Walter Braunfels | Die Vögel (The Birds) / 2009

rara avis

by Douglas Messerli

 

Walter Braunfels (based loosely on the play by Aristophanes) Die Vögel (The Birds)  2009

 

On April 11, 2009 my companion Howard and I attended the Los Angeles Opera premiere of composer Walter Braunfels's The Birds, a opera performed as part of their "Recovered Voices" series devoted to bringing attention to "lost operas," operas banned by the Nazis and neglected since.

     Braunfels was certainly not the typical banned artist. Although part-Jewish, Braunfels had converted to Christianity after serving in World War I, an experience which transformed his view of life. The opera, begun before the War and finished after, premiered in Munich in 1920 and received at least 50 performances over the next few years. With its Wagnerian and Strauss-like harmonies, and its restatement of Germanic Romantic values, the opera, indeed, might have nicely served the Nazi cause had it not been that Braunfels was adamantly anti-fascist, refusing to write an anthem for Hitler. His music, accordingly, was labeled as "Degenerate" (Entartete Kunst), and he was removed from his position as co-director of the Hochschule für Musik Köln (the Cologne Academy of Music); Braunfels waited out World War II in Switzerland, returning to a post-War world in which his music appeared as old-fashioned and completely out of touch with its time.

      Yet, as several music critics have observed, there is shimmering beauty to The Birds that creates a comforting sense of homage to Wagner and Strauss which easily enchants its audiences. Based loosely on Aristophanes’ hilarious satire of Athenian society, Braunfels' version follows the journey of Good Hope and Loyal Friend to visit the head of the birds, Hoopoe, paralleling Pisthe-tairos's sudden inspiration—stimulated, in part, by his fear that he and his friend will be killed by the skeptical avians—that the birds regain their rightful place as rulers of the heavens by rising up against the gods and building a heavenly walled city in the sky. As in Aristophanes’ play, Cloudcukooland is built and the birds, delighted with their success, award Pisthetairos (Braunfels's Loyal Friend) with their friendship and wings.

     In Aristophanes’ work, however, the building of the great city brings on a plague of visitors, each satirizing an aspect of Athenian society; Good Hope in the ancient version of the play is all but lost as Pisthetairos, one by one, mocks and wittily dismisses his "enemies," and, even outfoxing Zeus, marries the figure who translator William Arrowsmith describes as "Miss Universe."

         

     From the evidence of his Act I, Braunfels may have originally intended to more closely follow Aristophanes, but Act II of his opera diverts the focus of the work away from Loyal Friend's grand schemes by having Good Hope fall in love with the song and being of the Nightingale, resulting in one of the most memorable of the opera's duets between tenor Brandon Jovanovich and soprano Désirée Rancatore. He further imbues Cloudcukooland with Utopian possibilities by adding a marriage ceremony and dance between Miss Dove and Mr. Pigeon (Yvette Tucker and Seth Belliston).

    Omitting the series of visiting troublemakers to Cloudcukooland, Braunfels focuses instead on the mythic possibilities of the bird kingdom and the birds' hubris in attempting to rise up against the gods. Whereas Aristophanes’ Prometheus comes to Cloudcukooland to warn his human friend, Pisthetairos, suggesting how he might outwit Zeus, Braunfels' Prometheus (brilliantly sung by Brian Mulligan) is more like Strauss's John the Baptist, a prophet crying in the wilderness.

     The terrifying storm of lightning Zeus reigns down upon the upstart kingdom reduces the birds and humans involved to the twittering, fearful creatures they had been at the beginning of the work. The Utopian world sought by Good Hope and Loyal Friend has been destroyed, perhaps Braunfels's presentiment that the Weimar Republic would not survive. He would not be the first German-language writer to predict the dangers that lay ahead; two years after the premiere of The Birds, Austrian writer Joseph Roth wrote a scathingly realistic portrait of the conspiracies of the radical right in his novel, The Spider's Web.

      Yet Braunfels' work, with Good Hope's final insistence that his encounter with nature has changed him, healed him perhaps, an experience that will remain with him forever, merely reiterates the Germanic Romanticism that lay behind so much of the Nazi ideals. And in that sense, the dream of a militaristically-determined city-state, as presented in Braunfels' conception, may be a likely desire of another generation.  

 

Los Angeles, April 16, 2009

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2009).

Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman | Follies / 2012

slightly sour

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics), James Goldman (book), Follies / Los Angeles, Ahmanson Theatre, the production I saw was on May 26, 2012

 

Let me begin by unequivocally asserting that Stephen Sondheim is the greatest of living American musical theater composers and lyricists. In dozens of musical comedies and dramas, Sondheim has given us a long string of memorable songs, and notable lyrics in works such as West Side Story and Gypsy before he even got a chance to demonstrate his musical talents.

     Let me also admit that after seeing the splendid revival of Sondheim's Follies yesterday at Los Angeles' Ahmanson Theatre, I was sorely tempted to postpone writing about the experience. I was afraid, however, if I didn't immediately take on the task that I'd find myself in the same situation as I am with his Merrily We Roll Along, a production of which I saw in 2010 and have as yet failed to express my thoughts! I know the reasons for my reluctance; they are similar to those that I expressed about Sondheim's Company of 2007 (see My Year 2007). But I find it almost mean-spirited that I can't simply let well enough alone, that I can't just soak myself in all those memorably lyrical and witty songs of desire and pluck—which in Follies amounts almost to a cornucopia of treasures: "Beautiful Girls," "Waiting for the Girls Upstairs," "Broadway Baby," "In Buddy's Eyes," "Who's That Woman?" "I'm Still Here," "Could I Leave You?" "The God-Why-Don't-You-Love-Me Blues," "The Story of Lucy and Jessie," and "Live, Laugh, Love"—go home and report, "What a great show." And yes, this loving and caring revival was a great show, some of its praises which I'll sing shortly.

      But—that terrible three letter word—let me just repeat: I have problems with Sondheim's vision. After seeing ten works for which he has written lyrics, music or both, and after having heard recordings of several others, I have to conclude that Sondheim has one of the darkest visions of humankind of any Broadway composer. In work after work, he and his librettists focus on individuals living in unhappy marriages who cheat, lie, and delude themselves, beings who hate the world, murder, and even consume their fellow beings—drunks, vagrants, and evil-minded conmen and deviously manipulative women. In a Sondheim musical hope and happiness are as rare as a full eclipse played out against the Northern Lights.

     Now I certainly do realize that all these subjects are far more interesting as themes help to generate larger issues than do the everyday joys and pleasures of life. For a writer who has titled one book of poetry Dark, has written a fiction about the kidnapping of children and possible pedophilia, and whose plays, although comic, often include arguing couples and dysfunctional families, my observation may sound somewhat insincere. But even in my very darkest of works there is always some sort of reaffirmation or possibility of real hope. Although my companion and I, who have been in a mostly monogamous relationship now for 42 years, may argue daily, neither of us, we concur, has ever thought of leaving one another for more than a few hours at a time. I have nothing against the darkest of visions, but mightn't that dreary scowl be relaxed just once?

     I also know, having now read both of Sondheim's volumes of lyrics, with "attendant comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines and anecdotes," that, although I often disagree with him, the composer is quite brilliant and thoroughly knowledgeable about his art, able to cite the songs of his predecessors, pointing to their successes and failures. Sondheim himself claims Hammerstein as his mentor, and I take him at his word. But as dark as are certain passages in Carousel, Oklahoma! (see My Year 2003 for a discussion of those darker themes), South Pacific, and even The King and I—I will pass on making any comments about his saccharine, sugar-coated Sound of Music—Hammerstein's lyrics and librettos are joyful celebrations, for the most part, of love and life.

     Follies, like so many of Sondheim's works, is a kind of haunted castle of lost loves, dreams, aspirations, and hopes, a testament to a world of deluded people who are desperate to find love and meaning in a world that has failed them. Indeed, as Sondheim tells it, his librettist and he first intended this musical to be about a reunion in which, with its central characters plastered with equal parts of nostalgia and alcohol, have motives to kill each other, and he and Goldman originally set out to write a kind of murder mystery set at a party for aged performers. While they eventually dropped that notion—thank God—the sparsely told plot that remains is still about the four central character's torturous marriages, their desires for their dreams of the past, and the gradual stripping away of their delusions ending, at least in the revival version, with the still angry but dependent Phyllis and her husband Ben leaving without much hope of true reconciliation, followed by the newly rejected Sally and her disappointed husband Buddy hoping to just get some rest before they begin the next day of their lives.

     Such empty relationships, as we know, certainly do exist. Possibly these unhappy folk can all begin again, and they might even revitalize their relationships—although given the dark songs they have just sung about not getting what they want, losing their minds, and the desire to live life "in arrears," it seems highly unlikely. This same ending faces the characters of numerous Sondheim musicals, most notably in Company and Merrily We Roll Along; while others end in far worse ways: murder, assignation, fiery death, and even cannibalism. One might almost say that in Sondheim's world both characters and audiences are eternally lost in the woods with the knowledge that the wolf is following right behind.

     So despite the medley of lovely and witty melodies with which the composer has threaded his works, they are still quite deadly delicacies, laced with heavy doubt and open cynicism.

     Having said all that, we must also admit that nearly all of Sondheim's unhappy figures are survivors. They've had their ups (although we rarely see them) as well as their downs, as Sondheim's Carlotta (Elaine Paige) sings:

 

                                 Good times and bum times,

                                 I've seen them all and, my dear,

                                 I'm still here. 

 

Or as Hattie expresses her pluck:

 

                                 I'm just a Broadway baby,

                                 Walking off my tired feet,

                                 Pounding forty-second Street

                                 To be in a show.

 

After hearing Elaine Stritch's rhythmic rendition of this song, with the perfect timing the lines—

 

                                 At

                                 My tiny flat

                                 There's just my cat,

                                 A bed and a chair.—

 

for a few seconds I was uneasy with Jayne Houdyshell's more lusty and less-nuanced version; but, in the end, her zest of life nearly brought down the house.

      Similarly, the whole chorus gets to tap out their troubles in "Who's That Woman," led by the brass-throated Stella (Terri White).

   Sondheim also ameliorates his dark themes somewhat through the clownish behavior of his characters, revealing their own realization of their failures, as in Buddy's (Danny Burstein's) manic "The God-Why-Don't-You-Love-Me Blues" and the haunting "Live, Laugh, Love" song by Ron Raines as Ben Stone, a song of escapism which turns, as in Cabaret, into an echo chamber-like house of horrors.

     Sondheim's figures, moreover, often reveal joys that they do not even recognize, or, as he suggests, express deep feelings that they themselves do not recognize as pleasures. This is particularly true in both of Sally Plummer's (Victoria Clark's) powerful ballads, "In Buddy's Eyes" and "Losing My Mind." In the former, she expresses to her friends why she should be happy with her husband without comprehending, so it seems, that she actually might be happy for those very reasons:

 

                                 Life is slow, but it seems exciting

                                 'Cause Buddy's there.

                                 ..........................

                                 In Buddy's eyes,

                                 I'm young, I'm beautiful.

                                 In Buddy's arms.

                                 On Buddy's shoulder,

                                 I won't get older.

 

And similarly, in "In Losing My Mind," Sondheim himself points to her use of the word "to" instead of "and"  revealing her deepest problems are of her own making:

 

                                 I dim the lights

                                 And think about you,

                                 Spend sleepless nights

                                 To think about you.

 

    Clark sang these with a full-bodied voice that certainly did justice to the song, but after hearing Barbara Cook and Bernadette Peters sing those same lines, it is perhaps impossible to accept anything below their perfection.

      Finally, Sondheim's comic wit, even if it is dripping with bitterness, occasionally outweighs the despair of his characters. That is particularly true in Phyllis' (Jan Maxwell's) paean to divorce, "Could I Leave You" in which she poses alternatives to her unhappy marriage which she's already embraced:

 

                                Could I bury my rage

                                With a boy half your age

                                In the grass?

                                Bet your ass.

                                But I've done that already—

                                Or didn't you know, love?

 

Maxwell sang this with such clear diction that all the song's bitter humor shone luminously, like the crystal which her character daily counts.

     For Sondheim, apparently, these stories of survival, self-revelatory slips of the tongue, patter pieces, and comic diatribes are all we have in a world where everything is seen through a glass darkly. Perhaps it's as ridiculous to ask such a dark-thinker to show us the sun, as asking Ingmar Bergman—whose film Sondheim adapted in another recent revival, A Little Night Music—to show us a way out of deep despair. But then, to my way of thinking, that is precisely what Bergman does, whereas Sondheim entertains us grandly, but just as we begin to have fun, puts out the light. And there is, finally, nowhere to go but back home again, with the slightly sour after taste of too much gin in our mouths.

                                    

Los Angeles, May 27, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2012).

Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer | Moby-Dick / 2015

embracing the cannibal

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jake Heggie (composer) and Gene Scheer (libretto) Moby-Dick / Los Angeles, LAOpera, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion / the production Howard Fox and I saw was a matinee on Sunday, November 15, 2015

 

Unlike Melville’s original fiction, Jake Heggie’s operatic rendition of Moby-Dick begins not on land with Ismael’s bedroom (and homoerotic) encounter with Queequeg, but at night aboard the Pequod, where the heavily tattooed “cannibal” is praying in a real Samoan chant that opera librettist Gene Scheer uncovered. The man Melville calls Ishmael is here an unnamed “Greenhorn,” (a minor figure that is mentioned only a couple of times in Melville’s version), a beginner sailor who has never before set foot on a whaling ship. Indeed, this “Greenhorn” is hardly yet a full human being, but, as the etymology of that word suggests, is like a young animal with immature horns. It is perhaps no accident, moreover, that the word “Greenhorn” has long colloquially been used to describe a recently arrived immigrant, for that is also what this young buck is, a being new to the world he which he has suddenly set foot; and Heggie and Scheer’s work is very much centered around his discovery of and education about that terrifying brave new world.

     When awakened by the noise of Queequeg’s night chant, Greenhorn (Joshua Guerrero) is angry, damning all things religious and decrying his inability to sleep not only because of the cannibal’s chants, because of the raucous and heavy beat of waves and, we suspect, the peg-leg stomp down the night-time halls of the yet unseen captain Ahab.

     The Ahab (Jay Hunter Morris) we soon discover, challenging his sailors to spot the great white whale who has given him “the dead stump he stands on,” and promising to award the first man who spots the white monster with a Spanish doubloon, is very much Melville’s Lucifer-like figure who not only dares to follow this rare species across the seas, but swears he would “strike the sun if it insulted me!” While the men such as Queequeg (Musa Ngqungwana), Stubb (Malcolm MacKenzie), Flask (Matthew O’Neill), and Greenhorn have joined on in order to kill the ordinary black-faced whales, bringing back oil and blubber to their Nantucket homes in order to earn a living, the mad Ahab is interested only in his revengeful chase of the leviathan, and allows his men only one whale capture after Starbuck (Morgan Smith) intercedes, much to his own endangerment, on their behalf.

     It is appropriate that nearly all the lines Ahab speaks in this opera are taken directly from the book. For Ahab, the center of Melville’s work, is a creature complete, filled with ego and a fiery hate so large that he, at least in literary terms, cannot be reconceived. To alter Ahab’s words or behavior would be to sink the entire Pequod and its inhabitants.

     The opera’s creators, on the other hand, are not at all afraid of creating new situations and language for other of the works characters, paring down the leviathan-like structure of the actual work to make it legible and viable as a three-hour musical performance. Heggie, as in his other compositions, is an able composer of driving whorls of lush tonalities, and—except for a strange second act quietude at the very moment when one might expect the him to lash himself to the mast of Wagner’s wild brass flourishes—he offers an unsettling yet beauteous series of musical interludes, some of which, as critics have already noted, might be at home in a Broadway musical by Bernstein and Sondheim or even on the Hollywood movie screen. Fortunately the composer, along with director James Conlon’s impatient drive of the orchestra, never quite lets his music devolve entirely into those more populist compositions, even if there are moments when both composer and conductor almost dare to put their heart upon their sleeves.

 

     In part, this is necessary to convey what is now at the heart of this new conception of the white whale story, Greenhorn’s gradual transformation from an indifferent young boy to a man who, particularly through Starbuck’s moral pleadings with Ahab, Stubb’s joyous humor, and Queequeg’s love of the people and world around him, help to mold him into a full human being who finally comes to understand both the evil and the beauty of his life voyage.

 

     If through the tribulations, near drowning, and later madness of the cabin boy Pip (Jacqueline Echols) shows us that none of these important qualities can save one from the madness of fate, the child does show this opera’s hero that survival is possible and, that, at least, he may have an opportunity to begin a new life if he is able to finish the voyage.

     Heggie and Scheer reveal these new possibilities most clearly in the scene composed, apparently early on in their writing, in Greenhorn’s and Queequeg’s duet upon the mast whereupon Greenhorn—having finally come to realize the failure of Western logic and values—becomes determined to embrace the “cannibal” and his life in a promised friendship (symbolically a kind of marriage) where he hopes to learn the new language of Prince Queequeg’s paradisiacal homeland. Even though both the older sailor and the audience know it is perhaps a non-existent territory, “somewhere to the west, somewhere to the south,” Greenhorn is willing to enter into it—wandering immigrant that he is—and come to intimately know it. The song can only remind one, a bit, of Bernstein’s “Somewhere” from West Side Story, where both characters try to imagine a world completely unlike the one in which they are currently trapped.

     The opera’s creators immediately end the dream, however, with Queequeg takes sick and Greenhorn brings him below, forecasting the “cannibal’s” death. It is no accident that Ahab is willing to take Greenhorn’s place upon the mast: he will steer the ship through his blinded vision no matter what storms the Pequod must suffer.

     Just when Ahab seems beyond any redemption, however, both Melville and the opera’s creators show him, in his on-deck duet with Starbuck, to still have a few human scruples and doubts. Again, Heggie seems almost willing to dip again into something like a Broadway musical number that explores this temporarily softer side of the work’s villain, as, on a day of “a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky,” Ahab confesses to the desolation of solitude his life has been, recalling his wife back in Nantucket telling their son after his noonday nap of “cannibal old me.”

   For a few moments Starbuck is ready also to embrace his “cannibal,” as he and his captain and for a few minutes the two sing, much like Greenhorn and Queequeg, about returning together to the world they have left behind. And again, Ahab, looking into Starbuck’s eye sees a better world, a place for them where there might be new possibilities.

     But Ahab, of course, is no lover, but a man of hate determined to accept what he believes is his fate, which can only result in the destruction of him and his sailors.

     It is in the final chase of the whale that Heggie’s Moby Dick seems momentarily to lose steam, perhaps because the focus on these moments of hope have been so rapturous that the necessarily driven melody of destruction and death results in a sort of let-down.

 

    I can only salute the authors and designer Robert Brill for not creating a cinematic white whale to rise up out the backdrop; yet in its absence—left as we are wondering whether or not Ahab really has spotted his all-consuming and monstrous god—we find it nearly impossible to watch conscience and love be sucked into the vortex of meaningless destruction. And the music, it appears, can simply not live up to our feelings of that loss.

     Even though Greenhorn survives, metaphorically buoyed up in by the very death of his lover by that man’s coffin, Heggie is not Wagner, and his transfiguration of Greenhorn into a new human being, Ishmael, does not completely uplift us even while the hero rises up to prow of what we know can only be a better ship of life.

      For all that, Heggie and Scheer have created such an enormously entertaining musical allegory that I will be willing to share their voyage again and again.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2015

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

Thornton Wilder | Our Town / 2009

archetypal america

by Douglas Messerli

 

Thornton Wilder Our Town /  the production I saw was at the Barrow Street Theatre, New York, May 10, 2009

 

Few American plays can lay claim to being almost a dramatic "national anthem" other than Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Susan Bee recently suggested that everyone of a certain age who performed in high school theater was, at one time or another, in Our Town. I performed as a minor character in just such a production.

     Over the years, however, it has seemed to me that this archetypal drama without sets or costumes has gotten a little stale. Howard and I attended a production at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. around 1973, when they also performed that work, among others, in the Soviet Union.

     I remember that production primarily for the acting by Robert Prosky as the stage manager. Prosky performed it in a manner that was so "folksy," I could hardly bare the sentimentality of the piece. A 2003 television production starring Paul Newman and directed by James Naughton seemed even more lifeless.

     I also have the feeling that over the years that in some productions more and more props have crept onto the stage despite Wilder's insistence that the play use only three props at most. But perhaps this is just an illusion brought about by the busy verisimilitude of the productions I've seen.

     The 2009 production at the Barrow Street Theater in New York, accordingly, was a welcome change. Directed by David Cromer, this Our Town was a dusted-off rendition, where part of the audience, an important feature of the script, appeared on stage (me among them), several of whom were asked to read the questions in response to the academically inclined lecture of Professor Willard, who describes the geological history of Grovers Corners and surrounding territory.

    The stage manager of this version, Cromer himself, lost the New England accent usually lathered on in heavy doses, and spoke in a more appealing everyday quality, sometimes injecting energy through his hurried asides into a work that has a tendency in its slow spin of story-telling to fall into lethargy. With only two tables, and four chairs Cromer created a believable pair of houses in which live the Gibbs and the Webbs, whose children grow up, marry, and die in a few short hours. The abandonment of the New Hampshireisms was a particular advantage, I felt, since the play is so universally "American"—however one defines that—that this work has always seemed to be more at home in the author's home state of Wisconsin. Wherever Grovers Corners is, it exists more in the mind that in reality, and to place it in any particular locale seems to me beside the point.

     So casual were the actors, dressed in mostly contemporary clothing, that even the heart-rending wedding scene and the nearly impossible-to-perform cemetery conversation among the dead lost a great deal of its sentimentality.

     Interestingly, after paring down the characters’ lives and actions to almost abstract imitations of life, Cromer pulled out the naturalistic stops, so to speak, for the famous final scene when Emily Webb (Jeniffer Grace in this production) asks to go back "home" for one day in her life. Suddenly a curtain behind the stage was opened to reveal an entire kitchen, with a table set with plates, silverware, napkins, a working water pump and a stove where Emily's mother, costumed in turn-of-the-century dress, fries up bacon and pancakes. The startling comparison of the abstractness of the rest of the production with this highly realist scene brought home, with amazing results, one of Wilder's major themes, that we are too busy living life to really see it. Perhaps only the dead can truly smell the coffee, but on the Mother's Day Sunday I visited this play, the entire audience shared in the experience, as tears fell from nearly everyone's eyes. In a strange way, it was if Wilder had restated, within a narrow realist context, Ionesco's absurdly comic observations about living and death.    

 

Los Angeles, May 29, 2009

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2009).