John Adams and Alice Goodman | Nixon in China / 2011 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live production]

 six degrees of insanity

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Adams (composer), Alice Goodman (libretto), Peter Sellars (director), Nixon in China / 2011 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live production]

 

Although most of the critics who I read (Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times, Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times, and Anne Midgette of The Washington Post) agreed that the Met's new production of Nixon in China was excellent and long overdue, there was a sense between the three that the plot of the work was static and that one character, in particular, Henry Kissinger (sung by Richard Paul Fink) was a figure of parody whereas the others were treated more seriously. In a piece by Max Frankel, published in The New York Times a couple of days before the live HD airing, the former editor of the Times—who was with Nixon in China and won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the trip—squarely asked the question which the other reviewers only intimated:

 

                 ...Why bother, as in Nixon, to lure us to a fictional enterprise with

                 contemporary characters and scenes from an active memory bank?

                 Why use actualities, or the manufactured actualities of our television

                 screens and newspapers, to fuel the drama?

 

The answer, he feels, is "obvious but also treacherous," that the use of actual characters helps to "overcome the musty odor that inhabits many opera houses," drawing new audiences into the theater. But, Frankel continues, it brings other dangers with it:

 

                   The danger is that despite the verisimilitudes of text, setting and

                   costume, a viewer's grasp of events may not match the fabric

                   being woven onstage. What the creators intend to be profundity

                   may strike the knowing as parody.

 

      Most of the reviewers agreed that the composer, writer, and director did give their figures a range of emotions, both serious and comic, and between acts, Winston Lord (of National Security) assured us that much of the talk between Nixon and Chairman Mao in the First Act was close to what actually was said in their meeting; but all also felt that the opera did move to a kind of parody in the Second Art performance of The Red Detachment of Women, in which Fink, the singer-actor who played Kissinger, also plays a lecherous, Simon Legree-like landowner who has stolen away a young maiden. Fink sings:

 

                                             She was so hot

                                             I was hard-put

                                             To be polite.

                                             When the first cut

                                             —Come on you slut!—

                                             Scored her brown skin

                                             I started in,

                                             Man upon hen!

 

Some characterized this scene as surreal and the last act as psychological, as if they were somehow different in tone from the more historicized events in the First Act.

     If nothing else, there was a sense that Nixon in China, without a narrative arc, was a bit of a rocky ride. Certainly, at times, while always enjoying the shimmering glory of the music, I too felt that way while watching it. Yet now that I've pondered it for a while, I believe I was mistaken, that, in fact, the opera is highly structured and fairly coherent in its tone and presentation of characters.

     First of all, John Adams and Peter Sellars are never going to present something that works as a Verdi opera might. Although all may work with a complex weaving of historical events, Verdi's sense of drama is highly embedded in narrative, while Adams and team, postmodern in their approach, eschew what we might call "story."

    Nixon in China has "events," but there are presented in a series of tableaux, not unlike some medieval musical productions. Each character gets the chance to reveal his or her selves. But what Alice Goodman, Adams and Sellars are interested in is not so much the outer faces they present to the world, but what these figures are thinking and imagining within. And I think they would have to admit that every figure on their stage is, in one way or another, a bit unhinged; these are, after all—with the exception perhaps of Pat Nixon—people desperate for power. And all are on the edge of insanity.

     Even before we meet any of the major characters, the people of China speak in a strange manner that we comprehend is not quite rational thought, as they sing from the text of "The Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention":

 

                             Prompt delivery directly to authorities of all items

                                  confiscated from landlords.

                             Do not damage crops.

                             Do not take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses.

                             Pay for everything you damage.

                             etc.

 

As they chant, "The people are the heroes now," even if these "heroes" are highly manipulated and controlled.

     Out of the sky drops the Nixons' Spirit of 76, and no sooner does the President descend the airstair, shaking the hand of Premier Chou En-lai, than he begins inwardly calculating the great results of this journey as the filming catches him just in time for the evening news broadcasts in the USA, he hilariously singing out his fascination with his own acts: "News! News! News!

 

                                          News has a kind of mystery;

                                          When I shook hands with Chou En-lai

                                          On this bare field outside Peking

                                          Just now, the whole world was listening

                                       
James Maddalena, who has now sung this role in hundreds of performances, is an amazing actor, who brings off those jowl-shaking absurdities quite brilliantly.

     Nixon's and Kissinger's meeting with Premier Chou (Russell Braun) and Chairman Mao (Robert Brubaker) in the next scene is perhaps the most absurd of the entire opera, as the two powerful leaders speak in a series of alternating gnomic jokes, apothegms, and, in Nixon's case, simple American verbal blunders. As Mao becomes more and more incomprehensible ("Founders come first / Then profiteers") in sayings parroted by a wonderful trio of assistants, Nixon attempts his linguistic twists spun from what he believes the Chairman might be saying. It all reminds me, a bit, of the other Peter Seller's performance as the totally innocent and ignorant Chance in the film Being There, where he spouts meaningless sentences interpreted by others to be full of profound significance. Mao and Nixon, one a bit senile, the other humorless and often depressed, hit it off beautifully in their mindless chatter, while the more rational Kissinger proclaims to be unable to understand anything, and the Premier sits silently in sufferance.

      What that meeting accomplished, an issue clearly of importance in this opera, is questionable. But surely we can feel, and, in Adams' delicious scoring, we can hear the growing friendliness of all figures as they swill down Mai-tai after Mai-tai with toast upon toast. Again, non-drinker Kissinger misses out on all the glorious insanity of the evening.

      In Act II we get a chance to see Pat Nixon at the edge. She begins the morning, in fact, downing a couple of needed pills. Like Premier Chou she is in sufferance, and, although excited by the whole trip, she is also exhausted and, we feel, not at all comfortable. The most American of this opera's figures, she flaunts a bright red coat. Flawlessly played by Janis Kelly, Pat comes off as somewhat frail and slightly terrified being as she is rushed through a glass factory (where the workers award her a green elephant) and classrooms in which the students have clearly been told what to say and how to behave, before stopping by the Gate of Longevity and Goodwill, where she sings her touching and slightly pathetic paean to the world she loves:

 

                                         This is prophetic! I foresee

                                         A time will come when luxury

                                         Dissolves into the atmosphere

                                         Like a perfume, and everywhere

                                         The simple virtues root and branch

                                         And leaf and flower. And on that bench

                                         There we’ll relax and taste the fruit

                                         Of all our actions. Why regret

                                         Life which is so much like a dream?

 

Yet the homespun images she spins out of her sense of momentary joy—lit-up farm porches, families sitting around the dinner table, church steeples, etc.—are right out of Norman Rockwell paintings and is just as absurd of a vision as are her husband's darker mumblings.

      That evening's presentation of The Red Detachment of Women ballet, written by Chiang Ch'ing, Mao's wife—as she so shrilly reminds us later—is experienced by the now overwhelmed Nixons less as an objective performance—in reality the evening ended with enthusiastic praise by the President and First Lady—as from a psychological, inner viewpoint. It is clear that Nixon, as he suggests several times in the opera, admired Kissinger's mind, but he also mocked his ways and apparently disliked the man personally. Accordingly, the Nixons both conjure up the evil landowner in their tired travelers' minds, to be, or, least, to look like Kissinger.* Like many an innocent theater-goer, the Nixons become so involved in the story of a poor girl who is saved and then destroyed by refusing to obey Communist doctrine that they confuse drama with reality, breaking into the action of the ballet itself to save and protect the young dancer.

     Mark Morris, using some aspects of the original choreography, nicely stages his orderly squadrons of young military dancers against the chaos of events. This is perhaps the most difficult part of the opera, and I am still not sure whether or not it truly succeeds, but it is crucial to our witnessing the truly mad person behind Chiang Ch'ing (Kathleen Kim)—who in real life may have been responsible for hundreds of deaths and had, herself, erratic nerves and severe hypochondriasis—as she proclaims in the noted aria, "I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung," angrily declaring that all be determined by "the book." After Mao's death, we should recall, Chiang Ch'ing committed suicide.

     After witnessing these six individuals'—Richard Nixon, Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, Pat Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Chiang Ch'ing—mental dramas, we can only breathlessly watch as they slip into sleep. Kissinger shacks up with one of Mao's translators before disappearing into the bathroom. The Nixons share their disappointments, the President for being misinterpreted by the newspapers, Pat silently suffering, with tearful eyes, from her husband's inattention and having herself to attend yet again to what may be his ritual recounting of an attack he endured in World War II. Mao also finds relief in the hands of one of his translators before threatening his wife for having made political mistakes, until he falls with her into a lustful embrace upon their bed. Chou En-lai, clearly already in pain from the bladder cancer which would kill him 4 years later, awakens early to return to his never-ending work, drawing a close to all the madness with the most profound question of the opera: "Was there any point to any of it?" The "it" may refer, obviously, to the Nixons' visit, but it also suggests another possibility of meaning: "Was there any point to all their madness, to their desperate struggles to hold onto any power they might have over others?" All ended their lives in disgrace and shame, except for Pat; but even she almost disappeared from the public eye after the death of her husband, suffering a serious stroke the same year that Chou En-lai died.

     In some respects, I now wonder, despite its occasional comic elements and always lush sonority of sound, if this isn't one of the darkest of operas. But then, aren't the young and the old—represented by the US and China—usually at the heart of the tragic, Romeo and Lear?

 

Los Angeles, February 19, 2011

Reprinted from American Cultural Treasures (March 2011).  

 

*Coincidentally, in my 1990 "opera for spoken voices," The Walls Come True (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995), I included Dr. Kissinger in my "Twelve Tyrants Between Acts: Mundane Moments and Insane Histories," based on the paranoia and ridiculous accusations he expressed in his Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little Brown, 1982) when, in 1973, he was in Hanoi attempting to negotiate the Paris Accords.            

    

Georges Bizet, Eugène Cormon, and Michael Carré | Les Pêcheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers) / 2016 [The Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

love vs. faith

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugène Cormon and Michael Carré (libretto), Georges Bizet (composer), Penny Woolcock (stage director), Matthew Diamond (director) Les Pêcheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers) / 2016 [The Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

Changing the location from the more specific island of Sri Lanka (Ceylon), the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Georges Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers)—the first time on their stage for over 100 years—is set in a vague “Far East,” its ramshackle sea-side village filled with figures dressed in a wide-range of outfits that cover everything from the mid-19th century to the contemporary, and who inhabit rooms fit out with run-down refrigerators and television sets. These brawny pearl fishers reach for out a “brewski” while still worshipping the ancient brahma, and still glorifying their religion with the nightly songs of a vestal virgin, Leïla (Diana Damrau) who might have been at home in ancient times. By permitting these obvious anachronisms, director Penny Woolcock allows for the exoticism of Bizet’s world while bringing that fairytale landscape into the real world.

    That tactic pays off by transferring our attention from the obvious flaws of Eugène Cormon’s and Michael Carré’s original libretto and later disastrous musical revisions by the opera’s publisher Choudens, back to Bizet’s sparklingly limpid score. Under the careful and yet exploratory hand of conductor Gianandrea Noseda, we can now again hear the constant references to the surrounding ocean (made even more theatrically central by beginning the opera with plunge of two pearl fishers into the deep sea—using skilled company dancers with newfound aerial skills to pretend the undulations of swimming) and discover that there are more than two great arias to this almost forgotten opera.

     Yes, the well-known tenor-baritone duet, “Amitié sainte,” a swearing of the two male lead’s eternal friendship that reads to anyone with an ounce of imagination as a male-male matrimony, is the most unforgettable aria of this opera and many another; but almost as memorable is Nadir’s (Matthew Polenzani) solo recounting of the beauty of Leïla, “Je crois entendre encore.” And the choral pieces of both acts I and II beautifully bind the personal emotions of the village leader Zurga (Mariusz Kwiecien), Nadir and Leïla, with the fears, strengths, and desires of the community as a whole.

       In part, this tale, like so many operas, represents a struggle to express the self within the confines of communal rules and decorum. Nadir’s and Leïla’s love not only betrays the love of Nadir and Zurga, but the pledge Leïla has made to the community and their god. 

       The fact that both men are also in love with this woman merely complicates the various positions, public and private, which have been imposed upon them in this slightly desperate world, threatened by the possibility of daily death by drowning, being crushed by the waters’ tsunamis, and, at opera’s end, being destroyed by fire. In short, the central question of the opera becomes how can these individuals sublimate their private passions to their public declarations and their faith?

     The character of Zurga, in particular, is torn between these issues. It is he, despite the outcry of the community, who must decide whether the discovered sinners must live or die, and he openly wavers again and again, twice by the end of Act I. 

        Even after he has sentenced them to death, Act II finds him suffering for his decision; and, upon meeting with Leïla, who argues for him to spare Nadir, even if he kills her, he once again temporarily rescinds his decision, desperately wanting to believe that the whole affair was a thing of accident instead of a preconceived betrayal of Nadir’s and his love.

        But as Leïla goes on to restate their love, Zurga’s feelings of reconciliation quickly turn to jealousy and vengeance again in the magnificently tumultuous ending of “Je frémis, je chancelle, de son âme cruelle,” in response to which the previously submissive Leïla curses Zurga and proudly embraces her death beside her lover

        Once again, it appears, community values will outweigh personal passions; but having now realized that he has, symbolically speaking, had his own night with Leïla when, as a child, she offered him haven in her family home, Zurga shifts position one more time, in this case ardently turning against his community and religion by setting the fragile wooden homes afire, and sending the city’s inhabitants back to their burning homes in order to save their endangered children. While the lovers escape, his fate seems sealed, as he, himself, in this production, appears to be surrounded by flames. And no matter what outcome we might imagine for events, his passion for both Nadir and Leïla has set his own life afire at the expense of communal obligations and faith.

        So excellent is this new production of the early Bizet opera, we can be assured that at least for several years, The Pearl Fishers will again be available, at least in New York.

 

Los Angeles, January 17, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2016).

Dmitri Shostakovich, Yevgeni Zamyatin, Georgy Ionin, and Alexander Preis | Nos (The Nose) / 2013 [Metropolitan Opera-HD live production]

shrill charm

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dmitri Shostakovich, Yevgeni Zamyatin, Georgy Ionin and Alexander Preis (libretto, based on a story by Gogol),  (music), William Kentridge (stage director), Gary Halvorson (director) Nos (The Nose) / 2013 [Metropolitan Opera-HD live production]

 

Yesterday Howard and I saw, for the first time, the rather raucous, even, at times, rackety opera by Dmitri Shostakovich composed in the last wave of Soviet Futurist experimentalism in 1927-28 and premiering in Leningrad a year later.

     I cannot imagine a more innovative and stunningly visual version of this short opera than William Kentridge and Luc De Wit’s dynamic production which combines small, beautifully lit (by Urs Schönebaum) “realist” sets upon and behind which is projected a stunning collage-film of Russian visuals and English-language and Russian-language words that creates the entire world of Leningrad whirling out of control around the fairly simple story of a lower bureaucrat, Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov (wonderfully performed by Paulo Szot), who one morning wakes up without his nose.

     The nose has been found in a piece of bread baked by the wife of the local barber, who the day before has attempted, unsuccessfully, to shave Kovalyov. The barber, Ivan Yakovlevich, immediately attempts to get rid of the discovered nose, but has a great deal of difficulty as he is met throughout the streets by friends and enemies alike, establishing the almost always mix of wildly exuberant and severely controlled world of Gogol’s story. Finally, attempting to throw the nose into the Neva river, Ivan is spotted by a police officer who immediately arrests him.

      As Kovalyov wakes up to bemoan the missing appendage, the utterly absurd story begins its dramatic arch as the nose, suddenly now as large as a person (played in this production by Alexander Lewis), is seen running through the streets, and soon after is encountered by Kovalyov in the Cathedral—now dressed in the uniform of a State Councilor, who, compared with the Collegiate Assessor, is of so high a rank that Kovalyov dare not even address him. When he does demand that the nose come back to him, the appendage declares to have nothing to do with him and, in the crowded service, again escapes.

      Outraged, Kovalyov visits the chief of police, only to be told, as in so many tales of the slipperiness of those in power, that the chief has just left his office. A too-long encounter with journalists at the local newspaper follows, wherein they refuse to post Kovalyov’s notice of his lost nose for fear of discrediting the newspaper; who would believe in the loss of a nose: When Kovalyov finally reveals his face, however, they are convinced, but still refuse to post the advertisement, ironically offering him some snuff in recompense. In anger and self-pity the bureaucrat leaves them to return to his room in despair.

      The real pleasure of Kentridge’s sets reveal the nose in various “adventures,” linking itself, at one moment, to an equestrian statue, at another dancing upon head of Anna Pavlova. Mostly, the poor nose roams the city, attempting, like the murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, simply to not be noticed and trapped. As the artist-director described his interpretation of Gogol’s story in an engaging conversation with Met manager Peter Gelb before the opera, he sees the nose as something like a writer reading his failed words in despair, the words unable to match what in his head. The nose, a bit like one’s words, simply desires a life of its own, a life apart from its humdrum pimpled existence upon the face of the failed human being, we gradually discover, who Kovalyov is. Adding another layer of irony to the story, Kentridge modeled the opera’s nose upon his own quite sizable proboscis.

      Throughout the opera, indeed, much is ironic, and everything is almost always satiric, without being truly funny (despite the constant chortles that issued from the elderly woman sitting next to me who obviously confused attention to the opera with the need to issue vocal clues to her appreciation). Indeed, Shostakovich’s piece, one might argue, presents itself as a kind of one-liner. Without character development in the narrative, and basically shrill in its scherzo ostinato and high tenor and baritone squeaks, the work, despite its often exciting score, generally overwhelms its subject matter, particularly in the crowd scenes, where both in the train station and on the streets the large wonderfully-costumed cast run about in chase of the nose and scream out their fears for the dangers the escaped nose represents. At times, one sought just a few moments of tonal relief, but when those moments arrived, as in the comic balalaika song sung by Kovalyov’s servant or the somewhat quieter moment when, after everyone has rushed to a park to see the nose, one viewer summarizes the “nothing” he has seen; the momentarily quietude was quickly swept away again in the frantic action and sounds of Shostakovich’s busy city life.

      There is ultimately a kind of sadness to this satiric work, as when, even when Kovalyov’s nose is returned, it still is determined not stay upon his face as the Collegiate Assessor briefly fantasizes during an evil spell cast upon him by Madame Podtochina whose daughter he has refused to marry, and who he continues refuse even after the fracas has died down.

     In the end it appears that the nose has just been worn by all the hubbub of the citizenry and police stalking the Nevsky Prospekt and other parts of the Russian city. It is only then, when Kovalyov discovers upon awakening the next day, when his nose has returned of its own will, that Shostakovitch’s opera quiets down into a fetching polka, as the gossipy city-dwellers—similar to the officials proclaiming the Stalinist-imposed restrictions—chastise the writer for even thinking of such a silly and unbelievable story—although admitting, in true Eastern European manner, that, of course, such things can happen. That even the unbelievable can sometimes occur.

     If Shostakovich’s first foray into theater and opera is not a great work, it is, nonetheless, a kind of hidden treasure, despite its often-strident narrative and sounds. And William Kentridge has transformed this work into a true visual pleasure which I will not soon forget.   

 

Los Angeles, October 27, 2013

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

Robert Wilson | John Cage's Lecture on Nothing / 2013

nothing on a lecture

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Wilson (director and performer) John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing, music by Arno Kraehahn / the performance was presented by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA at Royce Hall, Tuesday, October 15, 2013 (world premiere)

 

Given his penchant in Einstein on the Beach and other operas and performances for repetition and long, slow movements, one might well comprehend Robert Wilson’s attraction to John Cage. Cascading the Royce Hall stage with long white scrolls on which various words and phrases of Cage had been written, Wilson himself dressed in white with white face, his performance promised to be interesting. But almost from the beginning, with a piercingly loud electronic blast lasting for seven minutes, during which an actor with a telescope appeared scanning the horizon, presumably searching for “something” as opposed for the promised “nothing,” much seemed amiss. I immediately perceived in these theatrical tricks the vast difference between Wilson and Cage, bringing me to increasingly wonder, as the performance moved on, why Wilson had chosen to reinterpret Cage’s famous piece.   

     I did not ever hear Cage perform in own work, but having known Cage I can imagine how he might perform it and others have attested to the fact that when the author read the work it was spoken quietly, honoring the spacial pauses of the written text—which I republished in my From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990. Wilson, at first, seemed also determined to honor these tactics. Much of the Cage work is memorable and quotable, and, for a few moments I settled back to simply take in the pleasure of Cage’s talk, “Slowly, as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere and that is a pleasure.” At one point Cage indicates the whole structure of his talk: “We need the glass and we need the milk.” As Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed, pointed out, however, it is neither the glass nor the milk on which Cage focuses, but the pouring, the process of creating this piece—which, in fact, is the “something” the text itself seems to deny.

     As always with Cage’s pieces, there is also significant interchange between the speaker and listeners. Early on in Lecture on Nothing Cage notes “If anyone is sleepy, let him go to sleep,” repeating it from time to time, as if encouraging those disinterested in his pursuit of silence and nothing to remain silent and accept the work as “nothing.” But for Wilson, quite obviously, desperate, so it seems, to make it clear that Cage was indeed saying an important “something,” one of these repeated phrases leads him into a theatrical and outright corny gesture where he stands up and moves to a bed, crawling into bed and pretending to fall sleep. A visual of the Russian poet Mayakovsky appeared, smoking a cigarette while, as, for a short period, we heard Cage’s gentle and probing voice instead of Wilson’s (Thank heaven!).

      When Wilson did return to the table, articulating Cage’s fascination with the process of his speech, naming its various parts and sections as if it were a work of music with various movements (which, in some senses, it is), he soon seemed to become frustrated by this naming and framing process, moving in the text faster and faster while continuing to raise his pitch until he ended in a kind of angry scream not unlike the beginning of the work—something so unCagean that it seemed to come from different planet.

      I am no purist, and I truly don’t mind different and, in this case, a far more theatrical reading of one of my favorite texts. But I cannot comprehend what Wilson was attempting to do in his interpretation of Cage’s work, unless he was suggesting his own personal dissatisfaction with it proposed “nothingness.” The marvel of Cage’s Lecture on Nothing is that in its silences, pauses, self-conscious statements of its own structure, and denials of grand ideas, it truly becomes a beautiful something. If you search too hard, without bothering to listen, you will not find it. Wilson’s personal interactions do just that, distracting us from the text, leaving us with much less, almost nothing.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2013

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