Eugene O'Neill| Long Day's Journey into Night / 2017

written in tears and blood

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugene O’Neill Long Day’s Journey into Night / Los Angeles, Geffen Playhouse, the performance I attended was on February 28, 2017

 

As I wrote in My Year 2004: Under Our Skin, in 2003 I was scheduled to travel to New York where I had a ticket for a revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night with Vanessa Redgrave. Bad weather prevented my travel plans, so I spent the next few days re-reading the play instead. I had long ago seen the Sidney Lumet film version. And finally, last night, I got a chance to see the play on stage for the first time.

      O’Neill’s great family drama is far more difficult to realize, I now perceive, than one can imagine simply by reading it or seeing such a brilliant production such as the film starring Katharine Hepburn, Sir Ralph Richards, Jason Robards, Jr., and Dean Stockwell.

       Certainly the cast at Los Angeles’ Geffen Playhouse were capable: all have played in numerous theatrical, film, and TV productions of important works. And this version’s James Tyrone, Jr. (Alfred Molina) is one of my favorite current actors.

       Yet the first two acts, in scenes that establish the figures before they turn into haunted ghosts, seemed uneven, as if these actors had just met for the first time. They did not have the rhythm of a family tortured by each other. Molina seems a far too-kind figure to represent the selfish and greedy former Shakespearian player that his character represents.

      Colin Woodell is a handsome Edmund, perfect the role, but seemed a bit ghostly even before he gets the sad confirmation of his consumption. Stephen Louis Grush also has none of the slightly loathsome charmer qualities that he later is asked to reveal. And Jane Kaczmarek seems far too earthly and powerful to be the frail Mary Tyrone, not so secretly hooked on morphine.

      Fortunately, after the intermission, when the long tales of guilt and errors begins spilling out, the characters found their footing, and the intimate conversation between Edmund and his father, where the son forces his elder to face up to his stinginess in planning to send him to a state institution for his cure and James Sr. admits not only to his greed but details how he has destroyed his own career and life by turning away from challenging roles—we do believe he may at one time have been a good actor, worthy of Booth’s praise—to recite, in endless popular performances, Edmond Dantès, the Count of Monte Cristo, an adaptation of which he had purchased the rights. Yes, his had told these stories to his wife and son endlessly, and we know, along with Jaime’s taunts, that he may be exaggerating or even lying in excuse of his behavior. But, if nothing else, he has supported his otherwise unemployable family members. And in the process he and we know he, just like Mary, has abandoned his life.

      Jamie’s drunken admission that he has attempted all of his life to corrupt his younger brother is a beautiful testament to his true love of Edmund, but also, we perceive, a sad testimony to how these family members destroy one another in their very embraces.

      And even Kaczmarek came alive in the long scene with her drunken maid, Cathleen (Angela Goethals), repeating all the lies about her youth—that she was a marvelous pianist and a committed religious believer—that James and her sons later disavow. This Mary seems far more grounded in the flesh than in any spiritual world. And by the end of the play, when her hair truly has “fallen,” a feat she displays throughout the work, she does almost seem to be the monster that the family sees her as.

     Although all of these figures already represent the living-dead—in real life O’Neill lost all three in a little more than three years—in the August 1912 day in which the audience encounters them, it is Mary who is the major “spook,” a woman, as Swinburne’s poem “A Leave-Taking” reiterates, cannot “hear,” “know,” “weep,” “love,” “care,” or, finally, even “see.” She is in another world, another time in the past that perhaps never quite existed.

      What is so amazing about this “play of old sorrow” is how relevant it is still today, more than a century later, where variations of the same drug abuse and alcoholism is being played out in thousands and thousands of American families. Although we no longer like to imagine that our mostly university and large hospital-supported doctors are “quacks” such as the one who prescribed Mary to take morphine and sent off Edmund to a cheap public facility to cure his tuberculosis, too many doctors today care just as little for their patients in over-prescribing opiates and antibiotics, the latter of which, by allowing super-viruses to develop, may result in an even worse public health crisis.

     The ghosts that haunted O’Neill’s family members are walking all over the US and throughout the world even today. Perhaps that is why, over the last several years, we have seen so very many vampire and flesh-eating horror films. This Belle-Époque vision of the “real” US resonates with the first 17 years of our own new century. And its effects threaten to end the global community just as surely as did the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2017).

Aristídes Vargas | La Razón Blindada (Armored Reason) / 2010

the traveling table

by Douglas Messerli

Aristídes Vargas (writer and director) La Razón Blindada (Armored Reason) / Los Angeles, the 24th Street Theatre / the production I saw was on October 24, 2010

 

Two men sit at a table, quietly talking, occasionally—at moments more and more often—breaking out into long poetic or narrative passages—then, with an explosion of terror, suddenly growing quiet, facing one another as if they had nothing to say. It is the world of an Argentine prison during that country’s “Dirty War,” where men are allowed only one hour each Sunday to interact with their fellow prisoners, a life-saving time when men come together to escape their growing madness, acting out stories and dramas of life, most of them vaguely based on Don Quixote and other dramas, through which they could embrace both the impossibilities, the dreams, and the absurdities of their lives.

     Author Vargas created this play from events that occurred to his brother during that brutal military regime in the 1970s until 1983, where the only line between madness and memory was the enactments of these amateur performers. Since the prisoners were not allowed to stand or move about, the drama is one of the imagination, a salvation of words only. In the dramatic presentation of this Kafkaesque, sometimes Beckettian reality, the actors—symbolized by two players, Jesús Castaños-Chima as de la Mancha and Arturo Díaz de Sandy as a sometimes reluctant Panza—play out their recreated versions of the Cervantes classic. Both are brilliant, encapsulating their imaginative voyages by moving chairs and table, which roll across the floors of the small 24th Street Theatre in south central Los Angeles in conjunction with leaps of creative stories and dismal pauses as they briefly lose all hope.

     The production, presented in Spanish with English-language captions, is difficult to follow for the non-Spanish-speaking visitor. I longed for an English-language version of this complex text which I could crib to help readers comprehend the dense poetic complexity of the original. Yet anyone with an iota of theatrical experience might be able to imagine the wonder of actors, forced to remain basically frozen across from one another, creating a literary forum in which they explore some of the most poetic and profound of dialogues that deal with their foes, real and imaginary, as they hallucinate a reality outside of their internments. The fact that even these flights of imagination are constantly interrupted by guards who invisibly return again and again to check on the prisoners’ behavior, only accentuates their intellectual courage.

     Throughout this intense drama, in which action is permitted only through the rolling furniture, the characters often grow despondent, like Beckett figures, unable to go on. Yet time and again, they do go on, they talk, dream, imagine, speak, shout, scream, cry out, and go dumb in an attempt to bring meaning into their empty and often absurd lives, in what one description of this play correctly describes as “an oblique strategy for survival.”

     At the center of all of this is the great knight-errant of Cervantes, who time and again mistook windmills for giants, old withering women as maidens, prisons for paradisiacal gardens—a world that denied precisely what these men had to face day and after day. What might such American prisoners have proffered as an alternative is not easy to imagine: a giant white whale, breaking through the prison walls? This is most definitely a Spanish-language fantasy, one that has allowed many through the centuries since its first creation to imagine wonderment where there is none permitted.

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2011

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2011).

Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek | Song from the Uproar: The Lives & Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt / 2015

glimpses of a vaster landscape

by Douglas Messerli

 

Missy Mazzoli (composer), Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek (libretto) Song from the Uproar: The Lives & Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt / Los Angeles, Redcat (The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) / the performance Howard Fox and I attended was a matinee on Sunday, October 11, 2015

 

In her program notes for her short opera Song from the Uproar: The Lives & Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, composer Missy Mazzoli briefly describes her subject as being born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1877, who—after the death of her father, mother and brother—traveled alone to Algeria, dressed as a man. Once there, the short synopsis, continues she “joined a Sufi order, roamed the desert on horseback and fell in love with an Algerian soldier. After surviving an attempted assassination and a failed suicide pact with her lover, Isabelle drowned in a desert flash flood at age 27.” The composer suggests that we have only a few short stories, articles, and fragments from the journals that survived the flood to help us comprehend this “fearless” woman, and, accordingly, she “felt that an opera about her life should be similarly fragmented—an evocation of her dreams and thoughts rather than a straightforward narrative.”

     The opera Mazzoli has created consists of 17 short songs, using repeated phrases found in the surviving pages of Eberhardt’s journal, along with highly stylized and synchronic mime-like gestures and dance movements by the 5 chorus members (meant, evidently, to represent the various personas of Eberhardt), along with film clips that reinforce any thematic content presented, and a five-man ensemble of double bass, electric guitar, clarinet and bass clarinet, piano, and flute and piccolo.

     The film clips, sorry to say, are rather prosaic images taken from snapshots of Eberhardt as a child and adult, as well as, what might be expected: a floating, drowning woman. The dance movements, while often well-executed, often seem superfluous, as if they are merely there to bring some motion into the otherwise quite static work; sometimes it appears, almost, as if the figures were executing some unreadable sign language. The libretto, based on the fragments of Eberhardt’s journal, somewhat poetically rendered by Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek, certainly do not really tickle the ear as much as representing a kind of list of associated words:

 

ISABELLE

Sight, smell, taste, touch

songs, hymns, verses, silence, refrains,

the sound, the noise, the voice,

sixty-five names for God.

CHORUS

Prime, odd, even, addition.

ISABELLE

Units, miles, bolded lines.

CHORUS

Circle, square, exponential.

ISABELLE

Square, fence.

ISABELLE AND CHORUS

Prison, embrace, remembrance.

 

At other times, as in the short paean to our hero’s independence “I Have Arrived,” seem almost as banal as a popular ditty:

 

ISABELLE

I have arrived -

I'll pick out my own song,

a music that will bleed the heart into

silence.

I have arrived -

I'll pick out my own song,

line by line, and at last

throw back my head and sing.

And many of the recitative-like pronouncements are almost indistinguishable from one another.

      What makes this chamber opera remarkable is Mazzoli’s beautifully shimmering, ethereal, and sometimes electric-guitar-whining score performed by excellent Mezzo-Soprano Abigail Fischer. Reminiscent, at moments, of John Adams, and, for a few instants, of John Zorn, Mazzoli’s music is the crucial element that encouraged the sold-out audience with whom I attended the event to thoroughly embrace this hour and one-half work, imbuing Song from the Uproar with a glorious sense of uplift that isn’t quite matched by the rest of its parts.

     In truth, Eberhardt was the daughter not of her mother’s wealthy husband, General Pavel de Moerder, but of the family’s tutor, Alexandre Trophimowsky, a former priest and anarchrist, who taught his daughter and her brother French, Russian, Italian, Latin, Greek, and, eventually, classical Arabic. Trophimowsky encouraged the young girl to read the Koran, while looking the other way when she, from early on, dressed as a sailor boy. At an early age Eberhardt begin to write stories—including one about male homosexuality.

     Even before traveling to Algeria, she corresponded regularly with her half-brother, Augustin, who had joined the French Foreign Legion, encouraging him to keep and share with her a detailed diary of what he saw and experienced in North Africa, while also corresponding with a French officer, Eugène Letord, who was stationed in the Sahara. Soon after her writings, written under a male pseudonym, spoke out strongly against colonialism.

     While being invited by the Algerian-French photographer, Louis David, to visit him in Algeria, she and her mother traveled to North Africa, living with the Davids. Despite their hosts’ disapproval, both she and her mother spent long hours with local Arabs, both mother and daughter converting to Islam, and, eventually, moving out of the French neighborhood to live in an Arabic-style house.

      It was not simply that Eberhardt dressed like a man, but that she dressed in burnous and turban like an Arab man that made her a social pariah to the French settlers. Her mother did not die in Switzerland, as Mazzoli suggests, but in Algeria, and was buried as Fatma Mannoubia.

      Meanwhile, Eberhardt continued to practice the Muslim religion—despite her attraction to alcohol and drugs—and, in later years, made contact with a Sufi order, the Qadiriyya, whose leader permitted to engage in that order’s secret rites.

       In the last years of the 19th century, because of family deaths and her inheritance of the family villa, Eberhardt was forced to return to Europe, becoming determined to travel to Paris to seek out a career as a writer.

      There, by chance, she met the widow of the Marquis de Morès, whose husband had been killed by Tuareg tribesman in the Sahara. She paid for Eberhardt to return to North Africa in order to search out the cause of his death, an offer which the adventurer could not resist, even if she did actually pursue that quest.

      During this trip she met the Algerian soldier Slimane Ehnni; the two fell in love, but were disallowed by the French colonial government to marry. By this time the French rulers, not only outraged by her dress and behavior, suspected her of being involved in espionage, which may have been the cause of her attempted assassination by a man with a sabre. Today she might surely be seen as a kind of terrorist.

      The government also arranged to reassign Ehnni to another region, which brought about Eberhardt’s failed suicide attempt. Forced again to return to France, Eberhardt lived with her brother Augustin and his wife, working with her brother, she in male dress, as a dock laborer. 

      Eberhardt and Ehnni finally married when her lover was reassigned to Marseilles, returning to Algeria as French citizens to live with Ehnni’s family. When the couple relocated to Algiers, a newspaper editor hired her to report on the Battle of El-Moungar. There, while staying with members of the French Foreign Legion, she met and befriended Hubert Lyautey, the French officer placed in charge of Oran, and it is generally acknowledged that she may have some spying for Lyautey.

      Weakened by fever, Eberhardt headed for Aïn Sefra, and requested Ehnni, whom she had not seen for several months, to join her. It is there, during a flash flood that the great adventurer died, her husband surviving.

      Despite Mazzoli’s claim that we have only a few stories and her journal with which to piece together Eberhardt’s life, at least 13 books written by her have been published since her death, including the full fiction, Trimardeur.

     Eberhardt’s larger-than-life adventures reveal her as a figure more like T.E. Lawrence than the slightly disconcerted proto-feminist that this opera represents her to be. In short, Song from the Uproar’s creators have done a disservice to their subject with their presentation of a few fragmentary, poetically rendered songs which cast her adventures in the form of a chamber-work instead of what it longs to be—a grand opera, with or without narrative coherence.

    One can only hope that, at some point, Mazzoli applies her obvious musical talent to a work of greater depth and grander vision.

         

Los Angeles, October 12, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2015).

Eleanor Antin | Before the Revolution / 2012

on credit

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eleanor Antin Before the Revolution, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, January 29, 2012 / I saw the matinee performance of this work with Howard N. Fox

 

Of all of artist Eleanor Antin's numerous personae, Eleanora Antinova, the Black American dancer attempting to be a leading ballerina in Diaghilev's famed Ballets Russes, is the most endearing. Somehow the very idea of the somewhat short, dark complexioned Antin—a woman who makes no claim to being able to dance in "real" life, and certainly has not trained for ballet—joining the tall "all-white machine" of Diaghilev's company goes beyond absurdity into the world of a touching fantasy, when Antin as Antinova plays out again and again her several Eleanora Antinova Plays, performances enacted by the artist from the mid-1970s through the next decade, works that my own Sun & Moon Press collected into a book of 1994.  

     Of these works, perhaps the most significant was the 1979 Before the Revolution, in which, performing numerous characters—from Antinova, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Nijinsky, to balletic beings such has Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI—Antin develops her "Historical Prophecy and an Interlude and an Interruption." Although I have seen most of Antin's performances when they first appeared, I did not witness the 1979 premier of Before the Revolution at The Kitchen in New York and its later manifestation at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. So I was delighted to be able to attend what she has described as a "re-performance" of the piece, this with several actors, on January 29, 2012.

     The work is divided into six sections: I. The Lesson, II. The Argument, III. The Vision, IV. The Rehearsal, V. The Interruption, and VI. The Truth, each loosely connected with the actions conveyed in their titles. The overall arc of this disjunctive narrative is Antinova's insistence that she dance a major role in the Ballet Russes instead of playing merely ancillary and exotic figures such as Pocahontas, etc., her arguments with Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and others about permitting her these roles, her insistence on choreographing her own ballet—wherein she plays a ridiculously overstated Marie Antoinette—her rehearsals for that performance, and her personal relationships with other figures of the company, particularly the disturbed Nijinsky.

     At the heart of this work, however, is Antin's personal "Interruption," wherein Antin states the major themes of her piece, and argues for an art that not only "borrows" or builds upon the past, but, in a Brechtian manner, creates a space between the artist and the figure she portrays, that must be joined through the imaginations of the audience. Beginning with a discussion of Diaghilev, accused by several as being a borrower, Antin brings several of these issues together in a monologue that might almost be stated as a kind of manifesto of her art:

 

"And who is not a borrower? Didn't we get our face and our name from our parents, the words in our mouths from our country, the way we say them from the children on our block, our dreams and images from the books and pictures other people wrote, painted, filmed? We take from here, from there and give back—whatever we give back. And we cover what we give back with our name: John Smith, Eleanora Antinova, Tamara Karasavina, Sergei Pavlovitch Diaghilev, and somewhere each one of us stands behind that name, sort of.

     Sometimes there is a space between a person and her name. I can't always reach my name. Between me and Eleanor Antin sometimes there is a space. No, that's not true. Between me and Eleanor Antin there is always a space. I act as if there isn't. I make believe it isn't there. Recently, the Bank of America refused to cash one of my checks. My signature was unreadable, the bank manager said. 'It is the signature of an important person,' I shouted. 'You do not read the signature of an important person, you recognize it.' That's as close as I can get to my name. And I was right, too. Because the bank continues to cash my checks. That idiosyncratic and illegible scrawl has credit there. This space between me and my name has to be filled with credit.

     What of me and Antinova? I borrow her dark skin, her reputation, her name, which is very much like mine anyway. She borrowed the name from the Russians, from Diaghilev. I borrow her aspirations to be a classical ballerina. She wants to dance the white ballets. What an impossible eccentric! A Black ballerina dancing Les Sylphides, Giselle, Swan Lake. She would be a 'black face in a snow bank!' The classical ballet is a white machine. Nobody must be noticed out of turn. The slightest eccentricity stands out and Grigoriev hands out stiff fines to the luckless leg higher than the rest. So Antinova designs her own classical ballet. She will dance the white queen Marie-Antoinette. She invests the space between herself and the white queen with faith...."

 

This profound statement of the separation of art and artist who must be given credit by both the artist herself and the viewer to make meaning, is at the heart of Antin's oeuvre, which, like a Kiekegaardian leap into faith, transforms simple desire into an almost sacramental act.

     The "Interruption" was even more poignant at the Hammer Museum performance I witnessed because Antin read these words on a small I-pad whose images disappeared as she spoke them, forcing her to ask her son Blaise to help her recover the message she was attempting to repeat.

     It was also interesting to have Eleanor Antinova played throughout by a Black actress (Daniele Watts), who certainly frees Antin from being seen as a white actress in Black face which some critics accused her of being the first time round.

     Actor Jonathan Le Billion was also very effective as the slightly mad Nijinsky railing against  Diaghilev, as the great dancer did in real life. But overall, the acting was mixed, with some figures unable to completely realize their roles. In part, that is simply due to the fact that in life these personalities were exaggerated and that Antin's work is not, at heart, a drama. To say what Before the Revolution is, exactly, is difficult. Perhaps it is easier to say what it isn't: it is not truly a play, an historical performance, a monological statement, a ballet-in-the-making, a personal encounter with a Black ballerina. It is all of these, but in its radical genre-bending elements, it is so much more!

    Although, as I mentioned previously, I did not see the original, it seems to me it is essentially a work for one person. Eleanor may not have been a greatest of actresses in that original, but given the "credit" we must grant to bring her art into life, the slightly mad ramblings of a single person, sometimes hiding behind cut-outs of her characters, seems the most appropriate rendering of this fascinating performance. Despite the separation of name and character, Antin becomes Antinova, becomes even the figures inhabiting Antinova's imagination in the original, and that, it seems to me, is the true miracle of this art. What we witness is a kind of madness, a madness, like Nijinsky's, that becomes transformed into something of significance. The artist in this work is almost like a child, a child so intent upon imagining other existences, that she truly creates them, bringing viable others into that envelope between the creator and the creation. If that act demands credit, it reflects back upon the audience for their commitment to the creative act, coming as a kind of unexpected reward for their faith. Art, for Antin, is almost always—despite its seeming focus on the various aspects of self—a communal act. Her King of Solana Beach could never have been a king without willing (even if unknowing) subjects. Antin's Nurse Eleanor Nightingale could not have survived the Crimean War without her imaginary patients, just as Eleanora Antinova is nothing without her willing claque. So too did the audience of Before the Revolution enthusiastically applaud this dramatic presentation of the dilemmas of Antinova's life.

     I was at Eleanor Antin's side after the 1981 performance, Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev at the Museum of Modern Art, when an enthusiastic attendee, with great reverence and respect, gushed, "Tell me, being so close to Diaghilev, what was it really like?" Eleanor was a bit abashed; she would have had to be in her mid-70s (she was currently in her 40s) to have actually performed with Diaghilev's company. Yet I perceived that never before had "credit" been so innocently and completely proffered!

 

Los Angeles, March 15, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater (March 2012).

 

George Frideric Handel and Nicola Francesco Haym | Rodelinda / 2011

the conscience of a king

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Frideric Handel (composer), Nicola Francesco Haym (libretto, based on a libretto by Antonio Salvi), Rodelinda / the performance I saw as a live HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera of New York on December 3, 2011

 

    On the surface Rodelinda seems a somewhat confusing story about a King, Bertarido (Andreas Scholl) who has just been defeated, and presumably killed, by Grimoaldo (Joseph Kaiser). The former queen, Rodelinda (Renée Fleming) and her son Flavio have been immediately arrested and put into chains, sequestered away—at least in the Met production—in what seems like an abandoned bedroom somewhere in the bowels of the castle.

     Before Grimoaldo's usurpation of the throne he had been offered the hand of Bertarido's sister, Eduige (Stephanie Blythe), which would have made him the heir apparent to the throne, but she has several times denied him, and now that he has illegally taken over, he lusts for Bertarido's widow, Rodelinda. When he approaches her with his desires, however, she is outraged and insists upon her devotion to her former husband and the protection of his child.

     Meanwhile Grimoaldo's advisor Garibaldo (Shenyang) prods his master on to more evil deeds, insisting that only the forceful, even the brutal are fit to rule. He has his own plans, moreover, to take the throne for himself, by marrying Eduige and becoming the rightful ruler.

      Only the court advisor Unulfo (Iestyn Davies) knows that Bertarido is still alive, pretending death in order to evaluate the situation and retrieve Rodelinda and his son from harm's way.

      Through her lovely arias we know that Rodelinda is loyal to her husband, denying the approaches of Grimoaldo. But when Bertarido shows up, to be hidden away in a nearby horse barn by his friend Unulfo, he overhears yet another encounter between Rodelinda and Grimoaldo in which she first insists of her love for her dead husband, but then suddenly seems to change heart, accepting Grimoaldo's proposal for marriage. What the two men hiding in the barn have not seen is that Garibaldo has threatened to kill her son if she does not give in, the knife put to the son's neck.

     Suddenly Bertarido's world collapses around him as he believes that his wife has not been able to remain faithful. Unulfo attempts to cheer him with an aria that relays the underlying theme of Handel's work: what seems unbearable today will look different in the future. Performed as it is between the two countertenors there is a slightly homoerotic suggestion in the plea that Bertarido should try to forget his wife's faithlessness.

     Unulfo suggests that Bertarido tell his wife that he is still living, an idea which, at first, Bertarido rejects, but then perceives that it will help to torture her for her deeds. It soon becomes apparent, however, that Rodelinda has no intentions of becoming Grimoaldo's wife, insisting that if she is to marry him that he must personally kill her young son, that she cannot be a mother to the boy would have been king and wife of the throne's usurper both. The ploy works, as Grimoaldo backs down, and Rodelinda is freed, temporarily at least, from any vows.

     Meanwhile, Eudige discovers that her brother is still alive, meeting him upon a pathway in the night, reassuring Bertarido of his wife's constancy. Unulfo brings Rodelinda to him, and the two are lovingly united, joyful to be in each other's company again. At that very moment, however, they are discovered by Grimoaldo, who orders Bertarido's arrestment and death.

     In collaboration, Eduige and Unulfo plan Bertarido's rescue, she secretly passing him a sword, Unulfo determined to lead him through a secret garden passage to his son, Rondelinda, and escape. However, when he comes to guide Bertarido to safety, in the dark room where he lies Bertarido mistakes the intruder as one of Grimoaldo's henchmen come to kill him, and he stabs Unulfo, who, although badly wounded, still pulls Bertarido to safety.

     Grimoaldo, meanwhile is in deep torment. All that he has sought has slipped his fingers. His first love Eudige has rejected him and Rodelinda has declared him a monster. Power has not fulfilled him, and he is tormented by conscience and his dark deeds. Finding him in such despair, Garibaldo is disgusted with his lack of will and determines to put a sword through his heart. At that very moment Bertarido and his family are passing, and the former king leaps into action, killing Garibaldo and, in so doing, saving Grimoaldo's life.

     Recognizing his position, Grimoaldo is only too happy to give up the throne to its rightful king. Turning again to Eudige she finally accepts his apologies, and the happy survivors sing in celebration of the future.

     Just recounting this breathless plot nearly exhausts me. One by one each of the major performers sing marvelous arias revealing their feelings and situations. This production was particularly blessed with the glorious soprano of Renée Fleming who premiered Rodelinda at the Met in 2004. Both countertenors were splendid, while Stephanie Blythe performed with her usual high artistry. The surprise of the opera, to me, was the tenor voice of Joseph Kaiser, who as the opera proceeded changed in both costume and voice from a seemingly pompous and puffed-up murderer to a handsome man of sorrow and conscience. It was a remarkably revealing performance both in its musical expression and acting abilities.

     In all this was a marvelous opera. If only the director, Stephen Wadsworth—who the singers all highly praised—had not felt it necessary to keep everything in motion by bringing in and out ancillary individuals during each aria, and arming his singers with flowerpots, books, even toys which at some point were often flung or crashed into the set. We understand that Handel's arias are structured with a beginning theme that elaborated on and repeated several times before returning us again to the original theme to be repeated once more, but that does not mean that we need be continually distracted. If the singers are good enough actors—as all of these were—to revitalize and slightly revise each repeated phrase, the music enwraps us into a kind of trance that works against this production's realist interruptions.

     Although the set was quite lovely, and the concept of moving horizontality through different sets across the gigantic Met stage worked well in several scenes, it appeared that the designers and director feared that the audience might fall asleep without the constant interruptions of everyday life. Although he is a powerful storyteller and a masterful dramatist, Handel is not Verdi.

      Nonetheless, with such great singers I would love to see the Met look into yet more Handel and other Baroque operas. Rodelinda was a joy.

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2011

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (December 2011).