up in smoke
by Douglas Messerli
Leonard Bernstein (libretto and
music) Trouble in Tahiti, premiered
at Brandeis University on June 12, 1952 / the version of the opera I describe
below was performed by the City of London Sinfonia conducted by Paul Daniel, the
film version directed by Tom Cairns / 2001
Using iconographical advertising images of the early 1950s, and moving
the opera between each of its seven scenes into the city streets, Cairns
presents a fantasy-like vision of suburbia in Bernstein's
"pop"-artist like conception of the period.
But behind the post-war paean
to the joys of life, sung mostly by the three-person chorus—
Mornin' sun kisses
the windows,
Kisses the walls
Of the little white
house;
Kisses the
door-knob, kisses the roof,
Kisses the
door-knob and pretty red roof
Of the little white
house in Scarsdale.
—there is a crueler reality within
that suburban household that shares much with the writings of period by J. D.
Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Allen Ginsberg, and, later, Edward Albee. Dinah and
Sam have seemingly everything they might want, he a good job, she a beautiful
home with the latest appliances, and a child right out of a Norman Rockwell
catalogue, shown in the first scene dressed in cowboy suit
Together they seem oblivious of their son, who slips away at the first
sign of the argument. Sam hasn't even time to attend an evening play in which
Junior acts; a handball tournament at his gym is of greater importance; and
despite her criticism of his values, Dinah too, we later discover, misses the
event.
The couple are both trapped in their own worlds: Sam in a job that keeps
money away from some while openly giving it to others through a value system
where, he argues, some men "are flabby and some men are thin," Dinah
torn between sentimental self-analysis (her beautiful aria "A Quiet Place"
is little more than a dream of desire instead of a deep subconscious
revelation) and total fantasy, wonderfully acted out in a drunken retelling of
the plot of the movie "Trouble in Tahiti."
Both are adult children who live in a world no more real than the
Technicolor advertisements surrounding them. Even as they encounter one another
on the street, they lie to escape each other's company. Their promised "talk"
turns into yet another trip to the "Super Silver Screen." Any
possibility of real communication vanishes like smoke as they truly "Skid
a lit day" (one of the scat phrases sung by the chorus).
In short, there is no real solution possible in this short satire, and
we understand why Bernstein would want to revisit this material in his more
substantial late opera, A Quiet Place,
wherein Dinah has just died, and Sam's two children, Junior and Dede, return
home, along with Dede's husband and Junior's former boyfriend, Francois. These
figures are no freer from angst than Sam and Dinah had been, but they do find,
by opera's end, at least a temporary release from their own histories,
signified most clearly by Junior's tossing the pages of Dinah's diary (in which
she has revealed both her hate of the marriage and her love for her family)
into the air, after which a short-lived quietude descends upon "the little
white house in Scarsdale....Highland Park, Shaker Heights, Michigan Falls,
Beverly Hills, Suburbia."
It is interesting to note that Bernstein's own parents were named Sam
and Dinah. And one wonders, despite Bernstein's more successful marriage, how
much the tensions between man and wife are an expression of his own homosexual
desires. He was himself a man torn between a need for a quiet life in which to
compose and the reality, as an internationally renowned conductor, of a
completely public one.
Los Angeles, December 20, 2009
Reprinted from American Cultural Treasures (January 2010).
No comments:
Post a Comment