Friday Photo 2024/39

pumpkins

San Francisco Opera: Un Ballo in Maschera

I was at the opera house last night for the second-to-the-last performance of the San Francisco Opera's season opener, Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. I love this opera & the production was superb. Even with two intermissions & a couple of those disruptive pauses between scenes ("Please stay in your seats during this brief pause" but of course some people can't resist pulling out their phones, because . . . they're so very important that 30 minutes can't go by without checking for all those very important messages?), the three-hour performance time flew by, thanks to the vigorous cast & the propulsive yet sensitive conducting of Music Director Eun Sun Kim.

The production (directed by Leo Muscato, set design by Federica Parolini, costumes by Silvia Aymonino, & lighting by Alessandro Verazzi) is both gorgeous & psychologically apt. Without going full-on Fritz Lang, the stage & the shadowy, jagged lighting seem influenced by German Expressionism: the sets are often soaring yet cramped, pushing people close to the front of the stage (which has the additional musical charm of helping project their voices outward into the auditorium); the costumes are colorful & aristocratically elegant but the surroundings are dark; the second-act setting near the gallows spot, with black trees jutting irregularly across the stage, is made vivid by swirling mist in changing colors, some of which (red) are cued to the emotional moment, others of which are just strange & shifting (I loved the effect but will note that a friend of mine found it distracting).

The court world portrayed here is frivolous & shallow, though with dark currents of treachery & resentment simmering underneath; Gustavo/Riccardo seemed a close cousin to the charming & heedless Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto. When he, urged by his page Oscar, decides to check into the soothsayer Ulrica's trade personally before agreeing with the Chief Magistrate's degree of banishment, he suggests the party visit her with music that is irresistibly lively, & indeed most of the courtiers start bobbing up & down to the music, moving their arms in rhythm, ready to dance at what is clearly another goofy escapade in the light atmosphere of the court – except the conspirators don't dance along; they stand, a solid & noticeable mass, glowering off on one side of the stage. It was a wonderful moment, as the audience (OK, maybe just me) can hardly keep from dancing along in their seats to this music. Movement of the stage pictures is used well throughout; when we come to the climactic masked ball, the set rotates, startlingly, for the first time all evening, & the stage is suddenly much brighter & deeper than at any other time during the show. (The climactic masked ball, but hasn't the whole show been a masked ball? No one here is without disguise, or masked motives.)

It doesn't do this performance justice to say this is what we want in Italian opera; it's what we dream of: the passion, the precision, the wild strength. The main conspirators, Adam Lau as Samuel/Count Ribbing & Jongwon Han as Tom/Count Horn. are, beneath their murmuring, their suspicions & their suspiciousness, implacable in their pursuit of vengeance, the granite rocks on which the swells of the frivolous court smash & break. Mei Gui Zhang as Oscar is gorgeously attired in black & white, with stylish juxtapositions of various stripes & checks, & a hat with a very tall plume, like an exotic bird that is also a faithful reader of Vogue. His exquisitely spritely music embodies the surface light-heartedness of the court, floating beside, reflecting on but never quite comprehending the darker contrasting currents.

As Gustavo/Riccardo, Michael Fabiano is all strength & careless charm. You can see why the people say they love him, but also how he could have created some dangerous enemies. The silver spangles rain down on the ball-goers as he expires. (There were some extra-musical groans & exhalations during his death that I would have preferred not be there, but that's a matter of personal taste.) Lianna Haroutounian is a compelling & sympathetic Amelia, & Amartuvshin Enkhbat as Renato/Count Anckarström is powerful as a good man redirected into enmity by perceived betrayal; both he & Amelia seem so much more thoughtful & conscience-stricken than the king that you can see why they belong together. Gustavo/Riccardo ultimately does the noble, Brief Encounter-type thing, but it takes him a while to get there (& you can see why such insouciance has its appeal to Amelia).

Judit Kutasi, so memorable as Ortrud in last season's Lohengrin, is similarly towering in the somewhat similar role of Ulrica/Madame Arvidson, the fortune-teller in touch, or so she claims, & so some of the authorities believe, with Satanic powers. She brought an interesting theatricality to the role that made it seem that whether or not Ulrica was actually communicating with unearthly powers, she was certainly aware of how to impress upon her audience that she was well worth the money they gave her. (She makes a brief & striking appearance in the finale of the masked ball, once it is clear that her prophecies have all, in the way of stage prophecies, come true.) The smaller roles – Christopher Oglesby as the Chief Magistrate, Samuel Kidd as the vivid sailor whose questions to Ulrica about his ultimate rewards are instantly answered by the disguised king, & Thomas Kinch as Amelia's Servant – are all strong. (As you can tell from the character names, this production uses the Swedish rather than the colonial Boston setting, though honestly . . . to me it doesn't really matter much.)

As usual before the opera began, we heard the recorded voice of company director Matthew Shilvock welcoming all those people who are attending the opera for the first time. This always attracts a big round of applause; I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps it's a case of more rejoicing in Heaven over the one straying sheep that is rescued rather than the 99 that have been there grazing all along, but maybe some day he will also thank those of us who keep coming show after show.

The woman who checked her phone during the first pause (she & her husband also spoke a bit during the performance) left at the first intermission, which was fine with me (& also with the woman on the other side of them, who moved over into their vacated seats, to get a better view of the stage). Speaking of views from the stage (I was in Orchestra A1), I usually pay more attention to the stage than the pit, even in the front row, but it was wonderful to notice how much the harp adds to both the playful music associated with the Court & with Oscar in particular & also to what I'll call the heavenly apotheosis music as Riccardo lies dying (according to the program, Annabelle Taubl is the Acting Principal Harp, but I'm not sure she's the woman who was playing last night).

During the second act, a woman a few rows behind me started an endless rustling with some sort of plastic bag (I will never understand why people wait until the music starts to do things like that – take out what needs to be taken out during intermission, people!). The woman behind me swiftly & unobtrusively went over & whispered something & the noise (mostly) stopped. During the second intermission I thanked the woman for doing this. "Oh, I'm hardcore," she replied. "You know what the problem is? It's these stupid women with all of their shit. You can check it for free, I don't know what's going on! The woman behind me is doing the same thing" – & she turned around &, murder rising blood-red in her eyes, glared at the woman. I'm not sure the other woman noticed, but maybe the message got through. Such is life in Operaland.

Poem of the Week 2024/39

Swan, tell me your old story.

What country have you come from, swan, what shores are you flying to?

Where do you rest at night, and what are you looking for?

It's dawn, swan, wake up, soar to the air, follow me!

There is a land not governed by sadness and doubt, where the fear of death is unknown.

Spring forests bloom there and the wind is sweet with the flower He-Is-Myself.

The bee of the heart dives into it and wants no other joy.

– Kabir, translated by Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass

Swans are such strangely resonant birds; they seem to be taken up culturally, wherever they live, as symbols of something larger than a mere part of the local fauna, though what they symbolize varies widely: grace, death (the swan song), beauty, royalty, wisdom . . . in this poem, the mystic Kabir addresses a swan, which seems here to be a conglomerate of all the meanings projected onto the bird – that is, it represents the grace & beauty of the world. The poet reaches out to the swan, acknowledging its mysterious life, a life separate from the poet's understanding: tell me your story. But not just your story: your old story, suggesting an attempt to hear the universal & historical history of not just this individual swan, but this swan as a representative of all swans, an archetype of the species, a long-lasting co-inhabitant of the earth. The swan, this beacon of grace & beauty, seems to be restless & rootless: where have you come from, where are you going, where do you rest, what do you seek? (Is there an easy place on earth for such beauty?)

Halfway through the poem, it takes a turn: the poet exhorts the swan to wake up, it's dawn (a general symbol of rebirth, new hope, new possibilities). Then, strangely, he adjures this water bird to leave its native element rise up into the air. Even more oddly, the poet further tells the bird to follow him – the mystic is already soaring into the empyrean. The suggestion is that the swan, this representative of what is gorgeous & graceful in the world, should join with the poet in the land he mentions, a place very unlike our earth, as it is not governed by sadness & doubt & fear & death. After telling us what this land is not, the poet tells us what the land is, & again he conjures up a sense of serene beauty by using the beautiful things of earth (what else do we have to compare things to?): not a bird such as the swan, this time, but springtime forests (spring, like dawn, is a symbol of revival & hope), blooms, sweet breezes carrying the scent of a flower – not an earthly flower, but a symbol of union with the divine (He seems to refer to God, & He-Is-Myself to union with God – though perhaps He is the flower, & the poet has become one with Nature, in the form of a flower).

To further suggest the on-going & active nature of this ecstatic union, the poet's heart has, or is, a bee (another lovely, useful creature, producing sweet honey & making nature fruitful through pollination) that – in an exuberant, active verb – dives into the flower. There's a sexual undercurrent to this ecstatic union, as there often is in poetry describing a mystic union with a deity. But though we are left with this final image of ecstatic union, has the poet truly achieved this celestial bliss? If he has, why is he calling on the swan, a figure of the beauties of this earth, to join him? Is he still longing for earthly beauty? Or is the poet rather calling on the beauties of the earth to purge themselves of doubt, sadness, fear, & death, & join him in seeking the transcendence of this ineffable joy?

I took this poem from The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, edited by Stephen Mitchell. Unlike many anthologies of spiritual verse, this one eschews the poetry of doubt as well as of dogma, & concentrates on poetic attempts to capture & celebrate the soul's union with the divine.

Museum Monday 2024/39

 

Elephant Candelabrum Vase (Vase à Tête d’Eléphant), from the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory & now in the Art Institute of Chicago

San Francisco Opera: Innocence

(Catching up on last June's offerings at San Francisco Opera, part 3. . . .)

I was at San Francisco Opera for the American premiere of Innocence, Kaija Saariaho's final opera (libretto by Sofi Oksanen & Aleksi Barrière). I realized right away that I needed to see it again, so I was also at the final performance. I don't generally go to the same production twice, due to my preference for expensive seats & my low tolerance for audiences, but this performance was clearly something special, like seeing a modern classic emerging newborn but already complete, & it was worth seeing not only twice but multiple times; in a work as subtle & detailed as this one, each viewing brings you in deeper.

We begin at a wedding reception in Finland; the bride & groom met as students abroad. Strange things begin to emerge about the wedding – why is it so small? where are the family & friends? is the groom's father drinking maybe a little too much, & why are his mother's vocal lines so consistently in an almost hysterically high tessitura? We learn that the groom's brother, ten years before, shot up the town's International School. A waitress assigned to the reception at the last minute turns out to know the family, from the time before. Her daughter was one of the shooter's victims. As we move forward in time with the reception (will the bride be told the family secret? will the family finally pull together, or fly apart?) we also move backwards, through flashbacks, to the day of the shooting, what led up to it, & its ongoing repercussions.

It was an astute move setting this opera somewhere other than the homeland of school shootings, the United States. Setting it here would make the story inevitably about the sickness of American culture (guns & money over children's safety, every time) & a corrupt & ineffective political situation that bars the obviously essential reforms. Instead, it is a deeper examination of what humans anywhere & anytime do to each other.

The story is fragmented; initially we hear from many of the victims (not all of them still living); they speak in a Babel-like cloud of different languages, describing everyday things, like going for a run or meeting people in public, & how they now struggle with them. Gradually we realize they are describing the aftereffects of the decade-old shooting at their school. But about halfway through, the libretto takes a twist; we start to hear the background of the shooter, his emotional oddities, the early warning signs that were ignored, the ridicule of his classmates & even a horrifying example of a sexually humiliating incident they perpetrated on him. None of this excuses the murders, of course, but as we go in deeper we gradually realize the terrible irony of the title: no one here is innocent. Innocence may be a thing that simply doesn't exist among humans, though they pretend it does, mostly to excuse themselves & condemn others.

A particularly striking character in this regard is Marketa (Vilma Jää), the waitress' murdered daughter, a talented musician. She is a tall, attractive blonde. We first see her through her mourning mother's eyes, as a wonderful, talented person cruelly cut off from the life she might have led. And that remains true. But we also hear from the groom's mother that the wonderful Marketa had a cruel edge, & made up a song mocking the future shooter for his ugly frog face, which she sang to the students repeatedly, because they enjoyed it & it made them laugh. The phantom Marketa appears & mostly shrugs off the song & how it affected its object of ridicule. I wonder if she isn't in some way meant as an image of the Artist in the world, following her own path (her music is distinctly different, with a sort of Nordic folk-song sound that is striking & memorable) but also eager for applause & the spotlight, even at the cost of someone else's feelings: a creator, yes, but also a destroyer; an indifferent, & therefore morally compromised or compromisable, figure.

The shooter himself never appears on stage, though he dominates the proceedings, nor do we see violence so much as its emotionally violent after-effects. [A correction: my memory was faulty & the shooter does appear on stage in this production; see Lisa Hirsch's comment below.] We do meet the shooter's accomplices, though both dropped out before the actual shooting. One I won't mention, as it's one of the more startling revelations, but another is a young woman who befriends the shooter & has some problems of her own, including a creepy stepfather. It's a mark of the libretto's deft touch that his creepiness is presented only through her perceptions; there's something there, but how much? We are not given easy or obvious explanations. There is the family priest, but he does not have much comfort to dispense; instead, he is haunted by the sense that he should have acted on warning signs he noticed & by the inadequacy of any counseling or comfort he can offer. The opera closes with the phantom Marketa urging her mother to stop some of her obsessive mourning rituals; you could take this as some sort of healing or closure, or perhaps simply as time moving on, & memory moving on, though the sorrow is embedded soul-deep until one also passes away.

A summary does not do justice to the libretto, which struck me as comparable to late Ibsen in its psychological nuance & mythopoetic power. It could stand on its own without the music, though the music adds a richness, a depth & complexity, that only opera can achieve. Saariaho's score is muscular & crepuscular; the tension is sustained throughout & all handled with great subtlety. At my second performance, when I was seated in front of the brass & percussion – I was on the other side for my first performance – I noticed how skillfully certain lines were highlighted by a trumpet. (Much as I love Britten & Billy Budd, I wince every time Claggart snarls Let him crawl to that isn't-he-evil orchestration – there's none of that here). This score is a magnificent final addition to Saariaho's rich legacy. [a correction: this was Saariaho's last work for the stage, but there's a trumpet concerto she composed after it; see Lisa Hirsch's comment below]

Another reason I wanted to have a second experience of this magnificent work is that, even though it felt as if I were watching the emergence of a full-blown masterpiece, a piece that seemed both already set among the classics & yet also completely new, it also seemed like something that might not get revived that often: the unsparing vision that gives it force also makes it difficult, even at times horrifying, to experience. I heard a few people compare it to Elektra, but that has a big star role. There's none of that here. Innocence is very much an ensemble piece. There are no detachable arias. The emotions it gives rise to are complicated & haunting. I very much hope I'm wrong about this, as this opera deserves many revivals. New operas are always a risk, & San Francisco Opera deserves all praise for co-commissioning this bold work.

I feel I've just scratched the surface of what should be said here. But let me salute the ensemble: conductor Clément Mao-Takacs, Lilian Farahani as the Bride, Miles Mykkanen as the Groom, Rod Gilfry as his Father, Claire de Sévigné as his Mother, Ruxandra Donose as the substitute Waitress, Lucy Shelton as the Teacher, Kristinn Sigmundsson as the family Priest, Rowan Klevits as the Student Anton, Camilo Delgado Díaz as the Student Jeronimo, Beate Mordal as the Student Lily, Marina Dumont as the Student Alexia, Vilma Jää as the Student Marketa, Julie Hega as the Student Iris, & the actors Oksana Barrios, Jordan Covington, Victoria Fong, Sam Hannum, Jalen Justice, Rachael Richman, Brian Soutner, Kevin Walton.

If I ever pull together a list of the greatest opera performances I've ever seen, Innocence will have to be on that list.

San Francisco Opera: Partenope

(Catching up on last June's offerings at San Francisco Opera, part 2. . . .)

I hesitated before getting a ticket to San Francisco Opera's revival of Handel's Partenope, because I had not much liked the Christopher Alden production when it was first shown here ten years ago (I summed it up by saying I felt I should be having a lot more fun than I was actually having; you can read my post on that production here). Ultimately what led to my pulling out the credit card once again was a combination of my adoration of Handel & my strong desire to see more early operas staged. I would happily jettison the entire verismo school for more baroque operas, which strike me as actually more realistic: people come & go, talking about their feelings at length (beautiful length, thanks for the powers of music), confused about love & most other things . . . this is a lot more life-like, & more psychologically astute, than the so-called verismo of poisoned violets & other equally improbable & melodramatic revenges.

What do you know, I ended up enjoying this go-round of Partenope much more! The production was basically the same, though maybe some of the more egregious elements were toned down (I recalled much more toilet-paper play the first time around, as well as more gratuitous chair-handling). The surrealist elements seemed stronger this time, including the projection of some of Man Ray's experimental films. Many of the successful elements of the original – the Art Deco elegance, the references to the First World War, the avant-garde aura – were in place & still strong. No one sang an aria hanging from the staircase, but striking moments abounded.

And the cast was very strong, in particular Julie Fuchs as a dazzling Partenope, with a full & elegant & even swinging style. (In one of her da capo ornamentations, I swear she wittily threw in a bit of Sempre libera from Traviata – a similar high-society queen who came to a sadly different end.) My two favorite singers from the earlier iteration, Daniela Mack as Rosmira & Alek Shrader as Emilio, both returned in fine form, & Shrader ten years on is still able to sing his aria while doing complicated yoga moves, so good for you, Alek! Carlo Vistoli ws Arsace, Nicholas Tamagna Armindo, & Hadleigh Adams Ormonte, all of them excellent. Christopher Moulds led the excellent band, & why can't we have more of this kind of thing rather than yet another round of the Bohemians?

San Francisco Opera: The Magic Flute

(Catching up on last June's offerings at San Francisco Opera, part 1. . . .)

There's always something that pulls us back to operas we may think we've seen often enough; in the case of San Francisco Opera's Magic Flute, it was the celebrated production by Barrie Kosky, usually described as the "silent film" staging, which of course grabbed my interest.

Silent film is definitely a major influence, but the designers clearly also looked at graphic novels, anime, surrealist collages, & comic books; I've heard some people describe the constantly shifting projections as exhausting, but they could just as easily be seen as exhilarating. On the whole I enjoyed the production, but was surprised by some of its limitations.

It does some things extremely well; this is the first production I've seen in which the trials by fire & water carry some weight & seem like actual trials .The whole quest/fairy tale aspect comes out very strongly. The use of silent-film style intertitles relieves us from the generally tedious comedy of the spoken dialogue. (But this has the unfortunate effect of depriving Papagena of some of her most winning moments.)

On the debit side of the ledger, the actions of the singers are extremely circumscribed: one limb awry & the illusion from the seamless projections falls apart. Also, the singers are mostly isolated from each other, often perched midway up the stage & addressing someone down below or off to the side. This is not an opera in which psychological realism is paramount, of course, but it does have a warm human heart that beats a little less vigorously when everyone is physically so separated.

There are specific silent-film references made in the costuming, some of which work better than others. I have never seen a production in which I thought so much about Pamina's hair; she's given the iconic Louise Brooks bob, but . . . is Pamina really a Louise Brooks type? I pondered whether the character would be better off with the golden tresses of the ethereal Lillian Gish, or Mary Pickford's tighter, spunkier blonde sausage curls. Papageno has Buster Keaton's porkpie hat, but Keaton's deadpan but sensitive calibration of on-coming disaster isn't really a Papageno quality (would Chaplin's pleasure-seeking but poignant Tramp be a better fit?). Monostatos is made up like Murnau's Nosferatu, which neatly avoids the ugly racial aspect of the lustful villain. The Queen of the Night mostly appears as a giant spider, which is striking & effective (though, again with the quibbles, shouldn't she at least initially be more immediately appealing?).The racial remarks can be pruned, but the anti-female aspects are too baked in to the libretto to be expunged. My audience mostly reacted to the more egregiously misogynistic remarks with laughter, which seems like the most sensible response under the circumstances.

I think the constraints of the production, striking & memorable as the production is, affected the performers; all of them had moments when I thought they were excellent, & others when I thought they were a bit overwhelmed. (Amitai Pati was Tamino, Lauri Vasar the Papageno, Anna Siminska the Queen of the Night, Zhengyi Bai the Monostatos, Christina Gansch the Pamina, Kwangchul Youn the Sarastro, Arianna Rodriguez the Papagena, & Olivia Smith, Ashley Dixon, & Maire Theresa Carmack respectively the First, Second, & Thirdd Ladies). Eun Sun Kim led a sprightly & noble rendiiton.

I was very glad to have a chance to see this production, even if it struck me as a big more of a mixed bag than I had hoped. But even when I decide I've seen the Magic Flute often enough, I end up glad I went.

Friday Photo 2024/38

 

on the way to the Opera House, San Francisco

San Francisco Opera: The Handmaid's Tale

Last Saturday night, I was at the Opera House for the west coast premiere of The Handmaid's Tale, with music by Poul Ruders & libretto by Paul Bentley based, of course, on Margaret Atwood's famous novel. I was tired when I went in (these things do affect our perceptions; the physical weighs us down, which is one of the themes of the Handmaid's Tale), I was skeptical for several reasons of what I was about to see, but I found myself overpowered by a work I'm still processing several days later.

I don't need to go into why I was tired, but I will broadly sketch my skepticism. The idea felt maybe a bit too obvious, even hackneyed, given the political situation in the United States (the mere fact that anyone, let alone a substantial minority, could still think of voting for Trump tells you everything you need to know about how morally & intellectually & spiritually bankrupt this country is). And the way this material is usually described struck me as self-indulgent: women as perpetual victims, men as oppressors. It's well known that over half the white women who voted in 2016 voted for Trump, & most men I know (including myself, of course) are far from profiting from the current gendered set-up. We've all seen those memes that appeared post-Dobbs about how the wrath of women had been aroused, but all I can think when I see them is Where have they been for the past 45 years? Nothing, & I mean nothing, that has happened has been a surprise. The reactionaries have been announcing for decades to cheering crowds (which included many women, of course) that they were going to pack the courts & overturn Roe v Wade, which is exactly what they did. When Trump was elected, owing to the anti-democratic Electoral College, there was grand talk about "the Resistance", a word which was also highlighted in the publicity for this opera. I dislike the self-glorifying term; it makes it sound as if we're all wearing berets & blowing up supply trains under cover of darkness. Opposing Trump mostly calls for the same boring grind as any other political work, including talking to – &, more to the point, listening to – people who are, in the delicate & lovely euphemism of political writers, "low information".

I just deleted several lines there, because, you know, people care about my political opinions as little as I care about theirs & let's get to the opera. But, for this opera in particular, the political situation is relevant, & our self-deceptions & assumptions are relevant. This opera knows this, & no matter what you go in thinking – & this is the mark of a great political opera, like The Death of Klinghoffer – you will come out a bit shaken in your certainties.

I read Atwood's novel around the time it was published, 1985, & found it strong & convincing – Atwood, of course, is too clear-sighted & complex a writer to produce a simple tale of victimization, & I'm happy to say the adaptation respects that. There is ambiguity & complicity all over in the action & characterization. I did not re-read the novel before the opera (lack of time, mostly) but it came back to me as I watched. The action, which is complicated & not presented in a linear manner, can be followed even without having read the book. The story told in the novel itself is fragmentary, a journal kept irregularly by someone whose fate we never learn, but in the opera the story, until the end, seems less fragmentary than fractured: the pieces are there, just not in chronological order.

Both narrative & music have a lot to accomplish here, & mostly they both succeed brilliantly, though at times I did wish for the expansion possible in a novel – in particular, I wanted to hear more from & about Serena Joy, the wife of the Commander, & Aunt Lydia, the woman in charge of training the handmaidens in their beliefs & duties. They are true believers in Gilead (though I started to wonder about Serena Joy); what are they seeing in it or hoping for from it? But compression & omission are required to convey everything that needs to be conveyed: the violent founding & strictures of the Republic of Gilead, the sporadic concern & opposition before & during the founding, the environmental depredations that make fertility & healthy infants such prized commodities, what life is like under Gilead, & the life (both before & after Gilead) & the tentative moves towards liberation of Offred (the titular Handmaid; her Commander is named Fred, as she is now Of Fred, but also, of course there's the pun on Offered).

The spare, very brightly lit set (designed by Chloe Lamford) & the color-coded costumes (designed by Christina Cunninham) tell a clear story about the relentless surveillance & regimentation of Gilead, & its Spartan lack of softness or luxury, or any kind of sensuality or romance. The time is moved forward a bit from the novel, so it's now happening a few years from our present time (though the surprising amount of cigarette smoking made me think it was still set a few years after 1985). The scenes of life in Gilead are sharply drawn, full of confusion, suspicion, & disappointment. So why would anyone think such a place was a good idea? The music conveys that very well: whenever there's a hymn or prayer or some sort of religious ceremony, the music takes on a gentleness, a harmonious beauty, an ascendance, that is not found elsewhere in the score (in which even Amazing Grace comes across in frantic, fractured distortions). This quality is subtly done; these moments don't jump out from the score, but they do mark a difference in tone from the violent percussion of Gilead's enforcers & the agonizingly high tessiture of the corralled handmaidens. In those early scenes of the handmaidens especially, I was very reliant on the surtitles.

Every aspect of this production is strong: the agile conducting by Karen Kamensek, the sensitive direction by John Fulljames, &, especially, the powerhouse cast: just to mention some of the major roles, Sarah Cambidge as a commanding Aunt Lydia; Lindsay Ammann as the bitter wife, Serena Joy; John Relyea as the opaque Commander; Katrina Galka as Janine/Ofwarren, a friend & ally of Offred; Brenton Ryan as an ambiguous servant of, or enemy of, the Commander & Serena Joy; &, in particular, Irene Roberts as Offred. I realize it's part of the narrative strategy that Offred is not a particularly interesting character: she is a fairly average person, with average interests & concerns, trying to make sense of a horrible situation she is aught up in. Roberts makes her vivid & convincing.

Do you need a spoiler alert if the key plot revelation to be discussed is that there is nothing to reveal? The opera ends, as did the novel, with an abrupt disappearance from the historical record. We do not learn Offred's ultimate fate: freedom, capture, the Colonies? Life, death, imprisonment? Does she reunite with the daughter who was taken from her? The final notes ring out, but the narrative hangs suspended. The point, of course, is that we can try to write the ending for our own time, as best we may, insofar as we can.

Poem of the Week 2024/38

Where the wild woods and pathless forests frown,

    The darkling Pilgrim seeks his unknown way,

Till on the grass he throws him weary down,

    To wait in broken sleep the dawn of day:

Thro' boughs just waving in the silent air,

    With pale capricious light the Summer Moon

Chequers his humid couch; while Fancy there,

    That loves to wanton in the Night's deep noon,

Calls from the mossy roots and fountain edge

    Fair visionary Nymphs that haunt the shade,

Or Naiads rising from the whispering sedge;

    And, 'mid the beauteous group, his dear loved maid

Seems beckoning him with smiles to join the train:

Then, starting from his dream, he feels his woes again!

– Charlotte Smith

This sonnet, written shortly before the 18th turned into the 19th century, combines the threatening aspects of the wilderness with the enchanting. We are first shown the scene: wild woods, pathless forests, frowning, in a personified way. It's a foreboding sight. Only in the second line are we introduced to the human element in this scene: an intruder, a darkling Pilgrim on his unknown way. If he's a pilgrim, how can his way be unknown, unless his ultimate goal is not some specific religious shrine but some as-yet undefined sense of peace? He is propelled by the inchoate yearning the fuels the Romantic wanderer. Darkling is always a striking adjective. Given the frowning forests, it's no wonder he is in the dark, but the word also carries with it something more than merely "without light"; it suggests something mysterious, disquieting, a darkness spiritual as well as literal. (Most readers of poetry will hear an echo in this opening of Dante wandering lost in the forest at the opening the Divine Comedy, with the grand & sacred aura that memory carries with it).

Weary from his unsated searching, the Pilgrim throws himself on the grass to sleep – a broken sleep, of course. Sleep leads to that other ambiguous realm of freedom & fright, the echt-Romantic world of dreaming. Smith really creates the whole scene with such swift strokes – the Pilgrim, a word with a long tradition of spiritual seeking & growth, here applied to a restless soul clearly in turmoil: he strays through the darkness & the wild, as if any direction is the same; he throws himself on the grass, his sleep will not be deep or restful.

The physical situation is as deftly presented as the psychological, & the two are intermingled, with human emotions & moods applied to Nature, & the natural world reflecting the inner state of the Pilgrim: the silent air, the boughs barely swaying, the moonlight, pale & capricious: pale, suggesting a ghostly rather than robust presence; capricious, which in this context suggests something like dappled, or the varying light you get when clouds or swaying tree-limbs temporarily block the light. But capricious is usually applied to humans, & it's usually a gendered term, applied mostly to women who are seen as emotionally volatile or subject to sudden changes of mood (if applied to a man, there would be an implication of effeminacy, suggesting he is lacking in manly steadiness of purpose). Here it is applied to the moon, usually personified as a goddess, in particular Artemis/Diana, the virgin goddess of the hunt, & of course the moon, with its regular cycles of waxing & waning, is a symbol of constant changing. A suggestion of a woman, a virgin uninterested in love, an element changeable & capricious, light that comes & goes: we may be getting a hint of the causes of the Pilgrim's underlying discontent.

The moonlight chequers (the British spelling of checkers; the poet is reinforcing the sense of spotty & irregular light) the humid couch: basically, the damp bank on which he's thrown himself. This is the sort of fancy diction that could be vaguely comic, but here it suggests to me that for the pilgrim the lines between civilization (a couch or proper bed) & the wilderness (a bank of soft grass, just as good!) are blurring. Is this the effect of exhaustion, dreaming, or despair?

Fancy appears; here, as in Shakespeare, the term means Imagination, particularly untrammeled imagination, a quality that emerges strongly in the night's deep noon, which is an inversion referring to midnight – again, a blurring of lines, this time between day & night. Fancy is personified as one who loves – a word that reinforces our sense of an erotic dilemma as what's lying at the heart of the poem – to wanton – a word that connects with capricious earlier &, again, reinforces a sense of erotic titillation & uncertainty underlying this Pilgrim's progress. Wanton meant something like to play or frolic, but already there was also an underlying sense of the meaning to be sexually unrestrained – again, this was a gendered term, applied in the sexual sense mostly to women.

Our pilgrim's sleep is broken: is he dreaming, or in a state of half-slumber in which his imagination (Fancy) is conjuring up an erotic vision? He seems to have some classical learning, to picture these women (naked, or nearly so, we can assume) as nymphs & naiads (nymphs are forest spirits, mostly associated with trees, while naiads are water spirits). It's a pretty picture, to him & to us; what sort of distancing is underway that compels him to see them not just as naked pretty women but as classical spirits? (It's like those academic paintings that displayed nudity freely as long as they could dress up the naked with a classical title.)

The scene is lovely but unreal, a bit otherworldly: the visionary nymphs . . . haunt the shade; visionary suggests religious ecstasy, but also something trance-like & unreal; haunt here means, basically, where they hang out, but it of course also carries ghostly overtones, & shade is a term that can refer to ghosts as well as the shadows cast by the forest. The whole scene is enticing, but illusory & possibly dangerous: there are dark powers at loose in the forest.

Right before we come to the final couplet, the implied but as-yet unseen other half of the hinted-at story appears: his dear loved maid. (Maid here means a young, virgin woman.) He loves her, but does she love him? In the concluding couplet, she seems to gesture to him to join them in their frolics, but just at that sweet moment his dream-world dissolves, & he remembers his unhappiness – presumably that he is not loved in return. We can see no ending, certainly not a happy one, to this pilgrimage, & part of the Pilgrim's grief is that he also sees no end in sight, at least in the actual world. Lovely dreams show up to entice, delude, & then torment him in the trackless forest.

I took this from The Poems of Charlotte Smith, edited by Stuart Curran.