But That's All Over Now, I'm Twenty-One

Being young, and creative, and prone to putting undue pressure on myself, I am perennially fascinated by those artists who became famous while still very young--who took cities by storm at the age of nineteen or twenty, who created art with a wisdom that belied their tender years! And if the young people in question didn't only make transcendent art, but also happened to lead wildly exciting and passionate lives, have famous paramours, etc., my envy only increases. (Secretly I yearn to have the kind of life that a biographer would find fascinating 100 years from now.) I come up with increasingly unlikely plans both to improve the quantity/quality of my writing, and to bring myself to the attention of cultural gatekeepers.

And lately, I feel like I've seen/read a spate of works that set me off thinking this way. Both operas I saw this fall--Die Tote Stadt and Idomeneo--were composed by men in their early 20s. Idomeneo wasn't even Mozart's first opera (though it was his first great success, and the earliest of his operas to be performed with any frequency nowadays)--he wrote it at the age of 24, after already having written about seven other operas! No wonder it is such a self-assured piece of work. Though hampered by a mediocre libretto, Mozart still did his best with what he had.

If anything, Die Tote Stadt, by 23-year-old Erich Wolfgang Korngold, is even more incredible. Korngold was writing for a much larger and more richly colored orchestra than Mozart used; his 20th-century harmonic language is obviously much more complex; and he wasn't writing a Classical score of recitative followed by da capo aria followed by ensemble number, but a dreamlike opera where every sequence flows into the next. Furthermore, Korngold treats his subject with great depth and maturity--how could a 23-year-old have such insight into the psychology of a middle-aged man driven crazy by the death of his wife?

While waiting for the bus after Die Tote Stadt, I talked to a lady who told me that Erich Korngold had a very controlling father who wouldn't allow his son to get married till he was 27. "But, seeing that opera," said the woman, "I feel sure that he must have sneaked out of his house at night."

Then, around Halloween, I decided that I should read a classic scary novel: Frankenstein. Since this book was published, people have been amazed that a 19-year-old girl could write such a haunting horror story. Indeed Mary Shelley had already led quite an eventful life before writing Frankenstein: a famous father, an elopement with Percy Shelley, the birth and death of a child, a lot of touring Europe in the company of other Romantic writers. "How is it possible that she did all this before turning 20?" I asked myself, old and dried-up at the age of 21.

After finishing Frankenstein I wasn't sure what to read next, and browsed the sale table at Green Apple Books. I rejected many books out of hand...but ah, okay, here was something I really ought to read, especially since I was a French major and should be more familiar with this author... and he certainly was a fascinating personality...

Only when I walked out of the store did the full truth hit me.

I'd bought The Complete Poems of Arthur Rimbaud. AKA The Complete Poems of a Visionary Boy-Genius Who Stopped Writing at Age 21.

"Damn it, Marissa," I said to myself, "you've done it again."

Fortunately I found some solace in a recent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell, explicating why some artists peak early and others peak late. No use envying the precocious geniuses if your mind is simply formed another way--preferring trial-and-error to flashes of infallible insight. Not that it's easy for artists who are late bloomers--they can experience self-doubt, despair, lack of motivation in a way that early-bloomers don't. (And they don't seem to have the wildly exciting lives, either.) But at least that's preferable to the thought that an artist must be precocious in order to be worthwhile at all.

Title of this post comes from my favorite obscure Cole Porter song, "What a Joy To Be Young."

In Bruges: "Die Tote Stadt"

As a budding opera lover, I looked upon attending Die Tote Stadt as a kind of test: it's the most obscure, the most modern, and the most "for connoisseurs" opera that I've yet seen. And you know what? I thought it was terrific. Rather than representing the limits of what I can withstand from an opera, it could just be my gateway drug to more forbidding works and less traditional stagings. The opera's two Big Tunes that I heard at the Opera in the Park concert, "Gluck das mir verblieb" and "Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen," are lush and romantic and therefore a gateway into Die Tote Stadt itself; the rest of the score bridges the romantic and the modern. Indeed, because the Big Tunes are initially presented as songs-within-the-opera, it is almost as though composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold is acknowledging that melodic outpourings are somehow old-fashioned and sentimental--even as he can't resist them.

Die Tote Stadt premiered in 1920, and it begins as a 1920s realist drama; that is, with a lot of unsubtly delivered exposition. The main character of the opera is Paul, a man who has retreated from the world following the death of his beloved wife Marie, and we learn this because his housekeeper explains everything to an old friend who has come to visit. It's a creaky device, but Korngold's music is so responsive to the text, so good at creating mood and delineating personality, that I didn't mind it much. The plot gets started when Marietta--a young dancer who bears a remarkable resemblance to the dead Marie--arrives, accompanied by some of the most splendid, crescendoing music I've ever heard. In her subsequent scene, Korngold provides a wonderful portrait-in-music of a vivacious flirt; meanwhile, Paul pours out his romantic longings. The SFO production made clear that for Marietta, "Glück das mir verblieb" is a sentimental old song that she performs in order to attract men; whereas for Paul, it is a profound message from his dead wife.

Indeed, at the end of Act One, Marie's ghost appears to Paul in a dream, and the opera shifts away from realism and into fantasy and symbolism. I could tell the audience started to get a little antsy at this point, because the ghost scene is much more static than the lively character interactions that preceded it. (It didn't help that this production combined Act One and Act Two, and that the seats in the opera house are not very comfortable.)

Still, eventually, you have to give into the dream logic, and the SFO production aided this with some astounding visuals. The back wall of Paul's living room dissolved (it was a scrim) to reveal a second, identical room behind it, with Marie's ghost. Marietta's theater troupe was done up in Fellini-esque commedia costumes and makeup. There was not one, but two, weird religious processions through the streets of Bruges (where Die Tote Stadt takes place--Paul has moved to "the dead city" of Bruges in order to wallow in his nostalgia). And there were many cool effects having to do with manipulating a John Singer Sargent portrait that represented Paul's dead wife.

The production (directed by Willy Decker, originally seen at Salzburg) was innovative without being schlocky, though there were a few choices I disagreed with: above all, having singer Emily Magee (Marietta) wear only her wig cap for a large portion of the opera. It was very distracting when she had to sing lines like "Isn't my hair lovely?" and also because all I could think of was "Ionesco would be pleased--it's a Bald Soprano!" And at another point during the dream sequence, some little houses spun around the stage to represent Paul's disorientation, but they looked too much like Dorothy's Wizard of Oz house spinning in the tornado--and if the production really wanted to evoke Bruges, the houses should have had step-gabled roofs. Also, along with Out West Arts, I have to wonder if the production would be more powerful if the lines between reality and nightmare were less clearly marked--if we were disoriented along with Paul, rather than realizing "it was all a dream" long before he becomes aware of it.

The score of Die Tote Stadt, as I mentioned, is extremely lush and colorful, with a huge orchestra that sometimes shimmers delicately and sometimes blares out climaxes. I know next to nothing about conducting, but this is the first time an opera's orchestra has impressed me as much as the singers have--kudos to Maestro Donald Runnicles.

As for the performers, Torsten Kerl, singing the difficult role of Paul (he didn't leave the stage once!) had a metallic, ringing tenor but was not the strongest actor--he looked like he was repeating the gestures the director had told him to do rather than feeling them organically. Emily Magee had a very powerful voice that effortlessly hit the high notes (an important part of Korngold's score, so full of soaring moments) and gave an energetic, physically engaged performance of the dancer Marietta. And Lucas Meachem sung "Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen" in a nice baritone voice and acted well in the role of Paul's pragmatic friend Frank.

Still, though the lead roles of Die Tote Stadt are very challenging, the opera feels less like a showcase for star performers, and more like a chance for singers, conductor, and production team to all collaborate in turning this odd story and complex score into a unified work of art. And in this case, the San Francisco Opera made it look dead easy.

If you're curious about the music and production, here is a video preview.



All photos by Terrence McCarthy, San Francisco Opera.