classics without walls

Messiaen’s St-François d’Assise at the Nederlandse Opera

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 03:45:57 +0000

St-François d’Assise

Opera in three Acts and eight Scenes

Libretto and Music by Olivier Messiaen amural -- perfection of blended anti-warhorses

A New Production of the Nederlandse Opera
Première Performance of 1 June 2008
Het Musiktheater, Amsterdam

Musical Direction: Ingo Metzmacher
Director: Pierre Audi
Sets and Lighting: Jean Kalman
Costumes Angelo Figus
Video: Ervan Huon
Dramaturge: Klaus Bertisch
Choral Director: Martin Wright
Resident Orchestra and Choir of the Nederlandse Opera

L’ange: Camilla Tilling
Saint François: Rod Gilfry
Le lépreux: Hubert Delamboye
Frère Léon: Henk Neven
Frère Massée: Tom Randle
Frère Élie: Donald Kaasch
Frère Bernard: Armand Arapian
Frère Sylvestre: Jan Willem Baljet
Frère Rufin: André Morsch

an account by KEN QUANDT

The saints have shown us many ways to live a perfect life. Yet somehow the lesson we tend to come away with is that the saints are special, rather than their lives. We know they would not have it this way, that they want us to know and to use what they have learned in our own lives rather than idolize them; and we know this because this is what their lives and actions always teach us. Therefore we need to be told their lives over and over again. Saint Francis is a perfect case. As we come to know him, we are stunned by his humility – not because we wish we were less proud, but because his humility, as it is described by the stories of his life, is so credible.

It was just these stories that Olivier Messiaen used for his libretto to this opera, and the greatness of this opera ultimately relies on the greatness of Francis’s life. Productions of the St-François d’Assise are mounted seldom and revived even less. The newest, which premiered in Amsterdam today, is the third of this millennium, after San Francisco in 2001 and Paris in 2004. The great news is that this production is at least as great as those. I’ll start with a description of the staging. For a synopsis of the action see my previous review of the Paris 2004 production.

The orchestra Messiaen called for is so large the Netherlands production has put it onto the stage behind the proscenium, dispensed with a curtain, and placed the action in front of it, onto a platform built over the pit. As we enter the hall we see the orchestra in the rear split by a five-foot path that cuts through it from the center back on an angle. The conductor’s stand is offset to the right. In front of this on the right of the semicircular platform there is a large rough icon of a tree made of black planks slapped together; in the center a heap of black crosses; and a bench and a small stepped platform on the left. Above and behind the orchestra there is a large scaffold, and scaffolds on the right and left sides of the stage, all softened by scrim. Above everything is a white ceiling with a huge oval opening showing a dark blue sky above. A forward sheet of scrim at the depth of the proscenium helps to separate the orchestra’s space behind from the space in front where the action will take place.

After the orchestra tunes the lights go dimmer and we expect the conductor to come on and assume the position in this strange location center stage. Instead the lights go dimmer and then go out. In a moment they rise a little, characters begin to move onto the stage, the conductor is at the podium, and the music begins. The conspicuous relocation of the conductor has been made inconspicuous by having him enter in the dark.

Francis and the brothers are dressed in traditional capuchins with hoods. There is no attempt at all to represent the monastery nor even the door the angel will knock on too loudly in the fourth scene, but just sparse furniture on the stage and scaffolding all around on which the angel or the huge chorus (dressed in flat black hooded gowns) can appear.

In comparison with other productions this one stresses the interaction of François with the other characters rather than placing him on a pedestal. A great innovation along these lines came in the Sixth Scene, the Sermon to the Birds. Where in other productions Francis faces the audience and finds the birds out there, we have in this case a set of twenty children dressed in bright colored robes receiving a sort of nursery school class from Francis and Massée. All sorts of playful business help fill the lengthy music, including drawing on the stage with chalk and improvised play with toy birds. For Messiaen as for Francis, birds tell men about God as much as men see God in birds: they are part of the community of creation. This is made a little easier to understand by bringing the children in.

In stressing the life lived with dramaturgy, over the iconography of saint we admire for living it, this production leaves us with a more concrete sense of the personal truth of François. For this Rod Gilfry did a wonderful job, and the emphasis on action took some attention away from the question whether he could replace the voice of José Van Dam, which no voice can. In fact, during the First Act, to my consternation, his voice faltered six or seven times as he moved to the upper notes. At the beginning of the second we had an announcement that he was singing sick and thereafter the faltering almost disappeared. By the Third Act it was clear he would have to reach beyond his own expectations to complete the piece, and he did. In the closing scene, which was made to depict not the death of Francis but Francis dying, Gilfry’s personal effort during the whole afternoon culminated by bringing everything else to a climax. His final scale upward, praying that God fill him, ravish him, inebriate him with His excess of truth, came through with heart, free of straining effort though slightly clipped, and made me sob.

There were two great costumes, the Leper and the second garb of the Angel, once she revealed herself to Francis in the Fifth Scene. The latter was a close representation of the nutty kaleidoscopic detail Messiaen called for in the libretto, rather than the plain whites and wonderful one-winged monochrome blue of previous productions. But the Leper was a new idea and a tour de force. He had a plastic scuba-like suit of lemon yellow and black irregular shapes all over, and looked like a gila monster but shiny. Here the acting of Hubert Delamboye and, as everywhere else, the directing of Klaus Bertish deserves special mention.

There are many moments in this opera where the main tones being sung fall in between tones you can name. One comes near the end of Scene Four when Bernard answers the question he has Jesus put to him, that he hopes the face he wears should be the likeness of His (de Vous, de Vous). Several come in the Sermon to the Birds, Francis singing. Our Angel added a new one that I think did not belong there, a rather too sharp note when she delivered the truth to the Leper in the Third Scene. But in the purity of her delivery, Camilla Tilling held this wrong note without a slip, just as she held all her other notes without a slip, and they were all perfectly in tune. She is very pregnant at this time and it affected her long notes not at all.

Everybody could see Metzmacher at work throughout, and yet he was not overly conspicuous except for a moment during the scene change between the first and second scenes. The piece is almost unplayable – I detected only two minor slips. The long intervals of bird music in the Sixth Scene were perfect. Though he was placed behind the singers rather than in their line of sight nobody missed a cue (there were a few monitors for the singers, including one in the front row center). Unfortunately the piccolo part that announces the arrival of the Angel had to be brought off by a mere human: placed right in the front of the orchestra it came off too loud and shrilly out of tune. Soon enough the xylophone takes it up and covers the error; let’s hope this can somehow get fixed.

The chorus was magnificent. Their last note, with orchestral tutti and gleaming white light from the rear of the stage, was louder than the last note of any Gurrelieder I have heard. As to the light, it might have been the very same one Nordey used at the Paris production in 2004: a rectangular array, ten by twenty feet, of about thirty spots that gradually brighten to a level you cannot believe you can still look at, and then black out for the end.

For me the crucial message from Francis’s life is his discovery, which Messiaen places right at the beginning, that although we might be glad to have all the abilities and good things that God has given us, the only thing we can really take credit for is accepting some part of the pain of Jesus on the Cross with equanimity. This alone is perfect joy. We must not confuse this act of acceptance with self-flagellation: life inflicts enough injustice on us and it is the acts of others we must accept and forgive, not our own. The theme returns in the penultimate scene, when Francis prays that God grant him two things before he dies: to suffer the pain Jesus suffered on the Cross and to find himself in possession of the love with which Jesus was able to forgive those who inflicted this pain upon him. The fulfillment of these two wishes was emblematized in Francis receiving the stigmata, one of the fullest experiences of God’s presence an individual can imagine undergoing. It is the function of great art to remind us of these stories and show how very credible they are, how close and near at hand it is for us to bring their pattern into our own lives.

I am very thankful for the great work that went into this production.

371a

“Parsifal” at the Bastille

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:54:13 +0000

Parsifal

a stage-consecrating festival play in three acts

Music and Libretto by Richard Wagner amural -- perfection of blended anti-warhorses

Paris Opera at Bastille
Performance of 17 March 2008

Musical Direction: Hartmut Hänchen
Mise en Scène: Krzysztof “Buy-a vowel” Warlikowski
Sets and Costumes: Malgorzata Szczesniak
Lighting: Felice Ross
Video: Denis Gueguin

Director: Miron Hakenbeck
Choral Director: Winfried Maczewski

A New Production

Gurnemanz: Franz Joseph Selig
Kundry: Waltraud Meier
Amfortas: Alexander Marco-Buhrmester
Parsifal: Stig Anderson (for Christopher Ventris)
Titurel: Victor von Halem
Orchestra and Choruses of the Paris Opera

an account by KEN QUANDT

Like the Grail, this is an opera that only feeds the watcher who delights in the good. As such it should be less popular than it is, but the music is so beautiful it will never disappear from the repertoire. Thus, it presents a challenge to music lovers and opera lovers: Find the good.

At the beginning of this production, during the long prelude, a large screen almost as wide as the stage and two-thirds as high suddenly shows a hand reaching up from beneath with a pencil. It writes AMOUR. A few bars later it erases these letters and writes FOI. Then it half-erases this and overwrites ESPERANCE. These, the three great virtues of the Church, tell us or remind us what it is for man to be good, and what the goods are that life offers to man. In the manner the writing was done the erasures suggest self-correction, error, and even a little frustration. The last one, hope, is perhaps the easiest for us to rest with, and the opera can begin.

The action takes place before the large screen. Gurnemanz and his knights are dressed in modern suits and tie, except for a young boy in a light brown shirt among them who somehow isn’t part of this. When Gurnemanz narrates at length the stories of the founding of Montsalvat and of Amfortas’s disastrous venture into Klingsor’s realm, the boy has sat himself on a table at stage right with dangling legs drawing the story in crayon and pencil, and it appears on the screen behind the actors.

We are reminded, here and throughout this mise en scène, that symbols and myths are not simply true. This message could have become the trashy thesis that nothing is true, but it never gets that aggressive edge. Throughout the opera it is this young boy that is there (except for the “Mature Audiences Only” scenes in Act Two), watching and debunking, but only because he is too young to understand. During Klingsor and Kundry’s graduate seminar in evil at the beginning of Act Two, he makes spit balls and throws them desultorily at Klingsor, obviously the bad guy but not that convincing. Mind you, all this is done low-key: during the intermission I found out that the fine lady sitting next to me didn’t even notice le jeune garçon. The result is, the question of the relation of myth and truth is placed right back into the audience’s lap where it belongs, since they are the grown-ups, just as the choice among the theological virtues had been.

For Amfortas’s entrance the screen moves to the right and we see him upstage in a hospital bed. Kundry is able to visit at the foot of it. If we have forgotten that health care has become our own eschatology during these decades, we can again think smugly this is euro-trash; but in the event, like the boy, it worked perfectly well. Titurel for instance comes onstage in a wheelchair, rather then lying not quite dead in an open casket, according to the libretto.

For Parsifal’s entrance the entire screen moves upward. Behind it we see what first appears to be a steeply raked amphitheatre, where the knights have gathered to find out who shot the swan. After the hospital bed we think perhaps it is an operating theatre as at a medical school. It’s equipped with two pairs of sinks, from one of which Kundry will get some water for Parsifal when he swoons after hearing, from her, that his mother is dead. Just what this structure is is unclear, but it stays on the stage throughout so we come to think of it as a fixture used many ways rather than asking it to be a statement in itself.

In fact, the things that are just going on “anyway” are what bear the special message of this mise en scène, and it is a profound one. The young boy is fragile humanity whose fate depends on things far beyond his ken. Rituals embody truth but if the truth is lost in persons’ hearts, the rituals become opaque. Who will teach the children? Parsifal, in Wagner’s version, a bit too baldly stated, is a story of the recovery of truth by a fool who happens into the service of a church that is fighting within itself because the priest has abused a choir boy but the congregation still relies on him to perform the service. The ritual might be hocus-pocus but what the fool does recognize, through “compassion,” is the anguish of the priest who finds himself having to help others while the prayers he makes on their behalf only re-open the wounds of his own guilt. The congregation has him in the position of a mediator successive to Jesus; following their logic, he is put in the position of being punished on the cross for fornication.

There is another unscheduled individual who appears on the stage in all three acts. It is a thin woman in a plain black dress with short grey hair. She is, I realized at the end, an angel – the perfect bookend to the child extra, the one who knows everything instead of nothing.

The audience is placed in the middle between these two extras, and the audience’s greatest thrill comes when it is itself placed within the demesne of the Grail, later in Act One. When Gurnemanz announces he will conduct Parsifal there, the medical amphitheatre begins to rotate. Around its outer circular backside it is a field of vertical bands of blue and white light that flow behind each other. Parsifal notes he is moving without walking and Gurnemanz makes his famous comment, “In this demesne, time becomes space,” a thing given an empty profundity in the post-Einsteinian age. It just means that truth is present, rather than somewhere else you have to go to: we have all had the experience that illumination gives us extra room and freedom to move in it. Wonderfully, when he is told this, Parsifal becomes unable to take the next step, halting and uncertain as we all find ourselves to be when we are over our heads in truth. The angel in the black dress helps him along, and Gurnemanz reaches out for him to take the leap and come across to him as a father teaches his child to swim.

Once they reach the demesne itself the amphitheatre has rotated full circle. It is different because it is in a pink light. But as the choir begins to sing the all-embracing hymns that usher in the communion, the light becomes plain. Indeed a new white spot illuminates the stage from the rear of the orchestra. Several of us seated there turned around to see what was happening, since our heads were in it. The choruses, and horns, too, begin to sound from the higher reaches in the rear of this vast box of a hall. The audience was in the demesne as much as anybody else is.

Again, this all speaks to those who are ready for it; but I believe more were now ready for it than at the beginning.

The Second Act begins with the “duet” – a word too civilized and tame – between Klingsor and Kundry. I can report there is still no need to look past Waltraud Meier for voice, acting ability, or womanness. Klingsor wears a black cape with a threatening red suit beneath. When he claims that he alone is immune to Kundry’s seductive powers and she reminds him it is because he castrated himself, she grabs him by the crotch. Then he takes off his black cloak and shows his threatening superman suit in red. None of the garçon’s spitballs actually hit him the night I was there.

There is already a bed on the stage, on the far left. Klingsor actually pushes her into it and gets on top of her, then gets up and rearranges himself. When it is time for the Flower Maidens to come on, everything slides right except the bed. The boy is slid offstage and onstage from the left are slid eight rows of cocktail tables three deep with two women at each, looking like flappers. The table lamps light up and they sing their Flower Song. It is a chorus line, attenuated, or a Busby Berkeley, attenuated.

Parsifal shows up and the maidens dally with him. The publicity photos show him tied to a chair wearing only the ungainly underwear of a Wagnerian tenor, but I can report that this stage is reached only gradually and doesn’t last long. For our purposes what needs to be said is that Parsifal goes with the flow: it is Kundry that interrupts, with her ominous address, “Par-si-fal.”

Meier’s thousandth impossible portrayal of Kundry, under the direction of Hakenbeck, portrays most of the complexities. Her description of Herzeleide’s feelings turns her into Herzeleide; Parsifal’s discovery of the connection between his attraction for her and Amfortas’s lament comes as a disappointment to her at the same time as an access to a liberation she cannot believe is really real; her continued resorting to seduction falls on deafer and deafer ears; at the end she lies supine before him legs spread. Salient in this whole sequence is that at her penultimate attempt his shirt again comes off (for the second time in the act), but he dons instead the bedsheet as an improvised cape that makes him look like he has angel wings.

Act Three begins with a film instead of music, an excerpt from a 1947 movie by Rossellini of Nazi Berlin. The newspapers had already trained the audience to make catcalls. We were far enough into the run that they vied for saying just the right thing everybody wanted to hear. In the film a young boy clambers up into a bombed-out building and unaccountably jumps to his death. Everything is unaccountable in Parsifal: the account always depends on the audience. Of course it is our young man from the opera, all future and too little understanding. Warlikowski is a Pole, like Karol Wojtiła and Czesław Miłosz. I just felt that greater pains deserve a greater berth.

The amphitheatre is in shambles. Gurnemanz sits patiently at that same table. Kundry moans and Gurnemanz tries to revive her by massage. The massage concentrates on her hands but moves up her arms, too. There is a moment where the music becomes round and she gets up: a connection I had not seen made in previous productions. Kundry stands, as a normal person stands. The plainness is stunning.

Parsifal returns, not in the heavy black armor of the libretto but the makeshift ragtag of anybody, bearing this huge spear. The most important thing to report is that Kundry stands at the center of the stage throughout the act, given by the libretto no words and only two, though very important, movements: bringing the water from the spring and washing Parsifal’s feet. To these Warlikowski has added her continuing presence in the center of the stage, her desire to touch the spear, her halting attempt to approach and help Amfortas when he comes on later, and more.

The first tear jerker came when Gurnemanz and the nameless boy start serving the grail: Kundry and Parsifal are sitting beside each other on the ground looking at each other. The second, and climactic, was when Parsifal had healed Amfortas with the spear and had assumed the service of the Grail: Kundry and Amfortas, whose sin had brought them Parsifal who has now absolved them, may, and do, halting but resolute, run to each other and embrace. They have become two humans whose stupid lives have occasioned something sublime – how far from Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and the hill of beans?

The orchestra played flawlessly. The remote horns and choruses spread throughout the hall were managed without error. The conductor, Haenchen, reached heightened crescendoes where they really matter. And Stig Anderson, our substitute for Parsifal, filled in for an unorthodox reading without a glitch. The star of the show was of course Meier, whose acting in Act Three played as important a role as her singing in Act Two.

7566

Q Review: “Pelleas et Melisande” at Covent Garden

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 17:09:06 +0000

Pelléas et Mélisande

an opera in five acts

Music by Claude Debussy
Libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck amural -- perfection of blended anti-warhorses

Royal Opera House at Covent Garden
Performance of 21 May 2007

Conductor: Simon Rattle
Director: Stanislas Nordey
Set Designer: Emmanuel Clolus
Costume Designer: Raoul Fernandez
Lighting: Philippe Berthomé

A co-production with the Salzburg Easter Festival

Mélisande: Angelika Kirchschlager
Golaud: Gerald Finley
Arkel: Robert Lloyd
Pelléas: Simon Keenlyside

an account by KEN QUANDT

The song that Mélisande sang just before she let down her hair in Act Three of Pelléas et Mélisande does not appear in the play, nor therefore in the libretto of Debussy’s opera, which imports the words of the play directly, the only differences being some omissions. We find the song elsewhere, prefaced to a collection of meditative aphorisms Maeterlinck called La Chanson de Mélisande, which appears in a miscellany of his writings that received the title La Grande Porte from the editors of Bibliothèque-Charpentier:

L’eau qui pleure et l’eau qui rit,
L’eau qui parle et l’eau qui fuit,
L’eau qui tremble dans la nuit …

L’anneau glisse et l’anneau luit,
L’anneau trouble l’eau qui fuit,
L’anneau tombe dans la nuit …

L’anneau tombe et la couronne,
–Que les anges nous pardonnent!
La couronne tombe aussi
Dans l’eau froide et dans la nuit …

The water that cries and then laughs so bright,
The water that speaks and the water in flight,
The water that trembles throughout the night …

The ring slips and the ring so bright,
The ring troubles the water in flight,
The ring tumbles throughout the night …

The ring does tumble and so does the crown,
–Pardon us angels! Please not to frown!
The crown, too, tumbles in its right
Through water so cold throughout the night …

The water is either the shallow pond she is perched beside when Golaud finds her at the beginning of Act One, or the bottomless well she visits with Pelléas in Act Two. In the former she has lost her crown (the couronne) before the play begins and does not want Golaud to retrieve it though he can see it there; in the latter she loses the wedding ring Golaud had given her in the meanwhile (the anneau), recklessly tossing it in the air as she lies on the well’s marble edge. All this gold under water makes her a Rhinemaiden out of water. It is as if she feels her rings and crowns would do better down there.

The poem, and in particular its line near the end asking the angels’ forgiveness, provide Maeterlinck his occasion to reflect on one of his favorite themes, the vanity and indestructibility of human consciousness. The Unknown may well have its emissaries, he tells us, but it is just as likely that the angels we ask to forgive us are just extensions of ourselves, no better than our own best thoughts. We are much more and much less than we think we are, and what we do or have done has much less to do with who we are than we can imagine. Our confusion about the boundaries of identity reaches into our attitude toward death, which is nothing if we are something since everything is eternal. Hope and fear we feel with equal lack of warrant: why do we worry more about what will happen right after we die instead of right after we are born? Though both are vain, our hopes vanish more easily than our fears, and this gives life its special climate. Most paradoxically, “From the moment one ceases to have a body, if he is still something then the something he is is no longer the ‘myself’ he had thought was everything. You will not recover your identity; you will become that which surrounds you; and you will be everything instead of you.”

This is the worldview that underlies his poetical Symbolism, which is not a matter of replacing things with symbols but of giving invisible feelings and intimations of the invisible an objective presence in things. His method calls on us to grasp the feelings directly from the things. The water for instance is an oblivion and death that we can peer into: perhaps when we can see the bottom it is the death that is this life and perhaps when the bottom is beyond seeing the water is the death beyond this life.

Hands mean everything in the way humans relate to each other. Golaud asks for Mélisande’s hand to guide her our of the forest; she will not be touched but follows him; and next we learn she has given him her hand in marriage. Pelléas wants to take her by the hand along a narrow dark path she does not know but at the moment her hands are already full of flowers. Golaud leads Pelléas on a path into the grotto beneath the castle and wants to take him by the hand to help him along, but decides it would be more secure if he grabbed him by the arm.

Blinking is something Golaud notices Mélisande does not do when he first sees her. She tells him she only closes her eyes at night. When his son spies on Mélisande and Pelléas all he can report is that they are not blinking. When at the very end Golaud confesses he has never known the soul of Mélisande it is despite the fact he has been so close to her he has felt the air wafted by her eyelashes.

Mélisande’s hair becomes the climactic symbol in this story when at the beginning of Act Three she lets it down outside her bedroom window and Pelléas loses himself in it beneath and even ties it to a lime tree before Golaud shows up and blows the whistle on them. Her hair is very long – longer than herself she tells Pelléas at the well. It comes from where her thoughts come from and all those thoughts are still with her. As Maeterlinck says in the Chanson, “Tous ce que nous avons vu, tous ce que nous avons connu, sera toujours autour de nous” (”Everything we have ever seen, everything we have ever known, will forever surround us”). This makes Mélisande his metaphysical hero though she cannot know it since conscious knowing cancels this kind of heroism. She cries instead of knowing, and so does Pelléas – and so will her babyas we learn at the final moment of the piece.

Golaud cannot cry but he can cry out, especially in anger. For him les tenèbres are inconvenient obscurité. In his version of the scene beneath the bedroom window from which Melisande had extended herself down to Pelléas with her hair, he extends himself upward by forcing his little son to climb up on his shoulders and spy on his stepmother Mélisande through the window. At the beginning Golaud comes upon Mélisande in the forest, and thinks her lost though she wants to stay. He wants to take her somewhere but does not know where because as he admits in the final line of the scene he is lost, too. He got lost hunting a wild boar that evaded him. He is lost because he thinks the needs to be somewhere else. In the Second Act he is hunting again, while Mélisande is beside water again, this time restfully and with Pelléas beside the unfathomable water of the well. The moment she loses the ring – high noon – Golaud on the hunt is thrown when his horse unaccountably shies at something. She returns to the castle to find him laid up and notices a blood spot on his pillow. This is what Golaud has for hair. She is tender and solicitous and gives him her hands, but when he takes them into his he only notices the ring is gone, and he goes into a rage. He (not she) must have that ring back. Maeterlinck quotes Bossuet in the Chanson: “Il faut savoir adorer dans les caprices de la predestination les secrets de la sagesse éternelle” (”One must learn to treasure the ways capricious predestination reveals the secrets of eternal wisdom”). This is what Golaud cannot do and cannot treasure doing either.

The Weltanschauung of a boundless soul that is empty in itself but full because fully absorbed in the world around, strikes a note initially foreign in our resolutely egoistical culture of the Twenty-First Century and makes us think we are hearkening back to something. The commentators remind us of the delicate and fleeting era of the Pre-Raphaelites and find it precious and beautiful (and Kristeva tedious, of course). Maeterlinck’s passion led him to study the life of bees and of termites, and it is not impossible for us to find something of his outlook in our way of seeing things these days if only we look through the other end of the telescope. The hypo-egoism he explores by comparing human society to a society of bees corresponds to the hyper-egoism we tend toward, according to which the environment could be destroyed by nothing more than our ignorant selves. The lurking contradiction in the way we find our unimportance so important makes the story Maeterlinck tells uncomfortable in a newer way than when it premiered in 1893 (the opera in 1902) – new, but not that different.

We may have been ripe for an environmentalist mise en scène for this opera, but Stanislas Nordey has done something else altogether, in the version that premiered last Easter in Salzburg (2006), and that is currently finishing a run at Covent Garden. I know Nordey’s work from the fantastic St-François d’Assise he put on at the Bastille in 2004. There as here he created a narrative by means of vertical backdrops behind the characters parallel to the action that keep track of where the story has been and how far it has gotten. And again he goes so far as to perch his characters up in the vertical backdrop ten feet above the stage. The reviewers of the Covent Garden run fixed on the term “hieratic” – a shibboleth to hide their confusion – but his method is a perfect match for the Symbolist method of Maeterlinck. The temporal magic of Debussy’s kind of music was already the perfect match for the Symbolist method of depicting mood and presence trumping projection, statement, and intentionality. The static magic of Nordey’s visuals does the same thing in the complementary dimension of visual space.

His work in this opera deserves to be described in any amount of detail a reader can tolerate and a writer can pull off describing. It is beyond me to do it it justice. I learned from his mise en scène what the opera truly means, that it is the story of the pure and virtuous soul being mistaken and then abused by a person and by a society that is drawn to it exactly by its virtue and beauty which can only affect them by making them conscious of their own pettiness. It is not a love story: Pelléas’s love is only the exception that proves the rule.

As the black curtain rises we see five large and obscure black columns with transverse streaks of grey on a darkened stage. They are the trees of the forest where Golaud finds Mélisande. She is far downstage right in a fire-red, skintight dress. Golaud enters from among the trees in a white suit with puffy shoulders and puffy pantaloons and sparkling sequins, a showy suit that he wears unselfconsciously as if this is what one wears. There is no pond for her to be falling into. Kirchschlager’s dress and her deeply intoned “Ne me touchez pas” indicate immediately she is much more than the fragile dryad that most productions, and Maeterlinck, too, make her out to be.

At the end of the scene the darkling trees slowly begin to rotate, revealing themselves to be some sort of thick panels we have been seeing on end. One in particular moves to the center of the stage. When it comes to a stop we are faced with a huge rectangle about twenty feet high and twice as wide with obscure transverse streaks of grey on a dark stage. Quietly and suddenly its front reveals itself to be two doors as they open outward toward us. Within is a lightbox, and as the doors fold all the way back we have before us a triptych that virtually fills the stage. The panels are illuminated and light silver grey, and scored with spare lines as if things could be attached and located on them. The center panel is a square flanked by narrower side panels about half as wide as tall. The stage is lighted by the box rather than the other way around. Geneviève reads Golaud’s letter to Arkel and Pelléas comes onto the stage. All three – a woman and two men – are wearing clothes in the same style as Golaud. This is, indeed, what one wears, man or woman. At the end of the scene the doors close, the characters disappear behind it, and the stage darkens. Stagehands barely visible in black rotate the huge box three times and stop. It opens and re-illumines the stage in front of it, and this time there are simple square objects located seven by seven on the center panel and three by seven on the sides. They create only a pattern, they are not things. This is the scene when Mélisande is brought to the castle and meets Pelléas on the way. In her hands she carries large and ungainly white bouquets (she must have gotten from the silver-dressed Geneviève).

The box closes and rotates three times; when it opens to begin the scene with Pelléas and Mélisande at the well its insides have become a marquee covered with the words PELLEASMELISANDE written over and over. Illuminated bulbs form the letters on a silver ground, or else a silver ground is perforated and illuminated from the rear. Pelléas and Mélisande joyfully run onto the stage. As the scene and their happy conversation warms up, a single PELLEAS in the upper right and a single MELISANDE in the lower left of the central panel glow brighter and brighter. Somehow Nordey has gotten these simple elements to convey irrepressible joy. The box illuminates the stage which is otherwise empty with a slate colored floor, and this time Mélisande does have a way to fall into the water since she is lying supine on the very front of the stage above the orchestra. Before this all the movements had been stiff, but now the characters are happy, and relaxed. Keelyside’s Pelléas in that suit is goofy-graceful and attractive.

The same moment she loses her ring in the well Golaud will have fallen off his horse. The box closes and rotates to take us there. When it opens we see it is hung with a symmetric array of bedpillows each having a bloodstain in the lower left corner, 3 by 7, 7 by 7, and 3 by 7. Red has made it into the box and so has an element from the story. Golaud tells Mélisande he is all right but she notices the stain on the pillow, a touch of reality in a world he thinks he controls with his will. Mélisande is the other red thing in this silver chrome world. Apart from the scene with Pelléas and Mélisande the characters stand far from each other and facing perpendicular (this kind of blocking is not hieratic but has become a cliché). Golaud is front and center facing the audience and exposes his personality to us and Mélisande watches uninvolved, upstage. For first time Golaud touches Mélisande but only to discover she has lost her ring. He sends her to retrieve it immediately – we are given to believe it belonged to his previous wife, who died. Quickly we ascertain the unstated fact that he is reusing it on Mélisande. He cares so much about it he does not care if she goes with Pelléas to find it. It is not only his rage that makes him careless. He is visibly blind to the play of destiny and ignores its suggestions of a truth beneath the surface.

The box closes, rotates, and opens to reveal the three spectral beggars in the grotto, in a sort of bas relief on the three panels, as if they were sculpted in stone like Michelangelo’s emerging slaves. They are repulsive as they are supposed to be, but at the same time they are marvelous. When we are under the sway of Golaud in the contrasting scene when he takes Pelléas down into the castle dungeon, the mood will be quite different.

Once Pelléas and Mélisande have done their penance in the grotto, Act Two comes to a close and we are ready for Act Three to begin with the Tower Scene where she lets down her hair. The Acts are through-composed, with musical interludes between the scenes. During these interludes the box has closed and rotated and opened to the music of the interlude. When the music comes to a stop at the end of an Act, the curtain lowers as the music dissolves into silence.

Wonderfully, we applauded but the house lights did not go up after Act One, nor at the end of Act Two. One does not tend to pop out of his seat when this kind of music stops. I attended a performance at the Met one lazy Thursday night a couple years ago that was done with two intermissions. As the lights came up the first time we slowly got up and went out to walk around but did not know why; and at the second intermission it seemed nobody in the Grand Tier even moved. I had never noticed how intimate a place is the Grand Tier at the Met. I was grateful there had not yet been an intermission tonight in Covent Garden and even began to hope they would let the magic last through to the end.

When the curtain rises to start Act Three the box opens to give us a triptych stunning and gorgeous. Not only has the red gotten onto the panels: now they are hung with an array of Mélisande’s red dresses, 3 by 3, 7 by 3, and 3 by 3. The one in the center of the center panel has Mélisande in it. If opera goers and their critics did not shop so much or act as if they did the critics might have left out remarks about store windows or fashion displays. If they had seen Nordey’s version of the Messiaen St-François at the Bastille, they would not have been embarrassed into speechlessness by the location of Mélisande, who of course does belong in the center and is the center the opera. At the Bastille Francis spent three of the seven scenes elevated to the center of the stage – hours in all – on a perch, then on a platform, and finally on a virtual cross.

Kirchschlager’s voice is already strong and throaty. Place her up in the middle of the stage with a solid backdrop right behind her and you have a sound oracular and prophetic. She, and the red we cannot help but stare at, have taken over. Beneath her and in front of the box, on the floor of the stage, Pelléas calls to her and begs to see her hair. The scene is almost worshipful but somehow she is not on a pedestal after all. It is love that Pelléas feels, rather than adoration. There is no much-awaited trick of long hair dangling down for Pelléas to grab. Instead the vertical world of the box is kept apart from the horizontal world of the stage. Pelléas lying on the floor comes to be surrounded by a pool of shimmering light projected onto the floor of the stage that represents his becoming tangled in her hair. At the ecstatic moment where the music turns inside out and unfurls its greatest beauties as if it were glowing from within like all of these boxes of Nordey’s, the frame of the triptych begins to glow in a deep aqua-blue color, the color and the luminous effect of the waters at Havasupai, exactly. The panels holding the dresses become a bit darker and the dresses verge toward crimson except for Mélisande in the center who has a spotlight. It is the most beautiful thing I ever saw. I will travel across the world to see how Nordey will again make time stop during the night song in Tristan und Isolde, Act Two.

The box closes and rotates away: another box approaches from the rear and it has, yes, a sentence on it in large letters: “Sentez vous l’odeur de mort qui monte?” The line is taken from the libretto of the coming scene when Golaud as if to punish or warn his half-brother Pelléas takes him into the castle’s subterranean dungeons that smell of death. The box comes to a stand facing us and lights up from within rather than opening. The words become visible in black and Golaud and Pelléas come onstage in front of it so as to appear in silhouette.

Nordey placed words onto his tableaux in the St-François, too. The effect both there and here is to freeze a passing line in the script because its significance is not merely passing. There, the questions with which the angel stuns the vicar appeared in writing on the backdrop. The line written here makes us ask, does Golaud need to take us this far? Have we indeed come so far? When Pelléas can stand the darkness and stench no more they leave outward, becoming invisible as they pass outside the front of the box and go behind it. The box rotates and the same words are on the other side, but now it is very bright. In fact the entire hall is lit by the brightness of the box. Pelléas runs joyfully around from the back relieved from getting out of the dank and drear. There has been no magic as Golaud guided Pelléas into the bowels of the castle, as there had been with the spectral figures emerging from stone when Pelléas guided Mélisande down to the grotto.

This box darkens and moves away and another approaches, and this time it does not open. On the stage in front of it a square almost its size appears in light. We are ready for the spying scene with Golaud’s son Yniold. Golaud’s sparring and cajolery takes place in an arena or a ring defined by the lighted area. When it is time to raise Yniold up to spy on what Mélisande is doing, the box does open but this time the doors open by sliding up and down from the center and disappear rather than rotating open to form a triptych. The box is bright white and empty except that Mélisande and Pelléas are sitting, elevated into the center of the box in plain chairs and facing each other. They are “doing” nothing and keep doing nothing, while Golaud and Yniold struggle into a sit-on-my-shoulders pose at the front edge of the stage. It is in this scene, after the elevation of Mélisande, that Finley’s Golaud really starts emitting animal grunts. When Yniold demonstrates their kiss on Golaud he turns to the audience to complain about his father’s gruffness and his beard; and when he is promised a new bow and arrow he plays shooting it at Golaud from many angles. The audience is endeared to the performer of Yniold by all this, and will as usual give loud applause to the child role, but its relevance comes in later when we are asked to contemplate whether the next generation will be any different.

It is the end of Act Three and the curtain lowers. Finally the lights come up and we have a breather. What will we see in the final act? The presence of the box throughout the first three acts and the modified uses it is given these last two scenes of Act Three leave us uncertain. But the consistency and the development in its use, defining a separate space that beings to accept a stain of red and then accepts Mélisande into it and then Pelléas, gives us the premonition of something revelatory. Nordey’s genius is to create a scenery language fantastically beautiful, disarmingly economical, transparently logical, and stunningly exact in meaning though completely mute. The silent commentary gives his audience an intimate feeling of involvement in the meaning and its interpretation all along, if only the audience allows itself to get the message and not be scandalized, especially by the use of the vertical dimension and the supergraphic written words. With the last two Acts things will become clearer and clearer until at the end they become unbearably clear and the performance is over.

The curtain for Act Four rises to reveal a huge glowing red panel with a violent black gash running across it, transverse like the angle of the streaks we had seen on the trees in the first scene of Act One, and on the face of the box in Act Three. The huge panel almost fills the stage except that visible beyond its edges, side and top, there is another red panel behind, and one, two, three more. Within this act Mélisande will be adored by the grandfather King Arkel, abused horribly by her husband Golaud, and made love to by the departing Pelléas before he is murdered by Golaud. Then she will be brought her baby as she dies by a kind of gradual diffusing of her self. Red has been her color all along, and all along the only color on the stage. Now we have the denouement of everything her redness has wrought. The light box is gone. It is almost as if Mélisande has come to Jerusalem to do her final dying. Each scene in the sequence a red panel rises away revealing the next person behind. When it is Mélisande that enters, in the well scene with Pelléas, there she is in red against the next red background – I thought of Isolde’s arrival in the Viola video of the Tristan Project. While Pelléas is confessing his love for her and she for him we notice there is only one more panel to raise, and we know who will be behind it – a good example of how Nordey’s economy, consistency and simple logic help us along.

After the murder of Pelléas, Mélisande is left alone, as if neglected even by the director, exhausted and distraught. She wanders downstage for the length of the interlude. Then the lights raise to reveal the final scene.

In the final scene of Messiaen’s St-François, all that is left is for Francis to die. For that scene Nordey brought everyone onto the stage. Behind them he placed all the backgrounds that had been used in the previous scenes. In a way he confesses that the gimmickry with the scenery has served its purpose, and now the story end will since Francis is to die. He’s done a similar thing here, using his scenery to tell the story and mark its stages, and he finishes up with a similar death scene. The red panel is gone. Behind the characters who have collected to blab their way through Mélisande’s slow dissolution with their vain and futile remarks, Nordey places almost two dozen of these same silver white sequined suits they are all dressed in, and the suits are standing empty. The red dresses hanging in the triptych during the Tower scene foreshadow them somewhat, but they are immediately self-explanatory and need no foreshadowing. After the abuse of Mélisande these twenty empty suits help us to understand why after all these people wear such stupid looking clothes and think nothing of it. They are clueless. As an outsider by birth and no blood relation to King Arkel, Pelléas is the exception that proves the rule. At the other extreme, Golaud complains in self-pity that he never knew Mélisande even though he was close enough to her to feel the air wafted by her eyelashes, but the pain of his shallowness only makes him more angry.

For her part, all that is left for Mélisande is to die. Her vivid and loving redness has had its effect on them and they will continue to be the nothings they think is everything while she will be freed to become the everything she always was. Her death is not tragic and not an act of martyrdom. Rather, personal life is less significant than we make it seem. As Maeterlinck says in a telling remark on the insignificance of the self near the end of his Chanson de Mélisande, “Le pouvoir de l’âme sur le corps a ses limites, et afin qui l’on commande en effet, il faut toujours supposé que le corps soit en bon état:” Mélisande’s natural weakness is enough reason for her to die.

3364

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mtheo — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 03:29:07 +0000

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Q review: “Recovered Voices” at the LA Opera

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 02:49:08 +0000

Recovered Voices

Recovering a Musical Heritage
The Music Suppressed by the Third Reich

LA Opera – James Conlon, Musical Director
March 7 (Première Performance)
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion amural -- perfection of blended anti-warhorses

an account by KEN QUANDT

Program: All selections: LA Opera / James Conlon cond
Franz Schreker: Die Gezeichneten / The stigmatized: Prelude
Walter Braunfels: Die Vögel / The birds: Prelude and “Liebwerte Freunde” (Nightingale’s aria): Stacey Tappan S
Ernest Křenek: Jonny spielt auf / Johnny strikes up: Orchestral ntroduction to scene3 and “Als ich damals”: Stacey Tappan S
Viktor Ullmann: Der Kaiser von Atlantis / The emperor of Atlantis: “The emperor’s farewell”: Donnie Ray Albert Bar
Erwin Schulhoff: Flammen / Flames: “Conversation with the Sea”: Rodrick Dixon T
Erich Korngold: Die tote Stadt / The dead city: Prelude to Act Two; Mariettas Lied (Tatiana Pavlovskaya S); Pierrots Tanzlied (Martin Gantner Bar)
Alexander Zemlinsky: Eine florentinische Tragödie / A Florentine tragedy, opera in one act from a play by Oscar Wilde, tr. Max Meyerfield: Bianca: Tatiana Pavlovskaya S / Guido Bardi: Anthony Dean Griffey T / Simone: Donnie Ray Albert Bar

Conlon came onto the stage at the beginning and spoke for several minutes. Behind him was projected the image of a poster from the original production of Jonny spielt auf, featuring a dressed monkey looking like a black man playing a saxophone. He has a Star of David on his lapel that was later placed there by the Nazis. Conlon lectured us amicably and boyishly on the Moral, Historic, and Artistic value of recovering the seven artists whose works, condemned as degenerate by the Nazis, were featured in this concert. Except for a synopsis of the Florentine Tragedy, the Program gave biographies of the seven artists but nothing on the pieces themselves – a regrettable omission since the most listeners had heard none of them.

I want to concentrate on the second half, the presentation of the Florentine Tragedy. Highlights of the first half were Tappan’s final note in the Birds piece continued by the oboe, the wonderful and also strikingly homogeneous music of the first five composers (which incidentally enabled Conlon to present the several excepts as an uninterrupted suite), and the Prelude by Korngold, which reached Brucknerian and Sibelian dimensionality in just a few seconds. Of performances the best was the last, the powerful, well-rounded and in-tune performance of Martin Gantner who was the hero of the whole night and got most of the applause, alongside Pavlovskaya’s Marietta, which was ravishing. Gantner is concurrently singing Wolfram in the LA Tannhäuser, where again the audiences have loved him.

The setting of the Florentine Tragedy after the intermission is not truly a performance “in its entirety” as advertised, except in the sense that all the notes were played. The stage is empty except for three music stands at the front, placed right, left and center. There are two or three chairs near the back. Onto the back wall pictures are being projected as in the first half of the concert. Those were black and white but these have some color. One of them shows hands playing chess and it occurs when the sung conversation between the husband, Simone, and the prince, his wife’s lover, becomes cagey. It recurs to indicate the recurrence of caginess but in truth the entire conversation is cagey. There is a varied version of this picture with a third, female hand reaching in to help one of the players’ hands. There is a large picture of a staid room that might be the scene of the whole thing. There is a picture of Simone’s wares which he proudly describes in order to bore the prince. There is a picture of a sword when Simone mentions his sword near the end. The pictures isolate more or less important themes in the action – itself largely a conversation – and leave them there for a while. The conversation moves on, so we ignore them until a new picture comes up that is relevant again. They are perfectly redundant.

The combination of pictures and simple staging might remind the Los Angeles audience of the Tristan Project (Salonen–Sellars–Viola) that debuted across the street here three winters ago and is about to be revived this spring in New York and Los Angeles. The Project is a presentation of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde sung concertante and accompanied by a huge and gorgeous video projected onto a screen hung behind the orchestra. Even more reminiscent to me was the modified version of the Project that Salonen, Sellars, and Viola presented operatically as Tristan und Isolde at the Bastille a few months after the Spring 2005 debut, and then again in the Fall of 2006. There, as here, the singers were placed on the stage, the stage itself was plain and black, and the video was projected onto the back wall, above and five times taller than the singers. There as here the stage direction was minimal.

Both the concertante and the operatic version of Tristan were successes. Despite its similarities to them this setting of the Florentine Tragedy is, unfortunately, a failure. Bill Viola’s Tristan video was always irrelevant to the action except on some emotive level – it was a tantric stream of consciousness – but at least it kept moving, while these still pictures were wooden, redundant in their reference, and immediately obsolete. The running watch that is always wrong is preferable to the broken watch that is right twice a day.

The stage direction here was of a piece with the projected images, namely, sporadically significant and feckless overall. What movements the singers are given, besides walking over to their music stands to sing, are designed to portray affect rather than to embody live response and interaction. Again a comparison with Sellars’s Tristan is instructive. At the Bastille, with a similarly exiguous supply of materials, he was brilliantly expressive, engaging, and dramatic. He was even able to bring in a totally gratuitous homosexual sub-theme and added a schtick about Tristan offering Isolde a little pocket knife to kill him with in Act One. At this Florentine, when Simone starts his long and tauntingly tedious declamation to the prince, the prince walks to the back and sits in one of the chairs, facing sideways, sort of facing Simone and sort of not. He is not singing, so he might as well take a rest. Simone has nothing to look at but his score on the music stand. He waves his arms some. We teeter into the Borge-zone. At one point Bianca finds herself at her music stand and turns the pages, so we know she won’t be singing for a while. Climactically the prince objects to Simone strangling him to death from a few feet away.

The characters keep becoming just singers and the singers are only sometimes in character. In between these frequent shifts the most appalling fact threatens to become evident and bring the whole thing down. They are actually just people. Somehow the concertante version worked last spring when Conlon brought this piece to the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Hall. That performance was stunningly dramatic, even though (and somehow because) the singers stayed behind their stands and had the orchestra behind them. Most memorable was the body language and facial expressions of James Johnson, who sang Simone.

Most tellingly missing in LA was a truly Jewish interpretation of Simone, such as Conlon had produced in San Francisco. Simone in the story was very willing to “act like a Jew,” and to fulfill the caricature. He was perfectly willing to take the prince’s overpayment, and would have except for the quintessentially un-Jewish act of killing him instead, in the face of which the dying prince’s invocation of his redeemer was clownish hypocrisy.

The new LA season was announced today, and it includes a continuation of the Recovered Voices project, made possible by a huge grant from Marilyn Ziering. Next year Conlon will perform Uhlmann’s Zerbrochene Krug and Zemlinsky’s Zwerg on the same program. Presumably these will be advertised as performances of the operas “in their entirety.” The LA Opera website today has pictures of the setting for the other operas they are doing (including for instance the Hockney setting for Tristan) but for the Recovered pair there is just a picture of Conlon. If they keep to the present kind of staging I will not be there.

The staging and sets suffered for being neither fish nor fowl. The concept of the Recovered Voices project also threatens to be too many things at once, with its triple goals moral, historical, and aesthetic. The Entartete Musik ranges from pretty good to great. Yes, it is worth remembering, but that doesn’t make it memorable. Toggling all the artists together does disservice to the best of them. If the project is at the Chandler rather than the Disney, operatics should be given greater stress than symphonics. We shall see – let’s wish for the best!

classics without walls

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an account by KEN QUANDT

“Parsifal” at the Bastille

Parsifal

a stage-consecrating festival play in three acts

an account by KEN QUANDT

Q Review: “Pelleas et Melisande” at Covent Garden

Pelléas et Mélisande

an opera in five acts

an account by KEN QUANDT

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Q review: “Recovered Voices” at the LA Opera

Recovered Voices

Recovering a Musical HeritageThe Music Suppressed by the Third Reich

an account by KEN QUANDT

Recovering a Musical Heritage
The Music Suppressed by the Third Reich