Enflammons son courroux: Les vêpres siciliennes in Frankfurt

Repression and resistance. Photo (c) Opera Frankfurt/Thilo Beu

The scenario of Verdi's Vêpres siciliennes, with pervasive corruption and radical resistance (and doubts about what forms resistance should take) is only nominally medieval; Verdi moved the action from the 16th century to the 13th in order that the opera might safely serve as a political rallying cry in his own day, and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have certainly offered all too many instances of similar oppression and violence. The music is itself permeated by this violence. Although written in the Meyerbeerian tradition of grand opera, the unsettled, unsettling orchestration and structure are unmistakably Verdi's own. The opening chords foretell no good; in this production, a gunshot proceeds them, explaining the foreboding. This deed is done in silence and darkness; but as it turns out, it is not (only) a characteristic abuse of power. When the thugs have gone, men and women of all ages materialize, at first singly and then in greater numbers, to furtively lay candles and flowers at the site of the murder. The photograph pinned above these tributes is that of Helene's brother, the murdered Frederic. (I give the French names, as Die Sizilianische Vesper was here given in its original language.) The production of Jens-Daniel Herzog for Oper Frankfurt sets the narrative amid Germany's own political upheavals of the 1960s and 70s; the turning points of the action, like the psychological states of the characters, are always attuned to what's going on in the orchestra. I personally found that Herzog's production made me more alert to the tensions among the revolutionaries, and to the musical representations thereof, than I'd been in previously listening to the piece. The political background never becomes more clearly defined than it is by Verdi and Scribe, but thanks to strong ensemble work and good relations between stage and pit, the emotional and psychological narratives of the piece were vividly realized.

Mefistofele: All'erta, è la battaglia incerta

Mefistofele and the empty world.
Photo (c) Staatstheater Mainz/Martina Pipprich

Arrigo Boito's under-performed Mefistofele seems to be enjoying a revival of sorts (there's a run in San Francisco and an upcoming concert performance at Carnegie Hall.) It also served as the stirring season opener of the Staatstheater Mainz, where I've just basked in its gloriously ambitious romanticism. Mainz boasts a strong cast, and a production where unexpected coups de theatre build emotional as well as dramatic suspense. More production photos can be found here, but they convey only a fraction of what actually happens on stage. The singers worked well together, as well as exhibiting individual commitment, and the cumulative effect was quite impressive. Boito's Gesamtkunstwerk is filled with the deliberately anarchic, the musically unexpected; that it all adds up to an intriguing, exciting whole is not the least of its surprises.

Sunday Special: September Schedule

Well, Gentle Readers, I've survived an international move, mostly gotten over jet lag, and sort of figured out the local public transit system. This means, of course, that it's time to figure out the local opera schedule. Fortunately, the Staatstheater Mainz has day-of half price tickets for all students. They also have those sleek, libretto-quoting postcards you see on the left. I have to say I prefer them to the "Look at this exotic thing!" advertising I've received from opera companies in the past (ahem.) Mefistofele and Macbeth are on the program for this month, so lots of exciting orchestration is hopefully in my future. The orchestra itself has an interestingly varied program, ranging from Buxtehude to Cage and beyond, so I may explore their offerings as well.

Gross Glück und Heil lacht nun dem Rhein: Scheduling

Gentle Readers, I thank you for your forbearance during a summer of irregular and infrequent blogging. I have been rusticated for the past months, far (alas) from live opera. Withdrawal symptoms have definitely set in. But now, the end of this hiatus is in sight! Zerbinetta over at Likely Impossibilities has a handy summary of what there is to look forward to at the Met. I, meanwhile, will be in Europe! Not only will I be in Europe, I will be in Germany, land of delicious bread, of infinite Wurst, and of lots and lots of opera! I'm feeling very, very fortunate to have my work take me to a country with over fifty opera houses, and looking forward to getting to see new singers, new houses, and new productions.

Great Voices Sing John Denver

Placido Domingo & John Denver, ca. 1980

I associate John Denver with road trips: rolled down windows, long ribbons of asphalt, and a carful of untrained singers happily caroling "Take me home, country roads." I think of his singing as characterized by a simplicity redeeming a sentimentality that might otherwise seem oppressively earnest. The project of having opera singers interpret these open-air ballads was one I viewed with intense if somewhat skeptical curiosity. The undertaking was the brainchild of Denver's arrangers, and facilitated by the considerable influence of Placido Domingo (more details here.) I couldn't resist the opportunity to review the resulting album, especially since I'm currently staying with my mother, whose adolescence coincided with Denver's heyday, and who therefore led Denver sing-alongs on road trips. Her enthusiasm for the project was great; and so I undertook my critical listening with her helpfully at hand as a one-woman control group for my bias towards loved singers and potential indifference to Denver's lyrics. The album's attempt to find a meeting ground for Denver's music and operatic voices met with decidedly mixed results. Too many of the arrangements were dominated by sentimental strings wallowing in the predictable harmonies common to many classical crossover or pseudo-classical albums. I thought that allowing the participating artists to cross further over into Denver's musical language--or, indeed, simply a greater variety in the arrangements--would have been, on the whole, more felicitous. On the whole, I'm inclined to regard the disc more as a curious conversation piece than anything else, but my mother enjoyed listening to it enormously (including the heckling of misfires), leading me to the conclusion that it may be more successful with John Denver fans than diehard opera lovers, for situations where those two categories don't overlap.

Owen Wingrave: You forget, you are the enemy too

Finley and Savidge: debating duty

Owen Wingrave may suffer by comparison with Britten's other operas, but it's still, to my mind, a stimulating piece, with exciting vocal writing, some specially beautiful music for its baritone hero, and a drama both moody and poignant. The novella by Henry James is largely expository in its treatment of a warlike family's conflict with last scion, as he turns his back on battlefields. James speaks of their old house as imbued with a "sense of bereavement and mourning and memory, of names never mentioned of the far-away plaint of widows and the echoes of battles and bad news. It was all military indeed, and Mr Coyle was made to shudder a little at the profession of which he helped to open the door to harmless young men." Wingrave is "almost cursed" with a sense of proportion more accurate than his family's.

The Arthaus DVD released earlier this year is of a 2001 for-television production: strangely, it seemed not quite formatted for square home screens. (More background on the 1971 work may be found here; original broadcast here.) Over forty years after the work's premiere, the idea of writing an opera for television still seems rather like a media experiment which might be productively repeated. The disc is mostly frill-less (and though there were credits for titles designers, I couldn't see that subtitling was an option) but it does include an hour-long documentary. I know comparatively little about Britten's biography, so enjoyed it thoroughly and without the ability to assess what elisions or overbold interpretative strokes may have undermined its accuracy or orthodoxy. Perhaps it was the fault of the screen I watched it on that no names for the interviewees appeared. It incorporates delightful footage, from rehearsals (numerous) to home footage of recorder-playing and playing with dogs in the backyard. It makes no mention of Owen Wingrave itself, however, despite the fact that the opera, to a libretto by Myfanwy Piper, focuses the narrative on the problem of the individual against and within society (unsurprising to those who know, or even know of Peter Grimes.)

U-Carmen: Bizet in South Africa

The vibrant, award-winning film U-Carmen eKhayelitsha was released in 2005, but it was a recent and welcome discovery to me (through Netflix's streaming services, of all things.) Directed by Mark Dornford-May, the film is adapted (or, better, transladapted) from Bizet's Carmen, reconfiguring the drama and the music to provide, as Bizet did, a gripping tale that balances between exoticism and realism, mixing gritty quotidian detail with gestures of startling romanticism. The fateful events play out in a suburb of Cape Town, where Carmen enjoys solidarity with the community of cigarette-rollers and marketplace traders, where she can easily disappear in dirt lanes between tin-sided houses to escape the pursuit of the urban police. The setting of urban and suburban South Africa in the late twentieth century is given far more specificity than Bizet's Seville was. Although occasionally self-conscious and semi-guilty about my fascination with the camera's dwelling on unfamiliar landscapes--long stretches of highway through near-desert, bright fabrics on laundry lines--I enjoyed frankly the sensitive delineation of social and religious dynamics in the community where the narrative unfolds.