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A Night at the Opera, Starring Death!
By George Thomson
A bombed-out, apocalyptic cityscape. Abundant and graphic
violence. Sadomasochism. Dark yet "relevant" political
humor. A woman wielding a spit. A man wearing false breasts.
Humping of impressive geometrical variety. Just another night
at the opera these days, you might think.
Except that it's not Abduction from the Seraglio, or Un ballo
in maschera, or a bold new take on Iolanthe. No sir: last
Friday night at the San Francisco Opera, traditionalists could
not cavil; all these things were supposed to be there, in the
long-awaited American premiere of Gyorgy Ligeti's Le Grand
Macabre. With a performance of the revised 1996 version
(imported from the Royal Danish Opera Production of 2001) the
San Francisco forces served up an evening that was musically
vital, though its longueurs managed to prove that Regieoper
can screw up even works that are nearly brand-new. But of
course, in this case, not many would be the wiser.
Ligeti's opera, based on a 1934 play by the Belgian Michel
de Ghelderode and sung here in the tangy English version of
Geoffrey Skelton, is set in a mythical "Breughelland" peopled
by the craven, the debauched, and the hopeless. The two main
characters are the unlikely duo of Nekrotzar, grim avatar of
death and destruction who takes his work seriously, and Piet
the Pot, the local wine-taster who from all appearances takes
his work rather too seriously. These two wend their way
through a series of tableaux: a pair of enraptured lovers
searching for a secluded place; the jaded love 'n' torture
relationship of an astronomer and his dominatrix-housekeeper;
a petulant prince and a Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee pair of
politicians; an apocalypse that . . . no wait, is it really?;
and a finale complete with live-and-love moral. The lovers
return at the end, unaffected in their bliss by the intervening
cataclysm.
It's light on plot, for sure. To keep the audience interested,
it relies as much on the sheer audacity of its black humor
and bizarre slapstick as it does on the music. Ligeti, whose
vocabulary probably doesn't even include the word "whatever,"
keeps these elements under characteristically tight control.
For every passage in the score that delineates a separate but
almost identical line for each single player (resulting in
some unbelievably small print) there is a correspondingly
precise prose instruction concerning gesture, staging, action,
timing, or character. They are of a piece: the admonition
to the third harmonica player "When breathing in the player
must concentrate on the lower note E-flat, often hard to
produce" and that to the singers seeking "A grotesque and
charged contradiction between the animated action and the
music which seems to come from behind double-glazing."
Or perhaps they are not. The first admonition is musical and
thus is to be followed. The second species of instruction
sounds like . . . well, direction, as in Director; it is
thus, apparently, taken to be totally optional - depending
on the Director's concept - and can be followed or ignored
as desired.
In this production a lot of these were ignored, mostly because
Director Kaspar Bech Holten had a big idea: Apocalyptic horror?
Comedy? Art Spiegelman! Comic Strip! It's a fetching
concept, one played out with glorious visual appeal in the
set design of Stefan Aarfing and the lighting of Jesper
Kongshaug. The sets included ingenious trompe-l'oeil skyscrapers
and the inside of an observatory, manipulating geometry to
create illusions of depth, with a bit of a nod to Roy
Lichtenstein in one scene.
Trouble is, people don't move a whole lot in comic strips.
What we got was a lot of very listless motion, negating many
of Ligeti's earnest exhortations to violent, exaggerated
gestures. Consequently, some of the slapstick came off as
agonizingly dull, and the sexual violence downright desultory,
even prudish (last season's Alcina was so much hotter, for
gosh sakes). No naked Venus here (Ligeti did provide for the
option of having a striptease artist mime the part; surely
they could find someone in San Francisco . . .); we got a
nearly fully clothed Venus, though with some uncovered breastage
so that the line about her being "topless" would still make
vague sense.
Another comic-strip conceit was the annoying use of frames,
thought-bubbles and captions. As Piet the Pot sings, cackles
and spits out an utterly preposterous cadenza, a thought
bubble lowers to Nekrotzar's head saying: "Is he nuts?" Lame!
Most egregiously, a chorus at one point was enclosed in a big
white frame on the stage with the caption "Meanwhile, outside
. . ." This was the chorus that Ligeti asks to have sung from
the house (preferably scattered throughout and dressed like
the audience); their pleas to be spared from the coming
apocalypse thus lost the powerful audience identification
that Ligeti intended.
Shrinking from the concept, though not from the music This
was but one lost opportunity of many. Over and over the
singers were made to play for titters rather than the nervous
laughter engendered by utterly over-the-top violence (have
these guys never seen Itchy and Scratchy?). Dialogue was
"updated" and topicalized; thus we got the "Patriot Act,"
"girly-man" and the "war on terror," raising these banalities
to the level of the surrounding allegory, where they sat
uncomfortably.
It would be easy, watching it all for the first time, just
to blame the lame gags on Ligeti's European sensibility, or
quixotic sense of humor; but he had a lot of help, for which
I wonder if he is grateful. At least he could be grateful
for the care and attention lavished on his music by conductor
Michael Boder, the Opera Orchestra and Chorus, and a phenomenal
cast. From the opening prelude - a toccata for sixteen car
horns - to the tightly wound canon and passacaglia with which
the work concludes, Boder and the orchestra gave a performance
of passionate commitment, embracing every gnarly twist and
turn with gusto. The one extended orchestral interlude, after
the putative apocalypse, was a masterpiece of murmuring,
shimmering texture, especially coming after a blistering
display of sextuple-forte power from the entire pit.
A cast of characters
Willard White, in neon mohawk and looking like an overstuffed
Dennis Rodman, played the eventually ineffectual destroyer
Nekrotzar with an appropriately bizarre sort of sepulchral
allure. His antagonist Piet was sung, screamed and acted
with boozy fervor by Graham Clark; his exultant cry of
"bulls--t!" was one of the evening's most refreshing moments,
as it turned out. The almost otherworldly lovers Amando and
Amanda, whose blissful and lyrical music is sometimes so
exquisitely jarring, were sung by sopranos Sara Fulgoni and
Anne-Sophie Duprels. The S-and-M couple of the second scene,
Mescalina and Astradamors, were sung in broad style by Susanne
Resmark and Clive Bayley.
The apparition of Venus in that scene, Caroline Stein,
reappeared in the third scene as the secret police chief
Gepopo, giving the star performance of the evening. Not just
the Queen of the Night on acid, this was Zerbinetta on PCP,
utterly fearless, completely improbable, bizarrely, heroically
compelling. Countertenor Gerald Thompson sang the role of
her boss, the spoiled-boy Prince Go-Go, with appealing
petulance, though his maturity level seemed to veer a bit
carelessly from infantile to adult. His minions the unctuous
White and Black Politicians (the White Politician in whiteface,
but the Black Politician in . . . whiteface? Another punch
pulled?) were sung with glee by veteran John Duykers and a
terrific newcomer, Adler Fellow Joshua Bloom. The Opera
Chorus, disposed throughout the stage and behind (but not in
the House, unfortunately) sang expertly, and performed the
requisite carousing and humping with, alas, practiced charm.
Violinist Laura Albers was the only member of Nekrotzar's
onstage infernal musical retinue in the third scene (Ligeti
asks for four instruments, including a piccolo, a clarinet
and a bassoon; ah well . . .); she played the strolling
fiddler from Hell with aplomb.
As I was leaving I heard a costumed reveller - they were in
the audience in suspicious profusion - telling her acquaintance,
"he really loved it . . . now we'll have to take him to a
real opera." Real or no, it is not all that it might be, but
it is nonetheless a triumph for the company and still a great
evening's fun. Le Grand Macabre continues at the Opera House
on November 5, 9, and 13 at 8 P.M.; on November 18 at 7:30
P.M., and on November 21 at 2 P.M.
(George Thomson is a conductor, violinist and violist, Director
of the Virtuoso Program, San Domenico School, living in Novato.
His website is at georgethomson.com)
(c)2004 George Thomson, all rights reserved
Janos Gereben
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