the Cotton Blossom returns!

When I wrote (here) about last June's San Francisco Opera production of Show Boat, I ended with the hope that it would be released as part of their new series of DVDs. I'm getting my wish! The opera's website lists it as coming in June, but Amazon, where I first saw the listing this morning, gives 30 June as the date. They also have the cover art, which SF Opera doesn't have up yet. Amazon can be frightening. I'm looking forward to comparing the DVD with my memories of this generally excellent production.

most of one of the posters outside the Opera House during last year's run of Show Boat

a fantastic new Flute

Kenneth Branagh's film of The Magic Flute was made in 2006 but is only now being released in the United States. I have no idea why there was such a delay – the film is captivating, and Mozart is well served. Over the years I've seen quite a few of Branagh's films (he's described on the DVD case as "the director of Thor," which is accurate but not adequate), and though I generally liked them (some of them quite a lot) I was really not prepared for the excellence and inventiveness of his Magic Flute. I preferred it to Ingmar Bergman's celebrated film adaptation. Even if, like me, you feel you've seen enough Magic Flutes to tide you over for the next decade, or two, I urge you to check out this one.

As with Bergman's film, this is an adaptation for film of the opera (as opposed to a recording of a stage production). Branagh did the adaptation, as well as directing, and he had the brilliant idea of setting the story in the midst of World War I, the war that broke open the modern world. Before I saw the movie I would have hesitated to declare that a brilliant idea, but the result is completely convincing, and accommodates the familiar story with surprising ease. The setting amid the trenches and the slaughter immediately raises the stakes, and many elements that before had a fairy-tale arbitrariness now make life-and-death sense: the vow of silence, for example, when Tamino cannot tell even Pamina what his mission is. For once I wasn't irritated that he didn't turn to comfort her. Or the trial by fire, when he and Pamina, both holding the flute, actually walk through enemy fire in their quest for peace.

But I shouldn't make the staging sound too literal: though there are some substitutions (the fierce serpent at the beginning is a hissing grenade, which releases a long tail of black smoke), we still have the titular flute and the spell-casting silver bells, and there are elements that evoke Surrealism, one of the several artistic responses to the war: a trench-wall of sandbags sings a chorus; characters fly and bounce and appear in different locations; when Papageno dreams of one day finding a Papagena, he is suddenly in a bright flowery field, and a huge pair of red lips float Magritte-like in front of him, until he suddenly snaps back to reality, where he's in a cell.

The ambiguities of war help explain some of the story's seeming contradictions: who can tell who is good and who is not and why, in the middle of battle? The Three Ladies first appear when the grenade knocks out Tamino; they float down from the night sky, all in wimpled white, like nurses or nuns. Then when they see how handsome the young soldier is, they pull off their headresses and show a lot more cleavage than nuns or nurses generally show. It's amusing, and part of learning how deceptive appearances are, particularly during wartime.

There's a constant tension in the film between the realistic and the magical (between war and peace, you might say). At the beginning as the overture plays a white butterfly flutters in musical time over green fields and then over the trenches and then war planes drop out of the clouds and also start rolling and dipping in time. The three boys appear and disappear and float in air or roll out of chimneys (their white and beige garments showing no sign of the soot billowing out with them) but they also behave like three actual little boys: when they clap their hands over Papageno's mouth, they do it a little too roughly, enjoying the mischief of it. (There are many excellent touches like this in the performances, as when Pamina hastily smooths her hair before seeing Tamino again.)

There's no simple equation of, say, the Queen of the Night with the Germans and Sarastro with the British. She is bent on war, driven by a personal enmity towards Sarastro (as in Bergman's film, he is a former lover of hers). She makes her entrance backlit, astride a tank. As she sings her first aria to Tamino, commanding him to rescue her captured daughter, the camera moves in until her mouth, issuing its sparkler notes, takes up the whole left-hand side of the screen, and as the other tanks in the background slowly move over the horizon, they look as if they are all issuing from her mouth. The movie is full of inventive touches like that.

Sarastro sometimes seems to be a medical man, at other times a military leader. Subtle touches make him more complex than usual: Sarastro is a good man, but how good, ultimately, were any of the men who led the war? One of the mystic signs of wisdom inscribed on the wall of his temple is the famous line from Horace which the British Empire took from the Roman, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and fitting to die for one's fatherland), a reminder of the imperialistic, patriarchal culture of war and patriotism that led to such massive carnage and devastation.

Monostatos is still a dark-skinned man, and initially I was a little surprised that Branagh didn't just change that to avoid the racially-tinged treatment of the character. But it lends some complexity to him; he feels he's victimized because of his skin color (he smashes mirrors as he laments his appearance), and it's a reminder of the imperial era's pervasive racism (he first appears in sort of Indian garb). But this staging doesn't excuse Monostatos or make him too sympathetic; he still tries to rape Pamina. There are darker-skinned men who have positions of authority in Sarastro's army. The crowd that supports Sarastro contains many different types of people (as many as were ruled by the British Empire), and I felt this conveyed the universal import of the story better than Bergman's device of showing "faces of many lands" during the overture.

This is the only Flute I've seen in which the very end, the final attack against Sarastro by the Queen of the Night, Monostatos, and the Three Ladies, doesn't feel sort of arbitrary. Amid the celebrations of the triumph and subsequent wedding of Tamino and Pamina, the Queen and company scale the walls of Sarastro's tower. Sarastro tries to help her but the Queen's rage and despair are so great she chooses death rather than his help. This is not only psychologically plausible, it also helps complete the theme of suicide – both Pamina and then Papageno finally resist the urge to kill themselves (though he's never quite as serious about it), but the Queen cannot bring herself to reconcile with her enemy.

Yes, this is an opera, so music must have the final word, and fortunately the visual felicities and thought-provoking staging are in service of an excellent performance. James Conlon conducted, pacing and shaping the music beautifully (and I believe I also saw him in a Hitchcock-like cameo as an officer in the trenches, comforting a sharpshooter). Joseph Kaiser as Tamino really dominates the story as a leading man in a way that stage Taminos usually don't – and here the wartime setting definitely helps; as I have previously noted, Tamino is the most hilariously unmanly of all opera heroes, but there's something really at stake in what he does here, and the chivalrous idealism that motivates his actions movingly evokes the high-minded romanticism of many of the young men killed in the war. The charismatic Kaiser is an excellent actor as well as a singer of warmth and sensitivity.

Benjamin Jay Davis as Papageno also gained from the wartime setting; he's still a bird-catcher (he first shows up with a canary used to test for poison gas) and still fun-loving, but Davis brings out a wistful side that sometimes get shortchanged when it's all about Papageno guzzling booze (here his drink of choice is beer, not wine, which shows how careful the adaptation is with details; of course a working-class man like Papageno would drink beer, not wine). Rene Pape brings his sonorous authority to Sarastro. The women are just as strong; Amy Carson is a lovely Pamina (when Tamino first sees her portrait, he imagines dancing with her, in a swirly swoony black-and-white dance that epitomizes youthful romanticism). Lyubov Petrova brings surprising nuance to the Queen of the Night. The men in particular had clear diction, though it's probably also more difficult to understand words sung by higher voices. Generally all the soloists are clear. Ensembles are more difficult to understand, which is to be expected. I did wish the DVD had the option of subtitles, though in general they weren't necessary.

The excellent English libretto is by Stephen Fry – no filler, no banging rhymes, no straining for effect; mostly just good straightforward English rhymes, and the right balance of jokiness and seriousness in the dialogue. I had to laugh when Papageno rescues Pamina and tells her about Tamino who loves her after seeing her portrait, and she says, "But where is he?" I always wonder that too during that scene. But then she and Papageno sing that all who are deceitful and treacherous should be punished, and we see the battle lines and the trenches of a war brought about by deceit and treachery and foolishness, with all the attendant waste and slaughter of a generation, and I found myself, to my surprise, bursting into tears.

The film is being released in theaters Sunday 9 June, with a reprise screening Tuesday 11 June. In some theaters the Sunday screening will be followed by a webcast Q-and-A session from London with Branagh (check www.emergingpictures.com to check for showtimes and theaters near you). The film is also being released on DVD on Tuesday 11 June, and is available on Amazon and the other usual sources.

fireworks & ashes

Going to concerts doesn’t leave much time for writing about them. It's been a busy time and I have quite a little backlog built up.

About a week ago I heard Philippe Jaroussky with the Cleveland-based Apollo’s Fire Baroque Orchestra, headed by Jeannette Sorrell, in a program of arias and instrumental works by Handel and Vivaldi. Each program held a little card advertising a free Jaroussky download; these little cards are aptly named dropcards because drop is what they did, littering the floors and corridors in Hertz Hall after the concert like the autumn leaves that had not started to fall even though it was late October because the summer heat had not gone away, and it was downright too hot that Sunday afternoon. It would have been a nice day to lie in the shade or maybe work in a garden, but not so much to be in a packed overheated concert hall, no matter how attractive the program. Also, my allergies were really bad, I guess because of the heat and subsequent confusion among the plants as to when they should release their pollens, and I had taken some meds, so there was that.


Sorrell, who conducted from the harpsichord, is petite and lively with an explosive mass of curly red hair. She addressed the audience frequently; a little too frequently for my taste, even if I hadn’t been leaning towards the slightly drugged and churlish, since most of what she said was I would think pretty much stuff most of us already knew, since many in the full house were clearly baroque aficionados (and were heading over to hear Viveca Genaux with Philharmonia Baroque at First Congregational right after this concert; in fact a friend generously offered me his ticket since after a week of constant concerts he was concerted out – and if a retired man feels that way, what hope does a working stiff like me have, so I declined with thanks). Sorrell noted that this concert was the group’s “San Francisco debut,” even though we weren’t in San Francisco, and her tone kind of indicated that she knew that but she said it anyway, which I thought was a little odd. So, for the record, it was their Bay Area debut. I’m not a big fan of little talks from the stage, though I do make occasional exceptions, no doubt to the delight of all, and since I was way off to the left side of the hall the spoken remarks sounded a bit muffled (though the music came through fine), which made them a little tiresome to me.

The group had the occasional tuning problem, which is an occupational hazard of playing early-music-style instruments, but on the whole they were fleet and glittering and did Apollo proud, and they clearly enjoyed playing for us as much as we enjoyed listening to them. There were a number of instrumental pieces interspersed with the arias, including several portrayals of tempests at sea or in the soul. Olivier Brault was the violin soloist for a Vivaldi violin concerto (in E-flat, Op. 8, No. 5, "Tempesta di Mare"), and he bobbed up and down with concentrated delight as he played, his long hair tied back in a very eighteenth-century style with a wide yellow ribbon. The concert was officially billed as “Handel and Vivaldi Fireworks,” and though there was plenty of sparkling furor, I thought that Jaroussky’s pure clear countertenor was best suited to the arias of plaintive regret. He is fairly tall and thin and has a Caravaggian face, and his body shakes slightly to his roulades in an oddly birdlike way.


The audience was quite enthusiastic and frankly started getting on my nerves more and more, since their enthusiasm led to more and more exclaiming over the music during the music. I’m thrilled that Jaroussky was singing some random woman’s favorite aria, but maybe she could hold that joy secretly in her heart instead of talking over the music? Same thing for the other random woman when he then sang her favorite aria. And I could have done without the watch-alarm obbligato in the second half.

And I was still under the influence of Simon Keenlyside’s recital a few days earlier, the magnetic fascination of which I completely failed to convey here. At least one friend who was also at both concerts was in the same mood as I was, but then he is a baritone himself and was put off by the cult of the countertenors. So, sorry, but you see how sadly it was with me, and unfortunately I felt a bit disconnected from what was really a quite enjoyable concert.


This was my first time hearing Jaroussky live. I became a big fan of his a few years back after watching the DVD of Stefano Landi’s Il Sant’Alessio, in which Jaroussky gives a memorable performance as the titular saint (also known as Saint Alexis), a fifth-century Roman patrician who announced to his wife-to-be on the day of their arranged marriage that he was putting himself in God’s hands and leaving. His family did not see him or hear of him for seventeen years, during which time he wandered as a holy beggar. The abandoned young wife of the unconsummated marriage continued to live with his parents as a daughter, and all mourned his mysterious absence from their lives. After the seventeen years he returned incognito to his father’s house, where no one recognized him, and he lived in a crawlspace under the stairs for another seventeen years as a lowly servant/dependent of the house. His identity was discovered on his deathbed, and a mysterious voice from Heaven proclaimed him a man of God.

This strange, Hawthorne-like fable (in fact Hawthorne wrote a very similar story, about a man who leaves his wife and children and lives secretly for decades apart from them) is brought to mesmerizing life by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, with strong assistance from director Benjamin Lazar. It’s a really stunningly beautiful production; each shot looks like a baroque painting, which is probably why Jaroussky’s face always reminds me of a Caravaggio.

random previews: opera

The San Francisco Opera season is well underway, but the one genuinely exciting, do-not-miss production is coming up in a few weeks: Karita Mattila in The Makropulos Case. As for the rest of the season, it doesn’t exactly heat the blood. For a while I thought Gockley’s aim was to turn the local house into the Met Lite, but at this point I’m thinking we should be so lucky, given the Met’s more adventurous repertory and staging in the last few years. We’re eating their dust out here in the West, not that I think the majority of the local audience minds. They seem quite in tune with Gockley’s advocacy of – well, let’s try for something neutral between “beloved classics” and “exhausted warhorses” – the more familiar works in the repertory, sung by already well-established names.

Anyone in search of anything more adventurous or challenging than People You’ve Heard Of, In Works You’ve Already Heard (or even those just searching for novelty) is out of luck. Gockley and the bulk of the San Francisco audience seem perfectly suited to each other. That’s not a compliment. Any potential audience members intrigued by works like Le Grand Macabre or St Francois are once again left to fend for themselves out there in the avant-garde wilds. Thank goodness for DVDs! What we're getting here are brand-name works presented in a more or less plush and traditional way. Nothing here is going to frighten the horses. Going to the opera in San Francisco now isn’t like going to the Museum of Modern Art; it’s like going to Bloomingdale’s.

By the way, I don’t really buy the claims that what San Francisco Opera is currently doing is “all about the voice”; everyone says that these days casting the big Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner works is difficult to impossible, whereas we’re living in a golden age for Handel and Rossini singing. So are we getting Radamisto or La Donna del Lago? We are not. We’re getting inadequate productions of the big Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner works, because a large segment of the audience isn’t interested in anything unfamiliar and no one is interested in convincing them that new stuff can be fun and engaging.

Yes, Aida and Madama Butterfly are great works, and there’s no disgrace in presenting them, but for a veteran of the opera house there isn’t a lot of urgency in hearing them; that’s the thing about Top 40 programming – sooner or later, and probably sooner, you’re going to get another chance to hear that piece. Yet opera is a strange and addictive drug: a few months ago I looked up the performance dates of Aida for a friend, and suddenly was strangely excited at the thought of hearing the opera – Aida, of all things, an opera that has never interested me much outside of Leontyne Price’s involvement with it.

I ended up feeling I didn’t really need to pay those prices for another Aida, though Zajick was definitely a temptation. It turns out to be just as well, since I could have written the reviews without seeing it: the Zandra Rhodes designs were eye-catching but didn’t always work well, and the cast was vocally uneven. (I had seen Zandra Rhodes’s production of the Pearl Fishers and though I loved the colors I thought the setting was too cartoony.) Sung drama is the most basic form of drama, and an art form that has survived in varying forms for centuries deserves an audience that thinks of it as something more than candy-colored camp.


As for the rest of the season, I enjoyed Werther; and though Nozze di Figaro is one of my favorite operas, I loathe this production, which I’ve already seen in two different revivals (my mostly negative thoughts on that 2006 revival are here, and it was actually less vulgar than the first); I love Madama Butterfly, but feel I’ve seen it enough for a while. I did spring for a ticket to Cyrano, because I’ve always admired Domingo and the only other time I’ve heard him live was in Herodiade. And then there’s the Janacek; I assume we have Mattila’s star power to thank for bringing us one of this great composer’s fascinating works. I honestly don’t understand why he isn’t as popular as Puccini – to me he has that same kind of emotional directness and melodic richness. And Jenufa has one of the few happy endings I find convincing, even inspiring. So that’s the one can’t-miss for me this season.

I’m not excluding the upcoming June Ring Cycle from that assessment, either; I hoped that Walkure last June would guide and convince me one way or the other, but apparently I got the vocal off-night, which seems to be how these things go for me (so if I end up not buying tickets, you can be assured you’re in for a treat!). The production itself is not very interesting (my thoughts on Walkure are here, and in there is a link to my thoughts on the Rheingold, which I saw in both DC and here).

Fortunately other local groups are taking up the operatic slack for those who maybe don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for their hundredth Butterfly:

On October 30 and 31, Urban Opera is presenting a Purcell pasticcio, the Witch of Endor. They’re a new group and though I missed their previous presentation, Dido and Aeneas, it was highly praised.

Cal Performances is presenting Lorin Maazel's Castleton Festival Opera in two Britten works, The Rape of Lucretia on March 24 and 25 and Albert Herring on March 26 and 27.

Ensemble Parallele is presenting Philip Glass’s Orphee, one of his Cocteau operas, on February 26 and 27, as a follow-up to their kick-ass Wozzeck.

Berkeley West Edge Opera is in a nifty new space in El Cerrito and has some interesting programs, starting with Handel’s Xerxes on November 13, 19, and 21, followed by an adaptation of Carmen called the Carmen Fixation and a new opera by Clark Suprynowicz and Amanda Moody called Caliban’s Dreams.

Festival Opera hasn’t announced its 2011 productions as far as I know. For a while they were doing one warhorse and one more unusual work (like Rorem’s Our Town or Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream) but lately it’s been two warhorses. I hope they resume their more adventurous ways. But even if they don’t, they present solid productions in a nice smaller theater, at a much lower cost than San Francisco Opera.

The other big opera excitement for me is the James Levine 40th anniversary CD and DVD sets. Cumulatively the sets are expensive, though the per-disc price is quite low. (And by not buying tickets to Aida, Butterfly, and Figaro, I more than covered the expense.) And click on those links and look at what you get! What I really love and admire here is the commitment to new or “difficult” works (there was a time when Mozart and Wagner were considered difficult. . . ). Two recordings each of Wozzeck and Lulu, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in Les Troyens and The Great Gatsby. . . everyone will have his or her particular jewels here, but anyone who doesn't find this collection thrilling . . . uh, is probably a big fan of the current programming at San Francisco Opera. I haven’t watched any of the DVDs yet, and have only listened to about half of the CDs, but I’m thrilled with the set and can’t recommend it too highly. My one complaint so far: the packaging is flimsy and difficult to use. I almost wrecked the DVD box trying to get the tray of discs out, and removing the CDs means reaching into the cardboard envelope and sliding them out by touching the disc – so a fail on the packaging, but the recordings are sheer gold.

Los Angeles Opera's Recovered Voices: the DVDs

At least two of Los Angeles Opera's recent productions from their exciting Recovered Voices series, which features composers silenced by Nazi Germany, are being released on DVD: one disc* features two one-act operas, Zemlinsky's Der Zwerg (The Dwarf) and Ullmann's Der Zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug), and the other features Braunfels's Die Vogel, based on The Birds by Aristophanes. James Conlon, the guiding force behind the series, conducts both.

I didn't see any mention of the DVDs in my admittedly cursory look through the LA Opera's website, and these don't seem to be scheduled for release in the United States anytime soon, or at least I couldn't find them on either Amazon.com or ArkivMusic.com, but the links above will bring you to the British site MDT, which is extremely reliable in my experience and usually has lower prices anyway, and the discs are not region-coded, so they will play on US equipment. I especially regretted not getting down to LA to see the Braunfels, so I'm excited these are forthcoming.

* Check out the blurb on the product page from the Bay Area's own Opera Tattler!

2 from the 30s

I recently saw two films from the 1930s, one of which I had wanted to see for a long time and the other of which I had never heard of until recently.

The one I’d wanted to see for a long time was the famous 1935 Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Max Reinhardt (or Professor Max Reinhardt, as the accompanying period newsreels ostentatiously refer to him), with the assistance of William Dieterle, and based on Reinhardt’s Hollywood Bowl production. That must have been a wild evening; wild enough, at least, to convince Warner Bros. to film it. The DVD extras included several contemporaneous shorts about the production which tread the usual line between a slightly abashed self-consciousness from the American movie stars that they're tackling the mighty Shakespeare (but gosh, that Bill Shakespeare sure wrote some swell comedy parts that still bring down the house!) and a certain smirky feeling that, after all, it is the American movie stars that the public really wants, no matter what the highbrows think. There’s a weird and amusing musical short film in the extras called Shake Mr Shakespeare in which various Shakespearean characters step out of the books and into Hollywood, where Romeo and Juliet break up over who gets star billing, and they take turns singing pop numbers about what they’d be like in Hollywood (including a really unfortunate but I have to say, "transgressively" hilarious, moment in which Othello gets some Al Jolson-type treatment).

But it’s not as if they left a whole lot of Shakespeare on screen anyway – the characters kept starting speeches and then we'd be on to something else when I thought they were just beginning. Hippolyta (Verree Teasdale) in particular suffers from this treatment; her character arc turns into a close-up grimace at the beginning and a close-up smile at the end and not much in between. Like his future wife, Theseus (Ian Hunter) is also a bit part here, and both speak what lines they have with an old-fashioned stage manner that is both charming and slightly comical to us.

Any possible dirty jokes are removed with American (or is it German?) efficiency and thoroughness, so that during the interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe the lovers kiss “the wall” and not “the wall’s hole.” The interlude falls a bit flat; it would have been more entertaining and in keeping with the play if they had parodied earlier movie styles (Pyramus as Valentino or Thisbe as Theda Bara, maybe), the way Britten parodied the recently revived bel canto operas in his setting of the play. People (including, apparently, Professor Reinhardt) sometimes think the interlude is just crude knockabout, but like all parodies it actually requires a subtle and sophisticated knowledge of artistic conventions and cliches, and just how much is too much.

The Hollywood stars – the ones whose names you’d still recognize, mostly – are fine; meaning their more natural screen style is closer to our current style. Olivia de Havilland as Hermia, in one of her first film roles, is already an astonishingly ripe beauty, and she works well with the slightly fey musical comedy buoyancy of her Lysander, Dick Powell. Jimmy Cagney is fine as Bottom, but honestly I’ve always found the character over-rated and sort of annoying. And speaking of annoying, Mickey Rooney is Puck.

Well – annoying isn’t quite the right word. He’s very effective at what he’s supposed to be doing, which is to be a screechy, uncanny, troublesome sprite. He has little horns, and is probably more naked than you really want Mickey Rooney to be (someone on Netflix worried that all that childish nudity among the fairies would lead to this movie being banned, which is a good example of decent impulses tipping over into insane prurience and depravity). There are interestingly dark undertones to the fairy world, though they don’t go as far as the S/M scenes I’ve witnessed in some more modern stage productions. Oberon and his followers are batlike, distinguishing them from Titania’s gauzier crew. There is an actual little Indian prince, beturbaned and jeweled, for Oberon to take from his queen for whatever purpose, and he gets a surprising amount of screen time, but since Titania loses her speech about his mother, a votaress of her order in the spiced Indian air, most of his emotional impact is gone.

He sure does look fancy in his little ornate jacket, though. The movie’s main strength is its visuals. It’s rare for me to wish a black and white movie were in color, but it’s too bad this one was made before color films became the norm. Theseus’s court inhabits elegant sets and travels in fantastically ornate chariots; all sorts of camera tricks in the woods create a haunting effect, beautiful and slightly creepy in the way of German romanticism.

Mendelssohn’s incidental music is used, as arranged by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (and the dances are by Bronislava Nijinska – clearly, care was taken). Korngold shows up briefly in one of the features, playing piano and marking his score, which is the sort of archival footage I love, though it would have been even better if they had actually allowed him to speak, possibly about the music, and maybe not spent quite so much time with Joe E. Brown talking about Bill Shakespeare’s comedy bits. They hired fancy, but they knew fancy doesn’t bring in the fans, at least in the short term.

I was reminded of the 1936 As You Like It, which also features music extensively, so extensively that they had to make room for it by removing all the jokes. The original score is by William Walton, so you can decide if it was worth the exchange; I was happy to hear it (after all, I've heard all the jokes in As You Like It). And once again anything resembling a dirty joke is gone, with the exception of one I suspect they just didn’t get (Touchstone’s “He that sweetest rose will find / must find Love’s prick and Rosalind”). This is most likely the closest I will ever come to a production in which Touchstone actually wears motley and a fool’s cap and carries a bauble. If you like contemplating relics of vanished theatrical eras, this has its appeal, kind of like seeing the Marx Brothers in the film version of their stage hit The Cocoanuts (yes, they spell it that way) or Laurence Olivier in his film Oedipus Rex (with those very theatrical rolled r’s and the oh-so-daring-for-midcentury use of masks – African-style masks).

Speaking of Olivier, he is Orlando, making this the first of his Shakespeare films, though he didn’t direct it. May I just say that I’ve never really gotten the Olivier thing? I suspect you had to see him on stage, or see him before you had heard over and over that he was The Greatest Actor in the World. His Rosalind is Elisabeth Bergner, constantly smiling and with a slight but noticeable (and not unappealing) accent. Her one-note portrayal wears out long before the role does. If you ever wondered what it would be like if Bjork played Rosalind, here’s a chance to see something close.

(I've also seen Branagh’s As You Like It, which is oddly set in Japan – not among the Japanese, which would be fine, but among an English colony in late nineteenth century Japan, one that has adopted all of the more elegantly photogenic customs of the country. But how can Rosalind and her father be exiled from their homeland and find new life in the forest when they’re already far from home? None of them belong there, so how can any of them possibly be the rightful ruler? And this isn’t some ironic take on colonization, an interpretation the play doesn’t support anyway. It's just a weird, though undoubtedly decorative, misfire. I don’t understand why Branagh does stuff like this – like filming every last word of Hamlet, even the little jokes about theatrical fads of the day, because he’s being authentic and faithful to the play, and then setting the whole thing in the nineteenth century, which is completely out of the blue. Maybe he just likes the uniforms.)

The other film was one I’d never heard of until Criterion released it several weeks ago: Leo McCarey’s 1937 Make Way for Tomorrow (though it could just as easily have carried the title of his other film that year: The Awful Truth). I hate to say I can’t believe I’d never heard of this movie, because that implies that if it’s any good, I would of course have heard of it, but . . . I can’t believe I’d never heard of this movie! It has an irony, emotional honesty, and sadness you seldom get in American movies. My curiosity was piqued when I read it influenced Ozu’s Tokyo Story, which is one of my favorite movies. The stories are similar: elderly parents are unable to carry on in their old home, and their unenthusiastic children, who have moved on in life, try to deal with the situation.

The movie opens on the parents’ snug, picture-perfect little Connecticut cottage, which has just been repossessed by the bank. The father (Victor Moore), an accountant, has been sick and unemployed for several years, though he and his wife (Beulah Bondi) feel (with varying degrees of conviction and self-delusion) that he’s bound to get a job soon, despite his age and the economic devastation of the Great Depression. They’ve worked all their lives, but have perhaps been improvident, or unfortunate, or unable to put aside anything substantial while raising their five children (it’s pointed out in one of the extra features that this was before such controversial measures as Social Security or unemployment insurance were passed by the Roosevelt administration, providing at least a fragile safety net for Americans, which the Republican party and their stooges have spent my entire adult life trying to destroy).

Four of the children arrive at the cottage (the fifth is a daughter who lives across the country in California) to be told the parents are now homeless. One thing I love about this movie is how much is suggested and left for our interpretation: one of the sons, who comes in singing “Mother” (“M is for the many . . . .”) immediately gets drinks for everyone, and makes funny but pointed jibes about the other siblings. It’s never suggested that he should take the parents in; clearly something about his situation (alcoholism? short-term jobs and poverty?) renders him marginal enough so that no one even bothers to suggest it.

The parents must go to different homes. The father goes with one reluctant daughter, and the mother goes to live in New York City with the oldest son, his wife, and their daughter, who’s in her late teens/early twenties. The son is employed, but his wife has to help make ends meet by teaching bridge, which the mother persists in thinking of as “playing” bridge. One thing that makes these scenes so wonderful is the way your sympathies shift among all the parties; in particular there’s a bridge lesson during which a creaking rocking chair sums up all the difficulties of the situation, and there's a phone call from Mother to Father (sick in his sour daughter’s stingy household) that is beautifully shot: first we see her filling the screen, with the bridge students behind her; she’s talking too loudly on the phone, as older people did, and the students, all middle-aged, well-off men and women in evening clothes, are initially disturbed by the noise, until (as the camera shifts so that we see them in the foreground, and her back to them and us) silent sympathy with the old woman’s forced separation from her husband brings a short-lived air of tender sadness and sympathy to the room. But then the film moves on, and there’s also comedy in the old people’s somewhat heedless inability to adapt to their new worlds.

The last part of the film is the final day the two old people spend together, before the sick father goes to the warmer weather of his daughter's home in California. She only has room for one more, so the mother is going to the old people’s home that had earlier horrified her. As in Murnau’s Sunrise, the city becomes sort of a fairyland for a couple in love, only this time the couple is old, and about to part for what they know is the last time. They go to the hotel where they spent their honeymoon, decades earlier, and the manager hears that they honeymooned there and treats them to dinner. Then they get a final dance (with the bandleader changing the tune so it's something they can dance to) before rushing to the train station (skipping the planned final dinner with their children) where they will say their final goodbye. It's one of the movie's ironies that the big city here has the same function as the forest of Arden, or the Athenian wood: it's the place where the wanderers are freed and find their truest life. Only here, it's not a place of darkness. In all honesty, I felt this part of the movie went on a little too long, partly because it was difficult for me to believe in such an unbroken day of kindness given to the obscure and poor, and partly because its sweet quality of a dream fulfilled means there’s less of the ambiguity, and the Chaplinesque fluidity between comedy and pathos, that is so impressive in the earlier scenes.

Though there are some moments that bring you back to their situation: as they pass a haberdashery with a “Man Wanted” sign in the window, the father goes inside, pretending he needs something; he comes out a moment later, empty-handed, and though it’s not spelled out he clearly went in, ever hopeful, to ask about another job he’s too old and sick to get. After seeing in the earlier scenes how difficult the old people could be, it’s slightly disappointing that they’re smoothed out a bit in these later scenes, but maybe that’s the point: we’re seeing them in the later sequence not as their children would see them, but as strangers would, and it can be so much easier to be kind to passing strangers. Criterion refers to this film as "among American cinema's purest tearjearkers" but I strongly disagree. Yes, it's a tearjerker story, but the way it's told has too much comedy and irony undercutting the purity of the tearjerking. If it's all about getting cheap tears, they would have made it a simpler story, and this isn’t really a story about good people and bad people (though it does wish we were all better people).

this looks promising

I have mixed feelings about attending livecasts (to me, they have the disadvantages of live performance -- rigid start times, sitting crammed in with other people -- without the compensating thrill of in-the-moment live sound, and in addition, they're generally more expensive to attend than it would be to buy a DVD) but I'm glad they exist, especially these days when the larger local organizations (that would be the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony, in case you were wondering) are retreating headlong and frantically into the most conservative possible programming and staging. So the more variety available, the better. The Met obviously is the current big leader in these livecasts, but there's increasing competition from a group called Opera in Cinema, which has been livecasting from La Scala and the Gran Teatre del Liceu. (Click here for their website, where you can enter your zipcode and find out which theaters near you offer their shows, and also see some of their previous offerings.)


So here's the promising part: Opera in Cinema is teaming with Opus Arte and so will be adding livecasts from Covent Garden (the first livecast will be September 10, when the Royal Opera opens with Jonathan Miller's production of Cosi Fan Tutte). And not only will they be livecasting from these three great European houses, but they have a new ballet series, and a Shakespeare series from the Globe Theater in London -- I can't wait for that one. Perhaps my dream of seeing an actual performance of Timon of Athens will be coming true! And I have high hopes that DVDs will result, since Opus Arte regularly releases very high quality sets -- in fact, they released one of my recent favorites, Messiaen's Saint Francois from Amsterdam. Remember the days when we'd occasionally get live stuff like that out here? Ah, what an opera fan I am -- longing for the good old days!

fun stuff I may or may not get to: July & August

These are the doldrums months for theater, and as such perhaps a bit of a relief, though there’s always something tempting:

Here’s some long-running fun: at the Exit Stage Left on 156 Eddy Street, starting July 8 and running Thursday-Friday-Saturday for four weeks, No Nude Men Productions is presenting a series of twelve staged readings of new plays, each based on one of the classical Greek deities. The website is here but also check out Marissabidilla’s more detailed entry here.

Festival Opera in Walnut Creek (at the Dean Lesher Center, a short walk from the BART station) presents Madama Butterfly (July 10-18) and Lucia di Lammermoor (August 7-15).

Berkeley Opera presents Legend of the Ring, a revival of its much-praised one-evening condensation of the Ring Cycle.

Old First Concerts at 1751 Sacramento Street (that's Sacramento and Van Ness) continues its regular series of concerts; the one that jumps out at me is early music vocal ensemble EUOUAE performing the Messe de Tournai, which they describe as the oldest polyphonic setting of the Mass to have been collected under one cover. They are also doing several other interesting pieces; see the full description here.

The 15^th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival runs from July 15 through July 18 at the Castro Theater. The big news here is Fritz Lang’s wild and wildly influential Metropolis, presented with 25 minutes of previously lost footage, but since Kino is releasing the new restoration on DVD this fall, I would rather see A Spray of Plum Blossoms (Yi jian mei), a 1930 Chinese version of The Two Gentlemen of Verona; or Rotaie, an Italian film from 1929 that sounds reminiscent of Murnau’s Sunrise; or L’Heureuse mort, a 1924 French comedy about a playwright whose alleged death makes him suddenly a valuable property. Oh, if I could stand the crowds I'd just stay in the theater from start to finish; all the films look enticing and they have some great live music from the Alloy Orchestra among others.

And the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is devoting its two top floors to its big summer show, Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection. Click here and here for SFMike’s two-part survey of Donald Fisher and his collection, complete with many lovely photos that give you a great sense of what's on view. I will say that since robber barons appear to be inevitable in our society, I’m grateful for any of them that direct their loot towards art, rather than running for political offices they don’t deserve to hold, and I'm talking about scum like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina. You often hear it remarked (well, depending on the circles you travel in) that it’s puzzling that the public will resist modern music though not modern painting. I’ve wondered about that myself. There are a couple of points to consider though: one is that the audience for modern art need only be one person with enough extra cash, and live performance needs significantly more people for even a tiny audience, and all of them need to be available at the same time. The second is that if you want to establish your social credentials through art (or if you are in fact genuinely interested in it), the contemporary is often the only thing both available and affordable, whereas given the centuries of scores piled up, you have to be actively interested in contemporary music to choose to subsidize it rather than something less risky. Also, of course, it's easy enough to walk away from a painting on a wall, or to stare at it until you feel you "understand" it, which is a very different experience from being forced to sit quietly while strange sounds fleet by. Anyway here’s your chance to check out the new holdings even before SFMOMA builds its planned addition. There’s a beautiful room filled with paintings by Agnes Martin, though my favorite is still the one already in the collection (that’s the painting I’m looking at in my avatar up there).

I have no idea what's going on with the fonts in this entry, and why blogger won't let me fix them.

again with the shirtless baritones

I obviously should have added Rod Gilfry to the list of baritones of whom I did not have "shirtless/naked" pics, because just days after that entry, I received a search for "Rodney Gilfry shirtless St Francois." Since I have watched the DVD in question, I can tell the searcher that not only is Gilfry clothed throughout the long opera, even when he receives the stigmata, but his Franciscan robes are not particularly form-fitting. Perhaps one day a director will be inspired by either baroque art or the box office and strip the saint down, but until then let me recommend this DVD, a terrific production of Messiaen's wonderful opera. I'm really just posting this to recommend that people buy the set. One link is for MDT and the other for Amazon; MDT has a lower price, but since they're in England you'll need to pay shipping, which you wouldn't need to do for Amazon, so the cost might even out.

Don't change a hair for me, not if you care for me

And here’s a special St Valentine’s Day half-price heart-shaped box of links for my readers, starting with some hilarity from the Onion.

I had more or less forgotten the day until the Opera Company of Philadelphia sent me an e-mail urging me to “treat my Valentine to Turandot!” I sometimes wonder if Marketing Departments ever bother to look up the plots of the operas they’re trying to sell. On the other hand, maybe they’re just having their little joke: marketing + bad love choices = St Valentine’s Day! At least it wasn’t The Rape of Lucretia, which I am going to see in June, by the way.

Here’s something else to look forward to: a DVD release of Messiaen’s St Francois d’Assise! This production is from De Nederlandse Opera (which recently brought us the first official recording of Dr Atomic, thereby retaining European supremacy in recording modern operas) and stars Rod Gilfry, and I have to admire a singer who can portray both Stanley Kowalski and St Francis.

And the line-up for the next season of Dancing with the Stars has been announced, and though I realize “stars” is being used loosely (I wasn’t really expecting Brad Pitt to suit up), I don't know who a lot of these people are. That's not that much of a problem, because really, what do I care? And at this point the professional dancers are better known anyway and on the upward curve of their careers (some nights it's like watching multiple little versions of A Star Is Born). But seriously – Denise Richards? You have to worry a little when Charlie Sheen is the mature, responsible partner.

The worrisome trend to me is the boast that there are several “real-life couples” on the show, since there seems to be an increasing emphasis on "relationship drama" rather than, you know, "dancing." Maybe the ratings got a big boost when viewers were wondering if Derek Hough and his partner from a few seasons back (sorry, I can't remember her name, and all this searching and hyperlinking is wearing me out) were dating. I liked her until she had a teary-eyed meltdown over the criticism of her hip movement. I'm a weeper myself, and granted she was at a severe disadvantage next to Derek’s serpentine hips, but, you know, keep it together. And she really did need to work on her hips.

Since then we’ve been treated to an increasing number of emotional outbursts, the most inexplicable being Lacey Schwimmer’s announcement that she just couldn’t keep on trying to please Lance Bass, who seemed fairly mild-mannered and tractable. Given her announcement that he was her teenage crush, I’m thinking he was just the victim of her issues, but maybe she was reacting to stuff we hadn’t seen. Or maybe not, since he seemed as befuddled by the surprise attack as the viewers were. There was a priceless shot of his sad blank face looking slightly puzzled when she stormed out. But full points to them for dancing to “I Kissed a Girl.” Witty choice!

I assume the “relationship counselor” who came to talk to the finalists was just a joke that didn’t quite work. Poor Cody Linley, bursting into tears. I was both amused and creeped out to hear him mention that there was a website dedicated to his eyebrows. I do know people with an eyebrow thing. Not to mention any names, of course. His Hannah Montana co-star Miley Cyrus is seriously creepy – she was shown greeting him at her "Sweet 16" birthday party in Disneyland, and I thought I was watching a 45-year-old divorcee trying to pick up her son’s naïve high-school teammate.

Another thing they need to stop doing on that show: having the little kids dance. Yes, these kids know it’s a competitive field, which means sometimes they lose, but no one that age needs to lose on national TV before millions of viewers, especially if they’re not just watching, they’re deliberately choosing to reject you. (Or maybe the viewers don’t vote on the little kids – I always leave the room during that part, so I really don’t know. I should probably get Tivo.) It’s the difference between playing sandlot baseball and playing in the Little League World Series on ESPN.

Another thing they should never do again: Cloris Leachman. It wasn’t so much her limited dancing skills as her constant need to be the center of attention that really annoyed me. My jump-the-shark moment with her was when Cody and Julianne were being interviewed after their dance (poor Cody! that kid was abused a lot) and Cloris came over and started pawing him. Possibly she just thought he was a camera. I’m sure the audience would have been equally delighted if those had been, say, Mickey Rooney’s liver-spotted claws caressing barely-legal flesh. But we all know that old women aren't rude, self-centered, or camera hogs: instead, they’re feisty. That's a pretty absurd and condescending attitude, especially toward a woman who made movies with Mel Brooks, but she certainly took advantage of it. When she finally left she announced to Carrie Ann, “I know you didn’t mean what you said” (referring to her comment from the week before that it was sad to see Toni Braxton leave when she was starting to improve, just so that Leachman could continue flopping around, though she phrased it more gently than that). Guess what, Cloris? She did mean it.

But the most painful moment of all was when Carrie Ann made Susan Lucci stand up and say, “I’m a good dancer!” or whatever empowering you-go-girl nonsense she made her repeat. I thought this was an incredibly degrading thing to do to a woman of her professional standing and, how shall one say, life experience. But improved self-esteem (justified or not) was a leitmotif with several of the other women. Strangely, the only man who was treated to these little confidence-building discussions was Lance Bass, which of course had absolutely nothing to do with his position as the only openly gay contestant.

Well, I do really enjoy the dancing. And I even like the Superstars of Dance segments; most of them, anyway. I think I was a little misled when they started off with Alvin Ailey. I wasn’t exactly expecting Pina Bausch (though that would be fun) but maybe Mark Morris. . . . But I’m very naïve about these things. When I heard that there was a movie coming out named Gigli, I assumed (as one naturally would!) that it was about Beniamino Gigli. I thought Ben Affleck was kind of odd casting. In my defense, there have been movies about Caruso, though it’s not much of a defense since Caruso is a very different sort of cultural figure; it's like Carreras and Pavarotti.

In any case, here's one more sweet link for you, before we toss the empty heart aside (empty except for the sour quince log, of course): Defamer’s pairings of the upcoming DWTS cast and some of the great choreographers. That's entertainment!

blown away

I see that Opus Arte lists among its August releases a two-disc set of the Netherlands Opera production of Dr Atomic. It's not yet listed on Amazon in the USA, but usually we get the Opus Arte releases a couple of months after the UK does, so I would expect it in this country sometime in the fall. (It's listed as "all regions" in the description, but I don't know if I trust that, though it might be worth the risk if the exchange rate were more in our favor).

I assume this production is at least partially revised from the world premiere version that left me so disappointed, but Peter Sellars is still the stage director and the cast seems mostly if not entirely the same: Gerald Finley as Oppenheimer, Jessica Rivera has his wife, and Eric Owens, Richard Paul Fink, James Maddalena, Thomas Glenn, Jay Hunter Morris, and Ellen Rabiner. The conductor is Lawrence Renes. My disappointment aside (plenty of people did not share it), I felt at the time that it was a shame a major work by a major American composer was not being recorded and released in some form.

I guess it makes sense to record a new work after a few runs, when the creators have had time to tinker (or slash and burn), but I have the feeling that the more relevant fact here is that it was filmed in Europe and not the United States, because given the welcome DVD release of brand-new works such as Chin's Alice in Wonderland or Dusapin's Faustus, The Last Night, it just seems that recording new works is, for whatever economic or cultural reasons, just more achievable over there. American opera houses seem to be edging in that direction, but I suspect they will rely more on big names in very familiar works. It's too bad. I wish someone had recorded the USA premiere of Le Grand Macabre four years ago, which was the only thing that managed to lift and elate my spirits even momentarily after the last presidential election. There's a good chance I'll need to see it again in the fall, and then where will we be?

fanboy fever!

A couple of years ago I was re-watching Griffith's Intolerance and there was a close-up of some chickens, and I thought, "Wow. Those chickens are long dead!" So were most of the actors, of course, but something - perhaps it was their total ignorance that they were being immortalized - really hit me emotionally about those chickens scratching away for worms, and really brought home that silent films resurrect a vanished world in a way no other art form really does. Even old recordings (and I eagerly anticipate each new Marston release) aren't quite the same revivifiers; it's not so much that the sound requires some aural adjustment as that the repertoire performed (especially, alas, in the case of the operatic solos) is almost exactly the same repertoire that similar performers would record today, whereas silent films, though an integral part of film history, are also a completely self-contained and finished world of artistic achievement, often at a breath-taking level. A few years after sound became widespread you couldn't make a silent film without its being an hommage, or camp, or some type of artificial throwback of a highly conscious sort. Even Chaplin gave up after Modern Times in 1936.

As a teenager I read Kevin Brownlow's superb history of silent film, The Parade's Gone By, and that's where I first heard about the French director Abel Gance, and I became a fan without having seen a single one of his films. They sounded remarkable, a dazzling blend of the old-fashioned high Romantic style of the nineteenth century melodrama with twentieth-century technological innovations that everyone else took years to rediscover. He made movies that lasted four or five hours yet were famous and influential because of the rapid editing that later became known as "MTV-style". As with many of the mainstream operas and ballets, an otherwise extinct theatrical mode has been preserved because of the style used to tell it.

Or would have been preserved if so many films hadn't been unavailable or lost. I did manage while still in high school to see Napoleon as restored by Brownlow. I should find the poster I bought on the occasion to check the exact date and location. It was a theater in San Francisco, and one valiant organist played the mighty Wurlitzer for the film's entire five hour length, and because it was a special benefit for the Pacific Film Archive, admission cost an unheard-of five dollars, and I sure do feel like an old man talking about how cheap things used to be back in the day. Several years later, when Coppola paid to have the film tour America, I saw it again in Boston, and when the cheering died down at the end of the film, someone official came out on stage to inform us that Gance, by then in his 90s, had died that night in Paris (and thank you IMDB - it must have been November 10, 1981), but he at least had lived long enough to see his great masterpiece restored and celebrated.

It's a remarkable film, and just about the only one I can think of that doesn't work even better at home on a large screen, because the last half hour bursts onto three screens, and when you see a cavalryman's horse gallop from the far left of the farthest left screen right up to the camera and then off to the right of the farthest right screen, you understand physically the basic magic of movies. But the three screens aren't just used for their panoramic possibilities; they also break into triptychs and diptychs and a rhythmic explosion of swift shots and double exposures that pull you into accepting Napoleon as a great force of nature instead of the shabby little dictator he was. And all along Gance has used the amazingly fluid camera of the silent cinema to create an entire and realistic world through clearly artificial means. I love the scene where the Marseillaise is first sung. It's been so long since I've had a chance to see the film that I won't even attempt to describe it, but it ends with the singing crowd dissolving into a shot of Marianne, the female embodiment of the Revolution, joining in and swinging her sword wide, and I swear it wasn't until hours later that I realized that no one had actually been singing; that's how effectively the film and its instrumental accompaniment had created the vivid impression of vocal music.

Anyway, I have been looking for other Gance films for over thirty years now. I came close long ago, again in high school days, when SF MOMA announced a showing (appropriately enough, for a museum then located in the War Memorial building) of Gance's great anti-war film, J'Accuse, parts of which were filmed on the front with actual soldiers. My very wonderful mother (hi, Mom!) drove me there only to find out that the show had been canceled for reasons I don't really remember - maybe the print never arrived, or it wasn't the version they thought they were getting. Gance spent a lot of his post-silent-film life recutting J'Accuse and Napoleon. His was not a style that translated well to the static cameras required by early sound equipment, or to the changed tastes of self-consciously modern times. I have seen some of his sound films, and though he does some interesting things (particularly in his film about Beethoven, where he experiments with the sound to give you a vivid feeling of what it was like for the composer to go deaf), they are generally fairly minor. (Besides the Beethoven film, I've seen one he made about Lucrezia Borgia; there's also a shortened version of Charpentier's Louise, which I have but haven't yet seen.)

So here's my big excitement: I was trolling through upcoming DVD releases on Amazon.com, and saw La Roue, which is the name of another of Gance's great silent films. I'd never even come as close as an announcement to seeing this one. I was frankly kind of stunned it was being released, and thrilled to see it was being released by Flicker Alley, since I have (and have even watched!) several of their sets, and they always do an absolutely superb job. According to their website, "[t]his new restoration with a running time of nearly four and a half hours, accompanied by Robert Israel’s symphonic score, is the fullest presentation of La Roue to reach the public since 1923." Even though I found this through Amazon, I didn't buy it from them, since for some weird reason (they do this with Criterion sets as well - does Amazon just hate cineastes?) they do not offer their usual discounts with Flicker Alley sets. So I bought it directly from Flicker Alley, and if you have any interest at all in silent movies I encourage you to do the same. And they have a discount before the release date! Which is Tuesday, May 6, so don't even think twice. Just start clicking your Paypal account into service. And then, once you are a Gance fanboy as well, you can also get J'Accuse, which Flicker Alley is releasing in September.

Obviously I haven't actually viewed either of these sets (or even these movies) yet, but based on what I know and have experienced with both Gance and Flicker Alley I can guarantee these will be outstanding. And if you feel otherwise, please do not tell me. I would like to respect you in the morning.

The other thing that's sabotaged my "get out of debt" plans this weekend is the latest ArkivMusic weekend special: Bantock's setting for "gargantuan orchestra" and soloists of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat. The weekend sale price will no doubt be gone by the time you read this, but the idea of all those succint quatrains about the evanescence of life and the fleeting quality of beauty being presented in an elaborate three-hour Edwardian extravaganza is too whacked out for me to resist. I fully expect to enjoy this, but I'm not making any guarantees about this one - I can really only promise you one sure thing at a time. After all this high Romantic swirling I think I will watch some Ozu films to bring myself back into balance.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, had a bad cold

I’d probably be pretty traumatized and depressed if someone told me how much time I’ve lost in my life to allergies, colds, and other nose-system problems. Sometimes I have to envy Gogol’s character whose nose just walked away. I had a sudden allergy attack yesterday and took plentiful medications, which left me woozy and drowsy but still sneezing and otherwise dripping in unpleasant ways, and unable to do much when I got home, and it picked up again today as soon as I got on the BART train, whose fabric seats collect dust. It might also be a delayed reaction to chopping down two large juniper-like trees (more like super-elongated bushes, actually) on Sunday. They were way too close to my bedroom window, and thinking of possible fire danger, in one of my bouts of prudence or paranoia I pulled out the axe; I also wanted to eliminate the handy bridge they provided to the roof for the squirrels and, no doubt, even worse creatures. I noticed that the rain puddles this evening were gilded with the powdery florescent pollen, so perhaps I’m just in for a long bout. I was reminded of my never-ending cold in December, and how much that threw my month off. I did get my taxes done this weekend, and here’s an unsolicited testimonial: all praise to TurboTax! I saved trees by filing electronically, and then cut them down in my backyard, so I feel well-balanced. Of course, as soon as I cut the trees down my window looked much more exposed, and I wondered if I had made a mistake.

I also wondered if there would be a lot of glare on the big screen (my television is conveniently located in my bedroom), so I had a test viewing of L’Elisir d’Amore from Vienna with Netrebko and Villazon. Yes, all my bitching about the upcoming San Francisco Opera season kind of put me in the mood to see it, and no, I don’t see any contradiction there – I mean, I love toasted coconut ice cream, but not at every meal, and sometimes I’ll happily eat it if it’s in the freezer, but I won’t bother going to the store and buying more even if I crave it, and it's like pulling a DVD off the unmanageable piles rather than buying an expensive seat months in advance and devoting a whole evening to the outing. I basically go to the theater for the show, not to get out of the house or through some weird misguided delusion that I’m in some sort of community, so the show has to be something I can’t get at home. All too often I’ll get postcards for plays that are about “romantic complications among thirty-somethings” or something similar that I have no interest in, and I just don’t see the point, when I could stay home and get the same thing for free, only better written and better acted, on any repeat of Friends. You don’t survive as a cultural institution by providing people with a more expensive, less convenient version of something that’s easily available all around them.

I did experience envy and the urge to go out of my house and straight to Houston when I saw that next season they get to hear the fabulous Laura Claycomb in Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as Berlioz’s Beatrice and Benedict – I don’t care who’s in it, I just want to hear this live – plus a world premiere by Andre Previn based on Brief Encounter, starring Nathan Gunn. We’re awaiting final counts from all the precincts, but our experts are predicting that San Francisco Opera will hold on to its clear lead as the hand’s-down winner of Most Boring Opera Season in America.

Anyway, Otto Schenk was the director of this L’Elisir, which means, depending on your point of view, that it’s tasteful, charming, and realistic in a traditional way, or boring, conventional, and completely unchallenging. I’m giving it a generally positive review, since I am at heart mild-mannered and easily pleased, and I like the two leads a lot, and I always enjoy the energetic Ildebrando d’Arcangelo (who plays Dulcamara), and it’s a delightful opera, and we’re spared Zeffirelli-style vulgarity, but if this is tradition, it needs, if not a mad regie makeover, a careful examination. Do all the cheerful peasants need to be quite so clean and happy? Couldn’t someone tell Leo Nucci that Belcore is supposed to be a dashing miles gloriosus instead of a grinning buffoon, and that’s where his comedy comes from? Also, someone unfamiliar with the opera might wonder why the lovely Adina has decided to marry someone clearly old enough to be her father (perhaps there’s a hint of a regie concept there?). And this is the sort of thing that gets called “realistic,” showing once again that realism is merely a set of familiar conventions.

I don’t know if my precarious finances will allow me to travel to Houston in a year – it’s seriously a wonderful city to visit, what with the Opera House and other cultural halls on one side, the very nice newish baseball stadium on the other, and in between a light rail that takes you to the Museum of Fine Arts and the de Menil collection – fire up your Feldman and visit the Rothko Chapel! – but I would definitely make it happen if the Berlioz were on at the same time as the Previn. I’ve been on a Berlioz kick, as I’ve mentioned, and I’m not really foreseeing Beatrice et Benedict on the schedules out here anytime soon. I’ve noticed that, as with Ligeti, Berlioz’s music heard live has a vivid, detailed, ravishing quality that recordings don’t quite capture. Dutoit’s Damnation of Faust at the Symphony last spring was so crammed with life, it helped make up for the disappointment of the dry-voiced tenor in that work at the Opera a few years ago. I finally finished the second volume of David Cairn’s Berlioz biography, which took me longer than perhaps it should have, and I realized that, without consciously intending to, I was postponing the painful ending, when the disappointed old man, struggling against constant illness, sees his great opera fail, outlives his lovers and his son, and is left with only the grim determined hope that in the future his music will be played, understood, and enjoyed. It’s a story of neglect and incomprehension that sounded very contemporary to me, and it made me want not only to hear Berlioz’s music, but that of my own contemporaries. Let this expiate! as Lovelace cried. I regret more than ever not going to New York to hear Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in Les Troyens.

So despite my December headcold without end, I did make a point of getting to the Symphony’s performance of the Symphonie Fantastique and its sequel, Lelio (big thanks to SY, who got me a half-price ticket, and best wishes for a speedy recovery from one brave little soldier to another, much braver little soldier). I had drugged myself up so that I could listen without annoying myself or others with sneezing and coughing, though unfortunately the equivalent of the original instruments movement has not taken over medicine, and I was drugged not with absinthe, laudanum, tincture of opium, or other historically informed medications or drugs, but with Claritin, Sudafed, Theraflu, and whatever else I had in my satchel that seemed to promise a dry and silent nose.

I had somehow gotten the impression that the Symphony was going to perform the complete Lelio, which is why I really wanted to hear the concert – these days everyone loves the Symphonie Fantastique, and so do I, but it’s not really a rarity the way its sequel is, and I probably would have gone home searching for rest and chicken soup if I’d known. Cairns tactfully suggests that Lelio’s odd combination of solos, choruses, spoken interludes, and satire on the Parisian music scene doesn’t really hold up well, and that may be true, but I’d like a chance to hear it live and judge for myself. Most sequels suffer by containing too much of what made the original successful, and Lelio probably pushes the idea of the suffering artist maudit farther than we can follow; rebelling against society by becoming a brigand or a pirate probably seemed less ludicrous to a post-Byron generation whose world actually contained brigands and pirates, so I can’t really fault, however much I might regret, the Symphony’s decision to play only sections from Lelio, but without the framework it really does end up being just lovely bits of random Berlioz. The soloists were Stanford Olsen, Shawn Mathey, and Dwayne Croft, and generally they sang beautifully, though at a couple of points I wondered if they were fighting the same cold I had, in which case I sympathize and congratulate them on how successful most of their singing was. The chorus did itself proud as well.

Lelio was performed first, which was sort of odd since it's the sequel, but the Symphonie Fantastique was being filmed for the Keeping Score series and they used the intermission to set up the cameras and the audience. Right before the performance they demonstrated how the cameras would be sliding up and down and across all on their very own, which was wise because the audience just could not contain its excitement at the sight, so we got that out of the way before the music started. I have to say it – God, audiences are stupid! You’d think these people had been raised in a Bornean rainforest, far from any sign of the Industrial Revolution, and had only been dropped in Davies Hall five minutes before the performance started.

I was in the front row, and had enjoyed having empty seats on either side of me during Lelio, but for the filming no seats that prominent could be unfilled, just like the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Oscar night. Fortunately I realized what was happening in time to move one seat over so that I was at least on the aisle. I honestly don’t know how three or four normal-sized men manage to fit side-by-side in those Davies Hall seats. One under-recognized aspect of Wagner’s theatrical genius is the elimination of armrests from Bayreuth, so we’re spared the territory-marking they always entail. I especially love it when women who are about a foot shorter than I am can’t sit without elbowing me in the ribs all night. So I tend to sit with my arms folded across my chest, mostly out of courtesy to those around me, though I suspect I look as if I’m angrily daring the performers to please me. To top it all off, since I am visually oriented and easily distracted I often listen to instrumental music with my eyes shut, so unless the camera made me look as if I’m in an ecstatic trance of artistic bliss similar to the ones illustrated in those cheeseball ads in the playbills, there’s a good chance I’m ending up on the cutting room floor, which is fine with me.

Yes, I enjoyed the performance of the Symphonie Fantastique, though there’s something clean and precise about Tilson Thomas’s approach that may not capture the full wildness of Berlioz (Mike at Civic Center expressed this opinion in his much more timely report on the concert). But it’s the nature of wildness to recede with familiarity, so you can either accept that and emphasize other qualities – Berlioz’s classical side, for example – or risk emphasizing the grotesque for its own sake, which can also be an artistically and historically valid approach to this music. I had felt bludgeoned by Tilson Thomas’s accounts of the Brahms 4 and Mahler 7, so I was overall pleased with his approach, and I'm always pleased with this music. On the very first flight I ever took, during a high school trip to Washington DC, I put on the headphones they provided and just as the plane lifted into the air the most incredibly perfect music for that exciting moment started playing, and I listened to the whole program so I could find out what it was – it turned out to be the March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie Fantastique, music which ever since has given me the sensation of flight.

giving the people what they want (L'etat, c'est moi)

It sure was swell of the Senate to intervene so Tom Brady and I could spend this Saturday night together. (Here’s the score so far: giving the people what they want, Iraq division: 0; giving the people what they want, NFL-watching division: 1!) I thought it was my economy-based move to minimal cable (no ESPN or any of its spawn, no Fox Sports) that was going to keep me from watching the Patriots go for a perfect season, but it turns out that it’s really the NFL’s attempt to put their games on a pay network that was going to keep most of the country, not just me, from watching. More and more games are slipping off the freely available networks and onto ones you have to pay for; in a few years my fanship might be limited to scanning the sports page while waiting for the train.

Practically everyone outside of New England claims to hate the Patriots now. The first time Brady led the team to the Super Bowl, it was an underdog story of the type allegedly beloved by Americans (of course, we only love underdogs once they stop actually being underdogs and become winners): picked down low in the draft and promoted due to injury, football’s Ruby Keeler had the proverbial storybook season, and remained likeable and level-headed through it all, even to the extent of insisting that the team be introduced at the Super Bowl as a team, without stars. But then he kept on winning, and dating supermodels, and appearing in model-like magazine spreads himself, and though he kept on seeming quite likeable, level-headed, and team-oriented, being handsome, rich, young, and successful is just too much for the public to take. Throw in the supermodels and it's all over.

The storybook aspect may be why people don’t seem to realize how chancy these things are; the Giants might actually win the game. But as far as I’m concerned, the Patriots, having already won fifteen out of the sixteen regular-season games they play these days, have already outdone the fourteen-game perfect season of the fabled 1972 Dolphins, so you can stick an asterisk on that old record (the Dolphins also used more than one quarterback, and played back in the pre-parity days, which proves my point that there is always an asterisk). But I suppose I can’t really blame the people who hate the Patriots because they’re sick of hearing about them, since I want the Patriots to win because I’m sick of hearing about the 1972 Dolphins, who smugly toast each other every chance they get.

Before Senator Kerry intervened, I briefly considered going to a sports bar to watch the game, but then I’d have to watch the game, you know, in a sports bar. Surrounded by rowdy drunks. Who hate the Patriots. I don’t think I really care enough. I mean, I enjoy watching football (though let me just say: the games last too long, there are way too many commercials, the action is very start-and-stop in a maddening way, and the game and the players exude an underlying, anonymous exhaustion, which, though it makes football the metaphorical sport of choice for contemporary America, is ultimately depressing), but I’m not a facepainter, and really don’t want to be surrounded by them.

Speaking of facepainters, I recently dipped a timid toe into the turbulent waters of Opera-L. I seem to have arrived in the middle of a Netrebko firestorm, but then there always seems to be a firestorm brewing there. Many of the postings take the form of indignant and sarcastic suggestions that other people should lighten up on the indignation and sarcasm. I’m not sure how long I’ll hang on. For every interesting note there are multiple examples of the higher bitchery taking up space in my inbox, and I only want to spend so much time hitting delete. I’ve never understood arguing for the sake of arguing. If it's not a dispassionate search for truth and beauty, I just don't have the patience. At a recent Wagner society meeting one woman announced repeatedly that she was “going to start something”; she then declared that the eighteenth century – all of it – was worthless and boring, at least compared to the nineteenth. To me, if you don’t like Gluck or Mozart or whoever, that’s your loss. Why would I argue? or care? You can’t have a discussion with facepainters.

Maybe my lack of enthusiasm for sports bars (or bars in general) is behind my bafflement at San Francisco Opera’s broadcasting plans. I can understand why the Met is in movie theaters, since their broadcasts are live. But if you’re broadcasting pre-recorded performances, why arrange them so that you have the disadvantages of live theater without the compensatory thrills? I will happily sit in a theater for six hours for a live performance, but much as I love, say, Tristan, there’s no way I’m going to cram myself into a movie theater that long, especially when I’ll spend the whole time wondering why there wasn’t a DVD release I could enjoy, repeatedly, at leisure. Financially the DVD is a better consumer choice anyway (at least for me, and am I not a representative man?), even without the possibility of repeated viewings: the Onegin and Puritani that the Met released recently are going for about $30 each on Amazon. If you add up the movie ticket price (I think it's currently about $22 for the Met broadcasts) and the cost of BART tickets, you’re already near that total, and that’s without any popcorn. Here’s my suggestion for the Met and San Francisco Opera: release DVDs, both on a subscription basis and for general sale, similar to the way Ward Marston sells his records or John Eliot Gardiner his Bach cantata series. Please, don’t thank me. Not having to go to the Cineplex and listen to Tristan with someone chewing in my ear is thanks enough.

ADDENDUM on the football game: I knew it wasn't going to be a snoozefest, and that the Giants were going to play their starters, so why didn't all the TV commentators know? I wish I'd said something beforehand, but I thought it was obvious. I wouldn't exactly say I have the heart of a champion, but even I know you're not going to go into the playoffs having rolled over and given the historic crown to your rivals, especially when they started their big season by thumping you soundly in your own stadium. Sure, from a rational perspective it was a meaningless game since both teams are already in the playoffs, but if you operate rationally you probably aren't caring that much about football anyway. From a psychological perspective it was huge for the Giants as well as the Patriots, so I fully expected to see Eli Manning out there for at least the majority of the game. Sometimes it amazes me how much more I know than other people.

consumption

I normally avoid movie theaters, finding a big-screen TV and Netflix preferable to the ordeal that movie-going has become, but I was given passes to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (mille grazie to J and CF) so I headed on over to the Castro Theater, which is smaller than I thought it would be but just as bizarrely and extravagantly ornamented as I had hoped, to see Nazimova in Camille. The sets and costumes are by Natacha Rambova and are even more strikingly stylized than the notorious ones she did for Nazimova’s Salome, which were based on Aubrey Beardsley; the Deco fabulosity on view here (the time is updated to the 1920s) was all her own. Anything extravagant or stylized makes some people nervous, and the speakers introducing the film felt it necessary to caution us about what we were going to see. There were still some condescending chuckles from the audience, but that’s a hazard of seeing silent films, even at a Silent Film Festival. I don’t really understand this: acting styles were different in the early part of the twentieth century (more rhetorical, grander, more theatrical, if you will, than cinematic) and it doesn’t take too much expertise to see who is giving a good performance in that style and who is not. If you’ve grown up seeing Raphael Madonnas, would you burst out laughing at your first Byzantine icon? You might find it hard to adjust at first, but it’s just a different means of representation with its own standards. But people think it’s a sign of sophistication to laugh at silent movies. I don’t think much of “sophistication” for audiences anyway: the problem with sophistication is that it’s a series of accepted attitudes, and the need to stay current with what is considered sophisticated can keep you from seeing and feeling what is happening right in front of you. Nazimova does have an explosion of hair and bee-stung lips (not too odd for a courtesan), but she is also a great actress – just observe the regretful little shake back into her life she gives herself as she leaves her uncorrupted friend from the early days and goes back to her silly party. Let’s have some respect for the woman who studied with Stanislavsky and when in America not only insisted on performing Ibsen but made him big box office. Her Armand was Rudolph Valentino, just as Four Horsemen was making him a star, looking appropriately dreamy and sad. Nazimova’s Camille dies alone, imagining Armand, clutching the volume of Manon Lescaut he gave her. In my Camille mood I watched the Garbo version a week or so later and Robert Taylor’s Armand gives his Camille the same gift, one that I have to say seems remarkably tactless under the circumstances. I had forgotten what a magnificent actress Garbo is; her face is a poem and her eyes are epics and those should be enough, but she gives us more. It’s even worth putting up with the egregiously awful Lionel Barrymore (as Armand’s father) to watch her. In some ways this 1936 version is farther from our tastes than the 1921 film; I can picture a contemporary woman wearing Nazimova’s costumes, but not the absurd rounds of fluff that Adrian inflicted on Garbo (her pastoral costumes, featuring hoop skirts and yards of white lace, are particularly ridiculous, especially for a woman who was supposedly raised in the country with the cows and chickens). Robert Taylor also looks appropriately dreamy and sad and then jealous, but it’s all about Garbo. The only actor to come close, despite the best efforts of Laura Hope Crews as the aptly named Prudence, Camille’s greedy realpolitik procurer, is Henry Daniell as Baron de Varville. He’s not exactly likeable, but you respect his coldness and his strength. There’s a scene in which Camille gets him to pay her debts, and he knows it’s so she can leave him and go to the country with Armand, and he slaps her. It’s a very emotionally complex moment, and an impossible one in the movies these days, when hitting a woman signifies ultimate villainy just as much as did the twirling moustache of melodrama. (Not that I’m advocating slapping women, or anyone else, but the idea that you never hit a woman is based on the notion that all women are, by nature, smaller and weaker than all men; it’s a version of “pick on someone your own size.” Since women in movies these days, even period pieces, are all experts with sword and fist, it seems an odd relic that they’re supposed to be untouchable. I saw one movie in which the bad guy slapped the heroine and we were clearly meant to think this was the absolute worst, but since she had just cornered him with her skilled fencing, why wouldn’t or shouldn’t he fight back? There seems a basic confusion there.) And later on de Varville and Armand fight a duel, and I knew that if the movie were made these days the Baron’s aristocratic bravery would be stripped from him and he would have to be an abject coward on top of everything else. For all the post-Code censorship of movies, they were realistic about class and economics in a way that contemporary movies are not. This is not like the Raphael Madonna versus the Byzantine icon, because those are equally valuable means of representation and I’m talking about a willingness to face up to the hardness of life versus some deluded fantasy of entitlement. Somewhere after the tragic "Women’s Picture" we slipped into the smug self-delusion of the Chick Flick, and it’s not really to the credit of our ability to take in some of life’s complexity. The whole world and style of Camille may be too alien for us anyway unless preserved in the music of Verdi (somewhere Robertson Davies points out that nineteenth-century theatrical styles can still be seen, but only on the opera and ballet stages). Once I did see Camille performed live - when I was at Berkeley, Charles Ludlam played the famous courtesan in his Ridiculous Theater Company production, and that should tip you off that the play was so far out of the mainstream it was avant-garde. The performance was celebrated, and I sort of wish now that I had not left at intermission, which I have only done about four times in my life. I keep feeling I must have missed something. But it just seemed like a fat man in a dress, and not a particularly memorable one (man or dress) either. It wasn't done as camp extravaganza, but it wasn't quite done straight (pardon the expression) either. Maybe I'd have a different reaction now. Maybe not. Either way, I'm not going to have another chance, since that world too has gone into the theater scrapbooks.