Gaetano Donizetti and Giuseppe Badari | Maria Stuarda / 2013

battling divas

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gaetano Donizetti (composer), Giuseppe Badari (libretto, based on the play by Friedrich von Schiller), Maria Stuarda / New York, The Metropolitan Opera HD live presentation, January 19, 2013

Watching the live H.D. presentation of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda on Saturday, I was reminded of and agreed with The New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini’s enthusiastic review of the opera:

 

                              …if you think of a gala as a meaningful celebration, then

                              it was hard to imagine a better New Year’s Eve gift to

                              opera lovers than this musically splendid and intensely

                              dramatic performance of Maria Stuarda.

                                   The production stars the great American mezzo-soprano

                               Joyce DiDonato in the title role, a part that has been sung by

                              sopranos and mezzo-sopranos. Ms. DiDonato's performance

                              will be pointed to as a model of singing in which all

                              components of the art form — technique, sound, color,

                              nuance, diction — come together in service to expression.                  

     All the performers were excellent, particularly DiDonato’s Maria, but also South African Elza van den Heever’s powerful Queen Elizabeth and Matthew Polenzani’s well sung the Earl of Leicester. The marvelous encounter between the Scottish queen and the English ruler is, quite obviously, the unforgettable scene in the opera, wherein, after insulting attacks on Maria for licentiousness, murder, and treason, the patient Scott ruins her possibilities for freedom by lashing back, denouncing Elizabeth as “the illegitimate offspring of a whore.”

      But the glorious aria “Oh! Nube che lieve,” which Maria sings to the clouds over her head—just before that encounter, in one of her first times in which she has been released to the outside—is absolutely beautiful, as well as her last act confession to George Talbot (Matthew Rose) and her touching acceptance of her fate. All is equally stunningly staged.

     Despite all of this glorious operatic bravura, however, Donizetti’s opera still seems a bit clotted and somewhat strangled by the libretto, which focuses too much on the two queen’s battle, without filling in the audience about the issues that lie behind those horrific clashes. The religious differences—the fact that Maria was Catholic in a culture that had recently, through the hands of Elizabeth’s father, broken with the Pope—are certainly hinted at, but not explicitly developed. Scotland’s own turmoil between the Knox-led Presbyterianism and local Catholicism is not even hinted. And, although Maria’s checkered sexual past—the death of her husband Darnley and her relationships with David Rizzio and others—are vaguely suggested, unless you know the history, Elizabeth’s attacks are nearly meaningless. Elizabeth herself is portrayed as such a cruel cousin that one would have no comprehension of how difficult she found it to sentence Maria, a queen after all, to death, nor might we imagine that that death might have been a misunderstood request.

     Of course, the audience of Donizetti’s day—and even the audiences of contemporary Europe, well versed in European history—might immediately have understood the underlying facts of the story. But, even though I think of myself as fairly well-educated in terms of history, I missed a large number of Donizetti’s and his librettist’s allusions, which helped to create a notion of Elizabeth’s almost maniacal behavior and Maria’s confused innocence. Even if you grant both Schiller and Donizetti their fictional aspirations, what the opera finally focused on was a battle of divas—as engaging as that is—instead of a battle between two warring queens—both of whom, as the divas, in between acts admitted, believed they were right. More importantly, without any deep historical context, it is difficult to comprehend the marvelous scene of confession. Was Maria truly involved in Darnley’s death? Was she plotting for the assassination of Elisabeth? And what was Leister’s role in all of this? The fuzziness of the opera’s history takes away the consequence of the character’s actions, so that the incredible meeting of the two queens seems to occur more as a force of performance rather than the figures whom the performers represent.

     Finally, as beautiful as many of the arias were, Donizetti’s score is simply not as beauteous as it aspires to be. Throughout, his formulaic patterns of Bel Canto arias seem just that. In short, while I was absolutely delighted to see this seldom performed work, it did not take me to the level of “complete renewal” that Tommasini promised. It was only—what a strange qualification!—a wondrous treat.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2003

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2013).

Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne (adaptation from the play, The Mahabharata, by Jean-Claude Carrière) | Battlefield / 2017

going on

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne (adaptation from the play, The Mahabharata, by Jean-Claude Carrière) and directors Battlefield / Beverly Hills, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, the performance I attended was the matinee on Saturday, May 27, 2017

 

After productions in New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere, Peter Brook’s most recent work, Battlefield, has now moved in for a short, 4-day run at Beverly Hills’ Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

      In some respects, this seems less like a new work than a kind of extension, or epilogue, to Brook’s epic 1987 work The Mahabharata, a nine-hour spectacle that had such a large cast that, when it was performed in Los Angeles, was staged at the Raleigh film sound studio.

      Like that epic-event, in this new Brook worked with long-term collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, adapting the play by the noted writer Jean-Claude Carrière (who collaborated with Luis Buñuel on several films and wrote the scripts for dozens of others, including The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Tin Drum, and Valmont); but as the years have passed Brook and Estienne have shifted their focus from large to small, moving increasingly to a kind minimalist purity.

       Battlefield runs just over 1-hour, and it’s sets consist primarily of few slender wooden poles lined up in a row along the back of the stage; there are only four actors, dressed primarily in colorful robes which they don to differentiate the various roles they undertake. Instead of the large chorus of instruments employed in The Mahabharata, there is a single drummer, Toshi Tsuchitori, who performed as well in that earlier production.

       Yet for all of this stripping away of extraneous detail, Battlefield does not feel simplistic or constrained. In fact, it carries with it all the terrifying details the great battle before it which has killed millions, including nearly all of Yudhishthira’s (Jared McNeill), family, along with his greatest enemy, whom his mother Kunti (Carole Karemera) reveals early in the play was actually his brother, born with her in a liaison with the sun.

       Yudhishthira, overwhelmed with the grief of all those deaths, is determined to enter the woods in penance for his destruction of so many lives, but his father (Sean O’Callaghan) and his mother insist he must carry on as the new King, suggesting that he visit his grandfather, the elderly and soon-to-die Dritarashtra (Ery Nzaramba), who, in a series, of parables and gnomic statements, impresses upon his grandson the cyclic nature of war and peace, of love and violence. What has just happened will ultimately happen again and again, and is not entirely the fault of those involved but simply a product of their destinies. Much as in Beckett’s works, Yudhishthira is a man who cannot “go on,” but must go on nonetheless.

     Finally convinced to take up the crown, Yudhishthira gives away all his personal goods and wealth to the priests, but is advised, instead, by his royal counsel, to give everything to the poor. One of the most charming episodes of the play is when, after gathering up all the robes upon the stage, the counsel attempts to give them away to the poor, a difficult thing to do to the front-row patrons of the Beverly Hills theater. Giving up on asking whether any them are poor, the counsel asks only if they might know someone who is poor.

       Other crises follow, and there are further engaging parables, one between Destiny and Time, who argue about a snake that just killed a child; Time wants to kill the snake, but Destiny successfully argues that the snake was only doing what a snake does and therefore should be allowed to escape alive.

      In another such parable, a worm is terrified to cross a road, desiring to remain alive in the world, even though he, in his former life a cheating man, has been punished by becoming just who he is. Time argues that he has no choice but to cross the road, even if a speeding chariot might crush him, and the worm is convinced to move forward; he is, of course, crushed.

      In a third such scenario, a just prince, after promising to save a pigeon, gives away parts of his own body equal to the size of the pigeon to a falcon who demands to feast upon his prey. Having finally given up his entire body, both the falcon and the pigeon praise the now dead prince as being the most just man in the universe.

       There is, in short, no answers provided for the horrible events that The Mahabharata chronicle; there is only the consolation of moving forward. While his mother and father determine to do penance by moving off into the woods, to live on roots and fruits, Yudhishthira has no choice but to rule for the 36 years that have been pre-ordained, and to do the very best he can do in his position.

       After all the roar of the battlefield, his rule is a time of silence, of sorrow, of regret, and reunification—reasons we can all use now as we once again hear the refrains of  “us” and “them,” of the differences between people who are, after all, simply our brothers.

       What Brook’s new work reveals is that, after the smoke has cleared and the bodies carried off, there can never be losers and winners; only fate itself remains. Lamentations have no meaning; only the knowledge of what life is and isn’t matters to those given the task to go on living.

       If this play is simple in its storytelling, it is made profound by the brilliant acting the entire cast. With their quiet voices, their every word was clearly to be heard, and only the beat of life played out on Tsuchitori’s drum had the ability to drown out their musings. But that is, obviously, life’s prerogative, as it gradually kills off all of the fears, absurdities, and contemplations of the living.

 

Los Angeles, May 28, 2017

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