what’s love got to do with it?
by Douglas Messerli
Pyrotr Tchaikovsky (composer), Modest
Tchaikovsky (libretto, based on a play by Henrik Hertz), Iolanta and Béla Bartók (music), Béla Balázs (libretto, based on a
story by Charles Perreault), Bluebeard’s Castle, Mariusz Treliński (stage director), Gary Halvorson
(film director) / 2015 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live
broadcast]
I originally intended, before
actually viewing the two operas presented in the MET’s HD Valentine’s Day
broadcast, to discuss these works separately, adding my remarks about the
Bartok opera to those I had already made above on the Los Angeles Opera production,
and writing about the Tchaikovsky work, never before performed on the
Metropolitan Opera stage, within another context. After seeing the pair of
short operas, directed by Mariusz Treliński, it became apparent that to do so
would be to ignore the carefully constructed and, at times, revelatory links
between the two works.
Of course, there is absolutely no reason to imagine that these two very
different pieces, written only 20 years apart, need have anything to do with
one another, Iolanta representing
clearly a work of 19th century that romanticizes love and seeks for
its characters’ purification through their orientation to the light, “the
pearl” of God’s gift to mankind. Light is not just God’s first creation, but
representative of moral value and comprehension in the Tchaikovsky work.
In Treliński’s version, the young girl’s father, King René (Ilya Bannik)
is not just a misguided parent, attempting to protect his beloved daughter from
a truth which may, he fears, transform her joyful demeanor into a world of fear
and terror, but is a dictatorial figure who pretends wisdom while denying even
the concept of it—no one with access to girl is allowed to mention light and
vision. Yet at opera’s start, Iolanta has come of age enough to perceive that
something is missing from her life, and begins to suffer even though she cannot
yet comprehend why she might have any right to do so, particularly since she is
lovingly cared for by servants day and night. Eyes, accordingly, have no
purpose but for tears, and tears, alas, have become to appear in her eyes
without cause. What we begin to perceive is that, even in the closed world in
which she has been sheltered, the young blind girl is beginning to comprehend
that something is amiss. How can her nurse, for example, know that she is
crying without touching her eyes, to spot her fever without putting her hands
to her forehead?
The opera’s libretto, however, does hint, moreover, that René’s
intentions may not all be a as loving as they are manipulative. Why will he not
even reveal that he is the king or that Iolanta has been promised in marriage
to Duke Robert (Aleksei Markov)? This beautiful young maiden locked away in her
enchanted garden, after all, is not so very different from the forested animals
the King keeps on his property to hunt them down and destroy them. And not only
is René mistaken in his notions of filial protection, but he has not bothered
to discover whether or not the young man to whom she is promised is a suitable
husband for her. In fact, Robert, even knowing of the vow to which he has been
committed, has been, so to speak, actively playing the field, and has fallen in
love with another woman, Mathilda.
Fortunately, his close companion, Vaudémont (Piotr Beczala) has not yet
found the perfect woman he is seeking, and which, almost as soon as he has sung
of his desires, he discovers in the visage of Iolanta. But even suddenly
witnessing everything for which he has been seeking, also reveals his own
failures: for him everything is based on sight. Accordingly, just as he begins
to reveal to the unknowing girl the importance of light and all that it
represents, she, in incomprehension of words, begins to reveal to him that
love, wisdom, and knowledge can (and must) be known even in the darkness.
Had Tchaikovsky been a 20th-century composer, he surely would have
sought out that second truth more thoroughly, faced as Bartók would soon be,
with the bleakness of the already discordant future. But Tchaikovsky and his
story, being of another time, pursues instead how to bring the light to his
heroine’s life so that she, too, can be blessed just as has her loving knight.
Today, the ridiculousness of the magical cure by the Arab doctor
Ibn-Hakia (Elchin Arizov) is apparent, with its mysterious “backstage”
melodramatics which, we are told, the young girl bravely endures as she is forced
to wear a blindfold to cover eyes that cannot see the light. Chalk it all up to
a dramatic revelation of the fact that she is cured, and is now suddenly able, because she has willed it, to share in
God’s great and glorious gift, all somewhat campily represented in this opera’s
conclusion through the project of white rays emanating in an art- deco-like
pattern behind the carefully arranged gathering, for the work’s conclusion, of
the chorus and leads.
In fact, even more so than when I saw the great Bartók opera late last
year, I could not help but comprehend the work, this time around, as a
horrifying, nightmare prediction of World War I and the fascist interventions
of the rest of the 20th century. Everything that Bluebeard reveals
to Judith will be realized in the century ahead, as the idealist’s life—the
dreamer in the moonlight—will be the required sacrificed of mankind.
What these operas do ultimately reveal by their pairing is that while
the first may represent a dream of love, the second has actually very little to
do with love, but is a tale of the twisted human attraction to the perverse,
concerning the awful hypnotic draw of the human species to the heart of
darkness.
Los Angeles, February 16, 2015
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2015).