High School Musical!

I was in the middle of preparing a long entry detailing my disappointment in San Francisco Opera's upcoming season, when I did get some good operatic news (and let me express due gratitude to David Gockley for first staging the work in Houston back in 1987): this coming July, plucky local upstart Trinity Lyric Opera is presenting the (let me make sure I have all the qualifiers in place) northern California staged premiere of Nixon in China! (The exclamation point indicates my excitement; it's not an integral part of the title, indicative of general kickiness.)

And get this: it's at my old high school. Not in the cafeteria where they used to stage the annual spring musical (and I was already objecting to the body mikes back then), but in the brand spanking semi-new Castro Valley Center for the Performing Arts, at Castro Valley High School, where, I regret to say, they did not raise the weak above the strong, though I did learn that to be a grain of sand in Heaven's eye is to taste eternal joy. It's easily accessible on BART. I've already bought tickets to both Friday performances.

From the scorched earth
People step forth
Over dead wood
And over the dead:
Follow their lead!

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Vingt Regards

I

Is Messiaen’s music now a cult? Hertz Hall is full for Christopher Taylor’s performance of Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jesus, with a buzz surpassing the usual recital. I overhear conversations about L’Ascension at the Symphony the other day and Saint Francois at the Opera several years ago. Does this happen to every composer on his way to “Oh, him again” status, or only the heaven-stormers? Is this what it was like to gather for a rare hearing of the late quartets when the generality still held that Beethoven’s late work was insane and monstrous?

II

resplendence, transcendence, refulgence, resounding reredos of reverberation

III

If you saw Christopher Taylor on the street, he would look completely ordinary, albeit slightly goofy; you’d guess correctly that he was interested in mathematics. When he plays, his looks change. He becomes completely compelling and magnetic. He’s downright adorkable!

IV

I’m not on the coveted piano-recital left-hand side of Hertz Hall, but if I look at the glassy black underside of the grand piano's raised lid, I see the reflection of Taylor's hands dancing over the keyboard and then the jumping inner works of the Steinway. The entire piano is trembling, quivering and shaking.

V

Christ, this ticket was a bargain!

VI

The paradox of silence, rarer and rarer in our world: the quieter and more attentive the room, the more disruptive even the smallest sound becomes; a hastily turned page in the program rips open the atmosphere. Once, on the hajj to Stratford-on-Avon, I was walking on a path beside an empty road, and suddenly the crunching of gravel beneath my feet sounded like a horrible deafening roar. I stopped walking, and experienced absolute stillness and silence for possibly the only time in my life, until a car came by and broke the spell.

VII

I’ve had a low-level migraine all day, but I just noticed it stopped when the music started, and resumed when the music stopped. Should I forward this to Benedict XVI as Messiaen’s first miracle? Do I need more of a miracle than his ability to write such music? Years ago, in the Cathedral Treasury at Chartres, I noticed a rather sheepish reliquary stuck way up on a shelf. It contained the alleged cloak of the Virgin Mary, the alleged discovery of which caused the great cathedral to be built. Doesn’t that make it actually miraculous? Isn’t what’s around us enough? Why are we slightly embarrassed by the sublime, yet hoping always for miracles?

VIII

I am hearing passages I never really heard on the several recordings I have. Do I just listen differently in a concert hall, so that, for instance, nothing distracts me from the quieter moments? Or is it just the recreative performers who take the same score and render it slightly differently, to people who all hear it slightly differently?

IX

“I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.”

X

(colors of the celestial city) I have my eyes shut. How did he get that bell sound? If I could play more than a C major scale on the piano, would I understand, even if I couldn’t replicate it? The sound is exactly like the Campanile carillon caroling as I walked through the light rain to the concert. It would be so cool to have synaesthesia right now. But only if I could turn it off later so the colors don’t blind me.

XI

Who are all these people?

XII

Walking out of the Hall, I’m oddly grateful for the misty rain and the trees of such dark green they’re almost black silhouetted against the pearly dove-gray sky.

XIII

This was one of the concerts I was most excited about this season. What do I do now? What does Taylor do after a performance? I would need to pace up and down in a darkened room for at least an hour.

can I get a witness

I don’t usually see the New York Times, so I am indebted to indefatigable linkmeister Sid Chen of The Standing Room for bringing to my attention the recent article on the new, or finally produced, operatic version of Elmer Gantry, with music by Robert Aldridge and a libretto by Herschel Garfein. It occurred to me that I might post something about it, since apparently I am one of the few people around who actually heard Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sing at least part of the role of Sister Sharon Falconer. I’ve often wondered what happened to the project since I heard the workshop back in 1992. Once the Internet blessed our lives, I would occasionally try to google some information, but rarely came up with much.

I had also wondered occasionally what happened to Composers in Red Sneakers, the composers’ collective in Boston that started around the time I moved there. The Times article mentioned that Aldridge was one of the original sneakers. I should dig out my old playbills and see if I heard anything by him at their concerts – for some reason I didn’t make the connection at the time. I sort of lost sight of the Red Sneaker group even before I moved out of Massachusetts (e-mail has since made it much easier to reach your potential audience), and I had assumed they had dissolved or otherwise imploded, as is the way of collectives. Turns out I was wrong – they’re still going strong, so good for them. I don’t know what they’re like now, but they were known back in the mid-1980s as a fun and informal new music group – this was back when being a fun and informal new music group was considered pretty much an oxymoron, or at least a bizarre and suspicious aberration. I’m not sure where exactly the name came from, but you got free admission to their concerts if you wore red Converse hightops. I had a pair and enjoyed new music, so I went several times. I think the concerts were usually at Memorial Hall on the Harvard campus.

The Elmer Gantry workshop was at the small C. Walsh Theatre at Suffolk University on Beacon Hill. According to my playbill, there were two performances, Thursday February 27 and Saturday February 29, 1992. I was at the Thursday performance. I know this for certain because I bought a libretto ($5) and had both composer and librettist sign it, and Garfein wrote the date. I wish Hunt Lieberson had been available to sign as well; I know there’s something silly about having people sign a piece of paper, which is why I rarely ask for autographs outside of formal signing sessions, but there’s probably some principle of sympathetic magic behind its appeal, and I wish I had had the chance to ask her – at least it would have given me the opportunity to say thank you to her.

I don’t remember where I heard about the workshop, though the Boston Globe seems the likely source. It was open to the public – I certainly couldn’t have gotten in otherwise. I talked some friends from work into going with me – the literary source might have held some interest (one of them actually had a Sinclair Lewis thing and collected editions of his work – not the author I would choose, but I respected it and found it kind of an endearingly offbeat choice), and these were people who were sort of edging into classical music and opera, and I’m sure they went because I said “You have to hear this woman.” I wasn’t really familiar with the lead, Vernon Hartman, but of the other singers Sharon Baker as Lulu Baines and Frank Kelley as Eddie Fislinger were familiar performers; I had often heard them with Lorraine Hunt (her name at the time).

There are two things I remember clearly about the performance. The first is this: The playbill said that the opera's opening scene would not be performed and the workshop would open with the second scene, and the libretto had only a synopsis of the first scene, and I believe either Aldridge or Garfein beforehand summarized the first scene and said that the faculty meeting we were about to see was actually the second scene of the opera, and despite all that, several people started off the post-performance discussion by saying they didn’t think the faculty meeting scene was the best choice as the first scene of the opera. The Times article implied a certain arrogance or at least bluntness on the part of Aldridge and Garfein, but I recall them being exceptionally courteous in the face of this evidence that the people who pay the least attention are always the first to voice their opinions. (By the way, the Times article isn’t quite correct in saying the workshop was of the first act – it was of portions of the first and second acts, and Aldridge and Garfein had a note in the playbill saying that “When complete, Elmer Gantry will be three hours long, in three acts.”)

The second thing I remember is of course Lorraine Hunt’s performance as the Aimee Semple McPherson avatar, Sister Sharon Falconer. While sorting through and organizing my boxes of playbills recently, I was surprised to see that I had heard Hunt as Nitocris, the king’s mother, in Handel’s Belshazzar. Imagine the luxury and folly of hearing her often enough to let some performances slip away from the mind. But others are particularly vivid in my memory (in Handel’s Giulio Cesare and Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito, for example), and one of them is the Elmer Gantry workshop. The Times article referred to a recording of her singing Sharon’s entrance aria. I hope it still exists and is released some day soon. No disrespect to the artist who ended up creating the role, but Hunt Lieberson’s peculiar spiritual intensity brought a special edge to the character – she might be an ordinary woman, she might be a charlatan, or, when you heard her sing, she really might be in direct contact with great powers sweeping through the starry skies, and it was all a matter of faith. The scene I remember most vividly had her crouched down in front of (possibly figurative) incense burners, her hands arabesqueing as if with the scented smoke, while she chanted and sang an incantation filled with deep, vibrant ululations. Afterwards one of my co-workers kept saying, “Oh my God! Oh my God! That thing she did with her voice!” Yep. Exactly. That thing she did with her voice.

complacencies of the peignoir

I will sometimes go into the theater with hypothesis in hand. For instance, this one about La Rondine: its supposedly clumsy dramaturgy had more to do with people missing the point than with actual faults in the work itself – was it probable that the masterly dramatic mind behind Boheme, Tosca, and Butterfly could have fumbled that late in his career? It reminded me of what a professor of mine had once blurted out when discussing the middle of Dr Faustus – “I wish Marlowe hadn’t written these scenes!” I knew what she meant; between the noble questing of the beginning and the sublime tragedy of the end, there are scenes of low farce. But it seemed to me that those scenes are central to the meaning of the play – given great potential, and an amazing chance, most people will squander their opportunities on the equivalent of squirting wine in the Pope’s face, and so the bumptious comedy points to the moral even more than the high-toned tragic speeches do. I’ll admit to a bad habit of listening to operas without reading along in the libretto, but I vaguely knew Magda in Rondine had made a choice between love and comfort, and I was developing the possibilities of a whole Dr Faustus/Rondine comparison in my head, and just as I am apparently the only inhabitant of the blogosphere who has written at any length about both Nathan Gunn and Barry Zito, so I figured this was my big chance to be the only person in the history of the world ever to compare Rondine and Faustus.

It turns out I was wrong, though. It is possible for the dramatic genius whose works have both blessed and oppressed the operatic stage to produce an inept drama. After the first part of the recent San Francisco Opera production, I was thinking, That was lovely – the second act was maybe too reminiscent of the Café Momus scene in Boheme, but still all very lovely. . . . I left the theater after the second part thinking, Whoa! That sure went off the tracks.

I’d like to make a distinction between being tired of certain Puccini warhorses and dismissing Puccini. The very fact that certain works of his are so much in demand that any habitual opera-goer is sick to death of them is a tribute to his genius. You could argue that his success salted the earth for succeeding generations of composers, raising expectations of lyrical and dramatic success combined with popularity that no one else could live up to, or should have to live up to, especially under changed social and financial circumstances. Years ago I read that, even though he was seriously ill, Puccini traveled to Vienna to hear the premiere of Pierrot Lunaire, and took the time afterwards to congratulate the young Schoenberg. I’ve always liked that story, since it indicates a generosity and openness that I admire. I’d like to read a good biography of Puccini to get an accurate picture, since there is no trace of any such attitude in the playbill’s Rondine articles; according to them, Puccini was jealous of the success of other composers (notably both Strausses), was contemptuous of any Viennese experimentation, and longed to achieve the dubious goal of writing an operetta, which seems to me like being able to weave a great tapestry but aching to dominate the crafts fair through the mastery of macramé. Maybe Gockley & Co. are just trying to reassure the Philistines, who seem to be in the ascendancy at the house (how ironic that this season opened with Samson).

It was a lovely production; all three acts had a different and gorgeous Art Deco set, each of which received a round of applause while the music was playing, for they were that kind of set and it was that kind of audience. Angela Gheorgiu made her local debut, and she does indeed have a strikingly lovely voice. The first act opened with a group scene, and I wasn’t sure which one was our star, until she moved towards the on-stage piano to sing her famous aria, and I noticed her dress was slit up to there, and I realized, well, obviously, there’s our star. I didn’t recognize her because for some reason she wore an incredibly unflattering Gidget-does-Lulu hairstyle. Considering the role wigs have played in her story (for those who don’t know, she was the one playing Micaela in Carmen to whom Volpe said, “That blonde wig is going on stage whether you’re under it or not”), I was surprised she agreed to such harsh-looking hair. I’m all about the hair. Anna Christy, whom I keep seeing playing maids, was both pert and charming, but of course since this is an attempt at an operetta Magda’s maid is treated with condescension and ultimately is put in her place. I like Misha Didyk (I have friends who hate him), who is the tenor and therefore, needless to say, the male romantic lead, but I didn’t have strong feelings about him either way in this role.

As for where the work goes wrong, it’s the third act. After the café scene in the second act, which I needn’t describe because it’s so similar to Act 2 of Boheme (though I would like to offer sincere praise to the hilariously tacky disco ball glittering in the back of the set), Magda has run off with her young lover. There is no Violetta-type sacrifice here, though – the woman of the world and her ardent young lover are in a fashionable resort, just as stylish as the first two acts, running up the bills. They sing about how much in love they are, in a duet of ill-advised length. I can accept this sort of thing from lovers with a mythic aura, like Tristan and Isolde or Cio-Cio San and Pinkerton, but there’s only so much of other people’s bland banal happiness I want to sit through. The maid and her boyfriend show up and then leave. Our lovers realize they are in serious debt. (That’s something I’d prefer to hear them go on about – as one who has spent not wisely but too well myself, I await the great operatic treatment of debt. Other than Rheingold, of course.) The youth wants to marry Magda, but such are the benefits of her worldly experience that she knows such a marriage would kill his saintly mother. Again unlike Traviata, no parent is brought on stage to make such a plea for him- or herself, so instead of a dramatically interesting confrontation we are given a supposition, and a clichéd one at that. (Being partly of Latin descent myself, I have some familiarity with such saintly old women, and personally I’m figuring that the mother is actually a raging controlling bitch.) Magda realizes that mounting debts and society's rigid rules require her to abandon her young lover, who, we must take on faith based on his tenor voice, is the great true love that would last the rest of her life, and instead she turns to – not poverty, disease, and a lonely death, like Violetta, but the wealthy arms of her rich protector. I thought there would be another scene or two after she makes this choice, but no – that’s it! Since her protector was played by the handsome and distinguished-looking Philip Skinner, and he obviously has pretty elastic views of what he requires from her in the way of fidelity (as shown by his willingness to take her back, despite her running off with the young lover, and despite the really awful hair), I’m thinking she should maybe count her blessings.

I was glad to have seen Rondine at last, and I would enjoy seeing it again. But it filled me with ironic skepticism rather than a warm glow. Unlike such operas as Carmen or Trovatore, with their sympathetic treatment of outsiders and those alien to the usual opera audience, this is a work aimed at warming the toes of the privileged (so I guess Puccini did succeed in writing an operetta). It is designed for those who have chosen, or ended up in, comfort, and want to luxuriate without consequences in the pretense that they might have had a great romance instead (so I guess Puccini also succeeded in writing an ur-chick flick). It’s an essentially nostalgic work, like Boheme, though it lacks that work’s real sense of poverty and sickness, however obscured those qualities might be by a golden haze of remembrance.

I was kind of stunned to realize that the plot of Rondine is essentially the same as the plot of Mae West’s Sex, which I had seen a few days earlier. Mae handles the whole thing with greater aplomb, and there’s no silly pretense that marrying her rich older friend rather than her handsome young stud is some sort of tragic dilemma. Both were written around the time when “A Bird in a Gilded Cage” was a big hit, so the fate of what the times would have called women of the world as well as the need for women to find financial support seem to have been popular themes. Maybe this reflects the growing independence, sexual and financial, of women. Maybe it reflects the largely female audience’s need to see dramatic interest in their lives – though as dilemmas go, choosing between love and money is sort of like deciding between Paris and London for your annual vacation – it’s a dilemma of privilege. It’s not as if we’re talking about coal miners and their wives here. Maybe it just reflects a certain self-indulgent need to feel sorry for oneself, and to reflect weepily on what might have been from the comfort of our padded red velvet subscription seats at the opera. Magda’s tragedy? Magda’s dilemma? Cry me a river, sweetiepie – at least your cage is gilded.

you're the moon over Mae West's shoulder

The hilarity ensues immediately once you buy a ticket for Sex, the Mae West play which has been making the national rounds: do you write “Sex” on your appointment calendar? Do you tell people you’re going to see “Sex”? I generally settled for “the play at the Aurora Theater” in my discreet way, but you’ve got to hand it to Mae – you might think society has moved past her particular brand of naughtiness, but she’s already sauntered ahead of you, because her good-humored innuendo not only outsmarts our blunt ways, she’s also as aware as Jane Austen of social class and money.

The script is similar to those West wrote for her movies – she (called Margy LaMont this time around) is a good bad girl; a rich and innocent young man, ignorant of her background, falls in love with her down in Trinidad; when he takes her home to meet his parents, she realizes that his mother Clara is the ungrateful society lady she rescued in the first act from a misadventure in slumming. Margy eventually decides that her future happiness lies in marrying her old-time friend and lover, the recently retired Lieutenant Gregg, who knows all about her life and keeps proposing anyway, and moving with him to Australia, an ending which satisfies everyone except the love-struck young man, who will get over it.

The play is actually similar to most of Oscar Wilde’s plays; like them, it is basically an ironic melodrama about class boundaries leavened with sexually subversive epigrams. I don’t want to oversell the comparison; I’m not saying West could have written anything like The Importance of Being Earnest (though even Wilde only managed that once), and she never wrote anything like Salome (though I would love to have seen her version). And her play is a lot looser than, say, An Ideal Husband, which is a disadvantage or an advantage, depending on how you feel about plot machinery. Her play has plenty of vaudeville moments, and the first half ends with a very entertaining and very extraneous series of song and dance numbers (Robert Brewer as the lovestruck young man had a particularly nice voice, sounding at times remarkably like an actual 1920s Irish tenor – I guess I’m thinking of the John McCormack sound).

The Aurora is one of those tiny theaters (four rows in a U-shape around the open stage) that like to claim there are no bad seats, but I had one, at the right-hand tip of the U, behind the stage couch. For quite a bit of the play I was looking over the actors' shoulders or observing their necks. I would have just accepted this as my bad luck, but I saw a woman buy a discount ticket at the box office half an hour before the show started, and her seat was much better than mine. You’d think that buying in advance at full price would give you the better seat. Apparently I have a lot to learn about the ways of the theater.

Seating discontent aside, this was an enjoyable evening (oh, all right, I’ll give in and say it – I really enjoyed the Sex, thanks so much, the money is in the box office), though I couldn’t help feeling that if this had actually been a film from the 1930s, the class drama would have been more sharply delineated – there’s something antiquated and formal about the dress, movement, and speech of the upper classes in those films that is alien to our society, and difficult to convey with modern actors in a stripped-down set. I wish the Aurora had trusted the material a little more and relied less on its curiosity value and period charm. They opened and closed the show with unnecessary historical background – a sketch of the usual jazz age pizzazz, some shocked contemporary reviews, the eventual arrest for obscenity after packing the house for months. I’m not sure why they thought this fairly straightforward, enjoyable play needed all that – they wouldn’t have done the same for Lady Windermere’s Fan.

The attempt to recreate the atmosphere around the original play may also have been the reason for the production’s major miscalculation, which I’m guessing was the fault of Tom Ross, the director: having Delia MacDougall, the actress playing Margy, imitate Mae West. There are certain artists, like Gertrude Stein or Groucho Marx, who have such strong styles that attempts to discuss them usually end up as attempts to imitate them, which is always a mistake. You’re just not ever going to see a better Mae West imitation than the one Mae West did. And the exaggerated voluptuousity that is the West physique provides a built-in punchline that just can’t be supplied these days, since the red hot Mama body type seems to have disappeared with vaudeville.

The basic question is whether a star vehicle can survive without the star. I think Sex is a solid enough play so that it would have been worth trying, and MacDougall brought enough interesting flashes to her performance so that I wish she had been encouraged to form an independent interpretation. One of the best plays I saw last year was a star vehicle without the star – Charles Busch’s Red Scare on Sunset, performed by the student actors at the American Conservatory Theater. Usually it just seems to work out that I post late, and basically I’m OK with that, on the grounds that it’s all based on memory the minute you leave your seat anyway, and sometimes it helps to have things shake out over a few weeks, and also it’s not as if anyone is waiting to hear what I think before buying a ticket. But sometimes a little too much time goes by even for me (though never say never – I may paper over poverty-induced gaps in my upcoming schedule with reminiscences of past theatrical glories, like some superannuated theater ghost who can’t wait to regale you with the time he was the understudy Guildenstern for the greatest Hamlet of three generations ago), and I do wish I had posted about Red Scare, mostly so I could salute the genius of Charles Busch.

I think I just had a vague sense that he was one of those guys who put on a dress and did bad Bette Davis imitations; I have nothing against that, but on the rare occasions when I’m drunk enough to laugh at something like that I’m usually preoccupied with wondering how to make the room stop spinning. I didn’t even bother going to see Tales of the Allergist’s Wife when it played here a few years ago. I don’t know what tipped me off that I might be mistaken, but I have recanted my heresy. Busch recreates, subverts, and glorifies a grand tradition of theatricality that goes back to Bernhardt and no doubt farther; and if you doubt me put Die Mommy Die in your Netflix queue. About halfway through viewing it I thought, Sweet Jesus, this is the Oresteia! with suppositories!

Last year the young conservatory actors created a Red Scare that was true to his spirit but independent of his presence. It was not only probably the most consistently well-acted play I saw last year, it was hilarious from start to finish (assuming that you find funny, and I do, a plot that centers on a Communist conspiracy to abolish star billing and the Arthur Freed unit at MGM and replace them with black-and-white ensemble dramas). It also dealt in a deeper way than many more ponderous plays with the function of art and fame in a democracy, with the easy American way of switching personal identity and its confusing results, and with the American attempt to define a cohesive social identity through demonizing outsiders. People tend not to see comic cross-dressers as holding the mirror up to our profounder nature, but I’ve gotten more out of Busch’s work than I have out of a lot of Eugene O’Neill’s. Charles Busch and Mae West, raffish provocateurs on the far shore of the mainstream! Is it universal, or peculiarly American, that it’s the marginal who tell all the truth, but tell it slant?

tidings of comfort and joy

Oh my goodness. I woke up New Year’s Day to find the house a complete mess, with empty beer bottles filling up the recycling bin and the trash overflowing onto the filthy kitchen floor and a half-empty bottle of wine still on the kitchen counter forming a sordid still life among teetering piles of dirty dishes and promiscuously scattered shirts and pants and other shocking garments tossed both on the couch and on my bedroom floor which was also littered with fallen comforters and quilts and stacks of books looming up like trees from the undergrowth of old papers and magazines with odd clusters of random CDs and DVDs popping up here and there like mushrooms amid decay and damp, and all I can remember of the last few hours of the late year is a rowdy sailor and a big fight and then black silence and oblivion for hours.

In other words, I fell asleep well before midnight while watching Popeye cartoons (love those Fleischer brothers! remember – if it could really happen, it’s not animation!), and I woke to find myself still a schlub with a headcold who desperately needs to clean his house. And it wouldn’t hurt me to make like Popeye and eat more spinach, either. I had skipped most holiday traditions this year, even my usual New Year’s Eve viewing of Fight Club, and apparently my neighbors were in a similar mood, since midnight passed without firecrackers or gun shots to wake me. So although the arbitrary divisions of the year have given way, it’s business as usual here at The Reverberate Hills.

Except for one bright shiny new thing! Vicki, who persuaded me to start a blog almost two years ago, allowed me to return the favor and persuade her to start one of her own. I even gave her a blog title and a series of suggested topics, but I can tell she was already ripe for blogging since I came up with a different blog title that might be even better but she had already jumped in. And I can pretty much guarantee that there will be, at some point, cockapoo pictures of an almost sinister adorability. So slide on over to the blogroll and check out Christmas in July. (In case you’re wondering what the second title I came up with was, it was Sensible Shoes. I don’t know – what do you think?)

ever at my back I hear. . .

Here's a poem for the New Year, from current Poet Laureate Charles Simic. The Library of Congress site notes, with delightful academic understatement, that "Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia on May 9, 1938. His childhood was complicated by the events of World War II." Yes, I'll just bet it was. This poem is from his collection The Book of Gods and Devils:

The Pieces of the Clock Lie Scattered

So, hurry up!
The evening's coming.
The grown-ups are on the way.
There'll be hell to pay.

You forgot about time
While you sought its secret
In the slippery wheels,
Some of which had teeth.

You meant to enthrall
The girl across the hall.
She drew so near,
Her breast brushed your ear.

She ought to have gone home,
But you kept telling her
You'll have it together again
And ticking in no time.

Instead, you're under the table
Together, searching the floor.
Your hands are trembling,
And there's a key in the door.

So here's to fresh starts and new beginnings, no matter how arbitrary or even deluded, and to making the most of your time, whatever that might be. Happy New Year to one and all.

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.

Tyger Tyger burning bright, Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, but not so much at my house. Christmas ornaments, being shiny, fragile, all about aesthetics, often expensive, and essentially useless, are the kind of thing I’m simpatico with, but this year I didn’t even put the tree up, so I will not be hanging that shining star upon the highest bough any time soon. I thought the weekend after Thanksgiving was too soon, since we still had a week of November to go, and then I came down with The Head Cold That Would Not Die on top of everything else, and it seemed that my little energy and less time should be directed elsewhere, and the moment slipped by. I don’t even get a real tree, which requires coordinating efforts with someone who can drive; I just lug the box up from the basement and put the tree together. Only God can make a tree my ass. (It turns out I’m allergic to pine anyway. I once washed the kitchen floor with Pinesol and couldn’t breathe in there for a week afterwards. Who knew it actually contained pine?)

So an artificial tree is definitely the way for me to go, and artificial seems suited to the season anyway, though this summer I did discover the joy of chopping down real trees. I suddenly noticed that the industrious squirrels had planted a walnut tree by the side wall and, under cover of the lemon tree, it had gotten so tall it blocked the light from my apricot trees. I could either spend $25 on an axe now or put off dealing with it and spend hundreds of dollars later for professional tree removal. Down I went to Home Depot and got my axe, and I discovered my inner pioneer. If I didn’t love trees so much I’d be on a bare lot right now. Some of my friends had a very odd reaction to the axe. I would mention buying it as one of several things I had been up to lately, but that’s the only thing they would mention in their replies, with strangely hostile comedy. I don’t know why exactly. Either it conjured up an image of can-do masculinity not usually associated with me (and you know how people love to keep others in their niches), or they just did not like the idea of me with sharp weapons to hand.

Until three days before Christmas, when I received another from a depressed friend, I had received exactly one card, though I have to say it was from the people I’ve had the deepest, most prolonged relationship with this year – my plumbers. Santa is flying through the air, his sleigh laden with sinks, hot water heaters, and other plumbing paraphernalia – the artist was too tasteful to include a toilet, but euphemistically in its place is a line for snaking out the sewer pipes, a sight I became all too familiar with this year. My traditional Christmas wheat seeds didn’t sprout, except for one or two sickly pale sprouts, which clearly were not going to stand up to the gummy mold taking over the bowl. So there was no greenery to decorate the nativity scene, which stayed boxed anyway. Even Macy's Holiday Lane, with which I have a childish fascination, ended up disappointing me; by the time I got there ready to buy, all the Eric Cartman ornaments were gone, and so was most everything else. The mess around here is depressingly lacking in seasonal glitter.

But I have been listening to lots and lots of Christmas music, for which I have a weakness, and not just Handel or Heinrich Schutz, either. I have piles of it (though at least one pile seems to have disappeared into the general mess – that’s the sort of thing I should be working on, and that’s why I didn’t put up the tree – and it bugs me because I know L’Enfance du Christ is in that pile, and I’m on a Berlioz kick). Many of them are of the “opera singers do Christmas” variety (and who would miss out on Callas’s beloved Christmas album? Has any singer ever surpassed La Divina’s piercing rendition of Rudolph’s anguish?), though I range into other fields. I’m always on the lookout to add a few new Christmas albums each year. I saw one on Amazon that was credited to Twentieth Century Masters. I was eagerly expecting Milton Babbitt’s “I Don’t Care If You Listen to My Variations on Frosty the Snowman” or, at a minimum, Philip Glass’s Little Drummer Boy, but the CD turned out to have performances by Alvin and the Chipmunks and suchlike. I resisted the temptation. But when I finish Cairn’s Berlioz biography, my next music book will be The Rest Is Noise, and believe you me, I’ll keep my eyes peeled for an appearance by the Chipmunks.

It’s lucky for me I like Christmas music, because it’s ubiquitous – even Noah’s Bagels was playing O Tannenbaum this afternoon. Before work this morning I was walking around the Embarcadero Center, and I heard version after version of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, an odd choice for a mall since it is the most deeply melancholy of all Christmas songs, even in the dance remix version they were playing. I can only assume people are so used to the song they don’t listen to the lyrics anymore, or hear the melody once they’ve recognized the song. This year of all hopeless years in America it seems desperate to dream that next year all our troubles will be far away, and we should be so lucky as to muddle through somehow. I don’t know how shoppers hearing this song don’t end up in an embryonic curl on the floor, sobbing for their desolated lives. I’m guessing that’s not what the malls have in mind.

That’s why in malltown we usually get the bright tunes, always carefully secular (that is definitely not a complaint – it seems too grossly ironic to hear about the impoverished little child in the manger while you’re stepping over the homeless slumped in the odd corners so that you can reach the sales before they all disappear – the sales, that is; the homeless aren’t going away anytime soon). The problem, at least for those who pay attention to the music, is that most of the popular secular songs were written in the 1950s, so they’re filled with that decade’s creeping paranoia and barely repressed twisted sexual politics. You’d better watch out! You’d better not cry! (We’re all happy here in the Homeland!) Guess who’s coming to town – the big man in red who believes in the redistribution of wealth! He has you under total surveillance! In case you miss the point, he’s got that big Karl Marx beard, and if you’re bad you get a lump of coal – an obvious symbol of the rise of the Industrial Revolution and the crushing of the proletariat. But that’s better than the creepy sexual innuendo, sung by a child who doesn’t quite realize what she’s seeing, in I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, an unnerving song that is just a short step away from I Saw Mommy Blowing Santa in the Parking Lot for a Hit of Meth. Then there’s Santa Baby. It turned up on a “Cool Christmas” compilation I bought a few years ago. I listened to it again recently, paying special attention to the lyrics. It appears to be about a prostitute or upper-middle-class housewife of some sort who, in exchange for a variety of luxury goods, is offering Santa anal intercourse. Ho ho ho indeed.

Then there are all the songs about snow. I find these slightly disorienting in an area where the cold end of the year means that the golden hills of summer are glazed green by winter rains. In the short December days I don’t see my house while it’s light except for the weekends, so it wasn’t until I went out to sweep up the leaves last Sunday that I realized I still had roses blooming – lo, how a rose e’er blooming from tender stem hath sprung! Although some of the cities around here are obviously arbitrarily named (Walnut Creek: neither a walnut nor a creek!), Castro Valley, where I grew up, is in fact a valley – kind of like Florence, only without the Renaissance – that once belonged to a ranching family named Castro. And only once, for one afternoon in my childhood, was it cold enough for something like snowflakes to fall. My mother put us all in the car and drove us up to the hilly part of town where it was coldest so we could watch the flakes fall. They melted away as soon as they touched the ground, and I feel like Colonel Aureliano Buendia remembering that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Years ago, when I heard the premiere of Harbison’s cantata for Christmas, The Flight into Egypt, he gave an interview in which he mentioned that his intention was to present the darker side of Christmas, especially in these times when the gap between rich and poor is wider than ever. He makes a good point, but I wonder if he was mostly thinking of the secular songs that have taken over, by commercial necessity. Many of the old carols reflect a subtle disjunction between what is and what should, or could, be. They are filled with questions: What child is this? Yonder peasant, who is he? Who were the first to cry Noel? Mary, did you know? And what was in those ships all three on Christmas Day in the morning? Do you hear what I hear? And who may abide the day of His coming, and who shall stand when He appeareth? They shift uneasily from place to place, imploring, commanding, seeking a different destiny: O come, O come Emmanuel; come, thou fount of every blessing; go, tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere; over the river and through the woods; field and fountain, moor and mountain, following yonder star; hasten now, good folk of the village; I wonder as I wander. And they reflect the muted glories and hidden wonders in the mundane. All is calm, all is bright; how still we see thee lie; above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by. So many of them emphasize how tiny and helpless the small child in the manger is. I think to take in the power of that image you don’t need to be a Christian of any sort, and in fact it might even help if you have no belief that the child is God or some variant thereof, but just a new generation of the dispossessed, born to the dispossessed.

No matter how filled with materialism, or even joyous celebration, your Christmas might be, at the day’s core is always the image of the vulnerable child, in the dead of winter. That might be why Christmas music elicits tears so easily. Perhaps the longing for a lost past is too overwhelming, or the longing for a redemption that has never arrived, unless the isolated moments of stillness are all the redemption we have. I’ve pretty much checked out of Christmas this year; the machine was just too much for me, though I’m trying to go pleasantly and decently through the days. I am a poor boy too.

confusion now hath made his masterpiece

Back to David Poutney’s Macbeth, and I’ll start off by saying something nice. I really liked the sickly radioactive-green slime in place of blood. It’s startling, it’s unearthly, it’s viscerally disgusting in a way that stage blood usually isn’t. (And there’s Shakespearean precedent for using the blood’s color as a metaphor: “his [Duncan’s] silver skin laced with his golden blood”.) The green is unfortunately less effective when shining on the typewriter after Banquo’s murder (see my previous entry). Green slime works as blood, but the color itself has too many positive and soothing connotations to be effective as a general symbol of death and horror.

Red was reserved for the witches. You’d think this would be effective, but it’s not. The witches in the Washington National Opera production (directed by Paolo Micciche) I saw last spring were also color-coordinated; they were all in white, and, like these red witches, some of them carried hula hoops. The white gave them an unearthly apparitional look, and they reminded me of Goya’s Caprichos. The red chorus, I’m sorry to say, kept reminding me of the ladies of the Red Hat Society, who are frightening in a very different way. I did like the one who kept turning the crank on her manual eggbeater, thereby adding an eerie touch to the orchestration, one that Verdi had sadly neglected. It reminded me of hearing Henze’s Fifth Symphony many years ago; as I was reading down the list of instruments, I came upon "bullwhip". I think it got cracking in the third movement. One witch in particular, wearing a going-to-church-extravagant red chapeau and strolling around with a red walking stick, made me think, The Red Brigade of Women present . . . Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience! You see how the mind wanders when the staging is ineffective. The sisters were indeed weird, but they were weird in the same way as the rest of the staging. It’s important that they be strange in a different way. Otherwise they seem like more of the same rather than an eruption from either another world or the subconscious.

I will mildly disagree with those who were horrified that the Opera bought this production, meaning we’re going to have to see it again. I thought the sets were OK. It’s what happens on and around them that is a mess, and that can be changed. There’s the big box with one or two glass sides that gets moved around and represents various things, from Macbeth’s castle to his isolation, and it’s set under a curved dome with a big cracked hole in it. It’s banal to put it into words – see, the natural order has been damaged! – but visually it’s quite effective, though perhaps not enough so to last for the entire opera.

Just about every scene cries out for change. Let me use the sleepwalking scene as an example. Jeremy Galyon, valiantly playing the doctor, is led in blindfolded by Elza van den Heever’s admirably committed Lady-in-Waiting. I assume the blindfold is because Lady Macbeth is sequestered and he’s not supposed to know where she is. But she’s not supposed to be that gaga. They have her already acting crazy by the banquet scene, so her attempts to force Macbeth to behave normally when he sees Banquo’s ghost no longer make any sense. The Macbeths present a façade of normal kingship that hides an increasingly sinister world of fear and surveillance, an effect that is completely lost when you turn Lady Macbeth into the madwoman in the attic. So she does her handwashing thing and the doctor takes notes. The only reason the doctor should be taking notes in this scene is so that he can be shown stopping his note-taking when he realizes what exactly is making Lady Macbeth feel so guilty. In this production, it’s probably needless to say, he writes the whole time, which makes even less sense than you might think because the Lady-in-waiting angrily snatches the paper from him when he finishes and either tears it or hides it away in her pocket (I forget which and it probably doesn't really matter). Maybe it’s meant to be a prescription, because she then produces a huge hypodermic needle, and the two of them run off stage, presumably to give Lady Macbeth the injection that causes her death. It’s hard to tell because they aren’t shown actually doing anything with the needle. But the death of Lady Macbeth is rumored to be at her own hand – again, under the façade of a normal, natural occurrence, bloodthirsty ambition causes its own destruction, a point that is lost completely if she dies through a lethal injection given by her servants.

I know lots of people found Hampson’s Macbeth riveting. I thought he initially was disengaged and not nuanced enough, which surprised me in an artist noted for his commitment and intelligence. He has a beautiful voice, and it’s one that carries especially well in the War Memorial Opera House. He has great stage presence: if he were a scholarly book, he would not only be regularly referred to as a tome, but inevitably as a magisterial tome. So I might just have heard him on an off night, possibly for both of us. At one point I thought, there’s no erotic charge between him and Lady Macbeth; you don’t get the feeling that their ambition and their guilty complicity excite them in any way. Right after that we got to see a flash of him humping her during Banquo’s murder, but that’s the sort of thing that is better conveyed in nuanced gestures during the performance rather than in an over-obvious tableau.

Georgina Lukacs as Lady Macbeth seemed like a wildly variable performer. I gather she was much better the night I heard her than in earlier performances. I sometimes wonder how much what I expect from voices has been affected by beginning to listen seriously in the early white-sound days of the first generation of HIP singers (long before they were called that). So after this performance I listened to recordings of Verrett and Rysanek in the role. Nope, it’s not me. Lukacs has a wildly undulating wobble, which she managed to control better in some of the later scenes. Just as I wish opera directors didn’t know about La Mere Coupable, knowledge of which has coarsened and distorted many a staging of Nozze di Figaro, I also wish they didn’t know about Verdi’s letter stating that Lady Macbeth needs an ugly voice. Whatever his motive in writing that, it’s clear what he meant: he wanted a striking and unusual type of character, from a singer who could give an actual performance, one that went beyond making the pretty canary-bird sounds. But too much that is inartistic is covered over by the whole “ugly voice” excuse.

Even the orchestra disappointed me. When I went to the WNO production last spring it was mainly because that happened to be what they were doing when I was in town (I was more focused on Titus at the Shakespeare Theater and on hearing Racette in Jenufa later that week), and I walked in wondering if I should have gone to the Nationals game instead. (If you’ve been to RFK Stadium, or seen the Nationals play lately, this is a pretty big indication that I was not that excited about Macbeth.) I walked out so glad that I had gone, and thinking that I had really underestimated the fascinations and effectiveness of the score. I took that to be because I hadn’t heard the piece in a while, but now I’m giving lots of credit to the magic stick of conductor Renato Palumbo. Massimo Zanetti conducted the San Francisco performance. We started off with a slack, enervated prologue, and I hoped for improvement that never came. There was no tension or forward drive, and the weird parts sounded pretty much like all the rest. Zanetti did have great conductor hair, though, a poufy backward sweep of silvery gray that bobbed up and down as his arms waved energetically about. I should point out that from my seat I normally can barely see the conductor.

So I walked out of this performance with renewed retrospective admiration for the one I heard last spring. Eventually the BART train showed up, and as usual I had to move at least once because someone was blasting her iPod at an ever-increasing volume. It amazes me when I think how much reading I used to get done on the trains, before the invasion of the inadequately silenced electronic devices. Since it was a short train, there was little choice where to go. I ended up in a seat near two spherical sisters. As teenage drunks go they were fairly innocuous, and I would salute them for not driving in that condition except I suspect it was just because they didn’t have a car. I was only about a stop and a half away from home by this time so I didn’t bother moving again (where would I go anyway on a short train?) when the younger one started vomiting, choking out apologies while splattering the window near her and the floor under her seat. “It’s OK, bitch,” her sister kept murmuring. “Bitch, it’s OK. We’ve all been there.” That might have been the truest performance I heard all night.