American Tragedy

In December I was at the world premiere of Tobias Picker's An American Tragedy at the Metropolitan Opera. This is an adaptation of what I wrote to someone who sort of liked it but thought that, accomplished as Nathan Gunn was in the lead role, he didn't project anguish:
Thanks for the interesting thoughts. I'm afraid I have to disagree with you on Gunn's ability to project anguish. In thinking over the roles I've seen him in, I think he did that amazingly as Zurga in the Pearl Fishers, and I also felt his anguish as Clyde at the very end of the opera. Before that I don't think Clyde, as presented in the opera, is anguished, but more of a restlessly yearning, craving young man. After all, he's doing pretty well until Roberta is pregnant -- he's getting better jobs, he has two beautiful women in love with him, he's on the way up. He seems like someone whose life is guided by wishful thinking, and when reality in the form of pregnancy intrudes, he's unmoored enough to think of elimination as the best result. What Gunn wasn't, in my opinion, was the more hollow, passive character of the book, though this may have been a change in the character due to the more dramatic nature of the stage.
What I found fascinating, and risky, about the opera, is that the center of it is Clyde, and he's an enigma. I go back and forth about him, as I did in the book (this to me is why A Place in the Sun is different from the opera and the novel, since it's set up as a doomed romance; in the other two the women are much more evenly balanced). To me the most amazing thing about Gunn's performance is that he manages to maintain audience sympathy at all, especially given the power of Racette's performance. When he comes bounding on stage in his singlet-style swimsuit right after Roberta's heart-breaking letter it's hard not to want to kill him. (Hmm, I guess that's the Clyde in me coming out. . . .).
I also had some reservations about the end. I thought Gene Scheer (the librettist) on the whole did an amazing job compressing and dramatizing a complex set of incidents, but removing Orville Mason's class hatred for Clyde (a slightly misplaced hatred, since he assumed Clyde was rich) and making him a political client of the family removes Mason's motivation for his extreme hostility to Clyde (shoving him while arresting him, repeatedly referring to him as "boy"). And though Dolora Zajick was powerful as the mother, I felt that in the final scene (I felt this especially the second time I saw it) her acting was a little too much the generalized anguished mother (she had one final gesture with an outstretched arm that was beautifully DW Griffith, but perhaps not the more restrained gesture of a woman whose strong Christian faith had rendered her more stoic when faced with the evils of the world). That's another interesting difference I felt the opera had from the novel: in the opera there was no reason to see the mother's Christian faith as shabby or fanatical or narrow-minded. It seemed like a powerful and possible alternative to the gospel of prosperity preached by the rest of the Gilbert clan. So I had different reactions to the end each time I saw it. The first time I felt, with the appearance of the hymn-singing boy, that Clyde had achieved some sort of inner peace. The second time, his anguish seemed greater, and I read it as Clyde experiencing utter despair, since even turning back to the faith of his childhood hadn't saved him. I have to say I sort of preferred the second reading. I had no moral or aesthetic objections to the first; it's just a matter of personal preference. I preferred the novel's slow fade into obscurity to the movie's more glam conclusion. (The novel, by the way, I found sensitive, powerful, and moving; I had avoided Dreiser for years, thinking he would be clumsy and overly earnest; his prose is clumsy but his insights are not.)
I keep thinking of this opera in relation to several others: Billy Budd, because both deal with inadvertent killers and bring up profound issues of justice and society; Dead Man Walking, because of the struggle towards redemption and death; and Madama Butterfly, because so much of it is like Butterfly told from Pinkerton's point of view. (These associations were jogged by the artists, of course, since Gunn is a celebrated Billy, Graham created the role of Sister Helen, and I'm hearing Racette as Butterfly in June.) To me the emotional specificity of music tends to come with repeated viewings/hearings, so this new opera faces the same problem as other new works: it's competing with moments seared into my consciousness. I would happily see it again, which is not something I can say of some other operas (for instance, Dr. Atomic, and I have to say I'm annoyed at some of the reviews of An American Tragedy which cite Dr. Atomic as a more daring work -- it has more obvious avant-garde credentials, but dramatically it not only is largely unsuccessful in my opinion but it offers no structural innovations for anyone who has heard Messiah or the Bach Passions and few musical surprises; though I liked the music, during most scenes I thought, well, it's X type of scene, so Adams is writing X type of music. To me making the ambiguous figure of Clyde the center of the work represents a subtler challenge to conventional dramaturgy than anything in Dr Atomic).

One Fine Day. . . .

Patricia Racette sang Cio-Cio San in SF Opera’s latest revival of Madama Butterfly. Though I could happily never see Boheme again, I don’t mind a revival of Butterfly, and I wonder if anyone really does; its mythic story touches on something essential about the solitary nature of love, and anyone who has ever loved without return, which means everyone, is bound to find her monumental devotion powerfully moving. Boheme casts a golden nostalgic glow over an idealized first love, but Butterfly pulls no punches about the intensity of love and what that can mean for its subjects. Racette is always a powerful actress (she sang Liu here several years ago and I realized at one point that instead of watching Turandot and Calaf square off I was watching her to see how she reacted to them; her Roberta in An American Tragedy was so moving that to me it became a perverse measure of Nathan Gunn’s charm and skill that he could bound on stage in his singlet after her letter aria and still retain the audience’s sympathy) and she correctly realizes that Butterfly is not a weak girl but a woman who chooses for herself a samurai’s right to death rather than a life without honor. And at the beginning I really did believe she was, if not exactly fifteen, then a very young woman. At the end, with her hair down and herself grief-stricken, she looked like a ukiyo-e print. One touch that I missed from the last production was Malfitano (as Butterfly) slowly removing the flower from her hair and letting it drop crumpled to the ground when she realizes that Pinkerton has returned, but not for her; that just killed me.
I realized in this production how much Butterfly is on stage because frankly the show dragged when Racette wasn’t on. It’s a very attractive production, with only Cio-Cio San’s house having solid substance and the ship in the harbor and other manifestations of the outside world appearing as shadows. But I found Franco Farino wobbly in voice and physique (if you have man-boobs and a beer belly, for God’s sake keep your jacket on in the love duet; that’s why the Navy designs the uniforms that way) and the usually touching role of the consul was even more wobbly. And they need to change the surtitle in which he asks Butterfly if she has any sisters; I think it’s meant to be an avuncular interest in the girl’s family rather than a lecherous request if there are more where she came from, which is what the audience seemed to think from its tittering. The day after the performance I pulled out one of the first opera recordings I ever bought, the Leontyne Price Butterfly (shout out to my diva!) so that I could hear Richard Tucker sing Pinkerton as it ought to be sung. I think “Addio fiorito asil” is one of the highlights of the opera and contains his realization that he tossed away something precious and true and with it his youth. I don’t agree that he’s a brute or a clod. If he is, then Butterfly is a fool to hang on to him with such intensity. There’s an opera to be found in such a story, but it’s more like Lulu (which I love) than like this one. This is why the “US imperialism” interpretations don’t quite work for me; there are three Americans in the work: the consul, who is kindly and tries to help the abandoned bride; Kate Pinkerton, who offers to raise another woman’s mixed race child as her own (not a view typical of the racism that accompanies imperialism), and Pinkerton, who has to have some quality to justify Butterfly’s hopes (I see him as someone like Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley; Sarah Caldwell’s “Pinkerton tossing the football” captured so well the sort of unthinking insouciance and self-regard of a goldenboy jock). I don’t see that those three really form a coherent indictment of US imperialism. I saw one production years ago that made much of the historic coincidence that Nagasaki was also the site of the second atomic bomb, which meant that Act 2 started with various butoh-style dancers crawling slowly towards us in complete silence; when the music started again, the whole story of Butterfly’s loss had been reduced to a tiny irrelevance in the face of a larger tragedy, which I think was not the effect the director intended. Butterfly is a mythic work just as much as Orfeo ed Euridice, and the truth of the myth is what the audience responds to.

I have a reasonable good ear in music. Let's have the tongs and the bones.

I often wonder what exactly people mean when they say they “love opera.” Usually it means they saw Boheme/Butterfly/Traviata once, and it made them cry, or that they’ve seen Boheme/Butterfly/Traviata hundreds of times, and if they’re not still crying, they at least enjoy complaining that the golden age is past. I wonder how many people are actually interested in drama expressed musically. My latest reason for wondering this is that everyone assures me that Festival Opera is taking a huge risk in staging Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. They probably are, since I saw a number of empty seats on opening night last night (once again, Festival Opera kindly invited me to attend). Neither Britten nor A Midsummer Night’s Dream are exactly unknown quantities, I would have thought, and it’s hard to believe we live in a world in which that combo is not self-recommending, but apparently we do, such is our fallen state. But then I have only realized this past year, based on various comments and reviews I’ve read, that Britten is apparently like coconut, in that people tend to love him or avoid him, with little middle ground.

If you have any interest at all in Britten in particular or opera in general, I urge you to head on down to Walnut Creek for the remaining performances of Midsummer Night’s Dream (which are Tuesday August 12, Friday August 15, or a matinee on Sunday August 17). Despite a few reservations, I thoroughly enjoyed the performance, and as I’ve said before this is one of the few Shakespeare-based operas that are worthy of their inspiration. Britten and Pears did a wonderful, intelligent job compressing the play (though I think the opera was trimmed a bit further last night, since I missed a few moments, though my mind might be deceiving me). And if many familiar lines from the play are missing from the libretto, I have to say I have the same experience during regular productions of any of Shakespeare’s plays, which are almost always cut, and not always with this libretto's intelligence and care.

This is the third time I’ve seen this opera staged; the first was at San Francisco Opera several years ago, and the second was at the Met. I’ve been to the Met four times, and the oldest work I’ve seen is Midsummer Night’s Dream; I’ve also seen The Great Gatsby and the first two performances of An American Tragedy, so based on my personal experience I have to say that the Met is clearly a staunch advocate of operas written in English and new American works in particular, which shows you the limitations of relying on one’s personal experience. If only I hadn’t had to call off my New York trip this past spring – I could at least have added an opera in Sanskrit to the list.

I have to say those empty seats I referred to earlier came in handy, since I moved after the first two acts when I realized the people around me were pretty much not going to stop chatting. I’m sorry, but I have to say it – what the hell is wrong with the audiences in Walnut Creek? I can understand the occasional coughing fit, I can even understand occasionally forgetting to turn off your cellphone, but there is absolutely no excuse for talking during a performance, and certainly not for conversations as long and as loud as the ones around me. Don’t let that scare you off, though, since I was assured by friends who sat elsewhere that the audience was courteous in other parts of the house, but someone seriously needs to do something about those people. Given that this is their audience, I really have to salute Festival Opera with gratitude for scheduling one unusual work along with one popular favorite – I would be deliriously happy if San Francisco Opera could match that 50/50 split. Festival Opera deserves the support of the Bay Area’s genuine opera-lovers.

The staging (by conductor Michael Morgan, with Mark Foehringer listed as co-director and choreographer) is simple but had some effective touches, mostly involving the fairies clearing props from the stage or covering or uncovering the lovers or Tytania with long stretches of rose-colored fabric (I know it doesn’t sound like much when you put it that way, but the effect is often charming), or the fairies' barely concealed eye-rolling when Tytania makes them wait on the ass-headed Bottom, a nuance I haven't seen in other productions of the Dream. And I really enjoyed the airborne Puck (an athletic and elegant Kurt Wolfgang Krikorian). The set for all scenes is basic, with a slightly rolling elevated area, some pink cloths hanging down, and a map of the stars as backdrop; a large rose descends when Oberon mentions the magic flower. The look is vaguely late ‘60s/early ‘70s; in general I think it’s a mistake to switch works to this period, because it is already so heavily identified with particular music and slang, though perhaps people always feel that about the period in which they grew up. In any case the switch isn’t too intrusive until the final scene, when the lovers pass around a bong during the performance of Pyramus and Thisby, and Theseus seems to be proposing a threesome to at least one of the couples. If the court isn’t formal and elegant, the crudity and foolishness of the Pyramus interlude loses some of its contrasting humorous effect. Before that scene, though, the costumes look vaguely but not painstakingly of the period, so the total effect is of haphazard whimsical charm, and of a slightly different time and place from our own; it’s just enough to have a slightly and desirably unsettling effect.

The costumes for the fairy chorus in particular are bright and witty and assembled from the fun and funkier reaches of our costuming subconscious; unfortunately I didn’t think they jibed particularly well with the ethereal, haunting music Britten used to slide us into the fairy realm. Also, the fairy chorus was made up of full-grown women, and was not a boys’ choir as specified by Britten. There is a quality – can I just say ethereal again, so soon after using it to describe the fairy music? – that a boys’ choir has that a women’s chorus doesn’t, so a certain delicacy of sound was lost, though the performance was still gorgeous. As Oberon, William Sauerland had a beautiful voice, and he phrased and enunciated with great care, but I couldn’t help feeling his voice was a size too small even for this comparatively intimate venue. Ani Maldjian as Tytania came through beautifully as a last-minute replacement for Marnie Breckenridge, who was called to Glyndebourne to cover a role in the new Eotvoos opera.

I don’t want to shortchange the rude mechanicals (John Minagro as Quince, Jonathan Smucker as Flute, John Bischoff as Snug, Trey Costerisan as Snout, and Joshua Elder as Starveling), especially the vigorous and rolling-toned Kirk Eichelberger as Bottom (some felt he stole the show, and if he didn’t for me, it’s only because I’ve never quite warmed up to Bottom – Eichelberger gave a commanding performance), but I have to say it’s pretty remarkable to see a Dream dominated by the lovers; their quartet at the beginning of Act 3 was particularly soaring and stirring. Nikolas Nackley as Demetrius had to compete with my memories of Nathan Gunn in the role, but he held his own with Stacey Cornell’s Helena of the lovely floating tones; Jessica Mariko Deardorff, who made a surprisingly big impression on me in the minor role of Ines in Festival Opera’s Trovatore last month, solidified the impression favorably with her Hermia. But to me the outstanding member of the excellent set was Jorge Garza as a clarion-voiced Lysander.

Speaking of chatty audiences, the court’s comments during Pyramus and Thisbe always strike me as fairly cruel and annoying, and in this performance they should have toned down the snickering and eye-rolling of the lovers and Theseus and Hippolyta (Igor Vieira and Lauren Groff, respectively, in what must be two of the more thankless roles in the operatic repertoire). I’ve often wished that one of the hempen homespuns would turn to the court and announce, as Holofernes does under similar circumstances in Love’s Labor’s Lost, “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble,” a scathing rebuke that of course sails right over the heads of its targets.

It’s probably needless to say that despite the few reservations I had about this scene, Pyramus and Thisby brought down the house, as it always does, which is actually sort of surprising, since so much of its humor is so sophisticated. When I heard this opera at the Met, the woman next to me assured her increasingly restive son, who was probably around thirteen and made it clear he would have preferred attending the Mets game, that he would absolutely love Pyramus and Thisby, and I thought, hmm, I don’t think so. Finding it funny is very dependent on understanding the theatrical conventions it’s playing off. I mean, if you’re not really familiar with Shakespeare – and Midsummer Night’s Dream is always a popular one to take children to for their first Shakespeare – you don’t necessarily realize that “O grim-looked night! O night with hue so black! / O night, which ever art when day is not! / O night, O night! Alack, alack, alack. . . ” is funny and overdone, because it sounds like what people think Shakespeare sounds like. (In another nice directorial touch, Peter Quince sits below his troupe, mouthing along earnestly, totally engrossed in the awful script he's written.) Britten in this scene brilliantly parodies a variety of operatic styles and conventions, particularly the modernist sprechstimme (I don’t know if that’s technically what Britten is doing, but it’s what the parody sounds like) in Wall’s speeches, and most particularly the bel canto style, beginning its modern resurgence shortly before this opera’s 1960 premiere. Pyramus and Thisbe, a formerly respectable myth which Shakespeare sabotaged for all time, may be a case where getting all the jokes prevents you from seeing how generally appealing something is. Go see for yourself!

fun stuff I may or may not get to: September 2013

A respectable San Francisco matron heads off to the after-party, having endured the official opening of the opera or, possibly, the symphony, how is she to know which

Off we go into the fall season, though two of the major local presenters, San Francisco Performances and Cal Performances, don't really unleash the awesomeness until October, though Cal does have Placido Domingo & Associates up at the Greek Theater on 7 September, and their annual Fall-Free-for-All performance sampler is 29 September.

At the Ashby Stage, First Person Singular and Shotgun Cabaret present Stealing the Leads: Women Read Glengarry Glen Ross, which sounds potentially awesome (sorry, I have to use a form of that word twice in two paragraphs). Unfortunately it's only for two nights; the 2 September performance is sold out but there are still tickets available for the added performance on 9 September. Both performances start at 8:00, which ironically makes them inconveniently timed for anyone who actually has to work in an office.

Old First Concerts has several evenings of interest to fans of contemporary music: the Aleron Trio premieres Shahab Paranj's Piano Trio No. 1, "A Bitter Letter" along with piano trios by Beethoven and Dvorak, on 13 September; sfSound presents an Elliott Carter memorial concert, with works dating from 1939 to 2011, on 20 September; and contemporary chamber ensemble Wild Rumpus lets the wild rumpus begin on 27 September. It's too bad that Old First Concerts are usually Fridays at 8:00, which I think might be the worst concert time possible for working people, but I may try to ignore reality (my reality, that is) and make it to some of these.

To add to your new music enjoyment this month, head to the Conservatory of Music on 6 September to hear works from six alumni composers: Frank Wallace, Kevin Villalta, Mark Ackerley, Mario Godoy, Joseph Stillwell, and Ian Dicke.

At Berkeley Rep, Christopher Durang's Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which won the 2013 Tony for Best Play, opens 20 September and runs until 20 October. As the title might tell you, it is a contemporary twist on some themes from Chekhov. Richard E.T. White is the director.

The New Century Chamber Orchestra opens its season with a concert celebrating this season's featured composer, Michael Daugherty. I don't know a whole lot about his music, but he certainly has a knack for naming; the program includes pieces called Viva, Strut, Viola Zombie, Regrets Only, and Elvis Everywhere. The evening includes one non-Daugherty piece, Josef Suk's Serenade for string orchestra. That's 26 - 29 September in their usual variety of venues, only this year, since Herbst is closed, the San Francisco venue is the Yerba Buena Center.

San Francisco Opera opens its fall season with two interesting works: first is Boito's Mefistofele (which the Opera very helpfully refers to as Mephistopheles, because otherwise you couldn't figure that out, and though of course you'd balk at buying a ticket to something with a weird foreign name like Mefistofele, you're A-OK with Mephistopheles), in the lively production last seen here in 1994, with Nicola Luisotti conducting and Ildar Abdrazakov, Patricia Racette, and Ramon Vargas singing (check here for specific dates, though if you're actually interested in, you know, music and theater, skip opening night, 6 September); and second is the world premiere of Tobias Picker's Dolores Claiborne, which as of yesterday afternoon, when Dolora Zajick officially dropped out for health reasons, stars the Unsinkable Pat Racette (soprano) for the first four performances and the always appealing Catherine Cook (mezzo-soprano) for the remaining two (check here for specific dates). I liked Picker's American Tragedy quite a bit, so there's that going for it, at least in my opinion.

By the way, in case you're already wondering what the Merola folks will be performing in summer 2014, it's Don Giovanni and A Streetcar Named Desire (which of course had its premiere here in 1998). See what you learn from scanning the ads in Opera News?

If you're looking for more opera, West Edge Opera will perform a semi-staged production of Barber's Vanessa. This time they will be at Berkeley Rep's thrust stage instead of up in El Cerritto; 21 - 22 September.

The San Francisco Symphony has a fine assortment of concerts, but nothing really jumps out at me, though I might easily have a different reaction another day, since I always enjoy An American in Paris and Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and the Mahler 9. There's also the magnificent Audra McDonald, but she's being wasted on the opening night party. Check out the full month here, but keep in mind that often the most interesting items on the symphony's programs are kept out of sight, tucked a mouse-click away under the standards.

heart of darkness

Last night I was at the second performance of San Francisco Opera’s Heart of a Soldier, with music by Christopher Theofanidis and libretto by Donna Di Novelli, directed by Francesca Zambello (all under the auspices of SF Opera General Director David Gockley). This is the “9/11” opera, based on the book Heart of a Soldier by James B. Stewart and the life stories of Susan Rescorla, Daniel J. Hill, and, especially, Rick Rescorla, a former soldier who worked in security at the World Trade Center and died while rescuing many of those inside the South Tower. I had read a shortened version of this story in The New Yorker several years ago and found it quite moving.

As in The Story of a Real Man, Prokofiev’s desperate last operatic effort to win Stalin’s approval, this opera uses the story of an actual person whose inspiring and heroic life is meant as both an exemplar for and perhaps a subtle rebuke to his compatriots. I might as well point out here that anything I say about this story applies not to the actual people but to their theatrical representations and the choices made around those representations; choosing a good and brave man as your subject unfortunately does not mean your work will also be good and brave.

I have not read the book. I have also avoided reading or hearing any reactions to the world premiere last Saturday, so I don’t know if my reaction is widely shared or not. I should point out that last night’s audience seemed fairly enthusiastic, though given the automatic emotions connected with this subject matter and the tie-in with the tenth anniversary of the attacks, I suspect most of the opera’s emotional work was already done for it.

Before the opera started Gockley’s disembodied voice issued from overhead telling us to stand and sing along with the national anthem. A cheesy video of a rippling American flag played across the curtain as we of course obliged. I like the national anthem quite a bit, but wondered what exactly was the purpose of this cornball touch. It did seem to suggest that what we were about to see would be void of the complications of a work like The Death of Klinghoffer, with its clashing tragic histories. The woman next to me said, “Is this something new, or is it just for this opera?” I told her I thought it was just for the opera, though for all I know they are now planning to make us sing along next time they stage Madama Butterfly or Nixon in China.

The audience took a while to settle down, as they always do after a sing-along. The opera opens at the World Trade Center, with office workers going about their office worker business, because we know what is about to happen but they don’t. Different times and places are layered on top of one another, as Susan Rescorla (Melody Moore), at her home in New Jersey, sees a piece of paper fall from the sky and notices it is singed (the business with Susan noticing the paper comes from the program-book synopsis, which I read after the show; though I pretty much got the drift, the exact action wasn’t really clear; it’s difficult to notice that a piece of paper has singed edges, even when you’re in the front row, as I was).

We see the adult Rick Rescorla (Thomas Hampson) standing outside the WTC, smiling and looking nostalgic as the scene dissolves to Cornwall in June 1944; a young Cyril Rescorla (Henry Phipps), soon to give himself the more Yankee-sounding name of Rick, has gone to visit the American soldiers he adores only to learn they are being shipped out to an undisclosed location. We know, though they do not, that they are on their way to the D-Day invasion of Normandy and the eventual overthrow of Hitler (so our first view of American military intervention is firmly linked to a war as good as a war can be; the world-saving glow of the good war is allowed to linger over all the subsequent American military actions we are shown).

It’s no wonder a romantic-minded boy like Cyril admires these soldiers, with their undoubted but understated courage, their good-humor, their dedication to duty along with an amused and slightly cynical awareness that sometimes your duty as defined by your higher-ups is a crock though you do it nonetheless, and their camaraderie, which is all the more remarkable in that Cyril appears to have stumbled across the only racially integrated US Army unit around in 1944. In fact he is particularly close to a friendly black man, one of several in the troop.

The United States Army was segregated until 1948, when President Truman, realizing that America’s long-standing and legal racial segregation was a valuable asset for Communist propaganda, and assuming no doubt correctly that such an act would never pass Congress, issued an executive order desegregating the troops. (And of course American apartheid in other areas lasted decades longer.) There is no problem in general with color-blind casting, but by showing us an integrated troop during World War II the opera is erasing the vicious history of American racism in a work that claims to be an accurate representation of historical events involving America’s relations with the world (often the non-white world), and that is indeed a problem.

The next scene takes place in Northern Rhodesia in 1962, where Rick is leading a group of British mercenaries. It is only in the synopsis that they are described as “mercenaries”; the impression you get from what is on stage is that they are regular British troops. You may still wonder what British troops are doing in Northern Rhodesia. The answer is simple: they are helping out the villagers by killing a lion that is killing their goats.

An American, Dan Hill (William Burden), enters a makeshift bar, where he is told by the friendly black bartender of a wonderful man who fights fiercely yet also reads Karl Marx (the mention of Marx is almost startling, as it is one of the few times in this work that you even receive a hint of larger political issues and theories, though no explanation is given as to why Rick reads Marx or what he gets out of him, and when Rick does quote an author, he quotes Kipling).

Rick enters, carried on the shoulders of his cheering men. He is smeared with the blood of the slain lion, since he has taken part in an African ritual to honor and take courage from the dead lion. A tribal chieftan had earlier given him a lion’s tooth to wear as a talisman around his neck, which is supposed to make him invincible in battle. The tooth and the lion’s courage will become leitmotifs in this work. The subtler implication is that Rick is (and, by extension, his troops are) not an interloper in Africa but rather in harmony with its traditional beliefs, and welcomed and admired by the native black population.

In case you’re wondering why you can’t find Northern Rhodesia on a contemporary map, it’s because only a couple of years after the events depicted in Heart of a Soldier the British, having presumably killed all the goat-devouring lions in the country, were expelled, and those who thought the land was theirs because their ancestors had been there long before the British, deciding that the country should no longer be named as if it were the property of English imperialist Cecil Rhodes, renamed it Zambia. You will not learn any of this from Heart of a Soldier; as you may have gathered already, you could get a more insightful view of British imperialism by watching HMS Pinafore.

Rick and Dan bond during a wrestling match. The black bartender demands that they first remove all weapons. He is obeyed without question, and there is laughter as Hill (it is hinted that he is with the CIA, though there is no hint as to why they would send an agent to Northern Rhodesia) pulls out three or four knives to Rick’s one. Hampson and Burden are both in good shape but are clearly middle-aged men and their low-key grappling leaves them a bit winded (I say this sympathetically, as one who is himself a short-of-breath middle-aged man). Most of Zambello’s staging is fluid and effective, but this is not one of the better moments, no matter how many excited shirtless young men she uses to obscure and heighten the action. Apparently the British soldier of 1962 spent any time left over from killing marauding lions in rigorous gym workouts.

(I think that phrases like “fascist aesthetics” should be used very carefully, and I wouldn’t push the comparison too far, but some of the themes in Heart of a Soldier clearly draw from the same well: there is the cult of the warrior’s body, which is homoerotic while cleanly demarcating itself from the homosexual; there is the emphasis on the communal over the individual, particularly in the form of soldierly comradeship, but there is also an emphasis on the necessity of a hero’s strength to save and protect lesser types; there is the importance of discipline and the glorification of heroic death.)

Dan and Rick head off in the mid-1960s, at Dan's suggestion, to the new battle ground of Vietnam, which Dan asserts might be “a just war.” Large placards in the opera-house lobby warn us that this work “contains adult language and deals with adult themes.” There is indeed a lot of military-style swearing, which is daintily excluded from the surtitles (though of course the opera is in English, so I’m not sure why it’s OK to hear “fuck” or "shit" sung but not to read them). But I kept waiting for the opera to deal with adult themes.

One of my many complaints about the libretto for Dr Atomic was that among its multitude of voices it failed to include that of the ordinary soldier (and indeed all its military personnel were portrayed as buffoons), but Heart of a Soldier fails to move beyond a boy’s-book understanding of military life, which is mostly presented as heroic and even glamorous; Dan and Rick frequently list the names of famous battles of the past, from Antietam back to Agincourt and Marathon, joining themselves to an illustrious heritage of soldiership, but there is no suggestion as to which side Rick and Dan would have been on in these battles, or even that the side might be important, and there is no indication that war might have tragic or even unexpected consequences.

Rick behaves heroically in Vietnam – setting an example for his men of defiant bravery, and ignoring orders from his higher-ups so that he and his men can rescue Dan from the VC (though like the other enemies in this work, they are invisible and silent except for their gunfire; we’re not told who exactly they are, or why they’re fighting, or even how they rank in size and organization against the Americans). One of his men takes a lot of speed, but he seems more like a goofball than anything else. When we see these men at Rick’s 1972 wedding in the final scene of the first act, one is in a wheelchair but there is little indication that they are otherwise suffering or damaged because of what they have seen or what they have done.

No one even gets a “dear John” letter from his girl back home (whenever the male bonding starts getting a little too intense, we get references to the girls back home). We see one of the sweethearts, the lovely Juliet (Nadine Sierra), who sprays her letters to her beloved Tom (Michael Sumuel) with her perfume so that he will think of her when he opens them. (Tom is very dark-skinned and Juliet very much lighter, as if that was a matter of no consequence in mid-1960s America.)

Juliet sings about how she used to pray for world peace, but now she “selfishly” just wants her one man to come home. Of course he never will; since we’ve met his girl and heard that he’s a medic who only wants to heal people, it is no surprise when he is killed in action. She does not express anger over the senselessness of his death, as if being killed in Vietnam was equivalent to dying in the invasion of Normandy.

If Rick and Dan grow weary in Vietnam or wary of the army, it’s only because of the pain of seeing their comrades die – not because of any troubling questions as to why the American army is pouring millions of dollars and thousands of young American lives (not to mention the cost in Vietnamese lives) into an invasion of a small Asian country few Americans knew anything about, or because of any concerns over what that endless war was doing to Vietnam or to America. (You’d get a better sense of the cultural ferment and anxiety over the Vietnam War by watching Hair.) Back in civilian life they find they miss their army days.

The only pain of these veterans is caused by the callousness of the civilian population, which ignores them or spits on them (weren’t there articles a few years ago pointing out that the much-cited spitting never in fact happened?). Consistent with this opera’s glorification of a certain sanitized view of military life, we see good men bound by their soldier’s honor being ignored or mistreated by the callous, ignorant civilian population. Civilians generally come off poorly in this work, smugly ignorant of the danger around them, and even of the world around them (there's a running joke about no one knowing where or what Cornwall is, and asking Rick if he's Scottish or Welsh).

During Rick’s wedding reception we learn that Dan feels a growing attraction to the Muslim life he witnessed in Beirut (no explanation is given as to why this American was parachuting into Beirut). He feels drawn to the sense of order and discipline in Muslim life and he converts, heading off (in what seems, but of course is not really, a related action) to Afghanistan to join the Mujahideen in fighting the Russians; apparently nothing Dan has experienced has made him cynical about war or the role superpowers play in the world, and once again this is presented as an individual soldier's search for a good war.

Presumably Dan’s conversion is emphasized in the opera to avoid depicting Islam itself as evil and destructive, but since we are never given any details on the ethnicity, religion, politics, or life experiences of any of the various vague “enemies” throughout the work, what the conversion really does is emphasize (and connect) the superiority of order, discipline, and meaning as found in military or fundamentalist life over the confusion and banality of civilian life.

The second act is shorter and even less effective. Rick is now head of security for a brokerage firm at the WTC. He runs evacuation drills, to the annoyance of his coworkers, who do not understand the purpose, even though this must already be after the first terrorist attack on the WTC. The office drones are reluctant to walk down stairs; they are motivated only when Rick tells them to imagine that there are glazed donuts with jimmies ("red white and blue jimmies") at the bottom of the stairs. They are befuddled and upset when they realize there are no donuts there. They demand to know why they can't just take the elevators; Rick does not give reasons for taking the stairs, even the obvious one that the elevator might get stuck; he merely says it’s the rule. He points out that the WTC is a symbol, though of what he doesn’t say (the Statue of Liberty is also a symbol, and it was not a target), nor does anyone mention that the twin towers are not only a symbol but a place where actual things are done that affect the rest of the world, not always happily.

Susan takes her dog for a walk. The audience reacts as if she were walking a quagga. I don’t know what happens to people when they enter a theater, but for some reason that unavoidable banality of the suburbs, the sight of a woman walking a dog, inevitably causes a sensation. Audience members around me had been quiet and attentive until that moment. The elderly couple to my left started whispering excitedly. A dog! Death in the jungles of Vietnam hadn’t caused such visceral engagement.

Susan meets Rick, who is out jogging barefoot. She wishes to herself that she were the sort of woman who would approach a man. Much emphasis in the early publicity was placed on the love story here, which involves two people in their 50s, but it is completely conventional and not very interesting: they meet cute, they dance together, they fall in love at first sight, they speak excitedly about each other as soulmates. Dan even points out to Rick that he's behaving like a high school kid. Rick and Susan sing at length to themselves (in rhymes; there’s a surprising amount of rhyming in the libretto) about wishing they were someone else, which is a sentiment maybe even more common to adolescents in love than to adults, but frankly it’s not clear who, in romantic terms, they are.

We’ve heard a lot about Rick and the military, but nothing about his marriage, including the reasons for its failure. (Dan does say he had doubts about it starting with the reception, but he doesn’t say why.) We are told that Susan is divorced, but we have no idea what happened, and we are told she has children, though presumably they are adults and out of the picture since no further mention is made of them. Melody Moore gives a committed performance (as, for that matter, do Hampson, Burden, and the rest of the cast) but she is clearly a young woman, with a fresh and vibrant air. Just as the battles we see are stripped of any political, economic, racial or religious context, so, in a subtler way, this relationship is stripped of any of the difficulties and complexities that would differentiate it from a relationship among people in their 20s.

Rick continues to be vigilant, to much comment, most of it negative, from others in his firm, though at least one woman sings voluptuously that she feels safer and better knowing he always has everything under surveillance. (There is no danger seen in a state of constant surveillance.) Dan, still a Muslim, and still working for the US government, continues to warn his superiors (“superiors that aren’t” as the libretto phrases it elsewhere) about the dangers of a possible terrorist attack, especially one caused by the dangerously charismatic Osama bin Laden (referred to only as “Osama”). Once again, the civilian population and the civilian government are shown as hapless and clueless, blithely ignoring dangers that only the honorable military men are clear-sighted enough to be aware of.

I haven’t said much about the music so far, mostly because despite the primacy of music in this art form this libretto is so determinedly blinkered and so relentlessly superficial in its engagement with larger issues that what the music expresses is inevitably limited as well. The music (conducted expertly by Patrick Summers) is mostly strong and appealing, though perhaps lacking in anything too striking or memorable, with a sound that is clearly contemporary but not so contemporary that it will startle the opera patrons. Mostly the music is quite engaging. It only really fails in the final scene, which is of course the 9/11 attacks; neither the music nor the libretto nor the direction rise to any heights here, and mostly suggest what is going on somewhat sketchily, though that does work under the circumstances, as the audience can supply a lot of the detail (and a lot of the emotion) from memories of the event.

We are back at the two towers we saw in the first scene, which are basically two large grids with stairs inside at the back of the stage; first the lights go off in the one on the right, and then there is confusion in the one on the left, and reassuring announcements from the clueless Port Authority before Rick realizes he needs to evacuate his people; then, when the second plane hits, the lights go out there as well. Papers start raining down from the destroyed building. At the end Dan and Susan recreate the lion’s blood ritual by rubbing ash from the towers on their arms.

When I first heard about this proposed work, it was merely a vaguely referred to “opera on 9/11” to be performed on the tenth anniversary. This did not strike me as a good idea. After the first few days (or was it only hours?) after the massacre, the United States sank to the challenge by unleashing an ugly, short-sighted, and dangerous period (still going on) of aggressive war, hysterical bullying, and xenophobia, and a curtailment of the civil liberties of its own citizens. I never thought I would hear anyone conscious of American ideals defend torture (always of “bad people” of course, who are always other people, again of course).

Given the anniversary timing of the opera, I figured we’d be seeing the heroes of 9/11, and not its subsequent manipulation and abuse in American society. So my first reaction was that the idea for the opera was either cynical box-office calculation or a misguided wallow in feel-good uplift (though of course those are not mutually exclusive motives). After seeing it, I have no doubt of the complete sincerity of the many talented people involved, which is probably why I was so saddened rather than angered by the work's insistence on a narrow and superficial view of a complicated and profound event.

The storyline calls for a deeper examination of the strengths and limitations of a military code of honor in a world that often has other aims and means, but the work is so cleansed of any complicating context that what we are left with is largely propaganda for a militarized society. I walked in suspecting (correctly) that no mention would be made of the estimated 100,000 plus Iraqis killed by the USA since the post-9/11 invasion of that country (and what a sorrowful history is in that “estimated”!). What I did not suspect was that, as presented in Heart of a Soldier, even the deaths of the other American victims would fail to evoke pity or even sympathy; the emphasis on one extraordinary man, far from putting a personal face on the thousands of victims, throws them even further into the shadows; they mill about in selfish confusion, having ignored Rick's attempts to drill them and save them, and all you feel is that it was a shame a hero died for these anonymous, ineffectual weaklings. The communal tragedy of 9/11 is missing.

I suspect that most of us who seek out live music found ourselves turning to music when we first heard about the attacks; I know that for me the Brahms Requiem will always carry overtones of the original 9/11, because after we were all sent home from work (I was in California, but no one knew what was going to happen, and no one could work anyway) I spent most of the day listening to it over and over, not knowing quite what else to do. An actor friend of mine told me that what he did felt so futile to him. I handed him my DVD of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and said that he was one of the few people I knew who shouldn’t say his work felt futile; I don’t agree with Adorno's famous remark that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric because it seems to me poetry – creation – is really the only human answer to human tragedies such as Auschwitz. So the idea of a 9/11 opera is not in itself a bad one, but this one fails to grapple in any serious way with either the causes or the effects of 9/11; such a work would need a whole lot more honesty about American history and society and America’s role in the world than we get in Heart of a Soldier.

Winds of Destiny at Berkeley

When Ojai North! – I have to point this out each time, that’s their exclamation point – was in Berkeley last month, I went to hear Dawn Upshaw in The Winds of Destiny, which was followed by Music of Afghanistan with vocalist Ustad Farida Mahwash and the Sakhi Ensemble, featuring artistic director Homayoun Sakhi on rubab. The whole evening was conceptualized and directed by Peter Sellars.

The Winds of Destiny (American Songbook IV) is a series of traditional and beloved spirituals and Civil War-era songs as deracinated by George Crumb. He makes effective and eerie use of percussion (the accompaniment was performed by red fish blue fish percussion ensemble along with Gilbert Kalish on piano, and there are those who will point out that the piano is a percussion instrument) to create haunting effects out of songs – Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, When Johnny Comes Marching Home, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and others – that are so familiar they tend to evaporate in our ears unless twisted into new shapes.

(Of course, some of the effect will be lost if the songs aren’t familiar; in the lobby beforehand I saw a tall thin woman, possibly Bulgarian, in a dark forest-green dress with bright red suede shoes and a head of hair henna’ed a clashing shade of solid purply-rust red, saying in puzzled tones to her male companion, “Shen – An – Do – Ah?” “It’s a place name,” he murmured.)

Upshaw plays a returning vet; dressed in fatigues, trying to lie down and rest, she suffers from memories of the war, looking nervous and unhappy. She jumps a little for the loud, gun-shot-like percussion. She clutches a pillow and caresses it as if it were a child. At the end, she stands on the bed and uses a pole as if the bed were a boat and she Charon the Ferryman.

I have been enjoying Upshaw’s adventurous and intelligent performances since the 1980s. I hadn’t seen her live in a few years, I guess, since I was kind of shocked to see how much she’s aged since I last saw her. I realize she’s been seriously ill (and has fortunately recovered) and I don’t look the way I did back in the 1980s either (and obviously a lot of this is coming from my own anxieties about aging), but in all honesty it kind of threw me. I don’t mean to be unkind about it, but there it is.

I do mean to be unkind about the youngish middle-aged woman sitting to my right, who entered announcing to her companions in the loud harsh bray in which she said everything, “So I told him, yeah, I’m a smoker!” She was apparently proud of it, which gives you an idea of the intellectual level of the conversation I was forced to listen to. It was a needless announcement anyway, since she was surrounded by an immovable air-wall of rancid cigarette stench. It was so embedded in the nasty creature’s hair and skin and clothing that it didn’t dissipate. It was literally nauseating sitting next to this thing, and every time she moved, her dirty clothes produced another suffocating wave of stale stink.

The older woman to my left, on the other hand, was delightful; completely silent during the performance but pleasantly chatty before and during the intermission. She had been to Afghanistan several times, doing volunteer work at an archeological dig. She and her husband had a list of places they wanted to see and things they wanted to do together; he had died a few years ago so she was carrying out the list on her own. A really beautiful and inspiring person.

Upshaw’s voice occasionally sounded a bit worn, but there were also moments of the old purity. Characterization might have led to some of the rough passages. I think some of the songs were amplified. She is, as she has always been, a committed and powerful performer, and this is powerful material, but its effect weakened in memory afterwards, largely because of Sellars’s naïve though well-meaning approach.

Given his portrait here of a woman deeply damaged by combat service and obviously longing to nurture a child (all that pillow petting and hugging), combined with his statements in his program essay that women “are more likely to return home [from combat] with post-traumatic stress” and that “one in three women in the U.S. armed forces is sexually assaulted or raped by a fellow American soldier” (assaults which they are frequently “too frightened to report”) and that “increasingly women soldiers have taken the lead in some of the more positive [I assume he means generally nurturing, since these positive aspects are completely unspecified] aspects of the U.S. occupation” one might think that the appropriate and necessary response to the situation is not carefully staged arty song cycles but a return to the less fragile all-male military.

Is there anything in his portrayal that would provoke disagreement from the most reactionary Victorian patriarch? Isn’t he essentially evoking the Angel of the Household that Virginia Woolf found it so necessary to kill? If women are more suited to being Florence Nightingale, why use them in combat anyway? (This is not what I believe, but this is I think the clear implication of what Sellars is presenting here.)

As for women soldiers taking the lead in the "more positive aspects" of the US occupation of Iraq (which I guess means trying to undo some of the damage they helped cause in the first place), I wonder if he’s simply forgetting the Iraqi men tortured and humiliated by Lynndie England and her ilk at Abu Ghraib. Those forgotten men, assuming they have not been killed already by US forces, would no doubt have the deepest sympathy with post-traumatic stress disorder among the war criminals who tortured them.

With all due respect to the undoubted suffering of American soldiers (men as well as women), many of whom were very young and idealistic, I find it bizarrely narcissistic, given the American public’s continuing and callous indifference to the immense suffering caused by our country’s endless wars, that the victim we are called upon to sympathize with is . . . American women. It’s like those Hollywood films about apartheid or the civil rights movement that are given a middle-class white protagonist for “us” to identify with.

Also, let’s not forget that we have a volunteer army. Who is this woman, where did she come from, why did she volunteer, what did she see, and more to the point, what did she do? Singing All My Trials while looking mournful is indeed moving when it’s performed with such conviction and intensity, but after the immediate experience there’s nothing to think about or grab onto; we’re presented with the smooth surface of a generic, victimized, nurturing Woman, a monolith that is clearly absurd: I’ve described three of the women in the audience that night, and even though they all came from a very small group (white, straight, middle-aged to elderly, middle-class, educated women who attend off-beat theatrical events in the Bay Area), they were three totally different and unique people. It’s aesthetically uninteresting to ignore these differences and politically insidious: while we’re smugly telling ourselves that women (that is, our women) will nurture and heal, we have Lynndie England and her ilk committing war crimes, and plenty of women politicians and commentators excusing or cheering them.

Remember when feminism was about freeing women from the burdens of idealization, and judging them as capable adults (that is, as morally complex and responsible human beings) instead of as perpetually innocent victims? Could we please go back to that?

There was a half-hour intermission, and then Sellars came out with a little speech about the cost of the Iraq invasion, which basically repeated information easily found in the program. You know, if you’re not going to start your work-night performance until 8:00, and you’re going to have long intermissions, please spare us the little ego-trip talks from the stage. Some of us have to work the next morning.

The Sakhi Ensemble is dazzlingly virtuosic, with improv solos traded off as in a jazz band. Ustad Farida Mahwash was an endearing singer, smiling broadly at us after each song and thanking us for our applause. But it was getting late and the audience was running out of steam, and for most of them this was, however enjoyable or appreciated, inescapably foreign music, something you might hear in an ethnic restaurant, not something you'd play on the radio at home. Oddly there were no surtitles, so we had to check the program insert to find out what was being sung (the lyrics were in Pashto and Dari, and I’m guessing few in the audience understood either). Afterwards I heard the possibly Bulgarian woman saying she really liked the last song (Beshnaw az nay, the “song of the reed,” composed by Ustad Nainawaz to a verse by Rumi). It was about the pain of exile, which clearly struck home with her. But I didn’t even see the words on the back of the insert until after the concert.

The players are all refugees from Afghanistan, now living a BART ride away in Fremont. Sellars seemed to think this was a marvelous example of continued creativity in the face of destruction, of bringing good things out of tragedy, and maybe it is, but I have to wonder: brave and beautiful though the musicians are, in their homeland they were popular headliner artists, while here they are exotica for an elite, following the star performer. I find it difficult to believe they don’t regret the change. Once again an optimistic and well-meaning American is assuring everyone that everything is working out for the best, but beneath their gracious smiles and committed artistry, I suspect the exiled musicians might disagree.

fun stuff I may or may not get to: December

This is mostly a New York month, since like all the cool kids I’m going to the Met to see From the House of the Dead. This will be my first time hearing something at the Met that is not in English and composed before 1960 (my Met operas are Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Great Gatsby, and An American Tragedy). Anyone judging solely from my experience would have a very odd idea of what the Met is about.

In addition to the Janacek, I’m seeing Le Nozze di Figaro and the new Bart Sher production of Les Contes d’Hoffmann.

And after my second, Saturday matinee viewing of House of the Dead, I’m following Esa-Pekka Salonen across Lincoln Center to Avery Fisher Hall, where he is conducting the New York Philharmonic in Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, the Ravel Piano Concerto in G, and La Mer.

I have a few open nights so I’ll see what’s playing when I get there. But the night before I leave I’m seeing One Night, a Schubert/Beckett combo with Mark Padmore singing Winterreise (or, since I believe he’s singing it in translation, Winter Journey) while Andrew West plays the piano and Stephen Dillane recites (I assume) the Beckett.

Back in the Bay Area, San Francisco Performances has some wonderful pianists on its schedule: Angela Hewitt on December 1 and Marc-Andre Hamelin on December 15.

In Berkeley Cal Performances presents Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut, the only Nutcracker worth seeing. (If you disagree with me on that, check out Saturday Matinee’s guide to local Nutcracking. And if Christmas means choral music to you, check out the choral roundup at Iron Tongue.)

Cutting Ball Theater has extended its run of The Bald Soprano until December 12.

Shotgun Players presents that beloved holiday classic, The Threepenny Opera, which was my favorite musical until I discovered Sweeney Todd.

Poppea in Houston

I offer the subject line to Adams or Ades or anyone who wants a good subject for a contemporary opera, possibly featuring a tie-in to the recent conviction of Ken "Bad" Lay.
I saw L'Incoronazione di Poppea twice. If this is typical of David Gockley's productions then I feel reassured about the upcoming years at SF Opera, though I have to say I'm getting really tired of the Pamela-bashing that's been going either directly or subtly around here, though perhaps I should save that up (throw it on the pile. . . . ).
This is a wonderful opera, more Shakespearean than almost all of the operas based on his work (except for Verdi's sublime Falstaff). Every character is rich and complex, from the Emperor down to his guards. This production was better than the three DVDs I watched before the trip in just about every way. The amazingly beautiful set (the only direct evocation of the Renaissance) was based on the inlaid wood studiolo from Gubbio now in the Metropolitan in New York and featured a tower to the right that opened and moved to become a staircase, a niche for visiting gods, a closet, and various other settings. The wall on the left curved around to the back and for Ottavia's entrance and Seneca's suicide beams slid out forming a staircase made up of disconnected steps, which was possibly too dramatic since apparently I wasn't the only one in the audience with a panic about heights and it was hard to concentrate until the singer had made it safely up or down (this was especially true of Seneca's suicide, when the beams were withdrawn one by one as he ascended). I hope they gave von Stade and Aceto hazard pay. The costumes were from the 1930s. I saw a review that said they were meant to evoke the fascist period in Italy. If that's true, then I'd have to say they were a failure, evoking for me Hollywood more than Mussolini: most obviously, there were no blackshirts. The emperor's retinue was either dressed formally like servants or like ordinary carbinieri. The coronation itself was distinctly Napoleonic and very reminiscent of David's painting of Napoleon crowning himself while the Pope looks on helplessly. The final duet (Pur ti miro) was sung by Graham and Burden seated on their thrones and staring straight ahead. I can't even describe why I found this so moving and so perfect. I liked Venus as a Jean Harlowe/Veronica Lake-type, surrounded by fat cherubs in sailor suits, but was a bit less convinced by Mercury as a Ralph Lauren model (though I did enjoy the little wings on his shoes; being able to notice these details is an advantage to front-row seats). They omitted the prologue, which was a shame. I like the perspective it gives to the whole work. Perhaps they felt the evening was already long enough. The cast was outstanding. There were a few moments when von Stade's voice sounded a bit worn to me, but it actually just added poignance to her portrayal of the abandoned Empress and she came through in the big moments (though she didn't quite leave scorch marks on the stage, the way Hunt-Lieberson did at SF Opera few years ago). Nathan Gunn as usual acted deeply and sang beautifully, but I did feel the staging failed in his key scene. Ottone loves Poppea but is dumped by him in favor of the Emperor Nero; the abandoned Empress orders him to kill Poppea or she will accuse him of attempting to rape her (either way he could be put to death); he is trying to convince himself that he no longer loves Poppea, but only Drusilla, who has loved him all along; he's torn among three women in a way that makes Clyde's problems in An American Tragedy look run of the mill. He feels paralyzed and trapped. The Empress's suggestion is that he borrows Drusilla's clothes and kill Poppea that way, to avoid immediate detection. He wears Drusilla's dress, but it's sleeveless and backless and though I can respect Gunn's probable reluctance to take his shirt off in every production, as worn over his white shirt it looked like one of those "Kiss the Cook" barbecue aprons they used to sell for men. A hat with a veil would have helped the illusion. There are two problem with the scene as staged: first, no one, even if she were half asleep and startled by the sudden sight of a sword right above her neck (she is awakened by Amor, who will not permit Ottone to kill the woman he still loves), could possibly think he was any woman, much less one about a foot shorter with curly blonde hair down to her shoulders. And as he runs off, since the dress is backless, he looks even less like Drusilla, rendering her subsequent arrest a bit forced. So it's unconvincing, and the second problem is that the subdued gown doesn't convey visually that his situation has unmanned him. Perhaps they were afraid it would make the scene ridiculous, but though Ottone's anguish is real (and Gunn conveys that well) the situation is slightly ridiculous. (That's one of the things I meant by the opera's Shakespearean richness.) In this production in particular it would have made an interesting contrast with the very different drag scene featuring the emperor in a scarlet dress and boa flirting with the courtier Lucano (William Burden played this scene and the whole role of the unbalanced Emperor superbly) and also with the pantomime dame role of Arnalta (Joseph Evans), Poppea's old nurse. Too bad this production wasn't recorded on DVD, as I would then have a clear favorite. I assume a recording will start circulating once NPR World of Opera broadcasts it (though not in this area); but a DVD would be better. Fans are just never satisfied, are we?

fighting vainly the old ennui

Dr Johnson, who would have killed at open mike night (“Ever notice how Whigs and Tories say hello? Whigs are all like, ‘Come, Citizen, let us to the alehouse whence we shall foment dissent!’ and Tories are all like, ‘Prithee, good sir, let us repair to the chapel, where we may thank the beneficent Maker for the rights of true-born Englishmen’”), famously observed that second marriages are the triumph of hope over experience; the same is true of subscription series – so many glittering stars and promising debuts, beloved masterpieces and exciting new works, laid out like a map to a new land, eventually turning into the reality of half-forgotten misty ruins, some shining monuments, blurred photographs, and lots of dust and inconvenience, and, always, a pile of bills waiting after the journey. I know this, but still get excited every year, by every company’s announcement. So I took it as a very bad sign for the upcoming San Francisco Opera season that I was bored, restless, and discontented even before I finished reading the renewal brochure.

One of the first things I did when I returned home in 1992 was to subscribe to the Opera, and I’ve been a subscriber (and small-level donor) ever since. The Opera has always formed the spine of my theater-going here. I came close to switching to individual tickets once before, when I was tired of uninspired performances of the same old standards (kids – this is what we call foreshadowing), but then Pamela Rosenberg took over and I could start expecting something interesting at the Opera House. So I actually feel very melancholy about this, and have put off posting about the upcoming season. I was fully prepared, despite an urgent need to pay off home repairs and suchlike, to pull out the credit card for the Opera. I guess I should be grateful that Gockley is watching my expenses for me.

It's like the scene in The Hard Nut when the older daughter, who thinks she's very adult and stylish and sophisticated, opens her gift from her parents, and can't hide her childish disappointment at the ugly fluorescent green sweater covered with weird squiggles, which they obviously chose in the hope that it would be stylish and sophisticated enough to please her. It's a complicated sadness, of misplaced good intentions and misguided hopes. I’m going to survey the upcoming season, so if you’d like to skip the idle philosophizing and rueful retrospectives then feel free to jump on down to where I resume delusional speculation, sorrowful denunciation, and general more-or-less insightful bitching.

First up is Simon Boccanegra, with Hvorostovsky and Frittoli, Runnicles conducting. No arguments with this one, so I’ll go off on a tangent instead, no doubt to the shock of any regular readers. I’m a little surprised this was chosen for Opening Night, but then I don't know why they bother performing an opera at all on Opening Night. They should switch to an hour of popular arias and then straight to the party. Or skip the arias altogether and just have the society women march across the stage in their usually garish and poorly chosen gowns. Warhorse, clothes horse – it’s not a night about music. So I’m definitely getting a ticket for this one, and definitely not on opening night.

Next up is The Bonesetter’s Daughter, a premiere by Stewart Wallace with libretto by Amy Tan. I have my doubts about this. Let me put it this way: I am one who frequently went straight from Symphony Hall to Tower Records (or, in later times, to Amazon.com) to buy CDs from composers new to me whose music I had just heard (Messiaen, Lieberson, Harrison, and Rouse were some of them). I’ve been known to buy CDs just because a review or blog mentioned a composer in passing (certain key words, like “gloomy”, “intellectual”, or “difficult” can always get me to buy, regardless of whether the reviewer means them as compliments). So I was thinking I knew nothing at all about Stewart Wallace, and it turns out he composed the opera Harvey Milk which was done here a few years ago, so I had not only read about him, I had sat through an entire evening of his music, and I still didn’t remember his name. I’m thinking that’s not a good sign. I want to see this just because it’s new, and I’m hoping for the best (if I weren’t basically an easily pleased optimist, I wouldn’t go to the theater as often as I do). But I don’t think the Opera should pat itself on its backstage for taking a risk with this particular new work, at least as far as the box office goes; artistic success is yet to be determined. Amy Tan is an extremely popular author (and she lives in this area), the large local Chinese-American population would be drawn to the story, what I recollect of Wallace’s music from Harvey Milk is, shall we say, not forbidding to the general public, and those desperate for novelty on the operatic stage will want to support anything new.

The San Francisco premiere of Die Tote Stadt is next. Well, so far this season is looking deceptively appealing, since I would love to see this one as well. (Perhaps “City of Death” would be suitable for opening night, especially since the target audience wouldn’t get the joke.)

Idomeneo follows. This is probably my least favorite of the major Mozart operas, partly for semi-silly reasons, and yes, I’m talking about the lack of on-stage sea monster action. Sorry, I just have a sea monster thing, and if you’re going to tease me with frequent mentions of a terrible sea beast, then you’d damn well better put the thing on stage. Also, just as for me Bach’s Christmas Oratorio always conjures up a frosty late December night in an ice-cold church in Harvard Square, and the wooden pew getting harder and harder (possibly because it was literally freezing) and consequently my butt getting more and more numb as the hours slipped towards midnight, and this naïve young concert-goer thinking, This is a whole lot of German, so Idomeneo conjures up a struggle to stay awake on an overly warm summer evening in Tremont Temple during a concert performance of a very lengthy and unfamiliar work with only a bare plot summary to hand, back in the days before surtitles. That might even have been the night when I first wondered why everything, no matter what its length, had to start at 8:00. I remember thinking during the concert, We’re early music people – this is too late for the likes of us. (I looked up the playbill: Roger Norrington conducted, and the cast included Anthony Rolfe Johnson as Idomeneo, Lorraine Hunt [Lieberson] as Idamante, Jeanne Ommerle as Ilia, and Lisa Saffer as Elettra, and yes, I would love to have that evening back, along with the chance to take a nap beforehand, and don’t I feel like one whose hand, like the base Indian, threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe.)

So far it’s at least modified rapture; the score is four for four, though as they say in football, some of those were ugly wins. But next up is Boris Godunov, starring Samuel Ramey. Out of respect for a distinguished artist, I don’t want to dwell on this, but I’d like to remember his voice as it was. Normally this would make my cut, but not under these circumstances. The large local Russian population will most likely turn out in force for this no matter what.

Then we have L’Elisir d’Amore, a title the Opera insists on translating, because while apparently “Die Tote Stadt” poses no problems as a title for an American audience, that same audience is incapable of figuring out that L’Elisir d’Amore means The Elixir of Love. This is a new production, set in the Napa Valley wine country (so let me pose the obvious question right now – would Nemorino, raised among wineries, really not realize what it was Dulcamara was selling?). Given that angle, and this opera’s general sunny pleasantness, and especially its short running time, I’m surprised this isn’t the Opening Night victim. Sometimes at the opera I’ll see what is obviously date night for some attractive young pair, handsomely dressed up in dark suit and expensive tie and nice floor-length dress with a gauzy wrap to cover the bare pretty shoulders, and often the night’s performance is really ill-omened for the young couple – Don Giovanni, Madama Butterfly, The Queen of Spades, all calculated to give pause to young love – and since they seem like such nice kids, I’d like to give them this advice: Take it from one who knows, because he’s read a lot of books, and they talk about this stuff, and he’s had plenty of time to think about such things while sitting by himself in many an ornate and gilded auditorium waiting for the show to start – this is the one to go to for date night. You will smile gently at the lovers’ misunderstandings, you will glow warmly at their happy union at the end, and in between, since all great comedies have moments of deep and pervasive sadness, your hearts will be pierced when you hear Una furtiva lagrima (especially, no doubt, as sung by Ramon Vargas in this production), and you will think of all the secret tears you have shed, or hope to shed, for the beloved by your side, and your hands will creep together, and remain clasped until the end, when you must reluctantly separate them to applaud the delightful show; and in later years – and the Opera seems intent on giving you many, many chances for repeat viewings – your memories of this night will add to your pleasure in the opera and in each other; and I wish my imaginary couple great joy of it, but I’m not feeling the need. You see? I know it all already.

Next up is La Boheme. Of course.

I thought of leaving it at that (the alternative was: Next up is La Boheme. No. Fucking. Way.), but of course there’s more to say. Look, it’s a beautiful opera, and a justly loved masterpiece; it happens I’ve never particularly liked it, and resent it in my petty, brooding way, but I can see what people respond to (sort of like watching Jacques Tati films at the UC Theater back in the day, with a thin smile on my face, while some around me are howling with laughter), and the love duet in Act 1 always made me cry, at least until the last time the Opera put it on. But I seriously feel as if Mimi’s gelida manina are wrapped around my throat, and tightening their grip. Can’t they just let that bitch die in peace? When you live in an area of limited live-opera resources (that is, if you live anywhere outside of New York City), you can’t help but miss all the works unstaged so that the bohemians may once again trot out their increasingly threadbare antics. The big deal with this production (in case you haven’t noticed, the selling points this season are setting and star, not the overly familiar repertory – I was going to look up how many times I’ve seen these operas in my years with San Francisco Opera, but then I realized I didn’t need to bother, since the telling fact is that it seems as if I’ve just seen all of them, even the new ones) is that Nicola Luisotti is conducting, and Joseph Calleja is making his debut, and Gheorghiu is returning. I liked Gheorghiu quite a lot in Rondine, but it will not have escaped my astute readers that I spent more time discussing her truly awful hairdo than her truly beautiful voice – I would be happy to hear her again, but I’m not desperate about it. I understand Mimi is a signature role for her, and I’m curious about that, since Gheorghiu seems to traffic in mid- to high-wattage star power and general glam diva-ness, while the qualities you need for Boheme are sweetness, simplicity, sincerity, and a melting tenderness, qualities which, let me just point out, are all the more endearing when they are only seen at refreshingly long intervals. So I’m back to No. Fucking. Way. (Let me clarify what that means – it means I don’t want to pay for a ticket to this. That would only encourage them. If someone gave me a ticket, I would go, of course –my principles aren’t that strict. I’m not exactly saying I can be bought, but I can certainly be rented for extended periods.)

Tosca, the first opera I saw at the War Memorial Opera House back in 1992, and many times both before and since, follows. Again, I like this opera a lot, but the only way I would pay to see it at this point is if Maria Callas returned from the dead, and even then only on one of her good days.

The Opera, by the way, is claiming that Tosca and Boheme are being presented as a special tribute for the 150th birthday of their composer. Sounds more like business as usual to me, and pretty half-assed as tributes go. I have yet to see Trittico or Fanciulla, or Edgar or Le Villi – can’t they even present unusual repertory from the familiar names? Even a single gala concert by distinguished artists of famous scenes or arias would have seemed more like a special evening and a suitable tribute to their favorite cash machine.

Porgy and Bess, with players to be named later, returns; this is actually the first opera I ever saw, and in the touring production sponsored by David Gockley’s Houston Grand Opera, no less. (Oh, David! You remembered! But I’m still not forgiving you for this season). I love the opera, it’s a great, vibrant work, and I just don’t feel like seeing it again.

Given the nature of this season, you had to know that Traviata would make an appearance – hear that lyrical coughing off in the distance? This time it’s not the audience. Again, a beautiful work, though I could easily name five, or six, or seven other operas by Verdi I prefer (well, if you’re going to force it out of me: Falstaff, Trovatore, Rigoletto, Ballo, Forza, Boccanegra, and Don Carlo/s). I’ll confess to being a little torn about this one; Alfredo is the dashing Charles Castronovo, and each time I’ve heard him (Tamino, Nadir, Don Ottavio) I’ve been progressively more impressed, and Violetta is La Netrebko. People divide very sharply on her. I’ve always been on the pro side of the great Trebs Divide, but she seems to have changed repertory since she sang all those Russian roles here long ago, and I’m curious to hear her now. But last time I saw Boheme, I had changed my ticket so I could hear her Musetta, and even her famously gorgeous shoulders couldn’t carry the overly familiar work for me. (I also note that for this, as well as Boheme, the much-touted stars are not singing every performance, and the second cast is not even named, so why buy in advance when you don’t know what you’re getting?) So right now I’m very doubtful about this one.

Then there’s the new Jake Heggie piece, Last Acts, with a libretto by Gene Scheer based on a play by Terence McNally and starring Frederica von Stade. As with The Bonesetter’s Daughter, I want to see this because it’s new, but I have my doubts, though fewer in this case. Generally I like Heggie’s music, and I’ve enjoyed a number of Gene Scheer’s songs and I thought he did an excellent job with the libretto for An American Tragedy, and von Stade is always appealing. On the other hand, though I especially liked Heggie’s music for his last collaboration with Scheer, To Hell and Back, an updated version of the rape of Persephone premiered by Philharmonia Baroque last year, I thought Scheer’s libretto was a failure, largely because of the simplistic and stereotypical presentation of the male character (who doesn’t even make an appearance; it's sung by two women). As for McNally . . . I’m not expecting much beyond slick and entertaining and sentimental on cue. I heard At the Statue of Venus, his last collaboration with Heggie, a scena about a woman waiting to meet a blind date. The libretto was basically the Barber/Agee Knoxville Summer of 1915 and Sex and the City run through a blender (Sex and the City: the incredibly repetitive adventures of four spunky gals in the big city – the whore, the bore, the priss, and the lawyer – who are not nearly as interesting and intelligent as they seem to think). Mixed bag here, but it’s actually a moot point for my decision on the Opera subscription, since I can get this through my Cal Performances subscription, and I’ll keep subscribing to them as long as they keep bringing Mark Morris back.

So there it is, and I don’t know anyone who is excited about this schedule. Well, let me adjust that, since I am nothing if not scrupulously accurate: there was one. At the intermission of the recent Gil Shaham concert, after appropriate introductions from a mutual friend, I mentioned to the elegantly dressed and obviously respectable dowager next to me that I was disappointed in the Opera announcement. She seemed stunned. “What do you want?” she demanded. “All new stuff?” Naturally I stoutly denied the ugly accusation, but things were never really the same for the rest of our five-minute acquaintance. I just think planning an opera season, especially at a large house, is a tightrope act, and I really think Gockley lost his balance this year.

There’s no shame in a safe season of well-produced and familiar works, but there’s little excitement either, and no glory, and ultimately no future. Twenty-five years ago, I would have been, if not excited by this season, at least satisfied enough to send in my money. But now, like all too many of this season’s protagonists, I’m left alone in my chilly garret, wondering why (O mio destino avverso!) cruel fate has decreed that I must part from my long-time love, the operatic stage. Here’s a conversation I’ve had way too many times:

Me (to Opera-Lover): Are you going to [name of the season’s token “modern” opera]?

OL: Oh, no. I hate modern opera! I don’t want to hear that!

Me (too courteous to point out he/she hasn’t heard the music yet): Oh. Are you looking forward to [fill in name of warhorse]?

OL: Oh, no. How many times do I need to see that?

As with anything, the core group that really loves and appreciates the form is fairly small, but steady, and you need their excitement to leaven the lumpen mass of the benignly indifferent (this applies to baseball or football as much as opera or the symphony), and I just don’t see much here to excite that group. The Opera has been doing a lot of outreach, with simulcasts, and the forthcoming movie (and, I hope, DVD) releases, and with lowered ticket prices this season (I salute that sincerely, and wish I liked the season enough to take advantage of it; all they need to do now is acknowledge that most of us have to work to buy our tickets, even at the lower prices, and raise the curtain earlier), but the outreach is mostly technological and not artistic. I’m not sure that filling a stadium for a live simulcast proves much except that you can round up several thousand people who don’t actively hate opera, and who love a free show. In order to move at least some of those people into paying for tickets, you need to break out of the view of opera as a stuffy, dead-end art form, and I don’t think you do that by showing the same ten operas over and over. Do you need to bring people into the opera house only to drive them out after a few years because they’ve already seen everything there?

There is a potential audience, and not just of music lovers, who turned out for St Francois, Dr Atomic, Dead Man Walking, Le Grand Macabre, or anything exciting, controversial, and adventurous. I have friends who bought tickets to those operas who had laughed at me for going to Boheme and Traviata repeatedly. I think what they were responding to was not any individual qualities in those fine works, but the sense that opera was a closed and somewhat outmoded and smug world for the already-initiated, or an expensive and comforting diversion for the comfortable. I’ve often heard that marketing has taken over arts organizations, and I’ve often wished it were actually true. Considering all the useless or dangerous junk that marketing types convince Americans they need (vitamin water? the Republican Party?), why can’t they convince people to sample something they really do need, like more productions of Janacek? There seems to be an assumption that anything outside the established warhorses is going to turn off potential opera-goers, but that’s just a projection of timid and conservative taste. There is absolutely no reason why Janacek would be more foreign or difficult than Puccini for a contemporary American with an interest in music or theater, and I wish musical organizations generally would stop sighing heavily about how difficult some music is, or how new music doesn’t sell out. You don’t tell people stuff is difficult and doesn’t sell. You tell them: Look, this isn’t for the run-of-the-mill opera-goer; this is for more cutting-edge types who don’t mind something a little more adventurous, and I'm thinking this might be something you would appreciate. You create series like the Los Angeles Opera’s Recovered Voices, with an intriguing premise that will keep people coming back. You don’t tell them something never gets put on because about ten people want to see it; you tell them it’s a rare opportunity to judge a controversial work for themselves. I have no background in marketing, but isn’t this obvious? I well remember walking around and around Boston Symphony Hall, nervously scanning all the posters day after day for weeks, thinking about going to a concert. I finally decided that Mozart’s 40th symphony and Beethoven’s 5th would be safe. I went and decided going to the symphony was OK. Dissolve to several years later, and I’m getting all excited when I hear there’s a piece consisting of 100 metronomes set off at the same time (and it doesn’t sound at all the way I thought it would, and I can no longer even remember what I was so afraid of in my cautious early years). See? It can happen. And I was an exceptionally timid youth. And if you still get people who refuse to see anything but the same ten operas over and over, well, to quote another celebrated quipster (not Dr Johnson this time, but also associated with the Word), let the dead bury the dead.

I wasn’t exactly expecting Moses und Aron or Die Gezeichneten to show up on the schedule, but there are plenty of neglected operas that are well within the artistic boundaries of this season that at least would be interesting to experience live; there are older works by Carlisle Floyd, Barber, Hanson, or Menotti, or newer works such as An American Tragedy or Margaret Garner, or even revivals for some of those world premieres that we keep hearing Gockley championed in Houston. But familiarity, down to each phrase of each celebrated aria in each well-known work, is the guiding principle here. Think of what a deep shock it would be to see Wozzeck on this schedule, and you realize how constricted the season is.

When your big step outside of mainstream repertory is Korngold's 88-year-old opera, already beloved by those who know it, by a well-known (albeit mostly for film music) composer, one considered unfashionable for a long-time because of his lush, melodic sound. . . . well, you’re just not that far from Puccini at all. The repertory this season seems particularly narrow in theme as well as style, and a gray sameness settled over the season as soon as I read through the list; most of them are of the “isn’t this romantic?” school, however misguided such an interpretation might be; most of them are of the “what pretty tunes!” school, however superficial such a judgment might be, or however based on familiarity more than anything else. Perhaps any musicologists out there can tell me if there is a single dissonant passage in this entire season; I feel like the dinner guests of the Emperor Heliogabalus, suffocating to death beneath the relentless cascades and accumulating drifts of heavily-perfumed rose petals.

Gertrude Stein is cooler than you will ever be

Her very close friend Marion Walker pleaded with her [to complete her medical degree at Johns Hopkins], she said, but Gertrude Gertrude remember the cause of women, and Gertrude Stein said, you don’t know what it is to be bored.
– Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Consider the creation of Gertrude Stein, that insouciant and magnificent monument of Modernism, that icon of lesbian swank (back when Paris was the dream capital of the Amazons: Natalie Barney’s salon! The Princess de Polignac and her musical evenings!), back when Paris was the shining scene for advanced American artists, Stein the permanent poet composing and composing and always so much being what she was, sitting at her desk among the famous paintings she had bought when no one had heard of her friends Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

That collection has been reunited this summer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and will shortly travel on to New York and Paris. I’ve been making lunch-hour visits to the show, once (or twice) a week since it opened. I’ve always had a Gertrude Stein thing.

I started reading her (3 Lives, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Everybody’s Autobiography, other things then available in random paperbacks) when I was probably 12 or so. My favorite painting at SFMOMA has always been the Matisse Femme au Chapeau from the Stein collection. I was thrilled when I managed to find an unabridged copy of The Making of Americans (back before there was an Internet to provide these things more easily) and I even read the entire thing during a gray January in Boston, propped in bed recovering from eye surgery.

On my one trip to Paris many years ago I made a point of seeking out 27 rue de Fleurus (as if I were one of the American doughboys and then later GIs who dropped in on Gertrude and Alice), even though it is not open to the public. There was a plaque on the wall, which was enough for me. I spent a sunny autumn afternoon at Pere Lachaise cemetery, about an hour of which was devoted to looking for the grave shared by Gertrude and Alice. A caretaker in a beat-up shed in a corner near the entrance (his dim shed contrasting oddly with the elaborate tombs and monuments of the celebrated dead for which the cemetery is renowned) sold poorly mimeographed guides, but I was not interested in finding Jim Morrison like the other Americans there that afternoon, I wanted Stein and Toklas, and their touching joint headstone – Gertrude on the front, Alice on the back – was incorrectly marked on the map.)

Earlier this summer, prompted by this exhibit, I re-read The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, which is delightfully entertaining and disproves her own quip to Hemingway, quoted therein: “Hemingway, remarks are not literature.” Even her score-settling seems good-natured, particularly when she talks about Hemingway, who by contrast tried to trash her with smarmy, nasty gossip in his own Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast. Well, what else is someone like him going to do after borrowing liberally from her style but turn around and trash her? Gertrude at least knew how to do it without making herself look like the one you'd prefer to avoid.

(the Gertrude Stein, with Alice perched on the handle, from the 1970s)

Then I re-read Everybody’s Autobiography, which is written much more in the usual Stein style, and thereby demonstrates how cleverly Stein captured Toklas’s tone (or, at least, created a tone very different from her own, which has become for us the tone of Alice B Toklas). It’s a bit more disjointed and general than the earlier book, but I guess that’s suitable when you’re writing about Everybody rather than one person, and I think Gertrude knew that the glory days were in the first book.

After the Autobiography of Alice B Toklas was published, various writers and painters objected to Gertrude’s version of events (including Matisse, who among other things disliked the characterization of his wife as having a horsey face, and who pointedly said that he thought Mme Sarah Stein was the truly artistically sensitive member of the family – but by then Gertrude was all about Picasso anyway). People get hurt and tossed aside and reality for what it’s worth obscured. The flip side of Gertrude’s persistence and triumph is that lots of nuance and complexity, especially other people’s nuance and complexity, gets smoothed over. It all inevitably gets smoothed over anyway as time passes and memories fade. Gertrude remains imperturbable in our memory of her salon, because she's the one who wrote the most memorably, but there’s sometimes a certain cruel indifference in her attitude (none the less cruel for being comic and probably justified).

Mrs. Van Vechten came. She too was a very tall woman, it would appear that a great many tall ones go to Wellesley, and she too was good-looking. Mrs. Van Vechten told the story of the tragedy of her married life but Gertrude Stein was not particularly interested.
– Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

As in Aesop’s fable of the painter and the lion, it’s useful as always to remember who is telling the story, and to consider why. So I followed up The Autobiography of Alice B with Brenda Wineapple’s joint biography, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein, which is absorbing and fair-minded and helps remind you that one of Gertrude Stein’s greatest creations was Gertrude Stein. I don’t mean that to sound dismissive of her: what about her wasn’t subject to ridicule and discouragement? Her Jewishness, her sexuality, her intellectual interests, her cultural tastes, her style, even her weight, all were sneered at, in various ways and at various times. Yet she persisted and even triumphed. Good for her.

You could have had a real-life equivalent of reading a disinterested biography by walking from SFMOMA across the street to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, which had a fascinating exhibit about Stein and her circle and her times. There are even (appropriately for the librettist of 4 Saints in 3 Acts) relics, including one of Gertrude’s embroidered vests, which was given to Virgil Thomson by Alice (given when Gertrude was gone and Virgil was no longer a threat to Alice but instead a helpful friend and a living link to the glory days long gone with Gertrude). The vest is surprisingly small. Gertrude’s weight was almost always mentioned in descriptions of her, and the CJM exhibit shows how her heft was used to create imperial (yet also motherly) images of her, so the vest size was almost a physical shock. (The exhibit closes September 6, just like the SFMOMA exhibit, but there’s a book available, which I haven’t seen yet.)

I read an interesting biography of Natalie Barney several years ago (Wild Heart by Suzanne Rodriguez). As artistic entertainment for one of her famous gatherings, Barney invited a young American dancer, then unknown, named Isadora Duncan, who brought along an accompanist: a shy young French pianist, then unknown, named Maurice Ravel. This is the sort of thing that makes me roll my eyes in historical novels (“Why, ‘tis my old friend Master Shakespeare! Come, Will, and quaff a flagon of ale with us!”) but in reality the celebrated and accomplished must start somewhere in obscurity and service, so of course it was Isadora Duncan accompanied by Maurice Ravel. Paris was like that, we like to think, and it stays that way in American dreams even though now most of it is like any big city in the world, packed with too many people and overpriced bad art and insistent advertising and the same stores and the stench of cars and cigarettes and the noise of sludgy American pop songs.

The lifestyle porn component of the exhibit is discreet but unmissable; scattered throughout there are old black-and-white photos, blown up so that they occupy entire walls, of the various Steins in their various living and dining rooms, sitting casually amid their Matisses and Picassos – things they bought because they liked them and were friends with the artists and could afford this strange and unpopular new work. (And we like to think that we would have bought what Gertrude and Leo bought, or Sarah and Michael, or that at least we would have been welcome guests at their Saturday nights.) There are quite a few paintings of the young Allan Stein, Sarah and Michael’s son, and you grow familiar with his furrowed eyebrows. There are casual friendly notes from Matisse, Picasso, and others, decorated with witty little sketches. On any visit you can hear visitors sighing in envy or wishing for just one of those paintings to hang on their own walls, or just one painter friend (let alone two) who would turn out to be the cataclysmic artistic force of the century.

(Sadly for my imaginary visit to early modern Paris, I have to admit that Gertrude tended to dominate people and to demand fealty, and though it seems she had the character and intelligence to justify her claims, and I think I would have liked her in person, people like that tend to be suspicious or dismissive of me; I think maybe there’s something too withheld about me, and I suspect Gertrude would not have asked me back. But she is gone and I have her books.)

Leo and Gertrude initially lived together at the address they made famous, 27 rue de Fleurus. He helped interest her in art, though later after they grew apart she eliminated his role in her version of the story. They were so very close, intellectually and emotionally, that the refined aesthetes in their circle, pausing in their connoisseur’s appreciation of the newly stylish Italian primitives, could titter nastily over the occasional rumor of incest. He kept on talking and she started writing. She became known for her heft and he went on long fasts, seeking relief from his delicate stomach. She found Alice B Toklas and cubism (in Picasso’s painting and in her writing) and he found Nina of Montparnasse, a street-singer/street-walker who seemed deeply and genuinely attached to him.


You can see the influence of Japanese prints throughout the exhibit, in the flat arrangement of space and the profusion of patterns that clash harmoniously and even in the popularity of scenes of intimate and domestic life. There’s a beautiful Picasso from his blue period, Soup, in which the young mother’s dark chignon and stooped posture as she offers a steaming bowl to her skipping daughter look very Japanese, and indeed Sarah and Michael displayed it with Asian instead of other modern art.

Then the way you showed your interest in advanced art changed from having a taste for Japanese prints to having a taste for African masks. These changes happen subtly and we all have our stopping points. Leo found he could not tolerate cubism, or Gertrude’s writing, both of which he considered childish nonsense. Gertrude and Leo were probably too close to survive together no matter what other paths they took.

There are things that were once considered daringly, even shockingly, modern but are now seen as romantic reminders of a lovely bygone day: La Traviata and Impressionist paintings of train stations are examples of those things. Cubism, setting aside its reputation as important art one should like, still looks intractably modern, determinedly “difficult” in design and almost perversely restricted in palette to drab shades of rust brown, gray, white, and black. This was around the time that Pound pointed out that literature is news that stays news.

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”
– Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans

Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude is in the exhibit, as it needs to be. The two became friends as she sat for sitting after sitting (I think she said over eighty of them). He was unhappy with the face and painted it out and then she and Leo left to spend the summer in Italy (because people could do things like that then – not have a steady job and buy paintings and live in Paris and then spend the summer in Spain or Italy – was everything just cheaper then?). While she was gone he painted the face from memory. When he was told that Gertrude didn’t look like that he replied, “She will.”

And if Gertrude had not created a Gertrude for us then Picasso’s famous portrait would become our Gertrude (like all those blurred society women of the time who now exist for us only as brushstrokes by John Singer Sargent). In the exhibit there is a small self-portrait by Picasso, done around the same time, hanging right next to the larger portrait of Stein. When I saw them together I realized for the first time that the face he painted for Stein is basically his face.

I thought it was sly of the curators to hang the pictures this way, but in a later room there’s a picture of Stein at her desk, with her portrait behind her, and the same Picasso self-portrait hanging right by it – so perhaps the curators were sly, and perhaps Picasso was sly, and perhaps Gertrude, who in her will mentioned specifically only one painting from the famous collection, this portrait, bequeathing it to the most prestigious American museum, the Metropolitan in New York – perhaps Gertrude was the slyest of all.

A possibly more touching painting is Picasso’s tiny Hommage a Gertrude, probably a gift for her name day (the feast of St Gertrude seems to have shifted to and from several dates in mid-November, so I don't know when exactly he paid this particular homage), with angels trumpeting and holding baskets of rich fruits, done in his distinctive style. It's both baroque and modern, grand and intimate. Gertrude hung it over her bed.

It’s the Matisses that have really dazzled me in this show. I’ve always liked color, so I think I probably would have responded to Matisse before he became beloved. His greens astonish me. Even paintings that I think, at first glance, are dominated by other colors turn out to have greens threaded through them in surprising, vivid ways.

Making weekly lunchtime trips to the exhibit enables me to handle the crowds by darting in and out of convenient openings. There are Cezanne bathers scattered through the show (one of them surprisingly tucked into the gallery devoted otherwise to paintings by Matisse’s pupils). There’s one small one that is almost always free for viewing, hanging right between one big room (with the Femme au chapeau and the portrait of Stein and Picasso's mysterious and authoritative Boy with a Horse and his lovely rose period portrait of a naked Fernande, his mistress at the time) and another big room (with mostly Matisses from Sarah and Michael’s collection, including the vibrant Young Sailor and the sheer mysteriously balanced perfection of Pink Onions).

I found myself tending to linger in front of the same canvases over and over – for instance, the lush and poetic Blue Nude, now in Baltimore and a long-time favorite of mine (previously seen here a few years ago in an exhibit of Matisse’s sculpture; and indeed next to it in this show there is a small Matisse sculpture of a naked woman in the same pose as the Blue Nude, and next to that sculpture is a still life that includes a painted representation of the sculpture).

But the painting that really knocked me out was Matisse's Fontainebleau Forest (Autumn Landscape). I found myself staring at it longer and longer each visit, surprised more and more deeply at how the vivid colors shaped and shaded the view, colors harmoniously contrasting and rhyming and flickering into a sense of unseen but rustling life in the clearing and the trees and the sky over a forest in fall. This painting is currently in a private collection, so I will probably never get to see it again. My memory will have to come to the aid of the small picture in the hefty catalogue.

I feel very fortunate to have been able to visit this exhibit as often as I did. The collection was dispersed even during the lifetime of its collectors, and by then they knew they had been lucky enough to be in the right time and at the right place and in the right circumstances and that their earlier days would become legend. The colors and shapes on these canvases forced the world to see differently. We take that way of seeing for granted now. So much gets lost and forgotten along the way. The canvases remain, to be looked at, and the books, to be read.

Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.
(Silence)
My long life, my long life.
– Gertrude Stein

The Mother of Us All