Figaro qua, Figaro là…

•Charles Morey: Figaro.   adapted from Le mariage de Figaro,   by Pierre de Beaumarchais.   Directed by Michael Michetti.   Seen at A Noise Within, Pasadena, California,   10 April 2015 •Mozart and da Ponte: Le nozze di Figaro.   Conducted by James Conlon; directed by Ian Judge.   Seen at Los Angeles Opera, 9 April 2015

Eastside Road, April 13, 2015—

LAST WEEK ENDED in a flurry of theater: two versions of the great Marriage of Figaro; a production of Julius Caesar; a production of The Threepenny Opera. Let's begin with Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, 1732-1799, whose article in Wikipedia introduces him as "a French playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, horticulturalist, arms dealer, satirist, financier, and revolutionary (both French and American)." I take the following three paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry:

Born simply Pierre-Augustin Caron, the son of a watchmaker from the provinces who had apparently settled in Paris, he took early to music, but was apprenticed as a matter of course to his father. At twenty-one he invented a refinement of the escapement mechanism which greatly improved the reliability and lessened the size of watches, which brought him to the notice of the king. Two years later he married a widow with money and land, and took the name "Beaumarchais," but she died with a year, and he fell into debt.

His fortunes turned quickly, though, and he became music=teacher to the four daughters of Louis XV. (He taught them harp.) He met an older entrepreneur, Joseph Paris Duverney, who helped him in a number of business ventures, by which he became rich and gained further access to French nobility.

In 1764 Beaumarchais spent ten months in Madrid, helping a sister who had married there. His bid for consulship to Spain was rejected, and he turned increasingly to business ventures while beginning to experiment with writing plays; his first drama, Eugénie, premiered at the Comédie Française in 1767.

Beaumarchais is best known nowadays, and especially outside of France, through the first two plays of his trilogy centered on recurring characters at court of Count Almaviva, grand corrégidor of Andalusia: Le Barbier de Séville, premiered in 1775; Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), and La Mère coupable (1792).

Anyone who knows The Barber of Seville (Rossini and Sterbini) and The Marriage of Figaro (Mozart and da Ponte), the great operatic settings of the first two plays, will recognize autobiographical elements in the plots. Music teacher to nobility; factotum from the lower orders; lawsuits (Beaumarchais was engaged in several); marriages (ditto)… it has even been suggested that Figaro's name is a thin disguise of the playwright's, who was fils Caron, son of Caron.

Figaro is of course a memorable character, thanks primarily to Lorenzo da Ponte's adaptation of the second play. Da Ponte himself was a Beaumarchais-like character; the decade 1776-1786 was a heady time; the intersection of literature, populism, entrepreneurship, greatly increased travel and the sophistication that naturally follows, and of course the age of revolution all participate in the brilliance and edginess of Figaro's character. (And yet my first memory of Figaro is of the black cat hungrily gazing at the goldfish Cleo in the 1940 Disney adaptation of Pinocchio.)

ALL THAT SAID, what was to be learned from last week's exposure to The Marriage of Figaro in both its original theatrical form and da Ponte and Mozart's operatic setting? First, of course, the power of music (and particularly of Mozart's); second, the brilliance of da Ponte's libretto; but a close third, the surprising depth and richness of the play. A quick disclaimer: I don't know the original; I've never seen the play before in any language, and I haven't read the original. (Yet: the entire text is readily available at Wikisource.)

As adapted by Charles Morey and directed, wonderfully, by Michael Michetti, Figaro is completely within the tradition ranging from Commedia dell'arte through 19th-century French farce to the Marx Brothers and even, as the actors pointed out in a post-performance talkback with the audience, to such standard television fare as Seinfeld. I suspect Morey studied da Ponte carefully and did a similar job of streamlining. A couple of minor characters have been dropped (Grippe-soleil, a young shepherd; Pédrille, a message-boy to the count; and with them, probably a sub-plot or two, not to be missed in this already complicated comedy.

Now that I look at the pivotal resolution, which Mozart and da Ponte render so magnificent — the Count's plea for perdono, Contessa — I wonder at the changes Beaumarchais may have made in the original text to get it past Louis XV, who at first banned its public performance. The plot hinges on unmasking the Count's sexual immorality and exploitation; he finally has to beg forgiveness of the Countess, who of course grants it. Clearly a sitting king will not countenance such a plot, and in the text as we have it the moment is underplayed. Two years after the Paris premiere, da Ponte and Mozart elevate that moment to something exalted, transcendent. Even so, the play is clearly political, subversive, revolutionary.

Michetti's direction and the Noise Within cast conveyed all the urgency, the sharp political satire, and the philosophical complexity of the play in a fast, sometimes zany, often touching performance. In the title role, Jeremy Guskin was perfectly brilliant, easily switching from broad comedy to darker, intelligent brooding — the great monologue in Act Five, only a little revised in Morey's adaptation, was marvelous. Angela Sauer's Suzanne was up to that challenge; and if Count Almaviva is costumed ludicrously and made foolish and foppish, Andrew Ross Wynn made the concept work. Elyse Mirto was an affecting Countess, and Will Bradley was utterly persuasive as Cherubin in spite of his tall, lean stature. The rest of the cast were remarkably even, flexible, and resourceful: every nuance of the play seemed perfectly interpreted; there was never a slow moment; even the complex second-act ensemble, with characters hiding in closets and jumping out of windows, worked like, well, clockwork. The production continues in repertory through May 10, 2015, and it should certainly not be missed.

Alas, the same could not be said of Los Angeles Opera's production, or its young cast's performance, of the opera. Seen from too far away, in too big an opera house, in a musical performance that was too weighty and strove too earnestly for greatness, this Nozze di Figaro was laborious. There were some pretty voices and some successful portrayals, but I left with the feeling I'd seen an awkward attempt by a provincial company.

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•William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar.   Directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott •Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera.   Directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott   Both seen at A Noise Within, Pasadena, California,   11 April 2015

FOR YEARS NOW we have subscribed to the plays performed by A Noise Within, the repertory theater company based formerly in Glendale and now in its own building in Pasadena. Founded by actors who had been with ACT in San Francisco, the company mounts seven productions each year: three plays in the fall, three in the spring, and a Christmas special.

The repertory has always included Shakespeare, usually two plays each season, set next to American classics by such playwrights as William Inge and Tennessee Williams, frequent trips into the French repertory, and occasional looks at the classic avant-garde (Ionesco; Beckett). The schedule works out in such a way that we can nearly always see all three plays of each half-season within three or four days, making it a convenient run-out from home. Every year we make this trip twice, just as every year we travel once or twice to Ashland for performances by the much wealthier Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I won't engage in comparisons here.

This year's Noise Within season had as its theme "Revolution": last November we saw three plays revolutionary in their time for style: Shakespeare'sThe Tempest , Oscar Wilde'sThe Importance of Being Earnest , and August Strindberg's The Dance of Death. Last week's plays were not only revolutionary in the style of their concept and expression, they were in fact about revolution. In addition to Figaro they were Julius Caesar and The Threepenny Opera , both shows directed by the same team and performed in the same stage design — and seen, as it turned out, on the same day.

This is the kind of intellectual and theatrical exercise A Noise Within often attempts, nearly as often successfully. The pairing of these two very different vehicles underscored profundities which are latent in the scripts and which should be obvious to any reader or onlooker, whatever the success of the production; in this event, the result was really quite powerful, really moving. I thought Threepenny suffered a bit from slow tempi, which tended to hamper the drive and bite of the play; but that flaw could be forgiven in the face of the detail, the passion, and the total authenticity of the performances.

Both plays were staged in a relatively unspecified early-twentieth-century setting, the stage occupied by stark industrial scaffolding. Both brought the audience into the piece: in Julius Caesar one felt included within the Roman rabble irresolute between Caesar's attackers and his defenders; in Threepenny one was directly confronted by the cast, intent on alienating its audience with fine Brechtian nastiness.

I thought it appropriate that we were seeing these productions in the week of Judith Malina's death — The Living Theatre, which she and Julian Beck co-founded in the 1950s to such and artistic triumph and controversy, has surely influenced these directors in these productions; and Malina would have appreciated the result, I think, though perhaps with a sardonic observation that it was high time the commercial theater fall into line.

That Living Theatre connection came to me at the beginning of The Threepenny Opera, which began indistinctly, with the cast roaming through the audience, moodily repeating isolated lines of dialogue from various moments in the play. We were eased into the play, you might say, albeit in quite an uneasy manner; there was a deliciously menacing quality to the moment, and though this was the evening performance that moment instantly threw the afternoon's Julius Caesar into yet another layer of ironic meaning.

A Noise Within has a fine website from which you'll get notes on the productions and cast lists; I won't attempt a detailed review here. I do have to mention, though, the strong Brutus of Robertson Dean; the eloquent Mark Antony of Rafael Goldstein; the engaging, complex clarity of Freddy Douglas's Cassius; which requires that I also mention Patrick O'Connell's successfully ambivalent, tragically aging Caesar. Other roles were as well conceived and performed.

In Threepenny we were impressed, my companion and I, by the quality of the singing. As Polly Peachum and Lucy Brown, Marisa Duchowny and Maegan McConnell had clear, accurate, expressive, well-focussed soprano voices; Andrew Ableson was a pleasantly reedy, sardonic, nasty Mâcheath; Stasha Surdyke captured Jenny Diver's complexity well. Geoff Elliott makes an all too credible Peachum, and Deborah Strang was quite marvelous as his Mrs., drawing the first row of the audience into the Ballad of Sexual Dependency with sarcasm and good humor that somehow coexist.

Speaking of that Ballad, though, reminds me that it was hard to get used to this translation, by Michael Feingold. It works, but seems a little stiff. I was steeped in Eric Bentley's translation, back in the middle 1950s; it seemed to me to have bite and efficiency lacking here — Bentley's "First feed the belly, then feed the mind" (as I recall it) works better than Feingold's "First comes the feeding, then the moral code." I don't know the original text; perhaps Bentley sacrificed literal accuracy to theatrical effect — but isn't that what Brecht and Weill were after?

Julius Caesar continues in repertory through May 8, 2015; The Threepenny Opera through May 9.
Details online at A Noise Within.

Opera: Zelmira; Contes d'Hoffmann

Eastside Road, February 18, 2015—

WE SAW A PERFORMANCE of Rossini's fine opera Zelmira in Berkeley last night, a staged production by Edge Opera, as I believe the former Berkeley Opera is now known, in a series they call "Opera Medium-Rare": workshop performances, sung from the printed music, unstaged, with reduced accompaniment. The idea seems to have grown out of a salon reading of — I don't know which opera; something some singers wanted to get to know, but which would have had little or no production history, at least locally.

Case in point: this mature Rossini score, premiered in Naples at the San Carlo in 1822, repeated to good reviews in Vienna, then throughout Italy; performed in London in 1824; then apparently dropped from the repertory, with few productions (and fewer staged!) until quite recently — and none in this country, except one New Orleans performance "around 1835" according to Wikipedia.

Two acts; florid coloratura writing, bel canto in its purist form, somewhat foretelling Semiramide, ludicrous plot, extraordinarily demanding tenor role and quite demanding soprano, contralto, second tenor, and bass roles. You can see why it would be a difficult opera to make convincing, especially in a big American opera house.

Well: we heard it in Berkeley's Freight & Salvage, essentially a small theater with an attached coffeehouse-bar, with decent acoustics, seating perhaps 500 people comfortably enough. In place of Rossini's orchestra — beautifully scored, by the way, according to comments I've read online — the accompaniment was provided by the musical director, Alexander Katsman, and the piano, with three colleagues playing violin, cello, and flute. (Why flute? Why not clarinet? Don't know.)

The vocal performances were adequate, even more than adequate, at one end of the scale; nearly breathtakingly impressive in tonal beauty and technical facility at the other. Shawnette Sulker has a sweet, resonant, clear high soprano, ranging up at least to an "E" I believe in this score, capable of dying away in a glorious pianissimo anywhere in the register, yet full of presence at any dynamic level, with no register break that I noticed — and it doesn't hurt that she is beautiful to see and graceful in her movement and expression.

As her confidante Emma Nikola Printz found a true contralto voice in her lowest range and blossomed clearly and fully in a higher mezzo-soprano area, matching and complementing Sulker's singing with equal beauty and presence, and negotiating Rossini's fioratura with admirable precision.

Even more amazing: Brian Yeakley, a true coloratura tenor di forza whose voice presses out high "C"s and higher, I believe, with little strain and considerable beauty; whose flexibility and accuracy were triumphal, and whose physical presence is engaging and sympathetic.

Michael Belle was nearly his match though with an appropriately darker tenor voice as the villainous Antenore. Paul Thompson, bass, was adequate in the difficult role of the aged king Polidoro; and baritone Jordan Eldredge was sympathetic as Antenore's lieutenant Leucippo.

We went to the opera for the general policy that one shouldn't miss one never before heard, but for another reason as well: our somehow-sister-in-law Želmira Ž. was interested in seeing it, with her husband M. They are the Czech-born parents of our son-in-law Pavel: I don't know how much opera they attend, but they agreed to join us at this one, and they seemed as diverted as we were.

THE OPERA ITSELF sent me to the aforementioned Wikipedia, where I learn tha Rossini's librettist, Andrea Leone Tottola, based his work on a play greatly popular in France in the late 18th century: Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy's Zelmire (1762). The plot concerns a princess who hides her aging father, King of Lesbos, from the invading usurper Azor, who is himself killed (before even appearing onstage!) by his own usurper Amenore (Azor's general), but who is ultimately saved by her husband Ilo, prince of Troy. De Belloy was a monarchist, according to French Wikipedia, who believed that "the alliance between the sovereign and his people held the key to a nation's force"; and he was attacked by Diderot (and by Voltaire, who'd begun by approving his plays).

At the heart of the dramatic theater, including of course music theater, is its function as a voice of and for the collective people: even as highly evolved a form as bel canto opera inherits this ultimate purpose. One enjoys a performance like last night's Zelmira for the beauty and technique of its voices, and the skill and imaginativeness of its musical writing; but I find the experience even more compelling for the principles and values lying behind and perhaps above its entertainment value: the abstract symmetry and resonance of the plot, at once absurd and haunting.

Sixty years lay between the premiere of de Belloy's play to that of Rossini's opera. That period — as long as the American epoch spanning from the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center — were of course epochal in the transformation of concepts of family, tribe, and nation; parallel one might say to the transformation in the arts from the late Baroque through Classicism to the beginning of Romanticism. Throughout the period, theater, including opera, represented and expressed a nexus of ideas, social and personal, practical and ethical, available to urban citizens of various classes; and it developed and responded in its various ways, often enough periphrastically to avoid censorship. It's a fascinating period, one with considerable in common with our own.

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A FEW DAYS AGO we saw the Metropolitan Opera performance of Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann as one of their "live broadcasts" into a local movie theater. I've noted my reservations about such productions here before: the disorientation of close-ups and changing visual (and aural!) perspectives when watching an in-the-theater production through the eyes (and ears!) of roving mechanical observers, as they're directed and chosen from by an unseen director/editor somewhere, who inserts a new and often intrusive personality into an art form already greatly impacted by its essentially committee-based creation.

That said, this was a glorious Hoffmann. It is of course a masterpiece, one of the truly great and significant works of art ranging from Orfeo through the Mozart-da Ponte operas to, for my money, Four Saints in Three Acts and Einstein on the Beach. It's amazing, I think, that this triumphant article of Romantic opera, a nearly perfect embodiment of German Romanticism, should have been the product of a classically educated Mozart-loving German fabulist and a Parisian Jew better known for his contributions to musical comedy. Even more amazing is its prescience, looking forward to Freud and the Surrealists, who themselves linked the internalizing, highly personalized contemplations of Novalis and Nerval, let's say, to the dreams of the Age of Aquarius.

For me the perfect visualization of Hoffmann will always be the film — English; 1952? — by the team that had produced Brian Easdale's The Red Shoes. The edition used in that film was cut and otherwise misguided, I'm sure: but (at least in my memory, which is now probably sixty years distant) it captured the hauntingly present but unreal quality that Hoffmann was expressing, a purely mental state linked to purely sensual stimuli.

The director of the Met production — I don't have the program at hand; you'll have to look up all the credits — was, I think, unduly chained to Hollywood Surrealism. Writhing faux-nude bodies and oddly emblematic eyeballs distracted from the content of Offenbach's realization, recalling Satie's objection that the stage trees don't really have to speak German in a production of a Wagner opera. (Or however the quote goes. I could look it up; I won't.)

But the edition used was the best I've encountered, restoring the impetus of the Muse to the prologue and epilogue, elevating Niklaus (brilliantly sung, spoken, and acted) to a major role, and fusing the scraps and extended successes of the score as poor Offenbach left it at his death into a major, rich, fully achieved work of art. The tenor singing Hoffmann was remarkably engaging and subtle. The three sopranos were persuasive. If the villainous bass-baritone was less than superb, that was due as much to clearly transient vocal problems as to the rather pedestrian aspect of the role he was apparently directed to present.

Minor roles were superb; ditto the chorus; and the musical direction was very good indeed. We were glad to have seen this.

Einstein on the Beach

VERY SPECIAL NEWS:

The Chatelet production of the Wilson-Glass opera Einstein on the Beach can be seen in its entirety — four and a half hours — streaming on line:



Many thanks to Daniel Wolf for bringing this to my attention.

Einstein, again

Eastside Road, October 14, 2013—

WHY WOULD ANYONE in his right mind spend hundreds of dollars and travel thousand of miles to see Einstein on the Beach four times in eighteen months — unless it were one of the great moments in the century of art from, let's say Symbolism to Postmodernism?

So there we were again, two nights ago, in center seats in the fourth row of the balcony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles's Music Center, sitting among an enthusiastic and attentive audience for the most part. (I wasn't able to see how the higher-priced section downstairs looked: I'm told there were empty seats.)

We saw the premiere (not counting an earlier preview) of the current traveling production of the Robert Wilson-Philip Glass-Lucinda Childs opera in Montpellier in March 2012; I wrote about that here and here. A year ago we saw it in Berkeley, as I mentioned here.

Then in January of this year we flew to Amsterdam, as I mentioned here. At the time we'd planned that trip, the Amsterdam performances were thought to be the final performances on the tour, but subsequent bookings were signed for Hong Kong, Melbourne, and this month's in Los Angeles. Perhaps the tour will go on forever: I almost hope so.

In each of the last three dates we've made with Einstein we've introduced friends and/or family to the opera, making it a double-date of sorts. I feel it almost an obligation to introduce others to this event, for a number of reasons, all of which I've already written about, over and over. I think I finally said it best in the most recent post, after the Amsterdam performance, when I tried to deal with

the question "Well, what is the opera about? In a nutshell, it's about the Twentieth Century, the historical process from steam trains like those Einstein rode in his youth, when he profited from the experience to analogize his theories on the relativity of time for popular understanding, to the age of the space ship.

But I almost completely gave up on commenting on the main thing the opera is about, which is Theater. As the ancient Greek plays are about cosmic things, examining human dilemmas in cosmic contexts, so are Robert Wilson's. The opera is about Theater, and Time; and it uses theatrical time, and plenty of it — over four hours, in which the audience is free to roam if necessary — to examine those two notions.

Having already written so much on the opera itself, I'll just comment on a few impressions from Saturday night's viewing. The Los Angeles installation of this traveling production seemed faster to me, though my companion assures me the running time was almost exactly what it's been before. Time seemed to pass more quickly: the opera seemed, well, defter. The sound seemed richer, too. The wonderful saxophone solo under Act IV scene 1, the "Building" scene, was counterpointed with percussion I'd not noticed earlier, and with a flute more prominent than I'd remembered.

Of course one of the things we'd already noticed in these repeated participations at Einstein is precisely that: the changing impressions the production makes as one gains familiarity with it. It's so rich and complex that many events or moments or sounds become evident, on repeated viewing/hearing, that were very likely there all along, and simply sidelined, as it were, by one's attention having been fixed elsewhere. That, of course, is one of the things the opera is "about."

Another thing about the Los Angeles production: the lighting seemed subtler, richer (that word again), even more effective. There were more colors, and many of them were more delicate. The band of light ending Act III scene one — the second of the two extended dance scenes — was particularly affecting, bringing James Turrell to mind — a particularly appropriate quality in Los Angeles.

Even the dramatic content of the show seemed affected by the geographical culture of its locaton. The second trial scene, which seemed so Kafkaesque in Amsterdam, passed by almost as entertainment in Los Angeles. So, too, the first trial scene, with its dialect spoof of feminism, borrowed the movie-and-TV context to become less potentially objectionable, more simply diverting.

I've reproduced here — a Los Angeles Opera spokeswoman invited me to lift it from their website — Wilson's drawing which serves as a non-verbal aide-memoire to the opera's structure. It repays attention, I think, as the structure is fascinating: three scenes (Train, Trial, Space Machine) repeated across four acts which are separated by "knee play" entr'actes. So the opera presents the idea of Relativity (encapsuled in the famous train analogy, showing that time passes differently for the passenger on a train than for a stationary observer of the train); then the effects or the expressions of relativistic concepts on social or political situations which imperfectly confront them; then the aspirations of 20th-century humanity to harness those concepts to technology which might lead them out of the century and its oppressions.


Plenty to think about here. It would be so interesting to spend a weekend in the country with the friends and family we've introduced to Einstein, talking about it. That, I think, would be the best possible form of criticism: conversation in repose, following experience in intensity.

Ainadamar revisited

OSVALDO GOLIJOV'S OPERA AINADAMAR, a public rehearsal of which I wrote about here last week, turns out, on seeing it staged yesterday at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center, to be a study in temporizing; and it's tempting to temporize in discussing it further. As I wrote last week, the score is full of beauty, and hearing the composer's often striking orchestration added a huge dimension to the already often compelling sounds of the rehearsal piano.

The vocal writing is effective, idiomatic, gratifying; and I was particularly struck by Golijov's investigation of tessitura: he explores every available area of his performers' pitch ranges, for musical, expessive, and dramatic purpose, and in virtually every case these performers responded willingly and — again; sorry to turn so often to the word — beautifully.

Garcia Lorca in 1914

The dramatic premise of the opera is interesting and relevant, hinging on the 1936 execution of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca by Nationalist forces shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Lorca was a Surrealist poet, gay, and an outspoken supporter of the Popular Front, as well as the brother-in-law of the leftist mayor of Granada: any of these might have put him on the wrong side of the Nationalist firing squad. His body has never been found, and details of the execution are uncertain; the event has attained mythic proportion.

This makes it a perfect subject for opera, of course; and Golijov — and his librettist, David Henry Hwang — take myth further by framing it within two time perspectives. The first of its three "images" introduces the actress Margarita Xirgu, who premiered the title role in Lorca's early (1925) play Mariana Pineda, an early 19th-century Andalucian heroine executed for refusing to betray rebels against tyrannical forces in Granada.

In this first scene Margarita, in the last month of her long life (April 1969), reflects on her relationship with Garcia Lorca, their meeting in a Madrid bar, and the content of the play Mariana Pineda, which clearly foreshadowed the curve of Lorca's own life. Composer and librettist frame this scene further, casting it as a duet for Margarita (soprano, written for Dawn Upshaw, compellingly taken yesterday by Marnie Breckenridge) and her favored student Nuria (high soprano, well sung by Maya Kherani).

Marnie Breckenridge as Margarita Xirgu; Lisa Chavez as Lorca photo: Steve DiBartolomeo

The second scene or "image" in this one-act opera introduces Lorca himself, cast as a trouser-role for mezzosoprano and memorably performed yesterday by Lisa Chavez — effectively costumed and made up, by the way, as comparison of the two photos here indicates*. In this scene Margarita, whose theater company is about to leave for a tour to Cuba, tries unsuccessfuly to persuade Lorca to come with her. He refuses, is arrested, arraigned with two other prisoners (a fearful teacher, a rebellious bullfighter), and led offstage for the execution.

The third scene returns to Margarita, dying, unable to go onstage in her role of Mariana Pineda, passing on her example, her charge, to her student Nuria.

Such is the dramatic structure of the opera, which is in fact more a scenic cantata. Opera Parallèle did what it could to bring visual interest to the work. Each scene was introduced with Flamenco-inflected dance performed by five women led by La Tania. Like them, the large chorus of girls and women represented The People, and were effectively directed by Brian Staufenbiel, who also found dramatic ways of negotiating the arrest and arraignment. Christine Crook's costumes were outstanding, I thought, and Jeanna Parham's wigs and makeup, as already noted, contributed to the veracity of the production.

But the libretto and the score resist the stage. Golijov's music, however beautiful and resourceful in its detail, depends too much on drones and drumming, too little on development or variation. The most successful moments are the public ones — Flamenco tenor Jesus Montoya's keening as the arresting officer Ramón Ruiz Alonso; bass John Bischoff's sympathetic portrayal of the officer-priest sent to confess the prisoners; above all, Lisa Chavez's expostulations as the fiercely patriotic Lorca.

The less successful moments were the private ones — to the cost of the excellent Marnie Breckenridge. Her character is given essentially a series of laments, at the end even recalling Purcell's Dido; and laments can only go on so long, and so often, before they begin to exhaust an audience's attentiveness.

Staufenbiehl tried to offset this problem with visual and aural imagery: prerecorded sounds of hoofbeats and dripping water refer to images in Lorca's poems, to Spanish machismo, to the "Fountain of Tears" where Lorca is said to have been shot, and whose name, curiously in Arabic translation, is the title of the opera. (Arabic influences the score, too, in its drumming patterns and the sinous near-pitch vocalization against drones.)

Matthew Antaky was the scenic and lighting designer: he provided a double stage, one above the other, to clarify the distinction of the public and the private moments I've alluded to; and to nestle within a larger frame, the entire proscenium, on which projections by the video artist Austin Forbord attempted a contextualization: film imagery from the Spanish Civil War; repeated sightings of the statue of Mariana Pineda which stands in Granada, and by which Lorca claims, in this opera, to have been obsessed and inspired in his childhood, foretelling the events of his life and times.

I'm afraid the result of all this, in spite of brilliant performances by the singers and by the conductor Nicole Paiement, is to suggest the difficulty, impossibility even, of turning a complex, detailed, extensive, essentially public subject into an effective evening in the theater. The theater has been the place for public contemplation of epochal moments since ancient Greek tragedy, of course, and the responsibility of theater to public understanding of public events has continued down through Shakespeare, the realist theater of Ibsen, and the provocative social-awareness theater of Lorca. It has been a major thread in the history of opera from Verdi (and before him Auber!) to John Adams.

But the last three operas I've seen — Einstein on the Beach, The Nose, and now Ainadamar — have revealed the very present problem of bringing intellectual complexity and scope to theatrically persuasive production. Einstein works, because the production that's been touring has had a chance to be perfected in its integration of sound, scene, lighting, music, and performance. Shostakovich's Nose foundered, in my view, for its director's shrinking from the opera's essential anger and bitterness. And this Ainadamar, while earnest, well-intentioned, and beautifully performed, didn't quite overcome the difficulties inherent in its author's approach to their subject.

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I saw Ainadamar from a very nice seat on the aisle, provided by Opera Parallèle's publicity office. I'm told the Federal Trade Commission requires us bloggers to reveal this sort of "gift," in theory in order to reveal possible sources of conflict of interest.

The issue of free tickets for reviewers is an interesting one. In my years as a music and art critic for the Oakland Tribune I never paid for a ticket, and rarely did the newspaper either. While it's true that a few journals, with deep pockets, have made it a point to pay for their writers' tickets, critical discussion being considered a necessity by the organizations that put on public performances, they have traditionally provided free admission to writers.

So too do publishers send free copies of books to reviewers, and other institutions, film companies for example, offer travel and entertainment. My first trip to Europe was paid for by a consortium of an airline, a national travel office, and a foreign governmental group. Soon after that trip, in 1973, the Tribune adopted a policy of refusing such junkets.

I don't want to resume the career of critic. For one thing, no one's going to pay me to write criticism; for another, I don't like the responsibility it entails. I will therefore rarely accept free tickets to events in the future, as I have rarely until now. This presents a personal problem, of course, because these events are expensive. I bought my tickets to Einstein on the Beach, three times in the last twelve months; and to Nose, as I buy the books I occasionally write about here, and the meals I describe over at Eating Every Day.

Lewis Hyde wrote an important book — The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World — in which he discusses, as Google Books puts it, "the argument that a work of art is essentially a gift and not a commodity." I can't whole-heartedly recommend the book; I find its second half, a discussion of Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman, both tedious and somehow distasteful. But the first half is brilliant.

Hyde outlines three types of economy: the profit-based economy we all live within, in which some value is subtracted from any commodity and kept as profit by everyone trading it; the barter-based economy in which commodities are exchanged in a zero-sum system; and a gift-based economy in which value is actually added to any commodity as it is handed on by one person or organization to another.

Where has there ever been a gift-based economy? Well, among certain "primitive" societies, Hyde points out, like that of native Americans in the northwest, until the custom led to their exploitation by newly arrived Europeans. But also among scientists, whose journal articles grow in value as they are published, reviewed, and re-framed.

And among the artistic community, which freely takes existing work, changes it, adds to it, and selflessly hands it on. This I think is what true criticism does too, and nowhere more than on the Internet, where most of us do considerable work for no compensation whatsoever. Of course our work may not deserve compensation: but do not suspect us of corruption. My seat on the aisle, and the one next to it for my patient companion; even the home-made cookies sweetly offered with my press packet, have not corrupted me. Not yet.



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*Also indicated: the influence of Wikipedia, whose article on Garcia Lorca is the source of the historical photo; and whose articles on other subjects linked in the above comments inform both this and other reviews of Ainadamar. A contemplation of the ubiquity of Wikipedia references, and their influence on journalism, would be worth exploring.

Ainadamar

Jesus Montoya and Nicole Paiement in rehearsal

AT ITS BEST, theater is invigorating, marvelous, and meaningful for its negotiation of individuals, cooperation, and context; and rehearsal can be its most telling moment. In rehearsal you find extreme individual concentration, commonality of purpose, gradations of authority, focus on intent and the inflections of accident and spontaneity. Theater is life; rehearsal is — again, at its best — life most fully lived.

There are few experiences as gripping. Last Thursday, the day after the twenty-four hours that brought us from Rome to San Francisco, we were sitting in a big, beautiful rehearsal space a few blocks from City Hall. To my right, on the flat floor of what must have been designed a century ago as a ballroom, Keisuke Nakagoshi sat with his back to me at a closed grand piano, the condensed score of an opera on its music rack. Beyond the piano Nicole Paiement sat on a wooden stool behind a music desk, the full score in front of her. A Spanish tenor was keening, Flamenco-style; he had just arrived from Europe.

Everyone was wearing black except for a big contingent of young girls in red tee-shirt uniform standing in block formation, upstage right, patiently waiting. With them, a smaller group of older girls, young women in fact, forming another chorus; and, stage left, three female soloists stood in silent concentration. In twenty minutes or so, after more seemingly random individual rehearsing and coaching, we were joined, Lindsey and I, by other audience members; and at six-thirty a young man who had been conferring with the performers individually and in groups introduced himself and the business at hand to us.

Marnie Breckenridge as Margarita Xirgu; Lisa Chavez as Lorca photo: Steve DiBartolomeo

This was a rehearsal for Ainadamar, an opera by the Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, which Opera Parallèle is presenting late this week at Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. I must admit to not knowing the composer or his work, a testament to my own reclusiveness in the last twenty years or so: Ainadamar has a long and respectable performing history; its recording won two Grammy awards; and Golijov has been commissioned for another opera by the Metropolitan. I found the rehearsal persuasive: this looks like an opera that has to be seen.

The young man was the stage director, Brian Staufenbiel, who quickly described the physical structure of the staging, quite absent in this rehearsal: two horizontal planes or stages, one above the other, configured side by side on a single floor this evening. He introduced the general theme of the opera, the confrontation of the poet Federico García Lorca (and his muse Margarita Xirgu) with the fascist regime during the Spanish Civil War. In performance there will be supertitles in English, but at rehearsal we heard only Spanish, and the boxy acoustics of this ballroom made it difficult to understand more than generally what was actually being said (sung).

But three things were clear. First, the music is both interesting and beautiful, even in piano reduction. (A glance at the score shows brittle, resourceful use of rather a large theater orchestra.) Second, the dramatic content is powerful, its issues of individual and society, and the political and too often violent nature of their intersection, still all too relevant. (The librettist of Ainadamar is David Henry Hwang, well known for M. Butterfly and, more recently, Chinglish; a writer well qualified to portray cultural and political collision.)

Third, this performing group is gifted, disciplined, intense, and completely dedicated to its own role, a role analogous to that emerging from the social forces at the heart of the story of Ainadamar. They negotiate between Golijov's score and the audience, equally responsible to each, clarifying the artistic issues, loyal to the composer, respectful of the audience.

I was very much impressed with the singing we heard. Mezzosoprano Lisa Chavez brings a dark beauty, vocally and physically, to the role of Lorca. The sopranos Marnie Breckenridge and Maya Kherani were similarly even in range, accurate in pitch, and compelling in tonal beauty, and the John Bischoff sounded sympathetic and solid.

Representing the Spanish people, apparently, are Flamenco elements composed into the score and the production. Here I thought Jesus Montoya a particularly expressive and artful tenor: he's sung the role in European productions, and brings authority to this production — while working with an easy and practical cooperation with Staufenbiel's direction and, especially I thought, Paiement's intelligent, sympathetic, and very practical musical authority.

(There will also be three dance interludes, performed by an ensemble led by the Flamenco performer La Tania; they were not included in this rehearsal.)

The choruses work responsively and sound effective. Nakagoshi's contribution, at the rehearsal piano, was a joy to behold, quick and resourceful, always musical, always helpful — and, as seemed to be true of everyone else involved, self-effacing, respectful, cooperative.

I hadn't originally planned on seeing the opera itself, for various personal reasons; but find two reasons to change my mind. One is the interest in thinking of this opera after having recently seen Einstein on the Beach and Shostakovich's opera Nose: like Ainadamar, they are "about" individual and society, politics and history, and are contemporary reflections on significant aspects of the century we have recently lived through.

The other, though, is the beauty of the score, and of the performance this team is bringing to it, judging by the rehearsal we saw a few days ago.*

• Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang: Ainadamar. Opera Parallèle; Nicole Paiement conducting, Brian Staufenbiel directing; with Marnie Breckenridge, Lisa Chavez, Maya Kherani, John Bischoff, Jesus Montoya, Andres Ramirez, Ryan Bradford, members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus and members of the SFCM New Music Ensemble.
At Yerba Buena Center for the Performing Arts’ Lam Research Theater, San Francisco; 8 p.m. February 15 and 16; 2 p.m. February 17.

*A third reason is a new-found interest in this controversial composer, whose (current, February 2013) Wikipedia biography raises some points worth considering for what they reveal of current musical economics, politics, and ethics.

Mozart: La Finta Giardiniera

Mozart: La finta giardiniera (The pretend gardener), K. 196 (1774) Nardo: Gordon Bintner Sandrina: Jennifer Cherest Podestà: Casey Candebat Belfiore: Theo Lebow Ramiro: Sarah Mesko Arminda: Jacqueline Piccolino Serpetta: Rose Sawvel conducted by Gary Thor Wedow directed by Nicholas Muni Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, August 2 and 4, 2012 The Merola Opera Program San Francisco Opera

Eastside Road, August 3, 2012—

NO LOVER OF MOZART can afford to ignore La finta giardiniera, an opera at the exact emergence of the Romantic music drama from its Baroque and classical sources. Mozart was a month shy of his eighteenth birthday when he traveled with his father and sister from Salzburg to Munich in early December, 1774. Someone — we're not sure who — had obtained a commission the previous summer for the opera, which Mozart apparently began working on in September.

The libretto, probably by the Roman poet Giuseppe Petrosellini, was taken verbatim from an earlier opera of the same name, by the now-forgotten Pasquale Anfossi. (It had premiered a year earlier, in December 1773, in Rome.) It's in many ways a stock item, with three couples from three social classes (nobility, courtier, servant) and an aging comic majordomo-type animating a plot given to disguises, mistaken identities, tangled courtships. (One recognizes elements from commedia dell'arte, and prefigurations of Così fan tutte and Le nozze di Figaro.)

A significant aspect of the libretto, though, is its preoccupation with madness. Insanity, both feigned and temporarily real, permeates many arias and ensembles; it's remarked on by the characters; it's even reflected in some of Mozart's orchestration. Irrationality was a frequent subject of attention during the Age of Reason, and while Petrosellini's libretto is pure comedy, and Mozart's setting in his own description pure opera buffa, there's a subtext here that makes me think of, for example, Tom Stoppard theater, where heightened intellection reveals the irrational undertones of otherwise apparently explicable behavior. Let Robert W. Gutman set the scene:

The opening tableau of… La finta giardiniera had already given notice of fatigue with the masquerades and hollow nostalgia of the aristocratic world. The curtain rises upon a seeming Edenic haven of security, a garden in which five protagonists sing together of bucolic contentment. Then, one by one, they reveal their true feelings, dissecting their emotions in a series of short solos telling of hidden sorrow, furious jealousy, and both unrequited and unwelcome love. Having disclosed the pain and eroticism beneath the idyllic surface, they reassume their public postures in a repetition of the beginning ensemble, now revealed to be a fiction… the scene becomes a travesty of the affected and already old-fashioned pastoral opera, a comment upon the nature of so-called reality, and an indication of the growing stress between directness and reserve, between the spontaneous and the formal.

Mozart: a Cultural Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999); pp. 123-4

La finta giardiniera is a portrait of transition: from feudal to republican social orders; from post-Baroque pastoral comedy to the Romantic drama of Mozart and da Ponte; from the symmetries and harmonic simplicity of Classical music to the expressive gestures and tonalities of Romanticism. Little wonder the opera was neglected in its day, disappearing after three performances. Gutman again:

…Wolfgang determined to impress Munich and went astray because at the same time he determined to impress himself no less. In a miscalculation born of divergent desires — on one hand, a desperation to carry the city by storm, on the other, a dizzying hunger to make the most of his freedom from the musical restrictions of Salzburg, so stifling to his inclinations — he fabricated an overambitious score rich in stylistic contrarieties and with finales of a complexity beyond anything a Galuppi, Piccinni, or Gassmann [his rivals] had attempted.

Op. cit., p. 340

Mozart returned to the score five years later, cutting and revising the score to conform to a German translation of the text. It was probably presented once or twice in 1780, and again in 1789, when it was still failed to find favor. "More for the conoisseur who knows how to unravel its refinements than for the dilettante… nearly always difficult… in the highest degree tasteless and tedious", run phrases quoted in Robert Gutman's book.

I've listened to the opera a few times in the recording contained in the Brilliant Classics integral recordings of the Complete Mozart — a box of 170 CDs I wouldn't want to be without. The recording was made live at the Monnaie in Brussels in 1989, and I find it more rewarding than does Robert Levine, for example. I have not studied the score, available online as a free download and (for money) on paper as reprinted by Kalmus: when I get a few days, I will.

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The reason I'm writing about La finta giardiniera this morning is simple: there's one more chance to see and hear this beautiful, complex, rarely performed opera, in a faithful and entertaining production, in San Francisco, where the Merola Opera Program is presenting it, sung in Italian with English supertitles. We heard it last night, and I thought it was superb. The young cast had clearly spent a lot of time preparing their roles, and they sing clearly, musically, with good intonation.

Nicholas Muni's direction seemed both resourceful and uncommonly intelligent, and all seven of the singers can act, facially expressive and gesturally effective. They often have business even when silent; they accomplish this tellingly, filling out their roles without upstaging other characters. Jealousy, despair, tenderness, insanity — all are readily communicated, often with subtlety. There is broad humor, of course — send-ups of stock medical jokes, for example. But nothing is ever uncontrolled; the fun never goes over the top; you can laugh without losing track of more serious (or at least more interesting) subtexts.

Gary Thor Wedow's conducting was energetic yet generous, and he and his orchestra brought out Mozart's rich colors and textures. La finta giardiniera enjoys its own score: in his first aria the Podestà (the comic Don Alfonso-like character presiding over the action) refers to the dulcet flutes and oboes, the somber violas, the violent trumpets and drums: Mozart is pointing up his orchestrational skills here. There are some surprising harmonic transitions in this score: Wedow presented them urgently. Elsewhere he instructed strings to play sul ponticello, underscoring the dramatic tension.

The singers are young, strong, attractive, and nimble. I won't single anyone out: every one of them was utterly persuasive in the role. There's a lot of fioratura in Mozart's score, which recalls vocal writing as distant as Handel's between stretches of pastoral lyricism. All seven singers negotiated quick passagework, leaps across the range, quick alternations of piano and forte, rarely failing to articulate the text clearly.

La finta giardiniera is a long opera: even cut — this production suppresses a few arias — the evening ran over three hours, with one intermission following the first of the three acts. I didn't find it overlong, and the cast didn't show any signs of fatigue either. We ran into them celebrating in a local bar-restaurant after the show, at midnight: a convivial scene. Youth, talent, enjoyment, energy; and Mozart: who can resist?

Einstein at the Berlioz

Montpellier, March 17, 2012—

My old friend John Rockwell said it well, years ago:

“Einstein was like nothing I had ever encountered. For me, its very elusiveness radiated richly, like some dark star whose effects we can only feel. The synergy of words and music seemed ideal. … Einstein on the Beach, perhaps, like Einstein himself, transcended time. It's not (just) an artifact of its era, it's timeless ... Einstein must be seen and re-seen, encountered and savored ... an experience to cherish for a lifetime."

I quote that from the Nonesuch Records website (Google nonesuch einstein montpellier, I can't readily embed links with Blogger on iPhone).

To John's remarks I merely add: the opera is as mesmerizing and transporting now. We saw it last nearly thirty years ago, at BAM; we saw it last night from similarly placed seats — center, nearly as high as possible.

Montpellier's Berlioz Theater is incredibly high, a postmodern version of a traditional European jewel-box theater. Perhaps our seats underscored this opera's unique effect: it was as if we were witnessing the coherent but often enigmatic proceedings of a distant and foreign society, at the same time re-acquainting ourselves with knowledge we'd somehow internalized, perhaps years ago, of the inexplicable yet reassuring meaning of it all.

There were little technical glitches along the way — opening curtain was delayed an hour. But the performances were superb: singing, instrumental, dance, acting, lighting, stagework.

The audience mostly remained seated the entire nonstop four and a half hours, though they were encouraged to come and go at will. They gave the piece a fine ovation, and they were right to do so. I think even Berlioz would have been struck with the beauty, the artistic truth, and the significance of the event.

The Great Gatsby

Marco Pannucio (Gatsby), Susannah Biller (Daisy), Julienne Walker (Jordan), Jason Detweiler (Nick), Daniel Snyder (Tom)

(photo: Steve DiBartolomeo)

LET'S STIPULATE AT THE OUTSET: a novel is one thing, an opera quite another. This observation is irrelevant to comments on one or the other, but not to the subject at hand, for in my opinion the most absorbing thing about last night's performance of John Harbison's opera on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was precisely that: the adaptation of a great novel to the lyric stage. And the adaptation was entirely Harbison's, as I understand it: scenario, libretto, and music all conceived and executed by a single mind.

Malcolm Cowley, in his introduction to an edition* of Fitzgerald's three great mature novels (Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon being the other two), suggests the method Harbison uses in his adaptation when he notes that

Each chapter consists of one or more dramatic scenes, sometimes with intervening passages of straight narration. The "scenic" method is one that Vitzgerald probably learned from Edith Wharton, who him turn learned it from Henry James…

Harbison makes a very straightforward compression of the novel, choosing pivotal scenes for (mostly) ensemble portrayals and linking them with orchestral interludes whose dual purpose it is to move the action (often literally, by car, driving from Long Island to Manhattan) and to "portray," through instrumental music, an emotional response to Fitzgerald's novelistic purpose.

Two problems immediately arise here. One is general, and is suggested in those scare quotes around "portray": can instrumental music suggest the profundity and the vague richness of emotional and (dare I say) philosophical speculation of the kind The Great Gatsby attains? Only, I think, when said music can borrow the already present allusiveness audiences find in musical genres whose language and literature they are familiar with, and only when the music itself is composed with a masterly consistency of style and technique. It's not Harbison's fault that these qualities are lacking at the present cultural moment: and it's certainly possible that his opera will be able to draw on them in some future.

The other problem is specific to The Great Gatsby, which Cowley goes on to put

in the Jamesian tradition… having the story told by a single observer, who stands somewhat apart from the action and whose vision "frames" it for the reader. In this case the observer plays a special role. Although Nick Carraway doesn't save or ruin Gatsby, his personality in itself provides an essential comment on all the other characters.

In the novel, Cowley suggests, "Nick stands for the older values that prevailed in the Middle West before the First World War"; the other characters "belong to their own brief era of confused and dissolving standards". Cowley's is an economist's construction of the novel; his introduction also deals with Fitzgerald's essentially straightforward relationship to money, and to Marxian positions on literary criticism. But economics is more than money and social class: it's a system of discussing value and "values" in more general and more pervasive terms than those centered merely on lucre.

And the success of Fitzgerald's novel, to me at least, is its way of propelling its surface brilliance and fascination — the brittle seductive opulence of its drives and desires — with an engine whose power is generated through the weight, the mass of entire generational and geocultural forces. One deft comment of Nick Carraway's, omitted from Harbison's opera, sums this up for me: he describes Jordan Baker taking a seat at the dinner table as if she were getting into bed. You don't know what this means, exactly, but you see it happen. The line makes you think of Noël Coward; it precisely defines the irony of Fitzgerald's style.

I think this important, as it distinguishes Fitzgerald from James, moves The Great Gatsby away from "the Jamesian tradition", whose complexity had threatened the utility of prose fiction as social commentary. The Great Gatsby is in the Austen-Flaubert-Chekhov tradition: "scenic," but ironic. It is for us twentieth-century Americans what Madame Bovary was for the late nineteenth-century French; it reveals the lassitude and debility and, finally, tragedy that follows a nation's lapse from those traditional values — call them moral if you like — that focus a community on practical means of meeting communal dangers.

It may be pointed out that an opera is after all only a night in a theater, singing and staging; one doesn't go to an opera for a disquisition on social or moral or economic justice. There are exceptions, of course; Le nozze di Figaro comes to mind: but it's never fair to mention Mozart in such a discussion; he's always the great exception proving the rule.

But the brooding, almost Wagnerian qualities of much of Harbison's writing in the orchestral interludes makes me suspect their "portrayals" reach toward these kinds of concerns. And among the most powerful of the purely instrumental pages in the score are those in the final interlude, "Day Through Night," moving toward Gatsby's funeral; and those in the epilogue, which finds Nick Carraway gazing out across the water toward the Buchanans's green light, contemplatively singing the magnificent final sentence of the novel, which completely seals the interpretation of The Great Gatsby as much more than a story of love, adultery, superciliousness, inevitable tragedy.

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Harbison's vocal music persuades me less. The opera is high-pitched, and among the least convincing music is that for Daisy and Jordan — especially their duet (soon set within a quintet) expressing their reaction to the stifling summer heat. It's not just that the words, whether Fitzgerald's or Harbison's, get lost in the high tessitura: it's that the melodic contours follow some incomprehensible directive, neither tonal nor not, perhaps meant to express the result of the mind-numbing heat, but unfortunately not ultimately engaging this pair of ears.

I mentioned Wagner earlier: much of the opera's score lacks air, crispness, definition. "Endless melody" no longer convinces me of deep or distant vision; perhaps it never did. The lack of clear key relationships, of sections distinguishable from one another by key, tempo, and instrumentation, encourages this listener's mind to wander, and that's a danger when there are so many things in the otherwise faithful adaptation of this great book to contemplate.

I have no complaints about the reorchestration of Harbison's score, reduced by Jacques Desjardins from the original large orchestra with winds in threes to a smaller but still considerable one with pairs of woodwinds and French horns, single brass, and reduced strings. I've never heard this opera before; I don't know if other musical adaptation was involved. The style of the onstage dance orchestra seemed perfectly authentic to the period (the Roaring Twenties, of course).

Nicole Paiement conducted with the precision, the attention to detail, and the grip on the long line that I've come to expect from her. I've heard her conduct operas now by Lou Harrison, Philip Glass, and Virgil Thomson: in every case she works for the composer, not imposing interpretation but respecting the composer's style. Her orchestra played well.

Matthew Antaky's physical production was quite effective, with Austin Forbord's mood- and place-setting rear projections of still and moving images of the water and the iconic Valley of Ashes — how many today realize the extent of ash-heaps in the coal-burning time of steam heat and transportation? — and effective suggestions of opulence conveyed through careful lighting, colors, and properties. Christine Cook's costumes were elegant, evocative, and character-defining.

I liked Brian Staufenbiel's directing, too. Each character, with the possible exception of Meyer Wolfshiem, seemed to have stepped out from the pages of the novel, fully fleshed out, with complex pasts and present needs; and all of them, even Tom Buchanan, were ultimately sympathetic. The party scenes were handled well for the most part; much of Tom Segal's choreography seemed deft and authentic, though long freezes and slow motion in backgrounds sometimes made longer soliloquies awkward: the intimacy available only in large crowds, which Daisy (or was it Jordan) mentions at one point, wasn't always at hand when needed.

You see the principal cast in the photo above: all sang well, I thought, on pitch, clearly when tessitura allowed, and acted well, both individually and in relationship to one another: this seemed like a well-prepared, well-rehearsed repertory production.


*Three Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night; The Last Tycoon. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953

The Great Gatsby: opera by John Harbison, after the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ensemble Parallèle Opera, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Feb. 10-12, 2012

Aaron Copland: The Tender Land

A FRIEND WHO'S INVOLVED with opera called the other day, asking if I planned to go to Berkeley Opera that week. No, I said, I didn't, why? What were they doing?

The Tender Land, he said.

Why on earth, I asked. He didn't respond immediately, but it was clear something was up. It isn't going to be reviewed, he said, And I thought maybe you'd like to go, and write something about it.

I don't do that any more, I pointed out. I'm retired. I don't write criticism.

But you blog, he said, You write about things you see, people read what you write. I just thought you might like to see this.

To make a long story short, what with one thing and another, against my better judgement, I said Okay, we have to be in Berkeley on Friday anyway, why not. I'm not fond of Copland's music of that period — his earliest music is his best, in my opinion — and I'm certainly not fond of his sense of theater. But I usually make it a point to see an opera I haven't seen before.

Then too, I have a kind of history with Berkeley Opera: I've narrated productions of theirs — in Beethoven's Leonore in 1997; in E.T.A. Hoffman's Undine (a much more interesting assignement) in 1999. I hadn't seen anything of theirs in years, and they'd moved into a new hall: it seemed like time to give it a try. So yesterday we stopped off in El Cerrito to see The Tender Land.

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El Cerrito High School has a new complex of buildings, one of them rather an attractive auditorium, seating perhaps a thousand or so in a wide, no-central-aisle fan-shaped house, with a good orchestra pit and a good-sized stage. This is the new home of Berkeley Opera, which has been making do with the Julia Morgan Center for many years. (Before, it had played Berkeley's Hillside Club on Cedar Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, where I remember seeing a fine Leonore in the 1980s.)

I'm not going to review the production: first, as I've said, I don't do that any more; second, it's been done by Musical America online, where Georgia Rowe writes production and performance notes I mainly agree with (except that I thought tenor Lee Steward perfectly acceptable in his higher range). (You can read Miss Rowe's review on the Berkeley Opera site.)

I thought the production — stage direction, sets, lighting and video projections, costumes — was perfectly appropriate to the piece, the theater, and the company. And the performances — both on stage and in the pit — were more than adequate, often nearly persuading me of the musical (though not the dramatic or literary) value of the work.

But The Tender Land seems to me hardly worth all this attention. In fact the opera seems bankrupt and bogus, an urban New York symbol-ridden view of a kitschy Steinbeck-flavored middle-American farm society; patronizing in its "tenderness" and boring both for its predictability and its emptiness.

The libretto is laughable, with lines like "Stomp your feet upon the floor" in a barn-dance scene. Much of the time it seems influenced by Gertrude Stein's writing for children:

Ma (Act I): Two little bits of metal, my needle and my thimble, a woman has to sew her family’s clothes against the cold cold weather. Two larger bits of metal, my woodstove and my kettle, a woman has to stew her family’s food against the cold cold weather.

Martin (Act II): I’m getting tired of travelin through. My shoes are wearing thin. I’m getting tired of wand’rin, wand’rin, not caring where I’ve been. I want to stay in a place for a while and see a seedling grow. I want to come to know special skies, special rain and snow.

Often the English is so stilted it sounds like a poor translation from another language: My own sweet child, my own sweet child, her face is like my mirror long ago.

Then there's Copland's music, mostly in his open, consonant, bare-octaves-and-fifths manner of the 1940s, of Appalachian Spring and after. Berkeley Opera used thirteen instrumentalists: double string quartet, contrabass, flute-piccolo, clarinet, bassoon, piano. The result was transparent, hard-edged, mostly well in tune; but Copland's music, especially in the first act, is so unvarying, has so little rhythmic interest, that it's fatiguing to the ear. (I suspect that the tension between his open harmonies and the equal temperament the piano insists on is greatly responsible for this fatigue, but that's a technical matter.)

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I've always thought of Copland, Britten, and Shostakovich as an interesting triad. Each was immensely gifted and intelligent; caught in an uneasy relationship to the prevailing Modernism-Reactionism duality of the early 20th century; apparently self-assigned to a position of National Spokesman for his art. Each composed masterpieces, particularly early masterpieces, then went on to an uneven output often troubled by indecision as to whether to be Popular or Principled (with respect to personal musical style).

Some of Copland's best scores are "abstract": the Sextet, the Piano Variations, the Clarinet Concerto. More are populist and narrative or at least pictorial: El Salon Mexico is my favorite, but of course Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid are major works. Too often, to my taste, he goes way over the top toward courting a wider audience: A Lincoln Portrait, Fanfare for the Common Man.

This opera, commissioned by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for a television production (but ultimately rejected by NBC's Television Opera Workshop), seems to have been written with Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! in mind. That piece, produced ten years earlier in 1943, is brilliant and original; The Tender Land is hokey and pretentious. I'm glad I've seen it, but it's now crossed off the list.