Philadelphia 14: The Barnes Foundation

One of the great American museums is currently right outside Philadelphia, in a suburb called Merion. The Barnes Foundation has always been controversial. Dr Albert C Barnes had a contentious personality, and a number of strongly held opinions, such as beliefs in racial equality and in the value of modern art, that put him at odds with early twentieth-century Philadelphia society. If you have any love for such Impressionist and post-Impressionist painters as Cezanne, Renoir, Rousseau, Matisse, Soutine, Modigliani, and Picasso (among others), you really should be planning a trip to Philly right now.

Entire books (some of them for sale in the Barnes gift shop on my recent visit) have been written about Dr Barnes and his personality and his collection and its subsequent adventures in the world (more particularly, in the courts). There currently is a plan afoot to move the collection to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, not far from the Museum of Art, though it's a little unclear when or even if that's going to happen.

The city powers of Philadelphia obviously would like the move to happen to punch up the tourist trade, but their reasons are not mine and, even if they retain the current arrangement of the art, it will become more like an ordinary museum in a car-choked city and less like the inspiring place it currently is. So by all means try to visit before any move takes place, and take the train there (it's not only much easier than the bus, faster and more pleasant, but by luck I happened onto a "silent" car -- no cellphones, iPods, etc allowed).

The Foundation is a short and pleasant walk from the train station, through what is obviously a very wealthy town. The residential location and the Foundation's educational activities mean the number of visitors is limited, and you have to get a timed reservation (which is easily available from the Barnes Foundation website).

The Benjamin Franklin Parkway has large signs marking the future home of the Barnes, but though Wikipedia gives dates, the Barnes Foundation site itself says nothing definite has been planned.

The sign above gives you some notion of how the art is arranged at the Barnes, though it doesn't show you the cars constantly whizzing by on the Parkway, a feature happily absent from the Merion location. Photography is not permitted inside the museum, so this is as close as I can get to showing you how Barnes arranged the works. His will originally forbade color reproduction of the collection or lending the pieces, though a few years ago an exhibit did tour and a splendid color catalogue was issued. But even with these recent changes, the images in the Barnes collection are not nearly as well known as other works by these painters, so when you see them you are usually having your first experience of them, just as their first viewers did, face-to-face and as paintings instead of as smaller, shinier reproductions.

The courts have given permission for the Foundation to be moved, but as you walk down North Latch's Lane you see signs in front of many of the yards suggesting that the residents of Merion have not given up yet.

The Barnes, like the Gardner Museum in Boston, the Frick in New York, the Phillips in Washington DC, and the de Menil in Houston, very clearly expresses the wishes and personality of its guiding collector (they all had advisors, but could accept or reject their advice).

The collection is housed amid the extensive informal gardens that make up the Arboretum, in a two-story building of cream-colored stone, with inset sculptures that I guessed correctly were by Jacques Lipchitz (yeah, I had to mention that I guessed the artist correctly).

The main entrance is set with ceramic tile, including beautiful reliefs based on some of the African art in the collection.

The world has caught up with many of Dr Barnes's beliefs, but I think the remaining aura of cranky bullheadedness around him has subtly affected how people see his legacy. It's easy to dismiss his strictures and his wishes as the perverse eccentricities of a willful rich man, but his whole museum is in reality incredibly well-considered.

Although the museum can seem a bit intimidating as you approach, off the beaten track and with guards checking your reservation number and time of entrance, on both my visits there the staff has always been very friendly and low-key, and willing to let in those of us who are paranoid about time and consequently showed up a bit too early, without having to wait until the precise moment of the reservation.

Once you're in, you can spend as much time as you like wandering the collection and the gardens. The first time I visited it was pouring rain, but luckily for me I had a clear sunny day this time. I only wish I hadn't been too late to see the lilac garden in bloom.

In fact the entire experience of the Barnes is very much up to the viewer -- there are no labels by the works with lengthy explanations of what you're supposed to be looking at (some have artist and title on the frame, but all are numbered, and you can check the artist and title on the laminated keys in each gallery, or not, as you wish).

Barnes had very strong opinions on what you should be looking at and for in art, and he arranged the paintings and the African sculptures and the many pieces of ornamental ironwork to make certain points. But it's up to you to draw the connections. For instance, in one room a small Cezanne painting of four people bathing by a river is hung above an early Netherlandish crucifixion (as in the Phillips collection, there are a number of earlier paintings here, often by artists considered precursors to the moderns in some way). And you can notice that in each picture the four figures are in roughly similar locations, and how the composition works around them, and how the nudity (of all four bathers or of the crucified Jesus) affects how you read the picture. Or you can look at just the Cezanne, or just the Crucifixion, or draw other conclusions.

It's one of the least coercive museums I've ever been to. This struck me especially because the day before I had been to the Museum of Art's Perelman building, and there was an exhibit of Daido Moriyama's photographs, and one with a sleeping woman's head that mostly took up the bottom half had a label assuring us that the image was "easily read as misogynistic."

There was no reason to read the picture that way at all; you could actually have seen the woman as dominating the picture, and read that as a sign of her power in a positive way, but that didn't fit in with whatever little theory the curator had. I'm training myself to skim or skip museum labels, but that's not easy for a compulsive reader.

You don't have that problem at the Barnes. The problem is absorbing everything. When you see galleries filled with amazing works you've never seen before, your little mind is apt to be blown.

The last time I was in New York I went to the Frick, since I hadn't been there in many years, and though the entire collection is on an extremely consistent and very high level, I realized that there's about half of it that just wasn't my thing (all those marzipan French nudes). The equivalent at the Barnes for me is the massive number of Renoirs.

I've always preferred the son's work to the father's. I especially dislike Renoir pere's nudes, though I will say that the Barnes has so many of them that I found a few I did like. Looking at a Renoir nude, with the massive thighs and hips tapering up to tiny breasts and a tinier head, is like seeing the Michelin Man naked. But it wasn't just their size and shape that bothered me, and on this trip I finally managed to figure out just what it was about them.

I'm more of a Botticelli man, myself, but that wasn't it, since I can look at the expanse of glistening dimpled flesh in a Rubens and see why that was considered the hottest thing around.

Then I realized why: Renoir's nudes all look incredibly stupid. With the Rubens nudes, the eyes sparkle and you can tell there's something going on up there. Calling a Renoir nude bovine would be a considerable exaggeration of intelligence and vivacity.

But I had no problem skipping over the many Renoirs and admiring the rest of the collection. There's a really stunning Picasso in rose, white, and gold, The Girl with a Goat, and an epic Dance that Matisse painted for this building, and a wonderful Cezanne of Leda and the Swan, of all unlikely subjects.

Just go and see them for yourself, and do it while you can still wander in the gardens afterward and even have the occasional room to yourself. The only thing they really need to do is put a cafeteria in the current location -- I will admit that sometimes what really helps you contemplate art is a sandwich.

By my so potent art

First, some memories for context:

I’m in Emmanuel Church on Newbury Street in Boston to attend a concert, and I’m looking for a toilet. For whatever psychological/theological/aesthetic reason, it’s often difficult to find a toilet inside churches, so I’m wandering around in the basement or off to the side or somewhere else dark and confusing. There’s a middle-aged woman down there looking for the same thing, only she asks one of the singers, a well-known countertenor. He gives her a somewhat brusque reply, not too surprising for a singer interrupted right before a concert by a stranger asking irrelevant questions. But his reaction seems to bother her since back in the pews I hear her telling her companion about the incident. Only in her telling the countertenor (who, for what it’s worth and if my memory serves me, and it may not, was married with children) gives a very snippy, fluttery answer in the high-gay mode. But he didn’t – I heard and saw him, and he sounded like a regular guy brushing off a stranger, not the queeny guy she made him. And this was from a woman musically sophisticated enough to go hear obscure Handel oratorios (that is, not Messiah) done by a small (that is, not prominent with society concert-goers) group. The incident stuck in my mind as a peculiar illustration of the disturbing power of a high but strong voice coming out of a male body.

A second one: I am in Boston Symphony Hall listening to a celebrity violinist also known for his good works (I should look it up, but I think it was Stern). Unfortunately his status meant that lots of people were there who had plenty of interest in either celebrity or good works, but not much in music. Clearly many there thought they were cultured because they were in a famous hall listening to a famous musician, but an actor observing the crowd could have gotten lots of tips on how to portray bored restless noisy indifference. The recital was sort of a disaster, until the encore. The violinist came out and announced in a booming voice that he was going to play a Haydn adagio. I don’t know quite what hit us. But he started playing his Adagio and every single person in that auditorium sat there in utter silence and stillness, transfixed and transported. It’s difficult to describe such beauty, much less how it came out of nowhere, but it reminds me of Larkin’s lines: “On me your voice falls as they say love should, / Like an enormous yes.” And everyone else in that auditorium felt something similar. It’s the only time in my life I’ve felt that kind of rapturous unity with an audience. Sometimes I think I keep going to concerts just in an attempt to regain that moment. It was my girl in the white dress on the New Jersey ferry. Because of that moment, I understand the legend of Orpheus.

One more: it’s late winter, again in Boston. I’ve gone home sick from work. The skies are overcast and wet. I decide to listen to one of the new CDs I’ve bought, the complete recordings of Alessandro Moreschi, the so-called "last castrato" and the only one ever recorded. The afternoon light is grey and cold, and I have a slight fever and a queasy stomach that are disassociating me slightly more than usual from the world around me. I’m listening to the sole survivor of another world, in the scratchy and imperfect sound that was possible during the recording in 1902. It’s like a visit from a ghost, and I ever so slightly freak out. It’s like looking at the stuffed body of the last passenger pigeon in the Smithsonian and trying to imagine crowds of those birds, darkening the sky. It’s like looking at a candle and trying to imagine the sun. It’s like glimpsing a foreign country from the window of a train, knowing that the sliver you see is all you will ever know of that strange land. It’s a vivid reminder of all the irretrievably lost efforts of art. Every time I listen to that recording I ever so slightly freak out in the same way.

So I made sure to get a ticket when Mexico City’s Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes visited the Yerba Buena Center with Monsters and Prodigies: A History of the Castrati. I was even inspired to read at long last a book I had bought years ago that had been waiting on my shelf ever since, Patrick Barbier’s The World of the Castrati, because it was credited as the inspiration for the play.

I can recommend the book highly: it’s informative, humorous but respectful, judicious, thorough, sensitive, dramatic, poignant, and absorbing. Somehow the Ciertos Habitantes managed to present a play largely consisting of chunks of Barbier’s text without capturing a single one of those qualities. It opens with some non-Barbier material: a centaur (so we are told; all we see is a flabby shirtless man with the horsy parts hidden behind a fence; the staging is fairly skimpy on spectacle, which is a problem when you're trying to present the spectacular) and conjoined twins recite some examples of the “monsters” (mostly malformed children) born in the Renaissance and the effect they had.

This may sound unduly callous, but these days there’s a certain academic conventionality to discussions of Renaissance “prodigies” and their cultural meaning. On the other hand, it’s certainly true the Ciertos Habitantes don’t seem unduly sensitive: one fairly extraneous character is a “slave” (he seems to be a South American Indian dressed in a fringed loincloth, I guess as a representative of Natural Man) who gets slapped around a lot – there’s a lot of slapping around on stage – and in one scene they turn the lights out and claim they can’t find him because of his black skin; actually, he’s more of a café-au-lait, but that’s the type of sub-minstrel show material we get when the boys wander from Barbier. I assume all this is meant to put the castrati in the categories of the “monstrous”; they are indeed outside the normal, but there’s a difference between a deliberately man-made and rigorously trained phenomenon like the castrati and an aberration of Nature.

Then we go to Barbier: conjoined twins (not from Barbier, but undoubtedly meant to represent duality or the monstrous or some damn thing) talk at us about how castration is performed. This led to lots of chuckling in the audience, particularly among two youngish women in the row behind me. I have no doubt that these sensitive and intelligent viewers would react in absolutely the same way to a description of female genital mutilation.

There seems to be some sort of thesis here that the castrati represent “Beauty” or “the Prodigious,” which is eventually to be destroyed by Science, an argument made by poets in the past and fundamentalists today. Perhaps I'm reading too much into the play; the various theses don’t make any sense, really, since castration is, after all, a medical and therefore scientific procedure, and the castrati received years of rigorous training, which hardly makes them natural prodigies or freaks. But I’m not going to spend much time teasing out and examining the implications; why should I put more work into the ideas behind this play than the writer, director, and actors all combined? There’s a lot of grandly theoretical conceptual-art-type language in the playbill. What you see on stage is mostly lots of prancing, giggling, and slapping, and lots of talking at the audience. One mentions themes only to counter the argument that one didn't "get" the subtleties of the material. If there’s a puerile and uncomprehending way of presenting something, this group will find it.

One actor – I’m not going to trouble myself or embarrass him by looking up his name – seems to be the chief representative of the castrati. He is short and fat, prissy and pouty, greasy with excess make-up, and he simpers around the stage in increasingly elaborate and intentionally absurd costumes, rendering ridiculous the whole baroque aesthetic of spectacle and disguise. It’s like watching a giant donut hole. A giant effeminate donut hole. A giant effeminate donut hole that can’t sing. Though Barbier makes the point that there is no reason to assume the castrati were all or even mostly – to use an anachronistic term – homosexual, here they are consistently represented as cartoons of flouncy, petulant effeminacy. Sometimes this actor is meant to sing poorly (you can tell by the grimaces of the other actors on stage, which are so much of the “mamma-mia-those-crazy-emotional-Italians” sort that I needn’t describe them), and sometimes he’s meant to sing superbly (ditto), but both sound pretty much the same and both range from the inadequate to the painful. I was reminded several times of American Idol auditions, when you can tell why the singer thinks he or she is good, but you can also tell why he or she is not.

Though the castrati were the great singing artists of their day and the delight of vocal connoisseurs, what you see on stage here are foolish preening caricatures either singing or listening to ridiculous music. We get glimpses of cardinals, always snoozing, and aristocrats, always simpering. We get a poor performance of “Lascia ch’io pianga” (from Handel’s Rinaldo, and two minutes on the Internet, if you’re not already familiar with the opera, will tell you that that particular aria is sung by Almirena, a role created by Isabella Girardeau: in other words, it wasn't written as a castrati aria at all). We get a musicological description of Gluck’s Che faro senza Euridice, which I guess is better than hearing this group try to sing it but doesn't quite capture the aria's grandeur. One of my mother’s college professors had been a Rhodes Scholar, and at every lecture his students would comically and cruelly count the number of times he slipped that fact in, so I hate to be like this, but I need to mention it again: I heard Lorraine Hunt Lieberson perform this repertory live. Don’t try to tell me that baroque or classical art is dated, irrelevant, ridiculous, or incapable of touching the soul in the deepest possible way. This is the first time in my life I’ve sat in a theater thinking, They really should have used pre-recorded music here instead of live.

To make an obvious point, if you don’t respect this music – if you don’t respect the power of art, and of the artists, however strange or unfortunate, who made it, and if you think the people who listen to it are affected poseurs – the whole phenomenon of the castrati is just going to be a silly freak-show spectacle for you. There’s no insight or pleasure to be gained there.

So why, when I have so many better past performances patiently waiting for me to describe them, am I jumping the queue for this tedious debacle? Because of what happened next:

We’re about 90 minutes into the performance, and I’m desperately trying to remember how long this intermissionless show lasts. A couple of people have already snuck out. The entire performance is in Spanish and Italian, and the poorly translated surtitles (which never included the lyrics to the arias, which seems a peculiar choice in a show about musicians) are getting increasingly erratic – zipping by too quickly, or disappearing for long stretches. The “slave” appears again, this time apparently as a French revolutionary. (As I know from Barbier, the French public never really warmed to the castrati, partly because of political and cultural rivalries with Italy, and during the Revolutionary period the feeling was especially intense.) I say he was “apparently” a revolutionary, because the surtitles have disappeared again, and I can catch Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite, but little else, though frankly I’m not trying too hard. I’m listlessly checking my watch yet again, having given up hope that this anticipated evening would be anything but long and wasted.

And then the woman to my left, who had been sitting there quietly except for the occasional chuckle and a moment when she was rustling in her purse for a butterscotch lifesaver (we were crammed in pretty tightly there) suddenly jumped to her feet! Her voice rang out like a trumpet: “What is this performance? What is going on? Do you know what he’s saying? He’s insulting us! This whole show is an insult! Can’t anyone else speak French? Do you know what they’re saying?”

For a giddy moment I wonder if this is part of the performance. Then I realize it couldn’t be – it’s so much more dramatic and interesting than anything we’ve seen so far. Someone shouts, “Why don’t you leave then?” Her companion looks panicked and starts murmuring, “I’m sorry.” The actors are stunned for a moment and break character. They start shouting at her, I can’t tell what, and she says, “Oh yeah? Come say that to my face, big man! Why don’t you go back to Mexico City! Come here and say that!” She’s not a large or fierce-looking woman, but frankly I wouldn’t have messed with her just then either. The actors soon return to the spirit of the play by reacting in the most juvenile possible manner: they grab the plate of dinner roles that the fat castrato has been gorging on (a fat guy eating – hilarious!) and start throwing them at her. Since I am right next to her, one of them hits my left arm and bounces off. I am collateral baked goods damage! Fortunately they were Parker House rolls – a Dutch Crunch roll could have done some serious damage.

By this time the other woman has managed to take her friend’s arm and persuade her to leave. My ennui has dissipated – I am electrified! For the first time, I really understand how the Italian audiences of the baroque could laugh and chat and flirt during a performance and suddenly be galvanized by a great moment of dramatic truth. At last the evening has given me some insight into the theater of the castrati! I am a strict believer in not imposing your reactions in a way that would disrupt other viewers, but this is a world turned upside down: I’ve just seen the greatest performance of the evening, and heard easily the best voice.

And so, angry blonde stranger on my left, bravissima, bravissima, arcibravissima! Trembling with adoration, I crown you with immortal laurel, and weeping with ecstatic pleasure, I toss roses at your furious feet!

The play resumes; someone dressed as Napoleon is prancing around on stage, and someone is saying repeatedly, “No, Napoleon was a midget!” I gaze wistfully at the roll lodged in the now-upright empty seat beside me. I, who hate food fights, briefly consider tossing it at the youngish women behind me, who are talking again. Their eyeglasses really bug me. You can tell they were carefully chosen to say “We’re stylish and sexy – but intellectual!” I realize I’m just trying to extend a moment that has come to its natural end. I also realize that expecting this mess to become worthwhile and interesting in its last – is it still half an hour? O dear God – is expecting a miracle beyond the capacity even of Lourdes. I normally stick to performances to the bitter end, but I’m realizing that I now have a clear path to the aisle, and so . . .

readymades

Cherokee Purple, Oregon Spring, Isis Candy, Christmas Grape, Green Zebra, Snow White, Black Cherry, Currant, Green Grape, Ginger Golden Delicious, Great White, Aunt Ruby’s German.

Those are all heirloom tomato varieties that I will be planting once my lower back stops stabbing and the wind lowers so my allergies aren’t as bad. I tend to buy plants based on their evocative names. I once rejected a spectacular pink rose – and it had to have been spectacular, because I’m usually drawn to the crimson, purple, or orange roses rather than the pink, which should only be made out of icing – because it was named Sexy Rexy. I like Rex Harrison fine, but I just couldn’t do it. Once in Boston I was very late for work because I wanted to hear the end of whatever Bach piece was on the radio. Another time I was very late because the light through the raindrops was so dazzling I couldn’t move from my spot on the sidewalk. And another time my whole day was thrown off because I spent about half an hour staring at the lapping sculptural waves of the Charles River. And one of the happiest hours of my life was spent sitting in the Pantheon watching the circle of light from the center of the dome making its slow progression over the amber walls. On the other hand, I still remember my annoyance trying to get to the BART station one evening rush hour while a young woman kept beseeching or ordering us to stop and look at the sunset. It was a particularly spectacular one – I’d spent about twenty minutes in a conference room with a good view watching it before I left the office – but I now wanted to get home and was anyway a bit irritated at being cast in the role of a blindly rushing bourgeois in her drama. All this is a roundabout way of saying I have no idea if I would have stopped to listen to Joshua Bell playing at the L’Enfant Plaza metro stop (even though I’m the type of person who can’t hear “metro station” without thinking “petals on a wet, black bough”).

BART has buskers a-plenty, some good, some bad (there’s one morning guitarist at Civic Center who is particularly annoying, especially when he orders us to smile). Some play classical and some jazz saxophone; sometimes it’s Chinese instrumental or Mexican vocal or gospel. One old black man plays the blues and he’s not that good but I’m convinced he gets money because he looks the part – he tends to wear a loose white wifebeater even when it’s chilly out, and he's ready to be a cover photo for a delta blues CD. One grimy angular old man with a long white beard shows up at night wrapped in a blanket and when the opera or symphony audiences come down he’ll start playing a reedy triumphal march from Aida on his flute, and it makes me wonder who in his past loved him enough to give him flute lessons and tell him about Aida and the opera and what happened so that he’s begging for change from the audience instead of being part of it. I hurry past some of the performers (especially if they’re just playing rock, which is irritatingly omnipresent anyway) but sometimes I give them money and sometimes I stop to listen, but usually I’m in the station because I’m going someplace and I need to get there, no matter how beautifully the busker is playing. There are only so many times you can explain tardiness by saying that a trance of unbearable beauty had rooted you to the spot. If you’re open to it, random poetry besieges you constantly. If you’re given to viewing the world aesthetically, you are already living in a world of private sensation and memory that is only open askew to even the sympathetic, and that can make for difficulties in most offices. Over the years I’ve learned not to advertise a lot of my interests at work – even those who like opera aren’t necessarily going to be simpatico with my operatic preferences. It’s not that I think I’ll be giving the wrong impression – actually, I’m afraid I’ll be giving the right impression, and I like to put that off as long as possible.

I’ve probably enacted many of the L’Enfant commuters over the years. Sometimes I’m indifferent to the music, sometimes I can’t be late for work, sometimes I want to get to my morning tea or the restroom or just out of the crowds. It would have been nice if people had been able to stop and listen to Bell, but the need to get to work, no matter how boring or pointless the job is, sometimes has to take precedence. How else in this world are we going to pay for whatever is our form of aesthetic delight? I’m surrounded by books and CDs and DVDs, each printed or digitally encoded with some novel fascination, and all I need to do is pay attention, once I get the time. That’s why I like concert halls, for all their drawbacks – they are the frame that makes me look and listen with attention. I often play music in the background that should only be played to the silent and attentive, but I’m reading or washing the dishes or surfing the Net – but I just don’t have the time otherwise, or I’m too easily distracted, or I don’t have the energy, or something. Sometimes you have to rush off to conserve your energy and earn the money so that you can stop and pay attention later.

Radames Rashomon

One morning last week I was lying in bed listening to NPR, which is what I do when I don’t jump up and go to the gym in the morning, which I don’t do when I am going to or coming from the theater, because I just can’t stay up that late otherwise, when I heard a teaser about a tenor walking offstage during a performance. I thought, “La Scala, Aida, Alagna” and went back to wondering how late I could show up to work and still be within the range of the acceptable. I didn’t think much more of it but needless to say I ended up hearing a lot more about it.

Brouhahas of this sort don’t really engage me deeply; I feel dramatics should be left in the hands of trained professionals, as in playwrights and composers, not tenors with possible low blood sugar and resentful Day of the Locust types in the balconies. I don’t have strong feelings either way about Alagna or his wife, though I understand Radames was maybe more than he should have taken on. And a Zeffirelli production? No thank you; I already have a Christmas tree, loaded down with shiny bright golden baubles. And though I can’t really approve of abandoning one’s colleagues practically mid-aria, I initially was sympathetic to Alagna. Booed at his first (notoriously difficult) aria? If you’ve read any of my other entries it’s pretty clear what I think of audiences generally, and I especially dislike “passionate” (for which read: loud, obnoxious, limited) self-appointed judges. Booing someone for a botched note in his first aria indicates to me a very technically based, athletic-competition view of performance (you catch the ball or you drop it; not a lot of nuance usually, even if the play is under review) which is completely alien to viewing opera as a coherent dramatic work.

I was thinking of a passage in one of my favorite novels, Clarissa, in which Lovelace criticizes the individuals (or claques) that disrupt performances with loud booing (for though he is a rake, he is also a gentleman). And I thought of passages in Galina Vishnevskaya’s autobiography in which she discusses similar problems for both herself and others at La Scala (if you’re curious, go to her index and look up Italy and Karajan; better yet, read the whole fascinating book, which is worthwhile even for people with no interest in opera – my favorite moment was her description of hunting through every florist shop in Moscow looking for a flower to put on the grave of Prokofiev, who had the misfortune to die on the same day as Stalin; even in death the tyrant was fearful enough to suck every flower in the city onto his grave). The major comparison, of course, has been to the travails of Maria Callas, which reminds me of Karl Marx’s witty epigram that history repeats itself: the first time is tragedy and the second farce. Karl was the Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker of fulminating proletariat-centered economists.

Within hours everything I thought I knew about the incident had been turned upside down and inside out, so that it was no longer clear what had happened or why or who had said or mistranslated what. The understudy rushing onstage in civvies? And it turns out there was another one already in costume? The booing might not have been for Alagna, but for suborned audience members, possibly hired by him? Was he really jealous of the ballet dancer’s ass, or was that a mistranslation of what the dancer said? Were there threatening gestures in the audience and low blood sugar in the singer? Singing on the steps at the Thursday performance (which made me think of Terrell Owens doing sit-ups in his driveway after being suspended from whatever football team was fool enough to hire him last year)? Eventually the insanity takes over and it’s not even worthwhile summarizing the details. Soon I’m sure a standard narrative will emerge, with agreed-on heroes, villains, and lessons to be learned, but who knows what relation it will bear to anything that actually happened.

The only thing that really mystifies me is the people who claim that this will “be good for opera” and “get people talking about opera.” That’s like the local cineaste claiming that the audience that goes on-line to read Lindsey Lohan’s latest drug-fueled blackberried manifesto of insanity will, through an inevitable progression, end up debating the finer points of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s oeuvre. The audience that really cares deeply about anything – not just opera, but pop music, and baseball and football games, and literature, and religion and politics – is fairly small though probably constant in size through generations. Everyone else is just looking in to see what the noise is about, before getting distracted by something else.

regie theater

I try to avoid posting in language that would, as they used to say, bring a blush to the cheek of modesty, but I realized this morning that yesterday's entry used the words "fucking," "shit," and "blow job." But these words arose organically from the subject, because I was talking about . . . Parsifal. . . .

Swan Dive

This is going to be long, but I find that so suitable for Parsifal. . . .

Digression One: Mein lieber Schwan!
My first viewing of Parsifal was in the form of the Hans-Jurgen Syberberg film, at Boston's long-gone Exeter Street Theater (a handsome romanesque revival building that was first turned into a furniture store -- sort of a proto-Ikea -- and then a Waterstone's bookstore, which is what it might still be for all I know). I had heard the music but didn't know the story in any detail. I nodded off briefly. (This had nothing to do with boredom; my body will sleep when it's tired no matter how interested I am in what I'm doing.) When I came to, Gurnemanz was berating Parsifal at length for shooting a swan. And I thought: what's the deal with the swan? Was it a very special swan? Why are they so upset?

Once VCRs arrived, I rented Syberberg's film again (the sweet beauty of VCRs: if I fell asleep, I could just stop or rewind the film). This time I was there for the whole swan incident, but I still didn't really understand the intensity of the reaction from Gurnemanz and company.

Several years later, I had spent a mostly sleepless night once again, tormented by the mechanical thumping of numerous stereo systems (I was living way too close to several colleges, among them Berklee). I was preparing to go for an early-morning run along the Charles River, hoping exercise would at least reduce my disgust with everything around me. Across from my apartment I saw a flock of pigeons pecking snacks from the trash left in the gutter. A group of little boys was walking down the sidewalk, spotted the pigeons, and immediately ran towards them yelling, just to frighten them away. Why? Why not leave the birds in peace? Why not enjoy their iridescent neck feathers and just go your own way? The children saw something smaller and weaker and had to disrupt it, just because they could. My disgusted mood only deepened.

I won't claim I made the connection right away, but eventually I realized that's why Gurnemanz is so angry when Parsifal kills the swan: he didn't need to. He saw something flying along and shot it for the joy of killing. I hadn't missed something special about the swan. It was a sentient being, and it needed no more sacredness to make killing it a sin. When Parsifal breaks his bow after the rebuke, the wrathful Gurnemanz doesn't pay much attention, but it's a major step in the holy fool's moral development.

This is the way the meanings of Parsifal have come to me, slowly, in irregular bursts. Parsifal has always fascinated me, but I won't claim even now that I, or anyone, can completely understand it as it vibrates deeply in our hearts.

Nonetheless (on to Schlingensief's notorious interpretation, my first opera at Bayreuth), I feel free to say that this production got it all completely wrong. Much as I love to sneer at overly conservative opera audiences, I have to give them this one. I hardly know where to start. I'm tempted to say Parsifal is all about sex and the production isn't sexy, and leave it at that, but there's so much more.

The setting was sort of a cargo cult/Heart of Darkness/junkyard mishmash that rotated around, though each section looked roughly the same, so Monsalvat and the Grail Hall and Klingsor's garden and the flowery meadow for the Good Friday music all looked pretty much the same. There was no development in the characters either. Parsifal and Kundry both have doppelgangers who (respectively) baptize or wash feet or whatever long before the character has reached that stage. Gurnemanz, not Parsifal, breaks the swan-killing bow, thereby completely missing that Parsifal has made a leap forward in understanding another creature's suffering.

And then there are the bunnies, eviscerated, decaying, or just hopping around in projections. The day after the performance I was speaking to a woman at the hotel breakfast who was with the southern California Wagner Society. They had gone to hear a lecture about the production (I believe from the director, but the only participant I know for sure is the Klingsor, John Wegner). The bunnies were discussed. Apparently bunnies have many cultural connotations throughout the world, particularly in India. Unfortunately the performance was not happening in India. Here are my associations with bunny rabbits: mindless fucking, Easter candy (hollow except for the ears), Bugs and Elmer Fudd (you see a bunny at Bayreuth, I defy you not to hear "Kill the WAB - bit! Kill the WAB - bit!"), my oldest sister's childhood pet that defecated little round balls of shit and did little else before dying, the song "Don't Be the Bunny" from Urinetown the Musical, and Matt Groening's Life in Hell bunnies (when they brought out life-size blank dolls shaped exactly like the Life in Hell rabbits with big red marks over the genital region, all I could think of was "Could you please show us on the doll where the heil'gen Speer touched you inappropriately? And would you confirm that this caused you a never-easing wound?"). I suppose you could wrap your mind around those associations as an aid to seeing into Parsifal, but you could do that with almost anything (such is the power and also the ambiguity of this myth). The problem with counting on cultural associations that are not native to your audience is that most people are not going to get it, and those who do will do so only because they've been told what to think. They're reacting from specific and not general information: instead of being open to the poetic images and reverberations of the stage pictures, they are slotting them into the previously assigned categories and feeling smug because they are people in the know, people with insider information that is not available to just anyone. A performance should be accessible to anyone who is willing to open up to it and think about it, not just those who have been given their secret decoder rings.

There were lots of projections. I think some of them might have been of the syphilis spyrochete (either I read this somewhere or I guessed: I don't think most audience members, excepting any doctors, would recognize those little squiggly things). I've read that Wagner once confided to someone that Amfortas had venereal disease. But a remark like that must be from the trickster in him: no one could possibly listen to that music and think that ache could be cured with a few shots of penicillin. It's an absurdly literal interpretation in a production that barely pays attention to literal meanings in any other point (even the spear is actually a shepherd's crook; the only standard stage picture was one they probably should have changed, which was dressing Parsifal in the conventional Jesus/Apollo long white robes and shoulder-length blond locks, not a look many men can pull off).

The Grail ceremony was a blood sacrifice enacted by participants from all the major belief systems, from Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish (because Wagner's art is more comprehensive than his tormented mind) traditions. I could see what they were getting at, and it had a certain power, but if the most sacred ceremony involves killing an animal and splashing its blood around, then what difference does it make if an ordinary swan is killed? It makes their reaction in that opening scene as overdone as I first thought it was long ago.

The Klingsor was an obvious case of ignoring the words and actions of the drama. Perhaps Wagner was to blame here for not composing the role for some nineteenth century David Daniels, but even a cursory reading of the libretto will tell you that Klingsor castrated himself (to cure the wound that will not heal) and was cast out from the Grail knights for this destructive evasion of that mighty force; hence his attempt to destroy the rest of the knights with the seductions of the Flower Maidens (showing perhaps that there is no resistance except through his method of self-mutilation). So does it make any sense at all for Klingsor to be not just powerful in a magicky kind of way but obviously the most virile man around? Why would the director have Kundry give him a blow job? I'm not really up on the mechanics of this, but is that even possibly when the man has been castrated? Klingsor (and I should say John Wegner gave an excellent performance) wore little but a loincloth for most of his performance, displaying his forceful, muscular physique, and like the dedicated performer of Othello in Nicholas Nickleby, he had blacked his whole body to play the part. Yes, Klingsor for some reason was portrayed as a black man, while Parsifal, Gurnemanz, Kundry, Amfortas, Titurel, and the Grail Knights were all white. What exactly was the message there, making the evil character black? To my American eyes the only thing genuinely shocking about this supposedly shocking performance was the minstrel-show make-up on a couple of the attendants (complete with the white outline around their mouths). There was a disturbing objectification of black bodies throughout: there was a large black woman who was required to walk around naked except for a little skirt (Kundry's doppelganger mentioned above was a midget, another example of objectifying the different, though all I could think of when I saw her was the outraged outburst of Peter Dinklage's character in Living in Oblivion, who was furious that once again he had to play in a dream sequence because he's a dwarf: "Does anybody even really have dreams about dwarves?").

Digression Two: More Fallout
I'm going to go on several tangents here, starting with Dr. Atomic: I still feel that it is one of the few operas where you can't do color-blind casting, because in a work claiming to deal with the moral problems of that time and place, you can't just pretend that there was no deep moral problem caused by segregation. But I will also admit that part of my discomfort was that the only black singer was cast as a buffoonish general. At least they partially avoided the temptation of making the darker-skinned characters wiser, more truthful and moral; they shoved that silly simplification onto their portrayal of the women. (I say they partially avoided the temptation because there was the American Indian nanny.) Maybe I would have had a different reaction to the black general if there had been another black person on stage, say, Audra McDonald as Mrs. Oppenheimer, a role I believe she going to sing in New York (and I'm going to go all Laurence Sterne and go off on another digression: I heard McDonald at Symphony Hall last spring, and she introduced The Glamorous Life by saying, "I'm going to sing a song from A Little Night Music: no, I ain't gonna sing The Miller's Son" and I realized how rarefied the air was in which it was not even within the realm of possibility that the hackneyed song no one wanted to hear from that musical would be Send in the Clowns; I was giddy on the esoteric heights. . . .). Of course, the whole problem of color-blind casting in Dr. Atomic would be solved if they revised it to be more of a meditative oratorio rather than an attempt to portray the actual events leading up to the A-bomb test, a revision they should undertake anyway.

Back to Klingsor. He not only returns in Act Three, he even regains the spear. According to my informant who heard the lecture, Wegner, who was very committed to the production, said this was to show that Klingsor has also been redeemed, though how and where and by whom is completely unclear; certainly the audience members I heard afterward were completely baffled, possibly because it's the opposite of what Wagner actually wrote. You can make a case for the sympathetic qualities of Alberich -- I personally find him very sympathetic -- but you really can't with Klingsor. If it's so easy to redeem everyone, why does it take so long?

My informant also told me that the naked black woman was cast because she had the exact build of the Venus of Willendorf. I told her I had noticed that (she was duly impressed) but I still found the display of her body exploitative, more like the Hottentot Venus than the Venus of Willendorf. She also told me that the many Arabic verses written all over were new this year; I, having painfully learned that everything is ruled by fashions, told her I had guessed that (she was doubly duly impressed). But there you have this production: there was no way into much of what they did unless you were in the privileged position of hearing personally from those behind the scenes. The performance was undoubtedly sincere and serious in its intention , but ended up looking trendy and wrong-headed. While watching it (from my excellent third row seat, the best I had for the festival) I was increasingly irritated, but as days went by most of the staging was so irrelevant it sort of slid off my memory and I was left with the very fine musical performance. Not a gesamkuntswerk, but not a total loss by any means.