the tears have stained all the pages of my True Romance magazines

I guess I just really like getting magazines. These days, if you buy one or two issues a year, it’s often cheaper just to subscribe, which means there’s always a good chance of something new and interesting in the mail, which is something else I really like. But my big organization/clean-up project was stalled by the massive number of magazines; I kept coming across stacks of them in various closets, boxes, shelves, or, frankly, on just about any flat surface. So I gathered together the various piles and spread them all out in the living room by magazine. It was kind of frightening. I tend to accumulate – everything I own turns into a collection – but I pretty much could have built a fort with the piles.

I read magazines differently from books, apparently, since I can rarely read books on BART these days (the trains are just too filled with cell phones and iPods and other technological noise)but I can still read magazines, and not just the frivolous ones. It’s odd that I can read an essay in the New York Review on the train but would have trouble on the same train reading the same essay printed in a book, but some deeply ingrained feeling about books is preventing me. You’d think by now books wouldn’t be events for me, but I guess they are.

Even constant commuter reading was not going to work through the backlog I had accumulated, and clearly something had to be done. There’s a lot to be said for just tossing everything and starting afresh pioneer-style, but I can rarely bring myself to do that. I mean, something led me to spend money on the magazines in the first place. And I hate the thought of missing something, and there's always the delusional hope of absorbing everything, an impulse that has led me into excessive CD-buying (with piles of them yet unheard, or heard only once), excessive book buying (piles of unread books), too many nights at too many theaters, and the difficult problem of how long to stare at each painting in a museum – is staring for a lifetime enough to absorb something completely? Can anything stand up to that? Should you waste time on anything that couldn't?

There’s also a certain interest in seeing over a decade’s worth of magazines in one spot. You notice that at some point fonts got larger (they seem to be getting smaller again, but maybe that’s just my eyes getting even worse). Busy graphics take over one year, and white space takes over a few years later. The weeklies are the hardest to keep up with (the main reason I get ESPN the Magazine rather than Sports Illustrated is that the former is every other week, and the latter is weekly.) Season previews from six years ago for sports I don’t follow – those I can toss pretty easily. And current affairs have a way of not being very current if you don’t read them fresh – scan them for historical irony and then they can go.

Apparently I didn’t read the New Yorker at all in 2004 (and by “didn’t read the New Yorker” I mean “I read all the cartoons when the issue arrived and then tossed the issue on a pile to be forgotten for over four years”). Going through that year now, I found lots of articles about the utter failure of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, and I'd have to remind myself that this wasn't this week's issue, though it might as well have been.

Other storylines arc dramatically with nothing in the middle (which, by the way, is what I’ve always thought Fitzgerald really meant by “there are no second acts in American lives”; the standard play of his day had a three-act structure, so he was claiming that there’s the skyrocket beginning and the tragic end, without the solid, productive years of the middle act). In the space of a few years the New England Patriots went from the Cinderella team that needed to prove itself to the dynasty everyone (outside of New Englanders at home or abroad) is sick of. Sports stories tend to fall into two categories anyway: the young firebrand trying to rise up from difficult beginnings to make a name, and the old lion fighting to retain his pride. For the really successful athletes, one story turns into the other, and I think there’s a basic truth there, but it also seems like such a pre-made narrative that you can’t help wanting an occasional variant glipse.

After a while it gets easier to flip through the magazines and classify the stories and let them go. Going through the past nine years of ESPN the Magazine, I found a surprising number of stories about how steroids are ruining sports and we’re all turning a blind eye – surprising, because it seemed that only last year did it become big news. I don’t like steroid use, but I think the whole issue is a little more ambiguous than its presentation implies, though that’s undoubtedly true for all stories. (Do steroids really give you an unfair advantage if everyone is doing it? Why are some supplements legal and encouraged and others not? It’s a continuum, and I think lots of people don’t see that. These days I hear athletes or actors described as looking like "steroid users" when they really look like normal guys in their 20s who have started a serious workout program. Maybe we’re just not used to healthy-looking Americans. As I’ve said before, Ah, America, the land where athletes and actors get thinner and more muscular and the battening audience gets fatter and fatter.)

Then there were the annual articles on whether America (outside of Giants fans, so that, as in the usual definition of America, this one also excludes the Bay Area) would ever love Barry Bonds. I think we can safely say by now that the answer is no, which is too bad. The music magazines tend to run the same sort of articles about Schoenberg and Elliott Carter (is Carter the Barry Bonds of twentieth-century American music, or vice versa? Discuss!).

It’s not too tough even for me to toss the 1999 NFL preview or Entertainment Weekly’s Oscar picks for 2003, but a magazine like Gramophone is a little more problematic. A review from the mid-1990s might still be of interest. But on the one hand, there’s a good chance the recording reviewed will be out-of-print. On the other hand, it was so long ago that the recording might well have been re-released, and in a cheaper version.

Then I realized I have way too many CDs anyway. The worst thing of all is feeling pretty sure that I had read something while also feeling that I needed to read it again, since I was a little hazy on what precisely it had said. It’s also a little disconcerting to see a re-issue hailed as a beloved classic of the gramophone, and to realize I bought it when it was new. I was amused to see ads assuring me that the future of home opera-listening lay with LaserDiscs. Some things go off to the Land of Lost Technology never to return, I guess (for a lot of people, my CDs would be one of those things, but I’m not prepared to give them up. I like to have physical objects rather than computer files, which I guess is one of the reasons my living room is filled with piles of magazines).

I also tend to read through, or at least look through, magazines like Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness, as opposed to tossing them en masse, as I can with more topical titles. (Here’s a handy guide to telling these magazines apart: Men’s Fitness has articles on how to keep your girlfriend from staying mad at you, Men’s Health has articles on how to keep your wife from staying mad at you, and Best Life has articles on how to keep your children and your boss from staying mad at you.) There are only so many ways you can do a bench press, so a lot of the advice is still worthwhile, though even magazines that take a basically sensible approach to health and fitness change with the society around them: for instance, since 9/11 you’ll see more military-centered articles. And at some point the cover models stopped being fitness models (who, conceivably, could be the reader, if the reader were genetically blessed, devoted to fitness, and hairless – though in the past few years, chest hair has come back in style, though not to the furry excess of the 1970s) and became celebrities, most of whom were more or less eager to talk about the new exercise program that buffed them up to wear superhero spandex in their latest release, coming soon to a theater near you. I wonder if whoever came up with the notion of “synergy” back in the day realized what a suffocating small circle it would produce.

Where celebrity fever has really taken over, I regret to say, is in the tabloids. For many years I subscribed to People magazine, when it was still a general-interest publication and not what V refers to as “Menopausal Women’s Weekly” (don’t deny it, you know it’s true). This always amused people (as opposed to People), since apparently I didn’t seem like someone who would subscribe to a magazine like that, but as I pointed out, I never saw any of those who made fun of me for subscribing tossing it aside to get to the New York Review of Books.

I let that subscription lapse years ago (People, not the NY Review, which remains my favorite magazine), but for several years I did get the Weekly World News. You remember the Weekly World News, progenitor of Bat Boy the Cave-Dweller – its screaming headlines and doctored photos and insistent coverage of Bigfoot and space aliens were straight from the great tradition, still defiantly and inexpensively printed in black-and-white on cheap newsprint when everyone else had gone over to color and shininess. Even with the screaming headlines, the black-and-white looked surprisingly chaste and severe next to the glossy color photos of misbehaving celebs that dominated every other tabloid, as if it were an early Bergman film stuck among MGM musicals. The “celebrities” that have taken over are, of course, as anyone knows who has waited in line at the supermarket, nothing and no one that any rational person would recognize as celebrities.

I had decided not to renew Weekly World News, because amusing as I found the articles about the newly discovered garden gnome sculpted by Michelangelo that turned up in a garden shed at the Vatican or the twelve warning signs that your co-worker might be a space alien, a certain sameness set in after a while, and it was, given its cheap printing, surprisingly expensive. So I felt a brief sense of guilt when, shortly after I declined to renew, it went under, the last survivor of a breed that once haunted the earth. I suppose it had failed to adapt to the times; the Weekly World News didn’t venture too much into Celebville except for Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, who, by the way, is apparently alive and living with 34 cats and a retired plumber in Cleveland, according to the November 8, 2004, issue. That same cover also has the headlines Secret Bush Hid During Election Campaign and 2nd Great Depression! Spend all your money now – it will be worthless by June! It took a little while, but they were right. Sometimes I thought there might really be something to their claim to be The World’s Only Reliable Newspaper. They may have invented the half-man half-alligator, but that’s not much worse than the MSM’s blind devotion to the right-wing agenda. I’m fully convinced that one of the many victims of the Bush Administration will be the credibility of the standard journalistic outlets.

I briefly considered hanging on to the Weekly World News on the grounds that, since it’s now defunct, my formerly trashy pile of old newspapers has magically been transformed into mylar-worthy Valuable Collectibles, but I think as soon as the recycle bin is empty again I will just say farewell to the World of Wonders found in its pages and toss them all, a tribute to the wasted world. Life is not an economical proposition. Besides, I still have the Bat Boy T-shirt they sent me for subscribing, at least until that too wears out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

blogging with Berlioz

Feuilletonist to blogger is not that big a leap; in fact, this all seems like a case of plus ca change, as so many things do. . . . (All quotations are from the David Cairns translation of The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, Everyman's Library/Knopf edition; anything in square brackets after this point is from me, not Berlioz.)

The Leonore overture, a truly gigantic piece, played with rare precision and verve, was received with only the feeblest applause, and I later heard a gentleman at dinner complain at their not doing Haydn’s symphonies instead of this ‘uncivilized music with no tunes in it’!! Even in Paris we do not have that kind of bourgeois any more. (p. 288)

[I think we still have them in Boston and San Francisco, though, because I swear I’ve overheard the same remark (possibly from the same old man), only with Beethoven’s name in place of Haydn’s.]

Let me now tell you about the Prague choral society. It is like all such bodies in Germany in being composed almost entirely of amateurs from the middle classes. . . . Unlike some institutions of the sort it does not have as its sole aim in life the rehearsal and performance of ancient masterpieces, to the exclusion of contemporary works. Such institutions are, if I may so describe them, mere sects, musical consistories where under pretext of a real or pretended enthusiasm for the dead they complacently dismiss the living, of whom they know nothing, deplore the growing influence of Baal, and consign all supposed golden calves and their worshippers [that would be Moses und Aron, I suppose] to perdition. These meeting houses of musical puritanism are the repositories of the religion not of the beautiful, whatever its age, but of the old, whatever its quality: a narrow, rancorous religion with its own Bible and the works of two or three evangelists, over which the faithful pore tirelessly, producing ever more subtle interpretations of passages whose meaning is transparently clear. . . . (p. 441)

I have never been able to bring myself to dilate on matters of which I am quite ignorant. It may come, in time and by force of example. Meanwhile you must forgive me if I keep silent. (p. 442)

Not only working men from Prague but also peasants came to the concert that I gave in the theatre, the low price of some of the seats having put it within their means, and I could tell from their fresh, uninhibited reaction to the more unexpected effects in the music how interested they were in what I was trying to do. . . . (p. 444)

. . .the season would open with an English version of that sparkling novelty, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. . . . (p. 490)

[OMFG! Hector, I love Lucia but ROFLMAO!!!! And that little jab at opera-house programming was written over one hundred and fifty years ago!]

Shakespeare! Where is he? Where art thou? I feel as if he alone of all men who ever lived can understand me, must have understood us both; he alone could have pitied us, poor unhappy artists, loving yet wounding each other [Berlioz is writing about the death of his wife, the actress Harriet Smithson, whom he had first seen as Juliet and Ophelia]. Shakespeare! You were a man. You, if you still exist, must be a refuge for the wretched. It is you that are our father, our father in heaven, if there is a heaven.
God standing aloof in his infinite unconcern is revolting and absurd [interesting to think that the artist indifferently paring his nails over his creation became the ideal that replaced the Romanticism of Berlioz and his generation]. Thou alone for the souls of artists are the living and loving God. Receive us, father, into thy bosom, guard us, save us! De profundis ad te clamo. What are death and nothingness? Genius is immortal! What? ‘O fool, fool, fool!’ [He closes with a quotation from Othello; his wife also played Desdemona, and in a strange reversal of the play was intensely jealous of him after they married.] (p. 505)

He repeats himself, the reader will say. It is only too true. The same endless rhythm: remembrance, regret, a soul clutching at the past, a pitiful blind urge to arrest the present and hold it as it flies, a hopeless struggle with time, a mad desire to realize the impossible, a desperate craving for limitless love. How should I not repeat myself? The sea repeats itself; its waves are all alike. (p. 552)

[Amen, Brother Berlioz.]

funhouse reflections

I went to the opening night of this year’s edition of Avant GardARAMA!, the Cutting Ball Theater’s annual evening of short experimental works, and it’s not too late for you to see them, which I urge you to do, despite my reservations about one of the three pieces.

First let me say I really love the idea behind these shows: that experimental theater is enjoyable and interesting. What a refreshing change from the eat-your-roughage approach most musical groups take. Last January I heard the Belcea Quartet, and the program book anxiously assured us that listeners “usually dismayed at the prospect of hearing Webern [in this case, the Five Movements for String Quartet, Opus 5] will find these pieces quite approachable.” What a relief to know I won’t need my smelling salts to endure a ten-minute excursion into the modern. It made me wonder if the accompanying Haydn and Schubert quartets, wonderful though they were, were chosen more for safety’s sake than beauty’s. Webern died over sixty years ago – isn’t there some kind of statute of limitations on these warnings? I mean, at some point they stopped warning us about Beethoven (though maybe they shouldn’t have – we wouldn’t take him for granted so).

And at the SF Symphony last June, at the premiere of Turnage’s Three Asteroids: The Torino Scale, Juno, Ceres, conductor Benjamin Schwartz turned to the audience – how my heart sinks when I see conductors put down the baton and pick up the microphone – and assured us that though the first movement was going to be awfully noisy, the second two were quite lovely. I don’t mean to single out Schwartz, who seems like a nice young man, but shouldn’t musicians his age be trying to shock guys my age with their wild and raucous sounds? Instead, though I preferred the first movement, I was a bit let down by its lack of awful noise, and wondered why a warning was considered necessary. Don’t undercut what you’re trying to sell.

So I salute the statement of Cutting Ball Artistic Director (and the evening’s director) Rob Melrose that this year's plays “are first and foremost experiences. There is no right answer, any more than there is a right way to respond to a walk in the woods. . . . There will be no test at the end of this performance. Sit back, enjoy and let your mind be washed over with these beautiful words and images.” And as usual with Cutting Ball, the video and sound (Cliff Caruthers), set (Michael Locher), lighting (Heather Basarab), and costumes (Jocelyn Leiser Herndon) were beautiful (by which I mean interesting as well as attractive) to look at and listen to. All three plays used the same set; a dully reflective silver material, somewhere between foil and mirror, which covered the floor and walls except when it broke for a narrow horizontal opening across the whole set about a third of the way up the wall.

First up was Gertrude Stein’s brief Accents in Alsace, performed by Paige Rogers, Felicia Benefield, and David Westley Skillman. While listening to Accents in Alsace I became convinced once again that Dr Seuss knew his Stein, and when you also consider how much Hemingway stole from her, it seems pretty clear that she is one of the great underground streams watering modern American literature. Some Steinophobes find her maddeningly childish, sing-songy and self-regarding, but I am a long-time Steinophile and feel that she has a winning charm and wit and poetry, even apart from the romance of her life story and her courage in pursuing her art. I sometimes think that I am possibly the only person in the world who has both never been to graduate school in English literature and also read in their entirety both Stein's The Making of Americans and Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed this bonne bouche.

Benefield and Skillman returned for the second play, Betting on the Dust Commander by Suzan-Lori Parks. I’ve seen several of her plays now, and love her work more with each exposure. The Dust Commander was a horse on which Lucius (Skillman) had placed a bet. His wife Mare (Benefield) – well, there’s no point in trying to describe the plot, because the piece is about suggestive metaphor, rather than a particular incident. As with Beckett’s Play, the second half of the piece is a word-for-word repeat of the first half, though thanks to the skill of the author and the actors, the repetition feels like a deepening, as if mere repetition is giving us the contour of their everyday life and their entire lives. The props – the yellow couch covered with plastic to protect it from the dust, for instance, and especially the Woolworth-style dining room table with its cheap bright yellow seat cushions – were almost distractingly perfect in positioning the time, place, and economic situation of the couple. The horse racing around on a circular track, towards victory or defeat (seen in both video and language), the repetition of word and gesture, the couple’s circular lives and hopes, and the dust interrupting the circularity with its slow accumulation, all created an evocative sense of a complete world of many dimensions. Benefield and Skillman were outstanding.

The evening’s third piece was the premiere of Bone to Pick by Eugenie Chan, a forty-minute monodrama recasting the legend of Ariadne, Theseus, and the Minotaur in the labyrinth as the story of Ria, a waitress in a roadside diner, and her customer Theo. Paige Rogers returned to play Ria. I had always thought of Paige as a comic actress, based on her surprisingly hilarious turn several years ago as Phoebe in As You Like It, the first show I saw at Cutting Ball, but her Lady Macbeth for them a few years ago and now her Ria have convinced me that her range is much wider. She gives an absolutely riveting, enthralling performance as Ria. There’s a sheer physical thrill in watching someone singlehandedly hold the stage for forty minutes. But I wish Chan had been less self-indulgent with the language and especially the characterization.

The Stein and Parks pieces both summon up vivid worlds through a powerful and sometimes eccentric use of language that belongs uniquely to their creators; there’s a certain timelessness in their lack of the sort of reference that would need footnotes. Chan takes a different (and entirely legitimate) approach, using what we can call without irony the time-honored modernist tradition of pastiche, collage, and reference to both ephemeral pop culture and classic myths and literature. But one trap in this style that wasn’t always avoided is the possibility of seeming a bit too self-aware and self-congratulatory (the passing reference to King Lear – Out, vile jelly! – felt that way to me.)

But the real danger is that you let your references do the work for you. That applies to both the author and the audience, which can think it’s gaining insight when it’s just catching a reference. For example, the use of the Big Mac jingle (“two all-beef patties, special sauce. . . .” – you know how it goes) in relation to Theo: meat, flesh, is already established as one of the repeating metaphors. But a McDonald’s reference carries with it, especially for the sort of audience that goes to evenings of short experimental plays, a whole host of almost entirely negative connotations. It creates an entire (and uninflected) aura around the character it refers to. It’s condemnation by brand name. And there’s some validity to that, but it can feel too easy and dismissive, and Theo is already way too much of a caricature to withstand this sort of treatment.

Repeated references (too often repeated – the play could have used some pruning) are made to his “six-pack abs” and to his appetite for meat with a side of fries. Well, unfortunately for most guys, if you have that diet, you don’t have those abs. That’s not an entirely trivial point, since it indicates a failure to think through what Theo’s life and character are like. His abs might actually tell you some interesting things about him – that’s he’s very disciplined, or that he’s athletic, or that he’s just pretty damn lucky (not least because his body coincides with the fashion for defined abdominals in men, rather than, say, broad shoulders or thick calves). Instead we get the cover of a romance novel: he’s arrogant and kind of a brute, but also kind of sexy, so Ria’s acquiescence to him can be excused.

My point here is not that the presentation of Theo should have been sympathetic, or that the piece should be told from his point of view – my point is that, if she had wanted to, Chan should have been able to present the piece from his point of view; in other words, he needs to be a plausible human being. (Her presentation of Kingman, Ria’s father, is a good example – he was nuanced and interesting enough in the brief passage about him so that she could have written another play entirely from his point of view.) Repeating that he loves guns and meat, and hates foreigners, doesn’t really deepen or expand the picture of him.

The caricature of him makes the portrait of Ria an ideological balancing act; she has to be knowing enough to qualify as a strong woman, but victim enough so that she shares no guilt with him. So her actions and reactions become completely predictable – when she finally turns the combination that opens the labyrinth door, then (of course, of course) she immediately has a tender, understanding relationship with the awful monster, and Theo, to no one’s surprise but Ria’s, pulls out the gun she’s told him not to carry and brutally kills the Minotaur against her protests. The entry into the labyrinth and the confrontation with the Minotaur are obviously meant as a diving-into-the-wreck moment, but whether you read it politically (one of the combinations she tries out is 9-11-01) or personally (the numbers that ultimately open the lock are her body measurements), it sort of begs the question of what she was thinking, and why she agreed to let him in. How, given the portrait she is painting of him, and her wry comments about him, could she not know what he was going to do?

Ultimately the limitation is not in the presentation of Theo, but in that of Ria. He is crude, overbearing, and violent; she is of course aware of all this, since otherwise she would be stupid, or as bad as he is; yet she helps him all along the way as if she didn’t know better. The only real fault she seems to have (if fault it can be called) is that most glamorous, envied, and forgivable of failings, a lustful longing for love. As with any conspicuously one-sided view, you feel that the storyteller is omitting a lot that might complicate things. There’s no sense that Ria is to blame for anything, and I just don’t buy it as either life study or as political parable.

A few years ago a woman wrote a letter to the SF Chronicle saying that the whole mess in Iraq would be taken care of in no time if women were in charge of settling it. You could probably guess the letter writer’s age pretty accurately from that statement; I remember back when that sort of thing was the sort of thing to say. But I wondered who those women were who were going to settle everything so briskly and sensibly: Laura Bush? Condoleeza Rice? Peggy Noonan or Maureen Dowd? The military wives and mothers who attacked Cindy Sheehan in the press? Pvt Lynndie England? And even the recent New Yorker article about Abu Ghraib described the male soldiers implicated (particularly the African-American ones) as “angry” while England was described as if she were an emotional victim of the situation, not quite in control of all those cheery thumbs-up gestures she was making over the men she was torturing.

And recently I read that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called President Bush “a total failure” – no argument with that, except there’s at least one thing at which he’s been undeniably and brilliantly successful, and that’s getting everything he wants out of the Democrat-controlled Congress that she helps run. I’m an overly reasonable guy, and I understand about taking impeachment off the table and continuing to fund our illegal and immoral wars of aggression – a politician’s reasons are not my reasons, and I understand that there are things I don’t have to take into consideration. But there was no excuse for caving on FISA, especially given Bush's epic unpopularity. So while it’s very nice that she’s going around talking about “empowering” our daughters and granddaughters, why is she pretending that the blood dripping from her hands is somebody else’s fault?

It is way past the time when anyone can claim dispensation from the American disaster thanks to chromosomal coincidences. You know when you’re a full and equal member of society? When you’re held morally accountable for your actions and non-actions.

enemies of the people

Festival Opera in Walnut Creek offered me tickets to last night's opening of Il Trovatore, an opera I love. For years I happily sailed along with one recording – the celebrated Price/Domingo/Milnes/Cossotto/Mehta version – and then one day out of the blue I was hit by Trovatore fever, and when I came to I had fifteen or twenty versions; my favorite, by the way, is still the justly celebrated Price/Domingo/Milnes/Cossotto/Mehta version. Any performance of an opera you love produces an odd mixture of gratitude for any live experience of it competing with impossibly high and probably unreachable standards. I’d love to prove my integrity and independence by trashing Festival Opera despite the lovely seats, but, alas for my reputation, I’m instead going to urge you strongly to head on over for one of the remaining performances (July 15, 18, or 20) at the Dean Lesher Center.

Even the Walnut Creek audience was not as egregiously bad as usual (I still wake up screaming at the thought of Rigoletto a few years ago, and the steady, incessant, three-hours-long fortissimo gum-chewing of a woman four rows behind me). Last night we did have the usual number of loud coughers, and an unusual number of ringing cell phones, as if the audience had never conceived of the possibility of turning them off during certain activities. (We even had a dramatic leap out from a seat and into the lobby with much door opening-and-shutting while Leonora is contemplating death.) There was also an annoyance fresh to me (it's so hard to keep up with the irritations of new technology) – little flashlights with which audience members can check I don’t know quite what, but something so important it couldn't wait until the house lights went up.

Maybe the folks with the little lights were checking plot summaries. Quite a few people seem to be oddly unfamiliar with Trovatore, because the absolutely brilliant libretto by Salvatore Cammarano and Leone Emanuele Bardare is frequently described as the ultimate in operatic absurdity. These people might be thinking of the tedious finale to the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, which is really more about social snobbery associated with opera than about the actual opera, and is almost spectacularly unfunny in either case (I say this as a Marx Brothers fan – but stick to their Paramount films; Harpo in particular suffers from being turned from an anarchist Nature god into a twee and benevolent little Cupid; their decline is usually dated after A Day at the Races, but I respectfully disagree and date it from the beginning of their alliance with MGM – Eric von Stroheim and I will both tell you that Irving Thalberg was in league with Satan).

What Cammarano and Bardare (no doubt under Verdi’s direction) came up with is a concise telling of a complicated story, whose every moment resonates thematically. Is it absurd? Perhaps, but I think that’s intentional. All plots, being more-or-less arbitrary impositions of meaning on life, are absurd. I don’t think this is even a case of one era’s conventions striking another era as ridiculous; even in the nineteenth century the baby-swapping mix-ups came in for their share of ribbing (Gilbert and Sullivan, or at least Gilbert, basically wouldn’t exist without Trovatore to play off of). Is Trovatore absurd and meaningless? Is life? Gloucester leaping off a non-existent cliff, Hamlet jumping into Ophelia’s grave, Oedipus marrying his mother, Vladimir and Estragon waiting day after day for a man who never shows up – these are also absurd, and their absurdity is part of their meaning. Every action in Trovatore is interrupted, every narrative is fragmented and obsessively repeated; personal tragedy becomes a haunting camp fire ballad becomes a story of supernatural frights; parents do not know their own children, lovers mistake each other, the usual duels and battles and kidnappings are all cut off abruptly and the action turns elsewhere with the arbitrary and terrifyingly inevitable logic of dreams. Trovatore is an example of high Romantic storytelling, kin to Hugo and Donizetti, but this is where the Romantic movement interest in the fragmentary, bizarre, and unreal aligns with the Modernist theater of Beckett , Ionesco, and Brecht.

San Francisco Opera’s last outing with Trovatore played up the link with a modern staging, which on the whole I liked (black, boxlike setting, bursts of fire, large fragmentary objects floating in space); Festival Opera goes for a more traditional approach (pretty much what you would get at San Francisco Opera these days; there was a lot of stand-and-deliver in the style of SFO’s recent Lucia, though often more subtly handled). Giulio Cesare Perrone’s direction was solid and efficient, with the occasional misstep (though I did particularly like the point when the Count di Luna makes Leonora swear she will be his: he stretches out his hand, and Leonora first raises her hand papal-blessing-style to Heaven as she swears, and then lowers it onto his hand so that only the tips of her fingers condescend to touch his flesh). The same was true for the sets, lighting, and costumes. Perrone had also designed the set, an efficient arrangement of columns raised on a few steps that was varied with the additions of branches, prison bars, or cathedral arches, an arrangement which not only made for suitably rapid scene changes but emphasized the underlying similarities among soldiers’ camp, gypsy camp, church, court, and prison. The costumes are basically handsome and traditional, but someone needs to get the Grace Jones headdress off of Manrico, and those shiny dangly things under the headdress need to go too. Other than that the differences between Manrico’s followers and di Luna’s were nicely emphasized by the use of vests and turbans for the former and traditional court or military gear for the latter. Matthew Antaky and Patrick Hajduk are both listed as the lighting designers, and again their design was efficient with some nice flickering touches, and a couple of strange moments (the lighting in the dungeon varied over the course of the scene from way too bright to bright to gloomy).

Michael Morgan conducted a nice performance and seemed very attuned to the singers. And the singers are where the Festival Opera production has it all over SFO’s last Trovatore (Dolora Zajick’s Azucena is the only singer I can recollect from that production, because she so overshadowed the rest). I knew the evening was promising when Kirk Eichelberger opened with a vivid, detailed and powerful account of Ferrando’s campfire story (but confidential to Kirk: get a different headshot; the one in the program does not do you justice). In a smaller role, I also really liked Jessica Mariko Deardorff as Leonora’s oddly unsettling attendant, Ines. I was not as happy with Scott Bearden’s Count Di Luna; “Il Balen” in particular seemed choppy and lacking in style and beauty. Perhaps he was having an off night. Patrice Houston’s Azucena didn’t push Zajick’s sound from my memory, but she was solid; perhaps a bit too much so to be necessarily sympathetic. Azucena is one of the great examples of Verdi’s compassionate understanding of the disenfranchised; she could so easily have been a stock character (evil Gypsy child-killer!) instead of one who sometimes steals the show. But she should seem more distracted and perhaps more fragile. Houston seemed too sensible. She also seemed to lose a bit of power at the end; her final cry was not as piercing as it should have been, and the supertitles didn’t help by stopping with “He was your brother!” and omitting “Mother, you are avenged!” and di Luna’s cry “And I still live!”

But on the whole I found the ensemble effective, and the two leads outstanding. Noah Stewart as Manrico was strong and ardent throughout, with (to my hearing) only a few occasional moments of strain or exhaustion. Hope Briggs as Leonora just seemed to go from strength to strength. She was committed, radiant and beautiful throughout, and her rich and lovely voice was possibly more powerful at the end than at the beginning. My guest for the evening was a singer who basically agreed with my reactions. But he, with his concern for long-term vocal health, was also worried that the singers were perhaps too young to be taking on such heavy roles, and that given the small size of the house they were singing louder than need be. Perhaps, but I found the sound viscerally, physically thrilling. Despite my reservations about Bearden and to a lesser extent Houston, here is an evenly matched, beautiful ensemble of youthful voices. Let’s see if San Francisco can do as well on its next outing.

the sleep of reason produces Italian opera

The San Francisco Opera’s season-ending Ariodante did not disappoint, once we all got over the withdrawal of Eva Podles several weeks before the run began. I was glad that my years of subscribing to SF Opera ended on a good note both on stage and in the audience. The whole thing felt rather elegiac, since I entered the crazy little world called opera through the baroque repertoire (I saw stuff like Rameau’s Zoroastre long before my first mainstream opera, which was Rigoletto, in an inadequate Met touring production). Baroque opera is why I don’t believe people who complain about the lack of melody in new operas; baroque opera is nothing but gorgeous melody after gorgeous melody, yet there is often an aura of palpable discomfort in the audience when the usual Verdi-Puccini-Donizetti-and-sometimes-Wagner fare is replaced with Handel, or occasionally even one of his lesser comrades. I don’t know if it’s the A-B-A aria structure that frightens people (though they should be used to a certain amount of this from Mozart), all the girls dressed like guys and guys sounding like girls, or the unfamiliar plots, or some combo of all those things. But perhaps repetition and exposure are wearing away that resistance too; the audience for Ariodante was remarkably attentive and receptive, at least the night I was there. Perhaps word had just gotten around that SF Opera had a season highlight here.

The storyline, surely familiar to all of us from Ariosto’s delightful Orlando Furioso, seemed a bit perfunctory, but I don’t know if that’s the libretto or the staging. It didn’t really matter, since the plot did what it was supposed to do, which was maneuver the characters into varied emotional states. Baroque plots always seem more complicated than they are. Years ago V actually accompanied me to a Handel opera (I’m drawing a blank, embarrassingly enough, on the title, and I’m not where I can check it, since the SF Opera on-line archives do not include Merola performances). She made the mistake of trying to read the plot summary, which I realized as soon as I saw the increasingly baffled look on her face, the plot being one of those “the shepherd Florimel, disguised as the shepherdess Floribel, is in love with Flomarinda, who is disguised as some damn thing, because she is fleeing from her father. . . .” I told her not to read the plot summaries; they only confuse you. The action is always perfectly clear when you see it on stage. I’m here to help.

I’m not going to make (too much) fun of baroque plots, either. All plots are arbitrary arrangements, and whether or not they seem ridiculous or contrived is just a matter of which conventions you’re willing to accept. When SFO did Rodelinda a few years ago, I read one review (it might have been in the Wall Street Journal) that was puzzled by the film-noir staging, finding no link between the two styles: well, both are highly stylized forms that use elaborate plots to suggest deep levels of corruption and cruelty. It seems close enough to me. I knew a woman (as we go back again to my early days as an opera-goer) who dismissed all baroque opera plots out of hand as absurdly unrealistic, yet her favorite opera was Tosca. Obviously Tosca struck a deep mythic and sympathetic chord in her, but it’s not exactly a storyline that could have been torn straight from the pages of my non-existent diary. I mean, if it could have been, I’d probably actually keep a diary.

Susan Graham as Ariodante and Ruth Ann Swenson as the beloved Ginevra were the outstanding singers in the all-round excellent cast, with Richard Croft’s Lurcanio close behind. I have heard from others that Swenson was a little variable during the run, but I had her on a good night; she really does have a golden tone that has always sounded well in the War Memorial Opera House. I can’t disagree with SFMike that Graham’s performance only confirms her divinity. I was a little mixed about Podles’s replacement, Sonia Prina; her runs and other baroque vocal extravagances sounded quite precise, but the overall sound was fairly harsh; it worked very well for the villainous Polinesso, but I’m not sure I’d be really eager to hear it in a more sympathetic character. My only complaint about Patrick Summers’s conducting was that I thought the pacing for the two big arias (Ariodante’s Scherza Infida and then Ginevra’s lament shortly after that – sorry, I don’t have the libretto with me and can’t be more specific with the first line) was a mite slow, almost to the point of slacking in tension – yet Graham and Swenson both were intense and wonderful in their singing despite that, which is why I’m giving them my much-coveted title of Most Fabulous Among the Fabulous. I liked the Tiepolo-ish costumes, and I also liked the setting (mostly movable dark-green marbled walls with golden cornices), but there did seem an odd disjunction between the colors of the costumes and those of the walls, as if some baroque Merce Cunningham had designed the show.

This was just one of those evenings where the work and the performance and the audience all clicked, at least for me (see Brian at OutWest Arts for an alternate take, though; and check out Opera Tattler’s Ariodante log for a thorough review of the score and the audience over several performances). Thus endeth the subscription. I did briefly contemplate getting a “choose your own” series for next season, but decided I might as well take the opportunity to sit in different areas of the house. Besides, I wasn’t entirely sure I could come up with the minimum four operas next season that I really wanted to pay for. In at least some fairness to SF Opera, since I’ve mentioned several times that they’ve never bothered to contact me about my lapsed subscription, I should point out that I received a form letter from them last week – I’m not criticizing them for sending a form letter; actually, I think it’s great that they reach out to everyone; I certainly wasn’t expecting an individually tailored letter – expressing regret that I didn’t renew, giving me Gockley’s e-mail address in case I wanted to express my concerns, and suggesting one of the “choose your own” subscriptions. (At least I’m pretty sure that’s what it said – I was in kind of a rush when I read it.)

I don’t think I’ll e-mail any blog links to Mr Gockley, but I do have one bathetic request: someone over there at the War Memorial Opera House really needs to keep the men’s room stocked with paper goods. A couple of times this season we haven’t had any paper towels to dry our hands, and before Ariodante I actually had to pass a roll of toilet paper under the stall to the desperate man next to me. Little things add up to big impressions.

my gashes cry for help

Lucia di Lammermoor was one of the first operas I bought. I had seen an Australian film called Man of Flowers, and though I normally sit all the way through the credits anyway this time I had a purpose besides extraneous thoroughness, which was to discover the source of the haunting duet featured on the soundtrack. I loved the film but I really loved the music, and I bought the cassettes (yes, it was that long ago) the next day. San Francisco Opera, which has in my experience an extremely adequate record with the Italian classics, has always done right by Lucia, and they pretty much continued the streak with their latest outing.

I was in the house for the performance that was simulcast to Major Phone Company Park (maybe I should explain the joke to out-of-towners or non-baseball fans: the Giants' new stadium was first called Pac Bell Park, which was fairly euphonious, but over the past few years, as the sponsoring phone company has merged or subdivided or metastasized or whatever it's doing, the name has changed to SBC Park and then AT&T Park, but since they aren't paying me for the naming rights I figure I can call it what I want). I understand from a friend who was there that it was a fun, relaxed atmosphere, with kids running around and people picnicking, with everyone enjoying both themselves and Lucia's murderous insanity, which is totally nice but I prefer my opera without all the distractions, though I have been wishing I were at the ballpark, but mostly so that I could watch a ballgame (it’s funny that while opera houses are starting to broadcast as widely as possibly, baseball games increasingly can only be seen on a few pay cable channels).

After the presentation of the San Francisco Opera Medal to Kip Crenna, the company’s musical administrator (I was a little startled to see Gockley casually pull the medal-case from his pants pocket; couldn’t they get a super to do some sort of Octavian-presents-the-silver-rose thing with it?), we then had to stand for the National Anthem. I love the Star-Spangled Banner, mostly because no one can sing it and the tune comes from an old drinking song, but my patriotism has dropped to just about zero over the last, oh, eight years or so, and besides I was exhausted and did not feel like standing; although the Opera House was fairly comfortable, we had had a few days of temperatures hovering around 95 degrees. But as soon as the quiet drumrolls that begin the overture rolled out, I realized why they needed to play the anthem: how else can you let those in the ballpark know that the show is officially about to start?

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Graham Vick’s production, given all the wacky whatthefuckery (which I liked) of last fall’s Tannhauser. His Lucia is fairly conventional; there were lots of sliding panels, which were no doubt acoustically useful, and scenes indicative of the outdoors; the costumes were mostly traditional-looking tartans (with Lucia’s bridegroom, nicely done by Andrew Bidlack, and company differentiated by their formal English court attire); the blocking was pretty basic. At several points I had the impression that the chorus was simply grouped by voice type and standing pretty much as they would at a choral concert. Nothing scary and radical, and nothing especially enlightening either.

I particularly liked the rippling pointillism provided by the harpist (I assume this was Michael Rado as listed in the orchestra personnel), and Alexander Marguerre on the glass harmonica was outstanding – I’m not sure if I’ve heard the mad scene done live with the glass harmonica before, but I’m now convinced it’s the only way to go; the extra echoing eeriness is worth any trouble involved in finding the instrument or someone to play it. But this was pretty much the Natalie Dessay show. The earlier Lucias I had seen in San Francisco starred Ruthanne Swenson, and though I would say Swenson had a lovelier voice, Dessay has a more powerful and committed stage presence, chiefly because she can act, as in, she could have a career on stage even if she couldn’t sing at all. She carefully moved from a coltish young girl to the blood-stained bride, vacant-eyed with grief. Edgardo, her true love, was played by Giuseppe Filianoti, and though I have heard glowing reports about him I can’t say he came across as a star, though in fairness to him I should note that by the time his big scene rolled around at the end it was quite late and everyone around me was however unwillingly nodding off in the heat, including the couple next to me who had driven up from Monterey and taken a hotel room for the night just so they could hear Dessay live for the first time (it was her San Francisco debut). They (actually, just the wife; the husband sat there in goggle-eyed silence except for an occasional loud interjection during the performance) asked me if I had gone to any of the Met simulcasts; I said no, since I thought they had the inconvenience of live performances (especially given our three-hour time difference with New York) without the compensatory benefits; she disagreed, and said that for people like them, living far enough from San Francisco to make a trip to the opera a major undertaking, they were wonderful, which I think is fair enough. They had seen Daughter of the Regiment with Dessay, and then Manon. There are very few operas I consider pretty much a complete waste of time, and one of the few that tops Daughter of the Regiment on that list is Manon (though I do like Puccini’s version), but I had seen Dessay in Le Rossignol and also as Ophelia in Ambrose Thomas’s Hamlet, so I recommended those to the Dessay fans. That Hamlet DVD (with Keenlyside as the Prince) is outstanding, particularly if you can forget that it’s based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which is easy enough to do considering how inadequate it is as an operatic version of the great tragedy, but can I just say that, amazing as Dessay is as Lucia, I had the slightest sense of déjà vu since I had also seen her run mad as Ophelia?

I retained enough energy to stand and applaud for Dessay as she deserved before stumbling out for the long trek home – I was so tired I couldn’t even walk in a straight line. During the curtain calls, in a delightful touch, the cast came out wearing or carrying various items of San Francisco Giants fannery as a salute to the audience in the ballpark, and once again I wished I had one of those crazy camera phones that all the kids blog with, so I could capture Dessay with her huge orange foam “Giants #1!” finger. You’ve gotta love that she did that, though I couldn’t blame her for switching during her second or third bow to a more stylish cap, which she perched on her head in a manner tres chic.

blown away

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

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

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

and repetition palls him

My last subscription opera was Friday, and since the theater gods had smiled on me and given me a wonderful evening, I decided not to pursue my original plan for marking the end of my sixteen-or-so-year subscription, which was to ascend to the topmost balcony, cry out in electrifying tones, O Gockley – avanti a Dio!, and then hurl myself into the orchestra pit, where with any luck I would land on the cymbals and timpani with a resounding crash. Also, the last thing San Francisco Opera needs is yet another performance of Tosca. Besides, Gockley’s name doesn’t scan right.

So I’ll be slipping unnoticed into the ranks of the single-ticket buyers. From the way I’ve been carrying on, you’d think I was never going to set foot in the place again. But it does feel different, and sad, to me, and I’ve considered just surrendering to habit and resubscribing, even though most of the upcoming season leaves me bored and indifferent. Part of it – and this may just be that relentlessly upbeat, incurably sunny-side-up optimism which has become a byword among all who know me – is that I just cannot figure out Gockley as an artistic administrator, and I don't think that's a bad thing.

I loved Pamela Rosenberg’s programming, but I have no opinion on how she ran the company or worked with people or whatever; I was sorry to see her go, but I had certainly noticed long ago that things have a way of changing even when you don’t want them to, so I was interested to see what Gockley came up with. He is of course best-known for commissioning new works, so that looked promising, and I had a sentimental link to Houston since the first opera I ever saw was their touring production of Porgy and Bess. And on my one trip to Houston, shortly after Gockley had been announced as SFO’s new general director, I had really admired HGO’s production of L’Incoronazione di Poppea.

Since then it’s been a very mixed bag. His first season here had largely been planned by Rosenberg, and though I was not thrilled that his one major change was to add Die Fledermaus to the schedule, I figured that, given all my sneering at opera-goers who refuse to attend anything they haven’t already heard a hundred times, I had better cowboy up and give my first Fledermaus a fair listen. So I did, and the singers were wonderful, the orchestra excellent, and the staging top-notch, and I loathed every minute of it. I’m too lazy to link to my write-up, but I believe I compared it to being clubbed to death with meringues, which makes for a long, sticky, and endless end. But now I know, right? It’s always better to speak from knowledge than prejudice.

Later I read an interview in which he seemed puzzled that anyone responded to that year’s closing production of Iphigenie en Tauride, which to me seemed so clearly one of the most memorable evenings at the opera that season and perhaps for several seasons that I was puzzled that he was puzzled. I had tried to ignore the interviews in which he assured the SF Philistines, like a man trying to soothe a yappy little lapdog, that there would be no “Eurotrash” productions. I hate that meaningless term anyway. I figured that if he needed to assure nervous patrons that they would be fed a safe diet of sloppy seconds from the Met, then that’s just part of running a big opera house.

But it was starting to look as if he just had fairly uninteresting taste. Then came Graham Vick’s Tannhauser, and Gockley made it clear that he felt this was a signature production for him, which floored me, since it out-Rosenberged anything Rosenberg had presented here. I loved it, but many others didn’t, which, let me say, is an understatement. Given the vehemence of the reaction, I wonder if he simply figured San Francisco audiences are even more averse to nontraditional productions than he had thought. But how could someone who spoke longingly of staging Andrea Chenier with big stars from the Met also consider this art-installation Tannhauser a good example of what he was all about?

I felt Gockley did an excellent job this season balancing the new, the familiar, and the less familiar. So I was stunned by the announcement of next year’s plans. The upcoming season is entirely respectable, and if you hear an undertone of dull and safe in that description, then thank you for reading me as I intended you to read me. Rudolf Bing himself might have assembled this season and proudly presented it to his Met patrons; in fact, with the obvious exception of the new works, it may well actually be one of Bing’s seasons, plucked straight from 1954 (oh, the now fashionable mid-century years!) and dropped into the laps of a San Francisco audience that has longed for nothing else, as it wonders vaguely where all the past years went, and why the glitter has left the atmosphere, and maybe Tony Bennett will be singing later in the Carnelian Room. . .

So I can’t just write Gockley off; he seems to have a zig for every zag, and if the cumulative effect is not one I find interesting or appealing, clearly many others feel differently. I was looking at the calendar for next year and realized I could see just about all the operas I was interested in by early October. For all I know by December I’ll be begging for tickets to Boheme, but somehow I suspect that I’ll just check out some of the DVDs that have piled up while I’ve been out: Britten, Janacek, Schoenberg, Berg, Henze, Chin, Dusapin, and Handel, as well as Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini. I know it’s ironic that I repeat myself in criticizing the repetitive season, but we all enjoy our habitual pleasures, and hate to have them taken away, and I'll miss having all my tickets lined up. I sometimes wonder if I rely so much on routine because it frightens me deeply to realize how quickly I adapt to anything’s absence.

Lhude sing, cuccu!

Maybe it’s the influence of the sultry air of summer, heavy, dirty, and mournful with thunderstorms that will never come, but in just two days last week, on ferry boat and BART train, I saw three women reading celebrated novels of adultery: two Anna Kareninas and one Madame Bovary. We all get the yen, and I too felt like putting down Paradise Lost, because even the deepest love can tire, oh, just a bit, after a dozen or so readings, and grabbing a ripe adulteress from the shelf, but I resisted and went back to the battle in Heaven. Reading about it (adultery, not warring angels) is so much easier than dealing with it oneself (well, I guess that's true of the angels as well); go for the glamour and avoid the work. By "glamour" I mean "deep insight into the human condition", of course.

If you’re tired of trains and arsenic, though, you may dazzle and entice your friends with some equally great but more obscure members – and who doesn’t like obscure members? – of the body of nineteenth-century adultery novels, lesser known only, I have no doubt, because they are written in Spanish and Portuguese: Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta and Galdos’s Fortunata and Jacinta from Spain, and any of the novels of the great Eca de Queiros (sometimes spelled Queiroz) from Portugal. As a public service, because that is the sort of thing I do here, I will provide a pronunciation guide to Queiros’s name (which contains various cedillas and things which I am omitting out of laziness and ignorance). I myself have a wretched Portuguese accent, and speak only a few words, but since “I am offended” and “You are shameful” are among them, I am in reality fully equipped for life in Lisbon, though perhaps not in Rio.

Anyway, I asked my father, a native speaker, and here goes: AY – sa duh kay – ROYZH. Do that with a slight backward roll on the “R” and you’re close enough. My father then hastened to inform me that the family (meaning his older relatives) did not consider Queiros a decent author, which is really all the enticement one might need. (By the way, if you read The Maias, and you should, do not read any of the introductory material first, at least in the Penguin edition – there is a major plot point they blithely give away, and you should come across it on your own.) I also used to see every movie condemned by the Vatican until they got around to The da Vinci Code. Not even the Pope’s proscriptive thunder could make me want to sit through that. When I finally heard what the book was about, I was stunned: that’s it? Jesus had kids who now live in the south of France, undoubtedly sucking on Gauloises and sneering at Americans? Look, if they can’t turn water into wine, I’m not interested. What an odd tribute to the human obsession with bloodlines, and what a sad insight into what passes for religious discourse in this country.

Since I’m providing pronunciation guides to Portuguese names, I’m going to put it on the record that my last name is pronounced to rhyme with “jazz.” Any other pronunciation gets a correction from me, and when I occasionally have the pleasure of meeting someone who reads me, I hate for the very first thing I say to be a correction. My grandparents anglicized the pronunciation when they emigrated, and in one of my few faint gestures towards ancestral respect I insist on their pronunciation. Though perhaps what I’m respecting is anglicizing, on behalf of several branches on the other side of the family tree.

Speaking of unsatisfied yearnings and disappointment, I finally have DSL installed, and though the guy from AT&T who had to show up to repair the line here was extremely prompt and helpful, everything else, meaning mostly the speed, has been . . . unimpressive. I haven’t had the heart for my eagerly planned YouTube orgy, because it just takes so much more time than I thought it would. I mean, I’m glad I’m off dial-up, but mostly because it’s just embarrassing still to be on dial-up. If you don’t own a cell phone (I don't), people assume you’re making a statement, as opposed to just being befuddled and stuck in the past, and they might even think it’s some sort of intriguingly independent-minded and subversively Luddite anti-electronic-leash statement, as opposed to “I am unpopular and do not get calls and besides I hate figuring out new technology”, whereas with dial-up all you’re really saying is that you sure do miss 1997.

Speaking of missing things, I'm really going to miss subscribing to the San Francisco Opera. I felt a restless melancholy earlier tonight as I prepared for tomorrow night's date with Lucia di Lammermoor by tearing my second-to-the-last subscription opera ticket from the subscriber ticket sheet I received last summer as I have every summer since 1992. Then comes Ariodante next Friday, and then farewell to Orchestra Left D5, and farewell to my sixteen-or-so years of subscribing and donating. I’ll undoubtedly end up at some of the operas next season, but it's not quite the same. I’ll be damned if I’m going to encourage Gockley as he drains all artistic excitement from the opera house. Technical toys are no substitute. I know I’ve already said I’ll be damned if I encourage the Opera's bold retreat to 1953, but I’ll say it again: I’ll be damned if I pay for a ticket to La Boheme or the lovely though exhausted standards Gockley is trotting out for the walled-in tastes of those who think, or rather who wish, that the musical world stopped with Rosenkavalier. The Opera’s upcoming schedule is not a season, it is a surrender. Oh, here I go again, an obsessive and spurned lover. I do wish them every happiness. What do I know. Maybe they were right to dump me, or, rather, in that classic move, to maneuver things so I felt compelled to dump them. Maybe it all really has been downhill since Zinka stopped singing Gioconda.

Under the circumstances, the San Francisco Symphony is looming larger and more gratefully in my mind. I am, needless to say, way behind in posting, so expect the drawn-out summer nights to be filled with Proustian (long, ravishingly self-indulgent) reminiscences of concerts from months ago (look, it’s all memory as soon as you stop applauding anyway), but I do wish I had written sooner about some of the Symphony concerts, just because I’m so glad to see a big musical organization that seems to be pointed in the right direction. I’m heading there Saturday night for my favorite Beethoven symphony and the new piece by Magnus Lindberg, but even though I’ve been eagerly anticipating this concert all season, still (and watch me ouroboros this whole thing, right here!) part of this faithless lover’s heart will be longing for the exotic charms to be found in hanging with the cool kids at the Columbarium. Go, and live without regrets.