Giacomo Puccini, Luigi Illica, and Giuseppe Ciacosa | Tosca / 2009

tosca’s kisses

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giacomo Puccini (music), Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Ciacosa (libretto, based on a play by Victorien Sardou) Tosca / the production I saw was from The Metropolitan Opera's HD production of October 10, 2009

 

By coincidence, soon after seeing a filmed version of Puccini's La Bohème, Howard and I attended the High Definition film production of The Metropolitan Opera's October 10, 2009 performance of Puccini's Tosca.

     Both Howard and I had previously seen Tosca on film and, together, witnessed the Berlin Opera's production at the Kennedy Center in 1975-1976. Howard saw the same production in Berlin the next year.

     Accordingly, we felt we knew the opera quite well, and perhaps I do not need to repeat the entire plot for most readers, although it is easily summarized.

     The painter, Mario Cavaradossi (brilliantly sung by Marcelo Álvarez) is at work on a painting of the Madonna in the Church of Sant'Andrea della Valle in Rome when he discovers a friend, Cesare Angelotti (former Consul of the Roman Republic) hiding in a family crypt nearby. Angelotti has just escaped from prison, and Cavardossi offers him a hiding place in his nearby villa.

     Enter the noted opera singer Floria Tosca (Karita Matilla), Cavaradossi's lover, who immediately becomes suspicious that her beloved is seeing another woman, having overheard Cavaradossi whispering to someone. He assures her that he is in love with only her, but when she notices the painting on which he has been working, she recognizes the face of the Marchesa Attavanti (Angelotti's sister), who Cavaradossi has observed praying at the church. Her jealousy returns, as she demands Cavaradossi change the blue eyes of the painting to her own darkly-colored eyes.

     A cannon is shot from the prison; they have detected the escape of Angelotti, and Cavaradossi promises his help to his friend. Enter the Chief of Police, the evil Baron Scarpia (George Gagnidze), who, upon discovering the Marchessa's fan in the crypt, successfully stirs up Tosca's jealousy once again. He himself would like to become Tosca's lover, and, as he sings of his evil machinations, the priests, chorus boys, and attending parishioners march forward in the “Te Deum,” which, in total hypocrisy, he finally joins.

    Later that night, Scarpia awaits Tosca in his home in the Farnese Palace. His henchman have discovered and arrested Cavaradossi in his home, suspecting him having hidden Angelotti. As Tosca arrives, Scarpia orders Cavaradossi to be tortured in the next room. He demands Tosca tell him what she knows about Angelotti, but she claims to have no knowledge and refuses his demands. As the torture continues, however, she wavers, and finally unable to bear her lover's cries, confesses that Angelotti is hiding in a well near Cavaradossi's hut. The artist is released, taken off to prison to be hung.

      Tosca now pleads with Scarpia to save Cavaradossi, but he is unwilling to do anything unless she give herself over to his sexual desires. In what is perhaps the most dramatic scene of the opera, Tosca hatefully gives herself up, but only if Cavaradossi's life is spared and they, together, are given a letter of free passage out of the country. Scarpia orders his henchmen to perform a mock-shooting of the artist and writes out the letter. As he moves to Tosca for his reward, she stabs him in the stomach, proclaiming the knife to be "Tosca's kiss."

     The final act is a short one, as Cavaradossi awaits to be killed. Tosca arrives, quietly telling him the news that she has killed Scarpia and the artist's life has been spared. All he has to do is dramatically fall as the soldiers pretend to shoot, and when they leave she will tell when it is permissible to "return to life." Liberty is at hand!

    But even in death Scarpia has extended his control over them. The guns are filled with real ammunition and Cavaradossi is murdered. The dark irony of their love is dramatized by Tosca's continued warnings to the artist to wait just a little longer, just a little longer, as the soldiers march away; finally, she commands him to stand, but as she rushes over to help him, she discovers the reality that he is dead. As the policemen arrive, having discovered Scarpia's corpse, she rushes to the parapets of the fortress, screaming "O Scarpia, we shall meet before God!" before jumping to her death.

 

    There have been numerous books and hundreds of essays written about this popular opera, and I have little of great originality that I could add. I would just reiterate the fact that, although this opera seems, in Puccini’s hands, to be centered upon emotional issues of love and passion, jealousy and hate, it is just as significantly motivated by the politics of the moment. Both drama and opera are set on a single day, June 17, 1800, a day in which, after having crossed the alps with his army, Napoleon Bonaparte met in the Battle of Marengo with the Austrians, led by General Mélas. The events of the play follow the historical reality. Early in the play we hear that Napoleon amazingly has been defeated by the Austrians, and Tosca's evening performance is given, in part, in celebration for that event. Later in the day, however, the truth is revealed: new troops joining Napoleon's army helped reverse the situation, and by evening, just as Tosca was performing in celebration for the French defeat, Napoleon's army crushed the Austrian forces. When the news reaches Scarpia's rooms, we observe Cavaradossi celebrating the fact before he is taken away to be tortured.

      A little back history may explain the situation. Just two years earlier, in February 1798, French troops, headed by Napoleon's general Louis Alexandre Berthier Louis Alexandre Berthier, occupied the Vatican State, proclaiming the establishment of the Roman Republic. The Pope, Pius VI, was forced to flee to Tuscany, and, ultimately, to France where he died. Cavaradossi's friend, Angelotti, was one of the Republican leaders, a consul.

     The Bourbon king Ferdinando IV, King of Naples, attempted to rescue the Pope and restore the Vatican but was defeated. For a brief time in 1799, the Roman Republic was incorporated into the Napoleon-supported Parthenopean Republic which included Naples, but by April of that year General Suvorov, heading the Austrian-Russian army crossed into northern Italy and defeated the French Republics. Soon after the Bourbons were returned to power, which, under the orders of Maria Carolina of Austria, wife of Ferdinando IV, began a "cleansing" of former Republicans, liberals, artists, scientists and others who had supported or been sympathetic to French rule. Both Angelotti and Cavaradossi, accordingly, were in danger, Angelotti imprisoned for his political position and Cavaradossi under suspicion for his artistic avocation. Thousands of men and women were killed under the eye of the newly appointed Baron Sciarpa (upon whom Scarpia is said to based).

     In reverse of Napoleon's battle, what seems to have saved the day in Cavardossi's and Angelotti's lives ends in death.

     Tosca's political position in this time of general turmoil is quite vague. She comes from the northern Italy, which clearly is attempting to defend themselves from Napoleon's advance, and her intense religiosity seems to suggest, as does her participation in the celebration of Napoleon's supposed defeat, that she has aligned herself, despite her lover's sympathies, with the Bourbons.*

     In any event, we can observe in the very political context of these momentous times that all the characters of this opera are, as one observer has suggested, not what they seem to be. The artist is also a revolutionary, the diva and sexually attractive lover is also religiously devout, the outward devout chief of police is a lustful lecher and liar. Even Angelotti is ready to don a woman's dress, which would have made him one of opera history’s several cross-dressing characters, in order to escape. If for no other reason, the shifting realities of these figures might justify director Luc Bondy's decision to remove the brilliant colors of Franco Zeffirelli's previous Metropolitan production, leaving the viewer with vast abstract spaces murkily lit. It may be a justification, but, in my estimation—and apparently in those of many other opera goers, who loudly booed the opening night production—it was not successful. At times it was simply difficult to "see" these brilliant singers, and one missed the elaborately artificial trappings in which they might have further hidden their identities.

     My point in all this historicity (other than my feeling that, in part, it is the very basis of the My Year volumes, in which I am attempting to remember what is so easily forgotten), is that, politically speaking, the characters are at "war" with one another even before the curtain has been raised.

     Floria Tosca is not only emotionally at war with both Cavaradossi and Scarpia because of her love and jealousies, but is spiritually at war with them, more pious than Cavaradossi's all too human depiction of the Madonna and Scarpia's hypocritical worship of the symbols of the church. She is, as Cavardossi's warns early in the opera, a natural confessor, telling her own confessor "everything." It is strange, accordingly, that he allows her to discover the circumstances surrounding Angelotti, for, inevitably, even if it is presumably to save Cavardossi's life, she betrays the cause.

      Tosca's kisses, accordingly, are all inevitably lethal, not only to Scarpia, whom she kisses metaphorically with the knife, but to Cavardossi, whom she kisses passionately, only to condemn him, unintentionally, to death. In such a world, in short, no one is to be trusted, for it is a world in utter chaos, official rule changing nearly instant by instant. The Battle of Marengo allowed Napoleon easier access to Italy, and Rome would soon fall to his forces, his son given by birth the title, "His Majesty the King of Rome."

 

*In Shirley Hazzard's 2008 book, The Ancient Shore she describes a 20th century dinner conversation with friends, a couple fiercely debating still about the Bourbon reign of Italy. Apparently, Italians are still divided on the issues.

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2009

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

David Yazbek and Jeffrey Lane | Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown / 2010

no one's home

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Yazbek (music and lyrics), and Jeffrey Lane (book, based on the film by Pedro Almodóvar) Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown / New York, Belasco Theatre, the performance I saw was on November 12, 2010

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, shouted Ben Brantley's review in The New York Times "needs—immediately and intravenously"—Ritalin. The musical "is...a sad casualty of its own wandering mind." Los Angeles Times reviewer Charles McNaulty agreed: "all the frenetic activity — with Sven Ortel’s projections lending Michael Yeargan’s fast-moving sets the hyperactive feeling of a fashion video — can’t conceal the gaping flaws of the show any more than decorative icing can improve a cake made without enough baking soda or eggs." "By midway through the second act," observed the Chicago Tribune, "the audience can no longer track the multicharacter action through chaos suited only for film, and palpably checks out of the entire proceedings."

    Anyone who has become acquainted with my theater writing will know that I have not always been kind to Broadway shows. But by the time I saw this original musical a week later, directed by the admirable Bartlett Scher, I could only wonder what all this critical hostility was about. Perhaps Scher had trimmed away some of his actors' frenetic motions since its opening, or perhaps these critics had simply gone to another play, for both I and the audience with whom I experienced this production thoroughly enjoyed the musical—a far better work, it seems to me, than most other musicals, originals and revivals, currently on Broadway. A woman in the row behind me gleefully admitted that she never reads the critics.

     I presume these critics had all seen Almodóar's film on which the musical was based. McNaulty even attempted to compare the two. Yet it seems strange that having witnessed the campy hysteria of the film, that they might not have expected a fast-moving theater event. Indeed, the whole metaphor of both film and the musical is that everyone, having lost or about to lose their sense of position or place (symbolized by love and home), is dropped into a whirling world of accidentally interrelated events. Accordingly, everyone is on the move: Pepa (Sherie Rene Scott), deserted by her lover Ivan (Brian Stokes Mitchell), wants to rent her penthouse and run off—unless she can convince Ivan to return—going so far as to burn her bed; her sexually active friend, Candela (stunningly performed by Laura Benanti), has fallen in love with terrorist and is desperate for advice and fearful of being arrested; Ivan's ex-wife, Lucia (Patti LuPone), having recently returned from a mental institution, is intent on tracking down Pepa and Ivan for revenge; her and Ivan's son Carlos, eager to leave his mother's troubled household, is intent on finding some new place where he and his fiancée might discover themselves. Add a passing Telephone Repairman and the gossipy/prayerful concierges of Ivan and Pepa and one is certain to create a farcical entanglement of people on the run.

     Only the taxi cab-singing Danny Burstein seems to truly comprehend the world in which he exists; prowling the streets to provide services to Pepa and others, he has stocked his cab with medicine, food, magazines, newspapers and anything else his customers on the move may need. This is clearly a world where no one's home; the idea that constant motion should be reflected on the stage is exceptional. Few other musicals that I can recall—Mahogany and Sweeney Todd being obvious exceptions—have so thoroughly taken to the streets.

     The only stop to all this action is, predictably, a Gilbert and Sullivan like magic elixir, in this case Pepa's Valium-laced gazpacho. And it is in the arms of the sleep it awards them that Carlos and Marisa, Candela and the Telephone Repairman, and the Chief Inspector and his Detective can discover the joys of love and regain a sense of stability and peace.

     The two strong women at the center of this work, Pepa and Lucia, must come to terms with their violent passions—and their accordant commitments to constant motion—by themselves, realizing, in the case of Lucia, that her husband had been "invisible" all along, and perceiving, in Pepa's case, that she suffers from an "overdose of love." Lucia's song, performed in Patti LuPone perfection, is perhaps the most touching of the entire production.

     And that is the real problem with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The singers, the acting, even the sets and costumes, the projections on the wall which some critics found so distracting, are all quite excellent in capturing the sense of this fast-moving, love-forlorn 1980s Madrid. Although David Yazbek's lyrics and music at moments ("Lie to Me," "The Microphone" and "Invisible") rise to the occasion, over all they are simply not fetching and powerful enough to glue this musical into a coherent whole. And without these two central elements of musical theater, no production can long survive.

     For all that, I think Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is an admirable failure, a larger-than-life statement of a culture that has lost its center and identity—clearly a subject that should have great significance for US citizens today.     

 

New York, November 13, 2010

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (November 2010).

Claude Debussy | Nocturnes || Magnus Lindberg | Cello Concerto No. 2 || Béla Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta [Los Angeles Philharmonic, conduced by Esa-Pekka Salonen] / 2013

into the atmosphere

by Douglas Messerli

 

Claude Debussy Nocturnes, Magnus Lindberg Cello Concerto No. 2, Béla Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen / the performance I saw was on October 20, 2013 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall

 

On Sunday, October 20, my companion Howard and I attended a concert at the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall which was part of the ongoing celebration of the Hall’s 10th  anniversary.

     Conducted by the Finnish composer and conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, former music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 17 years from 1992-2009, the works performed were by composers Salonen championed throughout his tenure.

      Beginning with Claude Debussy’s atmospheric tone-poem, composed in response to paintings by the American artist James McNeill Whistler—which together were titled, “Nocturnes.” Debussy’s Nocturnes, in general are characterized by the titles of the work’s three sections, “Nuages” (Clouds), “Fétes” (Festivals), and “Sirénes” (Sirens). Like the slow motion of passing clouds, the first section begins with a solemn and shifting movement of chords, which in the “Festivals” section is transformed into a celebratory, dazzlingly series of rhythms. “Sirens,” which features the sighing-like cries of a woman chorus (in this case the women of Los Angeles Master Chorale, which regularly performs with the LA Philharmonic) reminds one, inevitably, of the rhythmic sea waves combined with the entrancing sounds of mythical temptresses. Indeed, the entire work has a feeling of a fluid temptation of the listener, luring him or her into the work. The Debussy piece, in nearly any well-performed version, is a beautiful composition, but in the hands of Salonen it seemed crisper and a bit more muted than more romantically conceived renditions, permitting us to more clearly hear the tonal interchanges between oboes, English horn, clarinets, bassoons, trumpets, trombones, percussion instruments and, most importantly in this piece, strings.

      Orchestral interchange might also be a key word in describing the world premiere of Salonen’s friend and colleague, Magnus Lindberg’s Cello Concerto No. 2. Although some might describe the work by the contemporary composer as being a bit retrograde in its highly melodic score, it worked quite brilliantly, with its antiphonal relationship between the cello and orchestra, with the other works on the program. Bringing out the august tones of the work, cellist, Anssi Karttunen, who has regularly worked the composer as well as with the conductor, performed with the abbreviated orchestra (with only 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, trumpet, trombone and strings) impeccably unflappable.

      So too might the third and final piece, Béla Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta be described as both atmospheric and, and several points, antiphonal. But here, even more than in the “Festivals” section of Debussy’s work and in certain passages of Lindberg’s composition, the startling rhythms of Bartok’s Hungarian and Bulgarian influenced dances dominate, at moments deliriously rising only to collapse into the calm interchanges of the piano and celesta before all war breaks out again between oppositional strings.

      All of these works seem at moments, quite episodic, even though clearly the Bartok work is encased in near mathematically-created structures. But Salonen’s calm and firm conducting elicits from the various “parts” of these works a stunning sense of a rich unity.

      The substantially-filled hall applauded enthusiastically for several returns of the director and bows of the orchestral players.

 

Los Angeles, October 23, 2013

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (October 2013).

 

Oscar Wilde | The Importance of Being Ernest / 2011

nothing but the truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest / New York, American Airlines Theatre / the production I saw was on May 7, 2011

 

The central pun of Oscar Wilde's perennial comic delight—the homophonic relationship of the name Ernest and the word that characterizes "an intense and serious state of mind"—is at the heart of Wilde's work, for while the lovely women of this play, Gwendolen Fairfax (Jessie Austrian) and Cecily Cardew (Charlotte Parry), both can love only an "Ernest," a man of a serious state of mind, the young men, Algernon Moncrieff (Santino Fontana) and John Worthing (David Furr) immediately prove themselves be utter fakers and liars, both—as Algy defines it—Bunburyists, men who lie to their families about having a relative or friend elsewhere so that they can escape into the city (in Worthing's case) or into the country (in Algy's situation). And the first scene of this play is nothing if not complete evidence of these effete young mens' triviality, each competing with one another with absurd aphorisms and often meaningless bon mots. Jack, we may argue is the more serious of the two, but he is no more reliable in speaking the truth than is his friend Algernon, who besides being unscrupulous is represented as a kind of greedy glutton, particularly when it comes to cucumber sandwiches.

     We find it somewhat hard to believe, accordingly, that Jack/Ernest is so smitten by love of Algy's cousin Gwendolen that is ready to marry her on the spot, that is, until we discover that Gwendolen is just as frivolous, ready to marry him on that same spot because his name, she believes, is Ernest.

     All of this is great fun, but would become tiresome were it not for the existence of Gwendolen's Gorgon-like mother, Lady Bracknell (magnificently performed by Brian Bedford), of whom Worthing notes:

 

                                   I don’t really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am

                                   quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case,

                                   she is a monster, without being a myth, which is

                                   rather unfair…

    A great believer in "natural ignorance," Lady Bracknell is a stolid column of English conventionality, ready to accept Worthing because of his lack of political beliefs, habit of smoking, and apparent wealth, but unable to even fathom a man who has "lost both of his parents"—"To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."—and is absolutely flabbergasted when she is told that he was found in a black leather handbag in Victoria Station!

      Bedford plays this most luscious of monsters absolutely straight, no winks to the audience, no loopy drag-queen flopping of hands, and no change of pitch in voice. Lady Bracknell, in Bedford's shoes, is, if anything, more of a lady than ever, muttering her ridiculous pronunciamientos in a post-menopausal voice that seems made for the role. To watch him at work, although his "acting" is so flawless that one cannot comprehend it as "work," is a true joy, something that for me will be hard to forget, and hopefully something I can remember for the rest of my life.

 

     The remainder of the play, as everyone knows, revolves around a series of hilarious coincidences and more outrageous one-liners than even Henny Youngman might crack in a single night. Wilde's play literally drips with wit.

     As outrageous as it first sounds, Algy's suggestion that women only come to call one another sister "after they have called each other a lot of other things," comes true when, Gwendolen, curious about Jack's/Ernest's house in the country, comes visiting only to find another woman hosting tea. Their bitchy politeness crackles with fiery hate.

     Even Lady Bracknell's pronouncement of Jack's "carelessness" with regard to the loss of his parents is apparently close to the truth, when we discover that Miss Prism (Jayne Houdyshell)—currently Cecily's tutor—once worked for Lady Bracknell's sister whose child she carried away forever in a perambulator one morning, and, confusing it with her romantic manuscript, placed the romance in the perambulator and the child in her large black leather handbag—the act releasing a series of prismatic images of what this class-structured society has wrought.

     The revelation suddenly makes the two men, Algernon and Jack, brothers—which they have spiritually been all along. Jack, who soon after discovers that his birth name was Ernest, can now marry his cousin Gwendolen, as Algy, although he must forfeit the baptismal name of Ernest, will now be permitted to marry the young Cecily. Thus, all the characters can be said to have been incorporated into one large family, where everyone will live happily ever after...if they can remain earnest!

     It is doubtful, however, that in such a world of winding tales and deceit, as this family has suffered, that deep seriousness will be long permitted. As Ernest (formally Jack) admits: "It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth."

 

May 9, 2011, Newark, New Jersey and Los Angeles

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2011).

 

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II / Oklahoma! / 1998 [TV version, shown on US PBS in 2003]

allegiances

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Hunt (film director), Trevor Nunn (stage director), Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics, based on the play by Lynn Riggs), Richard Rodgers (music) Oklahoma!  [Royal National Theatre, London / 1998, a televised version with a slightly different cast presented on US PBS stations in 2003]

 

In the few weeks since I wrote about the film Oklahoma! I watched a version of the British 1998 revival on television. That production, a generally fine one—with particularly good performances by Hugh Jackman and Josefina Gabrielle, but with weaker secondary character actors than the movie and what I felt was uninspired choreography by Susan Stroman (the good territory folks were even more gestural and less exuberant in her version)—basically supported my feelings about the dark elements of this fable.

     Even though the Trevor Nunn production attempted to portray Jud in a more balanced manner, and actor Shuler Hensley succeeded (compared to the film portrayal by Rod Steiger) in making Jud more likeable, the dangerous aspects of the culture he represents remained embedded in his behavior. Indeed, in this production it became even more apparent that Laurey had chosen to go with him to the social because he was a farmer, and, accordingly, someone more familiar than the self-assured cowboy Curley. 

     What the film had not revealed to me quite as clearly as the play was that, upon asking Laurey to marry him, Curley “converts,” so to speak, promising to become a farmer. The two warring factions—farmer and cowman—demand alliances, it appears, almost like the family kinships of Romeo and Juliet. And the musical even more pointedly reveals that Aunt Eller and friends are ready to break the law—or at least, as she puts it, “bends it a little”—in order to speed love on its course.

 

Los Angeles, November 2003

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2003).

Martha Graham and Aaron Copland | Appalachian Spring / 1944, film version 1958

love, guilt, and consolation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martha Graham (choreographer), Aaron Copland (composer), Isamu Noguchi (set design) Appalachian Spring / premiered October 30, 1944 at the Library of Congress Coolidge Auditorium / the version I saw was the 1958 film version, directed and filmed by Peter Glushanok.

 

I have seen the film version of Martha Graham's and Aaron Copland's great collaboration several times, and in 2002 I watched it again, this time taking notes on the associations and feelings the music and dance brought to mind. The reader should understand my comments not as a literal description of the dance's events, but as my immediate interpretations of what I thought I saw. Another viewing might produce yet other such emotions.

      In a sense, the work, which so brilliantly expresses the heartland and seemingly captures the sense of Appalachia, was itself a kind of accident. Commissioned by Graham and the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation to write a work for dance for Graham's company, Copland drew on Shaker songs and the kind of American idiom that he had already expressed so brilliantly in his ballet "Rodeo" of 1942.

     Yet Copland had no idea what to title his piece, and even upon its delivery to Graham it was still titled, according the composer, "Ballet for Martha." It was only as the piece was readied to be performed that Graham christened it, after a few lines in The Bridge by Hart Crane in which Crane describes the "spring" as referring to water instead of a season. Yet, Copland reportedly laughed, everyone applauds me for so aptly expressing the sensibility of Spring in Appalachia.

    Moreover, the original outline of script, described as a kind of gender conflict between men's and women's work, featured not only a Pioneer mother, but an Indian Girl, a Fugitive, and a Citizen. In the end the story was winnowed down to the simple outline published in the preface to the Boosey & Hawkes score:

 

                    A pioneer celebration in spring around a newly-built farmhouse

                    in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the last century. The

                    bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful

                    and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. An older

                    neighbor suggests sorrow and then the rocky confidence of experience.

                    A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the

                    strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end the couple are

                    left quiet and strong in their new house.

 

It seemed to me that instead of the more European concept of "Love, Death, and Transfiguration," the tenor of Graham and Copland's more innocent and emphatically American fable is "Love, Guilt, and Consolation."

Here are my notes:

Into the yard of a newly built home, wonderfully represented by Isamu Noguchi's open walls with a porch-like structure on which sits a kind of rocking chair shaped like a butter churn, come the figures of the dance, first The Preacher (played in the original by Merce Cunningham and in the film version I saw by Bertram Ross), then the Pioneer Woman (Matt Tumey in the film version), and the Wife (Martha Graham in both the original and, at the age of 62, in the film). Four women (Worshippers) follow, who clap and dance joyfully, frolic, and, at moments, gesture prayer.

     A flute, oboe, and clarinet dominate this early passage, and when the flute reaches its highest note, The Husband (Graham's favorite, Erik Hawkins in the original and Stuart Hodes in the film version) enters, lovingly stroking the side of his new house, as he moves forward in pony-like and proud struts and leaps.

     The couple walk to each and move backwards, seemingly to reveal the history of their love, which is, through their various posturings, made somewhat ambiguous at times, with moments of fear revealed among their steady pleasure in one another.

  Now The Preacher kicks up a kind of ruckus, with the Worshippers following behind him as acolytes reveling in what one might describes as is a kind of spiritual square dance, in which he also leaps, bends, grovels, stands, and lifts.

     The Pioneer Woman comes forward expressing her own sorrows and delights, while the Husband quietly ponders his new life. The Wife turns to win the attention of her Husband, simultaneously demonstrating her own new fears and worries, and yet flirting joyfully with a kind of awkward hesitation.

     At one point she takes up the baby of the Pioneer Woman, kneeling, entreating her husband. Is it a desire for a family or her fear for the responsibilities it will mean, the commitments and sacrifice? Clearly, it is both.

     Although the storyline does not describe it as such, there seems to be also a tension between the two women, almost as if the Husband has previously known the Pioneer Woman and they been somehow involved.

      But now the Preacher comes forward into the center, as the couple join him, turning to stare in opposite directions before they enter the church for the plain but joyous ceremony, which ends in the couple stretching, spinning in joy, leaping in the wonderment of it all. The shaker hymn, "'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free," dominates the spirit of the occasion.

     Here the music changes, the Preacher suddenly becoming agitated, spinning forward almost in a kind of dervish, tearing at the air, renting his hair, damning, cursing, accusing, praying. What is their sin? What horror is he describing to them? Is it an actual or imagined transgression.

     The Pioneer Woman comes forward as if to plead for the Preacher to cease, the Husband standing up, turned away in refusal of the sermon. So the Preacher gradually shifts from his violent gesturing, moving forward in a lighter tone and tune.  The husband embraces the world, returning to his wife, while his wife dances a more agitated dance, focusing on her chair-rocker-milking stool as if she were reevaluating her situation. Again. the Husband returns to her, as they repeat some of their earlier dances of joy, reiterating and repeating their testaments of love while Copland's score returns to "'Tis a gift to be simple," ending in a long bassoon chord.

      The Wife turns from her former fears to a sense of relinquishment, resolution, consolation, as the couple kiss away their fears and embrace. The community moves off, the Preacher wishing them peace as he leaves. Husband and Wife now stand alone in their new domain.

 

Los Angeles, March 3, 2002

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2002).