & many of the gorgeous laments beloved of the baroque period; as David is crowned King of Israel, he sobs over the loss of the man he has loved. The story & its ending are both known, but reframed here in a powerfully emotional way.

A little re-arranging, a little re-visioning, & we have a dramatically successful work, beautifully staged. This year's West Edge Festival really went from strength to strength. I'm already looking forward to next season, which will include Handel's Rinaldo.

West Edge Opera: Dolores

I went to all three operas at this year's West Edge Opera festival, seeing each one twice. First up is Dolores, centered on labor leader Dolores Huerta, with music by Nicolás Lell Benavides & libretto by Marella Martin Koch. I heard West Edge's preview of part of the opera two years ago (my post on that event is here, &, while I have your attention, here is my post on a New Century Chamber Orchestra concert with a different premiere from Benavides). I was very enthusiastic about the work then & after seeing it complete & fully staged I am even more enthusiastic; a few elements that gave me (minor) pause in the preview, particularly the extended victory speech for Senator Robert Kennedy. made sense to me once I saw the whole design. I go to as many new operas as I can & few of them have struck me as so musically & dramatically complete as Dolores. This is a meaty work that audiences will be pondering for quite a while.

I won't repeat (most of) the points I made in my earlier post, so I'll start by discussing the attention given to RFK in the second half of the opera. The day after the premiere, before the first performance of the festival's second opera, I ended up discussing this aspect of the work with someone who objected to the RFK material, wanting more Dolores. First, it's a tribute to the character that the audience wants more of her – much better than wanting less. It's in the spirit of Huerta to be collaborative & to share the spotlight with others, so the opera, by shifting focus, is enacting her personality. And the focus on RFK is necessary because you can't understand why his assassination was such a blow to the farmworkers' movement & to Huerta herself unless you understand the hope he offered: the sincerity, the compassion, the charisma. Though many in the audience clearly remembered the historical events, we are far enough from them so that you can't take for granted that people will grasp who RFK was & what he meant (especially when the name is now associated with the idiot destroying America's public health). When RFK is first mentioned, I heard in the brass subtle echoes of that Virgil Thomson / Aaron Copland "Americana" sound, giving an aural democratic halo to his arrival (though at the first performance – at this point, do I only hear with ironic ears? – I thought I detected a very subtle criticism in this music of the whole concept of "Americana" & political heroes).

References to RFK increase during the first half, but we need to see, hear, & feel him in person, & that's why we need the extended victory speech, in which, along with random little jokes & banalities, you hear him reaching out to what we'd now call marginalized groups (the immigrant farmworkers, mainly Mexican & Filipino; the Black populace) with charm, grace, & inclusiveness. I'm old enough to remember the grape boycott that is a major feature of the opera (my family boycotted grapes, as my mother was a long-time subscriber to Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker paper), but I do not remember RFK & his assassination, or many of the participants in the story other than Cesar Chavez & Nixon. Before the audience can weigh the magnitude of the loss, we have to feel the weight of RFK's presence.

But there is some irony in the treatment of RFK & what is now called the mainstream media. We, attending an opera titled Dolores, know that she is the story here: Huerta, & Itliong, & Chavez, & the workers they fight for.  We learn that they've been struggling for years, getting traction only slowly. When does the press show up? When a glamorous politician, a handsome man from a powerful family, shows up & teases running for the Presidency. That's the story the press cares about: the top levels of power, who's in, who's out, & not those toiling anonymously at the bottom of the pyramid. (There was a bit of this going on at the second performance, when State Attorney General Rob Bonta made an appearance, to much buzzing.)

So the events around the grape strike & the RFK assassination are clearly laid out, as prior knowledge cannot be assumed, but there is a certain memory-play aspect to the opera which works powerfully, freeing it from a documentary / straight narrative style into something more suggestively dreamlike, even, at moments, surreal. The dead RFK will appear to Huerta. There are elliptical suggestions of the lives going on out of view while the work gets done. The repeated choruses of No grapes / strike (in both English & Spanish) are a powerful way of suggesting the passage of time. And the on-goingnesss of any lengthy effort – the boycott has been underway for three years when the opera opens – is a difficult thing to convey theatrically, where activities that last for years, whose essence is their grinding, relentless dailiness, must necessarily be compressed into the two hours' traffic of the stage (this is a problem with pretty much every work-related drama I've seen). These chants rise fluidly from the music & action, from the emotions at play, rather than from specific situations; they echo throughout the action.

A good example of what I mean by the almost dreamlike aspect is the treatment of Tricky Dick. His scenes arrive like great slabs of weirdness in between the scenes of the union struggles. Initially he doesn't directly attack the Union or the boycott. Instead, he sings, in sinuous, insinuating tones, about the lovely tastiness of grapes. As he sings, the projection screens behind him show gloriously lit, sparkling, nearly erotic shots of green grapes. Maybe because of that imagery I kept picturing Tricky Dick as the snake in the garden. His music is sprightly, appealing, with a little touch of Weimar cabaret, & a bit of a lounge singer's louche seductiveness. It is indicative of what a powerful, disturbing creation he is that both times I saw the opera the audience, though clearly all-in for Huerta & the farmworkers, burst into applause at the end of his first scene.

Tricky Dick is on a platform, raised above the action. With each reappearance, his message gets a little more sardonic, a little more direct in attacking the Union, though he remains physically above the fray (he does have one appearance on "the floor" during the first act, but he is alone, spotlit on a darkened stage). By the end of the first act, he has grown more direct; he practically snarls in support of "the squares" & the "silent majority" & speaks with increasing stridency about the need for Order & Discipline. So when there is a moment in the second act, after RFK's assassination, when Tricky Dick & Huerta finally confront each other, face to face, down on the floor of the stage & we see what the opera has been building up to, the moment is breathtaking. She defies him with continued calls for a strike. And though we see him go on to become President, we see that she will continue to fight. As she says, the fight isn't over until we win.

The irony, of course, is that Tricky Dick uses words like Order & Discipline as code words for keeping down the people who are already down. They are, in fact, the ones who live lives of discipline & order: we've seen Huerta, a single mother of a large brood, struggling to support her family, pinching pennies, stretching dollars, continuing to work hard every day in the face of injustice & cruelty. That's real discipline, of a kind the politically scheming climber Tricky Dick doesn't understand, or appreciate despite his political success.

Calling the character Tricky Dick rather than Richard Nixon emphasizes the archetypal, recurring nature of the character: he's practically a trickster god, though on the side of complacency & evil. No matter what he does, the ultimate beneficiary is always meant to be himself (I've read Paradise Lost, I recognize the type.) The naming also allows for the freedom to add some Trumpery touches to the characterization: he holds a Bible, but upside down, as in the infamous Bible photo-op, & along with documentary photographs from 1968 we see video from recent No Kings rallies (just in case anyone was missing the sad fact that this opera, set in 1968, is frighteningly relevant now, in 2025).

Let me spring back to the beginning of the opera to look at the character of Dolores. The opera opens with quiet but tense music, as she is being driven (her car is in the shop & she can't afford to get it out until payday) by fellow labor leader Larry Itliong. She refers to her children, & says that her divorce has been hard on them. It's a normal, workaday conversation, & the only other (possible) reference we hear to the divorce is her passing comment later that her children have seen the effects of farm work, & the way farmworkers are treated, on their father. The opera does not give a Wikipedia-style bio of Huerta, but you will get a clear sense of who she is as a person: strong, resourceful, resilient. And very much a person who is about "people power": the power of unions, of uniting, of forming alliances & coalitions.

Her approach is subtly contrasted with that of her fellow leaders, Itliong & Chavez. Itliong is very much about his own ethnic group (the Filipino workers) & has a short fuse, which is sometimes amusing & satirical (as in his sarcastically chipper number about the politicians who talk-talk-talk, while on the screens behind him the jaws of various politicians waggle back & forth in time) & sometimes short-sighted (as in his angry explosions at Huerta & Chavez when things don't go the way he thinks they should). Chavez is a bit messianic, a bit of a loner (he decides on his hunger strike without consulting the others), very much immersed in Catholic ideas of redemption through self-sacrifice (there is an interesting Catholic undercurrent in the opera: as a link between Kennedy & Chavez, as the source of understanding & strength – Huerta calls on Our Lady of Guadalupe as well as Our Lady of Sorrows, for whom she is named).

Huerta is the one who sees the need to keep the workers going with something more light-hearted than self-sacrifice & righteous anger. She suggests a mariachi band, which leads to some lively music & a contrast in dramatic mood, as well as to a lilting & extremely catchy setting of "Are you registered to vote?" It's very danceable; in face we see the three labor leaders dancing to it. It's so catchy that some political group ought to license the rights before the next election.

But there are also drawbacks to Huerta's collaborative approach: is it wise to put all the eggs in the Kennedy basket? There is a bleak chorus before RFK appears warning her not to count on him, that he will be killed the way his brother was. We hear the news of Dr Martin Luther King Jr's assassination, with a somber chorus to Aeschylus's words from Agamemnon about suffering into wisdom through the grace of God. This chorus will be repeated to powerful effect when RFK is shot (the reference to the great Greek tragedian deepens the sense of world-historical suffering & sorrow here).. After he has been shot but is not yet officially dead, Itliong already wants to come up with a new strategy. This is the sort of cold-blooded calculation politicians need. Huerta, though, cannot bring herself to recalibrate so soon. She is dealing with a deep personal as well as political blow – the loss of the first major politician who seemed genuinely willing to listen to them, include them, & help them with actions as well as words.

We get the social / political / community view of things, but there is also a powerful scene of Huerta's inward reckoning. As she prepares for bed, praying, she reflects, thinking of her children, wishing she were with them, knowing that she needs to keep fighting for them & others. The brass instruments  have been commenting throughout the opera, sometimes inspirationally, sometimes satirically. But for this scene, they recede, & we have a string-heavy section, interior & searching, with a lovely solo violin floating above. Then as Huerta sleeps, the music changes as Tricky Dick appears again, looming on the platform directly above her, as in an evil dream.

There is another string-heavy scene with violin solo: the aria of the busboy Juan Romero, who cradled RFK right after the shooting. He sings of his recent arrival in America, & of how rare it was for him to be treated with the respect with which Kennedy had treated him the night before, when he delivered room service to him & his wife. This scene shows us the genuine empathy of RFK, the ability to connect with people (or just to notice people) that most others ignore. As with Dolores's nighttime reverie, it is meditative, complex, beautiful: the real life of people, as opposed to what the politicians say or the media report. It is in a generous spirit that this moving aria is given to someone who could be seen in the wider sweep of things as a minor character.

(from the second performance: Huerta in black in the center; to her right is Mark Streshinsky, General Director of West Edge Opera)

The entire cast is strong & deserved the enthusiastic cheers they received; I'm just going to list names: Kelly Guerra as Dolores Huerta, Phillip Lopez as Cesar Chavez, Rolfe Dauz as Larry Itliong, Alex Boyer as Senator Kennedy, Sam Faustine as Tricky Dick, Chelsea Hollow as Helen Chavez / Ethel Kennedy, Sergio Gonzalez as Juan / a Journalist, Caleb Alexander as Paul Schrade of the United Auto Workers: all superb, all memorable. The staging by Octavio Cardenas was masterly & Mary Chun conducted the score with power & tenderness. Dolores Huerta herself was there in person, & spoke after the two performances I saw. She is still powerful, still fighting; the opera ends with her resolution to continue fighting despite the loss of their great ally RFK, & the communal cries of Sí ,se puede ring out so bravely that I felt sure the audience was about to join in (maybe they did, it was hard to tell); the cries end somewhat suddenly, but with the feeling that they are actually still sounding around us. What a memorable event this was! Congratulations to all involved, to West Edge Opera for midwifing, & to Benavides & Martin Koch for producing such a powerful work.

San Francisco Opera: Idomeneo

For some time now I have been saying to anyone who wants to listen, as well as to many who do not, that Idomeneo is the one Mozart opera I have never really connected with (to forestall the question, I love Clemenza di Tito, as well as all baroque opera, so this is not an objection to opera seria or stylized music drama in general). Yet I persist in trying! On Tuesday night I was at the second performance of San Francisco Opera's latest production of the piece. Idomeneo & I remain unconnected.

Not that I don't see things to admire in it: mostly musical things. Eun Sun Kim led a crisp ensemble in music that was powerful & tender. San Francisco Opera had assembled a sterling cast – Matthew Polenzani in the title tole; Daniela Mack as his son Idamante; Ying Fang as Ilia, a Trojan princess loved by Idamante; Elza van den Heever as the volatile Elettra, in unrequited love with Idamante; Alek Shrader as the counselor Arbace – who all sang with beautiful sound, but beauty used to expressive purposes; the vocal fireworks were explosive, the yearning & sorrow genuine. (I have to give a special mention to Mack, who was singing despite some unannounced vocal cord issues; she could not continue singing during Act 3 & instead mimed the role while Laura Krumm sang offstage – kudos to both of them for doing so beautifully under physically difficult circumstances. During the curtain calls company director Matthew Shilvock explained the situation & introduced Krumm.)

Ying Fang was making her San Francisco Opera debut & her tender & lively performance as the conflicted Ilia confirmed advanced word of her extremely beautiful voice & skillful acting. There were also excellent contributions from some current Adler Fellows: Georgiana Adams & Mary Hoskins as Cretan Women, Samuel White & Olivier Zerouali as Trojan Men, Samuel White as the High Priest of Neptune, & particularly Jongwon Han as the Voice of the Oracel.

Idomeneo-inspired lighting effects in the opera house lobby before the show.

It was an excellent performance of early prime Mozart, musically speaking. I know someone who was there last night after also hearing Saturday's opening, & he is currently planning a third & maybe fourth visit. But all he cares about is singing. He doesn't care about staging, or the drama, & he sits in the last row of the second balcony, a spot from which you can barely see what's going on way down on the stage anyway.

For people like me, who prefer the front row of the orchestra & consider opera a theatrical form, the production by Lindy Hume was less satisfying. I will say whatever role she may have had in helping the singers shape their characters & their interactions paid off; the performers were all convincing – though there were some oddities; for example, when Elettra, thinking she & Idamante are being sent off together, sings that although he loves another, she is going to turn that around & make him love her – when she sings that, surely Idamante shouldn't be standing there, directly addressed by her? What is he supposed to do with that? We don't know, because Mozart & his librettist Giambattista Varesco didn't give him any response. He just looks noble & stricken. But how could an honorable young man like Idamante not protest immediately that he loves Ilia, even if (he thinks) she doesn't return his love, & how could he proceed with the trip as if Elettra hadn't announced to him that she was going to seduce him?

The staging struck me as mostly Modernizing Update 101: there is a unit set, a large boxy room with large doors on the back & on the sides. Everything is overwhelmingly white, black, or gray (with the exception of a red cloth that gets carried around by Idomeneo when he is trying to sacrifice to Neptune in Act 3, & some green branches – inevitably, the rebirth of hope – carried by the chorus at the very end. But after 3 and a half hours, these bits of color didn't do much, at least for one exhausted viewer. There are projections against the walls of the room: some effective shots of the sea (some color here; lots of deep blues) at the beginning of the opera. During emotional moments, abstract blotches swirl around the walls, to match the inner tumult, a device that might have been more effective if it had been used less often. During emotional moments (Idomeneo's Fuor del mar, Elettra's D'Oreste, d'Ajace) characters will, naturally, tear off their outer garments. There are, of course, many chairs on stage. They get moved, re-arranged, sometimes thrown, occasionally sat in.

The costumes are mostly contemporary, with some odd touches: a couple of the guards, as well as some of the higher aristocracy, wear uniforms or suits surmounted by a shoulder cape of shiny black feathers. When Elettra & Idamanta are supposed to leave on their voyage, their outfits have odd golden filigree added to the back & shoulders. The clothes are almost all black, & struck me as drab & ugly. At the beginning of the opera, when the Trojan prisoners are being freed, they line up, sort of, & go up to a table where some guards give them envelopes, which, when opened, have a paper in them. I am unclear on what was supposed to be happening there. I assume it was meant to represent some sort of sign that they were now free (maybe the papers were new legal ID?) but it struck me as mostly the theatrical equivalent of busy-work, the kind of thing you do when you feel something needs to be happening on stage other than someone standing there singing, no matter how beautifully, a noble though perhaps slightly repetitious sentiment.

So the production wasn't helping things, in my view, but I have some issues with the opera itself. I have speculated to some that the reason I don't connect with Idomeneo is that we're promised a sea monster but he only shows up offstage. I'm only half-kidding about this, because the thing is, most opportunities for drama in this story are, like the sea monster, shoved offstage. The crux of the drama is that Idomeneo, returning to his kingdom of Crete after the fall of Troy, is caught in a huge & deadly storm &, apparently not having read as many fairy tales as I have, tries to placate Neptune by promising to sacrifice to him the first living creature he sees on land, which of course turns out to be his son. (Think of the dramatic fireworks Handel made out of a similar vow & a similar dilemma in Jephtha, & you'll see what's missing here.) In his sorrow Idomeneo, apparently not having read as much Greek mythology as I have, thinks he can outwit the god's anger by just sending Idamante away on a long trip. This doesn't work, of course, & the even angrier Neptune, deprived of his human sacrifice, sends a rampaging sea monster to attack the king's city.

Idomeneo doesn't tell his son, until the very end, about the vow. He just shuns him, orders him away, & generally rejects him. Presumably this is done to protect Idamante, who seems like the type to offer himself as a sacrifice if honor commands, but Idomeneo's evasive ways cause his son probably more pain than a straightforward explanation would have. What we end up with is hours of the father being abrupt & inexplicably (in the eyes of Idamante) unloving, while the son wonders unhappily what he did wrong. There isn't a lot of development there, mostly restatement. Some of the articles in the program-book note that Mozart's troubled relationship with his own father (or other father-figures) entered into his work here. On the one hand, sure, but on the other, so what? The only reason we have any interest in the troubled relationship of these long-dead men is that one of them created art that keeps our interest. And the art has to continue to hold our interest & to stand on its own apart from any psychobiography of the artist.

The motor of this drama is the anger of Neptune, but the drama's handling of it is fundamentally incoherent. Everything is driven by the sea god's implacable anger: the deadly storms, Idomeneo's vow, his attempt to evade fulfilling that vow, the attack of the sea monster. . .  There is a daring & challenging indictment being drawn up about the cruelty of the gods &, by implication, the religion that surrounds them. And then, abruptly, near the end of the opera, the sting is removed: Neptune, having apparently checked a calendar to see what year it is & realizing that the alternative is to become nothing more than a fancy fountain ornament, decides he'd better get on board with the Enlightenment. So he announces that Love & Reason are Everything, & that his commands, which called pretty clearly for a human sacrifice or else, had been completely misunderstood & instead what he obviously meant was that Idomeneo should step aside as King & let Idamante take over after he marries Ilia. Elettra gets her big number & goes offstage, presumably to kill herself, thereby removing the last obstacle to a happy ending, if not for her then at least for everyone else. Well, not quite everyone: I guess it's too bad about those hundreds of people killed by the rampaging sea monster! Maybe the sea monster also misunderstood what Neptune wanted. (I am reminded of Jane Campion's The Piano, in which a sincerely meant but barely plausible happy ending is tacked on to the story, completely undercutting everything we've just spent hours watching.)

So I remain unconvinced by Idomeneo. But if you want to hear some glorious music, sure, go up to the balcony, sit back, & bask in the sonic splendors. But you may want to keep your eyes closed. Check here for remaining performances.

San Francisco Opera: Tristan & Isolde

I was at the first performance of San Francisco Opera's superb production of Tristan & Isolde, & went again, last night, to the second.

As I said to someone (actually, no doubt more than one person) before the performance, there are opera fans, & there are Wagner fans, & though there's a Venn Diagram intersection there, the two are not really the same thing. I'm tempted to add another category, those for whom Tristan is itself set apart, even from the rest of Wagner's works. Tristan is not an opera, nor (pace the Master & his acolytes) a music-drama: it is a psychic derangement; it is flesh (infused with never-ending yearning, & deeper & more powerful than anything our actual poor little meat-machines can manage) transubstantiated into sound, swelling, cresting, subsiding only to tumesce forward, stretching endurance almost beyond comprehension; it is an auricular opiate &, like the products of the nodding poppy, it can nauseate some while leaving others disoriented (on a spiritual as well as physical level) for days, while they still long for another dose. Like Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo, it is an artwork with an imperative message: You must change your life.

This is, of course, not an easy command to follow, or even to comprehend; hence some of the discontent this disturbing, titanic work leaves in its wake. During my first performance, those seated around me were rapt; on the second, there were the usual gaggle of operatic whisperers & crinklers of cellophane. I would gladly have beaten them to death, my only defense being: "Your Honor, they were crinkling during Tristan!" The usual intermission exasperations – people moving too slowly, standing obliviously in some obviously inconvenient spot, expressing their stupid opinions too loudly – filled me with more than the usual rage. We all seem so much less significant in the light of this work (A judgment from which I do not, of course, exclude myself.) This is . . . not a healthy way to approach life.

Tristan, though, is not a "healthy" work, whatever that might be, unless having your little boat upturned, throwing you into more than usually stormy psychic seas, counts, in some long run, as healthy. The Wagnerian penchant for extremities – greatest of heroes, weakest of cowards, most wondrous of women, deepest of betrayals – is here in full force, & it doesn't take long after the initial movement of Eun Sun Kim's masterly baton to pull us into this worldscape. Here betrayal is the deepest truth, day, strikingly, with its sunlight & openness, is the enemy of all we long for, & night what we pine for unceasingly (that is, if "we" are pulled into the psychological orbit of the two lovers; some no doubt resist). Night isn't even our day-following hours; it is death, but not even death, oblivion but not quite that; it is some sort of cosmic universal force, darkly centered in a somehow joyous non-existence (is this bliss because we experience oblivion, or is the bliss so intense as to swirl us into a state of oblivion?).

I overheard someone during an intermission talking about "well, when two people are very much in love", as if, had things fallen out a bit differently, Tristan & Isolde would be picking out china patterns & shopping for a nice little castle somewhere. In this work love & sex stand in for something mightier than our little awkwardnesses, as with angelic intercourse in Paradise Lost, where the heavenly lovers:

obstacle find none
Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars:
Easier than Air with Air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure
Desiring; nor restrain'd conveyance need
As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul.

(Book 8, ll 624 - 629)

The world keeps intruding, though, usually in the form of King Marke & his court; in this production, directed by Paul Curran, the first act ends (after the lovers have downed the death/love potion that gave them permission to act on their deepest desires, & they need to be forcibly separated from their embrace of each other by the faithful Brangäne & Kurwenal) as a white-clad, somewhat ghostly looking Marke, elevated on a mobile platform, moves toward them from behind. At the end of the second act, the lovers' ecstatic duet ends abruptly with the sudden return of King & court, led by Melot, who has accused Tristan of betraying his King & loving uncle. The third act would end with Marke uniting the two, except Tristan has died & Isolde sweeps aside Marke & the rest of the world with her enraptured Liebestod (only to have the world sweep that aside for us, the audience, who must stagger out of our seats & wander back through crowded streets & noisy trains to the theatrical sets we call reality).

We, of course, can revisit the experience not only through our imperfect memories but also through the many recordings easily (maybe too easily) available to us. Though every note of the score (performed uncut in this production) may have sunk into our psyches, there is still a freshness & force to hearing it live, even in our days of dozens of recorded choices, especially with playing as dauntless & inspired as the Opera Orchestra's. I can only imagine how mighty, how intoxicating, this work appeared to those experiencing it in the opera house in the days before recording, when only rumor, piano reductions, or the occasional excerpt performed in concert could give people some idea of what was involved. (Even for us, though, there are new things to notice; this time I was particularly struck by Wagner's astute & careful use of the sparkling harp.)

Even so, excerpts, piano reductions, even recordings, can't give you a full sense of the experience. Sitting through it is part of it. The music keeps unrolling gloriously, perverse in its beauty; even Brangäne's second act warning to the lovers to beware floats above them like a celestial benediction. Are we hearing it as they hear it, as a beautiful sound that doesn't quite reach them? Wagner is careful not to ridicule or dismiss King Marke & his Court, or the other representatives of the world, such as the Steersman in the first act & the shepherd in the third. Marke has a touching monologue about Tristan's betrayal, one that gives us some sense of the depth & dignity possible in being merely, or "merely", human. The interior perspective of the lovers is not the only, or even perhaps the best, way of seeing things. One can long for rapturous annihilation while still realizing there might be other, though perhaps less grand or deep, possibilities. These cosmic forces are too difficult for us to live with in our daily way.

This famously or notoriously interior & lengthy work presents considerable challenges in staging; this production makes astute use of touch – the characters mostly stand apart from each other, so a hand on a shoulder (as Isolde's on Tristan's when she urges him towards the potion) or two hands slowly joining (as during the heedless lovers' second act duet) carry considerable force. Astute use is made of lighting, in harmony with the longing for darkness / night / oblivion of the lovers; when they first drink what Brangäne has given them, they fall to the floor & the already dim stage suddenly goes dark as the unfolding music suspends them & us in transformative time; as the light returns, isolating the two of them in its white pools, they slowly reach their hands towards each other, coming close to contact.

The pale walls – high, with windows up above, criss-crossed by timbers – that portray the interior of the ship in Act 1 return in Act 3's delirium & isolation, only this time hung askew, deranged, smashed: a society of shipwreck. Act 2 has more formal white walls, a bit palatial looking, with a large tree in the front: only the tree's branches are stubby, knotted; the tree, which is all a lovely silver, slants to one side. It is beautiful but thwarted, frustrated. Tristan's costumes are mostly modernish, a sort of suit & white shirt; Isolde is in a long green-gold robe, like a Celtic princess, & Brangäne in a similar robe of sort of a maroon. Marke wears a long pale tunic, hovering somewhere between medieval & contemporary. When Melot & company rush in at the climax of Act 2, they are accompanied by soldiers looking very medieval in chain mail & dark red velvety tunics. It's a striking effect, given the sudden intrusion of a storybook-medieval look. But even Tristan's more modern garb, which helps set the hero apart, suits the ambiguous time-setting; this is a world in which swords & magic potions are plausible, but also a psychological / spiritual / mythic world beyond the clanking of such plot devices.

The whole cast was strong – beyond strong; dazzling, given the sheer physical demands of this work. Christopher Oglesby, as the singer of the haunting sea chantey in Act 1; Thomas Kinch in the small but striking role of Melot; Christopher Oglesby as the loyal shepherd in Act 3 & Samuel Kidd as the Steersman; Kwangchul Youn as a dignified, touching King Marke; Wolfgang Koch as a gruff & loyal Kurwenal (faithful to his hero Tristan, even if he doesn't always understand Tristan the lover); Annika Schlicht as a compassionate, anguished Brangäne: all superb. But of course separate praise is due to the tireless Simon O'Neill as Tristan, whose anguished hallucinations in Act 3 blazed forth; & to the powerful, brooding Isolde of Anje Kampe, whose glorious Liebestod was the only fitting conclusion to the eveing. Eun Sun Kim shaped a clear, deep, & rich sound. (The English horn soloist, Benjamin Brogadir, also deserves highest praise!)

Twice I've been, & twice I've staggered dizzily out, spending the day (or days) afterwards with what felt like a hangover: listless, headachey, discombobulated. Yet I'm thinking of going again, if I can, tossing aside such worldly concerns as my parlous financial state & the physical & psychic after-effects. Look, I could quibble or carp about things here & there in particular performances or staging moments, but what would be the point? It would be like rating the ecstatic visions of a mystic saint. Tristan is a miracle, & as such it is impossible to stage perfectly, as we do not live in a miraculous world, but it's difficult for me to imagine performances that come closer to the unrealizable goal. This has been artistically a very successful year for San Francisco Opera.

Live from the Met: Les Contes d'Hoffmann

This morning (west coast time) was the first Met livecast of the season, featuring one of my favorite operas, Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. When you really love a work there are two directions you can go in: either you find problems with every production, or you find something to love, love, love in every production (the same person can take either path, depending on the work & one's mood). In this case, I found much to love, love, love.

I had seen the Bartlett Sher production at the Met when it was new in 2009. I had to pay a "new production" premium on my ticket, which I wasn't expecting, but OK, if you're traveling to that expensive metropolis in the first place, you're in an extravagant mood. Perched in my parterre box (it was the closest I could get to the stage), I liked the production very much. Seeing it again, I liked it even more. It teeters in a sweet spot between sumptuous & seedy; its lyric flights & swoony, fantastical darkness (even the students' drinking song at the opening blithely suggest violence & mayhem, before veering off into paeans to wine & beer), even its rich, deep colors shading into darkness, convincingly convey the spirit of the titular poet.

The stage opens in darkness, with a shabby desk & an old typewriter in the lower right corner; Hoffmann is also there, & if not drunk, then distraught. Pages flutter down from overhead. His muse enters, vows to save him, & disguises herself as his friend Nicklausse. The scene expands to the tavern, & then segues to the first act, Olympia, the mechanical doll that Hoffmann thinks is real, & is his ideal. This act has a George Grosz feel, full of dark energy & louche members of the demimonde. It also shares the aesthetic of the circus, not the slick, streamlined circuses of today, but the tawdry, sweaty glamour of the late nineteenth century circus (an inspiration for artists from Dickens to Picasso). The walls are striped, like a tent. There is a freak-show ambiance. Lulu-haircuts parade past leering clowns. Limbs festoon the walls, the eyeballs in Coppelius's bin drip viscously. Olympia is a vivid slash of pink with a cartoonishly high golden crown on. She is multiplied by dancers, as is the rose-bespectacled & besotted Hoffmann. It all goes to smash over a money dispute, & the circus leaves town.

The Antonia act comes next in this version. The setting is more stripped down but just as dreamlike: against a twilight blue, silhouettes of trees in varying shades of gray hang behind the mostly bare stage. There is a piano in the foreground, covered with music which mostly gets ignored or shoved aside. Dr Miracle arrives in a playful sort of horse-drawn buggy which also manages to suggest Sjöström's film The Phantom Carriage. Antonia's father, in a richly brocaded robe, broods over her mother's fate, & hers. He is not fond of Hoffmann. Antonia, encouraged by Dr Miracle, sings herself to death, & another of Hoffmann's loves expires. The more restrained staging of this intimate, more domestic act is a buffer between the more lavish, more social setting of the first & final acts.

That final act, in Venice, is suitably, lavishly carnivalesque. There are the Venetian signifiers: a dark red gondola, & a prancing, comically menacing Punchinello, straight out of Tiepolo. An increasingly desperate & cynical Hoffmann (even the tenor's hair is picturesquely askew) is now hopelessly entangled with an outright courtesan, Giuletta. She, seduced by a glittering diamond, seduces him, stealing even his reflection. The desperate Hoffmann murders a rival for a woman he longs for but also loathes. This act, possibly the darkest & most cynical in the work, opens with the lilting loveliness of the famous barcarolle. Death in Venice indeed, & we return to the tavern, where the half-mad Hoffmann, drunkenly hallucinating these tales, loses his chance at the actual woman he is in love with. As in Proust, the lover creates the loved one, only to discover that his invention does not quite overlay the actual person. But as he collapses in a drunken haze of despair, his Muse steps out of her Nicklausse drag (retaining the elegant top hat) & leads him to sit down at his neglected typewriter. This lovely & savage opera, teetering on the edge of full-blown tragedy, ends on a hopeful note: as the choral voices soar behind him, his fingers curl above the keyboard, & (again as in Proust) he begins to turn the grit & irritants (or the outright devastations) of his life into the nacreous splendor of his art.

Tenor Ben Bliss was our affable livecast host. It's always a bit jarring, though, to have the fourth wall so immediately dismantled; right after an act's finale, the singers, with professional aplomb, come right out & discuss their roles in the trajectory of their careers or other such matters, while the audience (some of us, anyway) are still swirling in the dreams they created. This was conductor Marco Armiliato's 500th performance at the Met; as you might expect from that record, he does a very good job, though he made some odd remarks about ranking Hoffmann slightly below the greatest operas, like Parsifal. (But it's pointless to compare anything to Parsifal, even (in the spirit of Cary Grant saying he wished that he, too, were Cary Grant) Parsifal itself.) What's the point of ranking things like that? (Maybe the maestro wasn't conveying his thoughts well in what was obviously not his mother language?)

Ever since I saw him in the livecast of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette (my thoughts here), I have been looking forward to Benjamin Bernheim as Hoffmann, & he was splendid in this long & challenging role. Hoffmann is what Romeo might perhaps have turned into if he had survived Rosaline, & Juliet, & some post-Capulet woman; as with all ardent romantics, after a certain amount of experience his idealism has edged towards cynicism & even despair. The slightly frayed elegance of his demeanor is nicely contrasted with the looming solidity of his impressive rival, as embodied by Christian Van Horn, the one's passionate & soaring tenor outcries sabotaged by the other's amused bass-baritone undercuts. The woman are also dazzling: Erin Morley is wittily precise but also strangely moving as the robot love Olympia; Pretty Yende is warm & captivating as Antonia & appealing as Stella, the "real-life" diva Hoffmann loves; Clémentine Margaine is a juicy Giuletta. Vasilisa Berzhanskaya was a forthright & faithful Muse/Nicklausse. I hope they release this splendid performance on Blu-Ray. I would love to watch it late into the night.

Afterwards I went across the street to a brewpub, having consumed nothing all day but a latte & some lozenges. Perhaps foolishly I downed most of my first pumpkin ale before my pizza arrived, leaving me in a Hoffmannesque haze. One of the baseball playoff games was on a screen near me, so I'd glance up from time to time for the comforting familiarity of the autumnal scenes: the pitcher leaning forward, shaking off the catcher; the hitter swinging &, most of the time, missing, the crowd bedecked in team colors, milling around. . . . Then I saw something I usually manage to avoid: not only a political ad, but one for Trump. After warning me that illegal aliens were being given transgender operations (seriously, though this sounds like some sort of fascist-swamp fever dream Mad Libs), the ad assured me that "President Trump was on my side". If he's on my side, I'm switching sides. As I pondered this into my second pumpkin ale, I decided that I hope aliens really are being given transgender operations: why not give the wretched of the earth something besides more misery? I'd much rather have my tax money spent on that than on making billionaires into squillionaires, or whatever the next step in their deification is. During the livecast interviews, the set & costume designers (Michael Yeargen & Catherine Zuber, respectively) had mentioned the "Kafkaesque" atmosphere they were trying for. I personally was leaning more towards Weimar, but we all agreed on touches of the surreal & the dreamlike. But then I leave the theater & find myself in a world in which a vicious clown like Trump is actually a serious contender for President, & I have to ask, what does Kafkaesque or surreal really mean these days? What is a dream? If this is a dream, when will we wake?

San Francisco Opera: Un Ballo in Maschera

I was at the opera house last night for the second-to-the-last performance of the San Francisco Opera's season opener, Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. I love this opera & the production was superb. Even with two intermissions & a couple of those disruptive pauses between scenes ("Please stay in your seats during this brief pause" but of course some people can't resist pulling out their phones, because . . . they're so very important that 30 minutes can't go by without checking for all those very important messages?), the three-hour performance time flew by, thanks to the vigorous cast & the propulsive yet sensitive conducting of Music Director Eun Sun Kim.

The production (directed by Leo Muscato, set design by Federica Parolini, costumes by Silvia Aymonino, & lighting by Alessandro Verazzi) is both gorgeous & psychologically apt. Without going full-on Fritz Lang, the stage & the shadowy, jagged lighting seem influenced by German Expressionism: the sets are often soaring yet cramped, pushing people close to the front of the stage (which has the additional musical charm of helping project their voices outward into the auditorium); the costumes are colorful & aristocratically elegant but the surroundings are dark; the second-act setting near the gallows spot, with black trees jutting irregularly across the stage, is made vivid by swirling mist in changing colors, some of which (red) are cued to the emotional moment, others of which are just strange & shifting (I loved the effect but will note that a friend of mine found it distracting).

The court world portrayed here is frivolous & shallow, though with dark currents of treachery & resentment simmering underneath; Gustavo/Riccardo seemed a close cousin to the charming & heedless Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto. When he, urged by his page Oscar, decides to check into the soothsayer Ulrica's trade personally before agreeing with the Chief Magistrate's degree of banishment, he suggests the party visit her with music that is irresistibly lively, & indeed most of the courtiers start bobbing up & down to the music, moving their arms in rhythm, ready to dance at what is clearly another goofy escapade in the light atmosphere of the court – except the conspirators don't dance along; they stand, a solid & noticeable mass, glowering off on one side of the stage. It was a wonderful moment, as the audience (OK, maybe just me) can hardly keep from dancing along in their seats to this music. Movement of the stage pictures is used well throughout; when we come to the climactic masked ball, the set rotates, startlingly, for the first time all evening, & the stage is suddenly much brighter & deeper than at any other time during the show. (The climactic masked ball, but hasn't the whole show been a masked ball? No one here is without disguise, or masked motives.)

It doesn't do this performance justice to say this is what we want in Italian opera; it's what we dream of: the passion, the precision, the wild strength. The main conspirators, Adam Lau as Samuel/Count Ribbing & Jongwon Han as Tom/Count Horn. are, beneath their murmuring, their suspicions & their suspiciousness, implacable in their pursuit of vengeance, the granite rocks on which the swells of the frivolous court smash & break. Mei Gui Zhang as Oscar is gorgeously attired in black & white, with stylish juxtapositions of various stripes & checks, & a hat with a very tall plume, like an exotic bird that is also a faithful reader of Vogue. His exquisitely spritely music embodies the surface light-heartedness of the court, floating beside, reflecting on but never quite comprehending the darker contrasting currents.

As Gustavo/Riccardo, Michael Fabiano is all strength & careless charm. You can see why the people say they love him, but also how he could have created some dangerous enemies. The silver spangles rain down on the ball-goers as he expires. (There were some extra-musical groans & exhalations during his death that I would have preferred not be there, but that's a matter of personal taste.) Lianna Haroutounian is a compelling & sympathetic Amelia, & Amartuvshin Enkhbat as Renato/Count Anckarström is powerful as a good man redirected into enmity by perceived betrayal; both he & Amelia seem so much more thoughtful & conscience-stricken than the king that you can see why they belong together. Gustavo/Riccardo ultimately does the noble, Brief Encounter-type thing, but it takes him a while to get there (& you can see why such insouciance has its appeal to Amelia).

Judit Kutasi, so memorable as Ortrud in last season's Lohengrin, is similarly towering in the somewhat similar role of Ulrica/Madame Arvidson, the fortune-teller in touch, or so she claims, & so some of the authorities believe, with Satanic powers. She brought an interesting theatricality to the role that made it seem that whether or not Ulrica was actually communicating with unearthly powers, she was certainly aware of how to impress upon her audience that she was well worth the money they gave her. (She makes a brief & striking appearance in the finale of the masked ball, once it is clear that her prophecies have all, in the way of stage prophecies, come true.) The smaller roles – Christopher Oglesby as the Chief Magistrate, Samuel Kidd as the vivid sailor whose questions to Ulrica about his ultimate rewards are instantly answered by the disguised king, & Thomas Kinch as Amelia's Servant – are all strong. (As you can tell from the character names, this production uses the Swedish rather than the colonial Boston setting, though honestly . . . to me it doesn't really matter much.)

As usual before the opera began, we heard the recorded voice of company director Matthew Shilvock welcoming all those people who are attending the opera for the first time. This always attracts a big round of applause; I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps it's a case of more rejoicing in Heaven over the one straying sheep that is rescued rather than the 99 that have been there grazing all along, but maybe some day he will also thank those of us who keep coming show after show.

The woman who checked her phone during the first pause (she & her husband also spoke a bit during the performance) left at the first intermission, which was fine with me (& also with the woman on the other side of them, who moved over into their vacated seats, to get a better view of the stage). Speaking of views from the stage (I was in Orchestra A1), I usually pay more attention to the stage than the pit, even in the front row, but it was wonderful to notice how much the harp adds to both the playful music associated with the Court & with Oscar in particular & also to what I'll call the heavenly apotheosis music as Riccardo lies dying (according to the program, Annabelle Taubl is the Acting Principal Harp, but I'm not sure she's the woman who was playing last night).

During the second act, a woman a few rows behind me started an endless rustling with some sort of plastic bag (I will never understand why people wait until the music starts to do things like that – take out what needs to be taken out during intermission, people!). The woman behind me swiftly & unobtrusively went over & whispered something & the noise (mostly) stopped. During the second intermission I thanked the woman for doing this. "Oh, I'm hardcore," she replied. "You know what the problem is? It's these stupid women with all of their shit. You can check it for free, I don't know what's going on! The woman behind me is doing the same thing" – & she turned around &, murder rising blood-red in her eyes, glared at the woman. I'm not sure the other woman noticed, but maybe the message got through. Such is life in Operaland.

San Francisco Opera: Innocence

(Catching up on last June's offerings at San Francisco Opera, part 3. . . .)

I was at San Francisco Opera for the American premiere of Innocence, Kaija Saariaho's final opera (libretto by Sofi Oksanen & Aleksi Barrière). I realized right away that I needed to see it again, so I was also at the final performance. I don't generally go to the same production twice, due to my preference for expensive seats & my low tolerance for audiences, but this performance was clearly something special, like seeing a modern classic emerging newborn but already complete, & it was worth seeing not only twice but multiple times; in a work as subtle & detailed as this one, each viewing brings you in deeper.

We begin at a wedding reception in Finland; the bride & groom met as students abroad. Strange things begin to emerge about the wedding – why is it so small? where are the family & friends? is the groom's father drinking maybe a little too much, & why are his mother's vocal lines so consistently in an almost hysterically high tessitura? We learn that the groom's brother, ten years before, shot up the town's International School. A waitress assigned to the reception at the last minute turns out to know the family, from the time before. Her daughter was one of the shooter's victims. As we move forward in time with the reception (will the bride be told the family secret? will the family finally pull together, or fly apart?) we also move backwards, through flashbacks, to the day of the shooting, what led up to it, & its ongoing repercussions.

It was an astute move setting this opera somewhere other than the homeland of school shootings, the United States. Setting it here would make the story inevitably about the sickness of American culture (guns & money over children's safety, every time) & a corrupt & ineffective political situation that bars the obviously essential reforms. Instead, it is a deeper examination of what humans anywhere & anytime do to each other.

The story is fragmented; initially we hear from many of the victims (not all of them still living); they speak in a Babel-like cloud of different languages, describing everyday things, like going for a run or meeting people in public, & how they now struggle with them. Gradually we realize they are describing the aftereffects of the decade-old shooting at their school. But about halfway through, the libretto takes a twist; we start to hear the background of the shooter, his emotional oddities, the early warning signs that were ignored, the ridicule of his classmates & even a horrifying example of a sexually humiliating incident they perpetrated on him. None of this excuses the murders, of course, but as we go in deeper we gradually realize the terrible irony of the title: no one here is innocent. Innocence may be a thing that simply doesn't exist among humans, though they pretend it does, mostly to excuse themselves & condemn others.

A particularly striking character in this regard is Marketa (Vilma Jää), the waitress' murdered daughter, a talented musician. She is a tall, attractive blonde. We first see her through her mourning mother's eyes, as a wonderful, talented person cruelly cut off from the life she might have led. And that remains true. But we also hear from the groom's mother that the wonderful Marketa had a cruel edge, & made up a song mocking the future shooter for his ugly frog face, which she sang to the students repeatedly, because they enjoyed it & it made them laugh. The phantom Marketa appears & mostly shrugs off the song & how it affected its object of ridicule. I wonder if she isn't in some way meant as an image of the Artist in the world, following her own path (her music is distinctly different, with a sort of Nordic folk-song sound that is striking & memorable) but also eager for applause & the spotlight, even at the cost of someone else's feelings: a creator, yes, but also a destroyer; an indifferent, & therefore morally compromised or compromisable, figure.

The shooter himself never appears on stage, though he dominates the proceedings, nor do we see violence so much as its emotionally violent after-effects. [A correction: my memory was faulty & the shooter does appear on stage in this production; see Lisa Hirsch's comment below.] We do meet the shooter's accomplices, though both dropped out before the actual shooting. One I won't mention, as it's one of the more startling revelations, but another is a young woman who befriends the shooter & has some problems of her own, including a creepy stepfather. It's a mark of the libretto's deft touch that his creepiness is presented only through her perceptions; there's something there, but how much? We are not given easy or obvious explanations. There is the family priest, but he does not have much comfort to dispense; instead, he is haunted by the sense that he should have acted on warning signs he noticed & by the inadequacy of any counseling or comfort he can offer. The opera closes with the phantom Marketa urging her mother to stop some of her obsessive mourning rituals; you could take this as some sort of healing or closure, or perhaps simply as time moving on, & memory moving on, though the sorrow is embedded soul-deep until one also passes away.

A summary does not do justice to the libretto, which struck me as comparable to late Ibsen in its psychological nuance & mythopoetic power. It could stand on its own without the music, though the music adds a richness, a depth & complexity, that only opera can achieve. Saariaho's score is muscular & crepuscular; the tension is sustained throughout & all handled with great subtlety. At my second performance, when I was seated in front of the brass & percussion – I was on the other side for my first performance – I noticed how skillfully certain lines were highlighted by a trumpet. (Much as I love Britten & Billy Budd, I wince every time Claggart snarls Let him crawl to that isn't-he-evil orchestration – there's none of that here). This score is a magnificent final addition to Saariaho's rich legacy. [a correction: this was Saariaho's last work for the stage, but there's a trumpet concerto she composed after it; see Lisa Hirsch's comment below]

Another reason I wanted to have a second experience of this magnificent work is that, even though it felt as if I were watching the emergence of a full-blown masterpiece, a piece that seemed both already set among the classics & yet also completely new, it also seemed like something that might not get revived that often: the unsparing vision that gives it force also makes it difficult, even at times horrifying, to experience. I heard a few people compare it to Elektra, but that has a big star role. There's none of that here. Innocence is very much an ensemble piece. There are no detachable arias. The emotions it gives rise to are complicated & haunting. I very much hope I'm wrong about this, as this opera deserves many revivals. New operas are always a risk, & San Francisco Opera deserves all praise for co-commissioning this bold work.

I feel I've just scratched the surface of what should be said here. But let me salute the ensemble: conductor Clément Mao-Takacs, Lilian Farahani as the Bride, Miles Mykkanen as the Groom, Rod Gilfry as his Father, Claire de Sévigné as his Mother, Ruxandra Donose as the substitute Waitress, Lucy Shelton as the Teacher, Kristinn Sigmundsson as the family Priest, Rowan Klevits as the Student Anton, Camilo Delgado Díaz as the Student Jeronimo, Beate Mordal as the Student Lily, Marina Dumont as the Student Alexia, Vilma Jää as the Student Marketa, Julie Hega as the Student Iris, & the actors Oksana Barrios, Jordan Covington, Victoria Fong, Sam Hannum, Jalen Justice, Rachael Richman, Brian Soutner, Kevin Walton.

If I ever pull together a list of the greatest opera performances I've ever seen, Innocence will have to be on that list.

San Francisco Opera: Partenope

(Catching up on last June's offerings at San Francisco Opera, part 2. . . .)

I hesitated before getting a ticket to San Francisco Opera's revival of Handel's Partenope, because I had not much liked the Christopher Alden production when it was first shown here ten years ago (I summed it up by saying I felt I should be having a lot more fun than I was actually having; you can read my post on that production here). Ultimately what led to my pulling out the credit card once again was a combination of my adoration of Handel & my strong desire to see more early operas staged. I would happily jettison the entire verismo school for more baroque operas, which strike me as actually more realistic: people come & go, talking about their feelings at length (beautiful length, thanks for the powers of music), confused about love & most other things . . . this is a lot more life-like, & more psychologically astute, than the so-called verismo of poisoned violets & other equally improbable & melodramatic revenges.

What do you know, I ended up enjoying this go-round of Partenope much more! The production was basically the same, though maybe some of the more egregious elements were toned down (I recalled much more toilet-paper play the first time around, as well as more gratuitous chair-handling). The surrealist elements seemed stronger this time, including the projection of some of Man Ray's experimental films. Many of the successful elements of the original – the Art Deco elegance, the references to the First World War, the avant-garde aura – were in place & still strong. No one sang an aria hanging from the staircase, but striking moments abounded.

And the cast was very strong, in particular Julie Fuchs as a dazzling Partenope, with a full & elegant & even swinging style. (In one of her da capo ornamentations, I swear she wittily threw in a bit of Sempre libera from Traviata – a similar high-society queen who came to a sadly different end.) My two favorite singers from the earlier iteration, Daniela Mack as Rosmira & Alek Shrader as Emilio, both returned in fine form, & Shrader ten years on is still able to sing his aria while doing complicated yoga moves, so good for you, Alek! Carlo Vistoli ws Arsace, Nicholas Tamagna Armindo, & Hadleigh Adams Ormonte, all of them excellent. Christopher Moulds led the excellent band, & why can't we have more of this kind of thing rather than yet another round of the Bohemians?

San Francisco Opera: The Magic Flute

(Catching up on last June's offerings at San Francisco Opera, part 1. . . .)

There's always something that pulls us back to operas we may think we've seen often enough; in the case of San Francisco Opera's Magic Flute, it was the celebrated production by Barrie Kosky, usually described as the "silent film" staging, which of course grabbed my interest.

Silent film is definitely a major influence, but the designers clearly also looked at graphic novels, anime, surrealist collages, & comic books; I've heard some people describe the constantly shifting projections as exhausting, but they could just as easily be seen as exhilarating. On the whole I enjoyed the production, but was surprised by some of its limitations.

It does some things extremely well; this is the first production I've seen in which the trials by fire & water carry some weight & seem like actual trials .The whole quest/fairy tale aspect comes out very strongly. The use of silent-film style intertitles relieves us from the generally tedious comedy of the spoken dialogue. (But this has the unfortunate effect of depriving Papagena of some of her most winning moments.)

On the debit side of the ledger, the actions of the singers are extremely circumscribed: one limb awry & the illusion from the seamless projections falls apart. Also, the singers are mostly isolated from each other, often perched midway up the stage & addressing someone down below or off to the side. This is not an opera in which psychological realism is paramount, of course, but it does have a warm human heart that beats a little less vigorously when everyone is physically so separated.

There are specific silent-film references made in the costuming, some of which work better than others. I have never seen a production in which I thought so much about Pamina's hair; she's given the iconic Louise Brooks bob, but . . . is Pamina really a Louise Brooks type? I pondered whether the character would be better off with the golden tresses of the ethereal Lillian Gish, or Mary Pickford's tighter, spunkier blonde sausage curls. Papageno has Buster Keaton's porkpie hat, but Keaton's deadpan but sensitive calibration of on-coming disaster isn't really a Papageno quality (would Chaplin's pleasure-seeking but poignant Tramp be a better fit?). Monostatos is made up like Murnau's Nosferatu, which neatly avoids the ugly racial aspect of the lustful villain. The Queen of the Night mostly appears as a giant spider, which is striking & effective (though, again with the quibbles, shouldn't she at least initially be more immediately appealing?).The racial remarks can be pruned, but the anti-female aspects are too baked in to the libretto to be expunged. My audience mostly reacted to the more egregiously misogynistic remarks with laughter, which seems like the most sensible response under the circumstances.

I think the constraints of the production, striking & memorable as the production is, affected the performers; all of them had moments when I thought they were excellent, & others when I thought they were a bit overwhelmed. (Amitai Pati was Tamino, Lauri Vasar the Papageno, Anna Siminska the Queen of the Night, Zhengyi Bai the Monostatos, Christina Gansch the Pamina, Kwangchul Youn the Sarastro, Arianna Rodriguez the Papagena, & Olivia Smith, Ashley Dixon, & Maire Theresa Carmack respectively the First, Second, & Thirdd Ladies). Eun Sun Kim led a sprightly & noble rendiiton.

I was very glad to have a chance to see this production, even if it struck me as a big more of a mixed bag than I had hoped. But even when I decide I've seen the Magic Flute often enough, I end up glad I went.