a fool in the forest

Scary Mouche, Scary Mouche!(Will You Do the Fandango?)

The world premiere of composer Howard Shore's opera adaptation of B-movie horror classic The Fly is set for July 2 at the Théâtre du Chatelet, Paris.  The libretto is by David Henry Hwang.  David Cronenberg will direct, with physical design being handled by much of the production team that collaborated on Cronenberg's 1986 remake of the film, for which Shore composed the score.  Placido Domingo conducts -- which is not necessarily the first choice on the list of things you want Placido Domingo to do, but by golly it's a free country.

Los Angeles Opera co-commissioned the work and will present the U.S. premiere in a series of performances beginning on September 7.  I am given to understand that the original plan was for Los Angeles to have had the World Premiere, this past season.  This did not occur.  You know how these things are.  Let's move on.

The production now boasts a stand-alone web presence at www.theflytheopera.com, including a promotional video -- with an actual MPAA "PG " rating attached, because parental guidance is so important in opera -- with plenty of commentary by Mr. Shore, smatterings of the music, glimpses of sinister scientific equipment of which no good can come, and the lead baritone or his equivalent doing some serious wire work, clambering about upside down and getting in touch with his inner insect. 

(There is a good quality streaming/podcast version of the same video at the Théâtre du Chatelet site as well, but some French person keeps talking over Howard Shore's explanations, for the better understanding of his fellow French persons who are not so fluent in English as they would have you believe.  Truth be told, the singers seem to be singing in French as well, in all versions of this video, even though the Los Angeles production will be in English.  It is all quite confusing, really.  It is, I submit, a good thing that Music is an International Language.)

This could be quite interesting, or an utter fiasco, or just "meh."  Time will tell me and, when the time is right, I will tell you.  Bzzz.

~~~

Photo: "Enter: the Fly" by Flickr! user Lawrence Whittemore, used under Creative Commons license.

~~~

Related in Name Only: Two years ago, I posted an MP3 of The Singleman Affair covering Tim Buckley's "Buzzin' Fly."   It's still here, and it's still good.

"Theatre makes strange bedfellows, and not just after the opening night party."

George Hunka makes a persuasive case for connecting the dots between Wagner and Beckett, with particular reference to the Met's recent production of Tristan und Isolde.

Here, the unexpected bond between Waiting for Godot and the endless Act II love duet in Tristan: 

As in either act of Godot, there is little more than talk for nearly an hour, but in Wagner this talk is filled with sublimely beautiful music, and in Beckett, devastatingly lyrical speech.  Over a century of Tristan performances and half-a-century of Godot performances have demonstrated the profound power of such a theatrical essentialism.

The entire piece is worth reading if you fancy either Tristan or Godot or, as in my case, both.

~~~

For further reading:  No Beckett content included, but the related topic of how Time operates in Wagner came up just yesterday on Sounds & Fury.

A slightly shorter version of George Hunka's post also appeared on April 1 in the Guardian.  No joke.

It's a Gift

Si j'étais un homme, sans doute je ferais les choses que vous me dites, mais les pauvres bêtes qui veulent prouver leur amour ne savent que se coucher par terre et mourir.

[If I were a man, I would do the things that you say [and live], but the poor beasts who want to prove their love can only lie down on the ground and die.]

    --La Bête, La Belle et la Bête

Most men, confronted with their true selves, run away screaming!

    --Professor Engywook, The NeverEnding Story

The Infanta (Mary Dunleavy) and the Dwarf (Rodrick Dixon), amid choristers and courtiers.  (Los Angeles Opera photo by Robert Millard.)

Having no particular interest in the remaining productions -- Tosca and La Rondine -- my own Los Angeles Opera season ended this past Saturday evening, and ended well, with the double bill of Viktor Ullmann's The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochene Krug) and Alexander Zemlinsky's The Dwarf (Der Zwerg).  There is one remaining performance of these paired productions (Saturday evening, March 8), and I will offer one word of advice for anyone with a remotely serious interest in music drama: Go!

This is the first fully-staged offering in music director James Conlon's "Recovered Voices" project, a multi-year initiative to rescue from obscurity works by composers who were directly affected by the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.  (The recent Opera News article on Conlon and "Recovered Voices" is reproduced on the LA Opera site.)  Both of the composers on this bill came out of the fertile musical hothouse of Vienna.  Ullmann, living in Prague when (as Conlon put it in his pre-performance talk) "it was presented as a gift to Hitler," spent two years interned at Terezín, continuing to write, before his death at Auschwitz in 1944.  Zemlinsky -- friend and compatriot of Mahler, teacher and brother-in-law of Schoenberg, first lover of Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel (née Schindler) -- was able to emigrate with his family to New York following the German entry into Austria, but died there in 1942.

The Broken Jug is a 45-minute comic piece in which a corrupt provincial judge with a roving eye is unmasked by the testimony in his own courtroom.  Enjoyable to be sure, but ultimately no more than a lovely trifle.  The best part of the LA Opera production is probably the shadow play that goes on during the opera's overture, some of which can be seen of which can be seen at the outset of the video clip posted here.

The Dwarf is something else again, a sad and beautiful work of high musical and dramatic quality that deserves to have a place in the standard repertoire.  The opera is adapted from a story by Oscar Wilde, "The Birthday of the Infanta."  In both Wilde's story and the libretto by Georg Klaren, the Infanta of Spain is presented with a dwarf on her birthday.  The dwarf has no idea that he is misshapen or an object of mockery: he has never seen himself, and believes that the laughter that follows him everywhere is an expression of joy and pleasure at his presence, his singing and his dancing.  When he is stripped of his illusion and shown himself in a mirror by the unfeeling Infanta, he dies of heartbreak. 

Both the story and the opera are rich in themes typical of Wilde: beauty as a double-edged sword, the disjunction between appearance and inner reality, decadence and innocence.  Klaren's text takes several liberties that actually serve to heighten the Wildean quality of the piece.  The Infanta of the story is only twelve while her operatic incarnation is turning eighteen.  Wilde's dwarf is younger too, a sort of "wild child" found by shepherds in a forest; Zemlinsky and Klaren make him more of a sophisticate, a genuinely talented singer with a mature and yearning soul, captured and kept by the captain of a Spanish ship for ten years before being sold to a Sultan, whose gift to the Infanta he becomes.  In consequence, the Infanta of the opera is more knowingly cruel than her prose counterpart, especially when she spurns the sensitive dwarf's pleas for love and reassurance, to fatal effect.

Zemlinsky's music is in the lush, intelligent late Romantic idiom of Richard Strauss.  (Zemlinsky conducted the Vienna premiere of Strauss's Wilde opera, Salome.)  There is enough dissonance sprinkled about to let us know we are dealing with a 20th century piece, but color, melody and emotional punch are the orders of the day.  It is as smart, elegant and dramatically effective as the best of Strauss.

The LA Opera production is all that Zemlinsky might have wished.  The look of the production is inspired, as was Wilde's story, by Velazquez's great Las Meninas, and the action plays out in an opulent palace room lined with sliding mirrored doors, which inevitably surround the sorrowful dwarf with the truth of how others see him.  (The set's initial resemblance to a really swanky hotel elevator lobby was quickly forgotten once the drama began to unfold.)  The Spanish court is in blacks, whites and grays, with red and pink trim for the cyanide layer cake that is the Infanta.  The Dwarf is in rich orange and gold, like the blood-orange of which he sings.

The singers are all, thank goodness, strong singing actors who do not succumb to the curse of "park and bark."  As he should, Rodrick Dixon as the Dwarf dominates from the moment he emerges from his gilt gift box.  Susan B. Anthony is touching, and was enthusiastically received, as the ineffectual Ghita, the Infanta's maid who protests against the cruel trick her mistress proposes.  Called upon to glitter and be gay while calmly destroying her new "toy," Mary Dunleavy glittered gaily as the Infanta.

The Dwarf is easily one of the two finest productions LA Opera has offered this season, essentially tied in my mind with the company's tremendous, under-attended, Jenufa.  There were a number of cameras at work around the Pavilion Saturday night, which suggests this production may see release on video.  Better yet, one hopes that some old bel canto warhorse can be kept in the stable in a season or two, so that the poor Dwarf, like Tinkerbell, can return to the stage revived by well-earned applause.

O Tell, Otello: Verdi'd It All Go Wrong?

Ian Storey as Otello, Mark Delavan as Iago; Los Angeles Opera photo by Robert Millard.

Los Angeles Opera's new production of Verdi's Otello has drawn responses ranging from lukewarm to actively hostile.  Mark Swed's view of opening night for the Los Angeles Times was decidedly mixed:

For all the company had accomplished by producing its first Otello out of nothing [21 years ago], the orchestra and chorus back then could hardly approach the sheer visceral power of this opening chorus, one of the most dramatic in all opera.  Swept away by it all, I was ready to believe we had entered a new era.  Then I opened my eyes.  And, shortly thereafter, my ears.

Health problems meant the company was obliged to trot out a substitute Desdemona for the opening.  When the intended lead returned, so did Swed, and felt an eensy bit better about it though his praise was still faint:

There is still lots wrong, even embarrassing, with this Otello, but thanks to [Chilean soprano Cristina]Gallardo-Domâs it is no longer a disaster.

Elsewhere, Christian Chensvold complained of "the combination of a beauty-deprived score by Verdi, unexciting production values, and an emotionless portrayal of the tragic hero by Ian Storey . . ."  (He had more positive things to say in that same post about the concurrent "Recovered Voices" double bill, on which I will be better able to report after I see it next Saturday.)

I caught up with Otello last night and, really, it is not nearly so bad as all that.  In fact, its virtues, which are largely musical, overcome its most glaring weaknesses, which are largely scenic.

Where lies the scene?  Cyprus, ostensibly -- Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito dropped Shakespeare's Act 1 altogether, so we never get to spend any time in Venice -- but a Cyprus that is oddly, and literally, off kilter.  Designer Johan Engels has devised a strange and troublesome curved and canted stage floor with a pair of large boxy tunnels for entrances and exits at right and left.  The inspiration seems to be a ship's keel, drawing on Otello's storm-wracked arrival by sea as the opera opens, but the sandy color scheme and the Cypriots' desert-ready apparel combine with the arc of the floor and an odd blue neon rear wall (representing the sun-sparked Mediterranean, perhaps?) to produce the impression that Otello has been dispatched by the Doge to oversee an abandoned skateboard park on Tatooine.  Alan Rich declared it "an authentic visual plague" and I suspect it may account singlehandedly for an increase in the company's workers' compensation premiums as singers and choristers struggle to get through the run without falling over.

The star of the evening is the orchestra and music director James Conlon, delivering an account of Verdi's score that is stirring and propulsive but also remarkable for transparency of tone and attention to detail.  That means, as I suspect Maestro Conlon might protest, that the star was actually Giuseppe Verdi, whose score does just about all that can be done while still being an Italian opera.  The thunderous bits were properly thunderous, but the quiet beauties of the Act 1 love duet and the achingly sad pre-murder meditations in Act 4 were most memorable.

Among the singing performers, this production belongs solidly to Mark Delavan's Iago, an utterly unapologetic and gleeful villain.  Boito provided Iago with an explanatory speech denied him by Shakespeare: Iago is a proto-Nietzschean nihilist who ruins lives because he can and because "death is the end and Heaven is a lie."  And while he is going about his nefarious business, he has a darned good time, thank you very much. 

Desdemona is a smaller, more reactive role, but I am hard put to imagine how Cristina Gallardo-Domâs' performance of it could be improved upon.  I am generally reluctant to go mooning about over sopranos, but it is tempting to make an exception in this case.  Ms. Gallardo-Domâs sang Cio-Cio San in the Met's new production of Madama Butterfly earlier this year.  Although I am on record with the view that seeing Butterfly once in one lifetime is entirely sufficient, I would make an exception if she were to venture that role here.

And what of Ian Storey's Otello?  Frequently more than adequate, but not dominant in the greater scheme of things, perhaps because of the strengths of Iago and Desdemona.  Otellos in general are so easily played upon by Iago that the character always risks coming off as something of a dupe, and for much of the evening Storey fell prey to that risk.  It must be said that he finished well, however, and that this Moor's last sigh when all became clear was moving and effective.

Last night's performance was in competition with the Academy Awards -- which, before the advent of the Kodak Theater, were frequently distributed in the very Dorothy Chandler Pavilion where we sat.  Oscar did not seem to have diminished the audience by much, and I was pleased to note that the average age of the attendees appeared to skew rather younger than is usual for opera.  Statistical fluke or hopeful sign?  Only time will tell.

~~~

Of Related Interest:

Out West Arts has not written up Otello yet, but did spend time with James Conlon over the weekend as the Maestro did double or triple duty by conducting not only the Opera orchestra but the Los Angeles Philharmonic as well.  This very positive post -- "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business" -- does a good job of highlighting just how important Conlon has become to this burg:

The really unexpected part is this – in this town that Salonen built where anxiety is widespread over his pending departure despite all the big promises of a Dudamel-filled future, Conlon has stepped in and quietly become the next major driving force in the musical life of this community.  In less than two years he has developed a beloved following from both local audiences and (I’m told) the musicians playing under his leadership.  He has laid out an agenda that he has so far delivered on with fairly good results across the board programming both more Wagner and overlooked German repertory for LAO.  He is truly excited about what he is doing and is eager to share it with audiences here personally. For example, he’s been doing most of the pre-opera talks of the projects he’s involved with himself and he’s as likely as not to make comments from the stage before his Philharmonic appearances. . . .  He attacks everything with gusto and I for one am thrilled about what he’s done so far.  We are lucky to have Conlon here right now.

The list of folks who are thrilled with what Maestro Conlon is up to is a long one, and you can count me in on it.  For all that he is obliged by management and market forces to pile on the Standard Repertoire each year, he has a demonstrated interest in obscured/less frequently mounted works.  Now, will someone please take his hints -- I've heard him drop them in it least two of his pre-performance talks now -- and let the man conduct a production of Pelleas & Melisande around here?  Please?

Someone's in the Kitchen with Donna, Strummin' on the Ol' Don Gio

Much as bees communicate information by means of a specialized dance, termites communicate by means of a primitive form of opera.

-- From Dr. Boli’s Encyclopedia of Misinformation

If Hamlet is the tragedy of a reflective man, of the man who "cannot make up his mind," Don Giovanni is the tragedy, to the extent that it is a tragedy at all, of a man with no power of reflection whatever.  Don Giovanni is all action and appetite.  He is at the end of his tether, but he does not know it.  From the outset of the opera, things go consistently wrong for him, but he never notices or acknowledges the slightest difficulty -- though in the end it perhaps dawns on him too late that he may have made a tactical error in shaking the hand of his last unearthly guest. 

Mozart's librettist Da Ponte scatters the action of the opera over an uncertain period of what seems to be several days -- between beginning and end, there has been ample time to inter the Commendatore and to erect the fateful statue -- but with its focus on the Don's comeuppance, one could imagine a more concentrated telling of the story observing the classical unities of time and place.  (Perhaps someone has?)

LA Opera has revived its 2003 production of Don Giovanni, with Erwin Schrott in the title role.  There are a half dozen more performances between now and December 15; I caught up with it on Friday evening.

The Los Angeles Times' Mark Swed did not particularly like the production, although he had general praise for the performers:

When L.A. Opera first presented this production in June 2003, it was a "Don" of desperation.  The company's plans for an ambitious cycle of Mozart operas by a noted director (Achim Freyer was held out as an intriguing possibility; Robert Wilson's name was also bandied about) had fallen through.  Early in the 2002-03 season, a director or full cast had not been announced.  With the clock (or hourglass) running out, the company pounced on a flashy copycat Freyer and Wilson production from Warsaw by a Polish film and theater director, Mariusz Trelinski.

There were in 2003 two saving graces.  One was the company debut of Schrott, who is a wonderfully physical singer.  The other was the meaningful conducting of then music director Kent Nagano.  The rest of the cast was OK, which was good enough, given that everyone on stage was treated like a caricature anyway.

For this revival, being promoted in part for its good-looking cast, most on stage are better than OK, which is now a problem, given that they still aren't allowed much room to wiggle beyond caricature.  Meanwhile, the conductor is Hartmut Haenchen, a German who recently completed 13 years as music director of Netherlands Opera, one of the most venturesome companies on the continent.  He has to know better, which may be why he seemed somewhat uninvolved Saturday.

Trelinski's production is nothing if not interesting to look at, and it doesn't come freighted with any obvious misguided political agenda, but it succumbs to that other pitfall of contemporary opera direction: moment by moment the stage pictures are often striking, but they frequently have no content apart from their own Coolness.

The costuming choices are particularly bothersome.  The overall look is of a color-saturated carnivale or commedia.  Everyone is color coded: the Don is hot pink or vivid black and white; Leporello is various shiny shades of spiderweb gray and, with his snippy comments, bald pate and sometimes lurching movements bears, an unfortunate resemblance to Richard O'Brien's Riff Raff; Donna Anna and Don Ottavio are upholstered in sumptuous forest greens, Donna Elvira in rich blues, and poor Masetto and Zerlina are a glowing yellow Harlequin and Columbine.  The women are all equipped with over-wide hoop skirts as broad as a sidewalk, and are obliged to make most of their exits walking sideways.  There are dancing trees, dancing nuns, crawling partygoers, smoke, mirrors, trapdoors, flying rigs, and a silent masked dancer heavily freighted with symbolism who resembles an undead Velazquez infanta.

The singers and players do well despite the distractions.  Uruguayan baritone Erwin Schrott is a very fine Giovanni, brimming with charm, self-regard and utterly thoughtless power.  He has embraced the role as his own and is booked to portray the Don in a variety of productions through 2012; a half dozen examples of the range of Schrott's Giovanni looks, most involving taking his shirt off, can be found here.  I have it on good authority that not only is Mr. Schrott a gifted performer, but he is also a really nice fellow to work with.

All of the other principal men in this staging are very good as well, with James Creswell in particular overcoming the obstacle of his costume to bring genuine moral heft to poor put-upon Masetto.  Among the women, I am at odds with Mark Swed: I found Alexandra Deshorties unduly shrill at several points as Donna Anna, while Maria Kanyova's Donna Elvira was affecting in her misguided pursuit of the errant Don.

As Mark Swed's review mentioned, LA Opera is selling this production in large part on the basis of the "good-looking cast."  The notices quoted in the ad running in today's LA Times, for instance, are all about Erwin Schrott's hotness.  The Times itself is abetting the plan, as in this rather gushy article ("Opera stage is new hot spot") by staff writer David Ng:

Opera is often called the highest of all art forms.  These days, it might also be called the sexiest.  Gorgeous young singers are drawing attention around the world, helping to rejuvenate the genre.  Starting this week, Los Angeles Opera plays host to some of that smoldering talent. . . .

The abundance of pulchritude is enough to melt the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion's chandeliers.  In person, however, the singers are refreshingly unpretentious.  They talk about everything from their favorite movie stars to their exercise routines.  No prima donnas here -- these performers make opera feel modern and accessible.

Urgh.

The chandeliers are in no actual danger: they are located in the foyer and not likely to be melted from within the auditorium.  Ng's article is as much as anything a breathless discourse on the hunky physical charms of Erwin Schrott, with Pulitzer-worthy insights such as: "To stay fit, Schrott hits the gym."  Who'd ha' thunk it? 

The Schrott aura is also on display in the interview and quick excerpts from the production included in the latest LA Opera video Podcast.  In addition to Schrott's Giovanni, the excerpts include appearances by bubble-headed Zerlina and the ghostly infanta mentioned above.  Beware of spoilers, however: the final performance sequence gives away the ending.

~~~

Los Angeles Opera photos by Robert Millard.

Anime'd Summer Night's Dream

Of course, you have to imagine this passage as being read in the stentorian manner of Mr. Coming Attractions, Don LaFontaine:

The year is 2017.  Global climate change has devastated the Earth.  This is now a cyberworld in constant dread of war.  The state of Denmark has grown prosperous and defended itself successfully against neighbouring states.  But could it be that its greatest threat comes not from without, but from within the state itself?

It is in this cyberworld that we find the young Hamlet.  His grief over his father's recent death turns to something far darker when the ghost of his father appears to him.  Hamlet is very soon to discover that something is rotten in the state of Denmark...

No, this is not your father's Hamlet -- or mine.  This is Hamlet from the new Manga Shakespeare series of graphically novelized versions of the plays from UK publisher SelfMadeHero.

What you get with this series are Shakespearean plots moved to imagined worlds consistent with the manga form -- hence Hamlet in a dystopian future and Romeo and Juliet set "in the highly fashionable Shibuya district of Tokyo" where Romeo (a rock star, naturally) and his love are "caught up in a bitter feud between two Yakuza families."  The dialogue is a cut-down version of Shakespeare's own, as seen in this animated version of the beginning of a Hamlet scene much prized Fools the world over. 

The rationale behind these adaptations is the predictable one: to make Shakespeare -- *sigh*, let's all say it together -- "more accessible to today's reader."

Manga is a dynamic, emotional and cinematic medium easily absorbed by the eye. Its attractive art and simple storytelling methods will enthuse readers to approach Shakespeare's work in the way he intended – as entertainment.

Shakespeare has survived worse.  Personally, I am less disturbed by any apparent "dumbing down" of the Bard -- or by the odd use of the verb "enthuse" in that last quote -- than I am by the prospect that we are only ten years away from living in an environmentally devastated cyberworld ruled by Denmark.

Hamlet and R&J came out in March, and are available domestically via Amazon; the publisher's catalogue [PDF] promises expansion of the series later this year to include Richard III, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night's Dream.  In the Fall, SelfMadeHero will also launch The Classical Eye, a series of graphic versions of non-Shakespearean literature, starting with selections from Kafka, Poe, and Bulgakov and moving next year to include Stevenson, Wilde, and Dostoevsky.  This cover is certainly striking, although it owes more to Dashiell Hammett's black bird than to Poe's:

[Manga Shakespeare links via John Holbo on The Valve.  For sheer amusement value, I recommend that you not miss the collection of chibi Shakespeare avatars appended as the first comment to Prof. Holbo's post.]

Follow the Lieder, or, All to Goethe Now!

Although I am a longtime enthusiast for the work of Long Beach Opera, scheduling conflicts prevented me from seeing any of the company's performances this season until last night. 

LBO, a quintessential ambitious-but-underfunded arts institution, is under more economic stress than usual this season, and for that reason was obliged to cancel or postpone its planned west coast premiere of Osvaldo Golijov's Lorca-based Ainadamar.  (Alex Ross was duly impressed with Ainadamar at its premiere at Tanglewood back in 2003, and his description causes me to hope that Long Beach Opera will be able to put it back on the schedule soon.)  In its place, company director Andreas Mitisek re-mounted his 2005 staging of Schubert's final song cycle, Winterreise, in which the 24 songs are intermixed with excerpts from Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.  (None dare call it Wertherreise.)

German art song is not a genre high on my list, largely because the performance of lieder generally involves no more than a talented singer, preferably with a talented accompanist, just standing around singing.  In German.  Beautiful, perhaps, but not particularly gripping.

In Long Beach, the talented singer was baritone-turning-tenor Erik Nelson Werner; the talented accompanist at the piano was Michelle Schumann.  Rather than simply singing Schubert's setting of Wilhelm Müller's poems, Werner assumed the role of young Werther on his final night, in his little room, surrounded by his books and his scattered writings and sketches, drinking heavily and thinking aloud about how he came round to putting a pistol to his head.  Charlotte, or Lotte, for the love of whom Werther takes himself out of the world, is present as a silent apparition, initially in white -- with tasteful blood stain, see above -- and later in black -- with tattooed wings on her back, combining an angel of death with the crow/raven imagery that recurs in Müller's text.  Jennifer Hart Jackson did all that was needed with the part.

Both Werther and Müller's unnamed winter wanderer are beset with misery in proper high Romantic fashion over the loss of their beloved to another, and their respective bitternesses, angers and suicidal ideations make for an effective combination.  Because both Goethe and Müller tapped the same store of Romantic imagery, Andreas Mitisek had no trouble finding passages from Werther that mirrored or foreshadowed passages in the songs.  By setting the action within the walls of Werther's room, and Werther's head, in the hours before his suicide, Mitisek made do without having to recount or portray the actual plot of Goethe's novella, focusing in tightly on its climax.  In the mode of Krapp's Last Tape, you could think of this as Werther's Last Lieder.

All told, this production did what Long Beach Opera (to its credit) always tries to do: it combined music and drama as equals, each providing strength to the other.  It is a small, sad gem of a piece and, having missed out on it in 2005, I am happy to have seen it revived.

We really are a long way removed from the Romantic sensibility, aren't we?  When Goethe wrote and published Werther, at age 23, the novella was a sensation.  Young men all over Europe adopted Werther's blue coat as a uniform and some unknown number of them were moved to kill themselves, precisely because that is what young Werther had done.  Can you imagine the lawsuits if a book -- a book! -- had similar effect today?  The Sorrows of Young Werther might well be discussed by Oprah, but as a problem to be solved, not a book club selection.

That bloodstain on Lotte's dress is a product of Werther's be-sturmed & be-dranged imagination.  He does not kill or threaten to kill Lotte in the book, but instead leaves her and her new husband, whom he has also befriended, stunned and shattered by his suicide.  A contemporary Werther would not be embraced as a figure of impressive sensitivity and heroic suffering to be emulated: he would be pegged as a stalker and arrested or dispatched to therapy. 

Someone's cell phone, ineffectively muffled in a bag, went off four or five times during the performance; always the same phone and always during a critical pianissimo or a significant moment of silence.  The Romantic dream, it seems, is over as over can be.  Cell phones notwithstanding, it was good to spend some time with that dream in the dark last night.

[Photo, from the original 2005 production, by Keith Ian Polakoff.]

Orchestra Pit or Passion Pit?

Shocking, simply shocking.  Given the company's apparent obsession this season with, ahem, sex, we may need to change the name of Los Angeles Opera to Los Scandalous Opera.

Let's examine the evidence, shall we?

EXHIBIT A:  Last week, I reported on LAOpera's production of the Brecht-Weill Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a work in which many of the characters are prostitutes who appear in various stages of dishabille and in the company of randy lumberjacks and such.  Worse, these are Marxist prostitutes, although perhaps they are just written that way.  I posted several video exemplars of the essential naughtiness of this work.

In preparing that post, I discovered that Los Angeles Opera is now making it a habit to post video excerpts from its productions to YouTube.  Consequently, there is now a growing trove of compromising material sufficient to prove to any doubter that this ostensibly "distinguished cultural institution" is little more than a cover for the spread of raging fleshly lusts.  And it is my sad duty to expose to you the full extent of the threat.

EXHIBIT B:   Perhaps you believe Baroque composers were good churchmen, possessed of only holy thoughts?  Not Claudio Monteverdi, whose L'incoronazione di Poppea is a hotbed of ancient Roman misbehavior.  Did Los Angeles Opera choose to share an excerpt featuring the admirable, upstanding, highly moral philosopher Seneca as he tries in vain to stem the tide of imperial sensuality?  It does not.  Consider the unseemly conduct concentrated in the final minute of this clip:

Naturally, as a defender of the law and all that is good, I was shocked by these proceedings, as I described in my blow by blow account in December.

EXHIBIT C:  As with so many sinister plots, it appears there is a Russian connection.  I refer here to Ms. Anna Netrebko, whose smoldering wiles are such as to turn even cool heads such as that of the redoubtable A. C. Douglas, whose exacting standards were so compromised by Netrebko's recent Met performance that he praised what he admitted he would otherwise dismiss as a "risible piece of typical bel canto trash."  Here in Los Angeles, this belle damoiselle Russe featured recently in a production of Massenet's Manon the theme of which LAOpera hammered home with this video treatise on [gulp] "Sex and the Opera":

EXHIBIT D:  Not yet satisfied, Los Angeles Opera will tonight launch a perfidious new attack on decency and on the towering figure of Richard Wagner.  This evening will mark the premiere of the company's new production of Tannhäuser, print ads for which warn explicitly that it comes replete with "nudity and strong sexual content."  Good gracious, what are the upright and pure to make of this?

So frightful.  So lurid.  One simply cannot look away.   

For those who cannot see this version clearly enough to look away with a proper snort of disdain, there is a larger, clearer Windows Media version on the LAOpera website, here.   As a friend, though, I advise you not to risk further exposure to the lubricious loungings of these scarlet-clad -- and often enough unclad -- debauched and decadent dancing votaries of Venus.   No no, you simply mustn't, really you mustn't.

As for myself, I will be in attendance next Saturday night, filling a seat that might otherwise fall into the hands of some unsuspecting innocent.  It is the least I can do For The Children.

Weill Bodies: Mahagonny, but No Ecstasy

Nothing you can do will help a dead man.

and

Nothing will help him or us or you now.

Those are the bleak twinned messages of the massed chorus that ends The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.  Several of the principal characters do not join in that chorus, because they are dead and, it follows as the night the day, nothing can be done to help them.

The Los Angeles Opera has mounted a new production of Mahagonny, running through March 4, and I was in the audience on Saturday night.  LA Opera audiences tend to be prodigal in the handing out of standing ovations, but Saturday night was an exception.  A lone patron two rows in front of us stood during the curtain call, but it turned out she was simply cajoling her companion to head for the door, as a number of attendees did even before the house lights came back up.  The downbeat ending is probably not to blame.  (As a critic famous for his sharp ear observed 50 years ago, "What do you expect from an opera?  A happy ending?")  Instead, the fault has to lie with the production, which is not actively bad but which contains an array of false steps that prevent it from gelling into a satisfactory whole.

Mahagonny is the collaboration between composer Kurt Weill and playwright Bertolt Brecht that followed on the heels of their success with The Threepenny Opera.  A short version -- the "Mahagonny songspiel" -- premiered in 1927, the full opera was first performed in 1930, and by 1933 the work had been banned by the Nazis.  "Alabama Song" from Mahagonny is reasonably well known, having been included on the 1967 debut album of The Doors.

As with Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny has one foot firmly set in the world of Weimar era political  cabaret, but Weill's score is so much more ambitious and sophisticated Mahagonny that it legitimately qualifies as an opera.  Brecht's text is a true-to-form Brecht text: mordant wit, a dash of decadence, a view of humanity that is profoundly cynical if not outright nihilistic, all washed down with hefty doses of Marxist didacticism.  At this point, the reader may wish to meditate upon the contradictions inherent in putting on such a vigorously anti-capitalist work in a spare-no-expense production with admission prices beyond the reach of all but the scurviest of . . . capitalists.

The plot and characters?  Here goes:  Fugitive criminals Leocadia "the Widow" Begbick, Trinity Moses and Fatty the Bookkeeper found the city of Mahagonny on the spot where their getaway car breaks down. Their plan is to fleece travelers of their money, because "it is easier to mine gold from men than from rivers."  We are somewhere in America, but the geography is decidedly odd: Mahagonny is in the plains or desert, but is near enough to Alaska to attract goldminers and lumberjacks while at the same time being near enough to Pensacola to be threatened by hurricanes.  Lumberjack Jimmy MacIntyre and three friends arrive from Alaska.  Jimmy takes up with the prostitute Jenny Smith.  The city is threatened by a hurricane, which veers safely away in the first moments of Act 2.  Tableau of eating, sex, fighting and drinking follow.  Two of Jimmy's friends die, Jack O'Brien of overeating and Alaska Wolf Joe in a prizefight with Trinity Moses.  Jimmy runs out of money and is unable to pay his bar tab.  This is as great a crime as is possible in Mahagonny, and Jimmy is sentenced to death.  Without money, he is abandoned by his remaining friend and by his lover Jenny.  Unlike MacHeath in Threepenny Opera, Jimmy receives no last minute reprieve.  He is executed.  God arrives and condemns the city and citizens; the city and citizens declare that the feeling is mutual.  Mahagonny devolves to its final chaos ending with the cheerful parting sentiments with which we began.

This production must have looked good on paper.  Director John Doyle  recently mounted  the very well received revival of Sweeney Todd in New York.  That production featured Patti Lupone, and she was recruited to appear here as the Widow Begbick.  Audra McDonald took the role of Jenny.  So with the cream of the New York stage on hand, nothing can possibly go wrong, right? 

Sadly, this is an opera house production peopled principally with operatic voices.  Audra McDonald has the gift of being able to sing, and act, at a high level in both musical theater and operatic contexts, and made the most of what she was given to do as Jenny.  She spent much of the performance in lingerie and embraced the essential sexual self-interest of the part. 

Anthony Dean Griffey as Jimmy brought a fine expressive tenor to the table, and exuded bluff bravado and such sympathy as could be generated for the nearest thing to a hero in the piece.  He and Ms. McDonald -- and the orchestra under James Conlon -- were the evening's musical standouts.

The aid of amplification notwithstanding, Patti Lupone was sadly out of her element.  I imagine that in a more reasonably sized house, and possibly in the more compact setting and smaller instrumental ensemble of the songspiel, she would make an excellent Begbick.  Here, she flounced and sneered heroically, all for naught.

The guiding principle of the production was to pass through time: beginning in the Dust Bowl 30's, moving to swingin' 50s Vegas, and ending in something close to the present.  None of it really mattered much except to give the designers something to do.

And then there is the odd matter of the flag: When Begbick & Co. found the city, they raise the Widow's [enormous] shawl on a fishing pole as the flag of Mahagonny.  We never actually see it flying as a flag, but it reappears as a prop throughout the performance, often dragged or draped in the vicinity of one or the other of the female leads.  Over time, it changes: mostly red to begin with, it becomes red and black later in the first act.  At this point, there is a clunky bit of staging in which a bit of step-point choreography for the entire cast slides into a Rockettes high kick that morphs in to . . . a goose step.  And then -- oh dear, we're not going there, are we?-- the hands and arms start to rise in a quasi-Nazi salute and -- because audiences are dim and we might not have caught on yet -- the theater is filled with a looped and echoed recording of a German crowd sieg heiling. 

And then we just move on in to intermission and the idea, which made no particular sense to begin with, is never revisited.

Ah, but the flag returns in Act 2 and continues to transform.  A white stripe appears, and a star or three, blue on white, and -- no no, wait for it, don't run too far ahead of me -- by the time we reach the final curtain, the surviving citizens of Mahagonny are lined up heading out of town and Jenny stands before them with the flag of Mahagonny in a tight triangular fold, as at a military funeral, and it looks like this:

Make of it what you will.  I don't actually think that there is some "America = Nazi Germany" argument being advanced here, given that (1) there is no basis in the work itself for that argument, (2) the argument itself ranks fairly high on the Deeply Lame scale, and (3) if that is what the production wanted to say it could have said it more forthrightly so that we in the audience might actually have known that the message was there to be received and you would not have to receive it from a weblog such as this.

To sum up: a worthy work, with some very fine performances, but sabotaged by fuzzy thinking on the production end and a sad case of miscasting.

~~~

APPENDIX A:

Always good to run one last Google search before posting.  I see that the LA Opera has posted some dress rehearsal video of the production on YouTube.  Sound is decidedly iffy, but there are two good Audra McDonald excerpts included and a look at Patti Lupone's laudable effort in a losing cause:

~~~

APPENDIX B:

I am a Mahagonny enthusiast, to the extent that this is the third production I have made the point of seeing in person.  All three have been performed at the Los Angeles Music Center.

Back in 1973, the Mark Taper Forum produced the songspiel as part of a double bill with The Measures Taken, a collaboration between Brecht and composer Hans Eissler.  If I recall right, Shani Wallis -- Nancy in the film version of Oliver! -- appeared as Jenny.  Although it was a long time ago, I think that version is still the best I've seen.  Someone needs to revisit the songspiel and give Patti Lupone the opportunity to be all the Begbick that I suspect she can be.

Jonathan Miller directed an earlier production for Los Angeles Opera in 1989, the company's third season.  The Los Angeles Times is stingy with its archives, but you can readily read the so-so New York Times review of that version, set in 1920s Hollywood.  I liked it better than the NYT did.  My sister's presence in the cast has nothing to do with that judgment.

I also caught the long-ago PBS broadcast of the Met's 1979 production with Teresa Stratas as Jenny and -- wouldn't you know it? -- YouTube again provides an excerpt.  Naturally, it is the "Alabama Song."  The clip shows its age and the sound mix does poorly by the orchestra, but Ms. Stratas amply demonstrates the operatic nature of the writing in this smoking performance:

As a bonus, here is Catherine Malfitano performing the song in the 1997 Salzburg Festival production (available on DVD).  Note that even when the opera is performed in the original German, the "Alabama Song" is written to be performed in English, or a reasonable facsimile thereof:

~~~

APPENDIX C:

We need to put him in a separate Appendix so as to separate him from those talented sopranos, ladies and gentlemen, but here to take us well and truly back into the cabaret roots of Brecht and Weill, welcome if you will, performing the "Alabama Song" in Berlin in 2002,
Mister
David
Bowie:

'Tis True, 'Tis Pity, and Pity 'Tis 'Tis True

In a workshop production in my Berkeley acting days, I once played the role of Arkel, the old old king of the realm of Allemonde in Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas & Mélisande.  A great and mysterious Symbolist text, Pelléas is not often mounted as a play any more.  It remains well-known via Claude Debussy's opera version -- though it is to Debussy's credit that Pelléas should probably, as with later Wagner, more properly be classed as "music drama" rather than mere "opera."  In any case, Maeterlinck produced a wondrous text and Debussy tampered with it hardly at all in converting it to a libretto.

3quarksdaily last week linked to Rutgers professor Jerry Fodor's Times Literary Supplement review of Bernard Williams' essay collection On Opera.  The review ranges wide and far, but I particularly recommend this passage that captures much of what is so fine in Debussy's Pelléas:

Williams says of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande that it is a 'representation of its characters’ inner life which is uniquely subtle in opera'.  In fact, I think, Pelléas is the reverse of a psychological drama: it’s an opera in which everything is mysterious because nothing is hidden. The central characters are Golaud, who is patently mad with jealousy; Pelléas, who, like a child, is without premeditation; and Mélisande, who is an enigma to Golaud because she is entirely transparent.  He can’t believe that she is just as she seems to be; that is the irony that drives the action.  In Pelléas, as in Impressionism, it’s not the depths but the surfaces that seem to be beyond grasping. There are two kinds of problem that anyone who makes an opera has to face.  One of these is common to all the dramatic arts, namely to achieve the right distance between the audience and the performance.  The other is characteristic of opera as such: namely to achieve the right relation between the singers and the orchestra.  (In both cases 'right' means, of course, right for the work in hand.)  Distance and balance are among the parameters at the composer’s disposal in constructing a work, and differences in their handling are fundamental to distinguishing between operatic styles.  One of the things that makes it right to describe Italian opera as a 'popular' genre is that it invites (or almost invites) the audience to sing along.  Notoriously, one can’t get the tunes out of one’s head.  Wagner is not like that.

The interaction between distance and balance in Pelléas makes it unlike anything else in the canon.  Pelléas is an opera about what can’t be mended; the fate of the characters is fixed and the opera consists merely of its unfolding.  Pace some of what Williams says, Pelléas isn’t about what can’t be known; it’s about what can’t be done; above all it is about spaces between people that can’t be bridged.  ('Don’t touch me' is Mélisande’s first line.)  The action seems very far away and very long ago.  The key line (which Williams, in a most uncharacteristic lapse, dismisses as 'idiotic') is Arkel’s: 'If I were God, I should have pity on the hearts of men'.  That is, if I were God 'I would pity the hearts of men', not 'if I were God I would make things better'.  Action doesn’t happen at a distance, but pity can.

The action in Pelléas seems much further from the audience than does anything in Verdi or Wagner (or, certainly, in Puccini).  One feels pity, but there is no Aristotelian terror, and one doesn’t feel empathy.  (What would it feel like to feel like Mélisande?)  What seems to me miraculous is how the opera effects this sense of apartness – by rethinking the relation between the music and the drama.  Usually, the one supports the other (not least by helping the singer to stay on pitch); or the music comments on the action in ways that are familiar from Wagner.  In Pelléas, remarkably, the drama seems to be suspended in the music, rather in the way that something might be fixed in amber.  The music itself seems to contain the action and thereby maintains the distance between the action and the audience.  I know of nothing comparable except, perhaps, in old Chinese poetry, where the verse seems less to express emotion than to be the medium in which it transpires.

Lovely.  Not to put too much weight on my own former character, but I would suggest that the other key lines in both the play and the music drama are the very last, also Arkel's.  Mélisande has just given birth to a daughter, whereupon she dies.  Arkel refers briefly to Mélisande -- "a poor little mysterious being, like everybody" -- then instructs that the child be taken from the room, saying, "She must live now in her place.  It is the poor little one's turn."

In addition to Debussy's opera, which premiered in 1902, Maeterlinck's play inspired several other musical adaptations.  Gabriel Fauré, best known as composer of the world's prettiest Requiem, got to it first with an orchestral suite in 1898.  Sibelius wrote incidental music to accompany the play, premiering it in 1905.  Arnold Schoenberg, not yet having abandoned tonal composition, produced a symphonic poem version more or less simultaneously with Debussy's, of which Schoenberg in Vienna was unaware.

The Los Angeles Opera has attempted Pelléas only once, in the 1994-1995 season in a production (which I did not see) by Peter Sellars who, typically for him, set it in a contemporary beach house in Malibu.  (Coincidentally, in the passage following the discussion of Pelléas above, Prof. Fodor looks askance at Sellars' recent, overtly politicized production of Handel's Theodora: "It apparently has never occurred to Sellars that the ideal director is transparent; you see through him to the performance.")  Long Beach Opera mounted a production (which I did see) back in 1991, under the direction of Brian Kulick, in a more timeless/Jungian vein, pictured above left.  Note the abandoned gramophone downstage.

~~~

In other local opera developments, Los Angeles Opera has just announced its 2007-2008 season: I have uploaded the press release here [Word document].   

The good news is the return of David Hockney's production of Tristan und Isolde, which I have been wanting to see since its premiere here twenty years ago.  More disappointing is the absence of the  previously promised new production of Meistersinger, which was to have been part of the run-up to LA Opera's launch of a Ring cycle in 2008, and the presence of Far Too Much Puccini (3 out of 8 productions, f'revvinsake).   

Also missing without explanation -- though I can't say whether this is a good or a bad thing -- is a planned operatic adaptation of The Fly being composed by Howard Shore based on his score to David Cronenberg's film.  Now there's an odd bit of source material.  If and when the production is actually announced, it is sure to generate -- all together now -- plenty of buzz.