Pyrotr Tchaikovsky and Modest Tchaikovsky | Iolanta || Béla Bartók and Béla Balázs | Bluebeard's Castle / 2015 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

what’s love got to do with it?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pyrotr Tchaikovsky (composer), Modest Tchaikovsky (libretto, based on a play by Henrik Hertz), Iolanta and Béla Bartók (music), Béla Balázs (libretto, based on a story by Charles Perreault), Bluebeard’s Castle, Mariusz Treliński (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) / 2015 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

 

I originally intended, before actually viewing the two operas presented in the MET’s HD Valentine’s Day broadcast, to discuss these works separately, adding my remarks about the Bartok opera to those I had already made above on the Los Angeles Opera production, and writing about the Tchaikovsky work, never before performed on the Metropolitan Opera stage, within another context. After seeing the pair of short operas, directed by Mariusz Treliński, it became apparent that to do so would be to ignore the carefully constructed and, at times, revelatory links between the two works.

     Of course, there is absolutely no reason to imagine that these two very different pieces, written only 20 years apart, need have anything to do with one another, Iolanta representing clearly a work of 19th century that romanticizes love and seeks for its characters’ purification through their orientation to the light, “the pearl” of God’s gift to mankind. Light is not just God’s first creation, but representative of moral value and comprehension in the Tchaikovsky work.

     This work struggles with a pre-modernist dilemma: how is someone without the knowledge of light and all that it represents—good, beauty, love, wisdom—able to comprehend what is missing from their life? Importantly, the opera asks questions that Blake had previously posed: can innocence be good, does lack of knowledge allow for salvation, or, as Pope Francis recently pondered, can an animal be forgiven and granted eternal life? For in this opera, which the director has linked up intimately with animal life, represents the blind Iolanta (Anna Netrebko) locked up, not in a beautifully enchanted cottage—as the original libretto would have it—but in a hunting cabin, replete with the trophies of deer antlers posted across its walls. Deers are seen roaming about the place, are shot, and their blood is drained all during the course of short performance.

     In Treliński’s version, the young girl’s father, King René (Ilya Bannik) is not just a misguided parent, attempting to protect his beloved daughter from a truth which may, he fears, transform her joyful demeanor into a world of fear and terror, but is a dictatorial figure who pretends wisdom while denying even the concept of it—no one with access to girl is allowed to mention light and vision. Yet at opera’s start, Iolanta has come of age enough to perceive that something is missing from her life, and begins to suffer even though she cannot yet comprehend why she might have any right to do so, particularly since she is lovingly cared for by servants day and night. Eyes, accordingly, have no purpose but for tears, and tears, alas, have become to appear in her eyes without cause. What we begin to perceive is that, even in the closed world in which she has been sheltered, the young blind girl is beginning to comprehend that something is amiss. How can her nurse, for example, know that she is crying without touching her eyes, to spot her fever without putting her hands to her forehead?

     The opera’s libretto, however, does hint, moreover, that René’s intentions may not all be a as loving as they are manipulative. Why will he not even reveal that he is the king or that Iolanta has been promised in marriage to Duke Robert (Aleksei Markov)? This beautiful young maiden locked away in her enchanted garden, after all, is not so very different from the forested animals the King keeps on his property to hunt them down and destroy them. And not only is René mistaken in his notions of filial protection, but he has not bothered to discover whether or not the young man to whom she is promised is a suitable husband for her. In fact, Robert, even knowing of the vow to which he has been committed, has been, so to speak, actively playing the field, and has fallen in love with another woman, Mathilda.

      Fortunately, his close companion, Vaudémont (Piotr Beczala) has not yet found the perfect woman he is seeking, and which, almost as soon as he has sung of his desires, he discovers in the visage of Iolanta. But even suddenly witnessing everything for which he has been seeking, also reveals his own failures: for him everything is based on sight. Accordingly, just as he begins to reveal to the unknowing girl the importance of light and all that it represents, she, in incomprehension of words, begins to reveal to him that love, wisdom, and knowledge can (and must) be known even in the darkness.

     Had Tchaikovsky been a 20th-century composer, he surely would have sought out that second truth more thoroughly, faced as Bartók would soon be, with the bleakness of the already discordant future. But Tchaikovsky and his story, being of another time, pursues instead how to bring the light to his heroine’s life so that she, too, can be blessed just as has her loving knight.

     Today, the ridiculousness of the magical cure by the Arab doctor Ibn-Hakia (Elchin Arizov) is apparent, with its mysterious “backstage” melodramatics which, we are told, the young girl bravely endures as she is forced to wear a blindfold to cover eyes that cannot see the light. Chalk it all up to a dramatic revelation of the fact that she is cured, and is now suddenly able, because she has willed it, to share in God’s great and glorious gift, all somewhat campily represented in this opera’s conclusion through the project of white rays emanating in an art- deco-like pattern behind the carefully arranged gathering, for the work’s conclusion, of the chorus and leads.

     Hinting that the happy girl of the first opera, in entering the new century, is drawn to return to the world of her father’s dark domination—or, one might almost argue, as if young Countess of Rossini’s Barber of Seville were to sudden awake in the bed of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figuro—Judith (Nadja Michael) of Bluebeard’s Castle inexplicably leaves her happy home of light to follow the Bluebeard (Mikhail Petrenko) into his nightmare castle. Like Vaudémont of the Tchaikovsky opera, Judith hopes to help Bluebeard—by opening the doors to all his rooms and revealing their secrets—to see the light and, in that process, discover just what they meant for Iolanta: good, beauty, love and wisdom. Treliński, in attempting to link these works, brings in, quite naturally, elements of the first work, the antlered deer heads, the roots of trees, flowers, etc into the second opera as Judith tries to entice Bluebeard to perceive (perhaps with a bit tweaking of the translation) just what Modest Tchaikovsky described as “the pearl” of God’s gift to mankind. And, in this sense, by performing these works together, they function to slightly shimmer off of one another, giving each work an intensity of meaning that alone they might not reveal. What also became clear by bringing these works together, was how informed they both were by eastern European thought, along with its inherent appositions of evil and good, meaninglessness and revelation.

    Yet, as my companion Howard pointed out, too often this can lead to “connect the lines” sort of sketch that easily collapses with any careful thought. For Judith is not and never could have been as innocent as Iolanta, even as a child. She is attracted to Bluebeard and his dark world, not because she herself once shared it, but because she cannot truly believe in his rumored evil. A bit like the Biblical Judith, Bartók’s figure might even imagine herself as being able, in the end, to take charge of the situation by beheading her Holofernes when he attempts to rape her in her bath. But she cannot act in time, needing still to prove her would-be lover innocent, refusing to believe the truth she already knows but cannot will herself to believe.

     In fact, even more so than when I saw the great Bartók opera late last year, I could not help but comprehend the work, this time around, as a horrifying, nightmare prediction of World War I and the fascist interventions of the rest of the 20th century. Everything that Bluebeard reveals to Judith will be realized in the century ahead, as the idealist’s life—the dreamer in the moonlight—will be the required sacrificed of mankind.

     What these operas do ultimately reveal by their pairing is that while the first may represent a dream of love, the second has actually very little to do with love, but is a tale of the twisted human attraction to the perverse, concerning the awful hypnotic draw of the human species to the heart of darkness.

 

Los Angeles, February 16, 2015

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

Lee Breuer | Pataphysics Penyeach: Summa Dramatica and Porco Morto

barnyard philosophers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lee Breuer (text and direction) Pataphysics Penyeach: Summa Dramatica and Porco Morto / performed as part of the Under the Radar festival, New York, Mabou Mines / the performances I saw were on a matinee on Sunday, January 18, 2009

After the weak performances I had witnessed one night earlier in a Broadway theater, I was delighted to witness actor Ruth Maleczech's marvelous acting as Sri Moo Parahamsa, the first bovine to lecture at the Gifford lectures of William James in Scotland. As if she herself had four stomachs, each with a different voice attached, Maleczech divertingly argues, in pure pataphysical nonsense, that the post-performance animal should take acting lessons, and proceeds in a heady mix of scientific jargon and an oddly logical argument based on the existence of the "triune brain," that all animals should "Know Thyself":

 

          As an academic, a mammal, and a cow, I know I have a soul

          And since I do not have a neocortex, it must not reside                              

               therein

          It's my thesis—and I'll go to the mat with a lizard on this

               point—that psyche lives in the limbus

          Reality is not real, it is virtual

          Each mind has its game and virtualities are subject each to their own laws

         The neocortex to the laws of reason, the reptilian spinal stem adheres

              to chaos theory

         and as for the hedonic—limbic laws are, in the vulgate vernacular, showbiz

             "Know Thyself" says the Delphic oracle

         Well, to "know itself" the post-performance animal should take an acting lesson

 

The school, of course, is her own: The Institute for the Science of the Soul, a fully accredited acting conservatory ranked in the top ten by US News and World Report!

    A zany satire on various acting methods ("A Strasburg, a Meisner and an Adler may differ in approach, But Methodists generally agree that the spiritual script breaks into actions and objectives") "Summa Dramatica" ends with a recovering animation, Marge Simpson, testifying on screen to the value of Sri Moo Parahamsa's Institute, loosing a hilarious send up of phrases such as "truth is beauty." This delicious monologue (or, if we count Marge as a "true" character, we must describe it as a dialogue) ends with the new barnyard post-performance conclusion that "The Greeks have been in denial for 3,000 years / The Truth is not beautiful." 

      Poor Porco, the wonderful puppet of Breuer's loony imagination, has just committed suicide, and in a valedictory ode from the grave admits that he could no longer stand living, obsessed as he had become with the great Grey Lady, The New York Times. Although he attended the famed bovine-run "Institute" for a while, he left it doomed by the "Sick Fiction Syndrome," destined to end its days as a replay of a subplot to The Lion King.

    Breuer's satire here at times seems so broad-reaching that it does not always hit its mark, but when Breuer's language does hit home, it takes us all aback, as we are shamed by our easy acceptance of mediocre journalism as a "true" presentation of life. Recalling his feelings upon first meeting The Grey Lady, Porco proclaims:

 

                What did I feel, Grey lady   I felt vivid!

                O the torture, the spins, the needles, the pins. The creative dilemmas...

                What music of my heart should underscore what angle of your face?

               What did I feel Grey Lady?   I felt "life-like"

               The Times was a beautiful vagina that in my hubris I engorged

                       with every cunilingual wag of my tongue

               Your vibrations were histronic!

               There was drama in the air—tragedy—and it was generational

               The New York Times was going through menopause

               ....

 

Later:

 

               I am a New York Times creation, American un-emancipated

               I am a tabloid's love slave.

 

    How hilarious, accordingly, to have read a few days lady, in the Grey Lady herself, a review expressing the following:

       So there's this pig, see, and he lives The New York Times. After a romantic affair with the Gray Lady, they commit suicide together with a "Diamond Sutra dagger," but not before the pig, played by a puppet, offers a few sweet nothings to a stack of newspapers.

     ...If you're trying to figure out what is going on here in "Porco Morto," ...you're not the only one. ...It stars animal puppets and features a lot of bad puns, pretentious jargon ("normative soulfulness"?), some jokey video and barely coherent mockery of commercialism and this news organization.

 

Lucky Porco's no longer around to engage in conversation with his former love. Breuer couldn't have written a sillier response. As Mac Wellman once admitted, the surreal events of his plays are generally based on news articles; "you couldn't make them up!"

     I was happy to verbally admit, upon Sri Moo Parahamsa's urging: "I pledge allegiance to the hype."

 

Los Angeles, February 15, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2009).

 

 

Marcel Marceau | in performance at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts / 1980

the resounding dance of silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

The performance I saw of Marcel Marceau took place in the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, Washington, D.C. in 1980.

 

Anyone who knows me well recognizes that I am not greatly sympathetic with the art of mime, particularly with the street-based mimicry that one witnesses in large cities throughout the world. As I wrote this year in my essay on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up, “I once quipped that all mimes should be shot at birth.” But when it comes to the art of Marcel Marceau, who died on September 22, 2007, I make an important exception.

     Marceau spent most of his long life in theater as a white-face, soft-shoed personage with his head covered with a well-worn hat topped by a red flower, a persona he called Bip, a reference to the Charles Dickens character of Great Expectations, Pip.

      Bip’s antics were closer to Harlequin than to those of a circus clown (although the great Ringling Brother's Barnum and Bailey sad-faced clown, Emmett Kelly—who I saw as a child in one of that circus's last tent performances—might be said to have been influenced by Marceau), his movements more similar to those of dance (it is no accident that Michael Jackson based his “Moonwalk” steps on Marceau’s “Walking Against the Wind”) than to the wooden and mechanical gestures of street mimes. Indeed, Marceau himself disparaged most of his imitators. For Marceau’s movements owed less to vaudeville than to the nearly flawless movements of the great silent film comedians Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers. One need only revisit the little tramp’s now notorious waddle through town and country, his choreographic struggles with machinery in Modern Times, and his pas de deux with a globe in The Great Dictator, observe Keaton’s daring leaps across train cars in The General or his fruitless yet miraculously successful struggles against the cyclone of Steamboat Bill, Jr., and recall Groucho’s perfectly executed leaps, slides, and daffy spins of his dance in Animal Crackers, or any of Harpo’s sleights of hand—all of them admittedly influences upon his art—to recognize their importance in Marceau’s artistry of moving his body through space.

     As for John Cage, moreover, silence for Marceau is something far more complex than a lack of sound. In his 1980 performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Howard and I witnessed a famous incident in which during his sketch, “Angel,” the music suddenly broke down into an uncertain buzz, upon which Marceau bowed politely and apologetically to the audience as stage lights dimmed and the curtain fell. After what seemed like an eternity (actually only 15 minutes later), the curtain rose once more and the sketch was repeated. Later, in an interview, the great mime insisted, “There is no such thing as silence.”

     By that statement, I don’t think he was simply speaking of the Mozart music which accompanied the piece, but was referring to the many sounds silence entices into its seeming emptiness. In Marceau’s silent dances of “Youth, Maturity, Old Age, and Death”—the title of one of Bip’s sketches—all the tumult and clamor of those various states of life echo through the audience, reflected in the gestures of the face, hands, chest, hips, legs, and feet of the performer. The symphony of our own settlement, the coughs, creaks, giggles, whisperings, and taps of the audience, are part of any performance, but in this great mime’s art, seem subtly incorporated in movement itself.

      Off stage, Marceau was an inveterate talker. He once admitted to an interviewer: “Never get a mime talking. He won’t stop.” It was his involvement with his audience that so separated Marceau from other mimes, whose performances often seem dissociated from the everyday, representing extraordinary ex-aggregations of daily activities.

     Born Jewish in the French-German-speaking Strasbourg, Marceau was the son of a baritone-singing butcher who was later imprisoned in Auschwitz, where he died. Escaping to the Southwest of France, the son changed his name from Mangel to Marceau and, with his brother Alain, became active in the French Resistance, altering children’s identity cards to save them from Vichy-German deportation. Through his ability to speak English, Marceau became a liaison officer to General Patton.

     Enrolling after the war in the Charles Dullin School of Dramatic Art, Marceau studied with the mime Etienne Decroux. So was Bip born. Accordingly, one might say that his persona was born out of Marceau’s political activities, which explains, in part, what helped to make his performances so human, what helped to bridge a connection between him and his audiences.

     There is no doubt that several of his sketches were sentimental, one of the most well known, “Public Garden,” reminding me of the kitschy works of numerous comediennes from Lily Tomlin to Bette Middler. But then, Marceau well understood that as a great artist in his field he was also a popularizer (his death coming after the deaths of a series of such popularizers—Gian Carlo Menotti, Beverly Sills, and Luciano Pavarotti): “I have a feeling that I did for mime what (Andres) Segovia did for the guitar, what (Pablo) Casals did for the cello.”

 

Los Angeles, September 27, 2007

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 10 (November-December 2007).

Mac Wellman | Two September / 2006

what america abandons abandons america

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mac Wellman Two September, New York, The Flea Theater / November 29-December 16, 2006 (The performance I saw was on December 7, 2006)

 

Over the years I have probably seen more plays by the noted American playwright Mac Wellman than any other writer. Beginning as early as 1986, I saw Mac’s play Cleveland performed as a BACA downtown production at, of all places, Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. In 1992, I attended the first of his famed Crowtet series, The Murder of Crows, at Primary Stages in New York. At the first production of the reconstructed Victory Theater on 42nd Street, I witnessed the 1994 En Garde Arts production of his Crowbar, which won two Obie Awards. The same year I saw both Swoop and Dracula at the Soho Repertory Theatre. The Los Angeles theater company, Bottom's Dream—with whom I co-produced a series of readings that included Mac’s Second-Hand Smoke, the third play in his Crowtet series—premiered the final play of that series, The Lesser Magoo, in Los Angeles in 1997. A year later I sat in on a reading of his Cats-Paw while visiting New York. I saw Terminal Hip performed in Los Angeles by Bottom's Dream in 2000, and witnessed his dance-drama Antigone in New York at the Big Dance Company/Classic Stage Company in 2001.

    Beyond these numerous play productions, I published his plays The Professional Frenchman (1990) and Bad Penny (1990) on my Blue Corner Drama series (the precursor to my later publishing house, Green Integer), printed his influential anthology Theatre of Wonders: Six Contemporary Plays on my Sun & Moon Press in 1985, published the first two Crowtet plays as Two Plays in 1994 on Sun & Moon and reprinted those plays as Crowtet 1 on the Green Integer imprint in 2000, following up with Crowtet 2 in 2003. Wellman’s two Dracula plays, The Land Beyond the Forest: Dracula and Swoop (1994) appeared on my Sun & Moon Press, as did his novels The Fortuneteller (1991) and Annie Salem (1996) and his collection of poetry, A Shelf in Woop’s Clothing (1990). More recently, I published his novel Q’s Q: An Arboreal Narrative on my Green Integer press. Together we co-edited the significant anthology of American drama, From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Drama 1960-1995, which included 38 American plays since 1960, including Wellman’s own The Hyacinth Macaw.

      Accordingly, I presume that it will be understood as no disparagement of Wellman’s great talent to suggest that the newest play I witnessed, Two September, at The Flea Theater on

December 7, 2006, was not my favorite of his works. Basically a political statement, the play seemed without much of the linguistic energy of his other works, despite the interweaving of texts by American writer Josephine Herbst, from whom he quotes a long passage that might be read as a thematic entry into this work:

 

             Today the point of gravity for responsibility has shifted from the small

             community to the relationship between things. Experiences have even

             made themselves independent of men… Over the air ways, in movies,

             experiences come to be dogmatized to certain kinds of experiences at

             the cost of all others… The world comes second hand—or fifth hand—

             to us and the illusion that it is fresh because it is shown as a picture of

             an actual place by some reporter divides man into incalculable parts of

             any true center. (from New Green World, 1954)

 

Although I have difficulty with what I perceive as a romanticized notion of “the center”—a harkening back to an order of small town America and the social priorities of another age—I think there may be no better direct statement of what I began to explore in the 2006 volume of My Year: the simulacrum we now seem to desire in place of the “real” because it remains, in its imitation of dangerous reality, at a safer distance than the actual events. But, of course, in that preference we often have no way of knowing whether what we are witnessing is something that has been manipulated to look like the real thing or an accurate image of it. Truth thus becomes so separated from reality, from what might have really happened, that we have no way of unweaving it from someone’s fabricated warp and weft. As Herbst has argued, coming as it has from one or perhaps six degrees of separation, the real becomes disconnected from us, and, accordingly, is indeterminable and often indecipherable.

     Herbst’s statements seem even more prescient in the context of later wars in Vietnam, the first Iraq invasion (when even news reporters were kept at a distance from significant events) and our current occupation of Iraq. Only yesterday—through the simulacrum of my choice, a CNN television report—the young soldier, Staff Sgt. Roy Starbeck, interviewed from Baghdad, expressed precisely these issues: "It's just...really just aggravating," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "People saying that they don't support the war because they don't like the president or saying they don't support the war because they are Democrats or saying they support the war because they are Republicans. None of them are taking the time or energy to find out what is actually going on over here."

     Obviously, with the rise of virtual realities in our computerized age, it becomes even more difficult to separate any notion of “real” from what is imagined or simulated.

     Iowa writer Herbst, former friend to Ernest Hemingway and Robert MacAlmon, experienced these problems first hand when she was summarily dismissed from her position at the Office of Strategic Services—precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency—an organization that helped to arm, train, and supply anti-German and anti-Japanese groups, including Mao Tse Tung’s Communist Forces in China and Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, the Vietnamese National Liberation Movement. Herbst was released from her position, evidently, on the basis of classified reports, thus allowing her no opportunity to even know the charges or defend herself from them.

     Sound familiar? It is precisely what President Bush is advocating for individuals who today are arrested on terrorist charges, that such people—defined by the government as terrorists—should have no access to normal legal procedures, that because of the need for governmental secrecy they have no right to know all the charges against them, and, accordingly, no possibility of a knowledgeable defense. Herbst was later to discover that the source of information that named her as a political radical (in fact, her second marriage was to John Herrmann, the writer who introduced Whittaker Chambers to Alger Hiss, and Herbst did embrace various Marxist ideas of the time)—information that was filled with lies and  exaggeration—had come from her supposed friend, Texas fiction writer Katherine Anne Porter. Although Herbst was later cleared of all charges, her reputation and career basically ended with her dismissal in the early 1940s.

     Against this backdrop Wellman portrays larger world-wide political events, particularly those relating to the young Ho Chi Minh, who had lived in and traveled throughout the United States in the first decade of the 20th century, and was highly influenced in his own attempts to free Indochina from the French colonialist regimes by the American Declaration of Independence and other such documents. His September 2, 1945 declaration of Vietnamese Independence in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi began:

 

                   All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with

                   certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit

                   of Happiness….”

 

Wellman presents the man as having sympathetic allies on the American front in China and Vietnam in 1945, individuals who attempted to explain to American higher-ups that it was in our better interest to support the Vietnamese National Liberation. OSS chief, William J. Donovan—the same man who fired Herbst—finally notified the local American forces to have no more connections with Ho Chi Minh, and in 1946 the first Indochina War (the Franco-Vietnamese war) began, resulting in the division of South and North Vietnam, and, ultimately, in the American military involvement in that country.

      The only actual link between Herbst and Ho Chi Minh is the figure of Donovan, and that fact, perhaps, is what weakens this play’s claim to our moral outrage. Donovan, moreover, later became assistant to the chief prosecutor, Telford Taylor, at the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal and received the Distinguished Service Medal.*

       What continues to haunt me, long after Wellman’s play, however, has less specifically to do with Donovan or his role in these two seemingly unconnected events, but relates to what might be perceived as the American inability to separate our fears from listening to the voices of people who, caring about our values and ideals, represent opposing viewpoints. And it is in this matrix of events—even more than our misunderstandings of Indochinese politics, it seems to me—that we reveal our ready acceptance of the simulacrum over truth. The same blindness that Wellman speaks of in the post-World War II politics were continued in the Nixon-era slogans such as “Love it or leave it,” declarations of hatred to anybody who even questioned American military decisions in the Vietnam War, perpetuating the absurd confusion that disagreeing with governmental policies and decisions necessarily means opposition to or hatred of our country or—to bring it into today’s context—represents terrorist attitudes. It is strange that in a country founded on individual freedoms—a country that was created by individuals speaking out against what was perceived as unfair governmental authority—is so fearful of embracing those who question and challenge political monotheism. In fact, by dismissing figures as radically different as Ho Chi Minh and Josephine Herbst we threaten our existence. Had we heard and followed the enthusiasms and admonitions of that Vietnamese leader, we might have saved ourselves from years of painful political turmoil and rescued the lives of thousands of American and Vietnamese men and women. Had we listened to a voice like Josephine Herbst, we might have recognized that the truths we believed we held were imitations of—indeed were false presentations of—the real thing. By abandoning figures such as Herbst and the hundreds of falsely accused liberals and even communist sympathizers within our own country, we forced them to abandon America; their insights and percipient warnings were no longer heard. That some of them remained to advocate alternative views speaks not to the greatness of our country but to their own unswerving beliefs in the truth.

 

*Of more interest, however, is the fact that Donovan was later the chairman of the American Committee on United Europe which, with funding from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations—secretly supported by CIA monies channeled through the Fairchild Foundation—fought against what was perceived as the omnipresent Communist force by attempting to unify Europe, which, in turn, led not only to the establishment of America’s cold war policies, but helped to fuel the cauldron of Communist fears brewed by the Senate Committee for Un-American Activities investigations and those meetings by house member Joseph McCarthy (part of the larger series of events related to the experiences of Josephine Herbst)—and indirectly led to today’s European Union.

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2007

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 9 (June-October 2007), on-line

 

 

 

Jeremy Sams, with music by George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and others / 2012 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live production]

everybody's opera

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jeremy Sams (writer and conceiver), with music by George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and numerous others, Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch (stage directors), Barbara Willis Sweete (film director) The Enchanted Island / 2012 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live production]

 

Perhaps for the first time since the days of Baroque opera, an opera company, in this case the New York's Metropolitan, performed a pastiche, a mix of operatic works assembled and woven into a new story. As several critics noted, this might have been a disastrous mish-mash of music and story, but with the encouragement of the Met's general manager, Peter Gelb, Jeremy Sams' selections intertwined with elements of the plots of Shakespeare's The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, the opera community has a charming new work that threatens to become a standard in opera houses. Certainly I would go back for another visit to this quite satisfying piece.

     Prospero (David Daniels), having taken over the "enchanted" island of the title's name, has at first loved and then abandoned Sycorax (Joyce DiDonato), a sorceress banned to the dark side of the kingdom, now furious for the results. Prospero and his daughter Miranda, having stolen away Sycorax's spirit servant, Ariel (Danielle de Niese), spend most of their days reading books filled with the formulas of potents and magic spells, attended by Caliban, Sycorax's dunder-headed and brutish son. He, she argues, using him to gain entry back into Prospero's sight, should be the inheritor of the island! Yet it is clear, Caliban has little talent to rule anything.

     Passing by this isolated island is a ship bearing Prince Ferdinand, a likely suitor for Miranda's hand. Determined to marry her off to Ferdinand, Prospero plans to summon up a storm that will bring the Prince to his island and into the arms of his beloved daughter. Ariel, who is charged to carry out the spell, however, chooses—in part because of the influence of Sycorax—the wrong ship, and sets the storm upon a boat carrying four Athenian lovers, who wind up upon the island instead of Ferdinand. Confusing the two males of the foursome with Ferdinand, Ariel serves them a magic potion, which brings all those involved, Miranda, Helena (Layla Claire), Hermia (Elizabeth DeShong), Demetrius (Paul Appleby), and Lysander (Elliot Madore), into a confusing series of mismatches, each falling in love with the others, until it is difficult to know whom is madly in love with whom.

     Indeed, as in Cosí fan tutte, it doesn't seem to matter—one by one they feel betrayed, confused by the vagaries of the heart, while Caliban cooks up his own scheme to be loved by one and all, men, women, animals, and demons from the dark.

       As in Baroque opera, each figure gets his or her own say in a series of beautiful arias, some well-known, others long forgotten.

     It is only by calling up Neptune (Plácido Domingo), at first furious for the interruption, then magnanimous in his help, that order is restored, Miranda married to Ferdinand, Sycorax restored to her proper position and the Athenian foursome paired with whomever they might at the moment desire.

     The frothy results are a delight, but would not have been so amazing without the wonderful costumes and sets of Phelim McDermott and his team (who previously put together the set and costumes for Satyagrapha). Every moment of this splendid work is underlined with their splendiferous wit.

     In a post-post modern culture such as ours, it is only fitting that pastiche might come back into fashion, and if The Enchanted Island is any sign of its pleasures, bring it on. As the opera closes, even its performers seem enchanted by the experience as they joyously sing "Now a bright new day is dawning." Bringing together numerous composers, this is everybody's opera and an opera for everyone.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2012

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2012).