waiting for the bus
while the streets are still empty
and the breezes fresh
30 June 2010
29 June 2010
28 June 2010
27 June 2010
baci per tutti!
San Francisco Opera’s production of Puccini's La Fanciulla del West this month was my first time seeing it on stage after decades of opera-going. It’s a very weird work, even if you accept all the California gold miners singing in Italian and sounding like – well, like characters in an opera by Puccini. It’s just a natural cycle in art for the sweet perfection of Raphael to give way to the expressive distortions of Pontormo and El Greco, and I’m happy that for once in the schedule the sweet perfection of Boheme has given way to this rarity, or oddity. I admire Puccini for always trying something new, and if the result is as mixed as the combo Italian/English title then that’s just what can happen if you strike out into new territory.
It’s especially strange to see Fanciulla in the Bay Area, where every reference to Sacramento or Wells Fargo Bank and other local landmarks elicits chuckles. (There are also murmurs every time we hear the theme now associated with Music of the Night from Phantom of the Opera. It makes for a murmuring crowd.) It’s very odd to be in the Golden State, thinking we’re the goal of America’s westward expansion and the cutting edge of America’s future, and to see the two lovers stride away from us to start a new life. But aren't they already where you're supposed to go for a fresh start? Haven’t they read Joan Didion? Of course, she’s been back in New York for years, and California is currently leading America’s decline into fiscal collapse and deteriorating social services.
The triumphant lovers are the Mexican bandit Ramerrez and Minnie, saloon gal extraordinaire. Ramerrez is incognito under the unfortunate pseudonym Dick Johnson. Maybe Seymour Butz was already taken. When Minnnie asks him his name the surtitles tactfully elide over it, in no doubt justified fear of letting loose the inner-thirteen-year-old boy in all the dowagers at the opera. Actually, to my right there was not a dowager but girl of about twelve or so. I thought at first she was shifting in her seat because she had been dragged to the opera and was restless, but she was just excited. Her grandmother told me that they were going to the LA Ring cycle the next week. I was very envious. Her (the little girl’s) favorite opera is Turandot, which she saw at the Met.
I’m a little embarrassed at myself, snickering over “Dick Johnson,” but there’s so much strange sexual stuff going on right below the surface of this opera, right down to Minnie winning the men over at the end by finally tossing away her, yes, pistol, that’s it’s a little difficult not to react to signifiers that don’t really signify anything. I was a little surprised the opera was post-Freud, but perhaps it’s all just a case of a cigar sometimes being only a cigar.
Ramerrez was portrayed by Salvatore Licitra. I’d heard him in recital but this was my first time seeing him on stage. Licitra was fine though his voice didn’t strike me as exceptional. He had an unfortunate moment or two; at one awkward passage the dowager in front of me (well, one of the dowagers in front of me) sort of clawed at the air and I thought she was sharing my distress but her movements were, it seems, actually indicative of ecstasy. Unfortunately his leading-man voice comes with character-actor looks. A dashing appearance could go a long way to selling you on a fairly thin and conventional gallant outlaw.
So he’s kind of a Joaquin Murietta type. And his gal Minnie is a weird mash-up of Diamond Lil and St Maria Goretti. One minute she’s zinging one-liners like a seasoned Catskills pro (“I can’t marry you – your wife wouldn’t like it!”) and the next she’s piously insisting that her American Indian maid, Wowkle, must marry the father of her young child, or blushingly confiding in Dick Johnson that she’s never ever been kissed. I don’t think “kiss” is a euphemism here. That is one well-behaved mining camp. Minnie seems like a natural precursor to Turandot, the ice princess waiting to melt. There's a very Italian preoccupation with the Madonna/whore complex transposed into the unlikely setting of Gold Rush California. Contemporary Italian patriots attacked Puccini (according to the program) for yet another non-Italian setting, which shows you what they know and how much setting matters. Double good for Giacomo for ignoring those who would tell him what to write and for ignoring nationalists.
I’m Latin Catholic enough for Minnie’s character to make a certain kind of sense to me, but twenty-first-century American enough so that I can see the possibility that Minnie crosses the border into frigid-tease territory. I imagine it’s mostly the personality of the soprano that keeps her appealing, which makes this an excellent role for the always likeable Deborah Voigt. (This is her first time as Minnie, which I believe she will also be singing at the Met later.) I think the down-to-earth, good-humored Voigt is impossible to dislike. Her voice does sound different from earlier days; it has kind of a metallic tang to it, which is not unpleasant. The role is strange in that it doesn’t really have a big aria along the lines of Vissi d’Arte or Un bel di or In questa reggia, though it has what you might call big moments, which Voigt handled beautifully. This time the big aria goes to the tenor, as they’re about to hang him in Act 3.
There’s also a lynch mob earlier, in Act 1. I thought it was a little unfortunate that Sid, the cardshark who’s almost lynched, was played by one of the few black singers on stage (Kenneth Overton). When the libretto has the Indians saying “Ugh” three times in their very brief appearance, it’s probably best to avoid any additional unpleasant racial moments. Wowkle was Maya Lahyani, who with a few lines cemented the positive impression she made last summer as Beppe in the Merola presentation of L’Amico Fritz.
The man who prevents the lynching is Sheriff Jack Rance (Roberto Frontali), who is the villain of the piece, though he seems like a more intriguing and even appealing character than Ramerrez, with a keen eye for keeping order among the naturally disorderly and an even-handed and interesting sense of what justice entails. He's not particularly villainous in the way that Scarpia is, but despite the inventiveness of Puccini’s rich and beautiful score certain operatic conventions must be preserved, and so soprano Minnie loves Dick because he is a tenor, and the baritone must be the heavy. I’d put him with Zurga in the Pearl Fishers and Alberich in the Ring as a character whose anger and bitterness make him more complex and even sympathetic.
The first act is a series of vignettes that emphasize the difficulty, isolation, and loneliness of the locale and its inhabitants (it’s similar to the method of Janacek’s From the House of the Dead). There are some striking soft moments for the chorus (all male; except for the very brief appearance of Wowkle, Minnnie is the only woman on stage). But generally all was quite loud: conductor Nicola Luisotti consistently had the orchestra at a level that made the singers force their voices a bit to be heard. This must have been a deliberate choice, but I’m not sure what the artistic gain was.
The second act opens with a view of Minnie’s lonely cabin perched high up in the mountain pass, with a steady fall of theatrical snow outside it, an effect that was lovely but (I would have thought) not all that unusual for experienced theater-goers, but around a third of the audience was so astonished by it that they burst into applause. You can see why I feared their theatrical sophistication might not bear up under the use of “Dick Johnson” as a pseudonym.
Though Minnie rescues the wounded Ramerrez from Sherriff Rance by playing (and cheating, which I guess is OK because it's for love) at cards, the bandit has somehow been separated from her before Act 3 and is about to be lynched. She rides in on a real horse (and Voigt looked great on this handsome animal, but the horse was too obviously being led for it to be quite the coup it should have been) and pleads with the men to release Ramerrez. Though they’ve all been in love with her (someone could have made a fortune in that camp by bringing in a few women of less rigid morals) they agree (once she tosses aside her little pistol) that she should have the man she has somewhat mysteriously claimed as her one true love. The chorus sings movingly as Minnie and Dick walk off hand in hand.
The performance of the first act was a little rough, the second was better, and by the time the short third act rolled around (after a second interminable intermission) Fanciulla was victorious. I could (and did) sit there and think of all the ways the ending was forced, improbable, or ridiculous, and none of it mattered. I surrendered completely to the beauty of the moment. That’s why people sometimes call opera absurd, but it’s not: the music has the power to go below, around, or above the logical (or whatever the theatrical illusion of the age is) into a deeper, more powerful and primal logic, and to touch us in the murky hidden realms where our deepest fears, hopes, and passions lie curled and waiting in the dark. As the last note sounded the 12-year-old girl next to me jumped up and exclaimed, “That’s a great opera!” And you know what? She was right. I mean, sure. Why not?
26 June 2010
25 June 2010
24 June 2010
what becomes a legend most
The electric opening night of San Francisco Opera’s production of Die Walkure seems to be turning before our eyes into one of those legendary evenings at the opera where all the moving parts click together and you’re so grateful to be there, which is lovely except I was at the third performance, and despite much that went right (in particular the excellence of the orchestra) it was vocally a rough night for most of the singers, and the production, which is the second installment of Francesca Zambello’s “American” Ring, is a very mixed bag. So I couldn’t help wondering if some of the ecstasy being expressed around me last Saturday wasn’t in part wishful thinking. We want our legendary evening too! And we don’t go to the opera house for sad reality to interfere.
So when the irritating old man in front of me, who expressed his Wagnerian credentials by conducting along with Donald Runnicles during all the loud parts and then whispering excitedly to his pinched-face wife, exclaimed after Act 1 that he had never, ever heard it performed better, I had to wonder if he'd ever heard it at all. Did he really not hear Christopher Ventris start to run out of gas right at Wintersturme and then flub badly what should have been the bright, ringing end of the act? Ventris recovered for Act 2, and I generally am not one of those opera fans who lives only to deduct points if the singers don’t spike the landing, but he was having noticeable problems.
And Mark Delavan, though he gave an interestingly tetchy performance as Wotan, was hanging on by his vocal fingernails by the time he was bidding lieb wohl to Brunnhilde. I seriously wondered if he was going to make it. We had been warned by David Gockley before the curtain that our Brunnhilde, Nina Stemme, was suffering from a viral infection but would sing anyway, begging our indulgence; as is usually the case under these circumstances, not that much indulgence was called for and ironically she sounded in quite good shape, though perhaps holding back a bit at points. Eva-Marie Westbroek as Sieglinde was in gleaming vocal shape throughout and truly lived up to the wonderful opening-night reports.
Raymond Aceto as Hunding and Janina Baechle as Fricka were both vocally fine, but bore the brunt of directorial miscalculations. Fricka was done up like one of Helen Hokinson’s club ladies, only not endearing. It’s easy to play Fricka as a bossy dowager, but this misses something crucial in her character, which is that she knows and loves Wotan so well that she can always laser in on the flaw he's trying to dream away in his grand schemes. She is the one who forces him to confront the reality of his power: it’s limited by the very agreements that create it. If your power derives from a hierarchy, you can’t undercut the hierarchy without losing your power. She is not bad, or even limited – she sees further into the realities of power than Wotan does. But that insight makes her deeply conventional – to maintain her own power, she is a defender of the status quo.
Same with Hunding, which is why he calls on Fricka for vengeance when his wife runs off with her brother/lover. Hunding and Fricka represent a conventional order that needs to be broken. But if you portray them as "bad" it implies that without them things would be just fine. How can we question our own Hunding/Fricka tendencies if we can separate them out as simple villains in a melodrama? Melodrama is about a clear moral order being restored. And Wagner is about moral order being confused, questioned, reversed, replaced.
When Hunding retires for the night, he snaps his fingers to order Siegmund over and chains him to the tree. It seems very un-Siegmund like to submit, even unarmed, to such humiliation. But it’s also un-Hunding-like. He’s not a bully or a coward, at least by the conventions of his world. He declares that the laws of hospitality are sacred, and he truly means that, and so does Fricka. He will observe them faithfully and then hunt Siegmund down as soon as he is no longer a guest. This is the orderly, rigid world that the Walsungs defy.
And we should maybe be a little disturbed at the incestuous Walsungs, and provoked to thought about conventions we take for granted. Siegmund and Sieglinde aren’t simply good victims in a melodrama. They’re troublemakers. I think Zambello made the whole set-up too simple (not that she's alone in this).
The whole idea of an “American” Ring, though it certainly sounds enticing, seems to me so far a bit of a fizzle. (My reaction to the earlier staging of Das Rheingold is here.) Given the nature of American society, an "American" Ring is pretty much going to fall into the classic Shavian/Chereauvian economic interpretation of the Ring. (Maybe the most American thing about the Ring, and the reason Shaw couldn’t quite contain Gotterdammerung in The Perfect Wagnerite, is the way what starts out as economic and political analysis turns into a tale of spiritual freedom and redemption, just as many American reform movements start out based on politics and economics and end up being about personal fulfillment and self-actualization.) So what distinguishes the “American” Ring from the average “capitalist” Ring is mostly kitschy touches like the busy décor of Hunding’s hunting lodge, with its deer heads and jacquard elk pictures and all the rifles (and speaking of all those rifles, they make Nothung look a little silly: why is the sword such a big deal when either Hunding, Siegmund, or even Sieglinde could pull a gun off the wall? It reminded me of the scene in Indiana Jones where the large grinning man does a lot of fancy threatening work with his whip and Jones just pulls out his pistol and shoots him. The age of heroes can't co-exist with firearms, as any reader of the Orlando Furioso knows.)
Some things work spectacularly well: the Valkyries parachuting into the beginning of Act 3 provide exactly the theatrical excitement and visual panache Wagner wanted for the wild warrior women. I liked having Fricka appear during the fight to make sure order was preserved. To my surprise, since I generally don’t like the distraction of live animals on stage and also generally find dogs really unnecessary creatures anyway, I loved the two hounds streaking across stage preceeding Hunding as he chases the runaways in the middle of Act 2.
Other moments left me moved but puzzled. The slow procession of military men, in a variety of American uniforms and carrying large head shots of dead heroes, is quite moving, especially when you learn, as you won’t from the program, that the photos are of real American servicemen killed in our current wars. It’s also quite distracting, since it takes place during the Annunciation of Death, when the focus should really be on the exchange between Siegmund and Brunnhilde. His renunciation of Valhalla since Sieglinde will not accompany him is not only his most stirring and truly heroic moment, it’s a key moment in Brunnhilde’s development from a somewhat cartoony hoyden to the mature and loving woman who says farewell to Wotan and accepts her fate. The focus really needs to be on their exchange. Also, with all due respect to the servicemen pictured and the individual decisions that led them to their collective fate, it’s difficult given the circumstances to see them as straightforward heroes and not as victims in various ways of America’s disastrous and immoral wars of aggression, only I’m not quite sure the staging really intends to raise such questions about their heroism and what it means. I wish Zambello had staged the scenes with Hunding and Fricka so as to evoke this kind of ironic and unsettled questioning.
A very good evening, but apparently and understandably not quite up to the first performance. Well, that’s live theater. I’m glad some excitement has returned to San Francisco’s upcoming complete Ring, though; between Achim Freyer in Los Angeles and Robert LePage at the Met, it looked as if San Francisco was again falling behind more adventurous companies.
23 June 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)