Halloween - the celebration that makes fun of mortality - comes early
and often and with genuine enthusiasm to this fine city.  Tonight, ahead
of both the official All Hallows Eve and the Sunday of the actual citywide
party, Halloween came to the San Francisco Opera.  For the US premiere
of Gyorgy Ligeti's "Le Grand Macabre," a good portion of the audience
came in outrageous, bizarre, funny costumes, with painted faces or wearing
masks, feathers, and the colors of the rainbow.

That, indeed, is how one should attend opera, especially one that
present a "death-defying" story of apocalypsis-in-the-making, a comic
opera dealing with the end of the world.  Outside the War Memorial,
besides the festive crowd, all was right and "operatic" - from the
searchlights outside the house (rented at a very reasonable $100/hour)
to the background provided across Van Ness by the brilliantly lighted
dome of City Hall, a recreation of the Vatican's San Pietro in a Beaux
Arts setting, elegant even if it is gigantic, the largest base isolated
building in the world).  There was cohesion and a sense of proportion...
without, but not within the Opera House.

"Macabre" begins with a grand concept, a "Sweeney Todd"-like picture
of a disgusting world of loathsome characters, a pair of lovers (Sara
Fulgoni, in a trouser role, and Anne-Sophie Duprels), and Death itself
(Willard White), wanting to put an end to it all.  Graham Clark has a
star turn as Piet the Pot.  All is well.  Two and a half hours later,
there is a wonderful finale, defying death, celebrating life.

The problem is what happens between the beginning and the end.  Unlike
the City Hall dome, the searchlights, the carnival crowd in real life -
components of one meaningful and pleasing whole, the opera falls apart
and nothing quite can put it together again, not the occasionally (if
infrequently) good music whenever car horns and sirens fall silent, not
the Opera Orchestra's dedicated playing under Michael Boder's firm
control, not Kasper Bech Holten's vigorous direction, not Steffen Aarfing's
comic-book-cum-fallen-skyscrapers sets.

The story is completely abandoned between the beginning and ending,
wandering off into lengthy, bizarre, and eventually just plain boring
episodes.  There is the endless sado-masochistic "love play" between
Mescalina (Susanne Resmark) and Astradamors (Clive Bayley).  Two politicians
(John Duykers and Joshua Bloom) scheme and quarrel (with references to
the Patriot Act, "nucular" and flip-flop) on and on.

Caroline Stein, a stunning coloratura, has an interminable scene as Chief
of Secret Police.  Prince Go-Go (Gerald Thompson) climbs up on an enormous
statue of a horse, then climbs down; he makes a speech, he eats, he hides
- hello?  What's going on?  A drinking song stretches, seemingly, for
hours - a phrase simply repeated over and over, not approaching whatever
interest one may find in Phillip Glass' slowly-evolving ostinato.  The
two hours' running time seems twice the actual length.

It's not just the inferior quality of the episodes that rankles,
but also the fact that in no way do they move the story forward.  The
adventures of Candide, for example, are also rather loosely-knit, but
they belong to one work, tell one story; "Macabre" doesn't.  There is
nothing wrong with being "odd, quirky, bizarre," but those qualities do
not excuse the lack of meaningful artistry.

The music is a mixed bag, but fares better than the hopelessly flawed
drama.  Ligeti by now has conquered his "micro-polyphony" sufficiently
to allow some of the beauty of his early works return into the score.
There are some lovely passages among all the noise, occasionally with
the power of an "Elektra"-like contrast.  John Lie's program notes point
to a connection between Ligeti and San Francisco: when the composer
taught at Stanford in the early 'Seventies, he listened to the emerging
West Coast minimalism of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, John Chowning, Harry
Partch, Lou Harrison.  He composed the contrapunctal "San Francisco
Polyphony" in response.

A kind of homecoming for Ligeti would be a splendid thing, but a
well-selected concert of his music would serve him better than "Macabre."
For the record: the opera's premiere took place in 1978 in Stockholm,
sung in Swedish.  This US premiere is of the revised version introduced
by the Royal Danish Opera (with Holten and Aarfing in charge) in 2001.

Janos Gereben
www.sfcv.org
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