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).
