Music director Michael Boder says when he came to the loudest part of
Gyorgy Ligeti's "Le Grand Macabre" at a rehearsal a few days ago, the
orchestra failed to produce the ffffffffff the score calls for.  After
calling attention repeatedly to "10 F's," and complaining that "you're
not loud enough," Boder finally said: "play it as a weapon of mass
destruction." The orchestra did, successfully, and the musicians laughed:
"So that's where the WMD went!"

In a Herbst Theater panel discussion today about the San Francisco Opera's
upcoming US stage premiere of "Macabre," talk constantly returned to the
timeliness and relevance of the 1978 work, to be presented here next
week in its 1997 Copenhagen revision.

The work's "message," the panelists and SFO artistic administrator Brad
Trexell, the moderator, kept repeating, is not to give in to fear, not
even the fear of death, but laugh in its face and live fully.  As the
opera's finale says: "For life grants most to those who give / And who
gives love shall loving live.  / When one does this, then time and tide
/ stand still: now and for evermore.  / Fear not to die, good people
all..."

In the panel discussion, there were references to the color code of
terror alerts, the destruction of Sarajevo (with its impact on the revised
opera), the scene in the work where "politicians call each other names
while the world is about to come to an end." ("Blackmailer, bloodsucker!"
- "Charlatan, clodhopper!" - "Exorcist, egotist!" - "Hooligan, humbugger!"
- "Constitution?  Ha-ha-ha-ha!")

The stage director, Royal Danish Theater artistic director Kasper Bech
Holten, spoke movingly of the 2001 Copenhagen premiere, scheduled just
days after 9/11.  "We were stunned and grieving, and considered canceling
the performance," Holten said, but then focused on the fact that the
composer, a Hungarian Jew and Holocaust survivor, wrote this savage and
defiant comedy in face of his experiences, and a cancelation "would have
been betraying him and his admonition not to be afraid."

The decision was made even more difficult by the fact that Steffen
Aarfing's stage design (completed months before 9/11) included tall
towers damaged by bombs.  The design, Aarfing said today, is based "on
a new way of making cartoons, inspired by European - especially Belgian
- comic books, and by the Japanese comics' emphasis on hardware and
violence."

Boder, who will conduct the Oct. 29 premiere, spoke about the "complicated
score...  sounds you never heard in an opera house before...  a large
percussion group, with car horns, paper bags" and Ligeti's reference to
a tonal section as "this terrible music." The participating singers -
Graham Clark (Piet), Willard White (Nekrotzar), Caroline Stein (Venus/Gepopo),
and Susanne Resmark (Mescalina) - were unanimous in complaining about
the difficulty of the music (White: "organized madness"), and in praising
the work, speaking of their excitement and delight in participating.
Several of the cast already completed rehearsals in London three years
ago when Covent Garden canceled "Macabre" there.

Boder spoke of the opera's "weird sounds" in terms of "period-specific
music." Verdi, Boder said, wanted to write an opera about Lear, but
couldn't - and it took another century before Aribert Reimann did -
because Verdi's age "didn't have music for naked brutality." Ligeti's
"grotesque comedy about death" requires that kind of musical setting.

"All the scraps of history are in the music," Trexell said, but not
obviously, quoting Ligeti about "rubbing pate into the carpet, so nobody
would notice." While the meaning of that was not entirely clear, Boder's
recommendation was, of Ligeti's Requiem for "great choral music," against
the choral shouting of "Macabre." Holten described the music as "Tom &
Jerry...  fun... but with great depth." Clark challenged the Herbst
audience to "attend the opera without fear," saying that the "country
that gave birth to jazz and Broadway" and many other manifestations
of musical unorthodoxy, should welcome the opportunity to be "baffled,
bewildered and bemused." The stage director spoke of encountering "Macabre"
in terms of traveling to an "exotic country...  say Thailand...  where
everything is different at first, but it all ends up as a wonderful
experience."

Clark, who said he has to scream loudly and at a very high pitch,
praised "this terrific piece of high energy," and said that "humor is a
damn sight more difficult to do than death." White, who spoke of "having
to sing falsetto in fff," disagreed with Clark, saying that "I still
don't know how to play Death." Anyone who witnessed White's marathon
heroics in the San Francisco as St. Francois has no doubt that he will
handle Nekrotzar's death rattle just fine.

For the SFO production, see

   http://sfopera.com/04_castcrew.asp?operaseasonid"1

Janos Gereben
www.sfcv.org
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