a fool in the forest

An LA Times Story With a Familiar Ring To It

Christopher Smith of the Los Angeles Times went to see Los Angeles Opera's Walküre the other evening, and lays claim to an Important Insight into its director-designer's methods:

I was equally eager to see director Achim Freyer's staging and designs, which have led critics, bloggers and impassioned local Wagnerians to whip themselves up to near-hysteria.

An incomplete list of comparison points for the design of the opera mentioned online include 'Star Wars,' a carnival, 'Wheel of Fortune,' the circus (both the regular and Cirque varieties), puppet shows and 'The Twilight Zone.'

But the opera was less than 10 minutes old when I realized it was I who had discovered the true, secret coda [sic] powering Freyer's vision. A post-performance trip to the Internet confirmed this revelation, which is clear, indisputable and undeniable, and which you can see above [in Smith's post].

(Emphasis added.)

If you click through to discover Smith's Revelation, you may wonder along with me whether his "trip to the Internet" might have included this revelatory, if unacknowledged, blog post.

~~~

Photo: Placido Domingo, as Siegmund, is stabbed in the back; it runs in the family. Photo by Monika Rittershaus via Los Angeles Opera.

~~~

Ave Atque Walhall Los Angeles Opera Isn't Making This Up, You Know

I listened closely during the curtain calls at Sunday's matinee performance of Das Rheingold, and I did not hear any of the booing that has been reported by some other correspondents.  Which is as it should be. 

Los Angeles Opera's first venture in to Wagner's Ring is certainly not perfect -- no staging of the Ring ever is -- but for all its eccentricities, it is unquestionably the Real Thing.  Brazenly theatrical and strongly marked by its director's particular stylistic tics, the LAOpera Rheingold nevertheless stays true to the task at hand: telling the story that Wagner actually wrote, letting the work speak for itself and not imposing some external idea of what it means or, in the director's mind, "should" mean.

As has been said again and again, Wagner conceived his enormous Ring des Nibelung not as a mere series of "operas" but as a Gesamtkunstwerk, roughly a total artistic expression of a fundamental mythic story presented through a unity of music, poetry, movement, and the visual arts, each element spectacular not for the sake of spectacle but in the service of the total tale.  Such a thing is ultimately impossible to achieve in practice, but Wagner himself pressed the technology of his time about as far as it could go in his effort to accomplish it.  (Because of the time necessarily involved in moving elaborate scenery and effects about, Wagner was occasionally obliged to write extra music, most famously in Parsifal, to fill what he intended to be seamless transformations between scenes, turning a bug into a feature.)

Achim Freyer, directing the Ring for the first time, imposes himself in matters of style in this production, but not in matters of substance.  It looks like an Achim Freyer production from beginning to end, but Freyer is directing the work that Wagner actually created, not some entirely different work that he wishes Wagner had created.  Because the tale is set in a distant and supernatural world, the unusual appearance of objects and characters makes more sense than it would in a more "realistic" work such as, say, Eugene Onegin.  The gods are gods, the dwarfs are dwarfs, the giants are giants, and magic is magic.  The Tarnhelm -- the magic helmet that allows its wearer invisibility or transformation in to creatures large and small -- looks like a golden top hat here, but it is still a magic helmet.  The Ring itself is easy to follow around the stage, as it is represented by a glowing orb.  Let's take a look, shall we?

Here we see Wotan, chief among the gods, holding the Ring aloft as he debates with himself whether to take the advice just given him by the earth goddess Erda (not seen here because she has descended, with her many arms, back into the depths of the planet) to rid himself of the (literally) cursed thing.  With him are his wife Fricka, with her perpetually yearning/clinging/pleading arms, and her brother gods, Froh and Donner.  The Tarnhelm floats atop the pile of gold at the rear.  The pile is being measured (hence the large ruler) to see how it stacks up compared to the goddess Freia, who stand before it and will be returned to the other gods by the giants Fasolt and Fafnir if only Wotan will add the Ring to that pile of gold (which he will eventually do).  The giants have taken Freia as collateral for the unpaid construction loan on Wotan's new godly fortress Walhall.  The other gods would like her back, because only Freia supplies the golden apples that keep them all young.  They are dressed in black here, as they have been since they began rapidly aging in Freia's absence.  When Freia is returned to them shortly, it will immediately improve their condition and they and their costumes will become both brighter and, in some cases, larger.   (A photo of Freia after her return, with an appearance by the aforementioned giants, is in the extended portion of this post.)

You may ask, "What is that on Wotan's head, a bishop's mitre or a parrot cage?"  Actually, that is his head, or a framework mask representing his head.  Wotan has only one eye, having sacrificed the other before the opening chords in order to win wisdom and Fricka.  His mask-head also has only one eye, as does the head of the much larger version of Wotan in which the singer is sometimes encased.  Masks and puppetry are a large part of Achim Freyer's stagecraft, much as they were for Julie Taymor in Los Angeles Opera's Grendel.  The gods are portrayed by only one singer each, but there are sometimes multiple representations of each character on stage simultaneously. 

In addition to those centuries-old theatrical tools, Freyer uses the most contemporary technology: the entire production is staged behind a scrim, which serves as a screen on which high definition video effects are projected.  Perhaps the most effective use of video comes near the conclusion when the gods walk over their rainbow bridge to Walhall: the rainbow's spectrum is projected on the scrim to create the illusion that the entire stage space has been suffused with mist, tangible light, and color.  Next slide, please.

Here, we return to the opening scene, in which the dwarf [Nibelung] Alberich is attempting in vain to win the affections at least one the three Rhinemaidens in the depths of their river.  The watery ambience is a combination of stage lighting and a blue video tinting of the scrim, with the Maidens partially obscured by rippling cloth being shaken by hands in the wings.  The upright Maidens are the three singers performing the parts, with their inverted "reflections" provided by three of the dozen or so dancer-mimes who round out the Company.  Not yet revealed here is the Rhinegold itself, which is represented by very bright handheld lights -- all right, flashlights -- underneath the fabric "river," which allows the gold to move magically about like a phosphorescent school of fish.  Forswearing love in favor of the gold's promise of ultimate power, Alberich clambers beneath the fabric himself and emerges with a large glowing Ring-colored lump, soon to be forged into the large glowing Ring we have already seen.

One more photo, featuring a character not yet discussed: the sly trickster fire god, Loge.

Loge is referred to but never actually appears in the remaining three parts of the Ring, although there is at least one photo from design rehearsals suggesting he will have a non-singing manifestation when the time comes to surround Brunnhilde with magic fire in Die Walkure.  (If so, he will probably recur at the conclusion of Episode 4: Gotterdammerung, when Literally Everything goes up in flames.) 

The character is so engagingly written that a well-performed Loge -- which Los Angeles emphatically has in the person of Arnold Bezuyen --  often steals the show in Rheingold.  As designed by Freyer and sung by Bezuyen, Loge is flame, devil and fast-talking lawyer-salesman all in one plaid zoot-suited package.  (Wotan only entered into the Freia-swapping contract with the giants on advice of counsel: Loge assured him there would be a way out of the deal later.)  Loge here has at least four arms and one hand seems always at his breast, because you know you can trust him, eh?

While Bezuyen's Loge received the most enthusiastic applause for any of the singers, the loudest ovation of all was reserved for conductor James Conlon and the orchestra.  (The musicians were hidden beneath the stage throughout and never seen; for the curtain call, a camera panned across the pit and the orchestra was projected on to the scrim to receive the crowd's huzzahs.)  I am not qualified to judge where Conlon and the Los Angeles players fall in the pecking order of properly Wagnerian playing, but I can say that the musical elements of this production were as compelling and effective as one could reasonably ask.  As he demonstrated in last season's remounting of the David Hockney Tristan, Maestro Conlon loves his Wagner, and his desire to do well by the composer shines through.

In summary, then: Freyer's approach to the Ring is by no means literal, but is genuinely honorable in its intention to present Wagner at Freyer's expense and not vice versa.  It is absolutely not boring and no matter how off kilter its surfaces may appear it is no betrayal of the work.  Beyond Bezuyen's terrific Loge, and Graham Clark's splendidly put upon Mime, the singers are entirely sufficient but not stunning.  I suspect that Vitalij Kowaljow's Wotan and Michelle De Young's Fricka will both be more compelling as those characters' complexities play out in Walkure next month and in the complete cycles next year.  The orchestra under James Conlon is better than sufficient and also likely only to get better.  Los Angeles can rightly claim that it has an authentic Ring to it.

~~~

Elsewhere:

A.C. Douglas' Sounds & Fury serves as a one-stop depositary for other's reviews of the L.A. Ring, to which I can add Fine Arts LA's report, which went up at about the same time as my own.

All photos by Monika Rittershaus via Los Angeles Opera.  Ms. Rittershaus is not the usual Los Angeles Opera photographer, but is instead an associate of Achim Freyer.  Her photos of other Freyer performances can be seen on the site of the Freyer Ensemble.

Post title derived in part from Anna Russell's much beloved explanations of the Ring:

• Part 1 [most of Rheingold]; 
• Part 2 [remainder of Rheingold through Walkure through the first half of Siegfried]; 
• Part 3 [remainder of Siegfried and Gotterdammerung, including la Russell's famous catchphrase]. 

Launch the Wotan Torpedoes

Tonight is the night, as Los Angeles Opera launches Achim Freyer's staging of Wagner's Ring with Das Rheingold.  For the occasion, the company has released these video excerpts in to the wild:

I must await the March 1 matinee before seeing for myself, but whatever else may ultimately be said about this production it certainly appears not to be dull.

Ringolevio

There is little more than a week remaining before Los Angeles Opera launches the first of its new productions of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen under the direction of Achim Freyer.  Photos that have emerged from the design and rehearsal process have borne all the hallmarks of a Freyer production -- large expressionist headmasks in particular -- but have given few hints of how Freyer actually intends to approach the Ring. 

In an article in the current issue of Opera News, "Painting with Music," the OC Register's Timothy Mangan provides the most detailed report yet just what the designer-director is up to: 

'I am a painter, and this is a profession with the whole man,' [Freyer] says.  'And when I do theater I divide myself.  And this is very interesting, because it’s schizophrenic.  And it’s very different.  But the person’s the same.  And the person learns from theater for painting, and from painting for theater.  But it is nicht Absicht [not on purpose] — it is mein Schicksal [my destiny].'

* * *

'I do not want to do what Wagner wants,' he says.  'I want to do a concept to show what Wagner wants. You understand?'  In his conception, he doesn’t intend to provide a visual copy of the music and text.  Wagner’s poetry alone is a masterwork, he says, and the music is yet another masterwork.  Freyer wants to stay out of the way, allow Wagner’s art to speak for itself.  'My conception is not to [duplicate] this.  I do the third [thing].  And the third is the room in which I hold the music and the text and bring it to the public.'

In other words, realism is boring — too literal.  Besides, Freyer says, Wagner isn’t realism: 'Wagner wanted timeless persons.  It is the mythos and not the history.  It is not historical, it is a vision of the beginning and the end of the world.  And this I want to do with figures and with rooms and lighting that you have never seen.  That’s very important.  I think I do music theater in the sense of Wagner but do not use the materials of Wagner from the time 200 years before.  I do it in this time — the revolutionary theater.'

Freyer interprets the characters in the Ring as 'quasi' persons, or split personalities.  They do not exist in a single way.  Some of the costumes, therefore, are mere façades, and the singers can come out from behind them.  'Wotan can come out, and I can show, "I play this person, Wotan, and I am a singer."  The singer can come out from the costume, the illusion is broken, and a new idea is coming: "Ah, that’s the sense of Wotan that comes out and tells us this."  Or Wotan has a shadow, and the shadow does a different thing than Wotan tells.  Or he has a double, a mirror of Wotan, and the mirror remembers the past and goes back.

If Freyer's doubling and distancing puts one in mind of Brecht and his Verfremdungseffekt, it should come as no surprise: Freyer's early years in the theatre in the mid-1950s were spent in Brecht's master class in East Berlin.  Until I see what he has done for myself, I am happy to take Freyer at his word that his konzept is an attempt to show us "what Wagner wants," rather than an imposition of "what Freyer wants."  It all sounds very promising at this point.

Last November, LA Opera announced that the full stagings of the entire Ring cycle scheduled for 2010 will be accompanied by a countywide Ring Festival of cultural and scholarly events.  Among these, unsurprisingly, will be at least a few panels and symposia looking at the most unpleasant side, not of the Ring itself, but of the Ring's creator.  A creative genius but a frequently repellent human being, Richard Wagner was possessed of a deep-dyed and unapologetic anti-Semitism.  Wagner died before Hitler was born, but the Führer's embrace of Wagner's music is well known, as is the Wagner family's own embrace, both philosophical and literal, of the Führer.  (Alex Ross gives an excellent account of the uses Hitler and the Wagners made of one another in The Rest Is Noise.  A major theme of that book is the degree to which the best of 20th Century music is essentially unthinkable without the contributions of those -- Jews and homosexuals -- that Hitler most desired to disappear.)

The combination of Wagner, anti-Semitism and the Nazis has been known to fuddle the thinking of even well-intentioned commentators, and the presence of that combination in the Ring Festival promptly generated this letter to the editors of the Los Angeles Times, in which fuddlement (or worse) has plainly gotten the upper hand:

Why politicize 'The Ring'?

Re 'Ring Festival Is Already Packed,' by Diane Haithman, Nov. 4:

I am curious why the Ring Festival has to have a seminar conducted at American Jewish University regarding the use of Wagner by the Nazis, and who pitched it. Are any taxpayer dollars funding this?

Wagner died in 1883, and while he may have held [sic] 'anti-Semitic' views, his work should be allowed to stand alone, and without all the Holocaust political hoopla, as one of the greatest artistic works in European history.

Should we not also censor Jewish-Israeli artistic works and demand seminars on illegal West Bank settlements, violation of Palestinian human rights, and the 'wall'?  When do responsible people leave their politics at the door so the rest of us can view and enjoy a great work of art on its own merits?

I have wanted to see Wagner's 'Der Ring des Nibelungen' for years.  But not now, and not in Los Angeles.  It seems that if some people cannot completely destroy the reputation of the artist, they will attach their unresolved psychosis of hate to the festival and the showing of the work of art itself.

David Seaman
Long Beach

I leave a full accounting of the fuddles and misprisions in this particular missive as an exercise for the reader -- no, not that reader -- and move on with a low moan and a mild shudder.

Lest anyone should be concerned that Achim Freyer is permitting unfortunate Nazi iconography to slip in to his production, I offer this rehearsal photo from next season's Götterdämmerung, in which it appears that the Führer's favorite, the Great German Hero, Siegfried -- surely the most dunderheaded Hero in all opera, but never mind -- is presented as some sort of goat-legginged anime lobsterman: 

Seriously: I can't hardly wait.

~~~

Opera News link via the OC Register's Arts Blog.

Illustrations via Los Angeles Opera.  Top: Costume Sketch [Donner] by Achim Freyer.  Middle: 2008 Walkuere rehearsal workshop, photo by Monika Rittershaus.  Bottom: 2008 Götterdämmerung rehearsal workshop, photo by Monika Rittershaus.

Wystan Waxes Waggish on Wagner

Los Angeles Opera will launch Achim Freyer's staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen in May next month, and this weblog can be expected to turn sporadically and spontaneously Wagnerian as the day approaches.  Let's begin with a bit of affectionate jeering at the Meister, shall we?

When I hunted up W. H. Auden's "New Year Letter" for incorporation in my recent New Year's post, I was only able to turn up an excerpt or two online.  Wanting to take a look at the whole thing, I swung by my local bibliotheque and checked out the Collected Poems. 

The "Letter" is a lengthy contraption in Swiftian couplets, written in the wake of the German aggressions of 1939.  While it begins naturally enough with a focus on the pall that has fallen over Europe, later segments of the poem focus on American concerns, and particularly on the self-absorbed brand of individualism that was and is an American hallmark, and for which Auden had little patience.  Near the end of the poem, we find this Tristan-inspired jab:

The genius of the loud Steam Age,
Loud Wagner, put it on the stage:
The mental hero who has swooned
With sensual pleasure at his wound,
His intellectual life fulfilled
In knowing that his doom is willed,
Exists to suffer; borne along
Upon a timeless tide of song,
The huge doll roars for death or mother,
Synonymous with one another;
And Woman, passive as in dreams,
Redeems, redeems, redeems, redeems.

All together: "It's funny because it's true." 

At least he likes the music.

To return to the LA Opera Ring: some intriguing hints of what this production will look like in performance can be seen in this video in which Placido Domingo, who will be singing Siegmund in Walküre, expresses his enthusiasm for what Herr Freyer has in store for we unsuspecting Angelenos.

Alberich in Wonderland

These CDs cost far less than downloads from the internet, and unlike downloads they are things, which I prefer.  When you drop a Wagner opera on CD on your foot, it hurts. That's what I call real value.

-- Brian Micklethwaite

I am off this evening to see Howard Shore's and David Cronenberg's much maligned The Fly at Los Angeles Opera; my own opinions of the thing should appear here tomorrow.

For many, including myself, the major attraction of this LA Opera season is the launching of the company's first production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, under the direction of Achim Freyer.

When the Opera's website was first updated for the current season, these graphics gave a vague hint of what the LA Ring will look like:

Recently, the Opera has begun to release additional photos, although it is unclear whether they represent work in progress or final production decisions.  Here are the three that are currently up (albeit well hidden) on the Opera's website.

From Das Rheingold:

Strange women lying in ponds may be no basis for a system of government, but similarly unusual dames basking about in a river make a perfectly acceptable jumping off point for a vast music drama. Welcome if you will Woglinde, Wellgunde and Flosshilde, the Rhinemaidens:

Meanwhile, toiling beneath the earth in an entry-level position in the mineral trade, this must certainly be if not the Nibelung at least a Nibelung:

From Die Walküre:

I am thinking this final photo represents the climactic confrontation between Wotan (note the single eye, best seen in the full size version on the Opera site) and recumbent Brünnhilde, who may already be undergoing a course of magical sleep therapy, witnessed by the horses that she and her sisters rode in on:

From these photos, it appears that all of the expected hallmarks of a Freyer production -- expressionist flamboyance, enormous papier-mâché heads -- are in place.  Also apparent is that Freyer is setting his production in a recognizable version of the world that Wagner actually wrote, not in some politico-feverdream "commentary" on that world.  No hydroelectric dams, no skinned rabbits, no steamboats, no explosives belts, just gods, dwarfs, and flying horses -- with sewing machine bobbins on their heads, but let that pass. 

Achim Freyer is a genuinely interesting theatrical figure and the purely musical components of this production are in good hands, so I remain essentially optimistic and continue to look forward to the premiere run beginning in February.

~~~

Photos by Monika Rittershaus, via Los Angeles Opera.

Additional credit where due: Out West Arts shared small versions of these photos back on Sept. 9, along with several others whose source I haven't yet traced.  I am particularly intrigued by the shifty gent in the red-checked trousers -- who can only be Loge, right?

The Said-est Music in the World

Composer and Britten biographer David Matthews comments today for the Times Literary Supplement on two new classical music books. 

First up, Music at the Limits, a collection of essays by the late Edward Said, most drawn from his work as music critic for The Nation.  Here is Matthews on Said on Wagner, incorporating a valuable public relations tip:

In a review of Michael Tanner’s book on Wagner, Said will not allow Tanner to dismiss the most unpleasant elements of Wagner’s personality as irrelevant to the appreciation of his music, though he does take to task those who claim that Wagner’s anti-Semitism seeped into his operas.  (We might think better of Wagner if only he hadn’t insisted on putting all his prejudices into print, or telling them to Cosima who devotedly wrote them all down; Chopin’s anti-Semitism was equally virulent, but he is rarely criticized for it, probably because he didn’t publicize it so actively.)

Of more local interest, Matthews also notes Making Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular by Catherine Parsons Smith, focusing on the period from the founding of the City of Angels through the early 1940's.  Here we learn that, notwithstanding its Alice in Lotus Land reputation, Los Angeles historically has been rather the opposite of a cultural backwater:

[Parsons' book] reminds us of a time when classical music had more obvious significance in general culture – when, indeed, it was seen as a vital and active element in the growth of Los Angeles from a town of 11,000 in 1880 to a city of more than a million in 1930.  Opera companies were quick to make visits: the US premiere of La Bohème was given in Los Angeles in 1897, the year a symphony orchestra was established; by 1910, there was a higher proportion of musicians and music teachers in Los Angeles than in any other American city.

That highlighted Fun Fact, I suppose, goes a long way toward explaining why even today Los Angeles operagoers are compelled to put up with so darned much stinkin' Puccini in their repertoire.

~~~

Photo: Members of the Albertina Rasch Ballet on the grounds of the Hollywood Bowl, 1930, via the Hollywood Bowl Museum.

"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.

A Long Afternoon's Journey Into a Knight at the Opera

"It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption."

I spent this past drizzly Sunday afternoon -- four and a half hours, not counting the pre-performance lecture/conversation -- with Los Angeles Opera's revival of its 1987 production of Tristan und Isolde, designed by David Hockney.  Hockney, conductor James Conlon and the orchestra -- and of course Tristan und Isolde itself -- combined for a performance in which the excellent ultimately outweighed the ordinary, which was plenty good enough for me.  There is one performance remaining (this Sunday, Feb. 10 at 1:00), after which I hope we don't have to wait another decade before Los Angeles sees this production -- any production of Tristan, for that matter -- again.

Generally, when writing up an opera performance, it is expected that you will write about the singers, but I have little to say on that score.  All of the principals were adequate to their tasks, none embarrassed themselves or us, but no one stood out as exceptional.  John Treleaven's Tristan sounded fine, but seemed a bit of a lunk.  It's an approach that will probably work well in two years when Treleaven returns to sing Siegfried in the LAO Ring, since Siegfried really is a bit of a lunk, but Tristan should be something more.  Linda Watson, pictured above, was not scheduled to sing Isolde on Sunday.  Instead, the role was covered for this performance by Susan Foster - her premiere in the part - who was strongest where it counts, in Acts II and III.  Kristinn Sigmundsson was very very sad as King Marke, who always has ample reason to be very very sad.

This is a production that succeeds because the audience actually can leave the theater "humming the scenery."  David Hockney's sets, and particularly the exquisitely fluid lighting of those sets implemented by Duane Schuler, work stunningly well as extensions of Wagner's sound world.  Hockney does not have any agenda of his own to impose atop Wagner's, and his designs are intended to tell Wagner's story straight.  Wagner wants the deck of a sailing ship?  He gets the deck of a sailing ship.  A castle and forest?  Done.  High atop a Breton cliff?  You are there.  No post-modern nudge nudge, no politico-theoretical conceptualist flapdoodle.  Hockney asserts his own identity in the details: the bright lustrous colors, the sweeping arcs of sails or tree tops, the interpolation of Celtic knot patterns in unexpected places.  It is all a delight to behold, a pleasure in itself without distracting or detracting from the musical business at hand.

You can see the designs here, at the official Hockney Pictures site, which provides access to the full range of Hockney's work, including his operatic and theater projects.  I recommend clicking the "Slide Show" link at the upper right of the Tristan page, to get something of the full flavor of these designs as they appear in the shifting light that is so central to Hockney's schema.  It is unfortunate that, as mentioned in this January 13 LA Times profile, hearing impairment has compelled Hockney to give up on designing new opera productions.

The loudest cheers at the conclusion of Sunday's performance were reserved for James Conlon and the Los Angeles Opera orchestra, with good cause.  The principal obstacle to optimal performance of this incomparable music came not from the players but from the venue.  The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion's acoustics, while not authentically bad, are unavoidably clunky, especially with the orchestra submerged in the pit as it is during Opera performances, and the excellence of the playing on this occasion called attention to the hall's limitations.  (The LA Philharmonic, for which the hall was originally built, at least had the advantage of sitting on the stage.  The Philharmonic has since moved across the street to the acoustically astonishing Disney Hall where last April, you will recall, its Tristan Project reduced this fool to quivering aesthetic jelly.)

~~~

ELSEWHERE, more or less on topic:

• There appears to be a consensus in reviews of this production that the casting is . . . somewhat second-tier.  Brian of Out West Arts basically agrees, but he wonders whether such complaints are ultimately either fair or relevant.  Noting (correctly) that "mediocre Wagner is still better than excellent Puccini any day", he writes in defense of mediocrity:

My reaction to Tristan got me thinking a lot about how people, including myself, tend to write about opera performance.  I mean what is so wrong with Linda Watson or John Treleaven.  Sure, they aren't the best in the world and they are far from the best ever.  But both deliver mostly competent performances.  People seem to dismiss them simply because they aren't "inspiring" or transcendent in some way.  Sure it's great to hear the best in the world, but isn't there room for artists who can perform difficult material in a competent way? . . .

    * * *

I think that Opera is a living thing meant to be performed and experienced live.  Too often critics, both professional and otherwise, tend to forget this.  And while I love to hear a standard setting performance in the flesh as much as the next person, I think there is much more to loving opera. Since opera, by its very nature, needs to be performed in order to be enjoyed, that often means working with the performers you have on hand even if they aren't ideal.  Baroque composers such as Handel didn't seem to have any trouble getting their heads around this, so what's our problem?

• Christian Chensvold of FineArtsLA chatted up John Treleaven at the start this Tristan run.  (That post comes with video! and French subtitles!)

• TIME's Richard Lacayo interviewed Hockney at about the same time the LA Times did, and the artist took the opportunity to repeat a pointed observation that the Times ultimately edited out of its piece:

LACAYO. How's your one man campaign for smokers' rights going?

HOCKNEY. I did an interview recently with the LA Times and said 'I have noticed here in California that 25% of the advertisements on American television are for prescription drugs. That's what's replacing tobacco.'  People smoke to calm down, but now in this country you take drugs to do that.  I'm a lone voice but I keep on it.  I'm not giving up.  Tobacco is America's greatest gift to the world!

The photos accompanying Lacayo's post serve to remind how attuned Hockney is to the combined verticality and sweep of trees, as is very evident in his Act II and III Tristan sets.

• The next big Wagner item on the Los Angeles Opera horizon is the premiere over the next two years of a complete Ring cycle, to be conducted by James Conlon and designed/directed by Achim Freyer.  I praised Freyer's production of Berlioz's Damnation of Faust back in '03.  His take on the Ring could be very good or or could be deeply odd -- quite possibly both.  An elite crew of Opera insiders are privy to it, but very little concerning the conception or look of this production has escaped to the public so far.  Although they look distinctly Freyerische, it is uncertain whether the illustrations accompanying the company's announcements of Rheingold and Walküre provide any hints of what to expect.
  

In preparation for next season, or on general principles, one can do far worse than to turn to Threepenny Review and Wendy Lesser's eloquent and cogent recent essay on the Ring, written on the occasion of her seeing the Kirov/Valery Gergiev production that has been roaming the continent this past year.

It is ironic, to say the least, that the emblem of opera in the popular imagination is a fat, blonde-haired woman wearing a two-horned helmet. The image comes, by way of cartoons and parodies, from Wagner's Ring, but Wagner himself would have been the last person to view his great work as the essence of opera. He thought what he was building in this eighteen-hour, four-evening piece was precisely not opera, but a rebellion against opera as he knew it—a fresh form that required a new name (something along the lines of "music drama") and that could not be performed in a standard opera house, but needed its own special festival setting. That Bayreuth in particular and Wagnerism in general have hardened into the strictest of operatic traditions is an irony which would not have been lost on the composer, for the oppressive and finally triumphant power of rules, even or especially in the face of the deepest individual desire to break them, is one of the Ring cycle's central themes.

Yet the Ring does succeed in breaking the rules, remaking the form, time after time, and differently every time.  For if a ring or a cycle by definition suggests the endlessness and eternity of a circle, this Ring and this cycle make their mark by coming, each time, to a distinct conclusion.  And while the cycle will inevitably start up again — at another time and elsewhere, or perhaps even in the same place — the specific performance you have witnessed will in every case be unique and unrepeatable.

(Threepenny link via 3quarksdaily.)

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Los Angeles Opera photo by Robert Millard.  Photo caption shamelessly borrowed from James Thurber.

Transfigured Knight [Updated at Last]

Oh goodness gracious sweet merciful Muses.

That a man might experience a full performance of Tristan und Isolde for the first time and emerge with his sense of life unaltered is possible, but I cannot imagine it to be common.  As with Wallace Stevens' blue guitar or certain massive bodies in space, things as they are are changed by being near to it, and when the performance is as fully realized as that of the Los Angeles Philharmonic last night words may be altogether inadequate to the task of expressing just what has happened -- appropriately enough for a work in which words tell us almost nothing and the music tells almost everything.

Duties of my practice preclude a full report at this moment, so this post will grow over the next few days as I add bits,pieces, clods and dollops to it.  To sum it up in advance: Last night's Tristan und Isolde, as conceived and performed under the rubric of The Tristan Project, was without a doubt the most all encompassing and exhilarating evening I ever expect to spend in a concert hall.

Oh goodness gracious sweet merciful Muses.

FOR FURTHER LISTENING:

Director Peter Sellars and video artist Bill Viola have been giving pre-concert talks throughout this run of performances, and they are marvels of passionate intelligence.  Peter Sellars in particular, in his summaries of what and how and why each act is as it is is riveting, with ideas and passions and connections flying in from all directions and all told so compellingly that the listeners are held as by a story round the campfire.  [He holds one idea about Tristan that is, to my mind, completely wrong, but as it did not manifest itself in any external way in performance, we'll let it pass.]  The sessions from the three nights in which one act of the drama was coupled with a work of Debussy have been made available for listening or download from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association's UpBeat Live page.  (Scroll down to April 12, 13, and 14 for Acts 1, 2, and 3, respectively.)  For convenience sake, I have also uploaded them at the links below:

• Peter Sellars & Bill Viola - 4-12-07 - Tristan Act 1 [MP3 link]
• Peter Sellars & Bill Viola - 4-13-07 - Tristan Act 2 [MP3 link]
• Peter Sellars & Bill Viola - 4-14-07 - Tristan Act 3 [MP3 link]

UPDATE [050207 1423 PDT]:

The Tristan Project will make its New York debut this evening.  For the occasion, I have finally got round to updating this post with a more extensive overview of the experience here in Los Angeles.  Given that the additions have proven to be very long, and given that they will be of interest only to a very few, I have exiled them to the continuation of this post.  Those who care to can click on through: