Aspergimi d'issopo e sarò mondo: Puccini's "Girl" and her gospel

Fanciulla del West's first cast (1910)

As I'm a member of a high liturgical tradition, I spent this evening at a Tenebrae service: in a darkened church, reading the penitential psalms. As I'm an opera nerd, this made me think of Puccini: Psalm 51 is Minnie's psalm, read out to and explicated for the miners of La Fanciulla del West. It's been widely recognized (see, for example, William Berger's Puccini Without Excuses) that this text and Minnie's gloss of it provide brilliant foreshadowing and a point of reference for Minnie's own growth over the course of the opera. Her confidence that no one lies beyond the reach of redemption is challenged when her idolized hero, the gallant Johnson, is revealed to be an infamous bandit, no common thief but the leader of a gang. Minnie's used to seeing--and cultivating--the good in the rough-mannered and often desperate miners. And it's not, in the event, the fact that Johnson is a bandit on which her confidence in her own worldview shatters; this she forgives him, after recovering from her first shock. But that the man to whom she has given her long-guarded heart should have lied to her, should have abused her innocence... this she cannot accept. That she finds her way--first by instinct, then by reason--to the truer understanding of grace which enables her happy ending is celebrated in the triumphantly lush orchestration of the opera's finale. But this scriptural reference does not occur in isolation; Puccini's penultimate opera is imbued throughout with spiritual language. Minnie speaks of wanting to knock at the threshold of heaven, riding in the mountains; the man she loves is constantly calling her blessed. I have a theory that biblical echoes are used by the composer in providing an alternate foreshadowing: a dark vision of the future which Minnie and Johnson only narrowly avoid. Brace yourselves, Gentle Readers, as I wade again into the murky waters of opera and religion.

Eliogabalo: eccomi trasformato

That Francesco Cavalli's Eliogabalo survives at all is something of a historical improbability. The experienced and popular operatic composer penned the work late in his career, but it was never performed. Was it too musically old-fashioned? Too politically subversive? Scholars have labored over these questions without achieving consensus (more information here.) It was this trail of scholarship that led Gotham Chamber Opera to the work, replete with erotic and political scandal, which is now being performed to capacity audiences at The Box. In other words, seventeenth-century Venice interpreting third-century Rome gets an environment strongly reminiscent of the seedy sensuality of Isherwood's Berlin. I was intrigued by the venture's approach to showing New York City audiences past decadence(s) through the venues and aesthetics of our own. The results of this enterprise, however, were mixed. The baroque-punk aesthetic of Mattie Ulrich's costumes (with more than a hint of burlesque about them) I thought inspired. James Marvel's direction of the on-stage antics, however, was crude and unsubtle, doing a disservice to Cavalli's sophisticated treatment of sexual power games played--often with desperation--by all of the characters. The burlesque dancers had, in fact, the choreography most expressive of eroticism and control. Almost completely lost in the indiscriminate lasciviousness was the debate, prominent in Aurelio Aureli's libretto as in its seventeenth-century context, on whether or not the iniquities of a tyrant ever absolved his subjects of their loyalty to the person of the king. (An honorable exception to this was the transformation of burlesque dancers into the Furies who haunt Alessandro as he meditates on the conflict between passion and duty, surrounded by the mockery of multiple mirrors.) Despite the largely two-dimensional direction, the singers performed with admirable commitment, although musical matters were also somewhat uneven. Still, caveats and cuts notwithstanding, I was glad for the chance to encounter this rarity of the operatic repertoire.

Bach's Mass in B Minor with the NYPhil

I have to accept the way [Bach] believed. His music never stops praying.... I do not believe in the Gospels in a literal fashion, but a Bach fugue has the Crucifixion in it—as the nails are being driven in.  --György Kurtág

This week, the New York Philharmonic's ongoing Bach Variations festival brings a deeply impressive slate of soloists to join the orchestra and the New York Choral Artists as Alan Gilbert leads his first performances of the B Minor Mass; I attended the first of these on Wednesday. For me, this was the first live performance of a piece I've listened to countless time since it taught me, when I was seven, that grown-ups could cry, and it's music I love deeply. It's music that's prayed with me and that has prayed for me when I could not. Under Gilbert's baton, the order and beauty of the baroque were celebrated in all their magnificence. Collectively and severally, the members of the orchestra delivered passionate and polished performances. And the evening led me to ponder: when it comes to Bach--especially when it comes to this Bach--can one achieve excellence without confronting eternity?

Stephanie Blythe sings the 20th Century at Carnegie Hall

Despite some empty seats, the Monday night audience for Stephanie Blythe and Warren Jones was one of the most warmly enthusiastic I've heard for a vocal recital. And such enthusiasm was justified: Blythe and Jones had enormous musical and personal chemistry, and Blythe united consummate comic timing with her formidable vocal gifts. The evening opened with James Legg's Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, a cycle written for Blythe shortly before the composer's untimely death. Blythe and Jones read the poems before performing the cycle, in place of providing a booklet with texts; I'd love to see this practice spread. Legg's evocative, richly colored settings tied the poems together in a poignant and thoughtful narrative. The asynchronous timing for voice and piano in "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House" established deftly the unsettled mood, and Legg continued to use the piano to color the text strongly, to paint thoughts shattering on stone, the hot thickness of clover, the slow glory of a sunrise. Blythe's use shading of dynamics and her wide palette of tonal color made for an emotional subtlety somehow surprising from so large a voice. The dramatic twist at the end of the cycle, from "Success is counted sweetest" to " 'Tis not that Dying hurts us so" I found thoughtful and affecting. Samuel Barber's "Three Songs," setting the poetry of James Joyce, were also new to me. While given with technical mastery and finesse by Blythe and Jones, I felt that Barber's lush neo-Romanticism sat strangely with the spare beauty of the poems ("Rain has fallen," "Sleep now," "I hear an army.") The lover's invitation to "Come among the laden trees" marks a break from the traditional bower of romance in a way that Barber's harmonies do not; but this quality, which I found jarring, was one of the cycle's attributes most appreciated by my companion. 

Don Carlo: lo spirto che vacilla

Filippo (Furlanetto) mourns what might have been.
Frittoli is Elisabetta. Photo (c) Met Opera

Wednesday's performance of Don Carlo boasted some fine singing, and, from Ferruccio Furlanetto's Filippo, excellent singing; despite this, the performance never really ignited (if you'll forgive the verb, Gentle Readers.) The principals suffered from the lack of thoughtful direction which Nicholas Hytner had given the production in its first run at the Met. For most of the evening, this merely led to slightly off reaction times, and an excess of what the Beloved Flatmate was wont to call Emotional Shorthand Falling. In the last two acts, matters became further scenically unraveled. Carlo and Rodrigo had only perfunctory contact in the latter's death scene; Elisabetta's tragic prayer lacked the choreography to support her shifts from supplication to anger, and her escalating despair. Most confusing, however, was Don Carlo's death, where he was killed in more-or-less fair fight by one of Filippo's guards. In the first New York run, it was Filippo himself who stabbed Carlo in the back, in the graphic cannibalism of a dysfunctional patriarchy. This failure to connect with the dark heart of Verdi's (yes, I'll say it) masterpiece was unfortunately mirrored--and perhaps anchored--in the pit. The deliberate tempi of Lorin Maazel's conducting brought moments of effective solemnity, but far too often lagged behind singers and weighed down the flow of Verdi's ineluctable tragedy. I would have welcomed more precision lavished on the details of the orchestration, or more rubato, or more dynamic variation, or more varied tempi (and spent, perhaps, too much time pondering these possibilities during the performance.) The orchestra achieved passages of considerable beauty, with the woodwinds distinguishing themselves, but the whole remained less than the sum of its parts.

Turn of the Screw: What goes on in your dreams?

Divided loyalties: Miles, the Governess, and Peter Quint in NYCO's Turn of the Screw (Photo (c) Richard Termine)

On a cold and rainy night in New York City, an audience "subject to a common thrill," as Henry James put it, gathered at BAM for The Turn of the Screw, Britten's deliciously uncanny twist on James' tale of self-doubt, self-discovery, and the supernatural. Sam Buntrock's production is set in 1982, with the Falklands War on the BBC, and the Governess' haircut modeled after that of Princess Diana. The guardian of the children, glimpsed during the prologue, is a Gordon Gekko avant la lettre, with a sleek desk and a ruthlessly crisp manner. Among other things, this choice refocuses the opera's questioning of gender and gender roles on the artificial masculine/feminine divide. Flora is reprimanded by Mrs. Grose for bowing instead of curtsying; she's flustered; it's Miles, debonair and confident, who models the perfect curtsy for his younger sister. The Governess is sheltered, even willfully persistent in her sheltered outlook when confronted with things beyond her ken. She insists that what she sees must fit into her moral categories, with, of course, disastrous results.

If the production had had less happening, I thought, it would have been easier to focus on the essentials of what it was about. Intelligent and nuanced in detail (how does the Iron Lady on the BBC affect this anxious socialization of appropriate femininity and masculinity?) it contained some ghostly gimmicks which I found distracting. If Peter Quint represents repressed (bisexual?) desire, there's no need for his presence to make the lights flicker and the TV go dark. Aside from these tropes of supernatural haunting, there's nothing to suggest that Quint is a tortured soul; rather, he seems the most self-assured character of the piece. Though Quint himself is not troubled, the Governess is, deeply. Miss Jessel was. Miles, by contrast, though disturbed and frightened by Quint, is also his ally, also the singer of his song. This unsettled, unsettling openness contrasts with the insistence of the others that Quint's ways are other and incomprehensible. In Miss Jessel's address to Flora, in Mrs. Grose's outcry, there are repeated assertions that men and women cannot, must not, should not communicate in the same ways. And this is part of what thwarts the Governess: Miles is (almost) a man; he can often seem it in his preternatural self-possession and suave, even challenging maturity. So how must she treat him? As a child? Or as the always-already sexualized, dangerous Other, the male? Miles' hesitant attempts--sometimes fearful, sometimes precociously confident--to reconcile this perceived dichotomy end in frustration, and the tragedy of a forfeited future.

Parsifal: durch Mitleid wissend

The education of the pure fool: Parsifal, Act I

The more I think about Francois Girard's production of Parsifal, the more I am struck by how thoughtful its engagement with the work is, and how gloriously humane its message. Girard uses the visual language of Christianity and Buddhism without being tied to either, thereby more effectively getting at essential truths without using symbols which might seem exclusive. For this is a production recognizing that the effect of all sin (or evil... but I'll stick with the word of the libretto) is alienation from self, from others, and from the natural world. The eventual atonement and reconciliation are attained through true recognition of others, with agape love, this force so powerful that it lightens what had been in darkness, unites what was divided, heals what was broken. False dichotomies are broken down, and symbols are used to lead to truths instead of as ends in themselves. It's a beautiful production visually, as well; much was done with the relationship of humankind to nature which I didn't fully take in, but I hope to better this on further attendance. Girard presents the community of knights in the first act as suffering from a dangerous blindness, mirrored in the thick veiling of the women from whom they are divided (lest the audience feel complacent about this, a mirror has melted to a scrim during the overture.) Gurnemanz is the closest to enlightenment, but as we learn in Act III, he's idolized Titurel, not seeing him as "Ein Mensch--wie alle!" His engagement with Kundry, too, is cautious and limited. When the swan, wounded, enters, it is represented by a female dancer, and set down on the women's side of the stage. Gurnemanz can't cross to it, but strokes it tenderly and with pity; the tragedy of its unavailing search is deeply felt, and representative (for Gurnemanz) of all the failed quests of this broken society. Parsifal can't see it as anything but a beast. "Gebrochen das Aug' " doesn't mean anything to him, although he begins to sense that it is important.

The knights are united, it is true, but the cost is too high, not only (but most graphically) seen through Amfortas' suffering. They are too focused on the Grail, although the communal sharing of its blessing (like the passing of the Peace in high church liturgies) is not made a Eucharistic meal. The nourishment is mystical, but the cruelty to Amfortas is nonetheless dangerous. This man's body is broken. Parsifal watches intently, fascinated. But when he approaches the assembly and meets Amfortas' gaze, it is the youth who looks away. The king might have offered him the blessing, but Parsifal can't face Amfortas as an individual, turning away and refusing his office. Gurnemanz's anger is clearly not only for the suffering, but for Parsifal's refusal to engage it. Klingsor's realm (possibly at the base of the cleft in the Act I valley?) is deeply uncanny, a space lost to sun and air. More sinister than this, however, and more unsettling than the lake of blood, is the enslavement of will--not only Kundry's--that has taken place here. The flower maidens face away from us, in formation, deprived of individuality: this is what evil does. This redirection from the focus on temptation as somehow intrinsically feminine/female was much appreciated by me! Parsifal is genuinely bewildered by this perverse society. As these lost souls start touching, then stroking, then grasping at him, it is horrifying as well as suitably sensual. They almost win: they are surrounding him, claiming him, imprisoning him, and he is fatally passive almost until the last minute,when he tears himself free. It is then that Kundry enters. "Parsifal!" This is persuasion: a more subtle but no less dangerous approach to corruption of the will. He comes to her slowly, slowly, tense and preoccupied with what she tells him, but she is able to approach him. This is, however, only the simulacrum of the genuine emotional connection he craves. At first he is passive under her kiss, but then returns it, and then, tightens his grip and embraces her with violence; it is she who tears herself away, not the other way around; it is his violence, not her seduction, which is the horrifying transgression. It is an act of will, not a totemic sign of the cross, which stops Klingsor and the flower maidens. When he addresses Kundry, it is with sudden, overwhelming sweetness. Finally and for the first time he is looking at her as another individual, and he knows she will want to find him.