Aeschylus | Prometheus Bound / 2013

tower of circles

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aeschylus Prometheus Bound (translated into English by Joel Agee) / the production I saw was on the evening of September 3, 2013 at The Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Villa, directed by Travis Preston and performed with the help of the CalArts Center for New Performance

 

Generally attributed to Aeschylus, and the first of what was probably a trilogy (Promethus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus Firebearer) Prometheus Bound is one of the earliest of Western works for theater and has been highly influential in Western thought since its creation. Yet, it is also a play filled with difficulties, particularly for our own time. Like Wagner’s Norse and German-inspired mythologies, Prometheus Bound is filled with sometimes arcane information and the complexly interlinking relationships between Greek gods and the humans the gods have encountered. For the contemporary English-language playgoer, the play’s intensive reliance on a Greek female chorus who chant out their condemnations, sympathies, and prayers for the great Titan, can sound, at times, almost comical, their shrill, wailing chants spinning out into almost meaningless orisons. And what can a contemporary director do to stimulate an audience who for more than an hour are bombarded by the voice of one being, telling his story, sharing his suffering, and predicting his and other’s futures, while all the time chained at the edge of a desolate cliff? How even to explain Prometheus’ brief encounters with various messengers of Zeus—Hermes, Kratos, Okeanos, and Hephaistos—and the almost inexplicable, stumbling in of Io, who Zeus’ wife Hera has turned into a cow, tormenting her with a magic stinging insects—even though she may later father Prometheus’ eventual savior Heracles? Just as in long stretches of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, in Aeschylus’ work there is often not much going on in terms of action.

 

     And finally, the very fact that this work is only the first of three parts, makes for a sense of this first being a fragmentary episode. Although Prometheus foretells his and also our futures, we can never be certain that he really does have the ability to see what he claims to, and others throughout the work scold him for not simply suffering in quietude to ameliorate the wrath of Zeus.

     But it is just that Prometheus can and does speak, that he refuses silence and denies Zeus’ unfair punishment for helping mankind survive, in particular,  stealing for them the power of fire, that we do care for this Titan, that we comprehend him, as Ralph Waldo Emerson described Prometheus, as “the Jesus of the old mythology”—again reminding us of Wagner’s Brünnhilde, who also was punished for intruding herself upon mankind, and, like Prometheus, was punished to remain in isolation, in her case surrounded by a ring of fire, for a seeming eternity before she is freed. If, at the center of this sometimes static work, lay radical ideas about the fight against tyranny, positing in Prometheus a hero willing to help the human race and ultimately end the reign of the gods, how can a director steer a course to successfully get to that point?

      Fortunately, seasoned director Travis Preston has saved his hero from shouting out his lines from linear rock, raising him to a vertical circularity that equates him more with Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Simultaneously speaking from his towering heights, the Prometheus of this production remains a Titan, while also suggesting a Christ upon the cross. He is, in short, one of us, and something beyond us, willing to suffer the eagles’ daily clawing and swallowing of his liver, in order to deny Zeus any pleasure in his punishment. Within the very stage set (the construction by Efrem Delgadillo, Jr.) we see both a continuity of time, a circle within the larger circle, the smaller bringing our hero through his daily sufferings, and the larger, a circle of community, a symbol of Prometheus’ embracement of the human race.

     The chorus, appropriately, not only speaks to him, but crawls up to join him in their shared sufferings. If there is sometimes something almost comical about their efforts, so too are any mortals’ efforts to communicate with the gods.

      Of course, even this striking visualization of Prometheus’ position would mean nothing if Preston had not found an actor who might be able to live up to the position in which he has put him. Ron Cephas Jones not only has the taut, skin-and-bones body that encapsulates the Titan’s suffering, but his basso voice booms out his thespian skills quite brilliantly—in near perfect opposition for what I previously described as the chorus’ more soprano efforts. Bound for the entire play, unable to move by himself, he nonetheless seems almost in control of the busy choreography (by Mira Kingsley) of the chorus, sometimes wrestling with each, and other times circling in a round dance that might almost remind one of Stravinsky’s pagan ritual in Rite of Spring.

      And finally, the music (by Vinny Golia and Ellen Reid), heavy on percussion, creates through its jazz intonations a sense of tortured coolness that reiterates the extremes of Prometheus’ emotional outpourings.

      If at moments all these elements—direction, acting, choreography, and music—momentarily slide into a kind of repetitiveness or even stasis that might make us fear that the difficulties of this tragic work might have, after all, won out—overall there is enough excitement in this production that the plays’ revelations brilliantly dominate. And even though the work ends, predictably, in utter despair, we can believe that one day the eagle will be shot, the Titan rescued, mankind freed from the caprices of the gods: Prometheus not only unbound but redeemed.

 

Los Angeles, September 4, 2013

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

 

Eugene O'Neill | Long Day's Journey into Night / 2018

tortuous nights

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugene O’Neill Long Day’s Journey into Night / Los Angeles, the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts / the performance Howard Fox and I saw was on the opening day, June 10, 2018

 

Yesterday afternoon I saw the much touted production by the Bristol Old Vic of Eugene O’Neill’s most important play, Long Day’s Journey into Night.

 

    While this was not my first time with this long-suffering play (a suffering both for its characters and, often, given the play’s length, for its audiences), I clearly had not seen as many performances as others, so one critic sitting behind me made clear to his theater guest—he’d seen, so he quite loudly claimed, at least six productions. I had watched the wonderful Sidney Lumet film, still my favorite of all of the play’s variations, two times, and planned to see it again a few days after this performance just as a reminder; and I’d read the play at least two times, once after having to miss—given a large East Coast snow storm—a production for which I had tickets, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Dennehy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Robert Sean Leonard. Moreover, I had also seen a recent production of the play with Alfred Molina, Jane Kaczmarek, Stephen Louis Grush and Colin Woodell at Los Angeles’ Geffen Playhouse last year (see My Year 2017).

     So, when attending the stunningly star-laden production at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, with a cast of Jeremy Irons, Lesley Manville, Matthew Beard, and Rory Keenan, I did have a fairly good knowledge of the work, having almost memorized many of the play’s significant scenes.

      Yet, I felt freed from the burden, so it seemed, of many of the critics sitting near me, I could still see this marathon-endurance with somewhat fresh eyes. And my husband Howard had never before seen a live performance, although he too had read it and seen the film version. Accordingly, I was open to a new interpretation, which surely director Richard Eyre, presented to us.

     Whereas previous productions and my own readings seemed to suggest that the play began in a kind of haze of a family reunion—Edmond having returned home after his adventurous experiences as a sailor, and his mother also having returned home from her stay at a sanatorium to help cure her of a morphine addiction—in which things “appear,” a word that should appear in double quotes, to be somewhat normal. 

     Mary is, as her husband James Tyrone tells her time and again, “looking fatter”—although in the productions I’ve seen, as well as this one, she looks thinner than a reed—with Mary attending to her much beloved son, Edmund, equally thin, who, so they all proclaim, has a summer cold.

     Of course, we immediately recognize this perception as a true illusion, or more deeply, a delusion. Yet, with the fog having lifted, the sun shining temporarily upon their lives, there is almost a feeling of a somewhat pacific family life hovering over them all. After all, O’Neill makes it clear from the beginning that Tyrone does still love his wife, and Mary still adores him, as she does her youngest son, and that even the black-sheep of the family, the whoring often drunken Jaime loves his brother, even his skin-flint father, and their problematic mother. This first act, with its many domestic necessities, the worry of all for Mary’s mental state and the dreaded fear for Edmund’s health, is balanced by the comings and goings of their maid Cathleen (Jessica Regan in this production) and the always irritated and invisible cook, Brigette, who invisibly attempts to bring this family together for their meals.

      Eyre and his cast, evidently, have purposely thrown this first act version away, immediately creating a tension between all the actors that one can cut with a sharp knife. Things that might once have appeared to be tenuous now cut immediately to the bone. The deluded expressions of family reconciliation immediately turn, in this performance, into ironic asides, expressions of true disappointment, dismissals, and evident hatred. The Tyrones of this cast almost immediately show their fangs while denying their every next sentence. One might be tempted to suggest that this Long Day’s Journey is a Trumpian world, where all the niceties have turned into bitter spittle.

    If there’s something almost refreshing in this sharply driven and quick-witted interpretation of O’Neill’s world, we also miss some of the lost belle epoch regalness and rituals that have, after all, allowed Tyrone to rule this ruined household and helped his wife into a drug addiction from which she will never ascend. This is not the world of Oxycontin addiction, but one of hotel doctors, and well-meaning townspeople who wash their hands from any dirty deeds.

     Fortunately, Irons plays Tyrone very differently from the imposing patriarch as we have seen in Sir Ralph Richardson, for example. He is a man, bitter and mean as he is, who is closer to Irons’ character of Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune, a distanced and highly distressed man who sees himself as an innocent in a world in which his wife has faded into non-existence, or as the character describes it, “when she gets that poison in her system there’s nothing you can do.” Like our contemporary leader, he will never be able to comprehend that he is, in fact, part of that poison. In the last long scenes of this seemingly endless night, Tyrone even seems to be a wronged man, a child of a father who has abandoned his family forcing the young boy to work endlessly as an American-Irish child-labor world to make a dollar each week to help support his mother. O’Neill even allows this character to demonstrate that he has been a victim of his own success: having purchased, on the cheap, a play which made him a matinee hero but closed him out of any of his great Shakespearian aspirations. Even though he claims, however, that the great actor Booth highly praised his acting, we can never know for sure whether or not his desires were so very different from those of Mary to become a concert pianist. There is no evidence for either of their claims. Perhaps Tyrone was simply destined to become a romantic matinee “ham,” just as the deluded Mary was to retreat to her own bedroom to find a way out of her own “romance.”

      If Irons creates a new vision of Tyrone, so too does Lesley Manville give us a new portrait of Mary. This is not at all the fragile Mary of any other version I’ve seen or imagined. She can endlessly ask, as she does, “is my hair falling down,” but—particularly given the helmet of a wig she wears throughout the play—we know she is sharp as steel. Although she may continually declare that she is lonely, that she wants people about her at all times, we also know that she desires, even longs, to be alone.

     No longer is Mary a kind a butterfly whose wings have been torn through the long years of hotel living and her so-called mediocre summer house, but that she is a powerful wasp, ready to sting all those surrounding. Almost like the quietly imposing sister of Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread, this Mary is angry about everything, even the son whose birth caused her pains that led to her addiction. She does not truly want her family’s company, and escapes, in her imagination, quite willingly into a past of mid-west family life and a beautiful wedding gown that never quite existed—even though she does finally discover the gown in the memory-ridden attic of the house she can never describe as a true “home.” The gown she produces, alas, is not so particularly beautiful. Indeed, Manville’s Mary can never find a home except for the mythical one in her own imagination. She never has had a true friend—actors were not to be permitted into her bourgeois/religious sensibility—and she has never truly embraced the family whom she declares she loves. Mary is the very center of this Long Day, and yet she is someone who none of the other family members ever want to see again; if only she would fall asleep, allowing them to tip-toe up to their rooms allowing them to fall into their own frightful dreams.

      Unlike the other Marys I have seen, Manville makes you truly want to recoil from her presence. She is more than a ghost, she is a kind of haunted horror figure of the past who can only destroy any forward movement of this family.

    But then, as O’Neill quite clearly reveals, this is an already doomed family. Even Edmund’s seemingly loving brother warns him about his own treachery. And the true center of this world, Edmond, O’Neill himself (played by Beard in a kind of accent that is at moments difficult to penetrate) knows that although he is the most loved member of this Greek-inspired destructive familial world, he is also the object of their mutual wrath. One by one, they pet him, kiss him, embrace him, and hover lovingly over his body, while still spitting out their tortuous truths, filling him up with liquor, and, in Jamie’s case, literally pulling him in and out of chairs, almost as if Edmund were a kind of doll which he might use in his own libidinous desires. There is violence and love in every one of his gestures.

      I’ve always thought of this play as a sad tragedy of family life. But this production provides a completely different dimension—not one I’m sure I entirely appreciate—which makes apparent just how sadomasochistic this family was. Their pushes and pulls, their psychological whips and chains are everywhere. And there is no respite for Edmond—or any of the others. Drugs, morphine, alcohol, and, finally, Morpheus himself, the god of sleep, are the only escapes from the tortures with which they afflict one another.

      If I have some reservations about this almost brutal production of O’Neill’s drama, I realize now, more than ever, just how close Long Day’s Journey into Night is to Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the “mother” and “father” of the later work afflicting some of the very same tortures upon a young professor and his wife. In neither of these plays do the characters, even though they have little left in their lives, “go gentle into that good night.”

 

Los Angeles, June 11, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 11, 2018).

John Kander, Fred Ebb, and David Thompson | The Scottsboro Boys / 2013

on the cusp

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Kander and Fred Ebb (music and lyrics), and David Thompson (book) The Scottsboro Boys / Los Angeles, the Ahmanson Theatre, the performance I saw as a matinee on June 1, 2013

 

Other than the Broadway musical writing team of E.Y. Harburg and Burton Lane of the 1940s, John Kander and Fred Ebb might be described as the most politicized of American musical composers. From their early Flora, the Red Menace, to Cabaret, with its singing Nazis, Chicago, with its murderous molls, and Kiss of the Spider Woman, with its homosexual and heterosexual prisoners, Kander and Ebb have taken on big themes, somehow wedding their edgy dramas to hit musical numbers, through a great deal of irony and pure postmodern pastiche. The central dilemma in all their works is how to tuck their dark themes into entertaining, brassy, Broadway displays that keep their audiences coming back for more, despite the brutality of the world the musicals display. Often, as in Cabaret, it is the very naiveté of their “villainous” figures—if you can call chorus girl Sally Bowles a villain (surely if not a villain she is a willing collaborator with the rising Nazi regime)—that poises their works on the cusp of the comic and tragic.

     Of all their works, their last (even this completed after the death of Fred Ebb), The Scottsboro Boys, is the most daring, as they take on the sad story of nine young Southern Blacks falsely accused of raping two white women on a train, tried for murder several times, with many of them imprisoned from 1931 to 1952 until their deaths. Despite any real evidence and a recantation by one of the women in the second of numerous trials, these young men, aged 13-19, were found guilty in Alabama year and after year simply because of the color of their skin.

      Given the usual subject matter of Broadway musicals, it seems almost ludicrous to think that even these two seasoned creators might have found a way to tell their story through infectious music and dance. That they chose the minstrel show as a form in which to accomplish this—a genre that for years itself demeaned and stereotyped American Blacks—is even more audacious; but, in fact, in its very highly exaggerated tropes and character types such as the Interlocuter, Mr. Bones, Mr. Tambo, and Jim Crow, it strangely makes sense to tell this tale in this manner, particularly since, in the version I saw, the Interlocuter (judge, accuser, bigot, and Alabama governor rolled into one) was played by the only one of two white men in the cast, the wonderful Hal Linden. Along the way, Kander and Ebb, are able to somehow satirize dying in the electric chair, being on a chain gang, and the sacredness of “Alabama Ladies”— in this case, because the two sacred paragons of Southern feminity, were, in fact, whores. Even the Yankee lawyer, the well-meaning but ill-suited Samuel Leibowitz is poked fun of in “That’s Not the Way We Do Things.”

       To balance these barbed and often barbarous numbers, the authors center their tale on the nine boys themselves, using minimal sets (framed thrice, each time a little more off center), with mostly lighted panels and chairs, which serve as the circle of the minstrel show, prison bars, railroad cars, electric chairs, and a terrifying isolation box. Although the nine Scottsboro boys did not all know one another in the beginning, by the end, they have come through almost as war-like comrades, the central figure Haywood Patterson (the powerful singer Joshua Henry) even learning how to write, and leaving upon his death, a written testament of the terrible travesty of justice. The heart of the musical, accordingly, is not the frame of the cake walk, but the painful songs of fear, fortitude, and just plain confusion of its central figures, which allows us to fully empathize and get to know some of the so-called “boys,” who by musical’s end are middle-aged men.

       There are several powerful moments in this musical, but two stand out. Offered freedom by the Alabama governor if he only admits to having committed the rape, Haywood Patterson, advised by his lawyer to say “yes,” dares to say “no,” denying the crime of which he has been convicted and assuring his life beyond bars. But in his very denial, he grows into a man who suddenly represents a beacon of truth in a world in which there are few moments of liberating light. His beautifully sung, “You Can’t Do Me” is certainly one of the great songs of Black determination.

     The other moment that made the audience gasp with recognition was at the very end of this piece. Throughout the musical, an unknown black woman sits upon the stage, a kind of mother-figure observing the strange goings-on. One reads her as simply a kind of witness to these terrible events. But (spoiler alert) in the very last scene we suddenly comprehend just what kind of witness she has been, as a white driver demands a bus rider, the same Black woman, to go to the back of this bus. Rosa Parks refuses, and we suddenly see how these poor young boys and their deaths truly had significance, despite the pain and abandonment they must have felt in their own lives. There is no doubt that the direct linking-up of these two events is somewhat “manufactured,” but it works nonetheless as a representation, if nothing else, of how all life, despite hate and injustice, can have significance, meaning, and worth.

      My appreciation of this musical however cannot mask the fact that there are a few serious problems. First of all, the score simply is not as clever and radiant as works such as Cabaret and Chicago.

     Although director/choreographer Susan Stroman has become almost a theater legend, I still find her chorographic skills somewhat leaden. Certainly, at times, the boys dance up a storm, leaping into the air in long chorus lines; but there is always something too controlled and patched together about her works (see my comments on her Oklahoma! in My Year 2003), and there are seldom any terpsichorean surprises in her creations. Similarly, her directing is capable but basically uneventful.

     Finally, the writers themselves have almost paralleled the horrible history of these Scottsboro Boys by failing to delineate their characters. Although we get to know Haywood Patterson, the other men seem always to be in the wings, hovering merely as chorus members instead of his fellow prisoners. Only in the scenes where the young Leroy “Roy” Wright teaches Haywood the alphabet, or when the mentally-retarded Ozie Powell attacks a deputy and is shot in the head by the sheriff, leaving him with brain damage for the rest of his life, do any of the other nine snap out of their silhouette portraiture.

     Still, given the innovative method of storytelling and the substantially heart-breaking historical facts that Kander and Ebb reiterate, this is a musical to be applauded.

 

Los Angeles, June 3, 2013

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

Giuseppe Verdi and Salvador Commarano | Il Trovatore / 2009

sparks

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giuseppe Verdi (music) and Salvador Commarano (libretto) Il Trovatore / The Metropolitan Opera, May 8, 2009

 

My seeing Verdi's operatic warhorse Il Trovatore at the Metropolitan Opera had more to do with contingency than with choice (it was the only production I could see during the few days of my stay in the city). But as with many of my activities it now seems, in the context of the concerns of My Year 2009, appropriate. Like so many of the essays of this year, the plot of Verdi's opera is also about "facing the heat," the characters having to endure the punishments for their own present errors and judgment as well as the sins of their ancestors of the past.

     In this case, the gypsy woman Azucena's mother has been burned at the stake for "bewitching" an infant in her care, the current Count di Luna's infant brother. To avenge her mother's death, Azucena kidnapped the young boy and threw him into the flames that burned her mother to death. Only the charred remains of a baby were discovered on the pyre, and since that day the Count has sought out the murderer with the intention of confirmation or further revenge.

     Meanwhile, the Count has fallen desperately in love with a young woman serving his wife in the court. The woman, Leonora, meanwhile, is smitten with wandering troubadour, Manrico, who also happens to be the leader of the partisan rebel forces threatening the Count's rule—who is, incidentally, Azucena's son. Discovered in Leonora's presence, Manrico is challenged by the Count to a duel, a fight unto death. Manrico quickly overpowers the Count, but strangely resists murdering him. He releases the Count. The war between the two forces continues, with the Royalist forces winning, and resulting in Manrico's near-death. He lives only because he has been dragged from the battlefield by his mother and nursed by her back to health.

      In the gypsy camp the gypsies sing of their tireless work, their spirits raised only by the site of a pretty woman, the famed anvil chorus, performed in this production as an almost sexual assertion of masculinity. Indeed, the strikes of the hammers upon the anvil sent almost real sparks into the audience, and certainly Verdi's joyous chestnut does foretell of the fire of the past and of the future.

     For, as almost anyone can foretell from the brief and somewhat absurd plot spelled out above, Manrico is doomed in his love for Leonora. Azucena is captured near the camp and is held captive in di Luna's castle, and when Manrico's army is defeated, he too joins his mother within the cells of the castle.

    Leonora escapes, returning to the castle and promising herself up to di Luna if he will release his prisoners. Di Luna agrees to release Manrico, and Leonora rushes to tell him. Manrico, however, is outraged at what he believes to be her betrayal of their love. Leonora, having planned all along to cheat di Luna of her presence, has taken a poison which acts faster than she has expected, and she dies in Manrico's arms. Di Luna, witnessing the death, sends Manrico to his execution, while Azucena reveals the truth: mistakenly she had thrown her own son onto the pyre and, accordingly, Manrico is di Luna's long-sought brother. Her revenge has at last been accomplished.

  

   Yet, despite these facts, Il Trovatore is not really a revenge tragedy but a story of four failed human beings who all come together in the "Moon Count's" castle (di Luna), creating a kind of lunatic world. The three commit unspeakable acts and the fourth is apparently incompetent. Azucena has been so caught up in revenge that she has, "accidentally"—a nearly unthinkable word in the context—murdered her own son, and although she has been a loving mother to Manrico, we nonetheless must recognize her as a reprehensible being. The Count, for his part, is also caught up in the past, becoming so determined to find his brother's killer that he destroys the sibling in the act. The count is courting, moreover, a woman who is an intimate of his wife. Manrico, the troubadour, is a terrible warrior, unwilling even to kill a brutal enemy in a duel; more importantly, he is a soldier who loses all battles in which he participates. He is not even a good "troubadour"—a devotee of courtly love—attacking Leonora at the very moment that she has sacrificed her own life for him. Leonora, in turn, enacts a suicide that saves neither her lover nor his gypsy mother. The fires within each of them, fueled by love, envy, anger, and hate, sparks each other's inevitable destruction.

     The production I saw at the Met, with Hasmik Papian as Leonora, Želijo Lucic as the Count, Marco Berti as Manrico, and Mzia Nioradze as Azucena was a superb rendition of this opera, with Papian (better known for her Norma) and Niordze as standouts for their performances.

 

New York, May 9, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (June 2009).

Gaetano Donizetti and Giovanni Ruffini | Don Pasquale / 2010

cleaning house

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gaetano Donizetti (composer), Giovanni Ruffini (libretto, based on a libretto by Angelo Anelli), Otto Schenk (on-stage director), Gary Halvorson (director) Don Pasquale /  2010 [Metropolitan Opera HD-broadcast]

 

A funny thing happened on my way to this opera. I had planned on my New York trip to attend the opera the day it was being broadcast live via high-definition video so that Howard could see the same production back in Los Angeles as I sat in the theater. He might even spot me the audience as the camera scanned it. The irony is that he would have a much better view of the entire opera, plus backstage interviews that are often entertaining, while I sat in a high balcony seat squinting down at the small figures upon the stage. He would also hear it, sung into microphones at the edge of the stage, far better than I could from my vantage point.

     While I was in New York, I stayed with Sherry Bernstein, my poet friend Charles Bernstein's mother, whom I told of my plans. On Central Park West, her apartment is only a few blocks from the opera house. Oddly enough, Sherry also planned to attend, not at the Met but, just like Howard, at a live video showing in some movie theater.

     Donizetti's comic opera is based very much on the stock figures of commedia dell'arte, so perhaps one need not be too serious about the ridiculous characters or the plot, which basically boils down to an attempt by two outsiders, Dr. Malesta (Mariusz Kwiecien) and his sister Norina (Anna Nerebko), to teach an old man, Don Pasquale (John Del Carlo), a lesson about life. Don Pasquale's young nephew Ernesto (Matthew Polenzani), in love with Norina, refuses to marry the woman his uncle feels is more appropriate. In reaction, Don Pasquale, on a suggestion from his doctor, Malesta, decides to marry Norina (pretending to be convent girl, Sofrina) instead, disinheriting Ernesto. 

     There is little else to the plot: the two are falsely married and Norina moves in, completely making over the house and her own wardrobe from top to bottom, as she prepares to head off to the theater without her new husband. Ultimately, the miserly Don Pasquale is so put-out—literally of his own life and house—that he is relieved upon discovering he has been duped, the marriage ceremony being illegal, and is happy to hand over Norina to his nephew, while agreeing to restore his inheritance.

     This silly story makes for many delightful moments, including Norina's truly comical "See, I am ready with love to surround him," and the servants' hilarious confusion in Act II and III, along with Norina's "Bring the jewels at once."

     Yet I cannot help asking why this brother and sister team are so intent on teaching the old Don Pasquale a lesson, all for the sake of the rather meek and incompetent Ernesto? Norina is such a wicked flirt and liar that we can hardly understand her love for a boy so shocked by the announcement of Don Pasquale's marriage that he is ready to leave home and inheritance behind. Obviously, the two, brother and sister, do have something at stake. By pretending to marry Don Pasquale, the penniless Norina comes into great wealth, part of which most certainly will go, at the old man's death, to her lover.

     But given her huge deceptions, even if they all turn out for the best, one has to wonder whether she will make such a poor boob a good wife. It’s clear that Ernesto is even more able to be hood-winked than his uncle. 

     By the time of the finale, "Heaven, what do you say?" there is actually little to be said. The heaven that has been invoked is one in which Norina has metaphorically cleaned the house of both men, who previously lived in a barren, cobweb-encrusted —at least in the Met production—similarly, in lives basically empty and unused. I guess the question is, will Norina return the jewels or wear them to the theater each night?

 

New York, November 15, 2010

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2011).

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).