Gioachino Rossini and Cesare Sterbini | Il barbiere di siviglia, ossia L'inutile precauzione (The Barber of Seville, or The Useless Precaution) / 2007 [the Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

the crazy house

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gioachino Rossini (composer), Cesare Sterbini (Libretto, based on the play by Pierre Beaumarchais), Bartlett Sher (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Il barbiere di siviglia, ossia L'inutile precauzione (The Barber of Seville, or The Useless Precaution) / 2007 [the Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

The great Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez, sometimes described as Pavarotti's heir, who performed Count Almaviva in the Met production of The Barber of Seville Howard and I recently saw is also known also for his performances in La Fille du Régiment, one of Pavarotti's greatest achievements.

     Accordingly, it seems appropriate that I briefly discuss the Metropolitan Opera's wonderful production of The Barber, whose overall production values, overseen by Bartlett Sher, and brilliant operatic performances by Joyce DiDonato as Rosina, Peter Mattei as Figaro, John Del Carlo as Dr. Bartolo, John Relyea as Don Basilio, Claudia Waite as Berta, and, particularly, Flórez as the Count (whose "Ah! qual colpo inaspettato!" nearly stopped the opera with audience applause) were memorable.

  

     The story of The Barber of Seville, as most opera-goers know, is a simple one, the kind of contrived plot behind hundreds of 17th and 18th century farces. Count Almaviva, having espied Rosina in the streets, has fallen in love and followed her to Seville, where he disguises himself as a poor student, Lindoro. Rosina is equally in love with the young man, but is locked away in the house of her guardian, Dr. Bartolo, advised by the musician Basilio, who warns him of the Count's love for Bartolo's ward. Hearing of the Count's interest and the arrival in Seville of a young man, Bartolo tightens the young girl's security, since he himself intends to marry her.

      Figaro, the local barber who has entry to all homes and—so it appears—hearts, is an old friend of the Count, and plots with him how the Count might enter Bartolo's house. He will disguise himself yet again, this time as a drunken soldier, ordered to be billeted in Bartolo's home. When that ends in chaos and failure, the Count visits the house as a disciple of Don Basilio to teach Rosina a music lesson, plotting with her their escape that night.

     The rest of the story predictably involves around a number of temporary setbacks and detours, but ends in the joyful marriage of Rosina to the Count with a nod to Figaro's necessary help, although by opera's end it does almost seem that if the Count had simply appeared as himself in the beginning he might more easily have won Rosina's hand, as if, as the subtitle suggests, all his precautions were useless. But then, of course, there would have been no occasion around which to weave Rossini's joyous arias!

      Aspects of this plot have been employed in so many instances that it may sound to the reader than I am describing another opera or play. The flaxen-haired ward of Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd, Lucy, a young girl also held against her will, whom the lecherous Judge intends to marry, quickly springs to mind.

      What makes Rossini's version refreshing, however, is the heady willfulness of his heroine, who from the first scene is determined to get the man she wants and is so artful in her quick-witted lies that the audience gasps as she nearly outfoxes her suspicious guardian. In Act II, when Bartolo suggests the letter of love he possesses was sent by the count to another woman, so strong is Rosina's sense of vengeance that she is willing to destroy her own life by marrying the old coot. In short, we can only feel a comic delight when the Count sings of the pains and sorrows the poor, innocent girl has had to suffer; for the woman with whom he will awake in the morning is, in fact, another being than the one of which he sings. There is, indeed, a kind of madness in his love.

      Not only is Rossini's opera, at times, a madcap farce, but is a work that speaks again and again of madness. It is, first of all, a world dominated by the busy activities of Figaro, involved as he is in the secrets and scandals of city life.  Despite the seemingly sequestered world of Dr. Bartolo's house wherein Rosina is confined, moreover, people rush in and out on a regular basis, particularly the Count, first as a soldier, then as a musician; but so too does Figaro feel, evidently, at home in the place, so much so that he is even able to obtain Bartolo's keys. At one point, when Basilio is locked out of the house, he simply pulls apart the iron gate that protects the place. These comings and goings provoke such an uproar at the end of Act I that a crowd gathers in the streets outside the home and the civil guard arrives to correct the chaos. The maid, Berta, sings of the crazy household ("Il vecchitto cerca moglie."). Madness reigns throughout this opera, a storm accompanying even the would-be saviors of Rosina. Is it any wonder that when order is restored, Bartolo defeated, and the Count married to his love, we who have witnessed all these events can only suspect that Rosina and Almaviva may soon continue that chaos in their own new abode.

 

Los Angeles, September 26, 2007

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (August 2009).

Rogelio Orizondo, with Carlos Díaz | Antignón, un contigente épico / 2017

 

a tragic cabaret

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rogelio Orizondo (text, with dramaturgy by Orizondo and Carlos Díaz), Antignón, un contigente épico / Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), the performance I saw was on March 15, 2017

  

Based on a very unreliable telling of Sophocles’ Antigone, the Cuban theater company Teatro El Público explores several issues of that play in the context of Cuban history, beginning, in part, with the poetry of José Martí. Yes, here two there appear to be two brothers, at once in love with each other and warring against one another (they appear naked in the earliest scenes), along with two sisters, also naked, presumably surrogates of Antigone and Ismene.

 

     We might imagine the brothers are similar to Che and Fidel Castro, fighting over how the Cuban revolution should be defined; but there the similarities stop, as the company explores, in cabaret-like skits the various elements of contemporary Cuba, the often open sexuality, the macho-like battles played out on the streets (performed deliciously, in this case, by two women actors, with water bottles serving as their cocks), the importance of the scout movement in government indoctrination, and, through old, grainy films, the relationship of the island’s culture to its Soviet relationships.

       Violence and camp alternate, as the characters present their world in a kind of shadow-relationship with the tragic epic of Sophocles play, while reminding us that they are diverted by contemporary exigencies.

       The great wonder of this production is the cast, Giselda Caler, Daysi Forcade, Luis Manuel Álvarez, Roberto Espinosa, and Linnet Hernádez, in and out of dress, more often as the play proceeds, dressed in outrageous costumes that reflect their changing attitudes. Even though their Spanish was highlighted on an English-language theater light-board, those shifting values often went by so fast, that for the English-language reader, they were sometimes hard to follow.

        But the many absurd edicts and proclamations that come down from on high translate well: “Most theater directors, we learn are homosexual. Many actors are homosexual. All of the actors of Teatro El Público are homosexual,” so one of these edicts proclaims. Even the character of the beautiful Martí poem quoted in the program seems to have a gay friend, a poet who “cleans houses in order to survive” and whom the author finds “in front of the Capitol building…./ looking at, longing for (I believe) those other dumb dirty boys / who make the Zona Rosa a fun place in the city.”

      We have only to remind ourselves of all the great Cuban gay and lesbian writers: Reinaldo Arenas, José Lezama Lima, Eduardo Machado, Virgilio Piñera, Juana María Rodríguez, Severo Sarduy, and Ana María Simo, to name only a few, to realize that despite Castro’s seeming homophobia, life in this world is far more than diverse, particularly given the island’s Spanish, Asian, African, and other roots.

     Playwright Rogelio Orizondo and director Carlos Díaz do not so much “discuss” these issues as to throw them out in the cabaret-performances as various possibilities, and probable alternatives to the tragedy behind Cuban history. If Polyneices is not permitted to be buried and Antigone is ordered to be buried alive, these sassy figures, nonetheless, transform Creon’s world in which they live. While film, we are told, is quickly censored in Cuban life, Cuban theater continues to present fresh and energized viewpoints as expressed by these excellent performers.

     As critic Manuel García Martinez wrote of this production, “Throughout the discourse they claimed freedom and sensuality for their own personal life.” In general, the company members’ pizazz and sass made up for any of the seeming incoherencies of their tale. Like dreamy carnival performers, these theatrical hoofers made you want to believe in Cuba’s future.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2017

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

The Wooster Group | La Didone / 2009

forces of gravity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giovanni Francesco Busenello (libretto), Francesco Cavalli (music), additional text: Terrore nello spazio (Planet of the Vampires), a film by Mario Bava, 1965 and Queen of Outer Space, a film by Edward Bernds, 1958 La Didone / Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney-CalArts Theater), Los Angeles / the performance I saw was on June 14, 2009

 

Known for its innovative retellings of major dramas and events (Hamlet, The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, etc.) The Wooster Group has moved into even more challenging territory with their newest extravaganza, La Didone, a retelling, in operatic form, of Francesco Cavalli's 1641 opera of the Carthagian Queen Dido and her new lover, Aeneas.

     Not only has director Elizabeth LeCompte taken on the challenges of opera in this work, but has overlaid the Cavalli work (unknown to most opera-goers) with a grade-B science fiction story, directed by the Italian film maker Mario Bava, Terrore nello spazio, known in this country as Planet of the Vampires. The film has it fans, Ridley Scott among them, whose film Alien was obviously influenced by this campy movie.

     On some levels it seems quite justifiable—and may have appeared to be absolutely "brilliant" in the early inception of the work—to bring the two, what used to be called "high culture" and "low culture" together, allowing them to comment on each other and to elucidate related themes. Both worlds, Dido's Carthage and the planet Aura, are visited by outsiders: Aeneas, prince of Troy, washes up upon the shores of Africa after a deadly sea storm; the spaceships Argos and Galliot, investigating mysterious signals coming from Aura, are caught in a force of gravity and plummet quickly to the new planet's surface, the Galliot destroyed in the process.

     That same kind of gravitational pull seems to happen to Aeneas, as Cupid (disguised as Aeneas' son Ascanius) plunges an arrow into Dido's breast, who, having remained true to her the memory of her dead husband, suddenly finds herself madly in love with the visiting stranger.

     The worlds for both sets of explorers suddenly shifts, as the remaining members of the Argos crew senses strange beings around them who they cannot see, and Aeneas is drawn into a boar hunt—presented almost as a frenzied sexual prelude—during which he and Dido retire to a cave to make love.

     The inhabitants of the planet Aura, in turns out, are invisible beings whose sun is dying, and who can survive only by taking over the bodies of their visitors. As in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, these beings become the people whose bodies they invade; and, as the now-repaired Argos takes off into space, there appears to be only one "real" survivor left, the others having been transformed to Aurans.

      Similarly, Dido hopes by conquering the heart of Aeneas to lure him into Carthage society. But the gods call him back to Italy, and Dido is left alone with a broken heart. In the Aeneid she commits suicide, but in Cavalli's version, she regains her sanity, marrying the nearby King Jarbas, who has long been in love with her.

      The Argonauts, in a Rod Serling-like plot development, realizing they do not have the energy to return home, choose a planet on which to settle: the third planet from the sun. We realize that either we are already the ancestors of these alien zombies or are about to be invaded.

     As always, The Wooster Group performs all of this lunacy with great seriousness, and that, in turn, saves most of this work from simply becoming camp. The singing, particularly Hai-Ting Chinn's Dido, John Young's Aeneas, and Andrew Nolen's Jarbas, was excellent and entices one to see the complete Cavalli opera (the original lasts 4-5 hours, while this production ran for about an hour and a half). Yet for all of the bravado and talent of the company, there remained something about the production that left one feeling that the connections were frail and facile.

     Certainly, it challenged its audience. Just the attempt to keep two simultaneous stories—the one in Italian, the other in a quietly-spoken film jargon—both of whose words often scrolled quickly forward at the same moment that computer screens deliver up various images, was, as Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty described it, "an exhausting cerebral spin." Experienced often enough, such intellectual activity could possibly save one from early dementia.

      Yet, at heart, I felt this work was intellectually empty, and spiritually had no real soul. The laughter it evoked was from the bland sci-fi jargon ("How do we repair the meteor rejector, Mark?), while the delight it offered was only of the musical sort. Between the two lay a hollow art.   

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2009

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

 

John Kelly | Time No Line / 2019

against linear time

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Kelly Time No Line / the performance I saw with Pablo Capra was at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) on April 25, 2019

 

It is difficult to know how to describe John Kelly’s one-man performance, Time No Line, which I saw last night at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles. That difficulty has partly to do with the fact that Kelly’s work is so many different things: a kind of muted autobiographical commentary (this particular work is based on his journals begun in 1976 and continuing into the present), a history of his involvement with dance (he performed briefly with The American Ballet Theater), art (for a while he studied with Larry Rivers), and music (he sings a couple of songs in drag and talks of his passion for opera), a kind of silent film presentation, and, perhaps most importantly, a testimony to the many friends he has lost of AIDS over the years.

     The lean and handsome Kelly has had a fascinating and often horrifying life. Playing, in the past, figures such as Joni Mitchell, Egon Schiele, and Caravaggio, Kelly was himself diagnosed as HIV-positive and broke his neck at another point while learning how to sing on a trapeze while playing the female impersonator of the 1920s, Barbette.

      If there’s a sort of self-obsession about this work simply because the performer puts himself front and center as such a multi-talented actor, there is also a kind of humility in his sharing of so many loves, endurances, and embarrassments.

     As reviewer Dan Callahan wrote in The Village Voice, “Kelly’s Time No Line is less about himself and more about the people he has lost.” The people of whom he speaks, some of them with whom I shared distant friendships, became ghosts that haunt his memory, and even when he is sharing his own artistic experiences, Kelly himself becomes a kind of ghost, explaining—or perhaps, at moments, self-justifying—his highly checkered past from dancing with ballet companies, performing in famed art venues such as La MaMa (where this performance appeared in 2018), The Whitney Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Tate Modern and, as well in far less grand East Village venues such as Limbo Lounge, Pyramid Club, Club 57, and the gay bar The Anvil (where long before his 1980 performances there, I met my first lover, the year before returning to the university to encounter my husband of now almost 50 years.)

      It’s a kind of heady mix to perform a song in one of his drag singer’s persona and in the next minute talk about Bush-appointee to the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, John Frohnmayer who notoriously nixed NEA grants awarded by that year’s panel to Tim Miller, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Karen Finley. At one point Kelly chalks a kind of version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Vitruvian Man on the stage floor.

     At moments Kelly reads from his journal before performing unscripted events involving props and interacting with his own images from his past projected on a back screen. It’s quite clear, as Kelly has described himself elsewhere, he is a “range queen,” a bit like performer Joey Arias (whom Kelly mentions in passing), a person who can, instant by instant, transform himself, a kind of artist-warrior who battles notions of gender and a notion of a coherent being.

     To comprehend his performances you have almost to imagine a genius-child dressing up and acting out nearly everyone figure he loves before his bedroom mirror. Only, the fun thing in this case is that we get to be there, to share his wonderment of human life, even if so many of them people and events are now phantoms. Time, in Kelly’s world is not linear, but endlessly circular and even overlaid with both present and past.

     The rather young—I think I may have been the eldest member of the audience—and sophisticated REDCAT attendees clearly assimilated and enjoyed Kelly’s chameleon-like work, even if they might not always know the figures of whom he speaks and enacts. This man/woman/ child gets to have it all along with the much deserved applause.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2019).

 

 

 

Mac Wellman | Bad Penny / 2008

tails/tales

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mac Wellman Bad Penny / City Garage, Santa Monica, California / the performance I saw with Martin Nakell and Rebecca Goodman was on Sunday, August 24, 2008

 

Having originally published Mac Wellman’s play Bad Penny in 1990, I was pleased to have the opportunity of seeing this play performed at the City Garage in nearby Santa Monica in 2008. Directed by Frederíque Michel, this production was what one might describe as an admirable attempt, particularly given the fact that the play was originally performed outdoors on and about Bow Bridge in Central Park with a much larger cast against the natural beauty and mysteriousness of the stream upon which the character of the Boatman of Bow Bridge rowed a real boat, while the City Garage production was limited to their tiny darkened stage and a cast of six, one of which, Mariko Oka, was asked to perform as the entire chorus.

     The New York Times praised the virtuosity of the play’s language, and the original production, by director Jim Simpson and produced by the renowned Anne Hamburger, helped to win Wellman an Obie.

      Although Michel attempted to recreate some sense of that original space through projections upon the walls of Bow Bridge and Central Park, neither she nor her cast seemed to completely comprehend the dynamic of Wellman’s language. Whereas in the original production, the props were limited to a boat and a tire which Man #1 has brought with him into the park from his car parked somewhere on the East Side of the City, Michel interpolated into the work various objects: stuffed birds, art easels, paint brushes, umbrellas, shoes, cardboard boxes, and other detritus that literalized Wellman’s “story” and deflected from the seemingly manic tales of the various figures who momentarily have gathered at this spot. While the script seems to call up, for me, isolated figures standing each some ways from the other as they vaguely interact to their various tales—the major of which concerns a woman named Kat’s unfortunate act of picking up a penny lying tails up—

 

                                                   I was having a basically okay

                            day until I picked up that bad penny. Now

                            now it’s ruined. Now I don’t even know what I’m

                            saying. Weird. This is really weird.

 

—the City Garage performance seemingly cornered its characters into a concatenation of strange types.

     Indeed, Wellman’s characters are very “weird” in their series of metaphysical postulations and horrific tales of childhood—lived by Kat in a “part of the city considered unfashionable….a fairly disgusting childhood…with a gruesome family” (“Gruesome mom, gruesome pop, gruesome cat, gruesome dog”) and lived by Ray X in Big Ugly, Montana, where he “went to Big Ugly Highschool and played end on the Big Ugly Football team, which was called the Big Ugly Metacomets.” But under Michel’s direction these strange experiences are simply part of a stranger universe where, at several points, rain pours from the sky and, nearby, a Cezanne-like artist stands by his easel expressing his doubts, while a southern cheerleader type pointlessly reprimands Kat and warns Ray against her.

     As I later explained to my theater companions Martin Nakell and Rebecca Goodman, Michel seemed more determined to skew Wellman’s work into play akin to the theater of the absurd (the City Garage company has produced several Ionesco plays), and by introducing into the play various dialects, this production distracted us from the fact that although Wellman’s world may be “weird,” it is never truly absurd, never entirely unbelievable. Despite Kat’s often disconnected speculations about what is real opposed to what we perceive and Ray’s furious attacks against both nature and urban life, in the original script these characters maintain a sense of poetic logic. Their imaginative and often ridiculous spins of rhetoric are always firmly grounded in the American experience, and despite their confusion and outrage there is always an underlying sense of nostalgia and hope in their plaints. Even the chorus’s gestural incantation of the incomprehensibility of all the values upon which these characters have pinned their hopes, merely reiterate a world more akin to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town than it is to the enraged human-rhinoceros or the flying father of Ionesco’s universe.    

      It is, in part, the open spiral of disconnectedness of their tales that helps to make Wellman’s characters, particularly in this play, so grounded in US life.

   By collapsing the chorus into one figure—a kind of shaman madwoman—and establishing her characters as regional types, Michel’s version of Bad Penny loses the dark, abstracted lyricism that I hear in the original script. And while Wellman’s original work ends in a frightening prediction of near-apocalyptic results for a country that buries its people in its various real and metaphoric toxic wastes—

 

                              For the Way leads over from the

                Fountains of Bethesda, where the Lord

                performed certain acts, acts unknown to

                us, across the Bow Bridge of our human

                knowability, pigheadedness, and the

                weisenheimer attitude problem of our

                undeserving, slimeball cheesiness; and

                scuttles into the Ramble, there, of

                utterly craved, totally lost, desperate

                and drive incomprehensibility—friend

                neither to fin, to feather, nor tusk

                of bat, bird, weasel, porcupine, nor gnat.

                And we who are not who we are must forever

                bury the toxic waste of our hidden hates

                in the dark, plutonic abysm of our human

                hearts, and be always blessed in the empty promise

                of the sky that looks down upon us with

                a smile, a divine smile, even as she

                crushes us all beneath her silver foot

 

—the City Garage production, by having Man #3 (whom they characterize as an observing artist) repeat Kat’s first lines, gives the play a false sense of closure, wrapping it up into the daily repetition of its characters’ acts:

 

                I come here every day, every

                single day. I come here, to this

                spot, every single day and

                every single day, every single

                goddam day, it’s the same or

                it’s different or it rains or it’s

                clear or it snows or it’s bright

                and beautiful or it’s dark, rainy,

                and kinda foul. ….

 

      While Wellman’s original promises us a sort of a terrifying transformation, Michel’s version leaves us in a purgatory of everyday experience, rendering all the cries of despair and hopeful vision of its figures absolutely meaningless.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2008

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (September 2008).

 

 

Richard Wagner | Tristan und Isolde / 2016

the sublime and the ridiculous

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Wagner Tristan und Isolde / Mariusz Trebliński (stage director), live HD broadcast from the New York Metropolitan Opera on October 8, 2016 / I attended with Howard Fox

 

The first HD streaming production of the new Metropolitan Opera season, Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is musically sublime, with outstanding performances by the great soprano Nina Stemme, Stuart Nelson (singing only his second Tristan), Ekaterina Gubanova as the intruding servant Brangäne, René Pape as King Marke, Evegeny Nikitin, singing the smaller role of Tristan’s loyal allay Kurwenal, and, perhaps most importantly, Simon Rattle conducting the Met’s great orchestra.

     Yet this version of Tristan und Isolde is often equally leaden and confusing through production director Mariusz Trebliński’s decision to set the opera on a war ship in Act One, and upon another ship and in that ship’s enormous lower-deck storeroom filled with large containers of what appear to be weapons all stamped with “Warning” in Act Two. The return to Tristan’s childhood home, where Kurwenal has set up like a hospital room, where other portions of the home, having undergone a fire years earlier, appear ready to collapse, is nearly inexplicable, particularly when Tristan retrieves his father’s military jacket from the floor of a nearly creosote leaden room.

      On top of this, set designer Boris Kudlička’s and projection designer Bartek Macias’ sets and projections sometimes clumsily recreated the story of the young Tristan’s loss of his mother (in child-birth) and father, along with the quite unexplained torching of their home and the woods around it, further making murky what is generally a fairly simple tale of love, consuming desire, death, and transfiguration.

     Certainly these various elements do keep our eyes quite busy during the opera’s many long, static passages; and certainly they help to make clear that part of Tristan’s determination to find love—first in his obedience of and service to the King of Cornwall and, later, in his love of Isolde—has a great deal to do with his being an orphan. The worlds of Tristan’s Brittany, Isolde’s Ireland, and Marke’s Cornwall, moreover, obviously are structures of military might achieved through violence—just the kind of world in which Wagner generally locates his operas. Everyone here is a loyal warrior or a traitor, with heroes being awarded and traitors (i.e, the other side) being destroyed.

       But these things are fairly obvious within the long narrative passages Tristan and Isolde recount throughout the opera, and hardly need be reasserted with such heavy-handed imagery and metaphorical projections.

       At moments, particularly the long, long love duet in Act II, the projections of clouds and spinning planets truly do give rise to the kind of splendiferous visions being experienced by the loving couple, particularly as Brangäne interrupts their “maddened” lovemaking with her beautiful off-stage song of warning—a moment, as Rattle himself described it, of near transcendence. But, for the most part, the maritime imagery and weapon’s room storage scenes seemed in opposition to the lovers’ Schopenhauerian ruminations about day/death and night/love. The fact that their verbal love play verges, itself, on gobbledygook is certainly reiterated by the drab surroundings of this production.

       And finally, the metaphorical ghosts of both Tristan’s child-self and his dead father, particularly in Act Three—although again much-needed visual elements while Tristan lies dying—created more murkiness than clarity. It’s apparent that Tristan is being visited by the ghosts of the past, but a child flashing the light of a cigarette-lighter into the dying man’s eyes seems nearly ludicrous—if not dangerous.

      As in all successful renditions of this great opera, moreover, any singer who credibly endures it is a wonder. Here, despite my cavils, this production, particularly given Rattle’s languid and highly nuanced musical direction, along with Stemme’s beautifully balanced and modulated singing and acting, will be recognized as one of the greatest of this opera’s performances.

      Finally, even if by slashing her wrists, Isolde doesn’t quite go “gently into that good night,” it allows her to represent her “Liebestod” as a gradual transformation of worlds through the gradual loss of blood, making Marke’s and Brangäne’s reentries, once again, simple intrusions on the inseparable lover’s lives.  In Tristan’s and Isolde’s love there is no room for others, not even room for living.

 

Los Angeles, October 9, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2016).