orange-tinted glasses

For King and Color

Handel’s Tolomeo
Glimmerglass Opera Festival, Cooperstown, New York

This rarely seen gem premiered in 1728 and was the last opera that Handel wrote for the Royal Academy of Music and its star-studded cast of singers. One can only imagine the fireworks on and off stage when the famous castrato Senesino took the lead role opposite Francesca Cuzzoni’s Seleuce and Faustina Bordoni’s Elisa. The story goes that La Cuzzoni and La Bordoni actually came to blows during a performance of Tolomeo’s follow-up Alessandro in which Handel tried to give each of the ladies equal stage time. Though the Royal Academy closed within weeks of Tolomeo’s premiere due to financial problems, Handel kept on writing operas, penning some 20 more. Oddly, the first modern revival of Tolomeo took place in Göttingen in 1938 and was performed in German. The Glimmerglass production represents the work’s first North American professional staging.

The opera’s plot involves the standard blend of intrigue, disguise, revenge, and mistaken identity. The exiled king Tolomeo is living on Cyprus disguised as a shepherd named Osmino. His wife, Seleuce, has been exiled as well and is also in Cypress disguised as a shepherdess, Delia. The royals of Cyprus Elisa and King Araspe are in love with Osmino and Delia, respectively, but more interested in the possibility of taking over the throne of Egypt. Alessandro, Tolomeo’s brother, is shipwrecked on Cyprus and draws Elisa’s attention—a king’s brother is much more worthy of her affections than a lowly shepherd. Osmino/Tolomeo becomes the object of Araspe’s jealousy and determine to kill the shepherd. Elisa too wants Osmino dead, but neither is successful in the face of the unwavering love between Osmino/Tolomeo and Delia/Seleuce.

There were some very fine moments in the Glimmerglass production, and, regrettably, some rather silly ones. Director Chas Rader-Shieber has opted to take every potential metaphor and turn it into a bit of gimmicky stage business. The opera opens with Anthony Roth Costanzo as Osmino/Tolomeo squatting behind a goldfish bowl while a stuffed tarpon drops down behind him. Presumably, Rader-Shieber thinks by inducing the audience to laugh in the first aria, he will win over those unfamiliar with baroque opera, forgetting perhaps that this genre has long been a staple at Glimmerglass.

Another intrusive bit are the three supernumeraries whose primary job is to manipulate the set and props for scene changes. They are dressed, as everyone is, in modified eighteenth-century clothing, but sometimes they appear shuffling across the stage in aging make-up and tousled wigs and, at other times, as the young men walking naturally. During Seleuce’s aria “Gentle breezes caress the ear,” these three bring five electric fans on stage in an agonizingly slow progression. As she sings, Seleuce turns them on to waft her song on the mechanical air, in case you missed the point. (This comedy could have turned sour had Anthony Roth Costanzo injured himself when he tripped on the pile of electric cords.) One is left wondering why a singer as fine as Joélle Harvey must compete with such props.

Julie Boulianne maintained a mischievous sense of aplomb in the role of Elisa, singing with her usual warm, nimble soprano. Miss Boulianne’s costume was surely the most successful with its magenta wig, blue and purple bodice, short purple tulle skirt, white stockings, and red ankle boots. In the first act, she carries on a bit with a wooden ship model as she talks up the just-shipwrecked Alessandro (a trouser role sung competently by contralto Karin Mushegain) and later reappears with it perched fetchingly on her head. This would probably be another one of Rader-Shieber’s conceits except for the fact that eighteenth-century wigs reportedly did include large models like ships.

One of the more elaborate and successful set pieces is the dinner table rolled out as Elisa sings of revenge. The heavily-laden table, covered in candelabra and dinnerware painted in monochromatic bronze, is illuminated by carbon filament bulbs. The table itself is so long that it never fully emerges from the wings. When Elisa sits down to contemplate her evil plot, she embodies the old saying about revenge being a dish best served cold, which one hopes is the director’s intention rather than just a lucky coincidence.

Costanzo’s countertenor is full-bodied and winsome. Physically, he is even similar to the build and coloring of Mushegain’s Alessandro, though the latter is decided less assured vocally than Costanzo. Another singer evincing discomfort was Steven LaBrie’s Araspe. Dressed in a flamboyant red suit with tailcoat and top hat, complete with two-foot feather, LaBrie had the physicality and the voice to make more of his rather two-dimensional role of the jealous king. Perhaps, he was just baffled by the mixed signals at work in the director’s vision for this production.

Photo: Julie Boulianne as Elisa, photo by Claire McAdams for Glimmerglass Opera

© Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved

 

The Lives of Others

The Consul by Gian Carlo Menotti

Glimmerglass Opera, Cooperstown, New York

Through 24 August

 

I can’t agree with Heidi Waleson’s assessment of The Consul as a “creaky artifact” (Wall Street Journal 29 July 2009). Granted this opera written at the height of the Cold War is replete with themes of paranoia and senseless bureaucracy. After all, The Consul’s 1950 premiere came a mere month after Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that Communists had infiltrated the State Department. We might find McCarthy a ludicrous figure today, but the public hysteria of the time is not so far removed from recent controversies over as the electronic surveillance of alleged terrorists and the kidnapping of journalists by oppressive regimes. Indeed, during one moment of The Consul, I was reminded of the 2006 German film The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), an extraordinary exploration of the effects of Stasi surveillance techniques on the lives of the subjects and the agent monitoring them.

The plot of The Consul may be succinctly described as a series of characters attempting to obtain exit visas from an unnamed country. This sounds more like experimental theatre from 1960s Paris than modern opera, especially when considered alongside Glimmerglass’s other 2009 productions of La Cenerentola, La Traviata, and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

The plot of The Consul seems so dry and dated that one wonders how it could possibly work as opera. How might a composer with a reputation for writing children’s opera and opera buffa handle this narrative in an ascetic, institutional setting? Having seen The Consul, I concur with adjectives such as affecting, cinematic, and tuneful. Menotti was indeed a master of the theatrical gesture, of deft characterization, and of musical drama. Whether or not The Consul works as an opera requires further examination.

Menotti (1911–2007) won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best musical play for The Consul in 1954. It was his first full-length work and ran, somewhat surprisingly, on Broadway for 269 performances. As with most of his works, Menotti wrote both the libretto and the music in English. The composer was not often kindly received by his peers. The New York Times obituary after his death in 2007 noted that Stravinsky was “dismissive” and the composer Luigi Nono withdrew from a program rather than have his music performed on the same evening as that of Menotti.

In fact, Menotti wrote 25 operas as well as ballets, orchestral tone poems, chamber music, cantatas, concertos, and songs. His musical signature throughout is an unabashed lyricism, lush textures, and dramatic sensitivity. Operatically, he is considered heir to the Italian lyrical verismo of Puccini. Avant-garde he was not. As Menotti knew all too well “to call [a piece of music] sweet and graceful is to damn it.”

The Consul is generally considered Menotti’s masterpiece though more people may know him as the composer of Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951), a holiday favorite, and as the founder of the Spoleto Festival and its companion Festival dei Due Mondi in Charleston, South Carolina. Opera commentator Matthew Boyden described Menotti as “one of twentieth-century opera’s most spectacular cases of changing fashion.” From 1945 to the early 1960s, Menotti found great success with opera, drawing audiences with his lyrical verismo and cinematic flair. By the mid-1960s, the prolific Menotti, who had written his first opera at 13 before entering the Milan Conservatory, was a has-been. Undeterred, he continued to compose and to head the Spoleto Festival and its spin-off in South Carolina. Like many another critically panned artist, Menotti’s works continue to find large audiences. While this might be damned as “populist,” it is also a sign of his enduring musicality and instinct for entertainment.

Inspired by a true story of an immigrant woman who hanged herself at Ellis Island after not being able to enter the United States, The Consul follows Magda Sorel as she attempts to obtain a visa to follow her husband John across the border. Sorel, a freedom fighter in this unnamed country, is injured in a skirmish with the authorities and leaves his wife, mother, and baby son awaiting word of when they may join him. Magda joins several other characters in daily applications at the consulate. The Secretary keeps everyone in bureaucratic limbo as they attempt to assemble the proper set of papers and identification. After an impassioned outburst, Magda is told she will be allowed to see the Consul at last. As she prepares to enter the office, the Secret Police Agent who has been following her for days comes out and she knows that her case is hopeless. Magda learns that John will attempt to re-enter the country and she knows that this will be fatal for him. To prevent him, she sacrifices herself, her son and mother-in-law having already died.

The Glimmerglass production achieves a variety of impressions that, it must be admitted, don’t always coalesce into a dramatic whole. The idea of individual differences worn down to uninflected submissiveness forms the basis of Andrew Lieberman’s set. The stage is separated into four cubicles of white bars with each compartment containing the same furniture: an oval cafeteria table and turquoise blue molded plastic chairs. At the corner of each cubicle hangs a speaker from which a maudlin song issues piping mediocrity directly into everyone’s private lives. As the opera progresses, these compartments are re-purposed into the Secretary’s office, the consulate waiting room, and a surveillance room.

Lieberman notes in the program that he began with “searching for core issues” in the opera before sketching visual ideas. The Consul, he says, “boils down to a lack of human agency.” Lieberman’s set with its insistent sameness collapses distinctions between interior and exterior, between public places and private homes. The effect is surprising—where the police state sought to insinuate itself into every aspect of the lives of the people, the people responded by entrenching themselves even more deeply into their own worlds. They also found ways to make inhospitable places into homey surroundings as the secondary characters and the supernumeraries do in this production, spreading out their belongings and turning the office into an approximation of home (after all, it’s where they spend most of their waking hours).

This multi-purpose set with its essential uniformity contrasts the variety of costumes, a somewhat ungainly blend of styles. Kaye Voyce’s costumes mix several eras, demonstrating, if nothing else, the enduring use of doubleknit. Some characters wear polyester while others sport denim jackets and torn leggings. The Magician is unforgettable in a russet-colored leisure suit, printed shirt, and moussed hair. In keeping with her position, The Secretary is severe in tailored suits and pumps.

These costumes go far toward differentiating the characters, supplying identity cues where Menotti rather coyly omits them. Menotti chose to give some of his characters names and others generic appellations (The Foreign Woman, The Magician). Notably, the latter generally give their names in arias performed in the consulate waiting room as they plead their respective cases before the Secretary. In this opera about the struggle for freedom, characters seem to have quite a bit of “human agency” in establishing their identities.

Certainly, the opera is melodramatic, even overwrought at times. Yet, Menotti is a canny scenarist who often interjects a touch of levity. To the hapless applicants, The Secretary issues instructions with a Freudian slip: 

Fill in these papers.

This is how to begin:

Your name is a number.

Your story’s a case.

Your need a request.

Your hopes will be filed.

Come back next week.

Menotti’s sense of humor comes through strongest in the character of The Magician. This character has a tendency to stop the show, especially if he has a flair for prestidigitation. As a metaphor for the hopes of the people in the waiting room who look in vain for a visa to materialize, the Magician comes across as a charlatan along the lines of the famous Kansas carnival man behind the curtain.

The Consul himself is the real wizard, a character who dominates the entire opera and yet is never seen. His is the fearsome power over lives wielded from within complete isolation. Only certain disciples may enter the inner sanctum of his office. He is sequestered away, protected, omnipotent—does he even exist? Yet, people believe in him implicitly as a savior. Menotti pushes the biblical metaphor even further with Madga Sorel who sacrifices herself at age 33. (The Glimmerglass production does not specify how Magda dies, leaving her immobile and silent in a consulate waiting room chair rather than gassing herself in the oven as in the original drama.)

It is true that as a product of the Cold War era, The Consul reflects its times. As a musical drama, however, it is no more outmoded than the nineteenth-century bohemian Paris of La Traviata or the orientalism of Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de perles (much less the extravagant baroque mannerism of Dido and Aeneas). In Glimmerglass’s modern production, we have a chance to examine how The Consul works as a piece of theatre. Spying and eavesdropping really aren’t so foreign on the opera stage, and as theatrical conventions, these ideas have animated many a plot line. As for surveillance, The Consul makes us all complicit in this act, and Menotti would be an entirely incompetent dramatist if he didn’t make full use of his power behind the curtain.

© Leann Davis Alspaugh, all rights reserved. 

Photograph: Robert Termine for Glimmerglass Opera

Lords of the Ring

Bartók and Puccini Go Full Circle With Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Gianni Schicchi

What can these two operas have in common—Bartók’s chilling, psychological drama of marital love and Puccini’s comic romp of greed and forgery? Surprisingly, quite a bit.

We tend to think of Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), along with Verdi and Rossini, as the third in the Italian grand opera triumvirate, three composers whose works constitute the bedrock of opera repertory. Where Verdi and Rossini were relatively consistent in their respective musical idioms, Puccini straddles two eras: late Romanticism and modernism. His melodic facility and love of theatricality made him a huge success, but at the same time, he was a twentieth-century man, experiencing melancholy, self-doubt, and sometimes outright pessimism.

Béla Bartók (1881–1945), on the other hand, was the quintessential modernist enigma. His works for stage, orchestra, piano, and ensemble are intense and austere, much like the composer himself. He championed Eastern European folk music (especially Hungarian), preserving songs and musical styles in danger of extinction at the turn of the century. The distinctive rhythms and melodic structures of this folk music made an indelible impression on his own compositions. His music seems to reconcile the swirling mass of ideas and influences of the first half of the twentieth century, resulting in a body of work that ranges from naïve to lyrical to expressionistic.

Both Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi were performed for the first time in 1918. The year was a point of convergence—the end of the Belle Epoque and of pre-war innocence—and a point of departure for so many of the -isms that characterize modern life. Just like the humble circle, these events turn in on themselves, blurring the lines of beginning and ending.

On the subject of origins, both Bluebeard and Schicchi originated in centuries old literature. Bartók’s librettist Béla Balázs (a poet who would become one of cinema’s most influential theorists) took his inspiration from Maeterlinck’s Ariane et Le Barbe-bleu (1899), which in turn drew on the original Charles Perrault fairy tale from the seventeenth century. Along with the stories of the Brothers Grimm, Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales is a popular source for works for the stage. Far from being just kids’ stories, fairy tales enable the young reader to discover his identity and to develop his moral character. Gruesome events, supernatural beings, and unrealistic plots are ultimately irrelevant in a fairy tale except as they direct the reader to wisdom and insight. (Bruno Bettelheim's 1976 The Uses of Enchantment remains one of the most insightful examinations of psychology and the fairy tale.)

The story of Bluebeard (the fairy tale and the opera) is a metaphor for worthiness or faithfulness tried by sexual and worldly temptations. Like Eve, Bluebeard’s operatic wife is tempted by the promise of knowledge in the form of the locked castle doors. Thinking to invoke a conjugal prerogative, Judith wants to know everything about her mysterious husband and demands that the doors be opened. Curiosity, a kind of greed, impels her to her fate, and the knowledge she gains removes her forever from any chance of intimacy. In addition to the lesson of the destructive aspects of jealous love, the story has much to say about the limits of love and the futility of ever knowing or possessing another person entirely.

Schicchi’s origins are even older, coming out of Dante’s Inferno from the early fourteenth century. In Canto XXX, Dante records the doings of one Gianni Schicchi, a Florentine noble well-known for his mimicry. Schicchi is condemned to the eighth ring of Hell for having forged the will of Buoso Donati, bequeathing to himself, among other things, a fine mare. To this story Puccini and his librettist, Giovacchino Forzano, added touches of commedia dell’arte and Grand Guignol, those time-honored theatrical styles of comedy and fantasy.

Just as everything old is new again in the hands of these artists, so the stagecraft of the operas illustrates a degree of circularity. Schicchi, as one opera of Puccini’s Il trittico (The Triptych) complements Il tabarro (The Cloak), a verismo drama of love and murder among stevedores, and Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica), a sentimental story of redemption in a nunnery. The biblical symbolism of the numeral three cannot have been lost on Puccini, and the triptych shows his mastery of the one-act genre as well as a keen sense of the whole compass of human emotions.

In Schicchi, Puccini completes the triptych’s cycle with opera buffa, using laughs to portray human nature’s darker side. The opera opens with the grieving Donati family gathered around the deathbed of old Buoso (in Dante’s Inferno he is condemned to hell for thievery). Mourning turns to madness when the family hears that Buoso may have left his fortune to a local monastery rather than to his own kin. The son Rinuccio, who has eyes for Schicchi’s daughter Lauretta, enlists the help of his prospective father-in-law Gianni, a man of lowly birth but one whose cunning the Donatis need. Scoundrel that he is, Schicchi comes up with the most contemptuous of plans, but it turns out even worse than expected—it’s bad enough that Schicchi impersonates the dead man and rewrites the will, but blackguard names himself as heir. 

The Donatis are left helpless not only because they have sworn to conceal the plot, but also because they fear the harsh consequences of Florentine law. By the end, the lovebirds sing contentedly while Schicchi gloats from the comfort of Buoso’s estate. Yet the fairy tale ending is marred by the aftertaste of Schicchi’s deed. Puccini has given us laughs aplenty and fine music to enjoy, but we keep coming back to the Donatis’ greed and Schicchi’s lack of morality. Even love isn’t quite enough to redeem this character who acts without fear of civil law or common decency.

With Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, the sense of circularity is even more pronounced. Through his friendship with Balázs and other members of Budapest’s Sunday Circle, Bartók encountered the ideas of Nietzsche and Freud in an era when Hungary was trying to escape from the long shadow of Germany. He experienced a certain creative tension, spending days collecting folk songs in rural areas and then returning to the city to debate with his friends the merits of music and ideas born in other cultures. To the influence of Wagner, Richard Strauss, and especially Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, was added Hungarian musical nationalism: the result was Bartók’s only opera.

There are only two characters in the piece, the duke and his wife Judith, an archetypal Adam and Eve with all the symbolism that implies. In the opera’s prologue (sometimes omitted in performance), Balázs uses a bardic style to introduce the ancient tale:

“The tale is old that shall be told, but where does it belong. Within? Without? How shall I tell the story, ladies and gentlemen? Let the song speak, I pray. We will watch together. Our eyes are open wide: but where is the stage: Within? Without? Ladies and gentlemen? (English version by Christopher Hassall, from the 1965 Decca recording)

The storyteller, like any folklorist, is careful to make the tale universal, without historical references. He then amplifies the ambiguity by refusing to anchor the tale in the external world, hinting that the drama lies within ourselves as well as without.

From Bluebeard’s first words, there is a sense of all foreboding come true. It is cold and dark, but Judith is determined to lighten the castle’s icy gloom with her love. Concealing her curiosity about her husband beneath assurances of the healing power of love, Judith persuades Bluebeard to open the doors one by one. Instead of fulfillment, the temptation leads to a fall, and Judith must enter the chamber where Bluebeard keeps his other wives: possessions just like any others. Standing alone on stage, Bluebeard welcomes darkness, and we ask ourselves, is he—are we—capable of the solace of love, or is the human condition essentially one of everlasting solitude?

Like Dante’s successive circles of hell, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is one ring of fire after another. The circular hall carved of stone indicates both infinity and closure; the doors close off vistas of wealth and knowledge, and the price for opening them is steep. The cyclical nature of the stage directions, beams of light accumulating until the shadow of the sixth door darkens them, provide a rise and fall that parallels the dramatic action. And, finally, Judith’s escalating curiosity, her repeated indulgence of temptation, her greed to possess her husband entirely, all combine to send her to her fate. Even Bluebeard, who would seem to have everything, is left as he began, alone in darkness.

Before we quit the circle, it might be interesting to consider briefly Judith’s end. The original “Bluebeard” story as it appeared in the Mother Goose Tales is quite different from the opera. In Perrault’s story, the wife opens a forbidden door and is about to be slain by her angry husband, when her brothers sweep in and rescue her. The brothers kill Bluebeard, and the wife inherits his estate, putting it to benevolent use. Perrault offers two morals: to the wife he says that curiosity, in spite of its appeal, often leads to regret; to the husband he admonishes against jealous love, implying that he must trust his wife and not try to trap her in tests of faithfulness.

However, Bartók and Balázs don’t offer tidy morals to their tale. They were interested in a much broader intellectual predicament: the absurdity of man’s existence, tempered by Schopenhauerian notions of Eros and fatalism, and overlaid with the undeniable echoes of what Baudelaire called “the ardent and despotic music” of Wagner’s Ring. Indeed, the Ring cycle, the quintessential model of operatic circulity, examines the consequences of greed across a wide variety of characters in a society that collapses under its own weakness. Sound familiar?

Photo at top: Even the 2006 Royal Opera House production emphasized the notion of circularity in Bluebeard with its sets.

© 2009 Leann Davis Alspaugh. This article appeared in a slightly different version in the performance magazines for Los Angeles Opera and Washington National Opera.

Woman in Mind: Identity in Ariadne auf Naxos

In spite of echoes of Lully, Mozart, and Wagner, Ariadne auf Naxos is a fascinatng experiment in modernism. Richard Strauss’s lush melodies are there, as are the glorious soprano roles, but the opera also raises questions that would have made Freud proud.

Ariadne auf Naxos is a particularly pliant opera, lending itself to interpretation and enjoyment at several levels. Given that the piece is a satire rather than a romantic or tragic opera, these options are welcome and part of the experience. Those who enter the opera house with reverence will be exalted by Ariadne’s loneliness and longing for death. Those who value entertainment will find none better than the buoyant Zerbinetta. Creative types will cherish the nervous Composer guarding his score from the vulgar antics of the dance troupe. Satirical though the opera may be, these characters raise interesting questions about identity—who they are, who we expect them to be, and, ultimately, who we are as audience members.

Ariadne: Woman, Goddess, or Sorceress?

Through the centuries, Ariadne’s story has taken various forms. In some versions, she is a goddess, in others, human, but two basic tales have evolved.

One emphasizes her abandonment by Theseus on the island of Naxos after she helped him escape from the labyrinth, and the second follows her rescue by Bacchus and their marriage. Long chronicled in art and poetry as the abandoned woman, Ariadne took a new turn in the fifteenth century when Lorenzo de’ Medici wrote a satirical carnival song about her marriage. By the seventeenth century, Ariadne was the most popular character in opera, the subject of more than 40 works. By the eighteenth century, she evolved from drama and tragedy to parody and satire. In the nineteenth century, the characters of Ariadne, Theseus, and Bacchus became recognizable archetypes of, respectively, the abandoned woman, the unfaithful lover, and the consoler.

Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal move Ariadne beyond her antecedents and place her in an uneasy world where there is no clear demarcation between stage and audience. Without these conventional limits, the audience is forced to do without the usual theatrical cues and judge Ariadne in relation to themselves. In the Prologue, Ariadne as the Prima Donna is arrogant and petulant. Audiences may find themselves wondering if they might not after all prefer the dancing troupe over this thoroughly unlikable diva. Ariadne and, in fact, Zerbinetta and the Composer, engender the debate of high art versus low and, by implication, their roles in these pieces. In addition, Strauss and his librettist strike at the heart of the creative process, questioning whether music is a sacred art, nurtured and performed in a rarefied atmosphere, or a lively, unpremeditated display of skill and timing—and which do we prefer?

Restiveness from all this division and duality is reinforced in the opera. Ariadne auf Naxos takes place not on a stage, but in the house of the richest man in town. The musical event is not lifted up out of the material world, but set down square in the middle of it. There are also verbal dualities: Ariadne’s bridal veil becomes her death shroud, her palace is a cave, and then there is Bacchus’s confusion about whether she is goddess, woman, or sorceress.

There are also Ariadne’s two possible fates: to remain the suffering woman or to marry Bacchus and be transformed. Transformation is something Strauss had explored before, namely in his 1889 symphonic poem Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), in which he followed the progress of the soul through suffering to self-fulfillment. In the opera, Ariadne’s suffering has good drama value, but theatrically is a dead-end. Enter Bacchus, whose arrival further confuses the unhinged Ariadne. Eventually, she is transformed through his love, and the frayed edges of her identity are restored. Interestingly, when Bacchus and Ariadne come together, they sing of creating a new identity, that of a new being formed in love.

Zerbinetta: What’s Love Got to Do With It?

More than simply a flighty dancer, Zerbinetta is self-aware and mature in her outlook on life. She also has a strong understanding of what it means to be an entertainer. Her role is not only to amuse the audience, but also to give them something to hold in their minds, in the original sense of the word “entertain.” Indeed, she sings about this, concerned that if the opera is performed first, the audience will forget all about her dance troupe.

Zerbinetta also understands the economics of theatre and the capriciousness of rich patrons. In short, she lives to perform and performs to live. She couldn’t be a greater contrast to Ariadne. Brushing aside her counterpart’s self-indulgence, she chides her by singing that she’s hardly unique among women. What’s more, Zerbinetta asks, if God had really intended us to resist men, why did he make them all so different? For herself, Zerbinetta is motivated by her heart’s compulsion to strike the spark of love from each new man she meets. Absolving herself of responsibility for this behavior, she wonders who can understand the heart when it can’t even understand itself. Heartless and shallow? Possibly, but after all she is a character on stage. At the same time, those among the audience who are honest enough would admit that from time to time they too have acted as Zerbinetta does.

In contrast to Ariadne’s focus on the eternal, Zerbinetta is interested in the here and now. She offers the intriguing idea that a moment or a glance may hold an emotion as deep and complex as any that Ariadne is experiencing. For example, her flirtation with the Composer (another blurring of lines between stage and wings) gives him new depths of experience, courage, and wonder. Who can say but that from this momentary mischief the Composer might not write some future profound and enduring work?

The Composer: Skirting the Issue

Strauss hearkens back to Mozart with the trouser role of the Composer. Hofmannsthal didn’t like the idea of a soprano singing the role, but it was an inspired choice in a satirical work that also asks questions about identity. It’s easy to imagine both Strauss and the librettist fretting over their piece and its proper reception, much like the Composer. Likewise, they also share with the character a deep experience of the creative process. But first and foremost, the Composer is a fiction, an illusion perpetrated by two old hands at stage magic.

 In the Composer, the audience hears a female singer, but sees a man. Though artificiality is expected in a theater, this contradiction is disconcerting, yet compelling. Further, without a proper name, the Composer seems to represent a composite of every artist, living or dead, past or future. Or he may be one unnamed individual. Actually, he is more of a phenomenon, a confluence of creativity that transcends gender.

On the other hand, he is so very human in his worry over his baby, the opera. If he wants his music to be heard at all, he’ll have to reconcile himself to seeing the piece performed alongside the dance number. The context of his music, then, becomes an unintended mixture of the tragic and the comic, and the Composer, like Zerbinetta, has concerns about which will triumph.

The Composer also has his share of dualities. Pressured to finish his piece, he declares that no work is ever finished—still, he must bow to the patron’s demand that the opera take place. Though acutely aware of his worth as an artist, he is quite oblivious to his own human nature. He sees Zerbinetta’s flirtation as a sign that, like him, she only wants someone to be true to her. As it happens, Zerbinetta’s idea of fidelity is short term at best, but the Composer willfully views it in terms of the love he has devised for Ariadne and Bacchus.

Ariadne auf Naxos is thought-provoking and prescient, conceived in a period when the modern age was just beginning to challenge notions of reality and to understand the self and identity. In this context, one could say that Ariadne, Zerbinetta, and the Composer are all aspects of one person: Woman. Ariadne and Zerbinetta, as their names suggest, range from A to Z in female personality, emotion, and ambition. In the middle somewhere is the Composer, a male/female hybrid juggling human nature and artistic impulse. The variations and contradictions of the original myth continue today, regardless of the medium in which artists try to reach the truth—and let’s hope for the sake of art that they never do.

© 2008 Leann Davis Alspaugh (This article appeared in a slightly different form for Los Angeles Opera’s Performance Magazine. Reprinted with permission. Photo by Jane Redding)

 

 

At the Eleventh Hour: Doubling in Pagliacci

Before the curtain rises on Pagliacci, Tonio appears in costume and announces “I am the Prologue!” The audience feels a hint of unease: how can a man be a text? And why look so theatrical to tell us that what we are about to see is real life? As we sit in the darkened theatre, primed by the overture, we are sure the show has begun, yet this mysterious fellow stands before the curtain, forestalling expectations and shattering the theatrical illusion.

Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857–1919), a struggling composer in Milan, wrote Pagliacci, or The Players, in 1892 in response to the roaring success of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. The hit of the 1890 season, Mascagni’s short opera about rustic chivalry offered emotional intensity amid lush orchestration. Sensing the trend that would become verismo, Leoncavallo acted quickly: “I shut myself in my house ... and in five months I wrote the poem and the music of Pagliacci.”

The source of Pagliacci’s plot is still debated, but the savvy Leoncavallo undoubtedly capitalized on the violent dramas then popular in French and Italian theaters; he also relied on an old standby, the play-within-a-play. As Michele Girardi notes, “Leoncavallo’s undeniable originality lies in the way he was able to combine news item and play in a tragedy of unusually disturbing violence by making ‘stage’ and ‘life’ identical.”

Stage imitating life is no surprise for the modern opera-goer, who has become accustomed to theatrical devices such period transpositions, contemporary realism (Weill’s Street Scene, for example), or even magical realism (as in Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas). But the verismo of Pagliacci is a particular form of realism, one that refracts and recombines our ideas of stage and life. The sense of doubling created by these parallel and conflicting notions in Pagliacci is worth a closer look.

The Jekyll and Hyde Effect: Doubling and the Imagination
Virtually every culture has a double archetype in its body of myths and its art forms. Many religions, including Christianity, acknowledge dual aspects of man, the corporeal and the spiritual. When the physical man discovered his psychological self, it resulted in a double that has intrigued therapists for decades.

In art, doubling refers not only to imagination made manifest, but also to the artist and his creation. To complicate matters, the double has many aliases: the alter ego, the divided self, the Doppelgänger, the soul, the kindred spirit, or the Other.

The motif of the double crops up repeatedly in literature, theatre, and the visual arts. There have been comedies about mistaken identity doubles (Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors) or dramas about doubles and power (Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito). Literature, too, is rich in doubles: the double as Other (kind Dr. Jekyll and monstrous Mr. Hyde); a narcissistic double (Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray); the supernatural double (Dostoyevsky’s The Double); or the born-again double (several of Poe’s female characters).

Doubling in opera occurs at a fundamental level in the combination of music and theater. Singers must train along two tracks, in vocal technique and dramatic explication. Audiences, in turn, must learn to interpret action and emotion two ways, primarily through music, but also with gesture, costume, and setting. Since most of us hear opera in languages other than our own, we must rely on the dual cues of the drama on stage and the surtitles above it. In recent decades, opera has witnessed a sort of interdisciplinary doubling as when visual artists design sets or film and television directors guide new productions.

Staging Reality: Doubling in Pagliacci
When Leoncavallo locked himself away to write Pagliacci, he harnessed a variety of influences, many of which utilized doubling. (Perhaps the most obvious was that the composer doubled as his own librettist.)

Writing as he was in a genre that originated in Italy, the composer included an inner play in a style also Italian in origin: the commedia dell’arte. The vibrant commedia dell’arte tradition of the seventeenth century was characterized by rich improvisation and masked actors specializing in a single role. As theatre historian Phyllis Hartnoll describes it: “This was not type-casting as we know it today, but the lifelong assumption of a disguise with which the actor became so identified that he often lost his own personality in the process, or rather, so merged his own personality in that of the type he played as to create a distinct personage.”

Leoncavallo crafts this merging to chilling effect in Pagliacci. Relying on the audience’s recognition of the familiar commedia dell’arte types, the composer turns this complacency to confusion and horror when the masks are dropped. Even though the masks in question are metaphorical, they are nevertheless revealing. The clowns’ ghastly white makeup leaves their features exposed and mobile. Watching Nedda make herself up in virginal white after her tryst with Silvio is disconcerting, but listening to Canio, the anguished cuckold, chide himself to “laugh, clown, laugh” and be a man is even worse. Comedy has mingled so intimately with tragedy, and artificiality so muddied reality that the audience is unsure how to react. The “grande spettacolo” that Canio promises for eleven o’clock turns out to be a spectacle of a very different sort.

The characters of Pagliacci are literal doubles, carrying two identities. Nedda, Canio’s wife, also plays Columbine, a commedia dell’arte heroine. She is not as she appears, however, being neither the faithful wife nor the chaste commedia heroine. As the leader of the players, Canio is at once naïve and volatile in the dual roles of actor and husband. He sings knowingly about the difference between life and art, but forgets this wisdom in the second act. As Pagliaccio, his passion prevents him from remaining in character and his easily-aroused jealousy makes him prey to Tonio’s scheming.

The character of Tonio is particularly complex. Following his portentous appearance in the Prologue, he plays, in the opera’s first half, a “real life” role as a deformed intriguer seeking revenge on Nedda for spurning his advances. In the commedia dell’arte world, his role would be known as the scemo, the scheming hunchback character type. Leoncavallo blurs the lines between character and narrative structure by placing Tonio in his scemo guise here rather than in the opera’s second half where the other commedia characters appear. In the second half, Tonio, now Taddeo the commedia figure, appears in his Prologue/clown costume and assures the faithless Columbine that she is pure and virginal. His motive seems to be ironic, but it quickly becomes menacing as he sees his plan realized in the gruesome double murder of Nedda and Silvio.

The Life Operatic: Doubling in Zeffirelli’s Pagliacci
Franco Zeffirelli’s Pagliacci is a latter-day double of Leoncavallo’s traditional production. The mountain village has been replaced by a tenement building under a freeway overpass, and the rustic villagers are now bikers, rollerbladers, and various other counterculture types. Clearly, doubling remains vital, even within this updated context. The colorful supernumeraries, the bustling stage business, the elaborate set with action at every window all clamor for our attention. Is this really any different from modern reality? The multitasking that opera asks of us echoes the complexity of its music and singing.

Even in an updated production, this verismo opera centers around the lives of real people, not gods or heroes. The glitz of the actors’ costumes cannot hide the sordid nature of their lives. Their emotional conflicts are not the stuff of myths, but unvarnished human nature—love, revenge, jealousy and a passion that leads to murder. According to opera critic Peter Conrad, verismo turns the pleasure principle at the heart of opera into the “pathology of desire,” that is, an excess of desire leads to sickness where once there had been exaltation. In a sense, verismo itself represents the alternative reality that developed when opera’s traditional characters and narratives were reflected in the mirror of nineteenth century naturalism. When Nedda sings of being as free as the birds, she is not lyrical, but desperate. And unlike the breath of the gods with its life-giving properties, Nedda’s last breath brings death.

Most opera houses today stage Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana as a double bill. However, offering Leoncavallo’s work on its own terms offers us a chance to experience an old favorite with a fresh perspective, to reflect on its unique blend of verismo and artificiality, and to savor its dramatic intensity. Without its shadow, Pagliacci becomes, in short, double the pleasure.

(©2008 Leann Davis Alspaugh, reprinted with permission of Los Angeles Opera; this article appeared in a slightly different form in conjunction with the 2005 Los Angeles Opera production of Pagliacci.)

Subtle Poisons: The Women of Vanessa

In the snow-bound, gothic atmosphere of the opera Vanessa, warm, sunny days and innocent love do not exist. Instead, there’s the endless winter of an unnamed northern country, where furs are a necessity and sleighs are the primary means of transportation.

The short days seem to have neither sunrise nor sunset, and a cage of glass, the winter garden, offers the only sight of greenery for most months of the year. Certainly, love exists here, but it is illicit, fleeting and obsessive. The women are beautiful, the house luxurious, and the food rich, but twenty years of days have passed virtually without incident. Into this setting, composer Samuel Barber and librettist Gian Carlo Menotti introduce three of the most fascinating women in opera, Vanessa, Erika, and the Baroness.

Like the winter garden with its artificial atmosphere and improbable plants, the opera shelters a hothouse of intense emotions and decadent impressions. While a snowstorm rages outdoors, a blazing fire overheats the sitting room of the opening scene. Vanessa, nervous and edgy, waits veiled and imperious. Erika, her niece, recites the supper menu, a succession of heavy dishes with indigestible French names. Nearby, the Baroness, Vanessa's mother, sits motionless and silent, a vaguely menacing presence. In this stuffy room, the mention of camellias, Christmas roses, and green orchids with their heady scents and surreal appearances crowds out any remaining air.

A Reason to Believe: Vanessa
In this world where the truth is held at bay, Vanessa awaits, as she has done for two decades, the arrival of her lover Anatol. It is the convergence of two destinies, but neither character merely submits to what is to come. Instead, both Vanessa and Anatol make a conscious decision to accept circumstances as they arise, even though reality does not bear out the hopes of imagination.

More than just an opportunistic cad, Anatol represents an agent of change for Vanessa. Charismatic and practical, he transforms her life from one of self-delusion to seeming fulfillment. When he appears, Vanessa expects her lover from long ago, but she is soon persuaded to transfer her affections to that man’s son of the same name. From his first words—“I believe I shall love you”—Anatol declares his quite deliberate intentions. Having come to know of her beauty and charms from his father, the son does not need to court Vanessa, he merely needs to find her willing and available.

Vanessa has lived with self-deception for a long time, first as the lover of a married man and then as a romantic recluse. By covering all the mirrors in her house, she has avoided confronting the truth about time and its effects on beauty. The young Anatol is not the lover she expected but, like him, she deliberately chooses love. Her marriage, then, merely trades one form of delusion for another. Vanessa the fantasist sees love not as an emotion to be nurtured, but as an undeniable fact of life: “My love cannot begin nor grow nor die, for it has always been.” In contrast, Anatol describes love as fleeting and spontaneous, without a past. Contradictory though these sentiments seem to be, both imply that love is not a force we submit to, but one that is conjured by force of will, our lovers tailored to our needs. For real romantic love in Vanessa, one must look elsewhere.

Shadow to Substance: Erika
The most dramatically successful love stories include a third person and Erika completes the opera’s love triangle. Temperamentally, Erika is imperturbable and naïve, where her aunt is willful and volatile. The Baroness is surprised to learn that Erika has allowed herself to succumb to Anatol’s charms, as she has always thought of her granddaughter as “proud and pure.” Though Erika admits to being only human, she won’t accept Anatol’s offer of marriage—she wants his love not his honor, and she cannot trust his easy affection. In her mind, her ideal lover has many of Anatol’s qualities, but is a very different man. Unlike Vanessa and Anatol, Erika refuses to overlook the lack of correspondence between reality and imagination.

In addition, Erika surrenders her life with a finality that Vanessa did not. For Erika, idealism dictated such actions as rejecting Anatol’s proposal and jeopardizing her life in the snowstorm. When she voluntarily assumes her aunt’s life of waiting, she is motivated by her high principles, standards of behavior that neither she nor any idealized lover can ever meet. For Vanessa, on the other hand, the retreat to isolation came out her belief that she could deny the march of time. When she ends her isolation, it is for a dubious suitor who offers bitter love. Erika’s transformation from her aunt’s “shadow” into substance is a misguided attempt at atonement and revenge, without the consolation, however tenuous, of any prospective lover.

Old Age and its Wisdom: the Baroness
The question of how to live motivates each of the opera’s characters, however, only the older ones seem to have any realistic grasp of how to spend their budget of days. The Doctor, a charming fellow, enjoys wine and dancing with a comely partner. Touchingly, he recognizes his professional limits and his inability to fathom the human heart. As a physician, he brings life into the world and sees its end, but his outlook is soft-hearted and sentimental compared to the steely Baroness.

Having reached an age where her memories outnumber her hopes, the Baroness is impatient with idealism, be it Erika’s imaginary lover or Vanessa’s longing for the more perfect past. She represents one side of the predicament Menotti described as the opera’s plot: “the central dilemma which faces every human being, whether to fight for one’s ideals to the point of shutting oneself off from reality, or to compromise with what life has to offer, even to lying to oneself for the mere sake of living.” The Baroness sees the business of living in the world as a moral obligation, an acceptance of the sour with the sweet because it is part of the gift of life.

The Baroness also embodies the opera’s theme of silence and its corollary, the power of the voice. She spends the first scene in silence, her motionless presence creating an unspoken subtext. Her twenty years of reticence toward Vanessa register her scorn and disapproval more strongly than any utterance could. To Erika, on the other hand, the Baroness expresses affection and solicitude as if she has higher hopes for the younger generation. She is at the center of the crucial encounter between Anatol and Erika in which she encourages her granddaughter to speak to her lover or lose him forever. When she questions Erika about running from the house into a snowstorm, she hears the truth but she is repulsed by its evidence of weakness. Her response is an eloquent rap of her cane on the floor and a departure in wordless disdain. By the end of the opera, Erika, like her aunt, has surrendered to a stagnant, inward life, one that the Baroness despises so much that she cannot even speak.

Finale
The ensemble piece “To leave, to break” near the opera’s end is a remarkably concise dramatic episode. As a Greek chorus, the cast recalls the variety of human experience, including our propensity for self-deception. It also foreshadows the future for the women of the opera. Fulfilling the many bird images in the opera (doves, phoenix, owl, parakeets), Vanessa leaves the cage of her winter garden and takes flight with Anatol, trading a life of isolation for one of transient love and superficial pleasures.

Erika is unwilling to make even this compromise as she reincarnates herself as a second Vanessa. However, there are signs that the future may not be an exact replica of the past. There is even a brief moment in the final scene when it seems that the Baroness may break her resolve not to speak to Erika. Though she has adopted Vanessa’s mode of life outwardly, the inner Erika might not be so easily subdued. “Lucky those people who are so anxious to believe,” Erika sings, and it is surely tempting to believe that Erika, like Vanessa, may be given a second chance.

©2008 Leann Davis Alspaugh (a slightly different version of this article appeared for Los Angeles Opera, reprinted with permission)
Photo: Kiri Te Kanawa sings Vanessa in the 2004 Los Angeles Opera production; credit: Robert Millard

The Problem With Poppea

Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) had taken holy orders and expected to pass the last years of his life quietly when the first public opera house opened in Venice in 1637. Just a few years later, at the age of 75, he joined librettist Giovanni Francesco Busenello to collaborate on L’Incoronazione di Poppea, premiered in 1643.

Monteverdi’s final work should be a grand artistic statement, a summing-up of 40 years of the maestro's musical and theatrical achievement. It should offer audiences comforting notions about the human condition, providing opportunities to sympathize with victims, laugh at fools, and rejoice with lovers. Poppea is all of these things, but somehow we reach the opera’s final bars without that feeling of closure, that everything has been neatly squared away. The trouble with Poppea is that it is a problematic opera, dramatically, musically, and morally—and yet it keeps opera lovers in thrall.

“Splendors of glass”
Busenello’s synopsis provides the first clue: “Nero, enamored of Poppaea, who was the wife of Otho, sent the latter, under the pretext of embassy, to Lusitania so that he could take his pleasure with her—this according to Cornelius Tacitus. But here we represent these actions differently.” Although Busenello distances himself from the historical facts outlined in Tacitus, his mention of the ancient historian may be construed as a veiled political reference, specifically, the superiority of the Venetian republic over the Roman empire. In addition, by citing Tacitus with his ultra-cynical view of the people and events of the empire, Busenello acknowledges Venetian society’s general skepticism toward women, a misogyny that placed the blame for corruption and decadence (ancient and contemporary) on the shoulders of amorous and manipulative women such as Poppea and Nero’s mother Agrippina the Younger as well as contemporary counterparts.

Venetian audiences hearing Poppea would have known well the story of Nero and his lustful consort (pictured on the first century Egyptian coins at upper right). They would have exchanged knowing glances at the final, florid duet between the lovers in which the new empress celebrates the realization of her ambition. Though the opera ends on a triumphant note, the Venetians knew that history carried the story to a less savory end: while awaiting the birth of her second child, Poppea argued fiercely with Nero over his spending, and, in a fit of rage, he kicked her to death.

It isn’t difficult to understand the appeal of ancient Rome as an operatic setting. Full of drama and danger, the empire offered characters, events, and lessons to be learned. In Nero, Monteverdi and Busenello bring to life an emperor whose reputation endures as one of the most dissolute caesars ever to wear a toga. The beautiful and ruthlessly ambitious Poppea sleeping her way to the top, fortified by daily milk baths (or so legend has it), is likewise irresistible. Yet, for audiences there is something slightly distasteful in glorifying the illicit passion of Nero and his mistress Poppea, in participating in the spectacle of evil triumphing over good. This is directly contradictory to the moral universe for which opera has conditioned us.

“Glories of Dust”
Venetian music lovers knew Monteverdi’s name well, whether from the books of madrigals on their music stands at home or from the music they sang in church. By the time of Poppea’s premiere, Monteverdi was the first of a new breed, the opera composer, and his secunda prattica the wave of the future. With secunda prattica, Monteverdi revolutionized music composition, especially in the pairing of music and text. He believed that text should “be the mistress of the harrnony,” that music should symbolize man’s emotional state. This exploration of the psychological potential inherent in music calls for poetic text to be paired with innovative harmony, neither the one nor the other taking precedence. In this way, Monteverdi perfected the technique of text painting, used to perfection in Poppea, where fascinating characters are delineated with vivid music.

At the same time, the musical “codes” within Poppea are not always transparent. The Prologue with Amor’s victory over Virtù and Fortuna introduces the opera with the idea that love is truth; however, by the end, it is clear that love is false (and politically dangerous). In addition, where Monteverdi's music reinforces one aspect of character at a certain dramatic point—Seneca’s moral conviction, for example—it undermines it elsewhere. Such was Monteverdi’s genius that it is the music rather than the plot that motivates dramatic action.

In fact, the opera’s musical challenges originate with its score, plagued as it is with questions of authorship. L’Incoronazione di Poppea was considered lost until the score reappeared in 1888 under the title Nerone. A number of related materials survive, including two printed librettos, seven in manuscript, two musical scores, and a printed synopsis; however, none of these is the original autograph score. At the time of its premiere, the score contained many musical omissions, with corrections supplied by the composer while he lived. Emendations followed for years after his death. Indeed, Monteverdi's name was not even associated with the opera until much later. Interpreters throughout history have taken advantage of this musical dilemma.

“Phantoms of Error”
The trend of humanism in seventeenth-century Venice with its move away from mythology toward the earthly finds an uneasy vehicle in Poppea. In place of the traditional classical gods presented for our admiration, this opera focuses on historical characters, though hardly ones we would care to emulate. As commentator Peter Conrad notes, “Poppea sets free the shameless hedonists who populate opera from now on.” The classical setting of the Prologue is quickly replaced by a scene of palace intrigue, the elevated supplanted by the sordid. Not for Nero and Poppea the gods of Olympus, but deities of their own making: power and passion.

Opera-goers will seek in vain for a moral center in this opera. Seneca would be a likely choice, but he commits suicide (at imperial order) less than halfway through the opera, leaving a structural and dramatic vacuum. Even the supposedly affecting scene of his suicide is undermined by the callow Famigliari who insist that life is too sweet to give up. Is this a noble stoicism or merely a facile commonplace? As the libretto shows, Busenello knew his Seneca, and he made the most of these contradictory perspectives, depicting the philosopher variously as wise, degenerate, and opportunistic. Perhaps, Lucano, Seneca’s nephew and fellow poet, might supply a dose of morality were he not first glimpsed in a drunken celebration with Nero over his uncle’s death. Music theorist Tim Carter argues that Lucano’s words might be a sort of ironic parody of the encomium, a speech of praise common in Roman times to demonstrate rhetorical prowess. One wonders, then, if this spirit of irony, of praising that which cannot be praised, could be extended to Poppea as a whole.

Modern audiences might be a little rusty when it comes to Tacitus, but understanding the saying “Nero fiddles while Rome burns” doesn’t require a classics degree. The questionable decorum of Poppea and Nero, especially when they are presented as a spectacle for our enjoyment, creates a moral dilemma: we expect to see good win out over evil on the stage, but Monteverdi gives us Poppea triumphant. When Seneca welcomes death, singing “Farewell grandeurs, splendors of glass, glories of dust, phantoms of error, which in one moment both fascinate and assassinate the heart,” we know that he is taking leave of all of life’s illusions, all those temptations that cause so many problems. For a moment, there is clarity, and then we understand that the trouble with Poppea is not its unanswered questions, but its troublesome truths about who we are.

©2008 Leann Davis Alspaugh (reprinted with kind permission of Los Angeles Opera)

One-Act Operas by Ullmann and Zemlinsky

“By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” —Psalm 137

In 1941, the Nazis transformed the Bohemian garrison town of Terezín into a “model ghetto,” renaming it Theresienstadt. Promoted as “paradise island for enemies of the state,” the camp fostered an ostensibly autonomous life with a bank, a Jewish library, and theatrical and musical performances. The sham was never more apparent, or more symbolic, than during the 1944 performance for the Red Cross of Verdi’s Requiem conducted by inmate Rafael Schachter. “There is no adequate description,” writes Czech author Mirko Tuna, a Terezín internee, “of a moment in music when the ‘Dies Irae’ and the ‘Sanctus’ were sung by a chorus, three quarters of which knew they’d be shipped in cattle wagons to Auschwitz the next day."

Indeed, Schachter and many others were shipped out, along with Czech composer Viktor Ullmann, one of the most active musicians in Terezin.

Viktor Ullmann: Music at Terezín
Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944) was a leading light of cultural life at Terezin. His personal charisma and gift for organizing concerts brought together musicians who might never have known each other outside their circles in Berlin or Prague. Ullmann’s Weltanschauung, a personal outlook centered on music, allowed him to flourish in spite of the realities of camp life—“we simply did not sit and weep on the banks of Babylon,” he once wrote—and he produced more at Terezín than in the years before he was deported.

As a young man, Ullmann studied music in Vienna with Arnold Schoenberg. In 1919, he moved to Prague where he met his mentor, composer Alexander Zemlinsky, and became his assistant. Ullmann found success in Prague, taking the post of conductor at the New German Theatre (now the Prague State Opera)
and composing chamber and orchestral works as well as song cycles. He became an ardent
follower of anthroposophy, a humanist philosophy that emphasized mystical enlightenment. By the time of his deportation, he had composed more than 40 works, but he would write many more while in Terezín.

The preservation of so much of Ullmann’s work may be attributed to his methodical recordkeeping and his friendship with the camp librarian. Ullmann correctly calculated that the Terezín librarian—whose library was popular with the Nazi officers—would survive. The composer consigned all his music to him and asked him to preserve it. The librarian did so and the music was eventually found in London in the 1970s.

Among Ullmann’s Prague works is The Broken Jug, based on a play by the German Romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist. Thirty years younger than Goethe, Kleist (1777–1811) was a restless spirit who began his career as a soldier, became a bureaucrat in Berlin’s department of finance, and was imprisoned by the French as a spy. He became a newspaper editor in Berlin after his release, but ended his life at the age of 34 in a double tragedy, first killing his mistress (at her bidding), then himself. A prolific writer, he is today considered one of Germany’s most important dramatists.

A charming comedy that mocks human nature and the judicial system, The Broken Jug finds Adam, a luckless judge who has lost his wig, presiding over a hearing about a broken jug. Without his periwig, the symbol of his position, Adam struggles to maintain his authority; to make matters worse, he is also the culprit, having broken the jug while escaping through Eve’s window. Deceptively simple, Ullmann’s opera is packed with layers of meaning, exploring the nature of reality, the lure of temptation and the tenuousness of respectability.

Ullmann undoubtedly intended the opera as a satire of the justice system under the Nazis, but it is also a timeless story of misguided amorous attentions and the consequences of discovery. The opera is set in a courtroom, where a battle over an insignificant item makes the legal system laughable. The motif of the broken jug has sexual as well as political connotations. It is indicative of a broken culture, one that suppressed Ullmann and other composers who found themselves removed from the German musical tradition by the Nazis. The Broken Jug would be the last work that Ullmann composed before his internment at Terezín.

Alexander Zemlinsky: Love and Cruelty
Not every composer silenced by the Nazis died in the camps; many such as Arnold Schoenberg and Béla Bartók escaped Hitler’s regime and came to America. Schoenberg found security and prestige in California, while Bartók found composing difficult and American culture alien. In both cases, the circumstances of war removed these composers from their rightful place in the continuum of the German musical tradition. Another such composer was Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942), who fled Europe in 1938 for New York where he lived virtually forgotten until his death.

Zemlinsky, or von Zemlinsky (his father added the aristocratic “von”), was born in Vienna and studied at the Conservatory, winning the admiration of Brahms. As a young man, he met Arnold Schoenberg and the two became friends and mutual admirers. Zemlinsky was Schoenberg’s only teacher, and the two men grew even closer when Zemlinsky began to gain attention as a conductor and composer, with no less than Gustav Mahler conducting the premiere of his opera Es war einmal... (Once upon a time…).

While serving as Kapellmeister at Vienna’s Carltheater, Zemlinsky met and fell in love with the legendary Alma Schindler. Often called “the most beautiful woman in Vienna,” Alma studied music and made friends with or conquests of some of the most famous men of the day. Zemlinsky was her first mentor and lover, though Alma referred to him as “a caricature ... a small, ugly gnome.”

Her sexual awakening occurred under his “virtuoso hands,” but Alma left him for Mahler. Los Angeles Opera Music Director James Conlon believes that Zemlinsky never got over Alma: “He was still in the shadow of that passion when he wrote Der Zwerg, in which, clearly, he is the dwarf and she the Infanta.”

The human voice—“Zemlinsky’s true muse,” says Conlon—formed the core of the composer’s repertoire. He wrote several operas, the best known of which are A Florentine Tragedy (Eine florentinische Tragödie, 1915–16) and The Dwarf (Der Zwerg, 1919–21), both adapted from stories by Oscar Wilde. Der Zwerg with its harrowing climax is unforgettable as a self-portrait of an ugly man.

Zemlinsky’s choice of the one-act structure inspired by Wilde’s text finds its precedent in Salome, a one-act opera by Richard Strauss taken from Wilde’s play of the same name. The one-act opera was not unknown in the nineteenth century, but Conlon notes that “The one-act opera became more of an option in the twentieth century. The exigencies of the conventional multi-act works from Italy or France had given way to the form serving the essence of the drama. Salome was a quantum leap, inspiring others and reinvigorating opera.”

Any mention of Wilde’s life and work must also include the theme of eroticism and the contrast between beauty and corruption. His Salome positions eroticism alongside perversity (as in Salome's love scene with the prophet’s severed head). In Zemlinsky’s interpretation of Wilde, it is eroticism heightened by cruelty, as the heartless Infanta taunts the Dwarf with his physical deformity.

“Zemlinsky favored the erotic in his compositions,” Conlon says, “putting himself directly in the storm’s eye of its turbulence, unlike Ullmann who, in The Broken Jug, is much more philosophic about love, distancing himself from its sensuous nature through comic detachment.”

Conlon continues, noting that the early twentiethth century challenged assumptions about the necessity of beauty in art. To modern audiences saturated with contemporary culture’s twin obsessions with physical beauty and psychological ugliness, the opera’s themes resonate even more strongly. When the beauty and sensuality of Zemlinsky’s music meet the cruelty and heartlessness of Wilde’s Infanta, the dilemma of modernism confronts us.

Breaking the Silence
Conlon’s examination of the societal influences on music offers compelling evidence for listening in a larger context. “To Ullmann, for example, Terezín was a stimulus to music-making. He even rediscovered his Judaism while in the camp.” Ullmann, Zemlinsky, and the many others suppressed by Nazism found in music what Mirko Tuma calls the key to cultural survival: “The theater and music were quintessentially l’art pour l’art, with l’art transcending itself and acquiring a dimension of sheer survival.”

In this case, art for art’s sake moves beyond the exhilarating and singular aestheticism of Wilde into something of a moral imperative. The restoration of this music means the restoration of memory—not simply the memory of a people sharing a religious and cultural identity, but the memory of a universal archetype, the struggling artist. Conlon believes that by restoring this music to the artistic realm in which it was created, it is returned to the broader realm of human expression, where we may know it not by its omission, but by its capacity to enlighten and illuminate.

©2008 Leann Davis Alspaugh (a slightly different version of this article appeared in the February 2008 Los Angeles Performances Magazine; with kind permission of Los Angeles Opera)

Out of Control: Jenufa and Her Stepmother

“In every creature there is a spark of God,” wrote composer Leos Janácek. In his opera Jenufa, this spark imparts dramatic intensity to the moral at the center of the work.

As Jenufa moves from immaturity to forgiveness, her stepmother the Kostelnicka—the title refers to her
important position as “sacristaness” of the village church (kostel)—takes another path, presuming to think that she understands God’s will. In her, the divine spark becomes a force of human ego and the result is disastrous.

Sometimes called the first Moravian national opera, Jenufa is a dramatic vehicle of considerable intensity and economy of plot and character. In adapting the 1890 play Her Stepdaughter by Gabriela Preissová, Janácek turned a story saturated in Moravian style into a parable outside of time and place. The opera circles compulsively around the concepts of will and control: Who is in charge? How are lives to be lived and by whose standards? Can the ego submit to a force greater than itself?

Keeping Secrets
The opera opens with an introduction to a tightly-knit village community. Jenufa, Laca, Steva, Grandmother Buryja and the others depend on each other’s industry and honesty-but Jenufa has a secret, one so damaging that she must hide it. In doing so, she violates the village’s unwritten rules of openness and trust.

Village life centers around the mill. More than a simple pastoral device, the mill serves as the primary motivation for all the opera’s characters. As the river flows past it, the mill wheel turns, and the grain is ground for bread. As it has done for generations, life follows the seasons, linking nature and man. However, the harmony of village life is about to be shattered by secrets, jealousy, and false pride. A figure in authority will fall and the lowly will rise. The correctives of Christianity will be forgotten and there will be violence and retribution. Ironically, it is the person of highest moral authority in the village who will precipitate this chaos.

Enter the Kostelnicka
From her first line, the Kostelnicka asserts her power, predicting Jenufa’s future as a beggar, reduced to scraping for coins because her husband is a wastrel. The Kostelnicka speaks from experience, having thrown her love away on such a man. She is a formidable figure, one who cannot be easily dismissed as a bitter old woman. As the village sacristan, she is endowed with the authority of the church. In fact, she really shares top billing with Jenufa as the opera’s main character, and it is worth delving deeper into her character.

From ancient times, the sacristan acted as a monastic official in charge of the vestments, the candles, and the sacred liturgical vessels. Originally, the sacristan was a priest, unless there was a shortage of priests, then a layman might step in. In medieval times, the sacristan was often a lay woman. In the sixteenth century, the reforms of the Council of Trent led to a reduction of duties and authority for female sacristans. To what extent parishes observed the rules regarding female sacristans often depended on factors such as the church’s remoteness from a diocesan center or political unrest. In 1927, for example, a lay woman sacristan in Vladivostok maintained the Most Holy Mother of God cathedral for several years because the previous pastor had been shot by the communists.

Undoubtedly, the female sacristan, or sextoness, filled an important position in a community of believers. Though she might never intend to impersonate or supplant a priest, the absence of a pastor allowed the sacristaness to assert herself literally and morally. In short, she might be, as Janácek portrays her, the highest moral authority of her village.

The Kostelnicka takes her job quite seriously. It is easy to imagine that she has worked hard to erase the memory of her youthful transgressions and to establish herself as a moral exemplar. When she sees Jenufa yearning for Steva, all those old memories come back, and the Kostelnicka foresees not only her stepdaughter’s unhappiness, but also irreparable damage to her own hard-won position. While this is all too human, the Kosteinicka, as a representative of the church, has an obligation to modesty and humility, yet she has put these aside in favor of an egotistical imperative to change the course of events.

Taking Control
Sealed in her cottage at the opening of the second act, it is now the Kostelnicka who has a secret—she has spread the rumor that Jenufa is in Vienna since the truth is too painful. She presides over a bleak, closed interior, shuttered against sunlight and prying eyes. The mood is set by a grim duet in which Jenufa coos to the sleeping baby, while the Kosteinicka wishes God would take the child away.

Fighting to maintain control of the situation, the Kostelnicka administers a sleeping draught to Jenufa and summons Steva, hoping to convince him to marry her stepdaughter. He declines, prompting the Kostelnicka to utter the chilling line, “if only I could kill the baby and throw it at his feet to reach his conscience.” Certainly, no one could accuse Steva of an overly-active conscience, but where is that of the Kostelnicka?

Laca enters next and the Kostelnicka challenges him to hear the truth: “I will tell you everything and test your love.” At this moment, the Kostelnicka’s soul is in the balance, and it is she who is being tested. Instead of trying to persuade Laca that he could love the child as he loves its mother, the Kostelnicka presumes to play God. The child that she has helped into the world, that she has named and baptized, is then condemned to death-first in word, then in deed.

As the Kostelnicka rationalizes her intention, she struggles with her clamorous ego, forgetting the Christian principles on which she has based her life and reputation. The desire to control lives is so strong that she is willing to commit a sin merely to save face. She temporizes, contending that by sending the boy to God she will keep him pure. This is sheer hypocrisy made even more reprehensible by her position as a woman of the church. In her fallen state, she convinces herself that she understands God’s plan and can interpret it to direct the lives around her.

Like Lady Macbeth, the Kostelnicka screws her courage to the sticking place and takes the child to the icy millrace. That this place so closely associated with life should be the site of death shows just how lost she is. However, murder will out and, at the first thaw of spring, the baby is discovered. At this point, the Kostelnicka has lost complete control of herself; she is ill, weak, “fading away.” Just as she prepares to bless Jenufa and Laca, villagers announce the grisly discovery. It is fitting that the Kostelnicka’s moral abasement should be exposed at just this moment. She has failed in virtually every aspect of her duty as a sacristan, not to mention her arguably more important role as a mother and grandmother.

Her confession—“The deed was mine”—stops the mob from charging Jenufa with the infant’s murder. Just as her words restore order among the villagers, so they lift the Kosteinicka from her degradation. She ends with the realization of her selfishness and turns back toward Jenufa and the others. From standing alone in false pride, the Kostelnicka rejoins the community. Though she will be tried and sentenced to death, she has the forgiveness and love of Jenufa. The Kosteinicka’s genuine contrition also restores her to the grace of God.

The Tragic Kostelnicka
A paradox lies at the heart of the opera. Jenufa, pregnant and unwed, has sinned against the morality of the village, yet it is she alone who can forgive the Kostelnicka and restore to her the strength to accept the law’s punishment and thus gain redemption. In classical tragedy, the dramatic tension must be resolved in favor of understanding and order rather than incomprehension and chaos (the latter would be the province of the moderns). The Kostelnicka embodies this tragic model, and her return to the will of the law and the
community restores order and, in turn, illuminates Jenufa’s true character.

©2008 Leann Davis Alspaugh (reprinted with kind permission of Los Angeles Opera)