Jacques Offenbach, Jules Barbier ( based on the tales of E.T. A. Hoffman) | Le contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) / 2015

love and tears

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Offenbach (music), Jules Barbier (libretto, based on his and Michel Carré’s play, based on tales by E. T. A. Hoffman), Le contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) / 1881; the production I saw was the Metropolitan Opera’s HD Broadcast of January 31, 2015

 

Jacques Offenbach’s operatic repertory favorite, Le contes d’Hoffmann is a true mish-mash of musical and theatrical offerings: comic opera numbers such as "Il était une fois à la cour d'Eisenach” (a number that might have been at home in the Broadway musical Cabaret, replacing that musical’s number “Messkite”); drinking songs in the manner of Verdi and Wagner; comic novelty numbers such as Olympia’s “Les oiseaux dans la charmille” and the servant Frantz’s insistence on his singing, dancing talent, “Jour et nuit je me mets en quatre”; all mixed up with stunning operatic arias of love and longing such as "C’est un chanson d’amour."

     Divided into three distinct "tales," Offenbach’s work functions as a baggy monster, with the vague and often fragile interconnective link insisting that the stories all represent the poet’s failed loves; yet productions have, at times, lopped off an act or, at other times, added another. The opera, moreover, sometimes effortlessly, at other times rather clumsily, shifts between realism, fantasy, and literary autobiography while delving into the grotesque. Particularly, under Bartlett Sher’s Metropolitan Opera direction, the work seems nearly always teetering on the edge of a Kafka-like nightmare tinged with a Berlin-cabaret sexuality that borders also on camp (Sher insists his sources were Austrian, but they seem much closer, to my way of thinking, to the Berlin of the 1920s.).

      For all this, nonetheless, the Le contes d’Hoffmann survives, perhaps simply because it does encompass so much that other operas of the day might have thrown overboard. Whether conceiving as woman as an innocent, an artiste, or as a courtesan, what Offenbach’s Hoffmann reveals, in the end, is that no fulfilling liaison can be consummated as long as the writer-artist is wed to his art. Time and again Hoffmann loses his mind, at no time more evident than when he puts on Coppélius’ rose-colored glasses to become enchanted with the wind-up doll Olympia (not so very different, indeed, from Lubitsch’s “doll” described in the essay above—except that in Hoffmann’s fiction, she has no human equivalent, despite the fact that the real human Erin Morley brilliantly imitates her robotic actions. 

      Hoffmann (the charming and energetic Vittorio Grigolo) falls in love with a fellow artist, the singer Antonia (Hibla Gerzmava), only to discover that her very profession may result in her death. Like a would-be controlling fiancée (today we would describe him as unliberated sexist), Hoffmann is forced to demand, as has her father, Crespel (David Pittsinger), that she give up her career, a choice that can only leave her in such frustration that she is almost immediately tempted to challenge the men in her life by channeling the voice of her mother, a former primma dona inflicted with the same illness. Antonia can no more give up her role as an artist than can Hoffmann.

     And finally, after nearly giving up on love, the writer seeks love in the arms of a wicked courtesan, Giulietta (Christine Rice) only to lose his reflection and, almost, his soul. Hoffmann’s absurd love does end in the death of Giulietta’s equally lied-to boyfriend, Schlémil (David Crawford). And even though, in killing her lover, he obtains the key to her boudoir, he is saved by the fact that she literally leaves him in the lurch, gondolaing off without him. As the police arrive, he is, once more, saved by the only one who truly loves him—and whom he, unknowingly, truly loves, his male friend Niklausse, secretly his "female" muse. If the device of the male friend/female muse offers a slightly homoerotic tinge to the opera, in the end it truly doesn’t matter since the muse, obviously, is an aspect of his own being, just as the three women with whom he falls in love are all elements of the one woman imagines as his divine partner, the Mozart diva, Stella, who literally ignores him, and whom he, in his drunken state, no longer even recognizes. Ultimately, the opera suggests that true artists can only find satisfaction in themselves—along with copious amounts of beer and wine! But, of course, it very does matter, since these figures represent various gender opportunities to the suffering artist.

      Interestingly, Sher has skewered his production away from the simplistic Hoffmann, who, despite his fascinating tales, remains a vague actor in the stories of his own life. For Sher, the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann is merely a stand-in for Offenbach himself. And, from this perspective, the opera does indeed reveal a great deal about the situation of the actual artist, a German Jew, well loved by French society, but obviously made to also feel always as an outsider. The several Jewish references (at times almost anti-Semitic, particularly in the legend of Kleinzach) signify the kind of dual reality which the composer faced, wherein at one moment he laughs with his audience as he tells the story, but by work’s end tragically becomes the mocked figure himself, taking on the tallit almost as a protective garment against the taunts of his failures in love and life.

     It also helps to clarify the inexplicable evil of the four-headed villain of the piece, who appears as Lindorf, Coppélius, Dr. Miracle, and Daspertutto (all played by the noted baritone Thomas Hampson). Why, we ask are these villains, so similar in some respects, all out to steal, murder, and abuse Hoffmann’s would-be loved ones. There is no explanation of course for such evil, such seemingly in-bred hate—except perhaps for the successful insider’s detestation of all who represent something different and new to his culture. Such hate clearly leads what Nicklausse / the Muse observes as a "loss of love and tears," but it will never be able to entirely destroy true art.

 

Los Angeles, February 1, 2015

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

Steven Sater (book and lyrics, based on a play by Frank Wedekind), Duncan Sheik (music) | Spring Awakening / 2015

an audience of the deaf and blind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Steven Sater (Book and lyrics, based on a play by Frank Wedekind), Duncan Sheik (music) Spring Awakening / a production of the Deaf West Theatre, the performance Howard Fox and I attended was on May 30, 2015 at the Bram Goldsmith Theater at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California

 

Just six years before Marsden Hartley’s visit to Berlin, another American-born artist, Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (better known to his German-speaking audiences as Frank Wedekind) was attending the first performance in Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater of the drama he had written between 1890 and 1891, Frühlings Erwachen (best translated as Spring Awakening). A few years later, in 1917, this “children’s tragedy” was performed, although threatened by closure for immorality, in New York; finally, after a court trial, it was permitted to be performed before a limited audience for a single performance. By that time, the German-writing playwright, traveling through Europe on an American passport, had been required to obtain a German document.

     Throughout most of its existence through the rest of the 20th century, Wedekind’s homily to bourgeois society was threatened with censorship and closings. As late as 1962 the play, performed in England, was threatened with closure, and was allowed a run of only two nights in censored form. It was not until Joseph Papp’s 1978 New York production that the play actually became fully available on stage to the American public.* And it was not until the early 21st century production of a musical version in 2006, with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and music by Duncan Sheik, that the work actually received the attention it might have for over 100 years—if only the sexually terrified parents it hectored had been able to remember their own youths.

     Yet even the other day, so The New York Times reported, a high school teacher in Connecticut was fired for attempting to explain to a student the sexual meanings of an explicit poem by Allen Ginsberg, precisely what the character Melchior, punished by being sent to a reformatory institution, attempts to do for his friend Moritz. Is it any wonder that parents throughout modern history have been terrified by a story, involving young teenagers, that portrays the inability of the older generation to talk about sexuality and the younger generations’ encounters with detailed sexual explications, physical and sexual abuse (emanating from both parents and peers), incest, masturbation, rape, homosexuality, sadomasochist behavior, suicide, and abortion? Even Tennessee Williams, to my knowledge, never encompassed all of these in a single play!

 

    Wedekind’s play may be, as the august The New York Times argued in 1955, after a Provincetown Playhouse revival, an “old-fashioned sermon,” but it certainly did not feel like an outdated play of ideas in the Deaf West Theatre production Howard Fox and I attended the other day at Beverly Hills’ Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. The work seemed as relevant to today’s hormone-charged teenagers than ever before, particularly given the fact that we all now recognize that the angst of young high-schoolers includes not only the age-old issues described above, but difficulties with gender identification and terrifying diseases such as AIDS, as well as drugs of every imaginable kind.

     Wedekind, who’d had personal experience, so his journals have since revealed, with nearly all of these “unspoken” dilemmas of youth, might also have introduced the subject of syphilis, prostitution, and pathological jealousy—all of with which he’d been involved, beside the subjects he brought up in his play—but that is not truly the issue here. Our children, whether we want to believe it or not, are daily faced with conundrums which they cannot fully comprehend and with which many adults are utterly uncomfortable with speaking about. If there was ever a significant definition of the “generational gap,” Spring Awakening speaks it and underlines it in bold strokes.

      Certainly there are problems with this play, both the original—which is often fussy and fustian both in its parent’s and teacher’s Calvinist and Lutheran pronunciamentos against anything to do with the body in word and thought—but also with the more spirited musical, which presents songs of the three-tone variety, jingles that, at times, seem more comfortable at a high-pitched commercial simplicity than in exploring either tonally or lyrically the more profound implications of the play’s and character’s problems. There are moments, surely, when Slater, as lyricist, does truly attempt to get to the deeper urges and complications of his youth’s sexual feelings, as in “The World of Your Body”

                                         O, I'm gonna be wounded

                                         O, I'm gonna be your wound

                                         O, I'm gonna bruise you

                                         O, you're gonna be my bruise

And in the openly rebellious sing-along, the students, led by their intellectually superior Melchior (a charming Austin McKenszie) speaks out:

 

                                       [MELCHIOR]

                                       There's a moment you know

                                       You're fucked

                                       Not an inch more room

                                       To self destruct

                                       No more moves, oh, yeah

                                       The dead end zone

                                       Man, you just can't call

                                       Your soul your own.

 

     Yet, for the most part, the Slater-Sheik score simply reiterates the ideals of a young people blinded by their generations’ simplistic beliefs, but also filled with the absolute openness of young people who simply cannot imagine (fortunately) all the horrors in the life ahead they will have to face:

                                      I believe

                                      I believe

                                      I believe

                                      Oh, I believe

                                      There is love in Heaven

     I suppose that in a world where you’re not permitted to believe in love on earth, Heaven is a great alternative, but it precisely that lack of imagination which resulted, as we know in hindsight, in this same generation’s terrible fates in World War I, and their children’s children’s horrible deaths in World War II. The musical ends, as I suppose such faith-inspired paeans to youth must always do, with a Hallmark card-inspired song, “The Song of Purple Summer” that might remind some older playgoers of the 1968 musical Hair’s “The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In).” 

      And even in this relatively tamed expression of the testosterone-driven boys and girls, Sater and Sheik have felt the need to tone down Wedekind’s honest shrieks against bourgeois notions of correctness, shifting Melchior’s rape of his beloved Wendla (Sandra Mae Frank/voiced by Katie Boeck) to a confusing give-and-take between the sexes—behavior which, as I’ve described elsewhere, as encouraging males, at least of my generation, to close their ears to female protests.

     But the real villain of both Wedekind’s original play and this musical concoction remains the very attendees of the performance, whether we be truly parents (or, as in my own case, complacent adults who have not had to deal the terrifyingly joyful experience of parenthood). And that fact makes Wedekind’s work a kind of unbearably tearful reunion with reality, with the confusion, longings, and impossible dreams we all had as youths, now so terribly unfulfilled and forgotten. Wedekind’s play, accordingly, no matter how fully we realize its truths, can never be a truly pleasant experience for the elders who might bother to attend the theater event. These young people (even when they are a bit older than the characters they play) will always be a reminder of our own failures, a truth the Deaf West Theater performers made even more poignant, by madly signing the words they expressed to an audience that was not only deaf to their metaphorical expressions of pains, perhaps, but primarily blind to what they were trying to tell us.

 

*Even reviewers, such as Arthur Gelb, writing of an earlier production of this work characterized it as an “awkward play.”

 

Los Angeles, June 1, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2015)