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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
www.sfcv.org
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