Gustav Mahler | Blumine, “Adagio” from Symphony No. 10, and selections from Lieder und Gesänge and Des Knaben Wunderhorn / 2025

a trip into mahler’s mind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gustav Mahler Blumine, “Adagio” from Symphony No. 10, and selections from Lieder und Gesänge and Des Knaben Wunderhorn / Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel / 2025 | the concert Howard Fox and I attended was on February 23, 2025

 

Yesterday afternoon Howard and I were fortunate to be able attend a concert of the work of Gustav Mahler, conducted by the great maestro Gustavo Dudamel at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

     It began with a “stranded” masterwork Blumine, torn out of his First Symphony, that yet, in its absolute luminous use of strings and subtle clarinets and brass creates very much what Orin Howard describes as a “piece of shimmery poetic restraint,” centered around a romantic sense of sexual expectation and resistance that Richard Wagner might surely have appreciated. The “flower,” the substance of this work, blooms so slowly and imperceptibly that we almost lose our breath as it comes into its final orchestral existence. This is the true substance of longing and desire that cannot utterly be fulfilled.

     And the wonderful Los Angeles Philharmonic performed it a manner that almost literally took our breaths away, particularly given the vertiginous view in which Howard Fox and I sat—probably in the very seats we shared in our very first visit to the concert hall many years ago with its architectural creator Frank Gehry as a member of our party. I am sorry to report that I do suffer, very slightly, from vertigo, and to watch the performance from this height literally did make me gasp for breath: perfect for the work of such endless anticipation.

     The second performance, the “Adagio” from Mahler’s Symphony No. 10, was just as breathtaking. But in this case the anticipation was in how all the strings, the rows of violins, violas, cellos, and woodwind instrumentalists stirring up our emotional tethers which we hoped might be mitigated by the rows of trombonists, tuba players, and bassoonists. This is truly a kind of Wagner-like exploration, expressing the situation when Mahler, whose wife Alma had begun an affair with the great architect Walter Gropius, himself fell into a deep Freudian frenzy of unrequited passion, ending in a kind of mental breakdown; even his manuscript was covered over with statements such as “Madness, seize me, the accursed! Negate me, so I forget that I exist, that I may cease to be!”

     Critics of the time thought the work to be that of a deranged man, a genius suffering a total mental collapse, the territory perhaps of Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice. Yet the brass finally do arrive to save the day, resolving the sexual frustrations, even if only briefly, allowing us a final relief in the brief bombast of their voices. Even as the violins and cellos flutter to the end, the purgation of the sexual intensity of this truly sexual masterwork is resolved by a slow putter of the trombones and tuba.

      The second half of the concert was devoted to a selection of Mahler’s Lieder und Gesänge and his Des Knaben Wunderhorn, based on the poems and songs of Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, which despite the wonderful performances of singers Ekaterina Gubanova and Simon Keenlyside, just didn’t quite do it for me. They too were almost breathless evocations of boys, women, and goats that, in Mahler’s truly theatrical style, often made us wonder about the folkloric events. But lieder has never been my favorite form. Perhaps you need to be German to truly enjoy the genre; but tales of throwing a ring into the river to find the woman of one’s dreams, a dialogue about a mother and her starving child (with reminisces of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage), and a cry out to heaven to seek the celestial touches of a lost boy just don’t do it for me. 

     The last, as commentator Howard Posner explains, became the theme of Mahler’s fourth movement to his Second Symphony, which might be sublime but seems, in the context, simply overdramatic, one of my problems with many of the great composer's works, and which possibly also explains his later lack of early 20th-century musical recognition. Given the beauty of his music that wasn’t, of course, deserved.

     And Dudamel and his now renowned Los Angeles Philharmonic do simply take one musically speaking into new dimensions that make you feel utterly dizzy with pleasure.

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2025

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (February 2025).

 

 

Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II | 'Ol Man River" from Show Boat / 1927

my favorite musical theater songs: “ol man river”

by Douglas Messerli

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ahqB-1NU0Q

Composers: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II

Performer: Jules Bledscoe, 1927 (original Broadway performer)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnmEgmugnCg

Composers: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II

Performer: Paul Robeson, 1928 (with Paul Whiteman and his orchestra)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df4VdyGIqJ8

Composers: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II

Performer: Paul Robeson, 1936 (film version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSzYRo9j7YM

Composers: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II

Performer: William Warfield, 1951 (film version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTnw_MmVptQ

Composers: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II

Performer: Frank Sinatra, 1946

In what many see as the first great American musical—certainly one of the first “serious” Broadway musicals—Florenz Ziegfeld moved away from revue and light entertainments, producing Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s remarkably rich score of Show Boat at his Ziegfeld theater in 1927. Purportedly, Ziegfeld did not like one of the work’s major songs, “Ol’Man River;” given some of the kitsch productions (I’ve included Frank Sinatra’s version here just as an example of such), one might comprehend his doubts.

     Yet, in Jules Bledscoe’s performance, who sang Joe in the original production, we can hear his well-enunciated anger at the white community who treats him so abysmally while working on the river that “just keeps rollin’ along.” His version may not vocally be the best, but it’s certainly of the best expressed and is a true denunciation of the slavery all around him.

     Paul Robeson’s 1936 film rendition is perhaps the best known, with small changes to the original text (“darkies” instead of “niggers,” etc.). His version, particularly in his 1928 recording is much faster than Bledscoe’s, and, at times, he oddly seems more interested in the river itself than the bigotry of which the song so severely condemns. It is, of course, a work of comparison, describing the puny meanness of the human race against the endless flowing of the mighty Mississippi, the only peaceful aspect in Joe’s troubled life.

 Dere's an ol' man called de Mississippi

Dat's de ol' man dat I'd like to be

What does he care if de world's got troubles

What does he care if de land ain't free

 

Ol' man river, dat ol' man river

He mus' know sumpin', but don't say nuthin'

He jes' keeps rollin'

He keeps on rollin' along

 

Human beings are another thing:

 

You an' me, we sweat an' strain

Body all achin' an' wracked wid pain,

Tote dat barge! Lif' dat bale!

Git a little drunk an' you lands in jail

 

Ah gits weary an' sick of tryin'

Ah'm tired of livin' an' skeered of dyin'

But ol' man river

He jes' keeps rolling' along

 

     Warfield’s singing in the 1951 film version is a darker, bass setting of the same song.

    Hammerstein reveals himself in this early work as a far deeper lyricist than his later musicals—although in every work he has one or two songs with greater political context (think, for example of “Poor Judd Is Dead” in Oklahoma!, South Pacific’s “You Have to Be Carefully Taught” or the spectacular narrative retelling of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in The King and I). But it remains difficult, even now, to accommodate the idea of the same lyricist who writes “Git a little drunk an’ you lands in jail,” or “Ah’m tired of livin’ an’ skeered of dyin,’with the fabulous metaphor of “the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.” And when one also realizes just how important Hammerstein was in Stephen Sondheim’s career, it gets even a bit stranger. Hammerstein seems far more at home in the “Make Believe” reality, than in the gritty world of slavery and miscegenation; but there he is, way back in 1927, long before he had anything to do with Richard Rodgers, working with the highly romantic composer Jerome Kern.

 

Los Angeles, September 19, 2017  

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

Jules Massenet, Edouard Blau, Paul Millet, and George Hartmann | Werther / 2014

between duty and the devil

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jules Massenet (music), Edouard Blau, Paul Millet, and Georges Hartmann (libretto, based on Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), Werther / 1892 / broadcast as a Metropolitan Opera HD-live production on March 15, 2014.

 

The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Werther makes it clearer than ever that Werther (the remarkable Jonas Kaufman) and his beloved Charlotte (Sophie Koch) belong together, while standing apart from the others of the work. As my spouse Howard commented, both are costumed in clothes—mostly gray with a white bodice in Werther’s case, and pearl-white or white with a dark overcoat in Charlotte’s—that stand in opposition to the others of the work. Although the melancholic Werther is willing to risk everything for love, he is, nonetheless, like her, a man who adores children and believes in duty. Indeed, his absolute love for Charlotte is based on her conventional values, her determination to care for her brothers and sisters after their mother’s death and to remain true to her promise to her mother that she will marry Albert, a kindly militarist, who by opera’s end all but accuses his wife of unfaithfulness, forcing her to herself send the pistols for which Werther has asked in order to kill himself since Charlotte has refused to give into his sexual assaults.

     What became more apparent than ever in this production is that, as opposed to the conventionality of both Werther and Charlotte, most of the rest of the opera’s figures—despite their outward celebration of the local parson and clichés of cultural obedience—are far more willing to bend to the joy of daily pleasures. Several times in Werther, characters sing out in praise of Bacchus, particularly early in the opera when we first meet The Bailiff’s (Jonathan Sommers) friends, Johannn (Philip Cokorinnos) and Schmidt (Tony Stevenson), who while mocking Werther’s seriousness, themselves sing of the wine and crayfish they are looking forward to at the local pub. Despite the Bailiff’s more serious demeanor and his insistent demand that his children perform adequately a Christmas carol he currently teaching them, he too speaks of Bacchus and, through his daughter’s Sophie’s encouragement, is easily convinced to join his friends at the pub.

     Although both Werther and Charlotte may see the children as “angels,” the children themselves act up and mock several of their superiors behind their backs. Only in Charlotte’s gentle care to they truly act angelically.

     Charlotte’s 15-year-old sister, Sophie, is a pleasant and gentle girl who, when Charlotte is away at the ball, lovingly cares for her siblings; yet she has her own way of not taking things seriously, at the pastor’s wedding anniversary party singing of the joyfulness of the day and weather, while flirtatiously inviting Werther to dance with her at the celebration. In Act III she, similarly, attempts to cheer up her distraught older sister, who has now realized through Werther’s anguished epistles how much she is in love with him rather than with her often fatuous and inattentive husband, Albert (David Bižić).

      In such a bacchanalian world of wine, women, dance and, in Sophie’s case, just the joy of living, the two heroes of the piece become tragic representatives of conventional faith and duty, a fact that, by opera’s end Charlotte has come to realize—that she was forged her with chains to Werther from the first time she set eyes upon him. Two of Werther’s most touching songs—his Act II disquisition on God’s response if he were to commit suicide (Werther’s version of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be,” “Lorsque l’enfant revient d’un voyage”) and his stunningly sad recitation of one of his translations of Ossian—center on death, as does Charlotte’s Act II aria (“Va, laisse couler mes larmes”), a prayer for moral fortitude. While the others dance around them with the zest of living beings, these two suffer, mostly in silence—except to the opera’s audience—unable to survive in the devil’s bacchanal of daily life. Although seen as everyone else as models of moral certitude, they are, in the real world in which they are forced to live, the most tenuous of beings. Is it any wonder, then, that they end their lives in a passionate embrace and kiss that resembles the high Romantic sacrificial pattern of “love, death, and transfiguration.” Although Massenet’s work is far more intimate and modest that Wagner’s great Tristan and Isolde, it is, at its heart, a similar tale, a tale of two lovers doomed by social and cultural conventions they feel are beyond their control, while the others, those on the side of the devil—according to Werther and Charlotte’s way of seeing things—are free to enjoy their lives and survive.

      As Jonas Kaufman suggested during an intermission discussion of this HD presentation of the Met production, in this pre-Freudian drama, there is no way that Werther or Charlotte might see the error of their ways, to psychologically comprehend their entrapment in the dichotomy of “Totem and Taboo.” The problem for modern audiences, accordingly is to try to maintain Werther (and also Charlotte) as credible figures, despite their manias, with whom we can identify. Both Kaufman (in one of the best operatic performances of the year) and Koch accomplished that!

      Unfortunately, in the last moments of Werther’s death, when the two sing of their passion and Werther is transfigured by the sound of the children singing, once again, “Noel Noel Noel,” the sound of the broadcast disappeared. Several members of the contemporary audience with whom we shared the theater suddenly became like children, shouting out for others to sing, or—in the most disgusting of experiences—two elderly women stupidly commenting in loud voices on the slow death of Werther: “Is she dead too? Oh, he’s still living! She’s covered with blood. Oh he’s still singing. Is she going to shoot herself?” etc. etc. Most of the audience members tried simply to imagine the emotional impact by following the subtitles, but for these adult-children the grand opera had simply fallen apart, the credibility that Kaufman had so brilliantly worked towards completely disappearing from the art. At times like these, one can only wonder why some people had been attracted to such a memorable opera broadcast in the first place, leaving the theater as they cried out, “I want my money back!”

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2014

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (March 2014).

Elizabeth LeCompte and the Wooster Group (adapted by William Shakespeare) | Cry, Trojans! / 2014

shakespeare as ceremonial dance

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Shakespeare (as adapted by the Wooster Group and Elizabeth LeCompte) Cry, Trojans! (Troilus & Cressida) / the performance I saw as on March 2, 2014 at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater Redcat

 

The Wooster Group’s production of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida began as a joint project between the American experimental group—whose major projects have deconstructed and recontextualized classic works—and the Royal Shakespeare Company of England, who basically present more standardized productions of the Bard’s work. For the London production, the Wooster players created a text, using Shakespeare’s language, which featured the Trojans as a native American tribe, while the RSC concentrated on the Greeks using a more formalized Shakespearian approach. The two worked separately, coming together just days before the production, purposely clashing in styles and approaches, particularly in the second part, where Cressida is given over the Greeks and the two sides erupt into battle.

      I might have certainly enjoyed that pairing, delighting surely in the way the two might play off against each other. The version I saw in Los Angeles the other night, however, was, perhaps, a far more coherent rendering, performed by only the Wooster Group, with the company playing both the Trojans and the Greeks, representing the former with elaborate costumes and plastic appendages designed by artist Folkert de Jong and the latter in cowboy-like masks while speaking in a drag-version of Aussie-British English. The Trojans are clearly at the center the group’s reconfiguration of the piece, and, obviously, some of what might have resulted in clashes of outlandish proportions had been tamed by the work’s new focus.

      The Los Angeles Times critic Charles McNaulty—usually an admirably intelligent and reliable theater critic—wrote, in a piece titled “Not great Wooster or Shakespeare,” that the new version did not work for Shakespeare traditionalists nor for those who love the New York group’s sendups of classic theater pieces. He felt the work was filled with meaningless stereotypes and that it lacked technological brilliance of their other productions:

 

                        The company has made its name by reflecting canonical texts

                        in a multimedia fun house mirror. Normally the stage is awash

                        in bleeping technology, but perhaps in recognition of the fact that

                        our lives are now inundated with screens, director Elizabeth

                        LeCompte has chosen to keep the video relatively low key.

 

     Even if the four small video screens used here may not exactly light up the stage the way they did in the group’s Vieux Carré, for example, they were crucial to the meaning and substance of the Wooster’s final version. Some may have simply perceived the screens filled with strange Eskimo-like representations or as camp images of Hollywood films. But, in fact, they were carefully chosen to parallel the seemingly Amazon-like tribal images of the play’s Trojans. And, most important, nearly all the “chorographical” movements of LeCompte’s actors were determined by the relation of the figures on these small screens. The arguments between Hector (Ari Fliakos) and Troilus (Scott Shepherd), the significant movements of the Trojan warriors are almost all “stolen” from the actors in the Inukitut-language Canadian film, made by Zacharias Kunuk in 2001, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (ᐊᑕᓈᕐᔪᐊᑦ), itself taken from an oral tradition of Inukitut myths.* The special relationships between Troilus and Cressida (Kate Valk) are borrowed from Eliza Kazan’s movie Splendor in the Grass of 1961, paralleling the movements of the forlorn love relationship between Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood.  At other moments there were scenes from Native American director Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals, and, as Cassandra (Suzy Roche) sings out her prophetic warnings the videos center on a scene of a young girl singing, which vaguely reminds me of images of a long-ago witnessed clip of a child-like Diana Durbin singing before an audience. The fact that, at one point, the Trojans sit about the campfire on colorful basketballs, momentarily tossing them at one another, hints of the comic sequence from Airplane! wherein the white Peace Corps worker (Robert Hays) claims to have taught the isolated Amazon natives with whom he has been stationed to play basketball; the camera observes the tribe on the court (the tribe being performed by the Harlem Globetrotters). In short, if the Wooster Group uses stereotypical elements it is not without humor or, in other cases, is based on actual native myths. If the Greeks seem less interesting in this production it is simply because that they represent the conquering classicists who are not engaged in totemistic behavior. It’s clear that the Wooster company prefers the lost culture.          

      While the Trojans are bound by clan traditions (represented here by films relating to that oral tradition and by Hollywood-structured emblems, our own clan-like constructions, which we do not even recognize as such), the Greeks are an individualistic culture of art, poetry, music, etc. Strangely enough, however, in the end it is the Trojans who are willing to fight alone to their deaths, while Achilles (also portrayed by Scott Shepherd), in his rage over his male lover’s Patroculus’s death, orders his men to ambush Hector, killing him like a gang of thugs of before they drag away his dead body behind Achilles’ horse.

      While this may not be the most successful of the many Wooster Group plays I have enjoyed over the years, it is not without its own profound overlaying of images which create a density of meanings and cultural significance that adds to and illuminates the original Shakespeare play.

     In the end I feel this work displayed a new subtlety in the group’s development, depending less upon ironic pointing and more on the ability of its audience to focus less on story and language—while, however, retaining both—than on ceremonial-like movements of its actor’s bodies, as if this play had been relocated into a world of dance, movements represented on the special arc-like paintings the figures drew throughout upon the stage’s floor.       

 

*Fortunately, I attended this performance with my friend Deborah Meadows, who immediately recognized the Inukititut film by Zacharias Kanuk; I, in turn, told her about the images from the Kazan film. Unfortunately, the company did not list their video sources on the program nor on their web-site.

 

Los Angeles, March 4, 2014

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2014).